DEPARTMENT Q: THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES / KVINDEN I BURET (2013)

Cleanly-handled Cold Case procedural from Denmark plays like a pilot for a series.  And so it is; just not for Denmark.  Someone (Dick Wolf?  NetFlix?) out soon with the inevitable Stateside reboot; no doubt hoping for more episodes than the four fat-free films made a decade back.  The first two  directed by Mikkel Nørgaard, who certainly has range (see KLOWN and BORGEN) and a knack for straddling tv & features.*   A prologue shows detective Nikolaj Lie Kaasmade jumping the gun on his last case and now finding himself in recovery; if back on the job, but out of homicide, demoted downstairs to process rather than investigate low-priority/unsolved murder cases.  Aided by low-ranked assistant Fares Fares, they single out a Cold Case worth reinvestigating and soon find it's considerably warmer than expected.  A rare kick these days to be able to follow a plot that adds up.  So unlike today's typical over-stuffed crime shows that need to stretch out every ambiguous moment to fill a contractual eight episodes.  Seeing these two guys getting into trouble breaking rules and protocol in the name of fighting for delayed justice surprisingly satisfying.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Three more films by almost the same team followed (not seen here, all based on novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen; ABSENT ONE/’14; CONSPIRACY OF FAITH/’16; JOURNAL 64/’18) in presumably similar style.  OR: *Something completely different from Nørgaard in the rudely comic KLOWN/’10.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/06/klovn-klown-2010.html

PADDINGTON IN PERU (2024)

After major huzzahs for PADDINGTONs I and II (orphaned CGI bear finds his name at a London railway station and a loving new family nearby), a drop in quality was only to be expected.  And so it proved with PERU.  The verdict: pleasant, but no match.  But hold on.  Once past a Peruvian prologue and a slapsticky first act that’s more MR. BEAN than MR. BEAR, the film finds its footing when Paddington brings his human family down to Peru where a beloved Aunt has taken ill.  Or so he was told.  Turns out she’s not taken ill, she’s taken off!  Part of a dastardly plot to find the fabled Lost City (and gold) of El Dorado.  Now we’ve found the right path: devious plot by phony Nun, secret goals, villains in disguise/heroes in disguise, and a dangerous journey that nods at RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK/’81  (Only LAST CRUSADE/’89, third in that series, makes for a better INDY sequel than this.  Steven Spielberg pea green with envy.)  Plenty clever, plenty fun, and with a neat touch of suspenseful sentiment for the wrap.)  With most of the original players (the kids touchingly ten years grown), plus some new South American players, including a gamely deranged Antonio Banderas.  Is the film as good as PADDINGTON 2?  No.  But it’s good enough!  And boasting a great last minute cameo appearance by PADDINGTON 2 secret weapon Hugh Grant.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  PADDINGTON 1 & 2.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/08/paddington-2014.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/paddington-2.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Considering how important marmalade is to Paddington, the writers ought to know they’ve got the wrong variety of oranges for a serious marmalade.  You want bitter fruit for marmalade.  Plus a shot of Scotch Whiskey.

THE BRUTALIST (2024)

Nowadays, the bench for budding film auteurs, the ones born with celluloid in their veins, is deep.  And fresh off the bench Brady Corbet reminds me of one who got called up decades ago, Paul Thomas Anderson.  The two sharing a preference for character & theme over narrative; and in taking the long view on composition & pacing.  (In spite of a 3'34" running time, Corbet keeps BRUTALIST from feeling long by doing what Anderson would, refusing to push.)  Less happily, they also share a big fault in not being able to wrap things up properly.  (Corbet’s first two films not seen here, so take this with a grain of salt.)  This intimate epic certainly comes on strong (though putting intermission dead-center in the running time a serious unforced error), its Agony and Ecstasy story following a traditional path with genius artist receiving the commission of a lifetime but running up against Mr. Needy Benefactor; an antagonist who thinks since he’s picking up the check, he owns it; lock, stock & conception.  But rather than Michelangelo & Pope Julius II, we have WWII Hungarian Holocaust survivor Adrien Brody (exceptional, as is the whole cast), a Bauhaus-trained architect who's at first misunderstood by eventual patron Guy Pearce, fierce & unknowingly funny behind scare tactics.  Jumping from micro to macro-projects, he’s hired & fired & hired & fired creating Pearce’s mother-love tribute in the form of an art/community/religious complex on the rolling hills of Pearce Family Property.  (Imagine Lincoln Center plopped down not far from Levittown.)  But Part 2 messes up the situations with post-war refugees (invalid wife of dubious affections); financial realities, rich man’s whims, and a trip to Italy for marble.  The last, with echoes of Bertolucci & Visconti throbbing away, the best thing in the second half.  Mysterious, and making sense of the weird sexual undercurrents running thru every character.  Possible threesomes, incestuous glances, closeted longings, and an obsession (from Corbet?) with breaking the norms of personal space in one-on-one conversations.  You’d think these people were all actors!  Then a rushed ending and hard to read coda that Paul Thomas Anderson might perhaps be able to explain to us.  Stumbles and all, an impressive piece of work at the price: Ten Mill!  A remarkable shaming of regular major studio practices.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  See where a lot of this comes from in two surpassingly silly, weirdly entertaining major disappointments of their day: Carol Reed’s THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY/’65 and King Vidor’s nutso version of Ayn Rand’s nutso THE FOUNTAINHEAD/’46.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/agony-and-ecstasy-1965.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/09/fountainhead-1949.html

