For more…

• M*A*S*H on Amazon
• M*A*S*H on Wikipedia
• M*A*S*H (tv show) on Hulu
• Roger Ebert on M*A*S*H

Kelly’s Heroes (1970)
Directed by Brian G. Hutton
Cast includes Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, Don Rickles, Carroll O’Connor

Kelly’s Heroes is a marvel of a movie. It’s one of those WWII all star cast movies—like A Bridge Too Far or Battle of the Bulge—with Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Carroll O’Connor and Donald Sutherland. It’s also one of the WWII caper movies, like The Dirty Dozen or—the absolute best of all this (sub)genre—Where Eagles Dare (1968), also starring Clint Eastwood. It’s a caper/heist movie, of which a number—and some of the best—were made around this period, including The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), The Italian Job (1969), The Hot Rock (1972), and The Sting (1973). As a caper/heist movie, in terms of its cast and its overall tone, it probably mostly closely resembles Ocean’s 11 (1960) and The Hot Rock.

(Caper/heist movies have enjoyed a bit of a surge in popularity in recent years, particularly since 2016. It’s interesting that so many of the best have been remade – from Ocean’s 11 to The Italian Job – and that these remakes are amongst the best made in the 21st Century. But one has to wonder why they didn’t just… rerelease the originals.)

And it is also a Vietnam War movie, a fact which seems to have eluded some critics at the time of its release, as well as some commentators since then, who note the weird anachronistic elements such as Oddball’s (played by Sutherland) clearly hippie nature either without any real thought as to what they might mean, or without fully groking the implications and exploring the impact. The frequent massive major bombardments and explosions were complained of by some critics at the time of the release, again seemingly without any consideration of their role in the film. Unnecessary perhaps in a caper film, sure, and often having no significant or apparent role in the plot per se. But as elements of a Vietnam War movie, all those chaotic, often misdirected bombardments can be seen as clearly serving a role. The chaos, confusion and mindless brutality of war, with humans just scurrying around within it. Very different from the heroic infantry soldier scenes or the Battle of Britain dogfights so popular in more positive depictions of war.

In 1970, the Vietnam War was still very much in progress, and considered as part of the (sub)genre of films critical of that war, Kelly’s Heroes would have to be one of the first, significantly predating films like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), though obviously the critique here is indirect, and more at the level of “vibe.” Watching Kelly’s Heroes, it’s hard not to think of it as having been an influence on Apocalypse Now, with people going off mission, going behind enemy lines, caper elements, the band of misfits (including the very young Laurence Fishburne), etc. Oddball has speakers attached to his tank—“We got a loudspeaker here and when we go into battle we play music, very loud. It kind of calms us down.”—and it’s impossible not to think of the “Ride of the Valkyries” scene in Apocalypse Now, hearing that now.

The pointlessness of war, the disaffection of common soldiers, the corruption and incompetence of officers, the waste of lives, prostitutes and substance use, dissolution and rebellion. It’s all there in Kelly’s Heroes—all that’s missing are some officers getting fragged and heroin. Oddball does remark at one point that he hates officers; Crapgame (Rickels) reassures him by noting that Kelly does, too. And the reason for that is Kelly, then an officer himself (a lieutenant), was ordered by his command to attack the wrong hill and ended up killing a bunch of American soldiers. Which is so a Vietnam War anecdote/tragedy.

And I feel pretty confident the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing. They knew they were making a bizarre, goofy ass chimera of a movie, and they committed to it. It’s a big part of why the movie is so fun, so good. They even throw in some obvious references to Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns—The Good, the Bad and the Ugly came out in 1966—with a bit of music (the soundtrack is by Lalo Shifrin) clearly intended to call up Ennio Morricone’s scores at one point, and the showdown between Kelly, Big Joe (Savalas), Oddball and the German tank commander near the end.

(In looking at the film in relation to Eastwood’s work, it’s perhaps worth noting that Kelly’s Heroes came out only one year after that other bizarre chimera in his filmography, Paint Your Wagon (1969).)

It’s not as pure and tight a war caper film as Where Eagles Dare. It couldn’t be and still be that goofy ass chimera, and—let’s be honest—Eagles is a truly excellent bit of filmmaking. Similarly, it’s not a sustained and focused meditation on the Vietnam War. But I think it has a solid claim to being one of the first major films to start the process of critiquing that war from the perspective of the ordinary grunt. 

Obviously, this movie is one of my favorites, and has been since I first saw it as a kid (not sure if that was on TV or at some rep cinema screening—I started going to rep cinemas when I was in elementary school and never looked back). People who know me will not be surprised to learn that it wasn’t Kelly that got me all excited back then, who I bonded with. It was, of course, Oddball

Update: mulling this over, since I wrote it, I’ve become much less convinced of the claim that this is a Vietnam War film in any way. Sure, it’s fairly scathing about the venality and ineptitude of military command, celebrates soldiers disobeying and looking out for themselves, and anachronistically features 60s hippie stuff, but other than the hippie stuff, those critiques of war are not particularly uncommon and not confined to the Vietnam War. (Whether M*A*S*H is more about Korea or Vietnam… I don’t know. The latter I tend to think.) Having a weird hippie tank commander could have been a largely commercial move – appealing to audience sensibilities and adding a lot of lightness. Big Joe and Kelly are, after all, pretty serious the whole way through. But… still something to consider.

