As far as I can see, the real problem with TCM's online course this summer is timing. They have secured two days a week throughout July on their network in order to showcase just over 40 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but they started the online course that corresponds with the films well over a week ahead (in June instead) of the first night's viewing. Unfortunately, the course started out diving right into Hitch's numerous silent features, movies with which even longtime aficionados of either classic film or Alfred Hitchcock may not have much experience. I fall into both categories and I have only seen The Lodger (1927) from his silent days. Well, until this week, when I snuck in an iPad viewing of his boxing romance, The Ring, while visiting my father up in Idaho (where I am currently).
I had planned to dive right into the Hitchcock course from the start, and while I read through the materials thoroughly more than once, games come up in the course where they ask questions using images from films I have yet to see because they haven't aired yet. Yes, I can take things over and over again as much as I want to get the score I wish, but it is a matter of pride that I do things right from the beginning. The first night of TCM's airings of Hitch's silents and early sound films wouldn't happen until July 5th – when I would already be in Idaho – and so I decided that I would use my time up here to work on the module for the silent part of the course on either my iPad or iPhone. Now, it has turned out that using the Canvas app to do the online course is pretty damn tedious and more than a little annoying. Also, TCM only about half selection of the evening's eight aired films up on their Watch TCM app, so I can't even see everything I would rather see before taking the first week's exam.
As a result of all of these problems, I have decided on the following plan: 1) watch the films I can on the Watch TCM app in my remaining days in Idaho, 2) watch the other films (that I don't already own) on my DVR when I get home, 3) don't do anything with the course until I get home, where I can use my computer and not have to worry about a creaky, unreliable app, and 4) make sure everything is watched before preceding with the testing. I may have to cram most of my work into a couple of weeks, but I think it will go smoothly.
The Numbers:
This week's feature-length film count: 18; 15 first-time viewings and 3 repeats.
Highest-rated feature-length films: Loving (2016) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) – 8/9
Lowest-rated feature-length film: The Sand [aka Blood Sand] (2015) – 3/9
Average films per day in June: 3.1667
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 205
The Reviews:
Secret in Their Eyes (2015) Dir.: Billy Ray – I filed this one in my entirely too massive folder titled Completely Unnecessary Remakes, the contents of which billow out of the confines of my head's filing cabinet like a mushroom cloud looming above a South Pacific atoll. I am sure it must have seemed like a can't lose proposition to do an American remake of the 2009 Argentinian thriller, El secreto de sus ojos, which took the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the 2010 ceremony. They lined up Chiwetel Ejiofor, Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Alfred Molina, Dean Norris and Michael Kelly to beef up their cast dramatically, and then took a rather complicated, non-linear story structure spanning a quarter of a century and, surprisingly, only made it slightly less confusing by dropping the element of a novel within the film telling part of the story and cutting down the story gap to just a mere 13 years. But even with that cast and that nod towards not dumbing something down for an American audience, they still gave us no real, compelling reason to make us want to watch the new version over the original, itself only six years old at the time of this film's release and completely available on the DVD and cable markets. And the performances and direction are just fine in the American version, but only hardcore subtitle haters would prefer this over the first one. The original has an extra layer of depth to it with the element of one of the characters using a novel to tell the story, and the Argentine locations add even more mystery to the proceedings. Here, the American version is just another serial killer story that takes place in Los Angeles and New York, and then they had to somehow tie it to 9/11 as well. I'm over it. I want to watch the original again. – TC4P Rating: 5/9
Deepwater Horizon (2016) Dir.: Peter Berg – I really did not want to see this film when I saw the trailer the first forty dozen times in theatres and on TV. The overly cute scenes between Mark Wahlberg and his family just kind of set off my "too saccharine" alarms, but there was something else bothering me. I knew Peter Berg was directing, and while I still like him just fine from his acting days (the highly underrated Late for Dinner, a film that I outright LOVE) and for directing at least four films that I really enjoyed (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, and Hancock), I had a sense that there might be the slight possibility that he would go easy on the oil companies involved in this issue. He is fairly outspoken on a variety of topics, and though he is known to lean left politically, many of his films tend to be quite patriotic, which has also gotten him a conservative fanbase. And he also takes some odd stances on things on social media that garner some controversy, so I thought the chance was there I might not enjoy the tone of this picture. And with the star being Mark Wahlberg, the man who disdains political talk from celebrities but has walked right into playing golf with Donald Trump in years past, I thought the potential that they might wander smack into a scenario that goes too light on BP and Transocean might be valid.I needn't have worried. Right now, I am just mad that I didn't see this film on a big screen, because it would have wowed my socks right off my feet. Berg conveys such a slowly tightening and eventually crushing sense of suspense to this terrible disaster upon nature and our oceans that I am kicking myself that I didn't pay closer attention to everything related to the film on its release. Wahlberg himself is spot on as the rig tech who finds himself in the middle of an increasingly dangerous situation, as are Kurt Russell as the rig supervisor and John Malkovich as an especially slimy oil company exec who ignores necessary testing early on and wants operations to continue despite warnings. Also from the trailers, which added to my initial negative reaction, I had a sense that this would turn into just another action thriller, where Marky Mark would rip off his sleeves and save everybody on the oil rig. Again, if I had just trusted that they were going more towards telling the story as accurate as possible (by Hollywood standards) then I needn't have worried. Yes, there is action aplenty and Wahlberg does have to do some rescuing, but it is consistent with the tone of the picture and it never turns into a John McClane-style film. I look back now and realize my initial reactions were a bit flip, and hadn't taken into account that there was a very real loss of life on the Deepwater Horizon and that Berg would care more about honoring their deaths than in amping up the action quotient to sell movie tickets. That's on me for not thinking more seriously about this at the top. In the end, I really enjoyed this tough as nails film. This rating for Deepwater Horizon may go up after the next time I watch it. – TC4P Rating: 7/9
