Seth Harris

Movie Review – The Palm Beach Story

The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Written by Preston Sturges & Ernest Laemmle
Directed by Preston Sturges

This is the ur-text of screwball comedies, every core element boiled down to its purest essence. There are pratfalls galore, windows getting smashed, and people confusing each other for others. It exists as both an ode to the comedies of mixed-up identities from Shakespeare and commentary on the late stages of the Great Depression. This film will inspire future pictures like Some Like It Hot and Intolerable Cruelty, but it doesn’t put on airs of being profound or world-changing. This is a pure character-centered comedy that understands how important it is to have a diverse variety of roles.

Comic Book Review – The Wicked + The Divine Book One

The Wicked + The Divine Book One (2016)
Written by Kieron Gillen
Art by Jamie McKelvie & Matthew Wilson

Approximately every 90 years, there is the Recurrence. This is an event where twelve gods of the ancient world reincarnate in human bodies. These forms are usually teenagers who are gifted supernatural powers, particularly the ability to influence the minds of mortals. Their purpose to combat an ill-defined forced known as The Darkness. Two years from their arrival, they will die, as it has been forever and ever. This is the basic premise of Kieron Gillen’s The Wicked + The Divine.

Movie Reviews – Sullivan’s Travels

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
Written & Directed by Preston Sturges

Sullivan’s Travels is a masterpiece in my book. It’s a metacommentary on movies that never loses sight that it’s also a slapstick comedy. The film is a reflection of the struggles of the working class, particularly during the Great Depression, but it’s a genuinely endearing love story. Preston Sturges managed to create a film that captures so much about his point in time yet speaks universally to the struggles & victories of our lives today. Yet Sturges made a movie preaching about the annoyance of preaching in film. It’s a beautiful paradox the produced a picture that is one of the best American films ever made.

Movie Review – The Lady Eve

The Lady Eve (1941)
Written & Directed by Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges may not be a name you know, but the influence of his work is still felt in movies to this day. He began his career as a screenwriter and successfully transitioned into directing, he’s considered the first person to do this. His characters show a sharp wit yet also execute a pratfall in the same scene, Sturges found humor in seeing bright people “hoisted by their own petard.” While the screwball comedy came about in the 1930s, it was Sturges who formed and refined the key tropes that made it up. The Coen Brothers are one obvious continuation of Sturges’s work, but even Pixar has cited the writer-director as someone they look to when developing their films.

SXSW Short Film Festival @ Home – Documentaries Part 1

SXSW (or South by Southwest) is an annual gathering of film, music, interactive media, and other creative fields that has been going on since 1986. Because of COVID-19’s spread, this year’s SXSW gathering has been canceled. But one way the organizers are bringing the festival to our homes is through MailChimp hosting over fifty of the short films that were to be screened there. I will be spending April watching and reviewing every short film by category. Our first two screenings will be devoted to documentary shorts.

March 2020 Digest

Features
Pandemics on Film
Single Location Movies
Short Film Showcase #2

TV Review – Best of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The Way of the Warrior (original airdate: October 2, 1995)
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Robert Hewitt Wolfe
Directed by James L. Conway

The original plan for season 3’s finale and season 4’s premiere was to do a two-parter about Changelings infiltrating Earth. Paramount execs didn’t want a cliffhanger, so that story got pushed to later into season 4. Ratings had been falling for Deep Space Nine in season 3, so something needed to be done to shake up the status quo and inject some new story seeds into the show. The first idea was to have the Vulcans leave the Federation over ideological conflicts, but then it shifted to the Klingons. Ira Steven Behr came up with a Klingon arc for multiple seasons that would bring the adversarial species into the conflict between the Federation and the Dominion.

Movie Review – Paddington 2

Paddington 2 (2017)
Written by Paul King & Simon Farnaby
Directed by Paul King

I strongly dislike most contemporary children’s movies. Now I will concede this could simply be a case of the grumpy old man saying, “They were better when I was a kid.” When the final week of school rolls around, my grade level team will typically have a Movie Day where students can pick which of the seven 3rd grade classrooms they want to visit based on the movie that the teacher is showing. You’ll often see films like The Secret Life of Pets, Minions, Trolls, Sing!, or whatever wide release pablum is the only thing being offered to kids these days. I try to present something off the beaten path, which usually results in a smaller number of students. Last year, I chose My Neighbor Totoro, and the children who chose my room all seemed to enjoy the picture. I have a feeling that, if the school is back in session this year, I will select Paddington 2 as my offering. It is about as perfect as you can get for a movie aimed at kids.

Movie Review – Downhill

Downhill (2020)
Written by Nat Faxon, Jim Rash, and Jesse Armstrong
Directed by Nat Faxon

I don’t want to write a review that simply compares Downhill to the film it is remaking, Force Majeure, but my god, I have to. Downhill is a recent example of a horrible way movie studios take foreign films and make butchered rehashes that show total disrespect to the audience. This movie loses every single element that made the original such a sharp, well balanced dark comedy and makes themes and characters way too obvious and on the nose. I laughed, possibly once, a slight chuckle, but spent the rest of the runtime having my worries confirmed.

Movie Review – Doubt

Doubt (2008)
Written & Directed by John Patrick Shanley

Meryl Streep dominates this movie, and her entrance is such a fantastic one. In the middle of Father Flynn’s (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) sermon about doubt, the camera follows a black shrouded figure walking along the pews. This is Sister Aloysius (Streep) looming over the children in attendance, intent on bringing down her hammer on any one of them who shows slight disdain for being in church. I wouldn’t say Aloysius is a villain, but she is most certainly the antagonist in the picture, on her fervent crusade to flush out what she sees as wrong-doing in a place she believes is her church.