NOSFERATU (2024)

After three strikingly original feature films (supernatural, Gothically grim, darkly horrific), writer/director Robert Eggers had his big commercial breakthru with this strikingly less original film.  Indeed, the material (DRACULA by way of F.W. Murnau’s famously litigated theft, NOSFERATU/’22) about as chewed over as it gets.  Eggers makes a go of it, largely thru the film’s look (models, mattes, diffused color, practical effects), with playfully crepuscular backgrounds that might have been a puppet theater collaboration between Edward Gorey & Caspar David Friedrich.  And, of course, many a nod toward the Murnau original, even more at his staggeringly fine FAUST/26.*  (Check out the hand shadow covering the overhead/canted-angle town-scape.)  Eggers less assured on his cast: leading lady Lily-Rose Depp’s sacrificial Wagnerian damsel and Bill Skarsgärd’s demon both vocally undermined.  Depp’s fearless physicality done in by underdeveloped vocal delivery; Skarsgärd’s voice lost to echo-chamber gargling.  Elsewise, it’s hit or miss, with Nicholas Hoult physically apt, but holding to a modern American posture while Willem Dafoe seems to have lost two inches from his usual 5'7" frame.  Eggers doesn’t make enough of the ship’s decimation, the voyage of rats, plague & a loaded coffin unable to match Murnau.  So he amps up the gross & the gory as substitute for shock & awe.  This fright-free film bodes ill for Eggers’ next announced films: a sequel to Jim Henson’s underwhelming cult fave, LABYRINTH, and yet another WERWULF.  Two ideas that spent decades in development hell under executive committees.  In other words: Product.  Diminishing returns from this unique talent all but assured.

DOUBE-BILL/LINK:  *Tim Burton’s SWEENEY TODD/’07 probably the last live-action film to bring off this look.  But he used CGI sweetening not seen here.  Murnau’s FAUST a likely guide for both.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/11/faust-1926.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Bram Stoker, author of the original epistolary novel DRACULA, was also famous for being valet/dresser to Victorian acting great Sir Henry Irving, first actor to be Knighted and thought to be a partial model for Dracula.  Why no one has tried to make DRACULA a backstager (Sir Henry as vampire/Stoker as Renfield) beyond me.

MIRROR / ZERKALO (1975)

After making the two best Russian films of his generation (IVAN’S CHILDHOOD/’62; ANDREI RUBLEV/’66) , Andrei Tarkovsky’s gaze turned aggressively inward with films that asked not to be watched, but studied.*  With a mere five films before his early death twenty years after RUBLEV, this, second of the five, came right after his one popular title, SOLARIS/’72, ironically a success in the wake of Kubick’s 2001/’68.  (Ironic as Tarkovsky no Kubrick fancier.)   A poetic look back at themes from his youth (not visually poetic, literally poetic, as in they're read to us), it’s less memory piece than memorabilia: newsreel clips, recreated housing and well-worn foot-paths, covered with high-toned classical music (Bach & Purcell) and Da Vinci prints for borrowed gravitas; family sickness and abandonment the main concerns.  There’s quite a cult for these later Tarkovsky films, but the precipitous drop from a shared vision to hermitic interior view is antithetical to a medium that runs at a set speed.  Yes, we can now pause and rewind from the comfort of our sofa, but it still goes against the nature of the medium.  At least this runs under two hours.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  As mentioned, IVAN’S CHILDHOOD, one of the greatest of all film debuts, along with his masterpiece ANDREI RUBLEV.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/ivanovo-detstvo-ivans-childhood-1962.html   OR:  While the sensibilities are different, Hungarian Béla Tarr pulls off much of what Tarkovsky tried for.  See: WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES/’00 and THE TURIN HORSE/’11.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-torinoi-lo-turin-horse-2011.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Stretching to make a point: imagine Robert Altman, after MCCABE & MRS. MILLER/’71 and THE LONG GOODBYE/’73 turning to 3 WOMEN/’77 and QUINTET/’79.  Oh wait, that’s just what he did.

