Welles Marathon: Othello (1951)

 Intro

Aside from maybe a silent film, I cannot think of a production that carries with it so many hurdles to enjoy a film in 2020 than Othello.  For some, it being in black-and-white would be one such hurdle, although I have no issue with films in black-and-white, except insofar that it's usually a sign that it's from a period of time where actors felt the need to be theatrical and broad.  

Shakespeare films are extremely hard for me to enjoy, because I barely understand the dialogue to be perfectly honest.  The whole thing feels like homework, because I'm concentrating so hard on hearing what the characters are saying.  Watching a film should feel effortless.  Watching Shakespeare, unless you're well versed in his plays, is not.

And then there are the problems unique to Orson Welles Othello.  Well, one such aspect is unfortunately not unique at all given the time period: blackface.  I've seen critics refer to it as "bronze" face which I guess makes it better.  Certainly looks better than Laurence Olivier in Othello.  Look that shit up.  But this is still something that hasn't aged well.

The problem unique to Othello is that Welles shot the movie with no money, or rather, he was constantly forced to accept acting jobs to complete the production, and the production took stops and starts over the course of three years before being done.  The result is a production that is filmed in different countries, with re-casting in the middle of production, and pretty much every nightmare you can imagine when trying to make a film.

As far as the location is concerned, black-and-white is a benefit, not a hindrance to the problems the production faced.  You cannot tell that one scene is filmed in Morroco and ends in Rome.  The illusion of it being in one place is preserved.  Would this be the case in color?  I doubt it.

But a consequence of filming the movie on the fly with no money is that he couldn't afford to film it with sound, which is very, very noticeable.  I'm not entirely sure which version I watched - there's an original cut shown at Cannes, it got released in America three years later in a different cut, and then there's the 1992 restored version that is apparently an entirely different cut.  

Whichever version I watched, and I think it's the latter one, it's very clear that actors' voices are dubbed over many, many times, and oddly enough the biggest offender is Welles himself.  Some of the other actors can fool you into imagining you're really hearing their voice, but Welles sounds like he's in a sound studio the entire time.

The other difficulty with watching a Shakespeare play is not that different from watching a normal movie from 1951: the acting.   Shakespeare acting is always extremely theatrical.  As far as it goes, the acting is good, but I'm not a huge fan of theatrical acting in movies.  It's too impersonal, none of the emotion lands for me, it's just extremely over the top by design.

I was also at a disadvantage because, while I'm hardly a Shakespeare neophyte (took a Shakespeare in film class in college), I apparently have never in my life come across Othello.  And you should at least be passingly familiar with Othello when watching this movie.  Welles evidently significantly reduces the play to its most important elements - which I am grateful for personally - but it might have the effect of making it harder to follow than normal for a newbie.

Like, one question I ask, and this is nothing against the performance of Micheál Mac Liammóir, who seems appropriate for the part: is Iago slimy the entire play?  Cause it's very hard to believe he gains anyone's trust with how openly slimy he is.  There is not a moment where he's not slimy.  But literally everyone believes every lie that comes out of his mouth.  In a modern film, I'd demand that there's a scene or two that shows him before he gets passed over for promotion.  

Otherwise, we're just watching 90 minutes of a clearly untrustworthy guy be trusted by everyone.  I suspect the approach here is to either go entertainingly over the top, although it would make a joke of the play, or try to somehow instill the character with some semblance of reasonableness at the beginning.  As it stands, this Iago does neither.

There are certain older movies that seem to be praised even among the last 30 years.  Because again, nothing Welles did in his life was immediately hailed as a classic, but a good portion of his movies were eventually hailed classic.  Othello is a case where I do not understand that.  His filmmaking is undoubtedly impressive, but good filmmaking alone does not a good movie make.  

Maybe a theme in Welles' works will be the excellent cinematography and mood that this movie creates.  The movie has three credited cinematographers.  His cinematographer on Citizen Kane had died by the time he filmed this movie, so he must have taken the right lessons from that movie.  That's probably the greatest strength of this movie.

Anyway, I've illustrated the problems inherent in this movie that would have made it a tough sell for me to enjoy it.  And it didn't overcome those problems.  But this doesn't really worry me, because I'm sure the other two movies from Shakespeare he made had a bigger budget.

2/4 stars

Mission Impossible Rankings

 As I've used the pandemic to catch up to movies that I've missed, I'll tackle another action movie franchise.  Much like Fast and the Furious, I have somewhat inexplicably watched the worst movies and then stopped watching them when the movies got good.  Well I did see Ghost Protocol in theaters actually, but I didn't watch either of the following two movies.  I have no idea both why I've seen the original M:I movie which came out when I was 3-years-old and why I simply stopped watching them recently.  Mysteries that will never be answered.

This was a much easier list than both the Avengers list and the Fast and the Furious list.  There is one spot on the list that I actually had trouble with, but the rest of the movies were fairly easy to rank.  So let's get on with the rankings.

1. Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018)

I never think this about action movies.  As soon as it was over, I wanted to find an excuse to watch it as soon as possible immediately.  I basically had a childlike grin on my face for most of the movie.  It's nonstop action, and while it has the unfortunate tendency of every other action movie to run over two hours, the movie doesn't feel long.

