ROBOT DREAMS (2023)

Officially released Stateside last year (no doubt for Oscar® consideration), but not in general release till now, this dialogue-free hand-drawn feature from Spanish writer/director Pablo Berger must be the most endearing, ultimately thoughtful & touching, animation since WALLACE & GROMIT stop-motioned into our hearts back in the ‘90s.  Wonderfully funny, too, but just as often tough-minded on love, life & loss.  A wise fable on happiness qualified as a lonely Manhattan dog in graffiti-clad  ‘80s NYC (no humans; just anthropomorphic animals) finds happy couples wherever he looks, while he's stuck with tv dinners and cable tv.  And that’s where he sees an ad for a companion robot.  Soon, the pair bond, an instant match, but then lose each other after an oceanfront beach visit leaves Robot behind a locked/patrolled boardwalk gate.  Closed for the season until Memorial Day.  Yikes!  Attempts at rescue prove hopeless with each side going from hope to abandoned acceptance, then on to dangers and even new partners in spite of remembering that first love.  Phenomenally well-observed (period NYC perfectly caught - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/04/movies/pablo-berger-robot-dreams-movie.html) and so delightful that the seriousness of the situation and a melancholy manner sneak up on you, leaving you smiling and a touch devastated.  Youngest viewers may need a nudge to explain some frequent unannounced jumps into and out of dream sequences*, but just about anyone other than snarky teens will be enchanted.  Heck, them too, though they may not admit it.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Kids will likely spot Dog & Robot watching THE WIZARD OF OZ and note a parallel between Robot and the Tinman who both rust up and lose a limb.  If they haven’t seen WoO, you might have a nightmare to deal with.

CONTEST: In addition to the WoO quotes, one sequence prominently pays homage to two classic stunts from Buster Keaton silents.  Name the situations and the films they come from to win our usual prize: a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

CHESS STORY / SCHACHNOVELLE (2021)

Best known to cineasts for THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL/14 (not seen here) and Max Ophül’s LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN/’48  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/letter-to-unknown-woman-1948.html), literary Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who successfully fled the Nazis only to suicide in Brazil when he was 60, has actually had more than 100 film & tv adaptations made from his work, including two of this story, a hallucinatory tale of international finance, madness, surviving the German/Austrian Anschluss of 1938, and chess.  (BTW - not Zweig’s only chess centered story to be filmed.)  Having mistimed the inevitable Nazi Occupation when German forces crossed into Austria ahead of a scheduled national referendum on annexation, lawyer Josef Bartok, who holds codes to the State’s foreign deposits, misses the ship to NYC his wife is taking when he's waylaid by police & soldiers on instruction from the new Nazi-controlled Treasury Department.  Locked into the luxury Hotel Metropole, but in a dire room fitted out in prison conditions, he’s psychologically tortured, physically abused and isolated; but promised his freedom if he gives up passwords to foreign held monies.  Slowly going mad, he’s almost drowned in a bathtub by an overeager jailer (his superior horrified at the thought of losing those codes) when an incident in the jail wing of the hotel allows Bartok to steal a book, the first companion he’s had in months.  By chance, it’s a book on great international champion chess matches and he’s soon obsessed by the game, eventually playing out some sort of fantasy match on a ocean ship against a great chess master and using all the tricks he’s picked up in his reading.  Zweig’s short story natural material for a heightened reality dramatization, but director  Philipp Stölzl, along with his entire production staff and cast (very much including lead Oliver Masucci - in a desperate situation, but his acting desperate in the wrong way) while maintaining a consistent tone, go so far overboard, everything comes out hopelessly overcooked.  Only the CGI ocean liner works as you want the whole film to, a triumph of design and execution while everything else is so neurotic & over-stylized right from the start, the film has nowhere to go other than ponderous excess as it forges ahead to an apparently hopeful ending in a mental asylum(?).  Pity.

WATCH THIS/NOT THAT/LINK:  Stölzl’s NORTH FACE/’08, also portraying this era, is far more successful capturing the discomforting political vibes of the time.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/05/nordwand-north-face-2008.html

LUST FOR GOLD (1949)

No doubt all the prestige on THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE/’48 prodded Columbia’s Harry Cohn to greenlight his own Gold Fever project.  Too bad his was Fool’s Gold.  The film holds a modest rep as something of a ‘find,’ strong cast/unusual bifurcated structure, but it’s a dog any way you slice it.  And here it’s sliced by bookending a five-reel flashback with thirty-minutes of contemporary action.  Both stories involving a hunt for $20 mill in gold, all bagged up and ready to go, but hidden in rough mountain terrain.  If the falling rocks don’t kill you, another treasure hunter just might.  All laid out in the wrap-around contemporary story as William Prince, Grandson of the original prospector, starts his own dangerous hunt between his motor-mouth voice-over exposition of times past.  A generation ago, when mean-as-a-coon-dog Glenn Ford shoots his partner after they find the elusive gold, only to have Ida Lupino and husband Gig Young come on the scene.  Ida plays easy to get, but only has eyes on the golden prize.  It’s ludicrous stuff, poorly played/poorly staged, with Glenn casually tipping ten-ton boulders onto adversaries with one hand, and an earthquake to settle all scores.  Now, back to our modern story which largely replays themes from the past before a double climax to end the hunt and tie up loose ends with action that anticipates NORTH BY NORTHWEST/’59 and MACKENNA'S GOLD/’69.  (How'd they do that?)  Perhaps director S. Sylvan Simon was responsible.  A final film before dying at 41 two years later, he’d largely been a comedy specialist, mostly for Red Skelton.  Speaking of Fool’s Gold!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Ford’s at his very best playing a bad guy for Delmer Daves in 3:10 TO YUMA.  The 1957 original, not the 2007 remake with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/09/310-to-yuma-2007.html

SUZUME NO TOJIMARI (2022)

