Movies – Page 84 – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

The Rear-View Mirror: Adam’s Rib (1949)

Oct 25, 2019Oct 23, 2019Julie1 Comment

Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!

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Adam’s Rib is a George Cukor comedy or, if you take into account the amount of doors slammed, a farce. It is about married couple Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy) an assistant district attorney, and Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn) a lawyer. It relates how they cope and bicker in a marriage where Amanda is a “modern woman”, which is to say a kind of (shorthand) feminist.

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The Rear-View Mirror: All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Oct 18, 2019Oct 17, 2019Matt2 Comments

As someone once said, there’s two kinds of people in this world, Elvis people and Beatles people. I know which side of that particular divide I’m on, but I sometimes get the impression there’s a similar divide among some movie critics and fans. Which of the two eviscerations of aging actresses is your favourite: Billy Wilder’s genre-busting, darkly comic Sunset Boulevard, arguably one of the director’s best films, or the sharp, witty, but stylistically relatively tame All About Eve by Joseph L. Mankiewicz?

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The Rear View Mirror: My Cousin Rachel (1951)

Oct 11, 2019MegeLeave a comment

Daphne du Maurier’s novel My Cousin Rachel, published in 1951, seems to exist in the spot where the universes of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie touch. On the one hand, the tone of the book is well-mannered, and its characters are not allowed to flat-out say what they passionately would like to say, but have to hide behind the mores of the era. On the other hand, someone dies, and another character is in danger to meet the same fate, so whodunnit? Continue reading →

The Compleat Ingmar #8: Dreams (1955)

Oct 9, 2019Oct 9, 2019Matt3 Comments

Before getting Criterion’s Ingmar Bergman set, I don’t think I had heard of Dreams, a 1955 drama directed and written by Bergman. Certainly, it doesn’t have the striking, dreamlike imagery of Wild Strawberries or the sexual frankness of Summer with Monika, but I was still surprised to read on Wikipedia that “Dreams is one of the few Ingmar Bergman films to have received lukewarm reviews”. It should come as no surprise that the performances are consistently strong, and especially the female leads make it well worth watching.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #27: Quentin Tarantino

Oct 5, 2019Oct 4, 2019Matt3 Comments

Whether you’re an Elvis man or a Beatles man, tune in to our latest episode of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, because we’re finally getting around to talking about the man who doesn’t need us to tell him how good his coffee is: on the occasion of the release of his latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, your cultural baristas are having a chat about writer-director Quentin Tarantino, his films, his music, his women, his use of violence and his very particular brand of nostalgia. How much Tarantino is that? A lot!

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The Rear View Mirror: The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

Oct 4, 2019Oct 3, 2019JulieLeave a comment

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In this delicious satire by Vincente Minelli, a producer reminiscent of a rather more charming David O. Selznick backstabs his way to the top, only to be shunned by those he betrayed along the way. Equally obsessed with proving himself after his father is ruined, Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) secures a job as a line producer by intentionally losing a game of poker to Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon) and offering to work off the debt. His friend and collaborator Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) initially profits from the ruse, as they go on to produce B-movies together, but he is betrayed when the project closest to his heart is taken from him. Continue reading →

The Stars My Dadstination

Sep 30, 2019Sep 30, 2019MattLeave a comment

Director James Gray’s Ad Astra, apart from being beautiful to look at (down in front, Brad Pitt fans!), also sets out to be that rare, beautiful thing: a sci-fi movie of ideas. It is interested in outer space as much as the universe inside the metaphorical man in the moon. If only it trusted those ideas to speak to its audience loudly enough, because then it might not have felt the need to spell them all out in explicit, clunky voiceover.

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The Rear-View Mirror: Shane (1953)

Sep 27, 2019Sep 26, 2019MattLeave a comment

How many movie tropes are there that are common knowledge, yet if you were to ask what films actually use them you would draw a blank?

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The Rear-View Mirror: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Sep 20, 2019Sep 26, 2019MegeLeave a comment

What an endearing mess of a movie. Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of the oldest movies I’ve seen that starts with the Big Bang, then creation, then Darwinism (leaving out millenium-long chunks of natural history, but never mind), only to violate that premise five minutes later. There are fossilized limbs of a sea creature that very much look like the arm and hand of its descendant, so its physical shape has not changed in the least.

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A Hooplehead Reunion

Sep 8, 2019Sep 8, 2019Matt2 Comments

The first half-dozen years or so of the 21st century saw some of the strongest arguments that a Golden Age of Television had arrived. Many of those were produced by HBO, from the New Jersey mobscapades of The Sopranos to the sprawling social canvas of The Wire. While it was cancelled after three season, the Western series Deadwood stands tall among the standouts of that time. Even thirteen years after its cancellation, it’s difficult to find a series as accomplished, with an ensemble cast as strong, and with writing as distinct.