Sandy

Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot's holiday)

(1953)

Sorry, but I'm clearly too unsophisticated and too American to appreciate this.

Reefer madness

Touch of Evil

(1958)

They tell me this is great, and I won't debate the point, but to me it has always seemed overwrought and terribly dated, what with the marihuana hysteria and whatnot. Not to say it doesn't have its charms, like Joseph Calleia as Menzies, sidekick and best friend to Orson Welles's Hank Quinlan, and Marlene Dietrich as Tana, who speaks those memorable last words about that friendship. But lead couple Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh are pretty much insufferable.

So yeah, I didn't really expect to be deaccessioning this one, but I am: ask and ye shall receive.

One cliché at a time

Sherrybaby

(2006)

Maggie Gyllenhaal is convincing as a parolee trying to stay off drugs and be a mother to her daughter, but there is absolutely nothing original or surprising here, least of all the big reveal that is supposed to shock us and explain much about why Sherry is where and who she is.

Oom-pah-pah

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

(1936)

A valley between the titanic It Happened One Night and that other Mr. Somebody-goes-somewhere flick, this is a pleasant enough film, but it shows what people who hate Capra are talking about: short on subtlety, long on social sanctimony--er, conscience. Still, I'll watch Jean Arthur in anything.

Capital punishment

Monster's Ball

(2001)

What I remembered about this: the racial text, and the hot sex.

What I didn't remember about this: the function of the Heath Ledger character, and how universally transactional sex and even love are in the film. It's not enough that Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) is a white male and thus has two power-hierarchical legs up on the black female Leticia (Halle Berry), but his financial security and her relative poverty put him in a position to come repeatedly to her rescue. It's hard to hear dialogue like

"I want to take care of you."

"Good, 'cause I need to be taken care of."

A film more interesting than good, ultimately, and interesting in kind of skeevy ways.

The roar of the greasepaint

Twentieth Century

(1934)

I'll stipulate that John Barrymore and Carole Lombard are great actors, and it's fun to watch them chew the scenery. For a while. Not necessarily for two hours. This is one of those films that I don't get why people find it great.

Murdered by irony

The Hospital

(1971)

I was thinking I saw this when it was new, but '71 doesn't seem right; maybe I saw it second-run at the drive-in in Macomb, Illinois, where my girlfriend (now first ex-wife) was going to school.

A strange, overloaded satire, with one of the most implausible love stories since the '30s musicals.

Love and war

The Informer

(1935)

Dublin, 1922, and Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen)--strong as an ox and half as smart--sells out his best buddy to the occupying Brits for the £20 that will get his girl Katie off the streets and onto a boat with him to America. Except that within a few hours he has spent a big chunk on booze and a bigger chunk on generosity, while his onetime IRA mates watch, and count.

I wanted to like this more than I did--I expected to like it more than I did--but the heavy-handed comic elements don't work as counterpoint to the tragic Judas story, they just sort of muddle the tone. It was one of John Ford's favorites, though, dear to the proud Irish American's heart.

Springtime

Cabaret

(1972)

Well, this was a no-brainer as soon as I saw that it had just cleared the 2-year threshold for DVR deaccessioning: an infinitely better representative of the personal-lives-playing-off-of-sociopolitical-watersheds musical genre than the one I saw last week, and a show whose latest Broadway incarnation featured the guy who carried today's earlier film.

I remember the first time I saw this, in a classic old movie palace in New Orleans, with my then-girlfriend (later first wife) Sue and an old friend of the family Katie (two ladies!). I also remember that the last time I saw it, which must have been close to a decade ago, if not more, I decided that it had run its course. The time off has revived it somewhat, but I still find it a collection of grade A songs wrapped in a C+ story. But oh, those songs!

Not made of stone

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

(1939)

Yes, everyone knows how poignant and stunning Charles Laughton's performance is in a role that Lon Chaney made his own in the silent version 16 years earlier, but what I want to talk about is: has any supporting actor ever had a better year than Thomas Mitchell had in 1939? Not only did he win the Oscar® in that category, but this was no better than his 4th-best role, maybe 5th-best, pending my taking another look at Only Angels Have Wings.

Inventir amour

Jules and Jim

(1962)

I might as well admit it: I'm just never going to be French. I like the French, and I like Truffaut more than most of them, but I just don't get how love works for them. This is usually described as a love triangular, but it's really a three-dimensional love pentagonal solid. In America, we'd simply call Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) crazy and institutionalize her. But for the French, it's not fun until someone loses and eye, or something even more precious. Perhaps it would have made more sense with a bottle of Bordeaux.

Liability

The Sweet Hereafter

(1997)

Wow, 15 years ago? I guess so, given that Sarah Polley looks even younger than the 18 she was.

Here we are in the weird moral universe of Atom Egoyan, where people grieve and guard their shameful secrets, and even the dead have gaping wounds. About as unsettling a film as you'll see, and I wonder whether I give it too much credit simply because it makes me feel like the ground is shifting under my feet. But give it credit I do.

Phantom

Le Dernier Métro (The last Metro)

(1980)

Occupied Paris, Nazis and collaborators out the wazoo, and Mme Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), a film star in her youth ('cause yeah, she's a pretty haggard-looking old lady by this time), is trying to keep her impresario husband's Montmartre theater alive, Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), for reasons made obvious by his surname, having fled.

