THE BIRDS, THE BEES AND THE ITALIANS / SIGNORE & SIGNORI* (1966)

Commedia all'italiana master Pietro Germi, best known for DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE/’61, goes to Treviso for a triptych of one-act sex farces within an unchanging cast of middle-aged middle-class Lotharios.  Story #1 centers on a socially connected doctor whose long-time pal is struggling with a bout of impotence.  The weakest and most stereotypical of the three  stories, the guy who can’t keep his pants on also can’t get it up!  But what if the cure turned out to be a quickie with the Doc’s wife?  The betrayal cure.  Tired stuff.  But improvement is just around the corner in story two.  Here, when a long-standing extramarital affair is exposed, the husband’s not ashamed, but relieved, even shaving off his goatee to celebrate his new freedom.  But since family ties can’t be clipped off quite as easily as a goatee, the story’s not over till the fashionably thin wife sings.  Spot on perfs all ‘round, and unexpected real emotion between comic playing.  Nice use of the confused son & daughter, too.  Then the last story blows them all away as a willing young beauty uses her allure & availability like a credit card.  (Germi brutally frank as needed.)  But when the girl’s peasant father shows up to collect, threatening the five men who’ve been partaking, he has a trump card to play.  His girl is still a minor.  Regrets, scandal, incompetent lawyer, outraged judge, real trouble in Treviso.  Germi not fooling around.  Enter one of the wives.  She knows the score.  She’s known the score; and not just the sexual score.  Plus faith that the rich have their ways (they write the rules), while the poor, especially the undeserving poor (the girl’s father thrilled at the cash he thinks is coming) always end up with the short end of the stick.  As if the poor man forgot: in Italian; commedia all'italiana doesn’t only mean comedy.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Try a Germi outlier, ALFREDO, ALFREDO/’72 with Dustin Hoffman going all Italian on us.  (Dubbed on the Italian track, he does his own talking in the English language dub.)   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/03/alfredo-alfredo-1972.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *For once, the Stateside title improves on the generic original.

PAVANE / PABANNEU (2026)

Everything feels secondhand sourced in Korean writer/director Lee Jong-pil’s sudsy romance for regular guy Moon Sang-min and regular gal Ko Ah-sung who meet and incrementally fall for each other at the department store they work at.  He’s new there, a tall shy type starting part-time in the parking garage where, many floors above, Plain Jane Ko already works.   Plus Byun Yo-han ile hanging around as third-wheel to offer tips & world-weary advice as philosopher, musician & comic cut-up.  Writer Lee’s best idea shows how the large department store functions like an extension of high school with cliques and strict pecking orders, a place where uniformed glam girls rule the roost selling designer goods on upper floors, and parking attendants work, appropriately enough, in the basement.  Plenty of gossip on who’s seeing whom, too.  The staff watching live on video chat.  Most of the film script worked out in a fog of predetermined fatalism, noble renunciation of desire and life-changing miscues.  With a colorful look that tries to hide its condescending view on the also-rans of this world.   As if director Lee had put in an order of MARTY/’55 and AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/’57 smothered with Wong Kar-Wai secret sauce.

EXTREME MEASURES (1996)

Everybody’s slumming in this paranoid medical thriller . . . and that’s a good thing.  Taken any more seriously, the whole movie would collapse.  Basically yet another ‘doctor plays God’ number, with the old Dr. Frankenstein & Monster horror model replaced by a newer suspense template taken largely from Robin Cook & Michael Crichton’s COMA/’78.  Here, Manhattan Emergency doc Hugh Grant, still floppy of hair, but stutter-free with medical jargon, inexplicably loses a patient and can’t figure out why since the hospital morgue has inexplicably lost the body.  Seems they never had it.  Is he being gaslighted?  What’s going on.  Who’s behind this?  Pressured to drop it, Grant investigates all the more and soon finds himself framed (with stolen/planted drugs) to shut him up and drum him out of work.  But, as in any good Hitchcockian innocent on the run pic, there’s a blonde to help, Sarah Jessica Parker.  Digging up a name in the files for Grant, he now can follow a series of clues leading to an empty wheat field . . . er, a subway underworld of homeless who knew the missing dead man.  But Grant, in turn, is also being followed.  Followed by two hitmen, the guys who planted drugs and trashed his apartment.  Enter moving subway train and a fight on the tracks.  Yikes!  Finally, he reaches fanatical research neurologist Gene Hackman.  (Co-star billing and a fat paycheck for 15 minutes of screen time.  You go, Gene!)  Scripter Tony Gilroy revels rather than hides some of the sillier plot holes.  (No one in New York has heard of a neurological clinic located in its own dedicated billion-dollar building, even printing the company name on plastic gift bags?)  And if director Michael Apted’s action chops are stronger with street traffic than in fights, he compensates by letting cinematographer John Bailey hit us with crazy sharp hospital interiors (no smoke or filters to soften the 1970s style image), holding back dark atmospherics to depict Grant’s slide toward danger.  Those who can shut off the right side of the brain may find this good dopey fun.  Plausibility sticklers, may like it even better.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Unusually good NYC location spotting all thru the film.  Even some of the interiors are real.  Grant’s trashed apartment no doubt a studio set, but his switchback stairway is the real deal.

SATURDAY’S CHILDREN (1940)

Considerably adapted by twin writers Julius & Philip Epstein from a now forgotten Pulitzer Prize winning 1927 Maxwell Anderson play, this B+ feature uses A-list creatives for what is essentially a test-run to see if new tough-guy phenom John Garfield could play rom-com (he can!); and if maturing ingenue Anne Shirley could fill in for troublesome Olivia de Havilland* (nope).  And if the film doesn’t quite come off, it does avoid the forced tone of too many Warners comedies, intelligently touching on current economic & office workplace issues.  Shirley, in a role the young Ruth Gordon originated, meets-cute on the job with Garfield, whose dream of making a fortune abroad is shot down when Shirley follows her older sister’s advice to make him jealous so he’ll propose.  Act Two shows him having second thoughts when, once again, big sis has a suggestion for Shirley: tell him you’re pregnant and he’ll have to stay.*  This all comes from the play, but they’ve added some melodrama for eccentric Pop Claude Rains, and tamed the newlyweds’ relationship by dropping a separation and her move into a rooming house.  Even so, all her role playing at home and at work offer plenty to chew on.  Note who gets laid off from work when there’s a downturn in foreign sales.  Director Vincent Sherman*, still young & hungry in the early ‘40s, lets, rather than makes things happen.  While strict mores at home & office do the rest.  Too bad they puff up the melodrama with a dash to the rescue.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Post GONE WITH THE WIND/’39, de Havilland demanded better vehicles, hence troublesome; at least in the eyes of Jack Warner.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Later on, Sherman often assigned to handle stars on the wane.  But try him at his best in 1943's THE HARD WAY.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-hard-way-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Warning!  The following is pure speculation.  The Epstein brothers add a scene at the doctor’s office to show Shirley really is pregnant, not tricking Garfield.  But in the play, she’s not pregnant, but adopting her sister’s suggestion to say she is to keep her husband from that overseas job.  The play would then end with the truth coming out but a face-saving plan to have a kid ASAP.  An ending ‘borrowed’ by Tennessee Williams in his CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF third act rewrite, made under orders from original stage director Elia Kazan.  (Okay, make that complete speculation.)

