AMERICAN STAR (2024)

At least commercially, this slow-burn thriller from Spanish-born director Gonzalo López-Gallego, with a typically fine Ian McShane, died of false expectations.*  Sold, to whatever extent it was sold, as one more Last Hit by an Aging Hitman story (tropes don’t come any tropier), it’s nothing of the sort.  Indeed, McShane’s nephew/occasional partner is already in talks for the next job.  And action mavens should be aware that any ‘hit’ action merely book-ends a character study of McShane, forced to wait a few days after his target fails to show on a first attempt at the man’s isolated home in Fuerteventura, a Spanish controlled Canary Island.  And it’s the island’s strange, haunting landscape that sets off a sort of inner existential journey of the soul for McShane.  (Fuerteventura the sort of beautifully baleful resort spot Michelangelo Antonioni might have booked for a summer.)  While McShane waits, a casual encounter with young local Nora Arnezeder leads to an afternoon of sightseeing and island history.  No pick up, more a surrogate father/daughter vibe though the girl is actually on the hunt for date material for her eccentric/lonely mom (Fanny Ardant).  Yet there’s something wary between these two; especially when McShane’s nephew butts in.  Do these two have a past?  Is something being hidden?  As a few lazy days play out, McShane is more comfortable bumping into Max, the tyke down the hall with disinterested parents.  Max the only person in the film who’s transparent, everyone else more layers than an onion.  And when the brief finale starts to run off course, López-Gallego shows his hand technically in clear narrative & kinetic action.  Stylish stuff; even a moral: No man is an island . . . except when you’re on Fuerteventura.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Just bear in mind, false expectations is a two-way street.

NOCTURAMA (2016)

French writer/director Bertrand Bonello brings focus and finesse to an extended prologue individually following eight (or is it nine?) 20-somethings moving thru Paris streets, shops & The Metro on some unexplained, tightly organized, yet apparently random path to a nearly deserted office building where they will stealthily meet in a conference room to finalize their plans for a terrorist attack on the city.  The bombs will go off perfectly; the rest of the film less so.  Using an upscale department store as overnight hideaway, political motives stubbornly remain left in doubt for generic anarchy, Bonello unwillingly to point fingers or be specific.  Such abstraction often meant to add universality to a subject (it doesn’t; being specific fosters universality), but here it just feels like a dodge, reducing the group from political agitators or sentimental sociopaths (your choice) to chumps.  Bonello does no better on logistics inside the store as pressure within the group on tactics break them into factions once their safe haven starts looking more like a trap of their own making.  In the end, government forces couldn’t care less about motive.  At last, something you can believe.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  Pulling an overnighter at a closed department store or mall shows up in a lot of films including Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES/’36.  Or try a classic Pre-Code department store sleepover in EMPLOYEES’ ENTRANCE/’33.  It should also be noted that any Security Staff that missed their hourly phone-in during the night, would automatically trigger some response, non?    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/employees-entrance-1933.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE  DAY:  The terrorists come off as arrogant, entitled pricks with undigested sophomoronic ideas on people & world politics (or is it trust fund baby syndrome?) with the exception of the token Black (no kiddin', a token Black!) who might have come out of a film or tv episode of fifty years ago.

SEBASTIAN (1968)

Larky Cold War espionager (home office division), not quite a spoof, but certainly not serious, earns points for late-‘60s ‘Mod’ trimmings, an all-gal encryption decoding center (run by Dirk Bogarde - he's Sebastian), D.P. Gerry Fischer’s unfoggy London Town in primary colors, and for Jerry Goldsmith’s ‘Swingle Singers’ stylings on the soundtrack.  But debits for a motorless narrative that doesn’t set up a big Cold War crisis for its decoding staff to tackle till the third act.  (A young Donald Sutherland shows up briefly to explain it all.)  Pretty good fun all the same as Bogarde runs around town (literally) hunting up savvy puzzle-solving ‘birds’ to replace departing staffers.  That’s how he crashes (again, literally) into Susannah York (whom he’ll also bed) while fighting off MI6 bureaucrats worried about inside ‘Lefties’ leaking State secrets.  (Like longtime aide Lilli Palmer.)  Not a bad cast there, plus John Gielgud as their boss and Michael Powell (yes, the Michael Powell) one of the producers, but not directing.  Instead, we get journeyman tv megger David Greene in a rare feature outing.  Who wants genius when you can settle for competence?

DOUBLE-BILL:  Near spoofs of the spy racket are tricky to pull off, asking to be laughed with and taken seriously enough to generate real emotion & suspense.  Typical examples from the two years immediately before this are James Coburn’s OUR MAN FLINT/’66 and IN LIKE FLINT/’67.  Both now looking pretty lame with half the cast all but winking at the camera to signal intent.

