Four Movies

I have watched four movies over the last week and want to share some thoughts on them with you.  Two are older movies, and two are brand new, released just this month on Netflix.

Marty, Life Is Short

This is a documentary about actor and comedian Martin Short, directed by Lawrence Kasden.   Short, of course, came to the attention of most people in the United States when he was a part of Canadian SCTV back in the late 1970's/early 1980's.  He went on to greater things on television (one season as regular on Saturday Night Live), guest appearances  on talk shows and acting roles in movies and countless television series.  I remember him in movies like "The Three Amigos" and "Father of the Bride", but I had no awareness of just how prolific an actor that he is (116 acting credits in IMDB), including his latest huge success in the streaming series "Only Murders In The Building".

This documentary includes home movies that Short himself made of both his family growing up and of his own family and friends.  And those friends are a Who's Who of show business today: Steve Martin, Stephen Speilberg, Catherine O'Hara, Tom Hanks, and many, many more.  The movie also tells of Short's resilience in the face of tragedy: his oldest brother was killed in an accident when Martin was 12, his mother died when he was 18, and his father died two years later.  Then, he lost his wife of thirty years, Nancy Dolman, to cancer in 2010.  His words about what he went through at that time and in the time that followed were particularly meaningful to me.  Not included in the film was the news of his daughter Katherine's  suicide earlier this year, which occurred after the film was finished.  It is dedicated to her.

Two great lines from the film that sum up Short perfectly:

Steve Martin: "Say you're having a dinner party and you invite Marty.  Then Marty tells you that something came up and he can't make it.  You then cancel the party."

Tom Hanks:  "Marty operates at the speed of joy."

You will laugh a lot watching this movie, and you will fell pain as well, but, ultimately, you will feel the "joy" to which Hanks refers.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Sally Field plays a widow working as an overnight cleaning woman at a public aquarium in Washington state.  It keeps her occupied and active.  Lewis Pullman plays an unemployed musician who arrives in town on a mission to collect money that he feels is owed to him. They're drawn together when his crummy van breaks down and he has to take a job as Field's substitute cleaning person at the aquarium.  They become tied together by their affinity for the aquarium's star attraction, an octopus named Marcellus, who serves as the voice-over narrator of the movie.

I know, doesn't make a lot of sense and it sounds terrible when you spell it out like I just did, but, trust me, this is a charming little story, and how it ends and how the characters tie together make for a delightful movie. 

A word about Sally Field.  She will turn 80 later this year, and she is wonderful in this movie.   She has over seventy acting credits in IMDB dating back to 1962.  She has done comedy and drama. She has won two Oscars and three Emmys and is a Kennedy Center Honors awardee.  She played Mary Todd Lincoln for crying out loud! She has come a long way from Gidget and The Flying Nun, and, as this movie has shown, she continues to do wonderful work.  She is a real treasure.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

(1976)

Back in March, I wrote THIS PIECE about movies that will turn fifty years old in 2026.  While researching for that post, one of the movies that I found on every list for that year, but that I had never seen, was this western that starred and was directed by Clint Eastwood, and I finally got around to seeing it, fifty years after the fact.

It is classic Eastwood stuff.  Josey Wales seeks revenge on a band of renegade Union soldiers who murdered his wife and son and burned down his home as the Civil War was coming to an end.  Along the way he meets up with an all-by-himself Indian and a family of settlers from Kansas who are seeking a better life out west.  He also has to fight off various bandits, hostile Indians, and, of course, those soldiers who killed his family.  Lots and lots and LOTS of people get killed in this movie and there is a lot of shooting and somehow lone man Josey/Clint manages to out wit, out shoot, and out kill all of them, no matter how outnumbered he always seems to be.  

Josey Wales is the 1860's precursor to the 1970's Dirty Harry Callahan. If, like me, you are a Clint Eastwood fan, then this is a movie for you.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

The Bride Wore Black

(1968)

French film director Francois Truffaut was an unabashed admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, and this 1968 movie was his tribute to him.  If you watch it, you will see the influence that Hitchcock had on Truffaut in scene after scene.  (FUN FACT:  The Bride Wore Black is based upon a novel of the same name by author Cornell Woolrich.  Woolrich also write the short novel "Rear Window", which was, of course, adapted by Hitchcock into my favorite movie of his.)  Jeanne Moreau played the title  character.  We learn early on that her husband was shot and killed on their wedding day, and she then sets out on a mission of revenge against five men responsible for the killing.

I recorded this one off of TCM.  It was in the original French with English subtitles. I was anxious to see it because back in 1968, this movie was shown at the Forum Theater in Squirrel Hill, where the then seventeen year old Grandstander was employed as an usher.  I can remember that I liked the movie because "it was like a Hitchcock movie".  However, the movie was especially memorable because of this scene that featured a topless Miss Moreau:

In watching the movie this week, I realized that this scene took up about two seconds of actual screen time.  It ain't much by today's standards, but to a 17 year old boy in 1968, it was pretty hot stuff.

All that aside, it is still a pretty good movie.  A suspenseful thriller and an apt tribute by Truffaut to Hitchcock.

Two and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

A Movie Friday

Spent some time watching movies this past Friday.

First up was "Sully", the Tom Hanks starring and Clint Eastwood directed movie about the forced landing of a disabled US Airways passenger airplane in the Hudson River in January 2009.  Hanks, who is always good in anything he does, stars as Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot of the craft.  The events depicted in the movie are recent enough that most people will remember them, and Eastwood does a great job in turning an event that last 208 seconds into a full length movie.

