I feel like I’m aware of Laurel & Hardy in a way I would say “everyone” is, but I guess that’s probably not true anymore (the kind of stuff I picked up or learnt about by osmosis in my ’80s/’90s childhood is surely very different to what kids got growing up in the ’00s/’10s). But I don’t think I’ve ever actively seen any of their work; certainly none of their feature-length films. The Flying Deuces is “probably their most famous film”, at least according to the blurb on my copy. Certainly, it’s the one you see bandied about the most; but then it’s in the public domain (one of only two Laurel & Hardy films where that’s the case), so it’s inevitably subject to endless cheapo releases. Leaving the quality of the print aside (it was poor; but at least it wasn’t cut, which apparently many are), I can’t say I was too impressed by the quality of the content, either.

Here’s the rub: it’s a comedy, but it barely made me laugh. The humour operates at a basic level, with gags that are either well-worn or repetitious. “How anyone could be so stupid as to stand there and continually bump their head is beyond me,” one of them says at one point. And yet the other does exactly that, because that’s the level most of the film’s humour operates at. Some might say this is the downside of the duo being popular and their work being old — i.e. it’s been imitated and copied for decades, and we’ve moved on. But I don’t find that to be the case with silent comedians —who were equally, if not even more, popular, and whose work is even older — nor with things like the Road to films — which are far from the height of sophisticated comedy, but tickle my fancy more often.

Well, there’s your answer, I guess: it’s all a matter of taste. And it seems Laurel and Hardy aren’t to mine.

The Flying Deuces is the 41st film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2022.

I guess one of the advantages of being a filmmaker with some degree of clout is you can take your regular-ass childhood and turn it into a movie as if it was somehow special. That’s what the Before trilogy and Boyhood mastermind Richard Linklater has done here, fictionalising his autobiography as the story of ten-year-old Stanley, who lives in Huston, Texas, in the era of the first moon landing. Except, in this version, Stanley is secretly recruited by NASA to secretly train to be a secret astronaut to secretly be the first person on the Moon, in secret. If that sounds like an unusual spin on a traditional nostalgia-driven biopic, don’t get excited: that subplot is moved away from as quickly as it’s introduced, and only pops back up two or three more times, each brief. The film is much more concerned with real memories than imagined ones, and is much less fun for it.

Often, at Christmas or other such get-togethers, members of my family will end up reminiscing about various childhood recollections. I’m sure many other families do a similar thing. What’s shared on these occasions are the kind of mundane memories that mean the world to us but, if you stopped to think about it, you know no outsider would find of much value. Well, seems Richard Linklater hasn’t stopped to think about it. And I really do mean “mundane”: there’s a sequence about which sibling did which chores and how they made their school lunches. As a commenter on iCM put it, Linklater “name checks every TV show and movie he saw, every game he played, everything in his diary […] for long stretches, it just feels like an itemized list of childhood memories.”

One part that’s actually rather good is Jack Black’s voiceover narration as the adult Stanley. There’s probably too much of it (again underlining the fact these are nostalgic anecdotes rather than a true narrative), but the actual quality he brings is very nice. It feels calm and understated, neither giving in to Black’s usual mania nor substituting it for the hardcore tweeness you might expect from such a rose-tinted autobiography.

Maybe Apollo 10½ will be more interesting to young people or future generations, whose technology- and safety-obsessed childhood experiences will be so far removed from what we see here. To them, it’s an historical documentary. I can’t say my childhood was much like this one (especially as it occurred almost 30 years later), but I guess I’ve picked up enough of this kind of nostalgia from other American films and TV series down the years that what Linklater has to share doesn’t feel remarkable enough to be worth sharing.

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood is the 42nd film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2022.

Here we have one of those films that commonly gets called a film noir, but isn’t really (or, at least, doesn’t fit well with the standard conception of what noir entails). The blurb for Arrow’s Blu-ray release describes it as a “Gothic-tinged Hitchcockian breakout hit” (apparently it was produced as a B-movie but became so popular they promoted it to “A-feature status”), which struck me as accurate — it’s less standard noir, more a Rebecca-influenced psychological thriller. While it’s clearly no Hitchcock, it’s a very entertaining substitute.

