POT-BOUILLE / LOVERS OF PARIS (1957)

In the interconnected world of Émile Zola’s ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’ novels, the exceptionally popular light social comedy of POT-BOUILLE (handsome, available young man moves to Paris, leaves an immediate mark on the ‘rag trade,’ and sets alight the heart of every woman he comes in contact with) leads directly into the full-blooded magnificence of AU BONHEUR DES DAMES/LADIES' PARADISE (super-charged retail emporium rapidly snuffs out an entire neighborhood of small family-owned shops while a Cinderella romance plays out inside the newfangled department store).  Both books wonderfully adapted by Julien Duvivier, but in reverse order.  DAMES a technically dazzling late silent from 1930 (updated to modern times*) whereas BOUILLE retains the 1880s setting and skips dazzle for the solid craftsmanship befitting a mature master.  It takes a reel or two to get up to speed (there are twenty characters to get in place), but the introductions are witty, fun and cleverly overlapped.  Gérard Philipe’s a natural as the best-behaved cad in Paris, ambitious in love & career without being pushy.  But as infidelity at work & play is the norm across social lines & gender not an eyebrow is raised.  Or isn’t till the dull dog who married Philipe’s castoff lover takes umbrage and tries to raise ’seconds’ when the affair reignites.  The women all shockingly beautiful (see photo; Anouk Aimée at 25, 2nd from the right),

none more so than worldly-wise shop owner Danielle Darrieux, Philipe’s sometime employer.  And by the second half, almost every act & line of dialogue is getting big laughs as an entire society of ‘honest’ deception is laid out before us.  Never more so than during a perfectly choreographed bit of boulevard farce as couples play a game of hit & miss infidelity on a grand staircase while an unfaithful father dies of a heart attack after too much ‘exertion.’  Shot & designed by legendary talent (Michel Kelber; Léon Barsacq), the only thing you might want to change is that anodyne English-language title.   (NOTE: Look for the Gaumont 2018 restoration.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Duvivier didn’t write the script for DAMES which may explain why it was updated.  An error, but not a mortal one.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/au-bonheur-des-dames-1930.html

THE PALE BLUE EYE (2022)

1830s West Point murder mystery (soon looking like a series of Satanic Ritual sacrifices), sees Cadet Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), peculiar enough to be a natural suspect, drafted as sideman to visiting ‘problem solver’ Augustus Landor (Christian Bale).  Set in the dark of winter, this plush entertainment is somber, serious and painfully stupid.  In tone & story development, it’s something between literary thrillers like THE ALIENIST/’18 or THE NAME OF THE ROSE/’86*, but shows little of their cleverness, sense or sensibility in the main crime before tossing in a ‘Got’cha’ twist epilogue that makes mincemeat of the story.  Turns out our ultimate villain just happened to stumble onto the perfect conspiracy to cover his tracks.  (An alibi of opportunity?)  The whole thing not only ludicrous, but positively distasteful; which is saying something these days!  With whispered vocals so you can’t HEAR clues; candlelit interiors so you can’t SEE them*; and Method Acting to show everyone was neurasthenic with iron poor blood in those days.  And to think, Poe's Tales of Ratiocination pretty much started the detective genre.  Writer/director Scott Cooper could have used that guy.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *While THE NAME OF THE ROSE received nothing like the staggering international reception of Umberto Eco’s novel, it looks considerably better now then it did in 1986.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-name-of-rose-1986.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Amusingly (and it's the only amusing thing in here), the cast is so ultra-U.K., you’ll wonder which side of the Revolution they’d have fought for.  (Also amusing to imagine how much this 70+ million dollar film would have lost if released theatrically.  Ah, there’s the real mystery, how NetFlix balances the books on all these DOA streamers.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Sans ‘fill light,’ which the human eye naturally adjusts for but camera lenses don’t, we’re literally left in the dark.  Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON/’75 has a lot to answer for on this misguided technique.  Try it out yourself.  Turn off the lights, light a candle or two in a room, then note just how much is visible.  Surprising, no?

ONCE YOU KISS A STRANGER (1969)

There’s bad, there’s inept, and there’s inexplicable.  All present and accounted for in this dunderheaded refashioning of Patricia Highsmith’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’51.  Not that Highsmith’s debut novel, famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951 is necessarily untouchable.  She wasn’t much sold on it.  (Though it certainly ‘sold’ her!)  But someone @ Warner Bros. in the dark days of Major Hollywood Studio free-fall must have figured that since they owned the rights, why not a remake?  Okay, but why bother if your theatrical release is barely above a TV Movie-of-the-Week?  Or was this prepped as a MotW, then bumped up to theatrical for having too much sex & violence?*  The story is largely intact: Two strangers playfully plan to swap apparently motiveless murders, but only the crazy one is serious enough to go thru with it.  Plus two big swaps to the storyline: Pro Golf standing in for Pro Tennis; and a gender swap that has lithe Carol Lynley in for fey Robert Walker, deleting any sub-textual gay angle from Paul Burke who has the Farley Granger role.  TV series director Robert Sparr shows little aptitude for how these things work.  How many POV shots can one man screw up?  And a low wattage cast culled from the guest star wish list of NBC’s FAME IS THE NAME OF THE GAME takes care of the rest.  Two modest successes: a famous moment from STRANGERS with Robert Walker’s ‘Bruno’ popping a little boy’s balloon with his lit cigarette (a huge surprise laugh) opens this film when Lynley walks out of the ocean and shoots a little girl’s beach ball with a spear-gun.  Plus a decent turn from murder victim Philip Carey who coasts on his resemblance to Charlton Heston to good effect.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *When a scene meant to play between 11 p.m. and midnight is bright as the noonday sun, chances are good it was designed to be visible on the crap resolution of tv monitors at the time rather than in theatrical showings.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Obviously, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN.

THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN (2018)

Pity the poor SUPERMAN adaptor!  Like Mickey Mouse, Peter Pan or King Arthur (among many such ubiquitous characters) name recognition is too high, it creates an unsolvable problem since everyone thinks they know just how the characters ought to behave and what adventures they ought to have.  Beloved and untouchable.  Projects may be easy to set up & fund, but destined to disappoint.  Even the ones that pay off.  So, no surprise this rather flat animated film of a Special Edition DC Comic (first made as SUPERMAN: DOOMSDAY/’07, not seen here) gets a mid-tier vocal cast for what’s largely a prologue to REIGN OF THE SUPERMEN/’19 (also not seen here).  The action follows a lot of mayhem in the streets after some dangerous space aliens land on Earth, which neither Superman nor an ethnically diverse Justice League, cross-plugging the DC franchise, are able to beat back without casualties; even with Lex Luthor helping out.  Why similarly conceived BATMAN animation projects come off so well (cool stylistics, starry vocal casting, visual coups & re-imaginations) while SUPERMAN makes do with the B-Team is a mystery.  (Here, the general look tries to merge 1960s comic book to 1980s anime.)  And do we really need to push on the Superman Christ allegory embedded in the Man of Steel origin story?  That casket with the lid knocked off a bit on the nose.  Apparently, the sequel goes all Supermen Multi-verse.  Think of the possibilities: SPARTACUS Superman: I am Superman! No, I am Superman!  OR: TO TELL THE TRUTH Superman: Will the real Superman please stand up!  Here’s an idea: Give It A Rest SUPERMAN.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  As usual, we point our readers toward that lodestar of Supermania, the 1940s Fleischer Bros. shorts.  A dozen or so little visual gems that perfectly capture the look, design and kinetic feel of the early classic comic books, with simplified narrative elements perfectly balanced to their purpose.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/07/superman-1941-43.html  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  When this one opens, reporter girlfriend Lois Lane once again has yet to realize Clark Kent is Superman.  Hasn’t this ‘reveal’ run its course?

