LA GRANJA / THE FARM (2015)

Exceptional, if exceptionally depressing cross-section of Puerto Rican Lower-Depths, told thru multiple stories put together like an interlocked wooden puzzle to form an ensemble portrait of have-not society.  Puerto Rican born writer/director Angel Manuel Soto, whose fast rise took a hit after the poorly received BLUE BEETLE/’23 (not seen here)*, proves just the guy to handle the mobile structure and difficult subject matter.  A barren hospital midwife, working intensive natal care, takes desperate action to ‘save’ an infant for herself.  A promising young boxer and his elderly trainer, picking up small change in the same ring used for lucrative cockfights.  The boy encouraged to bring the same cutthroat tactics to his fights as the killer roosters.  Highschoolers negotiating sex-for-drugs meet-ups, while the cool kids flirt, gossip, put out for the physically attractive and mete out rough justice for those trying to break in to their cliques.  The unlikely sympathetic loner, a bullied fat kid (‘Piggy’) who spies on his sister having sex, steals the camera the boyfriend used to photograph them in action, reads books (!), and swallows condoms of drugs to cart past police check points as a bike riding ‘mule.’  Pretty much everyone dancing to the tune of the aging, but ruthless smalltime neighborhood crime boss.  Soto’s direction, plainspoken, but not without style, perfect for his purpose; emotionally gripping yet letting action speak for itself.  A film natural.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  We’re not so far from Luis Buñuel’s early Mexican post-Neo-Realist masterpiece LOS OLVIDADOS/’50.  Just don’t go looking for any surrealism,    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/03/los-olvidados-aka-forgotten-ones-young.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Soto apparently back in good graces with the just released/well reviewed buddy/buddy action comedy THE WRECKING CREW/’26.  (not seen here)

FOLLOWING (1998)

Writer/director Christopher Nolan never went to film school, but you’d never guess from this zero-budget feature which looks, talks & acts like a graduation project from the smartest kid in class.  A beginner’s film noir pastiche, it might be afterglow off the ‘80s Neo-Noir revival.  (Perhaps unnoticed because the over-saturated color & formal set-ups of those films gets replaced by mournful monochrome & handheld jitters.)  Jeremy Theobald is physically right as a failing young writer filling his days aimlessly following strangers, hoping to find a story.  Instead, one finds him.  Alex Haw, as a deceptive fellow who just may be following him. Or does he want to get caught in one his burglaries, swiping sellable goods from apartments when he hopes no one is home.  Soon, these two are partners in trade and romance.  You thought Nolan would leave out the classic femme fatale (Lucy Russell)?  But who has the upper hand?  Who’s leading whom?  What’s being staged for effect and who’s being set up to take the fall from the small fortune in cash hidden in an office safe?  Nolan giving this story his preferred non-linear timeline treatment; counting on that approach to add depth, complexity and a puzzling vibe.  (Succeeding at only one of the three.)  Something that’s proved to be an Achilles Heel in about half of Nolan's subsequent films. 

DOUBLE-BILL:  A very short double-bill: Nolan’s apprentice short DOODLEBUG/’97 (it’s included on the Criterion edition of FOLLOWING), playing like some TWILIGHT ZONE episode (or is it ONE STEP BEYOND?), but reduced down to its essence at less than three minutes.  (The disc also holds an alternate ‘Linear Cut’ of FOLLOWING - not seen here,)

FLESH AND BLOOD (1922)

