Bigger (George Gallo, 2018)

Tyler Hoechlin, Calum Von Moger, and Aneurin Barnard in Bigger

Cast: Tyler Hoechlin, Julianne Hough, Kevin Durand, Aneurin Barnard, Robert Forster, DJ Qualls, Victoria Justice, Steve Guttenberg, Calum Von Moger, Max Martini, Colton Haynes, Tom Arnold. Screenplay: Andy Weiss, George Gallo, Brad Furman, Ellen Furman. Cinematography: Michael Negrin. Production design: Stephen J. Lineweaver. Film editing: Sophie Corra. Music: Jeff Beal. 

There is probably a good movie to be made about bodybuilding and fitness, but Bigger isn't it. A good one would deal with the ongoing questions about supplement use and abuse, the influence of steroids and other performance enhancers and practices, and the role of LGBT people in popularizing the bodybuilder image. Bigger ignores the role of supplements and enhancers almost entirely, and reduces the effect of gays on bodybuilding to just one of the stigmas Joe Weider (Tyler Hoechlin) encounters on his way to success as a promoter. What we get instead is a cliché rags to riches story, in which Weider battles antisemitism and a ruthless publisher-promoter called Bill Hauk (Kevin Durand) in the film, but based on fitness entrepreneur Bob Hoffman, to become a leading magazine publisher, fitness equipment and supplement manufacturer, and promoter of professional bodybuilding competitors, most notably Arnold Schwarzenegger (Calum Von Moger). Unfortunately, the film generates no real tension in tracking Weider's rise: The ugliness of the antisemitism he encounters feels incidental, rather than pervasive, and the tension with his apparently mentally disturbed mother (Nadine Lewington) feels like hack psychology. Hoechlin is a good, attractive actor, but he's forced to deliver his lines in a strange, tight accent that is, I suppose, meant to be Montreal-Canadian, but just manages to be distracting, especially since it doesn't match the one used by Robert Forster in the scenes in which he plays the older Joe Weider. Durand goes way over the top as the movie's villain, but there's some fun to be had in Von Moger's imitation of Schwarzenegger. It's a little hard to see who the film is for: People into bodybuilding won't learn anything they didn't already know -- and will probably take issue with what the film tells them about the actual people involved -- and people who aren't will take issue with the uncritical approach to the subject. 

On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951)

Doris Day and Gordon MacRae in On Moonlight Bay

Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Billy Gray, Leon Ames, Rosemary DeCamp, Jack Smith, Mary Wickes, Ellen Corby, Sig Arno, Jeffrey Stevens, Eddie Marr, Henry East. Screenplay: Jack Rose, Melville Shavelson, based on stories by Booth Tarkington. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Douglas Bacon. Film editing: Thomas Reilly. Music: Max Steiner. 

Leon Ames must have felt right at home playing the paterfamilias of a Midwestern household in 1917 in the Warner Bros. musical On Moonlight Bay: It was the same role he had played in 1944, when he was the paterfamilias of a St. Louis household in 1904 in Vincente Minnelli's MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. In both films he comes under fire for making the household move, upsetting his wife (Rosemary DeCamp in the former movie, Mary Astor in the latter), his daughter (Doris Day/Judy Garland), his bratty kid (Billy Gray/Margaret O'Brien), and even the family servant (Mary Wickes/Marjorie Main). In both films, the daughter falls in love with the boy next door (Gordon MacRae/Tom Drake). There's even a big scene set at Christmas in both movies. Granted, On Moonlight Bay suffers from comparison with Meet Me in St. Louis. For one thing, the songs in the latter are better, and Garland brings a note of heartbreak to the film that Day can't quite match. But the Warners movie gets a little life from a screenplay based on the Penrod stories by Booth Tarkington, a writer not much read anymore but who inspired two classic movies, Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935) and The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). The stories, about the misadventures of an 11-year-old boy, clearly inspired On Moonlight Bay's subplot about Wesley Winfield (Gray), kid brother to Marjorie Winfield (Day). Wesley is a scamp who purloins one of Marjorie's letters to her boyfriend, William Sherman (MacRae), and tries to pass it off in English class as his own composition. He torments Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith), who tries to court Marjorie, and he even manages to convince his teacher, Miss Stevens (Ellen Corby), that the reason he falls asleep in class is that his father is a drunkard who abuses his mother and sister. Much of this stuff is clumsily directed, but it's an effective enough distraction from the rather routine romance of Marjorie and William and from the tepid musical numbers, set mostly to old parlor ballads and turn-of-the-century love songs like the one that gives the film its title. Day is in sweet voice as usual, but her role in the movie and the songs she's asked to sing don't give her much to do, and she doesn't really have much chemistry with MacRae. Nevertheless, On Moonlight Bay was popular enough that it inspired a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953), that reunited most of the cast. 

