The Gateway, aka Curtain (2015) – The premise seems ready-made for a surreal comedy: A woman moves alone into a cheap apartment, and finds that her shower curtain keeps disappearing. Finally setting a camera up to observe it, she finds that it’s being sucked into… nowhere.
But it’s not played for laughs. Danni (Danni Smith) and her coworker Tim (Tim Lueke — I guess that’s one way to remember the character’s names while shooting) try to figure out what’s going on, both by researching the history of the apartment’s occupants and writing “please call” messages on shower curtains.
And then it gets weirder…
This is the kind of intelligent, low-tech SF thriller that is perfect for platforms like Amazon Prime (see also my recent comments on Radius). It’s rare that they’re completely satisfying in the end, but I could say that for most movies that try to make you think — it’s hard to stay smarter than the audience when you come to the point of putting all your cards on the table. This one tries to avoid that by never quite showing all its cards, but that can just as easily be interpreted as not playing fair with the audience.
Anyway. Worth watching, I think.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) – It’s no secret that James Thurber, whose short story of the same name provided the initial premise for this movie (it would be too much to claim the movie is “based on” the story) hated the final product. The story was a James Thurber story; the movie is a Danny Kaye movie. After having established his brand of comedy in three previous movies, Kaye brings that brand here: A likeable but eccentric daydreamer character, a genius for physical comedy, tongue-twisting songs in a variety of accents. It wouldn’t be too much to say, “It’s Danny Kaye playing Danny Kaye but calling himself Watler Mitty!”
That said… Does Mitty work in the coolest place ever or what? He’s a proofreader at the publisher of more than pulp magazine titles; the office is decorated all over with the originals of their flashy, sensational covers. (What’s more, the office looks more than half-way respectable, such as one would have found in the “slicks,” not like the actual low-rent offices in which the real publishers of the pulps labored.) Granted, being just the proofreader doesn’t sound great… until you realize that he’s literally paid to read pulp adventures all day, every day.
The Kung Fu Master, aka The Incredible Kung Fu Master, aka They Call Me Phat Dragon (1979) – Two mature brothers, each an expert at a different school of kung fu, join up to take down a criminal… but in defeat, said criminal sows seeds of mistrust between the brothers, such that they set their schools against each other and don’t speak for nine years. (One’s son and the other’s daughter secretly keep familial communication open.)
Into this fraught situation comes a guy literally named Kung Fu Ching, who pretends to live up to his name, but in reality gets his butt handed to him frequently. He tries to study at both schools simultaneously, but when both find out, they both kick him out as disloyal. But his new teacher is none other than Sammo Hung, newly arrived in town to take over the wine business of his dead uncle.
The presence of Sammo Hung should indicate to you that this is a comedy. What his mere presence doesn’t tell you (necessitate that I do the telling) is that it’s actually a really good comedy. Yes, it’s got the overly broad humor that characterizes most kung fu comedy, but there’s also actual wittiness mostly conveyed with well-choreographed fight scenes.
Add that to the intricate plot which actually makes sense (trust me, there are several subplot threads I haven’t mentioned here), and this is definitely one of the top-tier kung fu action-comedies.