1949 - IT'S A GREAT FEELING - a silly comedy but a fun film for movie buffs

Doris Day's third film.  Day was a terrific vocalist and turned into a very good comedian.  It's A Great Feeling is a showcase for her comedic skills.  She is once again co-starring with her friend Jack Carson and a bland crooner named Dennis Morgan who Warner Brothers was trying to make a major star out of.

The summary in brief because there is not of shall we say plot here.  Doris plays a waitress (in real life she had worked as a waitress) who is trying to get a film career going.  She hooks up with two Warner Brothers actors Carson and Morgan as they attempt to get her an audition with a film producer.  A very nothing plot.

The chief interest of this film is as a tour of the Warner Brothers studios circa the late 1940s.  There are amusing appearances from director Raoul Walsh with his eyepatch.  Walsh had lost one of his eyes while filming on location.  King Vidor shows up as does the legendary Michael Curtiz.  The director of the film David Butler who frequently worked with Day also has a cameo.

The film has an amusing list of Warner's stars.  Gary Cooper says "yup" a lot.  Ronald Reagan gets a haircut.  Edward G. Robinson pretends to be a tough guy to preserve his image.  Joan Crawford has a very funny scene.  There's legendary music director Ray Heindorf doing what else, conducting a song for Day to perform. Just a whole lot of fun watching for movie buffs. 

The film's locations are the studio itself and it all looks great in technicolor.  Carson, Day and Morgan have to carry the load but it's still a fun film to watch

For such a lighter than air comedy this film had some serious screenwriting talent, Jack Rose, I.A.L. Diamond and Melvin Shavelson.  The running time is 85 minutes.

2026 - MAYDAY, actually entertaining action streamer

Mayday is that rare bird in the world of the streamer film, it's actually entertaining.  The ingenious and fairly silly premise has the smirking Ryan Reynolds as a pilot who gets assigned a mission to photograph some missile bases in the Soviet Union.  Surprise surprise Reynolds gets shot down but he ends up parachuting near the cabin of an ex KGB spy played by of all people distinguished Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh. Well Branagh just happens to be a lover of American culture and decides to help Reynolds escape from the Soviet Union.  So the race is on as they are pursued by the Russian military.

This isn't the greatest buddy movie ever made but it does have some funny stuff in it.  The filmmakers are clever enough to take the usual action scene stuff which we've seen many time before and bring some new twists to them.  One car chase during the Russian May Day parade has them stealing a missile transport is actually original.

Ryan Reynolds plays the same part that he always plays, the smirking wise cracking action guy.  You can watch him play this character in Green Lantern, Deadpool, Deadpool 2, 6 Underground, The Adam Project and Red Notice (yuk) .  The surprise here is Branagh who steals the movie with his expert performance as the Top Gun loving former spy who's watched that movie hundreds of times and wants to eat at MacDonalds. 

The writers and directors of Mayday are John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein who made the also  funny and clever Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.  The running time is 111 minutes. 

2026 - YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING - on the big screen

The 3000 pound monster in the documentary genre which is sucking up all the space not to mention all of the money.  You Can See Everything presents itself as an intimate portrayal of the convicted and I would emphasize again convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes the head of Theranos.

Using the term documentary extremely loosely the film essentially boils down to this. Three grifters attempt to out con each other for about three hours.  A month before she begins her sentence Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans allow comedian and satirist Nathan Fielder into her home to document her life.  The purpose of this documentary is for Holmes and Evans to rehabilitate her image and proclaim her innocence.  

But Holmes and Evans may have meet their match in Fielder a comedian known for staging elaborate charades at the expense of people stuck in his little games. Yes this film is very compelling to watch.  Holmes and Evans are a couple of bizarre characters to put it mildly.  However Fielder clearly knows a thing or two about manipulating people himself.

There is no point getting into the specifics of this film with it's twists and spoilers but you can't not be impressed by how Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim take footage they shot in 2023  and managed to stretch it into a three hour film.

