THE ARENA (1956)

Before prolific tele-scripter Rod Serling discovered he could sidestep network self-censorship by sneaking (mildly) provocative ideas into his work under the guise of fantasy/Sci-Fi in THE TWILIGHT ZONE, he wrote for various prestige anthology shows.  So-called Golden Age TV like this hour-long drama for STUDIO ONE.  (Under Westinghouse sponsorship at the time, most editions retain the awkwardly ‘live’ original commercials; mini tele-plays for new appliances and actress Betty Furness.)  This one, a political drama about a senatorial feud played out on the Senate floor, a fair representation of the Serling model & method.   Just appointed Senator Wendell Corey holds a grudge against his state’s senior U.S. senator (director John Cromwell in a rare actor gig) who had denounced Corey’s corrupt senator father.  Corey’s newly hired advisor, Chester Morris, superb as a wise/wily D.C. operator, knows to play the long game, but on a drunk, blurts out an old damning secret.  Will Corey use the bomb or take the high road.  The same moral dilemma supplies the narrative motor in Gore Vidal’s THE BEST MAN/’64.  (It also shares ARENA director Franklin J. Schaffner.)  Main reason to watch is to check on one-time Hollywood A-lister Morris in a return to form with far better material than Hollywood offered after he’d slipped to programmers.  But the unfortunate main takeaway is seeing how commonplace Serling looks without genre camouflage and metaphoric trimmings.*  Censorship did him a favor.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Past THE TWILIGHT ZONE (try ‘To Serve Man’), Serling’s subcutaneous message technique (including his beloved O’Henry twist endings) is best seen in PLANET OF THE APES/’66 (again with director  Schaffner).  But his best without obfuscating genre elements is SEVEN DAYS IN MAY/’64 under John Frankenheimer, another Golden Age tv director.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/02/seven-days-in-may-1964.html

WORLD WAR III / JANG-E JAHANI SEVOM (2022)

For those who think Romania writer/director Cristian Mungiu (4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS/’07) isn’t tackling enough of his signature Modern Romanian Misérables tales*, here’s Iranian writer/director Houman Seyyedi to the rescue.  If that’s what you’re looking for, he’s damn good at it.  This award-winning downer, a convincingly tricked out nihilistic fable features Mohsen Tanabandeh as a homeless, middle-aged day laborer drifting from town to town after losing wife & child to an earthquake.  Finding temp construction work on a low-budget Holocaust film, he’s roped in (along with other day laborers) as a Concentration Camp extra in gas chamber scenes where he and his faceless building crew get treated a bit too realistically.  There’s a sense of irony run amuck as film production herders rush from shot to shot to keep on schedule.  But Seyyedi has much worse in mind than unsettling cos-play as Tanabandeh’s character inexorably sinks toward disaster: tapped to play Hitler; sleeping in the unheated gas chamber set, forced to double on early call kitchen duty, blackmailed by relatives of the local whore who secretly moves in with him on site.  Luckily, since he can’t read lines, he ‘acts’ by counting up to his next move; dialogue to be looped in later.  But any remaining laughs freeze in your throat as a series of missed communications lead to on-set tragedy and a revenge any Nazi resistence fighter would envy.  The film a bottomless black hole of Misérables’ revenge.  Fascinating, but very bleak.

DOUBL-BILL/LINK:  *Cristian Mungiu used different paths and more complicated character motivation to cover similar territory in GLORY/’16, where no-good-deed-goes-unpunished.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/01/glory-slava-2016.html

THE PAPER TIGERS (2018)

