Three Films Make A Post: Meet The Gayest Lady Who Ever Went To Town!

Theodora Goes Wild (1936): This screwball comedy by Richard Boleslawski with the great Irene Dunne (and Melvyn Douglas, though he’s not really Dunne’s equal here) is still a joy to watch. Of course, the joyless puritanism and churlish conservatism it argues against does tend to get in style again and again – and too many progressives can get as badly infected by it as the reactionaries do – so it felt unexpectedly topical from time to time. The film also puts a nice bit of emphasis that enjoying one’s life as much as one can and being a good person towards others are not in opposition. Still news to some today.

This being a great bit of screwball, it does not use its message to bury the fun; instead the film’s an absolutely joyous mixture of the slightly frivolous, the just plain silly, and the sort of absurd set-pieces the genre is well known for.

Choose or Die (2022): I found this very low budget Netflix horror effort by Toby Meakins rather frustrating. There are several really cool set-pieces here – particularly the diner scene is excellently disturbing – but there’s also a clear ambition to do more than just set-pieces. And it’s here where the film falters for me: while it is pretty clear what it is trying to achieve thematically, namely talk about matters of race and class, of the lack of hope you get when you’re black and poor and how it buries one, it does so in a manner that’s so blunt and flat, and has so little to do with how most of the horror scenes play out, the whole film falls flat on its face, even before the godawful ending.

Infinite Storm (2022): At times, this survival movie with Naomi Watts in a fine acting mood, directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, about a grieving woman saving a suicidal young man (Billy Howl) by literally dragging him down a mountain in terrible conditions, is surehandedly, quietly human, using the usual and typical tropes of this kind of wilderness survival affair to explore the fine lines between grief and hope, will to live and will to die. It is sparse (the right kind) and rather beautifully shot, as well. This good impression is regularly marred by moments where the film suddenly seems to lose trust in its own – and Watts’s – ability to express what it is trying to say, and suddenly swerves towards the cheese of badly used licensed music and badly written monologues that are meant to explain what the film is already expressing, but only turn it banal.