I did not think this would be the case.  The weird thing is that I'm not even that crazy about Solomon Lane, so when the plot of this movie revolved around busting him out of prison, I did not think it would be a good decision.  And Henry Cavill's character's arc was telegraphed pretty hard.  But the action in this movie my god.  Tom Cruise is a mad man.

2. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015)

The greatest decision the Mission Impossible franchise ever did was to bring Ilsa Faust, as played by Rebbeca Ferguson.  She is not all that secretly a female Ethan Hunt.  You could see where that might go wrong, but Ferguson is instantly compelling.  Like I said above, I actually don't find Solomon Lane that great of a villain, which is weird.  I'm not a huge fan of the actor's choice to deliver some of his lines in a whisper.  Usually, a good action movie requires a good action movie villain, but for whatever reason, this still manages to be a good movie.

But there's only so many ways to describe my love of these movies that aren't related to the action sequences.  This probably has the third best action scenes of the franchise, but I do think this movie is better than the movie with the second best action sequences.  That's because this movie has the better story, the better hook.  I guess I'm a sucker for the rogue agent forced to uncover the secrets that lead to his freedom.

3. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)

The third movie put this movie in a precarious position, having given Ethan Hunt a loving wife, which naturally brings about the question of why he would keep doing this.  The movie gets around this by having them separate, although obviously they tease for most of the movie that she got killed.  Smart move not to go that direction.  I feel a little unfair to Brad Bird by putting this here, because he's the man responsible for taking this franchise to new heights.  It's not his fault that the next director would improve upon even that, which probably didn't seem possible in 2011.

Then there's the scene with Tom Cruise seeming to climb the Burj Khalifa with just special gloves.  Obviously that's movie magic, but what incredible movie magic that was.  Maybe the most stunning stunt that the M:I franchise ever pulled.  And the subsequent run into the sand storm is also breathtaking.  It's here because of basically Paula Patton, who is fine, but is no Rebecca Ferguson.

4. Mission Impossible

The tough decision I had was in deciding the 4th and 5th place movies.  I know which is the worst movie.  But this movie and the next both carry completely separate strengths and flaws.  This wins out because of a tiebreaker I'll reveal for the 5th place movie.  But I'll say this: no movie has aged more in this franchise than the first one.  Which makes sense.  It's the oldest.  But this movie could have been made in the 70s.  In particular, when Emilio Estevez's character gets smashed by the elevator, it really looks, well, awful.  They couldn't have a shot short enough to make it not look like a dummy just got smashed.

That's just the example that stuck out in my mind, but it's reflective of most of the movie.  While it is a solid, average action flick, I almost want to forgive its faults because of when it was made... before remember that it was made in 1996, and it should look better than this.  The train and helicopter chase scene did start the franchise's hope to make one unbelievably impressive action scene and only because of what followed does it maybe not quite achieve that, but that's the one scene that feels like it could have only been made in 1996.

5. Mission Impossible 3

That tiebreaker?  I'm not a fan of the decision to open the movie with Michelle Monaghan getting shot.  And then when we catch up to that scene in the movie, having the person who got shot was actually in a mask.  The masks are easily the goofiest thing about this franchise, and they seem committed to keeping that even though it's ridiculous.  It's not that the masks itself are bad, it's just the decision to not have the actor in a mask, but to cast a different actor completely.  Anyway, that was my biggest problem with this movie.

And like I insinuated above, I don't really think it was a good idea to give Ethan Hunt a wife, because it was never something the movies could keep.  No fault given to Michelle Monaghan though.  She's appropriately charming.  And Phillip Seymour Hoffman manages to give off a Bond villain vibe and is fun.  But that damn fakeout with her getting shot still bothers me to be honest.  Not because I wanted her to die.  But because of the manipulation.

6. Mission Impossible 2

Yeah this was no contest.  Mission Impossible 2 straight up sucked.  I did not like how this was filmed.  I haven't really seen any John Woo films, but this does not leave me with a lot of confidence.  The doves were ridiculous, which is I know his trademark.  The slow motion, the repeat shots, Ethan Hunt's hair, all of it bothered me.  I believe the first few Mission Impossible movies were planned around stunts and not with an actual script and that's never more evident than here.

Thandie Newton does what she can, but the back-and-forth between her and Hunt is sometimes painful.  What they were going for here is much better achieved between Ferguson and Cruise.  I know they planned on her to return (in the role of Monaghan), but I don't really blame her for not wanting to return.  Anyway, this is the worst.

And there's my list.  I don't expect a lot of disagreement here.  It seems like people like or liked 3 a lot more than I did and I do think it's cool that JJ Abrams got the job because Tom Cruise really liked Alias, but it just doesn't work as well for me, mainly for the reasons outlined above.

The Orson Welles Marathon

Sometime four years ago, I decided to visit and revisit an entire filmography of one director and I landed at Steven Soderbergh, whose works I had mostly not seen and the movies I had seen I liked.  I lost interest in the project until quarantine, and then I continued what the little I had started.  While in the midst of working on the Soderbergh marathon, I was already working on who to do next.

