MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

More than twenty years on, it’s hard not to see David Lynch’s feverish look at Hollywood, L.A. as a before-the-fact companion piece to Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD/’19.  The earlier film like a response; perhaps even a rebuke.  A case of art vs. pastiche.*  Lynch has a narrative of sorts: a car crash disrupting a planned murder; a wannabee Hollywood starlet, naïf fresh before she finds an amnesiac beauty (like a dark twin) in her borrowed bed; a hot young film director with an offer he can’t refuse to re-cast a role*; a hitman having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day; a Garden of Allah like bungalow hotel run by tap dance legend Ann Miller; and much transference of personalities, apartments, industry jobs, souls and sexuality.  The entire film perfectly cast.  A heady brew that needn’t add up (and doesn’t) , merely be felt as something really happening (and it does).  Fierce & funny, violent & entertaining, Lynch never loses control of his mystifying material, helped by the restrictions of a feature length running time.  (Both sets of TWIN PEAKS see him losing interest at the two-third’s mark.)  DRIVE’s once dicey rep rightfully tilting up over the years.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *As mentioned, ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD/’19   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/once-upon-time-in-hollywood-2019.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Justin Theroux fine in a role that likely was written for Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan.  Note those chin-first profile shots.  Alas, without the MacLachlan’s pile driver of a chin.

SUNDAY DINNER FOR A SOLDIER (1944)

The title’s a treacly turnoff, but this WWII home-front booster is a legit charmer, give or take a few missteps & overplaying.  And, in its last act, magically tender.  We’re by the Florida Keys, where grown-up sister Anne Baxter lives in a disheveled houseboat with three much younger siblings.  Orphaned and just getting by, no thanks to irresponsible (or is it irrepressible?) Grandpa Charles Winninger, they’re all pitching in to make next week’s host-a-soldier for Sunday Dinner happen.  A matter of civic pride with the Army Air Force base just down the coast, they’ve signed up to host one of the flyover boys, but need a chicken for the traditional dinner.  And the only one on hand is like a pet to little sister.  (Chicken relatively expensive at the time, 53¢/lb.)  Expected domestic obstacles and a shortage of cash run the narrative, making that marriage proposal from a boring ‘butter-and-egg’ man to Baxter hard to put off.  Might our guest soldier-boy alter things?  Director Lloyd Bacon, known for helming the straight parts of Busby Berkeley musicals @ Warners, did some of his best work after moving to 20th/Fox.  (Who doesn’t like IT HAPPENS EVERY SPRING/’49?   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/12/it-happens-every-spring-1949.html)  And here, he gets fine location atmosphere (CA subbing for FL) when allowed, and a beautifully stylized soundstage set for the main coast-side action.  Bacon not the sort of director to integrate the two, but the studio mock-up grows on you.  But what makes this so affecting happens when Sgt. John Hodiak, on his last day of furlough, shows up on the beach and literally walks into the picture, a serendipitous replacement for the expected dinner guest.  What follows is about as lovely a wartime romance as Hollywood put on screen at the time.  Nice is underrated.  Nice is hard!  And finding your perfect match without drowning in sentiment a rare and lovely thing to watch.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL:  *Bacon perhaps sensing something special between Baxter & Hodiak who married two years later.  BTW - quite a year for underused/undervalued Hodiak who also made his best remembered film this year, Alfred Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT/’44.  

THE LAST VALLEY (1971)

Writer/director James Clavell swung for the fence and missed in this Thirty-Years War epic.*  What was that one about again?  Germany.  Post-Reformation.  Protestant majority largely governed by the Catholic minority.  Tiny feudal States in futile conflict.  Rampant pillaging.  Proliferating Protestant sects unable to unite.  That’s the idea.  But in one hidden valley, life is nearly unchanged.  Thanks to nature’s annual snow blockade, the town cut off from war’s calamities  Enter wandering teacher/intellectual Omar Sharif: hungry, hunted, finding paradise.  Soon followed by Michael Caine’s Captain, pragmatic warrior of little conviction.  Reasoning Yin meets Weaponized Yang as the little town tries to keep a balance of power between fervently religious peasants, horny troops with weapons, and ruling church & secular leaders.  Clavell wasn’t wrong, it is interesting stuff, but only Caine’s disdain toward conviction feels internally dramatized.  Everything else checked off thru suspiciously modern sounding speech.  (Clavell no G.B. Shaw.  Try SAINT JOAN to hear the difference.)  Worse, Clavell hasn’t the filmmaking chops to get us past the dramatic & character lacunae.  Why so little on that wintry pastorale?  It's the heart of the matter.  Nonetheless, simply putting these ideas out there enough to keep the film in the conversation long enough for it to develop a well deserved cult following.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Clavell never directed another feature, turning to a big novel that touched on some of the same outsider views of internecine war: SHOGUN/’80; ‘24.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Adapted and directed by Bryan Forbes, Clavell’s semi-autobiographical POW novel, KING RAT/’65, remains impressive, possibly his best on film.

