WHAT ARE WE WATCHING ON TV? JANUARY 2023

What are you watching in January?

I watched Fatherhood 2021 starring Kevin Hart. Hart's character has to raise his daughter after his wife dies. What a sweet film! Have some Kleenex available!

There was a pictorial on the photographer Tony Vaccaro in the Guardian yesterday; he died 12/28/2022 at the age of 100. He was celebrated as a war photographer though the Guardian showed mostly the pictures he took in civilian life, where he did a lot of fashion. HBO did a documentary on him in 2016 but it’s no longer available via HBO, but I was able to watch it on Tubi, with commercials. Underfire: the untold story of Pfc. Tony Vaccaro. 1 hr. 19 min. Director, Max Lewcowicz. Writers, Max Lewcowicz & Valerie Thomas. The documentary limits its focus to his work in WWII. Vaccaro was born in the U.S., orphaned as a child, brought up by an abusive uncle in Italy, returned to the U.S. & went to high school where he became a track star & got interested in photography (he claims he asked the shop owner for a camera to photograph people in secret). He was immediately drafted out of high school; he tried to join the Army Signal Corps, but was rejected as being too young. Only Signal Corps members were allowed to photograph, so Vaccaro had to conceal his camera during the earlier part of his war. This was an advantage, retrospectively, since the Signal Corps cameras were bulky, and Vaccaro was able to take shots quickly with his smaller (but rugged) camera. The pictures he took were amazing, taken during his active service as a G.I. from Normandy to just outside of Berlin, ca. 275 days in the European theater. He tells of developing some of his pictures using the chemicals from an abandoned camera shop in a deserted village. He was later allowed to take his pictures openly, as long as he gave priority to combat; he was never an official photographer for the army, though he worked for the army newspaper Stars & Stripes after the war. Suffering from PTSD, he kept the thousands of his photos in a box, and, unwilling to revisit his experiences, they weren’t available for 50 years. His celebrated pictures include the moment one of his comrades was killed by shrapnel during an artillery bombardment in the Hürtgen Forest, the snow-covered corpse of one of his friends after a massacre during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, a G.I. kissing a 2 year old while two women from a liberated village are dancing in the background, the body of a raped collaborator lying in a ditch, the burnt, still living body of a German tanker. He talks about how men die in combat, not throwing up their arms like in the movies, but simply collapsing, their bodies accepting gravity. For continuity, the pictures are introduced by Signal Corps motion pictures, scenes from Vaccaro at the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, interviews with Vaccaro as well as with professional combat photographers from Vietnam & Afghanistan & an archivist of military photography. If you’ve seen Band of Brothers it’s interesting to hear the voice of someone who experienced much of what it depicted, or tried to, since it appears it was much much worse. As a footnote, Vaccaro recovered enough from his brutal upbringing & the war to have a respected career in commercial photography (he never did any war assignments), and had a family.

FYI, here's the link to the Guardian pictorial: Veteran photographer Tony Vaccaro dies aged 100 – a life in pictures. Guardian isn't paywalled, but the NYT obituary might be: Richard Goldstein. NYT, 12/30/2022: Tony Vaccaro, 100, Dies; Photographed War From a Soldier’s Perspective.

Libeled Lady (1936) I re-watched last week, since Criterion Channel was rotating it off at the end of December (I rented it on VHS years ago, & I’ve probably seen it a time or two on TCM). If you can access HBOMax, it’s still on their TCM hub, though. And, given, its age & value, it may well be available at a well-stocked public library. Can’t miss MGM production when it stars Myrna Loy, William Powell, Jean Harlow, & Spencer Tracy, who do the “stage encore” at the movie’s opening; MGM knew what it had. Also with Walter Connolly as Myrna’s dad, a tycoon and fishing fanatic. If you like Loy-Powell in any of the Thin Man series (TCM was doing a retro New Year’s Eve) don’t overlook this one. I haven’t seen Jean Harlow in many films, but she’s very good in this one as Tracy’s fiancée who never fulfills her wish to be a bride (or his bride, anyway). Tracy postpones his wedding to attend to a crisis at his newspaper, it's being sued into potential bankruptcy by heiress Connie Allenbury (Loy) for misreporting her role in an adultery scandal. Tracy’s solution is to get her involved in a “real” scandal actually created by the newspaper, using one of his former reporters, Bill Chandler (Powell). In Tracy’s scenario, a PI will photograph Miss Allenbury in a compromising situation with a married man, i.e. Chandler. Chandler is a bachelor, but – no problem, he can marry Gladys (Harlow, Tracy’s fiancée) – then get a divorce after Connie Allenbury settles with the paper in exchange for quashing the PI’s staged findings. Chandler agrees to the scam, but the writers turn up the screws by having Chandler fall in love with Allenbury (& she him), pass himself off as a fellow fishing fanatic (allowing him to cast a hook in Harlow’s behind & nearly drown himself in a trout stream), & make love to Gladys when she threatens to leave her new husband, i.e. Chandler. Interestingly, there is not a resolution as such, the final scene has everyone shouting at everyone else, with Daddy Allenbury heard above it all completely confused.

