O AGENTE SECRETO / THE SECRET AGENT (2025)

Extrapolating from the four films I’ve been able to see, Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho has been turning out well-made, enigmatic, politically-minded shorts, tv & features for two decades.*  (Not much distribution Stateside.)  Now, he's upped his game from solid to great.  This film awarded everywhere but the Oscars®.  (Four noms/zero wins: you can always count on Mr. O.)  The film a portrait of Brazil in 1977 (there’s also a 2025 epilogue) less focused on military rule and atrocities than the wide, often banal effects (deadly in their own way) of a corrupt government: venal cops threatening to ’plant’ evidence on shakedown targets; eagerly cooperating bureaucrats in State offices; highly organized Southern gangs using Quotidian Horrors and Mob Murder to control the obsequious North of the country.  Actor Wagner Moura (probably new to most viewers*) in protean form, is Marcelo/Ambrose, a man trying to leave the country, along with his young son after the mother’s death from cancer, finds he's being blocked by past politics.  Going North for possible escape, he travels under an assumed name and pays the expected bribes & fees to get his papers & passport in order, waiting it out in a house of similarly desperate people.  Filho handles the large cast. sweeping action & events with the dexterity of a Disney artist with a multiplane camera, everything clear (character & narrative) with lines of action indirectly indicated rather than being pointed out.  The elliptical style giving a timeless/universal quality to events.  With the sort of thrillingly choreographed suspense and compound street chases Francis Coppola was a master of when he still regularly made movies.  Filho’s film immensely satisfying on multiple levels.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Now 50, if looking about 35, Moura is suddenly a hot property with upcoming co-stars like Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes & Kristin Stewart.  You may already know his voice as he was ‘Wolf’ in the superb PUSS IN BOOTS sequel, THE LAST WISH/’22.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/01/puss-in-boots-last-wish-2022.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try Filho’s hauntingly enigmatic NEIGHBORING SOUNDS/’14, a film that blows up inside your head months after watching it.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/o-som-ao-reder-neighboring-sounds.html

THE JAZZ SINGER (1952)

No BlackFace in this remake of the 1927 Al Jolson original.  So, progress?*  Alas, not much else improved.  No doubt someone at Warner Bros. thought popular nightclub entertainer Danny Thomas could carry a film.  After this, Thomas never tried again.  Now best known for his charity hospital (daughter Marlo still fronting donations), Thomas was a pleasant rather than riveting presence, just the thing for tv.  (Even more successful as a producer.)  Monologist rather than jokester, his strength as a performer something the film fails to get across.  So, we’re left with the old story of a Jewish Cantor Father assuming his son will carry on the family tradition at Sinai Temple rather than go into showbiz.  Tempting songster Peggy Lee’s around to encourage his ambitions, but Danny backtracks when he doesn’t make a quick breakthru.  Not much director Michael Curtiz can do with this one; Thomas changing his direction with the wind, Peggy Lee disconnected from the main action (not a peep about religious differences, and backstage insider stuff completely outgunned by next year’s THE BANDWAGON/’53), while attempts to make the plot less melodramatic only thins out the atmosphere & texture, the two main things going for the 1927 original.  That and Jolson’s raw, almost disturbing, force.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In a parallel Father/Son story, the 1927 original (considered Hollywood’s first Talkie) was directed by Alan  Crosland, father of this film’s editor, Alan Crosland Jr.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *BlackFace is back, baby!  For all you masochists, BlackFace returned (less black than fleshly gray & clownish) when Jerry Lewis remade JAZZ SINGER for a 1959 live tv production ‘in Living Color.’  Real deal Yiddish theater star Molly Picon brings verisimilitude as Momma and Eduard Franz repeats from here as ‘Poppa.’   And if you think Jerry doesn’t take over shabbos services while still wearing traces of that clown-face makeup, you’ve got another think coming.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBe0qy5k8vk

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Nothing we’d call ‘jazz’ found in any version of this story.  The term has narrowed over the decades; but who’d go to see THE SYNCOPATED ‘POP’ SINGER?   (A perfect title for the Neil Diamond/Laurence Olivier iteration of 1980.)  ALSO:  A real Jazz Singer story might be found in the loving relationship between American Songbook composer Harold Arlen and his father, longtime Cantor at Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse, NY, who used to sneak his son’s tunes into services.  Imagine hearing bits of ‘Blues In The Night’ in the midst of his cantorial melismas.

CUT BANK (2014)

Passable attempt at reviving a revival by writer Roberto Patino and director Matt Shakman, each with recent top-tier streaming credits (GAME OF THRONES, WESTWORLD,  WANDAVISION, THE GREAT), here showing more affection than aptitude for the 1980s Neo-Noir revival they’re trying to hollanderize.  Specific target, as usual, J. & E. Coen’s BLOOD SIMPLE/’84; but less a reasonable facsimile thereof than stylistic homage, like a finals project at UCLA Film School.  Starting with that mysterious title, actually the name of an actual town in Montana where Liam Hemsworth (distracting tall & handsome) is part of a convoluted plot to fake a mail carrier’s murder and split town with the reward & his girl.  But too many cogs spoil the loot and soon real bodies start to pile up.  Some of this is faintly amusing, some just dumb (especially the women's largely reactive roles, with misogyny displacing misanthropy).  Console yourself with the clever casting choices: Billy Bob Thornton now playing out-of-the-loop Dad instead of creepy town weirdo, that’s taxidermist Michael Stuhlbarg.  And if John Malkovich is a bit dried out as the only law in town, it’s sweet to see Bruce Dern, the foul-tempered, deceitful mailman who plays fake victim in the plan, nail the same role he’d have taken in 1984.  Dern no mere character-actor legend, he’s fucking immortal.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Seen BLOOD SIMPLE?  A couple of years later, John Frankenheimer pulled off a Neo-Noir no one thinks of any more: 52 PICKUP/’86.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/04/52-pickup-1986.html

MILLENNIUM ACTRESS / SENNEN JOYÛ (2001)

The early death of ‘millennial’ anime-tor Satoshi Kon (at just 46 in 2010) seems an even greater tragedy (an artistic tragedy) after seeing this remarkable film; possibly his finest.  Its story, advanced in an unusual narrative form, vibrantly visualized and ‘meta’ to the max, using a particularly fluid technique & superior characterization (as drawn & written, with nothing prefabricated) a perfect fit for telling the life and career of studio actress Chiyoko Fujiwarara just as her old studio is being torn down.  A young cameraman and an older interviewer are out to get a rare one-on-one chat and surprised to find the reclusive actress (older, but still beautiful) so open & welcoming.  And here’s where Satoshi Kon (who also co-wrote) shows his special qualities as the contemporary reporters come along inside her memories.  At times, watching from the side, other times participating in the action.  The older reporter having been a besotted intern/assistant on her post-war projects, he’s either working on-set or playing a part in front of the camera (sometimes as he appears now, sometimes as he was then)  Underneath the reporters’ hunt for her personality, Chiyoko also on the hunt for a man she helped cheat death when he was being hunted by the military.  The two promising to meet again after the war; a promise symbolized by a key that comes & goes throughout the course of her working life.  Told without definite lines of division between what she’s living and what’s she’s shooting on film.  Often stepping in and out of the narrative continuity in a fashion that puts the SpiderVerse (and its constant confusion) to shame.  Wonderfully uplifting as pure anime (Satoshi had the best color palette in the biz), the film’s also not afraid to be wonderfully sad in the telling.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Young anme master Makoto Shinkai picked up the gauntlet from Satoshi Kon, see YOUR NAME/’16.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Satoshi Kon loved to quote from classic Japanese cinema, here Akira Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD/’57 shows; and isn’t that Kenji Mizoguchi’s  THE LIFE OF OHARU/’52?

