OKJA (2017)

Something of an outlier for Korean director Bong Joon Ho.  Less in mixed tone, language or scope; instead, outlier status by way of being his first major disappointment.  Coarse and obvious, this social satire, KING KONG/’33 meets BABE/95 meets any ol’ Boy-and-his-Dog film misses badly.  Here, boy and dog replaced by genetically engineered giant pig (mmm, ersatz bacon!) and focus-group engineered little girl unaware the beloved beast she’s raising on Grandpa’s isolated farm is not there as pet, but as munchable.  Trying for a comically cutting indictment of capitalist cutthroats (Tilda Swinton², Shirley Henderson, Jake Gyllenhaal), Joon-Ho lets the baddies overplay like mad.  (Only his second English-language film; perhaps he didn’t notice.)  Hoodwinked by a Keystone Kops Kluster of Animal Rights terrorists (Paul Dano, Lily Collins, Steven Yeun) who abduct girl & pig before their big NYC introduction.  Naturally, everything goes wrong on both sides before righting itself with a baldly foreshadowed Golden coup de théâtre.  And while much of the CGI-to-live interaction comes off perfectly, the CGI beast itself has already lost its technical dazzle.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Bong Joon Ho was quickly back up to speed on the award-winning PARASITE/’19.  Far less known, his second (and first great) film, MEMORIES OF MURDER equally deserves a look.  (BTW: Note he’s Joon-ho Bong in that Write-Up; try both spellings if you’re using a Search Engine to find titles.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/salinui-chueok-memories-of-murder-2003.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  Unlikely protein source also a major plot point in Bong Joon Ho’s debut pic BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE / FLANDERSUI GAE/’00.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/barking-dogs-never-bite-flandersui-gae.html

RODAN / SORA NO DAIKAIJÛ RADON (1956)

Two years after establishing the modern Japanese monster movie in GOJIRA/’54 (Stateside revamp GODZILLA out in ’56), founding-father/on-going master of the form Ishirô Honda added color & pop design elements to his arsenal, moving past post-WWII disillusion and ditching men in monster suits to create a new species of city destroying horrors.  And what starts as an inspection of flooded mining operations finds not man at fault, but giant, killer caterpillars to blame before metamorphisizing into flying beasts of chaos.  The police are helpless; army bullets ineffective; rockets & bombs might cause earthquakes & eruptions.  Yikes!  But maybe just the thing to bring down these pterodactyl-like agents of destruction.  Director Honda paces this all expertly, laying out surprisingly detailed victims, scientists and local heros.  Piling on Tinker-Toy urban destruction and model monsters that might have come out of a breakfast cereal box, reinvigorating the imagination of playing with that old Erector Set you thought you had lost or long outgrown.  Knowing when to push ahead and when to linger, Honda will always spot that great shot of a city in ruins (miniatures & cyclorama painting) while in the foreground commercial neon signs come to life.  And if his lava flows like warm butterscotch pudding and urban destruction is scored by jolly military march music, it’s all part & parcel of these apocalyptic memory-making classics.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Can’t deal with low-tech monsters or men in Godzilla suits?  Honda’s also at his best with the human-devouring, shape-shifting ooze of THE H-MAN/’58.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-h-man-bijo-to-ekitai-ningen-1958.html

THE REPORT (2019)

Stepping up from shorts & streaming series to features, writer/director Scott Z. Burns can’t entirely avoid the stink of importance in this telling of a lonely man’s quest to bring post-9/11 C.I.A. torture techniques (‘Enhanced Interrogation’) to light, but the film rewards tolerance & patience, quite effective in using the style of a 1970s paranoid political thriller* to carry its theme & revelations to resolution.  (Though with but a token theatrical release, who knows how many people saw it.)  Adam Driver, looking as anonymous as possible, is Daniel Jones, a D.C. political aide in the early 2000s tagged by Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) to lead a task force sifting thru huge volumes of documents that wind up showing how many rules were broken (national & international); how useless the collected ‘information’ was; and how the C.I.A. worked in & out of official circles to cover up ‘patriotic’ incompetence.  Very well cast (Jon Hamm, Obama’s Sec. Of Veteran Affairs, exceptional), the film’s main power comes thru careful structuring of some hard to parse dramatic road blocks (the film not completely free of showing one-step-forward-two-steps-back frustration without itself becoming frustrating!), but also gaining real power thru its use of art design (gray walls, concrete-cube basement rooms, florescent lighting, and exteriors of post-modern brutalist architecture) to paint a portrait of D.C., its lever-pullers and maze of incestuous power-blocking participants.  (Note: Our Family Friendly label aimed at older teens; think of it as a Civics Lesson.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Alan J. Pakula’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN/’76 probably the main influence.

THE FOXES OF HARROW (1947)

From one of the many mossy/moldy antebellum bestsellers hoping to be the next GONE WITH THE WIND, this one set in 1820s New Orleans, its film adaptation has Maureen O’Hara & Rex Harrison making like Scarlett & Rhett mismatched lovers.  He’s a gamblin’ man, an illegitimate immigrant out to establish a new family legacy with a plantation won in an epic game of Twenty-One.  She’s the society belle who resists . . . but only for so long.  Lots of GWTW story beats (breached bedroom door; death of a child; high-toned mistress; mistimed vow renewal; oafishly large mansion & social parties; wise old Dad; the works).  And the Stock Market panic of 1821 in for the Civil War.*  Plus, dicey use of house & field slaves, juiced up with taboo Voodoo practices to make modern audiences even more uncomfortable.  But there’s a bit of background giving everything a twist since the best-selling author was Frank Yerby, the first Black author to have a book bought by Hollywood.  (Low six figures, a very considerable sum in 1947.)  And even if the story ends with our White couple putting down a slave revolt as they finally come together to save plantation & marriage (whatever did Yerby think of that?), there are also a few privileged moments of Black pride most unusual for the period.  Particularly when a recently purchased slave runs off with her newborn son rather than have him raised to be a slave.  A quality of hysteria in the scene that makes it even more distressing to watch.  Yet, not without a certain crazed dignity, too.  (Does her Fate-Worse-Than-Death reaction look back four decades to D.W. Griffith or ahead four decades to Toni Morrison?)  Of course, other than Yerby, all the creatives were White, so who knows who was responsible for what.  Harrison, who didn’t quite break out in Hollywood during this late ‘40s run in spite of exceptional work (this was the weakest of his five films at 20th/Fox), only gets better as the film darkens, while Maureen O’Hara seems completely artificial from start to finish.  Surprising under director John M. Stahl who specialized in Woman’s Pictures, but largely received unsuitable assignments at the studio after his huge success with LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN/’45.*  An awkward piece of moviemaking begging for reevalutation.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *To see Stahl in his element, and a sequence to match the best scene here (the Stock Market ‘Panic’), try the extended prologue from ONLY YESTERDAY/’33 where Stahl recreated the 1929 Stock Market crash to superb effect in a film that’s really more about his usual unwed mother theme.

TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022)

As an actor, Tom Cruise’s range has, if anything, steadily narrowed over his career.  (In a painfully knowing exchange here, a colleague remarks on his steely resolve, ‘I don’t like that look, man.’  Cruise: ‘It’s the only one I got.’)  But Cruise makes up for much that’s missing in animalistic cunning on what suits his abilities.*  As in this slow-to-show sequel to the star-affirming original TOP GUN/’86.  And he certainly was right to wait and wait . . . and wait, for a COVID-delayed theatrical release, knowing a film this corny, this formulaic, this masticated, needed the lowest common denominator mob-mentality only available in a packed movie house.  (Pumping up the volume by literally pumping up the volume.  Seen plain on a home screen, impact less reduced than undetectable.)  He even had critics falling in line.  Basically, a hammering John Henry vs Machine fable, Cruise’s old-school flyboy argues for seat of your pants cockpit instinct; his Navy superiors seeing an all-A.I. future.  But a mission to take out a nuclear facility in some nameless country (gotta safeguard the international market) needs a leader pronto.  The team assembled for him hardly a bespoke unit: Self-doubter; Blowhard; Over-achiever; Under-achiever; Surrogate son.  And that’s just the guys.  (The original TOP GUN the film they undoubtedly watch while hoping to get one of those BACHELOR roses from TC.)  The women flyers come in a variety of shades, but with no personality to speak of.  (Director Joseph Kosinski has more rapport with inanimate speed machines than with fleshly beings.)  Winding up with the big mission, a climax that largely replays the climax of the original STAR WARS/’77, right down to its ‘Use the force, Luke’ motif.  But then, in a coda for Tom & surrogate son, a laughable ‘jump the shark’ moment, something kind of wonderful happens.   The two, having bailed in enemy territory, need old-fashioned analogue tactics & dodges to make it back, turning the whole thing into the Boy’s Life adventure it’s been trying to locate for nearly two hours.  Fun!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Did Tom choose the song cues?  Half the cuts would have sounded moldy 36 years ago.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Cruise’s commercial pull confirmed when a film as God-awful as COCKTAIL/’88 cleaned up.  And his hold on audiences fully tested when A FEW GOOD MEN//’92 shot a whole scene on his back without loss of audience identification.  (Though a new MISSION IMPOSSIBLE/’23 shows undeniable fatigue.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Sounds unlikely, but the snowy last scenes had me thinking of WHERE EAGLES DARE/’70.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/where-eagles-dare-1970.html

ETERNAL LOVE (1929)

With the exception of cinematographer Oliver Marsh, just about everyone involved on this heavy-weight production bid adieu to silent cinema after this underwhelming romantic folly.  While better than its rep, no one could have been happy; especially director Ernst Lubitsch, quickly substituting this frigid, fatalistic idyll (lovers forced to marry their second choice, run off to die as one in a snowy avalanche - that’s the plot!) after producer Joseph Schenck (at United Artists) sold off the play Lubitsch thought he’d signed on for.  (Ernst in the midst of leaving Warners for Paramount via a series of masterpieces everywhere but here.*)  John Barrymore, clean-shaven to look his youngest, is the independent mountain man living rough in The Alps, longing for the beauteous Camilla Horn, settling for debuting Mona Rico, the latter styled to look just like Clara Bow.  While Horn (best known for F.W. Murnau’s FAUST/’26) weds love-struck, class-appropriate, boringly conventional Victor Varconi.  Lubitsch, shooting in rugged locations for the first time since LOVES OF PHARAOH/’22 (as hot as this is cold), makes sure it’s handsomely caught, using floods of mass movement thru the village and more late-silent camera moves & ‘push-ins’ than was his wont.  (Neatly handled ‘matching’ studio Alpine exteriors, too.)  All to little avail.  How typical of Hollywood that the far tastier sounding preceding pic, THE PATRIOT with Emil Jannings, a spectacular historical, his first at Paramount, is now lost.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Masterpieces as in SO THIS IS PARIS/’26 (Warners); THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG/’26 (M-G-M); THE PATRIOT/’28 (Paramount-now lost); then right after this, inventing the screen musical with THE LOVE PARADE/’29 (Paramount). https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-student-prince-in-old-heidelberg.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note the even squarer than usual frame ratio of 1.1:1 thanks to the synch music & effects soundtrack added on the left-hand side of the film strip in post-production.

THE PIGEON TUNNEL (2023)

Between his own fictionalized telling (A PERFECT SPY); highly selective auto-bio vignettes under this title (THE PIGEON TUNNEL); multiple ‘in-depth’ interviews & unauthorized biographies; the adolescent & professional life of David Cornwell (aka John le Carré) is a thrice-told tale . . . and then some.  Yet it still feels fresh & filled with expectation when the 89 yr-old author, shortly before his death, underwent the unique filming techniques & interlocutory powers of documentarian Errol Morris.  Raised by a confidence blackguard, recruited to spydom out of university, working in the grey zone of Cold War political ethics, astonishingly successful, transformative author of spy novels (think anti-Ian Fleming/James Bond), it makes for a compelling film even when Morris overloads on superfluous re-enactments.  Le Carrê one of those extraordinary extemporaneous speakers who just naturally emit superbly nuanced, perfectly structured compound sentences pre-organized into easy to understand, knowingly contradictory paragraphs.  (Though who knows what’s hidden under that terrifyingly bushy left eyebrow?)  One surprise though; in spite of keeping his thumb off the measuring scale of culpability between the East/West political divide, le Carré clearly disagrees with E.M. Forster’s famous dictum on how if he ‘had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’   Turns out, the first major independent act of le Carré’s maturity proved quite the opposite.  And one he says he would repeat.  Morris chastises himself on not pushing farther into personal matters (home, family, sex), but personal & political ethics is the line of inquiry he skimps on.  But his typically elegant filmmaking makes up for a lot.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: While the original mini-series of TINKER, TAILOR SOLDIER, SPY/’79 remains nonpareil le Carré, the underrated follow up, SMILEY’S PEOPLE/’82, not far behind.  OR: Try Sidney Lumet’s early, uneven attempt at le Carré-Land in THE DEADLY AFFAIR/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-1979.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/11/smileys-people-1982.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-deadly-affair-1966.html