For more…

• Kelly’s Heroes on Amazon
• … on Letterboxd
• Kelly’s Heroes (DVD) at San Francisco Public Library
• Kelly’s Heroes download
• Where Eagles Dare trailer
• Where Eagles Dare on Amazon
• Where Eagles Dare (DVD) at San Francisco Public Library
• Where Eagles Dare (book) at San Francisco Public Library
• Where Eagles Dare download
• Heist film on Wikipedia
• Vietnam War films on Wikipedia

Ranked 40th in a TimeOut list of the 100 best animated films done in 2014:

A sick joke on paper, this devastating domestic drama today feels like one of the more honest works of the anti-nuke movement. It’s a complete and utter downer, making a larger point subtly through the employment of animation itself: Such an adorably hand-drawn universe is too precious to last in a world of mutually assured destruction. We’re all living in a cartoon if we actually believe survival is possible when the radiation headaches mount and your hair starts failing out in tufts. (Heartbreakingly, the husband assures his wife that women don’t go bald—a “scientific fact.”) Big-name pop stars lent their music to the cause, including Roger Waters, Squeeze and David Bowie, who crooned the soulful, undanceable title track. If you haven’t seen this one, that’s totally understandable; it makes The Day After look like a gentle summer shower.—Joshua Rothkopf

For more…

• When the Wind Blows (movie) – Amazon
• Stream on Tubi (with ads, and owned by Fox, so you would be making a contribution to that company’s – and Rupert Murdoch’s – profits)
• Where else to watch
• When the Wind Blows – Wikipedia
• When the Wind Blows (comic book/graphic novel) – Amazon

I’ve written about lists a few times (for instance, here and here). And I maintain, as I’ve discussed, a “master list” to which I add various best/greatest/most important film lists I come across in my travels, and that does now and then throw up some interesting things to consider. As with a list I incorporated this weekend.

In 2005, the Hong Kong Film Awards polled a group of 101 critics, scholars and filmmakers on the “the best Chinese cinema,” as part of a celebration of a century of Chinese cinema. The list embraced films from Taiwan, Hong Kong (the majority) and (mainland) China, silent and in Cantonese and Mandarin. Most of the films are ones that appear on various other lists, but a few were ones I’d never run across before, and that’s always interesting for me. In particular, I think having a reference list of, for instance, those films widely considered “best” or most important from, say, China before 1949 is always useful for scholars and budding scholars and those who just want to take a deep dive into such an area.

But the most interesting thing about the list, for me, was the ranking of Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece, In the Mood for Love (2000): 90th.

90th? In the 2012 Sight and Sound polls, it was ranked 67th by directors and 24th by critics. In last year’s polls, its stature had risen considerably, in line with the general emerging critical consensus around the film, to 9th and 5th respectively.

Why this pretty significant discrepancy between the critical estimation of Chinese (predominantly Hong Kong) critics and filmmakers and those of the larger, global community of critics and filmmakers polled by the BFI?

It’s possible that time may explain it—that in 2005, just a few years after it came out, people hadn’t yet caught on to the merits of the film, and that as with the jump in esteem in the Sight & Sound polls between 2012 and 2022, it would now be ranked much higher. (The 2002 Sight & Sound polls, the first done after the film’s release, like those of previous decades, were much shorter than the more recent incarnations, only top 10 and with fewer people polled, so its absence from that year’s results is not really surprising.)

But it is also possible that the difference reflects some cultural issues that are simply not accessible to most non-Chinese viewers, perhaps even that it is a film made for export, made to appeal to an international audience, and that in the process aspects of it simply don’t work well in the country in which it was made. Obviously, I have no way of knowing.

I love it. Not sure I would rank it the 5th greatest film of all time, but it’s definitely up there. But for me, seeing the discrepancy here, between its ranking by the critics and filmmakers assembled by the HK Film Award and those by the BFI, is a cautionary tale, inclining me to look more closely at similar situations, at discrepancies in, say, how American and European critics rate and respond to African films versus how critics, scholars and filmmakers from Africa respond.

And it really makes me want a more recent Hong Kong Film Awards list. There may be one; I’ll have to look.

That list also clearly shows that there were some serious scholars of Chinese-language cinema involved, in the hard-to-find, seldom screened these days choices from older (mainland) Chinese cinema.

(It’s often possible to make some rough guesses about the people polled for a particular list, even if there’s a danger of generalization. For instance, this list of the “100 Best Movies Of All Time”… very fan boy, in a not complimentary sense. So much so that I am not sure about including it in my overall master list of lists. It is a bit interesting, though, to try to guess why some of the less fan-boy-ish films managed to get included.)

Update: In 2010, the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival surveyed over 100 film professionals—predominantly Taiwanese, but many from elsewhere—on the greatest Chinese-language films. In the Mood for Love was ranked 10th.

Pressed for time, so this is going to be a more telegraphic survey than usual, just quick notes on the films for the coming week that I think are most interesting, with some clips to whet your appetite.

Sunday, August 6

• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
• Bunch of Debbie Reynolds films, including The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Monday, August 7

• Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1970) – cheesy but fun example of the sort of science fiction and fantasy films produced on lower budgets before the whole blockbuster era and huge success of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc. upended things. No more quick, cheap and fun Sinbad movies.
• Billy Budd (1962) – directed by Peter Ustinov and starring Ustinov and Terence Stamp. I somehow didn’t even know about this movie. My personal must see for the week.
• Berlin Express (1948) – directed by Jacques Tourneur. Allied agents fight an underground Nazi group in post-war Europe. Film noir-ish, great director.
• On Dangerous Ground (1952) – directed by Nicolas Ray and starring Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan

Tuesday, August 8

• Bunch of films with Joan Blondell, a nice selection of 1930s movies, including two of the most fun and representative backstage musicals of that era:
  • Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
  • Footlight Parade (1933)

Wednesday, August 9

• Joan Blondell continues, with Blonde Crazy (1931) being the highlight
• The Emperor Jones (1933) – adaptation of a play by Eugene O’Neill, with Paul Robeson
• That’s Entertainment! (1974). An all-star cast, including Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra, introduces clips from MGM’s greatest musicals.
• That’s Dancing! (1985). Gene Kelly, Liza Minnelli and Mikhail Baryshnikov host this compilation of some of the greatest dance numbers in movie history.
• Stormy Weather (1943) with Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway

Thursday, August 10

• The day starts, in the witching hours, with three short films from the 1930s directed by Roy Mack, showcasing Black performers
• Uptown Saturday Night (1974) directed by Sidney Poitier and starring Poitier and Bill Cosby
• Out of the Past (1947)- directed by Jacques Tourneur. One of the finest and most interesting films noir.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949). Adapted from the book by Mark Twain. Bing Crosby plays an auto mechanic who’s sent back in time to King Arthur’s court. I loved this movie when I first saw it as a kid and don’t really have any critical distance.

