The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

  This is a stunning film when you consider that it's all made of paper cutouts on colored backgrounds.  I think I read somewhere that it's the oldest stop-motion animated film and it was directed by a woman.  The original print and negative were lost but it was restored from a British print in 1999.

Told entirely in paper silhouettes, the film tells several of the 1001 Arabian Nights tales about Prince Achmed, an evil sorcerer, a magic flying horse, a beautiful maiden rescued from a land of demons, Aladdin and the magic lamp, and more.  The cutouts are beautifully intricate and it's clear a lot of effort went into this film.

I know silent films aren't for everyone but I really encourage you to take the time to watch it, not just for the technical achievements on display but to see an art form in its earliest stage.  People were still experimenting with what movies could be and Weimar-era Germany was a goldmine for creativity and boundary pushing.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

  This was supposed to be part of my Halloween marathon but I didn't get it in time.  I've been looking forward to seeing it but I think it may have been overhyped for what it turned out to be.

The New Zealand Documentary Board is granted unprecedented access to a rarified subgroup of citizens for the first time ever:  vampires.  A crew follows flatmates Viago (Taika Waititi), Vladislov (Jemaine Clement), and Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) as they try to navigate modern life.  A wrinkle is introduced when a victim (Cori Gonzales-Macuer) is accidentally turned and must be introduced into the finer points of vampire society, specifically that one doesn't go around broadcasting that one is a vampire unless one wants hunters to stick a dining room table leg in one's chest.

As a mockumentary, this is top-notch.  The effects are never overwhelming, the cinematography is just the right amount of grainy, and the characters are firmly on the right side of being total dorks.  The humor is a little too awkward = funny for me but the performances are delightful.  I feel like I might have enjoyed it more if people hadn't been broadcasting that this is the pinnacle of comedy, but that is the problem with high expectations.  I don't know that I would watch it again but it was very sweet and a fun film overall.

The Journey of Natty Gann (1985)

  We just started using Disney+ this week.  Tyler was more excited about it than I was because it has all the shows he remembers from his childhood like Gargoyles and Darkwing Duck and Kim Possible.  I was not terribly impressed with their opening lineup but I remain hopeful that future installments will get more substantive.  (Except for The Mandalorian, which is glorious.)

The one film I did want to see from the Disney vault is The Journey of Natty Gann.  I remember seeing the preview for it on my old clamshell VHS and wanting to watch it but I don't remember it ever being available on tape, DVD, or even as a re-release in theaters.  I couldn't even find anyone who had ever seen it.  But there it was, sitting in the Disney+ stream.

Natty Gann (Meredith Salenger) is a young, headstrong girl in Chicago.  Her father (Ray Wise), is a union organizer but since it's 1935, there's not a lot of work to be had.  He takes a job as a logger across the country in Washington state and leaves Natty in the care of their landlady (Lainie Kazan).  Natty decides that's not good enough and sets out to ride the rails across the country to find her father.  Along the way, she makes an animal companion from a wolf used in dogfights and the pair brave many hardships.

This is definitely one of the slighter entries in the Disney universe but it was a hole in my knowledge so I'm glad to have seen it.  I was definitely the kid who thought "oh, a wolf.  It would absolutely become my sworn companion should I meet one," despite the fact that I refused to go outside and was more of a cat person.  I was prepared for some casual cruelty but the movie steadfastly remains in the Heartwarming category.  Easy enough to watch with your kids but I don't know for sure if it's worth buying another streaming service.  Now, Gargoyles.  That's legit.

We're using our free year through Verizon so it remains to be seen if we keep it.

A Star is Born (1937)

  This is the original A Star is Born, the one that has now had three remakes, each launching (or re-launching) their female lead to new heights.

Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) dreamed of becoming a star in Hollywood but ends up a waitress at a cocktail party.  The star of the party, Norman Maine (Fredric March), notices her and gets her to meet his producer (Adolphe Menjou).  She is reborn as Vicki Lester and becomes his new leading lady to rave reviews and public acclaim.  Unfortunately, the public isn't as willing to forgive Maine for his drunken downward spiral and he soon finds himself lost in his wife's shadow.  Despite his best attempts to remain on the wagon, Maine slides into one relapse after another until Vicki decides to quit acting and just monitor him full-time.  Maine can't stand the thought of her destroying the career she loves so he leaves her in the most final way he can.

