Movies

[jaggedwolf]

Taxi | 42nd Street | King Kong

Taxi (1931)

8/419 on the NYC list. Not as focused on the independent cab drivers vs the big consolidated company as I thought it would be. The primary plot is the romance between the daughter of a cabbie who dies in prison and a hotheaded independent cabbie. Again, I thought the way the hotheadedness would cause conflict would be mainly because of said taxi war, and it does come up at the climactic plot, but overall cabbie Nolan is hotheaded about things that don’t make any sense.

Like he tries fighting a guy he loses a dancing competition to, for no reason! Between that, his joking gestures at punching our heroine in the face, and that we go straight from her slapping him to them having gone on several dates, I was unenthused on the romance. And what each of them does to the other at the end...stay separated my dudes don’t have a dramatic reunion...

Despite that, the two actors have great chemistry. I particularly enjoyed watching them matching each other’s timing in the dishwashing scene and the final picking up of that hat.

42nd Street

9/419 on the NYC list. Another backstage musical. Don’t get the appeal of our chorus girl protagonist turned leading lady. Without knowing Ann was Ginger Rogers I thought she felt far more alive than our wallflower ingenue. Another character introduces himself as a “Broadway juvenile” and I still don’t know what that means.

Did enjoy seeing a musical being worked on over time, complete with our kinda gay director who is about to have a nervous breakdown. My only knock against him is the period-typical “suddenly kisses new leading lady mid-rehearsal so she understands what love is like” moment. It plays weirdly too, because five seconds later she has a genuine kiss with her love interest, who is not the director.

Didn’t expect all the songs to be crammed into the end. (1) the train exterior set opening up to show the inside was sick, loved that (2) what the fuck is the plot of the musical within the musical (3) the staging of the 42nd street number was cool even if I went ??? at a women getting stabbed during it

Sufficient numbers of vaguely important characters in this one that I started off mixing up all the women and many of the men with each other 💀 truly was relying on which characters were staring at who and the saying of names

King Kong (1933)

10/419 on the NYC list. Fay Wray got hired to scream and boy did she scream. My favorite monster fight scene here has to be King Kong vs that T-Rex looking creature, primarily because of the method by which King Kong wins but also because Ann screams so fucking loudly that the T-Rex creature doesn’t like it.

Nightmare subway commute dropped: King Kong peeling off the tracks and peering into a window

There were so many more monsters on that island than I thought there’d be, when the first non-Kong one appeared I said out loud “Is that a fucking dinosaur?” The stop-motion animation has the effect of making King Kong come across like a big dumb child, albeit one with excellent hand control given Ann’s non-crushed state. Loved him winning a fight ripping the jaws apart, I was rooting for him to do that. RIP that lady who was sleeping peacefully in her NYC apartment and dies because our wildlife filmmaker guy wanted to bring a giant ape back home.

My main notes for Ann and Jack respectively were “Girl, stop fainting!” and “Jack, fucking rescue her already!”. I thought the skipper was going to die and was pleasantly surprised by his survival. The caricatured natives are caricatures but get to be comprehensible by the crew.

“I hear it’s a gorilla” / ”Haven’t we enough of those in New York?” would be my favorite lines of the film if it weren’t for Jack’s love confession to Ann.

Jack: I guess I’m in love with you.
Ann: Why Jack, you hate women!