MULAN (2020)

Delayed time & again for production or scheduling issues before becoming an early Covid casualty (‘mixed’ release with theatrical & ‘Pay Wall’ streaming), then a rushed home video rollout, its commercial buzz long dissipated.  Seen now plain after all the hand-ringing by company bean-counters, it proves a dutiful, but sadly uninspired Live-Action remake of the superior 1998 cartoon version.  (One of Disney’s last hand-drawn animated features.)  Director Niki Caro and the writing team don’t do a slavish copy, no need on such an oft-told tale, but can’t find (or hold) a proper tone that works for family comedy tropes and military action as Mulan, a country family’s eldest daughter disguised as a young man, spirits away to join the Emperor’s Army in place of her aged father.  (Actress Liu Yifei such a bland presence, you hardly note the gender identity flips.)  And no one seems to have figured out how to get in and out of the CGI ‘sweetened’ action moves, giving the film a stop/start quality at all the wrong times.  (They might be practicing fancy moves for the NBA All-Star slam-dunk competition.)  Some grand vistas and mass movements are handsomely brought off, downright frame-worthy as compositions, but the storyline feels emotionally impervious behind all the pageantry.  Right at the end, when Mulan comes home, things loosen up a bit, but all too late.  Same-O on the film’s botched release, all too late.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  If you’re looking for a Disney version of the story, stick with animated MULAN.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/09/mulan-1998.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The final fight as Mulan fights off attack on shifting scaffolding might be out of a Harold Lloyd silent comedy ‘thrill’ sequence.

THE LAS VEGAS STORY (1952)

The early ‘50s found Jane Russell playing lady adventuress in films noir at Howard Hughes’ increasingly dysfunctional R.K.O.  Here, Victor Mature steps in for Robert Mitchum who did the one before (HIS KIND OF WOMAN/’51) and the one after (MACAO/’52).*  Director Robert Stevenson, about to start five years of tv fare before landing as Disney’s first-choice house-director, puts out a smoother, if less fun product than the two with Mitchum.  (Smoother because it doesn't suffer so much from Hughes’ micromanaging & reshoots; less fun because Mitchum is such a cooler cat than Mature.)  But decent enough; and better than that at the climax with a wild helicopter ride and a cleanly executed multi-floor chase between Mature & the film’s Mr. Baddie.  Vincent Price is unusually sympathetic as Russell’s caring husband, unexpectedly stopping at Russell’s old stomping ground for a bit of gambling.  Little does she know her wealthy hubby has gone bankrupt and is desperate to raise cash on her fabulous diamond necklace.  Little does he know that Russell has a troubled history here, chanteuse to Hoagy Carmichael’s piano man and main squeeze to detective Mature.  Neatly played most of the way, with a few songs for seasoning (Carmichael does one number ‘live’ and his classic ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ supplies the main background), but alas, not nearly enough location stuff from this early era in Las Vegas history.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *As mentioned, the two surrounding pics with Mitchum.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/his-kind-of-woman-1951.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/macao-1952.html

78/52: HITCHCOCK’S SHOWER SCENE (2017)

Manna for film nerds.  Not the usual talking-heads career encomium, but a well considered discussion/ deconstruction of the shower scene from PSYCHO/’60.  A dissection of a dissection; four minutes that changed Hollywood trajectory & Hollywood technique.  (The title refers to the 78 camera set ups and 52 cuts in the scene.)  And while a few celebrity ringers are in the mix, no one bloviates.  (Well, no one but Peter Bogdanovich who has to pull out his tired Hitchcock impersonation.  But then, he’d long earned the right.)  Yet what’s truly unique about the shower sequence, and something that gets short shrift amid the hows & whys of this or that detail, is how the horror in it remains shocking to this day.  After sixty years of escalating graphic gore & sadistic sensationalism, the abstract precision of light, sound, music & movement still the stuff of nightmares & artistic inspiration.  Nicely abetted here by contrasting John L. Russell’s crisp, Murnau-influenced b&w cinematography against the richly saturated TechniColor Robert Burks was shooting for Hitchcock before & after.  (Plus snippets showing how disastrously Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake combined the two looks.)  And if Hitch himself always stuck to his view of PSYCHO as a ‘fun’ film (or did so in public), fellow director George Cukor, an exact contemporary, both born in 1899, and great admirer, put it better than anyone does here when he said: ‘Oh, he’s so perverse!  He’d never tell you what he really thinks.  Never, never!  I have the greatest respect and admiration for him, but he will never tell you!  He’s absolutely impassive and says ridiculous things in this solemn way.’  That last idea largely avoided in this little thesis film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  PSYCHO the obvious choice.  Along with Hitchcock’s underrated return to form in FRENZY.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/frenzy-1972.html

