What classics did you see last week, Oct 16 to Oct 22?

New viewings:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018):
In the aftermath of World War II, a writer (Lily James) forms an unexpected bond with the residents of Guernsey Island when she decides to write a book about their experiences during the war.  A very well-done, moving drama, beautifully directed by Mike Newell, with an excellent cast, including Tom Courtenay. Highly recommended for those interested in the period, the story, and the cast. On Netflix.



My Dog the Champion (2013):
A sweet, touching, and funny family film about a young city girl training a cattle dog for an agility competition on her grandfather’s farm. Very good performances by Dora Madison Burge and Lance Henrickson, with a beautiful dog to support them. Recommended for those looking for a thoughtful, well-done family film.



Flipper (1996):
A teenage boy sent to spend the summer with his eccentric uncle on the Florida coast befriends a remarkable dolphin and takes on local bad guys who are polluting the water. Pretty standard animal story fare, but well-done with excellent performances by Elijah Wood and Paul Hogan and a useful theme about the environment. Beautiful cinematography, too. Strongly recommended for those who enjoy these kinds of films.



A Dog’s Way Home (2019):
A female dog travels four hundred miles in search of her owner throughout a Colorado wilderness. A sentimental, sweet dog adventure. Not the best film of its kind by any means, but worth a look for those who love these stories.



Re-watches:

Sense and Sensibility (1995):
Rich Mr. Dashwood dies, leaving his second wife and her three daughters poor by the rules of inheritance, and soon the Dashwood sisters are forced to leave their large estate and fend for themselves. Received 7 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Emma Thompson), Best Supporting Actress (Kate Winslet), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Emma Thompson). Thompson won for her script, which makes the most of all the bittersweet moments in this superb drama, beautifully directed by Ang Lee (who deserved a nomination, too). Wonderful performances by everyone in what is one of the best of all Jane Austen adaptations. Highly recommended.



Chocolat (2000):
A French woman and her young daughter open up a chocolate shop in a small remote village that shakes up the rigid morality of the community. Beautifully directed by Lasse Hallstrom with Juliette Binoche shining in her Oscar winning role. A bit predictable, maybe, but it’s hard not to be captivated by it. Nominated for four other Oscars, including Best Picture and Judi Dench as best supporting actress. Highly recommended for the cast alone.



Grumpy Old Men (1993):
A lifelong feud between two neighbors since childhood only gets worse when a new female neighbor moves across the street. An enjoyable comedy with a good story and a wonderful cast. Highly recommended for the cast and humor alone.



Grumpier Old Men (1995):
An inferior sequel in which Lemmon and Matthau resolve to save their beloved bait shop from turning into an Italian restaurant, just as its new female owner (Sophia Loren) catches Mathau’s attention. Rather silly at times, but it’s worth a look for the wonderful cast alone. And it is funny.

First Viewings:

The League of Gentlemen (1960) 8/10

Panama (2022) 2/10

The Leopard Man (1943) 5/10

Greased Lightning (1977) 7/10

The Masque of the Red Death (1964) 6.5/10

No Sudden Move (2021) 7/10

Cleopatra Jones (1973) 6/10

Repeat Viewings:

The Bat (1959) 5.5/10

“Dracula”   Distributed by Universal Pictures, 75 Minutes, Not Rated, Released February 14, 1931:

The movie that saved Universal Pictures from financial ruin and created an almost exclusive lock on a motion picture genre that remains a major source of income for the studio to this day, 1931’s “Dracula” 91 years after its troubled production retains its peculiar power to envelop and mesmerize audiences. The central performance by Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the title role cemented in the minds of generations of movie fans an indelible image of the undying vampire king from Transylvania which persists to this day.

Released not on Halloween but on Valentine’s Day of 1931, “Dracula” ironically wasn’t originally intended as a horror masterpiece. Advertised during its 1931 release as “The Story of the Strangest Passion the World Has Ever Known,” the first vampire tale of the motion pictures talking revolution was originally planned as a tragic love story similar to the “Twilight” pictures 75 years later...starring an exotic European personality the studio hoped would become a box office sensation to replace the recently deceased matinee idol Rudolph Valentino.

In “Dracula,” after ruling for centuries over his remote Transylvanian domain, a vampire king travels from his ancestral homeland to London in search of new victims...and possibly a bride. But in the 1931 version of “Dracula,” the atmosphere takes precedence over the lurid plot: The impressionistic photography by Karl Freund and the hypnotically charismatic performance by its star catapult the picture into the horror stratosphere...which almost makes the viewer wish it were a better picture.

