His Girl Friday (1940)

  Content warning: racial slurs, attempted suicide

Walter Burns (Cary Grant) knows he has to do something big when his ex-wife and star reporter, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell), storms into his office to announce that she's marrying a nice insurance salesman (Ralph Bellamy) and moving to Albany.  He convinces her to get a final interview for a man on death row scheduled to be hanged in the morning.  The Post has been running features and trying to pressure the governor into a reprieve in order to sway the upcoming election against the incumbent sheriff (Gene Lockhart) and mayor (Clarence Kolb).  Hildy knows it's a scam to get her to stay and reconcile with Walter but the story is too god to pass up. 

This is considered a screwball comedy because of how fast the dialogue is and how many sudden turns the story takes.  However, it is a little more mean-spirited than, say, Bringing Up Baby.  It is intensely cynical about the lengths reporters will go for a story, more like the comedy version of Ace in the Hole.  It is based on a play that was in turn based on a story written by two reporters and already had a film adaptation in 1931 under its original name, The Front Page.  For this version, the character of Hildy was gender-swapped and made into Walter's ex-wife, giving us one of the definitive performances of Rosalind Russell's career.  

By modern standards, these people are toxic, self-centered, and amoral.  But if you go in knowing that, this is still an incredibly funny movie.  It is blisteringly fast with jokes layered on jokes.  And not just from the main characters.  Nearly everyone (except Bellamy and Helen Mack, as the straight man and the emotional appeal, respectively) has unending quippy lines.  It is a classic comedy even if it stumbles as a romance.  It's streaming on the Criterion Channel and basically everywhere else because it's in the public domain.  It's even embedded in the Wikipedia page.

Lust in the Dust (1985)

  Content warning:  sexual assault (played as a joke)

Rosie (Divine) is just trying to get to the town of Chile Verde when she meets a handsome, silent stranger (Tab Hunter) headed the same way.  The stranger attracts a lot of attention, especially from Chile Verde's saloon mistress, Margarita (Lainie Kazan).  The town is known for a riddle involving a Scotsman's buried gold and everyone is out to get rich.

I was really hoping this was going to be hilarious but it is kind of awful.  This was one of the very few movies Divine ever made without John Waters and while he does everything he can to save it, there's just no escaping how bad it is.  I've seen porn parodies with better scripts.  It's not sexy or funny or even outrageous enough to be interesting.  You'll recognize almost every character actor in it which may tempt you, but I am here to warn you.  Stay away.  Let this molder on the trash heap of history where it belongs.  It's streaming on Tubi for free and still too high a cost.

The Croods: A New Age (2020)

  We're going to be charitable and chalk this up to a casualty of the pandemic.

Ever since the death of his family, Guy (Ryan Reynolds) has been searching for the far-off land of Tomorrow, a place of safety and abundance.  He loves Eep (Emma Stone) but finds the rest of the Croods overbearing.  Much to his elation, they stumble upon a walled garden inhabited by the Bettermans, friends of his family, and their now-teenaged daughter, Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran).  While Guy is made to feel right at home, the Croods face the brunt of the Bettermans' condescension.  Grug (Nicholas Cage) especially dislikes the estrangement, feeling that Eep is pulling away from the family.

Honestly, there's more to the plot but I literally got bored even remembering what happened.  I thought the first Croods movie was cute but this was a major step down.  It's overlong, overwrought, and not nearly as funny as it should have been.  The entire last third especially dragged and its the third with all the action and chase scenes.  I'm usually fine with kids movies being predictable, but waiting for them to get to the point they telegraphed was coming was excruciating.

A swing and a miss.  It's streaming on Peacock.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

 Happy Memorial Day!  Here's a movie about dead people.    

Mary (Candace Hilligoss) miraculously survives a terrible car accident that kills her two friends.  She moves to a new town and takes a job as a church organist but has recurring visions of a strange man (Herk Harvey) following her.  She feels it's somehow connected to an abandoned pavilion that once was a carnival and keeps returning to it, despite warnings from her boss (Art Ellison) and landlady (Frances Feist).

This isn't very substantive.  It's basically an extended Twilight Zone episode, but the vibes are absolutely impeccable.  Hilligoss is killing it as the disaffected Mary and the ghoul makeup is so simple but still really effective in black and white.  This would be a 10/10 instant buy if it weren't for the whiny loser who keeps bugging her for a date.  That guy was so annoying that I kept hoping a ghost would eat him.

