Month: September 2021

The last of the Paul Robeson: Portraits of an Artist set that I hadn’t seen yet, this film only contains Robeson as an off-screen narrator and singer alongside various dramatizations detailing numerous attacks on the Bill of Rights, particularly against workers and unions. While being a somewhat dry pro-union piece with some of the dramatizations being overly long, it’s an interesting artifact enumerating Anti-American activities committed by people with power and fits well in displaying Robeson’s years as an activist.

This is a bit of an oddity of a true story about a Black American man who finds himself joining a Welsh mining community. Paul Robeson’s presence is strong here both in stature and voice, as the potential boon to the men’s choir is the catalyst for the community welcoming him into their fold. I have a lot of sympathy for mining towns where digging for coal is the only ‘good’ job available, but even eighty years ago, when there weren’t as many other options available, the work is ridiculously dangerous and difficult and questionably a win in the grand scale of things.

This is a harmless romantic comedy version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Steven Martin is his charming self and the story is earnest. I had a hard time believing in his interest in Daryl Hannah, nor her interest in Rick Rossovich. The best couple chemistry was between Martin and Shelley Duvall though there was no indication that either felt sexually towards the other. I did find the scenes with the fire department to be amusing. The British Columbia setting was beautiful. Kudos to the makeup department that devised a nose that looked ‘normal’ when looking at the front from afar, but was obviously extra long when in silhouette.  

Sadly this was the weakest of the three Karel Zeman films from the Criterion set I watched. After finding a fossil, a group of young boys decide to climb into a boat to travel back through time to see a live trilobite. The whole production feels like a lazy river ride where the live action humans float past stop motion dinosaurs and other animals, complete with the expected ‘oohs and ahhs’ from the riders. It’s cute in a way similar to a classic live-action Disney from the same era, but it’s nowhere near as fantastic as the previous two Zeman films I’ve watched.