THE LOST KING (2022)

What a genre-shifting chamaeleon Stephen Frears has been over six decades of directing.  Solid, occasionally inspired*, unfazed by any story form.  Here, he’s mostly solid which turns out to be just the thing for this minor, if seriously likable pic about its real-life subject (and co-author) Philippa Langley, a British office drudge, passed over for promotion, turned Kingly sleuth on the mystery of Richard III, his sullied rep by the usurping Tudors and the physical whereabouts of his remains.  Co-written & co-starring Steve Coogan, as her friendly/supporting ex-husband, Sally Hawkins plays Langley as a bundle of nervous energy with health issues, but a bloodhound at tracking down clues, historical markers, collegiate partners and fund-raising opportunities.  Someone had the idea of sending in Richard himself as a sort of guiding avatar for Hawkins to bounce ideas off of, a tricky proposition that works since Frears knows just when to push coincidence & absurdity, and when to ease off on the uplift elements.  Pretty much a directorial paradigm for this sort of underdog-shows-up-the-experts thing.  The script, on the other hand, a bit of a setup.  Defending Richard at this late date hardly the outlier proposition shown .  Restoration of his actions and character going back, at least, to Josephine Tey’s THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, published in 1951, and having long gained traction in historical circles.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Yet, the ironic note to this story is that we remember Richard III more than, say, Richard II (reign: 1377 - 1399), because of his Tudor generated bad reputation, as delineated by Shakespeare.  Here’s the legendary evil Richard in an excerpt from THE SHOW OF SHOWS/’29 (originally in 2-strip TechniColor) with John Barrymore recreating his brief B’way triumph.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOcFMW4zdmA

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *What is inspired are the opening credits which for some unknown, if happy, reason are done a la Saul Bass, specifically the distinctive graphics he used for Alfred Hitchcock in NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59.  Here, abetted by composer Alexandre Desplat who goes all Bernard Herrmann in his music cue.

SCHOOL FOR SECRETS (1946)

Acting on screen since 1942, Peter Ustinov had a first solo credit as writer and made his directing debut with this nifty WWII story that doesn’t quite hit its potential.  A tremendous cast of Leading Brits (Ralph Richardson, Finlay Currie, Michael Hordren, David Tomlinson, John Lauie, Raymond Huntley) play scientists of varying disciplines called up just before the war as a think tank for yet to be designated problems.  Living, working and most of all thinking together in the house of flyer Richard Attenborough’s mother who hasn’t a clue of their importance.  (She imagines she’s running a boarding house for war shirkers & their wives!)  They end up inventing a sort of reverse engineering project, brainstorming their way to using early radar technology not for defense but as a guide for accurate attacks at night or through cloud cover using what we’d now call triangulation.  But whereas Ustinov gives everyone plenty of character bits, maintains a lively pace, manages reasonably effective model effects and works up a tragic ending for one member of the team, we never get a sense of collective brainstorming using every man‘s specialty to make the sum greater than the parts.  Pleasant enough (see Richardson’s first puff on a cigarette . . . the man was an acting genius), if no more.  But check out the future All-Stars below-the-line: Assistant Director Michael Anderson; Cinematographer Jack Hildyard; Camera Operator Gilbert Taylor.

DOUBLE-BLL/LINK:  Ustinov’s best film as director: BILLY BUDD/’62; with a star making turn from Terence Stamp, Robert Ryan’s Claggart and Ustinov, a bit young, but fine as Captain Vere. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/billy-budd-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Avoid the Stateside release, SECRET FIGHT, trimmed down to 72" from 102".

THE MUSIC LOVERS (1971)

In typical OTT fashion, Ken Russell’s intentionally scabrous, down & dirty Tchaikovsky bio-pic landed as unintentional response to a recent ultra-conventional 70mm Soviet release.*  Richard Chamberlain, who between this, PETULIA/’68 and LADY CAROLINE LAMB/’72, seemed to be trying to ‘out’ himself (three decades before outing himself!), is the great composer with even greater mood swings and an aversion to heterosexual coupling.  Fearing rumors that might hurt his career, he opts to marry a lusty Glenda Jackson (very game in all senses of the word*) and quickly regrets it.  (Their mere five-month relationship feels endless.)  That, and Tchaikovsky’s long epistolary relationship to rich benefactress Madame Von Meck largely run the plot, along with long longing homosexual glances.  All covered in chintzy period detail with lenser Douglas Slocombe compelled into hand-held hysteria between strikingly fine musical excerpts (André Previn/LSO) which show up higgledy-piggledy  regardless of composition date.  Only at the end, does Russell show his hand when brother Modest rejects ‘Tragic’ as a title for the Sixth Symphony and suggests ‘Pathetic.’  Russell knows full well that ‘pathetic’ and ‘Pathetique’ are not interchangeable here (and that almost all the historical ‘facts’ as presented are rubbish), but the childish joke is enough for him.  Hence THE MUSIC LOVERS, with Russell like a kid thumbing his nose . . . then eating the booger.  Even worse to come: LISZTOMANIA/’75!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK/WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *As mentioned, that Soviet bio-pic, a very different kind of dud, but a dud nonetheless.  And click on the LINK where you’ll also find our Watch This, Not That suggestion.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/chaykovskiy-tchaikovsky-1970.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One nice touch here, when Jackson furiously strips down in hopes of sex play, she wears the same stripped socks as the dead Wicked Witch of the East in THE WIZARD OF OZ.