HOUDINI (2014)

Of the half-dozen film, cable and tv-movies on Harry Houdini, early 20th century magician, escape artist, amateur spy and spiritualist debunker (a man whose name, a hundred years after his death, can still sell a bio-pic), only two seem to matter.  From producer George Pal, fanciful in 1953 for M-G-M*; and, from writer Nicholas Meyer in 2014, rather less fanciful for The History Channel in a three-hour two-part mini-series.  And while there’s residual affection for the earlier film (near newlyweds Tony Curtis & Janet Leigh star), this modern version with Adrien Brody, beats it in nearly every category.  (‘Nearly’ because Curtis is the better physical match.)  Director Uli Edel, if occasionally held back by his budget on dead studio exteriors, generally does better with suspenseful stage acts than with personalities.  Anything with a ticking clock comes to life; Mom Houdini and Mrs. Houdini fare less well.  But it’s a kick to see Brody (in stupendous shape) having fun in front of the lens for a change.  And if savvy modern audiences are a step or two ahead of any camera tricks selling the magic, credit Edel for getting so much to work.  So, stop raising that eyebrow at some of the less likely events (Houdini given such familiarity with the Tsar’s family?) and give Meyer’s fabulist take on the legend a shot.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *See for yourself.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/houdini-1953.html

AQUARIUS (2016)

Last year’s international must-see, THE SECRET AGENT/’25 (not seen here), was a breakthru for Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho, in spite of nearly twenty years’ work.  But this earlier high-profile film probably not the best place to start.*   Sonia Braga, best remembered Stateside for KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN/’85 and the popular, if vaguely appalling DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS/’76, stars in this lumpy saga as a hold out tenant who refuses to leave her handsome, if frozen-in-time beachfront apartment, stopping a big development project by stubbornly refusing even good offers family and ex-tenants pressure her to accept so they can get their payouts.  We’ve seen this one before, though with a lot less sex.  Everyone seems to be getting it on.  Even those pushy developers rent the deserted apartment directly above Sonia for a noisy orgy.  It doesn’t drive Braga away; instead, a peek at the action makes her horny enough to call up a handsome sex worker and have a go at her place.  (Okay, we’ve not seen that one before.)  There’s something ‘off’ (performative) about her encounters with middle-aged gal-pals and worried family members; as if we were watching The Real Widows of Recife.  Things get only weirder as Mendonça Filho strips gears to shift into a third act of skullduggery & property rights in a dastardly plot to degrade the building and force her out with a termite-riddled coup de théâtre.  Well, something’s termite ridden.

WATCH THIS, NpOT THAT/LINK:  *Instead, try Mendonça Filho’s intriguing first feature NEIGHBORING SOUNDS/’14.  (THE SECRET AGENT is in our cue.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-som-ao-reder-neighboring-sounds.html

TWO PROSECUTORS / ZWEI STAATSANWÄLTE (2025)

Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was (if possible) even more paranoid than usual in the mid-‘30s, before his ill-fated Nazi Pact and the ‘Great Patriotic War’ split his attention . . . for a while.  But it’s 1937 when this steely paced/inexorable miscarriage-of-Soviet-justice story plays out.  Alerted by a letter written in blood from within a fortress-like prison far from Moscow’s center of power, a local, idealistic State prosecutor (Alexander Kuznetsov, whose boxing past has given him an addictively photogenic face - half boyish/half smashed) follows up on the complaint by honoring the prisoner’s right to an interview.  Evidence of NKVD torture on ths longtime committed Communist not only confirming the man’s story, but giving support to tales of similar treatment thru-out the province prisons.  Much of it stemming from his refusal to certify official Death Warrants of innocent men; himself included.  Taking up the old man’s case against prison guards & the NKVD (the future KGB), the new State Prosecutor, a tru-believer in the Soviet system as outlined in its constitution, may be idealistic, but not so naive to think he’d have a chance to do anything locally.  So, without appointment, he’s off to Moscow in hope of seeing the USSR Attorney General.  No surprise where this is heading, but co-writer/director Sergey Loznitsa’s meticulous physical realization (the film shot in Latvia), and formal structural design (basically two long interviews: tortured prisoner and young prosecutor; young prosecutor and plainspeaking Attorney General); followed by a quickstep coda showing the NKVD trap awaiting him, no anomaly, but Kremlin-approved policy.  Played for suspense or shock this would fall flat as a blini, but comes alive when played as Greek Tragedy, predetermined ‘ot A do Ya’ (from A to Zed).  Why generations of Russians, a country all but synonymous with Revolution, put up with these conditions, probably unanswerable by anyone not part of the system.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Armando Iannucci’s bleakly hilarious THE DEATH OF STALIN comes within shouting distance of understanding/explaining the Russian attitude, if not the Russian soul.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-death-of-stalin-2017.html

SYNCHRONIC (2019)

ALL SPOILERS!  Skip this if you don’t want to know everything in advance.  Better yet, skip the film.  Anthony Mackie & Jamie Dornan, joined-at-the-hip New Orleans EMT paramedics, currently inundated with ODs from a new, potent designer drug marketed as ‘Synchronic,’ find this powerful hallucinogenic leaving a wake of dead or disappeared users.  Something almost sentient about this pill: its favorite book would have to be A WRINKLE IN TIME; favorite movie BACK TO THE FUTURE.  So when Dornan’s teenage girl goes missing from using the stuff (a runaway from home or lost in a time continuum?), perhaps there’s an explanation.  Going thru a bad personal patch, Mackie & Dornan may be fighting like an old couple, but hey!, family’s family, and a recent diagnosis of brain cancer emboldens Mackie to test the waters on Synchronic’s metaphysical properties and bring the girl back.  Co-directors Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Benson also scripted) play blind man’s bluff with the audience (a spare one, the film tanked) with spooky lighting, creepy score, inexplicably precise time leaps.  Really nothing you wouldn’t expect here, dumb genre logic, but cross the line with ‘progressive’ racial tropes long past their sell-by date.  From the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, the sacrificial Black Man giving his life to save his White pal* (here the pal's daughter) and, far worse, a revival of the ‘80s/‘90s Magical Negro character.  Benson doubling down by setting the climax at some Civil War battle with Mackie mistaken for a runaway slave.  Yikes!  Pretty good reviews and award action on this one.  Go figure.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT (not that you could find it!):  *On a DANNY THOMAS HOUR anthology show from 1967 (‘The Enemy’), Sammy Davis Jr, who got stuck with a lot of sacrificial Black friend to White ‘brother’ roles, outdoes them all in a little WWII drama when he discovers who the Nazi infiltrator is in his army unit after the undercover German agent mispronounces the ‘N’ word as ‘Neigher.’  Sammy risking all to save the unit yelling back ‘It’s Nigger, you Nazi rat!  Nigger!.’  (Or something like that; it’s been a while!)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  One happy surprise is a neat bit of support (about a scene & a half) from Ramiz Monsef as Synchronic’s remorseful developer, now trying to undo some of the damage.

