The Fly (1958)

Film: The Fly (1958)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I love classic science fiction and horror. I like the new stuff, too, but there’s a lovely nostalgia that goes along with movies in these genres from 50 and 60 years ago. The science, of course, is often goofy and ridiculous, and that’s a lot of fun. The horror also often seems so tame that it comes across much more charming than scary. That’s not always the case, of course. There are plenty of older films that have a genuine sense of horror and fear. In the case of the original version of The Fly, though, we’re looking at something that is far more about the entertainment than the scare factor.

If you’ve seen the remake from the 1980s, you know the basic story. A scientist develops a machine that allows for matter transference, basically a teleporter. After a number of tests, he transports himself. However, during this experiment, a fly enters the chamber with him and “his molecules” get mixed up with the fly’s, creating one human-sized fly man and one fly-sized man fly. Since this is an older film, we’re not going to get the gory stuff of the remake and the combination of human and fly isn’t going to be at the DNA level. Instead, we’ve got a man with the head and left arm of a fly and a fly with the head and left arm of a man.

Sure Hope It's Waterproof...

Film: A Hatful of Rain
Format: Internet video on laptop.

The idea of a parent misjudging his or her children is a pretty old story. There are plenty of novels, plays, and movies in which a parent dotes on an undeserving child and ignores or mistreats the child who really deserves respect. A Hatful of Rain takes that basic idea and spices it up by adding drugs and giving it a noir twist. That’s at least the intent here; whether or not it’s successful will depend, I suppose, on the viewer.

In a way, this is sort of Death of a Salesman replacing the story about the father and focusing on the sons. John Pope, Sr. (Lloyd Nolan) arrives at the apartment home of his son Johnny (Don Murray), Johnny’s wife Celia (Eva Marie Saint), and Johnny’s younger brother Polo (an Oscar-nominated Anthony Franciosa) to pay a visit. John is extremely proud of his elder son, who is a decorated Korean War veteran. Despite being a bartender himself, he’s also ashamed of Polo, who works as a bouncer in a nightclub.

Smuggler's Blues

Film: Frozen River
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

One of the many things I find interesting about movies is those instances in which a movie takes a very different perspective from the norm. I think about a film like Paradise Now, for instance, that attempts to show suicide attacks from the point of view of the attacker. While definitely sympathetic to Palestine, the film isn’t pro-suicide bomber, but an attempt to get inside the mind of someone who would do such a thing. In the case of Frozen River, the question asked is what might drive someone to act in a way completely against what she evidently stands for.

Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) lives in a trailer with her sons T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and Ricky (James Reilly). Ray is prematurely old—she’s probably in her late 30s or early 40s but looks closer to her mid-50s. She works part-time at a dollar store and does the best she can with a husband who is a chronic gambler and who regularly takes the money she has saved up to buy a double-wide trailer and blows it on lottery tickets and games at the local Mohawk casino. This is where we start the film—with her unable to make the balloon payment for her trailer and being threatened with having her television repossessed by the rental company.

Off Script: Only Lovers Left Alive

Film: Only Lovers Left Alive
Format: DVDs from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

I don’t know if Jim Jarmusch can be considered an acquired taste because I liked Jarmusch’s films from my first viewing of them. While I could probably rank his films in some order, every one that I have seen is one that I’ve liked. Only Lovers Left Alive is a film that I’ve wanted to see for some time, and it’s a film that makes me angry on a specific point. That it does says far more about me than it does about Jim Jarmusch or Only Lovers Left Alive.

In a very real sense, this is probably the least horror movie horror movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s classified as such only because our two main characters and two of their main associates are vampires. We’re never actually told that they are vampires and that word appears nowhere in the film, but they have fangs, drink blood, can’t go out during the day, and appear to be undying. The film is not so much about them tracking down victims and killing them or about the tortured love between vampire and human victim, but about the endless toll of the years on them and their troubled and increasingly difficult existence in the modern world.

Brokeback Manhattan

Film: Carol
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Every year when the Oscar nominations are released, I find myself with a sudden influx of new films on the list to get through. I do my best initially to get through as many as I can, but by the end of the year, I find that I’m tired of hammering on the most recent year of film. This is why I still have films to watch from the past few years. It also means that I’m still in that phase of catch-up mode for 2015, which is why I moved Carol to the top of the queue recently. Since Best Actress performances are still where I’m the most lacking (although I have caught up tremendously on them and they lag behind Best Actor by about half a dozen now), watching the one that is both currently available and that I haven’t seen seemed like a good fit.

What I didn’t know going in was that Carol was directed by Todd Haynes. I tend to like the films of Haynes, so it made me far more interested in this from the outset. That it touches on themes similar to Far from Heaven, which I think may be his most accessible film and certainly one of his best is an additional benefit. Far from Heaven focuses mainly on interracial romance set in the 1950s but touches on a homosexual relationship as well. Carol ditches that main point and concentrates instead on a lesbian romance set in the same time period.

Over the Border

Film: Hold Back the Dawn
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Keepvid is a nice little internet site that allows one to download videos, which is something I’ve used any number of times to safeguard a rarity that has appeared on YouTube. The downside of Keepvid is that it doesn’t work with Dailymotion, which means that anything I find there is at risk for vanishing suddenly, leaving me with no good option. Because of this, I watched Hold Back the Dawn today in fear that it might suddenly turn into a pumpkin.

This starts with our romantic hero and narrator Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) more or less breaking onto a Paramount Studios set so that he can speak to a film director named Dwight Saxon (played by this film’s director Mitchell Leisen, and filming a scene with Victoria Lake) who he once met. He offers Saxon a story for $500 and his desperation more than anything gets Saxon to listen. Thus begins a tale of love and melodrama starting in a place that is certainly racier than would normally be the case for a film from 1941.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Feature 2006

The Contenders:

Cars
Happy Feet (winner)
Monster House