It's considered a cult classic and I can see why.  It's moody and atmospheric without ever really being frightening, so it's good to show your horror-adjacent friends.  It's streaming on HBO Max, the Criterion Channel, and is also embedded into the Wikipedia article.  Score one for free education.

Brat (1997)

Content warning:  sexual assault, homophobic slurs, racial slurs, domestic violence

Danila (Sergei Bodrov, Jr.) has just completed mandatory service in the Army and is looking for a new path.  His brother, Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov), has been working as an assassin for a gangster (Sergei Murzin) in St. Petersburg and outsources a hit to Danila.  Viktor knows that he's gotten a little too expensive and is hoping some new blood will throw off a possible double-cross.  Danila, flush with cash after a successful execution, seeks out life and music but the gangster is not so easily put off.

I didn't like this one as much as Assa.  It also meandered but less whimsically, which just made it boring instead of a journey.  Also, it didn't really feel like a complete story.  In an American movie, this would just be Act 1 and would probably only be a 30-minute montage of various criminal scenes to set up the rise of a new empire.  

According to Wikipedia, this was made for about $10,000 and it looks it.  Everything is appropriately grimy and DIY.  Music features very heavily, especially some band called Nautilus, who even make a cameo at a house party.  

There are better crime films and probably better Russian films.  This is not one to get very worked up over which is probably why it's not available for streaming outside of a VPN.

Assa (1987)

  Content warning:  homophobic slurs, racial slurs  One of Movie Club's members is in a Russian film and literature class so this week, we helped her with her homework, and indirectly helped me with this blog because I have been trying to catch up on TV while I'm waiting for my new job to start.  I've watched season 4 of Downton Abbey, season 1 of Severance, season 8 of Game of Thrones, tried to watch Carnival Row and bailed, and now I'm on season 3 of Sons of Anarchy.  

Alika (Tatyana Drubich) is on vacation with her gangster sugar daddy, Krymov (Stanislav Govorukhin), when she meets a young musician named Bananan (Sergei "Afrika" Bugaev).  While Krymov is running around setting up all his little schemes, Alika and Bananan see the sights of Yalta in winter.  

The plot is really very simple, but it's so meandering that it feels like it should be more complicated.  But it's just boy meets girl, girl has mobster boyfriend, mobster boyfriend gets jealous of boy.  Everything else is a distraction.  It's probably a metaphor for the dissolution of the Soviet Union and massive social change that happened in the late 80s/early 90s.  Cold War Russia is not one of my areas of expertise.  At least, not the parts that actually happened in Russia.  It also has a weird subplot about the assassination of a Tsar, again I assume a more heavy-handed metaphor.

If you are into music, this features a band called Kino that was apparently very famous for bringing Russian underground rock into the mainstream.  I don't even watch Eurovision so again, not my area.  

The whole thing is streaming on YouTube in very good quality, either in one complete shot or in two parts.  It was entertaining enough, in that cold, bleakly humorous Russian way.

The Farewell (2018)

  Just a depressing-ass trio of family movies this week.  

Billi (Awkwafina) is devastated to learn that her beloved grandmother, Nai Nai (Zhao Shu-Zhen), has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.  Nai Nai is the only one who doesn't know, and Billi is told repeatedly by other family members that the knowledge must be kept from her so as to keep her from succumbing to despair.  As an American, Billi struggles with this cultural clash but agrees to keep the secret.  The family organizes a wedding for Billi's cousin (Chen Han) as an excuse for everyone to see Nai Nai for potentially the last time.

Once again, this was billed as a comedy but it is extremely not funny.  Cancer sucks and watching someone die from it also sucks.  As an American, I vehemently disagreed with withholding someone's medical information, but I also know it's not my job to police other cultures.  Part of building empathy is exposure to new and unfamiliar ideas and practices.  

So, once you get past the idea that this is somehow meant to be funny (and even the director called it a "nuanced drama" not a comedy), you can focus on the performances which are good but a little underbaked for my tastes.  The movie focuses a lot on how adorable and feisty Nai Nai is and how much everyone loves her but I didn't really get much of a sense of who they were outside of their grief.  If anything, I felt terrible for the cousin who was pressured into marrying his girlfriend of three months to sell this lie.  I think he maybe has four lines of dialogue, the fiancée maybe two.  Felt like the antithesis of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

It's streaming on Tubi for free or Kanopy with a library card.