What to Watch When You're Quarantined Weeks One & Two

Hello LWM Fans!

Like many of you, I've been wondering what I can do during this time of social distancing to keep from turning into dull boy Jack Torrance. Working from home keeps me busy, but the weekends stretch out into eternity without people to order drinks from, or Grindr hook-ups to give me now passe STDs

So I thought, "Hey! Why don't I tell people what movies I've been watching and they can add (or not add) them to their pandemic movie viewing queue." "That's a great idea, Lance!" I said- cause I've started talking to myself.

So because I'm a little bit behind- I'm rolling Weeks One and Two of Lance's Werthwhile Coronavirus Movie Diary into one post.

Enjoy... in no particular order.

Parasite (2019)

It was the big spoiler for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards, with jaws dropping everywhere for this first  foreign film Best Picture winner. I'm very fond of director Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer (2013) so I figured Parasite would give me all the Korean feels.

Nope.

This creepy mix of a "house with secrets" thriller and class warfare drama is fine. Ho is adept with visuals and the plot has plenty of twists- but Best Picture? Over Jo-Jo Rabbit (2019) or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)? Sorry. Don't get it. In a world where Fellini, Kurosawa, and Almodovar's foreign films were never even nominated for Best Picture, I don't see how this film pulled off this historical win.

Knives Out (2019)

This picture was not nominated for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards- but it should have been. Not since the trailer for Wes Anderson's latest film has there been such a cast!

Headlined by Daniel Craig and Chris Evans with expert support from Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Colette, Lakeith Stanfield, the always winning Christopher Plummer, and an un-earthed Don Johnson, the cast makes this by-the-book murder mystery an effervescent cocktail of duplicity and snide-ness. Between Craig's eyes and Evans' sweater-sheathed chest- I almost missed whodunnit.

Blonde Venus (1932)

Whenever I need a dirty elegance fix, I love to dig into my Dietrich/von Sternberg box set and relish in von Sternberg's sumptuous shadows and Dietrich's magnetic face. This time I re-watched their teaming in Blonde Venus. Dietrich is a club chanteuse shaking her money-maker to keep her radium-infused hubby (stalwart extraordinaire Herbert Marshall) alive and winds-up falling for playboy Cary Grant. I mean, who wouldn't? Dietrich drags her bonnie lad (cutie patootie Dickie Moore) from gin joint to gin joint until she does the motherly thing and returns her son to his father.

Released six months after Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus doesn't have the rich visual tapestry of that masterpiece. But watching Dietrich monkey around in the highly charged "Hot Voodoo" number is worth the price of admission.






Dark Waters (2019)

Todd Haynes is one of my favorite directors. The Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far From Heaven (2002), I'm Not There (2007), Carol (2015) are all exceptional films (not to mention his early art film Superstar- the Karen Carpenter Story told with Barbie dolls). So I was a little surprised how- well, quiet Dark Waters is. Mark Ruffalo plays an attorney who helps a cow farmer sue Dow chemical for killing all his cattle with their icky runoff. No spoiler alerts necessary- Dow did it- but will the little attorney who could make them pay for poisoning a whole nation?

Haynes is brilliant at steeping his movies in atmosphere- and Dark Waters is no exception with a sickly grey/green patina and dowdy Midwestern touches. But the tension of your typical investigative drama is not present here- leaving you wishing Victor Garber would twirl a mustache or Anne Hathaway would chew some scenery. What fascinated me most was the comparison of this film with early Haynes movie Safe (1995) where Julianne Moore's hypochondriac forces us to question the effects of our poisoned environment on our psyches.

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

I've been working through the Woody Allen films I haven't seen before they're all outlawed and Netflix sent me this much-loved entry. Allen experiments with his own persona by making Diane Keaton the neurotic weirdo he usually plays. When their elderly neighbor dies of a heart attack, Keaton (with flimsy evidence at best) concludes that she was murdered and with the help of cozy pal Alan Alda decides to track down the evidence to bring the deceased's dastardly husband to justice.