STRUL / TROUBLE (2024)

From Sweden, a comedy-charged innocent-man-on-the-run number, more THE FUGITIVE/’93 than Hitchcock homage.  And, for a change, avoiding the usual problem of having suspense elements flatten out under the lighter tone, and the funny stuff fizzle without real threat to buttress the gags.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s not only more suspense in straight renderings, but usually more intentional laughs.  But director Jon Holmberg, who co-wrote with Tapio Leopold, makes the tone look inevitable once he finds the right slightly heightened level of play (give yourself a reel to adjust), overcoming a jittery camera style that keeps falling off the beat.  He soon settles down with his own deeply funny fatalistic attitude, loading in suspense as home electronics salesman Filip Berg barely notices a murder going on behind him.  He’s busy installing a new tv monitor before he's knocked unconscious by the mystery killer.  So when the man's wife comes home and finds Berg holding a bloody screwdriver next to her dead husband, he’s quickly picked up by the police and railroaded into an 18-yr prison sentence for murder.  Some of the details seem like circumstantial setup to land him in jail; and they are.  As plot revelations will explain as we go along.  Smart and funny, with well structured plot-twists, it’s just believable enough to maximize enjoyment.  Filip Berg is super as the innocent man who finds a tunnel out (and in) to the prison laundry room, and adds on a lively helper in Amy Deasismont’s junior police officer/electronics customer.  A real find; pretty, with about twenty extra pounds Hollywood would never put up with. (The dopes.)  The main villain, top cop at the station, along with Berg’s court-appointed attorney available to explain some of the more puzzling aspects.  Plus LOL visual gags, and a classic set piece where the incriminating video evidence is embedded in an inconveniently huge tv monitor Berg and Deasismont are forced to carry around with them during the entire climax.  (Real Laurel & Hardy stuff that.)  And all cleanly laid out so we can really follow action and logistics thru Holmberg’s canny shot selection.  Why Hollywood hasn’t picked this up for remake a mystery.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The film a remake of 1988's STRUL.  (not seen here)

ELIO (2025)

Largely dismissed on release, the latest PIXAR animation opens with a series of hurdles to get over: First - explain period details on Space Exploration history; Second - introduce the analogue properties of HAM radio (and its nerdy devotees); Third - cite author/space expert Carl Sagan to a target audience born decades after his heyday.  So, extra points to PIXAR for clearly laying out the prologue that sets up little orphan Elio as an interplanetary junkie hoping to hitch a ride on the next visiting UFO.  Lucky for him, his guardian Aunt works as a space techie, so Elio’s always in the know and on track to suss out cutting edge info.*  The gimmick is that Elio’s suspicions are correct.  And he’s soon on his way.  The end also neatly finessed with the writers cleverly borrowing tropes from THE WIZARD OF OZ/39 and ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS/’61 (those HAM radio operators playing out a variation on the call-of-the-hounds sequence) to get Elio back home.  The problem is all the stuff that comes in the middle.  So many layers of species, society and antagonists to keep track of in space.  And they all think Elio’s Earth’s Leader.  While we get few characters to connect to.  The animation as messy as the story development.  (Story development once PIXAR’s trump card.)  Perhaps three directors (Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi) and nine writers too many cooks.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Always orphans in these things.  (Indeed, LILO AND STITCH/'25, which quickly buried this critically & commercially, features two of them.)  But it's hard to see why this film wouldn’t work just as well with two living parents at home.  Mom & Dad worried about a kid who daydreams about space adventure all day and misses out on what’s happening around him at school and in his own backyard.  (Fits right in with the WoO stuff at the end, too.  (On the other hand, Dorothy also an orphan.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Is this PIXAR’s least physically appealing film?