CRIMSON TIDE (1995)

Scroll down a few posts for William Friedkin’s updated CAINE MUTINY, specifically the tricky last scene where Jason Clarke’s conflicted defense attorney gets away with a duplicitous speech on his win over the inept Captain Queeg by channeling the recognizable vocal cadence & scratchy high baritone of Gene Hackman.  Works like a charm.  So, what a surprise to find the real Gene Hackman in this Nuked-up CAINE MUTINY ripoff, not playing defense (the trial is largely excised), but as Captain Queeg!  And worse, giving a painfully obvious, bulldozer perf.  But it’s hard to blame Hackman, the greatest utility player of his era, for overreaching when everyone’s at their worst in this hyped-up would-be thriller that sees Denzel Washington (in the spot Van Johnson had in the 1955 CAINE MUTINY film!!!) tasked with overseeing a nuclear sub, overloaded with testosterone & fat sailors, in Tony Scott’s typically overworked countdown suspenser.  Hooey about a power struggle in Russia that may put atomic codes into the hands of an ultra-Nationalist.  Our Mission: take out the weapons first (and probably start a Nuclear Holocaust) or lose the war before it starts.  Our Problem: orders from command central have been interrupted!  Is it an order to Proceed or Stand Down?  Yikes!  Scott, as usual, over-masticates every shot, special-effect, camera move & sound edit, running out of thrills or suspense while giving away all his characters’ traits & surprises by the third reel.  With forced laughs leading to a power struggle showdown between Gene & Denzel, the inevitable mutiny is doubled in this version with a counter-mutiny.  Then a copout ending, courtesy of Guest Star Jason Robards Jr.  The film a new low for all, but no doubt a particular embarrassment for its two stars.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Early in the film, James Gandolfini, one of the uncomfortably fat crew members, quizzes newbies on classic sub movies: THE ENEMY BELOW/’57; RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP/’58.  Both would substitute nicely here.  OR:  For a more contemporary comparison, try THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER/’90.  Its success likely got this the Green Light.  (Note copycat Black & Red posters.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-enemy-below-1957.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/run-silent-run-deep-1958.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-hunt-for-red-october-1990.html

FORTUNE FAVORS LADY NIKUKO / GYOKÔ NO NIKUKO-CHAN (2021)

After the ‘Gaia’ driven concepts and Earthly metaphysics seen in CHILDREN OF THE SEA/’19, Ayumu Watanabe brings a less abstract, less sophisticated, but still wildly inventive anime style to this second feature.  Not too far from traditional coming-of-age pics, Kikuko, our middle-school heroine, is an outlier by choice and by circumstance.  Stuck on the fence between rival girl squads, she chooses neither, but does find an outlier boy to wonder about.  (He’s a hoot, his face hidden under a mop of hair except when he’s ‘pulling’ faces as if he’s got a slight case of Tourette’s.)  Kikuko’s also dealing with batty mom Nikuko, Earth Mother in dimensions, childlike in enthusiasms.  All this playing out in the new port town they moved to after Mom’s latest romance collapsed like all the rest.  Watanabe runs a loose narrative, local events and sights grabbing attention from the modest narrative line, along with recurring abstract visual motifs.  (Mom keeps turning into a whirling dervish of pure energy.)  Much of this visually enchanting, but held back for Stateside viewers by Japanese custom and attitudes that don’t travel.  Though an image of a firmly embedded tree stump being extracted from the ground pretty on point as a metaphor for labor pains!  Then the film ends with young Kikuko learning about her complicated maternal past and finally getting her period while seated on the toilet.  Thank goodness, Watanabe has puberty rather than constipation for a subject.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Pixar’s TURNING RED/’22 is an obvious choice, but stick with Watanabe for his flight-of-fancy debut in CHILDREN OF THE SEA.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/02/children-of-sea-kaiju-no-kodomo-2019.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The rare film to get cooking right on screen.  Not only from the local chef at the restaurant where Kikuko's mom works, but also from Nikuko herself when she makes a pan of French Toast to share with her daughter.

FROM HEADQUARTERS

Exceptionally fun programmer from Pre-Code Depression Era Warner Bros., a murder mystery/police procedural that’s a paradigm of the form (especially the first two reels), positively loaded with pace and moxie.  After a score of films in the States since 1931, UFA actor-turned-director William Dieterle is still eager to show off his acquired Hollywood DNA in intertwined camera moves, smooth transitions and overhead shots for clarity & punctuation on what easily could have been a throwaway assignment.  Here, a Big City montage takes us thru documentary-style police arrests & formalities from analogue days, including a super cool look at an early IBM punch-card sorter.  Meanwhile, the main case is coming into focus as lead detective George Brent* and his team (Eugene Pallette, Henry O’Neill, Edward Ellis) figure out the latest tabloid sensation (note the baying news-hounds in the Press Room) was no suicide, but murder.  Murder with dueling pistols in a luxe penthouse.  Worse, Brent’s ex, a typically underwhelming Margaret Lindsay, is a prime suspect.  Or was it her brother, quick to defend her honor?  Could it have been the victim’s disapproving valet?  That new, shady business partner?  (He is European!)  Maybe it was the recidivist lock-picker who retrieved papers from the dead man’s safe.  So many suspects, each with a wildly subjective P.O.V. flashback for us to see.  (Lindsay’s shows her being sexually harassed from her own POV.  How’d they shoot that?)  Things slow down a bit in reels four & five to let  Brent get us all up to speed before we jump back to Express Tempo for the loop-de-loop whodunit denouement.  This was the kind of film you’d walk in right in the middle, then stay (thru the feature, newsreel, trailers, short subject, cartoon) till you noticed, ‘This is where I came in!’  But better hurry, it only got booked for a split-week.  Lucky us, we can catch it any time.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For an A-list example of this type of snappy Warner Bros. product, try Cagney & Davis in JIMMY THE GENT/’34.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/06/jimmy-gent-1934.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Solid, handsome, always a little dull at his home studio, Brent came alive when on loan.  But here, at his youngest and leanest, he’s a charmer.

BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 (2017)

REACHER lands in Maximum Security . . . on purpose.  That’s the gist of writer/director S. Craig Zahler’s ultra-violent actioner.  The switcheroo being that our protagonist isn’t Lee Child’s tru-blue Jack Reacher, crushing bones on the ‘right’ side of the law, but Vince Vaughn’s creepy thug, wrecking the joint to keep his kidnapped wife (and unborn daughter) from dismemberment.  Yikes!  True, BRAWL predates the current (surprisingly good) REACHER streaming on Amazon, but not the books or the less satisfying Tom Cruise iterations.  The other main influences seem to be Gaspar Noé’s risible IRREVERSIBLE/’02 (for the flinch-inducing bone breakage*), and, of all things, Alexandre Dumas for the far-fetched prison revenge scenario.  Nabbed during a drug run, Vaughn’s on the hook for 3.5 mill.  If he takes out a guy for the mob his wife (and unborn child) gets released unharmed.  But how to get to the top security jail and find the guy?  Go crazy violent and get transferred.  Well, maybe.  But since the drug lord seems to have men stationed all thru the joint (on both sides of the fence), why blackmail an outsider to do the job?  Grim doings, lots of gross-out kills, but how the heck does Vaughn remain such a formidable foe when he hasn’t had a decent meal, a full night’s sleep, a proper bowel movement or a work out in months?  With threatening stares, bulky muscle and none of his signature playful charm, Vaughn gets to play with, rather than against his towering beefy physique.  He looks like he’s trying to expand his rep.  Director Zahler looks like he’s trying to type himself.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  As mentioned, the new REACHER series, two seasons now available (only the first seen here), really comes off.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Noé, and for that matter Zahler, are so desperate to induce a visceral reactions, they overreach.  The machine goes TILT!  Hence, the giggles.

A GUILTY CONSCIENCE / DUK SIT DAI JONG (2023)

Recent winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards (all-time top local grosser, too), this courtroom procedural, a glossy-looking debut for director Wai-Lun Ng, wins you over with a double prologue that might serve as a pilot for a CBS weekly series, comic supporting characters and all.  Dayo Wong's leading role might well be called Judge Drudge, as he yawns his way thru mind-numbingly petty cases before ditching his job to join a mega-bucks law firm; then yawning his way thru crap cases, including an unwinnable manslaughter charge against a single mom whose child supposedly died from her neglect.  Briskly handled with pacey heightened realism, the actors skirting nimbly ‘round Ng’s odd jerky editing.  But the fun stops once the main story gets up & running as Mainland Chinese political priorities take over and turn the whole drama into a sort of anti-Capitalist Perry Mason episode where we discover Single Mom Louise Wong (from the manslaughter case) was set up to take a fall by the rich, ultra-connected Chung Family dynasty whose scion is the secret father of the child who died and whose jealous wife may be involved.  (And just like Perry Mason, Wong gets on-the-witness-stand confessions as needed.)  Setting the story from 2002-to-2005, before Hong Kong’s independence was severely curtailed from the One China/Two Systems days looks like awfully convenient blame placing.  Guess the fix was in for Mom to take the fall and now the fix is in to give major awards to films that point out past injustice under the old democratic government system when Billionaires, rather than Beijing, were Big Brother.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Though most of the good stuff comes early, Ng pulls off a great shot during the trial, filling the courtroom with members of the powerful Chung clan, all dressed in the exact same style & dark blue color of a conservative business suit.

THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL (2023)

Herman Wouk’s novel-to-play about a neurotic, barely competent, deservedly unpopular Navy Captain endangering his ship during a severe storm, and taken out of command by his own Lieutenant, has always been catnip for ham acting.  Who could resist its series of showy moments in court, none more so than Captain Queeg, reliving a nervous breakdown with strawberries under oath!  It’s the only thing people remember about Edward Dmytryk's overrated 1954 film with Humphrey Bogart rattling those ball-bearings.  The film significantly ‘opens’ the play, saving the courtroom for act three.  Other versions stick closer to the play: 85% courtroom; 15% soft-soap epilogue at a hotel conference room that celebrates either patriotism or mediocrity.  Hard to tell which.  And yet, the damn thing always works; the situation too meaty to miss.  (Plus it’s a courtroom drama, dummy.)  Back in his commercial doldrums days, Robert Altman made a starry tv film of it; now it serves as swansong for director William Friedkin, both men keeping the play structure, but Friedkin updating to the present.  Probably a mistake since a main part of the prosecution is keyed to mutineer Lt. Maryk’s (Jake Lacy) adoption of half-digested psychological terms.  Outlier behavior in the 1940s, hardly a stretch these days.  And Friedkin’s big cast of entertaining blowhards all seem to have won their sea legs rewatching A FEW GOOD MEN/’92 rather than on a ship.  Yet the film comes together just where the rest fall apart, in the mealy-mouthed epilogue when triumphant defense attorney Jason Clarke shows up drunk at a victory party after ‘slaying’ reviled Captain Queeg, played with a weird sense of chuckling defeatism by Keifer Sutherland.  Considering that the likes of Henry Fonda, José Ferrer, Barry Sullivan*, Eric Bogosian, John Rubinstein & David Schwimmer have all been undone by this belayed climax, how did Clarke pull it off?  Listen closely, and you’ll hear the answer: Clarke somehow switches vocal gears to channel an impression of Gene Hackman giving the speech.  A conjuring trick that must have left Friedkin smiling as he was the guy who directed Hackman in THE FRENCH CONNECTION/’71, career breakthroughs for both men.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Sullivan in a 1955 tv adaptation with original stage Queeg Lloyd Nolan.

STRANGE WAY OF LIFE (2023)

Amuse-bouche of a Western from Pedro Almodóvar (in English!) whets the appetite for a meal that never comes.  At half-an-hour, more frustrating than fun, as if one segment in an omnibus film lost its mates.*  Like many a portmanteau chapter, you can see where this one’s going right from the start when old lovers meet after 25 years and immediately fall in the sack as if they’d never said goodbye, only to wake next morning with a special request for breakfast.  And it ain’t ham & eggs.  One of the pair has a son on the lam for a murder and needs a little time to get him across the border.  So that’s why you’ve come back into my life!  Back into my big lonely bed!  Ah, the self-recrimination.  Okay, we’re avoiding the elephant in the room: these past lovers are Sheriff Ethan Hawke and Rancher Pedro Pascal working a Brokeback Foothills playbook.  There’ll be a getaway, a horse chase, a three-way Mexican Standoff, and a clever impasse to hold an ending in place thru mutual limbo.  Yippe-ki-yay!  Neatly handled as far as it goes (hot sex left to the boys as young men for reasons of delicacy?), but good grief, didn’t anyone tell these talented fellows that hundreds of Westerns have barely bothered to hide their homoerotic inclinations?  And that the thrill & mystery of something forbidden goes a little flat when you make subtext text?*  Still, nice to look at, Pascal is a helluva an actor (with a nice butt!) and you can imagine the two missing pastiche segments bringing hidden gay angles to the forefront in a variety of genes.  Horror?  International Spies?  Boxing Buds?  WWI Trench-mates?  Okay, not much hidden in those examples, but maybe this portends an English-language feature in Pedro Almodóvar’s near future.  That’d be nice.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The film has been paired (mismatched?) with Almodóvar's other English-language three-reeler, THE HUMAN VOICE/'20.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try the very first Talkie Western, IN OLD ARIZONA/’28, to see this in practice.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/in-old-arizona-1928.html

LIVING THE LIGHT (2018)