Except that he's really in the cellar, pulling managerial and directorial strings via Marion, less because he doesn't trust his replacements than because he has started to go stir crazy. Meanwhile, for no more evident cause than that they're in a movie together, Marion and actor Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu, and you forget how handsome he was) fall in love.

It sometimes feels a tad by-the-numbers, but hey, pretty people directed by Truffaut, why not?

Buy some illusions

A Foreign Affair

(1948)

Directed by Billy Wilder from a script he wrote with Charles Brackett, this tries desperately hard to be so much: propaganda for the effort to rebuild postwar Germany at the same time that we're taking pride in having bombed the bejesus out of Berlin; a charming romantic comedy despite the drawbacks of a nothing leading man (John Lund) and a grotesquely miscast Jean Arthur (who could ever believe her as a prig?); and an updated version of Dietrich's shady-but-plucky saloon singer from Destry Rides Again. And Dietrich--as in Destry (and for that matter, in Der Blaue Engel before both crossed the Atlantic), singing great songs by Friedrich Holländer (as Frederick Hollander)--comes close to providing a saving grace.

What reasons do you need?

Bowling for Columbine

(2002)

After the incident by the Empire State Building today, this seemed the logical choice among the films that had been sitting on my hard drive for more than 2 years, and an excellent choice it was, an even better film than I remembered--and, by Michael Moorean standards, not grotesquely unfair. Even the interview with Charlton Heston, which I remembered as being a cruel fish-in-a-barrel shoot of a senile old man, this time seemed at worst a borderline legitimate low blow. Also: I gotta get that Joey Ramone "What a Wonderful World."

Weed or wildflower

A Love Song for Bobby Long

(2004)

Recommended by a friend, this sat in my Netflix queue for maybe a couple of years and then on my DVR hard drive for a couple of more. It's a compilation of clichés--southern clichés, with the subset of New Orleans clichés, alcoholism clichés, writer's block clichés, academic corrosion clichés, parent-child estrangement clichés, education-of-the-ignorant/innocent clichés--you name it. And yet the commitment of John Travolta, Scarlett Johansson, and Gabriel Macht to this store-bought gumbo makes it almost palatable.

My aim is true

Winchester '73

(1950)

Truth in advertising: the central figure in this story is a one-in-a-thousand perfectly crafted rifle, which passes from rightful hands to a string of unrightful ones before [spoiler alert!] returning to the man (played [duh] by James Stewart). In many ways a routine oater (a word I've learned from the Times crossword puzzle), but with a lot of fresh twists. My favorite example, a spin on a particularly nasty anti-Indian cliché of the form):

Lin (handing his revolver to Lola [a young, semizaftig Shelley Winters]): Here, just in case you need . . .

Lola: Thanks, I know how to use it. [Takes it, but he doesn't release it, looking at her meaningfully, but unable to say the words.] I understand about the last one.

Liquor is quicker

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

(1947)

Remember back in October, when I watched my first Harold Lloyd film? Well, here's my second, which includes part of a third, 1923's The Freshman, which in turn provides a key kickoff, if you will, to this story--which, did I mention, is pretty damned terrific.

His youthful football heroics having landed him a job as a bookkeeper, Harold is still at the same desk after a brilliant visual montage reveals the passage of 22 years. Even more brilliant is the all-but-monologue in which he relates his serial love for seven sisters, each more beautiful than the last. But the capstone of brilliance is not the bizarre plot twist that leaves Diddlebock seeking a buyer for the circus he has obtained, but rather what is the closest thing to a moral of the story: if you've lived to age 44 without ever sampling strong drink, it's time to change your ways.

Surface tension

A Slipping Down Life

(1999)

Less than the sum of its parts, though two of the parts are Lili Taylor and Guy Pearce, two of the most unobtrusively great actors of their generation. The problem is the story, based on a novel by Anne Tyler. Let me put it this way: the decision by Evie Decker to carve into her forehead the name of the oddball charismatic rock singer Drumstrings Casey (think lovechild of Springsteen and Zevon), whom she has barely met, is above the median in clear motivation for characters' behavior. Still, the leads--and John Hawkes as Drum's drummer and manager--make it worth a look, even if you decide, as I did, to deaccession it from your DVR's hard drive.

The philodendron story

Desk Set

(1957)

Have you ever wondered whether every bottle of champagne opened in a movie has either been agitated or stored at 80 degrees? I weep when I see all that precious bubbly fluid wasted.

This is not Kate's best cinematic champagne buzz, but it's not bad, and like her best, it involves flirtation with the "wrong" man, except that since this one is played by Spence, and there's no Cary Grant equivalent, there's never any doubt that he's really Mr. Right, once all the confusion about whether the huge computer he's moving into the Reference Department that Bunny runs at the Federal Broadcasting Network (you know: in the old FBN Building, overlooking Rockefeller Plaza) is going to cost Bunny and her staff of 3 their jobs. Perfectly benign, perfectly forgettable, and once I realized that the 2½-hour time slot was just because I recorded it back when I would still take something from commercial-riddled AMC, the 103-minute actual running time was about right, too. (Yes, your math is correct: 103 minutes of movie, 47 minutes of nonmovie.)