It didn't take long for me to land on Orson Welles.  Few directors have the resume of an Orson Welles and few actors have the resume of an Orson Welles, and it just so happens that I have seen exactly one Orson Welles movie before this.  It would be hard to find a better choice, since I have seen at least a few movies from people with similar resumes. 

By choosing Orson Welles, I'll be accomplishing several goals of mine.  The first is that I'll be watching Citizen Kane.  That's the big one.  I have actually watched a fair amount of movies that land on the best movies of all time, and this was a big blind spot for many years.  The second is that it covers another blind spot for me, which is movies from the 1940s and 1950s.  Third, I have a few sources that I look to to pick movies, from the Ebert Great Movies to the NYT 1000 to even a critic who has picked a top 10 every year since movies existed, and a decently large amount of Welles movies fall on these lists, even aside from Citizen Kane.

But also, on more general terms, it's Orson Welles.  Few filmmakers have the larger than life persona that he does.  Few filmmakers have a mystery and aura that he does.  He also has a manageable filmography, something that really isn't true of, say, Alfred Hitchcock.  I've seen a decent number of Hitchcock movies, the obvious ones probably, but he's directed a truly ridiculous amount of movies.  

Despite the fact that Orson Welles directed his first movie at 25, he simply didn't direct that many movies, because he never had any money to make the movies.  He also seemed to have little interest in acting, aside from boosting his own movies, which meant that he didn't take roles if he didn't need to, and a decent amount of the roles were purely for the money, which wouldn't necessarily lend itself to being a good movie.  So I get the combination of classic movies, but a manageable amount of them.

And I would by lying if I said I didn't like that he also acted in movies where he didn't direct them.  The fear with doing a director marathon is that you might feel like you're watching a lot of the same movies.  His acting career should break up the sameness that might be brought, since I know Welles has a very distinctive style.

So I'll be covering Orson Welles, starting next week.  Thursday, I'll be posting my rankings of the Mission: Impossible Series movies, but starting next week, expect two Orson Welles movies per week.  Soderbergh had his fair share of obscure movies, and I was worried about the audience on those, but he also had extremely popular movies.  Welles, in 2020, pretty much has Citizen Kane, and maybe Touch of Evil, and besides that, I wouldn't expect most of the people reading this, unless you've sought this out I suppose, to have seen any of his other movies. 

Overview of Soderbergh's Work

I'm not entirely sure what made me pick Steven Soderbergh.  Part of the reason is because I made the decision roughly four years ago, and whatever initially inspired that pick has long since exited my memory.  I guess I wanted to pick a contemporary filmmaker and I wanted to pick one whose works I had mostly not seen.  It's that latter part that excludes most of the potential choices.  That's not to say, if I were to continue this for a while, that I wouldn't be willing to pick a filmmaker whose films I have seen, it's just part of the reason I'm even doing this is to watch films I haven't.

In any case, I think I have Soderbergh's career roughly sketched out.  Soderbergh is a restless director, something that you could probably gather from his average of one movie made per year.  But I think it goes even beyond that.  He needs to challenge himself.  If he doesn't feel challenged, he's not going to make the movie.

Of course, it didn't start that way.  At the beginning, he was just trying to get in the business.  And he did via Sex, Lies, and Videotape.  He apparently wrote that entire movie in eight days on a cross country trip.  I'm not sure how a 25-year-old was able to secure financing for $1.2 million and have a studio allow him to direct it.  Nonetheless the movie was a moderate hit, especially for being an independent movie, and it got critical acclaim.  

He ultimately was able to the carry the prestige that making that film brought him by basically making whatever he wanted.  Which explains the mostly black-and-white mindfuck that Kafka was.  Nobody searching for commercial appeal is making that movie.  After that, he made King of the Hill, and I suppose a Depression era movie following a kid is not exactly marketable either, although this movie I think is for everyone, even if it was a hard sell.

For his fourth movie, he returned to a well that he would many times: the genre movie.  The genre movies he made were typically cliché movies, not written by him, and he would try to spruce them up with some inventive directing.  The Underneath fucks with time, but again it wasn't successful at the box office.

His next two films were guaranteed to not make any money, which was just as well, because he clearly made them for himself and on a microscopic budget.  Schizopolis, an absolutely bizarre movie, apparently was made to get him inspired again, which it did so successfully, but it got bad reviews.  And Gray's Anatomy was made because he loved Spalding Gray, and you probably have to love him to in order to want to watch that.

In 1998, his career changed drastically.  He had been through a run of movies that made no money and while few of them carried a big budget, he realized his career wouldn't last long if he continued to do that.  So he made Out of Sight with George Clooney.  He had by far his biggest budget of his career, and actually it didn't make a lot of money.  It was, however, his most seen movie since his first one and received critical acclaim.

He made another genre movie in The Limey the next year and then had one of the greatest years a filmmaker has ever had in 2000.  He made two Best Picture Nominees, Traffic and Erin Brockovich, two drastically different movies.  Traffic won four Oscars, though not Best Picture, and he basically could get any actor and make any movie he wanted at this point.

Rather than going against the grain, he made Ocean's Eleven, which was a box office smash hit.  I wouldn't call it "selling out," but four of his last five movies at this point were somewhat designed to appeal to a mass audience, with the exception being The Limey, and it may have seemed like he would be content with his career continuing in that direction.  That would have been a wrong assumption.

After he had established himself as mainstream director, he then made one of three types of films to keep himself interested I imagine.  He either tackled a genre picture, typically one he had never tackled before, a movie with a different kind of approach to filmmaking, or he made a movie that held a message near and dear to his heart, whether that message was more hidden or explicit.

In 2002, he tried his hand at comedy, unsuccessfully, and science fiction, more successful although I didn't love that either.  In between the two Ocean's sequels, which I guess busts my theory of his picks since it's not in either of those three categories, he made a movie with non-actors, and made a film noir movie that tried to mimic 1940s film noirs in style (The Good German.)

Though the non-actor movie Bubble was loved by Roger Ebert, it didn't get great reviews.  He made the two-part Che, and while it's not really a political movie, one gets the sign that the man the movie is about holds politics pretty close to Soderbergh's with maybe less violence involved.  He's at least sympathetic to the revolutions, that I'm sure of.

In 2009, he made The Girlfriend Experience, which also featured non-actors, although this one seemed better reviewed than his first try.  Despite this, he didn't return to this non-actors after this movie despite intending to make more.  He also made The Informant! which is Soderbergh tackling a new genre: satire.

After a year where he made a documentary for his old friend Gray, who had since committed suicide, he again tackled brand new genre films for 2011.  In Haywire, he probably made the closest thing to an action movie he'll ever make.  And in Contagion, well I think he was just interested in making a film about what a pandemic would look like.  A movie that would become weirdly relevant sooner than he probably thought.

In 2012, he basically made the guy version of The Girlfriend Experience with real actors and more mainstream appeal in Magic Mike.  Along with The Girlfriend Experience, both movies also relate to the themes pushed back in his debut, so you could also argue that it features a "message" important to him, since he returns to it.

In 2013, he made a cliché thriller (Side Effects) and then tried his hand at making a biopic (Behind the Candelabra.)  And then he retired.  When he returned and stepped away from television, he was brought out of retirement by his wife's script, which was sort of a return to the Ocean's days in Logan Lucky.

And once he was back in, he returned to his old output.  He made two movies entirely on iPhones (one of which is Unsane) and then made a movie that is more message than movie in The Laundromat.  He has one more movie that is evidently completed but without a release date.  Not sure if that is coronavirus related or not.  And then another which is in pre-production.

What has this man not been able to do?  He has film noir, action, satire, heist, biopic, war, science fiction, a period piece, thriller, a documentary, and even a sports movie (High Flying Bird).  Most of those categories feature a movie that is at least moderately well-reviewed.  He does not have a superhero movie or zombie movie technically.  I don't think he's interested in making movies that feature not real things.  But you could argue the Ocean's movies are basically superhero movies and that Contagion is a zombie movie with no zombies if you want.

He has not, to my mind, been able to do one thing though: a comedy.  The most successful version of a comedy he's made is The Informant!, which isn't really a comedy.  The closest he's come to a comedy is Full Frontal, which is just awful.  If he ever makes a funny comedy, he'll have done literally everything well.  I don't expect him to though.  It's not like his inability to make a good comedy has inhibited his ability to have comedy in his other movies, so it's a worthwhile tradeoff for his career.

Ranking Fast & Furious

I'm starting to go back to work, but I was still able to use my free time to catch up to movies I've been putting off for years.  I watched the entire Marvel universe while I was stuck at home with most everyone else.  My next stop was the Fast and the Furious franchise, mostly because I hadn't seen any of the "good ones."  Yeah for too many years now, I have been in the extremely odd position of having seen the first four Fast and the Furious movies, but none after that.  Whereas most people, or at least some people, would recommend the opposite approach.  I ranked the Marvel universe movies, so now I'll rank the Fast and the Furious movies.

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1. Furious 6

I'll explain my issues with Fast Five when I get to that movie, but I'm pretty sure that's the consensus favorite and I have a theory about why.  I do have a slight issue in this movie with the villain, Owen Shaw, who is a little too all-knowing with literally limitless potential, but that's mostly the only issue.  It features the return of Letty, played by Michelle Rodriguez.  Her seeming betrayal added a weight and feeling to the movies that most of the others simply don't have.  She's one of the best action actresses in the business in my opinion, because she's not reliant on the writing to be compelling.  Her absence in Fast Five is a large reason why it's not here.

Also, in a weird way, I think the fact that there are actual deaths in this movie help the movie have stakes.  Which I guess we don't know will happen during most of the movie, but the return of Letty threatens the stakes of the franchise - if she can literally die and come back, there are no stakes.  They get away with it because honestly Michelle Rodriguez is what F&F needed and because the death in the fourth movie wasn't explicitly shown, which yeah is bullshit but it's just enough to ignore that there was no reason to think she didn't die in that movie.

2. Furious 7

The reason that Furious 6 is first over this movie is that Furious 7 takes a curiously long time to get to the point.  I actually like Deckard Shaw better as a villain than his brother, because well Jason Statham, but also he's also somehow easier to buy?  Like I know these movies bend reality and aren't realistic, but somehow a lone ranger who can do anything is easier for me to buy than a guy who will literally plan for every contingency possible with his hands deep in every government agency.  It's funny what one is willing to accept and not accept in these movies.  But it's still 2nd and not 1st.  That's because the movie doesn't really get started until the 37 minute mark - I checked.

