CINDERELLA (1914)

Yes, a famous title, but standard product for Mary Pickford during that crucial period (post-D.W. Griffith after Anita Loos’s THE NEW YORK HAT/’12) when she briefly returned to the stage, then was coaxed back to film by Adolph Zukor at what later became Paramount for a five-year run where her salary soared from $500 to $10,000/wk.  (And no federal income tax.)  Alas, all this probably more interesting than the film which boasts a modest amount of split screen & double-exposure dissolves to make do as Pumpkin & Mice become Coach and Four for Mary’s transition.  Perhaps if the print were in better shape or if director James Kirkwood weren’t so stingy with close-ups within a scene, stuck on tiny sets for palace scenes that look no more spacious than Mary‘s garret bedroom.  (The film probably shot in Manhattan, Astoria Studios in Queens not yet built.)  What you do get to see is Mary’s first husband Owen Moore as Prince Charming, young, handsome and not yet drinking or abusing Mary, and to watch Mary pull off that 12 o'clock devolution with no more than a simple cut as she runs down the stairs in finery with a clock insert before we cut back to a medium close-up with her Cinderella now back to rags.  Simple, and ridiculously effective.  Nice fresh score from Donald Sosin in the Pickford Foundation edition (a bonus on THROUGH THE BACK DOOR/’21 –  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/through-back-door-1921.html) or various subfusc Public Domain dupes with canned music or worse.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The Pickford/Kirkwood team is seen to far better advantage in next year’s FANCHON THE CRICKET/’15.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/fanchon-cricket-1915.html  BTW, if James Kirkwood sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of his namesake son, a co-writer on A CHORUS LINE.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  In the original Cinderella story, even before Charles Perrault got to it, the slippers weren’t glass, but fur (it’s a mistranslation) and one of the step-sisters hacks off some of her foot to try and make it fit.  Shades of SAW.  Yikes!

NELLY ET MONSIEUR ARNAUD (1995)

Classy French director Claude Sautet, with a mere baker’s dozen of films over three decades (no clunkers in my experience, but too many undistributed Stateside), took his cinematic leave with that rarest of achievements, a stand-up triple.  A confirmed old bourgeois Parisian of 71 when this came out, it’s a bittersweet relationship roundelay with Emmanuelle Béart (looking strikingly like Angelina Jolie as a human being), a 30-something in a dead marriage (depressed husband spending the day alone in bed), working a few part-time jobs after her editing job vanished, and a habit of telling the truth before it’s happened.  At a café with a friend, she meets Michel Serrault, former colonial judge/former successful businessman, a pleasantly prickly senior on the lookout for an editor to help him finally get to that memoir he’s promised publisher Jean-Hugues Anglade.  What follows is a series of companionate couplings (at restaurants, at the pool, shopping, word processing, even in bed . . . not companionate) to work out changing relationships and desires between friends and ‘exes.’  All told, about four times the main three, each a fully formed, interesting person.  We’re not so far from Éric Rohmer in his ‘70s/’80s prime*, but with a boulevard farce structure as dramatic mortar, and, more crucially, grown-ups instead of Rohmer’s talkative 20-something avatars.  Here, everyone very knowing about themselves/about others.  Describing a French history book to his grandson, Serrault sums it up as ‘Chauvinism with pretty pictures,’ which just might be a perfect description of this all but lost civilized French style of moviemaking.  Unlike Hollywood, here, stabbing back pain doesn’t signal plot-altering cancer; a change of heart at an airport counter doesn’t lead to dashing off for a last grab at happiness; and regretful second thoughts just leave you regretful.  If FOR ADULTS ONLY didn’t signify porn in advertisements, you might well use it for the witty, intelligent, wryly rueful, smashingly entertaining cinema of Claude Sautet.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *FULL MOON IN PARIS/’92 a good comparison for a Rohmer film where getting what you wish for is a small tragedy.  OR:  Sautet probably best known Stateside for UN COEUR EN HIVER/’92 made directly before this.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/les-nuits-de-la-pleine-lune-full-moon.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/05/un-coeur-en-hiver-1992.html

THE KILLER / DIP HUET SEUNG HUNG (1989)

After breakthru international commercial success in '86 on A BETTER TOMORROW, director John Woo had an artistic Great Leap Forward on his next Hong Kong actioner, besting the previous film in every way.*  Chow Yun-Fat leads a terrific cast of hitmen, cops and mob guys with a unified, even restrained, acting style that serves story rather than resumé.  The setup riffs on, of all things, MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION/’35; ‘54, that’s the one where an irresponsible playboy accidentally blinds a young, wealthy widow then spends the rest of the film trying to undo the damage.*  Here, ultra-smooth hitman Yun-Fat eliminates an entire crime family in a restaurant private banquet room only to accidentally blind lovely nightclub singer Sally Yeh then spend the rest of the film trying to undo the damage . . . in between action scenes of mass killings.  (So, a little bit different.)  Yeh’s a fey, reedy thing, which puts the emphasis on serious bromance between Yun-Fat, his empathetic police opposite (Danny Lee), and the physically failing former hitman who hired him (Kong Chu, stealing the pic).  A few things now look a bit dated technically, but Woo, especially in the first half, whips up the action set pieces of your dreams; the mass attacks in the second half are literal  overkill.  Then again, where would JOHN WICK be without this.  Best of all is the first of two (you read that right, TWO) Mexican Standoffs for Yun-Fat and Lee, with the sightless Yeh somehow holding on without bumping into a gun.  And with the two men each holding a cup of tea with saucer.  (What genius thought to include the saucer?)  A double-downer ending probably wasn’t needed, but Woo must have thought after killing off a battalion of mob-men, he needed some balance . . . sure, right.  Very enjoyable 35 years on.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *See Woo’s strikingly quick maturation for yourself!    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/12/a-better-tomorrow-ying-hung-boon-sik.html   OR:  *Here’s where the set-up came from: John Stahl’s MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION/‘35.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/08/magnificent-obsession-1935.html

ELEMENTAL (2023)