TONIGHT OR NEVER (1931)

Not even having all the qualities objectively needed for a smooth Silent-to-Sound transition was enough to keep glamour-puss Gloria Swanson in the Hollywood game.  Only three films between this and SUNSET BLVD. in 1950.*  So while John Gilbert and Clara Bow remain the poster couple for post-Silent Film career collapse, the major stars who truly thrived on the other side of the synch-soundtrack can be counted your fingers.  Samuel Goldwyn made a two-pic deal (later reduced to one) after buying this racy play (staged on B’way by David Belasco shortly before his death) about a talented soprano who needs to ‘experience love’ before she’ll become a true artist.  Enter ‘gigolo’ Melvyn Douglas (his film debut after this on B’way against wife-to-be Helen Gahagan) as the man destined to spend the night.  Goldwyn splurged on ‘Coco’ Chanel, in from France to dress Swanson, and hot director Mervyn LeRoy, in from Warners, to direct.  Alas, LeRoy’s youthful pep a poor fit for this sub-Lubitschean romantic farce, leaving only Goldwyn house lenser Gregg Toland to show his best form in some ravishing dark-etched lighting schemes.  Fun spotting Boris Karloff as a gossipy hotel waiter and you do get to hear Swanson vocalize, though an opening heard-but-not-seen excerpt from TOSCA has someone else singing.  Not really a bad watch, just unnecessary.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Best of Swanson’s early sound films was also her last, MUSIC IN THE AIR/’34.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/music-in-air-1934.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  If you’re using a Puccini opera for a story that resolves upon Deflowering the Princess, surely the one to go for is TURANDOT not TOSCA.

INU-OH (2021)

Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa mined a variety of ecstatic hand-drawn styles in this Rock-and-Roll take on feudal Japan.  Just too much of it.  It opens by joining a blind musician and a deformed dancer who travel thru a war torn 12th century Japan with their Heavy Metal-lite concerts*, stunning their fast-growing audiences with catchy/repetitive call-and-response songs.  Just too much of it.  Eventually, one of them will write immortal verses that still live today as a precursor to ‘Noh’ theater.  Just too much of it.  The first half of the film is such a riotous visual treat, you hardly mind the stop-and-start (mostly stop) narrative.  (Pat yourself on the back for figuring out the bit where a cursed sword blinds the singer when but a child and kills his father.)  We never do get a satisfying explanation of the masked deformed dancer.  (He looks and dances like one of those blow-and-deflate balloon men you see at storefronts.)  By the second half, the songs just seem to go on and on while the Shogun Kingdom, after seeming to win the civil wars, starts trying to control the artists’ agenda.  Maybe Japanese audience know the backstory by heart or were provided with playbooks & scorecards.  (There’s a smidgen of fact behind this.)  But Western audiences have nothing latch onto but the admirable drawing styles.  And even they pall faster than Yuasa is able to change his style & palette.  (NOTE:  The English language track proves considerably less exhausting to watch.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *If only singer Tomona would end his set by smashing his biwa (a traditional strung, guitar-like instrument) as if he were a 12th century Pete Townshend.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Instead, the first two seasons of SAMURAI JACK/’01-‘02.  Great music, great animation, great characterizations & vocals.  Gorgeous without being pretentious.

THE WHALE (2022)

Though hidden behind a morbidly obese 600 lb. man, it’s hard not to see the rather ordinary 1950s-ish dysfunctional-family drama director Darren Aronofsky has immobilized in dingy, claustrophobic Academy Ratio from Samuel B. Hunter’s award-winning play; like something William Inge might have stuck in a back drawer as too retrograde.*  One of those plays where the doorbell rings at regular intervals to bring on the next predigested character and plot point.  Brendan Fraser’s turn in a prosthetic fat suit sold the thing.  He’s good, too, but can’t entirely get past looking like Rodney Dangerfield decked out as Jabba the Hut, congestive heart failure his next cue.  First though, he’ll suffer thru a series of visitations on his way to fatally enlightened redemption: Avaricious teen daughter (quite a nasty piece of business, stung when Dad left home for the boyfriend;* as if half her classmates didn’t come from divorce); no-nonsense nurse, sister of Fraser’s late lover; one fallen young missionary looking for his own salvation; unseen pizza deliveryman to function like one of those classic sit-com characters you hear but never catch a glimpse of; gaggle of writing students who never see Fraser on their Zoom class screen; and the ex-wife who makes a late entrance to chastise, then stays to forgive.  Why was this bow to ‘50s-style ‘Golden Age’ tv quatsch taken seriously?

SCREWY THIOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: You can learn more about eating disorders watching John Belushi cough up a hunk of chicken on this old SNL skit. https://www.reddit.com/r/LiveFromNewYork/comments/jvneu2/john_belushi_as_elizabeth_taylor_11111978/

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *The structural bones in here really do come out of William Inge.  Mostly COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA/’52.  (But note how what was once gay subtext is now text.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/come-back-little-sheba-1952.html

THE SCARF (1951)

Twenty years after his silent film heyday (German UFA, stints in France & England), E. A. Dupont roused himself after two unwelcoming decades in Hollywood, digging up A-list talent for this indie B-pic.  Batty, but decidedly entertaining, Dupont helms his own film noir script with John Ireland’s criminally insane asylum escapee landing at an isolated turkey farm out West where he’s taken in and given a second chance by tough, but sympathetic rancher James Barton*; meets waitress Mercedes McCambridge who gives him hope; and visits psychiatrist Emlyn Williams who gives him reason to believe he really did strangle his own wife with that eponymous scarf.  Yikes!  Naturally, things aren’t quite what they seem, but Dupont’s ‘poetic’ dialogue, a torch song for McCambridge (who knew she could sing?), and adventures on the path to the truth, keep you hooked even when they’re unstuck to any semblance of reality.  The underlying (unintentional?) joke of the film is that Ireland (really too naturalistic an actor for his role) runs away from an insane asylum only to find nothing but more insanity on the outside.  Cinematographer Franz Planer, between top gigs with every great director in L.A., works up exceedingly dark lighting schemes for Dupont’s highly active camera that effectively take us up to the bounds of plausibility . . . and beyond.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Rarely seen in film, James Barton was something of a professional Irishman on the B’way stage, he’d soon star in Lerner & Loewe’s PAINT YOUR WAGON (the role Lee Marvin did on screen).  Looking & acting a lot like James Cagney, his over-scaled acting precisely as phony as Cagney’s was true.  Demonstrating what Orson Welles found so irresistible about Cagney, how he seemingly broke every rule of what film acting is supposed to be, and triumphed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Great pairing for fellow ex-UFA man Edgar G. Ulmer’s grungy masterpiece DETOUR/’45.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/detour-1945.html

DANGER LIGHTS (1930)