After viewing this film and spending a morning on the internet the seams do start to show.  It's implied that Fielder had exclusive access to Holmes and Evans.  The reality seems to be that she had a constant stream of reporters she spent time with.  The film also questions the sincerity or insincerity of Holmes towards the end.  It implies that she may not be as guilty as we have been led to believe.  However the reality is that this sociopath committed fraud to the tune of 700 million dollars which makes her sound pretty darn guilty to me.

The running time of this film is 174 minutes 

1958 -THE LIVING STONE, 1959 - PANGNIRTUNG , 1964 - ESKIMO ARTIST KENOJUAK, three very dated films about Inuit aka Eskimo life

Those "do-gooders" at the National Film Board of Canada produced these short films about life in the Artic for the Canadian Inuit aka Eskimos.  Well meaning but they seem really out of it.  A filmmaker named John Feeney was behind these films.  They are just loaded with lots of troupes about the Inuit people that were already outdated when Nanook of the North was released in 1922.  

The theme of The Living Stone is about Inuit sculptures that supposedly release the aura or a spirit living inside the stone. as the stones are molded into figurines.  But what the film really seems to be interested in is reinforcing one cliche after.  It's all here, people living in Igloos, people racing around in dog sleds and eating blubber or something when they are not fighting to survive.  The film does have some nice photography. The running time is 32 minutes.

Next up is Pangnitrtung a film about a government outpost in the middle of nowhere in Canada.  The outpost was originally founded by the Hudson's Bay Company in the early 1920's and is close to the North Pole. This film finds the Canadian government providing medical and educational services to the local natives.  The outpost has a school where the Inuit kids are being drilled by a rather scary looking teacher to abandon their native language in favor of the Queen's English.  This is not exactly an open minded point of view.  Pangnitrtung is probably the most problematic of the three films.  It's just a given that being assimilated into the mainstream Canadian culture is the best thing for everyone.  The running time is 30 minutes.

Finally there's Eskimo Artist Kenojuak.  This one is probably the best of the bunch.  Kenojuak Ashevak was an Inuit woman who paved the way for Inuit art.  She created prints that revolved around the Inuit culture.  This film is short and sweet and for the most part focuses on how she makes her art.  However we still get Inuit people riding around in dog sleds and living in igloos.  Some troupes just refuse to go away.

The filmmaker John Feeney lived in Canada for about 10 years until he decided that somewhere a lot warmer was called for.  He ended up relocating to the Middle East for the next 40 years and wrote a cookbook.  Running time is 20 minutes.

2026 - VISITING THE MONTMARTE CEMETERY - Paris, France

While on vacation in France for a couple of quick weeks I had a limited amount of time to walk through the famous Montemarte Cemetery.  This is a popular tourist stop and is absolutely loaded with the gravesites of many famous French figures.  Since this is a film blog here are just a few of them

You can hardly be in this movie buff film watching business without stopping to view the gravesite of Francois Truffaut one of the French New Wave's best directors.  At the age of 52 Truffaut was diagnosed with a brain tumor and passed away in October of 1984.   I suppose most Americans will remember Truffaut for his role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  A part he partially took to study American film production methods.  After his work on Spielberg's film he made the decision to to not get involved in making any film in the United States a very smart man.

Located near Truffaut's gravesite is that of actor Jeanne Moreau.  She had a long career as a performer appearing in her first film in 1949 and her final film in 2015.  She's practically a history of French cinema.  She worked with many famous directors, Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Wim Wenders, Louis Malle Jean-Luc Goddard and Jacques Demy to name a few.

Here is the headstone of writer/director/actor Sacha Guitry one of the French cinema's most witty filmmakers.  There is a very good box set of Guitry's films from Criterion.  The Pearls of the Crown and The Story of a Cheat are excellent films.

British filmmaker Gabriel Pascal seemed like an odd place to be interned.  Pascal managed to get playwright George Bernard Shaw to sign over the film rights to some of his plays.  Pygmalion was probably his best film adaptation of a Shaw play.  Pascal produced and directed Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in 1945.  At the time this was one of the most expensive films ever made in England.  It was also a notorious box office bomb.

