Iro's One Movie a Day Thread

Yeah that's what I pretty much think of My Fair Lady as well. One of the weaker musicals, but not a wasted three hours.

Can I recommend you to watch Top Hat, Swing Time, Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Band Wagon as it seems like you are starting to watch musicals?

Also if you haven't seen Suspicion, Spellbound, The Man Who Knew Too Much 1956, and Frenzy, all Hitch films, I'll also like to recommend them as well, if it's okay with you.

I'll take those recommendations into consideration (with the exception of The Man Who Knew Too Much '56, which I've already seen and not liked all that much).

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Can you please explain why?

I think I had it as a because it was a reasonably compelling little plot but the extraneous details didn't do all that much for me and stopped it being truly great to me.

I'm with you there on The Man Who Knew Too Much and Torn Curtain, Iro. The first one was okay and the second one pretty boring.

#312 - The Immigrant
James Gray, 2013



In 1921 New York, a Polish immigrant is forced to work for the impresario of a burlesque theatre when her sister is detained at Ellis Island.

I've watched quite a few films over the past few months that could fall under the heading of "melodrama", but I've found quarrel with a lot of them. The Immigrant arguably fits into that particular dramatic sub-genre, but there is plenty of talent on board and also a storyline that proves consistently compelling up until the closing credits. Marion Cotillard plays the titular immigrant, a Polish woman who encounters difficulty at the immigration checkpoint on Ellis Island when she is not only under threat of detainment but her sister is quarantined due to illness. It is at this point that she is saved from detainment by an impresario (Joaquin Phoenix) who manages a group of burlesque dancers and agrees to help out Cotillard if it means she will join his group. This of course leads to a series of escalating problems for Cotillard such as family disputes, sex work, and the appearance of Phoenix's charming yet troublesome magician cousin (Jeremy Renner).

Part of what elevates The Immigrant above typical melodramatic fare is the complexity of the characters. The French Cotillard may not be all that convincing as a Polish person, but she carries it well as she plays a person full of conflicting motivations and no small amount of consternation about her difficult situation. Phoenix is also a stand-out as a character who could easily have shrunk into a cynical or abusive stereotype but has much more depth than that, especially in his complicated relationship to Cotillard and the other women under his employ. He communicates his various contradictory emotions in manners great and small and easily comes across as the best performer here. Compared to these two, Renner comes across as a rather flat character who seems to exist only to drive the plot forward by creating a love triangle without having much definition in his own right, but he sells it as well as he can. Credit also has to go to the well-realised cinematography and production design that captures the 1920s setting with aplomb. It may not do anything especially amazing but it is a surprisingly compelling slice of melodrama that features talented performers playing sufficiently complicated characters amidst a well-realised milieu and is recommended to anyone who doesn't physically recoil at the prospect of watching anything that isn't classified as melodrama.

The Immigrant comes across as a modern-day silent movie. Except for the music, you could remove the soundtrack and add a few intertitles and see what a strong homage it is, in terms of both acting and visuals, to silent melodramas.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

I love Born on the 4th of July, some of the best work that Stone and Cruise has ever done.

#313 - Winter Sleep
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014



In a rural Turkish village, a hotel owner-operator and his acquaintances have to contend with a number of problems both internal and external.

As of writing, Winter Sleep is the most recent winner of the Palme d'Or - much like the film that won before it, it is a lengthy drama that involves little in the way of external action when it comes to generating interest. Though it does occasionally come a little too close to parodying itself as a super-serious dialogue-heavy foreign-language drama for its own good, Winter Sleep ultimately prevails despite this. It gives us complex characters that don't always inspire sympathy but at least prove interesting enough to generate opinions. The film centres on Aydin, a financially well-off business owner who contends with a variety of problems, often in ways that make him unsympathetic. His compatriots include his dissatisfied younger wife, his cantankerous sister, and his pragmatic lawyer. There are other characters but they mainly serve as catalysts for both external drama and introspection on the part of Aydin and the other main characters.

