Category: Film

Time Loop Movies

August 6 2020 – Palm Springs (2o20) Hulu. Happy Death Day (2017) Amazon Prime Rental

I am a sucker for time loop movies, where people relive the same day or few moments over and over again. Groundhog Day of course is the first and still the best in this genre, but there are other entertaining time loop movies.

I am not sure why these movies appeal to me so much. I guess I have always been attracted to alternate worlds. There is something comforting in knowing that our world is not the only possible world, that alternatives to our messed-up world are out there somewhere. The time loop movie is the most comforting kind of alternative world movie. I like the idea that you can learn by trying different things, that you don’t need to fear messing up because no matter what you do, everything resets tomorrow.

Besides Groundhog Day, my favorite time loop movies are Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow (the action-adventure version with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt), Source Code (the thriller/mystery version with Jake Gyllenhaal) and Day Break (the noir version, a 2006 one-season ABC show with Taye Diggs – let me know if you find it streaming somewhere because I couldn’t).

Palm Springs is the latest in this genre, a new romantic comedy starring Adam Samburg and Christina Milioti with nice turns from J.K. Simmons, Peter Gallagher, and Jane Squib. This is an amiable if not entirely memorable movie, a nice way to spend a couple of pandemic hours. Though many of the familiar time loop tropes are present, this movie breaks new ground in two ways.

First, Palm Springs doesn’t start on Adam Samburg’s first day in the time loop – he has been there years, maybe even decades, when the movie starts. Palm Springs omits my least favorite part of time loop movies, the first time a day repeats and the protagonist is confused and angry about what is happening. On the first day of a time loop movie, we the audience are way, way ahead of the protagonist.

The second way Palm Springs departs from previous Time Loop movies is by bringing a second person into the Loop. The dynamic of isolation and loneliness is transformed when someone else is in the loop along with the protagonist.

Palm Springs made me want to watch more time loop movies, so I also watched Happy Death Day, which I had never seen. Happy Death Day is the slasher version of the time loop movie, as the character played by Jessica Roth struggles to figure out who keeps killing her over and over again. The tone of the movie is similar to the Scream movies – tense and violent at times, but also funny. I love the scream movies so Happy Death Day was right up my alley. I look forward to watching the sequel when it becomes available on one of the streaming services.

There is one moment in every time loop movie that never makes sense to me. The protagonist eventually tries to explain their situation to a friend or lover, that they are living the same day over again. The person they confide in doesn’t believe them initially of course – it is a confusing situation to explain. But it would be so much easier to explain if they just said: “it is like the movie Groundhog Day.” How come no one in time loop movies has seen or even knows the plot of Groundhog Day? It makes no sense. Happy Death Day has an amusing coda where it finally acknowledges this weird selective amnesia about Groundhog Day.

What Ever Happened to John Fowles?

May 27, 2020 – The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) Criterion Channel

Whatever happened to John Fowles? I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and other novels by Fowles back in the 1980s and loved them. I loved the playful postmodernism of the novel: how Fowles could at once tell a gothic love story set in the past and comment on that story with a modern sensibility.

Fowles’ novels were widely read and respected at the time, but now seem almost completely forgotten. I never hear anyone talking about them now or read anyone writing about them. I am not sure why Fowles has been forgotten. Maybe there is something particular about his books or maybe something about postmodernism more generally. I don’t hear anyone talking about John Barth – another postmodern favorite of mine – today either. Please let me know in the comments if you too read John Fowles back in the day and if you have any theories about why he has been largely forgotten today.

I am due for a reread of his books. When some time has passed since I have read a novel, I remember the feeling I had reading the book and perhaps an image or two but almost none of the details of plot or character. I am not sure if this is a blessing or a curse – I would like to remember more, but on the positive side, I do get to read the novel again almost fresh. I plan to start my Fowles reread with The Magus, which I think was my favorite of his novels back in the day.

I am remembering John Fowles because Wendey and I watched the movie The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I remember this movie being well received at the time, getting several Academy Award nominations and winning a Golden Globe for Meryl Streep, though looking back now, it appears the reviews were more mixed than I remember. Wendey and I were mixed about the movie as well. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is beautifully shot and very well acted. I forgot Meryl Streep was ever this young, and she is very beautiful in the film. Both she and Jeremy Irons are excellent in their roles.

Playwright Harold Pinter wrote the script for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and he faced a big challenge adapting a book whose appeal stems largely from the voice of the narrator, who comments on the story and the author’s choices as the story moves forward. Pinter responds to this challenge by writing two different stories into the movie: the love story of Sarah and Charles in nineteenth-century England and the love story of the actors playing Sarah and Charles in the contemporary filming of that nineteenth-century love story. The novel has three endings, while the movie manages to have two endings: one for the contemporary love story and one for the love story in the film within the film.

In the end, I liked but did not love The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the movie. While the film-within-the-film was a clever idea, it left me feeling distant from the happenings in the film without enough intellectual playfulness to compensate.

