watched the rachel weisz/tom hiddleston anti-romance the deep blue sea tonight and i’m not quite sure what to make of it

it’s very very slow and emotionally muted, by design, since all of the characters are so emotionally constipated that they literally can’t stay in the room with another person while they’re experiencing An Emotion, but there’s a fine line between slow motion tragedy and pure bathos and the movie slides back and forth across it repeatedly.

it’s entirely possible the slide into comedy is intentional, and that’s the part that’s jamming me up a little. i spent half the movie semi-seriously arguing with my partner whether or not the main character had died in the opening scene and the entire rest of the movie was her experience of hell; her relationships with the men in her life are always framed as slightly hellish and definitely unsatisfying, but even more that the world is too much, too loud, too sad, too traumatic. there are multiple scenes where a crowd is singing, and it’s the least joyful bit of human noise imaginable, alternately dreadful cacophony, cloyingly sentimental, or horrifyingly inappropriate. i think that’s an artistic choice mirroring her chafing discomfort at the romantic roles she’s expected to inhabit and her lingering and unacknowledged trauma from the Blitz, but i’m not steeped enough in the genre to say for certain. the film was billed as a postwar romance, but it really isn’t that. it’s in the criterion Yearning collection, but whatever she’s yearning for, it isn’t either of the men in her life. she might be yearning for herself, for the life she might have had without the war, or for the sheer impossible dream of having a partner that both likes her and desires her sexually

watched the swedish movie Border tonight, and while it wasn’t quite the full tilt narrative freakout i was half expecting from the way people had written about it, it’s definitely worth a watch

it’s written by the same person who wrote Let the Right One In, and there are some parallels there: gender nonconformity, pre-narrative bodily mutilation in the name of normalizing a monstrous body, child abusers as the recipients of violence. but border is a… well, i don’t know if i’d say cheerier movie than LTROI, but it’s not a horror movie in the way that movie was, either. the romance is more lived in and less threatening, even as the romantic partner is morally a lot more ambiguous than eli was.

there’s a ton of things you could parse the narrative for, metaphorically, from intersexuality to queerness to violence against indigenous people, but the movie is relatively hands off with that, in large part because the cast doesn’t have many talkers in it. the metaphors are there, and they aren’t subtle, but they also aren’t insisted upon the way they are in a lot of fantasy fiction that deals with these kinds of things. the movie is metaphorically minimalist that way: tina’s ugliness is mentioned precisely three times, just enough to demonstrate that it’s a persistent issue in her life even if it isn’t aggressively present. there isn’t an on-screen performance of discrimination; tina is othered by the camera and her makeup, but the audience isn’t forced to be complicit in her abuse, which is how that frequently comes off in these sort of genre pieces.

recommended, pretty easily. i’m not giddy about it the way i was about She Is Conann, but it would make an interesting double bill with that movie, if you’ve seen it.

my favorite kaiju movies are the ones that are horror movies and that’s such a tiny percentage of kaiju movies

invasion of astro-monster looks like a million bucks and the monsters ARE monstering, so that’s all fine, but it’s a sci fi action(ish? war?) movie, not a horror movie. things get bad, but there’s never that sense of dreadful wonder that you get with horror. there’s an entire alien civilization on a newly discovered planet/moon in this movie, and it doesn’t present anywhere the same level of existential expansion that the mere existence of godzilla did in the first movie

some of that’s just the problem with any long-running series with any kind of continuity; once you’ve adjusted your worldview to include godzilla, he stops being an unsettling presence, the same way that people got tired of superhero origin stories, the same way that you can’t keep telling stories about falling in love with the exact same couple. but without yoking your story to time — letting your characters age and die and change — you just drift into a kind of eternal summer that loses the uncertainty that makes stories really hit

at ten movies or however many in, obviously giant monsters are a known quantity, both to us as an audience and diagetically to the characters in-universe, but i do miss the discomfort of the early movies. kaiju lose a big part of their grandeur when they’re as normalized as an earthquake, when life just goes on in their shadow much as before.

