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Monday, March 18, 2024

ANNA (2019)

Hard to know exactly when French writer/director Luc Besson became a hack, certainly long before this project brought on sexual misconduct charges against him, leading to this SPY vs SPY thriller to receive something between a dumped release and a burial.  Of course, there are hacks and there are hacks.  Besson, a technically facile filmmaker to his fingertips, reliably puts out slick watchable product, here with a neat twist to the story and a tricky time-jumping narrative that put all the punch-lines months ahead of the set ups which he jumps back to cover for us.  And the overriding twist even better as the recruitment of Russian beauty Sasha Luss for training as a Paris-based fashion model is really cover for her new life as an international double-agent assassination specialist spy.  Only none of her superiors know she’s really a KGB plant, working for Moscow.  Add bisexual action; John Wick levels of execution action; Hong Kong style Martial Arts acrobatic action sequences; and double-dealing backroom bargaining.  But there’s no kick to the carnage; clarity but no involvement.  If only Luss had a bit of chemistry with her three lovers: KGB-Luke Evans; CIA Cillian Murphy; hot haute model/gal-pal Lera Abova.  Only coming alive against mean boss-lady Helen Mirren, her Ruskie controller.  And thanks goodness for Mirren!  Hilarious playing a cross between Maria Ouspenskaya, Lotte Lenya & Fran Lebowitz.   And, to his credit, Besson knows it, giving Mirren the film’s last line.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Fair to say someone had thoughts of franchise on the brain.  The posters all but scream female James Bond.  But with a big financial loss and Luss's career now treading water, it ain’t happening.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

NIGHTMARE (1942)

That generic title isn’t the only secondhand thing in this modestly effective Universal programmer; so too the plot which is largely patterned on Alfred Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS/’35.  Here, Brian Donlevy’s gets Robert Donat’s spot as a London visitor whose chance encounter with a lady in trouble leads to a dead body and his picture in the paper as the presumed murderer.  Yikes!  On the lam, he heads north to find the real culprit, reluctantly helped by a mysterious lady whose antipathy slowly warms to partnership & a love match.  The main structural change combining the two women (originally Lucie Mannheim & Madeleine Carroll) into one, with the murder victim now a different character.  Diana Barrymore, daughter of John, has her highwater film appearance at 20, playing the combined role.  (She’s good, too, but would soon be brought down by the Barrymore curse: drug and/or alcohol addiction.)  Silly stuff, of course, and a far cry from Hitchcock, but not without a bit of swing & style under journeyman director Tim Whelan who got lucky with an unusually strong supporting cast for Universal: Henry Daniell, Arthur Shields, Hans Conreid & John Abbott.  Lesser known Gavin Muir plays the main villain (the man with the missing finger in 39 STEPS, Godfrey Tearle), here running a Fifth Column for the Nazis.  Whelan also got top-tier cinematographer George Barnes and an inventive score out of busy Frank Skinner.  The two also with major Hitchcock connections; Barnes Oscar’d for REBECCA/’40, Skinner about to score SABOTEUR/’42.  If only there were a decent edition around to replace the smeary dupes available on the internet.  Much of Barnes' daringly dark lensing barely visible.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Scripter Dwight Taylor (who wrote PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET/’53 with Sam Fuller -  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/pickup-on-south-street-1953.html) was prescient, writing LONG LOST FATHER/’34 for Diana’s dad John Barrymore, about a long absent father meeting his daughter after twenty years.  Not far off their actual relationship.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

LES HIRONDELLES DE KABOUL / THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL (2019)

