THE LITTLE THINGS (2021)

Smooth to the point of being frictionless, there’s nothing particularly wrong with this John Lee Hancock police procedural; maybe that’s the problem.  Denzel Washington’s a small town cop back in L.A. to sign off on some evidence when he’s confronted with a new twist on the serial murder case that stopped his career & personal life cold five years ago.  Rami Malek, the new detective in charge, and nearly as single-minded & detail obsessed as Washington, may be as neatly turned out as Washington is burned out, but is he on the same path to professional & family trouble?  Especially after letting Washington return to the hunt?  With Jared Leto coming in for a grungy turn as most-likely suspect, that makes three Oscar’d leads vying for attention on what might just pass as a modest indie built for underappreciated actors.*  Even with a hat-trick of a triple-twist ultra-cynical ending, the only surprise here is noting just how tiny Malek is when seen alone by his suburban pool at the end.  Away from the careful staging Hancock uses elsewhere (platforms?; boxes?) to even out a half foot/sixty pound disadvantage, Malek looks as fragile & delicate as a Dresden figurine.  (Hey!  Maybe he’s the titular ‘Little Thing?!’)  If IMDb can be believed, Hancock first wrote this script back in the ‘90s which sounds about right.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Did I miss something or is there a reason for all the ‘60s Pop tunes used here?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *ONE FALSE MOVE/’92 with Bill Paxton a good example of the type.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/one-false-move-1992.html

RETURN TO OZ (1985)

Between silent & sound; shorts & features; large & small screen; adaptations of the L. Frank Baum OZ books (he wrote 14) come by the score.  Tellingly, new attempts dried up for over a decade after 1939's THE WIZARD OF OZ, the classic M-G-M musical.  (So expensive to produce, it didn’t go into profit till re-releases & tv showings pushed it over.)  This try, by legendary Sound Editor Walter Murch in his sole feature film directing credit, has its faults (he’s no natural at calling the shots), but is by leaps & bounds the best of a pretty bad lot.  Officially adapted from ‘Ozma of Oz’ and ‘The Land of Oz,’ this accreditation presumably contractual as it’s ‘peopled’ & plotted to mirror the M-G-M film, equivalents & substitutions in character & story beats reordered but hard to miss.  Ergo, Jean Marsh’s Wicked Nurse, Nicol Williamson’s Great & Powerful Nome King, mechanical Tik-Tok in for Tin Man, Toto stuck on the farm, replaced by a chicken(!), Flying Monkeys OUT/Skating ‘Wheelers’ IN, an egg where once water destroyed a villain.  And the Ruby Slippers?  Still the Ruby Slippers.  This time, the narrative engine isn’t Dorothy wanting to go home, but Dorothy needing to get back to Oz to save her pals, currently turned to stone.  The substitution psychologically inadequate, so too most of Murch’s casting choices.  Voice casting for the non-human pals particularly off-putting.  But just as much works well enough to get you over the bumps in a very episodic plotline.  With one flying exception, the effects are super; a gallery of decapitated heads positively alarming, and the Claymation stop-motion work (especially a talking red stone tablet) a triumph.  Held down commercially on release as being too dark for kids, it’s easy to forget just how terrifying the ‘39 film is outside of the musical comedy business.  (I’m not the only kid to run out of the room during the chase around the castle.  Yikes!) But it’s true that the sensibility is closer to Tim Burton than to M-G-M musicals.  So, let the nightmares begin!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Instead of trying another OZ adaptation, go for John Boorman’s whackadoodle dystopian adventure ZARDOZ, a futuristic mystery play with Sean Connery, who else, as the last potent man on earth, and OZ showing up in a most alarming manner.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/03/zardoz-1974.html

RIZI / DAYS (2020)

Minimalist filmmaking from Malaysian-born/Taiwan-based Ming-liang Tsai on a familiar theme: personal loneliness amid the bustling city hordes.  Here, two men: older, presumably wealthy Kang-sheng Lee (regular Tsai alter-ego) and debuting Anong Houngheuangsy as the young masseuse/sex-worker he’s hired to meet in a hotel.  Largely shot with long takes in fixed positions (though Tsai does edit within his scenes to slightly change framing), there’s no interaction at first, only alternating looks at their daily routines in single shots that run minutes.  About halfway in, a sudden shift to movement thru the city via handheld camera supplies a jarring lift, like changing keys after an hour of C Major chords.  Then, back to the fixed position shots.  The technique giving off an intimate charge during the massage/sex act, but elsewhere the effect is merely slow rather than hypnotically still.*  But for those who can settle in (keep that remote with the Fast-Forward button hidden), the film gathers strength post-climax (so to speak) with an unusual non-cash tip involving, of all things, the musical theme Charles Chaplin wrote for his film LIMELIGHT/’52.  True to form, Tsai lets the eight-bar chorus cycle thru seven or eight times.  And damned if it doesn’t work exactly as he wants.  Even more when reprised.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *At times, you might think your streaming service paused, or a DVD stuck on a frame.  A glitch once easy to spot on celluloid stock where the film grain suddenly looked dead, now harder to see in a grain-free digital frame freeze.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Ming-liang Tsai designed the sparsely dialogued film to play without subtitles.  An image-oriented view of film going from F.W. Murnau’s THE LAST LAUGH/’24 thru Jacques Tati and beyond.