So I mean we saw Black Panther last night, and it was fantastic, the first one of these Stage 4 movies that fired on all cylinders for me, and easily the saddest of the movies, which I imagine is not coincidence. The way the movie is an extended meditation on grieving gives it some emotional heft, but most of the phase 4 movies have been about living through loss; Wakanda Forever excels because it doesn’t deflect that pain through humor or spectacle. The grief is the spectacle, the climax of each act and several of the action scenes. Eternals tried to do something similar, but had a much heavier lift doing so while introducing all its characters, laying out some very complicated 70s era world building, and wrapping its emotions in a murder mystery; Multiverse of Madness (infuriatingly) made Wanda’s substantial grief over the loss of her family a villainous derangement rather than a heroic flaw; Love and Thunder embraced humor as a coping mechanism so completely that the despair its characters felt was more textual than depicted.

How does one process loss? How does grief drive one to do monstrous, heroic things, and how does one come back from that ledge (or not)? These have been the consistent questions Black Panther has been chewing over since his first appearance in Civil War. It’s a question posed of both T’Challa and Shuri as the Black Panther, of Zemo, N’Jdaka, and Namor as villainous counterexamples, and of Wakanda, the US, and Talokan as countries. Grief—and the decision to either seek a very human and understandable revenge or a superhuman compassion and justice—is the persistent origin story of all Black Panther’s heroes and villains. It’s a shame to lose sight of that for franchise housekeeping questions about future crossovers furthering Marvel Brand Synergy.

Oh, and as a general note, all of these movies are varying levels of racist. Calamity Jane in particular gleefully celebrates indigenous genocide and the ability of its characters to kill the displaced people whose land they’re stealing. Cat Ballou thinks it’s subverting things, but even then they’ve got an Italian guy in redface. That’s common in the genre, but there are also plenty of westerns that push back against that kind of thing, and these mostly don’t.

Calamity Jane

Doris Day had a raw deal. She’s a powerhouse of a performer, with a good singing voice and a tremendous physical presence, but the backlash of the 50s was so overwhelming and she was a big enough star that she got a lot of roles about breaking her into place, and Calamity Jane is a particularly direct example of that. Everywhere Doris Day’s Calam goes, she’s plagued by mocking male laughter, forever the butt of the joke, forever disbelieved and ground down, barely tolerated by her friends and actively detested by her notional love interests. It’s not until she sets up housekeeping with Allyn Ann McLerie’s Katie Brown and learns to be a woman — losing the macho buckskins and trousers and being publicly shamed and rejected by her boyfriend — that any of the men take her seriously. It’s the shaming more than anything that makes her an acceptable romantic partner; Wild Bill Hickock only starts pursuing her in earnest after she’s been humbled by the handsome Army lieutenant proposing to Katie instead.

The gender anxiety is pretty blunt, and threaded throughout, in both directions — Hickock loses a bet with Calamity and dresses up as an “Indian squaw,” but then lassoes her and hangs her from the rafters to the delight of an audience of jeering men to reassert his dominance; the plot is kicked into motion when the saloon owner hires the male actor Francis Fryer under the mistaken belief that he’s a female dancer; Fryer is then forced into performing a drag act, which goes swimmingly until his wig comes off and the male audience angrily turns on him for deceiving them, in a scene that now reads as very dark—but it’s Calam who bears the brunt of it, and Calam who has to be broken into femininity.

There’s a marked homoerotic tension between Calam and Katie. Their relationship is significantly sweeter and more affirming than anything they have with either of the men, and the subtext of the centerpiece song “A Woman’s Touch” is hard to overlook as the two women remodel Calam’s cabin into a shared home. The movie ends with a wedding where the two women sing reprises of each other’s songs, notionally to the grooms, but structurally to each other — Hickock and the lieutenant are mere bystanders, though Hickock at least gets a later duet with Calam as they drive off into the plains.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Seven Brides somehow makes Calamity Jane look like Born in Flames: it’s an infuriatingly well-made movie, with tremendously catchy songs and a couple of all-time dance sequences, and a plot that revolves entirely around the abduction and planned rape of six women. I haven’t been so mad at a movie since On the Waterfront. There’s a tremendous amount of craft and skill in this and it’s in service of such a bluntly hateful story that it’s hard to really wrap your head around.