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988)

Opening with an apologia (from the Nikos Kazantzakis novel?) to anticipate accusations of blasphemy, we’re told upfront this is not a tale of the Christ from one of the Gospels.  But it is: The Gospel of Martin.  And Scorsese acolytes have long bent over backward to praise the film and spread the Not-So-Good-News: Jesus not only sacrificed his life to save mankind, he also gave up a putative home life as suburban dad with wife, kids & carpentry business.  (Or at least thought of doing so, a la  Ambrose Bierce.*)  That’s the bit that got Scorsese in advance trouble with the usual suspects (Conservative/Evangelical Christians who hadn’t seen the film . . . and never would), but St. Martin didn’t help his cause with barriers that kept ‘friendlies’ away, too.  Jesus as expert crucifix carpenter (such irony; and think of the shipping fees from Nazareth); Harvey Keitel’s Judas as henna-haired BFF; scripter Paul Schrader’s streetwise locutions (plus not a single line of dialogue given to a person of color . . . in the MidEast?); and in Willem Defoe a Christ more Scandanavian in looks than Max von Sydow’s Jesus in George Stevens’ dismal THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD/’65.  (At 2'44" this one only seems as long as TGSET’s full-cut of 4'20".)  Oddest of all, with all the echoes of rough-hewn religious bio-pics from Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini*, Scorsese’s endeavor, doesn’t feel so different from those mercenary, commercially-oriented Hollywood epics; and the religiosity even worse.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Get a lot closer to the subject with Monty Python’s THE LIFE OF BRIAN/’79.  Really.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/05/life-of-brian-1979.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Specifically, Bierce’s short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,’ appearing here as An Occurrence at Golgotha Heights.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:   *But the poster following a different director; Otto Preminger from his classic Saul Bass period.

LES CHOSES DE LA VIE / THE THINGS OF LIFE (1970)

Well received breakthru toward what might be called ‘Quotidian Bourgeoisie’ came to quintessential French director Claude Sautet midway along his stingy fourteen film output.  Told in non-chronological flashbacks after a car crash has stopped forward momentum on a life’s worth of decisions (personal & business/public & private) for middle-aged builder & family man Michel Piccoli, that French Everyman of moral indecision.  As a builder, he and his longtime partner are up against opposing plans by their backers while at home (if indeed Piccoli currently has one) he’s promised younger lover Romy Schneider they’re starting anew in a fresh city, but has also promised grown son Gérard Lartigau (hard to imagine as Piccoli’s son) to join him and his girlfriend for two weeks at the old family vacation home . . . with ex-wife attending.  (How amicable are these two?)  Well done and well cast, but whatever was advanced about this in 1970, now looks pretty common.  The film far surpassed by every Sautet film made after it.  (At least, the one’s I’ve seen!)  The list an extraordinarily sophisticated group of original ideas lifting the lid on that Quotidian Bourgeoisie so often looked down upon by French intellectuals & cineasts.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Look for them here: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=sautet; along with a special appearance from his debut pic.  New to Sautet?  Plump for CLASSE TOUS RISQUES / THE BIG RISK/’60 and UN MAUVAIS FILS / A BAD SON/’80.

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (1986)

Simple and effective, even when it stumbles, this nuclear cautionary uses hand-drawn animation with a flat palette to tell its story of ‘little’ people calmly living thru quiet desperation in the aftermath of world destruction from an atomic bombing.  Our retired couple (voiced by Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills, they’re the entire cast), long moved from the city to a small house in the country.  With the coming crisis announced on radio and in the paper, the husband attempts to follow all the advise in official government pamphlets (a step and a half beyond the old ‘duck and cover’ instructions) and hold out till service is restored.  Totally on their own, without a soul to turn to, media to inform, power or water; between diminishing resources and advancing radiation poisoning, the outcome is inevitable.  Director Jimmy T. Murakami changes gears during some dream sequences with a more fluid/fantastic style, but mostly keeps things to a Lake District/watercolor æsthetic that turns gray & empty as time passes.  The film's main trouble stems from the ingrained British condescension toward the unsophisticated middle-class, presumably coming from writer Raymond Briggs, who makes the husband a docile follower of rules, and the wife not so much down to earth as slow on the uptake.  (Of course, thinking that a nice cup of tea can fix anything isn’t too far off the mark!)  More interesting today as a socio-political take on the times (trendy enough to get David Bowie to do the title track) than as film, but it gets by.

DOUBLE-BILL:  For real artistic engagement with the folly of war and destruction in animated form from this period, there’s the unique style of cartoonist/animator R.O. Blechman with a resoundingly successful version of Igor Stravinsky’s THE SOLDIER’S TALE/’84 (Max von Sydow, Andre Gregory, Serge Gainsbourg among the vocal cast) which (alas) only seems to be currently available in a version cut in running time and aspect ratio.

DEEP IMPACT (1998)

SUMMER: 1998.  OMG!  There’s a gigantic meteor headed toward Earth!  Look again . . . SUMMER: 1998.  OMG!  There are TWO gigantic meteors headed toward Earth!  ARMAGEDDON, ‘Pop’ flavored extinction from Michael Bay thru Touchstone/Disney* while director Mimi Leder for Paramount/Dreamworks puts out this more sober-sided global finale.  JAWS producers David Brown & Richard Zanuck take first-position credit, even against Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks.  It certainly doesn’t feel like a Spielberg movie*; nor for that matter Brown/Zanuck.  What it very much does feel like is a Sherry Lansing-era Paramount production, a paradigm (or is it parody?) of when she was Head of Production.  Uncredited among the film’s producers, the Lansing touch of highly polished secondhand goods, faux serious tropes (here, mostly ON THE BEACH/’59) and over-qualified talent given little to do, are all in place.  Old pros to lend unearned gravitas; up-and-comers lucky to get ten lines of dialogue.  No one actively disgracing themselves (other than composer James Horner and Téa Leoni’s hair), and the 1998 state-of-the-art special effects have their moments, but the film has almost no personality.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Compare and contrast with ARMAGEDDON.  (not seen here)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Except for the use of Spielberg mentored director Mimi Leder who briefly held a niche as the rare woman who crept onto the Hollywood short lists to helm action fare after a big Spielberg launch.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  People have varied opinions on what’s improved and what’s been lost with the move away from ‘practical’ effects and the rise of CGI.  But no one doubts the improvement in Hollywood pizza since the ‘90s.  Check out that disaster Charles Martin Smith is eating in the prologue.