LAYER CAKE (2005)

Matthew Vaughn segued from producing mod British action fare . . . with attitude (LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS/’98) to directing them as well.  Here a chucklingly gory tale that pulls the rug out on rival drug dealers as they negotiate rubouts & payoffs.  No surprise for a producer adding a directing shingle, he’s stronger at casting his film than executing story & action, not yet able to parse tricky reverses in operations as swaggering wheeler-dealer Daniel Craig pursues early retirement with a deal too big to refuse and an add-on mission to find a rival’s missing daughter . . . or else.  The dual assignment playing out like McGuffins we barely care about.  So the Spy-vs-Spy confrontations between Craig and other operators suffocate rather than blossom in spite of visual overdrive.  Lots of up-and-coming actors to spot (Tom Hardy, Ben Whishaw, wonderful Burn Gorman who’d make a ‘Guppy’ for the ages in next year’s BLEAK HOUSE/’05); as well as top pros like Colm Meaney and Michael Gambon as friend & foe.  (Gambon, steals all his scenes as usual, but looks perfectly awful, as if he’d just come off radiation treatment).  Craig’s the main draw though.  Exceptionally fit, still lithe & youthful, coiled for action & looking downright pretty doing it.  Very James Bond ready.  (CASINO ROYALE out two years later.)  But Vaughn’s film just too cynical for its own good.  (The downbeat ending completely unjustified in something this larky.)  Later fare progressively successful commercially, and progressively unpleasant to watch.

ELIZABETH (1998)

Turns out, SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE wasn’t the only award-winning Elizabethan pic of 1998 to date badly.  Director Shekhar Kapur & scripter Michael Hirst not far behind with this posh, deceptively traditional view of a young queen’s unsentimental on-the-job education.  Glamorously cast (note last calls for Richard Attenborough & John Gielgud) with Cate Blanchett retreating into Virgin Queen persona when public & private disappointments prove friends, lovers & statesmen all unworthy of her affection.  Merely using her to leapfrog to power or take her down; flip the Church back to Catholicism or form one-sided alliances; siphon royal funds or stay in the Royal Renaissance sexual closet.  (That’s a new one!)  Only loyal/clever statesman/diplomat Walsingham (actual three-years age difference with Eliz stretched to 30 by a good, if miscast Geoffrey Rush) around to act as truth-teller/mentor.  The film is handsome to look at, especially if you have a tolerance for swirling cameras and high-angle shots, but the plotting turns progressively turgid (and frankly hard to follow) as Hirst works too hard to pull off a fugual climax with more public & private executions & assassinations than THE GODFATHER.  Anachronistically underscored with a vocalize based on Elgar’s Enigma Variations (‘Nimrod’) and, appallingly, the Mozart Requiem.  A shame, since, faults & all, the first half is a damn good show.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Much the same crew got back together for the less well received ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE/’07 (not seen here), scuttling plans for a third helping.   OR: You could say Elizabeth Tudor ‘built’ Hollywood since it was Sarah Bernhardt’s British-made four-reeler on QEI that convinced the ‘respectable’ trade to go see a movie when Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players (later Paramount) distributed it in 1912.  Later, Golden Age Hollywood saw Flora Robson & Bette Davis each play her twice (try THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX/’39) while the most underrated is M-G-M’s YOUNG BESS/’53.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-private-lives-of-elizabeth-and.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/05/young-bess-1953.html

