THE UPRISING (2026)

Between misleadingly advertizing promising a proto-Robin Hood foundation tale (more grime/more gore/more ‘realism’) and a strong back-wind from Peter Watkins’ monumental (and monumentally over-praised) ‘you-were-there’ LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871), Peter Greengrass’s downbeat take on Britain’s doomed 14th Century ‘Peasant Rebellion.’ equally crippled by an inadequate budget that makes do with Revell® model towns & river ships, never had a chance.  A pity as the history is fascinating and little known outside the U.K.  Basically a tale of overreach by the rich & titled, now underfunded after the Great Plague, and how they went back to pillage villages once too often, arousing revolt in the South and up to London; the Peasant Rebellion.  Unsustainable, but not before churches were looted and upper-crusts killed, along with many innocents.  Andrew Garfield is intensely touching as the bereaved farmer who becomes figurehead to the movement, but Greengrass can’t structure the chaos that outran the noble ideas.*  Once we reach the final betrayal  and epilogue (which finally brings in the Robin Hood angle), he’s lost touch with cast & audience.  So, in an ironic twist, it’s King Richard II, switching sides & allegiances like a weather vane, who becomes (by default?) the guy we’re interested in.  Barely 14 at the time (late puberty in those days, you wonder if his voice had even changed*), his assumption and use of his power over subjects and Council, the sudden growth as political/military strategist is the thru line Greengrass misses.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Richard II, ten when crowned, at his most impressive in his teens.  Shakespeare’s RICHARD II focuses on later decline and dethronement.  See this Richard in the opening segment of THE HOLLOW CROWN/’16.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-hollow-crown-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Here spoken in modern Mid-Atlantic English at a time when Chaucer, later patronized by Richard II, was writing.

COYOTE VS. ACME (2026)

Few things regularly fall as short of expectations as seeing some previously lost film you’ve waited years (decades?) for.  A legendary silent miraculously found in some Russian film archive turns out to be a formula programmer by a famous director on autopilot.  A print of some Early Talkie discovered in a dusty studio vault reunited with synch-sound discs found in the Seattle attic of a deceased private collector, where the pristine visual element turns out to be the alternate silent release.  An acknowledged masterpiece (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA/’62?) brutally trimmed from its original 22 reels down to 19 for a ‘70s re-release, finally restored to its original length, sent off to theaters with two reels printed in reverse.  Yikes!  So, when Warner Bros. opted to take a thirty-mill tax write off in 2023 and effectively erase the completed negative of this Live-Action/Animated mash-up (based on Ian Frazier’s dry/witty New Yorker piece on how Wile E. Coyote sued ACME Industries for years of malfunctioning products), you knew to keep your hopes down when Ketchup Entertainment came to the rescue with a Buy-Out/Theatrical release offer.  Surprise!  The film is a 1'43" ear-to-ear grin, studded with legit guffaws every couple of minutes.  (Including slapstick toppers topping the toppers on gags.)  This time, your wish is fulfilled.  Having previously spent much of his time doing big budget visual effects, director Dave Green segues smoothly into integrated visuals (CGI animation coaxed toward a hand-drawn æsthetic) and has consistent fun rug-pulling the narrative line with perfect pacing, pitch-perfect comedic acting (from animated humans and animators) that mesh seamlessly.  (Extra points to Tweety & John Cena!)  And shout outs to Will Forte for not attempting to compete with the Zanies, but letting his Personal Damages Attorney get his laughs playing straight man (Rowen to a gaggle of Martins).  And to Merry Melodies copycat vocalist Eric Bauza repeating from THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP/’24.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Remarkably for a pick-up, ACME grossed more than six times what BLEW UP made for the same releasing company.  That one’s all animated, so perhaps the better second feature might be WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT/’88.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-day-earth-blew-up-looney-tunes.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/who-framed-roger-rabbot-1988.html

CREEPY / KURÎPÎ: ITSUWARI NO RINJIN (2016)

Slow-burn horror from writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is aptly titled, but ultimately a near miss, mostly from its hard-to-swallow third act.  It certainly starts well with a prologue that traps a psychopathic serial killer after his brief escape from a holding cell in a police office building.  With no way out, the murderer still manages to make his point to the detective who’d been conducting the interview.  The film then jumps ahead a few years as the detective, now retired from the force and teaching college, keeps one foot in the game by investigating a cold case disappearance that happened near his new home six years ago.  Clues point to his odd duck of a neighbor whose personality runs hot and cold*, yet forms an unlikely friendship with the ex-detective’s discontented wife.  And that’s when you start to pick up on how this story is developing into a fool-me-once/fool-me-twice suspense thriller built from lessons not learned in that gruesome prologue.  But Kurosawa gets sloppy, unable to convince us of the creep’s powers of persuasion over his ‘assistants,’ while police forensics go untried on that cold case and putative victims seem to lose peripheral vision so they can be easily attacked.  The whole third act hobbled with implausible story beats and too many shrink-wrapped bodies to dispose of.  Or is it the film that's been shrink-wrapped?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Film composer Yuri Habuka often sounds like she’s channeling Bernard Herrmann.  Effective, but giving this suspenser Htchcockian overtones Kurosawa may not have been looking for.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Japan’s social conventions and physical restraint can look nearly as ‘off’ as the behavior of the film’s creepy villain.  Which doesn’t hurt, as you might expect, but adds an extra note of complexity.

MICMACS / MICMACS À TIRE-LARIGOT (2009)

Typically, French writer/director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known Stateside for AMÉLIE/’01 and DELICATESSEN/’91, demonstrates a bad case of the cutes along with a weakness for excessively ornate design that makes someone as OTT as Baz Luhrmann look more severe than Mies van der Rohe.  Cinematic vices that allow even his most popular successes to quickly exhaust themselves and his audiences.*  At least this fabulist caper, an eccentrics’ tale of revenge against rival titans of industrial war weapons, comes with a literary background as it’s straight out of Jean Giraudoux’s equally twee THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-madwoman-of-chaillot-1969.html), though missing Giraudoux’s farcical boulevard grandeur.  Jeunet opens with farcical tragedy² as a land mine kills a father before thirty years pass and his son takes a bullet in the head.  (Collateral damage from a terrorist incident.)  But the son recovers to seek revenge against that pair of international arms dealers, helped by some  ‘Court of Miracles’ eccentrics who design a plan of action worthy of Rube Goldberg.*  You have been warned.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *From our limited Jeunet list, A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT/’04 shows him at his most digestible.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/very-long-engagement-2004.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The shame of it all is that Jeunet shows real technical chops at almost everything he tries.  Maybe someone could get him and, say, Terry Gilliam enrolled at some lion taming school . . . as beasts who need taming.

