What I’ve Caught Up With, February, 2024 Part 2:
Film: Baby Face (1933)
A short pre-Code romp, Baby Face tells the story of Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) who rather blatantly sleeps her way to the top, a film that literally could not have been made a year later under the Hays Code. Lily’s career starts with her father, who runs a gin joint, prostituting her until he kicks her out and dies when his still explodes. She and her friend Chico (Theresa Harris) go to New York where Lily more or less sleeps her way through her career. The ending only makes sense for the time in which this was made and feels like a cop out, but Barbara is always a joy. As an odd little side note, one of Babs’s early conquests on her rise to the top is a very young John Wayne.
Film: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
I considered doing a full review of this movie and ultimately decided that I just wouldn’t have enough to say about it. The world is once again in peril, this time from a killer AI, and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) must mobilize the Impossible Mission Force to take care of business. The 164 minutes of this film are frenetic, filled with wild car chases, crashing trains, and knife fights and it never friggin’ ends. It’s fine, but it’s not really any better than fine. Action movies need to be pared down again to fit under 100 minutes. Bigger, better, faster, more just leaves me exhausted right now.
Film: Blow Out (1981)
A few years after The Conversation, Brian De Palma decided to make a similar film in Blow Out, where a sound recording catches a crime in action. Horror movie sound guy Jack Terry (John Travolta) is recording ambient sound when he catches the sound of an accident where a car goes into a lake. He saves a passenger named Sally (Nancy Allen), but soon discovers that the driver was the front runner in the next presidential election. Now he and Sally are loose ends that need to be snipped by Burke (John Lithgow) while they attempt to prove that this wasn’t an accident but an assassination. It’s The Conversation meets Blow-Up, but it’s the right level of sleezy and the end is brutal. It’s easy to forget that Travolta had chops, even back in ’81.
Film: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)
Everyone loves Pixar and most people love Disney and Dreamworks, but I’ve always championed animation studios like Tomm Moore, Laika, and Aardman. I’ve loved Aardman since the early Wallace and Gromit days, so I was excited for a potential Chicken Run sequel. Sadly, Aardman seems to have dropped off in recent years. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, starting with a virtually entirely different voice cast, is a pale shadow of the original. More depressing, it’s derivative. I liked this when it was made by Pixar and called Finding Nemo, because this is very much the same movie. The stop-motion work is still top-tier, but the story feels like nothing new.
Film: The Mark of Zorro (1940)
It's a given that a movie in 1940 is going to have a good amount of whitewashing in it, and that’s certainly the case with The Mark of Zorro, which puts Tyrone Power in the title role of a Mexican-California Robin Hood type. Don Diego Vega (Power) is brought home from Madrid to California where his father is the leader only to find that his father has been deposed by the greedy and venal Don Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg). Don Diego pretends to be a fop, but takes on the mantle of Zorro (which means “the fox”) to help the oppressed. This really is a Mexican Robin Hood with a heavy dose of The Scarlet Pimpernel tossed in. Basil Rathbone plays the Sheriff of Nottingham equivalent Captain Esteban Pasquale and classes up the entire thing, and Linda Darnell as the Maid Marian stand-in (and Quintero’s niece) adds to the joy. It’s fun, but pales next to the stories it’s sourcing.
Film: Excalibur (1981)
Excalibur is what you get when you filter the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table through a haze of the ‘80s and a truckload of psychedelics. It is, of course, a shortened version of Le Morte d’Arthur, because it would have to be. The real stories are wild as hell. This is merely over the top in pretty much every respect. This covers a lot of the basics of the story, all through what feels like a fog of hallucinogens. There are some fun cameos of people like Liam Neeson, Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart but it’s the wild scenery chewing of Nicol Williamson’s Merlin who makes the film. I saw this years and years ago, and there are moments of it that I remembered as if I saw it yesterday. Honestly, I’m a little shocked this isn’t a Ken Russell film.