BATTLE CRY (1955)

From a big whopping bestselling WWII book, a big whopping top-grossing war pic.  Though, as our poster accurately shows, it’s more Fringes of War than combat.*  Men to the side of the main event a 1955 speciality at Warner Brothers where only MISTER ROBERTS (about a Navy supply ship that never gets near the war) made more money that year than this one about a Marine company that trains and trains, but keeps missing the big battles.  Not till the last ten minutes of a two & a half hour pic do they see serious action.  Before then, a few mop-up operations, but mostly on-base interpersonal dynamics between the men, and off-base romance with tarts, tarts-in-hiding, wives with husbands overseas, sad-eyed widows and (via the post) girls back home either pining or signing Dear John letters.  Raoul Walsh, already comfortable in his first try at CinemaScope, gets what’s needed out of a motley cast, even pretends the Marines were integrated at the time, handling the immense scale of the thing without batting an eye.  (Some shots look like the entire Marine Corp was ordered to show up.  No doubt explaining those just integrated units.)  The brief battle, when it does come, is well staged for the period, but ultimately, this is Leon Uris territory, which means mostly obvious character flaws and stiff dialogue.  He’d only do one more screenplay before letting others adapt his doorstop novels.  Standouts include scratchy voice Aldo Ray, losing his cynical attitude toward love, and the alarmingly pretty Tab Hunter falling briefly for an older gal in glasses.  (That’d be Dorothy Malone.  She soon takes the glasses off, but if anything, looks sexier with them on.)  Everyone else holding to the one-dimension Uris gives them.  Then there’s Major Sergeant James Whitmore.  Pulling Voice-Over narration duty, the guy never shuts up.  Even as the battle gets going.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Is this the first Hollywood studio release to show men ‘giving the finger’ on screen?  It’s during a hiking sequence when some jeeps drive by.  ALSO: Some of those soundstage exteriors really stink up the joint in a film with so much fine on-location shooting, courtesy of Sidney Hickox in his last feature film assignment before switching to tv.

DOUBLE-BILL: Two years on, Anthony Mann directed Aldo Ray in a chamber-sized Korean Conflict war story, MEN AT WAR/’57.  It takes a while to find its bearings, but settles down and digs deep into a No-Man’s Land both realistic and abstract/poetic.

AN AMERICAN TAIL (1986)

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF meets PINOCCHIO in the second animated feature from Don Bluth after he left Disney over quality issues.  And Bluth’s animation is often downright splendid, aspiring to Pre-War Disney level.  Not only the famous early features, but also in the playful abundance of early shorts like THE BAND CONCERT/’35.  What holds it back, as so often with Bluth, is story development.*  Little Fievel and the Mousekewitz family, ‘Pogrom’d’ out of Russia, get separated on their way to America and have to find each other.  But too many of Fievel’s on-the-road adventures play as distractions with songs that embellish character (and show a surprising nice tenor from Dom DeLuise), but stop the narrative.  (‘Somewhere Out There’ did became something of a standard.)  Plus a faceless army of bad cats where a single villain is needed.  About halfway thru, you wonder why use mice instead of humans?   For that matter, why animation?  You can spot much of what’s wrong simply by comparing the film to its poster (see above).  Someone in publicity knew exactly what producer Steven Spielberg was going for: the immigrant experience with a Chaplinesque Little Tramp figure always in danger of being trammeled by the Larger-than-Life competition.  Did Bluth not get the memo?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Sure enough, a classic Charlie Chaplin two-reeler, THE IMMIGRANT/’17, does the job to perfection.  OR: Disney’s take on Prokofiev’s kid-friendly concert piece, PETER AND THE WOLF, part of the MAKE MINE MUSIC/’46 omnibus feature.  It dumbs down the narration and ‘arranges’ the classic score, but the look of the animation is extraordinary, and extraordinarily Russian.  Might it have worked here?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/make-mine-music-1946.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Listen up when ‘The Pledge of Allegiance’ is recited.  The sound fades just as they get to ‘One Nation, Under God . . .’   But that ‘Under God’ clause shouldn’t be in there, not part of ‘the pledge’ till the ‘50s when President Eisenhower let it in as a sop to the Right Wing/Anti-Commie crowd.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *As a Storyteller, Don Bluth is a great Animator.  While, as an Animator, Walt Disney was a great Storyteller.  (Strictly speaking, Story Editor.)  The diff being that Walt knew it and worked with the best Animators he could get, starting with Ub Iwerks.