Friday, August 11

• Some Rhonda Fleming films
• Bunch of Alan Ladd films, including the most important, probably: Shane (1953), a crucial western.

Saturday, August 12

• The Glass Key (1942) – with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Based on the Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) novel of the same name. Has what is kind of an ur plot for a film noir: A hired gun and his gangster boss fall out over a woman.
• A bunch of Deborah Kerr films, including two by the British film making team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger:
  • The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
  • Black Narcissus (1947)

For people into film, I’d say there’s a bunch of must sees in this week, but many of them films people are likely to have already seen, like Singin’ in the Rain, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Shane. Ones people are maybe less likely to have seen that I think are must sees are the film noir—Out of the Past and On Dangerous Ground—Gold Diggers of 1933, Stormy Weather, The Emperor Jones, and the two Powell and Pressburger. Those last are not the best films by that crucial duo, but are excellent and discussed whenever that duo comes up. My favorite films by Powell and Pressburger are A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948).

To pick just one (and assuming you’ve seen Singin’ in the Rain and Robin Hood)… it’s got to be Stormy Weather if you haven’t seen it or Out of the Past if you have.

For more…

• Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction – independent bookshops
• Singin’ in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece – independent bookshops
• Body and Soul (dir. Oscar Micheaux, 1925) with Paul Robeson – stream free on Kanopy
• Pioneers of African American Cinema – includes Oscar Micheaux – stream free on Kanopy
• Songs of Freedom – Musician and Activist Paul Robeson – stream free on Kanopy
• Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories by Herman Melville – independent bookshops
• Shane (1953) – stream free on Kanopy
• The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett – independent bookshops
• The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger – independent bookshops
• Powell and Pressburger’s War: The Art of Propaganda, 1939-1946 – independent bookshops
• The Adventures of Robin Hood – Amazon
• Singin’ in the Rain – Amazon
• Billy Budd – Amazon
• Stormy Weather – Amazon
• Out of the Past – Amazon
• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp – Amazon
• Black Narcissus – Amazon
• The Red Shoes – Amazon
• Where else to find/watch movies: JustWatch.com
• To download movies: YIFY

I’ve talked in the past about academic work in my field(s)—with some humor, but also with both affection and respect for the serious exploration done by, in particular, grad students and early career scholars exploring how serious issues play out in (in particular) popular culture. Here’s another example:

From the communal rebuilding of a computerized datapaths and software programs, to the reinvention of what a television show could look like during a global health crisis, to the rallying of a community of creatives after the sudden passing of their leader and friend, the Muppets always find a way to come together for the sake of each other. This commitment to what we owe one another acts as a countermeasure to the brutality of social norms and sincerely asks us to imagine “otherwise possibilities” 

Coby, Laura M. 2023. “ Muppets Take Windows 95: The Queer Failure of Muppets Inside: CD-ROM.” The Journal of American Culture 00 (0): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13482.

I do get, honestly, why work like this—an examination of a Muppets interactive product from a queer theory perspective—might seem weird, or even pointless, to people not in the academic humanities, or who haven’t spent much time thinking about it, but honestly most of that, all of that really, is a kind of snobbery, and reflects a real lack of understanding about scholarship in the humanities (and in the social sciences, as well, far too often).

I mean, if you take a step back and bracket prejudices towards queer theory or popular culture or interactive CD-ROMs (or computer games or whatever), it should be readily apparent that this is no more pointless than much (most, possibly even all) of the scholarship on Shakespeare or Jane Austen. Work on the Muppets and on contemporary material, arguably, is even more important because it helps us understand the current moment in culture (and also in capitalism). If work on Shakespeare or Jane Austen is more important, it’s only because more people read them, still, than are likely to engage with this Muppets product.

And that’s not invalid. Though it does remind me of a bit from David Lodge’s wonderful novel about academia and English departments in particular, Changing Places, in which one of the main characters, Morris Zapp (a riff on Stanley Fish), wants to write the definitive critical examination of Jane Austen from every angle, feminist, Marxist, practical criticism, you name it—so that when he’s done, no more scholarly work on Jane Austen will be possible. (Because presumably, he’s sick of how much of it there is, but I think we are meant to think it also reflects a sexist hostility toward or deprecation of Austen… and women more generally.)

And younger academics have to find topics that have not been done to death already, if they are to get papers published, get a dissertation through, have any hope of getting a tenure track position, or—increasingly these days—any paid position. So they look for new angles on old texts—queer rereadings of Austen, for instance, though that’s barely, not even at all, a stretch—or work on newer, and therefore perforce less widely known, read, popular, texts, like… the Muppets.

And also the Muppets just rock. I’d be happy to see whole special issues of journals devoted to Muppets scholarship.

For more…

• The Muppet Movie (1979) – Amazon
• The Muppets (Season 1) – Amazon
• Small World, by David Lodge – from independent bookshops

My scoring system weights the Sight & Sound polls (all of them) heavily, with points for their position in those lists, and so in my top 101 list there are not huge differences from their polls. Further down on my full list (which is much, much longer than 101 entries), though, the aggregation of so many lists does provide insights into well-regarded films which have never gotten the nod in an S&S poll.