Strong meat drawn in the style of storybook watercolors (stunningly so, often with characters simplified to little more than a slash & a dab of wash), Zabou Breitman & Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec’s animated film (from Yasmina Khadra’s novel) has a Dickensian narrative pull and structure to it, detailing the lives of a few ‘ordinary’ people in the destroyed city of Kabul under the Taliban where life is very much ‘the worst of times.’  The main characters are a young married couple (University prof; artist), chafing against zealot religious rules & regulations, living in virtual imprisonment in their empty apartment.  (For the wife, having to wear the burka to go out a particular horror.)  And the male jailer at a women’s prison, living thru the final days of his cancer ravaged wife.  An accidental death will bring the two stories together, revealing a chance for escape, but only thru unimaginable tragedy.  The climax a particular horror as a soccer game against a visiting Pakistani team gets a special opening act: political & religious motivated public executions (in a variety of methods) for your approval and entertainment.  If this sort of horror true?  Would a foreign team agree to such a thing?  Devastating stuff, even with the distancing format of a Dickensian drama, presumably straight from the novel.  Here, purposefully done in an enchantingly lovely visual style that only makes the Taliban religious madness & mania stand out in grisly relief.

DOUBLE-BILL: Surprising to see that Marjane Satrapi’s superb PERSEPOLIS/’07, a highly stylized b&w animated film about a girl’s coming-of-age under the Islamic Revolution in Iran, came out five years after Yasmina Khadra’s 2002 novel was published.

Friday, March 15, 2024

WINTER SLEEP (2014)

Winning Cannes’ Grand Jury Prize (shh - that’s second place) on ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA/’11, Iranian filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s returned after three years for the Palme d’Or (that’s first) with this fascinating, if punishing work.  Fascinating in its look at rural Anatolian terrain and people, centered around a relatively wealthy family who run a tourist lodge stunningly set in some hard to reach foothills off the vast Anatolian steppes.  Punishing in its formality, pacing, sheer length (3+ hours) and in detailing an entire culture & society stymied by passive/aggressive behavior; subtly (and not so subtly) attacking relatives, friends, employees, tenants and casual acquaintances in a manner so polite they needn’t act behind their back.  You could pull your hair out in frustration; imagine what it’s like for them!  Top dog is the lodge owner, a former actor and current pontificating bore (with the local newspaper column to prove it), patronizing to one and all in an even-handed manner that only makes it worse.  (Played by Haluk Bilginer, he’s also a James Mason lookalike.)  And with the annoying habit of mostly being right!  Hard to win sympathy when you politely dispossess poor tenants late with  the rent; deal with a disagreeable sister divorced into your household; patronize your much younger wife whose only wish is to do something on her own and play Miss Dilettante Charitable Cause with other people’s donations till it blows up in her face; just as you said it would.  All this disturbingly engrossing as long as you can lower your heartbeat to match Ceylan’s steady but slow pulse.  He certainly manages striking compositions to help get you thru all the dramatic caesurae.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A personal pet peeve, but does anybody ever believe characters on stage & screen ripping up or burning piles of cash to prove a point?

Thursday, March 14, 2024

SUNSHINE (2007)

The sun needs a jumpstart to save life on Earth in this Outer-space Techno-thriller directed by Danny Boyle, script Alex Garland.  Two guys you’d think would know better than to make a 2001 Deep-Think/Deep-Space Sci-Fi statement pic from such folderol.  Boyle,  overworking his self-regarding Mission Quest plot like a comic grabbing his one chance to play Hamlet, piles on space station paraphernalia & graphics to prop up a standard who’ll-die-next storyline (EIGHT LITTLE INDIANS?) as a motley crew of solar astronauts try to reach the drop spot for their atomic payload where a previous gang (of seven) failed to deliver and presumably died.  Cillian Murphy gets the big star push as the noblest techie on board, but had to wait on the big time when the film stalled commercially.  Perhaps because the one big surprise proves just too ridiculous; perhaps because the sun glare backing the major events is so unpleasant on the eyes.*   We don’t usually recommend sunglasses at the movies, but . . .  or maybe one of those solar eclipse safety-view boxes.  Better yet, skip the film along with the shades.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Avoided here, but isn’t this just a sober-sided ARMAGEDDON/’98?  Without the gags; without Michael Bay; without Bruce Willis and the usual blowhards.  Wait, SUNSHINE is sounding better by the minute.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The film might have come with a Migraine Alert.  And the big blunder that sets off a doomsday chain of events, is the equivalent of a man sent to investigate rainstorms, but forgetting to bring his umbrella.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