Based on Irish author Bram Stoker’s famed 1897 novel, “Dracula” had been adapted by writer Hamilton Deane and then revised by John L. Balderson into a popular play, the first live reenactment of Stoker’s novel to be officially approved by the late author’s protective and exacting widow. A silent 1922 German film version of the tale by filmmaker F.W. Murnau had been opposed by the Stoker estate, so the director had simply changed the title character’s name to Orlock and retitled his film “Nosferatu,” resulting in international copyright litigation which lasted years.

Debuting at London’s Little Theater in 1927, the Stoker-approved version of the play was attended by visiting American producer Horace Liveright, who asked co-author Balderson to revise the play again for a Broadway production. The American stage version of “Dracula” opened later that year at New York’s Fulton Theater with the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the title role, and ran for 261 performances before touring the United States throughout 1928 and 1929. When the play closed its West Coast production, Lugosi elected to remain in Hollywood to pursue a career in motion pictures. But while the success of “Dracula” onstage interested the financially ailing Universal Pictures, the studio had other ideas about casting the title role.

Bela Lugosi’s characterization in the title role of Universal’s “Dracula” is so firmly established in popular culture that every other actor who’s ever attempted the role, from Christopher Lee to Frank Langella to Gerard Butler, is inevitably and necessarily compared with Lugosi. Born in 1882 in present-day Romania, in the foothills of Europe’s Carpathian Mountains not far from Dracula’s own Transylvanian homeland, Lugosi’s image is instantly and automatically summoned when we hear or read the name of Dracula...a fact which haunted the actor forevermore.

Surprisingly, Bela Lugosi wasn’t Universal’s first choice for the role--in fact, the studio never sought the actor’s services so much as settled for them. While Lugosi, eager to establish himself as a motion picture actor in the United States, was the only performer to actively pursue the role of Dracula, other popular actors considered over Lugosi for the part included Ian Keith, Joseph Schildkraut, Chester Morris, Conrad Veidt, and Paul Muni. Most rejected the role outright--the distinguished Muni insisted in the trade papers that he had no interest in “enacting grotesques.”

One actor skilled in “enacting grotesques” and for years rumored to have been the leading contender for the role of Dracula was Lon Chaney, the fabled Man of a Thousand Faces--the era’s top character actor and a leading attraction at the nation’s box office. While Chaney’s name was briefly associated with the role of Dracula, his casting never went beyond the stage of a rumor. Contracted at the time to the Hollywood powerhouse MGM, Chaney was earning $3750 per week for his services. In order to “borrow” the actor for the role, Universal would’ve needed to guarantee Chaney’s weekly salary and assure a profit for MGM. Very simply, the cash-strapped Universal couldn’t afford Lon Chaney.

Lugosi was so eager to repeat his signature Broadway role for the screen that he compromised his professional dignity to be cast, even carrying a copy of the picture’s script to London to secure the all-important stamp of approval from Florence Stoker, the widow of the novel's author. Lugosi was eventually cast in the role...for the bargain basement salary of $500 per week, or a total of $3500 for nearly two months’ work--less than the studio would’ve paid the superstar Chaney for just one week. Word of Lugosi’s desperation circulated around Hollywood, and as a result the actor’s movie career never gained serious momentum with the studios.

Universal Pictures, and Lugosi, hoped “Dracula” would catapult the actor to the top tier of motion picture celebrities, possibly even as a replacement for the exotic European superstar Rudolph Valentino, whose sudden 1926 death was still fresh in the nation’s memory. Instead, while the success of the 1931 film rescued Universal from financial ruin, the picture established Lugosi as a movie monster, period...a fact never quite grasped by Lugosi himself, whose command of the English language remained tenuous. The actor mulishly rejected the role of the monster in Universal’s “Frankenstein,” insisting “I did not come to this country to be a scarecrow.” When “Frankenstein” became a sensation and made a star of Boris Karloff, Lugosi was crushed.

Still, the actor declined Universal’s offer of a long-term movie contract. In retaliation, the studio never allowed the actor to repeat the role of Dracula in any of the movie’s four sequels, permitting Lugosi to inhabit his signature characterization again only in the comedy “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” seventeen years later, in 1948. But by then the Universal cycle of classic horror films was over. From then on, Lugosi was offered little but low-budget productions such as 1952’s “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla,” and the notorious pictures of zero-budget auteur Ed Wood. When Bela Lugosi died in 1956, he was buried in his “Dracula” costume.

