A LITTLE PRAYER (2023)

One of those modest films where you know what you’re getting into before you get into it.  A sure Audience Prize winner from some mid-list film fest; always a bad sign.  A rueful domestic tale best-destined for The New Yorker as a piece of short fiction you never get to.  An acclaimed ensemble cast that underwhelms.  (Other than pater familias David Strathairn, always good; even better acting under his pseudonym,  Sam Waterston.)  Capturing the sympathies of many a super-hero hardened critic who take it under their wing like a charity case.  (Only Angus MacLachlan’s third feature as writer/director since 2014.)  Not that it’s bad.  It’s adequate.*  More’s the pity; a tasteless moment might hot things up.  Strathairn’s the even-keeled Dad who runs a modest Heating-and-Cooling Factory & Service company with his son, a hail-fellow-well-met type who’s been papering-over serious personal issues (alcohol, drugs, infidelity, domestic violence) since returning from two military deployments.  Happily, the daughter-in-law is a dream for Strathairn and his wife (a costumed tour-guide docent at a local historical ‘colonial’ campus).  No doubt all the young couple needs is the baby they’ve long been trying for to get the relationship back on track.  Instead, we get the other sister back to the homestead with her needy hot-button issues and difficult little girl, having once more left her no’count drug-brewing husband, to lech on the family teat and be a role model for bad parenting.  MacLachlan’s careful to undersell this dramatic burgoo, only to juice things up in the last act with four or five big reveals.  I didn’t buy into any of them, but tens of others felt differently.

READ ALL ABOUT IT :  *I’ve stolen this idea of ‘adequate’ being worse than 'bad' from Orson Welles who said much the same in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich talking about Maurice Evans, the top Shakespearean during Welles’ Mercury Theatre heyday.  WELLES: He took on practically everything in Shakespeare, the critics raved, and the people packed in to see him.  BOGDANOVICH: And he was bad?  WELLES: Worse - he was poor.  Or so it’s transcribed (make that mis-transcribed) and printed in THIS IS ORSON WELLES.  But on the original audio tapes Welles clearly says: Worse - he was adequate.   FUN FACT: Evans, now probably best-known as Mia Farrow’s doctor in ROSEMARY’S BABY, was a ringer for Jack Benny!  Undoubtedly one of the many reasons Ernst Lubitsch thought of Benny (of all people, radio comedian of genius Jack Benny!) to play that great, great Polish Shakespearean, Josef Tura.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (1976)

The trick to Barbara Kopple’s classic film on the thirteen-month Kentucky coal-miners’ strike against Duke Power & affiliates (1973 - ‘74) is that it’s not only a great documentary, but great filmmaking.  There’s an unusually high percentage of superb films on life in the mines (fiction & non-fiction), what it does to those who ‘go under’ and those who only stand and wait.  But you need to go to Zola/GERMINAL or those gobsmacking first two chapters of George Orwell’s THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER to find the like of what Kopple, in only her second film, does here.  It stems from the personalities she captures, the dramatic organization, the stealth shots of actions captured, the dull ache of showing up at five in the morning (in numbers for safety) to beat the opposition.  And the high bar you need to meet when opponents contain not only expected foe (owners, politicians, police), but also your own union reps, the local priest(!) and the fucking United Mine Workers President, the guy who also votes ‘for’ you.  (Soon replaced.)  It’s a tough story to lay out clearly, but is clear as a bell under Kopple & Crew.  (Note the high percentage of women in key spots, no easy thing at the time . . . no easy thing now.  Yet the deeper tragedy of the whole film, not only the murder of a teen supporter that hurries resolution, is the legacy of a work force doomed to win modest concessions while shrinking year by year to a meaningless number of jobs now only used as political fodder by Luddites for non-renewal energy and the pipe dream of what’s still heralded as Clean Coal.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Hard to imagine just how much unused footage might still exist in some warehouse.   A 2007 restoration of the original cut, out on Criterion, is excellent.  But a brief clip during a miners’ rally near Manhattan corporate offices features a highlight in a conversation between a NYC cop and one of the miners comparing wages, hours & benefits.  Priceless; surely, there’s more of it.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  As mentioned, Zola’s oft-filmed GERMINAL.  (It nearly comes across in a recent French mini-series.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/06/germinal-2021.html )  OR:  Orwell’s WIGAN PIER, which devolves into statistics, but is untouchable in its early chapters.

