Category Archives: Film

I Watched Love In Focus (2023, Dir. by Brandon Ho and Joseph Reidhead)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

This movie was so cute!

Jenna (Nicola Posener) is an actress on a detective show called Echo Park.  She is dating her co-star, Trevor (Trey Warner), even though they don’t have anything in common other than being actors on the same show.  When Jenna finds out the show is being canceled, she accepts her agent’s offer to stay in the family cabin until she gets things sorted out and figures out what she wants to do next.  When Jenna gets to the cabin, she finds out that it’s already being used by her agent’s son, Chris (Dan Fowlks), a nature photographer.  At first, Jenna and Chris don’t get along but then they discover that they misjudged each other.  Jenna actually is a good actress (and a great cook) and she wants to do work that she can be proud of.  Chris really isn’t as arrogant as he seems at first.  They fall in love.  Meanwhile, Trevor is trying to track down Jenna with the help of Roxanne (Shona Kay) and it doesn’t take 20/20 vision to see that Trevor would be happier with her than with Jenna.

Love In Focus is totally predictable but I still liked it.  The scenery was gorgeous and Nicole Posener and Dan Fowlks were a really appealing couple once they stopped fighting.  (People who fall in love in movies always have to start out fighting each other over something.)  There’s a really sweet scene where Chris’s parents talk about how they first met and fell in love and listening to their story made me smile.  The best part of the film was Trey Warner.  Even though Trevor was Chris’s romantic rival, he wasn’t portrayed as being a villain or a jerk or anything like that.  Everyone in the film was so nice that you really hoped everything would work out for them.

This was a sweet movie and I really liked it!

So, I Watched After The Storm (2019, Dir. by Emma Jean Sutherland)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Hey, ladies!  Take it from someone who has been there, if your family home is destroyed in a storm and someone offers to help you rebuild it so that you have a place to live with your adorable Siberian Husky, accept the help.  I don’t care if you used to date him.  I don’t care if you’re engaged to marry someone else.  That person that you think you’re going to marry?  Where is he?  He’s not the one at your house offering to help your rebuild.  The man who does show up, does he have a criminal record?  Does he have a history of being an abuser?  Is he a Nazi?  If the answers to those three questions are all no then accept the help and be sure to say thank you every chance you get.

After the Storm is about Lauren (Madeleine Leon), who reconnects with her ex-boyfriend Colin (Bo Yokely) after a storm destroys her home.  Lauren is a teacher, which is extremely cool.  I like and respect teachers.  And she owns an adorable dog!  I liked that Lauren was as concerned about rebuilding the community as she was rebuilding her house.  I could relate.  Last year, our neighborhood got hit by one of the worst storms that I’ve ever seen and it took over a month for the city to clean up all the debris and ge everything back and running.  I checked on my neighbors every day to see if they needed anything and a lot of very kind people helped us clean up the branches in the front and back yards.  (One of them had fallen on our wooden swing, crushing it underneath.)  Cleaning up wasn’t easy but we worked together and got it done and we were stronger as a community as a result.

But I got so frustrated watching this movie because Lauren kept getting upset whenever Colin tried to help her and I couldn’t understand why.  She was still angry about how they broke up five years in the past but Colin had obviously grown up since then and he wanted to help both her and the community.  The movie lost me whenever Lauren get angry with Colin.  Her main excuse was that she was engaged but when her fiancé did show up, he turned out to be useless.  Lauren’s stubbornness was hard to take.