ELEANOR THE GREAT (2025)

Venturesome actress Scarlett Johansson had her own ‘but what I really want to do is direct’ epiphany in this modest One-Little-Lie-and-How-It-Grew story; a sort of Senior Citizen DEAR EVAN HANSEN: Holocaust Edition.  94-yr-old June Squibb stars as the 94-yr-old fabulist who moves into her daughter’s Upper West Side Manhattan apartment after the death of her Holocaust survivor BFF/roommate.  Demanding, feisty, always kidding-on-the-square, her over-tasked daughter signs her up for JCC activities she ducks out on.  Instead, wandering down the hall and into a Holocaust Survivor support group.  Embarrassed to be there on false pretenses, she impulsively relates the real-life experiences of her late roommate as her own.  Yikes!  Worse, an eager-beaver journalism student (Erin Kellyman) gloms onto these purloined memories for a school project.  Worse², the kid’s a grief-stricken nepo-journalist.  (Dad Chiwetel Ejiofor, yet to grieve for his wife, the girl’s late mother, is a tv commentator.)  And before you can say Jacob Rabinsky or belated Bat Mitzvah*, our faux Concentration Camp pixie centenarian is getting press coverage, tv attention and general kvelling.  Naturally, this house of cards must collapse, but not before the distasteful set up leaves a foul taste in your mouth.  (Those sit-com comeback lines for Squibb from scripter Tory Kamen are the least of it.)  And as for Johansson behind the camera?  The expected over-reliance on close-ups to do the work.  (One measly piece of narrative info conveyed visually when Squibb sits alone on a beach bench.)  Still, kudos to Johansson for landing one of these directing debuts without having to also star in it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In our continuing survey of food and cooking gaffes on film, note the poorly stocked section of shelf-stable pickles Squibb complains about to show her ‘fearless’ character.  No one noticed they’re loaded with jars of Ba-Tampte Pickles, traditional salt-cured Kosher varieties that must be kept under refrigeration.  Now that would be something to complain about!  ‘Are you trying to kill me and my friend with your spoiled pickles?’

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *For a late in life adult Bar Mitzvah, check out one of the sweetest of all DICK VAN DYKE SHOW episodes: BUDDY SORRELL: MAN AND BOY/’66.

THIS IS MY DESIRE / EYIMOFE (2020)

Debut film of twin Nigerian brothers Arie & Chuko Esiri* is fittingly a twinned story; fraternal not identical.  DESIRE both a portrait of two disparate personalities and of Lagos, Nigeria.  The first, and more original of the two, is something of a Book of Job update about a single forty-something man,,a naturally gifted electrician  trying to get everything together for his move to Spain.  But a series of tragedies and losses take away almost everything he has: sister & nephews, inheritance, job, cash reserves, all of it playing out in a slow motion series of unforced errors.  But it’s his demeanor (calmly accepting, stoic; with one exception) and the way he manages to be down & out yet holding his head above water that sustain interest; along with the portrait of life in Lagos.  If this man can carry on . . .   The second story navigates the fast swings from favor to failure of a younger woman, a bartender with fashion model looks, who longs to run a dress-shop in Italy, but has nothing but trouble trying to put together the forms needed to travel out of the country and restart her life in a more promising fashion.  It’s those good looks that lead to the troubles, constantly proposed for dates, but not proposals.  Except from the guy she doesn’t want: her landlord.  What about that White American with a crush and a hefty wallet?  Meanwhile, her younger sister has tied herself up in an iffy pregnancy and a baby-selling racket.  Here, the twins preference for indirection/indication rather than clarity leaves a few too many unfilled holes, but there’s enough to hang on to.  (And the first story also get a hopeful epilogue.)  Easy to forget how one of film’s earliest appeals came from its ability to bring the world to viewers in costumes, customs, cultures and countries we might not otherwise experience.  The Esiri brothers have mastered that part already.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *CLARISSA, their free adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s MRS. DALLOWAY, a hot item at this year’s Cannes.

FELIDAE (1994)

A big international seller in print (less so Stateside), Akif Pirinçci’s serial killer story came with a twist, the cast is all cats.  A few humans make appearances, the felines call them ‘can openers,’ but this elsewise relatively straightforward catch-the-killer pic, structured as a standard ‘procedural,’ came within a whisker of getting picked up for a live-action Hollywood feature.  That idea fell thru (too much ‘hard R’ sex & violence?), so it stayed in Germany as a rare adult animated feature.  Director Michael Schaack’s hand-drawn style, something between '70s-era Disney & Bakshi, proves a good fit for charting new-to-the-neighborhood tomcat Francis who immediately lands inside the invetsgation when a mutilated cat appears below his window.  He makes a perfect lead to take us thru character introducions and exposition as new acquaintances pass on rumor & info . . . before passing on.  Yikes!  Suspects include an experimental unit of human researches using stray cats for testing; a cat cult of fatalistic ferals; a tough old bruiser; a slinky gal who’s always in heat (yowl!); an elderly sage who’s computer literate; et al.  Plenty of egos and misadventures for Francis to come against.  Yet the story isn’t nearly as involving or fun as the set up promises.  Needlessly fantastic on a story that needs straight playing for the suspense, waggish humor and seriously bleak tone to come across.  Maybe with new film technology (and Guillermo del Toro?) time's ripe for that Live-Action production?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Martin Rosen’s lesser-known follow-up to Richard Adams’ WATERSHIP DOWN/’78, THE PLAGUE DOGS/’82, shows a better approach to this sort of material.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-plague-dogs-1982.html

THE SHEEP DETECTIVES (2026)

Irresistible and slightly disappointing, often at the same time, someone (scripter Craig Mazin?; top-listed producer Tim Bevan?) had the madly wonderful idea of reconfiguring Leonie Swann’s German novel (a proposed animated production had collapsed) as a combo-platter of two favorite British genres: an Agatha Christie/Dorothy Sayers rural murder mystery; and one of those sweetly eccentric (or is it maddeningly daffy?) isolated/insulated U.K. countryside character comedies so popular a few decades back.  (And before that, the old Ealing Studios model.)  We open with a prologue for contented shepherd Hugh Jackman and his flock of sheep.  So preferable to people!  He knows them all by name & personality; he reads them a murder mystery chapter every night before bed.  Then one morning, he’s found dead . . . by his sheep!  Natural causes or murder?  Unhappy with a lack of action by the local policeman, there’s but one thing for the devastated flock to do; solve the case on their own.  Who says sheep are dumb animals?  Lily the Sheep (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) takes the lead, with an all-star cast voicing the many other varieties of sheep Jackman had.  Problem: how to communicate their findings to those humans in town.  This is all fun, and quite touching at times (a flashback to Jackman rescuing a sheep quite emotional; as is the look at lamb prejudice).  The sticking point is the CGI work on the sheep which probably needed to be either considerably more or considerably less realistic.  As it stands, the technical gaffes (usually from asking the digital magic to do too much) can pull you out of the story.  Also, rather like the likable THE CAT  WHO... Murder Mystery series by Lilian Jackson Braun, the clues and inevitable solution come too easily.  No matter, you’re sure to fall for the film’s nicely reserved sense of whimsy.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Not a film that first comes to mind, but watch what Gene Wilder does with a non-CGI sheep in Woody Allen’s  EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX/’72.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/everything-you-always-wanted-to-know.html