After hitting his feature debut out of the park (YOUR NAME/’16), the almost shockingly talented anime writer/director Makoto Shinkai skipped any sophomore slump, but still came up a bit short in WEATHERING WITH YOU/’19, gorgeous looking but somehow both too much and not enough.  NAME all about mirrored lives lived decades apart, WEATHER about a sunshine girl who lifts spirits & clouds in Tokyo.  The difference was that Shinkai’s second film felt reverse-engineered to fit preconceived visual ideas whereas NAME’s look and set pieces always generated directly out of the story.  And while this latest work can’t match the psychological sophistication and satisfying meta-physics of NAME, it does rebalance story & spectacle to their proper order of importance.  This time, our 16-yr-old heroine (an orphan living with her young aunt) ditches school, dazzled by a striking young man who asks directions to any nearby ruins. ?  Seems he’s looking for a door. ??  This will all eventually make sense as he’s a ‘Closer,’ keeping the world safe from devastating earthquakes by shutting secret portals to keep the 'Willys’ out.  Or whatever these spirits are, along with a magical kitty who holds the key (that’s literally holds the key) to locking the doors..  (This all shows a lot of influence from the Ghibli world of Hayao Miyazaki and is frankly unwelcome here.  Shinkai has his own distinctive voice.)  But all too soon, the striking stranger is physically possessed by a three-legged child’s chair (a fabulous and bizarrely anthropomorphic conception).  This leads to a series of simply spectacular set piece adventures as the threesome dash to the next open portal to stop the next catastrophic earthquake.  Suzume helped by a series of serendipitous female helpers.  (The film casually feminist in a manner atypical of anme.)  Quite a show, especially when Shinkai dares to use refreshingly simply graphic techniques mixed in with his animated pyrotechnics.  An abandoned amusement park come roaring back to life, quite exceptional.  Hopefully his next will have a storyline worthy of his great ability.  Till then, this will do nicely.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  If you haven’t seen YOUR NAME, what are you waiting for?  (Hopefully you’re not waiting for the long-rumored Live-Action Hollywood remake!  Boo.)    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/06/kimi-no-na-wa-your-name-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note the Closer’s best pal (and general Good Guy) back in Tokyo is a pack-a-day smoker.  Cigarette smoking by non-baddies, not something you see much of in Stateside animation.

BACHELOR IN PARADISE (1961)

After tackling low-budget Hollywood Horror with CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON/’54; TARANTULA/’55; THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN/’57, sharp B-pic director Jack Arnold took on a different sort of intractable monster, the increasingly disengaged post-Paramount Bob Hope.*   In one of the better leaky vessels that passed for Hope vehicles in the ‘60s, he’s an author of naughty bestsellers on sex habits around the world suddenly forced to go undercover (so to speak) in a modest California tract home development to pay off taxes.*  Turns out, he’s the sole bachelor around.  And since he works from home during the day while all those nosy neighboring housewives are free from husbands and kids . . .  Yikes!  Such a smart, smarmy set up, it seems impossible to miss completely, and it doesn’t.  Hope landing plenty of the glib one-liners that passed for dialogue in his later films.  He doesn’t even appear to be looking past his acting partners to read off cue cards.  Divorcée Lana Turner (she calls herself a bachelor BTW, not a bachelorette) co-runs the suburban paradise with only one home model to choose from (hers, which she rents to Bob, is pink).  Farcical situations bring many a missed opportunity, but you do get a chance to see who does and doesn’t show comic chops.  Kudos to Paula Prentiss, completely outshining everyone else.  (What a loss when she largely dropped out of sight.  The sultry voice, the clotheshorse frame, the comic-primed physicality; she might have followed Carole Lombard or Kay Kendall, two more gifted gals with shortened careers.  Elsewise, interest lies mostly in the glossy look inside & out from glamor cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg who gives us that pristine 1961 style that made real Supermarkets look like carefully dressed Hollywood sets.  With canned peaches going four for a buck!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Director Richard Quine’s shot at this sort of sex comedy was A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN/’67.  Six years naughtier; more dated; less funny.  But one year earlier, his STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET/’60 (Kim Novak; Kirk Douglas) does this suburban scene to a T, but in serious mode.  OR:  *Hope’s’ comedies quickly got progressively worse, including Arnold directed vehicles, even a Road Pic reboot with Bing Crosby couldn't help.  Just once, working again with Lucille Ball in CRITIC’S CHOICE/’63, did he appear to be making an effort.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/guide-for-married-man-1967.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/critics-choice-1963.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Still living under Eisenhower tax rates in '61 which meant that in spite of Bob’s many bestsellers earning a mill & a quarter, he's left owing about 6.5 hundred thou to Uncle Sam!  No wonder there was far less income disparity after taxes back then.

LES HAUTS MURS / BEHIND THE WALLS (2008)

Too good to go missing behind the algorithms.  French director Christian Faure, here also co-writing, who works mostly in French tv, made this stunning realization of Auguste Le Breton’s semi-autobiographical novel (posthumously published) about his teen years in the early 1930s, when he escaped from an orphanage only to be tossed in an ’educational’ reformatory run under conditions that could pass for a French Penal Colony.  (Le Breton best-known for movie-friendly crime novels RIFIFI/’55 and BOB LE FLAMBEUR/’56.)  Faure immediately throws down the gauntlet, opening his film by quoting the iconic ending of François Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS/’59.  But with no freeze frame to stop the action, we continue on to life in a prison-like work-house that might have inspired Lord of the Flies . . . or PAPILLON.  The situations follow recognizable dramatic paths, but this can’t stop them from being believably horrifying.   (Faure overloads once or twice and somewhat misses the mark in his use of music; a few times here suspense would expand without any, and in a superb idea of a boy who whistles the tunes he imagines he plays on a paper keyboard.  Here,  Faure ought to let us participate in what the boy hears in his head as well as what the other ‘boarders’ don’t.)  But nearly everything believable: from the vicious top boy who plays droit du seigneur with the newest young captives; the solid lead boy who runs his group with honor; the rich kid whose step-father has ‘parked’ him here; the sympathetic wife of the director who runs what passes for school; the penitent parent whose visit comes too late; the constant dream of escape.  An amazingly rich load of story & character arcs in an hour & a half, hard to shake even when things start to feel pulpy.  Well caught early ‘thirties atmosphere, too, and a shocking end card that informs us that these institutions lasted till 1979.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Two films mentioned above: BOB LE FLAMBEUR; 400 BLOWS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/08/bob-le-flambeur-1956.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-400-blows-les-quatre-cents-coups.html

CHAMPION (1949)

Like the mousy secretary in the Movies, the one revealed as a natural beauty once she takes off her glasses, so too Kirk Douglas, transformed from spectacled accountant/snarky suburban intellectual to All-American He-Man by losing the eyeware, permanently altering his career trajectory.  (Guess he’d been hiding that CHAMPION physique all along!)  It’s a fairly standard boxing number (Stanley Kramer produced, but from a tidy Carl Foreman script, Mark Robson directing, Franz Planer lighting cameraman), quite tasty, hitting all the long established boxing tropes.  Kirk enters the ring by happenstance, comes back for the money, grows tougher & meaner by the bout, gains skills/loses humanity with every TKO.  Gimpy kid brother Arthur Kennedy tags along even as he becomes repulsed; shot-gun bride Ruth Roman left behind; ambitious blonde Marilyn Maxwell comes & goes; finally lands above his station with society dame Lola Albright.  And the big prize?  An editing Oscar® for Harry Gerstad.  Best in the first half, before heavy dramatics take over, with Kirk still getting by on charm & aptitude before coach Paul Stewart takes a temporary walk.  With ring action effective, but kept in its place; solid, no showboating.  Even if the rocky dramatics in these things are undeniably frayed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Story structure here liberally ‘borrowed’ for Vincente Minnelli’s THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL/’52, with Douglas moved off the canvas and onto the Hollywood sound stage as a small-time movie producer who rises too fast not to come down.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-bad-and-beautiful-1952.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Some maintain a soft spot for early nerdy Kirk.  (He looked good in glasses.)  Go for the film right before this: A LETTER TO THREE WIVES/’49.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-letter-to-three-wives-1949.html