Physically impressive Early Talkie from director George B. Seitz, working at R.K.O. years before he settled down at M-G-M with the HARDY FAMILY.  James Ashmore Creelman, who wrote iconic RKO films like THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME/’32, KING KONG/’33, LAST DAYS OF POMPEII/’35, as well as absurdist trash like EAST OF JAVA/’35, retells the one about the older guy with the pretty fiancée who makes the mistake of introducing her to his younger best bud and doesn’t see the obvious until it’s too late.  Here, the mature guy is pug-ugly railroad manager Louis Wolheim (with his famous squashed gourd of a face), always dashing off to handle a rockslide, a washout, a troubled breakman on a drunk; the gal Jean Arthur (five years before stardom); and Robert Armstrong, the reformed tramp Wolheim befriends to his regret.  (By 1933, Armstrong had aged into Wolheim roles.  See KING KONG.)  All this reasonably well done for the period, but what truly makes this stand out is the workplace action caught by cinematographer Karl Struss.  In addition to some unusually fluid work for 1930 on domestic scenes (he did co-shoot SUNRISE/'27 for F.W. Murneau), Struss captures amazing actualitiés footage of real trains on real tracks in real locations, including a stunning battle between two enormous steam engines in a power showdown (they look like living metal monsters), as well as a tricky Act Two suspense climax with Armstrong’s foot stuck in the tracks and only Wolheim, out for revenge, able to save him.  Yikes!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Even before Wolheim died the following year, Edward G. Robinson was making something of a specialty playing these older romantic chumps.  Try this lesser known example from Howard Hawks, TIGER SHARK/’32. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/tiger-shark-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Many subfusc Public Domain copies out there.  But, for once, Alpha DVD offers the best picture quality.  (Though the early talkie soundtrack ain’t exactly hi-fi.)

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE (2018)

Everyone’s a fraud in writer/producer/director (megalomaniac?) Drew Goddard’s fever dream about ‘doings’ at the El Royale Motor Lodge.  And that would include Drew Goddard, so self-aware of his own fraudulent cleverness the film feels positively onanistic.  With a wing of fancy suites, the Royale, which straddles the Nevada/California stateline*, actually functions as a honey-trap for the rich & horny, with camera-ready inner core to facilitate filming illicit intimacies for future blackmail.  Enter Jeff Bridges: fraudulent priest hunting up a long-buried bag of stolen loot; Jon Hamm: fraudulent vacuum salesman & secret FBI agent (note cornpone Southern accent); non-fraudulent Cynthia Erivo: backup R&B singer with minor Reno booking; fraudulent all-purpose hotel deskman Lewis Pullman: post-Vietnam PTSD sniper; Dakota Johnson: fraudulent Cali-counter-culture princess with violence issues & a mentally-challenged sexpot sister; and the lux Motor Lodge itself, most fraudulent of all.  Goddard plays linear time games with theatrical staging techniques, stop-and-start narrative backstories & reveals, and the cast has good fun constantly reversing expectations.  If only Goddard knew when to stop twisting; the film runs an absurd 2'20".  By the time Chris Hemsworth shows up as a fraudulent sicko cult-leader/prophet, the film is begging to be put down.  (Hemsworth may be buried by the acting talent surrounding him, but does look like a God . . . or Brad Pitt in TROY.)  Happily, there’s lots of good mid-60s Motown to carry us along.  (Any film with a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox playing the Four Tops/'Bernadette' has its charms.)  But the fun keeps drifting off course, whether it’s Bridges who just happens to have knock-out drops in his pocket, Erivo knowing how to plug in a carburetor, a conveniently hidden shotgun under a bed . . . shaggy dog story stuff.  And that’s okay, but then using a dead serious Vietnam military massacre to tie up loose ends is tacky.  No follow up feature for Goddard, but the guy is nothing if not resilient.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Little doubt Goddard made a close study of Tarantino’s THE HATEFUL EIGHT/’15.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-hateful-eight-2015.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Oddly, the physical stateline that runs thru the middle of the lobby doesn’t figure into the plot at all.  You’ll find it featured in the wildly popular divorce dramedy: LIGHTNIN’, a huge stage success in 1917; a silent hit for John Ford in 1925; and an Early Talkie for Henry King with Will Rodgers 1930.  Both films slow as molasses in winter.  Hence the title character’s nickname, LIGHTNIN’!

JOHNNY ENGLISH STRIKES AGAIN (2018)

Brought out of retirement fifteen years after the first JOHNNY ENGLISH/’03 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/10/johnny-english-2003.html), Rowan Atkinson reprises as the bumbling James Bond-like agent when an unknown computer hacker attacks the entire British spy network online.  He’s the only guy left who’s not in the system!  Taking orders from Emma Thompson’s P.M., he’s seduced & set up by glam Russian rival Olga Kurylenko and kept from disaster by loyal aide Ben Miller as he hunts for the dastardly programming genius.  But while the film’s hit-to-miss gag ratio isn’t much different than it was in the original ENGLISH (No. 2 not seen here), the basic idea now feels tuckered out.  A SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER dance parody, really?  And only an extended Virtual Reality set piece equals the occasional blissed-out heights of the first film.  But if director David Kerr proves no Blake Edwards as comedy technician, like Edwards in THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN/’76, he puts out unusually handsome slapstick compositions.  (Edwards had cinematographer Harry Waxman; Kerr hired future TÁR/’22 cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister.)  Like most Atkinson films, this did much better abroad than Stateside.  (Why?)  But what makes it all so frustrating is that the film they might have made was sitting right in front of them.  Literally.  Just watch the prologue with Atkinson now employed as beloved school master teaching Spy Games in the field to his class of kids.  That’s the fresh team that should have wound up doing the job.  Call it: JOHNNY ENGLISH, SPY MASTER.*  (Would have made a great gag for all the WIZARD OF OZ nods they use in the climax by having the students recognize the references from having seen the movie ‘when they were kids.’  Like servicing Atkinson’s ‘Tin Man’ with a dose of oil.)  How they missed this obvious idea is a bigger mystery than anything in the plot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Atkinson is a wildly gifted physical comedian, but he's no dancer; certainly no comic dancer, even harder to pull off, as this routine SNF routine shows.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *You can see how this idea plays out Western-style with John Wayne forced to run a cattle drive with actual under-age boys in COWBOYS/’72  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-cowboys-1972.html

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988)