ARÁBIA / ARABY (2017)

Haunting in presentation and story, this Brazilian film from co-writer/directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa begins with a feint.  We track thru mountainous countryside following a teenage boy as he bikes home (a quietly stunning uninterrupted take) where his kid brother is sick enough to be home from school.  A check-in from their aunt (she’s the rural visiting nurse; Mom’s working in the city) is followed by a couple of stops with the teen in tow and an emergency stop at a big industrial factory where a man has collapsed.  And it’s that man, not the teen, not the sick kid, not the aunt, who takes focus for the rest of the film after the boy finds a spiral pad where the factory worker (who unexpectedly died overnight) kept a journal.  We never get back to the brothers or the aunt, as if we changed partners mid-dance to follow the short, itinerant life as set down in ‘Christiano’s’ diary.  It should feel like a structural gimmick, but doesn’t.  We begin with a reckless event that puts ‘Cristiano’ in jail long enough to learn some important lessons from a fellow inmate.  Once out, it’s a series of short-lived/smalltime jobs; most hard labor, some decent enough, others taking advantage of him (tangerine picking leaves him paid in tangerines).  For a while, a steady factory job leads to a romantic relationship that might have altered the course of his life, but it peters out after a miscarriage.  Events, and a life, come and go with a circle of life quality sans goals or milestones.  Yet 30-ish non-pro Aristides de Sousa is overwhelmingly moving doing the most ordinary things, and the directing team have a knack for lining up one artlessly artful composition after another.  (They tend to place large blocky buildings to one side of the screen and keep movement on the other.)  If Edward Hopper had lived in rural Brazil, his paintings might have looked like this film.

ROBIN ROBIN (2021)

Like a featherweight boxer who can’t compete with heavyweights in the ring, but just may be (as the tv announcers like to say) pound-for-pound the best fighter around, so too little Aardman Animations if you count product minute-by-minute.  For three-and-a-half decades, they’ve produced more joy, more whimsical laughs and sheer pleasure than any animator out there . . . per released minute.  This delightful half-hour short, released on NetFlix without enough fanfare four years back*, a typical example of their consistent excellence.  Aimed a bit more toward the little ones than the divine WALLACE AND GROMIT films, it follows a family of field mice (Dad & children, no Mom) whose new adopted member is a just hatched robin.  An event seen from the robin’s POV inside the shell.  Getting his mice family in and out of trouble as they forage for leftover crumbs, Robin dreams of bringing home an entire sandwich.  Bumping into a ‘winged’ magpie, something of a hoarder that one, Robin is encouraged to fly and, with this added skill, is able to be a provider as well as a troublemaker.  Lots of singing in this one while mercifully skipping the oversell & push found in so many other family-marketed rivals.  A big relief from the Dreamworks/Illumination model; Aardman thriving on grins and chuckles, avoiding the hunt for the canned laughs others prize.  And how well it weathers!  Note that the ‘stop-motionographers’ have swapped out Plasticine for articulated figures covered with needle felting.  Goodbye tell-tale fingerprints, alas.  But if it helps save costs to give us more Aardman product, I’m okay with it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *You’ll have to wait a while, but Aardman has just signed to make this a series to join their SHAUN THE SHEEP shorts.  Of the SHAUN spin-off features, FARMAGEDDON/’19 especially fine.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/a-shaun-sheep-movie-farmageddon-2019.html

THE FOUR POSTER (1952)

Jan de Hartog’s popular stage piece, a true two-hander and a perfect vehicle for a married acting couple to inexpensively tour with, was a major B’way hit for married acting couple Hume Cronym & Jessica Tandy (José Ferrer directing) while this film version had starrier married acting couple Rex Harrison & Lilli Palmer under stage-stuck film director Irving Reis.  (Harrison & Palmer with three B’way appearances around this time, including a huge hit in BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE, which they were still playing together in London in 1954 after Rex had taken up with Kay Kendall!  Talk about troopers!)  The play, a middlebrow Scenes From A Marriage, plays like an elegant series of alternately witty/wise/obvious/sentimental Black-Out sketches: Wedding Night; Labor Pains; 12 Year Itch; Children; Loss; Empty Nesters; Search for Youth; Till Death...; Survivor Blues.  Tougher-minded than you’d imagine, in addition to the expected charm & sentiment, with witty pen & ink styled animated interludes from the great John Hubley.  Pleasant, but these things can be awkward on film without an imaginative rethink.  (It has a better chance on the small screen.)  If only a decent print were available, perhaps it might come closer to its potential.*

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Touching on similar ideas, an earlier Rex Harrison film, from his initial Hollywood sojourn at 20th/Fox, shows what’s missing here.  Co-starring Gene Tierney, it's Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s still undersung THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR/’47.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Likely lost on today’s audience is that the very title of this film is a thumb to the nose of the Hollywood Production Code still forcing even married couples to sleep in separate beds.  A fourposter indeed!  Shocking.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Note the stage play is THE FOURPOSTER while the film is THE FOUR (space) POSTER.  Now you know what Hollywood producers do.

