THE CLIMB (2019)

With a new film out (SPLITSVILLE/’25), multitasker Michael Angelo Covino earns a look at his best known previous work.  Co-writing & co-starring with Kyle Marvin (Covino directs), CLIMB fits into the indie-Mumblecore/Cringe-Comedy movement, shadowing straight 30-something pals celebrating & rebelling against their bond at every opportunity.  Naturally, since he directs, Covino’s the Alpha male, always butting in on love & marriage, health & career with negative energy.  Marvin pushes against him, but his actions prove helpless in a can’t live with him/can’t live without him hug of mutual co-dependancy.  The thrust might be sadder-but-wiser . . . if anyone ever wised up.  That’s the joke as breaking up individual growth (even love & marriage) is Covino’s modus operandi.  Not even a near death experience sees a course change.  Just bear in mind, it’s the type of film that plays infinitely better seen in the midst of film festival fodder as contrast to navel-gazing platitudinous sincerity and the painfully obvious.*  Without that, Covino’s efforts come off as small beer.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *Kelly Reichardt brings award-winning seriousness rather than uncomfortable laughs to a similar relationship in her well received OLD JOY/’06  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/old-joy-2006.html

ELIO (2025)

Largely dismissed on release, the latest PIXAR animation opens with a series of hurdles to get over: First - explain period details on Space Exploration history; Second - introduce the analogue properties of HAM radio (and its nerdy devotees); Third - cite author/space expert Carl Sagan to a target audience born decades after his heyday.  So, extra points to PIXAR for clearly laying out the prologue that sets up little orphan Elio as an interplanetary junkie hoping to hitch a ride on the next visiting UFO.  Lucky for him, his guardian Aunt works as a space techie, so Elio’s always in the know and on track to suss out cutting edge info.*  The gimmick is that Elio’s suspicions are correct.  And he’s soon on his way.  The end also neatly finessed with the writers cleverly borrowing tropes from THE WIZARD OF OZ/39 and ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS/’61 (those HAM radio operators playing out a variation on the call-of-the-hounds sequence) to get Elio back home.  The problem is all the stuff that comes in the middle.  So many layers of species, society and antagonists to keep track of in space.  And they all think Elio’s Earth’s Leader.  While we get few characters to connect to.  The animation as messy as the story development.  (Story development once PIXAR’s trump card.)  Perhaps three directors (Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi) and nine writers too many cooks.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Always orphans in these things.  (Indeed, LILO AND STITCH/'25, which quickly buried this critically & commercially, features two of them.)  But it's hard to see why this film wouldn’t work just as well with two living parents at home.  Mom & Dad worried about a kid who daydreams about space adventure all day and misses out on what’s happening around him at school and in his own backyard.  (Fits right in with the WoO stuff at the end, too.  (On the other hand, Dorothy also an orphan.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Is this PIXAR’s least physically appealing film?

MOKEY (1942)

Fascinating and horrific in unequal proportions, this M-G-M B-pic, taken from Jennie Harris Oliver boys-will-be-boys magazine stories, likely a test run for a series that didn’t happen.  Directed by journeyman scripter Wells Root (a second & last megging credit, he’s lucky to have Charles Rosher as DP), all about 8-yr-old Mokey, motherless troublemaker, and his racially mixed neighborhood pals.  (Unusual for 1942.)  Played by young Robert ‘Bobby’ Blake, Mokey’s no domesticated DENNIS-THE-MENACE type or even the middle-class (juvenile delinquent-worthy) scamp of Booth Tarkenton’s PENROD (how that boy ever got to SEVENTEEN), but downright pathological, Mokey, meant to be lovably misunderstood, more serial risk taker who nearly gets two people killed* with self-centered lack of empathy and the attention span of a gnat  Dan Dailey (with a just grown mustache) is the neglectful/on-the-road dad who dumps child bride Donna Reed on the kid and lets his domestic go.  (Look!  It’s Hattie McDaniel’s sister Etta.)  Step-mother & kid a quick misalliance, with a lack of communication and Mokey fucking up over and over.  Eventually he gets in real trouble (Grand Larceny, nearly killing his new half-sister), runs away and (BLACKFACE ALERT!) hides out with his Black pals for three weeks in Blackface!  (Not the stylized showbiz type, but blacked up to ‘pass.’)  Meanwhile, Step-mom and Dad think the boy’s dead.  It takes a judge to untangle this mess and extend probation, but Mokey finally shows contrition by drinking a whole glass of warm milk to save this budding American family.  As a look at child-rearing and race relations of the day, this is gasp-worthy stuff; a Bizarro World to the corn-fed Mickey Rooney/Andy Hardy movies.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Highly likely that in real life, Blake got away with murdering his wife.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Watch for a strange haunting bit where Mokey’s almost adopted by a sad farming couple who’d lost a little boy just about Mokey’s age.  (This is where the movie ought to have been all along.)

