MAN OF ARAN (1934)

Thought those colonizing ‘spice’ miners in DUNE faced difficult living conditions?  They wouldn’t last a day by the tempest-tossed cliffs, wind-swept rock surface & oceanic fury of the Aran Isles off the Irish coast.  And this a real place!  Or nearly so.  That’s because pioneering documentarian Robert J. Flaherty was more interested in fancy than fact; catching legendary lifestyles whether or not they were still being practiced.  Even casting his players on looks (his screen families assembled from a pool of locals) and then reenacting events using multiple takes & angles as needed to get his poetic ideas about ethnography across.  Globetrotting the world to find the next tribal customs to capture for the big screen, his films magnificent fabrications.  Closer to studio films, but made on actual locations.  Holding out for a truthful essence of some iconic civilization, not what you’d find in a modern documentary.  From ‘Eskimo’  to Pacific Islander to all-American boyhood in the swamps of Louisiana, Flaherty didn’t catch reality, but curated it.  And this look at incredibly harsh living conditions and family life on one of the Aran Islands is probably the best introduction to his style; whatever you choose to call it.*  Whether struggling to bring in boats without crashing onto rocks, hauling rare soil & seaweed up the cliff-side to create plots to grow potatoes on the unyielding rock surface, or harpooning sharks the size of small whales for oil, the  film is a stunning series of terrific set pieces.  A mix of bravery (by the locals) and artistry (by Flaherty & crew).  Lots of red filtering on the stunning cinematography (Arthur Miller did no better for John Ford) and some fascinating rapide montage for sea hunts and crash landings.  You’ll see why it’s now considered a period piece and still controversial (the customs covered were all decades in the past when this was made), but still riveting, physically gorgeous, awe-inspiring stuff.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Call Flaherty ‘Father of the Illegitimate Documentary.’

BEACH RATS (2017)

Too arty for its own good, writer/director Eliza Hittman resets SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER/’75 with a queer sensibility (as if SNF didn’t already have one) moving sub-text to text following a gaggle of buff shirtless beach besties over a summer at hangouts & sandy shores of Brooklyn’s boardwalk where the days are all buds, bods, bros & handball.  Harris Dickinson draws focus as the ‘model’ son whose quiet behavior hides his internet cruising and hookups with daddy substitutes on the ‘down-low.’  (His father dies early in the film from cancer.)   As cover for his pals, and himself, he pumps himself up to get something going with a girl who shows interest, but eventually a series of bad decisions (cash, drugs, pawn shop, dangerous late night outings) start to catch up with him and the lines of separation prove impossible to maintain.  All this not without interest, but Hittmann asks for too much understanding and sympathy as his behavior significantly worsens.  Without his looks, who’d give this ‘rat’ the time of day?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  Federico Fellini’s I VITTELONI/’53 is ground zero for scores of films charting the ways young men can’t quite grow up.  It has yet to be bettered.

REBEL RIDGE (2024)

Jeremy Saulnier, here writing, directing, producing & editing, takes a big step up from the horror/suspense of GREEN ROOM*, pulling off a twisty revenge drama dipped in southern-fried racism and loaded with great character turns in parts large & small.  Only its structure, ironically the single best element in GREEN ROOM, gets away from him.  Worked out in sequential three-act narrative chunks, it unfolds like a compressed streaming-series, the opening arc a throwback (and something of a fake out) as if it’s still the 1960s with, say, Jim Brown single-handedly taking on Southern racism after being 'pulled over' by local White policemen for riding a bicycle on a country highway while Black.  Then complications set in.  This no isolated incident, but a small piece of interconnected corruption with good-old-boys in uniform (under the supervision of Sheriff Don Johnson) scamming the Black community out of parole cash, helped by crooked courts, shady legal practices and bribed judges.  Saulnier plays close to the vest, pulling you in with a fine eye for detail & blistering action.  Seeing computers screens in patrol cars a shock of the modern in a social system not much changed from ‘60s mentality.  Saulnier also got lucky on second-choice lead Aaron Pierre (a hunk who can really act), easily crossing from barely contained impatient rage (unable to stop a cousin’s prison transfer that amounts to a death sentence) to cooly planned physical payback.  This part of the storyline not so far from the current REACHER series with  Pierre’s military background as a top Marine instructor coming into play.  Though unlike Reacher, Pierre has no in-the-field combat experience and no band-of-brothers to fall back on, only tiny, blonde legal aide AnnaSophia Robb as support.  (But the chemistry between these two, perhaps because nothing transpires, is terrific.)  Too bad NetFlix skipped a theatrical release on this one.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *GREEN ROOM/’15, belatedly seen here for the chance to see the ill-fated Anton Yelchin in a decent role, first brought Saulnier’s confident filmmaking to our attention.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/09/green-roomterr-2015.html

PROJECT X (1968)