Here's the gavesite of  Henri Georges Clouzot frequently called the French Hitchcock although you could argue that it should be the other way around.  The Wages of Fear, Les Diaboliques and The Mystery of Picasso are excellent films and highly recommended.

Finally one of the strangest sites in Montemarte is the grave of new wave director Jacques Rivette which is literally unmarked.  Rivette was one of the most fascinating of the French New Wave directors.  Not really much of a successful commercial director he did made some interesting films.  I can remember sitting through La Belle Noiseuse a four hour opus about a guy painting a picture, whew.

2016 - THE GREAT WALL, is a not so great film

A good director kind of goes off the rails with this large scale fantasy/action/adventure film.  Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal play a couple of foreigners traveling around medieval China in search of gunpowder which was invented by the Chinese. They end up being taken prisoner by a mysterious Chinese army located on The Great Wall.

As is turns out the wall and the army are there to beat off a hoard of monsters who want to eat everyone up.  This leads to a large scale battle scene when the monsters attack.  The army in a series of really improbable maneuvers fights them off with some really outlandish weapons and tactics.  These monsters vs the army battle scenes are actually very well staged.  A lot of thought was put into finding crazy ways to eliminate these packs of snarly monsters.

Matt Damon was the star of what was essentially an Asian fantasy film.  He seems extremely out of place with his monster killing bow and arrow set.  He also looks mighty uncomfortable running around in this period piece film.  He had better luck in Odyssey which in many ways was a fantasy film. Clearly Damon and Pascal were hired to make this film palatable to a Western audience.  However even with the presence of a couple of Hollywood actors the film underperformed big time.

When you think about it The Great Wall is probably no better or worse than one of those later period and stupid Marvel/DC superhero movies.  I think a good director like Zhang Yimou should have really seen the weaknesses in the script. Yimou probably had his hands full just filming this large scale production.  The Great Wall was one of the most expensive films produced in China.  The film has it's good points.  It is visually stunning.  There is a lot of CGI in the film but Asian filmmakers always seem to be able to use it a lot more effectively than their Hollywood counterparts.

If you are looking for a time killer of a film with lots of action, visual effects, a very eclectic cast and monsters lots and lots of monsters this film is for you.  

The film has at least six credited writers never a good sign.  Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, Tony Gilroy, Max Brooks, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz  and extremely eclectic group to put it mildly.  The running time is 103 minutes.  

1949 - MY DREAM IS YOURS, Doris Day's second film

This is Doris Day's second film. She is again under the direction of Michael Curtiz one of the best directors in the film business.  Curtiz had discovered her and cast her in her first film Romance On The High Seas.  Curtiz's instructions to her was just play herself and let your likable natural personality come out.  Day was also tutored by her co-star Jack Carson who showed her all the technical tricks of acting in front of a camera.  In essence know where your marks are and understand the function of cinema lighting and photography.

Day absorbed these lessons well and in this her second film she had a very natural screen presence.  Day played a widow with a young son looking to break into the entertainment business.  She teams up with Jack Carson who plays her manager and starts to fall in love with her.  However Doris is attracted to nightclub singer Lee Bowman a drunk and a lowlife.  It's obvious where the story is going to go.  I should also point out that this film looks quite beautiful in stunning 1940's technicolor.   

All of this drama along with the musical interludes was expertly handled by Curtiz a man who was practically an idiot savant when it came to making films.  Curtiz always knew where to place the camera to get the maximum effect out of almost ever scene.  Curtiz was a great director in almost any genre.  He was comfortable making westerns, dramas, musicals or comedies and had a very long career.

This film was a major influence on Martin Scorcese when he came to make his musical disaster New York, New York a bloated, unlikable and incoherent mess.  My Dream Is Yours had a completed screenplay to work with.  Scorcese and Robert DeNiro tried to improvise their way through their film with the predictable disastrous results.