1408 (2007)

While big brother Harvey Weinstein juggled A-list projects, ‘shorting’ profit participants and sexually abusing female interns & junior execs at MiramaX & later his eponymous company, kid brother Bob stayed busy Exec-Producing B-list genre slop, mostly horror (series and one-offs) that played like ‘content’ decades before A.I. existed.  Bob a prophet of schlock before the fact.  This one, a typically profitable terror-torial one-off taken from a Stephen King short story, stars a somewhat thickened/puffy John Cusack* who seems to have misplaced his ‘Epi-Pen’ along with his character’s writing talent as a past-his-prime author of  haunted house/paranormal investigations.  Now burdened by the tragic death of a young daughter, and the marital breakup that followed, he’s eager for a new ghost story to reset his brand.  That’s why he won’t listen to hotel manager Samuel L. Jackson’s pleas to back off from over-nighting in Room 1408 of NYC’s Hotel Duncan.  Sure enough, he hasn’t settled in before a funhouse of horrors starts beating him up with visions of past victims, poltergeist attacks and replays of personal family tragedies.  Still new to English language pics, Swedish director  Mikael Håfström leaves a mess for Weinstein favored editor Peter Boyle to clean up.  But he can’t help the film from over staying its welcome and piling on the poltergeists and shock cuts to diminishing effect.  Somewhere inside here is a pretty good episode of ONE STEP BEYOND or THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Have Oscar nom’d Samuel L. Jackson (hotel manager), Tony winner Len Cariou (dead Dad) or Tony and Emmy’d Tony Shalhoub (book agent) ever been given less to do?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to think of an actor as inconsistent as the supremely talented Mr. Cusack.  His last Stephen King role, a cameo in STAND BY ME/’86, astonishingly memorable considering the brief screen time.  Here he seems to be channeling near contemporary Nicolas Cage for inspiration . . . and besting him by holding something back.

AMÉLIE ET LA MÉTAPHYSIQUE DES TUBES / LITTLE AMÉLIE OR THE CHARACTER OF RAIN (2025)

Inexplicably well-reviewed (if little seen) animation from France (feature debuts for directors Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han), best described as Whimsical/Creepy.*  Largely focused on Little Amelie as she passes from two to three years-old in the 1970s at the lux pagoda-style house her Belgian family (Mom, brother, sister, house helper) live in while Dad works a year in Japan.  Discovering some new natural wonder every day, Amélie develops a kiddie God Complex, getting into trouble with every adventure.  Mom weirdly unconcerned with safety in spite of near drownings and spills.  No matter, that local housekeeper serves as surrogate while late developer Amélie coos in wonder before finally starting to walk & talk.  If she’d only shut up!  A regular French philosopher manqué!  Now, we’re supposed to coo.  Short and stocky compared to her family, as if she needs to be shown thru an anamorphic lens.  (Or was she designed by Botero?).  The family does share unnaturally round cat’s eyes, just not the feline kind.  More Cat’s Eye marbles.  Yikes!  Though not the villainous landlady, a war survivor who hates Europeans.  But it’s Amélie you’ll want to slap.  The film like one of those over-sized child’s picture books your Grandma thought would make a nice gift, but which you never took out of its shrink wrap.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Hard to get behind a film that uses White Chocolate as Proustian Madeleine.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *TURNING RED/’22 director Domee Shi needs only eight minutes to land a lot of the ideas being messed with here in the hilarious child/parent horror of BAO/‘18.

THE BOY WHO CAME BACK / FUMIHAZUSHITA HARU (1958)

Japanese director Seijun Suzuki already shows pulp mastery in this early film from his contentious run at Nikkatsu.  And while he can only do so much with the clunky, repetitive, unmotivated script he was given, superb use of monochrome WideScreen TohoScope super charges his images with enough variety & excitement to set aside objections to sense and sensibility.  (Some male-on-female roughhousing may prove more of a deterrent.)  Sachiko Hidari stars as the chipper tour guide who volunteers at night as a case worker to just released Reform School toughs, helping to ease them back into society.  Place to live - √  New job - √ Staying away from the old gang - √  Keeping them out of trouble - √  This avocation a job in itself, especially with tough customer Akira Kobayashi, an unabashed punk, as your assignment. Good luck keeping this one in line; the attention span of a gnat and a habit of violently acting out when crossed.  Maybe he’ll straighten up after he’s set up by former pals for a gang killing.  The real surprise in here is that rather than stumble his way toward redemption with his attractive social worker, he’s got a girlfriend to reunite with, Hidari’s crush and attention remain platonic.  So the main reason to watch lies in seeing how Suzuki pulls this together visually.  Something he has no trouble achieving.  Though he’ll not hit his stride till the ‘60s when he adds EastmanColor to an increasingly stylized æsthetic that infuriated his studio and delighted his growing international followers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Can’t go far wrong with Suzuki’s mid-‘60s crime dramas.  Best starting point, YOUTH OF THE BEAST/’63.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/youth-of-beast-1963.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Some downloads clip a couple of reels off the running time.  Look for 1'39".

B.O.Y.: BRUISES OF YESTERDAY / GLASSKÅR (2024)

With the advent of New Queer Cinema, there have been so many gay coming-of-age films, it can seem as if there are distributors releasing nothing but gay coming-of-age films.  More male than female, presumably because there are still three or four men to every woman working in film.  (Back in the day, studios like Republic Pictures seemed to make nothing but ‘Bromantic’ Westerns, so . . . plus ça change?)  That said, Danish writer/director  Søren Green finds fresh paths in the well trod tropes of 'emo' adolescent alienation, with Noa Risbro Hjerrild excellent as a 16-yr-old kid already struggling with his sense of self when he’s sent to spend the summer with his grandparents while Mom goes to work in Italy.  Other than his skateboard, he feels abandoned by everything he’s close to when an already bad situation takes a turn for the worse and he’s shuttled off to his estranged father and his unwelcoming new family, as his mentally failing grandmother has a medical crisis.  Hardly a surprise to find the boy ‘acting out’ (though how to run away from home when you’re basically homeless?).  Desperate to feel something, he starts self-harming, and a mutual attraction with a thirty-something painter his grandfather (a glazier) knows from work also peters out when the man pulls back from this kid.  He likes him too much to cross a line, though the kid lies and tells him he’s 19.  Even a local sex worker says he’s not his type.  That ‘type’ being a paying customer; an idea the kid picks up on.  Under Green’s thoughtful handling, none of this feels forced or exploitive as we watch him hit bottom.  Thank goodness for the Danish health system!  Effective, touching, believable in ways you thought long over-milked.  Much helped by spot on casting from the boy on down.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  If Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne took on the subject, it might be a lot like this in tone if not in style & technique.  Try their breakthru LA PROMESSE./’96    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/09/la-promesse.html

DEADLY HERO (1975)

Where Michael Winner/Charles Bronson’s DEATH WISH caught the populist Zeitgeist of vigilante justice in a violently out of control, graffiti-ridden 1974 New York City; and Martin Scorsese/Robert De Niro’s TAXI DRIVER caught artistic psychoses from similar elements in 1976, DEADLY HERO just got caught in the middle*, falling on its face in 1975 using many of the same ingredients, splitting the difference between those iconic titles, but too crappy as film to work even as bridge.  Don Murray is all over the place as a vet patrol cop looking for trouble alongside young partner Treat Williams, then finding it when James Earl Jones’s phony African ambassador pulls a knife on theater conductor Diahn Williams at her 88th St. brownstone apartment and forces his way in.  Between a confused script & Ivan Nagy’s inept direction, you can’ t tell if this is attempted rape or sexual role playing.  They sure seem to know each other as they gag about.  But when frightened neighbor Lilia Skala calls the cops, Murray & Treat respond.  And the deadly shooting of a big Black man turns the senior cop into a tabloid hero-for-a-day.  Only the victim's story turns out not to match Murray’s version of events, and his increasingly desperate attempts to fix the mess turns deadly.  Like WISH and DRIVER, downbeat NYC locations emphasize the city’s ‘70s decline, but it all becomes more than a bit ridiculous* in spite of some fun spotting New York’s acting pool being used in the days before LAW & ORDER took over that operation.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *In their wildly different ways, DEATH WISH and TAXI DRIVER now look unexpectedly complimentary.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *This must be the only film where a damsel in distress is abducted by her pursuer along with her ‘cello!  It makes for an odd looking shot, but works to our heroine’s advantage when she invents a new use for the instrument.  Yikes!

