THE CHORAL (2025)

A can’t-miss idea that self-sabotages by striving for originality when the old tropes are just what’s needed.  It’s 1916, with more than a year of war on the continent as seen from a Yorkshire Mill Town where even their prestigious/well-funded local choral society feels the pinch of conscription decimating the ranks of tenors & baritones.  Now the music director is enlisting.  With few options, mill-owner/fading lead tenor Roger Allam (beyond praise) has little choice but to hire musically qualified, but ostracized Germanophile Ralph Fiennes for the position.  (He’s also a single man of ‘peculiar tendencies,’ as it was put at the time.)  Fiennes immediately starts recruiting any & all classes all over town, from bakery boy to disabled/still convalescing vets to sing, as well as settling on Sir Edward Elgar’s then little known oratorio THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS in lieu of the usual Bach, Beethoven or Brahms; all uncomfortably German.*  The film all but running itself in these early scenes, written & played with unexpected tartness, LOL personal putdowns, and gossipy chorister queens kibbitzing from the sidelines.  With a fierce, almost proud, local rudeness staunching sentimentality, even the telegraph messenger boy delivers his death notices with dispatch before riding to the next choral rehearsal; sacred and profane juxtaposition in the form of cheeky gallows humor and hopes of shagging a young, newly widowed soprano after practise.  Scripter Alan Bennett, now in his nineties, at his best here, and as the tone shifts when a one-armed/disabled vet* comes home to a wife’s disappointment and an offer to use his fresh tenor voice to  oust Allam from his usual lead spot.  After this, something goes seriously wrong with Bennett’s ideas.  Revising/downsizing the oratorio to fit resources; repurposing the poem as dramatic tableaux that comments on the war in ways more 1960s than 1916; bringing in Elgar not for a nervous opening night, but for suspense (will he let the show go on in this radical form?).  Everything stops ringing true to the times.  A nice coda returns to form as more young men leave for the war, and the film has an impressive offhand period look.  But Elgar, who wore his musical sentiment on his sleeve, would have mourned how Bennett's script and Nicholas Hytner's direction turn chilly in the third act.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *At the time, GERONTIUS had yet to achieve its current standing.  Four major recordings released in the last two years, the most recent featuring just the sort of amateur choir, The Huddersfield Choral Society, this film’s group emulates.  Founded in 1836, Huddersfield also recorded the first complete GERONTIUS in 1945.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jacob Dudman, the returning one-armed vet who sings Gerontius, appears to be doing his own vocals.  It’s a killer part so congrats . . . if he is.

NEXT TIME WE LOVE (1936)

Note that James Stewart, in his first leading role, is missing from our poster.  Under contract at M-G-M, who couldn’t figure out what to do with this tall, gangly (make that alarmingly thin), unconventionally attractive fellow; loaned out to Universal who had just the thing for him  On the other hand, they failed at make-up 101.  Check out the lip-rouge on his enormous lower lip.  Yikes!  Had Stewart been roughhousing with roommate Henry Fonda?  A lucky punch, too, since co-star Margaret Sullavan (that’s her on the poster) had just amicably divorced Fonda, and specifically asked for his roommate in the part.  Perfect together, they’d pair up for three more films.*  Here, with director Edward H. Griffith (best known for stage reliant transfers on Philip Barry’s HOLIDAY/’30 and THE ANIMAL KINGDOM/’32) along with gifted lenser Joseph A. Valentine faking unusually atmospheric NYC & Europe locales on studio sets (plus an uncredited Preston Sturges taking a pass on the script), they play out a difficult two-career/sperate lives marriage that’s unusually intelligent & modern for 1936.  Each following their bliss to success as Foreign Correspondent (him) and stage star (her).  While waiting in the wings, respectful third-wheel Ray Milland.  (Looking ridiculously handsome, it was, along with next year’s EASY LIVING/’37, his breakthru role after seven years.)  The film goes soft and sentimental in the last reel (which is fine for this sort of thing), but also narratively convenient to tidy up all the moving parts (which ain't).  But so much better than you expect, it’s something of a find.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Second pairing, THE SHOPWORN ANGEL/’38, now looking a bit shopworn itself, but 3 & 4 are contrasting masterpieces: Borzage’s THE MORTAL STORM/’40; Lubitsch’s THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER/’40.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-mortal-storm-1940.html

NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006)

Writer Patrick Marber made his name when Mike Nichols filmed his play CLOSER/’04 as an expanded four-hander.  Like many a Nichols’ project, second-tier material sold as designer goods (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/closer-2005.html).  Here, Marber adapts a novel by Zoë Heller about a high school scandal, essentially a three-hander involving a controlling, but repressed, soon-to-retire lesbian-leaning teacher; a younger/married art teacher she’s set her eyes on; and the 15-yr-old student whose dick gets in the way of everyone’s plans.  Written as a mash-up of Terrence Rattigan  (career disappointment; ducked personal opportunities) and Tennessee Williams (curdled passion between the fatally mismatched), it’s a well-plotted l’amour fou³ that crashes in the light.  It might have worked if Marber had only told the team he’d written a pitch-black comedy of bad manners.  Over-produced, in a manner typical of Scott Rudin in his pre-exile Hollywood heyday; mistaking borrowed prestige for taste.*   With top-flight stage director Richard Eyre showing yet again his strange disinclination for movie rhythms; Judi Dench working too hard in a part her pal Maggie Smith was born to play*; and Cate Blanchette failing to convince herself (or us) that she doesn't see thru Dench’s entrapment scheme or that she’d fuck her student conquest rather than older husband Bill Nighy.  Not bloody likely.  Maybe this would all play more convincingly as a period piece.  1950s?  And with the coded dialogue of those censored days.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *It’s why Scooter has classical composer Philip Glass on the score.  His glacially slow cyclical cell adjustments not doing much for the film, but cowing the Academy to pony up with an Oscar® nom.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Maggie Smith devotees can get a taste of what she might have done here by watching a Double-Bill of one of her Best, and one of her Least known films: THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE/’67 and THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARN/’87.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie-1969.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-lonely-passion-of-judith-hearne-1987.html

SYNONYMES / SYNONYMS (2019)

Forty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born writer/director Nadav Lapid on twenty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born lost soul Yoav; auto-biographical elements inevitable.  (The film also something of a family affair with a brother co-scripting and Mom co-editing.)  Here’s how Lapid tells it: With little more than a stolen French/Israeli dictionary as guide to his new country, Yoav is going for rebirth as a Frenchman.  (Perhaps why debuting Tom Mercier so often buck-naked.)  Squatting overnight in a rich family’s townhouse, he can’t find the clothes he took off to bathe.  Now he’s really in rebirth mode . . . if he doesn’t freeze to death.  Saved by two unexpected housemates, the home’s billionaire’s son and his girlfriend (the only other people in the place), his adventures in assimilation are kick-started with clothes & funds from these fairy faux siblings.  Nifty work from Lapid, with Yoav not so much meeting his future as flirting with it.  Especially the scion who’s already breaking personal space with his ‘guest.’  Adventures in the outside world work best with another Israeli, a political agitator who loudly hums ‘Hatikvah’ on Le Metro, hoping to provoke an incident.  Yoav, who’s sworn off Hebrew, watches in horror & delight.  And there’s citizenship school, too.  But Lapid pushes too hard with a soft-porn photo-shoot (Yoav raising funds); a move to enter the Foreign Legion (?), and reverse-snobbery at the chamber orchestra concert of the girlfriend who’s been bequeathed to him.  Has Yoav gone a bit mad or are his true (terribly confused) colors simply coming out.  A surprise meeting with Dad suggests a way out, but damn if anyone will take it.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lapid's alter-ego’s personal journey thru Statehood, Politics & aversion to his past is less interesting and less well-handled than the menage-a-trois set-up suggested here.  You’ll find that story developed in the most sophisticated manner imaginable in Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated THE DREAMERS/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreamers-2003.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Perhaps Lapid is yet another auteur, loaded with talent in handling cast, crew & camera, whose work might benefit with an outside pair of eyes holding the purse strings and sometimes saying, ‘No.’