A happy exception to the recent decline (in quality & coin) of current Disney & Disney/PIXAR animation; the film slowly but surely turning into something of a modest hit.  Deservedly so as this surreptitious Immigrant’s Sentimental Education comes loaded with enough feeling, whimsy & technical bravado to make up for any missteps.*  Concentrating on only two of the elements, Water and Fire, probably necessary to keep the running time down, but it likely signals future sequels for Earth & Wind.  (Boo!)  And while the race allegory of segregated Elements doesn’t quite hold up (what landlord wouldn’t refuse renting to a flaming ember apt to set the place ablaze?), the easy parallel is too likeably obvious to object to, and the rest of the story: Laid-back Water Being falls for a hot-tempered shopkeeper’s daughter Firebrand, is charming, a hot water bottle in the making.  (Kinda sexy, too.)  But the main fun comes in watching how the PIXAR creatives figure out one near-impossible technical challenge after another, a series of can-you-top-this animation, as the pair deal with an exponentially dangerous water leak that leads from Mr. Fire’s shop to threaten all of Element City.  First generation Korean-American Peter Sohn directs, a reward for getting THE GOOD DINOSAUR/’15 in reasonable shape  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/you-can-ignore-troubled-history-behind.html), here bringing in some personal immigrant childhood memories and a winning never-look-back approach.  It's also very well paced, with calm interludes not much seen recently.  Plus getting fabulous vocal perfs out of his two leads: combustible Leah Lewis and teary charmer Mamoudou Athie.  This one better than the sum of its separate elemental parts.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Neat gag at a sports arena when the Water Beings let loose in their stadium seats with the fan Wave of your dreams.  And is that game being played a version of Quidditch, the Harry Potter sport even J..D. Rowlings seemed to grow tired of?

SCREWY THOUGHT OFTHE DAY:  *One misstep is a plant character (Element Earth) heading into puberty & plucking small flowering seedlings from his ‘arm pits’ to offer Ms. Ember.  A disturbing sight!

FERRARI (2023)

In addition to conflating 'fashionable’ with fashion, acclaimed director Michael Mann can also be relied upon to deliver less than he promised.  (THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS/’92 a notable exception.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-last-of-mohicans-1992.html)  But here, in a neatly trimmed/well-observed bio-pic of Italian race car designer Enzo Ferrari (a project he’s toyed with making for decades), Mann finds just the moment of personal & profession crisis to allow us to extrapolate an entire life from.  1957: Company going broke; Wife vs. Mistress; Racing deadline.  But if Mann delivers on his promise, it’s a pretty small promise, one where every twist & turn is tipped off with a foreshadowing thud.  Each car crash, tragic death & marital compromise conveniently ‘signaled.’  Generally well acted, though Shailene Woodley feels helplessly miscast as the blonde mistress (her unacknowledged son with Ferrari looking as if he were adopted).  And, perhaps inevitably, it’s the first car racing pic that has you leaving the theater not wanting a car, but one of the men’s suits.  The style!  The material!  The trapezoid design on Adam Driver bulking him up above the waist sheer tailoring genius.  They also try to deglamorize Penélope Cruz as the resentful wife . . . good luck with that!  The film watchable; none too memorable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Third choice after both Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman backed off (and who knows how many others over the decades), Adam Driver is awfully good, yet often seems to be looking over his shoulder, as if half expecting Daniel Day Lewis to show up on set and step into the part.

PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1947)

In post-production for nearly a year, David O. Selznick, was a burnt-out case by the time principle shooting ended on what turned out to be his last Hollywood pic.  He continued, mostly as ‘backseat producer’ to new wife Jennifer Jones on a handful of projects, but was, at 45, essentially thru.  His legendary career a three-act/three-decade affair; leapfrogging from Paramount to RKO to M-G-M (first wife Irene, daughter to Louis B. Mayer, his two year son-in-law rises stint possibly his finest); then glorious independence (A STAR IS BORN; GONE WITH THE WIND; REBECCA); finally a delusional decade in thrall to Ms. Jones.  It makes this odd romantic fantasy both culmination & ruination; remarkably revealing psychologically with Joseph Cotten as a technically gifted, but underperforming painter who finds his artistic lifeline when he meets Jennifer Jones.  Just one problem: his muse is a phantom spirit from the past doomed to an early death a decade in the past.  Yikes!  Loaded with filler: Albert Sharpe & David Wayne, currently in FINIAN’S RAINBOW on B’way pretend to be in the plot; a Debussy arranged score to class things up (‘Girl With the Flaxen Hair’ an amusing choice for the brunette Ms. Jones); empty storm finale for a reel of ‘MagnaScope,’ TechniColor and D.W. Griffith showmanship.  (Even Lillian Gish to point the way.)  At least Ethel Barrymore gets to show off her ‘lioness eyes’ and buy a painting, but the plot vague enough to defeat its own trailer.*  Fortunately, playwright Paul Osborn manages to get what passes for a plot in some kind of order once Jones’s ghost grows out of childhood.  The film almost touchingly opaque as it tries to poetically figure out just what Selznick is looking for.  Director William Dieterle and cinematographer Joseph August gazing back at silent cinema for inspiration.  It could be Selznick’s own VERTIGO/’58, but with a dreamlike muse leading him not to a tower, but astray from his own talent.  Ironic, as Hitchcock was busy wrapping up his contract with Selznick at the same time on another mega-flop, THE PARADINE CASE/’47.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Attention paid by KINO quality control who placed the trailer for DUEL AT DIABLO/’66 on the DVD Extras when they meant to have Selznick/Jones’s DUEL IN THE SUN/’46.

PETIT MAMAN (2021)

Justly acclaimed film by writer/director Céline Sciamma opens with deceptive naturalism as an eight-year old granddaughter bids adieu (literally adieu as it’s a French film) to a series of elderly ladies, hall neighbors at the assisted living home/hospice where her grandmother has recently died.  The next few days will see her with her father as he cleans up Grandma’s home while the mother is off . . . somewhere.  But then the little girl chases a lost ball into the forest just behind the house, and we all know what happens when you head into the woods looking for a lost object in a fable.  Hard to say anything else here without major SPOILER ALERTS, but you should be okay if you put the left side of your brain on pause.  The rest of the film is all right side of the brain anyway.  Team Jung rather Team Freud, so to speak.  Because what should we find in the forest but another eight-year-old girl, a dead ringer (pun intended) who will become her new special friend, and invite to her nearby home, so much like the house she and her father are closing down.  (That’s twins Joséphine & Gabrielle Sanz playing the dopplegänger kids.  One of whom is a considerably better actress than the other, though nothing could make me reveal which one!)  It’s a treat to see how simply Sciamma handles this, and to imagine how a Hollywood treatment would ruin things with explanations or psychobabble.  (She’s the anti-M. Night Shyamalan we’ve long hoped for.)  Yet for all its charm, wisdom on childhood connections & fantasy, its refusal to draw thick black lines of demarcation between now & then/here & there/generation divide, the film somehow misses the emotional tug you expect . . . or perhaps are conditioned to expect.  Something that could be the subject for Sciamma’s next project.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Given a more literal edge, similar ideas pop up in a fair number of classic kid lit.  Frances Hodson Burnett's much adapted THE SECRET GARDEN an apt example.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-secret-garden-1949.html