Released the year of his death, and crucially, made after cinematographer Robby Müller had developed aphasia, this fine biographical essay film on the most distinctive of late 20th century independent lensers, can’t rely on his spoken reminiscences.  Instead, along with the expected clips: found test footage, stills & home movies (‘home’ often as not the set of his current film) to give his unique ideas voice.  Largely moving in chronological order, yet anything but a  ‘then-I-shot’ walkthrough, director Claire Pijman makes this less a study of technique, more a study of lighting philosophy.  With talk coming courtesy of favorite collaborators like regular directors Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch & Lars von Trier.  Not that you’d know who's who if you didn’t already have some idea coming in.  That’s because Pijman opts out of any on-screen signage to let us know who’s talking or what film excerpt is playing.  What’s gained from leaving non-specialists in the dark escapes me.  (So too the titles of many of the films!)  But if it’s the only major mistake, it has the fault of pointlessly annoying you all thru the film!  Oh well, fun spotting things you might have forgotten were Robby’s.  Peter Bogdanovich’s SAINT JACK/’79, anyone?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  It beggars belief that Müller was never nominated for an Oscar®.  Not even for his spectacular work on von Trier’s BREAKING THE WAVES/’96.  But a funny incident in the film explains all.  Seems he showed up for his first major Hollywood assignment (HONEYSUCKLE ROSE/’80) wondering why the company sent 40 people to shoot a sunset on location when he only wanted four or five to assist.  The rest cooled their heels.   Featherbedding a union call sheet not a part of his small-budget Indie-Euro experience.  No wonder the ASC only got around to giving him their major career award in 2013, after he had retired.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Müller gives a surprising amount of credit to mere patience, waiting for the sun to hit just the spot to naturally give him the light he was looking for.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Scroll down a couple of posts to find one of Müller’s early ‘calling-card’ films, THE AMERICAN FRIEND/’77 

NOBODY ELSE BUT YOU / POUPOUPIDOU (2011)

Co-writer/director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu gets close (but no cigar) in this wintry detective yarn about a small-town beauty whose suicide may have been murder.  As a crime novelist suffering from writer’s block, Jean-Paul Rouve stumbles upon the book-worthy case much as its victim (Sophie Quinton) stumbled upon her career when a chance meeting led to a photo shoot, local ad spots, national publicity campaigns and a shot at film stardom.  But her life is barely her own, patterned after the looks, life & career trajectory of Marilyn Monroe; sex-pot blonde to brief marriage to a sports star; intellectual boyfriend to affair with married politico; increasing delays at work and a growing addiction to pills & champagne.  Great atmosphere on the French/Swiss border (brrr!), and a sweet turn from assistant cop Guillaume Gouix who seems a bit stuck on the writer.  (The film starts to run down after he gets injured out of the storyline.)  By the time the threads start coming together, everyone seems to have lost confidence in the material.  And botched details start sticking out.  Why make the Arthur Miller stand-in a boyfriend instead husband #3?  For that matter, why make the title ‘Poupoupidou’ when it should be ‘Boop-Oop-a-Doop,’ from the Betty Boop number Monroe sings in SOME LIKE IT HOT/’59.   Not bad, just not good enough.  Which also goes for Ms. Quinton’s looks as Marilyn.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  Over the past two decades, there must have been a fresh Marilyn Monroe bio-pic every other year.  Time to give it a rest.  Instead, try the real thing with MM at her most relaxed and pleasingly inconsequential in HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE/’53.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/05/how-to-marry-millionaire-1953.html

THE AMERICAN FRIEND / DER AMERIKANISCHE FREUND (1977)

A lethal cypher, the Zelig of con men, the blandest force of evil; that hasn’t stopped Patricia Highsmith’s RIPLEY novels from five substantial film adaptations and a new streaming multi-parter.  Andrew Scott’s the latest to try the enigma on for size (not seen here), this Wim Wenders film its most unlikely iteration.*  And unlikely is just the word for Dennis Hopper’s Ripley, standing out in any Berlin crowd with his Stetson cowboy hat, he's more like ‘bizarro’ Tom Ripley.  Hardly a man who can blend into the wallpaper, his natural eccentricity draws attention like a sideshow barker.  In Berlin to hustle forged paintings from ‘deceased’ painter Nicholas Ray, Ripley’s at a pricey art auction when he meets Bruno Ganz, art-restorer/frame-maker, a dying man who’s the perfect pigeon to take on a legacy payout job Ripley rebuffs, hitman for Gérard Blain.  Using his medical condition as cover, Ganz heads to Paris for a second medical opinion and a quick subway murder.  But as one murder is never enough, two more set killing pieces follow.  Best is a messed up rubout on a train, the action highlight of the film and remarkably funny in a decidedly Highsmith manner.  The following double climax (murder and car chase) less well executed.  But Ganz’s near operatic swoons & blackouts, all wonderfully caught in Robby Müller’s painterly pallette with only the freshest of Crayola crayon colors, carries us thru.  The film memorable, effective stuff on its own terms.  Maybe Wenders was right to take Ripley off the title.

SCREWY  THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL:  *To believe Wenders, Highsmith, who initially disliked the film, later told him it was the best representation of Ripley on screen.  But as this was only the second Ripley (after Alain Delon in the overrated PURPLE NOON/’60), not that much of a compliment.  Anyway, who’d trust anything Highsmith said, a woman known to have smuggled live snails into England by ‘wearing’ them under her bosom.  Yikes!  For something closer to the real Ripley on screen, turn to Alfred Hitchcock’s Highsmith adaptation STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’51.  But is it Robert Walker’s Bruno or Farley Granger’s Guy?

DESCANSAR EN PAZ / REST IN PEACE (2024)

From Argentina, director Sebastián Borensztein lays out a glossy old-fashioned soaper of a type rarely seen outside of tele-novelas these days.  None the worse for it, too, though they miss too many ready-to-go melodramatic opportunities.*  Handsome Joaquin Furriel (one of those lucky actors who can pass for 25 to 55) is the proud papa whose wealthy lifestyle is a facade for crippling debt owed to friends, relatives & threatening loan sharks.  It’ll take a financial miracle to save him!  Instead, he gets a lifeline from a real life tragedy, the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing of an Israeli Community Center.  (Kinda tasteless for use as a story trigger, no?  Especially when the family is Jewish, and the film opens with a Bat Mitzvah the guy can’t afford.)  But when the smoke clears, Furriel is unaccounted for, listed as missing, presumed dead.  Debts cancelled, he’s secretly off to start a new life in Paraguay.  Then, 15 years later, the internet opens his eyes to his old family now and he’s compelled to return incognito hoping to reveal his true identity to the beloved family he saved from financial ruin by disappearing.  Fun!  Of course, we know how these things must end: a sacrifice to save the people he’s never stopped loving.   Or, if not that, having his grown son, unaware the ‘dangerous’ man following his family is actually his long lost father!  Unbeknownst to him, he’s shot his own Papa and is now being forgiven & blessed by the dying man.  What, no amnesia?   Alas, neither scenario gets followed.  That’s okay, instead we get Furriel showing the passage of 15 years by suddenly looking like Al Pacino as Silas Marner.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: * If you do this sort of thing, you can’t be ashamed to get a little dirty.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Back in 'Golden Age' Hollywood, when they still shot everything on soundstages & in b&w (unintentionally making it all slightly abstract & stylized), they knew how to get the most out of these things.  Let Ronald Colman & Co. show you how with RANDOM HARVEST/’42.  (And no skimping on the amnesia.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/random-harvest-1942.html

