365 Films in 365 Days

January 9, 2021
Echo in the Canyon (2018) ** 1/2
Kanopy
Free
Wildcard

So, there are so many great movies that I want to see on TCM and Criterion, so what do I do? I start scrolling through Kanopy to see what they have. I may have solved the mystery of why I tend to watch a single episode of a show, love it, and then never watch episode two. I have a tiny problem with follow-through, see also my piles of unfinished cross-stitch.

Anyway, Kanopy had Echo in the Canyon, about the California sound of the late ’60s and the musicians who lived in Laurel Canyon. Of course, this is my home town and my area and I love the music, so I had been wanting to see it for a while.

The movie was produced by and stars Jakob Dylan, who interviews these living legends, or rather sits next to them and nods, unsmiling, as they speak. He nods next to Crosby, Stills, and Nash (separately), Brian Wilson, Ringo Starr, Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, John Sebastian, and, I imagine accidentally, Michelle Phillips, probably because the rest of the Mamas and the Papas are dead.

There aren’t a huge number of female voices, I’m trying to say. I mean, you talk to who is available, but Judy Collins is only mentioned in passing and Joni Mitchell not at all. I did like that Tom Petty was interviewed as a person influenced by these artists.

These people are all great, I could listen to them all day. However, way too much of the movie is taken up with Jakob Dylan and his little friends doing extremely bland covers of their music. there is a reason Jakob Dylan is not a star, and it is that he is a perfectly competent musician, but seemingly entirely devoid of any personality. The only thing interesting is when the camera gets a profile and you think, “O yeah, that’s a really handsome version of Bob Dylan!” He really should have been urged to get into a different profession.

The other bright, young, starry-eyed performers in their mid-30s- mid 40s involved are Beck, Regina Spektor, Cat Power, Jade Castrinos, Fiona Apple, and, extremely briefly, Norah Jones, and the only one who does anything even remotely interesting with these songs was Fiona Apple. There isn’t a lot of point in covering a song unless you’re going to try to do something differently from the original, but these were all slavishly as close to the originals as possible, which means they could be nothing but disappointing and wildly mediocre.

Basically, half the movie was interesting, nay fascinating, and the other half was a stone drag. But I do recommend that half of it! 

January 8, 2021
The Tune (1992) ***
The Criterion Channel
Free
Wildcard

I left it to super late again, which I really must stop doing, so it wasn’t until 12.38 ayem in the middle of the damn night that I started watching this film, chosen because it is 70 minutes long and I wouldn’t have to concentrate on much of a plot. There were a couple of hour long mysteries from the ’30s on TCM, but my brain didn’t have the bandwidth to watch a mystery.

Bill Plympton was such a face of animation in the ’90s, and of course I saw all of his shorts on MTV, but never any of his full-length features. The Tune is the story of a schlub songwriter, Del, who is trying to write something so that his boss won’t fire him and that his girl (the boss’s secretary) won’t go back to her hometown.

He ends up, while on the way to a meeting with the boss where it’s hit song or get fired, in a strange town called Flooby Nooby where everyone has songs flowing out of them like water, since they are connected to their hearts. Del tries to connect, and also tried to get to the meeting, and on the way, sees many many hallucinatory images and hear a lot of great songs.

This is either the perfect movie to watch in the middle of the night, when you want to go to sleep and don’t want to watch something complex, or the worst movie to watch, because it is extremely lulling. I kept awake, though about fifteen or twenty minutes before the end, my wireless crapped out, so I had to continue watching it on my phone, which I did in bed. Not the best way to stay awake, but I did it!

January 7, 2021
She Done Him Wrong (1933) ***
The Criterion Channel
Free
Wildcard

So, remember yesterday when I said that it was going to be all TCM from now on? I clearly lied.

I didn’t feel like watching another Thin Man movie just yet, and there are some other things that were just too long, so I thought I’d glance around elsewhere. The Criterion Channel had these Mae West movies, so I thought, why not? So, not much of a change from TCM.

This movie is an hour and five minutes long, and someday I won’t be choosing movies quite so much because of the short length, but that day is not today.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Mae West film all the way through, and I’ll bet there are many people who know exactly who she is and have seen her and can pick her out of a lineup and yet have not seen one of her actual films. She was very unusual for the time in that she was her own screenwriter, and was the complete creator of the Mae West character from 20 years in the theatre before she got anywhere near movies. Of course, she had to wait for the movies to not only be invented, but be talkies, she would not have fared well in the silent cinema. 

She Done Him Wrong is pre-Code, and, I believe, was one of the films that actually made the Code come to fruition, because it is pretty dirty. Mae West is definitely living with a man without benefit of clergy, and the movie makes it clear that it’s not the first time. All men are obsessed with her on first meeting, and if you are going to write that movie for yourself, you had better be sure that your mouth isn’t writing checks that your ass can’t cash, but Mae West’s ass is perfectly capable of all the check-cashing you like. She doesn’t appear for the first ten minutes of the film, but everyone spends all that time talking about her, and it’s quite the star entrance.

Baby Cary Grant is in this, one of his first films, as a missionary, and is visibly Cary Grant the movie star even then.

Even at 65 minutes, it has a meandering quality, and is not overburdened with plot, until the last fifteen minutes, which is suddenly super-plotty, but manages not to wrap it all up anyway. But none of that matters, because it’s all about Mae, sparkling like a diamond. What an icon.

January 6, 2021
The Thin Man (1934) ****
TCM
Free
Wildcard

When I said yesterday that I might just watch every movie on TCM from now on, I was not kidding! At least, I wasn’t kidding enough to watch TCM movies two days in a row, at any rate. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

This is the first rewatch of this project, which was never meant to be solely new films, but I was leaning pretty hard on that idea. But they currently have on the TCM app all of the Thin Man movies, and I have not seen all of them!