THE OFFENCE (1973)

While you don’t think of Sean Connery, even in his James Bond-busting roles, as a go-to actor for NYC-centric director Sidney Lumet, they actually worked together five times.*  Notably, sans toupeé in four of the five, including this police downer where Connery’s twenty-year vet can’t hold back once he starts interrogating Ian Bannen’s serial child molester.  Nothing’s been proved, but Connery ‘noses’ him out.  After so many cases, so much violence, so much time on horror after horror (brought back in subliminal edits), he’s just knows.  He also, tragically, belongs to them in a way, obsessed to the point of losing all control.  Structured, after an extended prologue finding the missing girl, as a series of power-duets between Connery and his superior (Peter Bowles), Connery and his unhappy/unsatisfying wife (Vivien Merchant), Connery and the police internal investigator (Trevor Howard), and finally Connery and the perp (in flashback).  The script feels designed as a theatrical play with the whole cast stepping up one-by-one to face Connery.  And that becomes a problem, something Lumet seems painfully aware of as he tries, without much success, to pull everyone back from clobbering the camera with over-emoting using Gerry Fisher’s grungy color scheme & smudgy lighting to contrast with some tricky camera effects.  (It was either that or have Connery make like Rod Steiger in THE PAWNBROKER/’64 and stab his hand on a desk receipt nail.  Yikes!)  Made fast and cheap, the film is quite an achievement in some ways, a technical/professional marvel at the 1 mill. price, but also brutally obvious.*  And it’s not the only Lumet/Connery film to feel that way.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  I kept writing THE OFFENSE instead of THE OFFENCE.  The ‘wrong’ spelling a better fit.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Brutally obvious, a perfect description of the first Connery/Lumet collaboration, THE HILL/’65.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-hill-1965.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *No doubt, we’ve got this backwards in that it was more likely Lumet was a ‘go-to’ director for Connery, certainly so here.

WITHOUT LYING DOWN (2000)

Subtitle: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood.  A TCM documentary from about twenty years ago on the top screenwriter (male or female) from the late-‘teens thru the mid-‘30s.  That subtitle no doubt aspirational to the then prominent Hollywood women interviewed about being female in the industry in the 1920s vs 2000; surprised at what they didn’t know.  Not Cari Beauchamp who wrote the book on Frances Marion this is based on*, but certainly Callie Khouri, Polly Platt, Martha Coolidge, Robin Swicord, et al.; all of whom (Coolidge the notable exception) going on to earn far less credits in the 20 years after this came out then any similar list of prominent Hollywood males would have.*  It was the next generation of women film professionals who’d seriously alter the playing field.  And the film itself?; no more than adequate.  So much goes missing!  Second marriage to George W. Hill (top M-G-M director and fine collaborator) unmentioned.  Maybe half of the Marie Dressler career save is in here.* There’s not a word on Marion’s ‘Talkies’ Achilles heel: bad dialogue.  Irving Thalberg’s M-G-M factory system coming into play here.  And Marion’s post-Mary Pickford decade in silents gets skimmed over; she was just as successful with soapy trash for Norma Talmadge and when writing superior Women’s Weepies like STELLA DALLAS/’25.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *This film plays much better when paired with Beauchamp’s bio of the same name.  In truth, that too could use a modern update.  But a good place to start (probably the only place to start), even when Beauchamp gets held back by so many ‘lost’ films.

LINK: Typing Frances Marion into the MAKSQUIBS Search Box will bring up a few peripheral titles, but mostly show how enormous her contribution was.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=frances+marion

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *There’s a book in the false spring these talented Hollywood women thought had dawned.  And another film focusing on how Marion twice saved Dressler’s career, taking her from a has-been living in a fancy hotel closet in Manhattan, to a near hit film that was banned from the screen and then on to become America’s Number One star just as cancer struck.

PASSED BY CENSOR / GÖRÜLMÜSTÜR (2019)

Strong debut feature from Turkish writer/director Serhat Karaaslan, a psychological & societal study told thru the eyes of a new prison guard whose duties censoring inmates’ letters (coming and going) leads to obsessive behavior toward the wife of one of the men after he finds a photograph of her in an envelope.  Berkay Ates, in an award-winning, quietly off-kilter turn, as transparent in his guilty conscience as a Raskolnikov, is the guard whose initial interest in the wife (the striking Saadet Aksoy) is poised between protection (something truly is wrong in her relationship with her incarcerated husband and at home with her father-in-law) and old-fashioned stalking.  Ates even manages to get a nurse he’s met in a writing class and whom he ought to be dating, to accompany him on a bold house visit to confirm suspicions.  Social reticence and the trapped wife’s subservient position add frustration to the situation.  And when the guard finagles duty to oversee a conjugal visit between prisoners & wives, something’s bound to give.  At times, the guard’s naiveté feels a bit of a stretch for someone in his 30s with a bit of grey in his hair, even if he is still living at home with a nosy, overprotective mom; while the relationship with the career-oriented nurse he forces to come with him as he spies on his beloved, needs more attention.  But then, Ates’ unusually expressive eyes tell us all that’s missing.  Vagaries of film production in Turkey seem to have left Karaaslan stuck making short subjects, but he obviously has a lot more to offer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Check it out FREE on modestly advertiser supported TUBI.

