A Mighty Wind (2003): written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Mary Gross (Ma Klapper), Harry Shearer (Mark Shubb), Michael McKean (Jerry Palter), Christopher Guest (Alan Barrows), Eugene Levy (Mitch Cohen), Catherine O'Hara (Mickey Crabbe), Bob Balaban (Jonathan Steinbloom), Jane Lynch (Laurie Bohner), John Michael Higgins (Terry Bohner), and Parker Posey (Sissy Knox): From those wonderful folks who brought you Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show comes this, a loving, satiric tribute to the commercial folk music of the 1950's and early 1960's.
Back then bands like The Kingston Trio and The New Christy Minstrels strode the Earth like giants. But their time would soon end as rock-and-roll would reassert itself with the rise of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
This film is even more of a delight to someone who lived through this musical era (like, say, my Mom). But it's great nonetheless, with catchy songs that sound authentic and odd personalities that seem even more authentic. There's not a bad performance here, and one of the songs ("There's a Kiss at the End of the Rainbow") nabbed a Best Song Oscar Nomination. And frankly, should have won. In a better world, Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara would also have received Oscar nods for their pitch-perfect characters, the mismatched duo of Mitch and Mickey, reuniting along with other acts for a tribute to a deceased record company owner. Brilliant, funny, sad. Highly recommended.
Waiting for Guffman (1996): written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy; directed by Christopher Guest; starring Christopher Guest (Corky St. Clair), Fred Willard (Ron Albertson), Catherine O'Hara (Sheila Albertson), Parker Posey (Libby Mae Brown), Eugene Levy (Dr. Alan Pearl), and Bob Balaban (Lloyd Miller): Though the real film beginning of the Christopher Guest/Michael McKean/ And Friends mockumentaries was This is Spinal Tap, that film was directed by Rob Reiner. Waiting for Guffman was Guest's first turn in the director's chair, and Eugene Levy's first great contribution to this loose-knit confederacy of dunces.
It's a great film. Anyone who's from a small town will recognize many of the characters, perhaps even in themselves. The love Guest, Levy, and Company bring to the film helps the satire -- occasionally, sweetly bleak -- go down smoothly. The show must go on, and it generally does. The self-delusions of the assorted actors, directors, singers, and adoring townsfolk is Leacockian in stature. Highly recommended.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994): written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen with Sam Raimi; starring Tim Robbins (Norville Barnes), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Amy Archer), Paul Newman (Mussburger), Charles Durning (Hudsucker), and Bill Cobbs (Moses): The Hudsucker Proxy is like some lost Coen Brothers film, at least to the general public. But it's swell! And Producer Joel Silver ponied up about $40 million for the Coen Brothers to make it. That was crazy. And much-appreciated. The sets! The actors! You know... for kids! Well, not exactly.
The Hudsucker Proxy has the DNA of many later, more celebrated Coen Brothers Joints swirling through its giddy bloodstream, perhaps most noticeably Hail, Caesar! and The Big Lebowski. Its protagonist, as played by Tim Robbins, is an amiable, gullible small-town kid who wants to sell his ingenious product to the world. Jennifer Jason Leigh does a remarkable sustained amalgam of Rosalind Russell and Katherine Hepburn as cynical New York reporter Amy Archer. Paul Newman is evil incarnate, and Charles Durning has one of the most memorable scenes in the history of ghosts in cinema.
One can see the oddities of the production delighting the Coens throughout. While the film pays homage to the screwball comedies and dramedies of the 1930's and 1940's, it's set in the late 1950's. Why? I don't know -- everything about the production screams 1930's Art Deco. Why is the supernatural in the movie? Who are the clock-keeper and the sign-painter? Why do Jennifer Jason Leigh's scenes in her editor's office play like homages to the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie?
For that matter, why does the reporter's relationship with Tim Robbins' character seem more like the relationship between Lois Lane and Clark Kent than anything from the film's screwball pedigree?
I don't really know. It's a great, weird film that was a financial disaster when it came out. So what? Salute Joel Silver for his crazy desire to see a big-budget Arthouse movie from the Coen Brothers. Salute! Highly recommended.
Kind Hearts and Coronets: adapted by Robert Hamer and John Dighton from the novel by Roy Horniman; directed by Robert Hamer; starring Dennis Price (Louis), Valerie Hobson (Edith), Joan Greenwood (Sibella), and Alec Guinness (Eight members of the D'Ascoyne Family) (1949): Blistering, oddly charming black comedy from England's Ealing Studios, the standard-bearer for black film comedy from the late 1940's through to the early 1960's.
Alec Guinness doesn't play the protagonist -- instead, he plays the eight surviving members of the noble D'Ascoyne family whom the protagonist intends to murder. The protagonist, whose mother the D'Ascoyne patriarch disinherited because of her marriage to an Italian singer, seeks both revenge and an ascension to the title (and the associated lands and title) for himself.
Guinness is great as an octet of often ridiculous nobles, while Dennis Price plays protagonist Louis with the right mix of snobbishness and gentility. The murders are often quite funny, and it's difficult to feel much sympathy for any of the D'Ascoynes. Louis also finds himself caught between two love interests -- manipulative and scheming Sibella, a friend since childhood, and the prim and proper Edith, widow of one of the more haplessly sympathetic D'Ascoynes. It's all a very funny and sometimes extraordinarily cynical and bleak look at the British class system. Highly recommended.
