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Reviews
The Cobweb (1955)
An enjoyably self-spoofing melodrama.
This movie is a silly melodrama and I loved every self-spoofing minute of it. Not since "Die, Mommie, Die!" have I had this much fun. In fact, I would like to see a remake of this movie with Charles Busch in the Gloria Grahame role.
The fight over who will choose the new draperies for the sanitarium is wonderful. At first, I thought there must be something else to the plot of this movie. I was absolutely delighted to discover that there isn't! Lives, a marriage, a man's professional reputation, and people's sanity all hang in the balance as the fight rages on over who will design the new curtains.
I think the curtain fight is meant as a device to demonstrate how exorcised a group of people can get over something completely trivial when their lives are otherwise so empty. It begins to make more sense when you substitute some of the faux issues of our own day for the curtain fight, like Jerry Falwell's bizarre assertion of yore that Teletubby Tinky Winky was gay. However, in the context of this movie, the central conflict is just funny.
It is hard to believe that the man who made "An American in Paris" made this movie -- which I plan to watch again, preferably with a group of fun friends.
The Black Dahlia (2006)
There's a reason there is no plot synopsis
I spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out what was going on in this movie. Which is odd, because I am a long-time film noir buff as well as an actual criminal lawyer who has worked on a fair number of actual murder cases. So I rushed to IMDb after watching this movie to help me sort it out - alas, no plot synopsis. Which makes sense - one would need to construct a Venn Diagram and a flow chart to sort out who did what to whom and why. Once we do get to the whodunit portion of the movie, it feels like a tacked-on afterthought and is completely unbelievable. They might as well have pinned the murder of "The Dahlia" on the (stuffed) dog.
However, as a work of visual art, this movie is mesmerizing. It looks like an old hand-tinted postcard. I did not see a lot of the shadowy noir visual conventions I have come to expect, but there were many shades of brown to look at. Hilary Swank, Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, and Scarlett Johansson, as well as the Dahlia herself (Mia Kirschner) were all stunning, of course. But then, so was the photographic layout based upon this movie in Vanity Fair.
This movie needed something it did not have to get past its own sepia-toned veneer - a coherent plot and better acting. Mr. Hartnett was earnestly compelling most of the time, but the real standout was Mia Kirschner, whose character, through a series of film clips, seemed convincingly tailor-made for the land of broken dreams. I guess it says something about a movie when the standout player is the corpse. First runner up is the (stuffed) dog.
This movie gets three stars because it is very pretty.
Big Trouble (2002)
Best Barry Sonnenfeld movie ever
My family and I have watched this movie time and again, and it is totally and consistently hilarious. I love Barry Sonnenfeld movies, and I think this particular one is his best, and has been unjustly overlooked. The cast is great, and every character, and there are a lot of them, is memorably wonderful, including two of the most sympathetic hit men in cinematic history, one of whom is played by the ever terrific Dennis Farina. This is also the first movie in which I ever saw Zooey Deschanel, playing a disenchanted teen, just as good here as she is in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The improbable and clever ways in which these characters' lives intersect adds to the fun. I've seen reviews complaining about the logical inconsistencies in this movie, but this is a comedy, so who cares? Stop Making Sense and enjoy.