Movies I Watched in July, Part 1

After four posts about various New York films, you might think I'm sick of writing about movies on this blog. And frankly, you'd be sort of right. But not completely, and that's the key. Hell, I'm always up for talking about any sort of movie-related topic. Like, say, for instance, the movies I watched last month...

I might be the only person of my generation (or, for that matter, still alive) who's actually a fan of Joe E. Brown, a big-mouthed (literally!) comic actor who had his heyday in the 1930s but is probably best remember for delivering the classic final line of Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot." I'd enjoyed some of his pre-Code baseball comedies, like "Fireman Save My Child" and "Alibi Ike," so when I saw the description of the plot of "Circus Clown" on TCM included both "runs away to the circus" and "falls for a female impersonator," I knew I had to tune in. The circus portion was oddly convincing, mostly because as a young man, Brown really did run away with the circus and came back with the acrobatic skills to prove it. (He was a gifted physical comedian.) And though the female impersonator plotline was more of a prank played on our hero by some sideshow wiseguys than any sort of gender switcheroo, it did prove an interesting preview of his falling for Jack Lemmon in "Some Like It Hot." (Though in this movie, he wound up beating the hell out of the pranksters.) All in all a swell little 1934 comedy with a little romance, some good sight gags and a pretty impressive performance by Brown as both Happy Howard and his dad, Chuckles Howard. Check it out next time it's on TCM. Then maybe two living people will be Joe E. Brown fans.


Rewatched this one with the wife, and it held up pretty well. It still has that strange element all M. Night Shyamalan films have, where the characters speak in a stilted, overly formal style like they're robots who learned English from a program and are trying to pass for human. I really wish M. Night would let someone (me?) give his scripts a final dialogue pass before he rolls film, because as this movie proves, when he's in his groove, he can deliver an imaginative, entertaining little thriller. I'm still excited to see the sequel that the ending implies, but I'm hoping he films it soon. A certain bald, big-name movie star isn't exactly getting any younger...


Solid little comedy/drama about a woman (Melanie Lynskey) who seeks justice after burglars steal her laptop and her grandmother's silver. It becomes mostly comedic when she encounters an oddball (Elijah Wood) who fancies himself a bit of a vigilante, then becomes mostly dramatic when they encounter the guys behind the burglars and the bullets (and blood) start to fly. From writer/director Macon Blair, who starred in the similarly themed (though much less comedic) "Blue Ruin," this film works best as a character study, as Lynskey (who's excellent) uses her quest for justice to break out of the depression and anomie that's been constricting her life. The Elijah Wood character, with his bravado and nunchuks, walks the edge of being too big of a joke, but he winds up landing on the right side and, by the (surprisingly violent) end, I was genuinely invested in his fate, too. It's on Netflix right now, so you've got no excuse for not checking it out.

Up next: A bizarre movie about an even more bizarre experiment and not one but two (two!) theatrical releases.