CORNER OFFICE (2022)

Ever since his career defining role in MAD MEN, Jon Hamm has been trying to find a proper outlet for his enormously appealing, yet disquietingly off-center physical grace and commanding screen presence.  This little art house film, which casts against type, ain’t it.  A debut feature for Joachim Back, it feels like a graduation project by a promising student, designed less to please than to tease with Hamm as a new employee at some anonymous corporate headquarters (widget manufacturers?) where his affect and lack of engagement with fellow desk jockeys seems to place him somewhere on ‘the spectrum.’  But once he locates a secret office space, warm & comfortable/1950s style, hidden inside the sterile steel & glass aridity of the rest of the high rise, he finds he’s suddenly able to fix long intractable company problems.  His achievements only slightly shadowed by the inconvenient fact that his special working space may be a figment of his imagination.  And yet the results are real enough.  There’s a Theatre of the Absurd vibe here, as if Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener took the lead in Frank Loesser’s HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING.*  But how do you get out of the set up; how concrete can you make it and achieve dramatic closure?    Still, about halfway along, Hamm’s voice-over monologue finds a rhythm and enough clicks into place to carry viewers along.

DOOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The film of HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING doesn’t do the Pulitzer Prize-winning material justice, but a modest, modernized adaptation of Bartleby the Scrivener from 1972 does.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/bartleby-1972.html

MORBIUS (2022)

Though it wound up earning out, MARVEL fanboys & girls, hardly the most particular patrons at the multiplex, largely dissed this realization of yet another dark anti-hero comic-book figure.  (Loud dissing was saved for MADAME WEB/’24, next up from this writing team.)  For non-MARVELites, the good news is that it’s a full half hour shorter than recent adaptations; the bad news is . . . everything else.  (‘Jinx’ news is that Michael Keaton chooses unwisely again, appearing right at the end to plug a never-gonna-happen sequel.)  And MORBIUS?  Take away the ‘MACBETH CGI’ (definition: CGI ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’) and you’ve got a pic that looks like a pricey CSI 2-parter (all that chilly blue lighting) and wants to be THE FLY/’86.  Trying much too hard to be serious, Jared Leto is his own patient, impressively gaunt as he wastes away from some unfathomable blood disease before curing himself with a shot of some unfathomable elixir and becoming impressively buff!  Alas, major side-effects kick in; he becomes a violent, ultra-powerful, blood-sucking humanoid vampire bat.  Worse, fellow blood-deficient bro Matt Smith also wants the cure; bad enough to kill.  Though not actual brothers, these two play out a ‘Father always liked you best’ routine against mentor Jared Harris, the one interesting idea in here.  (Also, two Jareds star in one pic!  A first!)  Alas, the script & director Daniel Espinosa leave this underdeveloped to pursue unreadable action sequences often obscured by a vortex of bats.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Best moment comes early on when a character mispronounces Nobel Prize as Noble Prize.  Neither of which went to MORBIUS, instead earning three nominations and two wins (for Leto and a missing-in-action Adriaq Arjona) at The Razzies.

THE SCARLET HOUR (1956)

The combination of hitting sixty-five, ankling his long held perch as top director at Warners, and coming to terms with various WideScreen formats seems to have taken a toll on Michael Curtiz’s ironclad self-confidence as master of all genres.  And if his last truly great film was probably THE BREAKING POINT/’50 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-breaking-point-1950.html), it’s still good to see him recover much of his old form even in this reheated film noir from Paramount.  But there’s only so much Curtiz can do with this DOUBLE INDEMNITY wannabe (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and BEAU GESTE, of all things, also downloaded) or with the three leads he singled out with a special ‘Introducing’ credit.*  Alas, ‘Bad Girl’ Carol Ohmart and ‘Good Girl’ Jody Lawrence did little with their opportunity, though Tom Tryon as Inconsistent Lover/Loyal Stooge took advantage before transitioning with great success to bestselling novelist.*  The overwrought story has Ohmart & Tryon making out in a parked car when they overhear a plot to rob jewels from a nearby house.  Why not rob the robbers and have enough cash for Ohmart to leave dull husband James Gregory?  (Gregory also Tryon’s boss.)  Naturally, things don’t go according to plan and the lovers quickly fall out.  The real mystery is wondering if this might have worked with seasoned players.  (Heck, Barbara Stanwyck still doing this sort of thing - see CRIME OF PASSION/’56.)  Watch for a near duplicate of a famous scene from INDEMNITY where lovers turned murderers meet in a banal supermarket, here transferred to a music shop.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Curtiz had a dozen films left in him, all but dying in harness.  Four of them (see below) worthy of the great man even if he was so ill on the last that its star, John Wayne, more or less took over for him.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-proud-rebel-1958.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/10/king-creole-1958.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-man-in-net-1959.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/comancheros-1961.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  As Ohmart’s party-girl pal, Elaine Stritch doesn’t get that coveted Intro credit, but makes a bigger impression.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Tryon, who was gay, briefly took a bride this year, presumably part of his star-making regimen.

