The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947)

From roughly 1940-1944 writer/director Preston Sturges had an almost unheard of period of creative cinematic output. Classic screwball comedy's with Sturges unique flavor just kept pouring out of him, The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, all classics, and the occasional lesser but still good film like Hail the Conquering Hero and Christmas in July made Preston about the safest bet in the industry. This prompted Millionaire Howard Hughes to put in with Sturges in 1944 and launch their own studio, California Pictures. At first they had a number of projects in percolation but only one was ever released, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, a box office underperformer that all but spelled the end of Sturges career (he would release one more significant film, Unfaithfully Yours in 1948), as well as California Pictures (Hughes would later buy and later liquidate RKO Studios).

Sturges's idea with Diddlebock was to team with an ideal of his, silent comedy legend Harold Lloyd, who he managed to coax out of retirement. The film even begins with a slightly altered, sound added version of the famed 'football match sequence' from Lloyd's class 1925 film The Freshman, for which Diddlebock serves as a kind of sequel. After winning the football match Lloyd is hired by a university alum to serve as an accountant for his advertising firm, Lloyd spends the next 20 plus years wasting away at that job until his boss fires him for lack of initiative. Diddlebock, a life time tea-totaler then proceeds to get drunk, become very lucky at betting on horse races, and then spend that money on a failing circus. When Harold comes out of his drunken stupor he has no memory of what he's done with the last several days and comedy ensues.

Sturges was known for his witty dialogue which makes a teaming with Lloyd seem kind of odd, but the silent screen legend does a pretty good job delivering Prestons words, he also gets to play to his old strengths, particularly with a  prolonged sequence involving a lion loosed on the ledge of a New York City high-rise. The film however is an uneven one, alternating between long talkie bits, the setups seem to take way to long (which is perhaps way Hughes would later cut 13 minutes from the film an re-release it in 1950 as Mad Wednesday), and the physical comedy bits aren't what they would have been had Lloyd made them at the top of his game, and in fact what physical comedy there is in the film is highly derivative of stuff he'd already done. So the two creative minds feel like they are jockeying for control of the picture which ends up not a bad movie per say, but not a great one, more on par with Christmas in July then with The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. The film does boast a great 'topper' however and is about worth seeing for that alone. Interesting as a creative artifact, an experiment that didn't quite work out as imaged, likely because the parties involved seem to have been imagining different things. **1/2

Sharknado (2013) Rifftrax Live (2014)

Every once in a while a film comes along that has just the right horrible gimmick for its time, whose tongue-in-check awfulness the public finds they can enthusiastically embrace, and which thusly permeates the zeitgeist, Sharknado is one such movie. It's a horrible movie, not one I'd want to sit through un-aided, and while The Nostalgia Critic and Cinema Snob did a good job at skewering this film, I felt there was more humorous potential to be minded from it. That and its been stressful at work lately so I just felt like watching something really stupid. Rifftrax, a company/service put together by MST3K alums provides snarky audio commentary on feature films, and in this case did a live show simulcast to theaters across the company, though what I actually watched was a rebroadcast of this live show. I can't rate this, either the commentary or the movie on a traditional scale, suffice it to say both are juvenile but entertaining. At the broadcast they mentioned that the Rifftrax crew were going to do another live skewering, this time of the God-awful 1998 American version of Godzilla, and I'll probably pay to see this. In short Sharknado is awful, but awful humor makes it more bearable.