KAIBUTSU / MONSTER (2023)

On the surface, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s new film shares many story & character elements with Ilker Çatak’s equally well-received THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE/’23.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-teachers-lounge-das-lehrerzimmer.html)  Young public school teacher watches helplessly as a small physical incident involving a troubled student rapidly escalates into a major career-threatening fiasco.  But compared to Çatak, Kore-eda is playing fourth-dimensional chess with a story structure of perplexing, yet entirely credible ‘reveals’ reversing how we thought things came about; whom we think is at fault; how the trouble started, who told the first lie; even what we think occurred.  Ideas more in line with Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (A SEPARATION/’11) and at times reminiscent of Kurosawa’s RASHOMON/’50 as we jump back to revisit scenes now told from someone else’s perspective with someone else’s ‘truth.’   Stellar directorial references there, yet Kore-eda retains a personality all his own while parsing out the difference between lies, exaggeration and honest misunderstandings without breaking a sweat . . . or our trust.  A bit too neat in giving everyone a secret to bounce off the main story (for example, the school principal lying about a personal tragedy* or the boy’s younger friend having a bully for a father to explain something the teacher is blamed for), but this ’perfect storm’ of missteps is laid out in such clear patterns, we can easily follow each tit-for-tat error in judgement.  The plot’s a puzzle, but a very human one.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  In spite of the great films mentioned above, what came immediately to mind was William Wyler's classic THESE THREE/’37, also about a child’s lie that blows up to destroy lives.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/05/these-three-1936.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Don’t Japanese teachers have a union?  They certainly need one!  Though you can't help but wonder how much could have been avoided if the culture weren’t so rigidly polite, held down by restraint.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY (2009)


Unexpectedly raw, honest and riveting documentary on the Disney animation renaissance of 1984 - 1994, a unique mix of corporate and artistic gamesmanship, largely told thru original source materials rather than Talking Heads and starry-eyed encomiums.  First man down is Walt Disney son-in-law Ron Miller (as clueless a production head as anyone in town since Spyros Skouras at 20th/Fox in the ‘60s), this paved the way for Roy Disney to play prodigal nephew (of Walt), bearing Frank Wells & Michael Eisner as new co-heads and portent of his return.  Still, after a bit of deadwood animation was cleared out (BLACK CAULDRON/’85 a particularly pricey loss) and the indignation of having the animators moved out of their old legendary building on the Disney lot, fresh shoots quickly generated, fully announcing itself when ‘Under the Sea’ symbolically stopped the show at preview showings of THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-little-mermaid-1989.html)  And that’s when things really get interesting behind-the-scenes as two sudden deaths and the rise of Jeffrey Katzenberg threatened to upset the apple cart.*   With current Disney animation suddenly sputtering where it once hummed, the time couldn’t be better to revisit this period and see the knife’s edge they danced on.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Katzenberg, universally loathed at the studio, comes off as a real life Sammy Glick (as in Budd Schulberg’s WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN), consistently taing credit for decisions he fought against after they succeeded.  And just generally being a dick.