SYNONYMES / SYNONYMS (2019)

Forty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born writer/director Nadav Lapid on twenty-something Paris-based/Israeli-born lost soul Yoav; auto-biographical elements inevitable.  (The film also something of a family affair with a brother co-scripting and Mom co-editing.)  Here’s how Lapid tells it: With little more than a stolen French/Israeli dictionary as guide to his new country, Yoav is going for rebirth as a Frenchman.  (Perhaps why debuting Tom Mercier so often buck-naked.)  Squatting overnight in a rich family’s townhouse, he can’t find the clothes he took off to bathe.  Now he’s really in rebirth mode . . . if he doesn’t freeze to death.  Saved by two unexpected housemates, the home’s billionaire’s son and his girlfriend (the only other people in the place), his adventures in assimilation are kick-started with clothes & funds from these fairy faux siblings.  Nifty work from Lapid, with Yoav not so much meeting his future as flirting with it.  Especially the scion who’s already breaking personal space with his ‘guest.’  Adventures in the outside world work best with another Israeli, a political agitator who loudly hums ‘Hatikvah’ on Le Metro, hoping to provoke an incident.  Yoav, who’s sworn off Hebrew, watches in horror & delight.  And there’s citizenship school, too.  But Lapid pushes too hard with a soft-porn photo-shoot (Yoav raising funds); a move to enter the Foreign Legion (?), and reverse-snobbery at the chamber orchestra concert of the girlfriend who’s been bequeathed to him.  Has Yoav gone a bit mad or are his true (terribly confused) colors simply coming out.  A surprise meeting with Dad suggests a way out, but damn if anyone will take it.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Lapid's alter-ego’s personal journey thru Statehood, Politics & aversion to his past is less interesting and less well-handled than the menage-a-trois set-up suggested here.  You’ll find that story developed in the most sophisticated manner imaginable in Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated THE DREAMERS/’03.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/dreamers-2003.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Perhaps Lapid is yet another auteur, loaded with talent in handling cast, crew & camera, whose work might benefit with an outside pair of eyes holding the purse strings and sometimes saying, ‘No.’

A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO / AI NO SHINSEKAI (1994)

Blur-free nudity (a first in mainstream Japanese film fare*) was the commercial come-on for this largely giddy look at a sex workers boutique, the ‘girls’ waiting for the next order to phone in at their small Tokyo office.  A plump, jovial  office manager handles appointments and makes sure special requests are honored (the right girl for the right job), billing rates set in advance and assignation locations cleared.  The small staff (six young women/one young man) on hand (or on-call) to fill any & all requests.  We largely stick with two of the girls: Dominatrix Sawa Suzuki (treating her work like acting opportunities; whipping, piercing, turning her clients into literal bootlickers), while less kinky call-girl Reiko Kataoka sticks to the basics.  Meet-ups so frank (bouncy fucks or rock-‘em/sock-'em pain-for-pleasure fetish), it plays with a comic edge.  Advertent?  Or are we just self-distancing?  Elsewise, personal life filters in (love & marriage), climaxing in a theatrical orgasm, a play put on by an amateur company the staff has joined, supported by the mob who also seem to work as protectors.  The show an all hands on deck production; immediately followed by a swingin’ first-night/backstage cast party.  With a script co-written by famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki (his full-frontal nude shots pop up thru the film), and pacey, colorful direction from the prolific Banmei Takahashi, the film leaves no pornographic aftertaste.  Indeed, no aftertaste of any kind,

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *No blurring for the men, either, but none needed as they remain discretely covered by fundoshi, traditional Japanese male underwear.

HIS PICTURE IN THE PAPERS (1916)

Stealthily game-changing light comedy uses a handsome leading man in a role typically cast with a physical comedian or even a slapstick grotesque.  But since that leading man was Douglas Fairbanks, in his breakout film*, it paved the way for dozens of Cary & Hugh Grant types to play these roles in the future.  (Come 1920 - ‘21, Fairbanks moved on to the large-scale period adventures he’s best known for.)  John Emerson, an actor who really wanted to direct (yep, even in 1916), found a cache of story treatments submitted to Triangle Studios by a young Anita Loos (they soon married) and a young actor (Fairbanks) no one thought could act running out his option.  The knockabout farce they made follows Doug, the scion of a health food mogul, who prefers steak & cocktails to plant-based goop, but tries to make good and get his picture in the paper to placate Dad.  No less than D.W. Griffith though it unfit for release (Could they cut it down to a short?) and only the delayed delivery of a new feature for its big NYC premiere got this on the screen as temp substitute.*  An immediate commercial & critical hit, the Fairbanks, Loos, Emerson team made half-a-dozen like it in 1916 alone.  The ones that survive all fun, if in various states of repair.  FLIRTING WITH FATE from a few months later, in much better physical shape, and much better directed by Christy Cabanne.  But its storyline (despondent Doug hires a hit man on himself . . . than changes his mind) less original.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *As yet, Doug is ‘stash-less’ which gives his face an ‘unfinished’ look.