MOKEY (1942)

Fascinating and horrific in unequal proportions, this M-G-M B-pic, taken from Jennie Harris Oliver boys-will-be-boys magazine stories, likely a test run for a series that didn’t happen.  Directed by journeyman scripter Wells Root (a second & last megging credit, he’s lucky to have Charles Rosher as DP), all about 8-yr-old Mokey, motherless troublemaker, and his racially mixed neighborhood pals.  (Unusual for 1942.)  Played by young Robert ‘Bobby’ Blake, Mokey’s no domesticated DENNIS-THE-MENACE type or even the middle-class (juvenile delinquent-worthy) scamp of Booth Tarkenton’s PENROD (how that boy ever got to SEVENTEEN), but downright pathological, Mokey, meant to be lovably misunderstood, more serial risk taker who nearly gets two people killed* with self-centered lack of empathy and the attention span of a gnat  Dan Dailey (with a just grown mustache) is the neglectful/on-the-road dad who dumps child bride Donna Reed on the kid and lets his domestic go.  (Look!  It’s Hattie McDaniel’s sister Etta.)  Step-mother & kid a quick misalliance, with a lack of communication and Mokey fucking up over and over.  Eventually he gets in real trouble (Grand Larceny, nearly killing his new half-sister), runs away and (BLACKFACE ALERT!) hides out with his Black pals for three weeks in Blackface!  (Not the stylized showbiz type, but blacked up to ‘pass.’)  Meanwhile, Step-mom and Dad think the boy’s dead.  It takes a judge to untangle this mess and extend probation, but Mokey finally shows contrition by drinking a whole glass of warm milk to save this budding American family.  As a look at child-rearing and race relations of the day, this is gasp-worthy stuff; a Bizarro World to the corn-fed Mickey Rooney/Andy Hardy movies.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Highly likely that in real life, Blake got away with murdering his wife.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Watch for a strange haunting bit where Mokey’s almost adopted by a sad farming couple who’d lost a little boy just about Mokey’s age.  (This is where the movie ought to have been all along.)

LES YEUX SANS VISAGE / EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960)

1960 saw two seminal/groundbreaking horror pics.  One everyone knows: Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO.  One everyone should know: Georges Franju’s LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, the original Body Horror movie.*  Unlike anything in the horror canon (though I’d wager both Franju and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan saw Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR/’32 in its now lost first-generation print), the story* is a classic (science going too far) and simple (if at first you don’t succeed . . .).  But in execution: poetic, dreamlike, it’s more ballet than tragic folk ballad.  A surgeon’s beautiful daughter has lost her face in a near tragic accident.  Alive, but hideous, he’s determined to find the perfect match for a complete face graft.  Too bad he must kill an abducted girl to first treat the skin so the graft will not be rejected.  On the other hand, a murdered 'donator' can be identified as the body of his ‘late’ daughter.  With a grief-stricken fiancé to move the plot, and a loyal operating aide (Alida Valli with a corpse in the back of one of those Citroëns with the horsepower of a lawnmower) to assist the doctor.  Only a failed outcome could lead to detection . . . and the need for another face to lift off and graft on.  These scenes had people fainting at the time.  And while we’ve gone far beyond them in gory reality on film, the graceful terror and pulse-free forward momentum retain most of its uniquely effective horror.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Some of the influences close enough to suggest a possible plagiarism suit (see THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF/’62), but most less direct.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-awful-dr-orlof-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Adapted from their novel by Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac of DIABOLIQUE/’55 and VERTIGO/’58 fame.

THE PROSECUTOR / NG POON (2024)

Having accomplished pretty much everything an international Hong Kong-based Martial Arts actor/fight-choreographer/director can do (even STAR WARS took a bite), Donnie Yen is now on track to break a longevity record, retaining top form as he begins his fifth decade in film.  Here, he stars in and directs a modern Hong Kong actioner split between the police force prologue where an innocent young man gets a long jail sentence for unknowingly receiving drugs; followed by Yen’s new job at the Department of Justice where he’s able to see the enormous money laundering operation that set up the young man.  Power and corruption all over the place.  (Whatever did the current Chinese authorities make of the Dark Side of power politics portrayed here?*) But of course, we’re watching not for the Civil Service office procedural (damn complicated, too!), but for the chop-socky action.  Five or six mega-set action pieces with two standout sequences for Yen to show the choreographic elegance that’s the foundation that allows him to release some powerful violence.  First, in a parking lot sequence that feels as much a visual fugue as a fight (curving lines of action/vertical drops); and then in a climatic subway showdown as Yen and a key witness must survive an ambush of killers to reach court and testify.  Handsomely made thru-out, exciting and cast with a pitch perfect touch for easy character identification.  Yen, who’s already been announced for a JOHN WICK spin-off only has seven directing credits.  Are any of the others this good?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *A hard to swallow title at the end credits says Based on a True Story.  Really?