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)

Will Oldham and Daniel London in Old Joy

Cast: Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith, Robin Rosenberg, Keri Moran, Autumn Campbell, Steve Doughton, Matt McCormick, Darren Prolsen, Jillian Wiseneck. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt. Cinematography: Peter Sillen. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Yo La Tengo. 

After watching Old Joy, I went to IMDb to check if I had ever seen Daniel London or Will Oldham in anything else. Turns out, I probably have: Both have done several movies and a lot of TV, but never anything else that forces them to hold the screen the way they do in Kelly Reichardt's film. Often, the very unfamiliarity of the "stars" of a movie is its greatest strength, allowing you to see the characters they play unfiltered through a previously established persona. No matter how effectively someone like Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis may transform themselves from film to film, you're still watching them act rather than be a character; you're conscious to some degree of what they've done before. The freshness of Old Joy lies in getting to know Mark (London) and Kurt (Oldham), to work out their backstories and speculate about their motives. If Mark and Kurt had been played by, let's say, Jake Gyllenhaal and Seth Rogen, we'd have different responses to the characters than we do. Old Joy is a movie without a plot: Mark gets a call from his old friend, Kurt, who wants to take him to a hot springs he has discovered in the Oregon backwoods. Mark feels obligated to check with his pregnant wife, Tanya (Tanya Smith), before setting out on this weekend adventure -- the slight tension in their conversation hints that Tanya doesn't quite trust Kurt, and that maybe Mark would be happy with an excuse not to go. But the two men, accompanied by Mark's dog, Lucy (played by Reichardt's own dog, Lucy, the "co-star" of her 2008 film Wendy and Lucy), set out for the weekend. They get lost on the way to the springs and spend the night camping out in a sort of dumping ground on a back road, but get their bearings in the morning and hike to their destination, an isolated spring in the middle of the forest with no one else around. Mark soaks blissfully in his hot tub, but Kurt is more unsettled, getting out to smoke some weed and to give Mark a shoulder rub. Then they return to the city, where at the end we see Kurt wandering restlessly at night. There are no feral mountain men to threaten the two, as in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and no animal predators menace them -- any such tensions we supply from our own imaginations. What we are left with is a portrait of an aging, fraying friendship of two men who have gone different ways in their lives, so that at midlife Mark is settled and relatively prosperous (he drives a Volvo, that token vehicle of the middle class urban liberal), whereas Kurt is still feckless, rootless, and maybe intensely frustrated -- there are some hints that Kurt is sexually attracted to Mark. The past weighs on both of them: The film's title comes from a line spoken by Kurt, "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy." It's a film to be savored, to be recalled in the hours after you've watched it. 

Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor, 2018)

Demian Hernández in Too Late to Die Young

Cast: Demian Hernández, Antar Machado, Magdalena Tótoro, Matías Oviedo, Andrés Aliaga, Antonia Zegers, Mercedes Mujica, Gabriel Cañas, Alejandro Goic, Eyal Meyer, Cecilia Rainero, Michael Silva, Luciano Jadrievich, Pablo Giesen, Millantú Hilbert, Alejandro Garrós. Screenplay: Domingo Sotomayor. Cinematography: Inti Briones. Production design: Estefania Larrain. Film editing: Catalina Marín Duarte. 