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

The trick to Barbara Kopple’s classic film on the thirteen-month Kentucky coal-miners’ strike against Duke Power & affiliates (1973 - ‘74) is that it’s not only a great documentary, but great filmmaking.  There’s an unusually high percentage of superb films on life in the mines (fiction & non-fiction), what it does to those who ‘go under’ and those who only stand and wait.  But you need to go to Zola/GERMINAL or those gobsmacking first two chapters of George Orwell’s THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER to find the like of what Kopple, in only her second film, does here.  It stems from the personalities she captures, the dramatic organization, the stealth shots of actions captured, the dull ache of showing up at five in the morning (in numbers for safety) to beat the opposition.  And the high bar you need to meet when opponents contain not only expected foe (owners, politicians, police), but also your own union reps, the local priest(!) and the fucking United Mine Workers President, the guy who also votes ‘for’ you.  (Soon replaced.)  It’s a tough story to lay out clearly, but is clear as a bell under Kopple & Crew.  (Note the high percentage of women in key spots, no easy thing at the time . . . no easy thing now.  Yet the deeper tragedy of the whole film, not only the murder of a teen supporter that hurries resolution, is the legacy of a work force doomed to win modest concessions while shrinking year by year to a meaningless number of jobs now only used as political fodder by Luddites for non-renewal energy and the pipe dream of what’s still heralded as Clean Coal.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Hard to imagine just how much unused footage might still exist in some warehouse.   A 2007 restoration of the original cut, out on Criterion, is excellent.  But a brief clip during a miners’ rally near Manhattan corporate offices features a highlight in a conversation between a NYC cop and one of the miners comparing wages, hours & benefits.  Priceless; surely, there’s more of it.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  As mentioned, Zola’s oft-filmed GERMINAL.  (It nearly comes across in a recent French mini-series.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/06/germinal-2021.html )  OR:  Orwell’s WIGAN PIER, which devolves into statistics, but is untouchable in its early chapters.

THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND (2019)

Best known for acting in 12 YEARS A SLAVE/’13, Chiwetel Ejiofor, added writer/director to his shingle on this Family Film that’s also a family story.  Fact-based, earnest, uplifting; not the sort of adjectives that get people to watch; it just sounds  good for you.  Don’t let that put you off.  Ejiofor does exceptional work (in all three categories) as a father in a small Malawi village suffering thru early 2000s drought conditions that endanger not only this year’s crop, but a whole way of life.  The situation made worse by a Strong-Man government setting bad priorities and leading to civil unrest.  While at the same time, there’s celebration at home with Ejiofor’s teenage son, William Kamkwamba (played by Maxwell Simba), making it into the local school; if he can come up with the entrance fees.  So far, his mother’s managed to save up for the school uniform, but Dad won’t pay for anything in advance, especially when he hasn’t got the money.  Eventually dropped from classes, William holds on to library access only because his older sister is informally engaged to one of the school’s teachers.  And the library is where William, a natural tinkerer, finds his calling in a small book on the principles of energy.  And with the fast shrinking village collapsing into despair & poverty, the father’s mad idea of planting a new crop in the dry season (sow in the day/pray for rain at night) almost seems doable.  But it’s William who figures out a way to make it work with his wild notion of a windmill for water & electricity.  Or might if his practical ideas weren’t dismissed as toys.  And if this all sounds worthy rather than film-worthy (like some African set After-school Special), you may not be taking into account the film’s superb sense of place, scary outbreaks of violence, public & private misunderstandings, family loyalty and emotional payoffs.  Nothing novice about Ejiofor’s work here; it just might give Family Films a good name.

DOUBLE-BILL:  (not seen here)  In 2024, Ejiofor again acts/writes/directs on his second feature, another fact-based Struggling dad/High-achieving son story in ROB PEACE.   Seen it?  Worth a look?  Let us know in the Comment Box - see link below.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Extra kudos to Ejiofor for not milking the climax for ginned up suspense.   The film has more than enough legitimate emotion to carry us thru without it.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (2025)

While it’s a fool’s errand to expect Oscar’s Best Pic of the Year to be the best pic of the year, recent years have further degraded the award into a Buyer’s Remorse contest.  What title has curdled fastest?  One recent ‘winner’ took the remorse card while they were still handing out the prize!  So credit to Paul Thomas Anderson for winning the little man on a film that’s holding up.  Yippee!  (As for best of the year . . . ?)  Loosely built on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, VINELAND, the main action takes place seventeen years after a prologue detailing the inner-workings of a Weather Underground-like group of American Radical Left terrorists.  A problem here since 17 years prior to Pynchon’s 1990 novel would put those events in ‘the ‘Seventies.’  But when exactly are they happening here?   PTA refuses to pin this down to any specific year, but it plays as if it’s seventeen years before now.  That’s 2008, the year Obama was elected.  After that, we follow Leonardo DiCaprio’s time tamed terrorist, now a laid-back paranoid (if that’s possible), a single dad whose daughter pooh-poohs his vigilance against unchecked Fed danger till they each come under attack by various shadowy quasi-government authorities.  Mainly a force under orders from unforgiving DiCaprio rival Sean Penn, overdoing it by letting his inner Dustin Hoffman out in the film’s only bad perf.  (Naturally winning the film’s sole acting Oscar®.)  It soon escalates into a (not-quite) innocent-man-on-the-run (with daughter) picaresque, with PTA doing a swell job of keeping all parties (left/right), action, and prey vs. hunter set-pieces straight.  For once, you don’t need a scorecard.  As an old Party Line pal, still in the game helping ‘illegals’ avoid arrest, Benicio Del Toro is revivified, eyes wide-open and just about stealing the pic.  He also looks like he might be DiCaprio's cousin from certain angles.  (This a mixed blessing as DiCaprio, also from certain angles, looks like Elisha Cook, Jr.  No kiddin’.)  Shot largely in the old VistaVision format, PTA uses the extra-clarity to juggle loads of moving pieces and intersecting action that make the film play less like heightened true-to-life drama than living Venn Diagram.  If only he knew when to end the thing.  Flaws and all, this is deservedly PTA’s first film since 2007's THERE WILL BE BLOOD to work critically & commercially.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Paid to the location scout who found a perfect ultra-dippy section of hilly two-lane rural highway to set the action finale on.  (Where have I seen this stretch of road before?)

12 JOURS / 12 DAYS (2017)

Prolific French documentarian Raymond Depardon, often doubling as cinematographer and now in his 80s, hasn’t released a new film since this one.  But if it does prove to be his last, he’s gone out with honors; a calmly fraught look into a unique custom in the French Code of Justice that calls for a ‘Freedom and Detention Judge’ to revisit the status and rights of involuntarily admitted criminal patients held at psychiatric facilities within 12 days of incarceration.  Using simple non-narrated techniques (no voice-over to set the scene or give info), Depardon relies on static shots, basic reverse angles between judge and ‘patient’ (with assigned legal representation), we might be watching ‘Dogme’ filmmaking principles in action or a film along the lines of the late Frederick Wiseman . . . only much, much shorter.  (Running time about 90".)  The patients are split between three judges, all kind, all seen-it-all-before; all taking doctors’ reports ahead of patients explanations.  Half of them know they need more time before requesting a change in treatment or early release, all on some sort of sedating medication regimen, nearly all able to put across a five minute sanity pitch only to start showing mental cracks or something more complicated in rising order of sad, scary, delusional.  And just once, after a patient has left the room, does a judge let us in on something terrible from a patient’s past she’s aware of.  And it’s devastating.  All this fascinating to watch, but plainly exhausting to the players on both sides of the judgment table where they go thru the motions of observable justice with unexpected civility and hidden hopelessness.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  A fine correction to the cute/sentimental slush seen in so many fictional films dealing with mental health conditions & 'holding' facilities.  And no one playing it up for the awards circuit.