HIGH FLYING BIRD (2019)

Steven Soderbergh, a veritable moviemaking machine, wastes a pretty good idea in this largely overlooked NetFlix streamer.   Or is it scripter Tarell Alvin McCraney, freshly Oscar’d for MOONLIGHT/’16, who blows it, loading up on ersatz Aaron Sorkin ping-pong rhythmed dialogue that comes across as time filler?  Maybe it was the decision to record the whole shebang on a fancy i-Phone which gives a fish-eye lens look to almost every shot no matter how many high-end Manhattan buildings Soderbergh glides us thru.  Oh well, here’s that pretty good idea: a long term pro-basketball strike is hitting everyone in the pocketbook, especially just signed rookies who’ve yet to get on court.  Super agent/NBA powerhouse André Holland figures out a big-time money-raising loophole for him & newbie star clients who have their first checks cut, but still held in escrow and so don’t have to abide by NBA or Players’ Union rulings.  Stage one-on-one face-off matches and sell them like pro boxing prize fights in arenas and streamed on (why not?) NetFlix.  Think of the pent-up demand!  But the business talk is insufferably circuitous (shot in sunny offices that overload that iPhone camera lens and inadvertently silhouette the actors), b-ball action is nil, and the only truly sympathetic/interesting character is the great Bill Duke, a famous retired player who runs a youth sports program.  The film just the sort of thing a die-hard basketball fan might sit thru when a six-month league strike is going on.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Instead of looking for better Soderbergh, why not look at one of Bill Duke’s more underappreciated films.  Just hitting 80, still actively acting & directing, he’s best known for Urban Crime films and a lot of quality t.v. series work.  But try and find THE KILLING ROOM/’83, an early film made for PBS on the beginnings of the Chicago Meat Workers Union and how racial issues affected things around the WWI era.  Why Duke never gets mentioned as a pioneering Black filmmaker is beyond me.  Maybe he was just too good to need that sort of special pleading.

BACALAUUREAT / GRADUATION (2016)

Best known for 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS/’07, writer/director -Cristian Mungiu tackles more Modern Romanian Misérables in this powerfully ineffective look at the lengths of compromise & corruption even a basically honest upper-middle-class doctor will go thru (must go thru) to ensure his daughter gets the opportunities he feels she’s entitled to (feels he’s entitled to) after high school.  Not that he’s asked if she wants to study abroad; if his depressed wife wants him OUT/or his mistress wants him IN; if his dying patient is pulling strings for him as a quid pro quo on the Q.T. in order to jump up the waiting list for a new liver, if a police lieutenant will hush up irregularities to get a quick indictment on that man who may have assaulted the doctor’s daughter (and/or vandalized his car & apartment) . . . and so on.  (No cash, please; favors leave less of a trail.) The good doctor sees it all blowing up in his face in real time, but can’t those ‘honest’ inspectors also be bribed?  As it stands, wife, daughter, mistress, well-connected friend, all barely speaking to him.  If only the good doctor weren’t right so much of the time.  Yet precise structuring and clever ‘reveals’ prove not enough to keep an audience involved.  Ah for the days of Italian commedia all'italiana where you might imagine the great Alberto Sordi giving the role & issues the absurdist energy, bitter humor & audience identification to make you laugh while ideas got implanted across the political spectrum.*  Mungiu seems content to preach to the choir and Film Fest regulars.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *No need to imagine, Sordi did it commedia all'italiana style (for Vittorio De Sica) as IL BOOM/’63.  No classic, but a solid example of the form.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Mungiu also over-eggs the pudding by making the daughter and her motorcycle riding boyfriend by far the best looking people on screen.  As if we’re not already in their corner.

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL (1956)

With few exceptions, journeyman studio director Richard Fleischer was at his quirky best in scrappy programmers (NARROW MARGIN/’52) early in his career, and at his most lifeless in faceless high-end fare (DOCTOR DOLITTLE/’67).*  But this mid-list WWII character piece, an unusually tough look at Traumatic Stress during island combat in the Pacific Theater, shows him in pretty good form.  Robert Wagner’s the demoted officer, offered a chance to avoid court-martial for striking a superior officer by taking a dangerous assignment under psycho commander Broderick Crawford posted near an enemy buildup.  (Check out Crawford’s snickering tag-team enforcers Frank Gorshin & Skip Homeier.  Yikes!)  While there Wagner gazes into a pool of reflection (no joke, there’s a pool of reflection that goes from muddy green to crystalline blue) where Wagner’s past appears: rich, arrogant Southerner with sharecroppers to lord over; prettiest gal as wife (Terry Moore); Robert Keith as the wise father-in-law he’ll lose in battle.  Needless to say, this is not the best part of the pic.  But it does lead to Wagner getting the shakes in battle and learning to respect all sorts of people he meets as he loses almost everyone.  There’s a bit of far-fetched heroics in the last half-reel, but most of the war action is both well-handled and unexpectedly violent/gruesome for the period.  And all very well cast; Buddy Ebsen’s sympathetic Southern White 'cropper steals the pic.  Fleischer, when at his best, still full of surprises.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: An even better, if little-known example of Fleischer’s mid-list work of the time in VIOLENT SATURDAY/’55.  OR: Watch Fleischer actively try to relocate his old form with the creepy modesty of 10 RILLINGTON PLACE/’71. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/violent-saturday-1955.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/12/10-rillington-place-1971.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  David Weisbart was a big-time Major Studio editor (mostly Warners) who became a big-time Major Studio producer (mostly 20th/Fox).  Many great editors became great directors (i.e. David Lean), but is there another example of Editor-to-Producer at this high level?

11 FLOWERS / WO 11 (2011)

Communist China’s Cultural Revolution meets STAND BY ME.  Surely the least likely high concept pitch in film history.  Yet, here it is in Xiaoshuai Wang’s fine, semi-autobiographical film.  Best known for BEIJING BICYCLE/’01*, Wang’s been very prolific, seven feature films after this, even more before, but this coming-of-age memoir from the 1975 tale end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution may well be the best entry point to his work.  The title refers to young Wang Han’s eleventh year, the year he threw the household (kid sister, Mom, Dad) into a tizzy by insisting on a new white shirt when he’s chosen to lead his school in daily exercises.  With Dad gone most of the week at his assigned factory job (pre-Revolution he was an actor), this uses up the family’s cloth ration for an entire year.  Naturally, the prized shirt is quickly lost at play with his three devilish school pals.  That’s the STAND BY ME part of the pic.  They even come across a dead body, but unlike the boys in STAND, there’s not a budding, empathetic kid psychologist in the lot.  Instead, rude, energetic, mean & hilarious id-driven engines of destruction.  And it’s at play when Wang’s shirt goes missing, floating down a river his mother forbid him to play in.  He’d have it back, too, if it weren’t for the murderer of the man they'd seen earlier.  Yikes, the guy even knows him!  Injured in a revenge killing of the man who raped one of Wang’s older classmates, the new shirt now a bandage for a bleeding wound.  (The boy’s not sure who he’s more afraid of: a killer who might silence him or a mom who’s gonna murder him over that ruined shirt!)  All this wonderfully brought off, often indirectly by Wang amid the trials of living as quietly normal a life as possible under the restrictive rules of the Cultural Revolution.  Especially tough when your actor dad is already suspected as an intellectual and lover of Western culture.  Rapt storytelling, handsomely shot, too, with a muted but enveloping color pallette (real film stock still in use in 2011?), and a superb mixed cast of actors and non-pro kids.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For early Wang, try CLOSE TO PARADISE/’98 rather than his better known BEIJING BICYCLE/’01.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/so-close-to-paradise-1998.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/beijing-bicycle-2001.html  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Leave it to the blunt nature of Chinese social culture to make this ‘coming-of-age’ story end with a literal ‘cumming-of-age’ gag as Mom does the boy’s laundry.