My Dream Is Yours is a very entertaining film in a 1940's kind of way.  No one could knock out a song like Doris Day. The film also has a kind of weird animated sequence featuring Day, Carson and Bugs Bunny.  The cast besides Day and Carson is a who's who of 1940's Hollywood.  Eve Arden, Adolphe Menjou. S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall, Sheldon Leonard and Franklin Pangborn.  

This was the last appearance of character actor Edgar Kennedy who could trace his career back to silent films.  He worked with just about everybody, Charles Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, The Mark Brothers, John Barrymore, Rex Harrison and Harold Lloyd.  A remarkable career.

 The film was written by, Harry Kurnitz, Dane Lussier, Allen Rivkin, and Laura Kerr.  The running time is 101 minutes. 

2001 - ENIGMA, a romantic thriller

There's nothing all that bad about Enigma a World War II espionage thriller set in Bletchley Park England's famous code breaking headquarters during the war.  However the film doesn't really work as a spy/romantic thriller considering the talent behind the camera.  What this film really needed was a director like an Alfred Hitchcock or a Roman Polanski in their prime to really pull this story together while mixing the spy stuff with the love story.

Briefly the story involves a British mathematician who is returning to Bletchley Park after cracking up and spending some time in a mental institution.  It seems he managed to have a nervous breakdown over his involvement with one of the women working there who just happens to be a really hot blond.  She ended their relationship and vanished under mysterious circumstances .  Now he is attempting to find out what occured with her.  A parallel plot has him under pressure to break a German code that will give out the location of a German U-boat pack that is about to blow up an Allied convoy. There is just a lot of stuff going on in this film.

To solve the mystery of the vanishing hot blonde he ropes in another employee to help him played by Kate Winslet.  He improbably also gets involved with her and I guess she is sort of a consolation prize in the girlfriend department.  Although it's hard to think of Kate Winslet as anyone's second runner up as a girlfriend.  To give the filmmakers credit they loaded up the story with a lot of clues.  Enigma wants to be one of those plot twisty espionage stories.  Unfortunately all of this clue stuff gets tiresome to sort out after a while. With all the red herrings in the story you have to keep straight,  it's exhausting to get to a reasonably coherent ending.

A few more things to mention.  The film was criticized for not mentioning code breaker Alan Turling who helped crack the enigma machine code during World War II.  That criticism was kind of ridiculous since the film was a fictional story not a biography of Alan Turling.  Enigma was produced by Mick Jagger and Saturday Night Live impresario Lorne Michaels go figure that out.  Finally this was composer John Barry's last film score.  Barry wrote another of his melancholy low key scores which he had been composing towards the end of career.  Frankly a lot of Barry's score is just a reworking of his main theme. 

The film was written by noted English playwright Tom Stoppard, the running time is 119 minutes. 

1972 - THE HOT ROCK, entertaining crime caper spoof

This is a very entertaining spoof of one of those Mission Impossible films or TV shows.  To steal a diamond a team of criminals decide to rob the Brooklyn museum of a precious diamond.  The twist in this film is that everything goes wrong and they stumble along from one improbable and ridiculous situation after another.  They succeed in stealing the diamond which they then manage to misplace.  They spend the rest of the film wondering where they lost it and how to steal it yet again.

The film has a very good cast starting with Robert Redford.  He was an extremely good looking guy in the classic Hollywood tradition.  One of Redford's strengths as an actor was comedy and in his low key deadpan way he was very funny in this film.  Redford's big break was in the Broadway play Barefoot in the Park as Paul Bratter.  Paramount was smart enough to cast him in the film version of this Neil Simon play and he pretty much stole the movie away from a very manic Jane Fonda playing his wife Corrie Bratter. 

The rest of the cast were no slouches in the comedy category.  George Segal played Redford's brother in law and he was good in dramatic performances but he also excelled in comedy.  Ron Liebelman and Paul Sand were also well cast as the remaining members of the gang.  Finally there was Zero Mostel playing Sand's father who is also a shyster lawyer.  Mostel was always a very larger than life presence on film but given a good part and a director who knew how to keep him under reasonable control he could deliver the goods.