Much of the movie focuses on the NTSB investigation of the event that followed.  Did Sully do the right thing in making the forced water landing? (All 155 people aboard survived, so I'd say, yeah, he did.)  Should he have tried to return to one of two airports available to land?  These are the issues facing the NTSB, who it must be said were doing what they needed to do, but Eastwood makes them the "bad guys" in this one in such a broad fashion that I am surprised he didn't have then wearing black hats during the board hearings.

I give this one three stars, and I am looking forward to discussing this one with my buddy Tim Baker at some point in the future.

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Next up was from 1965, Blake Edwards' "A Shot in the Dark", perhaps the best of Peter Sellers Inspector Clouseau movies.  To be honest, some of the gags in this one go on too long and become almost annoying to watch, but there are enough honest-to-God laughs in this one to make it worth watching.  Watching Sellers trying to return a pool cue to the rack of cues in the billiard room is hilarious.

It also stars the beautiful Elke Sommer, the single most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person (I've told the story before), and she is gorgeous in this one.

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On Friday night I tuned into TCM to watch Woody Allen's 1988 drama, "Another Woman" that starred Gena Rowlands and Mia Farrow.  Rowlands plays a college professor who accidentally overhears another woman, Farrow, while she is visiting a psychiatrist.  Hearing they stranger's story makes Rowlands take another look at her own life, both past and present.  I had never seen this one, but I am always anxious to "discover" an Allen movie.  As I said, this one is no comedy, but rather an adult drama, one that makes you really think.  Maybe it's not for everyone, but I thought it was quite good.

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The final Friday movie, also on TCM, was "I Never Sang For My Father" from 1970 starring Melvyn Douglas and Gene Hackman.

Hackman plays Douglas' adult son who returns home after the death of his mother, and is faced with dealing with an aging father.  Lots of unresolved father-son issues come to light.  Again, not always an easy movie to watch, but excellently done - both Douglas and Hackman received Oscar nominations for this one - and a movie that probably everyone, to one degree or another, can relate.

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Still have one more movie on the DVR that I want to watch soon, another Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers comedy called "The Party" from 1968.  Maybe after the Steelers game tonight.  More on that one later, after I watch it again.

A Little Known Fact About "Trouble With the Curve"

WARNING: Post contains a possible spoiler.

I got around to watching one of my Christmas gifts last night - the DVD of the Clint Eastwood baseball movie, "Trouble With the Curve."  Despite the fact that you could see the ending to this one coming like a Kevin Correia hanging curve ball, this was a pretty good movie, one that certainly deserves being a part of your baseball movie library, if you have one.  Eastwood was Eastwood, which is always pretty good, unless he's talking to an empty chair, and there were good performances from the charming Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake (who, by the way, has proven himself to be more than just some cute kid from a Boy Band).

Anyway, Pirates fans should be interested to know this little know fact about the movie that was somehow left on the cutting room floor when the final editing of the film was done.  Had Timberlake convinced the Red Sox to make Bo Gentry their number one pick, then the next name on the Braves list, a kid who was highly coveted by the team's stats obsessed, computer geek scout, the one who wanted John Goodman's job, was none other than Stetson Allie.  Loved his 100 MPH fastball and his "upside."  

True story.

And I would have loved to have seen Clint Eastwood's reaction to THAT choice.

Movie Review: "J. Edgar"

The new Clint Eastwood directed and Leonardo DiCaprio starring movie, "J. Edgar", was heavily advertised during the baseball playoffs, and those ubiquitous commercials had me convinced that this was a movie to see. It had so much going for it....a great director in Eastwood, perhaps the best actor of his generation in DiCaprio, and a subject, J. Edgar Hoover, that was ripe for controversy and, perhaps, some rousing action.

Sorry to say, the whole was not as good as the sum of its parts.

While Hoover certainly deserves credit for building the FBI into the elite crime fighting organization it is today, a case could also be made that Hoover was also one of the more evil figures in our history. Personally, I was interested to see how Eastwood, whose personal politics are somewhat right of center, might portray Hoover. Would he emphasize the crime-busting anti-Communist passion of Hoover? Would he gloss over the Hoover who wiretapped seemingly everybody and use those findings to blackmail several Presidents and Attorneys General into keeping him at his post as FBI director until the day he died?

Well, the movie does show Hoover, warts and all, and it also plays up Hoover's long term relationship with his #2 man at the Bureau, Clyde Tolson. Unfortunately, the movie, which is told in flashbacks as Hoover dictates his memoirs to a present day Agent, is somewhat disjointed, which makes it somewhat hard to follow. The colors in the movie also are washed out through much of the movie. Sometimes that works well, but I don't think it did here. As a fellow viewer said to me as we exited the theater, "I expected more."

One thing that did not disappoint was DiCaprio's performance. He is really a great actor. I haven't seen everything he's done, but I've never seen him be anything less than excellent in anything that I have seen him in. I also like Armie Hammer, despite some ridiculous make-up, as Tolson. Very good performance there.

One of the historical figures portrayed in this movie was Robert Kennedy, and this leads me to a pet peeve. Whenever the Kennedys are portrayed in movies or on TV, why must the actors speak with such obviously phony New England accents? Is it really necessary to use accents when portraying historical figures? Would it make the movie any less valid if Jack or Bobby Kennedy just, you know, spoke their lines without making you think you are watching a bad version of Rich Little on the screen? Don't know who the actor was who played RFK in this movie, but the "pahk-the-cah" affectations were distracting in the extreme. Maybe they should have had him wearing a Red Sox hat, too.