I did like Bo Yokely as Colin.  Colin was a good friend to have in a disaster and, when it came to Lauren, he had the patience of a saint.  I got frustrated with Lauren but I did enjoy the scenes of her house being rebuilt once Laruen finally accepted the help and admitted that she was still in love with Colin.  You’d have to have a heart of stone not to smile at Colin carrying Lauren over the threshold while that adorable dog.  Love can overcome anything, even stubbornness.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY – 1995 was a banner year for Jane Austen and cinematic romance. This is one of my favorite scenes!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

I may write mostly about the film exploits of actors like Charles Bronson, Rutger Hauer, James Woods, Clint Eastwood, and Chow Yun-Fat, but there’s no doubt that I’m a sucker for a good romance. And my very favorite romantic films are based on the works of Jane Austen. I’ve watched the 1995 TV mini-series version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle at least ten times in my life. It’s just so good. My favorite Austen “book-turned-film” just may be the 1995 version of PERSUASION starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. I’ve probably watched it at least twenty times in my life. I love to watch these movies when I need a pick me up, or when I need to relax. They have hard won “happy endings” and they always leave me with a tear in my eye.

Well, it’s obvious that 1995 was an amazing year for Jane Austen adaptations, because the year also featured the release of Ang Lee’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY starring an incredible cast that included Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Emma Thompson would even win an Oscar for the screenplay that she adapted for the screen. If it was up to me, she would have also won an Oscar for her performance in this scene alone, and I still get happy tears every time I watch it. *(SPOILER ALERT)* If you’ve never seen the film, and you don’t want to see how it ends, do not watch this clip. However, if you love the movie, and the scene, as much as I do, enjoy. Happy Valentine’s Day, my friends!

Electric Dreams (1984, directed by Steve Barron)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Electric Dreams is a film about a love triangle between a man, his neighbor, and his personal computer.

Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen) is an architect who wants to develop a special brick that can withstand earthquakes.  One of his colleagues suggests that he buy something called a — let me check my notes to make sure I got it right — com-put-er.  Apparently, computers can do anything!  Miles is skeptical but he decides to give it a try.

(In all fairness, this movie came out at a time when there were no iPhones or even laptops and personal computers were viewed as being strange and exotic. )

Miles get his computer and it’s basically one of those boxy computers that used to populate computer labs in high schools across the country.  As soon as I saw the computer, I wanted to play Oregon Trail.  After the computer overheats and Miles tries to cool it down by pouring champagne on it (!), the computer comes to life.  Now voiced by Burt Cort, the computer develops a crush on Mile’s neighbor, a cellist named Madeleine (Virginia Madsen).  The computer hears Madeleine playing her cello and composes its own music to play with her.  Madeleine hears the music and assumes that Miles must be a great composer.  Soon, Miles and Madeleine are falling in love and the computer is getting jealous.  The computer composes more more music for Miles but grows angry when Miles doesn’t give the computer any credit.  Even though the computer can’t move from the desk and has to be plugged in to work, it still manages to wreck havoc with Miles’s life.  When this movie came out, the idea of someone’s entire life being electronically monitored and recorded probably seemed like an out-there idea.  Today, that’s just a normal Tuesday for most people.

Electric Dreams is a mix of romance, comedy, and science fiction.  The scenes of Miles and Madeleine falling in love are mixed with scenes of the computer basically having a nervous breakdown and conspiring to ruin Miles’s credit and even trap him in his apartment.  Electric Dreams is probably the most good-natured film ever made about a computer run amuck.  The computer doesn’t mean to hurt anyone, it’s just jealous and feeling neglected.  It’s a weird mix but the movie is so dedicated to its premise and Lenny Von Dohlen and Virginia Madsen are so appealing as the romantic leads that it works.  Electric Dreams proves that true love can conquer all, even in the Computer Age.

Love On The Shattered Lens: Charming Sinners (dir by Robert Milton and Dorothy Arzner)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Based on a play by Somerset Maugham, 1929’s Charming Sinners takes place amongst the very rich.

Kathryn Miles (Ruth Chatterton) is married to Robert Miles (Clive Brook).  Robert is wealthy and a respected businessman and, through her marriage, Kathryn is also wealthy and …. well, she’s not quite respected.  The fact of the matter is that everyone is gossiping about the fact that Robert is cheating on Kathryn.  Kathryn denies that Robert is being unfaithful but she knows that he is.  She also knows that Robert is cheating with her best friend, Anne-Marie Whitley (Mary Nolan).  Even when Anne-Marie’s husband, George (Montagu Love), comes to suspect that Anne-Marie is cheating with Robert, Kathryn tells George that it isn’t true and defends her cad of a husband.