"How do you send a thank-you note to the Pacific Ocean?" has got to be one of the coldest lines ever spoken in a movie and that just goes to show you how hardcore writers were back in '37.  This had a team of screenwriters, including famed wit Dorothy Parker, and the script absolutely crackles.  Gaynor is pitch perfect as the wide-eyed Vicki née Esther, and March is surprisingly sympathetic.  I actually liked this version better than the 2019 remake because of his performance.

There are some minor differences between versions but the basic mechanics are the same.  Powerful but alcoholic dude meets ingenue, ingenue eclipses dude, dude gets depressed, ingenue feels guilty, dude kills himself.  It works in 1937 because of the historical context.  After the 1920s, the suffragette movement, and the Depression, women were more willing to go after jobs that had previously been for men.  This film subverts the notion that the woman is supposed to stay at home while the man has a career and shows the psychological effects of a society unprepared to accept that.  Norman is happy for his wife's success but still would rather it be him instead, despite as a judge points out, that he has had every advantage and wasted them all.  He is unwilling to let go of his pride and that's what leads to his death, not some notion that he is nobly sacrificing himself.

This film is in the public domain so it's available on pretty much every streaming service.  It's from the 1930s but it is not in black-and-white, it is in glorious color, and it's the only version of this film that isn't a musical, so you have zero excuse not to watch it.

The NeverEnding Story (1984)

  Saturday, I hosted a viewing party for my friends Bethany and Misha because Bethany had never seen this movie and it's Misha's absolute favorite.  I don't know that Bethany loved it as much as Misha (and I) but it was an important part of her ongoing movie education.

Bastian (Barret Oliver) is a young boy trying to cope with the recent loss of his mother.  School has been hard, bullies harass him, and his dad (Gerald McRaney) doesn't know how to reach him.  So Bastian retreats into books.  One day, running from the kids who put him in a dumpster, Bastian finds an old bookshop, complete with a crotchety old proprietor (Thomas Hill) who very sternly warns Bastian that the book he is reading is much too intense for  a child, then conveniently leaving it behind so Bastian can take it, because that old man knows more about children and human nature than anyone else in Bastian's life.  Boy and book retreat to the attic of his school and Bastian is immediately captivated by the adventures of the warrior Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) against The Nothing which is eating the land of Fantasia.

As a kids' movie, this is still great.  As an allegory for adulthood, it's even better.  I'm sure there are people who have written full academic papers on how The Nothing is a metaphor for depression and loss of innocence while the characters Atreyu (and Bastian) meet are thinly veiled archetypes.  What I'm saying is that this movie holds up shockingly well.  And everyone should own it.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

  This might seem like a daunting movie to watch.  It's black and white, Swedish, with a loosely connected set of characters set in the Middle Ages during the Black Plague.  If you read that sentence and thought "Yikes," hold on.  It is absolutely worth watching and not just because it inspired the character Death from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

A lord (Max von Sydow) returns from the Crusades bitter and disillusioned, trying to get back to his lands and wife (Inga Landgre), only to be confronted by Death (Bengt Ekerot).  To buy time, the lord challenges Death to a chess game, drawing it out over the time it takes to return home.  Along the way, he and his even more bitter and disillusioned squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) meet a handful of people trying to live under the specter of the plague.

It's almost a Canterbury Tales kind of movie, but without the nested stories, and a beautiful meditation on how people cope with the uncertainty of life.  Von Sydow has never been young, not ever, but he is always magnetic.  Ekerot is by turns sympathetic and cruel and the pair's banter is what makes the movie.  Most of the rest of the characters are one-note archetypes but the story is an allegory anyway so it doesn't matter.

The Seventh Seal is pretty much essential for any cinephile, if only because it inspired so many other films, art, and music.  If you can, it's streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Ray (2004)

Okay, so obviously this did not go up last weekend.  In fact, nothing did because it turns out that it is extremely difficult to watch a movie and sight-see.

No poster today because I am on a train to New York City for a girl's weekend.

I did get in a movie last night because I am dedicated.

Ray Charles (Jamie Foxx) moves to Seattle to join the growing Jazz scene but finds his blindness exploited by those he is meant to trust.  While on the road, he also develops a heroin addiction which will inform most of his life.

A lot was made about Foxx's performance and really going for the "method" approach but honestly every single person in this film acted their faces off.  Kerry Washington and Regina King are phenomenal.  Clifton Powell is amazing.  Even Warwick Davis is in this for a hot second.