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (2017)

Having written off SPIDER-MAN after ‘3' (lowest IMDb rating of the bunch), it’s been quite the wait between SPIDER-MEN on this site.  (Other than out-of-series efforts like the meta-clever ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE and its over-egged sequel.)  But with BRAND NEW DAY setting all-time Box-Office records, and likely the last for 30-yr-old Tom Holland as Spidey, took a chance on his first.  (Sorry Andrew Garfield.)  Holland actually came in thru the side door, thirteenth-billed in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR/’16 (not seen here), now top-billed.  This is unquestionably THE Spider-Man to see for anyone who ever wondered what Michael J. Fox would have made of the role in his BACK TO THE FUTURE days.  Did Holland drop his U.K. accent listening to Fox tapes?*  No trace of the character’s NYC upbringing, instead Fox’s flat, Canadian, high-pitched, slightly croaky little voice that tends to speed up for no reason.  Same build and height, too; plus superior comic timing without any heat or threat.  Fox never did the Teen Beat beefcake shots they foist on Holland , but even that can’t sully Holland’s sunny disposition.  Backstory has him as Iron Man’s protégé, with Robert Downey dropping in like visiting minor royalty, acting supercilious.  A big downer.  While the main villain is Michael Keaton whom Spidey takes on before he’s primed for the big leagues.  That’s the main plot.  But as Keaton plays a sort of Anti-Iron Man and not Anti-Spider-Man, the whole film feels dramatically imbalanced.  Other characters (and there are a lot of them) make little mark (they even give Spidey the ‘wrong’ girlfriend).  And the effects often have a herky-jerky feel to them in spite of obvious masses of money thrown their way.  Guess we’re back to our lonelier than ever Spidey boycott.  (For all our Spider-Man content, type SPIDER-MAN in the Search Box in the top left corner on the MAKSQUIBS main site.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: These films are as producer-led as any big studio film from Hollywood’s pre-‘50s heyday.  Initially Laura Ziskin, now Amy Pascale.  Even promising more Spideys at the final credits as if this were James Bond.  That financial juggernaut probably less valuable than the SpideyWorld now is.  Nevertheless, there is a faceless director in charge, Jon Watts whose COP CAR/’15, made right before his SPIDER-MANs, is a smart little thriller that likely cost less than ‘craft-services’ for a week of a SPIDEY shoot, yet has far more personality and pleasure to it.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/06/cop-car-2005.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Just read on IMDb that Holland did indeed base his characterization on Fox.

WASTEMAN (2025)

David Jonsson stars in this brutish, British prison drama as a non-violent/accidental murderer who, thanks to over-crowding, gets a chance at early parole if he can keep his nose clean for the few weeks before his release date.  (With that set-up, Diogenes couldn’t find anyone who doesn’t know where this is going.)  Naturally, after getting this good news, he returns to new cellmate Tom Blyth, an ambitious sociopath working to grab the prison drug trade using drone deliveries of coke, heroin & weed flown to exterior transom windows.  What could go wrong?  No surprise, other/more established dealers are soon in his face and Jonsson’s inevitably drawn into the violence; finally blackmailed into agreeing to kill an aggressively violent rival dealer to protect his 14-yr-old son.  (Blyth has connections on the outside.)  Credit director Cal McMau and writers Hunter Andrews/Eoin Doran for ringing in a few changes on the usual pattern (the finale’s a pretty neat trick of misdirection), but it’s an uphill battle.  Fortunately, Jonsson has an wonderfully expressive, empathetic face.  If only they asked for a few more expressions!  Always a bit stoned, his sleepy/wary/beaten up look a decreasingly effective fallback position.  On the other hand, Blyth too obviously a graduate of the Robert De Niro School of Dramatic Intimidation making up for skipped classes.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For an ageless Hollywood take on the genre (and to see what’s missing here), Jules Dassin’s BRUTE FORCE/’47, with Burt Lancaster in his sophomore lead fronting an all-thug line up.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/brute-force-1947.html

THE SUBTERRANEANS (1960)

After winning his first Oscar® on GIGI/’58, composer/arranger/conductor André Previn’s next call from producer Arthur Freed had him not only score, but also perform ‘live’ on camera as jazz pianist within the club settings of this adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s best-selling novel about ‘The Beats.’   (Not hep to the term?  Think late ‘50s hipsters.)  Knowing the story was about Kerouac as a struggling writer (miscast George Peppard) unable to love before he encounters a mentally troubled mixed-race (Black/Cherokee) beauty who breaks thru his reserve, Previn asked the studio exec, ‘Who’s playing the Black girl?’  ‘Leslie Caron.’  Which explains everything.  At least, everything that's wrong here.  Not just Caron.  There’s clueless director Ranald MacDougall replacing clueless initial director Denis Sanders; Robert Thom’s script tossing out all but three of the novel’s characters; Freed’s conception of a small, raw, b&w film losing out to standard studio policy for MetroColor & CinemaScope; savage cuts to the film without input from Freed or MacDougall . . .   You get the idea.  Checking out old tv clips of the real Beats is embarrassing enough.  (Some of the writing, too.)  But this is off the charts.  (Excepting Jim Hutton whose scraggly attempt at a beard looks downright authentic.*)  M-G-M buried the remains, making this one of their few films never given home video release in any format.  (The curious can find Pan and Scan copies online.)

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *The year before, Roger Corman’s b&w horror cheapie BUCKET OF BLOOD/’59 got closer to the mark on The Beat Generation.  (It’s actually more in line with Freed’s original conception.)  If only the poetry club denizens snapped their fingers rather than clapped their  hands.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-bucket-of-blood-1959.html

DESIERTO (2015)

Mainstream commercial debut for Jonás (son of Alfonso) Cuarón, this Mexican illegal immigrants-on-the-run thriller is more interesting than first appears; just not for the right reasons.  Gael García Bernal (doing Alfonso a favor?) stars as the nice fence-jumper, a fair-minded guy trying to get back to the son he had to leave in California.  But when the truck he’s riding in breaks down, it leaves him, along with a baker’s dozen of fellow border crossers, with no choice but to hike thru the desert on foot in shadeless temps touching 120°.  Then things really start to go wrong as sharp-shooting ‘patriotic’ homicidal maniac Jeffrey Dean Morgan, along with his ferocious dog Tracker, spot the desperate group.  The rest of the film standard chase stuff, the hunter and his prey.  But what makes it interesting is just how far Cuarón goes to depoliticize the situation; never stopping to ask if it should be depolitized.  The only legit cop we see runs into, then drives away from Morgan.  Each miming disdain for the other.  Elsewise, Cuarón models the film on totally apolitical classics like THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME/’32, an oft-filmed story of a wild game hunter releasing human prey to chase around.  Or, say, THE LOST PATROL/’34, a John Ford film about an unseen enemy sniper taking troopers down one-by-one.  Plus Morgan brings in his own layer of inappropriate references from his long run in THE WALKING DEAD.  Odd decisions.  And if you are going to emphasize the sheer sports-like horror of a human hunt, you need a surer hand at action and suspense than Cuarón shows.  Where’s Raoul Walsh to work out those now-you-see-him/now-you-don’t angles between hunter and prey as they climb round rocky cliffs?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For a great angle on the Mexican immigrant experience, I CARRY YOU WITH ME/’20.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-carry-you-with-me-te-llevo-conmigo.html