BEAU BRUMMELL (1954)

After KING SOLOMON’S MINES/’50 over-performed (third highest gross of the year), M-G-M cast Stewart Granger in a series of period costume remakes & near remakes.  Unlike MINES, none topped (or matched) the originals*, but this one, a commercial disappointment ending the cycle, is the most interesting.  Adapted from Clyde Fitch’s stage perennial (half a dozen B’way runs 1890 - 1916), Warner Brothers used it for John Barrymore’s Hollywood debut of 1923, shot between legendary runs as HAMLET in New York & London.  Dulled by director Harry Beaumont, and with Barrymore off-form as the striving clothes-horse, it suddenly comes to stunning life in an extended third act, once Brummell loses fame, fortune & health.  This remake never reaches any heights at all, but has something going for it the middle sections where Granger’s Brummell, a social climbing commoner who’s become the Prince of Wales’ favorite, starts to become too intimate with his Royal BFF.  The bromantic chemistry between Granger and a deliciously plump Peter Ustinov (promising to diet for his one true friend) is both odd & touching.  Granger nailing the cutting ambition, arrogance and self-destruction even with little help from Karl Tunberg’s unfocused script or Curtis Bernhardt’s bland direction.  As to the men’s grand loves, Elizabeth Taylor is held down by unbecoming white wigs and that breathy, little girl voice, while Rosemary Harris’s Mrs. Fitzherbert, marriage habitually put off by the future George IV, hardly connects at all.*  Instead, the plum part goes to Robert Morley as Ustinov’s father, ‘Mad’ King George III, using his little screen time to grand effect.  Shot in England, a British production team has composer Richard Addinsell sounding like Miklós Rósza (no harm in that) and cinematographer Oswald Morris getting dappled, painterly sophistication on location.  Rubbish as history, this complicated relationship has obvious possibilities; a streaming event waiting to happen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Maybe the studio found it a bit too bromantic.  Note the suggested title BEAU BRUMMELL AND THE BEAUTY!

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Never marrying the Catholic Mrs. Fitzherbert, the one-hour tv film A ROYAL SCANDAL/’96 lays bare his ghastly arranged marriage to Caroline of Brunswick with Richard Grant spectacular as the Prince of Wales in this rarely seen little wonder.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/10/royal-scandal-1996.html  

OR:  *Of the other remakes, SCARMOUCHE/’52 is best liked, but better remembered than seen.  Compare it with the original.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/09/scaramouche-1952.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/03/scaramouche-1923.html

THE LOST DAUGHTER (2021)

Well received directing debut from actor Maggie Gyllenhaal plays like a literary conceit that never made it off the page.  From Italian literary sensation/mystery woman Elena Ferrante, the book may have been set a few decades back, carting trunk-loads of books to Greece on a ‘working’ vacation a pre-internet thing.*  But this merely the smallest item not to add up.  Olivia Colman is the chilly protagonist, withdrawn, reserved, with a blemished past that partially ‘explains’ her wary behavior; and so socially off-putting you never buy into her island encounters.  Would Ed Harris’s resort manager hang around waiting for an invitation?  Would that noisome Italian family (from Queens, yet) after a false start, wind up sharing personal confidences?  And would Colman share back?   The ignition point comes when a little girl from that loud Italian-American family goes missing at the beach.  Found by Colman, she’s brought right back.  But in the confusion, Colman takes her little doll.  Why?  Souvenir?  Talisman?  Reminder?  The more Colman becomes immersed in various interpersonal dramas (including a handsome beach attendant to ogle), the more she clings to the doll.  Tending it; hurting it; cleaning it; hurling it; rescuing it.  Psychologically it’s tied to her own past as sometime absent mother to her own two girls twenty years ago.  (Jessie Buckley disturbingly fine as a young Colman.)  Turns out, she’s got something of A DOLL’S HOUSE history to her. Or is it fixation?  It’s Ibsen meets Ferrante meets Michael Haneke.  Yikes!  Technically, Gyllenhaal favors uncomfortably close hand-held camera shots the way some actresses break personal space even when not on stage.  No doubt it’s meant to be off-putting . . . and it is!  Her other bold stylistic choice raises the color ‘temperature’ in the flashback scenes.  Then, once we start to know the score and fill in the past, the look is reversed with present day scenes getting the treatment.  A bit precious, then suddenly dropped.  Was it even intentional?  And since not a single person on the island seems able to pick up on the most obvious social cues Colman keeps dropping like cement bricks, why should an audience try to read stylistic tea leaves?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Another clue to this being set decades back comes with a movie show of THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, a 1954 Elizabeth Taylor clunker playing on this Greek island’s revival house.  (In 2021?  A Greek Island Movie Revival House?)  To Gyllenhaal’s credit, she turns this unlikely moment into a visual gag, posing Dakota Johnson, mom of the girl with the missing doll, to look like La Liz in the following scene.

