Night Train to Munich

A DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Night Train to Munich (B).  A light-hearted thriller in the vein of The Lady Vanishes, this 1940 release was directed by Carol Reed, who would later direct the classic The Third Man. After an opening montage showing the Nazi advance across Europe before the invasion of Poland, we see an important Czech scientist get whisked away to England just ahead of the Nazi occupation of his home country. Once in England, the scientist is joined by his spirited daughter Anna (Margaret Lockwood, The Lady Vanishes), but then both are kidnaped by the Nazis and it’s up to wise-cracking British agent Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady) to pull off a daring solo rescue mission. Paul Henreid, who later played an anti-Nazi freedom fighter in Casablanca, plays against type as a Nazi true believer. Although the movie is not without flaws, I still quite enjoyed it.

Barcelona

The Movie Snob revisits an old favorite.

Barcelona (B+).  I have long enjoyed indie director Whit Stillman’s work, so it’s a shame I still haven’t reviewed all (five) of his movies on this blog.  I recently rewatched this one, the second of his “doomed bourgeois in love” trilogy from the 1990s, and I enjoyed it yet again. It’s the 1980s, and two young American men, Fred and Ted, find themselves in the titular city of Barcelona.  Like most of Stillman’s characters, they are hyperarticulate, constantly musing aloud about the things that matter most to young people—mostly love and commitment, but also concerns about career, success, and finding a place in the modern world. Fred and Ted also happen to be cousins who are more like bickering brothers, and they make a fun odd couple as Fred first unexpectedly drops in on Ted for an extended stay and then tries to liven up his social life.  The movie is unusually political for a Stillman film, with anti-Americanism and terrorism making up an important element of the story.  Watch for Mira Sorvino in a substantial role just a year before her Oscar-winning turn in Mighty Aphrodite.

I have the Criterion Collection DVD and watched several of the extras, including a few talk-show interviews with Stillman that were kind of interesting.  I also rewatched some of the movie with the commentary track turned on.  The commentary featured Stillman and the two stars of the film, Taylor Nichols (The American President) and Chris Eigeman (Metropolitan), and it wasn’t as insightful or as interesting as I had hoped it would be.  Anyway, if you enjoy witty dialogue, you should definitely check out Stillman’s work—his other films being Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, and Love and Friendship.

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, by Neil Price (2020).  If you want to catch up on what archaeologists currently think about the Vikings, I think this is the place to do it.  This 509-page book is interesting and generally very readable. The first half is about the pre-history of the Vikings, with discussions about Viking religion, artifacts, and especially what we have learned from studying their burial mounds. The second half is about the Viking Age itself, when the Vikings starting going on their famous voyages of pillage and exploration around 800 A.D.  I definitely learned some things—like, the Vikings actually conquered and settled in a big chunk of Great Britain, a territory called “Danelaw.” On the whole, and notwithstanding a couple of clunky lines speculating about transgenderism among the pre-medieval Scandinavians, this was a much better and more enjoyable book than the other Viking book I recently read, The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

A new DVD review from The Movie Snob.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) (B-).  I didn’t even realize that there were two Alfred Hitchcock movies by this name when I bought this Criterion Collection DVD quite some time back. This is the older version he directed in England, and apparently it was the movie that propelled him to international fame.  It reminded me a lot of two of the other films from Hitchcock’s early “British” period, namely The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps.  As in those movies, some ordinary British folks accidentally get caught up in events much larger than themselves. Here, a married couple is on vacation in Switzerland when they accidentally come into possession of information about an impending assassination.  And the bad guys kidnap their daughter to keep them quiet!  Will British pluck and common sense see them through the crisis?  It’s not a bad little movie, but I liked The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes better.  Maybe because I had a hard time understanding the dialogue in this one and had to turn the subtitles on?  The accents were pretty thick, and some of the characters seemed to mumble.  I didn’t have time to take in all the numerous extras on the DVD, but there’s an interesting interview with Guillermo del Toro about Hitchcock, and I did re-watch a little of the movie with some film historian’s commentary turned on and found it quite interesting.

Rifftrax Live: The Return of the Swamp Thing

New review from The Movie Snob.

Rifftrax Live: The Return of Swamp Thing  (B-).  I think this was the only live show that the Rifftrax guys did in 2022, and I didn’t see it live; I just watched it on DVD.  It was decent but not one of the best Rifftrax performances ever.  The movie is really amazingly bad, a 1989 stinker starring the undeniably cute Heather Locklear (The Perfect Man).  She’s a California florist who for some reason decides to go see her sinister stepfather in his creepy mansion somewhere deep in the swamps of Louisiana.  And there’s a swamp thing (Dick Durock, Stand by Me), who is a slimy, green, plant guy who was apparently a normal human who got transformed into a hideous mutant while working on scientific experiments with the aforementioned stepfather. Very goofy and, with the riffing, decently entertaining.