READ ALL ABOUT IT :  *Anita Loos tells the whole unlikely story herself in A GIRL LIKE I.  Loos now best known for GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, but as a writer in the early ‘30s, she was Hollywood’s IT girl.

THE COMPLEAT BEATLES (1982)

Straightforward, unpretentious and unauthorized, this succinct Beatles docu has all you really need to know about John, Paul, George and Ringo, seen plain before mythology took over.  Basically a cut-and-paste job (a good one) by director Patrick Montgomery and editor Pamela Page (well narrated by Malcolm McDowel), buttressed with purpose-made interviews from a fair sampling of on-the-scene witnesses: Gerry (and the Pacemakers) Marsden, L.P. producer George Martin, et al.  Without finger pointing and with no ax to grind (nice to see Ringo get his due), the film is particularly refreshing in not polishing up every track and image to pristine state.  Instead, capturing some of pleasure in pulling out a slightly dinged up original pressing to listen to rather than some over-refined digital replacement/remix.  All in a couple of hours.  (THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY, currently in streaming rotation goes on for 10 hours.)  Best insight comes in noting just how quickly John’s voice broke down doing live shows.  Did that factor into the boys taking on Abbey Road studio hermitage?  Worst is the usual fawning over SGT. PEPPER.  Anyone around at the time can (off the top of their head) reel off five or six titles they’d put on the turntable before it.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  As mentioned in this NYTimes piece, the film is floating all over the internet.  The rights situation must be confusing as hell.  Most seem to be taken from decent VHS copies and are surprisingly watchable.    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/movies/other-beatles-documentary.html   

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The Beatles’ first Stateside visit turns NYC upside down in Robert Zemeckis’s debut pic, I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND/’78.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-wanna-hold-your-hand-1978.html

DREW: THE MAN BEHIND THE POSTER (2013)

Even if you’re not constantly looking for great movie poster art, its steady decline over the decades is obvious.  Hard to pinpoint the turning point, since memorable anomalies still pop up, but it surely started with the end of the old studio system in the ‘60s.  By the ‘80s, photoshopping and airbrushing had largely taken over from paint & brush storytelling.  Now, it’s down to a rotation of portraits, space rockets, uniforms and MARVEL.  So, doubly sad to read obits for two of the last great practitioners of the craft: Italy’s Renato Casaro and Hollywood’s Drew Struzan, dying about a month apart.*  Eric Sharkey’s Struzan docu is nothing special, but gets the job done, showing a lot of work, especially good at including putative poster campaigns that were turned down by studio execs who thought something less ‘artistic’ would sell more popcorn.  Fortunately, a George Lucas or a Steven Speilberg could sometimes step up and manage to find a spot for their preferred renderings in Special Editions or re-releases.  Sharkey goes a little light on Struzan’s peculiarities, a very likeable, but odd artistic fellow, and only does right by one of the two  major conflicts in the story: a fight over rights on 'lost' original art (that wasn't lost at all), and a non-Struzan poster for INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM that was eventually replaced by Struzan.*   Hagiographic interviews with famous actors & directors tell the rest, as do Struzan/Wife & Son, to bring this quiet and surprisingly quirky personality out.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  *In addition to individual obits, this appreciation neatly touches on the vast output of these two titans.  ALSO:  Can’t swear to it, but I think this is the TEMPLE OF DOOM poster that Lucas & Spielberg objected to as too dark in tone & personality.    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/movies/drew-struzan-renato-casaro-movie-posters.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/09/indiana-jones-and-temple-of-doom-1984.html

BLUE JEANS (1917)

Fascinating, frustrating, unmissable.  Frustrating in that the film’s in pretty rough shape, a dupe with severe nitrate deterioration.  The widely available George Eastman House print, free online, fortunately improves as it goes along.  Much better by the crucial last two reels where Joseph Arthur’s 1890 stage melodrama’s idea of tying the hero to a conveyor belt at a sawmill is filmed to stunning effect.  And note, it’s the guy on the belt and the gal who saves him in the nick of time.  (As if Snidely Whiplash threw the switch and Nell Fenwick saved Dudley Do-Right.)  But how’d we get here?  Briefly, under top silent scripter June Mathis*, hungry orphan Viola Dana meets-cute with handsome young Perry Bascom by stealing his lunch.  On his way to claim his late father’s sawmill from his Step-Uncle, he’s eager to marry Dana and settle down.  But when he gets involved in politics, a previous wife surfaces to denounce him.  She was already married to another, but can he prove it?  And now, Dana’s past is leaking.  Seems her mom ran off with . . . Bascom’s father!  These newlyweds are brother and sister!  Plus, her kindly landlords, who are about to throw her out, discover they are her actual Grandparents.  This but a fraction of the melodrama Mathis has to parse, which she does neatly under the clarifying direction of John H. Collins.  (The fourth of their five collaborations at Metro.)  Collins, who managed to make good films even at Edison*, shows flashes of brilliance here.  The pastoral courtship (though you have to squint) and even more in that sawmill climax.  What advanced editing, closeups and angles. His early death during next year’s Spanish Influenza Epidemic, only 29, a huge loss to cinema.  To Viola Dana, too, as they were husband & wife.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *The late ‘teens/early ‘twenties saw female creatives squeezed out of the film biz.  The two most powerful women left were writers Frances Marion and June Mathis.  Mathis going on to discover Rudolph Valentino with THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE/’21 only to slip when she lost BEN-HUR to the newly configured M-G-M.  Then dying in 1927, only 40.  A new critical study, JUNE MATHIS: THE RISE AND FALL OF A SILENT FILM VISIONARY by Thomas J. Slater details the life & work.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *More Collins from his Edison days.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/john-h-collins-edison-films-director.html

