Mud Songs

The Night Listener features Robin Williams as a radio storyteller who begins to receive calls from a 14-year-old boy whose depressing life story becomes material for a radio story. Williams speaks to the kid and his mother on the phone and notices they have similar voices. Is the mother pretending to be her 14-year-old son over the phone? Does her son actually exist? Does anybody care? More to the point, why should anybody care? What’s the big deal? There’s no reason for the audience to feel intrigued. Nobody with any sense would bother to hunt down the kid’s mother to see if he exists. Nobody with any sense would do half the things that go down in this movie. The filmmakers try to make it creepy and mysterious, and Williams does the best he can with the material, but the story goes nowhere. There is no story.

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is a B-movie that’s no more sophisticated or frightening than The Blob. Birds start acting funny and attack people. The movie has a few good shots, but it’s boring and over-rated. If you bother to watch it (I don’t plan to see it again), let me know if you think the guy who plays Mitch, Rod Taylor, looks and sounds like Robin Williams’s father. I was convinced the two must be related. They’re not.

I’ve seen most of Hitchcock’s movies. I’ll eventually post about them as I re-watch them.

The Fisher King is a much better film than I remember (I last saw it around 1991) and one fans of The Fountain might appreciate too. Both are existential meditations on love and loss, and they cut deep. I don’t think Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams and Mercedes Ruehl could have given better performances in this surreal yet uncomfortably realistic film directed by Terry Gilliam. A fantastical mix of sorrow and humour.