But let’s digress for a moment or maybe… upgress? Get meta. Boys and lists. What is it with boys and lists, especially pop culture lists? Should we make a list? Seriously, though, go read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which is an acute look at the male psyche, and in particular the psyche of males who make lists, structured around… a list of top 5 breakups. The protagonist, Rob, is of the view that “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” a view shared by the employees of his record store, “the musical moron twins,” and the three of them are forever making lists and judging people on their lists and likes. But the point of the book (it’s about girls, right? – just kidding) is that this is something we—blokes—need to grow out of. Which Rob does in the end.

Okay, that said…

The top 20 films from my aggregation that don’t appear in S&S, listed below, show a definite science fiction bias, which is interesting, and also suggest something of the disconnect of “popular” from “greatest” (at least as determined by critics and directors that S&S polls). It’s weird, for instance, to consider that neither The Maltese Falcon nor King Kong rank with S&S. These are mostly just very popular films, with the exceptions—like Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—being films that are popular with film scholars, cinephiles and filmmakers, the kinds of people who make lists of “best” films.

The top 20 highly regarded films on my aggregate list that don’t make Sight & Sound‘s cut:

• 1. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
• 2. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
• 3. Star Wars (aka Episode IV – A New Hope) (1977)
• 4. Annie Hall (1977)
• 5. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
• 6. Alien (1979)
• 7. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
• 8. All About Eve (1950)
• 9. Beauty And The Beast (La Belle et la Bête) (1946)
• 10. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
• 11. Brazil (1985)
• 12. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• 13. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
• 14. Duck Soup (1933)
• 15. Gone With The Wind (1939)
• 16. King Kong (1933)
• 17. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• 18. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
• 19. On the Waterfront (1954)
• 20. Back to the Future (1985)

My own list of what I think are the “best” films… Well, that would tend to change from month to month, mood to mood.

But I think it’s in many ways more interesting to look at “personal favorites” that are not on any best/greatest list. I mean, it doesn’t really tell us that much about someone if they say that, for instance, Seven Samurai or Vertigo is one of the favorite films. (For me, yes to the first, not so much to the second.) But if they say The Love Bug or—in my case—Kelly’s Heroes, well, that perhaps gives you more insight into their… sensibility. (Or, perhaps more so, into their childhood and teen years and what films they had the opportunity to see then.)

So here, in chronological order, is this boy’s list (random, by no means complete) of 100+ of my personal favorite films that don’t make the cut of any of the Sight & Sound polls and few, if any, other “best/greatest” lists:

• Animal Crackers (1930)
• Dracula (1931)
• The Public Enemy (1931)
• Frankenstein (1931)
• Grand Hotel (1932)
• Trouble In Paradise (1932)
• The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
• Queen Christina (1933)
• 42nd Street (1933)
• The Thin Man (1934)
• It Happened One Night (1934)
• Top Hat (1935)
• My Man Godfrey (1936)
• Swing Time (1936)
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
• Bringing Up Baby (1938)
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
• Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
• Ninotchka (1939)
• Stagecoach (1939)
• The Sea Hawk (1940)
• The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
• Fantasia (1940)
• His Girl Friday (1940)
• The Philadelphia Story (1940)
• Bambi (1942)
• The Palm Beach Story (1942)
• Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
• To Have And Have Not (1944)
• Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
• Wonder Man (1945)
• My Darling Clementine (1946)
• The Big Sleep (1946)
• The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
• The Ghost And Mrs. Muir (1947)
• Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
• A Song is Born (1948)
• Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
• The Thing from Another World (1951)
• The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
• The African Queen (1951)
• An American in Paris (1951)
• Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century (short) (1953)
• Duck Amuck (short) (1953)
• Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances de M. Hulot) (1953)
• Roman Holiday (1953)
• The Band Wagon (1953)
• Shane (1953)
• The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
• Magnificent Obsession (1954)
• White Christmas (1954)
• 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954)
• Godzilla (Gojira) (1954)
• To Catch a Thief (1955)
• The Ladykillers (1955)
• The Red Balloon (1956)
• Forbidden Planet (1956)
• Funny Face (1957)
• 3:10 to Yuma (1957)
• The Hidden Fortress (1958)
• Mon Oncle (1958)
• The Mouse that Roared (1959)
• Ohayo (Good Morning) (1959)
• Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) (1959)
• Floating Weeds (Ukigusa) (1959)
• Rio Bravo (1959)
• Operation Petticoat (1959)
• Zazie dans le métro (Zazie on the Subway) (1960)
• Yojimbo (1961)
• Dr. No (1962)
• Sanjuro (1962)
• Chushingura (1962)
• Charade (1963)
• The Birds (1963)
• A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
• Goldfinger (1964)
• My Fair Lady (1964)
• Mary Poppins (1964)
• What’s New Pussycat? (1965)
• Doctor Zhivago (1965)
• Thunderball (1965)
• How to Steal a Million (1966)
• King of Hearts (1966)
• Bedazzled (1967)
• Casino Royale (1967)
• You Only Live Twice (1967)
• Dont Look Back (1967)
• Marat/Sade (1967)
• The Lion in Winter (1968)
• Where Eagles Dare (1968)
• Romeo and Juliet (1968)
• The Producers (1968)
• Performance (1970)
• M*A*S*H (1970)
• Kelly’s Heroes (1970)
• Murmur of the Heart (Le Souffle au Coeur) (1971)
• Walkabout (1971)
• The Exorcist (1973)
• Three Days of the Condor (1975)
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
• Logan’s Run (1976)
• The Harder they Come (1977)
• Wizards (1977)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
• Manhattan (1979)
• Stardust Memories (1980)
• The Blues Brothers (1980)
• Gregory’s Girl (1981)
• Diva (1981)
• Eijanaika (1981)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
• Project A (1983)
• The Revolt of Job (1983)
• My Life as a Dog (1985)
• A Better Tomorrow (1986)
• Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
• Aliens (1986)
• Pedicab Driver (1989)
• The Abyss (1989)
• The Killer (Die Xue Shuang Xiong) (1989)
• The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
• Supercop (1992)
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
• Hard Boiled (1992)
• Groundhog Day (1993)
• To Live (1994)
• Fly Away Home (1996)
• Happy Together (Cheun Gwong Tsa Sit) (1997)
• Lake Placid (1999)
• Lord of the Rings [The Trilogy] (2001-03)
• Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
• Ernest & Celestine (2012)
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