Why is Kathryn doing this?  As Kathryn explains it, she doesn’t feel that marriage necessarily means that you have to love someone.  Kathryn married Robert for the money and the status and, as long as she has that, she’s willing to overlook Robert’s dalliances.  Admitting that Robert is cheating would obligate her to go through a divorce and potentially lose everything that she has.  If this film had been released just a few years later than it was, the Production Code would have insisted that Kathryn suffer for her less-than-reverent attitude towards the institution of marriage.  Since this is a pre-code film, Kathryn is portrayed as being strong and determined.  What the Production Code would have deemed a drama, the pre-code era considered to be a comedy.

Still, Kathryn does get revenge on her husband by openly flirting with a former lover, Karl Kraley (William Powell, handsome and suave as ever).  Kathryn also makes some money on her own, proving to her husband that she could be a success even if she hadn’t married him.  Kathryn informs Robert that she is going to be living her own life, even if they are married.  And if Kathryn wants to take a lover, that’s her decision.

And good for Kathryn!  Seriously, Robert is so smug and sure of himself that it’s deeply satisfying to watch as Kathryn reveals that Robert was never as clever as he thought it was.  Though the film does not end with the dramatic divorce that some might expect, it does end with Kathryn taking control of her own life and making her own decisions about how she’s going to live it.  That type of ending is rare enough today.  One can only imagine how audiences in 1929 reacted to it.

But is the film itself any good, you may be asking.  It’s an early sound picture and while the cast all proves their ability to handle dialogue, the largely stationary camera often makes the film feel like a filmed play (which is largely what it was).  Like many pre-code films, the emphasis here is on how the rich have better clothes and better homes than the majority of the people watching the movie.  That’s not a problem for me.  I like looking at nice clothes and wonderfully decorated houses.  Some others may dismiss this film as just being about the problems of the rich but my personal opinion is that everyone has problems.  Wouldn’t you rather have problems as a wealthy person than a poor one?  The most important thing is that the film features two of the best actors of Hollywood’s early Golden Age, Ruth Chatteron and William Powell, and they both give excellent and charming performances.

Charming Sinners is a bit of time capsule and probably not for everyone.  If you’re not interested in the film’s era, it probably won’t hold your attention.  But, to a fashionable history nerd like me, Charming Sinners definitely had its charms.

I Watched Romance On The Ranch (2024, dir. by John Lyde)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

In Romance on the Ranch, Suzanna Pereira plays Sara, who gets to live out one of my favorite fantasies.

Sara quits her job, sells her place, gets in a camper with her dog, and drives out west.  She has another job waiting for her, as a doctor at a big-city hospital.  But before she starts her new job, she just wants to see America and capture it with her camera.  I knew exactly how Sara felt.  There have been so many times that I’ve been tempted to just grab my camera, jump in my car, and just take off for parts unknown.  It’s not very practical in the real world but that’s why we have movies like this one!

Sara’s camper breaks down outside of a ranch.  Luckily, the ranchers invite her to stay with them while the camper gets fixed.  Sara volunteers at the local assisted living facility and she rides a horse for the first time in years.  She also meets two handsome brothers and she falls in love with both of them.  Aidan (Chris Reid) is quiet and likes to spend his time working on the ranch and with the land.  Porter (Brando White) is a rebel who gets his work done but at his own pace and who feels like Aidan looks down on him.  Sara wants to stay at the ranch but she doesn’t want to cause trouble between the two brothers.  The brothers, though, have issues to work on that go far beyond of them liking Sara.  Who will Sara choose?  The handsome rebel or the handsome cowboy who has a daughter who needs a stepmother?

