Little Miss Sunshine: (2006. dir: Jonathan Dayton) One of those star-studded "indy" films. Quirky deadpan humor so heavy-handed it might as well bear flashing captions beneath it reading QUIRKY DEADPAN HUMOR. The characters are all types, not characters (the suicidal uncle, for instance, was A Bill Murray Character Not Played By Bill Murray), but some are more enjoyable than others: for me, it was the brother (Paul Dano), the suicidal uncle (Steve Carrell), and the little girl (Abigail Breslin). I love Alan Arkin with the heat of a thousand suns, and I'm glad to see him sporting a statue of Oscar, and I did enjoy watching him cuss and shoot heroin and coach his granddaughter in a dance the judges would never forget, but we all know the Academy clutched at this opportunity to fete him for all the great, dark-humored and previously unrewarded work he did in the '60s and '70s.
The movie falls into two parts: road-trip and beauty pageant. The pageant part was just insipid; the road-trip part had bright spots. None of it made a lick of sense. It felt like someone really, really wanted to make a Wes Anderson film but lacked his vision, technical prowess, and his wonderful warmth of heart.
the Ragman's Daughter: (1974. dir: Harold Becker) A very late kitchen-sinker written by Alan Sillitoe, one of Britain's original Angry Young Men. Victoria Tennant was at the time a vapid, winsome-looking model, and Becker's direction is uninspired, so the film lacks the fascination of earlier Sillitoe offerings the Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It has in its favor an easy tempo and a strong focus on faces, but its loose gait also points up its thinness of story. In the end, unless there's a strong plot moving them along, the conversation of 18-year-olds is not usually very interesting.
There is a strange dislocation in time involved. I suspect as written it's the older, stable, family-supporting, hard-working version of the hero thinking back longingly on this romance in his vibrant, outlaw youth, but as it comes across the two selves seem to be inhabiting the same space. Which might have led to something interesting, but never did.
the Devil and Daniel Webster: (1941. dir: William Dieterle) Fairy tale fable with painted backdrops and good humor, particularly when poking fun at the pride of New Englanders. It's a little clunky in its pointed nonrealism, more like a filmed stage play than a movie, but all is forgiven because Walter Huston is a godsend and a joy. This is also the film's Achilles Heel because Huston's devil is so completely the master of all he surveys that the ending seems ridiculous when the verdict goes against him. In those scenes when the film glides into the fantastical and away from its hammy moralizing, it genuinely soars, making a life of evil look enormously enticing. Simone Simon is on hand to help with her notoriously feline sensuality, and Anne Shirley draws the short straw as the long-suffering wife who does nothing but sit, look pained, be martyred.
the Last of the Mohicans: (1992. dir: Michael Mann) I saw it in the cinema and it burned clean for me, by which I mean mere hours afterward I could remember little or nothing of it. I put that down largely to the darkness of the photography, my extreme closeness to the screen, the overuse of fade-outs which lent it a distancing sense of montage rather than story to be followed, and further distancing by a continually swelling string section.
Watching again on television and expecting little, I saw it in a new light. The acting ensemble is flawless, much of the filming effective, and that crucial scene in which Hawkeye, the British officer, the bad guy and the Mohawk chief are deliberating in three different languages is fabulous: none of it is properly translated, so we must guess at what's in French or Mohawk.
Wes Studi is tremendous, as is Madeleine Stowe, and one's eyes are drawn constantly and inevitably to Daniel Day-Lewis whenever he is onscreen, like some unstoppable magnetic force. And it's got one of the most stunningly heart-stopping romantic moments in the history of cinema: that infamous, uber-swoony moment when he cries out to her that he will find her, no matter what, no matter where she goes, he will find her. It's something in his voice, I think, the perfect timbre; it shakes you right to the bone.
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