LOVELESS / NELYUBOV (2017)

More than two decades after his stunning debut on THE RETURN/’03, Russian writer/director Andrey Zvyagintsev continues to make absorbing films that don’t quite satisfy or come up to his first.*  (Two of his eight not seen here.  Both, like THE RETURN, titles where he takes no writing credit.)  Like all his work, this well-reviewed work (his best received since THE RETURN?) is worth its running time, but certain filmmaking tics have crusted over into mannerism.  Here it’s most noticeable in Zvyagintsev’s use of ominous slow tracking shots in, portending major revelation, but with no payoff.  Fizzling into mere transition.  Still, this portrait of a dissolving bad marriage hit with the added pressure of a child neither seems particularly attached to suddenly gone missing, is compelling.  Especially as acted out by two self-centered couples, Mom & Dad each seeing others.  Only the characterless lost boy earning compassion in a brief, shadowy shot, hiding behind a door, overhearing his parents argue about their future and his.  Their actions taken past the breaking point when they take two days to even notice his absence after overnights with the putative replacements.  (The only other relative is the wife’s estranged termagant of a mother.  A visit there the most rattling thing in the film.)  Cunning and cutting, Zvyagintsev seems an extremely talented director in need of direction.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned: THE RETURN/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/09/return-2003.html

PUSHER (1996)

Hard-boiled Danish writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn was at Cannes this year with his first feature film in a decade.  Easy to see how he could have burnt himself out watching this debut.  In his mid-twenties at the time, he looks fresh out of the THIS IS SPINAL TAP ‘Crank it to 11' School du Cinema.*  A character study on a week in the life of drug supplier Frank (Kim Bodnia) and his inconstant mates (including a feral Mads Mikkelsen),as Frank rapidly sinks into dangerous levels of debt to various drug dealers a mere step or two above him, but far deadlier.  Shot entirely with jumpy hand-held camera (Morten Søborg), it has the opposite effect of Refn’s intention (a rookie gaffe), constantly calling attention to itself (especially in fast back & forth pans between actors) pulling you out of the action when it wants to pull you in.  With actors playing to Refn rather than to each other . . . or to us.  Guru cinéma vérité something of an oxymoron.  Worse, when Frank finds his back against the wall on the seventh day, Refn starts pulling melodrama out of his hat (character & plot reversals via guns, romance, power balances, cash & friendship) that might work in a more stylized film, but here look like cheating.  On the other hand . . . two sequels.  It made Refn’s rep.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *We much prefer Refn’s poorly received ONLY GOD FORGIVES/’13.  Perhaps because rather than crank it to 11, he aims for 12.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/08/only-god-forgives-2013.html

LUCKY JORDAN (1942)

Fourth-billed, but breaking thru as a major star on THIS GUN FOR HIRE/’42, Alan Ladd got solo above-the-title billing for the first time on this slapdash wartime comedy later the same year.*  Paramount Pictures rushing to get Ladd back on screen before the Draft Board grabbed him for the Army.  And, wouldn’t you know, that’s pretty much the plot of the pic; just that Ladd’s a big-time racketeer with the draft board on his tail rather than a big-time movie star with the draft board on his tail.  But treating superior officers like mob underlings doesn’t fly when your boss is Uncle Sam.  On the other hand, when a cache of secret documents goes missing, and foreign agents are hot on the trail, some of those underworld talents come in mighty handy, especially if you’re on the run, AWOL with the film’s antagonist WAC (debuting Helen Walker) who’s beginning to see possibilities in this arrogant soldier boy.  Sounds kinda fun, no?  Especially with the lousy news from the front in the early days of the way.  For a time, it brought out the silly side in Hollywood war movies.  Alas, nothing in here plays to its comic potential.  (Other than a running bit between Ladd and the drunken old ‘biddy’ (Mabel Paige) who pretends to be his mother.)  And while cinematographer John F. Seitz was proving transformative to Paramount literary writer/directors Preston Sturges & Billy Wilder at the time, there’s little he can do to give payoffs to disappearing characters & plot lines, or fix director Frank Tuttle’s lackluster comic timing.  (Note how elements snap into place whenever the script drops the comedy and goes for straight suspense.)  The film’s not unpleasant, just a mess.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See what all the fuss was about in THIS GUN FOR HIRE/’42.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/this-gun-for-hire-1942.html

FLICKERING LIGHTS / BLINKENDE LYGTER (2000)

Small-time crooks/big-time psychopaths (with comic edge to their violence) had become something of a genre unto itself by the time this Danish iteration, from writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen, came out.  Two & a half decades on, there’s not much surprise or kick left to it.  What it does offer is a chance to watch a young, lean Mads Mikkelsen as one of the four thuggish grifters making small change smuggling in contraband goods, like tax-free cigarettes.  ‘Menthol!,’ Mikkelsen grouses before laying out the confused Polish driver.  But it’s the next job that launches the main action when the four guys pick up a locked suitcase that contains too much dough to deliver without taking a 100% cut, hatching a plan to enjoy their profits by running off to Barcelona.  Naturally the intended party for the cash-filled suitcase is none too happy with things and the hunt is on as one small mob goes after another.  And this is where Jensen doubles down from quirky to absurd as our gang of thieves (plus an on & off girlfriend of little intuition) find a dilapidated house, formerly a country restaurant, now abandoned, they plan to restore.  Too bad no one knows how to cook.  But under the informal protection of a couple of equally oddball locals, the project starts coming together.  Tricked out with short daytrips, a slow-healing gunshot wound, walks on the beach, hunting down farm animals and flashbacks to character-defining crises from childhood, the film devolves into a fable.  Not without its shocks, laughs and nifty resolutions, the problem less that so much is absurd as that so much is secondhand absurd.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *You can get a good sense of Mikkelsen’s exceptional range, pretty much right from the start, comparing his young Robert De Niro act here (even in build) to his equally convincing Gregory Peck solid physicality in the WWII spy drama FLAME & CITRON/’06.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/flammen-og-citronen-flame-and-citron.html

WYATT EARP (1994)