SIX BRIDGES TO CROSS (1955)

Inadequate, even risible assignments under contract to Universal didn’t stop Tony Curtiz from breaking out in the 1950s.  But things suddenly improved, likely in the nick of time, on loan-out for his next film after this, co-starring with Burt Lancaster in TRAPEZE/’56.   (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/trapeze-1956.html)   After that, even Universal had to step up with better scripts.  Before then, this fact-inspired pic probably best of a bad lot.  Curtis is a juvenile delinquent in Boston (or rather debuting Sal Mineo as his younger self is) who likes the easy cash too much to ever straighten up.  Hit by a bullet as he runs from arresting beat-cop George Nader, the two develop a wary relationship with Curtis stooling for Nader, and Nader’s cop always giving the kid one more chance to make good.  Eventually, this pattern will backfire on Nader’s rep, when, after two decades and a World War, Curtis becomes suspect #1 in the infamous 2.5 mill armored truck robbery THE BRINK’S JOB.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-brinks-job-1978.html)  With Joseph Pevney’s solid if unimaginative direction much helped by lenser William Daniels’ deglamorized æsthetic.  (Real Boston exteriors and interiors; note the varying acoustics.)  And while there’s not a lot of surprises in how things turn out or how punishment is dealt, some blunt disdain toward Fed authority blundering into a local crime isn’t something you expect to see in a 1955 film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The following year, M-G-M’s SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME/’56 took on similar tough 'truthy' tenement tones: Brooklyn in for Boston; boxing in for robbery; Paul Newman* (born 1925 - half Jewish) in for Tony Curtis (born 1925 - all Jewish); catchy title track sung by Perry Como in for less catchy title track sung by Sammy Davis Jr,; Upbeat vs Downbeat ending; studio recreations in for real locations; master craftsman Robert Wise directing instead of journeyman Pevney.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/somebody-up-there-likes-me-1956.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Newman himself a last-minute replacement for the late James Dean.

THE WARLORDS / TAU MING CHONG (2007)

From directors Peter Ho-Sun Chan & Wai-Man Yip, a well-produced War, War and more War epic about the power struggle of leading Chinese generals to take enough cities to control the country, never comes together.  Especially if you’re not already familiar with the historical background.  But it does acquire enough kinetic momentum and character development to hold attention.  Jet Li plays the unfortunate General Pang, losing his entire army in battle (he alone survives under a pile of dead), now looking for fresh financial support, partners & troops.  Finally, a trio of elderly connected politicians back him (the type who pull the strings and really run the country) while two bandit brother kings (Andy Lau; Takeshi Kaneshiro) in remote territory may be willing to bring their army in hopes of legitimizing their status.  At first, the group have nothing but success as their smaller forces crush armies five times their size.  But differences in the principles of war and in the goals they are fighting for will tear them apart.  It’s those old men backing them who go on and on; along with the eternal Chinese Empress.  Oddly, we never see her, nor the final climatic battle; and since we also aren’t shown much difference in how the enemy generals act,, we can’t know if we’re even on the ‘right’ side.  Like soldiers, we only know we’re on ‘our’ side.  Sole rooting interest lies upon actions between our threesome of warrior ‘brothers.’   Trimmed by a reel or two for international release, someone decided other territories would only turn out for battle & gore; the hell with what’s going on behind the silk curtain.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The real shock in here comes when a final title card reminds us the real events behind this juiced up telling happened, not in some mystical past, but as recently as 1870.

THE EXECUTIONER (1970)

By 1970, Cold War Thrillers ran on parallel tracks: James Bond and his brood going OTT; John le Carré and acolytes drifting only more serious.  Light entertainment or reality’s deadly game.  But this modest example of the form offers convergence, trying to split the difference.  And it’s not bad.  George Peppard, in rapid career decline, has a role to fit his charmless arrogance, a mid-level MI6 agent, British-born/U.S.-raised (they gotta explain the accent, no?), who’s just lost his team on a failed mission.  Why?  A leak in the company.  But is this to be Find-the-Mole; or Whack-a-Mole over at what le Carré called The Circus?  Lucky for Peppard, current ‘bird’ (Judy Geeson) has access to all relevant files.  Unlucky for him, spy bosses Charles Gray & Nigel Patrick (played as a couple) catch them out and suspend them.  But Peppard has other resources: Oscar Homolka’s hungry Russian defector; Joan Collins’ infatuated spouse of a prime suspect; agent Keith Michell, a likely KGB ‘plant’; and so on.  Quite a cast for a low-budget Charles Schneer production.  (Schneer known for Ray Harryhausen stop-motion fantasy fables.)  Good location stuff in London & Athens; note the lack of process work even in traveling car interiors.  Director Sam Wanamaker*, one-time Black-Listed actor, now active helming smallish features & series tv, shows he’s partial to ‘60s stylistics (arhythmic quick-cut head-shots, zooms, tight framing) probably has his largest budget here; along with an extra twist at the end.  (Added to give Peppard a get-out-of-moral-purgatory-free card?)  Just keep expectations down for best viewing results.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though better known for acting, and for actor/daughter Zoë (try his funny take on Leonard Bernstein in THE COMPETITION/’80), Wanamaker had around thirty directing gigs.  Yet he’ll undoubtedly be more remembered as the main motivator in his adopted London-town for starting the push to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on its original Thames site.  Only an American could get it done.  Sadly dying before it was completed.

ZAMA (2017)

Distressingly believable historical, a multi award-winner from director Lucrecia Martel on early colonial attempts at commercial trade & development in northern  Argentina (late 18th century).  It’s where Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is stationed and where he has grievously erred thru hard work, loyalty to the Crown and near competency.  With such a positive record, why should his superiors let this magistrate transfer to a better post or Buenos Aires?  He believes he’s earned that reward by honest labor (he has a family he’s not seen in years) compared to the drunks, thieves & slackers around him.  Impossible to get anything accomplished in the face of men drifting toward savagery, disease & madness; or dying mid-lunch by an acute attack of the plague.  Zama hardly immune, having acquired a mistress and mixed-race son.  And more obstacles, like a rural legend with a gang of deserters & discontents,  one Vicuña Porto, regularly reported dead or attacking in some new place.  A man Zama will be ordered to track down, discover he has something in common with, then pay a price when Porto faces near mutiny by his superstitious men convinced that gemstones can be found inside coconuts from a certain grove.  And Porto needs to pressure Zama on their location.  Martel’s dogged realism does little to make this more palatable, it’s a drudge at times, but never without interest in its depiction of depravity and man’s infinite capacity for self-deception and illogical hope.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Werner Herzog’s  AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD/’72 set the standard for this kind of collective madness among early colonizers, though the film has lost the classroom caché and art-house following it once had.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Paid by D.P. Rui Poças who cuts off more heads than anyone on screen with tight framing, as if he thought they were releasing in Academy Ratio (1.37:1) not standard ‘flat’ (1.85:1).   Or was it meant for some in-between frame?  (Say, 1.66:1; often seen in Europe.)

