What movie did YOU just FINISH watching?

Just watched Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York (2019).



It’s very Woody Allen—everyone talks like him, is made to look like him, and acts like him. One-liners abound (best one: “Time flies.” “Unfortunately, it flies coach”). A love letter to New York with more or less the same plot as Midnight in Paris.

And it’s magical. Just a sweet little film, gorgeously directed, tightly plotted despite/because of the story’s seeming looseness, with that crackerjack dialogue. I share many of Allen’s interests (old New York, old movies, old music), so this material seems made for me. Set—deliberately—in a fantasy New York in which no one speaks the way people do in real life, a deliberateness that most critics apparently missed. Subtler and more intelligent than Catcher in the Rye (a book, may I add, that I’ve hated for its pretension and subtle-as-a-monster-truck imagery ever since being forced to read it in high school), no doubt an influence. Unlike in that book, the protagonist (Timothée Chalamet) learns that he’s just as phony as the people he’s putting down: The scene with the mother destroys his little self-centered, why-is-everyone-a-poseur-except-me worldview.

So good, just so good. Chalamet seems a bit awkward in the Allen role in the beginning—he’s no nebbish—but he grows into it as the movie goes on. Selena Gomez, of all people, adapts to the Allen style best. And Kelly Rohrbach, an actress I don’t know, gets a great scene with Chalamet; I would like to have seen her character more.

Unfortunately, when this movie was finally released in the States last year, American critics decided to critique Allen more than the movie. Too bad for them. In so doing, they missed out on a wonderful little flick.

Lucas with Corey Haim, Charlie Sheen and a very young Winona Ryder. Female lead was an actress named Kerri Green, I don't remember her from other movies.

The Cell (2000).

Lacombe, Lucien (1974)

Watched this straight after another Louis Malle movie, Au revoir les enfants (1987). They make a funny pair. Both are about young people in occupied France during WW2, but Lacombe, Lucien caused such controversy that Malle had to leave the country, while Au revoir les enfants saw him welcomed back with open arms and given all the Césars he could possibly want. Lacombe, Lucien is just as good and a whole lot darker. The antihero is an aimless country boy who tries to join the Resistance, gets knocked back, and ends up becoming a Nazi collaborator, partly by accident, partly because of all the fringe benefits (money, nice clothes, the feeling of holding a gun and playing the tough guy). Among Malle's many bold choices is casting a nonprofessional in the lead role (Pierre Blaise, a woodcutter with no acting experience who was killed in an auto accident the year after the film came out), though the best performance is probably by Holger Löwenadler as the Jewish tailor whose daughter he falls for.

I too enjoyed A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK very much - but good as Gomez was, I thought Elle Fanning was wonderful, Salzmank. Make sure you don't miss Woody's RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL (2020) with Wallace Shawn in the Allen role;  the titular Mort Rifkin. I went in with relatively low expectations and found it a delight, and filled with references to classic European and American movies (Christoph Waltz plays Death, and there are nods to Breathless,, Red Desert, Last Year at Marienbad, Jules et Jim, It's a Wonderful Life and more). Apropos of nothing, Steve Guttenberg plays Mort's brother, it's nice to see the eighties star finding a bit of a niche as a character actor after years in the B-movie wilderness   

The Bribe 1949 directed by Robert Z Leonard and starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price and John Hodiak in the main roles.
Federal agent (Taylor) travels to an island outside an unnamed Central American country in search of smuggled airplane engines. Meets his chief suspects (Hodiak) wife (Gardner), who works as a night-club singer. Falling in love with her complicates matters. There are also other characters lurking around (Laughton, Price) that might be part of the scheme.
Noirish crime mystery romance, not really top notch, but good enough to follow through to the end, even if some parts drags, with a spectacular fireworks sequence at the near end (that part was directed by Vincente Minnelli). A movie with Vincent Price and Charles Laughton as shady characters is always interesting, at least in that aspect.

Watched A Royal Scandal (1945, dir. Otto Preminger) the other day.



So, so close to a masterpiece. Charles Coburn is wonderful in it. Tallulah’s Tallulah, dahling. This is the best Anne Baxter performance I’ve ever seen (and she’s gorgeous here). The script is by To Be or Not to Be scribe Edwin Justus Mayer, whose other work I have to seek out, and full of some truly amazing things. Honestly, these are jokes … well, jokes worthy of the guy who wrote To Be or Not to Be. Ernst Lubitsch produced, supervised the screenwriting, chose the cast, and directed the rehearsals.

But he didn’t direct the finished product because of his declining health—and the movie is, at the end of the day, not a masterpiece. Seems too easy to blame it on Otto Preminger, but that’s the only reason I can think of: The pacing is just too off, too slow, and too many of the jokes aren’t timed right. There are great jokes here that don’t land because Preminger holds on the scene too long or cuts away too fast.

There are enough good things in here—mostly performances and the jokes that manage to get through Preminger’s deathly directing—that I recommend watching. All in all, though, it’s just a good comedy when it could have been one of the best ever made.

I've been looking for this for a long time. It was released on a substandard dvd in 2007, but I wasn't going to pay a high price for the washed out, badly mangled movie. It finally showed up on Youtube. 

Barrymore is terrific but the film is as godawful in its own way as Larry Semon's The Wizard of Oz. You won't find Melville in this.

Anyway, I can cross it off my Bucket List.