In something of a warmup for his largely autobiographical magnum opus, THE LONG DAY CLOSES/’92, this actually was the second in writer/director Terence Davies personal trilogy.  (The first, conveniently titled TRILOGY/’83.*)  It makes for a lot of self-contemplation, and LONG DAY not without its longueurs.  So, while that’s undoubtedly richest of the three, this more modest look back at Davies’ working-class Liverpudlian family (1940s to ‘50s) may be the better entry point; a memory piece that floats back & forth in time, linked by almost constant diegetic a capella song from its principles as emotional ‘event’ days (births, marriages, funerals, illness) chart the years.  (The music pop tunes of the day, many from Hollywood, hymns, even Negro spirituals until a classical finale sneaks in for the walk-off with, of all people, Peter Pears & Benjamin Britten on the soundtrack.)  Dad’s the focus of the longer first part, and what a terrifying piece of work Pete Postlethwaite makes of him.  Occasionally showing an affectionate side to his wife, daughters & son, but easily triggered to violent eruptions that come over him like an epileptic fit.  The terrors mostly accepted, even missed once he’s left the scene.  Just how common was this behavior in those tight row houses?  Even with doors closed, there was no where to hide.  Tacitly approved by friends, kin, neighbors & clergy?  Davies shoots the good and the bad in the calmest of manner, rarely moving at anything other than adagio in staging or camera work.  And my goodness, how Davies sweats the details, not only in physical production (in spite of being made on a dime), but in nailing attitude, dress, even how people stood or stooped, and sat uncomfortably close in tight quarters, while keeping to his favored formal compositions, slow tracks & pans.  Nothing happens/everything happens/life slips by.  Sui generis filmmaking; precious, but you have to come to it.  Davies trusts us to, and is rewarded.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Apparently, there was a long break between shoots (money issues?), and somehow, the men took advantage to pack on an extra twenty pounds and age about ten years.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Looking for a quick course on the use of grain and real 35mm film stock?  Then BFI has restored this with you in mind.  (Note: It may be less visible if you have one of those pricey monitors that over-processes the picture till everything looks like high definition Live Football coverage.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As if from another world, a ‘well-made play’ of British working-class family life, this time between the two World Wars in Noël Coward/David Lean’s THIS HAPPY BREED/’44.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/this-happy-breed-1944.html  OR:  *After LONG DAY, Davies made only six features (plus one documentary) in 30 years.  They have their champions, but only THE HOUSE OF MIRTH/’00 equals his early work.

LE DÉJEUNER SUR L'HERBE / PICNIC ON THE GRASS (1959)

In retrospect, the highly theatrical mid-‘50s trio of THE GOLDEN COACH/’52, FRENCH CANCAN/’55 & ELENA ET LES HOMMES/’56 something of an artistic last hurrah for iconic French film master Jean Renoir.  But his adoption as father-figure/mentor by the Nouveau Vague crowd, spurred by a post-war re-release* of LA RÈGLE DU JEU/’39, led to reviews that bent over backwards to praise some frankly diminished work.  This one at least a reasonable facsimile of the Renoir of old.  The basic idea a social satire in plein air of modern technical aridity vs. less efficient old/natural ways.  (Sort of 1959 digital vs. analogue.*)  But oh so obvious in content, tone & dialogue; even a bit condescending in how it celebrates simple country folk & chance vs. city sophisticates & fact-based rationality.  Paul Meuriêsse is the brilliant data-oriented man-of-science hoping to revolutionize mankind with artificial insemination, he’s also top candidate to lead the new European Union.  But when he gets lost in the countryside while celebrating his betrothal to an asexual militaristic kraut after a literal new wind blows in courtesy of a Pan figure with goat & musical pipe (!), he’s rescued by partying locals and gets to know the joys of life fully lived by earthy coquette Catherine Rouvel (a Claudia Cardinale type, but dreadful) and her friendly gang of revelers.  Ironically, she’d already met him as an unlikely volunteer for his fuck-free baby-making treatment.   (Don't worry, baby-making au naturel but a fade-out away.)  Putting this silliness in an ultra-natural environment ought to produce some kind of artistic frisson, but it plays like a Ruritanian operetta that’s lost its music and hence its raison d’être.  Happily, the film is often very pretty to look at, and, with less of an intellectual bent in a more spirited second half, things improve as they go along.  There’s even a marvelous shot that sums up the entire film when M. Learned and Mme. Free-Spirit take off on a borrowed Vespa, her ‘pack’ riding right behind them on a winding country road.  And not a Pan in sight.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *RULES OF THE GAME less re-release than first release since the film had effectively been banned during Occupation after its brief disastrous opening run.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Jacques Tati’s greatest film, MON ONCLE/’58, buries all competition on the subject of modern technology vs. the charm of old-school inefficiency.

65 (2023)

Everyone makes the right moves on this (not so) Mysterious Planet/Survival story.  Yet the film barely nudges the memorability needle to positive.  More interest in figuring out why that is than in watching the film.  Adam Driver, at his most stalwart (quel yeasty chest!), is the space pilot on a two-yr mission (wife & ill child left at home) who hits an uncharted meteor belt and crashes onto an unknown planet with cryogenic crew apparently lost.  At this point (a reel & a half in), the title comes up, revealing the entire plot!  It’s 65 million years ago on Earth.  How much development debate went into this decision?*  Presumably the writers or producers fought on whether audiences would be too far ahead of things.  They’d never get away with a surprise ‘reveal’ as climax, a la PLANET OF THE APES/’68, since even to know a little is to know too much.  Instead, Driver, and the little girl who survived with him, take on the usual Dino/Pterodactyl crowd while trying to reach a rescue vessel before the Big Meteor (the one that killed off all the dinos, natch) hits Earth.  The CGI creatures are pretty good, the space obstacles (meteors & such) unaccountably feeble.  More like what you’d see on a prestige Sci-Fi tv series decades ago.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  While it has problems of its own, THE MARTIAN/’15 has a setup that brings up similar issues in a more entertaining, and moderately more satisfying, way.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-martian-2015.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Second guessing shows in an unusually high number of deleted scenes on the DVD.