MY BILL (1938)

Poached from Paramount in ‘32, Warner Bros. signed Kay Francis to a long-term contract at Hollywood’s top salary only to see her popularity wane, partly due to stricter enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code in mid-‘34 and partly a matter of changing tastes.  Neither conducive to the sophisticated dramatic strengths bought out by ‘Our Lady of Decolletage.’  Demoted to B-pics by Warners in hopes humiliation would lead her to ‘ankle,’ she laughed them off, continued to do what the studio asked, and took the paycheck at the end of each week.  Here, Jack Warner tried driving her off the lot with something far more devious for a glamour gal: giving Kay a brood of four kids (one of them fully grown!); blouses buttoned up to the neck (nor a plunging back in sight); and middle-aged character actor John Litel as beau in this remake where she’s a cash-strapped mom in a little MidWest town.  An early credit for director John Farrow (Mia’s heavy drinking dad), Francis’s young widow sees three of her four kids move in with her disapproving sister-in-law, with only young son Dickie Moore sticking.  (An enchanting little boy, he calls her ‘Sweetheart’ and bats the thickest eyelashes seen on screen before young Liz Taylor came along.)  The story probably played better in 1930 as COURAGE (now lost), but without a Depression background it’s all a bit ridiculous, and more than a bit convenient dramatically.  (Litel as bank manager has long loved her and plays deus ex machina.  Problems solved.)   Friend Carole Lombard gave Francis an A-list lifeline with a co-starring assignment away from Warners, but nothing seemed to take.*  And Kay, only 33 here, faded out by the mid-'40s.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Here’s that Lombard film with Francis playing bad wife to Cary Grant: IN NAME ONLY/’39.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/08/in-name-only-1939.html   OR: Francis with William Powell in ONE WAY PASSAGE/’32, her best at Warners.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/02/one-way-passage-1932.html

WENDELL & WILD (2022)

Stop-motion animator Henry Selick (THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS/’93; JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH/’96), never a ‘less-is-more’ adherent, has rarely been as unnecessarily over-active as in this collaboration with Jordan Peele.  Off the big screen since CORALINE/’09 (technically still off since this is NetFlix), his visual stockpile may have gotten the better of him.  Or perhaps turning 70 led him to put it all up when he had the chance.  Not a bad thing, if story & characters profit by it.  But this traumatically dark tale of an orphan girl, blaming herself for her parents’ death (she's not half wrong), distresses when it wants to bring catharsis.  Sent to a Catholic Academy with other tossed-aside kids, ‘Kat’ sells her soul to a couple of wiseguy demons (Peele & Keegan–Michael Key) addicted to their master’s haircream, a product that also revives the dead.  At least, for a spell; long enough till our remarkably unlikable protagonist learns to accept . . .  (Now, you're ahead of me.)  On the plus side, James Hong, pushing 90, does a super job as Father Bests, also back from the dead; and a Hispanic sidekick named Raul (shouldn’t it be Raoul?), voiced by debuting Sam Selaya is great, the best developed character in here.  But too much feels either calculated (a push for racial diversity) or rushed (NetFlix holding to a Hallowe’en release deadline?).  The film is often fun to watch (worth it for technique & design alone), but a disappointment for Selick with only five features in 30 years.

DOUBLE-BILL:  In addition to the three well-known titles mentioned above, Selick’s live-action mix MONKEYBONE/’01 always goes missing.  Worth a look?  Write in and let us know.

NO SAD SONGS FOR ME (1950)