Almost as vivid as Lugosi in popular culture is character actor Dwight Frye in his wonderfully unhinged performance as Renfield, Dracula’s spider-munching disciple. Frye’s iconic characterization as Renfield, coupled with his performance as the sadistic laboratory assistant Fritz in “Frankenstein” later that same year, likewise derailed his movie career. By World War II Frye was working on an assembly line in a munitions factory. Attempting a professional comeback, Frye was cast as Secretary of War Newton Baker in the big-budget 1944 biographical picture “Wilson,” but died of a sudden heart attack prior to the film’s production.

A former carnival barker who’d traveled extensively with circuses and sideshows and was obsessed with the oddities on the periphery of society, director Tod Browning had established himself as a major force in silent films...many in collaboration with actor Lon Chaney, with whom Browning made ten pictures. But alcoholism and depression had led to a strain between Browning and his employers at MGM, as well as between the director and his star. When Chaney remade their 1925 silent hit “The Unholy Three” in 1930 as his first (and only) talking picture, he declined to have Browning return as the director. MGM released Browning from his contract shortly afterward.

The opportunity to direct the high-profile “Dracula” for Universal was a godsend for Tod Browning...and likely one source of the rumors associating Chaney with the picture. While Browning had worked at Universal earlier in his career, his usually meticulous attention to production details had begun to erode by the time of the 1931 film. Reportedly the filming of “Dracula” was a disorganized mess, with Browning allowing cinematographer Karl Freund to take over filmmaking duties for much of the production. As a result, “Dracula” is vividly photographed, especially during the opening Transylvanian sequence...but almost empty dramatically and emotionally

“Dracula” often moves like a photographed record of the stage production, alternating with scenes that seem as stagey as a silent film. Even with a running time of only 75 minutes, the picture seems much, much longer. The absence of a music score in the background, by 1931 a motion picture staple, is glaringly obvious. For its 1999 re-release on home video, Universal Pictures commissioned influential minimalist composer Philip Glass to write and record a music score for “Dracula” and the improvement is palpable. Performed by a string quartet, the music score turns “Dracula” into a different picture.

An alternate Spanish-language version of “Dracula” directed by George Melford and starring Spanish actor Carlos Villarias was produced on the same sets simultaneously with the 1931 production during the nights after the Browning/Lugosi version had completed filming for the day. Except for the signature performances from Lugosi and Frye, the Spanish version of “Dracula” is actually superior to the more familiar English version, with better production values, smoother pacing, and a longer running time of 104 minutes.

"Dracula" originally contained a brief epilogue in which actor Edward Van Sloan in his film persona as vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing seemingly emerged from behind the screen and delivered a short and very Halloween-worthy curtain speech which concluded with the words, "Remember...there are such things as vampires." The scene was ordered removed by the party poopers enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code during the picture's 1936 re-release and has never been restored, although the footage appears in a few documentaries.

Also starring Helen Chandler and David Manners, "Dracula" is not rated but is PG in nature for scenes of implied violence and thematic elements.


“The War with Grandpa” Distributed by 101 Studios, 94 Minutes, Rated PG, Released October 09, 2020:

In “The War with Grandpa,” after one too many ‘senior moments’ a retired builder still mourning the death of his beloved wife is compelled by his adult daughter to move in with her and her family...displacing his 12-year-old grandson, who’s consigned to the attic. The grandson declares war on Grandpa in an effort to reclaim his room, but needs to rethink his strategy when the conflict turns into a war of attrition...with his grandfather winning.

Audiences fearing a rehash of the execrable “Dirty Grandpa” from 2016 will be relieved: “The War with Grandpa” turns out to be a fairly engaging family comedy resembling a classic Road Runner cartoon blended with a 1960s-era Disney comedy--the kind of guilty pleasure you might hate yourself for liking, but will find yourself chuckling over for days afterward. Alternately puerile, sophomoric and simplistic, you just can’t deny the movie is frequently laugh out loud funny. The best part--a sweetly inclusive message about the futility of war...and the importance of family.

Adapted by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember from Robert Kimmel Smith’s classic 1984 children’s book and directed by former animator Tim Hill (“SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Muppets from Space”), “The War with Grandpa” is anchored by a nicely-realized late career performance from 77-year-old Robert DeNiro as the widower who finds himself distracted from his cocoon of depression by a tit-for-tat conflict with his wily grandson. There’s a real sense of warmth to the scenes between DeNiro and the kids in the picture...who presumably never saw “Taxi Driver.”

If “The War with Grandpa” has a problem, it’s in filling even its minor roles with top-drawer talent--an issue which becomes apparent when Jane Seymour turns up as a comely middle-aged clerk in the local department store. Still, it’s all in fun...although the customarily spooky Christopher Walken in his first big screen reunion with DeNiro since the Academy Award-winning 1978 war epic “The Deer Hunter” works a little too hard to score laughs as the widower’s gung ho buddy.