Theft and Murder as a Cure for Lower Back Pain

May 25, 2020 – The Deadly Affair (1967) and The Anderson Tapes (1971) Criterion Channel

I was laid up with lower back pain, so what better way to pass the time than with a double feature of films directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet made a number of great movies, starting with his first film Ten Angry Men and continuing through Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and The Verdict. I think of Lumet as not the most original or visionary of filmmakers, but as a good storyteller, who consistently makes entertaining films. Neither of these two movies was a standout, but both were entertaining in their own ways.

The Deadly Affair is a spy story starring James Mason. It is another movie from a John le Carre novel, similar in tone and content to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, except that it is shot in color and set in swinging London. Part of the movie is set during rehearsals and performances of Macbeth and Edward II by The Royal Shakespeare Company. The movie is compelling, as Mason’s character has to solve the mystery and unmask the killer while coping with marital problems and clearing himself of allegations of professional wrongdoing. Warning: this movie seems to hate women.

The Anderson Tapes is a heist movie set in a gritty New York City. It has a great cast, led by Sean Connery, Martin Balsam, and Dyan Cannon. It is the last movie role of Margaret Hamilton (aka the Wicked Witch of the West), and the first major role for a young Christopher Walken. And Garret Morris, later from Saturday Night Live, has a small role in the film.

The Anderson Tapes follows the standard heist-movie tropes: the assembling of the team, the planning of the job, and the intricate choreography of the heist itself. Spoiler alert for a nearly 50-year-old movie: it doesn’t have the standard heist movie ending. When characters are wheeled out on stretchers at the conclusion of the job, I expected them to leap up and celebrate with the fake ambulance drivers who were the cronies. Nope. In The Anderson Tapes, crime doesn’t pay. And another warning: this movie isn’t fond of women either. I am not clear if the misogyny in these films is due to le Carre, Lumet or the both of them.

The two films both have great scores by Quincy Jones. The score for The Deadly Affair is bossa nova inflected and features a song sung by Astrud Gilberto. That song and the theme from The Anderson Tape are both on my Shelter-In-Place Streaming Playlist.

A Good Watch Despite Junior High School English Class

May 24, 2020 – Cross Creek (1983) Amazon Prime Rental

Cross Creek is a sweet story about how a writer in the 1930s, played by Mary Steenburgen, abandons her husband and life in New York and moves to a remote part of Florida to write her novel. The writer learns to be independent, develops friendships with her neighbors, balances her autonomy with a romantic relationship, and ultimately learns to write from her own experience, rather than to emulate the gothic novels she loves. Since this is a true story about the writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, I don’t think it is a spoiler to report that in the end, she writes the novel The Yearling.

I read The Yearling in Junior High. It was the year that all the books they assigned in English class were about animals: the two I remember besides The Yearling are Old Yeller and Call of the Wild. I guess they figured that all kids like animals and so would like books about animals. They figured wrong about me. I found The Yearling and the other animal books to be completely uninteresting. At that point in my life, I only wanted to read science fiction.  

Cross Creek would have been boring to me then too. It is a family picture, without stakes beyond the emotional development of the characters. It could have been a saccharine Hallmark movie if it weren’t for the direction of Martin Ritt and the great performance from Mary Steenburgen. For the most part, the movie avoids sentimentality and presents a gently compelling story. The exception is the overwrought score. No music from this movie is ending up on my Shelter-In-Place Streaming Playlist.

One other nice thing about Cross Creek is the reunion of Mary Steenburgen and Malcolm McDowell, who has a small part as the editor Max Perkins. The two actors were in one of my favorite unsung movies, Time After Time, a 1979 thriller/romance where H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper through time to what was then current-day San Francisco. I am due for a rewatch of this movie, so look for a review of Time After Time on this blog coming soon.

Cross Creek is the third Martin Ritt film I have watched since the pandemic began. The first two were  Paris Blues and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is not the last Ritt Film I will watch – we are going to see Norma Rae as soon as we can get Henry to sit down with us long enough to watch. What is surprising is how different all these Martin Ritt films are from one another: a tense, black and white spy drama, a genial story of American Jazz musicians in Paris, and this sweet family drama.

Revisiting an Old Favorite from My Youth

May 22, 2020 – The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972) Kanopy

The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe is the comedic bookend to the last film I watched: Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion. Both early 1970s films deal with the amoral and brutal surveillance and repression by government security forces over the citizens of their country. And both films have really long titles. But where Investigation of a Citizen is mostly serious, The Tall Blond Man is a slapstick sex farce. I start laughing to myself just thinking about Peirre Richard as the mild-mannered, awkward violinist who is randomly identified to a faction of the security police as a superspy and Jean Carmet as the violinist’s best friend who believes himself to be going crazy as dead bodies appear and disappear at a dizzying pace. The Tall Blond Man also features a great panpipe-heavy score by Vladimir Cosmo (who also scored Diva) and the best backless dress of all time.

The Tall Blond Man is another film that I saw and loved at an Ann Arbor film society in the early 1980s. If the movie sounds familiar, you may have seen the mediocre 1980s English-language remake starring Tom Hanks. But don’t let a pale Hollywood imitation put you off of the real thing. It is so nice to revisit an old favorite from my youth, full of pratfalls and mistaken identities, and still find it as entertaining as I remembered.