LO STRANIERO / THE STRANGER (1967)

Luchino Visconti’s under-appreciated literary adaptation of Albert Camus’s L'ÉTRANGER was something of a lucky accident.  Conceived by Visconti with the novel used as starting point for his own ideas, Camus’s widow refused any significant changes.  More bothersome, envisioned star Alain Delon held out for a costly/controlling contract that producer Dino De Laurentiis answered by giving the role to Marcello Mastroianni.*  Two major decisions against Visconti that basically ‘made’ the picture.  A level of achievement we’re at last able to verify after a major late-‘90s restoration returned the extraordinary color palette (Algiers by way of Matisse’s Morocco) Giuseppe Rotunno gave to every frame.*  The story remains: French account clerk M. Meursile, on trial for an inexplicable murder of a young Arab man.  There’s a back story involving an earlier attack on a neighbor, the effects of sunstroke, a possible threat of revenge attack; a job offer in Paris and a marriage proposal deferred, a mother’s sudden death; all purposefully unclear.  But the murderer is convicted less by circumstantial evidence than by an off-putting attitude toward God, toward his dead mother, toward the Arab community, etc.  An outspoken atheist, Meursile comes across as cold & unfeeling, but it’s more failure of communication, less apathy than indifference.  But even that’s supplying an uncalled for moral.  Mastroianni gets this all across with unemotional clarity and a spot on cast of alarmingly disagreeable people.  (People Meursile has little problem agreeing with.)  It’s not that Meursile believes in nothing, but that he believes in nothing.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *You can get an idea of what Delon would have been like in the role watching Joseph Losey’s even chillier MR. KLEIN/’76.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/monsieur-klein-1976.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Lots of subfusc options still hanging around from before the restoration.  Viewer beware!

COP-OUT / STRANGER IN THE HOUSE (1967)

Drinking steadily since losing a hanging case sixteen years ago, dropping friends, family, position and reputation over time before a promising, but difficult new case brings a chance for renewal . . . if only he can keep it together once he gets to court.  Paul Newman played the type at 58 in THE VERDICT/’82; and here James Mason, sober adversary then, takes on leading dipsomaniac barrister 15 years earlier when he was also 58.  Too bad he didn’t get Newman’s script and director.*  Instead, writer/producer Pierre Rouve, no doubt using his success as exec producer of BLOW-UP/’66, directed for the first and last time.  Michelangelo Antonioni he ain’t.  Other than costumes and London location, there’s little ‘Mod’ about this one, a reset George Simenon novel which must have gotten by on character & atmosphere.  Both gone missing with the switch to ‘60s London.  (The search for ‘Mod’ elements the likely reason for retitling this COP-OUT Stateside.  Note psychedelic poster art.)  Brittle Geraldine Chaplin, in career free-fall after DR. ZHIVAGO/’65, and Bobby Darin, in general free-fall, are around as daughter and nasty interloper to little effect.  So too the film.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Mason did get that film’s director immediately before this, playing in similar world-weary mode for Sidney Lumet in their underrated early John Le Carré adaptation THE DEADLY AFFAIR/’66.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-deadly-affair-1966.html

CHICKEN RUN: DAWN OF THE NUGGET (2023)

After disappointing results on EARLY MAN/’18, Aardman Animations’ Stop-Motion masters ran for cover all the way back to 2000's CHICKEN RUN for a safe sequel.  And it starts pretty well with what looks to be something of a WATERSHIP DOWN redux storyline . . . but with chickens instead of rabbits.  Utopian commune threatened by new development: stay, fight or flee?   If only they’d stuck to that idea.  Instead, young daughter-chick Molly rouses her parents to sneak into the new chicken nugget factory on the other side of the lake and start a bird rebellion.  Even this could work if only the film didn’t succumb to such a mixed animation palette of techniques.  In the process, losing much of what we celebrated in our CHICKEN RUN Write-Up on the enriching difficulties of plasticine model animation: ‘And because you can feel & occasionally see the effort, the joy of filmmaking becomes participatory.’  The only participatory element here would be buying CHICKEN RUN Branded Merch.  Not bad, but it feels like a knock-off, a retread; plus twenty minutes longer than the original and hitting the Life-Lessons-Learned button awful hard.  Passing the reins to PARANORMAN/’12 helmer Sam Fell (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/paranorman-2012.html), Aardmann founders Peter Lord & Nick Park lost the emotional force they generated with little but a furrowed brow on Gromit the Dog.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Stick with the original CHICKEN RUN or, even better, a collection of WALLACE & GROMIT shorts.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/chicken-run-2000.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/wallace-gromit-three-amazing-adventures.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Those great labor-intensive Aardman projects, including SHAUN THE SHEEP, all feel like they were made for the filmmakers themselves; NUGGETS feels like it was made for kids . . . and NetFlix.

THE SONG OF LOVE (1923)

One takeaway for newbies to silent cinema is discovering how unexaggerated, natural, even modern some of the acting is, with little of the exaggerated face-pulling they expect.  There may be no dialogue (though modest lip-reading skills often acquired), but early as the late ‘teens ‘miming’ rarely seen, actors having learned (largely thru Mary Pickford’s example) to trust their eyes to do half the work.  And then there’s Norma Talmadge.  Now forgotten (her one Talkie didn’t help), this top romance star of the ‘20s is the exception that proves the rule; rolling her eyes left, right, heavenward; flinging limbs for emphasis; posing in profile to defuse her substantial nose, she’s all dumb-show.  Here, she plays a fair-skinned Algerian dancer, tantalizing Arab freedom fighters when they’re not plotting to crush their French overlords.  Two actually battling over her favors.  But only one (tru-love Joseph Schildkraut) is secretly also an undercover French agent.  And with a French beloved on the hunt for him. Yikes!  Talmadge will have to offer herself up to save him, but she’ll have to beat both the local insurrectionists and the French relief column.  Scripter Frances Marion (who co-directed*) did better by Talmadge in SECRETS/’24 and THE LADY/’25, this one just worth seeing for its striking production values & for the astonishing lighting from cinematographer Tony Gaudio (later of many a classic at Warners) in an early shoot using Kodak’s new panchromatic standard stock rather than orthochromatic.  What sensitivity to color and grey scale now at his disposal!  The sole surviving print (from a German archive) has a fair amount of nitrate decomposition and is missing the U.S. release happy resurrection ending, but, faults and all, this is something to see.  KINO has it in their PIONEERS: WOMEN FILMMAKERS series.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Marion, with nearly 200 writing credits, only directed three films, this being last & least.  Her first was Mary Pickford’s THE LOVE LIGHT/’21, co-starring Marion’s soon to be husband Fred Thompson (later a kiddie cowboy star) whom she also cast in her second, JUST AROUND THE CORNER/’21.  Not currently available, but in gorgeous condition at the Library of Congress, CORNER is taken from a Fannie Hurst Big City/tenement novel and looks utterly mesmerizing (story and production) in beautifully tinted orthochromatic stock shot by Henry Cronjager.  (Link to the clip below.)  How can the whole film not be available for viewing?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1rDX8EZqwU