JOHNNY COOL (1963)

Between BEACH PARTY/’63 and MUSCLE BEACH PARTY/’64 (tv’s BEWITCHED with wife Elizabeth Montgomery came next), journeyman director William Asher tried something ‘serious’ to laughable effect with this mafioso crime drama.  Produced by Peter Lawford post-Rat Pack exile (retribution after Lawford’s Kennedy in-laws snubbed Sinatra), he still managed to bag Sammy Davis Jr. & Joey Bishop in roles while Jack Palance stand-in Henry Silva stars as a grown-up Sicilian WWII partisan (speaking Italian rather than Sicilian dialect in the prologue) who’s tricked into coming to America to take out the mob men who informed on Johnny Colini.  Taking the same name, Silva’s tagged ‘Johnny Cool’ and starts crossing names off his list between trysts with an unbecomingly brunette Montgomery.*  The departed include Telly Savalas, John McGiver, Mort Sahl (!), even Jim Backus, who gives us a taste of Mr. Magoo before dying.  (Judging by the haphazard cutting within scenes, I fear the film's editor may also have been  dispatched.)  The mob and the law will catch up with Silva’s Cool, but not before Sammy sings the title track and takes off his eye patch.  That’s a surprise!  Another is seeing how seriously everyone takes this junk and that, in its way, it’s a fun, dumb watch.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Babyboomers of all genders & sexual persuasions knew their fantasies had matured when they graduated from blonde Elizabeth Montgomery in BEWITCHED to Diana Rigg in THE AVENGERS.

THE UNHOLY GARDEN (1931)

While eventually bristling under his contract to Goldwyn (10 years, crossing the Silent-to-Sound transition), Ronald Colman did fairly well by it; just not on this notorious flop.  Or so commercial & critical consensus would have it, then and now.  Why bother to have a fresh look?  Turns out, it’s a delightfully silly charade of comic-romance and adventure.  Zippy for 1931, too, with director George Fitzmaurice continuing in the spirit of visually juiced optics Colman had received since his remarkable Talkie debut in F. Richard Jones’s BULLDOG DRUMMOND/’29.*  Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur share writing credit, but it’s really all Hecht, goading himself with a personal challenge to write an entire ‘original’ screenplay in a day!  John Lee Mahin, whom he was mentoring surely did a polish.  (Hecht had done much the same race with the clock on the quickly written mystery novel, THE FLORENTINE DAGGER in 1923.)  Goldwyn supplied a strong cast (Tully Marshall, Fray Wray, Warren Hymer, Mischa Auer, Lucille La Verne) and below-the-line, George Barnes to lens, Alfred Newman for music cues & Richard Day on art direction.*  Colman’s a gentleman crook, hiding from international authorities, along with a motley group of cutthroats & thieves, at some desert hideaway run by La Verne.  Tully Marshall’s a blind embezzler, hoping to set up daughter Fay Wray with his well-hidden loot.  Colman proposes to his fellow crooks that he’s the guy who can get the info by ‘making love’ to Wray; but he’s really out to divide and conquer.  Only problem, he falls for the dame and just might do the honorable thing.  (Cue wistful renunciation.)  But not before he beats the crap out of the loose broad who's out to grab him and the reward for his capture.  (What?!  So ungentlemanly!  Hope there’s an explanation.)  Why no one’s noticed what a fun put-on this is beyond me.  In many ways, it’s a genre goof like BEAT THE DEVIL/'53, also a major flop before catching on years later.  This one never acquired a cult, but can be seen all over the internet in lousy dupes for free.  Here’s’s the best of a bad lot.  https://archive.org/details/the-unholy-garden-1931-1

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *When Darryl F. Zanuck put 20th/Fox together, he poached Day & Newman.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The little-known F. Richard Jones died young after DRUMMOND.  OR: As mentioned, BEAT THE DEVIL.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/bulldog-drummond-1929-bulldog-drummond.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/beat-devil-1953.html

KOMPROMAT (2022)