Back in 1939, Bette Davis died bravely of ‘Prognosis Negative’ in DARK VICTORY.  Now, a decade later, Margaret Sullavan, returning to the screen one last time after seven years off, was allowed to bravely say the forbidden word: ‘cancer.’  (Note self-congratulatory poster above.)  Though not naming anything more specific about what would carry her off in a few months, Doctor John McIntire also gets to mention the disease . . . once, and that’s it.  Progress!  In this relatively sobersided ‘Women’s Weepie,’ set in the sort of ‘50s suburban housing development you’d soon find on dozens of tv sit-coms, lackluster Wendell Corey is the busy husband, always off on a job while Sullavan wastes away.  Worse, he’s just hired attractive female assistant Viveca Lindfors.  A threatening triangulation turned opportunity/continuity for Sullavan who bypasses jealousy for matchmaking.  A perfect replacement for a soon-to-be grieving widower and a step-mom to daughter Natalie Wood.  (Excellent as always in her child star days.)  It all should make for a sticky piece of maudlin sentimentality, but director Rudolph Maté, just off D.O.A./’49, must have noticed the bizarrely similar story trajectories in two incompatible genres: Mortality calling in film noir and Women’s Weepie.  To their credit, both films honestly modest in their totally different ways.  And if Edmund O’Brien sweats his way thru the noir conventions of D.O.A., here Sullavan, looking decidedly worn since last seen, and done with the movies at only 41, yet finds under cinematographer Joseph Walker’s gentle care, a way to grow luminescent as the film goes on and she starts to lose the battle.  In her last scenes, reviving a sort of fragile beauty thru sheer will, acting and careful lighting.*

SCEWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Ingrid Bergman was the champ at growing more beautiful the sicker she got.  See GASLIGHT/’44, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY/’45 and NOTORIOUS/’44.

DOUBLE-BILL: Robert Donat , who had real health issues to work thru, brought unusual intelligence, acceptance & underplaying on a male iteration of ‘Women’s Weepie’ mortality tropes in LEASE OF LIFE/’54.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/lease-of-life-1954.html

THE DAMNED / LA CADUTA DEGLI DEL (1969)

Though few would now put this in the top half of Luchino Visconti’s output (tenth out of his thirteen features?), it was by some distance the most commercially successful on release.  Sex & Nazis, violence, nudity & perversion never a drag at the art-house box-office.*  And, famous titled Italian Communist that he was, it’s easy to see Visconti’s attraction to the subject matter in his own brief flirtation with Nazis in the mid-‘30s.  Less ideology than æsthetics, all those handsome Blonde Vikings in black & white uniforms with a blood-red accent.  (A look still drawing them in.)  Later, Visconti would come within a day of execution as part of the Italian Communist resistance.  If only similar character complication found its way in here.  Instead, it’s largely family dynasty drama, inspired by the real-life Krupps, as a couple of generations fight over who controls the metal foundries needed to weaponize the German Reich.  Interloper Dirk Bogarde is murdering his way up the ranks to a tune called by his lover, eldest family daughter Ingrid Thulin.  Visconti casts Helmut Berger (his exquisitely handsome partner at the time) as her perverse son, a charming psychopath who ‘reads’ gay, dresses a la Marlene Dietrich, but ravishes a young niece, a lower-class bottle blonde and eventually Mom herself.  Yikes!  The lad always around to pick up any family droppings as he morphs into an S.S. officer while various Nazi divisions begin taking over state & industry.   Meantime, Visconti takes subversive pleasure in the orgy/murder known as The Night of Long Knives where the ‘Brownshirts’ (portrayed here as a big gay orgy club) get mown down by leather-clad SS.  Handled in a manner unique in Visconti's films, with wildly roving cameras catching the action in hit & miss fashion.   The whole film inferring that the decadent elite brought about Hitler’s rise when it was really more the beer-stein mob rather than champagne flute sippers who voted them in.  And THE DAMNED winds up a sort of pastiche HAMLET: Berger’s Prince; Thulin’s Gertrude;  Bogarde’s Claudius; working thru a family dynamic Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes would recognize.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: One odd moment finds composer Maurice Jarre grabbing what sounds like a leftover music cue from his own DOCTOR ZHIVAGO when Berger ‘scores’ with Mom in bed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Homosexuality still officially (indeed legally) referred to in medical & psychological texts as a perversion in 1970. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Visconti’s other two with Berger are LUDWIG/’73 which is a crashing bore and the much maligned CONVERSATION PIECE/’74, a connoisseur’s piece but, in its own way, pretty special. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/ludwig-1972.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/gruppo-di-famiglia-in-un-interno.html