THE BEAST TO DIE / YAJÛ SHISUBESHI (1980)

Toru Murakawa’s elegantly horrific multiple-murder story, something of a Nippon Noir, is hard to classify, but easy to watch.  Drawing you in without adding up right from start when a middle-aged detective and a younger/fitter man fight over a stolen police gun in the pouring rain.  Shot from a distance, often at a high angle, the otherwise deserted sidewalk corner softly lit by street lamps to slightly obscure our view.  It’s compelling without rhyme or reason.  As is the following robbery and slaughter of a mob gang at a closed bistro/club where a table of partially stacked stolen yen waits to be distributed.  Instead, after a rubout, the loot is destined to go home with our murderer where his high tech music room calms him down via Shostakovich & Mozart.  And that’s before a concert in an arid modern concert hall for a strikingly charmless rendition of a Chopin piano concerto where our killer bumps into a woman he’ll meet again while holding up a bank.  (More mass murder of tellers and execs.)  Then pick-up a prostitute to masturbate in front of him while he relaxes with an alcohol slurpee.  Yikes!  What a strange film!  It coninues in this vein, a partner comes on board and there’s a dandy cat-and-mouse game with another detective on a moving train, before ending with one of those it-was-only-a-dream wake-up calls at the end of the concert.  (An old UFA trick Fitz Lang was partial to.)  Except this too is a trick.  Murakawa has something else in mind entirely.  Revenge?  Maybe.  Explanations?  Certainly not.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Murakawa brings revisionist flair to ‘80s ‘drop-out’ culture.  Was that a thing in Japan at the time?  Had me thinking back to the anti-genre/genre pics of Seijun Suzuki in the ‘60s.  Both directors decades ahead of their time.  Begin a Suzuki tour with YOUTH OF THE BEAST/’63, a true astonishment.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/youth-of-beast-1963.html

NINJA SCROLL / JÛBÊ NINPÛCHÔ (1993)

Superior anime from Yoshiaki Kawajiri successfully covers a lot of hand-drawn styles as it sets forth a sweeping tale of wandering Ninja Jubei who gets mixed-up in a political power struggle between rival clans and would-be Shoguns, with help (if that’s what it is) from a stranded ancient wiseman and the sole survivor of the current Shogun’s military advance force, a deadly female whose poison-laced body leaves anyone she takes to bed dead by morning.  Yikes!  (One intriguing exception: fuck with an already poisoned man and your poisoned body works on him like an antidote.  Got that?)  In spite of how this sounds, the story quite easy to follow.  But those alternating visual techniques are the real stars here; that and the uncompromising nihilistic ending.  The animation ranging from simple scanning of still compositions, many played over each other in multiplane to create depth; but just as often, lively shots, busy with screen-filling flights of birds or insects in patterns of motion.  Then, used elswhere simply for their beauty in silhouette (in washes of color rather than b&w).  Or with characters giving chase thru rows of spindly trees or bad weather.  Stunning, and stunningly effective.  But be aware: lust, sex, female nudity, violence & torn limb-from-limb gore also in the mix.

DOUBLE-BILL:   Not previously familiar with Kawajiri’s work; he’s been more active in tv and in non-directing capacities.  But if the styles aren’t much alike, the clean, enjoyably kinetic visuals brought the early seasons of Genndy Tartakovsky’s  SAMURAI JACK/’01 to mind.

BLOODY SUNDAY (2002)

Paul Greengrass’s docu-style film on the 1972 massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland, where poorly prepared British military forces shot 13 dead (twice that injured) during a political march protesting the lack of Civil Rights in this heavily Catholic town, perhaps inadvertently, plays as if hindsight wasn’t needed to foretell the tragic outcome.  As if both sides to some extent knew things would go wrong, but wanted them to go wrong ‘their way.’  Filmed by D.P. Ivan Strasburg, in hand-held guerilla style, it moves back & forth between sides with brusque editing and clipped fade-outs that leave us hanging.  (Like they'd been watching bits of Gillo Pontecorvo’s THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS/’66 before going to bed during the shoot, but didn’t learn anything.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/battle-of-algiers-1965.html)  Greengrass also gains and loses points, especially for American viewers, casting well-known PBS types.  Easier to keep track of, but hard not to be constantly pulled out of the story trying to remember where you’ve seen some of these actors before.  A major, if  unintended, I.R.A. recruitment tool in its day, this largely avoidable incident remains all but unknown Stateside.  Flaws and all, worthwhile for that.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Look sharp for the movie marque seen near the top with SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY/’71 listed as second feature.  Entirely possible, it's the only light moment in the pic.

THE BROKEN STAR (1956)

B-pic vets Lesley Selander, director, and John C. Higgins, writer, bring their A-game to this Western programmer with unexpectedly tasty results.  It’s a character study, but with most of its cast of characters working against type and story expectations.  The effect downright destabilizing.  Check out the opening: a dirt poor sharecropper is short on back payments; the Mexican collection agent working for the Great White Land-owner, cleans him out, secretly watched by top-billed Deputy Marshall Howard Duff.  He moves in, chats up the oddly reasonable Mexican before calmly shooting him dead and grabbing the eight thou hidden in the office.*  All stealthily watched by a silent Apache who hides from Duff before running to town.  Other than the farmer, every person on screen is acting against type.  And so it goes all thru the story, even that White Land-Owner not such a bad guy; the do-nothing Chief Marshall does something; the Mexicali girlfriend (her theme song, ‘I Hate You.’) engaged to Deputy #2 (Bill Williams, pleasantly plain) who’s Duff’s BFF and who gets the big heroic two-on-one fight sequence you expect Duff to handle.  The more you think about this one, the odder it becomes.  Alas, other than in character development, it’s a drab looking thing with minimal action outside a pair of fights, but nuanced story beats and characters refresh the old Western tropes.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See Duff work more typical/more congenial dramatic territory while also meeting future wife Ida Lupino on set in WOMAN IN HIDING/’50.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/woman-in-hiding-1950.html

THE HISTORY OF SOUND (2025)

Though slightly overshadowed by award-winning co-stars, Jessie Buckley in HAMNET; Josh O’Connor here, Paul Mescal deserves some kind of special recognition for inducing more well-earned/high-toned tears with those two films than any other actor achieved in 2025.  SOUND, lesser seen of the two, is, in its own distinctively hushed manner, just as moving, just as well-played.  The script, Ben Shattuck’s debut from his own short story, covers three time periods (in chronological order for a change!): the WWI era; a decade later; and the mid-60s, as it follows the relationship of O’Connor & Mescal after leaving a Massachusetts music conservatory when academic-minded O’Connor all but orders Mescal, a more musically gifted new acquaintance, to join him on a foot tour of rural New England recording folk tunes on wax cylinders before the traditional music is lost to modernity.  (A real thing that happened in many countries; Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s work in the field probably best known.)  The two men fall into friendship, fall into the rhythm of their subject, fall into bed; a relationship only strengthened by the occasional disagreement.  But the war and their differing levels of ambition & talent will amicably separate them.  O’Connor off to war, but insisting Mescal follow up on his natural musical skills on the world stage.  A decade’s separation from Mescal’s blooming career, and marriage for O’Connor, complicated by echoes of the war, will dissolve (too late) in a flash of recognition on what’s been lost.  And not repeatable on a wax cylinder.  It will be decades before full understanding brings emotional epiphany.  (And not just on screen.)  Director Oliver Hermanus, working closely with D.P. Alexander Dynan, plays his story in grace notes rather than in main themes, emotion inferred rather than underlined.  It can feel like a mannerism at times, but, like the folk song mordants flourished at the end of most melodic lines, things that can sound like blemishes may be part of a precious package.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Similarities to BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN/’05 have been noted, but O’Connor’s earlier coming-of-age film, GOD’S OWN COUNTRY/’17, hits closer to the mark.     https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2026/01/gods-own-country-2017.html

