Bill

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

By / / 1940s, 1943 / Leave a Comment

Movie-going friends often hear me complain about how so many movies these days run close to three hours. I think it’s to justify the increasing price of tickets.

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The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

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Avatar: The Way of Water and superhero movies, I’m thinking of you.

Ninety minutes to two hours is the sweet spot. It keeps the storytelling taut but leaves time to delve into character and background.

That said, there are certainly movies that can break that notion without any padding or filler. We’ve watched several in our film club: Red Beard and Andrei Rublev jump to mind right off.

Add to those The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, this week’s pick.

Without going into a full-blown review, I just want to touch on a few thoughts that came to mind after watching the movie.

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The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film

By / / 1950s, 1959 / Leave a Comment

This past week was our short-film week, and I was surprised to see that our film club had never watched Richard Lester‘s and Peter Sellers‘ The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. That had to be my pick for our interstitial week.

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The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film

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Rather than critique the short, I want to explain why I chose it.

Okay, I’m a sucker for droll British humor. I fell in love with Monty Python’s Flying Circus back in the 1970s, tracked down LPs of The Goon Show in the 1980s, and can rewatch Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night and two Musketeer films — The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers — anytime and thoroughly enjoy them.

Unlike many short films we’ve watched, this one wasn’t an early attempt to break into the business. Pretty much everyone involved in Running — Lester, Sellers, Dick Bentley, Spike Milligan, Leo McKern, Mario Fabrizi, and David Lodge — was an industry veteran, mostly in television and radio, but in a few films, too. If they weren’t already familiar — if not famous — names or faces when the short was made, they would become so later on.

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Chameleon Street

By / / 1980s, 1989 / Leave a Comment

This week’s pick for our Criterion film club was Chameleon Street, a 1989 independent film about an imposter who poses as a reporter, a doctor, and a lawyer, among other roles.

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Chameleon Street

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I thought this would be a film like Catch Me If You Can, the 2002 film about con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., or similar films. But that was completely wrong.

Wendell B. Harris Jr. wrote, directed, and starred in Chameleon Street, his first — and as of now his only — feature film. It’s an impressive debut. But everyone in the club was surprised that Harris hadn’t been able to turn it into a thriving film career, either as an actor, voice actor, or filmmaker.

The film is based on real-life con artist William Douglas Street Jr., with a bit of Erik Dupin mixed in. It’s so much more than just a con artist film.

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It Happens Every Spring

By / / 1940s, 1949 / Leave a Comment

Film critic Leonard Maltin called It Happens Every Spring “a most enjoyable, unpretentious picture.”

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It Happens Every Spring

Where to watch: Just Watch

That pretty much sums it up.

Back in my teen years, one of our local TV stations ran old movies on weekday afternoons, just in time for me to tune in after school. I watched a lot of second-tier movies, particularly when the weather wasn’t conducive to being outside. This week’s pick was one of those movies.

I hadn’t watched it since and turned it on this time as background while I cleaned up the house. But after about 15 or 20 minutes, it pulled in me. I sat and watched the rest of the film, mostly because of Paul Douglas.

Douglas plays Monk Lanigan, a (somewhat old) baseball catcher, who’s tasked with keeping an eye on his team’s new and mysterious pitcher, King Kelly (played by Ray Milland).

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Blue Collar

By / / 1970s, 1978 / Leave a Comment

Sorry not to have posted the past couple of weeks. Things have been crazy. I missed the movie (Mississippi Masala) and film club two weeks ago. I watched last week’s pick (Hedwig and the Angry Inch — which was terrific, btw), but just didn’t have time to do much thinking about it or posting on it.

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Blue Collar

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Things haven’t slowed down this week (maybe just the opposite). So I thought I would be brief about this week’s movie, Blue Collar.

I thought that I saw it when it came out in 1978. While elements were familiar, I can’t say that was the case.

Blue Collar stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto. If you expect this to be a comedy because of Pryor, think again. The casting signals the film’s mix of humor, drama, and violence.

Director Paul Schrader‘s film — three autoworker buddies, put upon by their bosses and taken advantage of by their union officials, break into the union’s safe where they find just a handful of cash, but a ledger detailing union corruption — is humorous at times, rough at times, and ultimately bleak. The trio tries to stick it to the man but ends up stuck by the system instead.

Thematically, Blue Collar has many similarities to film noir: It’s gritty, its characters are marginalized, and it ends in hopelessness.

Blue Collar is a bit uneven and unpolished, but still makes its point.

