The Outlaw Josey Wales (partial rewatch)

I saw this two years ago, really liked it, and thought I would buy it.  When the Blu-Ray was announced, I pre-ordered it, but later changed my mind and decided I’d better see it again first.  When it arrived from Netflix today, I really wasn’t in the mood to watch it but I put it in anyway because I like to get a fast turnaround with my Netflix.  Then I kept getting interrupted, and I really just wanted to finish the book I’m reading.  I guess I’m getting used to the idea that you can think a movie is fantastic but still not want to see it again, and that doesn’t make it any less fantastic.  I feel the same way about, say, Napoleon.  Amazing film, glad I had that experience, just don’t need to do it again.  It’s kind of making me rethink my DVD collection, too (although I hate to be hasty about purging, I’ve regretted those decisions before).  So, bottom line is I didn’t bother watching all of this again, but what I saw was just as good as the first time.  Rating: Great

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The Night of the Iguana

This didn’t click with me like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf or A Streetcar Named Desire, but it’s not bad.  Richard Burton plays a former (not defrocked, as he keeps insisting) priest with certain sexual peccadilloes, bumming around Mexico giving cheap tours and battling his demons, and encounters some other folks (namely Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner) with problems of their own.  It’s a well-paced character drama with some good comedy and a fair amount of racy material, and very well shot in a remote location.  It seems a little overwritten at times, but it sheds some decent light on the human condition.  Gardner pretty much steals the show with a sharp, brassy performance, although Burton is good, too.  Kerr kinda bores me, to be honest, but she’s okay.  Sue Lyon is passable, but again fails to leave much of an impression (after Lolita, this, and then Seven Women, she would rightfully vanish into obscurity).  I enjoyed this film, even if it probably won’t stick with me very long.  Rating: Good

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The Hudsucker Proxy

Although set in the late 50’s, this is really the Coens’ tribute to the Hollywood urban/screwball comedies of the 30’s and 40’s.  Such a milieu is appropriate for their love of regular schmucks and off-beat, rapid-fire dialogue.  And it’s a pretty good story, one that would be right at home among the works of Capra, Hawks and Sturges.  But the Coens have a tendency to go big, and when working in an idiom that already calls for big performances, it’s a case of overkill.  From the exaggerated design of the corporate machine to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s ridiculous attempt at a period dialect, it all screams “trying too hard.”  The tone is just too tongue-in-cheek, it needs a little more sincerity and a little less winking.  The gags get smothered by all the stylistic choices, and consequently the film just isn’t very funny.  But it does have heart, in the same way that similarly goofy pictures like Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (another Sturges tribute) do.  Leigh might be a disaster on every level, but Robbins pulls off his smarter-than-he-looks-but-not-by-much character very well.  Not as bad as I feared, but definitely not one of their best.  Rating: Fair

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