DEATH OF NINTENDO (2020)

Don’t be fooled!  This poster ‘reads’ as Animation, but NINTENDO is a Live Action coming-of-age film, and a good one.  Comfortingly conventional/true to the form, yet holding on to enough curious local custom & cultural specificity in time & place (1990s/Philippines) to make it feel freshly caught.*  Best guess is that writer/producer Valerie Castillo Martinez used her own memories of growing up in Manila for details, well caught by director Raya Martin.  A middle-school  summer break; the matriarchal society in charge at home (not a father in sight); some wary mixing between the boy groups and the girl groups.  Our focus on three buds and a neighboring girl who’d rather hang out with these computer game obsessed guys than those pink-fetishing girly girls.  The boys’ passion for the latest Nintendo Cassette Game only exceeded only by a desire not so much to lose their virginity, but their foreskin under the whetstone sharped razor of an unsanctioned tradition-bound country circumciser.  Yikes!  The boys certain this rite of passage a sure way to increase size.   As the youngest looking of the three pals, Noel Comia Jr. especially charming, a kid who doesn’t realize he’s become a handsome prince fit for the pretty new girl in town, but a much better fit for the smartest, Kim Chloie Oquendo as Mimaw, the boys' tagalong pal.  All while earthquakes and power shortages make this a summer to remember.  And doubly interesting to the viewer as a rare chance to see middle-class Filipino life.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Similarly gaining universality thru local specificity, FRENCH KISSES/’09, a coming-of-age film by ARAB OF THE FUTURE graphic novelist Riad Sattouf.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/03/les-beaux-gosses-french-kissers-2009.html

GHOST IN THE SHELL / KÔKAKU KIDÔTAI (1995)

You can date the international rise of anme (the Japanese style animation largely derived from 'Manga' comic books) from two 1988 films: Hayao Miyazki's MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO and Katsuhiro Ôtomo's AKIRA.  Seven years on, Mamoru Oshii sealed the deal with this futuristic semi-cyborg police thriller.  And while some of the technical aspects inevitably show their age, the ideas & characters certainly hold up/hold their interest.  Plus, feeling the sense of discovery and out-of-the-box strides of everyone involved in making this remain potent.  Heck, you can even more-or-less follow the story, no guaranteed thing in the 'Manga' world, as semi-cyborg policewoman Tanaka and her mostly still-human partner track down the mysterious 'Puppet Master' who may be hacking into everyone's operational system . . . or something like that.  Most endearing touch: Tanaka asking everyone she meets what percentage of cyborg-to-human they are.  (She's like a house guest rudely wanting to know what your rent is.)  But of course, you're not here for plot or character, or even some pretty interesting ideas*, but for the graphic design, city-scape, street signage and computer generated action.  None of which disappoint.  (NOTE:  Re our Family Friendly label, prudish parents should be aware there's a fair amount of female cyborg nudity.  Also, with so much info on screen, dubbed rather than Japanese w/subtitles is the way to go.)

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  With cool graphic trimmings, here's a nifty overview on the Rise of ANIME from a recent NYTimes article.    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/03/magazine/anime-manga-pokemon-demon-slayer-dragon-ball-z.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Look very closely at the lower-left corner of your screen, and you just might spot the Wachowskis furiously taking notes for THE MATRIX/'99.