THE CHILDE / GWIGONGJA (2023)

Writer/director Park Hoon-jung’s super-charged Korean action/thriller punches far above its weight right from the unsanctioned boxing match that follows hard on its mob vs mob prologue.  What follows is Bloody Clever (twists, ‘rhymed’ plot reveals & delayed pay-offs Dumas might have okayed); Bloody Satisfying (apparently independent plot strands woven into one); and just plain Bloody Bloody (in the modern free-flowing manner though less graphic than it seems).  Kang Tae-Ju’s the young boxer, fighting to raise cash for his sick mother when he’s told of the rich Korean tycoon who’s his secret father.  Heading to Korea to guilt trip Putative Pop for cash, he’s unaware he’s hunting up a dying man or that he’s placing himself directly between the legitimate son & daughter (from different wives) already at war to collect the dying man’s fortune, each with their own fighting force of killers.  Yikes!  But wait, only one of the two wants Kim dead right now.  The other only wants him dead . . . eventually.  Yet both sides will do anything to grab him.  Worse, there’s a third hunter, an Action Jackson figure whose loyalties (if any) are undetermined.  This is Kim Sean-ho, a remarkable Johnny-on-the-spot, always there beside Kang Tae-Ju, always smiling (when he’s not wheezing from exhaustion), and stealing the whole film out from everyone before tucking it in his perfectly-tailored suit pocket.  Hollywood!  Grab this guy immediately!*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: This is the film Quentin Taratino thought he was making with his KILL BILLs.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kill-bill-volume-one-2003.html   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kill-bill-volume-2-2004.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Imagine classical pianist Lang Lang as an action figure.  That’s Kim Seon-ho, second of the four leads on our poster.  (see above)

BLACKWELL'S ISLAND (1939)

Blind-sided by an era-defining success for debuting John Garfield in FOUR DAUGHTERS/’38, (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/four-daughters-1938-young-at-heart-1954.html), Warner Bros. now wasn’t sure what to do with their new star: street-savvy, ethnic, violent vibe, something of a precursor to all those Method actor types (think Clift; Brando) of a decade later.  (True, Bogart already at the studio, but he wouldn’t find his true character for a couple of years yet.)  So, before they finally figured Garfield out (see THE SEA WOLF/’41 https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-sea-wolf-1941.html), they used him to fill up prestige pics in support or bump up programmers, as here where his top-billed crusading reporter socks a police officer to follow a vicious syndicate boss (fifth-billed Stanley Fields in the film’s biggest role) into New York’s Blackwell Prison.  (It’s now pastoral Roosevelt Island!)  Entertaining & ridiculous in equal proportions, director Michael Curtiz, who guided Garfield in DAUGHTERS (and would again in WOLF) was brought in sans credit to buck up William C. McGann’s routine megging.  (You can easily spot Curtiz’s stuff, especially in the big prison riot and breakout climax.)  Rosemary Lane gets nothing to do, but as she co-starred in DAUGHTERS, she gets second-billing.  The supporting players, all second-tier Warners players, are great.  What a line-up of contract players that studio had.  Nice to see Charley Foy, of vaudeville’s SEVEN LITTLE FOYS, with a decent role as Garfield’s prison helper.  Even nicer to see Fields go to town with his childish vulgarian act not quite covering the real threat he and his waterfront protection racketeers put out.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Warners brought their A-game to the undercover reporter in prison storyline in next year’s EACH DAWN I DIE/’39.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/each-dawn-i-die-1939.html

DEAD MEN TELL (1941)

20th /FOX was winding down their long-running/still profitable CHARLIE CHAN series when they made this standard issue, if noticeably short, late entry, now with Number Two Son (Victor Sen Yung) and Number Two Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), suitable replacements for 'Number Ones' Key Luke & Warner Oland.  (After two more films, MONOGRAM Pictures would pick up the rights, keep Toler, degrade production values.)  A Buried Treasure mystery, there’s a motley gang of treasure hunters gathering for a ‘pirate ship’ cruise after piecing together four sections of said treasure map.  But when the quarters go missing, and map guardians start to turn up dead, #2 Son,  already on the trail, needs Pop to rescue him and solve the case.  A neat set up with journeyman director Harry Lachman* getting handsome chiaroscuro lensing from Charles Clarke, only a bit too much comic relief from Yung, and more deductive reasoning than aphorisms out of Toler’s Chan.  Three things hold it back: a plot that moves forward solely on overheard secret conversations; a no-name supporting cast (though future Superman George Reeves brings a bit of zest); and a ship that frustratingly never leaves the dock.  It makes the whole film feel stuck in port.

DOUBE-BILL/LINK:  *Lachman would leave the movies next year and return to first love painting, where he was highly rated.  Check out his painterly touch in his most ambitious film, DANTE’S INFERNO/’35.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/dantes-inferno-1935.html

CORMAN’S WORLD: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011)

In the ‘60 and ‘70, no one gave more future Hollywood machers a first shot at moviemaking than indie producer/mini-mogul/low-budget Schlockmeister Roger Corman, who just died at 98.  Sayles, Coppola, Demme, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda barely scratch the surface, and Alex Stapleton’s well-handled documentary, loaded with clips & personal remembrances works like a charm.  Charm: a word not otherwise associated with any of Corman’s nearly 500 production credits.  Here, no encomiums from old associates trying to raise his modest directing abilities (usually focusing on the Edgar Allan Poe travesties, only Scorsese blathers away about them), instead confederates laugh at all the horrible films they were forced to make.  Corman knew the score, dropping the megaphone as soon as it made financial sense.  He’d seen enough of his early hires move to the A-list while he was stuck with the hoary Hollywood adage about B-pic guys: Sure, you know how to save a buck, but do you know how to spend one?  It helps explain why Corman, once he left the small-time goons who ran American International Pictures and started his own New World Pictures, surprised Hollywood by choosing to distribute art house product (Bergman, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Fellini), putting them in offbeat venues, even Drive-Ins as a way to scratch his itch for quality.  (You could make a Corman exploitation pic about horny teen kids making out at Drive-Ins showing CRIES AND WHISPERS.  Cut to a close up of those old metal speakers hanging on a car window and having an orgasm.)  This modest doc is a gem.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Probably the most interesting idea in here, one everyone seems to agree on, is how the one-two punch of JAWS/’75 and STAR WARS/’77, which mainstream studios always cite as a game-changer that made mid-list Hollywood fare economically marginal, was even more disastrous for Corman’s cheap pop exploitation.  Suddenly, his style of movie was available as quality product and he couldn’t keep up.  So long theatrical distribution; hello direct-to-video.