American-born Quoc Bao Tran, with a background in Martial Arts action-editing, made his writing/directing feature debut on this good-natured, if rueful Kung Fu comedy.  Modestly released to even more modest sampling, he’s put out nothing since.  A shame as half of the film has a lot of fun following three one-time Kung Fu prodigies who reunite after 15 years for the funeral of their beloved former master.  All three nearing some sort of mid-life crisis, all three sure they’re still unbeatable, if a bit rusty from age, disuse or injury.  A workout or two should bring it all back.  Yes?  Making fast enemies out of later students now claiming the late master’s legacy, they’re easily goaded into challenge matches only to find clean fights, won or lost, can turn enemies into comrades.  And if these formal grudge matches can’t fix all life problems, flexing the old disciplines still has lessons for them.  Heard this one before?*  But as long as Quoc Bao Tran holds to ‘buddy’ tropes & character comedy, the cast is able to make something out of this ‘curate’s egg’ of a film.  First-among-equals Alain Uy as a divorced dad trying too hard to cover all bases a particular pleasure.  But the script keeps slipping in moral uplift, kidding-on-the-square fortune cookie aphorisms and nods toward the power of positive thinking.  And we’re not even mentioning a final climax against a deadly legacy usurper/villain who’ll be defeated if one of our former prodigies can only ‘feel the force’ once more.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Not seen here, but is this what COBRA KAI/’18 - ‘25 manages  better?

THE GENERAL (1998)

John Boorman’s superb direction on the rise and fall of Dublin gangster Martin Cahill can’t overcome problems in a script by . . . John Boorman.  Outmaneuvering the police in one crime caper after another, Cahill became something of a folk hero after record-breaking heists in the ‘80s.  (Around the same time, ‘Dapper’ John Gotti built similar public appeal in the States simply by being well-dressed where Cahill was slovenly.)  Boorman shows some of the violence & collateral damage, but largely soft-soaps the thuggish aspects of Cahill & Co., working the underdog/Irish darling tropes with stylish WideScreen monochrome (Seamus Deasy lensed) and a shitload of good acting.  Normally, Brendan Gleeson’s broad-stroke Cahill would have blown everyone else off the screen, but he gets a run for his money with the whole cast, especially Police Captain nemesis Jon Voight.  (Forgotten what a great actor he can be?  Not Boorman who directed him in DELIVERANCE/’72 and brought him in as a last-minute replacement.)  So what goes wrong here?*  It starts at the beginning, which is actually the end, with Cahill assassinated.  It sure looks like an IRA thing.  And is there anything audiences are more weary of than the Irish ‘troubles?’  Cahill was more likely an IRA victim.  (Is the answer known?)  In any event, he wouldn't play ball with them.  Perhaps Boorman picked the wrong POV to tell the tale.  Here, the gang who couldn’t shoot straight is the hapless/incompetent Dublin police force.  The bane of Voight’s despairing Javert.  It’s an off-the-beat option that might have refreshed a lot of threadbare story beats.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Well, there’s that misleading title.

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA / CHELOVEK S KINO-APPARATOM (1929)

Experimental Russian film journalist Dziga Vertov (the nom de kino means Spinning Top), was born Denis Kaufman, older brother to cinematographers Mikhail, who shot this, and Boris, who didn’t.*  Other than France’s Jean Vigo, Vertov likely owns the biggest reputation on the smallest body of work in film; basically the hour & change seen here.  But while Vigo an immediate natural behind the camera, Vertov looks like he had to work hard for every shot; plus self-burdened with the goal of creating Cinematic Esperanto for the masses.  He’d been making progressively less objective/more artistically subjective ‘kino reports’ since shortly after the 1917 revolution, but MAN still a stylistic leap.  (Though so many of the films missing or unavailable; who knows?)  Yet the film marks not a beginning but an end for Vertov; only one major project remaining: THREE SONGS OF LENIN/’34.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/three-songs-about-lenin-tri-pesni-o.html)  And he was only 38.  (Another case of Stalin shooting down an artist who was ‘too formalistic?’)  Long available only in shabby prints that didn’t help Vertov’s case, a recent BFI restoration (with a new score from Michael Nyman) brings back visual mischief & luster.  So, in hindsight, Vertov now seems to be one of the pioneers in the new City Portrait films coming into vogue.  Brother Mikhail would make one (IN SPRING) from Kyiv later this year; while 1930 saw Boris shooting Vigo’s cinematic letter from Nice, while the most famous of the lot, PEOPLE ON SUNDAY, from Berlin, involved Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak & Edgar Ulmer.  CAMERA a speed tour of Moscow, celebrating everything from street tramps to nude mud bathers, trolleys to kinemas, parades, delis, fashion and anything electronic that spins.  All handled in clever multiplane action and edited as closely as a pedestrian's swerve to avoid motorcars in crowded streets.  Building toward self-operating animatronic cameras and rapide montage Abel Gance would envy.  The film a marvel, though possibly an empty one.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Vertov obviously closely followed international trends, but it’s still a surprise to see so many Buster Keaton gags.  Buster wildly popular in Moscow at the time.  Look for lifts straight out of SHERLOCK JR./’24 and THE CAMERAMAN/’28.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Boris was already living in Poland at the time and would soon go to France where he shot for Jean Vigo, eventually debuting in the States on Elia Kazan’s ON THE WATERFRONT/’54.