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)

Public demand for low-down comedy wih a high silly factor during WWII helped journeymen comedy team Bud Abbott (straight-man) and Lou Costello (butt) over-perform at the box-office, especially in the early 1940s.  Limited talents, they caught a second wind in the late ‘40s, when someone at their home studio thought to combine them with Universal’s signature monsters.  (Five MEETs in total, the fourth over at Warners.*)  FRANKENSTEIN, first & best of the lot, churning out pots of money, even with few good notions on what to do with this can’t-miss set-up.  Raspy-voiced Abbott keeps the pace up (always his strong suit) while Costello holds to his usual too-scared-to-get-the-words-out shtick, but played against the Frankenstein monster, Dracula and Wolfman, he generates pretty decent laughs.  But that’s about it for comic ideas; the rest boilerplate A&C.  For some amusement, note that Wolfman (still Lon Chaney Jr.) grows fur under four full moons over five or six days.  A Full Moon record!  (And does so in unusually smooth Man-to-Wolf dissolve transitions.)  That Bela Lugosi is Dracula for only the second time.  It’s also his last major studio pic.  And that  Bud Westmore’s simplified monster makeups (based on masks), aren’t a patch on Jack P. Pierce’s built-from-scratch every day originals.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Least if not last, it was . . . MEETS CAPTAIN KIDD/’53.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/abbott-and-costello-meet-captain-kidd.html

PILLION (2025)

With nebbishy demeanor, wilted physique and close-set eyes, Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley in the HARRY POTTER films) comes on screen singing high tenor in a Barbershop Quartet, then wandering thru the pub, collecting tips in a straw hat.  Think you couldn’t get more masochist than that?  Think again!  Melling’s about to be picked up (well, picked out) for special service by leather-clad biker Alexander Skarsgård (even at 50, the guy Adonis was modeled after).  Naturally, it’s an arrangement, with Melling chosen as submissive (sexually & domestically), to Skarsgård’s laconic dominator.  An instant kinky cult item (rating-wise, a hard ‘R’), co-writer/director Harry Lighton’s film quickly lost whatever buzz-worthy qualities it seemed to possess.  Pop Psychology contents settling down to half-full in packaging & delivery.  Third-act reverses particularly obvious, not to say dog-eared, leaving us with way too much time to think about the relationship’s far-fetched gestation.  Lighton not helping his case by filming & lighting Melling as if he were screen testing to play Renfield in a new Dracula film.  One of those films where you had to have been there in the opening weekend for the buzz to trick you.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Not strictly comparable (to put it mildly), but Harold Pinter’s THE SERVANT/’63 (Joseph Losey’s 1963 film with Dirk Bogarde and James Fox) works its way thru some similar, creepy ideas on submissive/dominate bad behavior.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In our never-ending quest to find cooking faux pas in film, check out Melling at a party with many of  Skarsgård’s biker pals, scouring a ridged cast-iron pan with dish soap.  The one thing he deserves to be punished for, and no one says ‘boo.’

MADAME X (1929; 1937)

Alexandre Bisson was a turn-of-the-last-century French playwright best known for Madame X/’29, Madame X/’37 and Madame X/’66.  And that’s just in Hollywood.  Another dozen or so international iterations 1916 to 1981.  (From our writeup of Lana Turner’s remake: ‘Unfairly tagged for her lover’s accidental death, a rich young wife & mother disappears to protect her family from social disgrace, hiding for twenty years as Madame X, sinking into absinthe & despair until being spotted by a lowlife blackmailer she does kill.  Now, on trial for murder, she’s unaware that the young defense lawyer working his first case is . . . (gasp) the son she abandoned as a child!’  Oft filmed, and you’ll see why, it’s prime hokum for bravura acting, no less than Sarah Bernhardt brought excerpts of this irresistible trash to B’way when she was pushing 70.*’  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/madame-x-1966.html)    The only major plot alteration is that the lover’s death ain’t ‘accidental’ in the two earlier, infinitely preferable Hollywood versions: Lionel Barrymore’s primitive Early Talkie from 1929 and Sam Wood’s polished example of 1937 Golden Age Hollywood.  No question, 1937's the best as film.  Gladys George’s whiskey bruised voice a perfect match for Mme., especially on the lam, combined with John Meehan’s streamlined script (two reels trimmed), plus John F. Sietz’s lighting (as the wronged husband, William Warren never looked this good).  The problem is, in sensibly taming the old stage chestnut, the emotional craziness no longer runs the drama.  Barrymore, who tried directing for a few years before returning to acting, doesn’t seem to have much feel for the job (even factoring in Early Talkie technical limitations), but he does have a feel for ‘the theatre.’  So, if you can get thru the first two unbearably stiff acts, the third act's trial scenes, with their big arioso speeches for Ruth Chatterton’s Mother and Raymond Hackett’s son, gain cumulative power from the buildup, detonating just as they must have when this first was staged.  For anyone who’s wondered what acting was like at the time, and what all the bother was about, this is essential stuff.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And for reigning stage divas, not only a plum role of indeterminate age with a twenty-year time span, but also offering the chance to play off-stage as well as on with their much younger lover playing the son.  So, the big climax where Mme. X gives the boy a ‘mother’s’ kiss’ is loaded with kink & suspense.  (On the cheek in ‘37; cheeks and mouth in ‘29.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  *But genius acting it ain’t.  For that sort of window into theatre of the past, look to Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER/’29, with doomed Jeanne Eagels in the lead.