The movie’s sneaky about it, too — the first half is an interesting subversion of the standard love story, where the main couple gets married in the first scene and then has to figure out if they love each other. There’s some blunt critiques of what a raw deal marriage is for women, and the way men get married solely to gain access to women’s domestic and reproductive labor without caring about them as people — and this isn’t subtext, this is flat dialogue: “You don’t want a wife, Adam,” says Jane Powell’s Milly to her new husband after she realizes that she’s been married to care for his six brothers, not just him. “You want a cook, a washer woman, a hired girl. Well, a hired girl’s got a right to a room of her own!” The entire first act is Milly slowly teaching the younger brothers to see women as human, while Adam blithely laughs and goes about his day — it’s shockingly feminist for a 50s musical.

But then comes the turn, where Adam hatches a plan for the family to go kidnap six townswomen and force them to marry his brothers, and it’s played both completely straight — the women scream when they’re grabbed and stuffed into sacks — and completely for laughs. Milly and the women band together and exile the men to the barn when Adam sets off an avalanche to seal them all into the valley for the winter, and pelt them with rocks when they approach the house, but by the time spring rolls around they’ve all paired off anyway, and the movie ends with the women throwing themselves in front of a rescue party to prevent any justice from coming to their abductors. The movie ends with a massive shotgun wedding and a freeze frame and at no point do any of the men face any consequences. They get the brides they wanted! The moral of this movie is that abduction and rape are acceptable forms of courtship. Again, this isn’t subtext — Adam lays out his plan in a song called “The Sobbin’ Women” (riffing on the Rape of the Sabine Women and drawing explicit parallels between the founding of Rome and the colonization of Oregon) which includes the revolting lyrics “Now let this be because it’s true/A lesson to the likes of you/Treat ’em rough like them there Romans do/Or else they’ll think you’re tetched/Oh they acted angry and annoyed/But secretly they was overjoyed.”

What do you do with something like that, other than burn it to the ground?

Cat Ballou

After the other two, Cat Ballou feels downright incendiary. Sure, she still ends up partnered off at the end, but her arc takes her away from a learned, conformist femininity into a staunchly anti-capitalist outlawery where she gets to wear pants and shoot billionaires, admittedly not at the same time. Rather than “civilizing” the men around her (a recurring theme in both Calamity Jane and Seven Brides, as well as a real bit of propaganda during the colonization of the West), Cat drags them kicking and screaming into a direct assault on the foundations of a rotten society that places profit over people.

This is the only one of the three films that doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, interestingly; onscreen women can be independent, active characters that aren’t broken to fit into a tiny approved box OR they can have community with other women, not both simultaneously, a pattern that persists into today’s backlash movies. Cat’s a great character, and Jane Fonda imbues her with a playful melancholy, but she’s alone in a sea of men. If they aren’t constantly jeering at her, like in Calamity Jane, or abducting her for rape, like in Seven Brides, they’re still dismissive and undermining and forever struggling to see her as more than a pretty face and a hot bod. The movie moves its men toward seeing Cat as an entire person, but still ends with her kissing the biggest sex pest in it while he hoots and hollers, after she nearly got hanged because he refused to help her. It feels like she’s his reward, rather than the other way around; Calamity Jane got at least that much more narrative agency.

We’ve had some bad movies on this list, ones I personally hated or that were thick with really blunt racism, but few of them have felt as perfunctory and tired as The Unsinkable Molly Brown, or so completely trapped by the more is more requirement of the big budget musical. Especially coming off three all timers like West Side Story, The Music Man, and A Hard Day’s Night, the sagginess of Molly Brown is hard to excuse. Even the color, normally a dazzling highlight of these productions, is wasted here on beautiful but uncanny scenery shooting or opulent but hideous interiors. Debbie Reynolds, so sparkling and joyous in Singin’ in the Rain, gives a committed performance as Molly Brown (for which she was bafflingly nominated for an Oscar), but she still spends 90% of the movie hollering in a cornpone accent, and Harve Presnell, her costar and the only Broadway actor to make the jump to the big screen, is tall and handsome and blandly mellifluous and deeply, deeply dull as Johnny Brown.