Typical Lon Chaney vehicle from 1922; ten films that year, moving him up from support to top-billed.  (Mostly, naturally his Fagin in OLIVER TWIST puts him below child phenom Jackie Coogan’s Oliver.}  This one something of a template for much of Chaney’s career: Wronged years ago by some powerful man, he nurses a grudge before returning in disguise for his chance at revenge.*  Here, framed by a wealthy businessman via forged signatures, he finaly breaks out of prison after hearing of his wife’s serious illness . . . too late!  He watches from afar as her coffin is carried out of a tenement apartment before spotting his daughter, now a young woman who has no memory of him.  Complications?  ONE: the entire police force on the hunt for the escaped prisoner, so he’s forced to hide in plain sight disguised as a twisted cripple, sheltered by Chinatown Tong Lord Li Fang (Noah Beery!) while hunting down the true guilty party, that businessman.  Complication TWO: his daughter is about to be engaged to the son of that very man, the villain Chaney plans to take down.  Yikes!  Alas, three major obstacles hold the film down.  ONE: Chaney’s oddly ineffective disguise as a cripple with twisted legs and crutches.  (Likely more uncomfortable for Lon to play than for us to watch.)  TWO: Irving Cummings’ duller than dull direction.  (Cummings peaked in the ‘40s with light fare at 20th/Fox.)  And THREE: sadly subfusc surviving picture elements.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Chaney was one of the fortunate few who went to M-G-M and was paired with a series of truly outstanding, visually oriented directors..   Tod Browning, George W. Hill, Benjamin Christensen, Herbert Brenon (far better in silents than in Talkies) and Victor Seastrom whose HE WHO GETS SLAPPED/’24 (co-starring Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Tully Marshall) is a paradigm of the standard Chaney narrative formula.

DER TIGER / THE TANK (2025)

DAS BOOT in a TANK.  At least, that’s the idea till the last reel takes a couple of sharp right turns in a double epilogue.  Your reaction to them (it’s a big ask!) sure to determine your response to this generally excellent German POV WWII film.  Co-writer/director Dennis Gansel, with numerous episodes of tv’s BOOT behind him, an obvious choice (and a good one) to helm as we tag along with the five-man crew of a German ‘Tiger’ tank.  Theirs the last vehicle to make it out of Stalingrad in the 1943 retreat. And now the first sent back in.  The mission?  Retrieve a Lieutenant Colonel along with his notebook of codes, plans and final goals covering the next phase of the war.  Orders being orders (and Germans being Germans), the men mount up with only minor grumbling, driving their tank thru corpse-filled battlefields and blasted village remains.  At one point, hiding from enemy tanks underwater in their submergible tank.  (Now we’re really redoing DAS BOOT.)  Believably handled and often suspenseful (land mines; engine start-ups; fuel shortages; partisans), at least we’re spared the true deafening noise levels inside those metal echo chambers.  (Thanks tech people!)  They also keep things as apolitical as possible so we can root for our crew; saving Nazi atrocities for soldiers met along the way.  (A cheat and a cliché that’s been standard procedure for decades of largely sympathetic German-made WWII films.  Non-German ones, too.)  Well staged and acted, without blowing the budget on CGI overkill.  But just when we reach our destination, after sacrifice and loss to man and machine, the storyline shifts into something out of HEART OF DARKNESS before spinning again into one of those cop-out endings so popular back in UFA silent cinema days.  See Lang, Murnau, Weine.

DOUBLE-BILL:  DAS BOOT/’81, go for the 209" ;director’s cut.

SORORITY HOUSE (1939)

Cat fights.  ‘Perverse’ sexual sub-text.  Quid pro quo professors.  What else to expect with that title?  Shame on you!  Turns out this deceptively sharp R.K.O. programmer uses it’s one-hour running time to find interesting angles on the high expectations and social adjustments made when a 1930s small-town middle-class co-ed (only child of a widowed grocer) heads off to a well-heeled Liberal Arts college that lives & dies by ‘Greek’ Society.  Get ‘rushed’ by the right house and you’re a made gal; social & love connections present and accounted for.  Who says college isn’t worth the money?  Pretty Anne Shirley’s the down-to-earth freshman who meets-cute with top-dog senior James Ellison (a dead ringer for Christopher Reeve in build & profile).  He ‘helps’ her by spreading lies about a family fortune; she wins his heart by being sincere & unspoiled.  But it’s the customs & campus rituals of the time: the parties; the jackets & ties/the salon attire; the serenading frat boys & groveling pledges, the cutthroat ‘Greek’ rivalries that might be from another planet that sting.  And not as exaggerated as you might suppose.  Nothing startling, just that everything’s a little better than you expect.  And why not with Dalton Trumbo scripting from Mary Chase’s short story (Trumbo tacking on a little political speech for Dad after his daughter apologizes for excluding him from a fancy party); future noir master Nicholas Musuraca even on this workaday lensing assignment; director John Farrow (Mia’s dad) maintaining pace without pressure.  And, as a bonus, a rare chance for a remarkable Barbara Reed to show her stuff as a sophomore who knows she’s neither wealthy nor pretty enough to ever get a pledge.  (The pretty ones useful as bait to bring in trust-fund legacy boys.)  One of those little pics that thrive by being overlooked by studio execs, happy it came in under budget, ready to go on as a second-feature in big city second-runs and first-runs in the ‘sticks.’