LIFE OF CRIME (2013)

As to feature films, Elmore Leonard, master of the cockeyed contemporary crime novel, went out at the age of 83, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a ‘Lite.’  Specifically, as one of twenty-nine (!) producers on this modest, but appealing adaptation of his 1978 novel THE SWITCH.  (Leonard’s RUM PUNCH, which became JACKIE BROWN/’97 on screen, kept the pair of low-life criminals Ordell Robbie & Louis Gara, casually played here by yasiin bey & John Hawkes; less casually played in JACKIE BROWN by Samuel L. Jackson & Robert De Niro.)  Yet another riff on O’Henry’s THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF, here unredeemed hostage Jennifer Aniston, as straying suburban housewife whose straying developer husband, Tim Robbins won’t put up the million bucks ransom.  The well worn tropes can be greeted either with a yawn or as a welcome friend, depending on your mood, but writer/director  Daniel Schechter, along with his cast, wisely lay back and don’t push.  Only Will Forte’s wardrobe: too tight suits with long pointy shirt collars, shriek late-1980s fashion to forced comic effect.  (And the Maryland locations don’t look anything like suburban Detroit or Woodward Ave.)  But think of the film as a good common-denominator group choice.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   As mentioned above, JACKIE BROWN, by general consensus the best of all Elmore Leonard adaptations.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/jackie-brown-1997.html

LE DERNIER MILLIARDAIRE* (1934)

French writer/director René Clair had something of a charmed career from his first silents to his early sound features (late ‘20s thru 1933).  Everyone has their own favorite.  (SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS/’30, anyone? https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/04/sous-les-tois-de-paris-under-roofs-of.html)  But his luck ran out (or was it his talent?; he never quite regained his standing) on this mega-flop satire on money & international finance.  Playing like an aria-free operetta, it’s a reverse-image MERRY WIDOW; here THE MERRY BACHELOR.  That’s middle-aged Max Dearly, the richest man in the world, called to return (with checkbook) to his country of birth as financial savior and proposed spouse of the country’s much younger princess.  Only this Native Son has stipulations: citizens must become a productive labor force, not the casino freeloaders they’d been before recent bankruptcies at the country’s gambling palaces shut off the easy money spigot.  Meanwhile, the Princess already has a young lover, a secret baby, too.  Over-dressed funny sets & funny costumes combined with over-eager funny playing hardly help.  Most painfully unfunny.  Clair imagining that everything is even funnier when repeated a dozen times.  Yikes!  Film scholars tell us that the film failed from Political Party Line critical response: for the LEFT a betrayal; for the RIGHT, a false prediction.  But even centrists bailed on this one.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  The year before, The Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP/’33, took on WAR instead of ECONOMICS, and hit all the marks Clair missed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *MILLIARDAIRE = BILLIONAIRE.

EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC (2025)

Another unmissable collaboration from exiled-Egyptian writer/director Tarik Saleh and frequent lead Fares Fares.  Third of his Egyptian Trilogy*, this one an Actor’s Tale in three parts: Comic Vanity, Ironic Seduction, Horrified Political Pawn.  It begins when iconic film star Fares gets an offer he can’t refuse to portray (in the best possible light) the rise to power of dictatorial Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.  Totally wrong physically (tall, lean, hawk-like face), but he’s not in a career position to say no.  He’s also too proud of his reputation to phone it in, especially when being coddled with encouragement & favors by El-Sisi’s military yes-men hovering about.  Inducement or threat?  Soon, he’s taking advantage of perks, asking favors for friends, family and assorted lovers old & new.  A discreet phone-call from these strangely obsequious uniformed men all that’s needed to ‘fix’ all sorts of things.  A living get out of jail free card.  Seductive indeed.  And if this section feels a bit less original, you’ve likely fallen for Saleh’s setup; a fake-out for a leading man who doesn’t know he’s in way over his head on a three-sided political power struggle.  Or which side he’s on, or supposed to be on, to help his rebellious son, resentful ex-wife, recent lover or reckless current lover all in possible danger of arrest or worse.  Saleh juggling characters & narrative lines of action without confusion for us or easy choices, let alone answers, for our likeable protagonist.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *THE HILTON INCIDENT/’17 followed by THE CAIRO CONSPIRACY/’19 (not yet seen here).  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-nile-hilton-incident-2017.html

GIVE US THIS NIGHT (1936)

This slight & silly operetta from Paramount, made to introduce popular Polish tenor Jan Kiepura, along with Metropolitan mezzo Gladys Swarthout, didn’t come off.  (Kiepura’s glamorous soprano wife Mártha Eggerth had much better luck stealing Gene Kelly away from Judy Garland in FOR ME AND MY GAL/’42.)  Yet, forgotten and hard-to-find, it holds a lot of interest in the career of iconic Golden Age Hollywood composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to say nothing of five original numbers written for the film with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein.  Korngold, brought from Austria to Warner Bros. to handle the mishmosh of Mendelssohn used in scoring Max Reinhardt’s version of Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM/’35 (an enormous hit at the Hollywood Bowl/a money pit on film), Korngold then pit-stopped at Paramount to write & record NIGHT just as Warners desperately needed a score for the pricey CAPTAIN BLOOD/’35, first of the Errol Flynn/Michael Curtiz swashbucklers.  So, while finishing ‘post’ on his film operetta, Korngold had exactly three weeks to compose BLOOD.  As things turned out, NIGHT came out after BLOOD hit big (very big), and Korngold never had another chance on a full blown Hollywood operetta.*  This one, under Alexander Hall’s direction is okay (though what a voice Kiepura had, perfect for Korngold’s operatic triumph DIE TOTE START),  but feels awfully truncated at 1'17", including 40 minutes for song with quite a lot of plot to get thru.  Kiepura’s a happy Italian fisherman (yes, with a Polish accent) who sings to his catch (heck, the whole village sings).  Heard by an opera composer who wants to replace ageing tenor Alan Mowbray (very funny) he’s offered a job.  Only Momma; Momma she wants him to stay at-a home.  While fetching soprano Swarthout sees a new stage partner (maybe more).  Little does she know that her composer wants to propose with a just written love song sung to her by Kiepura!  Well, it’s that sort of thing.  But as a Hollywood road not taken, there’s considerable ‘what-if’ musical interest.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While never doing full-fledged lyric theater on film, Korngold was able to put plenty of vocal elements in his scores.  Check out the sailors bursting into song as they finally head for home in the middle of THE SEA HAWK/’40.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *M-G-M’s delirious operetta THE GREAT WALTZ/’38 doesn’t credit Korngold for putting all the Johann Strauss, Jr. music together which he did for the original B’way run in 1935.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-great-waltz-1938.html

INSIDE MAN (2006)

Spike Lee dropped issue-oriented auteur aspiration for hired-hand director in producer Brian Grazer’s tricked out bank robbery caper.*  (Did Grazer partner Ron Howard pass?)  No big themes in this one, just big movie stars jostling for attention (Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor) in Russell Gewirtz’s original screenplay.  Heist leader Owen clues us in via soliloquy right from the start, as does Lee who slips in one of those Zoom-In/Track-Out shots* famous from Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Spielberg’s JAWS, a technique he’ll return to two or three times later when he’s not dancing his camera around the action.  Look for a real humdinger of a shot when chief hostage negotiator Washington glides toward us on some sort of tightly framed 'dolly' wagon while everyone else is running on foot.  Just how bored was Spike?  These technically showy things can be fun in the right situations, but here they’re just camouflage for a robbery/hostage drama that turns out to be a Shaggy Dog story.  Even treading water, all those stars were enough to make this a modest hit, but, for once, Hollywood didn’t fall for good grosses, and Gewirtz has had little to show over the next twenty years after this debut feature.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Best guess, Lee thought he could make a sort of TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE/DOG DAY AFTERNOON combo out of this.  Ironically, Denzel Washington remade PELHAM three years later.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Or is it Zoom-Out/Track-In?

