This indeed aint no Mudd Club or CBGB; by the time Talking Heads had reached this point in their career, they were way beyond those trifling spaces. Stop Making Sense found director Jonathan Demme at a bit of a low ebb after the nightmarish making of Swing Shift, and found the band finally having an actual hit record for the first time; combine both forces and this is what you get. Demme makes a great and varied film out of four nights of performances at the Pantages Theatre, and the band gives him plenty to work with. Need I say much more? It’s them at their peak, pretty much, on what actually wound up being their last tour, it’s great and you don’t need me to sell it much more. I just really want to draw attention to this other poster for the film. Normally I try and illustrate these posts with the proper original poster where I can (there’s a couple of instances where I couldn’t do so), but there was no way I couldn’t not also use this astounding creation by Ghanaian poster artist Nana Agyq. I don’t know how a bit of City of the Living Dead made it onto here, but let’s be glad that it does:
So Indicator in the UK released a couple of very early Mexican horror films on blu-ray… I watched the first of those (La Llorona from 1933) a couple of years ago and finally struck the other off the list tonight. The earlier film is somewhat handicapped by existing only in fairly shitty condition (3rd or 4th generation 16mm print; mind you, for decades it wasn’t thought to exist at all, so better than nothing), and it appears Phantom here only circulated in similar condition for ages… fortunately, this one was restorable from the original negative, which is good cos I think this would’ve been even harder going in an inferior print. So, a love triangle—two men and the wife of one of the latter—get lost in a forest on a night-time walk, but a mysterious passing stranger leads rhem to a nearby monastery where they can take shelter for the night. Against the husband’s better judgement, they follow him, but the monastery (untouched by time, not to mention modern dentistry) is not entirely what it seems, and as the night goes on it looks like history may be about to horribly repeat. The true nature of the monastery is telegraphed about halfway through, but the characters are too dense to fully realise this, and the characters being irritating is one thing that got in the way of me fully enjoying this (the leaden pacing being the other main issue, 85 minutes of this really is about 20 if not 30 too many). I actually will give it points, though, for not fully explaining everything, I think keeping some details obscure actually works for it, and the stunning location does a lot of heavy lifting… the film was shot in an actual monastery, so the film at least has atmosphere to spare and often looks quite remarkable, which makes up for its other shortcomings.
Up for comedy again tonight. I actually first saw this on the big screen as part of a Cinematheque double bill… can’t remember now what the other film was, but I remember loving this, and I loved it again tonight. I haven’t always been convinced by what I’ve seen of the boys’ features so far (possibly they were better suited to shorts), but this one works for me. Fairly simple plot again, with Stan & Ollie making their way through the old West in search of a young lady for whom they have a special package, namely, the deed to a gold mine she’s inherited. Of course, because they’re Stan and Ollie, they can’t not get this perfectly easy task terribly wrong, which leaves them with the problem of getting it back and safely delivered into the right hands. This is a great showcase for James Finlayson, L&H’s most important third wheel, but obviously Stan & Ollie themselves are the top draw here (it has to be said, Rosina Lawrence is not exactly well used as the good girl), and the film features some of the funniest comedy sequences I’ve seen in any film. Stan & Ollie’s dance to “Commence the Dancing”. “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine”, possibly the most implausible 1970s pop hit ever (only kept from the top of the UK charts by “Bohemian Rhapsody”). Stan just losing his shit during the tickling scene (his hilarity face is one of the greatest things in cinema). The hat-eating business. The attempted break-in where their mule inadvertently rises to the upper floor of the saloon. All this within a fairly tight 64 minutes, so it doesn’t exactly slack off much. Like I said, it doesn’t use Rosina Lawrence well, I think her character could’ve done more than she actually does, but any quibbles I have with the film like that are pretty much overcome by how good the thing is on the whole. I think this may be the first time I’ve seen this since that Cinemathque screening, and I am as pleased tonight as I was then.
Oh, I needed this tonight. There has been some discourse about the new Naked Gun with Liam Neeson that currently appears to be coming out in August; I saw the first trailer for it the other day and am… well, not entirely convinced. I wasn’t sure that it felt like a “Naked Gun movie”, if you know what I mean, but the concluding joke about OJ Simpson was gold and you can’t always take a trailer as being necessarily indicative of the whole film (which I will likely wind up seeing at some point)… and, to be sure, the original film doesn’t exactly feel like Police Squad!, the TV series that inspired it, either. It strikes me now that it’s actually kind of like how the Monty Python movies relate to the Python TV series, in that both clearly relished the opportunity to not only spend a ton of extra money but also to do jokes that were rather more crass than they could’ve gotten away with on TV in those days (“sexual assault with a concrete DILDO!”)… In any case, the new film inspired me to dig out the old one, which I haven’t seen in years. I don’t have the same relationship with the film as I do the series, in that I kept finding new jokes the series even twenty years after first watching it; the film doesn’t really offer me new discoveries like that. But on this rewatch I think I did get a new sense of just how immaculate the comic timing is throughout the film (something like “Drebin!” “Frank!” “You’re both right” is so much funnier than it seems on paper because of how Ricardo Montalban, Priscilla Presley and Leslie Nielsen all deliver it), and just how well cast all the characters are. I still think it runs out of puff a bit in the baseball game climax, and some of the period references are very dated, but for the most part what an absolute delight The Naked Gun still is. The new version is going to have a hard time living up to it.
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