Bang Bang Baby (2014) Dir.: Jeffrey St. Jules – Sometimes nothing is more painful than watching someone try to intentionally create a cult classic. And if you are going to take a shot at using the most obvious gimmick to shortcut your project to this status – making your sci-fi/monster film a musical – then there really needs to be something special at the core of your story. Director Jeffrey St. Jules has a great assist in the lead role from actress Jane Levy, who really does have an Emma Stone thing going at times, though not all the time. (In some shots, she really reminds me of classic noir actress Jane Greer.) As a skirt-wearing auto mechanic living in an idealized late '50s/early '60s setting who is only able to escape her humdrum small town existence via her dreams to became a singing star, Levy is quite engaging and deftly juggles both the more comedic and dramatic moments in the script equally well. As the father who consistently gets in her way, all-star character actor Peter Stormare is perhaps miscast but I think that he brings his usual pro reliability to his role, and even gets his own country-flavored song, which surprised the hell out of me. (I didn't say it was any good, but the scene is funny.) The film itself has many humorous moments, but there is another darker level to this film that lends the film a quality which takes it out of the normal horror-comedy range (besides the musical element). Levy's character is not the simple, goody two-shoes character you expect from the way the film opens. She drinks like a fish when she is sad, she relies a bit too much on a fantasy life built around her romance with an Elvis-like pop idol, and endures abuse and rape from an obsessive creep in her town. Meanwhile, unspecified medical experiments are taking place in the town that is turning much of the populace (and the local wildlife) into mutated freaks. The more horrific elements of the story are pretty much tamped down until late in the film, and while they never go quite as far as I'd like, their impact is felt pretty hard when they finally appear. Having the villain grow a second mouth in his neck so he trades off lines in his big song with himself is a pretty neat idea, and the scene featuring townsfolk gathering to down "suicide drinks" en masse is heavy stuff for a musical. The film itself has a thick edge of surreality to the proceedings, so that it becomes hard to tell which of the heroine's lives is the fantasy and which is the reality. Or if either (or any) of them are at all.
I run hot and cold with the musical score, which I feel plays it too safe and low-key much of the time. I kept waiting for one of the earlier numbers to really kick it into high gear. Even the title song, which occurs at the halfway mark of the film and is an uptempo song with a big dance break and wacky sound effects, looks too much like a rehearsal done at half-speed and never really takes off like I wish it would. (It should be the big, goofy, joyous center of this film.) I could not help the feeling that the storytellers never really commit to the notion of a full musical. There are several scenes that could have benefited from being told in song instead, and would have livened the film immensely, but St. Jules settles for more exposition via dialogue in its place. Still, there is an overall weirdness that I find quite compelling and whatever doesn't work in the film is outweighed by the things that do. And I really like a couple of the lines from the score, such as "So, marry me; there's worse things you can do/In a quarantined town of freaks, choices are few." Who hasn't thought that about their own hometown? – TC4P Rating: 5/9
American Anarchist (2016) Dir.: Charlie Siskel – I remember reading portions of The Anarchist Cookbook back in the '80s and getting a good laugh from it. We carried the books at the chain of bookstores in Alaska for whom I worked for two decades, and they were mostly kept under the front counter to keep them out of the hands of juvenile delinquents. We knew the Cookbook had bits about making homemade explosives in it, but really, I remember placing it in my mind alongside the Foxfire series and the Carlos Castaneda books and other alternative/hippie/folk culture stuff we carried in those days. (All of that stuff sold like crazy too...) I remember thinking back then that The Anarchist Cookbook was just a funny book that talked about smoking banana peels to get a minor high and other goofy junk like that. I remember reading the section with home bomb-making and thinking “Who would really take the time to do this?” It just seemed too complicated and, frankly, dangerous. Believing it would be used by homegrown terrorists to do harm against the general populace was unthinkable to me at the time, even though I had friends who delighted in using small explosives to blow up toilets at school. All that has changed. If you put something stupid on YouTube, scores of absolute dopes will try to replicate or even outdo that something stupid. (As I heard recently on the news, stupidity is quite catching... and yes, it was about you know who and his goons.) If you put out a book that tells readers how to build simple bombs and grenades and any number of other things that could help you in waging a revolution against a government or protecting yourself and your family against armed insurgents, some of those readers will apparently make real, definite use out those instructions. Documentarian Charlie Siskel – the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel – has built American Anarchist around his interviews with William Powell, a professor who was only 19 years of age when he wrote The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970. He spent the last 47 years of his life hiding from his legacy (he died this year in March), living in a deep state of denial over what his book brought to the fore in our society. Siskel doesn't mince words and goes after Powell (and his wife) hard, giving him opportunity after opportunity to explain his actions and outright apologize for them as well. Powell mostly tries to evade Siskel's traps, and gets very angry a couple of times over the filmmaker's persistence on this one question. In some ways, the film does get a tad one-note with this repetitive stance, but in telling us the story surrounding the infamous book and its creator, Charlie Siskel has given us a fascinating look into the power of words to do real harm; sometimes, even murder. – TC4P Rating: 7/9
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