NO NAME ON THE BULLET (1959)

Still short, but no longer young enough to play ‘The Kid,’ war-hero turned actor Audie Murphy caught a break playing a Bad Guy under Jack Arnold’s laconic direction* on this unusual chamber Western.  Not much in the way of action, romance, horsemanship or vistas, but branching off the ‘50s trend toward psychological Oaters toward, of all things, philosophy and semantics.  (Philosophy & semantics 101, but still . . . )  Structurally, a traditional Stranger-Comes-To-Town piece, Murphy’s a traveling hitman, a hired gun who stays technically not-quite-guilty by goading his assigned target into drawing first.  Feared and so well known, his name enough to trigger panic for half the men in town, causing unprovoked suicide, stress severed partnerships, fire sales.  Yet no one as yet even knows whom he’s come to kill.  Waiting till that effect fully settles in, Murphy strikes up an unlikely friendship with town Doc Charles Drake (excellent).  Playing chess and discussing which of the two helps humanity more; the professional killer who removes evil men standing beyond the law; or the principled physician who heals indiscriminately?  The dialogue ain’t G.B. Shaw, but it’s not bad.  With Arnold knowing just how much we can handle before the next threat, including a disrupted attempt at ‘premature justice’ from the town’s fair citizens against Murphy’s Angel of Death, our vastly outnumbered/out-gunned seasoned assassin.  The film even pulls off an unexpected victim to reveal at the climax, along with a clever way out of this philosophical pickle that avoids being a cop-out by inches.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Before Murphy went with Universal and (mostly) Westerns, he showed another kind of range in an early role working under John Huston on Stephen Crane’s THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE/’51.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/05/red-badge-of-courage-1951.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jack Arnold best known for iconic ‘50s Sci-Fi: CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON/’53; IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE/’53; THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN/’57.

LOVE AFFAIR (1939)

Starting as shipboard rom-com between solo passengers on their way to NYC, Charles Boyer (Continental Rake) and Irene Dunne (ex-club singer/current publishing secretary), the two  engaged, just not to each other.  (And both peerless.)  Shifting to dramatic romance and a decisive meet-up six months later at the Empire State Building, Leo McCarey’s genre mash-up looks better than it has in seven decades when R.K.O.’s original film elements were lost in transit to 20th/Fox where McCarey was remaking it for Cary Grant & Deborah Kerr as AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/'57, a notably inferior effort.  It got a lot of attention when some of the plot and a bit of the film showed in Nora Ephron’s typically anodyne SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE/’93.*  Now, with the 1939 original restored by Lobster Films & MoMA from McCarey’s donated 35mm nitrate print (check out the before & after on Criterion) you can at long last really see it.  McCarey, in the sweet spot of his career, between THE AWFUL TRUTH/’37 and GOING MY WAY/’44, seems unable to put a foot wrong.  His loose, improvisatorial style, built in his early silent comedy days, entirely intuitive, finessing pivotal moments like the lovers’ visit with Boyer’s failing grandmother, to unexpected emotional levels.  McCarey’s pay-to-play Catholicism held from treacle by his Personal Trinity: Faith, Sex and Comedy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Enough attention to generate an unhappy third version: 1994's LOVE AFFAIR with Warren Beatty & Annette Bening.

CONTEST:  How does Elvis Presley figure into this?  A correct answer earns your choice of movie for a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2024)

After the Osage Tribe find oil reserves under their land and grow rich in the early 1920s, the local white men who’d long run their affairs in Oklahoma, scheme to take profits and rights away from them.  No surprise in that story; a true and important one, for sure, but not exactly filled with surprise.  Equally unsurprising, the kid glove treatment from critics & the award circuit for Martin Scorsese’s latest self-indulgence; packing two-reels of story into a three-and-a-half hour running time,*  (His last, THE IRISHMAN/’19, an equally long marathon.)  A sub-story embedded here on the birth of the FBI thru their belated investigation of the swindle offers major possibilities, fresh angles on an old theme, plus the film’s best perf in Jesse Plemons’ G-Man.  But it doesn’t show up till the film’s half over, and never claims focus.*  Instead, Leonardo DiCaprio returns from WWI, aimless but hoping to work for his politically powerful Uncle Robert De Niro, a sort of Oklahoma version of one of those ‘benevolent’ White capitalist bullies Edward Arnold used to play in Frank Capra movies.  Bob’s really out to murder his way into an oil fortune with help from his naïf nephew who’s married into the clan.  But as DiCaprio is 50+ when his character needs to be 25 to make sense, he comes off as a bigger villain & a bigger dope than we can invest our emotions in.  While a nefarious De Niro, unable to just rely on his intimidating stare, the fallback gesture he over-relies on in mid-list fare, a habit that likely kept Scorsese looking elsewhere for an alter-ego for nearly three decades (1985 -  2019), brings out a truly odd solution: channeling Robert Duvall as an acting model all thru this film.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Marty knows it, too, fashioning a five-minute radio show recap of the whole plot for a burlesque coda; even taking a cameo role in it.  A gag or an insult?  Tone deaf or Brechtian?  Discuss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Besides Plemons, the other worthy element in here is Jack Fisk’s production design.  Even if Scorsese tries to sabotage it with ill-considered camera moves (interiors and exteriors) aping his famous nightclub back-entrance intro shot in GOODFELLAS/90.

JOINT SECURITY AREA / GONGDONG GYEONGBI GUYEOK JSA (2000)

Well-received, but disappointing.  Award-bait (cinematic & humanitarian) from iconic Korean writer/director Park Chan-wook plays like an allegory on the futility-of-war.  Odd, as it takes place in the on-going Cold War between North and South Korea.  In a peacefully maintained border area campus, where territorial lines are laid out in tasteful sidewalk pavement styles, a neutral foreign official, with a Korean background, has come to investigate what happened when patrolling soldiers of the South crossed into the wrong DMZ area, nearly triggered a landmine, found themselves in North territory and, after explanations, slowly started to bond with their enemy.  Brothers under the uniform?  Or just under the skin?  The breach in territorial protocol an honest mistake/misstep or a testing provocation?  Things seem to be calming down as the soldiers work things out on their own (and share chocolate), but when a superior true-believer officer hits the outpost, suspicions flare up and a gun-happy Mexican Stand-Off erupts.  Like a 1960s parable (specifically 1964: more earnest FAIL-SAFE then hip DR. STRANGELOVE), and a big hit in South Korea, it was a career breakthru for Lee Byung-hun as the handsome South Korean soldier.  But in trying for timeless verities, Park ends up dated.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Head Juror at this year’s Cannes Fest, Park Chan-wook remains best known for his gross-out thriller OLDBOY/’04.  There’s lots more to him, but it’s a good place to start.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/oldboy-2004.html

LOVE (1927)