The Ladykillers: written by William Rose and Jimmy O'Connor; directed by Alexander Mackendrick; starring Alec Guinness (Professor Marcus), Katie Johnson (Mrs. Wilberforce), Cecil Parker (Claude (a.k.a. 'Major Courtney')), Herbert Lom (Louis (a.k.a. 'Mr. Harvey')), Peter Sellers (Harry (a.k.a. 'Mr. Robinson)), Danny Green (One-Round (a.k.a. 'Mr. Lawson')), and Jack Warner (The Superintendent) (1955): Oddly charming and gentle black comedy from England's Ealing Studios, the standard-bearer for black film comedy from the late 1940's through to the early 1960's. The body count is high, but it's hard to argue with the choice of victims.
Alec Guinness, sporting some pretty crazy fake teeth, plays Professor Marcus, the ringleader and chief planner for a quintet of thieves planning a big heist. Their plan hinges on Marcus taking rooms at the house of a deceptively lovable old lady (Mrs. Wilberforce, played wonderfully by Katie Johnson) for reasons I'll let the movie show you.
Guinness and his fellow actors -- including a young Peter Sellers and his police nemesis from the later Pink Panther films, Herbert Lom -- are terrific as their plan goes increasingly awry. Mrs. Wilberforce's ability to sow chaos wherever she goes without ever being affected by it herself repeatedly screws up the gang's plans. And their own somewhat English politeness makes the whole problem of eliminating Mrs. Wilberforce into an increasingly elaborate series of attempts and apologies.
The Coen Brothers remade The Ladykillers in 2004. It's not as bad a movie as some critics said, though it's also nowhere near the film that the original was. Alec Guinness trumps Tom Hanks. And the Coens didn't have Peter Sellers around to do uncredited work voicing Mrs. Wilberforce's two maddening parrots and a cockatoo. Highly recommended.
Saboteur: written by Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Priscilla Lane (Pat), Robert Cummings (Barry), Otto Kruger (Tobin), and Norman Lloyd (Fry) (1942): From the first half-decade of Hitchcock's American phase comes this oddball thriller -- half-WWII-propaganda, half-thriller, half-loopy-road-comedy. That's three halves, and yes, it is that over-stuffed.
Robert Cummings plays a worker at a California warplane-assembly plant who's framed for sabotage by a man he (literally) ran into only moments before a disastrous fire destroyed part of the plant and killed his best friend. With only an address on an envelope to go on, Cummings flees Los Angeles to track down the saboteur. Well, saboteurs and fifth-columnists. Lots of them, and lots of them rich, high-society types.
Moments of comedy and weirdness will bring to mind both Hitchcock's earlier foray into the 'Wrong-man Road-trip' sub-genre, The 39 Steps, and that later Cary Grant masterpiece, North by North-west. But this is the weirdest of those three -- so weird that it stands as a forerunner to film-makers like the Coen Brothers and David Lynch far more than it does to Hollywood's more traditional thrill-directors.
What will happen to Cummings' character? He'll be aided in his escape from the police by a philosophical blind musician (shades of Universal's Frankenstein!). That blind musician has a super-model niece who will be pulled into the drama. Billboards featuring that niece will comment comically on the action of the film at regular intervals. Will she come to believe and then fall in love with Cummings? What do you think?
So off their road-trip goes. Patriotic members of a traveling circus's freak show will aid them, with the Human Skeleton delivering the film's best line, about the failings of normal people ("The normal are normally cold-hearted."). Cummings will break his handcuffs with the fan blade of a car. They'll visit a place called Soda City. They'll mingle with high society. And in the film's famous climax, Cummings will finally face the saboteur... on top of the Statue of Liberty.
Saboteur is very odd and unconventional. One can see why it was a box-office failure at the time. But it's also a sign of Things to Come. Though you might want to brace yourself for one of the most abrupt endings I've seen from the Golden Age of Hollywood Abrupt Endings. It's like Hitchcock was late for an appointment. Recommended.
Intolerable Cruelty: written by Robert Ramsey, Matthew Stone, John Romano, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen; directed by Joel and Ethan Coen; starring George Clooney (Miles Massey), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Marylin), Geoffrey Rush (Donovan Donaly), Cedric the Entertainer (Gus Petch), Edward Herrmann (Rex Rexroth), and Richard Jenkins (Freddy Bender) (2003): A mediocre Coen Brothers movie (of which this is one) is still better than the vast majority of all other movies.
This trifle is certainly the glitziest of their big-star productions, those Coen Brothers movies starring George Clooney or, once, Tom Hanks, in roles that seemed to be intentionally crafted to either mock them or at least test their capacity to mock themselves. Both Hanks and Clooney have been game, though Clooney's much better at it -- Hanks's go at embodying Southern-Fried tomfoolery in The Ladykillers was overshadowed by most of his co-stars, including a cat.
Veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins, who's worked with the Coens a lot, shoots Catherine Zeta-Jones like the most radiantly golden of Golden-Age movie stars. Clooney's character, meanwhile, repeatedly obsesses over how white his newly whitened teeth are. Various eccentrics and grotesques get most of the good lines and good physical comedy. An ex-con turned assassin seems to have wandered in from Raising Arizona, while the hideously geriatric head of Clooney's law firm seems to have arrived fresh from The Hudsucker Proxy via Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
Is it good? Not exactly, but it's neither boring nor stupid. For a movie the Coens say was in development for eight years (originally with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere attached), it seems weirdly underdone, especially in the dialogue department, though that may be a result of having been rewritten too many times. One of the oddities of the production is that Clooney's character seems like a prescient lampoon of his later characters in Michael Clayton and Up in the Air. Recommended.