Too Late to Die Young tosses viewers into an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and leaves us to figure out where and who they are, and why they're doing things. It's usual for movies to do this, of course, and we've all learned to follow the clues that lead us to the answers. But Dominga Sotomayor doesn't make it easy for us, especially because there are so many characters that it takes us time to figure out which one is the center of the film. In this case, it's Sofia (Demian Hernández), a teenage girl struggling to find her way into womanhood, and that's a situation familiar enough to give us some grounding. Eventually, we realize, if we're patient and attentive, that the group of people around Sofia are Chilean families who are fleeing urban life (and politics) in the city of Santiago, the lights of which we can see from their mountainside retreat, a kind of latter-day hippie commune. As the sometimes feckless adults do their thing, Sofia develops an infatuation with the somewhat older Ignacio (Matías Oviedo), as meanwhile a boy her own age, Lucas (Antar Machado), is falling for her. Sofia's father and mother have separated, and she has come to this new community with him but longs to live with her mother. She expects the mother to visit them for the New Year's celebration but is crushed when she doesn't arrive. The other character on whom the film focuses is young Clara Magdalena Tótoro), who gets separated from her dog, Frida, finds her again (perhaps), but loses her once more. It's a kind of metaphor for the unstable relationships that are the core of the film, which has been seen as a commentary on the instability of Chilean politics and society after the fall of Pinochet. The New Year's party becomes a central focus of the film, and it precipitates the film's denouement by sparking a forest fire that destroys the encampment. It's a movie full of well-observed moments and fine performances by its mostly young cast, especially Hernández, who transitioned to male after the film's shooting ended. 

The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996)

Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, and Parker Posey in The Daytrippers

Cast: Hope Davis, Anne Meara, Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, Pat McNamara, Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott, Stephanie Venditto, Marc Grapey, Douglas McGrath, Marcia Gay Harden. Screenplay: Greg Mottola. Cinematography: John Inwood. Production design: Bonnie J. Brinkley. Film editing: Anne McCabe. Music: Richard Martinez.

The Daytrippers is a mashup of subgenres: It's a road movie, a marital dramedy, a midlife crisis fable, and even an extended mother-in-law joke. No wonder it took so long to find a distributor: How do you market a movie like this? But it's also a wonderful sleeper find, if you just happen to come across it on the Criterion Channel, as I did. First of all, it's a terrific ensemble of skilled actors, some of them cast against type, like Marcia Gay Harden as a ditz in an extended cameo. The premise is this: Louis and Eliza D'Amico (Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis) are apparently happily married, but when he leaves their Long Island home one day for his editorial job in the city, she finds a note that suggests he may be having an affair with someone named Sandy. When she tells her mother (Anne Meara) about this, Mom insists that her husband (Pat McNamara) drive everyone into Manhattan to confront Louis and uncover the identity of Sandy. "Everyone" includes Eliza's sister, Jo (Parker Posey), and her boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), who happen to be visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. This is not exactly your close-knit family, as it's held together loosely by the domineering mother, kept just this side of caricature by Meara's shrewdly calculated performance. The rest is a series of misadventures, as the family follows a series of clues and false leads, winding up in often hilarious but also poignant little side trips. It's the lack of go-ahead story that I think tripped up some of the movie's initial critics, like Roger Ebert, who found the movie, especially Meara's character, annoying. But there's so much about The Daytrippers that's closely observed and skillfully performed that I found myself wanting to see it again just to watch the way some brilliant performances -- Schreiber is especially wonderful in a role that's a 180 from tough guy Ray Donovan -- mesh into a true ensemble.

Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953)

Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel in Kiss Me Kate

Cast: Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Tommy Rall, Bobby Van, Bob Fosse, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore, Kurt Kasznar, Ann Codee, Willard Parker, Ron Randell, Carol Haney, Jeanne Coyne. Screenplay: Dorothy Kingsley, based on a musical play by Sam Spewack and Bella Spewack, and on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Charles Rosher. Art direction: Urie McCleary, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters. Music: musical direction by Saul Chaplin, André Previn, songs by Cole Porter.