THE CHRISTOPHERS (2025)

Maybe Steven Soderbergh needs to direct fewer films.  (To say nothing of his work as producer.)  For well over a decade his projects (even the more obviously commercial ones) have been reasonably well-received critically, sometimes commercially, too, but forgotten so fast, it’s as if they never existed.  So too here on this well acted, but empty whimsy on failing artistic powers, greedy children, a truth-telling assistant and the difference between what art costs and what it’s worth.  Not strictly a two-hander, though it feels like one; a throwback to faux-stylish death-haunted ‘70s play adaptations like SLEUTH or DEATHTRAP.  Ian McKellen plays the fast-fading chattering bore of a painter whose estranged children (Tweedledum Jessica Gunning and Tweedledee James Corden) hope to cash in post-mortem on a late work, THE CHRISTOPHERS, a series of unfinished portrait studies on his last great love.  Lucky for them, talented but undiscovered painter Michaela Coel needs a job and hits it off in an antagonistic way, to get hired by McKellen as his assistant.  Her secret assignment: finish The Christophers after his imminent death using his paint & brushes to hide the forgery, then split the sales with the siblings.  Has no one told these dopes that unfinished ‘lost’ work can fetch prices equal to if not higher than finished second-rate stuff?  In any event something of a real relationship develops between the painters scuttling the plot . . . but in a good way.  A fun watch, if you have the patience.  Some of the heavily improvised dialogue does go on (McKellen not one the great Shakespearean monologists for nothing!), but the teasing will he or won’t he destroy his unfinished work before he kicks the bucket, holds less interest and puts out less tension than Soderbergh counts on.  So this time, the film was forgotten before it hit the screen.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  For something in the same ballpark: aging gay writers/artists confronting their demons, try LOVE IS THE DEVIL/’98 or QUEER/ 24.  Each with Daniel Craig, but going from object to subject.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/01/queer-2024.html

ALIBI (1929)

‘The Talkies’ truly arrived at the movies not as you’ve no doubt repeatedly been told in 1927 with THE JAZZ SINGER, but in 1929 when films with some sort of synch-sound capacity flipped from 1928's 20% sound/80% silent to 80% sound/20% silent.  (These figures about as rough as the recording quality at the time.)  Audiences, studios and critics picked up on the shift and knew things would never go back.  But much woe amongst film intelligencia who saw the change as either bad canned theater or canned bad theater; an art form immobilized.  Yet even in 1929, signs of life were appearing if you looked for it.  Visually imaginative, fluidly shot, still enjoyable today.  Standouts holding on to camera mobility and personal style included Ernst Lubitsch’s THE LOVE PARADE (next year he’d invent the Music Video in MONTE CARLO);  F. Richard Jones’s BULLDOG DRUMMOND (alas dead of T.B. the next year); and this film’s Roland West* who’d inexplicably fall out of the biz two films/two years later at 47.  Here, after a quick-step opening to get wise-guy mob man Chester Morris out of jail, West films a big single-take thru art director William Cameron Menzies’ Art Deco nightclub to establish antihero Chester Morris’s character with a tracking shot Martin Scorsese might envy.  And while the visual pizzazz comes & goes, it all leads to the film’s climax with a penthouse escape that can still cause a gasp or two.  The plot gimmick involves a five-minute gap in Morris’s alibi that would have given him time to kill a cop.  And it’s trusting fiancé Mae Busch, a cop’s daughter, no less, who trips him up.  Other than West’s sure hand, it’s Morris who makes the pic.  The ruthless gangster kept in reserve behind the romantic lead Busch falls for still packing a wallop.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Morris would slip to formula programmers, hamming it up in BOSTON BLACKIEs and the like.  But seen here, in THE BIG HOUSE/’30 and in RED-HEADED WOMAN/’32, he’s the real deal.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-big-house-1930.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/red-headed-woman-1932.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The uptick in ‘Talkie’ quality so apparent even Oscar® noticed, with these three films collecting eleven nominations.

LA CASA LOBO / THE WOLF HOUSE (2018)

Partners in animated shorts since 2007, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León went feature-length with this vaguely political allegory, a well-reviewed, if little seen chiller that mixes various styles of animation (hand-drawn; puppetry; stop-motion).  It opens with a ‘restored’ faux ‘60s documentary on a discreet German Colony in Chile’s back-country, a happy land where  strong local honey, strong personal discipline and strong support for the fascist Pinochet government lead one freedom-loving woman to escape.  Now she’s living in a cabin of fear with a wolf at the door and fellow visiting victims.  Or something like that.  JC/CL none too clear on narrative detail; much more concerned with laying out overstuffed design elements amid constant washes of colors and animated movement in every corner.  All very 1970s avant garde in decor and technique.  (1973 when Pinochet took power, so . . . intentional?)  The animators’ visual idée fixe a deadly bleed out (seen in many of their earlier shorts) which turns into a spontaneous blood bath.  Less stop-motion animation than glop-motion animation as characters ooze away in front of your eyes.  No doubt, appealing to some.  It certainly got attention from Film Fest juries.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Top notch animated/allegorical anti-Pinochet pic in EL CONDE.’23.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/09/el-conde-2023.html

COOGAN’S BLUFF (1969)

To New Yorkers, Coogan’s Bluff is a natural promontory by the Harlem River, think 150th to 160th St, then big apartment buildings West to St. Nicolas Ave.  Old timers remember the Polo Grounds in Washington Heights.  Not movie mavens.  For them, COOGAN’S BLUFF is where Don met Clint; that’s Don Siegel & Clint Eastwood.  Siegel becoming, along with Sergio Leone, one of Eastwood’s two directorial father-figures.  Leone for vision & ambition; Siegel for tools & efficiency.  Yet it almost didn’t happen when studio execs put up either DON Taylor or Alex SEGAL to direct Eastwood’s first Universal project.  Luckily, the memo split the difference and Don Siegel got the call.  Siegel claimed not to have even seen an Eastwood pic.  Together they worked up a shootable script from five drafts and got along fine.*   But how hard could it have been?  The story no more than a fish-out-of-water/bull-in-a-china-shop story about a lean/mean Arizona Sheriff Coogan losing his extradition in those tough Manhattan streets and overstepping his authority to get him back between stare downs with Lt. Lee J. Cobb (pleasingly reserved), pushy romantic passes at criminal psychologist Susan Clark (giving as good as she gets), and the general mayhem of Manhattan in its Fun City days.  Check out the Swingin’ Discotheque Club.  Boobs and LGTB action.  Neatly run, as expected by Siegel, though don’t look for the actual Coogan’s Bluff, the big action finale filmed in Fort Tryon Park below the Cloisters Museum far West of Coogan’s Bluff.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *This out of Don Siegel’s excellent auto-bio A SIEGEL FILM.