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (2018)

Still untold.  A glitzy, wasted opportunity from Pamela B. Green (her sole feature credit as director) pays tribute to forgotten female film pioneer Alice Guy, but misses her importance.  The facts get on screen, in distractingly imaginative graphics, but we never get into what made her click as a filmmaker.  No comparisons with other early filmmakers.  No decent length clips to help judge her.  Her achievements taken on faith.  Mme. Guy had yet to turn twenty when she started working for Leon Gaumont in 1895.  Yep, same family as today’s distribution giant.  M. Leon brought her to a preview of Lumière’s legendary/first-ever projected film showing.  By the next year, Guy was directing some of the earliest film shorts.  And continued doing so over the next twenty-five peripatetic years; till the film industry became big business post-WWI and women, other than actresses, writers & editors, largely disappeared from most positions.  Famous for the early studio she and husband Herbert Blaché built in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he wound up directing in Hollywood* while she looked for work.  It’s a fascinating story, she lived till 1968 and there are filmed interviews of her, mostly from 1964, but we never find out what we really want to know.  The clips are tiny, yet collections of her work are available, but we don’t get enough to form even a preliminary opinion, or see how she was different (better?) than others at the time.  Worth a look, but meaningless without better support from the films.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  A couple of years before this came out, Thierry Frémaux’s LUMIÈRE!/’16 used Auguste Lumière's eternally fresh 19th century actualités to tell his story and the story of the start of The Movies.  Getting everything right this one flubs.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Husband Herbert Blaché, a far less important figure in film history (and a real shit), yet now far more seen than his wife as he directed Buster Keaton’s first feature, THE SAPHEAD/’20.  Not really part of the Keaton canon, Buster only a hired actor here just as he was beginning his own post-WWI shorts and features.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-saphead-1920.html

PRETTY BABY (1950)

While the game looks lost before the credits finish, hard-hitting Warners hardly the studio for farcical workplace rom-com, a bit of patience and an open mind helps get this one over the finish line with honors.  Bronze, not gold; nothing to sneer at.  Key man undoubtedly writer/producer/Hollywood wag Harry Kurnitz, here with Jules Furthman co-scripting on a good idea about a mid-size NYC ad-agency run by Dennis Morgan & Zachary Scott (in a swell double act) trying to hold onto tyrannical major client Edmund Gwenn’s baby food company.  Enter Betsy Drake as emergency temp secretary, overloaded & under-prepared as new boss Morgan goes at his usual warp-speed.  She’s soon demoted to mimeograph machine operator.  Depressed, she steals a seat on the subway home using a realistic plasticine doll baby when happenstance, and the necessities of farce, place her next to Gwenn.  Unaware of who he is, she mentions the baby is named after him!  After all, in spite of his bad rep, he is paying the bills at her company . . . that is if she’s still got a job there.  At this point, almost all the forced setups are in place, and the film can get down to being unexpectedly bright & funny.  Gaining big laughs at a more than acceptable pace, and not only from Kurnitz.  B’way director Bretaigne Windust, who staged the two top comedies of the ‘40s (ARSENIC AND OLD LACE; LIFE WITH FATHER), but never quite figured out the movies, does his best work on film with flowing tempos rather than hysteria.  (Note absence of 'comic' underscoring.)  Alas, while the three male leads consistently find (and share) the fun with us, Drake (whose short career seemed to be organized by husband Cary Grant*) simply hasn’t the goods to pull this off.  You keep wondering why Warners didn’t reunite Morgan with his co-star from last year’s IT’S A GREAT FEELING, Doris Day.  Perfect for the part.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *With one exception, Drake’s film career ran eight features (1948 - 1958), including two duds with husband Grant (EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED/’48; ROOM FOR ONE MORE/’52.  Wife #3 (of 5) to Grant 1949 to 1962, her best film was, of all things, Frank Tashlin’s WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER/’57, against Tony Randall.

THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)

Best known for directing the original mini-series of PENNIES FROM HEAVEN/’78, Piers Haggard’s early folk-horror feature is both seriously creepy and unexpectedly serious.  A telling of a witches cult, with real supernatural elements, at a time when England’s upperclass has written off witchcraft as superstition, but still feverishly believed by devout country folk.  And damned if they aren’t onto something wicked this way comes.  No doubt the film’s release in the ‘Mod’ era, with advertising fit for the film-savvy ‘70s, made this come off as Hammer Films fodder.  But Haggar seems to have had something more like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH/’43 in mind.*  And if he doesn’t get all the way there (who has?), it’s an honorable attempt.  A country farm lad (with a mop-top hidden under his wool cap, is ploughing his field when he turns over monstrous remains.  His master makes light of it, but is convinced to go to London for answers when an ancient scientific tome cites similar finds.  While he’s away, half the town starts to succumb, becoming possessed by a witch who seduces men (with full frontal nudity, no less) to either their doom or into joining her cult.  Even a female acolyte, saved by a local farm boy, is unable to resist the call of this devil cult.  And that’s after an unqualified surgeon has painfully removed a patch of ‘Devil’s Skin’ from her thigh.  Yikes!  Returned from London, the Magistrate is now convinced, and a fight between The True Church and The Devil’s servants is inevitable. Very effectively done, and well shot largely in bright sunshine instead of the typical gloom & doom. And while Haggard has neither the funds nor the chops to make his ambitious final showdown work, the film is good enough so you take it ‘on account,’

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Recently, Robert Eggers got his horror-driven career off the ground with THE WITCH/’15.  But nothing has ever matched the stake-burning conviction of Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH.  A film to make you think of tossing the reel tins in the lake to find out if they’ll innocently sink or guiltily float.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/day-of-wrath-1943.html

L’AGE D’OR (1930)

By now, the main shock in Luis Buñuel’s early surrealist film is how unshocking it is.  Or rather, that its shocks need explanation.  Like a joke that needs to be explained; not a good sign.  (If you can watch with a commentary track, I’d give it a shot.)  Coming on the heels of UN CHIEN ANDALOU/’29, which does still shock, Salvador Dalí again collaborates, though apparently with less input.  Working a line-up of near random topics, chosen to rile the easily offended (Politics, Religion, Social Mores, War and the Bombing of Innocents; something for everyone!), the thru-line for an hour’s running time (three times the length of CHIEN) settles on frustration, a Buñuel idée fixe, here unconsummated love.  Custom & propriety interrupting one couple as they dry hump to Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde, ‘make love’ in a tree garden, and, as a footman announces a visit by the interior minister with the man, leave the woman to suck on the marble nipples of a classical statue.  Perverse acts of frustration pointing directly ahead to those guests in THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL/’61 unable to leave a drawing room, or the meal no one can get to in the masterful DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE/’72, both looking as vital & essential as L'AGE now looks merely historic.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above EXTERMINATING ANGEL and/or DISCREET CHARM.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/exterminating-angel-1961.html

LEFT-HANDED GIRL / ZUOPIEZI NUHAI (2025)

First solo-directing gig for the left-hand girl of ANORA/’24, one half of filmmaking partners Shih-Ching Tsou & Sean Baker.  Here they share script credit on a character driven story about a single mom who moves to Taipei (where most of her family lives) with her two daughters (20-something/8-yr-old) to open a noodle shop.  Talked into a location toward the back of a busy mall, they also move into a small apartment on the same day.  Counting on her kid’s help, Mom’s soon confronted by their indifference to her situation, adjusting to impersonal big city life, and her older daughter’s resentment of . . . well, just about everything.  She’s a pain; going thru an age where you’re not sure if you’ll be seated with the grown-ups (Table A) or the tykes (Table B).  The 8-yr-old also having trouble as old-fashioned Grandpa insists on ‘curing’ her left-handed ways.  But if she’s got ‘the devil’s hand,’ then why not say ‘the devil made me do it’ to cover her shop-lifting habit.  Life at the mall has it’s advantages!  And just when Mom’s found a nice guy at the discount store down the hall at the mall.  All this coming to a head at a big family gathering to celebrate Grandma’s 60th.*  Scores will be settled.  Truths will be told. Guilt will be spread.  Fault lines and implosions with the cake.  It’s all a bit of a cliché, like blaming the parents for the kids’ issues in a 1950s movie.  A shame as much of the observations, detail and mysteries of the characters are more compelling when left unresolved and unexplained.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *In the States, these family blow outs often as not occur at Thanksgiving reunions.  But since that holiday doesn’t exist anywhere else but Canada, Christmas, Anniversaries and Big Birthdays take its place for international family meltdowns.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Tsou shared her first directing credit (on TAKE-OUT/’04) with Baker.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/11/take-out-2004.html