Category: 2016 Movie Challenge Page 5 of 21

Challenge Week 43: True Stories

When Steve gave me this film to watch, he said I’d either love it or hate it. When a film is pitched to me like that, it’s actually pretty common for me to be somewhere in the middle on it, which I guess is weird. Anyway, that particular maxim holds true in this case.

This is a strange amalgam of a film, part rock concert, part vignettes of life in a small Texas town, part random scenes that are each interesting on their own but I have no idea how they tie together. Director David Byrne is one throughline, a narrator/tour guide type figure telling us about this Texas town where we find ourselves. John Goodman is another, as an earnest guy who just really wants to get married. Beyond that, it’s just a lot of random little bits of stuff that I found entertaining but had difficulty grokking as a whole.

tf-date

Challenge Week 42: The Phantom Carriage

I went into this expecting an Expressionistic horror film, along the lines of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or maybe Haxan, to get that Scandinavian flavor, and there’s certainly a ghostly creep factor to much of the beginning, but the film as a whole is more of a morality tale – not that that’s a bad thing.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and when two carousing men threaten a fight, their previously-merry companion David stops them seriously to tell them the story of the phantom carriage – each year, the last person to die on New Year’s Eve must drive Death’s carriage and collect the souls of the dead for the next year. The special effects on the carriage and the driver are pretty spooky, especially for 1921, and really effective. Of course, David ends up visited by the phantom driver, who turns out to be his old friend Georges. Georges reminds David of his happy life with his wife and family, then how he turned astray and left them as he fell further and further into degeneracy. Ultimately, the story is about whether David can redeem himself and return to his family, or if it’s too late for him.

tf-davidgeorges

Challenge Week 42: Millennium Actress

This completes Satoshi Kon’s filmography for me, and OMG did I save the best for last (unwittingly). I liked his other three films, but I loved this one – not only does it avoid some of the excesses that anime often falls into for me (including the end of Kon’s Paprika), but it straddles the line between fantasy and reality in a way that is basically made for me. I don’t know if Travis knew that or not when he recommended this to me, but good on you, mate.

When a famous studio is about to close, a TV journalist goes to interview the studio’s biggest star, now long-retired and rather reclusive. She grants him the interview, and starts telling him the retrospective of her life, starting with how she met an intriguing young revolutionary as a girl – he dropped a key, which she picked up and kept for him. She became an actress in hopes that he would see her movies and find her, and at this point, her retelling of the movies she was in blurs with her real-life search for this young man that would last throughout her career and life. Meanwhile, the TV journalist and cameraman ALSO become part of the story, appearing in the movies, and eventually taking part in them and helping her on her quest to find the mysterious man.

tf-key

Challenge Week 41: Midnight Mary

Cheery little Pre-Code drama told mostly in flashback while Mary Martin awaits the jury’s decision in her murder trial. Turns out growing up poor, getting locked up for a crime you didn’t commit, becoming a “lady of the night” (hence the nickname), then falling in with gangsters can lead one down a dark path that ends in murder – but there are bright spots, too, like when Mary almost manages to leave her gangster boyfriend for a rich young gentleman who truly loves her.

Almost.

tf-street

Challenge Week 41: Westward the Women

What a super-interesting and unusual Western! And surprisingly under the radar. I’m a big fan of Westerns but had barely heard of this one before Laura assigned it to me, and I’m so glad she did.

The premise is that a rancher in the newly developing California decides to bring a bunch of women west to marry the men working on his ranch, so he hires an experienced wagon master (Robert Taylor) to escort them, goes east to find a bunch of women to volunteer to make the dangerous journey, and then they all head west on a wagon train. Anybody who’s seen a wagon train movie knows what’s coming, and it’s pretty much all here – circling the wagons to defend against Indian attacks, trying to get wagons over steep or rocky terrain, dealing with starvation/thirst/exhaustion after weeks without relief, etc. High drama.

tf-wounded

Page 5 of 21

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