I’m going with something a little bit different for this week’s post – rather than focusing on one movie in particular, I’m gonna give some brief thoughts about the two movies I actually sat down and watched with any level of continued focus over the course of the past week. While they’re both highly regarded in various ways, Sorry to Bother You and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre otherwise couldn’t be more different. Sorry to Bother You came out earlier this year (in fact, it was a summer movie that I mentioned wanting to see here) and is a highly surreal comedy (?) laced with potent social commentary/subtext, whereas The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a classic adventure film from way back in 1948.
Fun fact – the line “We don’t need no stinking badges” is never said in this movie. As with many famous lines, it’s misquoted. It’s actually “We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – I watched this movie as another step in my lifelong quest to see every movie on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 List, circa 2007 (for the curious, as of now I’ve seen a measly 38 of the 100 on the list, with my individual viewing experiences ranging from extraordinary to befuddling). While watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it’s not overly difficult to determine why the film holds the #38 spot on that list: there’s some hard-hitting acting from leading man Humphrey Bogart – who plays our treasure-seeking vagabond protagonist, eventually driven downright insane by the pervasive greed surrounding the bygone industry of prospecting – and also from supporting actor Walter Huston, whose performance netted him a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor statue.
Another fun fact – Humphrey Bogart started losing his hair during this movie – for most of his appearances on screen, he’s wearing a very well-crafted wig.
It’s also not difficult to watch the events of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre unfold and realize how many other adventure films were likely influenced by its methods. It could probably be argued that Treasure essentially birthed a genre, and while its production value – surely high at the time, but obviously laughable here in 2018 – and its overall 1940s hamminess don’t really hold up well by any stretch of the imagination, it was fun to watch and drove home an important message. Watching Bogart – who incidentally has a face that looks like it got hit by a Greyhound bus, but also who holds the leading role in a number of AFI darlings including The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon, and of course Casablanca – descend into madness in the back half of the film was especially transfixing, and its dramatic effect is no doubt compounded by his character’s insistence in the early moments of the film that no amount of gold would turn him into the person he eventually becomes.
Me during finals week.
Treasure is one of the AFI list’s many entries that heralds what many would consider the golden age of cinema – an age consisting of overly vaudevillian sweeping orchestral scores, absolutely ridiculously produced and shot fight scenes (the bar fight in the first half of Treasure was especially comedic in its use of a ping-pong like mechanic), and a lot of fast talking in what might be a hard-to-comprehend accent but also might just be poor sound quality. Either way, watching without the subtitles was a challenge at times, even when the words being spoken were in English, which reminds me: given that Treasure takes place primarily in Mexico (a perfect backdrop for a LOT of casual racism, another seeming earmark of movies filmed during this period), there are a lot of Spanish-spoken lines of dialogue that dubiously feature no subtitling, and it’s impressive when you learn that Walter Huston – the deliverer of many of the Spanish lines – didn’t speak a lick of Spanish, and instead memorized the sound of the lines based on a native speaker reciting the lines into a tape recorder. When you’re watching the film itself, though, all the lack of subtitles really does is make things a little hard to follow, even if its intended goal (I think) is further immersion of the audience into Treasure‘s setting.
Me after finals week.
In short, my arbitrary star rating for Treasure is probably like three out of five. Check back in the future for further discussions of the films I watch as I continue my trip down the AFI’s Top 100 list.
And now for something completely different!
Sorry to Bother You – When I first started this post, I was going to limit it to a discussion of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, even though Sorry really knocked my socks off. I want to tell you about just how bananas Sorry to Bother You is (and not necessarily in a good way), but I also want to avoid any spoilers, so I’ll sum up my thoughts by simply saying that it may be one of the strangest movies I have ever seen in my life. There’s no doubt that writer/director Boots Riley has created something wholly unique, though, at the very least in its method of presentation, and I’ll admit that while my reactions to any given scene regularly transitioned in the blink of an eye from laughter to confusion to wide-eyed horror, I could never stand to look away.
Tessa Thompson’s earrings tell you everything you need to know.
Sorry to Bother You is also very well-cast, with Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out), Tessa Thompson (Thor: Ragnarok), Armie Hammer (The Social Network) and Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead) rounding out a clearly energetic ensemble. Stanfield and Hammer in particular have fantastic chemistry, and have a one-on-one scene in one of the film’s more tense stretches (again, no spoilers) that may have been where it reached its peak in my eyes. Pacing the performance of the cast is an abundance of visual style, with the use of a number of cinematographic tricks ranging from the standard whip-cut to an impressive Michel Gondry-inspired one-shot showing protagonist Cassius Green’s rise from lowly telemarketer to cream-of-the-capitalist-crop “Power Caller.” Adding to this sense of style is a phenomenal soundtrack from The Coup, which, at least technically speaking, was the best part of the film in the opinion of this lowly blogger.
Armie Hammer’s beard game = strong. His evil business owner game = also strong.
What I really wanted to say in writing about Sorry, though, was that I think I would have enjoyed the film a lot more if it had reined its clear penchant for surrealism in a bit more. While this is an effective tool for potent delivery of the messages the film is trying to send – messages which pertain to today’s society in a not-so-savory way, I’ll have you know – it’s at times over the top to the point of being distasteful, and perhaps even detracts from that very message that it clearly cares so much about delivering to its audience. I’m all for pushing the limits of the art of filmmaking, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to at least mention my viewing of Sorry in a post, but it felt distinctly out of control at times, and made the film’s central story a little tougher to parse. At the very least, I’ll be curious to see if Boots Riley’s next piece of directorial work has the same outrageous flair, but for now, I’ll be forced to give Sorry a mere two stars out of five, with those two stars owed entirely to the film’s one-of-a-kind nature and little else.
A sweatervest and a short-sleeved dress shirt is a bold move in any climate.
If you’ve read this far, I know what you’re thinking: Sorry to Bother You and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre go together like vanilla ice cream and sauerkraut (actually, I’ve never tried those things mixed together, so there’s a chance that it would be good, but I really doubt it), so it’s silly to write a post about both of them at once. You know what? You may be right. I may be crazy. But – again, if you’ve read this far – it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for. Really, though – one of my favorite things about movies is that – especially these days – you can watch two completely different things back-to-back, and maybe you’ll like both, or maybe you’ll like neither one. It doesn’t matter how well they’re reviewed – it might matter more what mood you’re in, in fact. Films are a distinctly subjective type of consumer product, but at the end of the day, you like what you like, and that’s what’s important.
As always, thanks for reading!
Tuesdays with Cory 