Worth Mentioning - I Was Born Under a Wand'rin' Star

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Eastwood, Rapace, and occupants of interplanetary craft.

PAINT YOUR WAGON (1969)

Somehow Paramount Pictures and director Joshua Logan thought it would be a good idea to cast Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood as the leads in a musical. Somehow Marvin thought doing this musical would be a better career move than starring in The Wild Bunch, which he turned down in favor of working on Paint Your Wagon. The result, not surprisingly, wasn't received with overwhelming enthusiasm... but the making of this movie, which stretched on for five months and went over-budget, did help Eastwood come to the decision that he wanted to direct his own movies, which he would make sure would run more smoothly.

With a running time of 164 minutes, Paint Your Wagon asks for quite an investment from the viewer, especially when it's clear very early on that this concept just doesn't work. Most viewers will be wondering within minutes why so many people decided to dedicate so much time and money into bringing this film into existence. But even though it's baffling, there is an odd watchability to this mess.

Set during the Gold Rush era, the film begins with prospector Ben Rumson (Marvin) witnessing a wagon crash that leaves one man dead and his brother (Eastwood) wounded. While burying the dead man, Ben discovers gold in the ground - and he makes the wounded man his business partner, which is why Eastwood's character is referred to as Pardner much of the time. A mining camp is built up around the spot where Ben found gold... and since this place is populated entirely by men, everyone goes nuts when a Mormon comes through with his two wives. Ben goes more nuts than anyone, paying $800 for the wife the Mormon is willing to get rid of. The woman - Jean Seberg as Elizabeth - asks Ben for just one thing: she wants him to build her a cabin. So he does. And since this isn't the most romantic situation, it's no surprise that Elizabeth falls for Pardner, and he falls for her. Quite progressive for their time, the players in this love triangle decide to solve the problem by just allowing Elizabeth to have two husbands, like her ex had two wives. But they still have to deal with the gold running low and the mining camp becoming a boom town.

The songs in this musical aren't great and Marvin and Eastwood don't exactly sing, but there is a standout tune in here - one which actually became a hit in the UK and Australia. That song is "Wand'rin' Star", which manages to be the best song in the movie despite the fact that Marvin is the one singing... more like grumbling... his way through it. It works because there's emotion to it; Ben is prone to melancholy, and that really comes through in an effective way in "Wand'rin' Star".

Paint Your Wagon feels like a mad experiment in the careers of its leads, an experiment that didn't quite pan out, but there is a charm to it.

COSMIC DAWN (2022)

Writer/director Jefferson Moneo's sci-fi thriller Cosmic Dawn - which he says was inspired by an extraterrestrial encounter he had as a child - centers on a woman named Aurora (played by Camille Rowe), whose mother is said to have disappeared when she was a child... but Aurora knows exactly what happened to her mom. She was abducted by aliens, and little Aurora was witness to it. So it's no surprise that when we catch up to her as an adult she's burying her memories and emotions with drugs and alcohol. Then she starts to have visions that seem to lure her into a bookstore run by Natalie (Emmanuelle Chriqui), who recommends a book to her: Cosmic Dawn, by a woman named Elyse.

Aurora soon finds out that Natalie is a member of a UFO cult that's run by Elyse (Antonia Zegers), and that all of this cult's members have witnessed alien abductions, just like Aurora did. Well, almost all of them. Natalie's husband Tom (Joshua Burge) is a skeptic, just there to support his wife. As Aurora joins the cult members in an isolated location they call the Mothership, we have the sense that something is going to go terrible wrong here - and Moneo tells us we're right to be suspicious, because he has the story play out in two different time periods. Scenes of Aurora interacting with Elyse, Natalie, Tom, and the others at the Mothership are intercut with scenes set four years later, at which time Aurora is no longer associated with the cult. Now it seems its members are trying to draw her back.

I found Cosmic Dawn to be a very intriguing movie, and I was hooked to see exactly how things were going to fall apart at the Mothership - and how crazy the situation was going to get by the end of the film. The movie is carried by some terrific performances from the lead cast members, which is no surprise in the cases of Chriqui and Zegers, as they have been working steadily since the '90s, but I was also impressed by relative newcomers Burge and Rowe. In the scenes where he expressed skepticism over what was going on at the Mothership, Burge made Tom stand out as my favorite character in the movie, while Rowe did a great job of playing our emotionally troubled heroine.

Beyond the acting, I was also wowed by some of the showy visuals Moneo dropped in here and there. I'm sure this film is going to gather a lot of fans who are into those trippy visuals, as well as the musical aspect of the movie. Not only does Cosmic Dawn boast a score composed by Halloween franchise veteran Alan Howarth, it also features five songs from the band MGMT, plus multiple tracks written by MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden. Surprisingly, neither Howarth or MGMT are responsible for the tune "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft", which the cult starts singing at one point and which plays over the end credits. Anyone who watches this movie is probably going to find it quite a challenge not to get "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" stuck in their heads. 

Cosmic Dawn has a lot going for it, but there are also shortcomings. There's a lot of build-up in the movie to pay-off I didn't find to be completely satisfying. Things never got quite as weird, crazy, or unnerving as I was hoping they would. Much of the film's 98 minutes (and that could have been cut down some) consist of conversations between members of the Cosmic Dawn cult, and there came a point when I got tired of waiting for something exciting to happen.

This movie will be exactly the type of odd some viewers will be looking for, while others will find it to be too uneventful. And I lean more toward the latter. I'm glad I watched Cosmic Dawn, and there's plenty I liked about it, but in the end there wasn't enough there for me to want to watch it again. It's worth a look, but it's a "one and done" movie as far as I'm concerned.

The review of Cosmic Dawn originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

ANGEL OF MINE (2019)

Directed by Kim Farrant from a screenplay by Luke Davies and David Regal, the U.S./Australia production Angel of Mine is a remake of 2008 French film called Mark of an Angel, which I have never seen. I don't know how the original compares with this version, but having no knowledge of Mark of an Angel before watching this certainly benefited the viewing experience. I had no idea where the story was going or what the lead character played by Noomi Rapace.

Rapace gives a captivating performance as Lizzie, a mother whose ex-husband is trying to take full custody of their young son because Lizzie has psychological issues - understandably - after losing their newborn daughter in a hospital fire seven years earlier. When she takes her son to a friend's birthday party, she catches sight of the friend's younger sibling, who happens to be a 7-year-old little girl. The moment Lizzie sets eyes on this kid, she becomes obsessed. She's stalking this little kid, befriending her mom Claire (Yvonne Strahovski) and pretending to be interested in taking their house off the market (which she couldn't afford to do even if she wanted to) just to be around the child. Clearly, Lizzie sees the girl as a chance to replace the daughter she lost.

Lizzie is an enigma to the viewer. We can't never be sure just how off-balance she truly is or how far she's going to take this obsession. What is sure is that it's extremely creepy to see her watching this child and trying to manipulate her way into the girl's life.

I didn't know what to expect from Angel of Mine when I started watching it, but ended up getting an intriguing, unnerving thriller with some terrific acting in it.