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.

NEXT TIME WE LOVE (1936)

Note that James Stewart, in his first leading role, is missing from our poster.  Under contract at M-G-M, who couldn’t figure out what to do with this tall, gangly (make that alarmingly thin), unconventionally attractive fellow; loaned out to Universal who had just the thing for him  On the other hand, they failed at make-up 101.  Check out the lip-rouge on his enormous lower lip.  Yikes!  Had Stewart been roughhousing with roommate Henry Fonda?  A lucky punch, too, since co-star Margaret Sullavan (that’s her on the poster) had just amicably divorced Fonda, and specifically asked for his roommate in the part.  Perfect together, they’d pair up for three more films.*  Here, with director Edward H. Griffith (best known for stage reliant transfers on Philip Barry’s HOLIDAY/’30 and THE ANIMAL KINGDOM/’32) along with gifted lenser Joseph A. Valentine faking unusually atmospheric NYC & Europe locales on studio sets (plus an uncredited Preston Sturges taking a pass on the script), they play out a difficult two-career/sperate lives marriage that’s unusually intelligent & modern for 1936.  Each following their bliss to success as Foreign Correspondent (him) and stage star (her).  While waiting in the wings, respectful third-wheel Ray Milland.  (Looking ridiculously handsome, it was, along with next year’s EASY LIVING/’37, his breakthru role after seven years.)  The film goes soft and sentimental in the last reel (which is fine for this sort of thing), but also narratively convenient to tidy up all the moving parts (which ain't).  But so much better than you expect, it’s something of a find.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Second pairing, THE SHOPWORN ANGEL/’38, now looking a bit shopworn itself, but 3 & 4 are contrasting masterpieces: Borzage’s THE MORTAL STORM/’40; Lubitsch’s THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER/’40.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-mortal-storm-1940.html

NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006)

Writer Patrick Marber made his name when Mike Nichols filmed his play CLOSER/’04 as an expanded four-hander.  Like many a Nichols’ project, second-tier material sold as designer goods (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/closer-2005.html).  Here, Marber adapts a novel by Zoë Heller about a high school scandal, essentially a three-hander involving a controlling, but repressed, soon-to-retire lesbian-leaning teacher; a younger/married art teacher she’s set her eyes on; and the 15-yr-old student whose dick gets in the way of everyone’s plans.  Written as a mash-up of Terrence Rattigan  (career disappointment; ducked personal opportunities) and Tennessee Williams (curdled passion between the fatally mismatched), it’s a well-plotted l’amour fou³ that crashes in the light.  It might have worked if Marber had only told the team he’d written a pitch-black comedy of bad manners.  Over-produced, in a manner typical of Scott Rudin in his pre-exile Hollywood heyday; mistaking borrowed prestige for taste.*   With top-flight stage director Richard Eyre showing yet again his strange disinclination for movie rhythms; Judi Dench working too hard in a part her pal Maggie Smith was born to play*; and Cate Blanchette failing to convince herself (or us) that she doesn't see thru Dench’s entrapment scheme or that she’d fuck her student conquest rather than older husband Bill Nighy.  Not bloody likely.  Maybe this would all play more convincingly as a period piece.  1950s?  And with the coded dialogue of those censored days.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *It’s why Scooter has classical composer Philip Glass on the score.  His glacially slow cyclical cell adjustments not doing much for the film, but cowing the Academy to pony up with an Oscar® nom.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Maggie Smith devotees can get a taste of what she might have done here by watching a Double-Bill of one of her Best, and one of her Least known films: THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE/’67 and THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARN/’87.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie-1969.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-lonely-passion-of-judith-hearne-1987.html

SYNONYMES / SYNONYMS (2019)

Forty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born writer/director Nadav Lapid on twenty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born lost soul Yoav; auto-biographical elements inevitable.  (The film also something of a family affair with a brother co-scripting and Mom co-editing.)  Here’s how Lapid tells it: With little more than a stolen French/Israeli dictionary as guide to his new country, Yoav is going for rebirth as a Frenchman.  (Perhaps why debuting Tom Mercier so often buck-naked.)  Squatting overnight in a rich family’s townhouse, he can’t find the clothes he took off to bathe.  Now he’s really in rebirth mode . . . if he doesn’t freeze to death.  Saved by two unexpected housemates, the home’s billionaire’s son and his girlfriend (the only other people in the place), his adventures in assimilation are kick-started with clothes & funds from these fairy faux siblings.  Nifty work from Lapid, with Yoav not so much meeting his future as flirting with it.  Especially the scion who’s already breaking personal space with his ‘guest.’  Adventures in the outside world work best with another Israeli, a political agitator who loudly hums ‘Hatikvah’ on Le Metro, hoping to provoke an incident.  Yoav, who’s sworn off Hebrew, watches in horror & delight.  And there’s citizenship school, too.  But Lapid pushes too hard with a soft-porn photo-shoot (Yoav raising funds); a move to enter the Foreign Legion (?), and reverse-snobbery at the chamber orchestra concert of the girlfriend who’s been bequeathed to him.  Has Yoav gone a bit mad or are his true (terribly confused) colors simply coming out.  A surprise meeting with Dad suggests a way out, but damn if anyone will take it.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lapid's alter-ego’s personal journey thru Statehood, Politics & aversion to his past is less interesting and less well-handled than the menage-a-trois set-up suggested here.  You’ll find that story developed in the most sophisticated manner imaginable in Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated THE DREAMERS/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreamers-2003.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Perhaps Lapid is yet another auteur, loaded with talent in handling cast, crew & camera, whose work might benefit with an outside pair of eyes holding the purse strings and sometimes saying, ‘No.’

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (2018)

Still untold.  A glitzy, wasted opportunity from Pamela B. Green (her sole feature credit as director) pays tribute to forgotten female film pioneer Alice Guy, but misses her importance.  The facts get on screen, in distractingly imaginative graphics, but we never get into what made her click as a filmmaker.  No comparisons with other early filmmakers.  No decent length clips to help judge her.  Her achievements taken on faith.  Mme. Guy had yet to turn twenty when she started working for Leon Gaumont in 1895.  Yep, same family as today’s distribution giant.  M. Leon brought her to a preview of Lumière’s legendary/first-ever projected film showing.  By the next year, Guy was directing some of the earliest film shorts.  And continued doing so over the next twenty-five peripatetic years; till the film industry became big business post-WWI and women, other than actresses, writers & editors, largely disappeared from most positions.  Famous for the early studio she and husband Herbert Blaché built in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he wound up directing in Hollywood* while she looked for work.  It’s a fascinating story, she lived till 1968 and there are filmed interviews of her, mostly from 1964, but we never find out what we really want to know.  The clips are tiny, yet collections of her work are available, but we don’t get enough to form even a preliminary opinion, or see how she was different (better?) than others at the time.  Worth a look, but meaningless without better support from the films.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  A couple of years before this came out, Thierry Frémaux’s LUMIÈRE!/’16 used Auguste Lumière's eternally fresh 19th century actualités to tell his story and the story of the start of The Movies.  Getting everything right this one flubs.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Husband Herbert Blaché, a far less important figure in film history (and a real shit), yet now far more seen than his wife as he directed Buster Keaton’s first feature, THE SAPHEAD/’20.  Not really part of the Keaton canon, Buster only a hired actor here just as he was beginning his own post-WWI shorts and features.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-saphead-1920.html