I liked this movie, even though I knew everything that was going happen.  It’s basically a Hallmark movie, even if it didn’t air on the network. Everyone in the movie is very pleasant and nice and the ranch was a really pretty location.  I liked that the two brothers were both nice guys and loved each other deep down, no matter how much they fought.  They had different ways of looking at the world but neither was necessarily wrong.  There’s just something incredibly romantic about big strong men working in the Great Outdoors and learning to express their emotions.  Mostly I liked the movie because I could relate to Sara.  I looked at those beautiful mountains surrounding the ranch and I wanted to get out my camera and start snapping pictures too.

Love On The Shattered Lens: Dangerous Curves (dir by Lothar Mendes)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1929 film, Dangerous Curves, takes place at the circus.

Larry Lee (Richard Arlen) is a tightrope walker and, when we first meet him, he’s a bit of a cad.  He knows he’s the best and he knows that the crowds are specifically showing up to watch him risk his life on a nightly basis.  Every woman at the circus is crushing on him but Larry hardly notices because he’s used to being desired.  He’s in love with his tightrope-walking partner, Zara (Kay Francis).  Everyone can tell that Zara is manipulative and not even loyal to her relationship with Larry.  She wastes his money and Larry sometimes spends so much time thinking about her that it breaks his concentration on the tight rope.

Eventually, Larry discovers that Zara has been cheating on him!  When Larry finds out about Zara and Tony (David Newell), he cannot get the image of them kissing out of his head.  When he tries to walk across the tight rope, he loses his focus and, as the audience gasps, Larry falls to the ground below.  (In an impressively-edited sequence, we see Larry falling from about five different angles before we finally see him hitting the ground.)  Larry recovers but his confidence has been broken.  Instead of returning to the circus, he just wants to drink and obsess on Zara and Tony.

Can bareback rider Patricia Delaney (Clara Bow) convince him to return to the circus?  Can she give him the confidence to once again walk across the tightrope?  Will Larry then teach Pat how do the tightrope act herself?  Will Larry finally realize that Pat loves him and that he loves her?  And how will Pat react when, after all she’s done for Larry, he suddenly decides that he wants to bring Zara back into the act?

Dangerous Curves is a mix of melodrama and romance, all taking place at the circus.  It’s also a pre-code film, which means it’s a bit more honest about the relationships between the characters and Larry’s subsequent drinking problem than it would have been if the film had been made just a few years later.  As a result, this is a melodrama with an edge.  The members of the circus community are living on the fringes of polite society and they’ve built their own community, one that is based on their unique talents.  Larry’s sin isn’t so much that he’s arrogant and tempermental.  It’s that he doesn’t properly respect the community of which he’s a part.  He thinks he’s above the rest of the circus.  His fall from the high wire humbles him.  His relationship with Patricia eventually redeems him.

That said, the main appeal of this film is that it features Clara Bow in one of her early sound-era performances.  Bow became a star during the silent era but, unlike many of her contemporaries, she was able to make the transition to sound.  I absolutely love Clara Bow and this film features one of her best performances.  She’s determined and energetic and she plays the stereotypical “good” girl with just enough of a mischievous glint in her eye to make her compelling.  She may be willing to help Larry get back on the tightrope and then subsequently learn how to walk the tightrope herself but she also shows that she’s not going to put up with him taking her for granted.  As well, both Clara and Kay Francis get to wear a lot of cute outfits, which is always one of the pleasures of a pre-code film.

Dangerous Curves is worth watching for the chance to see Clara Bow at her best.

 

Live Tweet Alert: Join #FridayNightFlix For The Crush!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, at 10 pm et, #FridayNightFlix presents 1993’s The Crush!

If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag!  It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

The Crush is available on Prime and Tubi!  See you there!

Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland: Great Romances of the 20th Century – Season 3, Episode 10 (Aired April 24th, 2001)

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Happy Valentine’s Day, my friends! Today I celebrate my own valentine, my wife Sierra. I bought her a beautiful bouquet of roses, as well as a card, on which I wrote my true feelings of love and appreciation for her. It made me very happy to see the joy on her face as she received her roses and read her card.