THE JUNGLE BOOK (2016)

Barring earlier attempts (including one of this title in ‘94), the current cycle of Disney Animated Classics turned ‘Live-Action’ features began with ALICE IN WONDERLAND in 2000.  (Note scare quotes around ‘Live-Action’ as enough CGI used to make these read as hybrids.)  Over a dozen since (and counting) with Tim Burton’s DUMBO/’19 by some lengths worst of the lot (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/11/dumbo-2019.html) and this Jon Favreau film pick of the pack.  The story of a boy raised by jungle animals remains intact if tweaked to lean toward Kipling’s Just-So stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ TARZAN & Disney’s BAMBI/’42 (now getting its own ‘live-action’ treatment).  As for what’s CGI and what ain’t, hard to say as even real backgrounds and a very real boy (Neel Sethi, okay, but no Sabu*) loaded into the CGI blender.  And that brings up the usual problem: Just how quickly state-of-the-art CGI dates.  Here, animal mouths ‘speak’ oddly, furry coats look stiff and jumps can feel weightless, all distancing us from full involvement.  Once the dramatic endgame gets under way in an action-packed, high-stakes, suspenseful third act, and Favreau’s writers stop burdening Bill Murray and pals with comic relief out of the 1967 animated film, everything finally comes together.  It's not so much that the old hand-drawn animation was more convincing, if anything, it’s far more stylized, but that it’s all-of-piece stylistically so we aren’t constantly jarred out of identification with story & character.  While you wait for the film to turn the corner, check out the rather self-conscious money shots (Favreau all but insists!) and amuse yourself by noting how much Ben Kingsley (heard but not seen) sounds like Patrick Stewart.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *The old Alexander Korda version with Sabu is a treat, a period treat, mind you (1942), but still effective when seen in the fine new restoration out on Criterion.  On the other hand, Andy Serkis’s all CGI attempt (All-Star vocal cast; big budget) was pulled to avoid direct competition.  DOA in a limited 2018 release with Mowgli and most of the critters looking CGI creepy.  Much like Serkis did playing Gollum in LORD OF THE RINGS/’02.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/jungle-book-1942.html

JIM THORPE -- ALL-AMERICAN (1951)

Funny that the main reason to watch this factually-challenged Hollywood bio-pic of Jim Thorpe, the great Native American sportsman, the sheer tactile pleasure in seeing Burt Lancaster at 37 believably inhabit the graceful athleticism of a college-age phenom, would make the film a non-starter nowadays.*  A full-blooded Irish-American New Yorker as tragic Native American track & field/gridiron legend?  As for the rest, moderately effective boilerplate in an ossifying Warners bio-pic tradition that came in two flavors: Either birth to breakthru to crisis to academic acceptance, various LIFE OF So-and-so prestige pics, mostly  by director William Dieterle.  Or: Cradle to maturity via extended flashback with a mid-life fall before late re-recognition, often directed by Michael Curtiz, as here, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY/’42*, THE STORY OF WILL ROGERS/’52.  But neither Curtiz’s still potent visual flair nor Lancaster’s joyous physicality can overcome a pretty dark story.  Certainly not with the lazy construction that uses former coach Charles Bickford to lay out Thorpe’s history as a very long intro speech at some testimonial dinner.  Thorpe’s decline & fall after his Olympic Medals are rescinded when he’s ‘outed’ as (technically) a professional, is the dramatic fulcrum of his life, but needs a fuller development and a more sophisticated story structure.*  And the film has the devil of a time coming to terms with a defeated man and still finding a bit of uplift.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *After Lancaster, Max Steiner’s ‘Indian Tom-Tom’ music cues would be next to go (but rightly so).

DOUBLE-BILL:  *You can see how the template works in YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, James Cagney’s George M. Cohan narrating his own flashback (to FDR no less!), one wife gone  missing (Thorpe loses two!) and WWII patriotism for that little bit of uplift at the end.  Even more parallels in that both men only in their mid-60s, died soon after the films came out.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Most histories of the modern Olympics note that the emphasis on amateur status, which sounds fair & noble, was really an attempt to keep things ‘clubby,’ heavily skewed to favor upper crust Etonians and the like, with working-class tradesmen and laborers unable to afford to compete.  An attitude that in Thorpe’s case, meant his 1912 medals weren’t reinstated until 1983.

PICK-UP (1933)

Tight little B+ item (that’s budget, not a grade) from Paramount, standard fare, very Pre-Code, with Sylvia Sidney, the notorious Baby-Face Moll, getting out of the slammer while her husband stays in and stews.  A violent man she’s glad to see the back of, she really had little to do with his crimes in spite of the nickname.  Leaving with no more than her freedom and a fiver for her pocket, she’s glad to just get out of the rain sitting in the cab of ambitious taxi driver George Raft.  After sharing a meal and a chaste overnight at his apartment, she winds up moving in for what turns out to be less a full blown romance than an arrangement.  She is still married, not that she lets him know.  Taking a chance on a cheap, available country garage, they’re making a go of things (still living in sin, mind you) when society calls in the form of a rich amoral gal who likes the way Raft makes her engine purr.  She likes the way he makes her purr, too!  Needless to say, his new interest and Sidney’s not so old past are enough to break up the happy home.  But when the heiress goes too low, and ‘Mr. Sidney’ escapes jail to force his way back into her life (she’s secretly just gotten an unopposed annulment), the shit hits the fan and only some highly unlikely giggle-worthy courtroom melodramatics can sort it all out.  Bread & butter stuff here, more Warner Bros. than Paramount, but well cast up & down the line.  And with such distinctive leads: Sidney with her crinkly proletariat Madonna face; Raft, never much of an actor, but retaining his streamlined Art Deco facade; together they freshen a stale tale under Marion Gering’s dutiful megging.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  1933 was the year background scores started to be a regular thing in the movies.  Helped by technical advances that allowed mixed tracks without serious deterioration in sound quality.  Warners and R.K.O. were far ahead, but here you can hear Paramount trying to play catch up . . . not very well.  Odd since the studio’s musicals had been generally ahead of the field, thanks mostly to Lubitsch and Mamoulian.

LA JEUNE FILLE SANS MAINS / THE GIRL WITHOUT HANDS (2016)

You know the drill for animated features: a ten-minute crawl of fast scrolling end credits (hundreds & hundreds of faceless tech meisters) to patiently sit thru in hope of a brief animated encore.  (Usually a plug for some putative sequel.)  Not here, more like two minutes; four or five names per card; half of those names Sébastien Laudenbach.  And that’s only fair since this minor astonishment is all but entirely the work of said M. Laudenbach.  (His main credit reads ‘Written and Drawn by.’)  Taken from an exceedingly dark, presumably unexpurgated fable by those laugh-a-minute sadists, The Brothers Grimm, the visual style suggests thru quick, throbbingly alive sketches, often a mere impression of events & characters to start our imagination.  It’s up to us to complete the thought.  At times, Laudenbach might be playing a game to see just how little he can get away with and still have it all register.  Naturally, not everything comes off for us to work things out, but with a story this ghastly, perhaps that’s for the best!  Here, a poor miller sells his daughter to a devilish creature for plentiful water and ’dirty’ gold only to find she’s rejected as barter because her pure tears have ‘spoiled’ her hands.  Off they come or lose the deal!  Yikes!  Later, she’ll get useless, if handsome, gold replacements from a Prince before he goes off to lose a war; believe an enchanted lie about her giving birth to a monster; then return to . . . well, you can’t imagine.  Young inventive kids, the scribblers in your life who create a notebook of squiggles and tell you a story to go with it, might be excited to see how the simplest of color washes and broad strokes work to make form, characterization & movement.  Alas, the underlying story and level of violence (even with a happy ending) would give anyone under 13 nightmares for months.  Older than 13, too!

