Thoughts on La Cérémonie

 On Criterion last month, I watched La Cérémonie, a 1995 French film directed by Claude Chabrol that is a mix of a dark comedy and a crime film, and I really adored it. It stars Sandrine Bonnaire as this quiet, dry maid hired to work for a rich family out in their remote mansion, led by the matriarch Jacqueline Bisset, who is nice but kind of flighty, and she has a very “whatever” attitude to things, until she meets Isabelle Huppert, a local postal clerk who is seen as the town kook, and brings this eccentric weird energy to the movie that is really funny and bright. Huppert is more of a rebellious influence on Bonnaire, who just starts to ditch her work, take off with Huppert in goofing around and bonding over dark pasts, and take advantage of watching TV in her room (like seeing goofy talk shows and puppet-filled music videos), and the family both doesn’t get it, but also seem unaware in their own world. Basically, if you’ve seen Parasite, you get what kind of family this is, the comments the film is making on class and the bourgeoisie, and the similar endings.

I liked how funny and weird Huppert was in this, she seemed to be having a lot of fun. I liked how Bonnaire just came off as so still and observing her surroundings (including being nosy and listening in on the family’s private conversations to learn secrets), but ultimately coming off as cold inside when she just had it with them. And I was surprised to see a young Virginie Ledoyen as the teen daughter.

This was a lot of fun to watch, I’m happy I checked it out.

Thoughts on Flesh and Bone

Last month, I rewatched Flesh and Bone, this 1993 film noir that I think is one of Meg Ryan’s most underrated films. She was known so much for being a cute romantic comedy heroine, that’s it’s easy to forget how great she is at drama. I had randomly seen this years ago and was blown away by how dark and sad and tragic the story is, and it hit Hulu in November, so I rewatched it.

The basic plot is that Dennis Quaid plays a reserved country guy who was forced into being a thief as a child by his corrupt father James Caan, and in the 1960s, him as a kid acts as bait for a farm family to take him in for the night as a lost child, and while he’s stealing their stuff during the night, his dad comes in and commits a family massacre, sparing only the baby, and scarring his son for life for his non consensual role in this tragedy.

Thirty years later, the baby is now Meg Ryan, who has lived a rough life with an alcoholic uncle, thinks her family all died in a car accident, and married an abusive gambling loser, feeling stuck in a crummy life save for her good looks. She and Dennis Quaid meet by chance (she passes out while popping out of a wedding cake at his friend’s bachelor party, he takes her home to sleep and sober up), slowly develop a relationship when her marriage ends, and then he’s racked with guilt when he realizes she was the baby that awful night.

Along with a young and uncharacteristically scrappy Gwyneth Paltrow as a cynical con artist who is now James Caan’s new protégé, Ryan and Quaid delivered masterful performances that were both out of their usual range. Ryan has this frustrated, tired vibe to her of a pretty girl who has been used up by loser men, and has no direction in life, and is just existing at this point. She is so damn good in this movie, and I don’t like that her cutesy stuff defined her career during her peak, she has way more talent than she has been given credited for, and didn’t deserve to have her popular career end over 2000s-era tabloid sexism. And Quaid is largely known for playing sexy, fast-talking charmers with big joker smiles, and he reins that all in to play a guy who is haunted, nervous, reserved, and hardly ever smiles throughout the film. This is another underrated role from him.

James Caan I wasn’t as into, I felt like his character came off as a little hammy, and didn’t feel like an actual person like everyone else did. Even Spence-educated NYC rich girl Paltrow came off as more convincing as a backroad country girl hustler than Caan did as a Southern killer. I think if he didn’t overdo the accent, it could have come off as more menacing and less “actor-ly.”

I loved hearing The Cowboy Junkies’ version of “Blue Moon” play in a scene, it’s a gorgeous song from their 1988 album.

Thoughts on Shadow of a Doubt

Last month, I rewatched Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt on Criterion, I hadn’t seen it in many years. I still found it creepy and effective, I love how chilling and menacing Joseph Cotten is as the serial killer, and his ugly misogynistic rant at the dinner table about wealthy widows (who he targets for murder) was unsettling.

Teresa Wright, at nearly 25, was convincing in playing an innocent teen girl who slowly realizes that her uncle is a monster, and she embodies the fright and helplessness really well. A podcast noted the scene where her father and his friend (the always great Hume Cronyn) have this ongoing game talking about how to get away with the perfect murder, as these light jokes between them, and she’s practically clawing the table in panic, and just blows up at them for joking about murder.