ADAM'S RIB (1923)

Alongside the historical/religious epics that marked his career (from JOAN THE WOMAN/’16 to THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’56), Cecil B. DeMille directed fistfuls of Westerns and even more High Society Melodramas & Sex Dramedies.  This one, a surprise critical & commercial flop (note playbook poster ad copy), repeats DeMille’s current formula of sticking a period flashback in near the end of Act Two, tying his modern story to matching characters in, say, Ancient Rome or here, Prehistoric Times.  The idea should have seen characters of the past point the way forward to the parallel characters of today.  But DeMille regular scripter (and mistress) Jeanie Macpherson merely used copycat figures in period drag to retell the same story we’d been watching, just in historical guise.  Here, wheat speculator Milton Sills’ ignored wife (Anna Q. Nilsson) is nearing the dangerous age of forty and ready to take on a new lover.  Yikes!  Not if perky daughter Pauline Garon can stop it!  She’s only got eyes for a nerd paleontologist (really!), but vamps Mom’s new beau unaware he’s the Exiled King of some Ruritanian country.  (Really!)  And that’s just the half of it.  DeMille is already falling into stiff habits here (his creative prime came very early) and lets loads of bad acting (corny even for 1923) pass.  (Garon exceptionally poor.)  Fortunately, Nilsson and especially Sills know what they’re up to; Sills even carries off his caveman outfit.*  But this flashback adds little besides bare limbs and fans caught on to the emptiness . . . though not for long when DeMille moved his next historical flashback to the front as prologue to his otherwise modern version of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS out later the same year.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/ten-commandments-1923.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Yes, the same Anna Q. Nilsson who’s plays bridge with Gloria Swanson as one of ‘waxworks’ in Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD/’50.  For Sills at his formidable best, try older deMille brother William’s excellent domestic drama MISS LULU BETTS/21.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/miss-lulu-bett-1921.html   Or in manly swashbuckling form for Frank Lloyd in the superb first version of THE SEA HAWK/’24.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/06/sea-hawk-1924.html

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (1959)

To generalize wildly: With Civil Rights issues coming to the boil across the country in the 1950s, two prospective Black leading men (both born in ‘27) were primed for stardom: Sidney Poitier & Harry Belafonte.  Hollywood town big enough for two of us, but apparently no more.  But where Poitier got stuck with most of the ‘credit-to-his-race’ roles, Belafonte (more able to pick & choose thanks to his singing career?) took on less of the social burden.  He also formed his own production company.  Here’s how the difference showed: when a Poitier antagonist/co-star called him a nigger, Poitier sucked it up to perform emergency surgery & save the punk’s life.  When Belafonte’s antagonist/co-star called him as a nigger, Belafonte sucked up the insult and went ahead to rob a bank with the creep.  And as films with once progressive attitudes tend to age quickly while genre movies, especially film noir, last forever, Belafonte’s characters are rarely dated in conception.  So it goes for this Robert Wise/Abraham Polonsky noir stunner, an undersung bank robbery-gone-wrong classic, loaded with tasty New York locations (Big Apple & Upstate), phenomenal suspense, crystal clear action set pieces, and just a couple of unforced errors (one stolen/one facile) right at the end.  Ed Begley’s the retired NYC cop who comes up with the plan; Robert Ryan the aging violence-prone, racist WWII vet running out of options to keep up with younger girlfriend Shelley Winters; Belafonte the debt-ridden jazz musician running behind on payments to the mob and his ex-wife & daughter.  Wise in particular seems to be walking in clover thru the entire film, thrilled to experiment away from studio production heads.  (Is this the director’s only non-studio system film?)  Imagine if WEST SIDE STORY looked more like this film.  It might have been as good as everyone says it is.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Two years off the screen, and then another two years off after this, Gloria Grahame had acquired a bad rep, but she’s awfully good here as a sexy neighbor vamping Ryan.  And, speaking of vamping, check out the gay mob guy making something of a play for Belafonte.  Unusual at the time even for a non-studio film.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Most available copies & streamers show in full-frame Academy Ratio (1.37:1).  But the film would have likely been cropped down to show in 1.85:1.  Note the generous framing top & bottom, along with an occasional boom-mike shadow.

HAVE A NICE DAY / HAO JILE (2017)

PLACE: Some decaying mid-sized city in modern urban China.  OBJECT: A bag of loot with a million Yuan.  PROBLEM: It’s missing.  Just about the oldest trope in the film noir playbook.  Is the money ‘hot?’  Why was it stolen?  Who stole it?  Where is it?  And who stole it from whomever first stole it?  Structured as a series of interlocking chapters, the tone somewhere between early Coen Brothers (switchback double-crosses) & early Tarantino (impulsive violence); not that there aren’t many other influences in such a heavily mined field.  This one emphasizes its range of backstreet characters: from most sympathetic (young man needing cash to ‘fix’ his girlfriend’s botched plastic surgery) to least (controlling mob boss phoning up hitmen & sadists to do his dirty work).  But what makes it all fresh again is in presentation as brought forth by minimalist animator Jian Liu whose style holds to flat, mesmerizing visuals with action that often isn’t action at all, but painterly stillness between bursts of movement.  You’ll find more separate drawings in a PIXAR trailer than in this entire film.  Yet subject & style are so well matched, the drawings so evocative, characterizations & attitude so compelling, you rarely feel much lost by physical simplicity.  How this technique would work in other genres goes unanswered here, but may be solved in Jian Liu's new film, ART COLLEGE 1994 (as yet unreleased Stateside).  It sounds like quite the change of pace!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  After the end-credits, a pop song (not by Shanghai Restoration Project who did most of the other songs here, but by Kuan Pang) plays over some of the evocative background drawings, followed by a tiny Easter Egg twist for one of the characters.

THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)

It only seems that time has tamed Alan J. Pakula’s paradigmatic post-‘60s paranoid political thriller from heebie-jeebies to giggles.  Truth is, wiseguys like Richard Condon with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’62 (later in WINTER KILLS/’79) and Terry Southern with DR. STRANGELOVE/’64 were already hip to all the threats & absurdities so dutifully spelled out here.  A shaggy Warren Beatty, even more vocally constipated than usual (possibly due to crisis rewrites amid a writers’ strike), is the iconoclastic reporter who stumbles thru the looking glass conspiracy that’s ‘taking out’ everyone who was nearby when a Senator/Presidential candidate was assassinated.  The film structured as a series of interviews that make Beatty less reporter than unknowing angel-of-death.  But when he’s reported dead, he grabs the opportunity (and a false identity) to enlist with the conspirators and take down these agents of chaos from the inside.  Pakula brings his over-composed shooting style, elegant as only Gordon Willis’s lighting & graduated grain can make it, and pulls off a beaut of a slow burn suspense segment (suitcase; bomb; passenger jet), then makes the mistake of reusing the technique at the climax.  On the way, sinking to the single worst bit of filmmaking in his entire career with a good ol’ boy bar fight out of a '70s Burt Reynolds film, spreading all thru the tavern to add fake local color, breakable 'stained-glass' plastic partitions and cute elderly tourists.  Audience pandering you expect in a Burt Reynolds’ film, but something Pakula has little aptitude for.*

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Pakula much happier on his next film, grounded by the realism of ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN/’76.  OR:  As mentioned above, MANCHURIAN and STRANGELOVE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-manchurian-candidate-1962.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Then again, PARALLAX might work/might hold up better as a larky Burt Reynolds ‘70s pic that takes an unexpected dark turn throwing Reynolds off his game.