THE IPCRESS FILE (2022)

The insatiable maw of streaming services has recently glommed onto various iconic star-making suspense films of the 1960s & ‘70s.   Movies one might have thought untouchable.  What young British actor (and they’re always Brits) would want to risk their RIPLEY against Alain Delon's in PURPLE NOON/’60?  Compete with Edward Fox’s JACKAL/’73?  Or take on Michael Caine in THE IPCRESS FILE?*  Yet this is the one that sparks on all cylinders, indeed, a big improvement from the Caine/Sidney J. Furie 1965 original.  (Caine great; director Furie a hack.)  For a change, its six episodes never feel padded, scripter John Hodge able to top off the tank entirely from the Len Deighton novel.  With Joe Cole bringing skinny, but steel-tested strength to the film’s making-of-Harry Palmer-spy concept.  (The famous black glass frames slightly thinner than Caine’s.)  The same Cold War setting, now opening with some backstory on how Palmer’s Berlin blackmarket past sent him to jail; and the subsequent spy-in-training deal that got him released.  Turns out, he’s a natural at the game and soon has a major assignment concurrent with a JFK visit to the U.K. while international nuclear scuttlebutt plays out in the plot’s foreground.  (No surprise, the two events merge toward the climax.)  I’d forgotten how much is lifted from THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (published ‘59; film ‘62), but it works just as well here.  Great support from a lesser known cast (only Tom Hollander's spy boss a familiar face*), but all spot on under James Watkins unusually site specific direction.  This IPCRESS a paradigm of a streaming remake.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DB:  The ‘65 IPCRESS worth it for early Caine (those gourmet cans of fish, now quite ‘in’).  So too both RIPLEYs, though René Clément’s PURPLE NOON makes author Patricia Highsmith a moralist, while even a very chilly Andrew Scott as Ripley in the remake is unable to make eight episodes seem necessary.  As for DAY OF THE JACKAL, the Fred Zinnemann original is the one truly great film of the bunch while the Eddie Redmayne rethink thought it a good idea to make him a family man.  Yikes!  (Check ‘em out using our Search Engine.  Upper Left-hand corner on the main site.  E-phone users scroll down to find the Web Version link.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Palmer works for Hollander who runs an MI6 offshoot.  Think SLOW HORSES but staffed with high achievers rather than disgraced also-rans.

THE GRANDMASTER / YI DAI ZONG SHI (2013)

Thanks to Harvey Weinstein, Stateside and Euro audiences for Wong Kar-Wai’s action-charged/poetically-realized bio-pic on mid-20th Century Martial Arts master Ip Man had to make do with his slaughtered edit, trimmed from 123" to 108" with sequences re-ordered for ‘clarity.’  (See: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-grandmaster-2013.html)   An egregious act against a well-established director unequaled since The Ladd Company lopped and ‘linearized’ Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA/’84 in similar fashion for similar reasons, down from 3'49" to 2'19".  That short edit tanked before it disappeared, completely replaced by the fuller cut.  Things didn’t turn out as well for Wong Kar-Wai after the Weinstein desecration grossed a bare 6 mill Stateside while the longer/far superior Asian release did better overseas, finally appearing internationally from a different company, though still not much seen over here.*  The LINK above to our post on the Weinstein edit remains largely accurate in story description, but everything in this longer cut feels more lived in, more elegiac, more drop dead gorgeous (main scenes shot on super 35mm/special effects mostly digital).  Ironically, neither version especially more or less clear in narrative effect.  (Hey, it’s Wong Kar-Wai; soul rather than story.)  But the relationships feel deeper; the sense of missed opportunity and lost time really register; and the Martial Arts set pieces gain by having more space around them.  That banister balancing in the 64 Hands battle about as thrilling as these things get.  (Again, for story detail, click on the LINK above.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In the earlier post I was dead wrong about The Weinsteins eventually re-releasing a ‘Director’ Cut,’ happily those rights went elsewhere.