THE CLIMB (2019)

With a new film out (SPLITSVILLE/’25), multitasker Michael Angelo Covino earns a look at his best known previous work.  Co-writing & co-starring with Kyle Marvin (Covino directs), CLIMB fits into the indie-Mumblecore/Cringe-Comedy movement, shadowing straight 30-something pals celebrating & rebelling against their bond at every opportunity.  Naturally, since he directs, Covino’s the Alpha male, always butting in on love & marriage, health & career with negative energy.  Marvin pushes against him, but his actions prove helpless in a can’t live with him/can’t live without him hug of mutual co-dependancy.  The thrust might be sadder-but-wiser . . . if anyone ever wised up.  That’s the joke as breaking up individual growth (even love & marriage) is Covino’s modus operandi.  Not even a near death experience sees a course change.  Just bear in mind, it’s the type of film that plays infinitely better seen in the midst of film festival fodder as contrast to navel-gazing platitudinous sincerity and the painfully obvious.*  Without that, Covino’s efforts come off as small beer.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:   *Kelly Reichardt brings award-winning seriousness rather than uncomfortable laughs to a similar relationship in her well received OLD JOY/’06  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/old-joy-2006.html

JAWS @ 50: THE DEFINITIVE INSIDE STORY (2025)

Laurent Bouzereau had a great run turning out behind-the-scenes special features as Extras on premium DVD editions of classic Hollywood films.  Not the academically inclined essays or close-readings of directorial style found in Criterion Commentaries, but gossipy backstory featurettes.  A Value Added Bonus from pre-streaming days.  With less call for such offerings in today’s market, Bouzereau has moved on to feature-length studies, like a recent bio on film composer John Williams.  Now, this Golden-Anniversary look at a single film, and not just any film, Steven Spielberg’s JAWS.  Good stuff as far as it goes: archival clips, talking-head encomium from fellow directors, plenty from Spielberg himself.  (Though why Emily Blunt in here a mystery.)  But heck, who doesn’t like JAWS?  Well, other than the NY’er film critic Penelope Gilliat, who used to split the year with Paulina Kael and whose squib review on JAWS read, in its entirety, ‘Don't bite.’ and ran for years.  We do get a couple of little known surprises about some post-location work in a water tank and even a pick-up shot in a backyard swimming pool.  But this is really no more and no less than a Super-Sized version of the DVD Extras Bouzereau used to make.  And he's always careful to avoid tough issues.  For Williams, not a peep about his many musical ‘borrowings,'  (see here: https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/11/music-by-john-williams-2024.html), and now in not mentioning the rift that later developed between Spielberg and one-time film alter-ego Richard Dreyfuss who is only seen in archival material.  (Best guess is that Spielberg blames Dreyfuss for the failure of passion project ALWAYS/’89, but who knows.)  Worth a look, but also a missed opportunity.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  JAWS co-scripter Carl Gottlieb’s original paperback, THE JAWS LOG/’75, often credited as the first bio on a movie production.  But that ‘honor’ should go to Walter Wanger whose My Life with Cleopatra came out in 1963, or perhaps 1973's The Magic Factory: How MGM Made An American in Paris.

DERSU UZALA (1975)

After a career threatening triple blow (latest film on Tokyo have-nots, DODES'KA-DEN/’70, not just rejected, but killing his new Directors’ Commune with their first release, then an apparent suicide attempt), Akira Kurosawa returned to active filmmaking with this Russian-Japanese production.  A straightforward, intensely moving tale of Man, Nature & Friendship, epic and intimate, more importantly, beautifully realized.  Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk), a solitary hunter in the uncharted Russian East (his family lost years ago to smallpox), he’s both aging & ageless, when he comes across a military surveying unit, led by Captain Vladimir Arsenev* (Yuriy Solomin).  With cunning awareness and superior knowledge of the ways, whys & wheres of the forest, Uzala soon becomes invaluable guide & guru, ready for almost any situation, even as the men tease him for his honesty & innocence.  But it’s the fast-developing bond with the Captain that leads the film thru a series of adventures and close calls.  Captured in immaculate scenes that have the rapture of early silent cinema, of something caught in the moment.  (We might be watching Lumière Brothers' ‘actualités’ from 1895 or an early D.W. Griffith California short made near the time of this story.)  The film structured in two halves and an epilogue, matching the two expeditions Captain Arsenev had with Uzala as guide, and the failed attempt to bring the now truly aging woodsman into the comfort of city civilization.  Fitted with one life-scaled, yet majestic set piece after another, though nothing (perhaps in all film) tops the storm sequence in the first half when last year’s stiff stalks of grass, are gathered at a frenzied pace by the two exhausted men to create a sort of grass igloo as overnight protection from a fast-coming blizzard and certain death.  The sort of patient excitement thrillingly realized thru-out the film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Kurosawa’s return to form lasted thru his next film, KAGEMUSHA/’80.  After that, overreach and a great man’s scrappings.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/kagemusha-1980.html