DOUBLE-BILL:  In addition to earlier shorts,  Sébastien Laudenbach has now made what appears to be a friendlier feature: CHICKEN FOR LINDA!/LINDA VEUT DU POULET/’23 (not seen here).  OR: In the Sell-Your-Soul-To-The-Devil Department, this story recalls Stravinsky’s L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT/A SOLDIER’S TALE which was also made into a superb film by eccentric animator R.O. Blechman working in CinemaScope.  But it only seems to be currently available in Pan-and-Scan abominations at half it’s original length.  A real loss.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1946)

This was director Edmund Goulding’s other Somerset Maugham project of 1946, going directly from this 1915 semi-autobiographical novel at Warners to recent bestseller THE RAZOR’S EDGE at 20th/FOX. (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/razors-edge-1946.html)  The second of three futile tries at BONDAGE (R.K.O 1934; M-G-M 1964*), it’s largely forgotten now, with miscast actors and an unworkable script with more obstacles than a game of bumper pool.  Surprisingly, Patrick Knowles makes a decent show as a med school pal, but elsewise, accents alone make this a non-starter with Eleanor Parker’s Cockney waitress inexplicably ensnaring Paul Henreid’s artist-turned-med student stumbling awkwardly over her just as he does over his psychologically debilitating club foot.  Parker trying to be unrefined; Henreid trying to be British.  (A Viennese father is mentioned, but the real explanation is that Warners was running out a soon-to-expire contract.)  Even Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s fine score seems detached from the story* while Goulding proved better at turning THE RAZOR’S EDGE into silky smooth melodrama.  And if that film’s spiritual elements now look like a Hollywood embarrassment, pulpy human interest and plus-perfect casting make it as intensely watchable as this film is missable.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Perhaps because all attempts at BONDAGE come up short, the three films (1934; 1946; 1964) offer a unique chance to study changing Hollywood mores & manners/style & content without much emotional involvement getting in the way.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/10/of-human-bondage-1934.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/11/of-human-bondage-1964.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A fine piece of music on its own, Korngold was brought in to ‘punch up’ a film that obviously wasn’t working.  Later, Korngold asked to see the 1934 version with Bette Davis and told her it was excellent, though some scenes after ten years seemed somewhat ridiculous.  ‘Our film, however, is ten years ahead of its time; we’re ridiculous already!’  A superb suite from the score, recorded as part of the famous RCA series of classic film scores in the early 1970s, helped start a full-scale Korngold revival that now sees almost all his film, opera and concert compositions available in multiple versions from top classical artists.

L.627 (1992)

You’d think after three decades* of increasingly gritty docu-style Lives-of-the-Cops films, this down-and-dirty look at an underfunded Narcotics Unit (CIC) in some out-of-the-way Paris nab (not a tourist in sight) would have lost its edge.  Yet, almost the reverse is the case in critic/filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier’s superb ensemble piece.  No police procedural, more a systemic view at a failing system, and the characters who find work-arounds to strict rules & regulations to keep it functioning.  Didier Bezace is the gifted investigator, always in trouble with superiors, but too well connected to his personal pack of criminally dicey informers to spend more than token stints in office purgatory assignments.  Supported and thwarted by talented, if lazy slobs, his co-workes more interested in hitting quotas than in solving crimes or social problems, Bezace might come off as too exemplary, but Tavernier sets limits.  Dealers who won’t give up suppliers get physically abused; hookers & illegal immigrants cultivated to work as informers; even an emotional attachment to a hooker/addict for times when Bezace isn’t working his side-gig of filming weddings to afford finer things for his wife and little girl.  Remarkably, Tavernier is able to give nearly as much background & detail on a dozen cohorts without stopping narrative for exposition.  Standouts include the sole female trouper, a very tough cookie; the annoyingly juvenile group leader; and special attention to partner Philippe Torreton in the first of many outstanding perfs for Tavernier.*  Using less of the charging style Tavernier often favored with cinematographer Alain Choquart, the steadier camera work helps us keep lines of action and that big characters list straight while laying out enough action and cases to fill two seasons of a series ‘bible.’   Too compressed to lose a sense of discovery, and too well acted to develop the tics, tricks & corny traits series actors incrementally add to characterizations.  (Note: *After two decades, here's a more detailed second MAKSQUIBS Write-Up.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Torreton gives nothing but Gold Standard work in all his Tavernier projects, never more so than in his award-winning WWI portrait in CAPTAINE CONAN/’96.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Tavernier also lucked out making this in 1992, not long before out-dated analogue equipment began giving way to less cinematically congenial digital tools.  Not only no computers, no electric typewriters as they were considered dicey in light of wildcat strikes that could shut down power at any time.

DECISION TO LEAVE / HEOJIL KYOLSHIM (2022)

Still best known for the gross outs and technical command of OLDBOY/’04 twenty years ago (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/03/oldboy-2004.html), and currently buzz-worthy from THE SYMPATHIZER/’24 (now streaming/not seen here), this recent feature shows Korean director Park Chan-wook in more traditional mode.  Built from film noir elements, but not particularly dark or claustrophobic, it’s more of a Lady or the Tiger story as Busan police detective Park Hae-il works thru his latest baffling murder.  Baffling less for the case (suicide or murder?), than for his reaction to his main suspect.  Married, with a wife he only sees on wknds, he finds himself attracted to the elderly victim’s much younger wife (Tang Wei).  Flirtation leads to an affair, but is he sleeping with a murderer or can he prove suicide?  Months later, the suspect has remarried, moved to the town he and his wife live in, and reconnects with him (the wife instantly suspicious) just before this second husband dies.  Was this one murder?  Was the first husband’s death murder?  She had killed before, assisting her elderly mother in her suicide.  She certainly doesn’t act the grieving widow.  More like a Black Widow.  Park has a fine time getting all his plates spinning at the same time, but doesn’t always follow who you want him to.  It makes a generous 2+ hour running time seems even longer.  (At its most problematic in the first act.)  Still, noir fanciers will enjoy imagining the film’s close connections to 1940s Hollywood noir.  Perhaps with Barbara Stanwyck taking on the possibly guilty married suspect and Fred MacMurray as the flatfoot.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *There’s more than one Stanwyck/MacMurray film to consider, but go for DOUBLE INDEMNITY/’44 with its great Billy Wilder/Raymond Chandler dialogue and, in a role sorely missed here, Edward G. Robinson personifying character conscience.

