marysz Reviews

WandaVision (2021)

Just watch the original "Bewitched"

[6/10 · 16 January 2021]

WandaVision is meant to be an ironic take on sixites sitcoms featuring the supernatural, primarily Betwitched. Betwitched features Samantha, a witch married to a mortal. But the original Betwitched is more contemporary (and ironic) than this smirky remake. Samantha had an outspoken mother, Endora, who's questioning of Sam's lifestyle takes on a feminist note. And there was Gladys, the suspicious neighbor, wonderfully played by character actress Sandra Gould. Darren, Samantha's husband is a decent, kind man who loves his wife unconditionally, even though he doesn't understand her. Darren's boss Larry harasses his female employees, and the series questions his behavior it even as it plays it for laughs. Bewitched's gentle irony and it's questioning of contemporary values holds beautifully. The best thing about WandaVision is the music. It does genuinely capture the mood of the times and gives the series a sparkle it doesn't quite deserve.

Dietland (2018)

Dark Feminist Comedy

[10/10 · 30 June 2018]

I haven't seen the whole series, but I like Dietland. Posters here have objected to Plum's passivity and desire to be thinner, but Plum, in a way, is a stand-in for the audience, who long to be thinner, younger, more glam, etc. but resist looking into the political and cultural systems that marginalize and impoverish them. I like the Brooklyn settings and NYC locale of the show. I hope this dark and well-written show gets a second season. All the characters are interesting and we need to get to know them better.

Mister Buddwing (1966)

Old, non-gentrified Manhattan

[8/10 · 27 August 2016]

I love James Garner, but he's miscast in this stilted movie about a man who's lost his memory wandering the streets of mid-sixties Manhattan. He awkwardly confronts random young women whom he confuses with a woman he knows named Grace. These startled women, played by Katharine Ross and Suzanne Pleshette. do a a great job, but they're too young for him and his fixation on these much younger women make him look creepier than the film intended. It's only when he meets a woman who accosts him, played by an older and more appropriate Jean Simmons, that he connects with his true identity. As another reviewer here noted, Garner is out of his natural range as an actor in this picture.

Watching the film now, the real attraction is that it's shot on location in Manhattan, during a time when the city was sinking into the urban malaise that would affect it until the mid-nineties. Mister Buddwing's Manhattan is dingy and affordable and accessible to ordinary people in a way it isn't today. There are no steel and glass buildings blocking the sky. It's a more human place.

Hair (1979)

Hair: The "Hamilton" of its time

[6/10 · 2 July 2016]

I just watched the movie Hair in TCM, for the first time since I saw after its original release. The musical was already past its prime when it was released in 1979 and Treat Williams was already a little old for the title role. What strikes me now is how well, sexist it is; the female characters are just appendages to the men. They're passive and soft-spoken and just go along with whatever the guys want. "Women's lib" was not on the agenda here. The draft and the war in Vietnam were the impetus for this film and that's what contemporary audiences reacted to.

The movie, about a lovable group of ragtag hippies in Central Park has a frenetic quality to it; Milos Forman was the middle-aged director. This film isn't about the young as they were, it reflects Forman's middle-aged male longing for the energy and sexuality of youth. Living on the West Side at the time, I was struck that they cleaned up Central Park for the film. The park was in awful shape. You can see it in the film where the dust rises from the bare dirt in the Great Meadow during the "be-in." The eventual value of this film may lie in its documentary value because it was shot on location in late 1970s Manhattan,

The Second Face (1950)

Working Women and Selfish Men

[8/10 · 8 April 2016]

The Second Face presents the female predicament of postwar America; working women, especially "plain" women who are discarded by men. The setting is the garment business in 1950s Los Angeles, an appropriate venue to contrast plain. hard-working secretary and aspiring designer Phyllis with beautiful, empty-headed fashion models. The men are sleazy and unfaithful except for Phyllis' love interest Paul, who loves her from afar. In classic B movie style, Phyllis has a tragic accident when she rushes to prevent her friend Claire from shooting her unfaithful boyfriend (the women in this film aren't as helpless as they first seem; that's the film's strength). She is transformed by plastic surgery into a beautiful woman (in fact, she simply wears makeup, and a weirdly unflattering haircut). Now the lascivious men who rejected her before are interested. But what about Paul?

This slow-moving film has a Douglas Sirk-ian feel to it. The poster for the film with its dramatic mask and the words "No Man Wants Me!" promises a highly emotional drama. This film in fact, is about women, both married and single, coldly evaluating their chances in life and sizing up the men around them. This is a more interesting film than its given credit for.

The Art of the Steal (2009)

Plenty of Blame to Go Around

[9/10 · 30 May 2015]

This is a passionately made documentary about how the rug was yanked out from under the legitimate trustees of the Barnes Foundation in order to move its priceless art collection to Philadelphia. I was lucky enough to have visited the Barnes when it was still in Merion. Barnes unintentionally created intractable problems for his collection when he put it in a quiet, affluent, suburban neighborhood, while at the same time intending that his collection should be for ordinary people. This has always puzzled me. Originally, he actually hung the paintings in his factory in Philadelphia so the workers could see them. When the power brokers zoomed in on the Barnes, the residents of Merion, on one hand, wanted the collection to stay in the neighborhood but, on the other hand, made it as difficult as possible for visitors to see it by restricting their numbers. Also, there was no way to reach it by public transportation.The septa station is not close by. This stubbornness on the part of the residents was their fatal flaw--and it made the Foundation vulnerable. By the time the town and county were willing to change the zoning, it was too late. The Annenbergs and the Pew foundation are no angels, but if Barnes had originally put his collection in Philadelphia in the first place, in a working-class neighborhood instead of in a wealthy suburb, he could have fulfilled his ideals about making art accessible to everyone, not just the elite. Unfortunately, even in its new location, it's still not easy to get in and see the collection. Visiting it has always been an elitist experience, ironically.

