Holiday Weekend Watching - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton
None of this is to say that I'm encouraging people to stay indoors all weekend, especially if the weather's going to be nice where you are, but I'm all about the options. The current forecast for my section of PA has rain starting late Friday afternoon and more or less drizzling down on us through much of Sunday, so Monday's likely to be my only day to try to sit outside for a while.
A three-day weekend tends to open my possibilities both directly - with an added day off - and indirectly by making it temporarily less important that I be in or out of bed by some particular point. It makes it easier to watch that extra episode at midnight or one, rather than forcing one's self to shut down and go to sleep like a "responsible" adult. Sure, I'll wreck my sleep schedule for the work week to come, but it's pretty much a mess by default.
Enjoying my time with Turner Classic Movies, I'll continue to point out some items I've recently rewatched or seen for the first time, that are also currently available to those who have TCM, via their TCM Watch site.
An odd earworm for much of this week has been the versions of "Polly Wolly Doodle" - from the innocent original to the halting a lurid - played over the course of Blake Edwards satiric S.O.B. (1981, 122 min., R for language, sexual content, nudity, drug use and suicide), following my recent rewatch of it for the first time in some years.
The skewering of Hollywood culture, centering on producer Felix Farmer (played with almost superhuman range, from nearly catatonically depressed to manic, to furious, by Richard Mulligan) and his actress wife Sally Miles (Julie Andrews) with a perpetual virgin public persona, is a wonderful black comedy, with terrific performances at each turn.
Enjoyable throughout, my favorite character remains Dr. Finegarten (Robert Preston), drawing both eye and ear in any scene he's part of. The swirl of intrigue from the various plotters and opportunists is generally fun to watch, with unlikely and touching themes of humanity, respect and friendship emerging as the film nears its end. The only part I still feel badly about each time I watch it is the tragic, loyal dog on the beach. (Available on TCM through June 21st.)
1979 and 1980 were big movie years for me, which is to say I saw a great many films in first run those years, many of them multiple times. Why? Sue and I started dating on Groundhog Day 1979, each seniors in high school, and as we didn't go to bars and similar night spots, nor want to hang out at one or the other's family's houses, our dates were dinner and a movie, or movie and dinner, and movies tended to stay in theaters longer back then. Arriving in mid-June that first year was Arthur Hiller's The In-Laws. A manic buddy comedy, playing a quirky, possibly shady character Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk), off against an extremely straight-laced dentist Sheldon "Shelly" Kornpett, whose son and daughter, respectively, are engaged to be married. It's hardly a cerebral film, and the plot is held together by improbable gags and the audience's good will, but it still has many entertaining moments. With Arkin not rejoining us for the final season of The Kominsky Method, this nostalgic trip fills a little of that for me. (Available on TCM through June 21st.)
Veering sharply into colorful sci-fi horror, 1968's Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (the original, Japanese title translated as "The Gokemidoro Vampire," though it was never marketed that way to the West.) A truly mixed bag of passengers on a doomed flight - including a terrorist, an assassin, a weird, blood-red sky, suicidal birds, and a UFO encounter - leads to a bizarre island and an invasive, predatory menace. The film wastes no time. (Available on TCM through June 25th.) Here's an original, Japanese trailer. Oh, hey, here's the film on YouTube, with the original, Japanese audio and English subtitles. What was for me both an interesting, if narrow, examination of a very different daily existence, and a pause to reflect on how much better I've had it on my own career path, was David Maysles 1969 black and white documentary: Salesman. Maysles follows four door-to-door salesmen for the Mid-American Bible Company, though the emphasis is on one of them. The patter, the art of the sale, and the persona each cultivates, all prove to be much more important than the product they're peddling. Trying to get some sense of how much of each was bravado and how much genuine self-image is part of the challenge. An engrossing 90 minutes, for me it was draining to empathize with them, though refreshing and even invigorating to be able to step back out of their well-worn shoes and, to me at least, their nightmarish existence. (Available on TCM through June 23rd.)
Or, again, if you don't have TCM, I see this is also available on YouTube.
Arriving on Hulu today is a supernatural horror film The Vigil. It's being promoted as a 2021 film, though it's actually from 2019 (when it hit the Toronto Film Festival), in that it didn't secure U.S. showings until this year. That said, it is an American film, written and directed by first-timer Keith Thomas.
Here a young man is recruited to be the shomer- someone to sit vigil over a deceased member of an Orthodox Jewish congregation, a congregation the young man was once a part of. It turns out that this is a job that others have refused or run out on in fear of a malevolent spirit. I'm torn between being put off by the blatant push in the trailer to make this a new film franchise, and giving a nod to their honesty about it. Who works in film (or publishing for that matter) who doesn't dream of coming up with something that is at least in part a self-perpetuating money-maker?
