The Couch Potato Returns! (Memorial Day Weekend, 2014)

Otto Preminger's Saint Joan - something of a disaster when it was released, this turned out to be pretty good. There certainly are things wrong with the film; there's some obtrusive scoring during a couple of scenes, it has a really bad performance by Richard Widmark as the Dauphin and a rather silly coda. The surprise is that Jean Seberg as Joan is actually not bad. Her performance was roundly criticized back in 1957, but I thought she was fairly effective. The scene where she recants her confession near the end is absolutely heartbreaking. The film itself is pretty enigmatic regarding who and what Joan really was. The tragedy it presents us with is that of an innocent who sacrifices herself for what turns out to be an unworthy cause (the Dauphin is, to put it mildly, a worthless, witless douchebag). This is a Warner Archive release with no extras (might be a trailer - I forget).

Fritz Lang's Man Hunt - a considerable cut above the usual WWII propaganda movies. Man Hunt features Walter Pidgeon as an English gentleman who decides to do a "sporting stalk" of Adolf Hitler in 1939 but gets caught by the Nazis, who, understandably, assume that he was about to assassinate Der Fuhrer. Pidgeon doesn't make the slightest attempt to do an English accent, so the film feels very much like a plea for America to get off the fence and into the war (Man Hunt was filmed and released early in 1941, some months before the Pearl Harbor attack), ending, rather amusingly, with Pidgeon's character hiding in a cave (anyone need a clumsy metaphor for isolationism?) while being taunted by George Sanders' Nazi Captain. Other than having an incredibly dumb closing scene (you can't escape that kind of thing in WWII propaganda films, even those that predate America's entry into the war), this was a lot of fun. Though Joan Bennett is terrible as a Cockney prostitute (she wasn't an especially good actress to start with and the awful accent she adopts here makes it even more obvious), Pidgeon and Sanders are both terrific. The dvd has an ok commentary track, along with a short documentary about the making of the film.

Lewis Milestone's Edge of Darkness - here's another WWII propaganda film from 1943 and this one manages to make the Lang film look subtle. Edge of Darkness delivers its message like a truncheon to the head. Granted, it'd be silly to expect nuance from a big studio film from that time period (shortly after America entered the war), and if you can get past the obviousness of it, Edge of Darkness is actually quite entertaining. It tells the story of an Nazi-occupied fishing village in Norway and the armed rebellion (led by Errol Flynn) that takes place there. All you really need to know about this film is that - SPOILER - the first shot in the concluding battle is fired by a priest who'd previously counseled the villagers to avoid violence!

Stuart Blumberg's Thanks for Sharing - an ensemble comedy/drama about three men dealing with sexual addiction through the 12-step program. Mark Ruffalo and Gwyneth Paltrow are in the most interesting segments of the film. Tim Robbins and Josh Gad are, unfortunately, stuck in the considerably less interesting segments. though i guess Blumberg deserves some credit for getting an actual decent performance out of the maddeningly uneven Tim Robbins. The dvd has a commentary track, deleted scenes and a 16 minute "making-of" documentary, all of which are worth checking out (the deleted scenes especially if you want to hear Ruffalo do a funny Brando impression).

(Checked in here to find this draft from 12 years ago and decided to publish it).