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *The story adapted from Arsenev’s memoirs about his expeditions, including his time with Uzala, while military surveyor to the Czar.  Editions in English available online.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Attention to the aspect ratio.  Shot on 70mm (though mostly seen in 35mm anamorphic transfers), some video sources stretch the image wider than the than the 2.2 (or 2.35) : 1 Kurosawa used.  (This problem not always apparent in the framing of the opening credits,)

THE OTHER SIDE (2015)

Independent documentarian Roberto Minervini*, though born and financed in Italy, has largely focused on the lives of America’s have-nots, here among politically or economically marginalized White Louisianans.  The first two-thirds of the film focused on the extended family of Mark Kelley, a laid-back, rather likeable drug addict (everything from meth & heroin on down), somethings of the family head, protector to his dying mother (cancer), an equally frail Grandmother and his fiancé.  He’s waiting to serve a three-month prison term, but holding out with help from a handy tool kit to get him into public & private buildings for ‘shopping.’  Something of a Godfather to his many Aunts, Uncles, various cousins, nieces & nephews, none of whom appear employed, all fiercely Right Wing Conservative (their hatred of Obama tinged with racism), proud to vote straight Republican Party line against their own interests.  (If’n they voted.)  Somehow, Minervini was allowed (encouraged?) to get all the way into their lives, right down to some ‘Hard R’/Full-Frontal fucking; the women either sickly thin or tending to fat; the men headed toward meth related gauntness.  You get the feeling those who look on the far side of forty may really be ten or fifteen years younger than you guessed.  The last third of the film (far less involving/original) moves away from Kelley & family to showcase a militaristic far-right outfit and their families over a July 4th holiday where weekend warriors practice defending bedrock American values with ‘live’ ammo against ‘the Left’ taking away their rights.  Sure to occur within the next two months!  You’d think they’d notice nothing happening year after year, but they’re all too busy bro-bonding and blowing up Obama in effigy.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Minervini’s latest, THE DAMNED/’24, moves from Documentary to period narrative.

THE LOST LEONARDO (2021)

Lost, yes.*  Leonardo, well . . . ?  Andreas Koefoed’s singularly unconvincing documentary on the discovery of an equally unconvincing ‘new’ painting by Leonardo da Vinci (of Jesus, no less, 'Salvator Mundi') grows only more depressing as it goes along, dropping any considerations of art and restoration to drool over financial machinations.  The basic set-up involves a pair of art hunters who buy a poorly restored Renaissance era painting which looks like a bad copy of a School of Da Vinci portrait of the Messiah; dressed in 15th Century drag and looking like Mona Lisa’s brother.  And, barring a few art experts/dealers who vigorously poo-poo the attribution, many more seem to know which side of the bread is buttered and are happy to get in line: experts, historians, museum curators, auction house profiteers, newspersons; all on the band wagon with stars in their eyes and open pockets.  After bidding wars, a painting that was originally bought for about 1200 bucks winds up going for half a billion (!) from murderous Saudi Prince Mohammad Bin Salman eager to take the plunge for the cultural caché of possessing not a Da Vinci, but with the far more appealing idea of owning the most expensive art work in the world.  Offered a chance to lend it to the Lourve’s Da Vinci spectacular, he wisely declines.  (Fear of competition and close comparison?)  Meanwhile, the film seems happy trying to have its cake and eat it too, lifting the occasional eyebrow as it coasts on Leonardo’s genius rep and toggles between documentary 101 clichés and interstitial interviews with supporters who don’t seem to acknowledge a difference between a painting’s worth and its price.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Not a forgery, per se, but by the look of things, merely a third-rate/in-the-style-of exercise.  A work that’s more in the nature of a misattributed composition, like the supposed 6th and 7th violin concertos (not by) Mozart (he wrote five) recorded by many great players.  Yet they reveal themselves as faux-Mozart within six or seven measures.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Since everyone assumes Prince MBS holds the painting but has it hidden, this Leonardo isn’t even LOST.

ACT ONE (1963)

Everyone’s favorite theatrical memoir, a surprise bestseller for playwright/director Moss Hart, limps to the screen under Dore Schary’s direction.  His one attempt at megging pure self-sabotage, with his writing, casting & producing little better.  Schary, previously a major Hollywood producer who rose to M-G-M head-of-production before quickly flaming out, a lifelong friend who’d been Hart’s assistant in the ‘20s, tosses out the first half of the book, losing much of a rags-to-riches saga that goes from tenement to Tamiment (the Catskills adult camp resort/B’way incubator) that made the book so memorable.  (Streamers?  Are you listening?)  Reduced to Hart’s first B’way success on ONCE IN A LIFETIME, about Hollywood’s silent-to-sound transition, co-written with established playwright George S. Kaufman.  As Kaufman, Jason Robards Jr is a reasonable choice compared to George Hamilton’s doorstop of a Hart.  Made even worse as best pal George Segal is so obviously right for the part.  That’s the way things go here.  Only Jack Klugman, Hart’s non-pro friend, coming across as a fully lived-in character.  And with the film’s compressed grey scale and Skitch Henderson’s OTT score, things can get pretty dire.  Fortunately, the tropes of getting a play up & running nearly impossible to kill.  Other than that, screwing up nearly everything wise, warm & witty from the book.  And most likely missing your favorite moment. (For me, it’s when play producer, and general mensch, Sam Harris notices at the last minute how loud the play is.  A casual comment that helps Hart fine tune the last act and turn out a hit.)  James Lapine’s recent rewrite for B’way got closer, but still not quite there.  Maybe if Sam Harris had been around to say something sage . . . 

