The Importance of Being Earnest, and a few more films

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)

NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#238  [archive]
DEC. 17, 2023

Though it seems unlikely, two young women both insist that they can only love a man if he's named Ernest, so two young gents introduce themselves as such. The catch is, there's really nobody named Ernest.

"We live in an age of ideals, and my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name which inspires absolute confidence."

It's hard to imagine a stupider premise, but what playwright Oscar Wilde did with the idea is a delight of witty wordplay and amusing ridiculousness.

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

Movie adaptations often try to 'enlarge' a play, but this is filmed as a play, with no attempt to do anything but that. Being a marvelous play, it becomes a marvelous movie, stuffed with British pomposity which is then mocked relentlessly.

Filmed in glorious Technicolor, it's "a trivial comedy for serious people," with laughs all over. If, like me, you've never seen it, you're mistaken and need to repair the error of your ways forthwith.

Odd trivia: The film was adapted and directed by Anthony Asquith, who made the 1938 Pygmalion and the excellent 1951 The Browning Version. His father was H.H. Asquith, the British Home Secretary who ordered Oscar Wilde's arrest for homosexuality. Too bad Daddy was long dead before the movie.

"I am sick to death of cleverness. Everyone is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we still had a few fools left."

Oh, we still have a few.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Incubus (1966)

William Shatner plays a soldier, injured in an unspecified war, who comes to a small village where a well's water supposedly has magic powers. He's hoping the waters will cure his injuries, but two sister succubi are trying to ply their wicked ways with him.

This was written and directed by Leslie Stevens, creator of The Outer Limits, with Shatner in his last pre-Star Trek role, and cinematography by Conrad Hall, who won the Oscar for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

And it's in Esperanto.

That's a language invented by a linguist, intended as a world-wide 'second language', but it never much caught on. Nobody speaks it as a native language, and like Klingonese, mostly only nerds speak it at all.

But here's an entire movie with Captain Kirk and the cast speaking Esperanto. Reportedly, Stevens had everyone learn their lines phonetically, and he wasn't even an Esperanto speaker himself — he just wanted to make a spooky movie and thought the language sounded spooky, too.

So how's the movie? Weird, but never quite spooky, sorry. It has an arty feel, looks great, and the subtitles are refreshingly large and readable. No goose bumps, though.

The film bombed, presumably because Stevens refused to allow dubbing into English, or any other language. 

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Interstellar (2014)

I saw Interstellar on the big screen when it first came out, and remember it as a long, sometimes boring ride to a pretty good finish. Re-watching it now, it seems longer and less interesting.

It's a frustrating movie to watch. Leading man Matthew McConaughey speaks only in mumbles and whispers, while over-hyped director Christopher Nolan loves jump cuts to roaring jets or explosions or a blaring score, so it's inaudibly quiet, then uncomfortably loud, and the entire movie must be watched with a finger on the volume controls. 

That's not accidental. Nolan is an acknowledged master moviemaker, and he's also an outspoken advocate for the cinema experience. He wants you to see his movies at a theater, and if you're watching on video, I think he'd rather you didn't. Certainly, he knows all his fiddling with the sound levels means you'll also have to fiddle with the sound levels, so fuck you, Nolan.

The story is set a few generations in the future, with Earth in a desperate famine caused by pollution and climate change. McConaughey plays just plain Cooper,  a farmer who, despite the aforementioned famine, drives his pickup truck right into and over miles of ripening corn when he gets excited.

What he's excited about is some strange gravitational anomaly in his daughter's bedroom, which leads Cooper to a super-secret NASA facility, where it's revealed that he used to be a hotshot NASA pilot — why, everyone says he's the best pilot anyone's ever seen (a rather tiresome movie trope).

Of course, NASA pulls him out of retirement to command a mission to find a new planet Earthers, can migrate to, having ruined this one, but — but if you're on the crew of a mission to rescue humanity, wouldn't you be chaffed at taking orders from someone who'd been retired and farming corn for eight years? Wouldn't he be kinda rusty at NASA stuff, with eight years of technical briefings and upgrades that he'd be woefully un-informed about? 

The movie's cute robots are basically walking rectangles, very clever and well-engineered, with adjustable settings for humor and frankness. All of Interstellar's science seems to be based on science, and that's refreshing, but since there's so much science, there's a great deal of dialogue explaining it, which is sometimes less than fascinating.

There are numerous movie stars in small roles, which is often a distraction, especially since most of them have little to do and don't do it well. See Michael Caine, delivering every line as if it's the poetry of Dylan Thomas, which in two scenes it is.

The effects are IMAX-worthy, and it's clear that thousands of people gave this movie their best efforts. I was thrilled again at the ending, but jeez, it takes nearly three hours to get there. The movie would be improved if 45 minutes and several characters were chopped away entirely.

Nolan has crafted a pretty good huge-budget sci-fi extravagance for the multiplex, but at home its flaws are more apparent. And he's screwing with the volume all the way, so let me reiterate how frustrating it is, trying to watch this. 

Fuck Christopher Nolan.

Verdict: YES, in a theater. MAYBE, at home.

12/17/2023   

• • • Coming attractions • • • 

The Lawyer (1970)
Not of This Earth (1957)
The Saint in New York (1938)
Same Kind of Different as Me (2017)
The Shooting (1966)
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)
The Train (1964)
Welcome to New Orleans (2006)
Winter Soldier (1972)

... plus occasional 
schlock and surprises 

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you're missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:

Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Films for Action • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • WatchDocumentaries • or your local library. 

Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.

— — —

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Reviews are spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-warned. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

 

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