Producer/director William Castle (that ballyhooing schlockmeister of horror whose films came, like a box of CrackerJack, with a gimmicky prize inside – a buzzer under your seat, aroma sprayed inside the theater, an on-duty ‘nurse’ for the fainthearted -- to hype the scare factor) was running on fumes by the time he made his penultimate film.  But what am I saying?  Castle was always running on fumes, that’s what made the goofy gimmicks fun.  Here, a cryogenically suspended man from the 1960s is successfully thawed after 150 years and tossed into a town dressed to look just like the 1960s!  How’d Castle get all those ‘60s details right in a film shot in . . . 1968!  That’s Christopher George with the right stuff to save the planet from some horrid . . . oh, well, you get the idea.  There’s some blather about his ‘matrix,’ his custom built new personality, designed to fit the latest situation.  Just don’t get your hopes up for any deep-dish thinking on the idea or for moviemaking & art design more polished than a Third Season STAR TREK episode.  The main reason to have a look is for a chance to savor the unique vocal cadence & off-beat humor of supporting actor Henry Jones.  Enjoying every new crisis with a grin and a new plan of action, he’s ready for anything and a consistent hoot.  As for the special effects on screen (double exposures and film negative imagery, Castle should have gone back to cushion buzzers.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Craftsman-like director John Sturges, of all people, made something along these lines in his overlooked sleeper THE SATAN BUG/’63.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-satan-bug-1965.html

ANOTHER COUNTRY (1984)

Now looking a bit touristy and maudlin, this look back (from his Russian exile) at the salad days of Guy Burgess’s sentimental education at British Prep School is more effective for spotting stars on the rise (Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Cary Elwes - all three lush of hair/dewy of eye) than in sussing out how the playing fields of Eton not only won the Battle of Waterloo but also set the stage of self-loathing & sexual hypocrisy that readied the soil for the Cambridge Five Russian spy ring to flourish.  With a cast old enough to matriculate from college let alone prep school (all in their mid-20s), director Marek Kanievska loses any idea of youthful sexual confusion in an all-boys academy and sits back while original play author Julian Mitchell’s sticks to his idea of Burgess as a sort of iconoclastic Oscar Wilde character, tilting at the lads in class until fatally falling hard for one.  Punished with a whipping on his bony bum, his indiscretions made only worse by crossing over house perimeters.  (Twice the prefects & ‘Gods’ you’d need to pacify.)  Burgess’s path to social & political revenge (a dish best served as cold as vodka at the Soviet Embassy) was set.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  For a more sophisticated, if narrowly focused look at Burgess in exile, try Alan Bennett’s delicate miniature AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD/’83, broadcast while COUNTRY was still playing on stage.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-englishman-abroad-1983-question-of.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Everett got all the talk at the time (he’s certainly a striking figure, a Caravaggio portrait in British tweed), but Colin Firth, as an ultra-rational true believer steals the pic.

GLADIATOR II (2024)

No secret Ridley Scott’s recent clutch of films (not so recent, too) haven’t been living up to all the pre-release hype: NAPOLEON, HOUSE OF GUCCI, THE LAST DUEL, ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, ALIEN: COVENANT.  Scott’s become like that old joke about a surgeon whose last operation was a great success . . . other than the patient dying.  Not so here, this sequel to his great hit of a quarter century back isn't even a ‘great success.’   A mishmash of Ancient Rome historical hooey, Scott in too much of a hurry to get either story or cast right.  Hero manqué Paul Mescal (think Spartacus) is over-parted as the captured combatant turned stadium star, losing character interest with every pound of muscle added.  Main adversary Pedro Pascal, the conflicted not-quite villain (think Brutus), unable to connect with anyone on screen scans the room looking for the nearest Exitus.  It leaves Player #3 Denzel Washington foot-loose and fancy-free, stealing anything left on the table.  His actual position/function in Rome's politics & society something of a blank.  Things don’t start well with an unconvincing CGI battle of triremes, an omen of bad CGI effects to come.*  Did no one warn Scott his flooded Colosseum battle was no Chariot Race?  The main storyline, the part not cribbed from SPARTACUS/’60, charts the race to get rid of looney ‘Twin Emperors’ Caracalla & Geta*, replacing them with either a re-empowered Senate or having it swiped by Washington’s Republic-phobic sophisticate.   All complicated by easy to guess secrets in lineage that the story isn’t able to support by anything Scott gets on screen.  No wonder our poster makes Pascal look as if he’s on crutches.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Rule of thumb on falsifying history to fit narrative: Is it more interesting than the truth or less?  Well, the twins weren’t twins; Caracalla a couple of years older than Geta; they died five years apart, Geta murdered in a power grab by older brother Caracalla while being held by their mother.  Yikes!

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Have current audiences been softened into CGI acceptance by video games and all those so-called Photo-Realistic animation remakes?  Does that help explain today's reliance, nay preference!, for using the often more expensive digital systems when a ‘practical’ visual solution is both less expensive and often more believable?