Nina Foch stars as the eponymous Julia Ross, who takes a job as a live-in secretary for a wealthy widow. But the job is a front: Julia is kidnapped, waking up a prisoner in a Cornish mansion, where the widow (Dame May Whitty) and her son (George Macready) try to convince her she’s actually Marion Hughes, the son’s wife, and she’s having a bit of an episode.

From the way Arrow described the film, I assumed it was going to play to some degree with the idea that maybe she is actually mad. It would be a neat twist, right? That she is Marion Hughes, and the stuff we saw at the start was part of her delusion. But no, the film doesn’t even vaguely gesture at that route: right after Julia meets her prospective employer, we see that she’s plotting something nefarious — and the film isn’t even seven minutes in. Then, even before we really know that something’s up, Julia’s fancy-man is looking into her disappearance. It’s like the film’s playing all the right notes but in the wrong order.

But it doesn’t really matter, because the whole thing is suitably entertaining. Rather than relying on the mystery of what’s happening, it’s more about how Julia can get out of the situation. Will she be able to escape her confinement? Can she somehow get out a message for help? Or will the villains succeed in their scheme? Plus, at just 65 minutes, it moves at a whipcrack pace, so you can sit back and enjoy the absurd plot rather than worrying about, well, how absurd it is.

My Name Is Julia Ross is the 43rd film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2022.

When their bank heist goes sideways, two brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) make their getaway in a stolen ambulance — with a policeman they shot and the paramedic working on him (Eiza González) in the back. With the cops immediately on their tail, thus begins an epic car ambulance chase around the streets of LA.

The setup feels like it should signal the low-/mid-budget debut of a new director showcasing their talents with a 90-minute stripped-back thrill-ride that’s mostly contained to the eponymous setting. But it’s not directed by some newbie — it’s Michael frickin’ Bay, back on the form that gave us action classics like The Rock. And so the 90-minute character-focused thriller is in there (honest it is), but augmented with 40 minutes of big-budget Bayhem.

Compared to Bay’s other work in the past 15 or so years, Ambulance feels restrained. Compared to almost any other filmmaker, it’s anything but. When I say “restrained”, part of what I mean is the editing. Not that it takes a leisurely approach by any means, but it doesn’t have that “impressionistic jumble of B-roll” style Bay has tended towards on and off ever since Armageddon, and that became his only mode during a couple of the Transformers sequels. Also, I didn’t notice this until I read it on IMDb, but the film contains a literal Chekhov’s gun — that is, a gun that is a “Chekhov’s gun”. That’s so Michael Bay.

Giving this film 5 stars would be a bit silly… but it was really good. It’s the kind of movie you’d never rate higher than 4, but you love for what it is: magnificent Bayhem.

Ambulance is the 44th film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2022. It placed 9th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2022.

When an overheard white lie about losing her virginity makes barely-noticed Olive (Emma Stone) the centre of her high school rumour mill, she decides to manipulate her newfound notoriety for her own amusement.

As “raunchy teen comedy” plots go, it hits a sweet spot of being neither too prudish nor too lecherous. The dialogue elevates it further in a sharp and witty script by Bert V. Royal (who, it seems, has since only worked on TV shows I’ve never heard of. Shame). In her first lead role, Emma Stone gives a perfectly-pitched, surprisingly nuanced performance. The story really allows her to show off her versatility, believable as both the ‘quiet girl’ and ‘confident slut’. Obviously there’s lots of comedy, but she sells the moments of sincerity too. It’s no wonder she quickly got snapped up for more awards-type work. Plus, there’s Stanley Tucci being what I imagine Stanley Tucci is actually like as a dad, which is perfection.

The only major downside (and it’s a bit of a spoiler, but also so predictable that it barely counts as a spoiler) is that it would’ve been nice if the guy she eventually ends up with wasn’t so stereotypically hot. We’re meant to buy him as a kinda-goofy sports mascot rather than someone who’d actually be playing The Sport? Yeah right.

I’m not always a fan of high school movies or teen comedies, but there are definite exceptions, and this is the latest addition to that rarefied list.