FINAL PORTRAIT (2017)

Stanley Tucci, with more than a hundred acting credits over four decades, has something of a legit sideline on a handful of directing gigs.  The films mostly focused on stunted creatives in Food: BIG NIGHT/’96; Writing: JOE GOULD’S SECRET/’00 and Painting: FINAL PORTRAIT.  Each suffers from giving the game away in the first reel: a chef who can’t compromise; a writer who won’t write; a sculptor/painter who doesn’t finish; yet all quite watchable if you don’t mind the tone of self-congratulatory appreciation.*  Shot in the U.K., but showing a good feel for ‘60s Paris, PORTRAIT is helped by a real deal subject. Alberto Giocometti , mostly known for his impossibly elegant, tall, spindly sculpture, here working on a painted portrait of writer James Lord (the film taken from his memoir).  The artist’s life coming into view when a two-day sitting expands to nearly a month.  (It also can seem that long to the audience.)  Fortunately, things are regularly enlivened by guest appearances from Giocometti’s ill-treated wife, his exuberant mistress and his wise, patient artist brother, nicely played by Tony Shalhoub.  All pleasant, interesting, not exactly necessary.  The film getting an accidental edge because of various sexual lapses by our leads, Geoffrey Rush, now cleared, but at the time under some sort of investigation.   (Giocometti also cops to some perverse dreams in the film.)  And more notoriously, Armie Hammer, who plays Lord, currently unemployable after some sort of misconduct/fantasies discovered.  But since he sounds exactly like Jon Hamm and looks like Ryan Reynolds, you may not realize he’s been off the screen recently.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Of the three, JOE GOULD’S SECRET, no doubt because its investigator, the great New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, went on to his own monumental case of writer’s block, is conceptually the most interesting, in execution least satisfying.

KEN / SABRE (1964)

Second in Kenji Misumi’s mid-‘60s Sword Trilogy, this contemporary tale focuses on the top two members of a University Kendo Society.  That’s the martial arts form where opponents under heavy protective gear whack away at each other with bamboo beating sticks.  But once purity-driven, over-disciplined Kokubun (Raizô Ichikawa) is chosen team captain over Yûsuke Kawazu’s less severe Kagawa, internal battle in the club threatens to outpace any challenge from other schools.  Handsomely shot in WideScreen b&w, Misumi’s formal control is nearly as awesome as it was in KIRU/’62, a TechniColor historical that came first in the trilogy.  But where that period piece covered decades and could leave you floundering to follow the narrative thread, KEN is far more straightforward.  Not necessarily a good thing when the adapted short story is loaded with the familiar fetishes of author Yukio Mishima: Ultra-Nationalism, extreme military discipline, repressed homoerotic tension, suicidal vanity and some particularly venomous misogyny.*   Eve in the Garden of Eden had nothing on the sexual temptation & luring lies Kagawa’s sister uses to court and then destroy Ichikawa’s purer-than-thou Kokubun.  Misumi handles this all brilliantly, with visual flourishes that never call attention to themselves (KIRU far more technically showy), but the underlying theme of denial, supported by exhausting training to repress the pleasures of sun, surf & sex before a championship meet, certainly comes thru.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  When does the team have time for classes?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See these fetishes play out in Paul Schrader’s visually alluring, dramatically slippery bio-pic MISHIMA/’85.  (Though no gay angle.)  Or in Mishima’s own short, PATRIOTISM/’66.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/patriotism-1966.html

BORDERLESS / BEDONE MARZ (2014)

Award-winning debut feature from Iranian writer/director Amirhossein Asgari immediately establishes itself as a worthy contender on the short list of strong, but unsentimental films on children at war.  Dropped into some unknown Middle-East conflict, we’re left quite alone with a ten-yr-old boy living a sort of stealth life inside the wreck of a ruined freighter afloat on a river border between unnamed warring factions.  Something of a Huck Finn character, this inventive kid has worked up solitary lodgings & employment of sorts catching & curing fish which he sneaks back to dry land to trade at a little store for necessities.  Time-frame, allegiances, family ties, causes of war: all undisclosed.  The boy’s unexplained existence baffling and admirable.  (As if a war zone surrounded the island inhabited by Boy and Horse in the similarly dialogue-free early parts of THE BLACK STALLION/’79.*)   He’s also a compelling physical presence, with a feral cat’s wary eyes, a bit like the boy in WHITE MANE/’53.  So when someone does show up, a war child from the other side of the conflict, speaking a different language, it might be a bad news.  (Possibly for the film, too, as it briefly threatens to drift into easy allegory, but is soon pulled back to its better instincts by the time two more ‘guests’ show up: an infant and an escaped American P.O.W.   Asgari’s handling of the ship’s logistics is particularly impressive, he really makes you believe it’s happening.  Very grim, though, other than a few moments when the infant turns playful or drowsy.  The shipboard events needn’t turn into Buster Keaton’s THE NAVIGATOR/’24, though the situation isn’t so far removed, but a bit of variety wouldn’t be uncalled for.  (The Keaton classic has a happy tag-ending, but its real end is a tragic one.)  It took Asgari eight years to make another film (THE LAST SNOW/’22, not seen here), who knows when or if he’ll get the chance to mature.  He certainly deserves it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned above: BLACK STALLION; WHITE MANE. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-black-stallion-1979.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/02/crin-blanc-le-cheval-sauvage-white-mane.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Referencing THE NAVIGATOR perhaps not so far-fetched; this film’s poster might pass as a poster for the Keaton classic.

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME (2024)

When it comes to missing the obvious potential on a ‘can’t miss’ project, Thea Sharrock gives George Clooney a run for the money with this tru-ish high-concept item.*  The easy-to-sell idea is football (soccer if you must), specifically, The Homeless World Cup International in Rome, with more than a score of countries participating.  Turns out, it’s a real thing.  What took so long to see the uplifting movie possibilities?  No one’s trying to reinvent the wheel here, a bit of slo-mo action on field, a suspense-filled climax with a penalty kick shootout.  While away from the pitch, all the expected homeless factors for the men & women participants: drugs, split families, war refugees, the pro who lost his nerve), our British gang pulled together under the laconic tutelage of a former star player who teaches the troubled young men patience, mutual respect, how to care for each other and play as a team.  Sure enough, even the most talented & selfish of the bunch learns that there’s no ‘I’ in ‘Team.’  Stir in a decent cast (Bill Nighy’s coach buries the whole characterful underdog lot simply shrugging his bony shoulders); add a cleverly worked out triple-twist ending; finally let everyone have their cake and eat it too.  It’s Sharrock who drops the ball.  And not only on the field.  Quarter-sized ‘pitch’ and 15-minute matches, BTW.  You’d think the tight space & time restraints would work to a director’s advantage.  But there’s no continuity in the scrambled shots, and not enough explanations to ground the interactions between teammates & rivals.  Fit and mentally together, they seem the most employable of indigents.  The film still works, it is a can't-miss' story idea . . . but just barely. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Check out George Clooney’s wink-wink/nudge-nudge approach to one of his ‘can’t-miss’ projects in LEATHERHEADS/’08.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/leatherheads-2008.html