DOUBLE-BILL:  BLUFF not only an unplanned trial-run for Siegel/Eastwood’s era-defining DIRTY HARRY/’71, it also served as a stealth-pilot for tv’s McCLOUD, a six-yr run with Dennis Weaver, nicer/less sexy.

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986)

In spite of being a considerable hit (because of being a considerable hit?), this is the peak period Francis Ford Coppola film no one talks about.  It’s also the last time he worked as a  hired hand (replacing Penny Marshall after production started).  More importantly, it’s the only female driven film of his maturity.*  And if Magical Realism Americana in the suburbs ain’t in Coppola’s fach (a lesser talent who could believe in sentimental life-lessons via time-travel might have been better), enough comes thru when a gag touches a nerve to make the film play.  As when lead Kathleen Turner belts out ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ in front of her embarrassed High School classmates in 1960.  The unlikely situation possible because a story that opens in 1985 as Turner contemplates divorcing ‘High School steady’ husband Nicolas Cage (relentlessly pulling focus by over-egging his role), does a Fade-Out/Fade-In to 1960 after Turner faints at their 25th High School Reunion.  Structurally, we’re close to THE WIZARD OF OZ, but here Turner’s ‘Dorothy’ alternately tries to fit into her wised-up teenage self while offering advice to help her old gang prep for what she knows is coming.  Instead of Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, she dreams of a future with Cage (the one she got), nerdy Bill Gates type Barry Miller and dangerous literary Jack Kerouac wannabee Michael Fitzsimmons.  And barely giving a thought to her future children not showing up if she swaps.  Original scripters Jerry Leichtling & Arlene Sarner not bothered by the usual narrative rules of cinematic time-travel.  They also fudge her return to the present.  Things improve whenever the older generation shows up, including Mom Barbara Harris and especially a wonderful Leon Ames as Grandfather.  If only they had more to do.  Hard to care when Cage & Turner inevitably make nice.

DOUBLE- BILL/LINK: To see just how many opportunities are wasted here, go to PLEASANTVILLE/’98  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/10/pleasantville-1998.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Much the same could be said of Martin Scorsese’s ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE/’74.

THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER: RECOBBLED (1992 - 2013)

A Holy Grail for British animator Richard Williams (WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT/’88; sequences in A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM/’66; THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE/’68; various PINK PANTHERs), this never completed magnum opus was probably too ambitious from conception.  But what a conception!  And what an achievement as far as he got!  It’s THE LAST SUPPER for animation heads, a mess, but also the greatest painting ever made.  Basically, a standard ARABIAN NIGHTS story: beautiful princess pursued by an evil usurper is saved by a not-so-simple simpleton with a mouthful of tacks.  There hadn’t been an animated film this visually ambitious since Disney fell on his face with the stunning, but inert SLEEPING BEAUTY/’59. (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/12/sleeping-beauty-1959.html)  That too a financial disaster.  But Disney could weather the loss; Williams could not.  Far from finished when funds ran out and a Completion Bond Company took over, the eviscerated results (about 80") issued by MiramaX vultures to zero B.O. under a couple of titles.  Fortunately, Williams retained his work print.  (Seen here a decade ago with Williams in attendance.)  But while the work print proved invaluable, much better visual quality appeared on any number of fan edits that started to show up on the internet.  Best of the lot, Garrett Gilchrist’s long evolving ‘RECOBBLED Cut,’ dropping installments as it added chapters and refined as ever better elements appeared.  Where do these materials come from?  (The dates listed above reflect Williams’ work print and Gilchrist’s final (?) revision; running time 1'39".)  That’s the one to look for.  Hardly a perfect work, story sense never Williams’ forté, but being forced to see so much effort in such different stages of creative development isn’t just enlightening, but a backstage thrill into the wizard’s workshop.  With lovable characters (even Vincent Price’s villainous ZigZag with his rhymed couplets carries rooting interest), you’ll soon pick up on the hop, skip & jump rhythm of the narrative thread while you goggle at visual influences ranging from Chuck Jones to M.C. Escher, Aubrey Beardsley to Peter Max & Gahan Wilson.  Designed to play on the biggest, widest screen possible (Williams has the compositional eye of William Wyler), if you can’t make out the flies buzzing around The Thief’s head, you need a bigger screen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The ReCobbled Cut uses well-matched, if abruptly edited classical music, heavy on Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade.’  But the repeating decor, designs and geometric floor patterns beg for an original Philip Glass score.  ReCobbled ReScored?

KING SOLOMON’S MINES (1937)

Originally published in 1885, H. Rider Haggard’s book was still showing up as major motion picture material every other decade a century later (1919; 1937; 1950; 1985).  To say nothing of once-removed second cousins for Tarzan & Maciste to visit; even a Son-Of iteration in WATUSI/’59.  And that’s before hitting the small screen via one-offs & series in spite of dated elements and attitudes: Darkest Africa clichés; Great White Hunter leading man.  M-G-M’s splashy version of 1950 (Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, African location backgrounds, TechniColor - https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/king-solomons-mines-1950.html) long considered the class act in a landfill of kitsch, usually given top rating.  But a look at this British production when seen in a good print, easily overtakes it.  With solid journeyman director Robert Stevenson* on U.K. studio work, producer Geoffrey Barkas shooting location footage in Africa and cinematographer Glen MacWilliams (he’d later do remarkably convincing water tank work for Hitchcock in LIFEBOAT/’44) getting it all to match up pretty well, the film holds up better than M-G-M’s.  Just don’t expect major studio Hollywood technical polish.  (Certainly no ‘invisible’ editing!)  But what really makes this version a standout is in how it follows the book and in how well it’s cast.  Cedric Hardwicke, Roland Young, John Loder and Anna Lee all dashing, amusing, romantic as needed.  And then there’s Paul Robeson as mysterious fellow traveler Umbopa; friend, foe or just out for himself?  Just shy of 40 and in terrific shape, still built like the former Rutger’s football star he’d been before stage & concert hall, it’s probably the best role of his curtailed film career.  Somehow making his aid to these White fortune hunters & adventurers believable in even the most ridiculous situations.  And when he opens his mouth to sing one of the pseudo African songs, especially when he lets his bass bottom loose, he’s simply undeniable on screen.  He also looks like he’s having a great time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Yes, the same Robert Stevenson who directed Orson Welles in JANE EYRE/’43 and became Disney’s top house director in the ‘50s and ‘60s: MARY POPPINS/’64 and a host of Disney hits.  Considering his gross figures include half-price kids, it’s entirely possible Stevenson is the most commercially successful director in Hollywood history counting not by dollars but admissions.