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Everyone’s in peak form for this treasurable pop entertainment, a paradigm of pulp movie making.  Even writer/director John Carpenter’s typically repetitive score feels right on target.  Made for a relative pittance (six mill), the tight budget undoubtedly helped rather than hurt, triggering imagination & vitality, with wit & charm in its playful scale-model trickery and proudly low-tech effects.  It’s 1997 (NOW as the screen tells us) and much decorated/now disgraced military vet Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell in excelsis) is about to start a sentence in Manhattan’s top-security prison facility . . . it’s the entire island!  Once you’re on it, you never get off.  Only possibility, POTUS Donald Pleasence (the real 1997 saw Bill Clinton in office) has just ejected from a hijacked plane* and landed inside the island prison.  Snake’s mission: Save the Prez and get-out-of-jail-free.  The rest, a series of escapes from vicious gangs and death traps with tasty co-stars like Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau joining in the hunt.  All ridiculously satisfying.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That terrorist commandeered plane weirdly prescient of 9/11.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Scroll three posts down to ROAD HOUSE and LINK to a NYTimes discussion of ‘good’ bad films.  Check the Comments in that article and you’ll find ESCAPE mentioned again and again as the ‘perfect’ Good Bad movie.  What are these people thinking?  There’s nothing Bad about this quirky masterpiece.  Bad because it has a small budget?  Bad because it’s an actioner?  Because it’s genre?  Because the F/X is fanciful?  Similarly, ESCAPE is also no Guilty Pleasure.  What’s to be Guilty about a minor masterpiece built out of distressed materials?  More like a miracle; a miracle of moxie.

DOUBLE-BILL:  In a lesson Hollywood never seems to learn, ESCAPE FROM L.A./’96 cost ten times as much and was about a third as good.

FIXED (2025)

Puerile when not scatological, it’s plain to see how co-writer/director Genndy Tartakovsky’s strenuously ribald animation about a horny househound trying to stay ‘intact’ by running away from his appointment with destiny has gotten a rocky reception.  It’s one thing to be a sex-addled comic film made for the puberty-preoccupied BIG MOUTH gang, quite another to play out as if it was conceived, written & drawn by them!  The leg humping, sack swinging, anus obsessive gags quickly grow tiresome.  And that’s a pity as the all-star vocal cast for the neighborhood animal pals is just as much fun to listen to as the choice of palette, design & presentation is to look at.  A bright, hand-drawn, 2D throwback style, riffing on 1990s cartoon æsthetics like REN & STIMPY.*  But for those who can wade thru the jejune-ity of the first act, things improve noticeably once our boy (and his boys) make it to the city, get lost, and enter a testicle-free zone of misadventures & close calls that are rude, crude & lewd in their own way.  Starting with a mass cat attack and continuing with some pretty funny, smoothly handled, testicle-free, action-oriented comic set pieces.  Set your patience level UP and your expectations level down to MEDIUM and you’ll find a decent piece of entertainment in here.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *And note how often a cut to close up reveals details reminiscent of some Dr. Seuss character, presumably from the production's 'fixed' model sheet.  (Those tufts of top hair!)

ROAD HOUSE (1989)

After decades of missing (okay, avoiding) this rockem-sockem cult classic about a Zen-loaded bar bouncer in a new town, I broke down last night only to find it featured in today’s NYTimes as the #1 ‘good’ bad film of all time.  (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/movies/road-house-patrick-swayze-good-bad-movie.html) No question about the bad part, it’s the good that’s debatable.  (Surely, the Patrick Swayze ‘good’ bad film is POINT BREAK/’91, no?.*  Perhaps even a great ‘bad’ film.)  On the other hand, RH does meet the good/bad criteria that holds ’were it any better, it wouldn’t work at all.’  Everything is OTT even before Swayze is called to clean up a lawless town; he’s like the new sheriff in this quasi-Western where evil, land-grabbing Ben Gazzara has the power to bend everything his way.  Lots of pointless nudity (so many tushies!) & violence (so much blood!), with most of the action a bit sloppy under director Rowdy Herrington (a well-deserved Razzie nom).  On the other hand, the many car stunts and explosions darn good!  The rest, amateur in execution and lacking chemistry between anyone.  Not necessarily a bad thing here, as it gives the mayhem the weightless quality of a Tex Avery cartoon.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Tellingly, both these films were loosely remade to little effect.  Stick with the originals.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/point-break-1991.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  If you get this film in a physical format, you’ll likely find a little extra where cast & crew look back on the film with a mixture of pride at its ever expanding popularity and embarrassment at its crudity.  That’s about right.