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  Look for classic character actress Elisabeth Risdon in particularly good form as a snobby aunt who pushes her niece so hard it leads to a suicide attempt.  One of many moments in here that let you know R.K.O. was hoping to turn this into something closer to their big hit of 1937, STAGE DOOR.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/07/stage-door-1937.html

MEL BROOKS: THE 99 YEAR OLD MAN! (2026)

From Judd Apatow, a fawning two-part documentary on iconoclastic funny man Mel Brooks; his rise from hardscrabble Bkln boyhood to WWII army service, then comedy sketch writer for tv’s Sid Caesar, ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ LPs with BFF Carl Reiner, near idyllic marriage to Anne Bancroft (Beauty and the Boychik); the great (and not so great) series of comedy films as writer/director/star (along with straight stuff he only produced). Then a dry patch followed by career resurrection on B’way with smash musical adaptation of his first film THE PRODUCERS; and lastly, baggy pants éminence grise pushing 100.  The film no more than an elegant cut & paste clip job, with interspersed interviews from collaborators (that’s where most of the fawning comes in).  Fine & informative, just be aware there’s nearly four hours of it.  Nice to see underrated titles like THE TWELVE CHAIRS/’70 and HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART ONE/’81 (his most ‘serious’ work) given attention.*  Though it’s a bit cheeky of Mel to go on about being the first to take down Hitler with laughs when Ernst Lubitsch did it four decades before him, while we were still at war, in a film Brooks himself remade!  TO BE OR NOT TO BE/’42; ;83.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Some Brooks titles have improved with age, but YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN/’74 still tops.  Best directed too, thanks to its physical attachment to the James Whale original.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/02/young-frankenstein-1974.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of archival material that let you compare & contrast interviewers.  Who is that British gal who doesn’t let her guests get a word in edgewise.  Yikes!  Mike Douglas gently riding roughshod as needed.  Dinah Shore babbling away.  Tom Snyder pronouncing judgement.  Fun!

VOLCANO (1997)

Hoping to ‘fan-boy’ up film coverage readership with genre savvy writers, ever longer reviews on marquee titles, and recurring beyond-the-algorithm lists covering Horror, Foreign, Action, the New York Times recently added participatory fluff like Good-Bad films.  That’s where we found this unlikely/unloved ‘90s disaster flop getting the Gen X nostalgia treatment.  Easily confused with Guilty Pleasure pics (laugh with it) or films ‘so bad they’re good’ (laugh at it), whatever your definition (perfect analogy: Tex-Mex Frito Pie), this ain’t it; not so much Good or Bad, but Generic.  It’s also, as disaster pics go, more ‘70s (naturally caused like EARTHQUAKE*) than ‘90s (a threat from Outer Space).  Journeyman director Mick Jackson fails to class up the form (presumably what made middlebrow movie execs buy into the project), and no one involved has (or will admit to) the Junk Food æsthetic needed.  Tasteful trash won’t cut it.  City Commissioner Tommy Lee Jones crinkles his way thru the crisis while chilly co-star Anne Heche tags bravely along as chief geologist after losing her assistant in a gassy crevasse.*  With kids and puppies to wander into trouble; middle-aged White martyrs saving minorities; a big Black baddass, ‘cuffed by a White racist cop but still turning lava away from an endangered neighborhood.  One plus comes from seeing a late example of pre-CGI ordnance and Don Cheadle, as Tommy Lee’s deputy at Command Central, coax a few laughs while trying to wheedle his way onto the field.  But it’s all pretty dull.  How could they set the stage for catastrophe at La Brea Tar Pits and not have some dinosaur spew out with the lava is beyond me.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Not a Good/Bad film nor a Bad/Good film, EARTHQUAKE/'74 is a Bad/Bad film.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/10/earthquake-1974.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The last screen blonde this chilly was Victoria Tennant, directed in L.A. STORY/’91 by none other than Mick Jackson.