It was interesting for me, throwing out that list and reflecting on it a bit. The biggest thing that emerged for me from looking at it was how few recent films there were. I really just don’t watch as many movies as I used to, not new movies at any rate. (I watched three movies this past weekend, but they were old ones, and two of them I’d seen before.) As I suggested above, looking at this list it seems more about what movies I watched from the ages of 13 to 25, a time in my life when I was particularly open to falling in love with films—and records and books and, it must be said, people. I’m not immune to falling in love now, but it does feel like it’s rarer now for something to grab me totally in that way. I miss being open in that way, I think. But also I am more discerning now with the movies I do watch, whereas when I was a kid I’d watch anything. So most of my recent films are already on various “best” lists, or—for instance with The Quiet Girl—seem likely to be so soon.

oh yeah, before we begin properly – Hello to Jason Isaacs

Sunday, July 30, is a bit all over the map but in a very nice way. Some excellent movies, including

• Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) – which I don’t care for, but I respect that’s a minority view
• Great Expectations (1946) – directed by David Lean, and based on a slimmed down version written for the stage by Alec Guinness. Considered one of the best filmic adaptations of Dickens.
• Gigi (1958) – directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold. Not a great musical, but a good one, though there are aspects that seem much less charming now than they presumably did, at least generally, when it came out
• Coming Home (1978) – an important Vietnam War film, with Jane Fonda, who conceived of and produced the film, and cinematography by the great Haskell Wexler
• Being There (1979) – with Peter Sellers. Directed by Hal Ashby, who also directed Coming Home. He had a good 1970s—some truly exceptional work.

So that’s a pretty solid day. But the standout, the real “must see” for the day—and the week— is the last: Daisies, “a 1966 Czechoslovakian surrealist comedy-drama film written and directed by Věra Chytilová” (Wikipedia). Not as well known as it deserves to be, but as with Jeanne Dielman the most recent Sight & Sound Critics Poll has boosted its profile: it was ranked 28th, after never having appeared in any Sight & Sound list previously: “This feminist milestone is an anarchic comedy of subversion whose approach to montage is as exuberant as the film’s two protagonists.” Its appearance, and Jeanne Dielman topping the poll, may reflect changes in the critics polled for the list, as well as an increased interest in more complicated and non-traditional films.

I got turned onto it fairly recently—though before the S&S poll—by a friend who’s an art history professional but regularly knows more about films than me, which is, you know, embarrassing. And when I try to show off some of my art history knowledge to get some of my own back… well, let’s just say it doesn’t go well for me as a rule. But I am grateful for being introduced to this really fascinating piece of filmmaking. (It’s also available on Max, Apple TV and the Criterion Channel.)

I can’t really go through every film that TCM’s screening, though sometimes it’s tempting, so I’m just going to call out a few of the films that seem like highlights from the rest of the week.

• Them (1954) – Monday at 6am. An American giant monster movie, and one of the better ones, with a cameo by… Leonard Nimoy
• Some great film noir as well on Monday
• Lucille Ball on Tuesday
• Anthony Perkins on Wednesday, including Psycho (but not, sadly, Pretty Poison)
• The Silencers (1966) at midnight Thur/Fri – the first Matt Helm film, with Dean Martin as a secret agent. There were a whole bunch of secret agent movies in the 60s, trying to cash in on the success of James Bond. This one is fun, and fun to see Dean Martin doing his thing. It co-stars Daliah Lavi, who was in one of my favorite Bond films, Casino Royale (but probably not the one you’re thinking of). It’s also perhaps the first movie to feature a post-credits scene.
• It’s followed by two blaxploitation films, Slaughter (1972) and then Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975). Not great films from this genre, but of interest.
• That night, Treasure Island (1934), directed by Victor Fleming (who had some success a few years later with Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz – in the same year) and starring Jackie Cooper. Justly famous film version of the book.

And the week closes out, on Saturday night, with two costume dramas starring Errol Flynn, two of the best, non-Robin Hood category: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and The Sea Hawk (1940). Elizabeth and Essex was directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and also stars Bette Davis as Elizabeth I. Davis’ strong performance was considered Oscar-nomination worthy, but she actually got nominated for Dark Victory instead. The Sea Hawk again has Flynn as a ship captain battling the Spanish Empire and again with some sparks with Queen Elizabeth, in this film played by Flora Robson in a marvelous performance.

And just after midnight: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). What more could you ask for? Well, Captain Blood (1935), obviously, but still… if you’re into great movies, fun period action and adventure movies, it’s just a terrific triple bill, pretty much unmatched.

For more…

• Jason Isaacs’ strange cult following
• Great Expectations (1946) – Wikipedia
• Great Expectations (1946) – Amazon
• Great Expectations (2023) – the new BBC version with Olivia Coleman
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Daisies (1966) – Amazon
• Casino Royale (1967) trailer – Youtube
• Casino Royale (1967) – Amazon
• Captain Blood (1935) – Amazon

And it’s not just A Christmas Carol. Right after it, they’re showing In the Good Old Summertime (1949), which is a musical remake—starring Judy Garland—of another Christmas staple, at least in my house, The Shop Around the Corner, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring James Stewart. It’s the movie that was remade most recently as You’ve Got Mail, but the original, set in Christmas-time Budapest, is—despite not having Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks—the better version, as well as being the Christmas-y one. I haven’t seen this musical remake, though the title suggests it is not a Christmas movie in this version.