THE AFFAIRS OF ANATOL (1921)

Remembered almost exclusively for big, bigger, biggest epics (mostly historical; secular/religious), Cecil B. DeMille began with Westerns (which he continued to make) before starting a series of signature OTT upper-crust social dramedies (which he didn’t).  From the late ‘teens to the early ‘20, these silents contain much of his best work, often seasoned with slightly nutty allegorical rhymed flashbacks to show how little things had changed since ancient times.  ANATOL, one of the largest if not one of the best, served as something of a farewell to past DeMille stars (Gloria Swanson, Wallace Reid, Agnes Ayres, Bebe Daniels) and, if no flashback, particularly OTT sets & costumes from Paul Iribe, especially for Daniels who plays stage star Satan Synne.  Taken, rather loosely, from an Arthur Schintzler play about a playboy testing for tru-love, he 'tries out' three woman while on his honeymoon (in the play, he isn’t married) and is fleeced each time.  That’s really it for the story*, but DeMille loads in production value (as usual with deMille a poor substitute for style) and encourages a heightened acting that fits his purposes.  Reid & Daniels take acting honors, while brilliant cinematographer Karl Struss joins regular DeMille lenser Alvin Wyckoff in providing all sorts of opportunities for some elaborate color tinting effects.  Come 1923, Ernst Lubitsch would come to Hollywood and shortly take over these things with a humorous knowing touch and a level of cultural & visual sophistication unknown to C.B.

LINK:  Good print, if no score (provide your own!; I used Delibes ballet scores) via this link.   https://archive.org/details/silent-the-affairs-of-anatol

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *DeMille’s attempt to return to the genre in 1934 with FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE failed.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/four-frightened-people-1934.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Or is unless you read Elliot Dexter’s platonic pal for Swanson, whom Reid grows jealous of, as gay.  In the play, he’s the guy’s BFF.

WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965)

Everybody’s got the hots for nightclub D.J. Juliet Prowse* in this low-rent indie so eager to titillate it teeters on camp.  Just don’t get your hopes up, implied masturbation is about as far as you could go in ‘65.  Dance crazes fill the gap: the Frug, the Pony, the Watusi (what, no The Locomotion?).  All because Prowse got the heebie-jeebies after a few ‘ghost’ phone calls.  Or was that faint heavy breathing at the other end of the line?  Comedian Jan Murray has a rare dramatic turn as a detective who seems a bit too interested in this victim.  Sympathetic club owner Elaine Stritch is way too sympathetic . . . if you get my drift.  So when doe-eyed club go-fer Sal Mineo shows up at her public swimming pool (fit as a freestyle gymnast), Prowse is open for a friendly relationship . . . just not the kind he wants.  Yikes!  How many hands does a girl have to fight off in this town?  Occasional feature film director Joseph Cates captures some of the rapid decline in ‘Fun City’ Manhattan thru mindless club life and dank under-lit street corners (kudos to D.P. Joseph Brun), but he’s all thumbs on plot mechanics and suspense in what is essentially a prurient stalker pic.  Unique for the time, which helps explain its current cult following.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  1965's indie New York film scene wasn’t only sleazy drama.  See the sit-com stylings of A THOUSAND CLOWNS, bringing similar visual æsthetics to cozy/acerbic family dramedy in an era when sincerity was tabulated by the level of visible grain on your film stock.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/02/thousand-clowns-1965.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *After debuting with a featured dance role in CAN-CAN/’60, Prowse next co-starred with Elvis Presley in G.I. BLUES the same year.  All downhill from there.