Also, because James Wan is not quite as good at action sequences as Justin Lin.  He's clearly not bad at them - I still have him higher than every other Lin movie.  The reason this movie is as high as it is really is because of how the movie handled Paul Walker.  I'm not giving the movie extra credit, but the thread was already set for Walker to leave the franchise (though I'm sure he would have returned) before he died.  And I confess that "See You Again" as seen in this context is more affecting than I expected - I still think it's a terrible song, but it did its job here.

3. Fast Five

I really wanted to have a hot take here, and I'll explain why I didn't in the next selection, but needless to say, this was the official start of the new age Fast and the Furious, the one less concerned about car races (though they still have those) and more concerned with making amazing action spectacles.  And this movie has them aplenty.  My theory, by the way, since I teased it above, that people think this is the best is because it genuinely came out of nowhere and surprised people.  The expectations properly set, they did not have their minds blown as much as this movie did in the following installments even though they are better.

Why is this third?  Elena.  Apologies to Elsa Pataky, who I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and just say that she struggles with having any sort of screen presence when not speaking her native language.  Because holy shit is she just a black hole of nothing in this, and she's a super integral part of the movie!  But there's just nothing there.  She's super bland, uncharismatic, laughably nothing character.  Which isn't completely her fault.  Not like the script did her any favors.  If you give an actress as little to do on the page as Pataky is given, you need a better actress than this to make her a character.  Her turn at the end is again laughable, because she doesn't imbue her character with any sense that this will happen.  It just needs to happen to make the plot work.

4. Fast and the Furious

About that hot take I wanted to do?  I actually think in some ways, this is a better movie than Fast Five.  It's clearly the movie that cares most about the characters and does the work to make you care about them.  I'd damn near say you need to watch this movie if you want to care about the characters at all in the later movies, because besides saying family a bunch, they rely heavily on preexisting knowledge of relationships.  It also has probably the best structure and I appreciate the relatively low stakes of the whole affair given how absurdly high stakes the later movies are.

But then there's that damn soundtrack.  I asked myself: can a soundtrack really sink a movie enough to make me place a movie below a movie I think is otherwise better if you ignore the music?  The answer is yes.  This is maybe the worst soundtrack of any movie I've ever seen.  And they play music a lot.  And Fast and the Furious does not exactly have good soundtracks normally.  And if this is your cup of tea, more power to you, but this soundtrack is painfully 2001.  Limp Bizkit, Ja Rule, Fat Joe.  God I never knew I could hate a soundtrack so much.  Everything else about the movie is fine, but if someone wants to remix this movie with a better soundtrack, please dear god let me watch that.

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5. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

I think the first four movies on my list, believe or not, are very similar in quality.  I chose not to put star ratings on this particular ranking, because I didn't need to.  I needed to with my Avengers list to help separate.  Not here.  But if I did, I assure you there would be a stark drop from 4th place to 5th place.  I don't really think any of the rest on this list are good movies.  That's not to say there aren't things to recommend and you can't enjoy yourself watching them, but I wouldn't call them good movies.

Tokyo Drift is hurt mostly by some cringey and bad acting.  I don't think the direction is bad, I don't necessarily think the writing is bad, and I don't think the story is bad.  But the acting is bad mostly.  Bow Wow isn't bad, but his character makes no fucking sense at all and it's distracting.  Nathalie Kelly is very bad in this movie though with zero charisma.  This series is not that great on casting, huh?  Han is of course great and the highlight of this movie and why this movie is above the others which have no Han.  But ultimately, too much screentime is required of Bow Wow and Kelly, which sinks the movie and Lucas Black is a pretty bland actor that doesn't really add anything either.  Get better acting, this movie is good.

6. The Fate of the Furious 

I'm very glad that Elena is only sort of integral part of one movie and then was just obligatorily put in sequels because that's just what the Fast and Furious franchise does at this point, but she otherwise might as well not have been in them.  That's sort of the case here too even though she's technically important, in the sense that she surprises Dom with a baby and then gets held hostage by the big bad.  I get what this movie was trying to do with this.  But it is so clearly manufactured tension, it's hard to care.  If there were hints she was pregnant or had a baby in a previous movie, it might have even worked.  But no.  This was clearly "we need the team to think Dom is bad" and that's the best they had.

I realize we're talking about a summer blockbuster here, but this would have been a better way to approach their goals in my opinion anyway.  Have Charlize Theron have a point.  She's generic action movie bad here with no seemingly human goals.  Have her present what seems like a valid point.  Have Dom buy into that.  Reveal to the audience and Dom's team, but not Dom, something she does or is willing to do that crosses a line big time.  Dom learns this information late in the movie, switches sides.  Hold his never before seen baby hostage is just lazy writing.

7. Hobbs & Shaw

Never before has Fast and the Furious been more gloriously goofy than this movie.  It's as stupid as the movies below this, but it takes itself less seriously and has better action set pieces.  Vanessa Kirby is a delight and a welcome addition, but the further twist that only Hobbs' brother can do this is just silly.  The sister twist was enough.  Go ahead and save Hobbs connection to his family for the sequel.  It is insanely 137 minutes long, and someone needs to tell the producers of the Fast and the Furious movies to aim for under a 2 hour run time.  While a lot of the later F&F movies are too long, no other movie in the franchise feels as long as this one does.  And it very well may be the longest, but that's not really my point, because it's probably only the longest by a few minutes.