Shaft (1971)

The mother of the blacksplotation genera, for me this movie was clocked in an aura of retro-camp and nitchieness, but upon seeing it I find that it works well as a movie in its own right, even divorced from its historical context and place in cinema history, its just a good movie. The story is based on a detective novel by Ernest Tidyman which I find that I am now mildly interested in reading because you get a sense from the movie that there is more to the story, there are a lot of characters in the film that obviously have long history's with the character of John Shaft that are merely hinted at, and I would be curious to learn more about those. The performances throughout are fair but not polished, these are mostly amateurs, and you can further tell that the film was shot on something of a tight budget because of its lack of sets, which I think only enhances the picture in that it forces it to rely on location shooting and early 1970's New York City is just a fascinatingly gritty place to look at. Historically important and not half bad besides. ***

Noah (2014)

Perhaps the weirdest combination of director and biblical storyline since Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger then Life) directed King of Kings in the early 1960's. Director Darren Aronofsky is best known for such dark, obsessive, even sexual films as The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Black Swan, and while for me his films don't always work, I at least know they are going to be interesting, and that was what I was expecting from Aronofsky's Noah, an interesting failure, but it turned out to be surprisingly good. In fact I'd go so far as to say that Noah is one of the better Biblical epics ever made, and that success is due in large part to the same thing that drove the success of Ray's King of Kings, an outsiders ethos and not being too married to the text. Aronofsky is very much not married to the text in a way that could be quite frustrating to those Christian audience members expecting to see a faithful rendering of the age old story, in board outline you have that here, but the director makes a lot of side trips and digressions, and even gives the story a different moral, an ecological one. To me there is nothing wrong with this because the director is dealing with mythos, a flexible thing which needs to change some to meet the needs of the time in which the story is being told, not a ridged inerrant Bible story for fundamentalists.

The story of Noah is in fact probably my least favorite Bible story, its pretty morally disgusting and Aronofsky doesn't shy away form this aspect of the tale, his Noah's (played by an earthy Russell Crowe) is a difficult, obsessive and often unlikable fellow (as any Aronofsky protagonist should be) but in comparison to the wider pre-apocalyptic world he inhabits, mostly better then the alternative, i.e. Ray Winstone's evil king Tubal-cain. The ash gray world of the film and its small noble band struggling against the digressed remnants of humanity around them reminded me a lot of the film version of The Road, ironically this biblical pictures closest cousin. The story here is dark, depressing, and often defeatist, but has moments of an ambiguous hope. Jennifer Connelly still has that chemistry with Crowe she memorably had in A Beautiful Mind nearly a decade and a half ago, Emma Watson's cute, and Anthony Hopkins has a great, hammy, almost cameo part as Methuselah. A really different take on the old story that for me reinvigorated it, a worthy experiment and one of the strangest big budget movies I've ever seen. ***1/2

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

When I first heard about this Disney animated film I thought, that's ingenious, just perfect for kids. The story centers on Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) the villain of the fictitious early 1980's video game Fix-It Felix Jr, which reminds me a bit of the actual 1980's video game Rampage, only the object here is the fix the building not to wreck-it. After years of demurring Ralph decides to visit a support group for other video game villains held after hours at the arcade where he lives. That's the big conceit of the film, video game character at an arcade interacting with each other in various games at night when the arcade is closed. Ralph at heart is a gentle man, frustrated by being cast as the villain and how the other characters in his game treat him so poorly, especially when he is essential to there continued existence in the arcade. Anyway Ralph decides that he'd rather be a hero then a villain and sneaks into a first person shooter game called Hero's Duty in order to win a medal that he plans to take back to his home game to earn the respect of the denizens of the apartment tower whose job it is for him to wreck. Ralph does get the medal but ends up in an out of control space ship that he crashes into a candy themed cart racing game called Sugar Rush, were he meats a little girl and 'glitch' named Vanellope von Schweetz  (voiced by Sarah Silverman) and it goes on from there.

Now I'd seen bits and pieces of this film before because my niece and nephews quite like it, as I suspected they would when I first heard this movie was being made. Anyway the out of order bits I'd seen didn't seem to gel that great, but there is an arc to the proceedings that now having seen the movie all the way through, works better then I would have expected it too. The film contains lots of fun video game cameos by the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and Q*bert, and the voice cast is a pretty great and corky mix including Jane Lynch, Jack McBrayer, Ed O'Neil and Mindy Kaling. All in all a satisfying outing. ***