TABU: A STORY OF THE SOUTH SEAS (1931)

Of the four films F.W. Murnau completed after leaving Germany for Hollywood, three are masterpieces; one is lost.  This, the fourth, premiered shortly after Murnau died in a car crash.  Begun in collaboration with documentarian Robert J. Flaherty, hard to know just how much input Flaherty had.  A very slow worker, he left over ‘creative differences,’ but there’s nothing in the film to indicate a split personality, so let’s assign full authorship to Murnau.  A simple fable from Bora Bora in the South Seas, it opens in Paradise (see title card) as the island’s youth collect food from the sea and mates from gambols on natural water-slides.  (Real-life E-Ticket stuff.)  But when a modern schooner is spotted arriving, you know it means trouble in paradise.  Just not the trouble you’re expecting.  No white man corruption or domination of indigenous peoples, leave that to the guilt-ridden apologists of AVATAR or MICKEY 17.  A century back, Murnau allows these tribal societies to generate drama on their own terms.  Here with young lovers being separated by an ancient custom that chooses a Maid of Good Fortune, chaste & untouchable, TABU to the boy who loves her.  Rather than submit, the two break tradition and flee to a more developed island, in spite of no funds, the boy having carelessly signed away a fortune to Chinese merchants eager to trap the best pearl diver on the island.  To raise funds, the boy will dive for the gems in a spot so dangerous it’s marked TABU.  Technically silent, and wondrously shot by Floyd Crosby (Oscar®), it’s loaded with ceremony, ritual chant & dance for the new Maid of Good Fortune.  Presumably authentic, though the added soundtrack all South Seas musical clichés and Smetana’s The Moldau!*  Just where Murnau, recently dropped from FOX after refusing to add Talkie segments to CITY GIRL/’30 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/05/city-girl-1930.html) might have gone from here is anyone’s guess.  (NOTE:  Family Friendly label, but with a fair amount of 'National Geographic Nudity.') 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A recent edition (not heard here) replaces the 1931 soundtrack with a more authentic ethnic music track, though whether it better fits Murnau’s period sensibility is debatable.  Have a listen and let us know your thoughts in the Comments.  (NOTE: Comments automatically come up on I-Phones, but need to be clicked open on laptops.)  

THE LIFE OF CHUCK (2024)

With a massive literary output, but little consensus on quality or even favorites among Stephen King’s work, two things both fans and non-fans can agree on: ONE, the most acclaimed film adaptations of his work come out of his short stories/novellas, and TWO, his devilishly clever set ups often as not paint him into a narrative corner he can’t get out of.  (Particularly so on his longer horror novels.)  So, what a smart idea to take these two items into consideration when developing this film, a truly superior King adaptation.  Taken from a novella (√); and burying its turn-out-the-lights ending (√) by reversing the running order of it’s three acts so that Act Three (‘End of Days’) comes first, followed by Act Two (spontaneous celebration of life thru dance, think symphonic scherzo), and finally, Act One, with major themes & character motivation sketched in as an orphaned boy finds life’s balance (sweet/sour; sadness/joy; dance/accounting) thru his grandparents.  (We're being purposefully vague here as the film plays better left in discovery mode.)  Efficiently directed by Mike Flanagan (something of King’s house director these days*), if a bit studio bound in Act Two.  Well designed & cast, Mark Hamill gets a real acting role for a change as Grandpa, and a career-defining turn from Tom Hiddleston as the mysterious ‘Chuck’ everyone talks about.*  All ending with a rare sense of satisfaction for a King project.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *So much so, King entrusted Flanagan with DOCTOR SLEEP/’19 (not seen here), a close relative to THE SHINING/’80, the Stanley Kubrick adaptation King disparages.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Speaking of turns, CHUCK confronts us with the question of who’s the more surprisngly good dancer: Tom Hiddleson here or Mads Mikkelsen in DRUK/’20?    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/02/druk-another-round-2020.html

MICKEY 17 (2025)