There’s an air of uncanniness to the entire production. Some elements — the frontier sets, the American performances, the dreadful costuming — are thoroughly artificial, but then they’re put against real locations or the second act’s detour into European cosmopolitanism, and it becomes almost viscerally uncomfortable to watch. West Side Story and The Music Man embraced artificiality, and thrived; A Hard Day’s Night put a vaudeville spin on New Wave realism to great effect; Molly Brown marries Hollywood hyperreality with Broadway theatricality and it just doesn’t work.

Something also clearly went askew in the production. They cut 12 songs from the stage production, and it shows: Debbie Reynolds only gets two songs, and they’re both out of the way early on, leaving the rest of the tunes to be carried by Presnell, who is… I mean, he’s fine, he can sing perfectly well, but it’s so noticeable that he’s the only one who gets a number. There’s a song at the end of the second act that is notionally performed by Reynolds, but she spends the entire song with her back to the camera like she’s been replaced by a stunt singer, a baffling decision in a decade that was routinely still using ghost singers — My Fair Lady came out the same year, and didn’t feel the need to hide Audrey Hepburn’s face while she was being dubbed. The producers originally wanted Shirley Maclaine for the role, then Judy Garland when Maclaine couldn’t do it, so admittedly Reynolds was a compromise casting, but even then, why treat her like this?

I’m not a big fan of frontier movies in general — that whole Little House on the Prairie genre gives me a pain — but there’s plenty of narrative grist in that genre that the movie doesn’t bother with, even as it spends the vast majority of its runtime on the tension between these nouveau riche hicks and the second generation snobs of Denver. Things don’t start to really come alive until Molly splits from Johnny, returns to Europe and an affair with an impoverished prince and loses her accent, but that isn’t until the last fifteen minutes of two and a half hours; Reynolds does bitter and jaded and cosmopolitan so much better that it’s a shame the movie didn’t spend more time in that period of Brown’s life. The Titantic sinking, and Brown’s survival of it — the survival that earns her the sobriquet “Unsinkable” — takes less than two minutes of screen time, and is made of footage from the 1957 black and white Barbara Stanwyck Titanic. Baffling decisions all around. Debbie and Molly deserved better.

Something I’m curious about but don’t know enough about to really go into here is that Molly wasn’t just a rich hick trying to buy her way into society, the way she is in the movie, she was a rich philanthropist that did a lot of whatever you call rich person organizing? The closest the movie comes to that is a single gigantic gift bestowed at random on a priest, and a throwaway line that they pay their servants “too well,” whatever that means, but in real life she wasn’t just a donor and wasn’t just on philanthropic committees, she was actively forming them, and traveled the US and Europe to implement them. Like, real!Molly organized a survivor’s committee to ensure that all the survivors were taken care of after the wreck, and that wasn’t in the movie at all. In fact, anything that would have suggested that film!Molly had any conception of the world and the power relationships in it was cut out in favor of the sub-Caddyshack slobs vs snobs storyline, which is so much duller.

Also, she didn’t just survive the sinking, she took an oar in the lifeboat, and threatened to throw the lifeboat captain overboard if they didn’t go back and help more survivors; the movie version of that scene has her giving her clothes to other rich women who are cold and slapping a hysterical woman. I don’t know if the real life Molly Brown was an actually good person or not, but she was definitely more deeply engaged in something than anything that shows up on screen here, and that’s… I don’t know what the term here is, exactly. Richwashing? The movie strips any discussion of the power of the wealthy away and boils it down to a personal snobbish meanness instead.

I’m not a big fan of the Beatles or New Wave movies, but it’s startling how well they come together here. I’m definitely here for the band more than the songs, and for the visuals more than the band. It’s just such a breath of fresh air after the rest of the list — even after two all timers like West Side Story and The Music Man — that’s it’s hard to contemplate dipping back into more traditional waters.

It’s kind of wild that A Hard Day’s Night didn’t have a bigger impact on musicals as a genre, given how influential it is on everything from music videos to mockumentaries to television editing; nothing else on this list looks anything like it. Even the later Beatles movies don’t do anything nearly as ambitious interesting, and certainly nothing as effortlessly cool.