I’m also celebrating my favorite film valentines, Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland. I’ve been blessed to have a few opportunities over the years to talk to people who were friends or family with Bronson and Ireland. They always say the same types of things… “they were so in love,” “Charlie would light up whenever she was around,” “she always softened him up.” That’s one of the reasons I enjoy watching them on screen together. There’s something about knowing how much they love each other that just makes me happy. Back in 2001, the TV series “Great Romances of the 20 Century” featured Bronson and Ireland. One of the most interesting parts of the episode showed Charlie and Jill being interviewed on the set of the film BREAKOUT (1975). Bronson was notoriously prickly in interviews, and he seemed to be heading that way on this particular day. But when Jill started talking about her husband to the person conducting the interview, you could just see the impact her words had on his mood and countenance. She made him smile and his entire mood changed, confirming everything I’ve been told. It’s quite beautiful to see.

If you’re interested, I’ve linked to the episode below.

https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/bb5e43736ee3d63cc3370ae4495d977b/great-romances-of-the-20th-century-s3-e10-charles-bronson-and-jill-ireland

Love On The Shattered Lens: The Red-Haired Alibi (dir by Christy Cabanne)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1932’s The Red-Haired Alibi tells the story of Lynn (Merna Kennedy).

When we first meet Lynn, she is working at a store in Manhattan.  She has red hair.  The film is in black-and-white but we have no doubt that her hair is red because every single character who meets her mentions that she has red hair and she continually reminds people that she has red hair.  Everyone seems to be so stunned to meet a redhead!  And I have to say that this is the most realistic part of this movie.  I have red hair.  I’ve had complete strangers tell me that they like my hair.  I’ve also had complete strangers ask me if I’m a natural redhead (and I am!) and some other things that I’m not going to repeat here.  Personally, I love having red hair.  I’m a member of the proud 2%.  I don’t care if some people claim that people with red hair don’t have souls.  When you’ve got red hair, what else do you need?

As for the movie, Lynn meets a charming man named Trent Travers (Theodore van Enz).  Trent offers to give Lynn a job, away from the drudgery of working in sales.  Trent will pay Lynn to be his companion at night.  And since this is a pre-code film, Red-Haired Alibi is pretty open about what that means.  Lynn agrees.  Trent is handsome and rich and who couldn’t use the money during the Great Depression?  I imagine the film’s audience agreed.  One thing that always comes through in these Depression-era pre-code films is that morals don’t really matter when you’re struggling to pay your rent and not starve to death.

The problem is that Trent is a gangster.  Trent spends his nights committing crimes and then using Lynn as his alibi.  Eventually, Lynn realizes that she’s gotten herself into a dangerous situation.  The police suggest to her that she should get out of town before Trent takes things too far.  (I guess they didn’t have witness protection in 1932.)

Lynn flees New York and builds a new life for herself in White Plains.  She meets a charming widower named Bob Wilson (Grant Withers).  They marry and settle into a life of domestic bliss.  Lynn becomes the stepmother to Bob’s young daughter (played by Shirley Temple, in what is believed to have been her film debut).  Everything seems to finally be perfect for Lynn.  Or at least it does until Trent shows up….

The Red-Haired Alibi is a generally well-acted but somewhat slow 1930s melodrama.  Comparing this film to some of the other films of the early 30s, it’s a relief to see a cast that knows how to deliver dialogue in the sound era but director Christy Carbanne sometimes struggles to maintain the sort of narrative momentum necessary to make a film like this compelling.  The ending feels a bit silly but, at least during the pre-code era, there wasn’t a need to try to punish Lynn for having a less-than-perfect past.

Dancer and former silent actress Merna Kennedy was best-known for her work with Charlie Chaplin and she gives a likable performance as Lynn.  Two years after making this film, she married Busby Berkley and retired from acting.  Tragically, she died of a heart attack in 1944, when she was only 36 years old.