Robs takes on Media and Entertainment

I went down the rabbit trail of silent era comedies this week. This church is held up by the three pillars of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd (Their characters I have respectively titled as the Hapless, the Scamp, and the Buffon). Having watched several different works of art from these three, I think they should be considered required viewing and study for film making, stunt design, and comedy writing. I think calling Keaton “hapless” is close - but not quite on the nose. He has an insane amount of luck, but just not when it comes to getting ahead in life. Chaplin's character is a homeless tramp, but he is more of a hilarious mischievous small-time criminal. And Lloyd, whether playing ‘Luckless Luke’ or ‘Harold’ with glasses has a graduate degree in clowning. They are all supreme stunt coordinators and performers. I tried to make a critical comparison of the three, but I just don’t have it in me. They are all different and each very good. Keaton was my favorite. I...

Google Plot summary: ¿A movie about a Paris police chief whose life investigating violent crimes has left him despondent. After beginning an affair with a beautiful but cold woman named Cathy, he befriends her boyfriend, Simon, a local nightclub owner? Uh yeah - that is not really what this movie is about. This is a heist film - more akin to “The Thomas Crowne Affair” (1968)/(1999),  “Heist” (2001), or “The Score” (2001). Except: a) the focus is on the policeman rather than the criminals b) it doesn’t have a happy ending c) no one wins. Yes the Cop does have an affair with Cathy under the nose of her boyfriend Simon - but Simon & Cathy are manipulating him while they stage their caper. The cop is brutal in his pursuit of the criminal gang. There is a great female actor playing a transvestite homosexual man who is a snitch. The cop is cruel to her, taking her information and resenting / abusing her for it. The cop is indeed despondent, but his response is not depression. It is a...

  This is supposedly categorized as noir, but I think it is missing some key components. There is a crime, but it lacks the cynical attitudes and motivations. There are aspects of the lighting style which are in the neighborhood of noir, but it is more about the dramatic effect of the set design. I guess there is a femme fatale (maybe two of them), but she is an antagonist to the heroine more than a key element. You could have swapped them out for any number of alternatives. I don’t think this is noir - just black and white. This movie is a fantasy film similar to the Frank Capra flick. It is about doing the year 1946 over. There is a very short, narrated voice over when the time jump happens that tells the audience - Joan Leslie is the only one who will know. She is second billed, but this movie is ALL her.  She is attempting to avoid the tragic circumstances of the previous year - and makes a very believable case for what a human person would do in that situation. Her husban...

What happens when you take a top glamor star of depression era cinema, and put her in an unglamorous role with deep moral themes about religious hypocrisy? You get a critical & financial bomb at the box office.  If your audience came in hoping to escape from their dire circumstances - and you give them a slow burning conflict of mores on opposite sides of the spectrum, they are not going to dig it. The critics will say the characters are ‘satisfactory’ or that the star is out of her depth.  I say - Bpppffftt ! If you took that movie and redid it shot for shot today - it would sell. You probably could not fill theater seats with it. We don’t go to see these kinds of movies anymore; however, there are any number of streaming services that could / should reproduce it. It is public domain now, so that door is wide open. The director did a great job (even if he is uncredited). The story was based on a play - and I would argue that you could almost stage it the same as he shot i...

If I had it to do over again, I would have waited for streaming. A melodrama is constructed for strong emotional appeal. The sensational tug on your inner feely-wheelies takes precedence over the story. There is dialogue which is bombastic and excessively sentimental. Characters are flat as a pancake. The struggle is against some outside force. Music plays a big part in setting the tone and informing the audience. And THAT is “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 3” (2023) . Sprinkle in some visual spectacle and a dash of camp, and you have the James Gunn space soap opera. Not opera - soap opera. It is a giant, velvet drawstring bag on his MCU legacy. The film has lots of shouting. Lots and lots of it. Lots of spittle. Lots and lots of it. Lots of ‘bum-bum-buuu ummmm’ moments. Lots and lots of it. Lots of tears on top of too much makeup. Lots and lots of it. *sigh* The action setups were game quests with exposition cut scenes between. Many of the jokes were set up - remind you of the set up 20...

“A Gentleman in Moscow" is a 2016 book by Amor Towles*. There is also an 8-episode TV series on Paramount+ / Showtime that I have not seen. This write up is about the book. Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian nobleman who, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, is sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel  (1) . That is as concise a summary as anyone could write. It tells you nothing about this book. This is a study of a character over the course of an adult lifetime. He starts half my age and the story closes as he is nearing my parents’ age. The backdrop is the transition from tsarist to communist Russia, but this is not an allegory on the merits of communism or autocratic rule. This is a story about people. There is a rich collection of supporting and side characters. These are people you know - not the fantasy players in a le Carré novel. Essentially all of the action takes place inside the walls of a fancy hotel. There were scenes of polite and mannered co...

  “Coffee and Cigarettes” is an anthology. Anthology is a fancy word for assortment or album or compilation. My favorite synonym is miscellany which means ‘a mixture of things’. That is probably the most appropriate way to describe this film. So how do you consume a mixture of things that are related in style, but otherwise can be chewed on as separate pieces. Same way you used to listen to a new album, I think. Does anyone listen to albums anymore? I watched it straight through, but I think watching each of the 11 scenes in increments of 7 or 8 minutes probably works as well. If I go back to it, that is what I will do. There are elements of the sets and cinematography tying them together. There are lines of dialog that are unrelated to each other from one scene to the next, but they make a loose repeating pattern as well. This movie is a compilation of 11 scenes with two or three characters each having a conversation while they smoke and drink coffee. It is black and white. That i...

How do you take a 100 minute movie with Nick Cage, Larry Fishburne, Leslie Bibb, and Barry Pepper - as well as Cole Hauser, Adam Goldberg and Peter Facinelli - and somehow make an unwatchable stew of tones and over the top cliches? I think you give it to a TV director, TV writer, and TV editor. I could not actually finish it. Even for me, that is pretty bad.  It is a series of scenes that could have been part of a TV-series, but they weren’t. They were just the beats from a TV-series. Maybe it was put together by some people who read the wikipedia article for “Traffic” (2000) - then sketched a storyboard for a telenovela - then remembered they were making a movie and just cut it back down from there. It is like it has been sequentially translated into 2 different languages, each time by someone who wasn’t a native speaker. Set designs were thrifty, but not too cheap. Cinematography is somehow gray and lurid at the same time. If there was a highlight, it is the music. It was the onl...

I watched “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” (2001) recently. It is not nearly the deep exploration of the human psyche I remembered. Maybe that is why I had time to think that her story has a lot of similarities to the MCU Iron Man, just smashed into a single movie. There is not the same degree of character growth for Croft as for Stark, but there is an archetype here that stuck me. They are both: Athletic with distinctly styled dark brown hair Exceptionally smart & adventurous Utilize clever tools and gadgets Snarky / Funny / Patronizing to the people around Attended to by an attractive personal assistant Rich / Entitled / Play(boy/girl) / Philanthropist-ish Compelled to protect the world from BIG evil Driven by living up to a relationship with father In terms of contrasts: Laura Croft rides a motorcycle, listens to hip-hop and talks with a posh (and yet reed thin) English accent. Tony Stark was able to build [a hockey puck sized nuclear reactor] in a cave! With a box of scraps!  (Jef...