LES YEUX SANS VISAGE / EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)

1960 saw two seminal/groundbreaking horror pics.  One everyone knows: Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO.  One everyone should know: Georges Franju’s LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, the original Body Horror movie.*  Unlike anything in the horror canon (though I’d wager both Franju and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan saw Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR/’32 in its now lost first-generation print), the story* is a classic (science going too far) and simple (if at first you don’t succeed . . .).  But in execution: poetic, dreamlike, it’s more ballet than tragic folk ballad.  A surgeon’s beautiful daughter has lost her face in a near tragic accident.  Alive, but hideous, he’s determined to find the perfect match for a complete face graft.  Too bad he must kill an abducted girl to first treat the skin so the graft will not be rejected.  On the other hand, a murdered 'donator' can be identified as the body of his ‘late’ daughter.  With a grief-stricken fiancé to move the plot, and a loyal operating aide (Alida Valli with a corpse in the back of one of those Citroëns with the horsepower of a lawnmower) to assist the doctor.  Only a failed outcome could lead to detection . . . and the need for another face to lift off and graft on.  These scenes had people fainting at the time.  And while we’ve gone far beyond them in gory reality on film, the graceful terror and pulse-free forward momentum retain most of its uniquely effective horror.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Some of the influences close enough to suggest a possible plagiarism suit (see THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF/’62), but most less direct.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-awful-dr-orlof-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Adapted from their novel by Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac of DIABOLIQUE/’55 and VERTIGO/’58 fame.

SUPERMAN (2025)

After three films that took GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY/’14;’17;’23 from ‘found delight’ to unwatchable overkill; James Gunn has managed to make SUPERMAN unwatchable in his first attempt.  Progress!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Of course, the purpose of this exercise was less to make a movie than to reboot DC Comics as a legit rival to MARVEL.  (Themselves currently in the doldrums.)  But if nothing beats SUPERMAN for audience awareness, the fan base is more wide than deep.  And, perhaps by design, low in Cool Factor.  (A bit like PETER PAN that way.)  He's Superman: the super hero too perfect to cast a shadow.  Add one, and he’s not Superman.  He’s an IP conundrum studios can neither count on nor count out.  Usual point of positive reference SUPERMAN/’76, thought to have solved these problems.  It didn’t, even the F/X thought poky at the time.  (Lots of problems, especially with the color grading whenever Supe went in the air.)  Three great things: John Williams’ score (constantly alluded to here); Glenn Ford's accidental Dad, waking as an actor after a decades nap; Geoffrey Unsworth’s wondrous countryside cinematography.  And that missing shadow?  Christopher Reeve’s aquiline nose.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Best to stick with the famous series of Fleisher Bros. Cartoons from the early 1940s.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/superman-1941-43.html

THE PROSECUTOR / NG POON (2024)

Having accomplished pretty much everything an international Hong Kong-based Martial Arts actor/fight-choreographer/director can do (even STAR WARS took a bite), Donnie Yen is now on track to break a longevity record, retaining top form as he begins his fifth decade in film.  Here, he stars in and directs a modern Hong Kong actioner split between the police force prologue where an innocent young man gets a long jail sentence for unknowingly receiving drugs; followed by Yen’s new job at the Department of Justice where he’s able to see the enormous money laundering operation that set up the young man.  Power and corruption all over the place.  (Whatever did the current Chinese authorities make of the Dark Side of power politics portrayed here?*) But of course, we’re watching not for the Civil Service office procedural (damn complicated, too!), but for the chop-socky action.  Five or six mega-set action pieces with two standout sequences for Yen to show the choreographic elegance that’s the foundation that allows him to release some powerful violence.  First, in a parking lot sequence that feels as much a visual fugue as a fight (curving lines of action/vertical drops); and then in a climatic subway showdown as Yen and a key witness must survive an ambush of killers to reach court and testify.  Handsomely made thru-out, exciting and cast with a pitch perfect touch for easy character identification.  Yen, who’s already been announced for a JOHN WICK spin-off only has seven directing credits.  Are any of the others this good?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A hard to swallow title at the end credits says Based on a True Story.  Really?