LA CAPTURA / FACING EL CHAPO (2026)

If other Mexican tv-movies are this good, sign me up for a subscription.  Directed by Chava Cartas (script by Bernardo Esquinca from Héctor de Mauleón’s magazine series), a story too amazing to be anything but true.  Naturally well constructed, too.   (Who’d believe it as a piece of fiction?)  It opens as El Chapo, Mexico’s top-drug lord (Hector Kotsifakis) and top cartel second El Cholo (Juan Pablo Cruz García) wade to freedom thru one of his infamous escape tunnels.  Moving thru the watery muck in their underwear, they emerge (weapons intact) then steal a car after tossing its middle-aged driver & passengers out.  The incident, initially reported as a simple stolen vehicle, and the car quickly spotted by roadside Federal Policemen (Alfonso Herrera; Noé Hernández), patrol car partners just reassigned to night shift.  Family man Herrera and near retirement loner Hernández strangers without a known history to have built trust on.  And with bigtime drug money corruption so rampant, it’s naive to have trust between agencies; from one desk at headquarters to the next; let alone  to the guy sharing the front seat of your police vehicle.  Even more so with two of the most dangerous people in the world cuffed and wearing dirty underwear behind you.  (No wonder some crucial info gets ‘slow walked’ thru the system, there's always someone  on the take you've got to work around.)  Overtaking that stolen car, the pair immediately know who they’ve got and what the stakes, bribes and odds of survival are.  Plus, they’re running out of gas in unfriendly territory and a stop will surely expose the men in the back seat.  Sure enough, word inevitably leaks thru mobile phone pics and a hostage drama quickly ramps up as cops & criminals race not only to the scene, but also to Herrera’s family home.  All this honestly and cleanly handled without having to push the situation.  Yes, massed military-style standoffs in the mix, but at heart this is a chamber piece.  And all the more effective for it.  (NOTE:  Once again, for those on the Main Site who see our LABELS which don't show on e-phones, another Family Friendly listing, but definitely not kiddie fare,  Think Junior High and up.)

DOUBLE-BILL:  Instead of other drug cartel action/suspensers, go for a Western that works in similar fashion, 3:10 TO YUMA/’57, the Delmer Daves classic with Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, everyone at their peak.  Not the over-egged 2007 remake.

SON OF THE GODS (1930)

Fourth and last of the consecutive films silent star Richard Barthelmess and director Frank Lloyd made to ride thru the Silent to Talky transition (1929 to 1930).  Lloyd, by now, pretty much back on his feet technically, if anything, a bit ahead of the curve.  Barthelmess, on the other hand, never quite adjusting to ‘30s tempo, but holding on to stardom by moving into stories on controversial social issues.*  Here, it’s race prejudice.  Barthelmess who became a major star with his YellowFace turn in D.W. Griffith’s BROKEN BLOSSOMS/’19* (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/broken-blossoms-1919.html), again plays a Chinaman (as he’s pejoratively called here), but without YellowFace, since his Caucasian features are half the plot.  Sent into the White man’s world by proud, rich father Anders Randolf (very much in YellowFace), Barthelmess is not so much ‘passing’ as ‘not mentioning.’  And while he’s considered a great guy by his old college pals (always good for a loan), whenever his heritage leaks out to people who don’t know him, especially to hopeful young women, the reaction is vicious, as if getting a good table they’d never manage on their own was the equivalent of rape.  And the film doesn’t hold back on these attitudes.  Realizing he’ll never succeed, especially by living off his father’s largess, he tries Europe, finding a job and living on his own resources.  Once more, a white admirer, Constance Bennett, swears nothing could come between them, but a confession leads to a public flogging for being ‘deceptive,’ cunning as all Chinamen are!  Meanwhile, Dad is dying back in New York’s Chinatown (is that a set or a location shot on Doyers Street - looking much as it does today?).  You’ll know how the rest plays out, even the appalling cop-out for the censorship board to facilitate the ending.  That’s kinda fascinating, too; subject matter and rawness of presentation quite unexpected for 1930.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Unfortunately for Barthelmess, his series of socially engaged films (‘30 - ‘34), though often worthy as commentary and as film, never hit the way Paul Muni and Mervyn LeRoy did in I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG/’32.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/i-am-fugitive-from-chain-gang-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *To Barthelmess's credit, YellowFace more in attitude than in makeup.

MOTOR CITY (2025)

Hard to know where to start on this one.  Writer Chad St. John brings action experience, director Potsy Ponciroli made the promising OLD HENRY/’21, so this feels like regression, a concept-driven film-school graduation project.  Let’s start with its title: hard to see anything Detroit here.  Not filmed there, worse it looks not filmed there.  Supposedly set in the '70s, post ‘67 race-riots, we might be in any Rust Belt town, not a majority Black city just hanging on to a million residents.  The generic look matching its generic storyline: mob moll Shailene Woodley falls between new XXXL lover boy Alan Ritchson (the actor who saved REACHER from pint-size Tom Cruise) and local heroin franchiser Ben Foster.  But when he’s framed out of the picture by Foster with a historically large drug bust that makes the police look good, Ritchson winds up in the clink where he’s soon plotting escape & revenge.  Eventually killing his way out with a pair of prison accomplices with blood, car chases & mayhem.  Standard action fare; though a penultimate fight in the confines of a moving elevator is vicious enough to match violent French provocateur Gaspar Noé in unintentional laughs.  And now, since we can’t avoid it any longer, we need to mention that high-concept . . . er, gimmick . . . er, mere gimmick;  St. John & Ponciroli give everything in here the silent treatment.  That is the Silent Film treatment.  Or think so.  What they actually do is go about 92% inaudible dialogue.   ‘Silent films’ actually had plenty of dialogue, just no way to record it.  Reading lips becoming something of a game for audiences.  (Is Victor McLaglen swearing?*)  Here, the dialogue is muffled behind glass or obscured by distance.  You might as well hire a mime to do complicated exposition.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One of the biggest laughs Buster Keaton ever got came thru lip reading.  Right at the end of THE BOAT/’21, his richly comic/existential short, when lost at sea with his family in a sinking boat somewhere between sand & sea, he’s asked by rescuers for his location and, speaking in medium close-up, ‘mouths’ the name of his vessel.  This punchline entirely dependant on the audience reading his lips.  Damned if they don’t!

A KISS IN THE DARK (1949)

Loud, fast, not particularly funny.  A good description of most Golden Age Warner Bros. comedies.  This one isn’t even fast.  Putative explanation follows.  Contract star Jane Wyman, after a decade’s slog from featured player to second leads, finally breaking onto A-list leads in THE YEARLING/’47 (on loan to M-G-M) then surprising the heck out of Warners execs when JOHNNY BELINDA/’48, a film no one wanted to make, hit big.  So, having nothing on deck for her, they called in comic script doctor Harry Kurnitz to punch up this dusty screenplay about neurasthenic concert pianist David Niven whose controlling manager has just bought an Upper West Side apartment building for his growing portfolio.  (He’s also robbing Niven blind.)  Checking out his new property, Niven finds a whole building of sweet eccentrics, falls for pretty model Wyman, woos her away from overbearing fiancé Chester Morris and is freed from psychological ailments by getting to know and appreciate New York's hoi polloi.  Alternately over or under played, it was director Delmer Daves only attempt at light comedy.  And it does alter the Warners model by not being particularly fast, but only because building manager Victor Moore has such a deliberate manner.  Not for nothing was Moore’s style best caught on film under Laurel & Hardy experts Leo McCarey and George Stevens.  Only at the end, when most of the comic complications have been dealt with, do you suddenly notice how charmingly Wyman & Niven work together, an adorable mismatch.  But by then it’s much too late.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Niven bats 1000 at similar comic weight in BACHELOR MOTHER/’39.  Wyman’s best in these things came during her Second Lead days.  Try PRINCESS O’ROURKE/’43.  (Note both films written by Norman Krasna, who’s often mistaken for Harry Kurnitz.)      https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/08/bachelor-mother-1939.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/06/princess-orourke-1943.html