It’s a gorgeous-looking b/w movie, with big panning overhead shots that swell with the music in this one stunning sequence after the girl (both she and her uncle are named Charlie) reads a news article in the library about the “Merry Widow killer,” and it tracks with what two detectives trailing her uncle have been telling her, as well as her own suspicions, and the music and overhead shot is like a big lightbulb moment for her, it’s incredible.

I’m happy I watched it again, it’s still my favorite of Hitchcock’s movies.

Thoughts on Wanda

In October 2021, I watched Barbara Loden’s 1970 film Wanda on Criterion, a long lost movie that got restored in 2010, and I thought it was going to be this introspective indie gem about a lone woman figuring her way through life in tough blue collar worlds, but I found it meandering and boring. I appreciated the cinema verite look of it trying to look like a documentary, or following this woman who is pretty much a passive loser who abandons her family only to take up with lowlife men on the road, but I found it boring, and tuned in and out. I couldn’t really get a grasp on her character. She didn’t have to be some feminist hero, but at least I wanted to know what was going on more with her than just watching her as an observer. It just followed her going from leaving her husband and giving up custody of her kids, getting fired, falling asleep in a movie theater and getting robbed, then just happening to walk in on a bar robbery and taking up with the guy, and end up being an accomplice in a bank robbery, hooking up with other loser men, then at the end just seen in a crowded bar smoking, with not really a definitive end to her story, but the movie just ends there.

I think from the arthouse hype I thought this would be more deeper or groundbreaking, but it felt like it was trying to be this experimental art film, like indie when it was underground, that was written/directed and starred Loden, who was an actress who played Warren Beatty’s sister in Splendor in the Grass, was married to Elia Kazan, and only directed this film and later died of cancer at just 48 in 1980. I liked the intention of it, and that it was trying to look scrappy and rough, but I mostly found tedious.

Thoughts on Clifford

I watched Clifford in October 2021 on Hulu, the 90s movie where a middle-aged Martin Short plays a ten-year-old boy who causes a lot of life wrecking damage for his uncle Charles Grodin, who I felt could have a case of justifiable homicide since Clifford came off like he was guided by the Devil, especially when he frames his uncle for a false bomb plot and nearly ruins his relationships at work and with his fiancée’s family. However, I like the movie a lot more than when I first saw it at 11 and thought it was weird and off-putting. Now I found it really darkly funny, especially Short’s demented expressions to the audience and Grodin’s classic “losing my mind” rants and seething one-liners. I cracked up laughing at Grodin’s deadpan delivery on the doctored voicemail Clifford edits: “Hi, this is Martin Daniels, I'm not home right now but I got a bomb under city hall. Talk to you later.” I played that back a few times.

I could also see how, despite Short being a small man, that the movie did tricks to make him look even shorter around the others, like the other actors were standing on boxes or platforms to look like the “adults,” or Clifford wears a boy’s school uniform to look more childish. I’m also comparing this to seeing present-day Short in Only Murders in the Building, and how he’s not that much shorter than the other cast members to any significant degree.

I had heard that this movie was made earlier than its release, it was filmed around 1990-1991, but Orion Pictures was having issues and eventually declared bankruptcy and shut down, and the movie came out in 1994, with the bookended parts with old Clifford and a young Ben Savage filmed in 1993.

I can see why this bombed, it’s way too dark and weird, and kid me was also confused by it when I watched it as a rental that one of my parents picked. But I also think it works well as both having come out post-Home Alone and Problem Child as a more bizarre version of it, as well as a more stranger comedy that is more accepted in alternative comedies on streaming and Adult Swim.

Thoughts on Racing with the Moon

On Hulu in October 2021, I watched Racing with the Moon, a 1983 coming of age drama in which Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage play teens in 1942 California who are six weeks away from being shipped off as Marines to fight in WWII. A lot of it is about their loss of innocence, not just with figuring out their relationships with their girlfriends, but also being 17 and fearing the unknown in fighting in the war and not knowing if they will come back alive.

I thought it was decent, I liked that it was very character-driven. Sean Penn is the son of a gravedigger who dates Elizabeth McGovern, who he thinks is rich because she lives in a giant gated mansion but her mother is really the maid, and most of the movie focuses on their relationship, a lot with class struggles and her feeling hesitant to tell the truth. I thought they worked well together onscreen in a cute young love kind of way, and the actors did date for real during this time.