TWO GIRLS ON BROADWAY (1940)

Top-billed for the second time after moving from Warners, M-G-M was still figuring out what to do with a very young Lana Turner, not yet 20.  Musicals?  Not how we think of Lana now, but she made her share.  Did her own singing, too.  This backstager, a programmer from megger S. Sylvan Simon (say it three times fast), skimps on connective tissue to squeeze in pots of plot along with a few numbers in just 73 minutes.  Turner’s kid sister to Joan Blondell, small-town dance tutor engaged to hoofer George Murphy.  Going on an amateurs radio show, Murphy scores a big break in the Big Apple, then parlays his win into a gig in a revue and an invite to bring out the girls.  (Not the most believable moment in the pic.)  Only problem, longtime fiancée Blondell is strictly smalltime while Turner outshines her professionally (Blondell okay with that) and personally (tougher to swallow).  For Blondell, this offers an orgy of self-effacing renunciation; for Murphy, two neat dance routines and an orgy of apologies; for Turner, a chance to show off some nice moves on-stage and the buoyant looks and personality she had before M-G-M lacquered on the hard-shell surface.  Blondell, as so often, managing to layer in a bit of real sentiment between the formula moves.  Plus, standout lighting from DP George Folsey.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The big turntable stage set that shows up for this little film’s one big number is yet another outing for the mammoth circular staircase set originally built for THE GREAT ZIEGFELD/’36.  It was next seen on screen, again with Turner, in next year’s ZIEGFELD GIRL/’41 where Turner had to share it with Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland.  Worse yet, dropping down to fourth-billed on that A-list pic.

BLOW (2001)

It’s fitting that Ray Liotta, playing understanding Dad to Johnny Depp’s drug dealing mogul, gives the defining (and best) perf in what proved to be Ted Demme’s last feature.  (A drug related death at only 38.)  Liotta having made his name in Uncle Jonathan Demme’s SOMETHING WILD/’86 and whose signature role was in Martin Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS/’90.  You expect Demme influence, but instead get lots of Scorsese; specifically GOODFELLAS which is nearly a template for this highly personalized story of how Depp’s character (the real life George Jung) became a key figure in upping the ante in Stateside drug consumption from weed to blow.  And it’s a great subject, one that this Demme isn’t quite up to, try as he might.  As the film would have it, Jung is more or less accidentally hooked into trafficking cocaine as a competent fellow who Columbian kingpin Pablo Escobar trusts to deliver across the border.  But in Demme’s hands the trip thru ‘70s fashion in clothes, grooming and preferred substance abuse skates on the surface.  Entertaining, and with lots of surprising turns from Paul Reubens (excellent!) and Penelope Cruz among many others.  But the sentimental turns and case pleading, all from the Jung/Depp’s POV, desperately needs counterweight from another (probably legally opposing) force while Demme only piles on more swag.  It makes a nice contrast to the barren walls of Jung's many prison layaways, but is missing any nuance.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The real Jung, as seen in a still at the end of the pic, certainly no looker . . . unlike Depp!  So the way Depp enjoys all the outre ‘70s clothes (those pointy collars!), long hair styles and cosmetic trappings, plays very differently on him than it must have on the real guy.  The difference between a natural peacock and a squab who can only dress like one.

THE SECRET OF MONTE CRISTO (1961)

With film profits stuck in the U.K. under post-WWII financial protection policies, Hollywood used the embargoed cash to make more movies there.  It’s why you find M-G-M turning to a series of British historicals starting with IVANHOE/’52 or Disney making a series of family-suitable/live-action Classics like TREASURE ISLAND/’50, the one with Robert Newton.  The Disney run uniformly successful.  So when they wound down production, a little company like Mid-Century stepped into the breach.  (Too late for Mid-Century who disappeared after this.)  In spite of its title, look not for Alexandre Dumas' COUNT*, instead, an ‘original’ 1800s treasure map adventure, the old saw about four strangers, each holding one part of a map promising millions, forced to come together to find out where X Marks the Spot.  (That joining up a mid-point climax all but missed in Leon Griffiths' script.)  Rory Calhoun is pleasant company, but hopelessly American as an honorable Brit stepping in to help a Lady-in-distress whose father was just killed over his piece of the map.  Three others join them while two villains (and a lady adventuress) await up ahead.  All second-rate actors to be sure, but the production (by Robert S. Baker & Monty Berman who produce, direct and photograph per the opening credits) is quite handsomely shot and believably mounted.  (Though one exterior courtyard seems to get reused once or twice.)  And, of course, there’s a loyal servant for lame comic relief before he turns into a courageous ace-in-the-hole.  No great shakes, but not so far off the Disney model.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *From France, two new versions of the Dumas CRISTO just out: one a feature film/one a mini-series.  Both well received but neither yet showing up with English subtitles.