Actually… that’s it for Christmas stuff. So not much of a Christmas in July. Curious that they’d even program A Christmas Carol now, even at 2 am…

Anyway, Wednesday has a number of good films, including Fury (1936), directed by Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and starring Spenser Tracy. That’s followed by To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heat of the Night—so a good night of movies.

Thursday, July 27, is all about the Bard, with some very good Shakespeare on screen:

• Kiss Me Kate (1953) at 8:30 am
• Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier at 10 am
• Romeo and Juliet (1937), directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer at 12:30 pm
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) at 2:45 pm, and
• Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) at 5:15 pm

I haven’t seen that “Romeo and Juliet” so it’s the must see for me. The Olivier Hamlet and Henry are justly famous. They’re interesting to watch alongside the more recent versions by Kenneth Branaugh—the earlier ones very much filmed versions of plays, the later ones trying to see how much more can be done cinematically, both by people steeped in, deeply engaged with Shakespeare. I love Kiss Me Kate, but I always want to see it in the 3-D version, ideally in the Castro Theatre of old, where the song “I Hate Men” tends to be a laugh riot. My favorite number in it, though, is “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”:

Continuing…

Friday is Blonde Ambition day. Or something. I like it when programmers do stuff like this—it’s a bunch of movies with “blond(e)” in the title, well four anyway, beginning with the best of the lot at 1 am, Blondie (1938), based on the comic strip.

Saturday, July 29, looks awesome—one of those days when, in the past, when so many movies you could only catch on TV, I would stay in all day watching stuff. It begins with one of the better San Francisco-based movies, Freebie and the Bean, which I’ve written about previously and which is a prime contender for the movie that started the whole “buddy cop” genre. It’s followed by a really stellar selection of stuff:

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) at 4:30 am – directed by Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and with a soundtrack featuring Leonard Cohen
• Key Largo (1948) at 2 pm – directed by John Huston, starring Bogie and Bacall, with Edward G. Robinson as the bad guy. Not as talked about or often seen as the other Bogie and Bacall films, but excellent.
• Foreign Correspondent (1940) – early (well, before all the famous ones anyway), excellent, interesting Hitchcock
• The Omega Man (1971) at 6:15 pm – fairly cheesy post-apocalypse sci fi film with Charleton Heston. Not as good as that other post-apocalypse film with Heston and some damn dirty apes, but an interesting piece for reflecting on trends in cinema, and in anxiety, as we moved out of the classic Hollywood era.
• Double Indemnity (1944) at 8 pm – one of the most famous and most important of classic film noir. Not my favorite – which might be Out of the Past – but a must see for anyone serious about film and film genres.
• Body Heat (1981) at 10 pm. A modern (when it came out forty years ago) reboot of the whole film noir genre, with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Excellent.

If you haven’t already seen it, the obvious “must see” film of this week is… McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which Roger Ebert hailed as “a perfect film.” (I mean, it’s not Howard Hawks, but it is pretty perfect otherwise.)

For more…

• Metropolis – Kanopy
• Blondie (1938) – Wikipedia
• Key Largo – Amazon
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Wikipedia
• Roger Ebert’s review of McCabe & Mrs. Miller – spoiler: he liked it. A lot.
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Amazon
• Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Reframing the American West
• Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling
• Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction
• Film Noir Reader
• Henry V (Kenneth Branaugh) – Amazon
• Hamlet (Kenneth Branaugh) – Amazon
• Romeo & Juliet (Zeffirelli, 1968) – Kanopy
• Shakespeare to stream on Kanopy

I started this blog at an earlier time on the internet (as the many broken links and defunct sites linked to on earlier posts suggest). One of my thoughts was that it would be a place where I shared what I liked, and people might come here for one thing, and then check out others—and if they found that my taste was a good fit for theirs, this would be a place they might turn to more regularly, to follow along with me. It would reflect my sensibility—it’s there in the subhed—and if people liked it, it would be a guide, a curation of movies, music and the like of interest.

One of the perils and promises of the current moment on the internet is the vast, unimaginable volume of… of stuff we have available. Do a search for underwear on Amazon and you’ll be overwhelmed, spammed, swamped with choices. And unfortunately many of them will be lousy and it will be quite hard to figure out which are not—maybe less so with underwear, but certainly with things like tech gear. I mean, how many iPhone cables can there possibly be? Are they all equally good/garbage? How can you even tell?

Things have gotten better in some respects, but worse in more since I started this. Many of my music links are dead because the blogs or websites that hosted them are gone, some probably taken down in response to copyright infringement. But I suspect in part because of such copyright infringement, so much more “legit” music is now available on YouTube. It’s rare these days that there’s a song I want to listen to that I can’t find there, which was much less the case a decade ago.

But the loss of the blogs also means the loss of the curation they performed. Of their sensibilities. And so, in the vast undifferentiated realm of the internet, Google (gamed) search results and YouTube, how does one find the good tunes, the banging tunes, the ones that break your heart or melt your face? The good books, the good movies?

For many, perhaps most people, that has been for a while through largely algorithmically generated recommendations and lists—on YouTube, on Amazon, on GoodReads (i.e., Amazon), on IMDb (i.e., Amazon), on Spotify, etc. But there are a host of problems with this, problems that have been getting more and more attention in recent years, and seem likely to get worse—much worse—as these corporations rush to embrace AI (machine learning and LLMs, etc.—basically just better, faster, leaner and meaner algorithms, with unclear but little human crafting).

The issue of gatekeeping, taste-making and algorithms came in for some academic scrutiny even before “we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to AI” (“we” being corporations looking for paths to profit without paying workers).