COLORADO (1940)

Republic Pictures stalwart Joseph Kane directs this atypically ambitious Roy Rogers programmer.  (Admittedly more aspirational than fully achieved.)  No Western (and with hardly a verse of song), but a Civil War meller about Captain Jerry Burke (Rogers), assigned by no less than General Ulysses S. Grant to break up a Sessionist Conspiracy in Colorado illegally selling guns to the Indians and letting outlaws run wild, all so Union soldiers are needed to keep the peace and patrol the territory and can’t be sent East to fight in the war.  True Southern loyalists and venal public officials joining to help the cause or make a buck.  This complicated by a neat personal story with pretty Pauline Moore joining the stagecoach with Roy and sidekick Gabby Hayes (hey!, it’s still a Roy Rogers’ pic, no?) on her way to meet fiancé Milburn Stone (later Doc in GUNSMOKE), a turncoat Captain who Rogers keeps giving a break to (and vice versa).  Hmm, what’s that about?  Running about an hour, well acted and shot on locations John Ford wouldn’t have sneered at.  If only we could properly see it!  Alas, yet another poorly preserved slice of American cinematic history left to fall into public domain purgatory, but worth the hunt to find a minimally acceptable download amid the subfusc crowd.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Rogers, not yet 30, has yet to acquire that ageless look or Dale Evans.  But did already have Trigger.  (Acquiring the horse not long after Olivia de Havilland rode him in THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD/’38.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *A pair of properly restored Rogers in Republic’s own TruColor system out via KINO.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/03/sunset-in-west-1950.html

FOR THE BOYS (1991)

One of those ‘can’t miss’ ideas that miss badly, critically and commercially, moving director Mark Rydell permanently off the A-list he’d only recently hopped on, dropping James Caan two billing spots away from leads, and losing tens of millions for 20th/Fox.  And yet, it is a ‘can’t miss’ idea: Bickering pair of UFO entertainers* go thru three major wars (WWII, Korea, Vietnam) blindly unchanging while war and world move past them.  Okay, I’m cheating.  That’s what the film should have been about.  Instead, it’s a two-sided soap opera for both entertainers (each separately married), structured like THE SUNSHINE BOYS (Neil Simon’s play-to-film about a pair of estranged vaudevillians forced back together for a celebratory tv special).  The film peaks early with Bette Midler’s high stakes audition/debut at a WWII London UFO show where she’s so good, with a song or an ad-lib, putative partner Caan wants her immediately out.  A full-reel exhibition of everything Bette does best; and she’s a legit wonder.  Surely what got her the film’s sole Oscar® nom; it also leaves the film with no place to go other than in-fighting interrupted by the occasional personal tragedy.  Two peculiarities: Caan morphing from shit to pretty decent guy; Midler going from tart/sassy doll to pain in the tuchus.  Their always at odds personalities especially noticeable because of the real life antipathy between these two leaking off the set and onto the screen.  (Check the name NOT on the LP cover above.). You need to go back to Walter Matthau and Barbra Streisand in HELLO, DOLLY!/’69 to find the like on display in the final cut.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Bob Hope and Martha Raye are the usual suspects as the real people behind Caan and Midler’s characters.  Raye certainly thought so, unsuccessfully suing the producers for damages.  Hard to buy either as a serious inspiration beyond the obvious UFO connection.

LA FRENCH / THE CONNECTION (2014)

A fact-touched, but largely fictional, drug-trafficking thriller out of Marseilles (1975 - 1981), structurally neat as a pin, and unusually easy to follow.  (And note how its French & International titles are combined on our poster to reflect a certain 1971 movie.*  Writer/director Cédric Jimenez earning rather than coasting on the reference.)  A mano-a-mano duel between the lawman and the dealer, with Jean Dujardin’s magistrate, just promoted from juvie drug crime to the big leagues, playing new sheriff in town to go after longtime drug boss Gilles Lellouche*, a man whose tentacles reach all; from murdering henchmen to judicial bench men and disco club investors,  desk-jockey police dicks and political appointees.  What he didn’t figure on was the obsessive/addictive personality and workaround legal tactics of Dujardin’s Judge, a man who puts everything aside (even family and his own survival) to bring down decades of backroom deals and delivery infrastructure.  Jimnez is technically fully up to date in action-driven movement and editing, but he gets real period texture by shooting 35mm in a style that (abetted by cinematographer Laurent Tangy) mimics the color, tone and film stock of the late ‘70s.  (Note the '70s animated Gaumont logo, too.  As much a throwback as the sideburns.)  Not a great film or even a great story, but solid, pleasurable work.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Naturellement, FRENCH CONNECTION/’71.  (In France, they dropped the article.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/french-connection-1971.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Jimnez gives the leads a Michael Mann stare-off meeting midway along.  A misstep, though you can see why he felt he had to.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024)

Excluding the rare exception where actor-identification in a role supercedes the person they play (think Gary Cooper/Lou Gehrig), Hollywood bio-pics come in two often self-defeating flavors: WAXWORKS and LITE.  Neither necessarily pejorative; each can be screen worthy, both in use recently.  (Churchill bios always leaning WAXWORKS; Musicians tilting LITE.)  More noticeable (and positive) is a general move away from cradle-to-grave in favor of finding the crucial act to tell the tale in a single stroke.  So, no surprise to see co-writer/director James Mangold going Single Arc-Lite on Bob Dylan: fresh acoustic folksinger to electric literary-rocker.  Alas, no superceding identification in sight, it’s all Bob Dylan Lite (Timothée Chalamet - with a high polish shine); Pete Seeger Lite (Edward Norton - very good); Joan Baez Lite (Monica Barbaro - less good); and so on.  But what ultimately kills the film is what’s not in here: Mangold missing any sense of danger or revolution; something all these culturally revolutionary BabyBoomers had in spades.  Pollack, Mailer, James Dean, Johnny Cash; you never knew what you’d get when they showed up . . IF they showed up.  Here, we know exactly what’s coming and it boils down to the surrogate Father/Son dynamic between Seeger & Bob.  (That and a bit of bed-hopping from Dylan.)  Adolescent rebellion a decade late (arrested development from Bob Dylan?), leaving surrogate Dad and his politically activated acoustic folk behind to play his own electronic-flavored rock/R&B) and bring out a voice of his own.  Mangold’s reductive explanation only defangs and domesticates a difficult/complex personality.  The times they are a’changing, but bio-pic bromides are forever.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Another way to do these things is to have the celebrity figure cast a shadow from just out of frame, as the Coen Bros. have Dylan do in the unsatisfying INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS/’13.