This has a lot of fun parts and for a decent portion of the movie, I thought I might rank it highly, but the brother subplot just was a complete dud for me, and that's about the point where I kind of checked out of the movie.  This whole movie is action and banter.  It really does not help that Ryan Reynolds and Rob Delaney are there to make the movie feel even more bantery than it already does.  If F&F wants to keep getting good critical love, it's gonna need to make the villains better at this point and not just cast awesome actors like Idris Elba to play cartoon villains.

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8. Fast & Furious

This movie has two main problems.  Michelle Rodriguez must have been busy during the filming of this movie.  Avatar came out the same year, so I assume that she filmed when she could.  Which meant that she's barely in this movie and gets killed off.  Fast & Furious was relying A LOT on the memory of audiences to care about a character from a movie made eight years ago, because she's in five minutes of this movie and then dies and that's basically the emotional crux of the movie.  It doesn't work.  It certainly doesn't help that this was retconned as her not actually dying later in the film series.  I knew she came back, so maybe that's influencing my opinion, but I don't think it's an especially effective hook.

The second thing is that, while this movie does up the action scenes I think, the ending of this movie is downright goofy.  A bunch of cars chasing each other going into caves and it looks fake as shit.  Like distractingly bad CGI.  It might as well be a cartoon.  I watched Fast and the Furious because I want to see them actually pull off stunts, not watch CGI chases.  Or at least fool me.  It's also a very stupid movie, plot-wise, so this movie barely has anything going for it.

9. 2 Fast 2 Furious

Besides producing a great Ludacris song, this movie has pretty much nothing going for it.  It's amazing they ever brought Tyrese Gibson back, because dude can't really act.  The later movies, smartly, use him purely for comic relief.  Here he's expected to be a bigger part of the movie, and man is his acting bad.  It's basically a rehash of the first movie, but without actually making you care about any of the characters and being much more ridiculous, and without being over the top enough to be entertaining.

Unlike the first movie, the soundtrack to this movie is actually good.  I wish the soundtracks were switched desperately.  Turns out I like listening to Ludacris a lot more than listening to Ja Rule.  Didn't need the Fast and Furious movies to tell me that.  It goes without saying, but the Eva Mendes Paul Walker romance doesn't really land either.

Soderbergh Marathon: Part 26

Intro

Magic Mike (2012)

I can officially say I've seen every Steven Soderbergh movie.  With a career that started in 1989 and has continued into 2019, I have seen a whopping 31 movies directed by Steven Sodebergh.  In hindsight, I would have skipped a few.  I'm thinking specifically of the Spalding Gray movies, which were not his worst work by any means, but just seemed singularly for Spalding Gray fans and weren't really Soderbergh movies.  

He has a completed movie and one in pre-production so it will not be long before I can't say I've seen every movie.  Although one of those movies appears to be a Meryl Streep movie and the other features Jon Hamm, so I will probably watch both of those movies too.  What's two more movies when you've seen 31 already?

Onto the movie of the day, I am eight years behind the zeitgeist on this one.  I don't think I avoided this movie for any particular reason.  I probably didn't even know Steven Soderbergh directed it so I didn't really have a reason to watch it.  It got solid reviews, but not the type of reviews to make me go see a movie I'm not particularly interested in.

This is the type of movie that is not quite what it seems like it is while at the same time surely not disappointing anyone who thinks it's that type of movie.  Which is probably why it made a ton of money!  If you're there to see Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey strip and put on a show, well it certainly gives the audience what it wants.

This is actually pretty unusually structured movie.  It is, on the surface, something of a romantic comedy while not having the tone of a romantic comedy at all.  It's not clear there's even a true romance until the end in fact.  Yeah they flirt and have some chemistry, but right when a normal romantic comedy would address their relationship, they address the fall of the young stripper instead.

The least compelling aspect of this movie is probably the young stripper, Adam, played by Alex Pettyfer.  It's pretty standard young guys gets in over his head, resorts to drugs, has downfall.  It's not the main part of the movie, and the turn to drugs moment is a lot more casual than most of these movies are to the point where I didn't even realize I was getting that story until, again, the end.

That's basically the movie.  It follows the two normal plots that this kind of movie will typically follow, but it's not totally clear that's where it's headed.  I thought the movie was just going to leave the Mike and Brooke flirtation as just that: a flirtation.  And I didn't necessarily think the movie was going to emphasize the downfall as Adam as much because he quickly becomes not the point of view character.

Magic Mike, as I'm sure most of those reading this know, was created thanks to Tatum's experiences as an 18-year-old stripper.  Oddly enough, the least compelling part of the movie is probably the most like Tatum was at the time.  Tatum, in other words, is not playing his younger self, but I assume a wholly created fictional character.

The appeal of this movie appears to be to see a heretofore unseen subculture of life: the male stripper.  It feels reasonably authentic in its depiction of what it's like to be a male stripper.  You get a sense of what it was like for Tatum to be a stripper, which is I imagine why he wanted this to be a movie.