THE HOLDOVERS (2023)

Like LICORICE PIZZA, Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘70s coming-of-age pic two years back  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/licorice-pizza-2021.html), Alexander Payne’s ‘70s coming-of-age film (script David Hemingson) pushes period detail a tad too hard, likely because both filmmakers a decade or so young to have experienced the era as grown-ups.  But both get a helluva lot right, and with more loving touch than denigration.  HOLDOVERS, by far the more conventional film, pleasingly so, tells the old, old tale of antagonists forced to spend time together, warming up to each other as small personal revelations drop.  You know exactly where it’s going, but Payne & Heminson bring just enough surprise ‘reveals’ to hold interest even when the film threatens to run over 2'.  (Payne’s spoken of leaning on Hal Ashby’s THE LAST DETAIL/’73 for style & technique, but not able to recreate Ashby’s unique rhythmless rhythm, birthed in his days as an Oscar-winning editor.*)  Set at one of those clubby New England Prep Schools for rich, difficult scions, Paul Giamatti works hard not to make too much of a meal of his prickly, often soused, openly loathed classics prof, and debuting Dominic Sessa keeps up with him as a troubled but bright kid on his last chance before being punished with a transfer to Military Academy.  Along with the house cook (Da'Vine Joy Randolph, a grieving Black whose Prep-alumni son has recently died in Vietnam), they’re alone over the winter break after all the other stranded boys score a skiing vacation, thanks to an über-wealthy classmate.  Tiny adventures lead to life-affirming changes, lessons learned, trust discovered.  With warm & fuzzy feelings kept dry as Payne can manage in a Yuletide pic, it makes for first-rate middle-brow comfort food.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *In the NYTimes Magazine, Payne talks about what he lifted from Ashby and his exceptional THE LAST DETAIL/’73.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/magazine/the-out-of-fashion-film-trick-that-makes-the-holdovers-so-affecting.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-last-detail-1973.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  I have the back on any pair who walk out in the middle of LITTLE BIG MAN/’73.  (Though my guess is Payne meant showing a film clip as a compliment.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  You expect lots of smoking (pipes, ciggies, weed) in a ‘70s pic, but Hoowee!, such a lot of drinking to go with it.

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (2023)

SPOILER-ALERT!  Not from us!  No, the Spoiler comes from the SPIDER-VERSE itself, announcing ‘To Be Continued’ right at the end.  After 2+ hours setting up one more go at SPIDEY ORIGIN STORY (Chapter Five: Dad Dies), does anyone imagine they’ll go thru with it in some putative Part II?  Me neither.  Regretfully, after seeing Spidey masters Phil Lord & Christopher Miller demonstrate that MORE truly is LESS, perhaps it’s time to bid the SPIDER-VERSE goodbye.  A shame too, as INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE/’18 was such a happy surprise.*  Now, 15-yr-old Spidey, the Black High School Spidey with a cop for a father, gets confronted by Anti-Matter ‘Spot’ (slackly voiced by Jason Schwartzman, but conceptually the best thing in here), a Super-Villain powerful enough to need a village (of Spider-Entities) to counter him . . . in the next film.  All those International Spideys, wedged in like some SONY Headphone Product Placement.  Altogether too many Spideys (and all with parental separation issues); too many styles of animation thrown at us; too many plotlines & characters (catering to multiple views as you’ll need to reach Level Six to figure it all out), the evanescent look both cool & headache inducing.  When it opens in a year or three, just let us know how they finesse their way out of knocking off Dad so we don’t have to sit thru another 2+ hours.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *And INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE/’18 so promising.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/spider-man-into-spider-verse-2018.html

THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (1943)

Directing from 1915 to 1962, but mostly known for no-nonsense contract work @ 20th/FOX in the ‘30s, ‘40s & ‘50s, Henry King’s critical rep has long suffered from too many faceless ‘prestige’ assignments under studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck; this blandly respectful bio-pic with King on auto-pilot, just such an assignment.  (King also stayed too long at the trough.  Of his late work, only THE BRAVADOS/’58 showing him at something near his best.)  Taken from Franz Werfel’s bestseller about religious icon Bernadette Soubirous, a simple French country girl in the mid-1800s who stubbornly founded Lourdes as a shrine with a spring of healing waters thru her unwavering belief in visions of the Virgin Mary.  For King, it’s a typically solid, ultimately dull example of doing unto Zanuck exactly what Zanuck wanted you to do.  What the hell, everybody loved it, awards, box-office, new stars.  Seen today, it suffers from a lack of French character (Charles Bickford a French priest?  Anne Revere’s French mom?) and a town looking suspiciously like a redressed HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY set.  Jennifer Jones got the reviews as Bernadette (and an Oscar®), but the standout perf is from Gladys Cooper as one scary nun, a holdout against saintliness.  (And look for Dickie Moore delivering a note near the end.)  Everyone else, the yea & nay-sayers, acting strictly by-the-book.  Worse, the more respectful the film tries to be, the more ersatz it becomes.   Funny, scripter George Seaton easily able to make us all believe in Santa Claus writing/directing MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET/’47.  Go figure.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *King seen at his considerable best in small-town Americana, downbeat character drama, and in just about any of his silent films you can get your hands on.  Four superior examples below.  OR:  Type Henry King in our Search Box for many more.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/twelve-oclock-high-1949.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/state-fair.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/deep-waters-1948.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/01/stella-dallas-1925.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Composer Alfred Newman, who won an Oscar® for this score, brings back a bit of the magnificent ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ he claimed to have written for HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME/’39, but which was actually the work of Nazi-exile Ernst Toch.  Newman used it yet again, this time a fuller version, right at the end of his score for THE ROBE/’53.