THE PALACE (2023)

At the Venice Film Festival, where a pretentious piece of shit will routinely get a twenty-minute Standing Ovation (good films get twenty-two), Roman Polanski’s scabrous comedy about an ultra-luxe Swiss-Alps Resort Hotel on New Year’s Eve ‘YK’ got five.  Barely enough time for all the producers & talent to get on stage.  Commercial rollout DOA.  Is it really that bad?  Well, yes and no.  There’s something to be said about Polanski biting the hand that feeds him, taking pot shots at the aging ghouls & gargoyles who populate Price-No-Object resorts & Film Fests for forced holiday fun.  And what a noxious/toxic lot they are!  Especially when catered to by impeccable hotel & personal staff while they attend to the appearance of eternal youth and the pursuit of fresh partners in bed & business.  Less Jonsonian satire than Feydeau farce; less IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD/’63 slapstick greed than the Little Foxes of Blake Edwards’ S.O.B./’81*, but with the Davos crowd & Russian mobsters in for Hollywood hypocrites.  (Note Polanski nipping Edwards’ propped up dead body gag.  Or was he thinking WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S/’89?)  Alas, we can’t recapture the air of disapproval & mortified silence of that Film Fest premiere.  (It’s like seeing Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES/’81 without Manhattan Upper East Side ambience.)  But if Polanski’s comic cruelty works better in small doses within his dramatic vehicles, there’s still a decent ratio of laughs between gross gags about overindulging in caviar, plus some fine Euro-based comedians new to you.  God knows, the ones you do know not at their best.  But if ‘the prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges,’ as Philip Barry said in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY/’40, there’s little uglier than watching them indulge their tastes & fantasies.  For optimal enjoyment, pretend you’re watching a documentary.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Anything mentioned above would do, but go for S.O.B.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/sob-1981.html

OR:  For those who think Polanski, now pushing 90, has lost a step, see his previous film, a muscular look at the Dreyfus Affair which received little Stateside attention.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/jaccuse-officer-and-spy-2019.html

MENUS-PLAISIRS - LES TROISGROS (2024)

Still going strong at 94, documentarian Frederick Wiseman brings his now over-refined fly-on-the wall approach to Michel Troisgros’s perennial three-star Michelin restaurant, an unexpectedly informal, unexpected modern establishment in the French countryside near Roanne.   Structured around two food services, lunch & dinner, we spend the bulk of our time (a rather too generous four hours) in the hushed, clinically clean kitchen, and then on the restaurant floor where chef & staff turn maddeningly loquacious.  ‘Michel, I love your stories and philosophizing, but my food is getting cold!’)  In between Ozu-like ‘pillow shots’* of an idyllic countryside, we stop at a farmer’s market and many local sources (goat ranch, farms, vineyards, honey station, cheese ‘caves’ (these masters of maturation the most obsessed), while Michel tours and son César starts officially taking the reins at the restaurant/inn.  And while a few plates have that fussy haute cuisine look (one tasting menu offers a single asparagus stalk as a course; quite a large stalk, but still . . . ), most look devastatingly yummy.  (Who had the balls to bid for ‘craft services?’)   At times, Wiseman’s refusal to interject program info self-defeats (like a waiter who won’t explain a dish), but the sheer level of craft & detail that goes into these dishes comes across as something heroic.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The restaurant’s Zen-like calm mirrored in Wiseman’s use of those Yasujirô Ozu influenced static landscape ‘pillow shots’ in-between sequences.

LINK:  HURRY!  Free on PBS internet sites thru April 20th.  https://www.pbs.org/video/menus-plaisirs-les-troisgros-rbfnou/  

ATTENTON MUST BE PAID:  Hard to believe how many of the guests demand food substitutions or have allergy issues that put much of the menu off-limits.  You wonder why they bother to go and pay 3-star Michelin prices.  Yikes!  Better the cheese loving customer who has the cheese monger serve up six different varieties.  Mmm, cheese.

JUSTINE (1969)

For vet Hollywood helmer George Cukor, a funny thing happened on the way back from winning an Oscar® . . . five years drought between MY FAIR LADY/’64 and this salvage operation.  It was old-line producer Pandro Berman to the rescue, stung when art house director Joseph Strick failed to deliver on location in Tunisia, forcing this adaptation (just one part) of Lawrence Durrell’s ALEXANDRIAN QUARTET* to return to the 20th/Fox lot with Cukor taking over.  And while already doomed by a hard to follow script (illegal gun shipments to Palestine hidden beneath the sexually charged mutating affairs among foreigners navigating a debauched 1930s Alexandria) and uneven casting (some Hollywood ringers hopelessly inauthentic and a famously inert perf from gorgeous star Anouk Aimee), what a fascinating watch it is.  Dirk Bogarde, Anna Karina, Philippe Noiret, John Vernon, outstanding whether diplomat, whore or agent, and even Aimee able to give Michael York’s tush a run for the money.  (York’s Cubist facial planes a great help here as naïf lovestruck professor.)  With Cukor’s studio artifice far surpassing what we see of the disappointing remains of the location footage.  Leon Shamroy’s lush lensing, Irene Sharaff’s riotous costuming for orgies & social events.  The thing doesn’t add up, how could it?, but you’ll savor all the tasty bits of this curate’s egg of a film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The only comparable Cukor film is his equally compromised, equally rich BHOWANI JUNCTION/’56.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/bhowani-junction-1956.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Durrell’s four cross-pollinated novels largely untouched on film.  (So too Proust, with whom he's often compared.)  This 20th Century literary classic sounds perfect as a long-form streamer or as tony PBS fare.  Is it still read?  Or perhaps it's too politically incorrect.  (For this 1969 film, Alexandria’s infamous 1930s Child Brothel cast with veiled ‘little people.’  Actual kids only seen looking in.)