Preternaturally gifted Korean writer/director Bong Joon Ho, now regularly working in English, has a great story to work with here . . . if only he’d stick with it.  Starting in classic fashion, a pair of lowlifes (Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun) go on the run from murderous loan sharks, getting out of town (make that out of the solar system) by grabbing the first interplanetary flight opportunity colonizing a frozen planet.  Yeun’s got a connection while Pattinson signs up to be a human guinea pig, an ‘Expendable,’ placing himself in harm’s way to test the waters (literally), experimental meds, air quality, local critters, and, should he die, getting ‘reprinted’ (DNA, memories and all) via 3-D techniques; a freshly made perfect copy, ready to die again.  But a problem arises when he’s left for dead, but recovers to return to the space station on his new planet after a replacement Mickey (that’d be Mickey 18) has already been cloned & printed.  Yikes!  Endless possibilities here for moral & physical doppelgänger dilemmas: farce² or metaphysical morals & mortality.*  But the film is stopped in its tracks by a cast playing so broadly, the gags stick in their throats; and with Pattinson also putting on a ‘funny’ voice.  (Dennis Weaver from GUNSMOKE?)  While Mark Ruffalo, the pseudo-religious visionary villain trying to start a brave new world tilts Trumpian.  But an even bigger problem finds Bong Joon Ho moving past endemic complications for overworked anti-colonizing allegory with an Earthling crew cleansing ‘their’ planet of its indigenous population of ‘monsters’ who turn out to be nice enough ‘roly-poly’ beasts when respected/left alone, only acting like  interstellar Comanche warriors when attacked by the likes of . . . us.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Both AVATARs/’09; ‘22 work the same colonizers vs indigenous storyline.  But give MICKEY credit for more jokes and an hour’s less running time.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *You’ve no doubt noted how the prologue mirrors Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT/’59 while that extra Mickey gumming up the works pulls from Dumas’s twin princes in THE IRON MASK/’29, usually done as a romantic swashbuckler.  (In 1998, Leonardo DiCaprio played it.)

NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER (1980)

They skimp on subway graffiti, but everything else is in place on this tip-top template of grit & grunge ‘80s NYC style, the Daily News FORD TO CITY; DROP DEAD era of near bankruptcy and soaring violence.  You know, the good old days.  TV director Robert Butler, stepped in when journeyman hack Sidney J. Furie ankled*, while leads James Brolin and Cliff Gorman only feel like they’re stepping in for starrier names.  (Cheaper than the A-team, say Kurt Russell and Al Pacino, but here, the B-team probably a better choice, lesser stars & director offering a useful lack of polish and upping the film’s ‘gonzo’ factor.)  Brolin, ex-cop/truck driver, gives chase (by foot/by car; pedestrians be damned) when his teenage daughter is mistakenly kidnapped by Gorman who thinks he’s grabbed a real estate developer’s kid.  And we’re off; never stopping to look back on a race thru parks, avenues & down & dirty city streets.  (Bonus points for getting Manhattan logistics right for a change.)   Local obstacles include traffic jams; street gangs; crashes; even the police.  One in particular, Dan Hedaya, has a beef to settle with Brolin.  Only top detective Richard S. Castellano (unbeatable here) understanding what’s going on.  This mid-range actioner deserves its cult following.  Find it on-line now in halfway decent prints; or wait for the upgrade coming from Kino Lorber, as detailed in the LINK below.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  After the unintentionally ironically named ‘Fun City’ of the ‘60s, ‘70s Manhattan  ran on fumes, with films like ACROSS 110TH STREET/’72 and THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE/’74 pointing the way toward ‘80s Manhattan Armageddon.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/across-110th-street-1972.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/taking-of-pelham-one-two-three-1974.html  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: More on JUGGLER’s difficult path to restoration and distribution.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/movies/night-of-the-juggler.html

REPULSION (1965)

With over a dozen films and international stardom already in hand, 22-yr-old Catherine Deneuve made her first (and best*) English-language film in this psychological horror that gave Roman Polanski something of a mainstream hit in only his second feature.  Still extremely effective, though it does wear its cinematic influences on its sleeve (mostly Hitchcock & Cocteau*), the film triumphs over a tiny budget with imaginative stylings and unwavering focus.  (Extra points to cinematographer Gilbert Taylor.)  Deneuve plays an introverted manicurist at a fashionable beauty salon, her impassive face betraying diffidence toward job, clients, fellow workers & boss.  Something that might not pass notice if she weren’t such a blonde beauty.  It’s the unspoken subject underneath how people respond to her, elsewise her downward spiral into depression, delusion & violent fantasy might have been caught before it was too late.  Sharing a flat with her older sister, her mental skid is already on track when she’s left alone for over a week while sister & boyfriend take off on vacation.  By the time they return, job, lives and a ready to cook rabbit will have gone ‘off’ in horrifying ways.  Immaculate filmmaking, with Polanski’s uncanny shot choice putting tricky psychological ideas across, without forgetting to unsettle us.  Often scaring the bejesus out of us thru shock cuts, shock pans, shock reveals, angles and smash sound edits.  Unnerving stuff that sticks with you.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *While few actresses chose better directors on their home turf, Deneuve didn’t seem to know the score in either directors or co-stars on her mediocre attempts in Hollywood.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Though easy to see ROSEMARY’S BABY/’68 appearing after a three-year gestation, Polanski more closely revisited this terrain, now playing the lead and speaking entirely with his own fully mature voice, in THE TENANT/’76.  His still underrated, darkly comic absurd Kafkaesque tragedy.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-tenant-1976.html

