Climbing Mount Criterion XXX

Somebody must've heard and believed in Michael Bay's argument that what he was doing with the action film was creating high art--two of his films, after all, are part of the Criterion Collection. But before outsize propagandistic junk like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor rendered that idea ridiculous, it was somewhat tenable in The Rock (#108), a movie that takes Nicolas Cage's screamathons and Sean Connery's crusty-elder declamations and turns them into something operatic. That's not exactly the same thing as good, mind you: Ed Harris isn't believable as a rogue military man, Connery's escape from the prison confound's common sense, and--well, you could waste a lot of time pointing out the plot holes. But Bay's conviction that big-equals-good made reasonable sense in movies when he wasn't trying to explain the history of the world, which makes his flaws as a director (especially his hamfistedness when it comes to romantic subplots) at least tolerable.

The Scarlet Empress (#109) is unavailable. M. Hulot's Holiday (#110) and Mon Oncle (#111) are my first exposures to Jacques Tati, and while I can understand equating him with Keaton and Chaplin as a comic character actor, the comparison falls apart when it comes to pacing. These films are slow, at least slower than the pace I'd prefer to take in comedies, though sometimes the sluggishness is an asset--the buildup to the grand explosion that ends Holiday is masterfully tense, and the running gag in Mon Oncle with the horrid fish-shaped metal fountain finally seems worthwhile once we get to a shot lingering on the male guests at a garden party--once the incessant trickling of the water finally forces the men to cross their legs, it's a riot. But I'll take Modern Times's commentary on the push-putton age over Tati's; Tati takes a few easy whacks at the self-satisfied tools upper middle class, while Chaplin gunned for the people who ran the show.

Playtime (#112), I'm told, is prime Tati, but it's also unavailable. A pair of more pleasurable comedies ensue: Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (#113) is a marvelous send-up of the heist film that manages to have all the tension and drama of a heist film as well, with an excellent performance in particular by Marcello Mastroianni. And Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (#114) is a Marxist romp that's still fun despite its taking obvious whacks at the ruling classes. When the ladies of the wealthy Bullock family wail along with the clan's trained monkey and the camera lets you catch all the noisy stupidity at once, its multilayered slapstick is astounding.