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Lots of once well-known Algonquin Round Table celebs flit by, all unrecognizable as cast by Schary.  But look for Eli Wallach as top B’way director/producer Jed Harris, here called Warren Stone for legal reasons.  Famously awful, he’s the man Laurence Olivier modeled his Richard III on.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  A literary rite of passage for all theater nerds, ACT ONE easily lives up to its rep.  And knowing that Hart died at 57, only months after completing it (and that his last two credits were directing MY FAIR LADY and CAMELOT), makes the never written ACT TWO only more tantalizing.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Many Hart (and Hart/Kaufman) plays were adapted for film: YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38; THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER/’41; LADY IN THE DARK.’44.  But his best film work came adapting GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT/’47 and in his stunning Hollywood savvy in the rewrite of A STAR IS BORN/’54.

CONTEST:  Name two connections between this film and the Marx Brothers’ A NIGHT AT THE OPERA/’35 to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

WOLF HALL (2015)

Hillary Mantel’s dense, intensely involving novels on the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the commoner son of a blacksmith who became Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain (WOLF HALL; BRING UP THE BODIES) were manna from heaven for long suffering FoTC’ers (Fans of Thomas Cromwell) who’ve always seen him get a raw deal in hagiograpics focused on Thomas More or Anne Boleyn.  (Though even as villain, Leo McKern, of RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY fame, managed to gain rooting interest against Thomas More’s principled MAN FOR ALL SEASONS/’66.)  But Mantel alone gave her spirited Tudor tutorial a Cromwellian POV.  And it’s spirit that went missing from this superior, well-received 6-parter, in spite of its obvious qualities in period detail, historical sweep, acting & art direction.*  But so somber, so sober, so measured in pace (you keep wishing someone would break out in a sprint).  Since it’s initial broadcast, the final book in Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy has come out, THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, charting his fall.  So, with its own 6-part dramatization appearing after a decade’s wait, time’s ripe for a revisit.  And surprise, a decade on, WOLF HALL 1 - 6 plays better than when it came out.  (Better to these eyes, anyway.)  With its sense of detail, character, devious court politics and quiet bravura acting trumping the pervasive hush and sorrowful tone that had seemed to smother what worked.  It may also have been helped by unmet expectations on Mantel’s opaque plotting, non-linear jumps and lack of rooting interest in THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT.  (A surprisingly tough read.*)  With the same creative team on board, we’ll soon see how they do with less triumphant source material.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  *Before WOLF HALL, in A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY, Hilary Mantel did a similar revelatory rethink for the French Revolution, reversing character traits on everyone from Danton to Robespierre.  Though with scores of unfamiliar characters and historical twists, it’s an even more daunting read than THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT.  But worth the effort.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Those qualities include all the principals: Mark Rylance, Damien Lewis, Anton Lesser, Claire Foy (Cromwell, Henry, More, Boleyn);  Peter Straughan script; Peter Kosminsky direction.

NOMAD: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BRUCE CHATWIN (2019)

Categorizing Bruce Chatwin as a writer of travel books (books of travel a bit closer to the mark) is as inadequate as labeling M.F.K. Fisher a cookbook author.  Both sui generis in their field, with wide ranging interests and POV, Chatwin upturning the genre on his first (best?) book, IN PATAGONIA, which combines storytelling, history, science and philosophy, ranging from personal to site specific.  Werner Herzog’s tribute/memorial film does a good job introducing him*, but Chatwin died young in 1989, which limits Herzog’s personal insight to the last seven years of his life, leaving earlier details covered as a fairly standard cut-and-paste job with a few surviving talking heads (wife, subjects, fellow academics) to fill in the gaps.  It still paints a fairly complete non-hagiographic picture, but you can tell Herzog remains frustrated at getting so close to Chatwin only toward the end of his life.  What he does miss capturing is the sheer impact Chatwin must have had on travels to undeveloped lands (by Western standards) on the tribes and nomadic peoples who must have wondered who this fairy tale prince of a figure was (think David McCallum in his Illya Kuryakin days) and why he was interested in their customs and stories.  It must have opened (or closed) many doors for him.  Yet, what came out, in novels and novelistic non-fiction, has yet to find a true successor.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  Published in 1977, IN PATAGONIA is the logical starting point.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Herzog’s COBRA VERDE/’87 (not seen here) is based on Chatwin’s historical novel The Viceroy of Ouidah (not read here).