One thing I was extremely distracted by was the movie's complete ignorance of what I imagine the clientele of a male strip club would be.  Again, I'm assuming and that may make me an asshole, but I think a minority of the attendees would be 20-something, beautiful women.  There would be 1) a lot of middle-aged women I think 2) gay guys 3) 20-something women who aren't models.  And yet you'd think if you became a stripper, everyone who you got to dance for would be a 10.  I know, I know it's a movie, but it's the one thing that ruins the authentic seeming subculture.

It was solid.  I kind of expected to like it more?  I ended with Magic Mike to end with a popular movie, but I had some semblance that it would be great and it's merely fine.

2.5/4 stars

Welles Marathon: Citizen Kane (1941)

Intro

Citizen Kane (1941)

I'm not honestly sure I would have picked Orson Welles as my second choice for a marathon if it was not for the fact that he made Citizen Kane.  Now, even without Citizen Kane, Orson Welles would be a worthy choice for a marathon such as this, but he wouldn't necessarily have distinguished himself from a George Cukor or a Howard Hawks pick if not for Citizen Kane.

Citizen Kane has for years remained my greatest blind spot in my film knowledge, although I have many blind spots when it comes to classic movies.  I have never been able to bring myself to watch it because I largely expected it to disappoint and I largely expected the outsized reputation that it holds to be bewildering.

One thing is clear: I am not all confused by its reputation.  It's a beautiful looking film with great direction, great performances, and a compelling mystery.  Better yet, against all odds, the mystery's conclusion with all the buildup still satisfies, and makes the entire movie come together.

Now, is it the greatest movie ever made?  Well, no.  Apparently its reputation was not immediate.  The movie was an expensive bomb that was critically praised but was largely ignored and forgotten until the mid-1950s when it was re-released in theaters to promote Orson Welles' return to the stage and it was shown on television for the first time.  By the 1960s, it started to automatically be included on any top ten films ever made and was frequently the top film.

This is confusing to me.  Because I get why the movie would be considered the greatest ever made at the time and to be fair even as late as 1960, I can still see that reputation.  But then critics kept it at the top for years and years and years and it makes less sense the farther away from 1941 you get, but the farther away it got, the more cemented it became as the best film ever made.

One misconception I had about Citizen Kane was that its greatness was largely attributable to Orson Welles himself, seeing as he wrote, directed, and starred in the movie.  But he co-wrote the movie with Herman J Mankiewicz, the look of the movie can pretty much entirely be credited to Gregg Toland, and the editing to Robert Wise.

Welles didn't know much about directing when he made Citizen Kane, but in his own words, he was "ignorant" and because of that, he made impossible demands to Toland, who was an acclaimed cinematographer prior to Citizen Kane and chose to work with Welles precisely because he was so inexperienced and would want to push the limits of what could be done on screen.  Toland just so happened to be so incredibly good at his job that he somehow made the impossible demands come to screen exactly as Welles imagined it.

If there's one thing that completely holds up, in 2020, about Citizen Kane, it's Toland's work.  Welles was incredibly lucky that Toland wanted to work with Welles.  Toland had been Director of Photography for Wuthering Heights, Grapes of Wrath, and The Long Voyage Home prior to Citizen Kane, among other movies.  Welles himself worshipped the ground that the John Ford directed The Long Voyage Home walked on and watched it constantly as he was making Citizen Kane.

I cannot say enough good things about the cinematography.  The movie is just a master class in its use of lighting, frequently using shadows to its advantage.  Apparently the movie's shots of ceilings was unprecedented at the time, not to mention its extended use of deep focus.  Neither of those things are really going to be noticed in 2020 when both of those things are way easier things to do, but the lighting is still kind of jaw dropping.

As for the groundbreaking editing, this part has actually shown its age a bit.  The movie overuses the intersecting shots where before one shot fades out, then next shot fades in.  And every time that is utilized, it goes on about ten seconds longer than it should.  We don't need to see 10 headlines of the same thing, a few will suffice.  Similarly, the newsreel footage that functions as an overview of Kane's life goes on way too long.  This would have been less noticeable at the time, because it was trying to mimic a real thing that hasn't existed for a very long time.  But I imagine many modern viewers will find themselves nodding to sleep before the movie really kicks off.

Even accounting for that, the editing is still impressive.  It was edited by future director Robert Wise, who could have been a feature for a marathon himself, having directed The Sound of Music, West Side Story, and the first Star Trek movie.  Both Welles and Wise were somehow in their mid-20s when they made this.

Again, not something I really should have been surprised about, but I was genuinely pleased with Orson Welles the actor.  He seems to play his role a lot more modern than most actors at his time did.  He doesn't really have the weird exaggerated acting style prominent before Marlon Brando and is successfully charming, commanding, vicious, whatever the script needs him to be.  I can buy his character as a media tycoon.

He isn't alone.  Welles wanted to use first timers to the screen for whatever reason, and somehow the gambit paid off.  A large majority of the important players were members of Welles' own Mercury Theatre company, so he clearly knew they could act.  Joseph Cotten was well-established on the stage and ended up being a leading actor later that decade.  Agnes Moorehead was one of the few women who was able to start her film career at 41-years-old and have it last until the day she died.