THE MARKSMAN (2021)

Longtime Clint Eastwood producer Robert Lorenz, after a directing debut on TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/trouble-with-curve-2012.html), goes out on his own with (what else?) a Clint Eastwood movie . . . but without Clint Eastwood; instead, Liam Neeson gets the call.  Sixth-nine to Eastwood’s ninety-one, how often can Liam be considered the younger choice these days?*  Set at his failing ranch near the Mexican border, Neeson’s Vietnam vet runs straight into a vicious gang from a drug cartel on the hunt for a mother & son.  But when Mom dies in a firefight, Neeson feels duty-bound to honor her dying wish and get the resentful kid to relatives in Chicago.  In debt up to his ears and with his smalltime ranch just burnt to the ground, what’s he got to go back to?  The pair, only deeper in shit after killing the brother of the top enforcer, go on the lam, heading Northeast pursued by the law (including his worried daughter) and by the cartel mob, traveling in his expiring pickup truck with his (narratively expendable) dog.  The script doesn’t always succeed in having us swallow the next story beat, but the film grows more effective (and affective) as it goes along.  And Lorenz (or one of his co-writers) pulls off a few first-rate set pieces (an encounter with a corrupt highway patrolman; a quick, finessed buy at a gun shop, plus the expected thaw between man & child) without making a meal of them.  Standard stuff, but not a bad standard.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Eastwood’s own CRY MACHO/’21, out later the same year, with similar story elements, a similar running time, and Eastwood in a similar/familiar Eastwood role, earned little more than half this film’s modest gross.  Actually, the Eastwood pic this most recalls is A PERFECT WORLD/’93, a film that predates Lorenz’s involvement with Clint by a decade.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/04/cry-macho-2021.html

ARCHIE (2023)

Four-part bio-pic (bio-streamer?) on Archie Leach (aka Cary Grant) is decent enough and dutiful, running about three hours, but ultimately held back by two big missteps.  First: trying to cover a whole life (these things better when a moment in time tells the tale - see BEING THE RICARDOS/’21  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/being-ricardos-2021.html); Second: using Dyan Cannon’s memoir on their marriage as a hub to spin the story off of.  Very Dyan-centric in spite of using Grant’s late-in-life lecture tours as an easy organizing principle.  What keeps you interested (at least if you’re a movie-bio maven) is seeing how much Grant’s formative years mirror the life & hard times of Charles Chaplin.  Childhood poverty; absent father; mentally unstable mother; knockabout stage company saving him, giving direction and bringing him to America; quick Hollywood success; multiple unhappy marriages, etc.  Just as interesting is seeing how much this film mirrors the faults of Richard Attenborough’s CHAPLIN/’92.  Though none of the acting here comparable with Robert Downey Jr. & Kevin Kline’s Chaplin/Fairbanks act.  But since we never get fully hooked into the story, we spend too much time noting who does (and who doesn’t) ‘pass’ as the famous celebrity they get to play.  Impersonation or recreation?  Laura Aikman does Cannon to a ‘T’; Jason Isaacs hit-and-miss as Cary.  (Is that Robert De Niro under the clipped accent?)

Rather than relaxing into the role, Isaacs relaxes out of it.  Yet Grant ought to be playable, didn’t he create the man he played in life & on screen from common Cockney clay?  As presented here, he’s annoyingly overprotective & over-controlling, out of his depth when he and the much younger Cannon hit the cultural/generational ‘70s divide.  A bit of a fuddy-duddy at home, Grant still comes across rather well.  And why not with an adoring daughter as Exec Producer.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  People tend to look askance when they read David Thompson, in his top-rated ‘Biographical Dictionary of Film’ on Grant: ‘There is a major but very difficult realization that needs to be reached about Grant - difficult, that is, for many people who like to think they take the art of film seriously.  As well as being a leading box-office draw for some thirty years, the epitome of the man-about-town, as well as being ex-husband of Virginia Cherrill, Barbara Hutton, Betsy Drake, and Dyan Cannon, as well as the retired actor, still handsome executive of a perfume company - as well as all these things, he was the best and most important actor in the history of cinema.’  Doubt Thompson?  Hit this LINK to see some evidence.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/search?q=cary+grant

THE MAN WHO CAME BACK (1931)

Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, Fox Films’ top romantic team over the silent-to-Talkie transition (12 films from 1927 to 1934) are mutually uncomfortable in this OTT meller.  A B’way hit in the ‘teens, it probably worked better as a silent in 1924 (now lost - w/ George O’Brien & Dorothy Mackaill) than in this flatfooted Early Talkie from Raoul Walsh.  (Walsh nearly as stiff as his leads.)  Farrell, scion of a Wall Street Baron, drunk & dissipated, prone to headline-making scandals, is finally cut off by Dad, forced to make a fresh start of it in San Francisco (with a mere five thou).  But old habits die hard and he quickly sinks ever lower before he’s shanghaied to Shanghai.  Yikes!  With even Gaynor, the only decent person to believe in him, having drawn the line after he suggests she could be mistress rather than wife.  Disillusioned, she naturally follows him halfway ‘round the world where they have a second meet-cute . . . in an opium den!  (See poster.)  He’s back on the sauce; Gaynor quite the sight as an opium addict.  But together, maybe they can pull themselves thru.  Really?  Ridiculous as this all sounds, we’re actually not so far from one of their great silent hits, STREET ANGEL/’28, their second film together.  Ah, but that film was with Frank Borzage, a director who had a knack for fatalistic romance stitched together on a thread of religion & redemption.  Plus, no bad dialogue to consider.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  As mentioned, STREET ANGEL/’28, the follow up to their even more famous initial pairing in 7th HEAVEN/’27.  I’m partial to ANGEL, but HEAVEN, also directed by Borzage, gets more attention.  Try ‘em both!

LE PUPILLE (2022)

Award-winning short, just 38 minutes, but every one treasurable.  Frame-worthy, too, without feeling overly studied, but freshly caught and charged with life.*  It’s a Christmas story from WWII Italy, based on an old letter from the childhood of occasional writer Elsa Morante, better-known as wife to Italian writer/intellectual Alberto Moravia (CONTEMPT/’63; THE CONFORMIST/’70).*  Stuck over Christmas Eve & Day at her All-Girl Catholic School/Orphanage, eruptions of petty grievances and boundaries of established cliques keep the young girls in separate camps even as they bind together in the face of traditional convent rules, irrational custom and the enveloping religiosity of Mother Superior & her staff of Nuns.  The need for mutual support strong enough so that even a poorly treated girl despairs upon learning she'll spend her holiday with a kindly aunt.  And that’s in spite of the school & convent being low on fuel, low on food, low on funds; Christmas feast no more than a serving of pasta & a pear.  And that prized cake?  It may well be given away in hopes of future favors.  Yet didn’t the girls win it thru their Christmas Pageant, appearing as angels on a ‘Wishing Tree’ where locals give (hopefully) generous donations for prayers of intervention on soldiers at the front or perhaps a sick spouse.  The rationing of gifts and rituals of duty by the Sisters beyond a child’s understanding . . . if not her memory.  Somehow, they seem to survive the gross incompetence of the Nuns, and their own incessant squabbling.  With neither a wasted second nor an unmemorable frame, don’t let this ‘long’ short subject get lost in the shuffle of bigger, shinier, more exploitable fare as Alice Rohrwacher (Italian-born in spite of the surname) makes something very special out of the smallest of moments.  Find on Disney+ or look around under the radar.  Definitely worth hunting up.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Compared to this, something splashy, commercial, in the same ballpark, even good, like MATILDA/’22, feels test-marketed and pushy.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/matilda-2022.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The originating letter charmingly sung to us by varied combinations of school girls.