Monday, March 11, 2024

DRAGNET (1954)

Curiouser and curiouser.  As tv viewership rose and movie attendance sank in the ‘50s, two competing ideas fought to reignite box-office: WIDEscreen vs. DEEPscreen; CinemaScope vs. 3D.  And, much like a later battle between Blu-Ray and HD, the fight all but over before it began.  About a year after it started, films shot in 3D were being released ‘flat.’  Whereas WideScreen formats took off in a multitude of aspect ratios & systems.  Which gets us to this feature-length edition of Jack Webb’s popular half-hour tv police procedural; the one with his odd staccato speaking style and underdressed sets.  (Webb never met a wall he didn’t want to strip bare and paint over in matte gray or green.)  The film is soporific, neither a 2-part tv episode reedited to feature length (see DAVY CROCKETT or THE MAN FROM UNCLE/THE SPY WITH MY FACE); nor a free-standing story using little but the tv title (Don Siegel’s THE LINEUP*).  Instead, typical DRAGNET thirty-minute content (a mob murder to solve) drawn out to fill 88" in WarnerColor.  To all intents & purposes, shot as if they were making a 3D film when they ain't.*  Why else action scenes with multiple items directed straight at the camera?  Why else knockout blows delivered right at the audience?  Why else an eighty-eight minute running time? (Due to technical limitations having to do with only two film projectors in most projection booths, those 3D films ran in two 45-minute chunks with an intermission.)  Was director Jack Webb too lazy . . . er, cost-conscious/efficient, to bother restaging for 2D, without gimmicky 3D POV camera positioning, after finding out Warners not only weren’t releasing in 3D anymore, but weren’t shooting in 3D?  Instead, merely cropping the usual 35mm Academy Ratio Aspect (1.37:1) down to 1.85:1?  Webb’s lack of response almost as weird as his mannered ideas on filmmaking & acting.  On the positive side, a fair amount of L.A. location shooting, cool ‘50s men’s ware for the police detectives and a high gloss on the lacquered up/latest model cars to keep interest up in the first act.  But things quickly turn sleepy when 30 minutes of plot get stretched over an hour & a half.  Early views of Dennis Weaver and Richard Boone help, just not enough.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a look at Jack Webb stylistics, try his next, PETE KELLY’S BLUES/’55 in WarnerColor and CinemaScope (2.55:1).  OR: *For something considerably better, Don Siegel’s eye-popping THE LINEUP/’58, mentioned above.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/08/pete-kellys-blues-1955.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-lineup-1958.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *This is largely supposition, but was there another Hollywood production planned & designed for 3D only to have the rug pulled out on them when the format was dropped by their studio, then continued in 2D as if nothing had changed?

Sunday, March 10, 2024

MR. BASEBALL (1993)


After famously missing out on Indiana Jones/RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK/’81 when CBS held him to his MAGNUM, P.I. contract, Tom Selleck continued to flirt with, but just miss, the big time on the big screen.*  With the exception of THE LOVE LETTER/’99 (a Kate Capeshaw vanity project), this was his last try to crack feature film as leading man.  And, like his other attempts, much better than its rep or box-office would have you think.  Under imaginative direction from Fred Schepisi (and regular D.P.  Ian Baker), finding new angles on an old game (and no Slo-Mo crap), Selleck’s slumping Yankee gets demoted to Japan for a tune-up and star rehabilitation.  You’ll guess the rest (though a triple twist at the end faked me out), but the fun’s in how West Baseball is West and East Baseball is East and somehow the twain do meet.  Some of the Ugly American cultural clichés probably a bit moldy even in ‘93 (why not make Selleck hip to sushi; ultra-smooth handling chopsticks; slurping noodles to beat the band before his new girl’s relatives noisily join him?).  But having Selleck as self-centered asshole (with a terrific clout at bat) pushes him so far out of his comfort zone, he becomes more interesting to watch than usual.  Elsewise: Japanese manager Ken Takakura* teaches him discipline; Selleck responds by getting him and his team to loosen up.  And about halfway thru, those lessons start showing up, not only on the characters, but in the film DNA.  Fun!  (*And look who dominates the Japanese poster.) 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Selleck was like a ball player trying to get out of the Minors and join ‘The Show.’  It’s nearly the plot of this pic. 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Pace A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN's 'No crying in baseball' rule, this must be the only baseball pic in decades without a tear in sight.