Kevin Costner is seriously underrated.  Not as an actor, fine in the right role (underdog striver/ornery father-figure).  No, he’s underrated as a Hollywood survivor.  Few movie stars could slip past career-ending debacles like WATERWORLD/95*, THE POSTMAN/’97, the on-going HORIZON/’24 and EARP with nary a nick to their commercial standing.  In EARP’s case, big losses on writer/director Lawrence Kasdan’s dead serious/reasonably factual bio-pic on the legendary lawman were chalked up to the recent release of George P. Cosmatos’s more light-hearted lob at the same subject, TOMBSTONE/’93, sucking all the air out of the market.  (Ironically, using the rowdy tone of SILVERADO/’83, Kasdan’s previous Western epic.)  No doubt that’s part of the story, but EARP didn’t need help to fail; a 3+ hours length and grim predetermination turned possible audiences off all on their own.  (One thing that does make both films a must-see are the two enormous all-star casts, offering the chance to sample half of Hollywood's best late-twenties/early-thirties actors at the time.)  Kasdan’s main take on the saga is decidedly Freudian: Earp’s Old Testament revenge against GOD for taking away his young bride (and unborn son) before he’s redeemed (after murdering towns-full of gun-toting strangers*) by a beautiful Jewish prostitute.  Yikes!  But the film is a drag (if not for Gene Hackman with but ten minutes on-screen); at times (particularly in James Newton Howard’s windswept overblown score) even a disgrace.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  John Ford’s MY DARLING CLEMENTINE/’48 remains tops in EARP mythology (very ‘print the legend’) though low on accuracy.  Even though Ford, in his early Hollywood years, knew Earp.  OR:  Edward Cahn’s fascinating (if hit & miss) Early Talkie LAW AND ORDER/’32, with Walter Huston as Wyatt Earp (called ‘Saint’ Johnson here) with a script by son John.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/my-darling-clementine-1946.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *In spite of critical ridicule, WATERWORLD, in a variety of ‘improved’ re-cuts, eventually recouped.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Hard not to wonder at The Wild West’s ‘liberal’ gun policies that ordered NO GUNS in town.  Pick ‘em up again on your way out.  It’d never happen today.

REMEMBERING GENE WILDER (2023)

Once past the generic title (fit for a local memorial service) and the generic structure (movie clips & fresh or archival interviews set between self-narration from Gene Wilder’s audio version of his autobiography), and not withstanding occasional non-linear jumps to pre-fame days, this Ron Frank/Glenn Kirschbaum documentary on the iconic/unorthodox comic movie star is mainly unusual for its sheer niceness.  As was its subject.  (No given with great comic actors!)  But what it does best of all is getting you to reconsider films you’d either overlooked (SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL/’89) or actively avoided (THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES' SMARTER BROTHER/’75 with wife Gilda Radner).  And simply by listing THE PRODUCERS, BLAZING SADDLES, and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN showing how indebted Mel Brooks’ film career batting average was to Wilder.  Behind the movie roles, more personal heartbreak than you recall.  Touching stuff.  It also serves well as a Wilder starter pack without giving away too many highlights or spoilers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Our regular suggestion for the funniest/lesser-known Gene Wilder pic remains START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME/’70.  OR: Type Gene Wilder into our Search Box (Upper Left corner on the Main Site (e-phoners scroll below to the link) for a pot-pourri listing of various Wilder films & mentions.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/02/start-revolution-without-me-1970.html

LA FEMME INFIDÈLE / THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE (1969)

Often beginning his films with little inflection and just-the-facts directness, gourmet gagster Claude Chabrol could come off as the Jack Webb of the French Nouvelle Vague.  Often as not, this tactic was a fake-out meant to leave you off-balance, uncertain where you were being led till you’d digested the first act.  By then, you’d know if you were watching good or bad Chabrol.  This one of the good ones.  Stéphane Audran (then married to Chabrol) is the beautiful, blank wife of well-heeled businessman Michel Bouquet; working in Paris/living with their 10-yr-old boy in Versailles.  Right now, Bouquet’s visiting mother is about to head home, but not without first telling her son to lose a little weight.  Seems rude, but Maman has picked up on the ‘off’ vibe between the couple.  And a stealth phone call by Audran cues us in to some sort of relationship troubles before the pair share a joyless night out with friends, highlighting a couple at cross purposes.  Soon after, Bouquet hires a P.I.; Audran disappears every other afternoon; an affair of no great passion is confirmed; and civilized confrontation turns on a dix sous piece into violence.  The mix of family comfort and discomfort; smiling lies & unpleasant truths; married & unmarried beds of iniquity.  Like the jigsaw puzzle the young son is trying to complete, there’s a piece missing in this relationship.  Then two detectives knock at the door after dinner.  Death and domesticity.  Chabrol couldn’t always be bothered, but when he could, he knew how to tighten the screws.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  And dig how Pierre Jansen’s atonal score keeps you off-balance.

CONTEST:  Along with fellow Nouvelle Vague-er Éric Rohmer, Chabrol co-authored one of the first books to make the case for Alfred Hitchcock as more than ‘mere’ entertainer. (As if that alone weren’t enough!  Ah, the French.  See: HITCHCOCK; THE FIRST FORTY-FOUR FILMS.)  So, no surprise to see Chabrol lift a major scene from a major Hitchcock film here.  Use the Comment Box to name the film and the scene to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of a streamable film of your choice.

LENIN IN OCTOBER / LENIN V OKTYABRE (1937)

Straightforward and easy to follow, Mikhail Romm’s film on Vladimir Lenin and The October Revolution of 1917 is less ‘agit-prop’ than YA bio-pic.  Made to celebrate twenty years that shook the world, it takes bolshoi liberties with the facts, most notably by raising Joseph Stalin’s involvement in events, largely by giving him now exiled Leon Trotsky’s part.*  And damned if the simplified storyline & politics don’t work in entertaining fashion.  Romm might be telling a modern Robin Hood story, with short, stocky, balding Lenin taking from the establishment and giving to the proletariat.  There’s even a big, benign protector/bodyguard called Vasily in the Little John spot.  Structured for near constant suspense, we begin with Lenin’s train ride from Finland Station to Petrograd, hunted all the way by agents.  Met by comrades in the city, he goes into immediate hiding, his every move an opportunity for various parties and groups of activists across the political spectrum to grab him.  (From Sergei Eisenstein’s OCTOBER/‘28 to Warren Beatty’s REDS/’81, party confusion is where they lose us.*)  Boris Shchukin makes a downright bouncy Lenin, a charmer (recent bios paint him as only slightly less ruthless than Stalin) while loyal aide Nikolai Okhlopkov isn’t so different than Alan Hale was in Little John in next year’s THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD.  Both leads repeated in Romm’s follow up, LENIN IN 1918/’39, but that film a good deal more daunting to watch.  With impressive sets and set pieces, sweeping, screen-filling action, self-serving political villains and a noticeable absence of Eisenstein’s artistic trappings, this was THE representation of ‘Volodya’ for at least a couple of generations in Russia.  And note the final shot at the victory rally: Lenin with his characteristic out-thrust arm; Stalin standing behind him waiting for the next act to begin.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Trotsky had his post-mortem revenge after Stalin’s death when Khrushchev’s cultural ‘thaw’ clipped Stalin out of all circulating prints.  Restored to full length, here’s an excellent print available free:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lenin_in_October_(film)_1937.webm  

DOUBLE-BILL:  *As mentioned above, Eisenstein’s OCTOBER: TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, which, as Stalin pointed out, is too ‘formalistic.’  (The guy was also a film critic.)  And Beatty’s REDS, which has its own problems though Jack Nicholson makes a fantastic Eugene O’Neill, if not nearly as tragically handsome.