HYPOCRITES (1915)

Before movies became Big Business in the mid-1920s, women could be found working just about all positions other than cameraman.  (The weight of equipment an obstacle?*)  In the ‘aughts, Alice Guy-Blaché probably best known before Lois Weber came along in the ‘teens, acting, writing, producing, directing before slowing up significantly after THE BLOT/’21.  Unlike Guy-Blaché, Weber was specifically drawn to female protagonists & woman’s issues, though she’s equally interesting for technical prowess, as a recent KINO set shows.  (Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers)  Her 1911 short, SUSPENSE, about Mother & Child threatened by a tramp home invader, boasts dynamic angles, multi-plane framing within a single shot, and a doozy of a threatening extreme close-up as the tramp moves right into the camera lens.  It’s basically the same shot found in D.W. Griffith’s superb MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY/’12, but made one year earlier.  (Guess which is taught in most Film 101 courses.)  But the main item on this disc is her 1915 feature HYPOCRITES, a strange affair that looks toward those Cecil B. DeMille allegorical stories comparing modern times to ancient fables.  Why we’re just like the Romans!  The Bible!  The Egyptians!  Here when a religious leader dares to show his flock ‘The Naked Truth,’ in olden days a monk and a nude statue and the parallel match a modern parson with a ghostly nude lady.  Live ‘tasteful' full-frontal nudity not something you see in much mainstream fare circa 1915.  (Banned in Boston?  You bet.)  Lots of camera trickery, but the story awfully slow & confusing, showing Weber without a nose for narrative to carry us along.  Lots of nitrate decomposition, too.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Weber better represented by THE BLOT, even more by her weirdly compelling anti-abortion melodrama WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?/’16 where society wives use abortion as birth control, and their unborn children wait out eternity in a ghostly nursery-room.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-blot-1921.html

CONTEST:  *Come up with a camerawoman on any major silent-era motion picture and win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice on any streamable film we’re able to get hold of.

TEL AVIV ON FIRE (2018)

It was the worst of times (with current events in Gaza); it was the best of times (boy, do we need it now!) for a charming/funny Palestinian/Israeli comedy.  Set in the world of Ramallah Hollywood (Rollywood?) where a sort of Palestinian Tele-Novela is filming (I almost wrote shooting) in a small tv studio, its storyline set during the ‘Six-Day War’ of 1967, centered on an Arab Mata Hari type.  Sticking his nose in where it doesn’t belong, the producer’s nephew (Kais Nashif, a skinny Richard Benjamin type with a permanent 5 o’clock shadow over his entire body) is on set for his idiomatic expertise in Hebrew.  But, this being Rollywood, this 'Nepo' assistant really wants to write.  Only problem, he’s actually got some good ideas and the leading lady insists he’s heard out.  Only problem, on his drive home, he asks an Israeli checkpoint guard about using the word ‘explosive’ as a compliment for a woman and gets hauled out of his car as a possible terrorist.  Brought in to Checkpoint Headquarters, he’s questioned by the Captain in charge.  Only problem, the Captain’s wife loves the Rollywood ‘soaps’ and he also has some ideas to improve ‘Tel Aviv On Fire.’  Only problem, his ideas aren’t bad!  Maybe a bit too pro-Israeli; the show soon being criticized on all fronts, within & without.  Only problem, the viewers love the political complications & personal dilemmas popping up behind the romance & espionage.  What’s next?  Marriage between Palestinian vamp and Israeli General?  Maybe not unacceptable if the bride keeps spying on her husband.  Yikes!  A second season renewal?  And so on.   Co-writer/director Sameh Zoabi keeps it all light on its feet; you expect it to go Dumb & Obvious, but he manages Smart & Obvious.  No small achievement for a film farce.  And thankfully, everyone in the cast has good timing.  Something that probably can’t be said about watching this film at this moment.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  An inspiration for lighter themed Arab/Israeli films, THE BAND’S VISIT/’07 now looks too interested in parading goodwill & winning humanitarian awards whereas ON FIRE mostly just interested in generating laughs . . . and perhaps all the better for it.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/10/bikur-ha-tizmoret-bands-visit-2007.html

THE CHAMP (1931)

Back at M-G-M after shedding the last vestiges Early Talkie technique on STREET SCENE/’31 at Goldwyn Studios (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/street-scene-1931.html), director King Vidor brought a looser freewheeling style, naturalistic staging & acting and a preference for real location shooting to this formulaic male weepie.  By turns, raw and sentimental, it was a late triumph for screenwriter Frances Marion*, an original story about a washed-up boxer with a bum ticker who gets back in the ring for the sake of the idolizing son left by his ‘Ex,’ now a rich, repentant society lady.  No secret how this is all going to play out, but Vidor had a perfect touch for the material and a perfect cast unafraid of pathos, bathos or Depression-Era ethos.  Sure you’ll wince at some dated elements (the boxing climax painfully under-cranked & faintly ridiculous, though not the knock-out blow!), but you’ll be laughing thru real tears.  Especially when Vidor wraps with one of his signature OTT operatic ariosos.  In line with ones given to Renée Adorée clinging to John Gilbert as he drives off in THE BIG PARADE/’25 or to Jennifer Jones, crawling back to die next to Gregory Peck in DUEL IN THE SUN/’46.  Here, it’s little Jackie Cooper ('Dink') unable to process his grief after the big fight.  Wallace Beery got his Oscar® (with a bit of studio pull) as the out of shape, but still powerful ‘Champ.’  (Note Cooper switching from ‘Champ’ to ‘Daddy’ when he tries to throw in the towel.)  With Irene Rich as the tardy Mom & Hale Hamilton the new husband, both completely understanding in this villain-less film.  And note Cooper’s best pal, a Black kid who hangs at the race track with Dink.  (Cooper quietly tells Rich he’s ‘colored’ in case she didn’t notice.)  Acted by debuting Jesse Scott (8 or 9) with zero ‘darkie’ caricature so typical of the period.  Dressed like every one else, talking like everyone else, no craps, no shufflin’, no funny hat or wiseguy personality.  Being just a person something of a small miracle for a Black kid on screen at the time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Second only to Ben Hecht as a legendary Hollywood screenwriter, for some reason Marion isn’t even listed at IMDb on this, her second Oscar® winner.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Cooper particularly loathed working with Beery, not the lovable mug of his films, but a brutal, all 'round pain in the ass.  Note Beery slamming his hand onto Cooper’s in the jail scene.  Yikes!  (Cooper’s reaction shot stunningly lit.)  Nevertheless, they made four films together, best after this probably TREASURE ISLAND/’34, the only version of the story with a crying jag for young Jim Hawkins.  No way, Louis B. Mayer was going to release a Jackie Cooper film without a scene for the little fellow to cry his heart out.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/treasure-island-1934.html