Greta Garbo’s silent version of ANNA KARENINA always considered something of a travesty, starting with that title.  Plus, no cheering section for Anna without Dolly, Kitty or Levin; no pregnancy; no drug addiction or suicide attempt; no insufferable forgiveness from cuckold husband; no train!  No wonder Garbo tried again, now with sound, in 1935.  So, why is this infamous iteration, taken on its own terms, so satisfying?  That notorious happy ending?  Seems just right in Edmund Goulding's well-directed production.  Perhaps because even at its most M-G-M idiotic, the film all of a piece.  Very well cast, too, with top-billed John Gilbert as love-struck Vronsky.  (The orchestral soundtrack on the official DVD release from Warners recorded live, so you hear the audience gasp & laugh at his initial reaction to Garbo.)  The real hero here (along with regular Garbo lenser William Daniels) may be Hollywood’s highest paid scripter Frances Marion, here credited only for ‘continuity,’ who chose to make the film as a series of ‘set pieces.’  Snowy meet-cute, ballroom gossip, race track disaster, mother-love reunion, renunciation², etc; and who put them in order.  Simplified into an awkward love triangle for Garbo not between Gilbert’s military officer and VIP husband Karenin (a one-note Brandon Hurst), but between Anna’s love for Vronsky vs. her love for her little boy.*  Her fourth Hollywood film, but first to take her beyond temptress mode.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Advantage 1935 in both these roles with Basil Rathbone’s chilly husband a far more dangerously attractive/formidable obstacle; and, fresh off DAVID COPPERFIELD, the wistful charm of Master Freddie Bartholomew, the other love of Anna's life.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/anna-karenina-1935.html

ZOOTOPIA 2 (2025)

With near identical budgets (150 mill) and near identical creatives (from directors Jared Bush/ Byron Howard down thru cast & crew), this animated sequel nearly doubled the billion dollar gross of the 2016 original.  And if hardly twice as good (indeed a modest fall off), it’s good enough to justify blockbuster numbers.  This time out, Judy Rabbit and Nick Fox are no longer adversaries, but junior cop partners on the hunt for the long suppressed truth behind Zootopia’s origin story.  Is it possible those forked-tongued snakes got a raw deal in the legend of Zootopia’s beginnings?  They’ll go to the ends of the ‘safe’ territory behind the transformative wall of intra-species cooperation to find the truth.  Less straightforward than the earlier film’s police procedural format, which may explain why the film is over-produced, trying too hard to top themselves with (very impressive) spectacle.  But this soon drops away as their main mission clicks into place; along with expected character turns from various animals new and returned.  Less understandable are a pair of self-revelatory/self-justifying soliloquies for Nick & Judy.  Talk in place of clarifying action . . . in an animated film?!  The film quickly recovers movement and momentum, but an odd glitch from these guys.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  No doubt, you’ve seen the original, yes?   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/zootopia-2016.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Stick with the end credits not just for the tag surprise, but also to note the international line-up of names & nationalities.  A veritable cornucopia of D.E.I. in the film’s D.N.A.

WEAPONS (2025)

This critically & commercially well-received, darkly-comic Body Horror from writer/director Zach Creggar even earned a rare acting Oscar® for the genre.  Good scary fun, if ultimately less than meets the gashed eyeball.  It opens poorly, with needless narration from a wise-for-her-years child giving us too much info, and Creggar defensively covering with a plethora of ‘shock cuts.  But things rapidly improve once Grade School Teacher Julia Garner finds all but one of her kids, Alex, absent.  Make that missing.  As if the Pied Piper had tootled them away in the night.  Angry suspicions fall on the teacher, but no evidence.  No matter, she’s dubbed a witch by locals.  (Another error, make that a cheat, from Creggar removes any serious investigation of the house & parents of Alex, the boy who stayed in town when they ought to be swarming the joint.)  Still, this prologue enough like a classic TWILIGHT ZONE opening to get you interested.  (Actually, it’s more like a ONE STEP BEYOND episode, but who remembers that paranormal knock-off.)  And this is where you wonder how one of those half-hour shows can possibly support a two+ hour film.  (Spoiler Alert!)  Answer, it doesn’t.  Instead, Creggar switches to HANSEL & GRETEL, but without Gretel.  (Hansel & Hansel?)  With spooky Great Aunt (that’s award-winner Amy Madigan in fright wig & makeup) as the witch who’s capturing little boys and girls to fatten up before getting the life’s essence out of them.  (Sustained only by cans & cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.)  A few gory visual effects; hop/skip & jump character continuity for some non-linear surprise explanations; and a nifty semi-heroic turn from grieving parent Josh Brolin (head squarer than ever) also helps.  Just be aware: some gory effects nearly as ‘grimm’ as those famous Brothers.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  One unhappy comic-horror throwback sees the return of a trope from the 1970s that saw either the FIRST or the WORST/most realistic gory violence hit the one significant Black in the movie.  Now, this spot goes to the film’s main gay character (and his husband).

THE CHORAL (2025)

A can’t-miss idea that self-sabotages by striving for originality when the old tropes are just what’s needed.  It’s 1916, with more than a year of war on the continent as seen from a Yorkshire Mill Town where even their prestigious/well-funded local choral society feels the pinch of conscription decimating the ranks of tenors & baritones.  Now the music director is enlisting.  With few options, mill-owner/fading lead tenor Roger Allam (beyond praise) has little choice but to hire musically qualified, but ostracized Germanophile Ralph Fiennes for the position.  (He’s also a single man of ‘peculiar tendencies,’ as it was put at the time.)  Fiennes immediately starts recruiting any & all classes all over town, from bakery boy to disabled/still convalescing vets to sing, as well as settling on Sir Edward Elgar’s then little known oratorio THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS in lieu of the usual Bach, Beethoven or Brahms; all uncomfortably German.*  The film all but running itself in these early scenes, written & played with unexpected tartness, LOL personal putdowns, and gossipy chorister queens kibbitzing from the sidelines.  With a fierce, almost proud, local rudeness staunching sentimentality, even the telegraph messenger boy delivers his death notices with dispatch before riding to the next choral rehearsal; sacred and profane juxtaposition in the form of cheeky gallows humor and hopes of shagging a young, newly widowed soprano after practise.  Scripter Alan Bennett, now in his nineties, at his best here, and as the tone shifts when a one-armed/disabled vet* comes home to a wife’s disappointment and an offer to use his fresh tenor voice to  oust Allam from his usual lead spot.  After this, something goes seriously wrong with Bennett’s ideas.  Revising/downsizing the oratorio to fit resources; repurposing the poem as dramatic tableaux that comments on the war in ways more 1960s than 1916; bringing in Elgar not for a nervous opening night, but for suspense (will he let the show go on in this radical form?).  Everything stops ringing true to the times.  A nice coda returns to form as more young men leave for the war, and the film has an impressive offhand period look.  But Elgar, who wore his musical sentiment on his sleeve, would have mourned how Bennett's script and Nicholas Hytner's direction turn chilly in the third act.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *At the time, GERONTIUS had yet to achieve its current standing.  Four major recordings released in the last two years, the most recent featuring just the sort of amateur choir, The Huddersfield Choral Society, this film’s group emulates.  Founded in 1836, Huddersfield also recorded the first complete GERONTIUS in 1945.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jacob Dudman, the returning one-armed vet who sings Gerontius, appears to be doing his own vocals.  It’s a killer part so congrats . . . if he is.