Netflix. Gudetama: an eggcellent adventure (2022) 10 episodes, ca. 10 min each, though #10 is 16 min. 3D animation. I watched this Jan. 3 to stay awake for a medical appointment, and found it surprisingly fun. It’s Japanese, & once again, I urge you to watch it in the original language with subtitles; hard to get a hook into the culture unless you hear it as she is spoke. Opens with a group of eggs in a restaurant kitchen, waiting to be used, then an egg cracking open spontaneously with its slimy contents pulled by gravity hither & thither. Then the yoke sprouts a mouth & eyes even as it is surrounded by its gelatinous “white” (if it had been cooked, but it stays raw), this is Gudetama (Shunsuke Takeuchi). He is quickly joined by the fruits of a fertilized egg, i.e., a chick (Seiran Fukushima). The little chick (her lower parts are modestly covered by the lower half of her brown egg shell – while on the other hand much is made of Gudetama’s bulbous butt) is Shakipiyo (Seiran Fukushima). She is completely adorable (maybe computer tweaked to make her sound more child-like) & the series should be named after her. The chick is governed by an instinct to find her mother, though at first she imprints on Gudetama, then a picture of a farmer, as well as a live chef. She enlists Gudetama on a quest to find their mother (she believes they originated from the same hen) & plops him into a soft-boiled egg container with wheels as they explore the kitchen, then the public area, of a sushi bar, where the day’s appetizers are continuously added to or removed from a conveyor belt. There is a wonderful sequence where Gudetama is plated as an appetizer in front of a pair of sushi topped with salmon roe, where, in chorus, the eggs (with little eyes and mouths) explain their origin in the belly of a Bering Sea salmon caught in a crab net, while a wistful tiny omlette lashed to a slab of rice with a strip of nori laments the fact that he never seems to be selected. There is a noir episode with, of course, a hard-boiled egg as a guide. One reviewer on IMDB, presumably a vegan, thought it was horror movie unsuitable for children, & one could imagine a film about talking eggs might have some political implications in some parts of the world. But what I admired is an innocence about the storytelling that is so completely different from the Disney method. By the way, the 10 episode has Shakipiyo waddling off to parts unknown, still in search of her mother, so there might be a season 2.

I loved Libeled Lady and I would watch any Jean Harlow or William Powell film!

The Owners (2020)
Comedy, Crime, Horror
"A group of friends think they've found an easy score at an empty house with a safe full of cash, but when the elderly owners arrive home things begin to go awry." From IMdB

Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones stars in this film. I liked the twist that comes in the film.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) 2 hr. & 10 min. Director Joseph Kosinski. Screenplay, Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr., story by Peter Craig, who also created the characters in the first Top Gun. Cinematography, Claudio Miranda. Film Editing Eddie Hamilton. Watched this on Epix, a channel that’s part of my cable package. Usually films on Epix are also on Amazon Prime. Checked this afternoon but that doesn’t appear to be the case. I haven’t seen the first TG (1986), so most of the backstory & nostalgia moves had no resonance for me. In any case, I found the opening 2/3ds of the film to be pretty blah & implausible to boot. Tom Cruise is Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, still a Captain after all these years, because he’s a … maverick, mostly because he likes to take unauthorized flights on really expensive naval aircraft, though his hotwiring abilities are used to good advantage in the final third, which is some good action stuff. Interestingly, Cruise’s name is not listed in the opening credits, but he is definitely the center of the picture, riding his motorcycle, hair flying, sailing with his ex-girlfriend & bar-owner Penny (Jennifer Connelly), playing football on the beach with his pilots. His name does come up in the closing credits, of course. His pilots have a lot of swagger, like Division 1 Big Men (one woman amongst them) On Campus, with everyone having a seemingly mandatory Animal House type nickname. Maverick is shanghaied to train the navy’s top pilots to destroy a cache of uranium to be used by an unnamed enemy (somehow equipped with better weapons technology including planes than the U.S. – but better than American personnel??! – we think not) to create something nefarious. Being a maverick, Maverick would not be his best choice to train a team, but he grits his teeth & does his duty until the screenwriters free him from the task, and he gets to lead one of two F-18 groups (one to target & open a seam, the other to bomb), flying at near ground level through a twisting valley under the nose of batteries of surface to air missiles, escaping by flying up a mountain at speeds that exert tremendous G-force in order to escape avenging enemy fighters in order to get back to their aircraft carrier. The whole attack and escape is edge of your seat; probably you can skip the rest. Only anonymous enemy badguys die (except Maverick’s admiral buddy, Iceman, but it’s natural causes & he gets a nice but brief military funeral), so it’s a feelgooder.

