Again with the diary

Here’s what I’ve been watching lately, none of which rates a strong recommendation. Though each is okay or better, I do not feel driven to apply a number rating or a full-fledged review. (Admittedly it’s an open question how mature the plumage is on even my reviews of widest span.) So on with it:

Two Days in October appeared on the PBS program “American Experience” and marks Robert Kenner as a documentarian to watch. It pairs up two events in 1967 that really paint a portrait of the era -- a Marine detachment is ambushed and massacred in the jungles of Vietnam, which the generals try to pass off as a victory, while back on the homefront at the U of Wisconsin, students sit in to protest Dow recruiters on campus and are violently routed by Madison city police, which radicalizes the entire campus. The mix of archival footage and talking head retrospect is extremely well put together and evocative.

Tarnished Angels is a Douglas Sirk from 1958, not on DVD but broadcast on Turner Classic Movies, in Cinemascope but surprisingly B&W after he had made a string of amazingly expressionistic color films. Adapted from the novel Pylon, this was declared the best film made from Faulkner by the author himself. The leads from Written on the Wind are re-teamed: Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack. The first two have some fresh moments, but the last is just his steel-jawed self. Hudson is a maverick reporter for the New Orlean Times-Picayune who becomes fascinated with the flying gypsies of a traveling airshow. Stack is a WWI flying hero now barnstorming in his biplane, with Malone his parachute-jumping wife. Complications ensue, with a good deal of wild chariot-racing low over the water and around the pylons. In some ways a preposterous period piece, in others the film bears the mark of Sirkian sophistication.

De-lovely is almost de-lightful. The Cole Porter songs certainly are, as is Kevin Kline in the lead role. Ashley Judd is appropriately swanky as his wife of convenience and a good deal more. This biopic is infinitely franker about Porter’s homosexuality than Night and Day starring Cary Grant, which is referenced in this film. The problem is that much is referenced but little is developed. There’s a half-heartedly meta- framing device, but the through-line is weak. The music and the performances are worth watching, however, and it’s a kick to hear Ashley tell Kevin that she is engineering his escape from Hollywood debauchery by purchasing a house in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Reefer Madness: The Musical is jaunty and irreverent, a Sundance fave apparently. For two-thirds of its length, the energy of the singing and dancing definitely carry the story along; the final third spins out of control in a manner that failed to entertain me. I guess you could say the buzz wears off. Kristin Bell (tv’s Veronica Mars) is extremely effective as the ingenue; her death signals the film’s. Alan Cumming is snappy in a variety of roles. Neve Campbell pitches in a nifty dance piece, in support of her brother who plays the lead. Good dirty fun, for the most part, but when it goes over the top I am as reluctant to follow as a smart WWI soldier in a trench.