My Week of Movie Watching

Bad Day at Black Rock – A mysterious man with a withered arm (Spencer Tracy) arrives in a desert town looking for a Japanese farmer and riles up all sorts of bad blood. Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine play the heavies who are covering up a horrific crime. Bad Day is a mixed bag for me. The subject matter (The treatment of Japanese Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour) is worthwhile, and the film with its widescreen photography is beautiful looking. There’s a terrific scene where Borgnine picks a fight with Tracy and gets pulverized. Overall, these things can’t quite compensate for the shortcomings. First and foremost is the town itself. There are literally only about 6 buildings in the whole town, and I kept having questions that I shouldn’t have, like “Why do they live there?” “What do they do for a living?” Tracy is supposed to be a vet just out of WW2, but he seems way too old. Worst of all, the film is utterly without dramatic tension. We know very, very soon exactly what has happened here and where the story is going to go.

The Parallax View – Interesting 1974 political thriller from Alan Pakula. Warren Beatty plays a reporter trying to investigate the assassination of a popular politician. His investigation leads him to a huge corporation that seems to exist to carry out killings for hire. Made in the aftermath of Watergate, this one is a product of its times. Looked at now, its sense of paranoia seems a bit quaint. In tone, it will remind a lot of people of The Manchurian Candidate, and in fact borrows from that films classic finale. Not a perfect film, but worth a look. Recommended.

Inside Llewyn Davis – Another triumph from Joel and Ethan Coen, this one reconstructs the Greenwich Village folk scene from the early 1960’s with loving, vivid detail. Oscar Isaac plays the title character, a barely-hanging-on coffeehouse singer who leaches from everyone he knows in order to keep on doing his thing. If you watch this and the thought of buying the soundtrack doesn’t occur to you, I would be truly amazed. The music here is really, really brilliant. The Coens films are always populated with memorable supporting characters, and this one has one of the greatest in John Goodman as a foul-mouthed Jazz musician who Davis catches a ride with. Very enthusiastically recommended.