Hairat

By / / 2010s, 2017 / Leave a Comment

Our film club finished up our latest cycle last week. So before we begin again, we all make a pick for our short-film festival. I won’t offer any comments here about the other picks (which were all enjoyable to watch); just some thoughts on mine.

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Hairat

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Last Friday, before our Zoom film club, I was coming back from a conference in Tampa, when we stopped at a rest stop on I-75 just past Paynes Prairie.

To me, a prairie means dry grasslands, without trees, but possibly plenty of gophers. Of course, that isn’t the case in Florida. There’s plenty of water, and it resembles a swamp from the interstate.

As we’re pulling into the rest stop, I see people gathered along a chain-link fence separating the rest stop from a storm-water retention pond. An alligator has everyone’s attention.

We get out of the car and walk over to a 7- to 8-foot gator about a yard away — on the other side of the fence. (Yes, gators can climb fences, but by my calculations, I could run faster than it could climb.)

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Bernie

By / / 2010s, 2011 / Leave a Comment

Bernie didn’t ring a bell when I heard it was this week’s pick for film club, but after looking it up, I recognized the poster for this 2011 movie.

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Bernie

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I assume that after the previous year’s abysmal Gulliver’s Travels, I immediately disregarded Bernie when I saw that it starred Jack Black. I should have paid attention to the other two headliners in the cast (Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey) and to the director (Richard Linklater).

Black could easily have overplayed real-life mortician Bernie Tiede, but his restraint endears you to the character, even after he’s shot wealthy widow Margie Nugent (MacLaine) and hidden her body in a Deepfreeze. It’s a sympathetic portrayal, yet has touches of humor (such as when Black cheerfully — maybe a bit too cheerfully — sings “Love Lifted Me” as he drives along as the opening credits roll).

MacLaine is equally restrained, but maybe too much, as the hard-hearted Margie, who slowly grows fond of Bernie until she becomes overly possessive of him and his time.

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Smokey and the Bandit II

By / / 1980, 1980s, Re-Released Review / Leave a Comment

Originally published: Sept. 2, 1980

Movie sequels (or remakes of old movies) are swiftly joining death and taxes as an inevitable and not always pleasant) part of American life. The latest entry in the sequel sweepstakes is Smokey and the Bandit II (or The Sheriff Strikes Back), starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason, and Dom DeLuise.

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Smokey and the Bandit II

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SATB II picks up about year after Smokey and Bandit. Bandit (Reynolds) has been driven to drink by the break-up with Frog (Field), who has gone back to Texas to marry son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice. The old team is brought back together when Snowman (Jerry Reed) is offered $400,000 to transport a pregnant elephant from Miami to Dallas in four days.

The film is pretty familiar Burt Reynolds’ fare, i.e. lots of car chases, gorgeous girls, and good one-liners. Reynolds, Field, and Reed work together well as always, and DeLuise is an excellent addition to the troupe. Gleason isn’t quite as high-handed in his role of Sheriff Justice in this film but makes up for it somewhat by playing a triple role (Justice and his brothers, Reginald of the Mounties and Gaylord of the Texas Highway Patrol).

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Body Heat

By / / 1980s, 1981 / Leave a Comment

Like a lot of the country, we’ve been having a heat wave in Florida. Temperatures last month were over 100, matching the daily record one day where I live.

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Where to watch: Just Watch

There’s also a heat wave — in more ways than one — in 1981’s Body Heat, our club’s pick for the week.

Several weeks ago, we discussed how the rain was a character in its own right in The Hole. From the opening scene (which reminded me of the opening of Psycho, set in a hot Phoenix) to the final one, the heat is equally ever-present.

You can almost feel the heat just watching, thanks to writer/director Lawrence Kasdan. The characters talk about it, their clothing shows the sweat, and the movie uses a very warm color palette.

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Delicatessen

By / / 1990s, 1991 / Leave a Comment

Delicatessen is one movie that tickles me from beginning to end, even though its plot is built around — and this isn’t a spoiler since it’s introduced before the opening credits — cannibalism.

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Delicatessen

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Taking a cue from last week’s club pick, I selected Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s post-apocalyptic gem to watch. I’ve seen Delicatessen several times, but not in the past 20 years or so.

Delicatessen has its own quirky atmosphere, rich texture, and deliciously dark humor. But it reminds me of the movies of Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python fame and who had a hand in Delicatessen‘s North American release), Tim Burton, and Guillermo del Toro.

Not a moment is wasted; all of the characters and all of the scenes are woven into the cinematic world consisting of a dilapidated apartment building and the tunnels beneath it.

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