MAZURKA (1935)

After choosing Hitler over Hollywood as the lesser of two evils (at least for getting a film made), G.B. Pabst found himself the most acclaimed filmmaker in mid-‘30s Nazi Germany, but not the most popular. That would have been Willi Forst after the one-two punch of MASKERADE/’34 and MAZURKA, rare international successes out of the Reich, using his patented mix of romance, melodrama and music.  (Both films quickly/faithfully remade by Hollywood.*)  MAZURKA stars silent film diva Pola Negri as a rising young operatic soprano wined, wooed and wrangled into bed by Albrecht Schoenhals’s womanizing piano virtuoso.  A sorry tale reluctantly told in flashback twenty years after the fact by a sadder-but-wiser Negri, on trial for his murder.  Now a Music Hall chanteuse she recognized her seducer starting the same routine with a young woman, a fresh young thing just about the age the daughter she gave up all those years ago would now be.  Yikes!  Where’s Douglas Sirk when you need him?  Technically a bit rough around the edges, Forst likes tricky editing and optical printer tricks the German film industry couldn’t handle as smoothly as Hollywood did at the time. (A recent restoration may iron out some of these faults.)  Negri, thicker than she was in her heyday, but still a powerhouse, and surprisingly non-demonstrative/modern in her acting choices, leagues ahead of the acting going on around her.  The film largely holding up right thru its secret mother/grateful daughter renunciation scene.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Over at M-G-M, MASKERADE became ESCAPADE/’35 while MAZURKA landed at Warner Bros. as CONFESSION/’37, probably the best of Kay Francis’s post-Production Code vehicles.  Ironic as Warners stopped German distribution in 1934, the year before MAZURKA was made, after one of their reps was attacked in the street for Jewish connections.  Even more ironic, CONFESSION was directed by German/UFA emigré Joe May.  Off the record, I prefer it.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/confession-1937.html

A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO / AI NO SHINSEKAI (1994)

Blur-free nudity (a first in mainstream Japanese film fare*) was the commercial come-on for this largely giddy look at a sex workers boutique, the ‘girls’ waiting for the next order to phone in at their small Tokyo office.  A plump, jovial  office manager handles appointments and makes sure special requests are honored (the right girl for the right job), billing rates set in advance and assignation locations cleared.  The small staff (six young women/one young man) on hand (or on-call) to fill any & all requests.  We largely stick with two of the girls: Dominatrix Sawa Suzuki (treating her work like acting opportunities; whipping, piercing, turning her clients into literal bootlickers), while less kinky call-girl Reiko Kataoka sticks to the basics.  Meet-ups so frank (bouncy fucks or rock-‘em/sock-'em pain-for-pleasure fetish), it plays with a comic edge.  Advertent?  Or are we just self-distancing?  Elsewise, personal life filters in (love & marriage), climaxing in a theatrical orgasm, a play put on by an amateur company the staff has joined, supported by the mob who also seem to work as protectors.  The show an all hands on deck production; immediately followed by a swingin’ first-night/backstage cast party.  With a script co-written by famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki (his full-frontal nude shots pop up thru the film), and pacey, colorful direction from the prolific Banmei Takahashi, the film leaves no pornographic aftertaste.  Indeed, no aftertaste of any kind,

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *No blurring for the men, either, but none needed as they remain discretely covered by fundoshi, traditional Japanese male underwear.