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 (2023)

Anyone thinking JW4 might bring course correction after the bloat & show-offy excess of JW3 has another think coming.  At a punishing 2'49", it toggles between winking self-acknowledgment and lumbering self-importance as a final reckoning plays out for a scorecard’s worth of characters with little left to give.  While newbies on the scene, like the new master villain, mere shadows of earlier players.  Opening with a kidding reference to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA/’62, it soon becomes apparent that director Chad Stahekski is ‘kidding-on-the-square,’ with serious intent (art & philosophy) behind the larky mass killings.  (Though credit someone for this exchange:  ‘The bloodshed wasn’t necessary.’ Answer: ‘The bloodshed was the point.’)   The end goal this time is for Wick to lift the organization’s proscription on him (and with it on his allies), but the set pieces are glum and over-elaborated.  We might be watching that guy in the insect repellent commercial who purposefully sticks his arm in the mosquito infested see-thru box to load up on easy targets.  Only Stahekski’s not thru with glass-paneled vitrines which show up in an endless martial arts set piece that must have been designed as an audition to stage next year’s Metropolitan Museum Costume Gala.  Those events even more boring than JW4.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  JW:Chapter 2, easily the best of the foursome.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/john-wick-chapter-two-2017.html  (Or type JOHN WICK in the Search Box of the Main Site - Upper Left Corner - to see all our WICK posts.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  At one point, Wick ‘sees’ his late wife in a vision.  But shouldn’t he also see his dog?  (Or rather her dog.)  That’s what started the whole business a decade back, yes?

NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU (2023)

Unheralded rather than over-hyped, this chamber-sized alien horror pic from writer/director Brian Duffield, a word-of-mouth hit for HULU, delivers on its title, but comes up short in the chiller department.  It’s as if he studied the field too carefully, getting every note right yet missing the tune.  There’s creepy, there’s crawly, but only one real scare in the pic.  Duffield sets up a neat technical challenge for himself, squelching almost all dialogue in favor of music cues & sound design, in what amounts to a near one-hander for Kaitlun Dever, alone in her big ol’ isolated house, running some sort of dressmaking shop in a cluttered space filled with homey dollhouses and a few past secrets she nurtures involving her late mother and a former BFF.  Then came the aliens; setting up a multi-stage battle to subdue & subsume her mind & body.  The first half, working more by suggestion (the filmmakers’) and imagination (yours) is best, with lots of references from Duffield, a veritable magpie of our shared spooky celluloid past, heavy on A QUIET PLACE/’18 and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS/’56.  To his credit, the film is better than one of those two.  Guess which.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, A QUIET PLACE/’18 or BODY SNATCHERS/’56.  (The 1978 A-list upgrade nearly as good).  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-quiet-place-2018.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/01/invasion-of-body-snatchers-1956.html

MOULIN ROUGE (1928)

Best known for late-silent backstagers VARIETY/’25 and PICCADILLY/’29, E.A. Dupont came up short in the Talkies, eventually sinking to Hollywood ‘Bs.’  But this other backstager, set in the world of Paris Music Hall, equals his best; it may even be more important, preserving a precious glimpse of late-‘20s Paris revue before the Depression.  Filmed in real theaters and using lots of stage routines & artistes of the day (no doubt ‘tamed’ of full nudity to allow international release), the opening reel & a half is almost nothing but stage material.  And quite a show it is!  (Prologue also eye-popping as an out-of-towner chooses between the faded hooker on his right and a more glamorous transvestite on his left.  Not spotting the gender, he goes with the better looking one only to be robbed just down the block.  It was all a setup.  Yikes!  But then the main story kicks in with Olga Tschechowa as Parysia, top Moulin Rouge attraction whose daughter is back from three-years at school to see the show and introduce Mom to her wealthy old-school fiancé.  But when his conservative Dad won’t consent, Parysia pleads her daughter’s case unaware that the scion has fallen hard for his putative mother-in-law.  Whoops.  (Classic inter-title when Mom learns of this forbidden love: ‘My car is at the curb.  Save my daughter . . . then kill yourself!)  Dupont tends to overplay his hand even in his best films, and does so here, but there’s plenty of action to watch, beautifully caught by lenser Werner Brandes (the print is in great shape) and well acted except for the daughter, only three years younger than Mom and looking older.  It’s out with a fine score that’s a mix of the 1929 synch track and a 1990 full restoration.  A real treat.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  BlackFace Alert!  A chorus line in BlackFace singing & dancing up a storm behind Parysia in one number and during a curtain call.  At least , Parysia doesn’t Black up.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Dupont’s next backstager, PICCADILLY/’29, pairs perfectly.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/piccadilly-1929.html

CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS / CRYSTAL FAIRY Y EL CACTUS MÁGICO (2013)

Chilean writer/director Sebastián Silva stumbles badly in this cockeyed, autobiographically inspired recollection of a youthful sojourn to gather the medicinal/hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus and ‘experience’ it while camping overnight with like-minded friends on a pristine beach.  But whatever Silva was aiming at, he fatally compromised his vision with two ‘Ugly American’ types to lead the way, messy handheld camera work and improvised dialogue out of a Method Acting class exercise.  Michael Cera who’s got the cash to round up a few fellow travelers (delightful company as played by three actual Silva siblings) and the lack of morals & sense of entitlement to steal a hunk of someone’s cactus when no one will sell them any.  The girl, Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman, daughter of Andy Warhol fave Viva), a self-invited New Age flake imposing enlightened views on one & all (though sneaking in coke & chips as needed), not helped by looking as if she always skipped the rinse cycle.  (She’s the college roommate who’d do nude yoga in the living-room whenever you had guests.)   Worse, Silva turns sentimental right at the end, letting these two off the hook with positive personal growth you may find even harder to swallow than the film as a whole.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Silva a totally different fellow in THE MAID/LA NANA.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/09/la-nana-maid-2009.html