Allen works hard to bring some reason to the proceedings (and keep his wife from diddling Alda) but in the end, the joke's on us, because the paranoid neurotic is right. Some good laughs, my beloved city of Manhattan, and Angelica Huston as a sexy authoress make MMM land somewhere in the middle of my Allen film ranking.

Faithless (1932)

Tallulah Bankhead was one of the great notorious figures of American culture. Her libertine hedonism shocked and titillated, resulting in a successful stage and radio career. While the great Tallu also graced the silver screen- her impact there was much less- well, impactful. Her gravel-filled voice and grand, theatrical gestures were overpowering on the screen, but there were a couple cinematic gems where you can see what made her a one-of-a-kind sensation.

Faithless features Bankhead as a spoiled heiress who has the Depression era lesson that "money isn't everything" bludgeoned into her well-coiffed head. The Pre-Code twist is daring, even for today- and hearing her intone, "Sausages! Sausages!! Sausages!!!" makes the creaky morality tale palatable.

So that's what I watched. What movies did you watch?

The Dietrich Effect

Dear LWM readers, I have a confession to make.

I've been cheating.

Yes, it's true. I have been cheating on my movie idol Joan Crawford with another movie idol. I've tried to keep my thoughts centered on Crawford's shoulders and eyebrows, but I have become obsessed with another set of eyebrows. And those pencil-thin works of art belong to none other than teutonic sex goddess, Marlene Dietrich.

Dietrich has always been one of my favorites. Her ability to draw focus by simply raising an eyebrow or blowing an erotic puff of smoke, her nonchalant accent both murdering and sensualizing her English dialogue, the distinctive angles of that camera-loving face- the Dietrich cinematic mystique is enthralling. I recently got the new box-set of her work with director Josef von Sternberg, and I've found my movie thoughts engrossed with the career of this tempestuous force of the silver screen.

The new box set contains Dietrich's earliest Hollywood product, and it's really interesting to watch how her acting style changed over time. In her first American film Morocco (1930) (The Blue Angel (1930) although shot first, wasn't released in America until after Morocco) Dietrich is still finding her way both in acting and with the English language. Legend has it that von Sternberg literally had her count moments and steps in between actions and dialogue. Her eye movements, her gestures, her dialogue- everything was planned out. Yet somehow her performance is electric with an intense freshness thanks to Dietrich's aggressively laissez faire screen presence and visible lust for that thing called movie stardom. Her musical numbers, in particular, flash and the famous tux kissing scene helped create the any-sexual persona that would dominate the rest of her career.

By the time Dietrich starred in her final film with von Sternberg, The Devil is a Woman (1935), her performance has gone from planned to crafted. She no longer has that bit of uncertainty counting beats. Every eyebrow motion and purse of the lips is part of the confetti-covered artwork that von Sternberg is making. It's beautiful to watch- but that spark of the unknown- the sexy danger of what Dietrich might do feels lost amongst the mantillas and masks. Von Sternberg's Galatea has become a statue again- an exquisite statue- but a statue nonetheless.

After Dietrich ended her artistic partnership with von Sternberg the debate heated up as to whether Dietrich needed von Sternberg, or von Sternberg needed Dietrich. The easy answer is Dietrich did just fine without von Sternberg. True she was probably never photographed as sumptuously as she was in Shanghai Express (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934), but from an acting perspective, her later works show a relaxed quality that von Sternberg's compulsively controlled direction didn't nurture. In Destry Rides Again (1939), A Foreign Affair(1948), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Touch of Evil (1958), and Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), Dietrich proved she didn't need von Sternberg to create an indelible acting performance.

Even in slighter faire like Tay Garnett's Seven Sinners (1940), Dietrich is so devil-may-care as the Sadie Thompson-esque Bijou, she brings a wickedly romantic sparkle out of the normally frontier-y John Wayne. Dietrich was the essential secret ingredient no matter who directed her.

Now if only there were a movie with Dietrich and Crawford in it...