The film alternates quite frequently between mundane dialogue scenes, frequent long-running philosophical diatribes between Aydin and those who are close to him, plus the occasional instance of external action (such as the smashed car window that kicks off what could be considering the film's main plot). There isn't much in the way of style, but this isn't the kind of film that needs one as it is all about the characters interfacing with one another, often at great length. Aydin makes for a fascinating yet not particularly sympathetic protagonist and the various foils he comes into contact with are strong in his company or even on their own as they follow their own sub-plots (especially one that reaches an unsurprising but still shocking conclusion). I'm not sure if it really needed to be a full three hours long - parts of it are interesting, especially the discussions about the nature of good and evil and how one's individual behaviour and sense of self either reflects it or doesn't, but it can also be a bit of a slog depending on your tolerance for this type of talkative, actionless film.

I'm not sure anyone has enough acting ability to make Jeremy Renner appear charming. Let alone Jeremy Renner.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Should I have specified that it was in-universe?

No, it's just what occurred to me as I read it.

Going through these reviews, Iroquois, you are one tough critic. I'm going to go find The Immigrant.

Thank you.

#314 - Underworld
Len Wiseman, 2003



A war breaks out between vampires and werewolves as they fight for control of an ordinary human who may hold the key to an ancient prophecy.

I really shouldn't get my hopes up over vampire-themed action films - if I didn't like the much more acclaimed Blade, then what chance did this have? It had an interesting premise, sure - vampires versus werewolves in an appropriately dark and violent film, what could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, a lot. I know that The Matrix was an awesome film that redefined the action genre with its slick leather-clad aesthetic and fancy slow-motion gun violence, but when the first action sequence of your film involves not only both those factors but an awfully familiar-looking grimy subway setting (except tinged with blue instead of green), then it doesn't get one's hopes up. Thus begins a fairly stolid excuse for a supernatural action thriller as our badass protagonist (Kate Beckinsale, who I was surprised to learn was actually English considering how I could have sworn her accent was slipping at times) gets caught up in the search for a human (Scott Speedman) that the "lycans" (read: werewolves) and the vampires both want to get a hold of for their own nefarious reasons.

Despite the somewhat twisty narrative and promise of cool action, Underworld ultimately fails to deliver on either count. Most of the acting - save for esteemed British thesps like Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen (who play the head vampire and head werewolf respectively) - is so incredibly wooden I can hardly believe it even made it into a movie. The effects work on the lycans hasn't aged well at all, but the moody Gothic atmosphere that the rest of the film generates still holds up alright. Much of the film skews far too much towards the implausible without being awesome enough to compensate and just ends up blowing past without leaving much of an impression. Underworld is most definitely a disappointment, but now that I've seen it, it's hard to imagine a better story coming out of such a premise - even if it did, it probably wouldn't have the thrilling excitement to back it up.

#315 - The Emperor's New Groove
Marc Dindal, 2000



The self-absorbed emperor of the Incans is accidentally transformed into a llama by his vindictive chief adviser and must find a way to turn himself back.

The Emperor's New Groove feels like a breath of fresh air after the last couple of animated films I've watched, if only because it managed to make me laugh a lot. It runs off an admittedly conventional Disney plot by having incredibly selfish protagonist Emperor Kuzco (David Spade) turn into a llama as part of a failed assassination plot by his power-hungry adviser Yzma (Eartha Kitt) and her dim-witted but good-natured manservant Kronk (Patrick Warburton). He then spends the bulk of the film grudgingly co-operating with Pacha (John Goodman), a kind-hearted peasant who wants to stop Kuzco from building a giant swimming pool on the same hill where he lives with his family. Together, the two of them have to contend with South America's treacherous landscape and vicious wildlife, all while Yzma and Kronk try to finish the job they started.

What the movie lacks in an original plot (and you will be able to pick a lot of the beats that this movie uses - the major exception being the lack of a romantic sub-plot), it more than makes up for it by having a rather constant stream of funny jokes. I appreciated the banter and physical humour that erupts between characters - having the film bounce between two very similar pairs of characters means that there's twice the need for odd-couple humour, but the film's response is to deliver twice as much. The interplay between Kuzco and Pacha is frequently good, but it's not quite as good as that between Yzma and Kronk, the latter of whom practically steals the show with his charmingly dense baritone. There is also some nice metafictional humour such as Kuzco's frequently unreliable narration being played for laughs as well as the movie hand-waving plot holes in some amusingly ridiculous ways. I also appreciated the absence of musical numbers save for the opening theme, which was a nice touch considering how much other Disney films from the same era seemed to depend on having numbers. Of course, its short length and lightweight nature means that there's not a whole lot of emotional heft to it, but that just means it avoids getting completely bogged down in typical Disney sentimentality and instead ends up delivering a pretty rapid-fire comedy, so if that's all you're after then dive right in.

