Jeremy_Urquhart

Definitely the best Roger Corman movie I've watched yet. It's paced well, and it does quite a lot with its premise in 79 minutes, unlike similar B-movies which might hook you in with a cool title, only to under-deliver on what it promises (looking at you, The Wasp Woman).

This is nearly divided into three acts and remains consistently enjoyable throughout. It probably won't surprise or blow many away, but it's a pretty damn good and overall satisfying movie.

Catch-22 came along in the early 1960s and was like, "Hey, war is silly when you look at it from this point of view," and then movies thought they could do that too, and for about a decade, they tended to fail pretty miserably. How I Won the War, the actual film adaptation of Catch-22, and I'd even argue the movie version of M*A*S*H... you can sort of admire what they're trying to do, and even agree with them on some level, but they don't really work.

As for How I Won the War, it's probably only remembered because John Lennon is in it in a supporting role, speaking in a way where you only understand about 10% of what he's saying. He's not good here, and it feels like total stunt-casting. But his involvement is why I'd always been aware of this film for years, without ever really wanting to watch it, even though I quite like most of Richard Lester's movies, especially the ones he did with Lennon and the other Fab Three (A Hard Day's Night and Help! Are both pretty great).

Lester's love of farce and absurdity should've translated into something good here. It's a satirical and farcical World War II movie, but it's also not very funny. There are a handful of amusing moments, but most of the parts that are trying to be funny don't work. The technical aspects shine a bit brighter, because it looks and sounds better than I was expecting it to. There are also a bunch of times it reminded me of Saving Private Ryan, especially with the structure and some imagery. It'd probably be more fun to put on a tin foil hat and try to explain how this might've influenced Spielberg's very grim war drama than it is to actually watch How I Won the War.

I saw The Wild Blue Yonder described as a comedy according to at least one source, and I'd push back against that. It feels quirky at first, with Brad Dourif (I nearly typed "Pitt") playing an alien being interviewed, with it being kind of a mockumentary, and overacting a bit, but then a weird sadness sets in. Similarly, this film is also called a documentary in some places, but that's also a bit questionable. It's about space and humanity, broadly, but also obscurely. It's about an alien, making it more of a mockumentary maybe, but also it's not really about an alien.

Back to that sadness. It's a weirdly moving watch, hitting that same off melancholy that Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man also did, and so maybe it's not too surprising that The Wild Blue Yonder came out the same year as that other movie, which I would label Herzog's best. The Wild Blue Yonder isn't as good, but it makes for a weirdly fitting companion film to Herzog's confounding, tragic, and frustrating documentary masterpiece.

It's hard to write coherently about this one, but that's because it's so unconventional. So, a rambling review suits a kind of random, occasionally rambling movie. It drifts around, and isn't always enthralling (or comprehensible), but it hits some kind of weird sadness. The music choices go a long way to adding that sense of sadness, and it's also downbeat in an eerie and appropriately alien sort of way. I felt a bit melancholic after watching this in a way that only Werner Herzog films seem able to make me feel. For that, I feel like this might well be one of his more underrated feature films.