No less than five production companies and thirty-one producers (including Guy Fieri, of all people) contributed to this little winner. Also featuring deft performances from Rob Riggle, Cheech Marin, a very funny Uma Thurman as DeNiro’s left-holding-the-bag daughter, pop singer Laura Marano as his granddaughter, and a shrewd and clever 15-year-old Oakes Fegley as the grandson who’s the catalyst for the title conflict, “The War with Grandpa” is rated PG for rude humor, cartoonish slapstick violence, thematic elements, and some language concerns.


“Yesterday”   Distributed by Universal Pictures, 116 Minutes, Rated PG-13, Released June 28, 2019:

It’s probably not a good idea to put too much thought into “Yesterday” while you’re watching it, although you’ll probably find it impossible to not think about it afterward.

The violations of the space-time continuum in the picture are difficult to accommodate, especially for those audience members who follow the “Star Wars” and Marvel Comics-based pictures, and are notoriously picky about such details. And although “Yesterday” is filled with amusing scenes, charming set pieces, and some of the best music ever composed and performed, the whole is decidedly not a sum of its parts. And that’s a real shame.

In “Yesterday,” Jack Malik, a struggling British musician on the worn edge of youth, is tempted by his lack of success to quit the music business and return to his primary profession of school teaching. But after he’s knocked unconscious in a traffic accident caused by a cosmic anomaly and momentary global power outage, the young musician awakens to find a substantial change in culture. Specifically, the world has no memory, or historical account, of Coca-Cola, cigarettes...or The Beatles.

Now the failing musician is faced with a dilemma...and an opportunity. With a head filled with Beatles songs in a world that’s never heard them, his path to global superstardom is open--all he needs to do is to claim the Beatles music catalog as his own. But first he needs to decide whether unprecedented fame and wealth is worth the burden of having to live with a lie...and possibly losing the affection of the only girl who ever truly loved him.

Despite an original premise and a musical score filled with a dozen or so of the best songs ever written, “Yesterday” ultimately becomes a fairly standard rags-to-riches entertainment story, a variation of the Faust legend, with British actor Himesh Patel’s Jack in the Faust role, Lily James as Marguerite, the girlfriend, here called Ellie Appleton, and Kate McKinnon as Mephistopheles in the guise of the venal and soulless talent manager Debra Hammer, who promises young Jack riches beyond comprehension in exchange for his talent.

Part of the joy of the Beatles experience was in witnessing their growth and maturation. When heard today, their early music--songs such as 1962’s “Love Me Do” and “She Loves You” in 1963--seem primitive and primordial, little more complex than prehistoric cavern-dwellers chanting and pounding on hollow logs. That the group in a few years’ time was able to gain the musicianship and sophistication to produce works like “A Day in the Life,” “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” is nearly astonishing.

There’s no sense of that wonder in “Yesterday,” and even less of the joy. Jack, the movie’s central character, possesses the knowledge of the Beatles catalog, but not the discipline the band’s members required to produce it. Despite his presumptive skill and experience as a musician, during Jack’s first solo appearance with his own band to perform one of “his” new compositions before an audience, the opening song (the 1965 hit “Help”) is almost laughably inept, hardly even worthy of a suburban teenage garage band.

Additionally, despite the movie’s premise, there’s never any real sense of the band’s eventually modifying world culture. The impact of The Beatles extended beyond popular music, and eventually affected world culture. To begin with, without The Beatles there likely would’ve been no Rolling Stones, Woodstock, Michael Jackson, or long hair on men--all details mentioned in the film as having occurred anyway.

Worse, in a movie that turns on the audience’s liking the central character, Himesh Patel’s Jack Malik becomes almost painfully unsympathetic and even unlikable. To be successful as a persuasive dramatic narrative, the movie has to show us plainly why the lovable Lily James as Ellie follows her musician crush and encourages him to persist in his pursuit of success in music. Instead, the audience falls in love with Lily James as Ellie, and vaguely wishes she’d come to her senses and dump Jack, maybe find a guy who’s a little more attentive and caring.

Of Jack’s musical work without the spirit of The Beatles on his shoulder, Kate McKinnon as the Mephistophelean manager Debra delivers the picture’s best line: “I hate it...but I’m not interested enough to listen to it again to find out why.” It’s a great line, but she might also be describing the picture’s plot development or even the movie’s central character.

In the end, Jack’s decision, and the path of his soul, is made easy by a piece of advice he receives from a familiar countenance indeed. Led by an address slipped to him by a fan, Jack arrives at the door of an aging, reclusive artist living in a remote seaside cottage on the periphery of society. The old artist shares with the conflicted young man the culmination of his long years of experience: “Tell the girl you love you love her,” the old man advises Jack, “and tell the truth whenever you can.” Come to think of it, that’s what those four guys were telling us all along.

