I still remember the sandwich more fondly than the film.
Today, I got paid to fatten my body and deaden my soul a bit. It'd been an extra rough week with pretty steady busy work. I've got to work Saturday? There are no emergencies? Everything is stable? We’re going to the movies.
Before the movie, we hit the Chinese Buffet. I didn't go back for seconds. But that's only because I had piled my first plate high with enough food for three. A little bit of everything. Pork fried rice. Four different types of chicken. Beef. Potatoes. Zucchini. Fried fish. About halfway through, I was full, but I finished it all out of sheer cussedness. That's one of my superpowers.
Superpowers? Yeah. Deadpool. Sigh. Like that big buffet meal, Deadpool was a confounding mixture of sweet tang and fried fluff. There were some underlying nutrients in the food and the film, but both were so heavily coated with sauciness that it's hard to tell whether the food and film are doing more harm to my person than good. Probably it would have been better to skip lunch. And skip the movie.
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Ah, dang it. I got interrupted while writing that and never returned to deal specifically with any of the contents of Deadpool. Oh well.
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Monday night, I took Abigail on a dinner and a movie date. We hit the Spaghetti Warehouse in Syracuse where the Syracuse Cinephile Society hosts their Monday night films.
Why don’t I stick with a theme…
What did we eat? The “Ultimate Feast for Two,” which turned out to be just about one of everything on the menu. Followed by a brownie sundae. So, again a bit of gluttony, but this time the food was authentic. It was bigger and showier than Mama’s home kitchen (I’ve got no Italian in me, by the way), but it was comfort food just the same.
What did we see? Devil and the Deep. 1932. Charles Laughton. Tallulah Bankhead. Gary Cooper. Carey Grant. Yes, a lost gem. Comfort food. Authentic. Big and showy, but downhome good.
Film history would have been just fine if this film had been lost forever. It adds nothing new to the grammar of cinema. Its story of jealousies and betrayals had been done before and has been done since. But.
I am so happy that this film exists. Seeing it renewed my love for film, especially classic Hollywood film. I am sick of what passes today for realism. This film, in its grand gestures and exaggerations, is so much truer to real emotion and experience than any contemporary film. It’s strange, but the best recent film that I can compare it to is Winter Sleep, three hours long and subdued, the opposite of this film in many ways. One is melodrama. One is painfully understated with punctuations of violent emotion. Both feature men who cannot functionally relate to the women in their lives.
I see dozens and dozens of new films each year. There’s probably great stuff that I’m still missing from the festival circuits. I don’t doubt that there are great films out there. But Devil and the Deep proves that Hollywood was once the location of smart scriptwriters and incredible actors, talented directors and excellent editors. Some of the folks that we were sitting with criticized the acting and the story after the film. I do think that they misunderstood the film. It is a weird film. It traffics in big gestures and takes no half measures. It’s tough to defend the film without giving away the latter half of the film, which I think should stay a surprise. I’ll just say that the film works in as far as Laughton is pathetic and that we do feel sorry for him even as we want Bankhead to be happy and whole.
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The only other feature that I’ve seen is Man Up, a romantic comedy from last year. Again, I got paid to watch it at work. There were plenty of funny moments and I’m on board with the generally optimistic vibe that it projects, that true love can be found. But I’ll play the broken record and say that there’s enough naughtiness in it that it just irks me. There’s no reason why a film about a woman who inadvertently steals a blind date couldn’t be an an all-ages film while still being a serious examination of sexual longing and interaction. I offer as proof any number of screwball comedies from the 30s. So, whatever, the film is fine.
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That’s it. Only a few crappy non-reviews. I’ve also watched about 20-40 minutes each of Harry and the Hendersons, The Brothers Bloom, and Ant-Man while at work. Harry is harmless dumb 80s crap. Bloom is a lot better than I gave it credit for at the time. Ant-Man was visually dull and uninspiring on the small screen. At home, it’s been TV time: Better Call Saul, 11/22/63, and The Flash. Saul is great. 63 was alright, but mostly disappointing. Flash is nothing but dumb fun.