Aside from the cinematography and editing, I must give due credit to something I rarely notice in films: the makeup.  Welles plays Kane both young and old, and the old scenes are considerably more convincing than you'd think.  Welles, again, was 25, and while his performance suggested an older guy, the makeup really helped sell it.  The old makeup in this movie is better than some modern productions, though the black-and-white probably helps.  Same goes for his old friends who also appear younger in the flashbacks.

Roger Ebert makes a compelling case for why the newsreel footage that opens the film is important.  It gives you his life and death right away so that when the film follows what he calls "an emotional chronology" you can still follow it.  But I'll be honest.  I think you can do without it.  Or at least shorten it.  It goes on forever and I think when people call Citizen Kane boring, it's almost solely because of this.  Because you are immediately on the verge of falling asleep, and it's hard to recover from that. 

I do like the structure though aside from the newsreel.  I want to say this was also a revolutionary decision, but I'm less certain about this.  Anyway, the mystery firmly established at the beginning, the movie managed to keep my attention throughout the gradual reveal by the people close to him.  And as I got closer to the end, the more sure I became that the movie wouldn't have a good reveal of what Rosebud meant.

Which was a stupid assumption on my part.  Yes, I was under the impression that this movie would disappoint, but still.  I should expect Citizen Kane to at least stick the landing on the ending.  Surely, its reputation as the greatest movie of all time wouldn't have happened with a disappointing ending.  But I'm having trouble articulating why I think it's a great ending, so I'll just leave it up to the readers to already know the reason.  

It's amazing to me how much one's preconceptions about a movie can impact what you think about a movie.  I did not necessarily go into this with the greatest expectations, and I loved it.  Had I expected the #1 movie of all time, I think I might have a different opinion.  Enough people "warned" me about the movie that I allowed the movie to surprise me.  I wish I could go into every movie like this.

But alas I can't.  I hope I can free myself of what many critics at the time suffered from: Welles was compared to Citizen Kane for the rest of his career.  To use an analogy I doubt anybody has ever used before, Citizen Kane was Illmatic, and everything else he made was compared to it and suffered because of it.  So I'll do my best to avoid that if possible.

This marathon has already been a success one movie in.  The rest of the movies can be duds and I'll be happy I chose Orson Welles.  And in case it wasn't clear, I'll end with this:

4/4 stars

Soderbergh Marathon: Part 25

Intro

Haywire (2011)
We're reaching the endgame folks.  I have just one more movie after this one and I can officially say I have seen every Steven Soderbergh movie.  I can now say I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of him as a filmmaker.  He has three modes to simplify it more than I should: he has his mainstream movies, his experimenting with technology movies, and his genre movies.

Haywire tackles a genre Soderbergh has not yet tackled, and unless the next and last movie I cover is a vastly different movie than I expect, it remains his only movie.  This is Soderbergh's action movie.  I've also seen it called a martial arts movie, which may or may not be true, but if you told me that beforehand, I'd feel like I was misled.

Haywire combines the Lem Dobbs-Soderbergh collaboration for the third time.  Weirdly, the movies are separated by 20 years and if the trend holds, we can expect a fourth collaboration around 2021.  Dobbs has solo writing credit on all three films, and all three oddly enough are pretty damn reliant on the director.  Kafka is completely stylized, The Limey's appeal is basically its editing, and of course Haywire is an action movie, so the action is the appeal, not the dialogue or even the story.

The main function of an action movie is to entertain with action scenes and not let the rest of the movie fuck that up.  Most action movies fail to even deliver on that first part, much less come up with a competent story.   Haywire does however deliver on the action elements.

Soderbergh would make a good action director if he decided to go in that direction.  He films most of the action scenes at a farther distance than most action directors do, so that you can see every punch and kick land.  There's no shaky cam, no 10 cuts for every 5 seconds here.  And he was able to do this because the film's star, Gina Carano, was an MMA star.

About Carano, she will not blow you away as an actress.  But she does what's needed.  She was well-cast, because the character she plays doesn't really require much range, but she does require someone who can convincingly kick ass.  And she convincingly kicks ass!  This is one of those movies where every punch, kick, you can hear and feel.  They seem brutal.  Like I said, Soderbergh could do this any time he wants to if he wanted to, which I doubt.

As far as the second part of a good action movie, the rest of the movie does not fuck up.  It holds together.  It would certainly not stand under scrutiny, but I had no problems following the movie's plot as the movie happened.  And it's hard to tell if the dialogue is specifically good, because well every other part in this movie is like an A-list actor.

Yeah the supporting cast in this movie is insane.  Like ridiculously overqualified.  You have Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Fassbender playing what amount to bit parts.  Well McGregor's is a bit more prominent, but he lurks in the shadows most of the movie, so even he doesn't get a lot of screentime.  You also have a young Michael Angarano and Bill Paxton to round out the cast, and while both of them I would picture in a movie like this even without Soderbergh's involvement, they just add to the acting talent.

All in all, Haywire gives you what you came for and that's really the most important element of an action movie.  You hire Carano to do what she does best - beat people up - and make it look like she's actually beating people up, and you have a successful movie.

3/4 stars