THE FLORENTINE DAGGER (1935)

From Warners’ ‘Clue Club’, third in a series of six mid-‘30 mystery movies, mostly adapted from novels, in hopes of starting a monthly release schedule that proved far too ambitious.  This one from a Ben Hecht genre potboiler written ‘on spec’ as a personal dare to see how fast the famously speedy journalist/playwright/scripter could write a commercial bestseller dictating to a rotating staff of typists.  Trimmed to essentials by Tom Reed and (considering the budget) stylishly directed by Robert Florey, it’s pretty good fun, boasting a super cast of second-leads & supporting contract players (Donald Woods, Margaret Lindsay, C. Aubrey Smith, Henry O’Neill & Robert Barrat; plus a superb sniff from Herman Bing) who pull our young protagonist (the last of the murdering Borgia family) from a planned suicide.  He’s helped by a suggestion from a friendly psychiatrist that rather than kill himself he should try writing it out to clear his mind.  Convert your destructive thoughts into a period play on your ancestors to release your personal demons.  Presto!, not only cured, but with the biggest theatrical hit in town!  Alas, the star actress hired as Lucretia Borgia falls into a deep depression after her father, the play’s director, is murdered.  Perhaps she’s succumbed to the Borgia family curse (method acting gone too far?).  Or has the playwright reverted to type.  Neither, says the psychiatrist who thought he was helping the lad.  Indeed, many a secret from the recent past will need to be cleared up before uncertainties can be explained.  Explained with the help of an amusingly amoral Viennese police captain.*  Everyone on set seems to be having a ball making this one (not always a good sign for the movie itself, BTW), and happily the feeling is infectious.  Just keep expectations to a reasonable level for best results.

READ ALL ABOUT IT/LINK:  The Movie Database has this list of the Clue Club films.    https://www.themoviedb.org/collection/1058366-clue-club-collection?language=en-US

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Perhaps the plot also baffled the recently empowered Hollywood Production Code who allowed someone to get off scot-free with not quite justifiable homicide!

SIDE STREETS (1934)

Featured players at Depression Era Warner Bros., Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak had just co-starred in the classic Pre-Code proto-feminist HEAT LIGHTNING/’34 when they had this Post-Code proto-feminist rematch.  This time business moves from auto-garage & lodge in the desert to a ‘side street’ fur salon owned & operated by MacMahon in San Francisco.  That’s where she meets-cute (in the Zoo) with unemployed able seaman Paul Kelly.  He’s picking up spilled peanuts meant for the monkeys; she’s picking up him!  The film nothing if not frank & hardheaded.  Soon they’re partners at the store and in bed.  Now married, he's already two-timing the wife with sharp looker Dvorak.  (Film’s original title ‘A WOMAN IN HER THIRTIES’ says it all.*)  But a baby will change the equation as Kelly’s nuts for the little heir.  Too bad the kid with MacMahon ain’t the only infant in this story.  Yep, Dvorak also in the family way.  Worse, Kelly’s roving eye gets another target when MacMahon’s flirtatious niece comes to help in the shop.  Yikes!  Meanwhile, MacMahon displays psychological acumen & salesmanship in selling those fur coats, leveraging mistresses against wives for big sales using subtle suggestion & not so subtle blackmail.  All while being a good egg.  Super stuff, even when some hallowed tropes of Women’s Drama threaten to make things too far-fetched.  But jeez-o-pete, what an actress Aline MacMahon was.*  And though she was big-boned, even matronly, there was a sort of Madonna-like magnificence & beauty to her.  LIGHTNING certainly the finer flick (both films programmer short at an amazingly speedy 1'3"), which means perennially dull megger Alfred E. Green hasn’t the time to slow things down.  Lenser Byron Haskin & typically superb art direction from Anton Grot give this one a sense of place & side street atmosphere.  The film, long hiding in plain sight, overdue for an airing.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, HEAT LIGHTNING. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/07/heat-lightning-1934.html    

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Keep in mind Kelly and MacMahon exactly the same age: 35.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  In Axel Nissen’s MOTHERS, MAMMIES AND OLD MAIDS (a fine rival on Hollywood actresses to go-to authority Jeanine Basinger), we learn MacMahon had a first professional theatrical experience as a ‘super’ to Sarah Bernhardt and shared the stage on her final B’way show (her 31st) with a debuting Meryl Streep.