This film was directed by Peter Yates an Englishman who kicked off his film career with two good crime thrillers Bullitt and Robbery.  Yates was a versatile director who didn't get stuck in the crime movie category.  He made a lot of different types of films and was fairly successful.  Yates keeps the plot moving along from one scene to another while not neglecting the comedy or character moments.

The film was written by ace screenwriter William Goldman from a book by Donald Westlake who specialized in serious and not so serious crime novels.

The running time is 105 minutes.  

2026 - THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE, on the big screen

I suppose you could classify The History of Concrete as a documentary but it's really an extended version of one of John Wilson's episodes from his HBO series How To With John Wilson.   It's well known that Wilson decided to end his HBO series after three seasons.  After that he opened a repertory theater in Queens, New York and somehow got it into his head to make this oddball film.

The premise of this alleged documentary has Wilson deciding to make a film about concrete.  We see him attempting to get financing from friends and partners who understandably have more than a few doubts.  In a particularly amusing scene, Wilson decides to use the plot structure of a Hallmark film to make his film.  This is just a jumping off point as Wilson travels around NYC and the country where he encounters one quirky person or situation after another. 

There are a couple of tattoo artists who frame skin tattoos from dead people to sell like they are posters from a museum gift shop. Then there is the only man in New York City who has a chewing gum removal business since apparently the streets of NYC are covered with people who just spit out their gum anywhere

Moving on, Wilson makes a strange visit to an Ohio town to look at the oldest concrete road which somehow finds him spending time at a driver's training school.  I also have to mention a foot race where the runners race around and around a city block endlessly. To give out any more of these vignettes would really ruin the film.  

Wilson was at the Sundance film festival with this film and got good reviews.  Unfortunately the 3000 pound monster in the room that he is competing with is the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything which is really sucking up all the air in the room.

This is a very entertaining film.  I'm not exactly sure what the point of all of this is but if you are looking for something different and frankly very funny it's well worth a look. 

The running time is 101 minutes.  

1954 - THE HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE, an apocalyptic tale for our times

You better keep your house clean and tidy and mow that lawn if you want to survive a nuclear bomb.  That's the message of this odd and interesting short film.  The film was sponsored (produced?) by The National Paint,Varnish, and Lacquer Association and The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau along with the Federal Civil Defense Administration. 

Three small houses are constructed near a nuclear bomb test site.  Two of them are what you would probably call today hoarder houses.  Their lawns are a mess with stuff laying around everywhere. But The House in the Middle is all clean and tidy and well taken care of.  Boom goes the nuclear device and the fire storm comes raging into the model homes.  The houses to the left and right are decimated but the house in the middle the one with the good paint job and the mowed lawn in the desert no less just has some minor peeling.  The lesson is a very clear one and the results speak for themselves.

This film has some self important narration by a guy sitting at a desk.  Is he a spokesman for The National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association or The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau?  Probably the truth will never be known.  He drones on and on while the viewer is waiting to get back to more good stuff with things "blowing up real good."  Instead the film ends with some kids running around picking up trash, a real letdown even for a short informational film like this.

This film exists in two versions, black and white and color.  If you want to watch it and get some insight into how the government and apparently The National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association along with The National Clean Up–Paint Up–Fix Up Bureau tried to down play a nuclear attack you can give it a look.

 The running time is 12 minutes.   

1961 - SCARLET SAILS, a Russian fairy tale

 From filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko comes this romantic fairy tale filmed on an elaborate scale.   Ptushko loads the film up with epic photography, large scale sets and characters who are more symbolic than real people.  It kind of tends to overwhelm the story but that's the way Ptushko liked to make films.