AD ASTRA (2019)

Writer/director James Gray, who tends to please critics more than crowds, takes a big left turn from his usual Earthbound family relationship dramas, leaping all the way to Neptune for Interplanetary family relationship drama.  Whether he need have bothered is debatable as this unexceptional father/son conflict boils down to a hackneyed struggle between Dad (paranoid, God-like, Old Testament Tommy Lee Jones) and only son Brad Pitt, a wounded New Testament rebel out to save the world.  Largely ditching the Bible for A WRINKLE IN TIME, Gray bumps the Madeleine L'Engle classic from YA to a grown-up Bizarro iteration*, with Jones off his nut on Station Neptune, flushing bolts of electricity and threatening the entire Solar System.  Conceptually pretty weak, but as physical production the film’s a wow!  Forgoing current CGI methods for old-school ‘practical’ special effects, the film is loaded with hushed beauty and a sense of daunting weight that so often goes missing in CGI.  (Sense of scale not quite as successful as some of the planet & space-ship models look like Revell® 1:8 scale kits.)  Yet a burial in ‘sea-space’ an instant classic, while a surprise attack from a primate stowaway (presumably an ‘escaped’ experiment) a desperation move to squeeze in an action sequence.  Somehow, Pitt pulls it all off without embarrassment.  The first Gray pic anyone might think of rewatching . . . but only for the F/X.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Alas, film attempts at A WRINKLE IN TIME have come up short.  Instead, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001/’68, the obvious visual lodestar here.  Note how its stubbornly slow pace and stillness, which ought to expose 1968 effects work, has the opposite effect of selling it.  Gray unwilling or without the confidence to run out the clock.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/08/2001-space-odyssey-1968.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  No doubt, the producers hoped for more Academy Award action than the Best Sound Mixing nomination seen on our poster.

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)

With Dino De Laurentiis exec-producing, Canadian director David Croenenberg was finally able to move up from schlocky (in a good way) mind-blowing shockers to classy, B+ budgeted horror via this Stephen King adaptation.*  Christopher Walken, forty but looking much younger, brings his peculiar, wary anxiety to a well-liked High School teacher who wakes from a five-year coma with inexplicable psychic abilities allowing him to visualize past & future events in subjective POV.  Reluctant to use his new power, he’s convinced to try and solve a still active serial murder case and finds his ‘gift’ a two-edged sword.  Running away from instant notoriety, Walken starts a new life as a beloved tutor in a new town, only to be confronted by his past when former fiancée Brooke Adams (now married with kid) comes thru town; and by his present and putative future thru Martin Sheen’s Kennedyesque Senate candidate (and future Fascist President?).  Like a lot of Stephen King, the second half has trouble answering what gets raised in the first half, so Croenenberg holds tight to a blueprint slavishly lifted out of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and hopes for the best.  (That tight budget working hard against the big set pieces which come off as tinny.)  But he does provide a real humdinger of a jolt in a final ‘future ‘visualization’ from Walken that audiences of the time must have shrieked at in outraged pleasure.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Note the all-star character actor list in parts large & small: Tom Skerritt, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Herbert Lom..

CONTEST:  Either King or Croenenberg was really paying close attention to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’62 as a certain liquid beverage figures into both plots in unlikely ways.  Name the beverage and how it shows up in each film to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Naturally, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-manchurian-candidate-1962.html

THE GIRL SAID NO (1930)

William Haines’ brief run as a top M-G-M star peaked with five films in 1930.  Yet only two years on the studio dropped him; presumably for his unapologetic gay lifestyle.  And while he limped thru a couple of 1934 indies, Haines largely pivoted (very successfully) to antiques & interior decorating.*  (Joan Crawford & Nancy Reagan swore by him.)  A tough sell these days, he usually played the scapegrace kid, a scamp whose devil-may-care selfishness got everyone else in trouble.  Then, with about a reel & a half left in the pic (at college or on a first job; in the service on land or sea; at Pop’s failing family business), he’d have some sort of short, sharp, shock, see the error of his ways, ‘man up’ and save the day.  Forgiven, a twinkle in his eye would hint at fresh bad behavior ‘round the corner.  The End.  This one’s the same . . . and different.  (And with Sam Wood directing, not too sleepy for an M-G-M Early Talkie.)  Back from college after manhandling a new girl and her new car (his behavior more appalling than laugh inducing), Haines skips his folks’ anniversary dinner to hit the town with college pals.  Scripter Charles MacArthur making a cunning move by showing he’s really no worse than his pals.*  An entire generation of self-centered hedonists!  Then, MacArthur places the required life-altering crisis not at the end, but in the middle.  (Dad dies and the whole family leaves manse for tenement.)  Haines, still the supreme Jerk of No Trades, continues to force his affections on an engaged Leila Hyams (it’s 1930 so she encourages the mauling) only to luck out when he nails a seemingly impossible office assignment.  This not only leads to a happy ending, it also sets up a one-reel comic duet between Haines and the always astonishing Marie Dressler, fresh off her ANNA CHRISTIE/’30 comeback, as a rich old bat Haines needs to ‘land’ for the bank.  When Haines gets top billing, the story is always The Rake’s Progress.

DOUBLE-BILL: *The best iteration of the usual Haines character arc is in George W. Hill’s TELL IT TO THE MARINES/’26 with Eleanor Boardman coming between Haines and co-star Lon Chaney.  Alas, Haines’ best film, MEMORY LANE/’26 (John Stahl; Conrad Nagel, Boardman) only exists in a superb, but out of order print that (reel-by-reel) has its scenes grouped not by story continuity but by tinting color!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *So, what did happen with Haines?  Was his carefree character too irresponsible as the Depression took hold?  (The economic crisis had yet to fully hit Hollywood in 1930.)  Was it simply that what seemed like larky fun in a 20-something became unacceptably cruel in a 30-something slightly thickened by age?  Or did synch-sound & dialogue add unattractive realism to his constant ribbing, quips & caustic hijinks?  Suddenly the playful jabs really hurt.

CONTEST:  *MacArthur lifts his famous ending from THE FRONT PAGE (co-written with Ben Hecht) here.  It's the one signified by the line: ’The son of a bitch stole my watch.’   Explain its use here and name another MacArthur/Hecht film classic that reused the same idea.  (And no, it’s not Howard Hawks’ gender flip reworking of THE FRONT PAGE as HIS GIRL FRIDAY/’40.)