The title refers to the Russian practice of forging damaging evidence to either blackmail or secure convictions on falsely accused enemies.  Here, it’s aimed at the new Director of the French/Russian Alliance in Irkutst.  (You know, like the RISK board-game territory.)  It ought to be a natural for a thriller about the French Alliance Chairman finding himself trapped in a Kafkaesque diplomatic nightmare, his conviction a fait accompli and escape the only option.  The problem is co-writer/director Jérôme Salle making nothing but false moves at every story beat to get to the next narrative staging area.  And while it’s hardly unusual to find a film asking us to swallow something unlikely to get the ball rolling, or find a way out of a narrative jam, KOMPROMAT is ludicrous right from the start and stays that way.  Just take the opening, a festive gala at the Alliance auditorium to celebrate his appointment in Irkutst.  Who wouldn’t begin the evening for these overdressed political hacks with anything but an R-Rated homosexual pas de screw for a near nude, writhing couple?  Just be sure your estranged wife brings your 6-yr-old daughter to see it, along with the aghast ultra-conservative locals.  French cultural arrogance?  Or entitled cluelessness?  Our director is soon charged with transparently false claims of distributing internet child porn and sexual abuse of his daughter.  (Hey, she fell asleep and left before the erotic dance started.)  But the real agenda is to expose a putative spy network.  Gilles Lellouche, who plays the blinkered cultural leader brings a Liam Neesom vibe to his role, but his actions are so consistently brain-dead, this quickly wears off.  As in: getting a ride to an escape point near the border from the blonde translator who’s decided to help you (for unknown reasons)?  Don’t forget to hang around in the car to strip and have passionate, steamy sex before you start your escape.  So French.  Grabbing a ride back to Moscow to try for ‘safety’ at the French Embassy?  No problem, you’re sure to get a ride with a worldly pastor who’ll hide you in his car trunk and yell at the guards who want to have a look.  N'est-ce pas?  Another twenty plot turns go like that.  And when that’s not enough,  Lellouche is sure to be on his cell phone so the wicked FSB (sort of like the old KGB) can track his position.  And the film’s handsome production (great location shots of fierce roads thru forests), only make it all worse.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  But imagine the possibilities of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau fumbling his way to freedom with this script.  It’d be worth it just for the car sex.

SNOW WHITE (1937)

With Disney about to release the latest of their audience-pleasing, taxidermical Live-Action adaptations of beloved animated classics (the one that started it all), a post on the original 1937 beauty.  (Along with Warners’ first properly distributed Talkie, THE SINGING FOOL/’28, SNOW WHITE probably the film seen by more people than any to come out between BIRTH OF A NATION/’15 and GONE WITH THE WIND/’39.)  It recently was trending on social media after the new SNOW WHITE opined on not much caring for it; even finding Prince Charming something of a stalker.  Immediately retracted, and walked back by mortified Disney publicists, the idea that a 13th century fable, as compiled by the Grimm brothers in the early 19th century, wouldn’t line up with 21st century mores & manners apparently too much to take in.  Anyway, stalking?  He’s searching.  And the film’s big hit tune is all about how the princess, having already met and fallen in love, dreams that ‘One Day My Prince Will Come.’  As she tells the Seven Little Men.  A surprisingly up-to-date term for 1937.  (Apparently, the dwarfs 100% CGI in the new version which makes them . . . animation?  Or is it more a photorealistic CGI kind of thing?*)  Enough preamble.  How’s the old film holding up?  Wonderfully, especially when seen in its latest restoration; more dazzling and much sharper than recently.  In addition to the miraculous set pieces (the housecleaning, the marching to & from work, dancing (those organ pipes!), with details you might not have noticed before.  Like the way the air briefly fills with dust when rags are shaken out the window.  Such care!  Not only showing off, but showing a level of pride in the product that’s also a lost art.  (Speaking of lost techniques, note the unique water effects, changed in the next Disney features.)  The film exceptional at displaying what was probably Walt Disney’s best gifts as moviemaker: famously not much of an animator, it was his superb sense of character development and his often ruthless way with story editing.  (Compare the lack of focus & drive to similar story beats in his SLEEPING BEAUTY/’59 when Walt had grown far less involved.)  To nitpick, one song isn’t up to the rest (‘With a Smile and a Song’), but even Adriana Caselotti’s childish coloratura now seems more appropriate.  (Brief personal note: when those rocks fall on the Wicked Queen, this toddler was being quickly hauled out of the theater in sheer terror, but watching the screen over his mother’s shoulder for the next horror.  It’s still a scary pic.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID I:  When the Disney brand was at a low point culturally & commercially in the ‘70s, lots of backlash in how Dopey was treated.  True, the guy’s a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, but look again to see just how much he’s mainstreamed into the group, part of the team and used to the best of his abilities.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID II:  Six years later, in 1943, Rodgers & Hammerstein would get credit for inventing the fully integrated musical in B’way’s OKLAHOMA!, with all songs advancing action or character.  Yet isn’t that what happens in SNOW WHITE?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Before Live-Action remakes and photorealistic CGI animation, those clever Disney monetizers would turn everything into a skating show.  SNOW WHITE ON ICE!!