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023)

Steven Spielberg threw in the towel (or was it threw up his hands?) on this eighth INDIANA JONES film, handing off to James Mangold.*  And a quick glance at the running time raises immediate concern as the film is nearly 40 minutes longer than any previous INDY; bound to feel overstuffed.  So it proves right from the start, as everyone seems determined to fold in a variation on a favorite bit chosen from across the whole series.  The prologue hews close to LOST ARK’s template.  Later, a tough urchin tags along a la TEMPLE OF DOOM (second and worst in the series).  Tomboyish sidekick?  Enter Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  And of course plenty of Nazis, snakes (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), plus weapons that boomerang back on guys good & bad.  It’s not an undoable idea, LOST CRUSADE, third in the series (second-best), managed something similar in its zippy prologue with River Phoenix as young Indy, doing a sort of origin orgy of Indy aversions.  Now, Harrison Ford plays his own younger self (heavy CGI very good!) running thru a WWII endgame (heavy CGI not so good), before jumping ahead to late ‘60s NYC and the search for ‘the other half’ of Archimedes antiquity time machine.  Fortunately, there’s enough goodwill left in the series to let us invest time, energy & sentiment in all the shenanigans, even when obvious mistakes are made.  Why have the tough street kid murder a bad guy when he could have simply swum thru a gap in an underwater gate too tiny for the big brute to fit thru?  For that matter, why bother hiring Antonio Banderas for a glorified cameo?  Remember when Shia LeBeouf was being set up to take over the franchise?  Bet he’d like to use the Dial of Destiny on his career.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Eight?  Not six?  The reasoning can be found in our LAST CRUSADE post.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/indiana-jones-and-last-crusade-1989.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  There’s another template being used here (from prologue to finish), an ominous one.  Preston Sturges’s unhappy attempt to revive Harold Lloyd’s THE FRESHMAN/’25 as a middle-aged drudge via THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (aka MAD WEDNESDAY)/’47.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Ironic that Mads Mikkelsen found early international attention playing a famous Danish Nazi resistence fighter in FLAME AND CITRON/’08, yet is usually stuck playing villains, like this Nazi villain, in his English-language pics.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/flammen-og-citronen-flame-and-citron.html

A BETTER TOMORROW / YING HUNG BOON SIK (1986)

Still highly rated, career-markers for all parties, now looking pretty threadbare, particularly for writer/director John Woo who locked onto his Hong Kong Actioner voice & style after making 15 films in 12 years.  But Better Tomorrows were in the pipeline, literally so with two sequels (not seen here), and actually so starting with THE KILLER/’89.  Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun-Fat star as rough-playing gangster pals, part of a big drug & counterfeit operation, their lives complicated by cops, prison, demanding bosses and now Cheung’s kid brother a new Police Inspector.  Woo seems uninterested in these personal matters for much of the film (why should he be?), instead giving all his attention to the action scenes (fights, chases, shoot-outs) which are relatively crude.  And not only by current standards.  Worse, he lets two of his leads, Emily Chu as a comic cipher of a girlfriend (hopelessly trapped in misogynistic shtick); and a shamelessly showboating Yun-Fat.  At one point, Yun-Fat is smoking, sloppily stuffing his face, twiddling with his tongue, rattling out dialogue, and chewing on a wooden matchstick . . . all at once.  Riveting in all the wrong ways.  Hopefully, THE KILLERS (coming up shortly on MAKSQUIBS) will show Woo turning the corner toward his own better tomorrow.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Known for lux, precise, cinematically choreographed action (certainly during his Hollywood decade: ‘93 - ‘04), Woo returned to Asia with a worth-the-wait grand, historical epic, RED CLIFF/’08.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/chi-bi-xia-jue-zhan-tian-xia-red-cliff.html

INNERSPACE (1987)

With ‘50s/‘60s B-pic stalwarts and Dennis Quaid’s impeccable ass showing up in blissed out cameos, plus Meg Ryan before she started acting adorable (at the time she simply was adorable), this silly action-comedy from Joe Dante (and Papa Bear Steven Spielberg) makes a darn good case for ‘80s Pop entertainment.  (Now looking spectacularly good in Hi-Def formats.)  Heck, even Martin Short keeps his end up.  Something he rarely managed in his leading-man days other than THREE AMIGOS/’86.  Quaid’s a gonzo test pilot/astronaut type, prepped for ultra-miniaturization and a trip via syringe inside a bunny rabbit.  But a failed techno kidnapping plants him in Short’s tush and the chase is on.  The opening promises little in the way of comic invention, and Dante lets the running time get away from him, but vet character actor Kevin McCarthy shows up halfway in to hilarious effect just as the twists, gags & reversals of fortune really start coming together.  Legitimately exciting, more than the sum of its parts, even getting away with a touch of sentiment at the end.  You could teach a class in Hollywood film structure off Jeffrey Boam/Chip Proser’s script.  Soft grosses no doubt kept the suggested sequel from happening, but who knows?  Each of the leads still active.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: All the creatives must have had an adolescent weak spot for the downsized spaceship & tiny team of doctors in FANTASTIC VOYAGE/’66.  They certainly improved on the model!  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/07/fantastic-voyage-1966.html