Three Films Make A Post: Boy Meets Dog

Love and Monsters aka Monster Problems (2020): If you’re patient enough to get through the film’s atrocious first twenty minutes that combine lots of exposition, crappy jokes and an intensely annoying main character, you, as was I, might be surprised by how entertaining Michael Matthews’s science fiction comedy adventure with medium sized monsters then becomes. It’s still a movie with not a single original bone its body, mind you, insists on a very traditional way for a guy to turn into a hero™, and ends trying to sell us people inspired by a speech of our protagonist going out for what amounts to mass suicide as a hopeful ending, but at least, it puts its borrowed bits and pieces into a pleasant series of adventures. More often than not, it’s really quite charming in its undemanding way, and if you survive the first act, you’ll probably be entertained on rainy Sunday morning.

Maigret voit rouge aka Maigret Sees Red (1963): This is the second time Jean Gabin steps into the shoes of Simenon’s police inspector hero of oh so very many novels and adaptations. Directed by Gilles Grangier, this outing finds Maigret hunting a trio of actual American gangsters using their particularly violent methods (US crime is to this film as Russian crime to today’s US crime cinema) on his home turf. It’s clearly a matter of national honour, with a low-level nationalist vibe running through affairs that would be much more annoying if Grangier’s nice eye for interesting side characters, Gabin’s always lovely (and often pretty funny if he wants it to be) low-key acting style, and the film’s absurd ideas about the way US gangsters of its time worked, weren’t so damn distracting and charming. It’s certainly as pulpy in mood as Maigret gets.

El esqueleto de la señora Morales aka Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (1960): This macabre thriller/comedy by Rogelio A. González is generally seen as a gem of Mexican cinema, its heavy-handed satire of Mexican bourgeois mores clearly the thing to delight the people compiling “The Most Important Mexican Films of All Time” lists and such. The film’s gender politics have aged rather badly, though, as has its critique on the bourgeoisie. Chabrol, this ain't.

If you’re like me coming at it from a more genre savvy perspective, the satire, the black comedy and the thriller elements here don’t always fit together all that well or effectively, and while González repeatedly shoots very beautiful scenes, there’s little here to see rather more disreputable kinds of Mexican cinema haven’t done quite a bit better. On a curious note, this is also one of the few adaptations of a work by Arthur Machen, though not adapting anything of the part of Machen’s body of work I’d actually like to see adapted.