Driven By Impotence and Threatened Masculinity

March 18, 2020 – Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) Criterion Channel

Dottore kills his mistress on the day he leaves his position as the chief of Homicide to become the head of the Italian police division that investigates political subversive. The killer doesn’t try to hide his crime. In fact, he deliberately leaves clues to his involvement. Dottore is both attracted to and repelled by his impunity, and he is determined to test the limits of his power.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is a satiric political thriller by the Italian director Elio Petri. It is fascinating to watch. The character of Dottore is at once compelling, repulsive, and baffling. The score by the great Ennio Morricone gives the movie a lighter touch than you might expect from the subject matter (you can hear the main theme from the movie on my Streaming Festival Playlist on Spotify). Investigation of a Citizen gets energy from its setting in late 1960s Italy, in all its swinging and radical glory, including protestors changing “Mao, Mao Ho Chi Minh. Did they really chant that then? It seems almost inconceivable now.

Though this film is about politics, this film has more of a psychological than a political orientation. The repression of the state is not attributed to the needs of capitalism so much as to the needs of Dottore to compensate for the scorn and infidelities of his mistress. It is his feelings of impotence and threatened masculinity that drive this repressive bureaucrat and murder.

Investigation of a Citizen won an Academy Award and the grand prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. In my view, it is worthy of those awards. I had not heard of Elio Petri before, but I am going to seek out other films by this director.

A Wealth of Talent

May 15, 2020 – The Cincinnati Kid (1965) Turner Classic Movies

The Cincinnati Kid features Steve McQueen as the up-and-coming stud poker ace who goes up against the older poker king played by Edward G. Robinson in 1930s New Orleans. There is a wealth of talent in this movie. The screenplay is by Oscar-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and Terry Southern, who wrote the screenplays for Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, and Barbarella. This is Lardner’s first credit since he was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10. The film was directed by Norman Jewison and edited by Hal Ashby, who went on to direct Harold and Maude, Coming Home, and Being There, among other movies. Ray Charles sings the theme song, which is on my Shelter-In-Place Streaming Festival Playlist.

The cast is also amazing. Besides the two leads, the movie features the great Karl Malden, a very young Rip Torn, veteran Joan Blondell, Cab Calloway in a non-singing role, Tuesday Weld, and Ann-Margret who may be the second-most beautiful and sexy woman who ever lived, after my wife Wendey.

The story peters out at the end, but it is a fun ride getting there. There is a great chase scene through a railroad yard and some nice New Orleans jazz. This could be the fourth jazz movie in my festival, although unlike Paris Blues, Chico and Rita, and A Song Is Born, the music in The Cincinnati Kid is incidental to the plot and none of the characters are musicians.

A Lazy Weekend Morning

May 9, 2020 – The Way Back (2020) Amazon Prime Rental

This is a recent film starring Ben Affleck as a depressed and alcoholic former basketball star who becomes the new coach of a Catholic High School’s undersized but scrappy basketball team. If you guessed what happens next, you would be right. But even though predictable, The Way Back is understated and well made. Affleck gives a powerful performance, the soundtrack is moving and not too sentimental, and the teens in the movie are actually believable as teens. While this movie won’t show up on my ten-best list, it was an enjoyable way to spend a lazy weekend morning.

Taking me Back to Bill Kennedy at the Movies

May 9, 2020 – The Host (2006) Hulu

I love this movie. Bong Joon Ho is a great director, as we saw in his Oscar-winning movie Parasite. The Host is Bong’s take on the classic monster movie. It reminds me of watching Godzilla vs. Mothra and other monster movies after school on the 4:30 Movie or Bill Kennedy at the Movies, growing up in the Detroit suburbs. Bong takes all that is good about the monster movie, subtracts the stiff acting, poor special effects, and overall silliness, and adds his trademark visual flair, commentary on social class, and dark humor. Of course, the villain in The Host is the United States – our negligent attitudes toward toxic waste create the monster, and our efforts to kill it through the use of “Agent Yellow” harm the people in the movie’s coastal city while leaving the monster unscathed.

I must also say a good word for Song Kang-ho, who has been in all of Bong’s films that I have seen – he is the dad/driver in Parasite. Song is always amazing; he brings charm and goofiness that lighten what would otherwise be dark and violent films. In The Host, Song plays the sleepy, slow-witted son and father, who is so damaged already that nothing the monster, the Korean police, evil scientists or the U.S. government do can really hurt him.

Wendey came in to watch the last hour of the film with me, and she loved it too. We both recommend it highly if this is your kind of thing.

Return to an Old Favorite

May 1, 2020 – His Girl Friday (1940) Criterion Channel

I wanted a movie that was light and fun, something that would make me laugh. I turned to this old favorite, which I haven’t seen in a million years. Has there ever been a movie so funny and delightful as His Girl Friday? Cary Grant is brilliant as the narcissistic newspaper editor who will do anything to get a story. Rosalind Russell is brilliant too as the ace reporter who wants to get away from the heartless newspaper business – or does she? If you have never seen this movie – which is available streaming from many sources – do so as soon as possible. And if you haven’t seen it in a long time, go back and watch it now. His Girl Friday is even better than you remember.