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.  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.