March Film Roundup

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): Wes Anderson’s Die Hard , the moment he figured out his style and decided to never do anything differently again. I like that style, so I enjoyed this movie. I’ll say my favorite bit was the way Etheline Tenenbaum spends years being courted by intense, Wes Anderson geniuses but she’s sick of that shit and ends up marrying the accountant. Yesterday Sumana and I happened to rewatch the “Wes Anderson horror trailer” SNL sketch and I can now see it’s basically just parodying The Royal Tenenbaums . Truly a touchstone. That’s the only movie proper I watched in March but we also watched a stream of the National Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest , directed by Max Webster. It’s a really funny play, but if Oscar Wilde was in my writing group I’d tell him “you have a serious problem where all of your characters sound like you, to the extent that all of your famous quips turn out to be lines you put in the mouths of one character or another.” And then he’d probably say “Bah, Leonard, you know the price of everything and the value of nothing. — The Picture of Dorian Gray , Chapter IV” Oh yeah, I should also mention we recently watched some midcentury military training films: One Too Often (1950), featuring Jack Lemmon(!) as the Private Snafu-esque knave who keeps gambling with his life while on leave. It’s full of the sort of cinematic vocabulary familiar to me from MST3K sthorts, complete with guardian angels who keep bending the rules for ol’ Jack… until they don’t. Resisting Enemy Interrogation (1944): This film packs a feature’s worth of intrigue into 66 minutes, as the enemy use clever interrogation techniques and deductive reasoning to blow our boys out of the sky, like an evil version of Mathnet . Highly recommended as a thriller in the same vein as Eye of the Needle (1981). Undercover (1943): Kinda hamfisted John Ford short where Gallant practices good spycraft and successfully establishes his cover story (Or does he? discuss, men!) Whereas Goofus takes one step across the border and screws everything up. Pretty entertaining, but unlike Resisting Enemy Interrogration I don’t think it holds up well as a narrative film.