NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL
#413
Insignificance (1985)
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005)
Integration Report 1 (1960)
HyperNormalisation (2016)
Tugboat Annie (1933)
every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with some anti-alphabetical cheats)
Insignificance (1985)
“Have you ever noticed that ‘what the hell’ is always the right decision to make?”
I’d heard about this movie when it came out, but it sounded so empty and calculated, I never saw it, never wanted to see it, never even read a review. Turns out it’s from Nicolas Roeg, which raises my interest from nothing to something, so here goes:
Marilyn Monroe is filming her famous and kinda icky upskirt scene for The Seven Year Itch. Her husband, Joe DiMaggio, is at the shoot, seething a little, and they’re on the outs about it. A famous stranger, Albert Einstein, is in a hotel room overlooking the shoot, and Senator Joseph McCarthy visits to demand that Einstein testify and name names the next morning.
These four characters bounce around off each other, and maybe the best part is when Marilyn explains the Theory of Relativity to Einstein. For fear of lawsuits, though, the four main characters aren’t named.
Michael Emil as “The Professor” is terrific. Gary Busey as “The Ballplayer” is a reminder that for all his wackiness, the dude could turn in a performance. Tony Curtis as “The Senator” is adequately slimy. And Theresa Russell as “The Movie Star” gets the voice all wrong, but she’s otherwise OK. It’s the first time I’ve seen Russell in a movie where her acting didn’t wow me.
It’s a successful minor league play, turned into a fair to middlin’ minor league movie.
Verdict: MAYBE.
♦ ♦ ♦
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005)
13 minutes of light and sound appropriated from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, then filtered to black and white, scratched and chopped and overlaid against other clips. A classic movie made into a moving collage — it’s art! And like a lot of art, I don’t understand it.
Verdict: MAYBE.
♦ ♦ ♦
Integration Report 1 (1960)
This is a 21-minute report card on painful race relations in America, in 1960.
Montgomery AL: All-white cops and all-white citizens stand around while blacks prepare to March for desegregated lunch counters. Cops help firefighters unfurl several hoses, but there’s not going to be a fire. A cop walking by shoves two older black man, for no apparent reason.
Monroe NC: A local NAACP official, Robert Williams, has white folks up in arms because he’s said, “Sometimes, violence must be met with violence.” For the camera, he explains why he said it, and of course, he’s right.
Brooklyn NY: A lawyer delivers a hell of a speech about a black man shot to death by cops, while he was already in custody, after being arrested for littering.
On and on, a few minutes for each location. It’s awful that blacks had to fight so long to be treated simply as humans, worse knowing that their battle will apparently never end.
Directed by Madeline Anderson, and the internet says this was the first documentary directed by a black woman. I’m guessing the number 1 in the title means it was intended as the first in a series, but I’ve been unable to find any more.
Verdict: BIG YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
HyperNormalisation (2016)
Everything the media and government tells you is suspect — probably a lie, and if not, certainly shaded for the advantage of the rich and powerful. That’s the point of Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation, a free-association documentary that looks at, well, everything. From a hilarious but heartbreaking performance of “No-One Knows How Shitty I Feel” to the invention of internet porn, Jane Fonda workout videos to Moe Qadaffi, Kissinger to Trump, the lies only grow larger.
Hundreds of little and huge lies get a few moments each, accompanied by ominous music, and by Curtis’s polished Brit-accented narration. At two hours and 45 minutes, this is a very big bite with lots to chew, and a frustrating mix of the vitally important and superficially inane. I learned some things, definitely, but also yawned and paused it for a nap.
My preference in a documentary is to drill deeply into one topic, but this is an abstract glide across the surface of just about everything in the news since Ronald Reagan. The shallow glide eventually accumulates its own depth, though.
In the end, it proves what most of us already know: that everything the media and government tells you is suspect — probably a lie, and if not, certainly shaded for the advantage of the rich and powerful.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Tugboat Annie (1933)
Annie (Marie Dressler) is an old lady of the sea, who got her nickname because she literally drives the tugboat, running the business with little help from her heavy-drinking ne’er-do-well husband Terry (Wallace Beery). Their son, meanwhile, grows up to become captain of an ocean liner, while Dad keeps getting drunk and screwing things up and Mom keeps trying to make the business profitable.
There are some laughs at the dynamic between long-suffering Annie & rarely-sober Terry, but the movie is mostly a serious drama that still carries some heft 90 years later. The boating scenes, while clearly filmed on sets, convey the danger and wetness, and there’s a surprisingly well-staged ferry wreck.
No studio would let a 65-year-old woman head a film today, but Dressler is better than excellent. Beery is pretty good too. Robert Young (30 years pre-Marcus Welby) and Maureen O’Sullivan (Tarzan‘s best Jane) co-star. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy (Little Women, Mister Roberts).
Written by Norman Reilly Raine, based on characters he met on Seattle’s waterfront as a young man, possibly including Thea Christiansen Foss, the founder of Seattle’s Foss Maritime. Raine later co-wrote the classic 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood and won an Oscar for The Life of Emile Zola.
Tugboat Annie is a good movie, recommended, but my initial interest was driven by claims that it’s the first major motion picture filmed on location in Seattle, some 25 years before I was born here. “Filmed in Seattle” is a stretch, though. There are some brief, passing shots I recognize as Lake Union and possibly lower Queen Anne, some background imagery on the water, and the tugboat action was filmed on Puget Sound — from a distance, without the actors. The movie’s authentic Seattle footage can’t total more than five minutes, max. Mostly, it was filmed in Hollywood.
And weirdly, the movie calls Seattle ‘Secoma’, a combination of Seattle and Tacoma, which is something nobody else has ever called this city.
Verdict: YES.
9/22/2025
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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