LA SYMPHONIE PASTORALE / PASTORAL SYMPHONY (1946)

Best film @ Cannes in 1946!  . . . along with ten other winners.  Starting up after WWII ended, the re-inaugural edition of the hardly begun Film Festival spread the wealth among participating countries.  The committee was out to make friends and influence tastemakers.  (Hollywood took their prize home for THE LOST WEEKEND/’45.)  Alas, this ‘winner,’ a significantly tamed version of André Gide’s novel on religious and social hypocrisy at a small town in the Alps, probably serves best as an example of the sort of infuriating work and positive critical reaction directors like Jean Delannoy regularly received by hitching a ride on some classic piece of literature.*  Not that it’s bad, it’s adequate, and nicely shot when they stick to real Alpine wintry locations.  Michèle Morgan is blonde & beautiful, affectingly ‘off’ (if a decade too old) as a blind orphan ‘adopted’ by town minister Pierre Blanchar who either doesn’t realize or can’t admit his love for the girl is anything but pure.  (Per Gide it ain’t, which is the whole point; per Delannoy it technically is, which loses the point.)  The girl morally innocent, yet not unaware of the destabilizing effect she has on everything she touches: the minister, his suddenly ignored wife, his handsome/talented organist son just back in town (Jean Desailly, best thing in the pic), etc.  And when she discovers her sight can easily be corrected with simple cataract surgery (Delannoy’s modern setting making this belated realization hard to swallow), Morgan instinctively knows her physical handicap was the only thing protecting her (and the family) frm a complete meltdown.  This is pretty interesting stuff, but as presented here, little more than sudsy romantic misalliance.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Similarly, Michèle Morgan’s best English-language film, THE FALLEN IDOL/’48, a superb Carol Reed/Graham Greene collaboration, also softens its story.  But with two major differences: it’s Greene’s own story, and the change is an improvement.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/fallen-idol-1948.html

ROMANCE (1930)

Greta Garbo’s second Talkie was another adaptation from ‘a play of quality.’  So too her third, all three directed as if walking on egg shells by otherwise talented/underrated Clarence Brown.*  The big difference is that the first, Eugene O’Neill’s ANNA CHRISTIE, really is quality goods; not so Edward ‘Ned’ Sheldon’s ROMANCE; cut-rate CAMILLE at best.  Though it still made a mark on B’way (three runs, the last musicalized by Sigmund Romberg).  Garbo, who made a CAMILLE for the ages (the real one) with George Cukor in ‘36, might as well be part of the demimonde here, too.  No courtesan, but opera soprano; nearly as bad in 1880.  And once more she’s torn between a wealthy old lover (Lewis Stone), burnt out at 51 he tells us, and virgin-pure Rector Gavin Gordon (well out of his league) who comes to reform, only to be aroused into a passion he’s never known.  Flaccid moviemaking, with Garbo’s accent at its most impenetrable and the men acting to the back row.  Dull as it is, Sheldon really does seem to be on to something (‘love’s truth and the horny heart’) he doesn’t quite know how to handle as drama.  At the least, it’s better than the third in the series INSPIRATION/’31, if still mainly for Garbo completists.  Everyone else feel free to jump ahead to GRAND HOTEL/’32.  Garbo swapping opera for ballet with M-G-M, at last, figuring out how best to use the legend in The Talkies.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Brown did far better by Garbo in silents and in ANNA KARENINA/’35.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/anna-karenina-1935.html

SILENT NIGHT (2023)

After resetting the bar on violent Hong Kong action fare in the ‘80s, director John Woo had brief success in Hollywood before diminishing returns brought him back to Asian markets.*  Two decades on he’s working in English again (sort of) on a standard revenge thriller loaded with OTT gore & grue.  Not especially well received, it sunk in early post-pandemic days.  A pity because of its type, it’s exceptionally well made (you can actually ‘read’ the action set pieces), has a conceptually rich character twist that gives purpose to style, and old-school star-power from a seriously jacked-up Joel Kinnaman*, grieving father to an innocent 7-yr-old boy, collateral damage in out-of-control L.A. gang warfare.  Opening in medias res, Kinnaman is chasing gunmen on both sides only to wind up shot in the throat; alive but voiceless.  Initially falling into catatonic depression before rousing himself to wellness thru deadly revenge. Cue Woo to turn this into a Silent Film, a LOUD Silent Film.  Unlike other Martial Arts films who drop dialogue during those major balletic fight scenes, but don’t try to figure out how Silent Film differs, Woo does.  'Silents' had their own rules, cutting rhythms & could support a different kind of continuity.  So too scene length (happy to just hang around) and editing technique (agogic).  Things Woo does instinctively, starting by muddying up all dialogue to a point where it no longer matters.  His technique mirroring what Jacques Tati developed for his highly stylized, largely non-verbal French comedies.  Tati’s pastoral yin to Woo’s urban yang.  By the finale, the multiple killings grow a bit too JOHN WICK (the films share a producer), Kinnaman downing dozens of gang members from both sides.  But if any physical presence/human force could pull it off, Kinnaman could.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Losing speech here, Kinnaman’s next, THE SILENT HOUR/’24 takes away his hearing!  Had it done any biz, his next might have stripped off his sense of smell.  SILENT SCHNOZ?   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-silent-hour-2024.html

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Woo came back to China with a two-fer bang in RED CLIFF.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/chi-bi-red-cliff-2008.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/chi-bi-xia-jue-zhan-tian-xia-red-cliff.html

COUNTDOWN (1967)

James Caan, Robert Duvall, Michael Murphy, Ted Knight and Robert Altman.  With that cast and that director, you’d imagine a higher profile for this Mission-to-the-Moon story.  Likely a dog all parties hoped to forget, yes?  Well, it is pretty conventional.  But as pre-2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY sci-fi goes, it’s solid mid-list fare with the added benefit of seeing Altman, at 42, making his belated move from tv to features.  A ‘job of work’ rather than something distinctively Altmanesque?  Sure, only hearing his cast talk over each other more than usual for the period feels like a personalized element.  The story more character study than space opera, those characters being astronauts Duvall, military man, and Caan’s civilian scientist.  Duvall, originally slotted to solo as first man on the moon, forced out by an expedited Russian launch that causes NASA to panic and move up the mission, with Duvall replaced by an untested Caan,, proving to the world NASA isn’t part of the military, they’re purely scientific.  But with only a few weeks to liftoff, a pissed/jealous Duvall the one guy who can teach Caan the fine technical points.  Will Duvall help or sabotage?  Hardly the genre game-changer 2001 would be next year, but neither is it a Boy’s Own Adventure.  Instead, a fairly serious study of then timely possibilities.  (Armstrong touched down only two years later.)  And the best moment in here purely visual, a silent reveal of the fate of those moon-bound Soviets.  Altman would start finding his own screen voice on his next two films: THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK/’69 and M*A*S*H*/’70.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Not much for the women to do in this 1967 film.  Astronaut wives only fit to watch, wait and worry . . . when not tending the kids.  Oddly, Duvall’s ramrod straight army man the sole unattached male.