The other part focuses on Nicolas Cage as his drunken goofball friend who gets his girlfriend pregnant and is trying to come up with abortion money. I liked how loopy and offbeat Cage was in this early in his career, where he’s supposed to play the dumb friend but I found him more interesting to watch than Penn, who is fine but I just never liked him much as an actor, his real strengths is as a director showcasing character actors.

There are other early roles for big actors in this, like Crispin Glover as a jerk rich boy antagonizing Penn at his bowling alley job where he and Cage set up the pins in the years before they became mechanized, and Michael Madsen as a war amputee who Penn briefly meets while he accompanies McGovern to her volunteer hospital job. I also read that Dana Carvey was in this, but I wouldn’t know where. Carol Kane has a brief cameo where I think it’s hinted she’s a sex worker, and according to IMDB, Michael Schoeffling had an uncredited role as another amputee solider.

A running thing in this movie is that Penn and Cage like to race along trains and jump onto handles alongside them, and it’s their childhood game that they hold onto even as they know they are leaving their innocent lives for the uncertainty of war. Those parts were sweet, and come full circle at the end.

My favorite sequence was likely the pool hustle scene, where they are trying to get money for the abortion and are conning soldiers in a game of pool. Even if I could figure out where this was going, I still thought it was engaging and liked the tension as a couple of soldiers are catching on to their hustle and Cage is desperately trying to cover for himself and Penn as just regular guys playing a game.

So I thought it was decent overall, it was nice to watch.

Thoughts on Unfaithful and Devil in a Blue Dress

In October 2021 I watched Unfaithful on Hulu and Devil in a Blue Dress on Criterion.

I’ve seen Unfaithful a couple of times, and always liked it, but got more into the second half of the movie. I never had liked that part before, because I didn’t like that it turned into a murder cover-up story instead of more confrontation about the affair that led up to it, but now I liked it. The first half of the movie is Diane Lane having her sexytimes affair and jeopardizing her comfortable marriage and feeling conflicted and guilty over it, but still going back to it, and the second half is Richard Gere killing her lover in an act of passion and feeling horrible about it afterwards. This feels more evident when he’s struggling to get rid of the body and he’s trying to lift and carry a limp dead body wrapped in carpet and is clearly in over his head with this.

I didn’t know that the film is a remake of a Claude Chabrol film from the 60s, but it makes sense. Adrian Lyne directed this more like a French domestic drama than an American film, and despite that it’s from 2002, it feels more 1990s for some reason. I like the slow and measured pace of it, how it has sexy scenes that are layered with a lot of mixed emotions of lust, anger, and guilt, and how well and mature that Diane Lane played these scenes, that made her more complex than just wanting to cheat on her husband for cheap thrills. And I like that Richard Gere isn’t made to be an abusive or neglectful jerk to excuse her cheating, he’s a decent ordinary guy who quickly picks up on his wife’s different vibes and has suspicions about it, he’s not a complete fool. And I like how in the end, it is still not really complete, like the audience can fill in what happens next with this story they would feel like a big local true crime story.

Devil in a Blue Dress was an incredible noir film, I had missed it when it was on Hulu, and caught it on Criterion. I had seen Carl Franklin’s One False Move, and liked how even with a bigger budget and Denzel Washington as the star, it still carried over those themes from the previous film of overt racism, uncomfortable violent scenes, handheld camera for action scenes, and having this genuine rawness to it. It’s a story in which Washington plays a guy in 1948 Los Angeles who is struggling for work and is tapped by gangster Tom Sizemore to find a woman (Jennifer Beals) who is dating a mayoral candidate, and it sends Washington on a journey that involves murder, corrupt cops, racism, and a lot of crooked business going on.

Washington was fantastic, and he just easily fit into Franklin’s work, more of a period noir film that felt more like an indie movie than Hollywood, that went a lot darker and further with some really messed-up scenes. I already knew the general story on Beals’ character, so I wasn’t surprised, but I was amazed by how great Don Cheadle was as a relative unknown at the time. He’s a friend of Washington’s who is a trigger-happy, cold-blooded killer, who just kills people on impulse, and he stole the movie and was amazing to watch as a really cold and unsettling character who could seem charming then flip in a second. He was definitely the big highlight of the movie to me.