Fool me once, W.C. Fields, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It goes to show that in my Rapid Response to “It’s a Gift” just how little I knew about Fields or his movies. Roger Ebert’s Great Movies piece of “The Bank Dick” informs that you don’t have to be familiar with Fields’s movies to be considered a movie buff, and yet if you have never come across him, you’re hardly a movie lover at all.
Ebert describes him as a man who seemed to be drunk at all times, whose louse behavior was par for the course, and whose movies were not especially good, but whose best moments were spread across numerous features and shorts. His best known feature, “The Bank Dick,” made eight years after “It’s a Gift,” shows just how little Fields’s formula had evolved in that time. And to watch the two films in close succession, you begin to develop an affinity for their patterns and their sillier shared qualities.
That doesn’t mean I exactly enjoyed “The Bank Dick.” It’s perhaps even more formless of a story than “It’s a Gift,” and yet taken together it’s much easier to respect the work Fields is doing and the effort that’s gone into making these films, as dumb as they are. Continue reading “The Bank Dick (1940)”
Derek Cianfrance’s films have big emotions, sprawling, slow burn narratives and are steeped in conflict, romance, melodrama and more. He takes intimate stories, like a deteriorating marriage in “
It’s fitting that “Sully,” the latest film by Clint Eastwood about the “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, has been released on the weekend of 9/11’s 15th Anniversary. The worst happened that day, and we’re lucky to have first responders to celebrate this weekend. But what Sully experiences in Eastwood’s film casts doubt over whether he’s a hero at all, or whether he or all the other “heroes” could’ve done more to save others.
In Mark Harris’s book “Five Came Back,” Harris chronicles director William Wyler’s thoughts as he grappled with making “The Best Years of Our Lives.” He talks about his decision to cast the non-actor and real-life amputee Harold Russell as Homer, a man who lost his hands not in the war but during training. In making that choice, Wyler said he was dedicated to honesty and authenticity. He looked at thousands of veterans returning home to watch his movie, and he knew anything that didn’t ring completely true to their experience would fall flat.
To look at the 13-year-old Appachey is to think the worst about him. He’s a sullen, pudgy kid with an attitude toward his mom and perhaps a vendetta toward life as he aimlessly breaks ice in an abandoned lot. Even his name, a misspelled pronunciation of a Native American tribe, just makes you wonder about this kid and his family. When we first meet him in the documentary “Rich Hill,” we see him light a cigarette in an oddly placed toaster in the middle of his house’s foyer. Then he explains how his father walked out on him when he was 6 and never came back.
The salt of the Earth genius of David Mackenzie’s “Hell or High Water” is that it takes this Robin Hood story of justice for the working family over the bankers and the system and makes it purely Texas. Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay (“Sicario”) sees debt billboards mocking our heroes from every highway and has political, financial commentary carefully weaved in among heist dialogue, brotherly joshing and casually offensive and racist quips. It’s so steeped in Southern values and is one of the most richly American movies of the year.
The comedies of W.C. Fields have not aged well, but there’s a clear dark side upon watching them today. I can imagine a version of this film in which none of the incompetence, prat fall humor and family comedy would be played for laughs and instead as a dark satire of a depressed, miserable nuclear family.
In the press, Anthony Weiner’s real failing was not just being the butt of a sex scandal or an obviously smutty pun, but for a failure of trust. He had gotten caught sending sexually explicit photos to other women, resigned from Congress, apologized, and then got caught again. Lawrence O’Donnell asked him flat out on MSNBC, “What’s wrong with you?” He had shown repeated acts of poor judgment, and his combative presence in the media and with the public belied that of a man who could not control himself.
Ricky Baker is a bad egg. That’s the way his Child Services agent Paula describes him. He burns stuff, steals stuff, kicks stuff. And that little line says a lot about just how little the world actually thinks of him. He’s a big kid, round and pudgy with dark skin, yet wearing a big red hat underneath an even more oversized white hoodie covered in decals of diamonds and Illuminati pyramids. If all you think of Ricky is that he’s a bad egg, then you won’t see the quirky personality this outfit alone suggests; you’ll just see a punk kid and wannabe gangster destined for nothing.