Directed by the talented and eclectic Danny Boyle, the filmmaker behind 1996’s “Trainspotting” and 2008’s “Slumdog Millionaire,” from a screenplay by the equally-talented Richard Curtis, the writer behind 1999’s “Notting Hill” and 2003’s “Love Actually,” “Yesterday” is entertaining enough, but richly unsatisfying. The picture ultimately presents viewers with more questions than answers. For fans of the Beatles--and honestly, if there weren’t millions of us, there’d be no movie--”Yesterday” might inspire a sense of disquiet, and possibly a feeling of blasphemy.

One character is exactly correct when she observes toward the end of the picture, “A world without The Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse.” But at the same time, the picture’s premise and structure begs a question: If a single musician were really able to compose the whole of The Beatles’ catalog of songs before even releasing his first record album, what in the world would he do for an encore?

“Yesterday” is rated PG-13 for suggestive content and language concerns.


“Anna”   Distributed by Summit Entertainment, 119 Minutes, Rated R, Released June 21, 2019:

Writer and director Luc Besson sometimes seems to be a modern incarnation of the legendary 1950s and 60s French filmmaker Roger Vadim.

Besson, like Vadim, often writes lurid and titillating stories, hires stunningly attractive women--not necessarily actresses--to populate the central roles, photographs his movies in the style of a haute couture photography session, and edits the results with the fast-moving intensity of a comic book adventure.

While Vadim was famous for films such as 1957’s “And God Created Woman” and 1968’s “Barbarella,” Besson is responsible for 1990’s “La Femme Nikita,” 2005’s “Angel-A,” and “2014’s “Lucy.” “La Femme Nikita” was actually popular enough with audiences to spawn a long-running syndicated television series.

Besson’s new picture “Anna” at first seems to be such a typical entry in the Luc Besson filmography that it’s puzzling that the filmmaker even bothered to make the movie. The picture is divided into short segments, each designated with subtitled explanations such as “two months before” and “six months later.” And with its complex and confusing timeline and frequent cross-cutting, “Anna” also seems for a while to be Besson’s equivalent of Fellini’s surrealist “8 1⁄2,” or Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.”

But as other similarities to “La Femme Nikita” in particular are revealed and become too profound to ignore, another possibility becomes apparent: “Anna” is primarily a practical joke played by the filmmaker on his audience--a broad, semi-parody of the filmmaker’s own previous work. Which is surprising, because a lot of us never realized until now that Luc Besson is not only repetitive, but actually owns his own cinematic genre.

“Anna” tells the story of Anna Poliatova, a beautiful young Russian woman trapped in a bleak marriage to an abusive narcotics addict. After becoming an unwitting accomplice in a failed ATM heist, Anna accepts an offer from a government operative to complete a rigorous training period and become an assassin for the KGB. Desperate for a new beginning, the young woman is motivated by a promise that after five years of service she can retire to any location in the world she desires. Anna’s cover identity is as a model in the Parisian world of high fashion.

Despite its confusing structure and uneven style, “Anna” paradoxically becomes the most entertaining picture Luc Besson has released since 2005’s charming “Angel-A.” And the picture’s entertainment value is augmented by a good natured cast of seasoned veterans, who seem to be having fun playing a sort of Russian Roulette with accents.

The Welsh Luke Evans adopts a Russian inflection and contributes one his most warm and accessible performances as the KGB operative who recruits, trains, and supervises Anna, and then falls for her. As an actor, Evans was most recently seen speaking in broad American tones in the horror picture “Ma,” but is probably best known for singing with French inflections as the villain Gaston in Disney’s live-action 2017 version of “Beauty and the Beast.”

The Irish Cillian Murphy contributes an American accent as a CIA agent similarly smitten with the rookie Russian. And a heavily-disguised and all-but-unrecognizable Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren, who seemingly can comfortably inhabit any nationality on earth, speaks with Russian inflections in roughly the same role German actress Lotte Lenya invented for the 1962 James Bond picture “From Russia With Love.”

Holding it all together as the Russian Anna is supermodel Sasha Luss, who happens to actually be Russian. Happily, much of Luss’ characterization is supplied by a succession of wigs, outfits, and cosmetics. In other words, to phrase it charitably, in a role that requires little acting, Sasha Luss is perfectly cast.

“Anna” is rated R for strong violence, language concerns, and some sexual content.

Lional Barrymore in drag is a sight to behold.