Censorship has erased some of the bawdiness from Cole Porter's lyrics but his music still remains. Howard Keel is swaggeringly handsome as Fred Graham/Petruchio and Ann Miller is thoroughly vivacious as Lois Lane/Bianca. She is accompanied by a trio of terrific dancers, Tommy Rall, Bobby Van, and Bob Fosse, in numbers choreographed by Hermes Pan (with some uncredited assistance from Fosse in the "From This Moment On" number, where he gets an extended duo with an almost unbilled Carol Haney). The adaptation of the Broadway hit stumbles a little in Dorothy Kingsley's screenplay, but rights itself in most of the musical numbers. George Sidney was never as skillful a director as his MGM contemporaries Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, but the stretches between the story parts and the song and dance parts aren't overlong. The only major drawback to this version of Kiss Me Kate is Kathryn Grayson, who pouts a lot as Lilli Vanessi/Katherine, but doesn't have much chemistry with Keel and fails to make the character someone we care about. Her voice, too, has that vinegary edge to it that even careful miking can't hide. Nor do Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore succeed in their attempts at clowning as the goofy gangsters with their supposedly show-stopping number, "Brush Up Your Shakespeare." (How, by the way, did the line "Kick her right in the Coriolanus" get past the censors?) Still, this is a solid B-plus MGM musical, and an honorable attempt at remaking a stage version. It was made in 3-D, during the brief period in the 1950s when the studios were trying to win audiences back away from their televisions, which explains some of the exaggerated perspective of the stage sets and the occasional instances of things being tossed at the camera.

Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)

Bill Gunn and Seret Scott in Losing Ground

Cast: Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, Billie Allen, Maritza Rivera. Screenplay: Kathleen Collins. Cinematography: Ronald K. Gray. Film editing: Kathleen Collins, Ronald K. Gray. Music: Michael Minard.

A philosophy professor and her husband, a successful artist, lease a summer home in the country, where she tries to work on a paper about ecstatic experience and he is struck by the beauty of the countryside as well as the young Puerto Rican women in the neighborhood. Her discontent with the isolation and his flirtations leads to some reassessments of their marriage. This is the stuff of which New Yorker short stories are written, and writer-director Kathleen Collins makes her best of it. But did we mention that Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) and her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), are Black? It's not something that Collins makes much of in the expected sense: They don't experience bigotry or discrimination in the course of the film. Collins, who was also Black, does something more deft with the fact: She keeps it present in the consciousness and the dialogue of the Rogerses, who seem to cling to the antiquated term "Negro" in ways that we don't expect from hip, educated people in the 1980s. Losing Ground is not about race, but it's informed by it in subtle ways. The film was made on a shoestring budget and sometimes shows it: The photography is sometimes murky and some of the acting a little amateurish. But its exploration of ideas and emotions is the product of keen observation and sharp writing. Collins died only a few years after the film was made, and didn't get to see it find an audience: The film played only at a few festivals and never received a theatrical release, but it was greeted with praise by critics after it was screened at a retrospective of Black films in 2015.

Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975)

Thierno Leye and Dyella Touré in Xala

Cast: Thierno Leye, Myriam Niang, Seune Samb, Fatim Diagne, Younouss Seye, Mustapha Ture, Iliaman Sagna, Dieynaba Niang, Langouste Drobe, Farba Sarr, Abdoulaye Boye, Papa Diop, Martin Sow, Mamadou Sarr, Makhouredia Gueye. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Orlando L. López, Seydina D. Saye, Farba Seck. Film editing: Florence Eymon. Music: Samba Diabare Samb.

Xala is a sharp-edged, often very funny satire on the failings of postcolonial Africa, namely, the adoption of European ways to the neglect of traditional African culture. The result is a kind of impotence, which is what the title means, and which manifests itself not only in the sexual dysfunction experienced by El Hadj Aboucader Beye (Thierno Leye) on the night of his wedding to his third wife but also in the dysfunctional business and political world to which El Hadj belongs. His first wife, Adja (Seune Samb), and his second, Oumi (Younouss Seye), are very much alive and present to kibitz at the wedding reception. Adja sticks to traditional garb, while Oumi adopts European dress, so they represent two polarities in El Hadj's life and culture. He also has a daughter by Adja, Rama (Myriam Niang), who is sharply critical of his Westernized ways: When he offers her a glass of water and pours it from an Evian bottle, she snaps that she doesn't drink imported water. (Evian becomes another symbol of his European ways, when we see his chauffeur use a bottle of it to wash El Hadj's Mercedes and another to fill up the radiator.) Rama also refuses to speak anything but Wolof to El Hadj, even though he replies in French. The film deals largely with El Hadj's attempts to cure his sexual dysfunction, which leads him eventually to the holy man of his chauffeur's village, who temporarily cures him, but then exacts a revenge when El Hadj's check bounces, teaching him a lesson about ignoring the people of his country while kowtowing to the Europeans. Xala is a keenly observant movie, sometimes to the point of discomfort, and though its two-hour run time is a little slackly paced and the acting sometimes not all you could wish, it makes its point effectively.

Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match

Cast: Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Buster Phelps. Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard, Kubec Glasmon, John Bright. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ray Curtiss.

This crisply directed and tightly edited Warner Bros. crime movie is almost too snugly put together. It runs for only a little over an hour and still manages to tell a pretty complex story that spans the years from 1919 to 1932 in the lives of three women as they grow from schoolgirls to adults. The "bad girl," Mary Keaton, is first played by Virginia Davis as a tomboy showing off her black bloomers on the monkey bars. She barely graduates from elementary school, then spends time in a reformatory before taking a job as a show girl, played by Joan Blondell. The "rich girl," Vivian Revere, played by Anne Shirley under her first screen name, Dawn O'Day, is a bit of a flirt, who confides in the boys that her bloomers are pink, but doesn't show them off. She grows up to be played by Ann Dvorak as a bored socialite married to Robert Kirkwood (Warren William) with whom she has an adorable (read: cloyingly cute) child (Buster Phelps), but runs off with a ne'er-do-well played by Lyle Talbot, who gets in trouble with the mob, headed by Ace (Edward Arnold) and his enforcer, Harve (Humphrey Bogart). The "smart girl," Ruth Westcott, starts out as the class valedictorian (Betty Carse) and goes to business school. Her story, even though she's played by Bette Davis, is the least interesting of the three. In fact, she seems to be there only to make it possible for the three women to light their cigarettes on one match, setting off the supposed curse on the third to catch the flame, who happens to be Mary. The result is that Dvorak, though her career never took off like that of Blondell or Davis, gets the juiciest part in the film and makes the most of it. Of course, Warners didn't know that Davis would become its biggest star, but anyone who decides to watch Three on a Match thinking it's a "Bette Davis movie" is going to be disappointed. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching formative moments in the careers of stars like Davis -- or for that matter, Bogart, in one of his first gangster roles.

Invention for Destruction (Karel Zeman, 1958)

Cast: Lubor Tokos, Arnost Navrátil, Miroslav Holub, Frantisek Siégr, Václav Kyzlink, Jana Zatloukalová. Screenplay: Frantisek Hrubín, Milan Vácha, Karel Zeman, based on a novel by Jules Verne. Cinematography: Antonín Horák, Bohuslav Pikhart, Jirí Tarantik. Production design: Karel Zeman. Costume design: Karel Postrehovsky. Film editing: Zdenek Stehlík. Music: Zdenek Liska.

Where has this wonderful film been all my life? Invention for Destruction (aka The Deadly Invention and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne) is catnip to a lover of Victorian book illustration like me, with its miraculous transformation of old line engravings into sets and costumes as well as its astonishing blend of animation with live action. It makes other attempts to bring the steampunk aesthetic and the adventures in the books of Jules Verne, including such well-known movies as the Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1958) and the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954), look phony -- they look like they were made in the 1950s, whereas the world of Karel Zeman's film looks authentically late 19th-century. This is the real thing: Verne, and just as importantly, his illustrator Léon Benett, brought to life with both respect and whimsy. The latter quality, which gives us some fantastic machinery and even some roller-skating camels, is just as important as the first. Zeman takes Verne more seriously than his great predecessor Georges Méliès did in his pioneering evocations of the Vernesque future, but not as seriously as Hollywood did, preferring occasional tongue-in-cheek renditions of the author's visions. Still, Invention for Destruction, based loosely on Verne's 1896 novel Facing the Flag, has serious undertones in its treatment of the titular invention, a clear analogue of Einstein's investigation into the potential of atomic energy and the terrifying weapons that evolved from it. I'm just astonished that it has taken almost a lifetime of movie-watching for me to get around to discovering this amazing film.