WALLACE AND GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL (2025)

Bliss.  In spite of only a handful of Wallace and Gromit stop-motion animations since 1989, and this but the second at feature-length, any lowered expectations of modified rapture can be put aside; VENGEANCE MOST FOWL as good as anything in the Nick Park canon following the adventures of gonzo invertor Wallace and his patient dog/helpmate/companion Gromit, that most empathetic of creatures.  A previous feature, CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT/’05, though wonderful, gave the impression the series would always be at its very best in half-hour shorts.  Not so!  Here, triumphantly equaling their best without any commercially-driven sequelitis faults of going bigger/better/bloated.  Instead, retaining the sweet-natured charm and capacity to reduce any open-hearted viewer to incessant ear-to-ear grins rather than pushing to trigger hardened boffo responses, all while carefully building & positioning an explosively propulsive climax that’s cumulatively hilarious, kinetically thrilling, beautiful simply as design and creatively overwhelming.  (How’d they physically do that?, really not coming into play as you’re too involved in character & story to bother with stop-motion technicalities.  A second watch will do for catching up on the amazing craft & technique that goes into these things.)  This time Wallace creates ‘Norbit,’ an intelligent gnome designed to take domestic drudgery & chores off Gromit’s hands . . . er, paws; and it jolts the delicate balance of their routine, usurping Gromit’s place in it as well as making him jealous.  But there’s worse to come as a Zoo-incarcerated villain from the past (Feathers McGraw of THE WRONG TROUSERS/’93) has figured out a way to reprogram & reproduce the gnomes to rob the town blind and facilitate a jail break.  (Zoo break?)  It’s Cautionary A.I. tale meets THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE; and just about perfect.  Refined modeling materials used on the action figures no longer regularly capture the animator’s fingerprints.  But other than that, I wouldn’t change a thing.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Post prologue, the opening sequence showing the daily routine of the boys getting up and having breakfast with help from mechanized efficiency gadgets (very Rube Goldberg) undoubtedly inspired by the opening scenes of Buster Keaton & comic rival Joe Roberts doing much the same in THE SCARECROW, a comic short from 1920.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/09/scarecrow-1920.html

ENRICO IV / HENRY IV (1984)

Marco Bellocchio’s adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s famous play disappoints on every level; not excluding source material.  Not that you can’t see its appeal as catnip to past-prime stars of a certain age.  Here Marcello Mastroianni is the modern man who’s bumped on his head and comes to believe he’s Medieval Emperor Enrico IV.  Living in an old cloisters, he passes the days surrounded by paid lackeys playing court games while his relatives bring in a psychologist who has a plan to shock him back to reality.  But is he really mad or just playing a game of control to avoid life’s responsibilities?  (This too another form of madness, no?)  Opened out with a big waiting game for the rest of the cast (Claudia Cardinale and other relatives hoping for a breakthru) there’s a bit of amusement seeing Luciano Bartoli play the younger Enrico in what seems to be old Mastroianni hair styles from his matinee idol days.  But it all plays as if everyone is vamping for a tune that never shows up.  The pursuit of empty prestige is palpable.  Pass.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Mastroianni made lots of unhappy choices in his later years, but the old lion was no spent force.  Given a decent script and a sympathetic director, he’s a worthy father and opponent fit for sparring with Massimo Troisi under Ettore Scola’s direction in CHE ORA È?  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/02/che-ora-e-1989.html    OR: Courting controversy, and likely to be showing its age, Peter O’Toole & director Peter Medak play similar games in their Pirandello influenced social satire THE RULING CLASS/’72.

BLACK GRAVEL / SCHWARZER KIES (1961)

Intriguing, if not fully functional German film noir straddles two major periods of post-WWII German economy: Black Market manipulators and the fast emerging Industrial Boom.  Co-writer/director Helmut Käutner does a great job loading on the ‘anything goes’ atmosphere usually associated with lawless border towns (had Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL/’59 made it to Germany?) here divided not by a river cutting North from South, but between job-seeking local drifters & grifters still adjusting to the New Germany in a well-paid transient market, and the continuing U.S. presence (military, political, entrepreneurial) running the show and fitfully keeping order.  What he doesn’t do so well is set up the action and characters which don’t click in till the second act is well under way.   Once that happens, the plot still has to fight thru some painfully indicative acting by the leads as an old flame is rekindled between gravel driver Robert Neidhardt (a late film debut at 39) and his ex, Ingmar Zeisberg, now married to an American Major.  As to the missing gravel that drives the plot?  It’s not stolen for sale by some nefarious third party, but swiped to bury a dead dog and a pair of lovers (one an American) accidentally killed and seriously complicating already complicated relationships.  Good nasty fun, with an alarmingly funny twist when a happy solution is suggested by a CIA plant who naturally thinks everything can be explained thru East/West conspiracies before a cascade of bad timing puts the kibosh on any possible future.   Definitely worth a look, but some indulgence needed.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  The film was slightly reedited between its premiere and general release, much to its detriment.  Especially the end where, in the shortened general release cut, the metaphoric postman not only doesn’t ring twice, but never gets to the mailbox.  Who thought this a good idea?!  Only a minute longer (113" to 114"), it makes all the difference.