#316 - Suck Me Shakespeer
Bora Dagtekin, 2013



When an ex-con learns that the vacant lot where his money was stashed is now covered up by an extension to a very dysfunctional high school, he pretends to be a teacher in order to gain access and search for his cash.

I have to give this German film credit for having one of the most awkward English-language titles I've ever seen (though I doubt they could have directly translated Fack ju Göhte into English), and the film definitely lives up to its coarse and deliberately misspelled title. Suck Me Shakespeer may use a familiar premise - when someone first explained it to me, my response was "Isn't that basically the plot of Blue Streak?" (the obvious difference there being that the building in question is a police station instead of a school), with my next frame of reference being School of Rock - but it does get a surprising amount of mileage out of this idea over the course of two hours. Most of that can be credited to the edginess of the humour, with the school in question being shown to be in a state of complete disrepair and anarchy, where the mericless pranking of the school's most delinquent-filled class is enough to drive teachers to attempted suicide. Naturally, events conspire so that the cocky ex-con protagonist is forced to teach the class and also contend with the belligerent romantic tension between him and the bookish, sweet-natured female teacher who he must co-operate with in order to stay in the school long enough to find his stash (and pay off an underworld figure, of course).

Unfortunately, edginess only gets you so far when the plot is as trite as this one and many of the gags end up covering the same ground, even if they do come across as too absurd to be plausible or tolerated in real life (such as the protagonist responding to a group of students cutting class by grabbing a paintball rifle). Even when the students inevitably start to warm up to both the ex-con and the actual teacher (and vice versa), that just means the gags peter out as a result of encroaching sentimentality and the characters ultimately aren't endearing enough for you to care all that much about whether they overcome their obstacles or achieve their goals. Throw in a soundtrack full of emotionally on-the-nose pop songs and you have a real crowd-pleaser on your hands - while I'm not totally immune to the charms of this film and am glad it rises ever-so-slightly above its extremely basic narrative, I am ultimately not all that enthused about it. I would not be surprised if this got an American remake.

#317 - The Gold Rush
Charlie Chaplin, 1925



During the Klondike Gold Rush, a lone prospector has some misadventures involving a beautiful woman, a remote log cabin, a dreaded outlaw, and a fellow prospector.

This is the third Charlie Chaplin film I've seen and I'm still inclined not to think of any of them as more than just alright. This one was different in that I watched a restored version where Chaplin himself provided an all-new narration in place of the usual title cards, presumably as a means of updating it for an audience that was rapidly getting used to talking pictures. Admittedly, it does help the movie flow quite a bit, though it does make me wonder how the film would have played out if it'd been the proper silent version, though I suppose if I care that much then I can try watching the silent version on the film's Wikipedia page. Even in this shorter and louder version, The Gold Rush doesn't do all that much for me. Though it's obviously filled with gags, none of them really made me laugh (with the exception of the climatic cabin sequence, which involves some inventive use of editing and special effects that is somewhat undercut by the use of a very fake-looking miniature dummy).

Otherwise, it's pretty standard silent comedy with just enough of a dramatic edge as Chaplin's impoverished protagonist falls for a dance-hall beauty while also having to contend with the harsh climate and dangerous individuals that he comes across while trying to make a fortune. There are the occasional bizarre little flights of fancy to add to the regular comedy, such as Chaplin's friend growing hungry and imagining Chaplin as a giant chicken (which of course involves a chicken suit), but not even the more surreal imagery is enough to make much of a difference one way or the another. The Gold Rush definitely isn't bad enough to make me want to avoid any more Chaplin, but it definitely feels like I'm seeking out his films out of formality more so than out of enjoyment.

I'm baffled by anyone who seeks out Chaplin films out of enjoyment.

For all its great reputation I was disappointed with The Gold Rush, to be honest... There are plenty Chaplin films which are a whole lot better.