The Music Man probably isn’t the most cynical movie we’ll watch for this project, but it’s almost certainly the most cynical movie that manages the transition to aching sincerity the best — and without sacrificing any of that cynicism. None of the things that the movie viciously skewers in the first act have gone away by the third — the River Citizens are still as stupid, pretentious, and self-regarding as ever — but then those are their strengths, too, and it’s love that makes the difference. Not a blind love that wishes away or forgives their venalities, but a knowing, encompassing love that recognizes that the gap between what people are and what they want to be can be beautiful.

And this is an insight that applies to all of the characters in the movie: Robert Preston’s magnificent flimflam man “Professor” Harold Hill is all pretense, all cynical disdain, but he’s not any less parochial than the rubes he sneers at, he’s just chosen to be the grinning Satan in their morality plays — see for example the way he jumps to the exact same conclusion that Shirley Jones’ Marian the librarian must have been sleeping with the rich old man who bequeathed all the books in the town library to her; what other way can men and women interact? You’re either a simp or a con artist. He spends most of the movie trying to hoodwink Marian into loving him, but she’s onto him from the start, and comes to love him because of that, rather than despite it, without forgiving any of it. She makes the active choice to love him because his con is nevertheless actually improving the town — her brother Winthrop comes out of his shell because of the con, and even if the band isn’t real, his joy and newfound gregariousness is.

Marian herself isn’t exempt from this central insight: she holds herself at a remove from both the town and Hill, but that’s no less pretentious. She knows how to pronounce “Rubaiyat,” but she’s living in the same small town, and holding herself above them all makes her stated goal of elevating the culture so much harder. She’d rather cling to her self-perception as a miserable cultural sophisticate living in exile than unbend enough to improve things — and no one in the town thinks well of her; they all think she’s an intellectual fraud that secured her position by sleeping with the richest man in town. Hill doesn’t challenge that perception, but he doesn’t care, and also doesn’t think that it undermines her self-perception. The gap is beautiful.

It gives the love story such an energy, a playful combativeness that isn’t mean, exactly, but gives their flirting layers. It also enables the final turn to sincerity, as they both grapple with what it means to be truly seen and loved anyway. It makes love a conscious, active choice, rather than chemistry or fate or fatuousness, and that’s so much more interesting than the 38th iteration of moonlight and water.

This all comes to a very literal head in the film’s climactic scene, where the outraged townspeople, whipped into yet another fury by yet another traveling salesman, drag Hill into the gymnasium and command him to lead the band in a performance of Beethoven’s Minuet in G. The band is legitimately terrible in the way that school bands usually are, but the aching yearning in Preston’s face as Hill stops hearing what the band actually sounds like, and starts hearing what he wants them to sound like is a dagger to the heart — and then each of the parents jump up, tearfully ecstatic that their Davey is actually playing music, and it’s beautiful. He didn’t expect anyone to actually listen to what he was saying and try to actually do it, and he’s completely helpless in the face of their belief. I cry every time, I can’t help it.

I haven’t even touched on the music, which is phenomenal, and an entire class on the use of leitmotifs to build and reinforce characters across a huge cast; the way that Hill and Marian trade motifs to symbolize their romantic movement toward each other is particularly moving. It’s also delightfully complex, with lyrics and melodies layered on top of each other that somehow never get swallowed in the mud. It’s as showy and formalist as West Side Story, but without any veneer of hipness to hide behind. It’s a perfect film.

God, it sucks about all the brownface in this movie, because it’s so close to greatness otherwise. Everything looks great, sounds great, moves great, but then you get down to the vast gap between the text’s attempt to grapple with racist tensions between different waves of immigrants, and the ways that European immigrants get to ascend to whiteness while Puerto Ricans — who are already US citizens, in 1961 no less than 2022 — are locked out of it, and you’re staring at all of these white actors in brownface and it just sits there like a turd in a bowl of soup. There’s no eating around it!

West Side Story is such an ambitious movie from the moment it opens — with an overture card that eventually reveals itself as an abstract depiction of Manhattan — with a real understanding of the ways that cinematic musicals can be inspired by stage productions of musicals but need to bring their own visual language and approach to them, and the script hammers home repeatedly the ways that whiteness protects and privileges even hardscrabble white immigrants at the expense of everyone else, I’m frankly at a loss to explain how nobody stopped the browning up. Were they not paying attention to their own story? Had they not internalized it at all? How did the actors deliver their lines without cracking?

