What I’ve Caught Up With, July 2023:
Film: Ladies in Retirement (1941)
<
There is an odd little subgenre of Victorian noir that would include films like Gaslight, Lady Macbeth, and definitely Ladies in Retirement. Housekeeper Ellen Creed (Ida Lupino) brings her two simple and possibly insane sisters (Edith Barrett and Elsa Lanchester) to live with her. When things go south and the mistress of the house (Isobel Elsom) wants the sisters gone, things become murderous. Things become more complicated with the arrival of Ellen’s nephew Albert (Louis Hayward). It’s good, not great, but Ida Lupino as always is a treat to see on the screen. Films like this make me wonder why she wasn’t a much bigger star, because she definitely had the chops.
Film: Jockey (2021)
There are a few classic sports stories that show up in movies. One of them is the story where the old professional is on the tail end of the career, looking for one more victory or one more title. Horseracing seems like an odd choice for this story but that’s the story being told in Jockey. Jackson Silva (Clifton Collins Jr.) is barely hanging on to his career, and is falling apart physically when two things happen. First, his trainer (Molly Parker) acquires what may be a champion horse. Second, a jockey named Gabriel (Moises Arias) arrives, claiming to be Jackson’s son. It’s a standard sports movie in a lot of ways, but is a true showcase for the talent of Collins, who is magnetic, if perhaps a bit too tall for the role.
Film: High Life (2018)
A lot of science fiction is all chrome and flash, but there’s a different brand of sci-fi that looks dirty and lived-in, like Alien. High Life evokes that, but comes much closer to the original Solaris. A group of death row convicts are given a sort of reprieve by being sent on a space mission out of the solar system to a nearby small black hole. For much of the film, we are left with Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his daughter, with a great deal told in flashback as we see the dissolution of the people on the ship billions of miles from home and traveling at near-relativistic speeds. Is this a horror movie? Kind of, but it’s surprisingly realistic, existential horror, where there’s no fear, but simply the dread of continued existence. To be fair, I’ll watch just about anything with Juliette Binoche in it.
Film: Pride and Prejudice (1940)
I am not the target audience for the writings of Jane Austen, and yet here we are, with the second version of this that I’ve seen. The truth is that the story of Pride and Prejudice is genuinely a good one. This version is perhaps a bit more stiff than the one from the 2000s and because of that it shows its age, but it’s impossible not to be entertained by it. The fact that it stars Greer Garson shortly before her Oscar winning performance in Mrs. Miniver and Laurence Olivier at the height of his powers makes it more worth seeing. Elizabeth Bennet’s dressing down of Mr. Darcy is never not going to be great, and while I like the 2000s version better, this is awfully good.
Film: Black Widow (2021)
These days, I’m finding it more and more difficult to care that much about superhero movies and the MCU in general, but I’m still struggling my way forward with the ones I haven’t seen yet, which is most of the last three years or so. Black Widow is, honestly, the female-led movie the MCU needed. It’s actually a little short for a modern MCU film, and that’s a bonus. It also moves pretty quickly. It’s the ending Scarlett Johansson deserved, and it’s a nice to see Florence Pugh in the MCU. Ultimately, I’m happy to have seen this, but it’s not one I feel I’ll need to watch again any time soon.