This is a very uncomplicated love story/fairy tale.  A young girl living on a coastal town, is filled with stories from some old geezer sailor about how she will meet her true love when he sails into port on a ship with scarlet sails,  Parallel to this plot is the story of a young aristocrat who longs for a life at sea  away from the stifling environment of his rich parents and estate.  Since the film is called Scarlet Sails  he ends up becoming captain of a ship and there isn't much doubt that this twosome will meet and fall in love. 

I always enjoy Ptuhko's films.  He usually worked on a vast canvas in widescreen and with lots of special effects and amazing large scale scenes.  The word subtle was not in his vocabulary.  Putshko's early films were in the stop motion field and I believe some of them are floating around on YouTube and might be worth a look.  

Scarlet Sails running time is short which is probably a good thing especially for such a simple fable.  This film is available on YouTube in a good copy

The screenwriters were  Alexandr Yurovsky and Semyon Nagorny, the running time is 88 minutes. 

2019 - THE MASTER OF DARK SHADOWS, a look at the gothic/horror soap opera

Well you would be hard pressed to say the world really needed a documentary on the cult soap opera  Dark Shadows and it's creator and producer Dan Curtis but here it is.  Dark Shadows was a soap opera where the gimmick was that it was a gothic romantic novel in the soap opera format.  The show was created by Dan Curtis who to put it nicely was a "type A" Hollywood personality in the best tradition.

The show was cheaply done and had that soap opera touch of dragging out story lines episode after episode where essentially nothing really ever happened.  Initially filmed in black and white it had a not that bad cast which featured Joan Bennett who had been a star in Hollywood during the 1940's working for director Fritz Lang.  This show really revolved around a performer named Alexandra Moltke who played the damsel in distress.  Moltke may not have been much of an actress but she certainly had a very interesting personal life.  She was the mistress of a German millionaire named Claus von Bulow who was accused of murdering his wife by administering an overdose of insulin.  Von Bulow was put on trial not one but twice where he was eventually acquitted.

Dark Shadows struggled along for a while and was on the verge of cancellation when producer Dan Curtis hit on the idea of actually adding a horror element to the show.  Enter the character of Barnabas Collins who turned out to be a vampire and also a very popular character.  Dark Shadows was off and running while reworking just about every horror movie plot Curtis and his writers could think of.

Producer Dan Curtis

This documentary does a fairly good job of recounting the Dark Shadows phenomenon.  It was a very hot show for a while.  Dark Shadows aired in the late afternoon and was extremely popular with kids getting home from school.  This film has the usual archival film clips and interviews with the remaining cast members.  It's certainly a lot more entertaining than the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie version that showed up in 2012.  The Master of Dark Shadows  turns out to be a real nostalgia wallow for people who remember the show.

The running time is 92 minutes.

1973 - WAVES & 1970 - ERRIGAL, two films by Patrick Carey

While bouncing around the internet the other day I happened to stumble onto the Irish Film Institute and in particular a filmmaker named Patrick Carey.  Carey was a cameraman who worked In Ireland and Canada. He has credits on some major motion pictures.  Barry Lyndon, Julia and A Man For All Seasons on his resume.  Carey returned to Ireland and with his wife formed his own film company where he created short films about and around the Irish countryside. 

Waves, was photographed off the Irish coast. Carey had worked as a cameraman on David Lean's epic Ryan's Daughter and after watching this film you can see that he definitely had a big influence on Lean's picture in the seascape scenes.

Errigal  is apparently the highest point in an area of Ireland called the Derryveagh Mountains.   It's the perfect place for lots of impressive nature photography.

Waves feature no narration and Errigal has some introductory remarks at the beginning of the film after that it's narration free for the remainder of it's running time.  Both these films clock in under a half an hour.  These films are art films. The films are what you would call mood pieces or visual essays.

These films can be viewed at the Irish Film Institute website https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie/patrick-carey/  but they would probably look more impressive on a large screen format.  These films are not paced for today's ADD film viewer who are conditioned to overblown action scenes with rapid editing.

The running time for Waves is 26 minutes.  The running time for Errigal is 14 minutes.