JOINT SECURITY AREA / GONGDONG GYEONGBI GUYEOK JSA (2000)

Well-received, but disappointing.  Award-bait (cinematic & humanitarian) from iconic Korean writer/director Park Chan-wook plays like an allegory on the futility-of-war.  Odd, as it takes place in the on-going Cold War between North and South Korea.  In a peacefully maintained border area campus, where territorial lines are laid out in tasteful sidewalk pavement styles, a neutral foreign official, with a Korean background, has come to investigate what happened when patrolling soldiers of the South crossed into the wrong DMZ area, nearly triggered a landmine, found themselves in North territory and, after explanations, slowly started to bond with their enemy.  Brothers under the uniform?  Or just under the skin?  The breach in territorial protocol an honest mistake/misstep or a testing provocation?  Things seem to be calming down as the soldiers work things out on their own (and share chocolate), but when a superior true-believer officer hits the outpost, suspicions flare up and a gun-happy Mexican Stand-Off erupts.  Like a 1960s parable (specifically 1964: more earnest FAIL-SAFE then hip DR. STRANGELOVE), and a big hit in South Korea, it was a career breakthru for Lee Byung-hun as the handsome South Korean soldier.  But in trying for timeless verities, Park ends up dated.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Head Juror at this year’s Cannes Fest, Park Chan-wook remains best known for his gross-out thriller OLDBOY/’04.  There’s lots more to him, but it’s a good place to start.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/oldboy-2004.html

LOVE (1927)

Greta Garbo’s silent version of ANNA KARENINA always considered something of a travesty, starting with that title.  Plus, no cheering section for Anna without Dolly, Kitty or Levin; no pregnancy; no drug addiction or suicide attempt; no insufferable forgiveness from cuckold husband; no train!  No wonder Garbo tried again, now with sound, in 1935.  So, why is this infamous iteration, taken on its own terms, so satisfying?  That notorious happy ending?  Seems just right in Edmund Goulding's well-directed production.  Perhaps because even at its most M-G-M idiotic, the film all of a piece.  Very well cast, too, with top-billed John Gilbert as love-struck Vronsky.  (The orchestral soundtrack on the official DVD release from Warners recorded live, so you hear the audience gasp & laugh at his initial reaction to Garbo.)  The real hero here (along with regular Garbo lenser William Daniels) may be Hollywood’s highest paid scripter Frances Marion, here credited only for ‘continuity,’ who chose to make the film as a series of ‘set pieces.’  Snowy meet-cute, ballroom gossip, race track disaster, mother-love reunion, renunciation², etc; and who put them in order.  Simplified into an awkward love triangle for Garbo not between Gilbert’s military officer and VIP husband Karenin (a one-note Brandon Hurst), but between Anna’s love for Vronsky vs. her love for her little boy.*  Her fourth Hollywood film, but first to take her beyond temptress mode.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Advantage 1935 in both these roles with Basil Rathbone’s chilly husband a far more dangerously attractive/formidable obstacle; and, fresh off DAVID COPPERFIELD, the wistful charm of Master Freddie Bartholomew, the other love of Anna's life.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/anna-karenina-1935.html

ZOOTOPIA 2 (2025)

With near identical budgets (150 mill) and near identical creatives (from directors Jared Bush/ Byron Howard down thru cast & crew), this animated sequel nearly doubled the billion dollar gross of the 2016 original.  And if hardly twice as good (indeed a modest fall off), it’s good enough to justify blockbuster numbers.  This time out, Judy Rabbit and Nick Fox are no longer adversaries, but junior cop partners on the hunt for the long suppressed truth behind Zootopia’s origin story.  Is it possible those forked-tongued snakes got a raw deal in the legend of Zootopia’s beginnings?  They’ll go to the ends of the ‘safe’ territory behind the transformative wall of intra-species cooperation to find the truth.  Less straightforward than the earlier film’s police procedural format, which may explain why the film is over-produced, trying too hard to top themselves with (very impressive) spectacle.  But this soon drops away as their main mission clicks into place; along with expected character turns from various animals new and returned.  Less understandable are a pair of self-revelatory/self-justifying soliloquies for Nick & Judy.  Talk in place of clarifying action . . . in an animated film?!  The film quickly recovers movement and momentum, but an odd glitch from these guys.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  No doubt, you’ve seen the original, yes?   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/10/zootopia-2016.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Stick with the end credits not just for the tag surprise, but also to note the international line-up of names & nationalities.  A veritable cornucopia of D.E.I. in the film’s D.N.A.

WEAPONS (2025)

This critically & commercially well-received, darkly-comic Body Horror from writer/director Zach Creggar even earned a rare acting Oscar® for the genre.  Good scary fun, if ultimately less than meets the gashed eyeball.  It opens poorly, with needless narration from a wise-for-her-years child giving us too much info, and Creggar defensively covering with a plethora of ‘shock cuts.  But things rapidly improve once Grade School Teacher Julia Garner finds all but one of her kids, Alex, absent.  Make that missing.  As if the Pied Piper had tootled them away in the night.  Angry suspicions fall on the teacher, but no evidence.  No matter, she’s dubbed a witch by locals.  (Another error, make that a cheat, from Creggar removes any serious investigation of the house & parents of Alex, the boy who stayed in town when they ought to be swarming the joint.)  Still, this prologue enough like a classic TWILIGHT ZONE opening to get you interested.  (Actually, it’s more like a ONE STEP BEYOND episode, but who remembers that paranormal knock-off.)  And this is where you wonder how one of those half-hour shows can possibly support a two+ hour film.  (Spoiler Alert!)  Answer, it doesn’t.  Instead, Creggar switches to HANSEL & GRETEL, but without Gretel.  (Hansel & Hansel?)  With spooky Great Aunt (that’s award-winner Amy Madigan in fright wig & makeup) as the witch who’s capturing little boys and girls to fatten up before getting the life’s essence out of them.  (Sustained only by cans & cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.)  A few gory visual effects; hop/skip & jump character continuity for some non-linear surprise explanations; and a nifty semi-heroic turn from grieving parent Josh Brolin (head squarer than ever) also helps.  Just be aware: some gory effects nearly as ‘grimm’ as those famous Brothers.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  One unhappy comic-horror throwback sees the return of a trope from the 1970s that saw either the FIRST or the WORST/most realistic gory violence hit the one significant Black in the movie.  Now, this spot goes to the film’s main gay character (and his husband).

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