PHASE IV (1973)

‘Yes, but what I really want to do is direct.’  That old Hollywood punchline is usually tagged on ‘personality’ actors, but here, acclaimed graphic artist Saul Bass, whose posters & credit sequences for Hitchcock & Preminger are the stuff of legend, picks up the megaphone for this small-budget Sci-Fi Horror.  Even more surprising, it works!  A real creep out on an eclipse that changes the nature of all the ants on Earth, defanging their natural enemies & turning various ant species from combative to single collective.  The film a three-hander for two scientists (Nigel Davenport; Michael Murphy), sent to an isolated desert lab to work out ant communication & a plan for human survival, who wind up hosting a left-behind local (stowaway Lynne Frederick), who plays Eve to the men’s double Adam act.  Davenport the nihilist; Murphy the idealist; Frederick the author of the lab’s original sin, ruining the experiment before she's catalyst to transformation.  Not without gauche moments and all too obvious moves & motivations, but also with many memorable visuals (expected) and ideas (less expected).  One shot of rows & rows of pale poisoned ant warriors on their backs, surveyed by their black ant compatriots quite spectacular, and not only conceptually.  The end proves more than the budget (or Bass) can properly handle, but taken for what it is, this film should have led to further adventures for Bass away from his drafting table.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Why so unknown?  Best guess is that Stateside releasing company Paramount simply didn’t know how to market this sort of thing.  Pity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Scientists experimenting in an isolated lab a genre unto itself in this period.  Skipping over all those orbiting Space Station variants, you might try John Sturges THE SATAN BUG/’65 or Robert Wise THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN/’71.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-satan-bug-1965.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-andromeda-strain-1971.html

CONTEST:  Beware!  SPOILER embedded in this Contest Question.  PHASE IV’S outcome involves the evolution of a hybrid creature combining ant and human elements.  It’s not all that far from the précis of a faux trailer seen in a comic movie about the film biz.  Name the Faux Feature title and the film the trailer comes from to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

THE OUTSIDERS (1983)

The classic YA novel, converted by Francis Coppola into something of an homage to ‘50s melodrama & stylistics (think Douglas Sirk; Nicholas Ray; and a soupçon of Elia Kazan).  With a frankly amazing cast of up & comers (Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane & Patrick Swayze already fully-formed actors among Method Actor wannabes C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, et al.), its story, as if you didn’t know, very WEST SIDE STORY/REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but set in ‘60s small-town SouthWest where only teens seem to live, and wrong-side-of-the-track Greasers grumble & eventually rumble with cashmere-clad wealthy ‘Socs.’   Nowadays, the film plays as something of a parody of itself.  Heck, it did back then, too, but what’s become even more clear are the gender issues that drive the plot.  Not sexual issues; gender.  If readers & non-readers alike know one thing about author S.E. Hinton, it's that her manuscript was submitted with initials in hope that publishers would assume the author was male.  And something of the same thing is going on with the male heavy cast of protagonists: they’re really girls.  (Does that explain the gender-neutral nicknames?)  Sure they’re gross & rough, messy & ready for a fight, but also obsessed with GONE WITH THE WIND.*  (Have you ever met a teenage boy who’s read it?)  More touchy-feely than the budding ‘tween psychologists in STAND BY ME/’86, they cuddle for warmth, sleep with one head tilted on a BFF’s shoulder, and have æsthetic/philosophical heart-to-hearts on the impermanence of sunsets when not quoting Robert Frost.  (These deep feelings sure to be used as song cues in the soon-to-open B’way Musical adaptation.)  Getting out of the bath, they alluringly drape a towel on toned torsos to flaunt & flirt while sashaying thru the gang.  And does anyone have an actual, as opposed to an aspirational girlfriend?  Not gay, either.  Nor trans-anything.  Just girls in Greasers clothing.  It explains a lot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  This Write-Up based on the original 1983 1'31" cut.  Twenty years later, Coppola upped the running time by twenty minutes with previously deleted material and tossed his father’s lush score for something more ‘Pop’ oriented, no pun intended.

DOUBLE-BILL:  OUTSIDERS, a big, if brief financial help after ONE FROM THE HEART/’81 bankrupted Coppola’s ZOETROPE, was soon back in the soup when his even artier b&w Hinton followup, RUMBLE FISH/’83, did barely a tenth the business later that year.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Coppola reveling in visual GWTW aspects.  Dramatically tinted long shots with silhouettes bathed in over-saturated autumnal color, opening credits with titles sweeping across the screen and the cast listed by ‘house.’   A particularly neat touch at the time as those famous opening credits had been replaced by a still title shot as the infamous 70mm re-release of GWTW in the ‘mid-60s was forced to re-do the title optical since it no longer fit properly in the cropped image.  The original title design only restored years later.

THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER (1990)

The Anodyne Era in Disney animation began post-JUNGLE BOOK/’67 (last to have Walt’s direct participation) and was ended by THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89.  From this mild lot, THE RESCUERS/’77*, a little adventure in the Deep South for a pair of Manhattan mice, at least had a decent amount of charm, a feisty girl protagonist (still rare at the time), and an outstanding villain in Geraldine Page.  It also made a considerable pile of cash.  So, a belated sequel made sense as the new era got going.  Plus, it offered a great chance to try out game-changing digital animation techniques in the Aussie outback (note PIXAR getting its own section in the end credits), seamlessly blended in with regular hand-drawn leading characters and all those wacky Antipodean critters.  The vistas spectacularly successful; right up there with Chuck Jones’ Monument Valley canyons in those early Cinemascope ‘Road Runner’ shorts.  Now with vertiginous POVs!  If only anything else in here was nearly as good.  Lousy story construction and lazy character development as a fatherless boy tries to save a mammoth mother eagle from a rapacious poacher.  We leap from a prologue so OTT you’re convinced it’s a dream sequence, to pointless use of those two RESCUERS mice (why send them down from Manhattan?), to a villain drawn to look like Jack Palance but voiced by George C. Scott.  (This last one simply weird.  Though give credit to debuting director & producer (Mike Gabriel; Thomas Schumacher) for killing this guy off with the most gruesomely gleeful onscreen death in Disney animation since The Evil Queen went down in a blaze of deep purple in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS/’37.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For detail on the Disney animation revival (and this film’s major flop), see WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY/’09; and for this film’s back story the original RESCUERS.  http://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/waking-sleeping-beauty-2009.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-rescuers-1977.html

WEST INDIES (1979)

Long unavailable (its rep undoubtably helped by inaccessibility), now restored, French-Moroccan filmmaker Med Hondo built an agit-prop historical, from Daniel Boukman’s play ‘The Slavers,’ into an unlikely piece of Brechtian Epic Theater.  A big, colorful pageant play about the West Indies struggle for independence, interspersed with musical numbers, staged entirely on a former slave ship (looking incongruously spic-and-span).  It opens in the 20th century as a plebiscite is being debated in what looks like a symbolic kangaroo court of current West Indies rulers: Continue as a French Colony or Risk Independence?  We then jump back to cover episodes from a long miserable history of White domination: slavery; the sugar cane trade; forced immigration to supply cheap labor to Europe; collaboration by ambitious locals; waffling sentiments from a hypocritical Catholic Church.  All the usual suspects.  Ambitious as hell, but Hondo fails short; one more political playwright downed by following what German playwright Bertold Brecht says (intellectual distancing & didactic lessons) rather than what he does (emotional involvement & theatricality).  Here, the caricatures are as stiff in personality as Hondo is in his staging.  (He’s very big on keeping his cast seated.  Movement reserved for the chorus.)  The songs repetitive; dances out of an exotic floorshow.  And it’s not as if this were a great period in French lyric theater; mostly plotless revues for the tourist trade.  Imagine one of Roberto Rossellini’s late, arthritic ‘teaching pictures’ done as a stage musical.  Those films also well reviewed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Richard Attenborough, a large budget and an all-star cast fall just as short taking on WWI in the form of Brechtian Epic Theater in OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR/’69.  OR:  For eye-popping Hollywood horror on the slave trade, SLAVE SHIP/’37.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/fascinating-and-appalling-this-little.html