THAT FORSYTHE WOMAN (1949)

A typical star-clogged loss-leader from a directionless post-WWII M-G-M, this ‘prestige pic’ proved unable to recapture past studio glory.  On the plus side, there’s a cleverly trimmed script from Book One of the John Galsworthy novel about a wealthy, but ruthless British family dynasty (just a couple of generations old), but only so much can be done with such a disagreeable lot.  (Not that this has stopped multiple dramatizations.)  Even the good eggs a chilly bunch.  And while the 1880s setting calls for overstuffed period detail, pudding-rich late-‘40s TechniColor makes you long for the outdoors only to discover you’re now stuck on an M-G-M backlot, even in the country.  The story, a roundelay of mismatched pairings & misaligned fortunes, suffers from missing backstory, but could still work if the cast hit the mark.  As it is, only underrated Errol Flynn (underrated as an actor, that is), convinces as Soames Forsythe, superb as a man whose pride can’t take no for an answer.  As the penniless beauty he desires, Greer Garson would have been fine twenty years ago; as would Walter Pidgeon, appropriately enough sporting a bad dye job as a painter who’s the family Black Sheep.   (Don’t believe the studio publicity about him & Flynn swapping parts to play against type.*)  A very young Janet Leigh and placid Robert Young both hopelessly MidWest American as the naive ingenue cast aside when her lower-class artistic lover falls for another.  (Guess who.)  Director Compton Bennett would show more moxie figuring out how to integrate docu-wildlife footage, a mystery treasure hunt and romantic melodrama in next year’s KING SOLOMON’S MINES/’50.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *This film could have profitably used the two stars of KING SOLOMON’S MINES!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/king-solomons-mines-1950.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While the story calls for Soames to basically rape his wife (not a crime in Victorian England), the thought of the gentlemanly Pidgeon forcing himself on Garson . . . well, the very idea!  In any event, the Production Code reduced rape to a quick slap on the Garson jaw by a sexually frustrated Flynn.

DANS LA COUR / IN THE COURTYARD (2014)

Though recently tapped for Cannes’ 2026 Opening Night with LA VÉNUS ÉLECTRIQUE/THE ELECTRIC KISS, French writer/director Pierre Salvadori has a low profile in the States.  Too French?  Too light?  Too mid-list?  But if COUR is anything to go by, we’ve been missing a trick.  From desciptions, this seems considerably darker than his other work, though it doesn’t start that way.  Gustave Kervern stars as a shambling, disheveled 40-something, a severely depressed substance abuser who walks out of a concert gig (he’s a rock guitarist) and into a job as live-in janitor at a slightly worn apartment house.  Hired on the spot by an unconcerned/disinterested Catherine Deneuve who’s going thru her own mental crisis, sloughing off longtime volunteer commitments to obsess over minor building issues.  And it seems every tenant in the building on the cusp of a nervous breakdown.  Yet without qualification for either building maintenance or mental counsel, Kervern’s calm manner of letting time take care of problems satisfies the co-owners and all turns out well.  But wait!  That’s a likely Stateside version of the film had it gone thru Hollywood Development Hell.  Salvadori having none of it.  Instead, at nearly every turn, the story takes the darker path with ingrates using Kervern for their own purposes, tenants over-loading him with tasks, and mental fantasy taking hold of Deneuve’s increasingly fragile state of mind.  A spontaneous visit to her childhood home with a by now poignantly chummy Kervern a particular (and dramatically brave) horror.  There’s resolution, of a sort, but this is hardly Handyman Mary Poppins by the time Kervern checks out.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Deneuve, quite rightly, nominated for a Best Actress César.  No grandstanding, no begging for sympathy, nothing taken for granted.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Salvadori’s best received film (at least his most nominated) is EN LIBERTÉ! (THE TROUBLE WITH YOU) which followed this in 2018.  (not seen here)

CLIFFORD (1994)

A polarizing film.  Everyone hates it for a different reason.*  Back when Hollywood was struggling over how to make use of Martin Short’s obvious talents, they tried off-beat leading man (leading clown?) to see if he could ‘open’ a film.  He couldn’t.  Splitting the lead in thirds helped*, but he only found his niche when they incorporated the law of diminishing comic returns and cast him in support.  But he’s still the whole show in CLIFFORD, forty-four at the time, 'realistically' playing a tantrumy ten-yr-old.  (Think ELOISE away from The Plaza.)  Turning progressively creepy (exponentially irritating) as we go along, he’s left in the care of child-hating Uncle Charles Grodin trying to impress child-loving girlfriend Mary Steenburgen and going slightly mad in the process.  (Or with his comic twitches is he auditioning to replace Herbert Lom as Chief Inspector Drefuss in a new PINK PANTHER pic?)  The one great bit in the film (likely unintentional), comes in what might be called ‘the battle of the bad hairpieces’ as boss Dabney Coleman is called out for a lousy toupé, but no one says a word about Grodin’s equally bad rug.  Elsewise, the series of comedy situations don’t so much develop as repeat under Paul Flaherty’s laisser-faire direction; and the film’s flashback structure (an older Short lectures a new bad boy on his misspent youth) is needless padding.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Okay, not strictly true.  The film has its fans, and something of a cult following.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See THE THREE AMIGOS/’86. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-three-amigos-1986.html

CAIRO CONSPIRACY / WALAD MIN AL-JANNA (2022)

This, the second of exiled Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh’s Cairo Trilogy, is the masterpiece of the three.*  A slow-burn political thriller in religious garb during the run-up to elect a new Grand Imam at Al Azhar University, the apex for Islamic Studies for over a millennium,  We follow events thru the wide eyes of Adam, a new Al Azhar student on scholarship from his small fishing village, just arrived on the historic Cairo campus to find his bunk and bearings.  (Now officially ‘a sardine.’)  Adam also starts to find new friends, unaware the primitive yet beautiful site is a hotbed of political activity, covered by spy networks.  But he learns fast.  Especially after a wised-up classmate, a likely informer for State authorities, is murdered on campus, and the hunt to discover the murderer(s) leads to Adam being recruited as his replacement.  First assignment?  Become a trusted member of the radical anti-State (terrorist?) organization planning election interference.   After this, without seeming to alter tempo in the Hollywood manner, Saleh tightens the screws on all sides as everyone suddenly stops trusting Adam (with the possible exception of State recruiter Fares Fares).  Salem getting this across not with the usual tropes of chases, guns and close calls, but with rigorous intellectual/philosophical debate that can also put lives at stake as secrets about religious candidates are uncovered.  Fascinating, and deadly in intent; the film ending with a twisty sort of religious grace based on Islamic studies and principles.  Our moral?  Adam’s lesson?  Well, not that ‘the tragedy of this world is that everyone has their reasons’ (as Jean Renoir put it in RULES OF THE GAME/’39), but that everyone has their agenda.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Fares Fares, who stars in all three films, lets student co-star Tawfeek Barhom take focus, but is just as good as conflicted State intelligence gatherer.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The first and third (THE NILE HILTON/’17; EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC’25) not far behind.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-nile-hilton-incident-2017.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2026/04/eagles-of-republic-2025.html