In our second week on the “air”, we feel the sting of a holiday weekend. These extra days often afford me time to watch even more films or catch up when need be. However, this Monday I didn’t get to see anything new, but I had already managed to finish four films and the remainder of a series.

So, here is what I watched this weekend:

The Last Airbender

This is the stuff legends are made of…legendary bad pictures, that is. With no discerning eye for shot composition or any ability to direct young actors, M. Night Shyamalan continues to prove he’s as inept behind the camera as a five-year-old with a camcorder. The film is poorly paced, sometimes confusing and forces information on the audience through narration that could have been better represented through visuals. From all I’ve heard it’s a very narrow and shallow interpretation of the original source material, which seems to lend itself better to television miniseries than to theatrical motion picture.

I am calling this The Last Shyamalan for two reasons. The first is that it will be the very last Shyamalan film for which I put down any money. The second is that it will hopefully mark the decline of Shyamalan as an in-demand filmmaker. I can only hope the box office tumbles quickly after this surprisingly strong weekend opening so that studios will realize they can’t just through money at ineptitude. Then again, Roland Emmerich keeps getting jobs, but at least he’s entertaining even if superficial.

In Old Chicago

Like Best Picture winners Cimarron and Cavalcade but focused on a much narrower period of time, the film provides a surprisingly deft and engaging portrait of early Chicago politics leading up to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Although there are a handful of historical inaccuracies, such details are seldom an issue when a film is as successfully crafted as this.

Tyrone Power and Don Ameche play brothers whose outlooks are diametrically opposed. Powers’ Dion O’Leary is a backroom dealer who uses his street smarts and gambling cred to woo a saloon singer played by Alice Faye into a business arrangement that puts them at odds with a dangerous competitor who they would like nothing better than to see out of business. Ameche plays Jack O’Leary, a gifted orator and lawyer whose combative personality makes him the perfect man to take on the corrupt competitor his brother is trying to eliminate in his bid to become mayor of the city. Powers and Ameche are both better than I expected, though Powers isn’t as strong as Ameche in terms of talent, he makes up for it in presence.

The film ends up being a terrific example of how to set a historical narrative and framing human tragedy (very evocatively and successfully displayed in the film’s last 30 minutes) without feeling moribund or overly manipulative.

Sayonara

Marlon Brando leads a solid cast in this post-Korean War drama about a U.S. soldier reassigned to Kobe, Japan in order to better align his potential marriage to a prominent general’s daughter, but instead ends up falling in love with a Japanese stage performer. The film takes the unusual tack of pushing back against U.S. military codes at the time which prohibited soldiers from bringing Japanese wives back with them to the states, going so far as to encourage them not to marry and later attempt to reassign them all to new areas where they couldn’t take their loves.

Brando is in fine form, though his accent early in the film is intensely grating. But this film really belongs to Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki who provide the soul of the picture as the ill-fated lovers who struggle against prejudice and regulation to pursue their undying love of one another. Buttons is especially moving stepping away from his celebrated comic talents to take a rare dramatic role. Umeki conveys the meek, excitable attitude of her character with little concern for the stereotypes inherent. If many aspects of the film are tinged with American sensibilities, they are forgiven in part by the important message the film delivers.

California Suite

I originally saw this film over a decade ago when it was shown on television. I caught a few Oscar-nominated films at the time and this was one of them. I must say that although I remember very little of the film itself, the opening theme is absolutely memorable and quite appropriate to the film’s style and theme. The performances are all superb with Maggie Smith delivering her Oscar-winning performances with comic timing many wish they had.

The film drifts on occasion and the scenes between Walter Matthau and Elaine May seem out of sorts with the rest of the film, but then again, most of the production doesn’t seem to have any purpose in combination except to detail differences in behavior of various individuals visiting the same Los Angeles hotel. The hotel is connective tissue reminiscent of Best Picture winner Grand Hotel (and many others), but which barely feels related. Matter of fact, the film could have been told in four separate episodes on television and you wouldn’t have been able to tell they were from the same production.

But the combination of talents, director Herbert Ross, writer Neil Simon (who adapted the film from his stage play) and the well selected cast, make for an entertaining film once you get past the strange way the film is cobbled together and the lack of segment cohesion.

Soap

Season two has been completed. And in the last two episodes, I started recognizing the plotlines, so this may be where I came in when I watched the show on Nick-at-Night a decade ago. It hasn’t lost a lot of its charm, so I’m still pleased, but I’m beginning to see the transitions they are making for Robert Guillaume who will soon depart the series to headline his own show, which I’m now going to have to watch again to find out how Ingrid went from scheming and conniving on Soap to just simply irascible on Benson.