BY LOVE POSSESSED (1961)

After hitting a career peak in her mid-30s, even gaining critical praise on PEYTON PLACE/’57 and IMITATION OF LIFE/’59, Lana Turner had nowhere to go but down.  Trying a safe bet, she revisits the frank sex talk & New England autumn of PP, this time to little effect.  The film not so much bad as dull.  Lana’s a rich wife with a drinking problem & a limp husband in lawyer Jason Robards Jr., legal partner to Efrem Zimbalist Jr.  He’s crippled, too, not physically but emotionally, unable to see the womanly side of wife Barbara Bel Geddes.  Just as little going on with the younger generation where scion-of-Efrem George Hamilton & lovelorn presumptive fiancée Susan Kohner are on prenuptial hold.  Maybe that’s why everyone sleepwalks thru the pic, somnambulists not only in front of the camera but also behind.  John Sturges about as far from his directorial comfort zone as he ever got (lucky for him, THE GREAT ESCAPE but one film away) and Lana Turner vet cinematographer Russell Metty unable to do any more for her than he can for the art decorator's model showroom interiors.  Finally, some mismatched screwing comes into play, Lana becomes a woman again with Efrem and Hamilton takes the town tramp in his car’s reclining front seats.  That’s Yvonne Craig, asking for a cabin rental next time, the only lively thing in here other than Thomas Mitchell, senior attorney whose encroaching mental decline may be a dodge.  The one interesting plot element, frittered away without a proper dramatic confrontation for him.  Hard to fathom how pro scripters like Charles Schnee & Ketti Frings missed it.  Maybe just miss the whole film.

DOUBLE-BILL: Jason Robards followed this, his effective Hollywood debut, with D.O.A. assignment #2 working with Jennifer Jones (chalk & cheese against another Child-of-Hollywood actress), in an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT/’62.  Equally dull, possibly worse filmmaking, but somehow more interesting.

THE TOMORROW WAR (2021)

A Live-Action Sci-Fi war film so loaded with CGI monsters, landscapes & urban mayhem, it makes sense to bring in animation director Chris McKay (LEGO BATMAN; ROBOT CHICKEN) to run things.  Working off a nifty, if not particularly original idea (Alien Threat dooms mankind in the future, but a wormhole brings military emissaries to today’s world to draft recruits and time-jump into the battle decades ahead*), it would make a solid premise if only half the pieces clicked.  But it’s one of those films that feel as if it died in development; too many executives sending too many story & character notes.  So, it’s a Climate Change allegory & warning.  It’s a now-and-future family crisis drama.  It’s a war fatigue & band-of-brothers tale.  And with an ironic twist since as things turn out the answer was back home, back in the present all along.  Fortunately, Chris Pratt is just about perfect as heroic regular guy in Dad Jeans (before heading into battle he’s entirely believable as a high school science teacher) and there are some nice supporting turns from the men (the women less so).  But loud & exhausting when it means to be exciting (it might have been unbearable in a theater), it’s another case of diminishing returns on the infinite possibilities of computer generated aliens, with suspense-free plotting from scripter Zach Dean (and all those execs*) that slips from the amusingly casual to the expediently lazy.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Where most time-travel plots are obsessed with small changes in the continuum having large repercussions on the past or future, here, it’s only about killing the aliens.  But presumably, half the next generation, the force fighting for time, wouldn’t exist with the alterations of history made by our guys.  An interesting lack of interest that plays as a cheat.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Was there a prize (The JAWS Memorial) for coming up with new ways of saying ‘Smile You Son of a Bitch’ as you took aim at an alien?