If — and I’ll admit that’s a huge if — you can get past that, the film is, as I said, fantastic, a giant leap forward in how American musicals are shot and framed and scored, with an approach that draws a lot more from horror techniques than from MGM. There are a ton of low and high angle shots that don’t distort or obscure the (incredible) dancing, but that do emphasize the cinematic theatricality of the numbers. The musical numbers here are a thorough break from reality, emphasized by the framing, color palette, and focus tricks; you end up with more striking still images during the numbers than we’ve seen — normally these movies live in the entire sequence, rather than any one shot, but not West Side Story.

The story itself is… well, I mean, it’s Romeo and Juliet, innit, with all the strengths and weaknesses that brings along. The biggest issue is that Romeo and Juliet need Shakespeare’s eloquence to make them interesting, and when you discard the poetry and drag them down nearer to the real world they’re pretty insipid. Natalie Woods’ Maria has flashes of a personality, but Richard Beymer’s Tony is just a lunk-shaped void with a nice singing voice; the script makes him out to be a hulking, quick-tempered bruiser with a sore ego, but Beymer’s performance is all affable puppy dog, and it’s deadly considering how much screen time he has. Three of the four (four!) love songs are iconic, but then the Bernstein/Sondheim rapture ends and you’re left with nothing.

There’s some interesting gender stuff going on in the background, particularly with the character of Anybodys; Anybodys reads so strongly as a trans boy now, with the character demanding repeatedly to be one of the (male) members of the gang — a position he only achieves after Riff dies, and which eventually entails participating in the near-rape of Anita, the film’s intentionally queasiest moment, and the catalyst for the final murders. There’s some stuff to unpack there; some parallels to the ways that the Polish immigrants are offered an ascent to whiteness if they’ll drive out the Puerto Ricans for the cops. It’s unclear how intentional that is — Anybodys is credited as part of “Their Girls,” along with Graziella and Velma — but it was prominent enough that the character is explicitly transmasculine in the Spielberg remake.

Ultimately I don’t know about this one. It’s phenomenal in so many ways, and it’s both hugely ambitious and mostly successful in achieving those ambitions; it’s just impossible to look past the racism inherent in the casting. It didn’t have to be like this. With just slightly different choices — a stronger commitment to matching the textual anti-racism of the script with a corresponding anti-racism behind and in front of the camera — this could have been an all time classic.

Andrew and I recently watched Tampopo, a much beloved film directed by Jûzô Itami starring his wife and frequent collaborator Nobuko Miyamoto as Tampopo herself. It was originally released in 1985, but it is currently streaming through the Criterion Collection alongside a whole retrospective of other Itami films that I’m excited to watch too. I’ve really loved this movie for many years, although it had been a long time since I’d watched it and Andrew hadn’t seen it before, so it was nice to be able to re-discover this multi-course meal of a comedic film.

The movie is almost an essay collection meditating on the centrality of food in our lives, filled with brief, little vignettes interspersed like little amuse bouches in between bites of the main dish of the central plot. There are flashes that reminded me of The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie by Luis Bunuel, Tardi’s Mon Uncle series, In the Realm of the Senses, Rocky, the Magnificent Seven, and Gekiga-style manga in the way it dices together humor, eroticism, and pathos into a delicious, fluffy omurice combo.

The central plot revolves in particular around a hapless chef trying to master the difficult art of the perfect bowl of ramen that happy diners will drain to the last soulful drop of broth. Luckily she has a dream team of ramen aficionados like a very straight version of Queer Eye for the Chef Lady, who come together to help her make over her culinary skills, her restaurant, and even her chef outfits. The result is a delightful journey that I can’t help but feel helped to inspire a whole legion of Japanese culinary-themed manga, shows, and films such as the Drops of God, Oishinbo, Giant Spider and Me, Samurai Gourmet, and Midnight Diner, just to name a few of my favorites. Itami really deftly balances the serious technical ability and passion that the characters pour into ramen against a lovely sense of the absurd that keeps the whole endeavor feeling like a real hero’s journey for the title character.

If you’re looking for a movie that will leave you in a good (though possibly also very hungry) mood, I highly recommend bellying up to the Tampopo ramen bar.