RETURN OF THE BAD MEN (1948)

From R.K.O., a big boned Western with the soul of a pint-sized programmer; the epic and the mundane canceling each other out under Ray Enright’s solid but faceless direction.  Up against the most famous Outlaw Brothers in the West (the Jameses, the Youngers, the Daltons; plus one sister*), Randolph Scott delays his move to California (with fiancée Jacqueline White) to help maintain order during the Oklahoma Land Rush.  A segment likely put together with footage  from R.K.O.’s Oscar® winning CIMARRON/’31, just the sort of prestige piece this film would like to be.  With comic relief supplied by George 'Gabby' Hayes’ banker and loads of fellow program Western stars, Robert Ryan stands out a mile as main villain Sundance Kid.  Put in this company, Ryan’s so powerfully modern he overwhelms everything around him.  A post-war element (that’s post-WWII not post-Civil War) breaking the Hollywood model for these things.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Producer/writer/actor Stacy Keach and undervalued director Walter Hill managed to corral real brothers Keach, Carradine and Quaid to play all these brothers in THE LONG RIDERS/’80.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-long-riders-1980.html

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Everyone’s in peak form for this treasurable pop entertainment, a paradigm of pulp movie making.  Even writer/director John Carpenter’s typically repetitive score feels right on target.  Made for a relative pittance (six mill), the tight budget undoubtedly helped rather than hurt, triggering imagination & vitality, with wit & charm in its playful scale-model trickery and proudly low-tech effects.  It’s 1997 (NOW as the screen tells us) and much decorated/now disgraced military vet Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell in excelsis) is about to start a sentence in Manhattan’s top-security prison facility . . . it’s the entire island!  Once you’re on it, you never get off.  Only possibility, POTUS Donald Pleasence (the real 1997 saw Bill Clinton in office) has just ejected from a hijacked plane* and landed inside the island prison.  Snake’s mission: Save the Prez and get-out-of-jail-free.  The rest, a series of escapes from vicious gangs and death traps with tasty co-stars like Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau joining in the hunt.  All ridiculously satisfying.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That terrorist commandeered plane weirdly prescient of 9/11.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Scroll three posts down to ROAD HOUSE and LINK to a NYTimes discussion of ‘good’ bad films.  Check the Comments in that article and you’ll find ESCAPE mentioned again and again as the ‘perfect’ Good Bad movie.  What are these people thinking?  There’s nothing Bad about this quirky masterpiece.  Bad because it has a small budget?  Bad because it’s an actioner?  Because it’s genre?  Because the F/X is fanciful?  Similarly, ESCAPE is also no Guilty Pleasure.  What’s to be Guilty about a minor masterpiece built out of distressed materials?  More like a miracle; a miracle of moxie.

DOUBLE-BILL:  In a lesson Hollywood never seems to learn, ESCAPE FROM L.A./’96 cost ten times as much and was about a third as good.

FIXED (2025)

Puerile when not scatological, it’s plain to see how co-writer/director Genndy Tartakovsky’s strenuously ribald animation about a horny househound trying to stay ‘intact’ by running away from his appointment with destiny has gotten a rocky reception.  It’s one thing to be a sex-addled comic film made for the puberty-preoccupied BIG MOUTH gang, quite another to play out as if it was conceived, written & drawn by them!  The leg humping, sack swinging, anus obsessive gags quickly grow tiresome.  And that’s a pity as the all-star vocal cast for the neighborhood animal pals is just as much fun to listen to as the choice of palette, design & presentation is to look at.  A bright, hand-drawn, 2D throwback style, riffing on 1990s cartoon æsthetics like REN & STIMPY.*  But for those who can wade thru the jejune-ity of the first act, things improve noticeably once our boy (and his boys) make it to the city, get lost, and enter a testicle-free zone of misadventures & close calls that are rude, crude & lewd in their own way.  Starting with a mass cat attack and continuing with some pretty funny, smoothly handled, testicle-free, action-oriented comic set pieces.  Set your patience level UP and your expectations level down to MEDIUM and you’ll find a decent piece of entertainment in here.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And note how often a cut to close up reveals details reminiscent of some Dr. Seuss character, presumably from the production's 'fixed' model sheet.  (Those tufts of top hair!)