The Lower Depths, The Aviator, Play It Again, Sam, & The Last Hurrah

The Lower Depths is unfortunately, the second movie on the two disc The Lower Depths Criterion set. I think someone is stealing my Netflix DVDs. I didn't get Slacker or the Jean Renoir's version of it, so I was just stuck watching Akira Kurosawa's version, with the always outstanding Toshiro Mifune. It fits very well with his other films. Not quite as comedic as I was lead to believe, it was just fairly humanist. And a little depressing.

The Aviator is a movie I really should have seen a while ago. Pretty strong and amazing cast, and it's always good to see Loudon Wainright, even if I also had to deal with Rufus. Man, he's overrated. Of course the movie is great. I mean, it's Scorsese, even when the movie is bad, he's still capable of greatness. This movie, however, was great, so he didn't have to do anything to improve it, but he did. My favorite scene was, of course, the censorship board. Stupid censors. About the only real problem with the film is that it's really too long. It's good, but not almost three hours good. Very few films are almost three hours good.

Play It Again, Sam is an early Woody Allen film, and so it's very hit and miss. Well, it's a Woody Allen film so it's hit and miss. It's less miss than some of his, but it's a minor Allen. Of course, my love for Casablanca clearly makes me more inclined to enjoy it than a lot of people would. I always used to get it confused with The Purple Rose of Cairo. I always seem to imagine Jeff Bridges getting on the plane at the end of the movie. Which is difficult, since Jeff Bridges isn't in this one, and that one isn't about Casablanca. I think it's just that I imagine Jeff Bridges in the Tony Roberts role.

The Last Hurrah is a fictionalized version of a corrupt Boston mayor. It's really not hard to figure that out, just like every other political movie based on a real person but fictionalized enough so that names are changed. I do sort of enjoy the old school politics, even though it's really set up to be rooting for a corrupt guy. And rooting against a guy who works for Planned Parenthood. I didn't realize just how old Planned Parenthood was. I mean, since I support them in everything they do, I never really spent a lot of time learning about them. I didn't realize that Margaret Sanger created the organization that later became Planned Parenthood. Thanks John Ford, for keeping that line in the film so I would be interested enough to look that up. Makes me think better of the group, even if I didn't already. Anyway, I seem to be incapable of talking about any movie without going off on a tangent somehow. Well, not somehow, that's how my brain works. I mostly don't feel like writing those all down. Back to the movie, it's a very interesting look at how candidates are created and other ones stay in power. Those parts were much more interesting to me than the family dynamics. And of course, it mainly ignores the fact that the center of the movie is a political creature who we really should be happy that he gets his just deserts. Plus, why is it that so many movies give the character a heart attack or something else illness-related to drum up a little sympathy at the end of a movie for someone we should hate? So cheap and easy.