AVATAR: THE WAY OF THE WATER (2022)

The first of four (!) planned sequels to the original James Cameron CGI-heavy blockbuster offers more (and more and more and more) of the same: super-sleek indigenous planet peoples (this time forest dwellers and coastal paradise types) compelled to join forces to fight off a new round of genocidal attacks by Earthly invaders from the sky out to steal a fountain of youth formula.  Think Amazon tribes & Tahitian natives vs arrogant/powerful East Coast/West Coast raiders in another intergalactic ‘Bad’ Cowboys/ ‘Good’ Indians action adventure.  And since 2009's AVATAR became the all-time top grosser, hard to gainsay a sequel.  This rising to #3 on that list*, though with hardly an original idea in a self-indulgent 3+ hour running time.  (Half an hour longer than the first film.)  Unexpectedly, establishing shots of landscapes and characters look unconvincing.  (Or does if you're not hooked on video games.)  Like a Robert Zemeckis film where improved pure CGI and motion capture techniques reduce rather than improve identification.  Fortunately, this problem soon corrected, unfortunately, not much else is.  And so many borrowed tropes from classic fable and fantasy.*  (The lion with a throne in his paw a real lulu, but you choose your favorite.)  The final battle, when we finally get there, is impressive in its windy manner, but the way Cameron presents his tarnished ideas as fresh discovery comes off as more self-delusional than ever.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Third place on the all-time box-office list nothing to sneeze at!  But even without adjusting for inflation, it’s also a 20% drop from the first film.  Perhaps the underwater heros of the film aren’t the only ones running out of oxygen.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/07/avatar-2009.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The film so impersonal, you keep looking for a little sign on the wall attributing direction & story not to James Cameron but to ‘School of James Cameron.’

SUNDAY BEST (2025)

Rather than the expected hagiographic look at tv variety show host Ed Sullivan, a fixture on CBS Sunday nights for twenty-five years (late-‘40s thru early ‘70s), documentarian Sacha Jenkins takes a hagiographic look at Sullivan’s unprecedented progressive booking policy on largely excluded Black talent: ex-Vaudevillians up to The Jackson Five.  With generous clips of singers and dancers, the film touches on politics and representation as Sullivan puts his neck out where others did not.  Lots of wonderful stuff in here, some still surprising (Sammy Davis Jr in a duet with White smoothie Tony Martin?), Nat King Cole showing his jazzy piano chops.  But why no Moms Mabley?  Moms told the single funniest, dirtiest joke even heard on broadcast tv on a 1969 Sullivan show.  (How’d she get away with it?)  Sullivan’s fight to get Harry Belafonte on in spite of their political differences.  (Likely, Belafonte wasn’t held back by CBS execs for Leftist leanings, but for being the sexiest man ever put on the tube, period.)  Irresistible stuff.  But Jenkins, or whomever finished the cut (Jenkins died before this aired) also tries to cram in the usual personal details and check off some important White guests (The Beatles; Elvis; Original B’way Casts), which only points up how much else is missing.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Jenkins misses two important points.  ONE: Right thru the 1950s, whenever you saw Blacks on tv, you knew you were seeing the absolute best. How else could they have made it on the air in that environment?  Now, check out any police or medical procedural to confirm that Black actors can be just as bad as anyone.  The other missed point is how important Sullivan was as a sort of ANTI-algorithm.  In addition to giving, say Elvis or The Beatles, an early and a late slot, the rest of the really big show would be filled with things completely different which you would have to sit thru.  So, you might accidently bump into something wonderful, something you kinda liked, even if it wasn’t cool to say so out loud.  A modern ballet company, an opera aria (with the famous Sullivan band snare drum adding a beat for extra emphasis), a foreign nightclub act, Yugoslavian tumblers, plate spinners.  Plate spinners!  Good Lord, two whole generations unaware of Plate Spinners!

DOUBLE-BILL:  *A DIY double-bill is waiting on youtube by adding the name of your favorite (see poster) alongside Sullivan and watching the videos pop up.