It's not so much a revolution to the biopic formula but it is still absolutely worth watching.  Ray Charles was not a person who I had ever been curious about, and I was happy to learn that on top of being a gifted performer, he was an incredible mimic.

The direction is interesting, with sharp cuts to Charles' early life and childhood trauma, but it was a little jarring at first.  I would have liked to have seen a more seamless transition from his early life on the road to his meteoric success but I understand that everybody's life has boring bits that aren't cinematic and should be left on the cutting room floor.  Like I said, it's absolutely worth watching if you haven't seen it and it's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Clash (2009)

  I try to branch out and not just stick to the same genres but I don't know that I'll ever be any kind of expert on films from outside the U.S. (or film in general, really).  Still, this is my first Vietnamese action film.  Yay!

Phoenix (Veronica Ngo) is an enforcer for a gangster named Black Dragon (Hoang Phuc Nguyen).  She agrees to pull One Last Job in order to be free of him and get her daughter back.  She puts together a team, including Tiger (Johnny Tri Nguyen) and Snake (Lam Minh Tang), both men with secrets of their own, to track down and steal a laptop from a group of French mercenaries but things never go according to plan.

The action is appropriately gritty with excellent martial arts choreography.  Veronica Ngo is definitely someone to look for in the credits as an up-and-coming star.  Johnny Nguyen is also seriously underrated but from his IMDb credits, looks like he is a go-to for a lot of stunt crews.  It is pretty low-budget by Hollywood standards but I personally appreciate the focus on hand-to-hand and not shoot-em-up.  Writing is a little predictable but nowhere near the worst I've ever seen.  It's currently streaming on Tubi with ads.

I Married a Witch (1942)

  I thought about including this in my We Heart Horror marathon because it does involve witches but it's squarely a rom-com and not in any way horror.

Jennifer (Veronica Lake), a witch, places a curse on the Woolley family after Jonathan Wooley (Fredric March) burns her and her father (Cecil Kellaway) at the stake in the 1690s.  Returned to life after a lightning strike hits the tree their spirits were trapped in, Jennifer decides to wreak havoc on the current Wooley, Wallace (also Fredric March), by making him fall in love with her just before he is supposed to get married to a newspaper heiress (Susan Hayward) and run for governor.  She doesn't count on falling in love with him herself.

This is held up as one of the best madcap rom-coms of the 40s but I was really put off by how irritating Jennifer is as a character.  Veronica Lake was a great actress but she is given nothing to do here except pout and simper after March.  Like, I get that she's supposed to be a "bad" witch who turns good because of a misplaced love potion but there's nothing to her character other than being beautiful that would make a person care.  I guess I'm just stuck on how helpless she seems despite having a lot of power at her disposal.  I know that's supposed to be a bonus for women at that time but I just find it too annoying.

Of Fathers and Sons (2018)

  Okay, so we're back to regularly scheduled programming now.  Happy Day of the Dead, here's a movie about terrorists.

Filmmaker Talal Derki is originally from Syria and returned to go undercover in order to film a family involved in the Al-Nusra group of mujahideen.  The father, Abu Osama, has named all five of his sons after famous terrorists, including his oldest, Osama, who was born on September 11th.  (Not THE September 11, just A September 11th.  Like 2005, I think.)  Anyway, Derki stayed with this family for over two years, recording as much as he could about the kids' indoctrination into jihadist ideology.

Not going to lie, this is a pretty hard watch.  It's important, in that it shows exactly how similar all extremist groups are in their thought processes and habits.  They stress that war is unending, that there is a holy mandate, victory is assured but not imminent, devalue all education except religious, marginalize women except as for breeding purposes, and above all, decry that there is any other way to be.  From ISIS to the KKK, it is the same playbook.  These people believe they are in Armageddon and there is no concept of peace that does not include conquering everyone who does not share their beliefs.

There is a ray of hope, however, in that the second son, Ayyman, chooses to go to school instead of a militia training camp like his brother.  He at least has a chance to escape the crushing lockstep of true believers.  Education and exposure are the only chances anyone has.

I feel like every year there's a new documentary on Syria because it is a clusterfuck.  Next year is going to be harrowing because we've abandoned our Kurdish allies --already a persecuted minority group-- to be hunted down and murdered.  I'm sure someone will get it all on tape.  I hope so.  Exposure and education.  Show us so we may learn.

Of Fathers and Sons is currently streaming on Starz which I get through Amazon.