UNFROSTED (2024)

Catnip for Baby Boomers; younger viewers (and who isn’t?) may find themselves culturally at sea.  Still, this docu-farce on the race between Post and Kellogg’s to get a shelf-stable breakfast pastry into your local 1963 supermarket is relentless good fun.  Or is it just relentless?  Shot and performed like a living cartoon, Jerry Seinfeld co-writes, directs & stars as a top cereal exec leading the drive.  Wisely backing himself with an All-Star line-up of Stand-Up Comics in roles large & small, Seinfeld's consistently surprised line delivery remains for better or worse largely intact.  Odd that a comedian with some of the best comic timing since Jack Benny should rush fences and then have trouble shifting down a gear or two.  Elsewise, his directing debut comes off pretty well: hothouse lighting; goofy period technology & office decor horrors taken for granted; real actors as needed (Christian Slater, Hugh Grant, Jon Hamm all welcome).  Hope he gave his helpful editor (with at least eleven 'saves') a big bonus!  Though maybe no bonus for their researcher: Cabbage Patch Dolls; Missing persons on Milk Cartons?  In ‘63?  (Or is this a test?)  Laughs will undoubtedly vary by age (plenty had over here), yet it’s hard not to wonder if a pseudo-serious take might have paid bigger dividends.  Whenever Walter Cronkite shows up for a report, it’s like half the work is being done for you.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention to that Pop Tart coming out of your toaster!  Don’t know if it’s still true, but when the original four flavors first came out, the Brown Sugar filling got so notoriously hot from the toaster, it burned the roofs of the mouth of an entire generation of kids.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  To see this kind of social satire done in a serious and seriously funny way: THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT/’51.  Or for ‘60s throwback period flavor & thoughtful content: PLEASANTVILLE/’98.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-man-in-white-suit-1951.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/10/pleasantville-1998.html

GODZILLA MINUS ONE / GOJIRA -1.0 (2023)

Surely the best GODZILLA movie since GODZILLA, that is the first GODZILLA, or rather GOJIRA, the title of the original 1954 Japanese cut.  (Starting an 8th decade of constant activity, who could possibly have seen them all?)  The initial film, made not so long after the literal fallout from the bombs that ended the war, had a top-tier cast & compelling direction from Ishirô Honda, with atomic guilt on offense & defense, motivating the monster out of the depths.  This new film goes farther back, to near the end of the war as a Kamikaze Pilot gets cold feet, scraps his flight, then watches in horror from his inactive plane as the monster flattens the small island he 'parked' on.  Haunted by a different sort of guilt than what was seen in the original film, he survives to live a ‘borrowed’ (or is it bartered?) post-war life, grabbing a chance for peaceful redemption by starting a new, ad-hoc ‘found’ family out of war’s rubble, and later joining a civilian defense group when an even stronger Godzilla beast rises from the depths to finish his mission of total destruction.  Again, a fine cast and an inventive director* help this stand out, but it’s the writing, concept and changing ideas of a new Japan moving away from its fixation on honorable death to embrace honorable life, that ups the emotional involvement.  (A volunteer mine sweeper raises the issue directly, saying: ‘This country never changes . . . perhaps it can’t.’)  The special effects vary from superb to ‘whazzit’ (Godzilla, at best, always an oddly proportioned thing, especially when standing), but packing a wallop when he chows down on soldiers or picks up a battle ship and tosses it over his shoulder.  Yikes!  If there’s such a thing as a paradigm of a GODZILLA pic, this is it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, the original GOJIRA/’54.  For more Ishirô Honda horror, with color & a decent budget, try THE H-MAN/’58.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-h-man-bijo-to-ekitai-ningen-1958.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Director Takashi Yamazaki not afraid to lighten the mood from a generally serious tone, often with a sly film reference he refrains from pushing in your face.  Like ending the first act with a ‘Smile you son of a . . . ’ homage to JAWS/’75.

THE ROUNDUP / BEOMJOIDOSI 2 (2022)

Deservedly popular Korean (comic) police actioner (two sequels already) with Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) again playing detective Ma Seok-do, currently under a restraining order for excessive violence, but charging into his next case for a quick career-redeeming win.  Here he’s after some vicious ex-pat Korean criminals, now working scams in Vietnam where they prey on Korean tourists.  But even the worst of the worst can go too far and these guys now find themselves under attack by the gangster father of one of their kidnap victims.  For Detective Lee (and his superior who’s joined him on the hunt in Vietnam) it means he’s fending off opponents on three-fronts: Ultra-violent kidnapers; ultra-powerful mob guys; and the cops (Korean and Vietnamese) trying to reel him in.  Director Sang-yong ain’t going for subtlety, but sure gets his laughs, as much from character as from tonnage; with plenty of gross-out gore and martial arts choreography to pair with the film’s wonderful line-up of eccentric personalities.*  And Don Lee is the real deal in action comedy.  With fast moves and bulky frame, you really believe in this one-man wrecking crew, a combo platter of Jackies Chan and Gleason.  (Because of fairly realistic violence, this rates a 13 & Up Family Friendly Label.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Look out for the Gangster’s Wife #2.  A woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it.  And note how much of the action (knife battles and vehicular mayhem), are done for real and not made ridiculous thru CGI overkill.

OORLOGSWINTER / WINTER IN WARTIME (2008)

Coming-of-age WWII story set in Nazi-occupied Holland ought to be a slam dunk for co-writer/director Martin Koolhoven, but unexpectedly hits the rim.  Hard to put a finger on just what goes wrong, but it plays like a melodrama with convenient story beats substituting for plot, trying for realism with a series of predetermined twists going wrong instead of right.  Debuting Martijn Lakemeier, is touchingly rebellious as the 15-yr-old son of a small town mayor, looking up to his resistance hero Dutch Uncle and down on a father he views as little better than a collaborator.  Assumptions that prove tragically misguided when they come directly into play after an RAF pilot bails and needs medical & reconnaissance help.  There’s a romantic complication between his nurse sister & the wounded flier, but that’s less of a problem than the boy’s short attention span.  Every time he takes his eye off the ball, some mini-disaster happens, usually to his bike.  (BTW, how many bikes does this boy have?  Even with wartime restrictions he seems to go thru about five.)  Much of the snowy atmosphere is nicely accomplished (pity about the occasional use of fake ‘foam’ snow), but then Koolhoven will build up a race to an execution that D.W. Griffith might find too much.  And why so much political naivety by the kid (and seemingly much of the town) about the deadly consequences of Nazi retribution when the film begins in January 1945, long after they must have figured things out and were waiting for the Allies certain advance.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Jamie Campbell Bower, quite good as a remarkably fast healing RAF pilot, looks like the missing link between Malcolm McDowell and  Jonathan Rhys Meyers in their salad days.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Andrei Tarkovsky started his career with one of the great WWII coming-of-age films, IVAN’S CHILDHOOD/’62.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/ivanovo-detstvo-ivans-childhood-1962.html