We argue that music streaming platforms in combining proprietary algorithms and human curators constitute the “new gatekeepers” in an industry previously dominated by human intermediaries such as radio programmers, journalists, and other experts. The article suggests understanding this gatekeeping activity as a form of “algo-torial power” that has the ability to set the “listening agendas” of global music consumers. While the power of traditional gatekeepers was mainly of an editorial nature, albeit data had some relevance in orienting their choices, the power of platform gatekepeers [sic] is an editorial power “augmented” and enhanced by algorithms and big data. Platform gatekeepers have more data, more tools to manage and to make sense of these data, and thus more power than their predecessors

Bonini, Tiziano, and Alessandro Gandini. “‘First Week Is Editorial, Second Week Is Algorithmic’: Platform Gatekeepers and the Platformization of Music Curation.” Social Media + Society, vol. 5, no. 4, Oct. 2019, p. 2056305119880006. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006

It is not just those old blogs as taste-makers and sensibilities that have been lost, but almost all of the previous “gatekeepers” that Gen X and older millennials grew up with. Reviews in newspapers and, more quirky and independent, free weeklies like the old versions of the East Bay Express and SF Weekly. The programmers at the local art house/rep cinema. The “staff picks” shelves at shuttered bookstores or video rental places. A favorite DJ at a favorite radio station—though some college radio stations are hanging on and there are new, internet-enabled things emerging like BFF.fm (“Best Frequencies Forever”) with amateur and new professional DJs doing interestingly quirky and diverse programs—San Francisco-based and genuinely excellent, which you can listen to online from anywhere in the world. And some radio stations still seem to do things well, like Australia’s triple j, with its “hottest 100.”

And podcasts as well, an area I must confess I haven’t really dug into much, beyond a few predictable ones, ones that are actually mainstays for me, and serve a lot of that gatekeeping/curatorial function, on non-profit systems so not (yet) (as) subject to the profit-making and algorithmic modes that drive most other things these days, like NPR’s All Songs Considered and Pop Culture Happy Hour. Or Mark Kermode’s Screenshot on the BBC, or his podcast with Simon Mayo, successor to their excellent, wildly popular radio programme on BBC 5 Live, which ended in 2022. (Here’s a nice clip prepared as a goodbye.)

(This is all a bit rambling, for which I apologize. There’s always this tension between getting something out there, and getting something really tightly written, and with my current situation, I just don’t have the time for “tight.”)

The big takeaways, the points I’ve been trying to get around to making:

• Algorithmic “taste-making” is not about taste-making at all really—more like force feeding. Profit-making and gatekeeping in a bad way, keeping you within the known, predictable, profitable and corporate-controlled.
• Spotify is the devil. Also Amazon, despite my ubiquitous links to that site. (I’m switching to Bookshop.org for books, which supports independent bookstores and lets me do shelves / lists.)
• While taste-making blogs have declined fairly precipitously in the face of the increasingly corporate, dull and damaged internet, there are still some out there, and you should find them.
• There are also some other genuinely interesting “radio” programs and review sites, and you should seek them out. Listen to BFF.fm.
• Almost certainly, they will all be independent and/or controlled by not for profit entities like NPR, BBC, Australia’s ABC.
• Seemingly independent things that start up, like GoodReads, if they start to get any real traction in taste-making and gatekeeping, are likely to get gobbled up by some corporation, probably either Amazon or Google, which will then use them to suck you back into their corporate maw.

When I get some time, I’ll try to return to this and… tighten up.

BFI’s synopsis: “Social comedy telling the story of a family man who is dismissed from his insurance company when he sides with a colleague in a dispute against the management. After an unsuccessful search for work and having been forced to pawn his wife’s kimonos he accepts an offer to work in a friend’s curry restaurant.”

In the past, movies like this were hard to see. This particular film wasn’t released in the US until 1982. But now it has a Criterion release, and you can also watch it (though not in as good a quality transfer as Criterion’s) on the Internet Archive.

It’s also showing later this week as part of the Harvard Film Archive program “Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro” which started on June 9 and runs through August 13.

An embarrassment of riches.

Ozu’s one of my favorite directors, though that’s hardly an outré opinion. His Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari) (1953) appeared in Sight & Sound’s list of the greatest films of all time in the first list after it was released and has climbed steadily in critical estimation since. In the 2022 version of the S&S lists, it was ranked #4 in both the overall list and the poll of directors. If you combine the various serious critical appraisal lists for the last 50 years, the only films that top it as contenders for “greatest film” are Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Rules of the Game (La Régle du Jeu), and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have yet to see an Ozu film that didn’t seem a completely achieved work to me. I adore his cheeky comedy, Ohayo (Good Morning)—it’s one of the films I use to turn younger kids on to watching subtitled foreign films. I tend to try not to see movies like this on a small screen for the first time, but I’ve never had a chance to see Tokyo No Korasu in a theatre before. But I still don’t have access to TCM, so I may just have to watch this on Criterion. But wow, I wish I could attend all the screenings at the Harvard Film Archive.

Two Ozu films are available to stream for free on Kanopy: Tokyo Story and Floating Weeds (1959). There’s also an episode on Ozu and Kurosawa as part of the “Understanding Japan: A Cultural History” course produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian.

There’s been a lot of good writing on Ozu, as you’d expect with a director with that kind of critical regard and such a large body of work:

• Ozu’s Tokyo Story – edited by David Desser, part of the Cambridge Film Handbook series
• The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday – by Woojeong Joo
• Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence – edited by Jinhee Choi
• Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer – by Paul Shrader
• Ozu: His Life and Films – by Donald Richie, older but the basis for much of the subsequent critical discussion and a very good read.

