Weapons: I already reviewed this movie, but I saw it again over Labor Day weekend. The only movie theater that Baltimore lost during the pandemic was the Landmark Harbor East, which reopened under new management in late-2022. Unlike the Rotunda’s multiplex, which shifted from the noxious CinéBistro to the far preferable local Warehouse Cinemas, the Harbor East has been ruined. The formerly handsome hallways are covered in pixelated faux-deco bootleg posters for a random assortment of “classics” (among them Diner and Apollo 13), the most comfortable seats in the city have been swapped out for massive recliners fit for the obese. The Rotunda’s seats are terrible, too, but that place went from a dump to an acceptable multiplex. And the Rotunda has the best projection and presentation in the city…unless the movie is in 2:00:1…
But sometimes, there are only so many screens to see a widescreen movie on in Baltimore at any given time. Weapons came out just over a month ago to massive box office (yet it’s about to come out on streaming?), and I liked it well enough, but does it have anything to offer a second time around? I was bored out of my mind. There isn’t a single interesting character in the movie, just sketches of shells of movie archetypes taken not from Magnolia, but a vague understanding of the entire history of moving images. Eddington had far less action and “forward momentum,” but every scene was so rich and full of visual and sonic detail; Weapons is child’s play by comparison, a movie that succeeds at being a movie and nothing else.
Short Cuts: Robert Altman’s last great film, released in 1993; Paul Thomas Anderson would arguably top it with his paraphrased remake Magnolia just six years later. Short Cuts isn’t top-tier Altman, and the proper analogue for Magnolia is Nashville, but it’s useful comparing the films because it clarifies weaknesses in both filmmakers more than any strengths. Altman manages to make 188 minutes consistently entertaining, if not much else; although it’s shocking to see a child hit by a car, and later die in the hospital, this accident is treated with the same glib cynicism that Altman leans on whenever he’s lazy. Magnolia, on the other hand, is high on its own earnestness and committed to a “movie-movie” kind of spectacle that Altman consistently rejected. They’re very different filmmakers—I don’t know why they were so often compared.
Short Cuts is by far the longest comedy I’ve seen that sustains its momentum without ever really getting serious. Although it’s Altman’s last great movie, it’s characterized by a breeziness, a glancing eye that only gets at impressions, never anything real; this same breeziness carried him along for another 13 years making some decent movies, but nothing great. He was never cutting again, the last time was The Player, and even then the edge was wearing off. But even second-tier Altman is better than most movies now or since, and Short Cuts is worth watching with the sound off for anyone with even a passing interesting in film. Watch how Altman moves the camera, when he zooms, what he focuses on, how he weaves so many people together, and how much grace is in his work that’s absent from American movies today.
A Man and a Woman: One of a few movies whose theme song is more popular and influential than the movie itself; the only other example I can think of is Halloween, which is a very famous movie with many sequels, spinoffs, and reboots. Maybe not even that one. Jaws, Star Wars? No. Chi-Chi Ah-Ah-Ah from Friday the 13th? The squealing at the start of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? There’s no one else, just A Man and a Woman by Claude Lelouch. I doubt Billy Corgan had seen Lelouch’s Oscar winning film when he wrote “French Movie Theme”—well, maybe—but that tune was in the ether, he wrote a pastiche of Francis Lai without knowing it was him (probably).
Da… Da… Da-Da-Da-Da-Da, Da-Da-Da… Da, Da… No wonder Lelouch won an Oscar and a Golden Globe in 1967, this is the most straight-down-the-middle, inoffensive film to come out of France in that glorious decade. At least Rohmer won the following year! There’s one great line in the movie: Anouk Aimée’s says her husband was a stuntman, and Jean-Louis Trintignant asks, “Where do you meet a stuntman? In a ravine?” And the ending, where Lelouch didn’t tell Aimée that Trintignant would surprise her outside the train, is nice: lovers reunited on the platform, a movie cliché made real by people who happen to be actors in a film. James L. Brooks tried to recreate the same kind of double exposure in an alternate, unused ending of Broadcast News, but to his horror, someone on the crew let Holly Hunter know that William Hurt was on set for some reason…
Lelouch made C'était un rendez-vous, or It Was a Date, in 1976, where he drove nonstop through Paris for eight and a half minutes, running red lights, on sidewalks, and right past pedestrians. Shot with a super wide angle lens, it’s closer to space shuttle footage than any car chase in movie history. Better in every way than A Man and a Woman.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith