RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[M.10rda]

THE WEDDING DATE (2005):
Another romcom I agreed to watch w/ my wife - okay, mostly watch, I dipped out for a while in the middle to do chores. I've endured worse. There are several cute lines/moments that were obviously calculated in a lab and tested on human captives to elicit sappy reactions. The direction is generally glib but it does move along fairly briskly. There is some nice UK location work. Amy Adams is third-billed, either right before or right after her breakout Oscar nomination for JUNEBUG (in other words before she didn't have to accept roles in disposable romcoms). She's a blonde here though, meh.

Star Debra Messing is a redhead  and gives a performance that helps one understand how she could have a hit TV show though also how she never had much of a career in movies. The hunky gigolo she hires to be her wedding date  is played by Dermot Mulroney, who gives a performance that reminds me how he could keep getting work in movies but also reminds me of why (after 30-35 years) I still can't distinguish him from Dylan McDermott. Of course the major flaw in this movie is the premise: Why does a successful career woman who is also a beautiful fun redhead need to pay Dermot Mulroney thousands of dollars to go to a wedding with her? He's a very generic hunky guy, of which there are plenty in both the US and UK. To her credit,   Madame 10rda says Mulroney is unattractive because he has a hairlip. She has better eyesight than I do but I see no hairlip - I mean, young Joaquin Phoenix, now he had a hairlip (which I guess he's had fixed). But then again, if you were a wealthy hot woman who felt like she needed to throw her money away on a gigiolo, Joaquin Phoenix would probably be more fun to take to a wedding...    2.5/5

[M.10rda]

THE FEATHERED SERPENT (1948):
There is no feathered serpent in this movie.  But I digress. This is the only Charlie Chan movie I can remember actually watching - I figured I owed it to my man Mantan Moreland to see one of his storied performances as "Birmingham", the long-suffering valet and sidekick to the legendary sleuth, who is played of course by a white man in yellowface.     Chan is Roland Winters this time - the O.G. (I think) Chan was Warner Oland, a British-German guy who died midway through the franchise. Oland was a decent actor (in other, ethnically appropriate roles) - Winters is pretty lame. On the upside, Chan's Number One and Number Two Sons are played by actual Asians Keye Luke (from GREMLINS!) and Victor Sen Yung, who do a good job - and speak perfect English w/o an accent - but really must've felt amply compensated to put up w/ Winters' yellowface and ridiculous pigeon "Ingrish"... 

Anyway, the four detectives are literally driving through Mexico randomly, Jessica Fletcher-style, when they get sucked into a (large) murderous conspiracy involving Aztec treasure or - something. Mantan is likeable and amusing as always, though Birmingham's dialogue is less funny than "Jeff's" in the ...ZOMBIES duology. Actually Birmingham is essentially a sober voice of reason, generally merely pointing out that Chan's actions are extremely unsafe and unwise, though not actually acting "cowardly" or anything and even behaving w/ valor once or twice. Nevertheless nearly 100% of Chan's interactions with Birmingham are to tell him he's a useless fool. The same is true for much of his dialogue w/ his sons - they make reasonable observations or suggestions and he grins at them and tells them they're idiots. On the other hand, Chan is always deferential to the (many) white characters, even the inevitable villains.  From a historical/critical/sociological perspective, the entire movie comes off as hyper-racist (fake minority putting real minorities in their place in the service of the majority) but even in 1948 it's hard to see how anyone could watch this movie and not walk away thinking Charlie Chan was an enormous insufferable @$$#0l3.

Directed by William Beaudine, who made many infamously cheap and subpar movies.    2/5    An appearance by the Quetzlcoatl from Larry Cohen's 1984 flick would've livened things up significantly!

[M.10rda]

THREE'S A CROWD (1927):
Some sources claim that effete faux-French mime Harry Langdon was as big of a star as Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd in the 1920s.That may have been true for some small amount of time (I only learned of Langdon a few months ago) but those other three guys were comedy stars for years - before, during, and after the 20s, really. As soon as Langdon decided to translate whatever marquee value he had into a a career directing his own features, his star seems to have immediately (and understandably) plummeted. THREE'S A CROWD was his first effort in the directing seat, and it bombed - he followed it with THE CHASER, which bombed even worse. Although it was weird and slow and I never actually LOL'd once, there were at least recognizable gags in THE CHASER. THREE'S A CROWD is pretty much just abject sadness. 

THREE'S A CROWD is either set in Buffalo NY between January and mid-April or else Langdon shot it on Chaplin's GOLD RUSH locations. It looks like NYC at the end of Spielberg's A.I. all the time. Here Langdon plays a nigh-catatonic menial laborer living in squalor. His boss is sort of mean but then Harry is also a terrible employee. Eventually Harry finds a seemingly homeless woman freezing in the cold and takes her in. She's pregnant and soon gives birth. At last Harry has a reason to live! But then the woman's jerkface husband shows up. The ending to THREE'S A CROWD couldn't be more bleak.

Maybe Langdon was going for Chaplinesque pathos here, but the hypergesticulative/cartoonish Little Tramp was somehow still amusing even when he was suffering. There is NO humor in THREE'S A CROWD, barring a weird motif where Langdon keeps falling through a trapdoor in the middle of his apartment, which is absurdly built out of the side of the warehouse, so Langdon will dangle about 50 feet in the air above a dumpster, which actually is more bizarre and scary than funny. There are some other moments of truly nightmarish imagery, plus its unflinching depiction of dysfunction and alienation against a backdrop of urban blight made me think of ERASERHEAD more than anything else. Apparently Langdon went through a bad divorce around the time he made THREE'S A CROWD and THE CHASER, and the bitterness and depression is overpowering.   

2/5    One might also say that David Lynch's Philadelphia-and-fatherhood-fueled bitterness and depression is overpowering in ERASERHEAD - but ERASERHEAD also has a handful of the funniest jokes in film history. Lynch was a funnier comedian than Langdon!