HBO or HBOMax: The Menu (2022) 1 hr. 47 min. Director, Mark Mylod. Screenplay, Seth Reiss, Will Tracy. Cinematography, Peter Deming. Film editing, Christopher Tellefsen. This reminded me of Knives Out or Glass Onion, but with a tad more nihilism. Kind of like the HBO series The White Lotus, though maybe less self-regarding. Centers around celebrity chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) who stages a meal to end all meals at the Hawthorne, a restaurant on his private island. Motivation for all the ruckus seems to be the chef is bored & he doesn’t like his rich clients, and somehow gets his extensive staff to go along with his shenanigans, though no explanation of their motivation(s) is/are given. One of them (Christina Brucato) gets to stab him in the thigh as a Me Too gesture. Reactions to the various courses of his high end menu (lots of foamy foodie satire) drawn out of the ensemble cast, including Anya Taylor Joy (playing a young woman whose name & origin change as the story unfolds) & her foodie boyfriend Nicholas Hoult (whose food focus makes him over the top oblivious to what everyone else can see is going on), Janet McTeer (who must get comeuppance for her nasty reviews, though she’s been positive about Slowik & the Hawthorne), John Leguizamo, an actor on the downside of his career with his assistant Aimee Carrero (non-scholarship Brown graduate), Reed Birney & Judith Light as a couple who have eaten at the restaurant 11 times & can’t remember what they ate (for which Slowik reserves his special wrath), a trio of crooked entrepreneurs, Slowik’s drunken mom. The chef’s hatchet woman/maître d’ is Elsa (Hong Chau). No one is poisoned, but other things occur. Food looks nasty, but there are cheeseburgers for balance. But I don’t like cheeseburgers (or the Americana of Top Guns), & don’t see the fine distinction with s’mores, which also have a role at the conclusion. The film overall I found somewhat like White Lotus, not as smart as it wants to be.

Just loving the French Series of comedy drama Cheyenne and Lola up to episode 6.

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) - Delightful film about a 1950's cleaning lady who decides to travel to Paris and decides to buy herself a couture by Dior.

A double feature of good movies today:

CAUSEWAY (streaming at Apple+) stars Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry. She's an Afghan vet, recently returned home after a traumatic brain injury and not coping very well with being back in her mother's home; he's a local auto mechanic dealing with physical and emotional trauma of his own. Not a love story, but a story of two people finding strength and acceptance in friendship. Fine performances, especially from Henry; the supporting cast includes excellent character actors Linda Emond, Jayne Houdyshell, and Stephen McKinley Henderson. And there's a nice touch of inclusion when one minor character is deaf for no particular reason other than that some people are.

CATHERINE CALLED BIRDY (streaming at Amazon), adapted by Lena Dunham from Karen Cushman's classic YA novel, is the story of Catherine, who is a 14-year-old girl in the late 13th century. She's beginning to understand that she has been given an unusual amount of freedom for a girl of her era, and is struggling to accept that she will mostly lose that freedom when she marries. And that marriage appears to be just around the corner; her father is in financial trouble, and his best shot for rescue is to marry his daughter off to a wealthy lord. Bella Ramsey, who was 17 when the movie was filmed, is a delight in the title role, and it's going to be great fun to follow her career. The rest of the characters are a bit thin, but a solid cast brings more to them than Dunham's script does; kudos in particular to Andrew Scott as the desperate father, Joe Alwyn as Catherine's beloved uncle, and Sophie Okonedo as a wealthy widow who marries into the family.