I got around to this Saturday night. The story arc is generally satisfying, as we find out that he's someone who's pointedly left his Orthodox upbringing behind, and over the course of his ordeal we find out most of the reason why, including a specific incident and a resulting breakdown that he's still struggling with.
The main horror element of the film involves a malevolent spirit known as a Mazzik, which uses dark memories and convincing illusions to trap, wear down and break people. The circumstance young Yakov Ronen (played by Dave Davis) is put into is sudden and off-putting, and makes some of his early behavior during his contracted five-hour vigil more understandable. He had no idea he was going to be doing it until it was nearly time to begin. Lynn Cohen does a fine job of portraying Mrs. Litvak, the widow whose husband's body is lying in state, who we're initially led to believe is beginning to suffer dementia from Alzheimer's, but we gradually come to realize it's much more complicated than that.
My only complaint is a technical one: The essentially non-existent closed captioning. See, because there are sections where characters speak for a few moments in Yiddish, they have some subtitles, but there are no standard captions. Put the captions setting on, and all you'll get is a double set of captions when someone drops a line in Yiddish. I'm used to having captions on ALL THE TIME, as I have difficulties with some types of voices and cadences of speech, and it's no exception in this film where some characters rarely enunciate. During those times I'm left in my Charlie Brown world of "wah-wah, WAH-wah" or murmurs, spattered with the occasionally intelligible word or phrase.
HBO/HBO Max viewers who haven't been watching the limited series Mare of Easttown should be aware that this Sunday night we'll be getting the series finale, so that seven-episode tale will be handy to binge. An engaging, small town Pennsylvania crime drama with a stellar cast, headed by Kate Winslett. As last week's frenetic episode piled up seemingly too many clues and suspects (flirting with toying with us maybe one time too many), ending with tensions rising and something about to break, I was already envious of those who would be jumping in late enough to have all the parts available. I will vaguely warn that it has some potentially very uncomfortable themes, but I won't elaborate as that would give too much away.
Here again is the trailer from the series debut. As someone who's lived most of his life in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I'm nearby enough to be familiar with the Delaware County settings. The locales, the local actors, and the attention to details by the outside talent, all managed to capture the tone of the area. The Easttown of the show is a fictional pastiche, and the actual Easttown Township has a different look, but they captured the region well.
Despite its 10-year run and relentless syndication I've maybe seen a handful of episodes, so I'm not the target audience for Friends: The Reunion. Newly-arrived on HBO Max, the special reassembles the cast on the fully rebuilt set of the show (including at least one beam that had been removed because it was blocking people's shots), then moves to a talk show format hosted by James Corden. Corden can be very likeable in the right situations, in short bursts, but some part of me will always (and wholly unfairly) see him primarily as someone who took over the Late Late Show spot on CBS once Craig Ferguson opted to leave. I was a huge fan of Craig's show, and Corden's replacement program proved unwatchable for me. But I digress... From what I've seen of this HBO Max special, show host Corden's operating in his default superfan mode, which strikes me as too broadly-applied to come across as completely genuine. How much of that is my age and crankiness is uncertain.
Anyway, if one was a fan of Friends, especially after our pandemic year (-plus), this special may be a tonic. Familiar places, faces, references, a lots of hugs and general physical closeness, which so many of us have been especially lacking. The only, likely itch the special doesn't scratch is the one for fans to see any new material from the characters. This is all just about the actors reuniting and reminiscing against familiar backdrops and clips from the show. There are no, new, scripted segments for the characters, no advancement of any of their stories since the 2004 finale, so keep that in mind if you decide to watch.
Finally, looking just beyond this weekend, next Wednesday (June 2nd) the final (fifth) season of Kim's Convenience will be arriving on Netflix.
This Canadian, family sit-com, featuring the Kims, is one I've written about before.
Having been greenlit for a sixth season earlier, news last year that the show's creators decided to move on and that the network decided to end it with the fifth, came as an unpleasant surprise to both the fans and the show's cast. As best I can tell the chore of shooting that season under pandemic restrictions contributed to severely draining the battery of one of the show's creators, and that the other one decided not to simply take over what had been a collaborative process since the show's genesis as a stage play. The network then decided to let the show end pure, rather than risk making a season absent the show's creators' input and oversight.
While Canadian audiences saw this season months ago, I've avoided spoiler information so I don't know how abrupt this unplanned end to the series will be. Ideally, it won't end with obvious cliffhangers beyond the general sense of wanting to know what else will happen with characters one's developed an interest in. Between a general, growing interest in Korean family stories (as seen with the nominations and awards for last year's Minari) and those of Asians in general, and one of the show's leads set to launch into greater prominence as the lead in Marvel's Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, I'm sure that many fans and likely most of the cast are holding out some hope that we may yet revisit the Kim clan. For the moment, though, this season marks the end.
Piling in on top of all of last week's notes, that's more than enough for this week. Watch what seems most promising to you, but also try to get some fresh air and read a book!
Catch you back here next week, as we begin to explore June. - Mike
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