Hope everyone had a good Eurovision and #worldgothday weekend. I watched both semi-finals and spent 6 hours on Saturday rooting for Italy and Ukraine so my brain is wonderfully rotted.
You know how some people’s comfort movies are cheesy action flicks from the 80s and 90s? I’ve discovered that mine are RKO disaster musicals. Specifically, Step Lively is a mid-forties musical remake of a not-that-great-to-begin-with Marx Brothers comedy that desperately wants to be a 1932 Busby Berkeley smash but it’s ten years too late and also Frank Sinatra is there. It has such a weird energy and I’m enamored.
I’ve mostly been in the land of film, since I’m using the TCM app to catch up on 31 Days of Oscars, but still managed to watch the first season of The OA, the second season of Fuller House (I have a much longer meditation on my feelings about this show in drafts), and the beginning of Trollhunters. The thing abou-
I’m sorry, I can’t continue. “Adrenalina” is playing in my head.
While I’ve watched plenty of films I’ve enjoyed, what I’ve been allowing myself to do more recently is stopping in the middle of a movie I’m not really feeling. It’s hard to gauge, since I want to give a film a fair shake before I “give up” and if I’m half an hour from the end might as well close it out, but this past week I noped out of both San Francisco (1936) and The Sandpiper (1965). SF is one of the first disaster movies and does some impressive if badly aged special effects work for the time period, considering that the city they’re depicting is entirely gone, but I’m really not a fan of Jeannette MacDonald or her soprano voice or any romance she might have with Clark Gable. Despite an interesting cast and premise, I felt the film lacked any sort of vitality and was leading toward hitting me over the head with sentimentality about faith and perseverance in the face of unendurable hardship. Wasn’t in the mood.
The Sandpiper, while apparently capitalizing on the steamy Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton affair by having Liz and Dick’s characters…have an affair, didn’t seem all that interested in being entertaining at all. Taylor was completely miscast, it layered on needless literary pretensions with the sandpiper/free birds metaphor, none of the characters or cinematography or scripts seemed to have much of a personality at all. The 60s beatnik free art scene seems custom made for me, but alas. ‘Twas boring.
Finally, more than a week ago, I stopped in the middle of Papillion (1971) despite the fascinating pairing of Steve McQueen with Dustin Hoffman. Gritty and grim for the sake of being gritty and grim (prison’s not a laugh but did we have to have it repeatedly anvil over our heads?), there sadly wasn’t much going for it despite McQueen’s performance as a man driven slowly insane by solitary and the appearance of Man From U.N.C.L.E. repeat guest Woodrow Parfrey . It’s kind of like people enjoyed watching McQueen escape in The Great Escape and decided that it made any escape movie starring McQueen worthwhile. Not really. And then it was remade in 2017???
All this to say that if you don’t like it, don’t watch it. Letting go of films halfway through has led me to watching many more films simply because I’m watching what I’m in the mood for. It’s difficult for me, sometimes, because I believe in watching things outside my comfort zone – but sometimes movies just aren’t good.
Have you read my article about a goat yet?