The Reckless Moment (1949)

Motherhood's dark side

[10/10 · 23 January 2012]

The Reckless Moment is a mesmerizing post-war film about a housewife, Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) who is forced to enter the underworld to protect her teenage daughter. Other reviewers have mentioned director Max Ophuls' fluid camera-work, which carries the viewer along as surely as Lucia Harper's complacent middle-class life is swept away by her husband's absence and the seedy blackmailer Nagel, who threatens to implicate her daughter in her lover's murder. Lucia is constantly referred to as Mrs. Harper throughout the film; in her world, she has no existence outside of being a wife and mother. But despite living in a beach community in Southern California, she's incongruously shown wearing masculine-looking heavy coats and tailored suits. She has to "man up" to protect her family. This is a movie of opposites; the Harper family's wholesome, bright family life is contrasted with the tawdry Los Angeles streets that Lucia (appropriately in dark glasses) is forced to prowl as she scrounges around for money to pay off Nagel. But she has two allies, Donnelly, Nagel's accomplice, who falls in love with her and Sybil, her shrewd African-American housekeeper (Frances Williams). Traumatic as Lucia's experience is, Donnelly's devotion to her connects Lucia with the love and sexuality that may be missing from her marriage. Sybil, whose quick thinking helps save the day in the film's climax, calls into question Lucia's (as well as the viewers') assumptions about race and social class. This is an extraordinary film that belongs in the National Film Registry.

The Amazing Mr. X (1948)

Great late-forties noir

[9/10 · 30 November 2010]

An engrossing, beautifully photographed film about two wealthy young sisters exploited by two conniving men, one of whom is a sham psychic, magnificently played by Turhan Bey. The sisters, intelligent as they are, seem pretty dim-witted throughout the film. Even though this film has a noir aura to it, they are hardly femme-fatales. The film was made in 1948, when there were societal pressures on women to stay home and let returning vets take the jobs they'd held on the home front during World War II. The infantilized sisters in this film, who depend on the men to rescue them, reflect this trend.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this low-budget forgotten B movie packs more intelligence and punch than most suspense films around these days. And the cinematography by John Alton is terrific. The print I saw was poor, yet the film was so well conceived that I could overlook it. It would be great to see a nice crisp print (if that's possible). Highly recommended!

Motherhood (I) (2009)

Frazzled Mom--but why?

[4/10 · 27 November 2010]

Motherhood is about a Greenwich Village mom Eliza, who is so busy taking care of her kids, her elderly next-door neighbor and feeling inadequate about the fact that she hasn't "made it" professionally that she lives a chaotic life and takes terrible care of herself and of course, for all her devotion to her kids, neglects them also. She can't take care of her kids' needs if she's not looking after her own. This is how many women live their lives, but the filmmaker did the film a disservice by setting it in the Village--it's such a wealthy neighborhood that it's hard to feel sympathy for this mom. And as for the scene where she actually invites a strange deliveryman up into her family's apartment on the day of her daughter's birthday party, no less, and dances with him is completely unbelievable for a film set in New York. Even a ditzy person like her would completely distrust strangers. As some of the other reviewers here have noted, Eliza is an immensely privileged woman who lives in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the world. Her privilege undercuts the important message of the film, which should be about the under-appreciated and mostly invisible but enormously time-consuming job it is to raise children. If this film was made with a truly working-class setting, it would have been more believable. And even though it's supposed to be a comedy, it actually isn't particularly funny.

Dementia (1955)

Guilty of being an angry woman

[8/10 · 22 November 2010]

A wonderfully odd surrealist film made in 1953 that is reminiscent of the German expressionist films of the 1920s. A primly dressed young woman asleep in a dingy urban hotel room wakes up, puts a knife in her pocket and wanders the streets of a dystopian city filled with lecherous and violent men. A newspaper headline shouts of a stabbing. Is she responsible? In a flashback in a graveyard, we learn her father was a drunk who beat her. Her mother's sin was reading magazines, eating chocolates and seeing other men, which leads to her being murdered by her husband. In a way, the "horror" of the film is the ways women try to accommodate themselves to living in a male world. Women are prostitutes, downtrodden cleaning women, beaten wives or seductresses in this sick and unfair world. Perhaps the heroine's sin is simply the fact that she has the temerity that act out her anger at her fate instead of passively enduring it like the other women in the film. What's interesting to me is the fact that even though she's constantly characterized as being "evil" by the boorish male-voice over, she actually comes across as quite respectable and intelligent (maybe that's what ultimately makes her so threatening to the men). Daughter of Horror has low-budget, but creatively noir cinematography and a wonderful scene at a jazz club at the end. Daughter of Horror is truly avant-garde in the way it looks ahead to both the underground films of the sixties as well as the feminist movement.