THE WOODEN HORSE (1950)

Fact-based, yet by-the-numbers WWII P.O.W. breakout story (THE SO-SO ESCAPE?), decent rather than pulse-pounding, ‘veddy-veddy’ stiff upper lip British and intended that way.*  The gimmick’s in the title, a bespoke wooden ‘vaulting’ horse, built in the Stalag by officer-prisoners as a Trojan Horse able to hold three men inside.  It's an A-frame structure hiding a tunnel digger who secretly burrows while incarcerated officers camouflage verboten activity with jumps & flips over the ‘horse.’  Ease boredom!  Keep in shape!  Finish the hole!  All this still fresh in 1950, but for modern audiences the film only comes fully to life after three men (Leo Genn, Anthony Steel, David Tomlinson) clamber inside and are carried to a tunnel entrance hidden in plain sight.  Only then does director Jack Lee* get the engine to turn over as we stick to Genn & Steel and watch them finesse their way thru German occupied cities trying to find the resistance and a passage to Sweden.  Great locations and period detail backing the intriguingly uneven relationship growing between Genn’s helpless English-only superior officer and Steele’s indispensable multi-linguist.  The ending’s a bit abrupt, but better too little than too much.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For fuller realizations of U.K. precursors to THE GREAT ESCAPE/’63 try THE  COLDITZ STORY/’55 or THE PASSWORD IS COURAGE/’62.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-password-is-courage-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Writer/producer Ian Dalrymple had a freakishly strong year in 1938 earning two Oscar® noms for co-adaptations of G.B. Shaw’s PYGMALION and A.J. Cronin’s THE CITADEL.  Then never nom’ed again.

WHEN STRANGERS MARRY / BETRAYED* (1944)

First give thanks for easy-to-find mint prints all over the internet on this tasty film noir from Poverty Row Monogram Pictures.  Decent film elements from this source not something you take for granted.  Second, a tip of the hat to penny-pinching producers The King Bros. who lined up four future Oscar® winners for a Monogram ‘second’ feature: scripter Philip Yordan; actors Kim Hunter & Dean Jagger; composer Dimitri Tiomkin.  Most importantly, the film’s a fun watch, even with schlock director William Castle already jonesing to be a new Alfred Hitchcock.  Not only the plot, a rip-off of SUSPICION/’41 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/06/suspicion-1941.html), Castle blatantly lifts THE 39 STEPS/’35 shot of a cleaning lady finding a body and her shriek cutting to a train whistle.  (Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE/’42 also gets badly burgled.)  Bumpy going in general (as if shots were missing), but hard to take offense with all the suspenseful/creepy set pieces.  And dig that deep focus hotel room composition.  (Castle certainly does, even repeats it.)  Plus untrustworthy characters to fill the narrative as child-bride Hunter starts to believe Dean Jagger, the traveling salesman she barely knows and impulsively married, may be the Silk Stocking serial killer.  When Jagger doesn’t arrive at the Manhattan hotel he’s booked for them, Hunter’s lucky to bump into past beau Robert Mitchum who’s long held a crush.  Hoping to find him, they see Homicide Detective Neil Hamilton for help.  (Hamilton a deadpan hoot in one of Monogram’s minimally decorated offices.*).   Once Jagger does appear, the couple is soon on the lam, sticking out as the only Whites at a Harlem Jazz Joint before finding overnight refuge in an uptown rooming house.  Fate comes knocking anyway; followed by a neat double-helix twist you may not see coming.  Ending with yet another Hitchcock lift; only this one anticipates the tag in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/’52.  Ten bucks says the idea wasn’t Castle’s, but in Yordan’s script.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Good lord, Mitchum was a lean fellow with an amazing V-shaped build at the time.  Check out the broad shoulders/skinny waist in that big double-breasted suit!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Film re-released in ‘49 as BETRAYED with Mitchum jumping from third to first billed.  ALSO:  *Hamilton plays nearly the same role nearly the same way 20 years on in TV's BATMAN.

CANOA: A SHAMEFUL MEMORY (1975)

Working off a straightforward/fact-based script by Tomás Pérez Turrent on how small-town mass hysteria led to a mistaken-identity mob-lynching (the corrupt local priest falsely tying the victims to the 1968 international student uprisings), Mexican director Felipe Cazals used linear deconstruction and Brechtian distancing devices to create this classic of political engagement and generational cinematic change.  The story simple enough for a fable, a Grimm fable, as a happy-go-lucky group of 20-somethings, low-wage University workers, head off for an overnight hike on a nearby mountain.  But bad weather leaves them seeking shelter in an unfriendly rural town.  And while they find welcome at a farm building for the night, word has already spread (even on the town loud speaker system) that these kids are front men for a Communist invasion of rioting students out to destroy the church and local monuments.  Hasn’t their priest been warning of this for months?  The rest plays out like a lethal game of rumor, lies multiplying into violent attacks on the outsiders, though the first victim is a long distrusted local.  And neither the law nor a Hollywood-style voice of reason to stem the vicious tide of hate.  Cazals over-eggs the first half of the film with too much endearing larky behavior by the university crew, but there’s no denying the power of the inevitable atrocities of the something wicked this way comes second half.  Or the lack of justice after the fact.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Stateside mob violence of a different kind, but with a similar feel comes over strongly in Joseph Losey’s THE LAWLESS/’50.  OR:  *Take director Cazals’ advice, as seen in an Extra on the Criterion edition where, in conversation with fellow Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (BTW  Guillermo del Toro introduces the film), Cazals says the only film influence on this was Juan Bustillo Oro & Fernando de Fuentes’ EL COMPADRE MENDOZA.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/el-compadre-mendoza-1934.html

THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES (2018)

The work of film essayist Mark Cousins can be a bit precious and navel-gazing.  (Fine if the navel in question weren’t his but the subject’s!)  But in this fresh take on Orson Welles’ life & legacy, the style suits Cousins and subject equally well.  Probably the best film on Welles.  (Or is till Cousins misguidedly continues into post-mortem supposition.)  Aided by Welles' lifelong habit of sketching everything he was thinking about, Cousins organizes a peripatetic life with drawings casual and frame-worthy; by-passing protective moats to enter the Wellesian fortress.  Focusing more on the work than the life, this telling is immediately enveloping even for what’s not in here.  Not a word on weight.  Nothing on Hollywood disappointments.  Passing over the WAR OF THE WORLDS scandal.  Indeed, not quite enough on mundane commercial success as actor (largely for self-financing projects) or showing how Welles could coopt the system when it fit his purpose.  Instead, his astounding range of media reinvention (radio, film, theater), and nods at some bravely controversial political stands, particularly on race issues far ahead of the curve.  Much of this told thru a previously overlooked treasure of archival holdings of those quick-stroke drawings.  The University of Michigan archives seems an especially rich repository.*  Revelatory stuff.

DOUBLE-BILL:  The film points out a couple of attempts at dramatizing events: Richard Linklater’s ME AND ORSON WELLES/’08 surprisingly worthy; Tim Robbins’ CRADLE WILL ROCK/’99 weirdly mean-spirited.  Or look for most of his own work covered within.  Just type the title wanted into our SEARCH Box located on the Main Site (left side/top of the page).

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Has an exhibition of drawings using works spread across various institutions been attempted?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Cousins errs in showing clips from TOUCH OF EVIL/’58 in Academy Ratio (1.33:1).  The full frame negative was meant to be cropped down to 1.85:1, common practice at the time in many non-anamorphic films.  Universal Pictures was apt to send out uncropped full-frame prints where, if shown without the correct aperture plate, they'd reveal all sorts of studio-set artifice (lights, girders, wiring) hanging above the intended image.