This first one, though, I have seen I think, three times before now. The first sequel I have seen twice, and the second sequel only once, but there are six films altogether, so I’d better get cracking. Though possibly not all in a row.

This is a charming film with William Powell and Myna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, being charming together. It’s just barely pre-Code, in that Nick and Nora do sleep primly in twin beds, (though you know they are getting it on like Easter bunnies when the camera isn’t rolling), but large sections of the plot involve cheating and mistresses and divorce and bigamy, and some people likely to be living together without benefit of clergy, though it’s not spelled out. It’s kind of dirty for such a twinkly picture.

They drink enough that I wouldn’t recommend a drinking game where you try to match them, in that you would literally die before the movie’s half over, and it’s a short film!

All in all it’s…did I mention it was charming? Well, it is! And I finally broke the accidental animation trope!

January 5, 2021
Hollywood Party (1934) ***
TCM
Free
Wildcard

No, still no Iron Man 2, get off my back! I’m just never going to watch a movie that long that I start watching at 11p, it’s just the way it is. And then there was another movie I was thinking of watching in a different category, that I will not talk about because it’s a story for when I actually do watch that movie.

So I ended up scrolling through TCM to see what they had on offer, and it’s just so many awesome movies I may never watch anything but TCM movies again. They just sort of currently have an overabundance of short, comedic films from the ’30s and ’40s that I’ve never seen before, but star Cary Grant and June Allison and William Powell and so on, and I am not made of stone.

Basically, I was looking for something short and cheerful, and I lighted on something called Hollywood Party, starring Laurel and Hardy. I really have seen very little Laurel and Hardy, so I decided to give it a go. Well! It turned out to be one of the weirdest little movies I ever did see.

First of all, Laurel and Hardy may well have top billing, but they don’t show up until the last 10 minutes of the movie! It is mostly about Jimmy Durante, who plays a very famous jungle adventure movie actor called Schnarzan, who gives a big party in order to get some real, fierce lions from a jungle explorer. Also trying to get these lions is a rival performer called Liondora, who disguises himself as a Grand Royal Duke. A very rich couple attends the party with their niece, who instantly falls for a juvenile, while the fake Grand Royal Duke seduces the wife, and the husband walks around ripping up thousand dollar bills to prove how rich he is. Not invited to the party is Lupe Valez (The Mexican Spitfire), who plays Jane in the Schnarzan movies, because Durante breaks up with her right before the party, but she crashes the party anyway, and is very fiery and Mexican, and when Laurel and Hardy show up as the real owners of the lions, they have a long scene with her in which they keep cracking eggs on each other, for some reason. Also, it’s a musical in the Busby Berkeley style, did I mention that? Well, it is. And heads up for one number with Black actors as African warriors with really truly bones in their noses.

Actually, it’s about eight movies in one, and since apparently it had eight directors, each directing a different section, I’m not entirely shocked that it doesn’t really all mesh. Zero things are resolved, of course, it all ends up being a dream, sorry, spoilers.

“Well,” I thought, as I started watching it, “At least I will break the unplanned streak of every movie so far this year being at least partially animated!” And then Mickey Mouse showed up at the party as a guest. It is fate!

So, like I said, it is an extremely weird film, I’d call it avant-garde if it didn’t star Durante, Laurel and Hardy, and have an uncredited bit by the Three Stooges (and also Ted Healy!), and it deserves either one million stars, or zero stars, so I split the difference and gave it three.

January 3, 2021
The Secret of Kells (2009) ****
Hoopla
Free
Wildcard

When I spun the wheel today, it came up Marvel. I started my Marvel movie watch/rewatch in May 2019, and watched Iron Man and both Hulk movies (I know the Ang Lee version is not MCU, but I included it anyway), so Iron Man 2 is up next. This is actually a first watch, as I never bothered to see it originally, as I heard it was terrible.

But suddenly, it was almost 11p, and the idea of seeing a 2 hour long movie that is supposed to be kind of bad was too daunting. So I just started flipping through channels on my Roku, trying to find something without too much plot, or maybe that I had already seen, something that wouldn’t tax my poor tired brain, and also would be nice and short.

There were some possibilities on the Criterion Channel, like The Canterville Ghost, and some Mae West movies, but nothing seemed quite right. Then I looked at Hoopla, one of the public library channels, like Kanopy. I get Hoopla through my Glendale library card, and Kanopy through my LAPL card. And there was The Secret of Kells.

It fulfilled the criterion of being short, at 1h 15m, but I hadn’t seen it before, so I would have to follow a plot, but I had the idea that it wasn’t too terribly plotty, more about the gorgeous images and general feeling of the piece. I have been listening to a lot of reviews of Wolfwalkers lately, and this film has been mentioned often, as it is by the same filmmakers, and also about magic and ancient Ireland.

The animation is stunning, and so original and beautiful. It makes the best of all possible computer animation look cheap and shoddy. The shapes of the various monks, the colours, the angles…it’s impossible to explain, you just have to see it.

The voice work is great, too, especially the great Brendan Gleason as Brother Abbot, who is trying to hard to protect the abbey and the people from the Vikings, that he forgets what is also vital to save, the beautiful illuminated manuscript being created by his orphan nephew, Brandon, and another monk, Brother Aidan.

When I went to Ireland with my choir a few years ago, I fell ill on the day we went to see the actual Book of Kells, that this movie is about the creation of, so I never saw it, which I regret profoundly now.

This movie is stunning. I cannot believe it took me so long to watch it, so thank you, Iron Man 2, for being too long for me to watch tonight.