COLD STORAGE (2026)

Good gross-out fun (Evil Fungus from Outer Space division), but only if you’re willing to work with it.  The ‘tell’ in producer/scripter David Koepp’s method of madness, hiding in plain sight, is substandard F/X (practical & CGI), purposefully a few steps behind state-of-the-art.  Sure, the film’s modest ten mill. budget brings limits to director Johnny Campbell’s options, but Koepp* is less interested in scaring the shit out of you than spoofing the snot out of your nose.  (Ewww!  Yuck!)  It doesn’t all work; Campbell not up to the subterfuge.  But if you accept the concept of a 1950s Alien Cautionary (long buried Killer Fungus from Space threatens to melt in its unstable deep-freeze storage unit and infect all mankind) revived in a modern time frame, the film offers a classy cast eager to run with the ball.  Liam Neeson as a Cassandra of a scientist (getting those laughs he missed in THE NAKED GUN); Leslie Manville as his once-and-future ‘Girl Friday,’ and Vanessa Redgrave, having fun for a change as a suicidal secret weapon.  Plus young, minimum-wage storage warehouse guards over their head in alien gore (Joe Keery by way of STRANGER THINGS; Sosie Bacon by way of Kevin’s loins); and a surprise winner in Georgina Campbell, nailing the impossible role of ’straight man’ amongst the crazies.  Shut off the left side of your brain and bring in your more disrespectful teens for full enjoyment.  (Another Family Friendly label meant for tweens and up.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Koepp hasn’t had this much fun behind a keyboard since JURASSIC PARK/’97, which you’ll recall had more believable digital trickery thirty years back.  (Actually, not quite thirty as STORAGE sat on the shelf for three years before Samuel Goldwyn Films picked up Stateside distribution.  Not that anyone went to see it.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  William Cameron Menzies’ INVADERS FROM MARS/’53 the sort of period Sci-Fi Koepp must have had in mind.

LOS FUERTES / THE STRONG ONES (2019)

Pleasingly modest queer bromance; a first-rate/award-winning feature debut for Chilean writer/director/editor Omar Zúñiga.  Limited theatrical release beyond Chile; the film, no doubt designed for the inbred Film Fest echo chamber before eventual internet distribution.  But Zuniga’s film too good/too well-observed to be left to die in that critical bubble.*  Thirty-something Samuel González, stopping to visit his dental technician sister in a small coastal fishing town on Chile’s Southern coast on his way from Santiago to Grad School in Montréal , sees sparks fly after a casual meeting in a bar with slightly younger Antonio Altamirano.  Gay romance not exactly taboo in such a confined, traditional community, but not exactly welcomed.  The men discreet in public, passionate (if a bit on the tasteful side*) in Altamirano’s off-the-beaten-path cabin.  The main problem for the men location, location, location, as Antonio’s a local boy hoping to build his own fishing biz with a starter boat while Samuel wants a wider canvas for his life and art.  Yet they’re such a natural match, you ache for a solution.  And that’s about it.  But when something is this solidly told, it can be enough to move you to tears.  What an eye Zúñiga has for building drama out of striking waterfront locations.  With cinematographer Nicolás Ibieta nominated for an Pedro Sienna Award . . . whatever the heck that is.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *None of that rolling off the bed in blinkered ecstacy crap for Zúñiga, and the handsome pair look like people rather than models, but a few tip-toeing camera angles feel too arranged, and a little behind the times.  Perhaps a Chilean dodge to get funding or the necessary PG-13 equivalency.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *But that’s just what happened, Zúñiga’s done nothing since.