You can of course find plenty of Ozu on Amazon, particularly in Criterion Collection releases, including Tokyo Story and Good Morning (Ohayo). There’s also stuff to stream including Good Morning and Early Summer.

Some of the other things on TCM this week that are particularly appealing include

• Carefree (1938) – one of the best Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers pics
• Ocean’s Eleven (1960) – the original, with Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin
• Jules and Jim (1962) – Truffaut
• The Candidate (1972) – Robert Redford
• Shaft (1971)
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

TCM has chosen an interesting way to celebrate the 4th of July—a day almost entirely devoted to musicals. It’s a good choice: it’s such an American genre, I feel, and while the Western is perhaps more so, that genre is enmeshed in two of the worst issues in American history, slavery and the dispossession and genocide of Native Americans, and even bracketing that (which is a lot to bracket) is often less “holiday” in spirit.

But the day begins (in the wee small / post witching hours) with two of the better of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road” movies: Road to Utopia and Road to Bali. If you’ve never seen one, check it out. They’re… well, dated in all sorts of ways, obviously. Not great movies, but often mentioned, some of the most popular movies of the 1940s. And interesting in other ways: they are often semi-spoofs of popular movie types of the era, not so much genres as common settings/plots, like the jungle adventure. And they are largely thin narrative wrappings around vaudeville and stage gags and routines, so also provide a small window into that world (as do Singin’ in the Rain and White Christmas).

Those are followed by two topical shorts, one on the Bill of Rights and the other the Declaration of Independence, and then the rest of the day is given over to musicals, and it’s interesting to look at the full list, which seems to have been made up of ones that TCM programmers felt were somehow particularly American:

• Small Town Girl (1953) – A sheriff’s daughter falls for a playboy arrested for speeding.
• Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) – “starring Neptune’s gorgeous daughter, Esther Williams”
• Annie Get Your Gun (1950) – Fanciful musical biography of wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) – When their older brother marries, six lumberjacks decide it’s time to go courting for themselves. Directed by Stanley Donen.
• Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949) – A beautiful woman takes over a turn-of-the-century baseball team. Directed by Busby Berkeley and starring Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett and Esther Williams (in a non-aquatic role).
• On the Town (1949) – Three sailors wreak havoc as they search for love during a whirlwind 24-hour leave in New York City. Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and starring Kelly, Sinatra and Garrett again, as well as Ann Miller, Vera-Ellen and Jules Munshin.
• Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) – A musical portrait of composer/singer/dancer George M. Cohan. Directed by Michael Curtiz (Captain Blood, Casablanca, White Christmas and a massive list of others) and starring James Cagney.
• The Music Man (1962) – A con artist hawks musical instruments and band uniforms to small-town America. With Shirley Jones (“The Partridge Family” and a million other things), Buddy Hackett (The Love Bug) and Hermione Gingold.
• 1776 (1972) – The founding fathers struggle to draft the Declaration of Independence. There is much more, and less, to say about this one.

Okay. You can see the “Americana” theme here, even with Million Dollar Mermaid, which is about an Australian swimming sensation, Annette Kellerman. She comes to the United States and makes it big in vaudeville and then film. Really big: her A Daughter of the Gods (1916) was the first million-dollar film production. (It’s also noteworthy for the first fully nude appearance by a major star in a US movie. Unfortunately, like most of Kellermann’s films, this is now considered a lost film, as no copies are known to exist.) So even if ostensibly about an Australian, it’s really that most quintessential American tale, the rags to riches story: little girl with damaged legs goes on to become a world class athlete and then star of stage and screen. It’s a story, a fable, America loves to tell itself.

Overall, this selection ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous. I’ve mentioned On the Town before. I consider it one of the greatest American musicals ever made. The other obvious contender for that title is, of course, Singin’ in the Rain, also directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, and to a large extent about their partnership, with Donald O’Connor playing the Donen role and Kelly as essentially himself.

So that’s the sublime end. The ridiculous is, as you might expect, 1776. I’ve seen it; if you have, too, you have my sympathies. I suppose they had to include it? And have it be the capstone of the set? Given the subject matter? Inexplicably, it has a fairly good rating on Rotten Tomatoes: 74% on the TomatoMeter and an even higher 84% audience rating. But writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby said “[the] lyrics sound as if they’d been written by someone high on root beer,” and Roger Ebert, in his review in the Chicago Sun-Times declared, “I can hardly bear to remember the songs, much less discuss them. Perhaps I shouldn’t. It is just too damn bad this movie didn’t take advantage of its right to the pursuit of happiness.”

So the music part of 1776 would not seem to be the basis for the decent regard shown for it on Rotten Tomatoes. That really must be about the subject matter, which after all is also the reason for its inclusion in this line up. There, Canby and Ebert differed, at least a little. Canby observed (this was in 1972, on the film’s release), “it is the first film in my memory that comes close to treating seriously a magnificent chapter in the American history.” He doesn’t say it does a good job, but suggests there’s something there. Ebert, on the other hand, declared, “This is an insult to the real men who were Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and the rest.”

You can watch it for yourself if you want to judge. And it will be interesting to do so with the benefit of having Hamilton around. There, too, there are differences of opinion about the historical and biographical component, but they are much more detailed and nuanced, and benefit from a lot of good more recent historical work on the “Founding Fathers.” And the music in Hamilton doesn’t suck, even if it’s not to everyone’s taste. But be warned: 1776 is not a short film—it’s 2 hours and 21 minutes long. That’s a lot of bad music to get through (and the acting is not great either)—and that’s not even the longest cut of this movie.

Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) – on Wikipedia, and at Amazon (streaming and DVD).

On the Town (1949) – on Wikipedia, and at Amazon and the library.

1776 (1972) – on Wikipedia, and at Amazon and at the library.

If you want to learn more about movie musicals, some books you might want to check out:

• The Sound of Musicals (from BFI)
• Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter