STRANGE WORLD (2022)

Coming so soon after best-in-years animated releases from Disney & Pixar (Luca; Encanto*) makes this ham-fisted fossil-fuel allegory look even worse than it is . . . and it’s already plenty bad.  Rightly rejected at the box-office, its crude Gaia Whole Earth philosophy hiding under two generations of Father/Son misunderstandings (Dennis Quaid to Jake Gyllenhaal to Jaboukie Young-White); female empowerment role models; story & stylistic nods at RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (note titles & ‘wipes’ between scenes) and (God help us) AVATAR story arcs & æsthetics.  Even the color palette (pure Pepto-Bismol) and character design (potato noses on all the guys), if not deal breakers, as executed an insulting botch.  The main story a Fix-It trip to the other side of their dying planet (where they find Granddad, missing since the prologue) at least brings on the film’s one technical treat, some ethereal red pterodactyls.  But elsewhere, the stink of focus group-think fills in inclusive boxes (interracial marriage; gay son; parallel generation gaps) and retro analogue devices for home (vacuum tube radio; vinyl LPs played on a Victrola) and war (Gramps using Napalm flame-throwers on those pesky aliens - who came up with that one?).  It still might have played, but nothing in here feels organic; not even the vegetables.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: If you thought JY-W would only be half as annoying heard but not seen, you’ve got another think coming.  And poor Dennis Quaid, whose nekkid tuchus was a highlight of many a rom-com back in the ‘80s, finds his animated self given a signature stance scratching his behind next to Gyllenhaal at something like four times the width.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK/LINK:  *As mentioned, 2021 animated winners LUCA and ENCANTO.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/encanto-2021.html

COUP DE TÊTE / HOTHEAD (1979)

Patrick Dewaere is spectacular (and spectacularly brave) in this scorched-earth farce about a reserve soccer player in a third-tier town who takes revenge on . . . well, on just about everyone.  Inadvertently injuring the club’s star player during practice, Dewaere is  permanently escorted off the field, loses his factory job, gets dumped by his partner (hubby’s come home), run out of town; falsely convicted on a trumped up rape charge, and finally left to rot in prison.  All but that mistress mix-up orchestrated by the city’s leading citizen, an ‘upstanding’ businessman who owns the team, owns the factory, owns the cops and the prison warden.  Dreaming of revenge in his cell (especially about making a ‘collect call’ on the woman who claimed rape), Dewaere miraculously gets his chance when a bus accident leaves the team short a man for the semi-finals and he’s the only legit player close enough to make game time.  Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (who usually leans toward epic seriousness, here letting his inner Blake Edwards out); written by French comedy master Francis Veber (sampling Ben Jonson cynicism toward the human condition); so much right in here on professional sports, fickle fans, political expedience, moral compartmentalism, corrupt government, the lure of personal revenge and the satisfaction of self-limitation.  All but perfectly structured and executed, the film takes no prisoners and asks no mercy.  Hilarious, appalling and painfully believable.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Among social satires, perhaps only THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT/’52 takes on all comers with equally hard-headed honesty, outsized laughs and a sort of grim melancholy.  There Alec Guinness; here Dewaere, rare masters of the unsentimental little man.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-man-in-white-suit-1951.html

THE LAST RIDE (1944)

‘Junk’ programmer from Warners, close to a Poverty Row production, but pretty good fun all the same; it's like a  throwback to their Early Talkie muckraking pics, hitting some topical issue before the news cycle had passed.  Typically covering racketeers taking advantage of Prohibition Rules, with cops either collaborating or chasing, a couple of molls in skimpy lingerie, speeding cars with rat-a-tat-tat ‘Tommy’ guns and brothers on opposing sides of the law.  But oh, how times have changed!  Now, the bootleg items aren’t alcohol-based but strictly rationed rubber tires in wartime.  1 - Steal tires off parked cars.  2 - Let victims know your ‘insurance company’ can cover the loss.  3 - Rush over with a team to install over-priced sub-standard retreads.   What else you gonna get?  Here, the marks are a couple of rich, entitled college-bound Prep School lads who crash and burn (or blow to Kingdom Come) along with steady girlfriends in Pre-Code levels of violence.  Only then does the main story get going as two brothers get involved (Richard Travis; Charles Lang) ), one a rising cop who’ll go undercover to take down the mob; the other a weakling whose ‘entry vice’ was pinball machine rentals.  (Once they get those pinball machine hooks in you . . . )  Eleanor Parker has third billing but little to do other than make dinner for her beau . . the ‘bad’ brother.  No prize for guessing who she ends up with.  Still, not bad as these things go.  And at a notch under an hour.

DOUBLE-BILL:  Warner Bros. codified the good brother/bad brother mob routine in THE PUBLIC ENEMY/’31 where originally miscast James Cagney and Donald Cook swapped roles to spectacular effect shortly after shooting began.

XUAN YA ZHI SHANG / CLIFF WALKERS (2021)

Typically lux/lush Yimou Zhang, this Precursor-to-WWII ‘impossible mission’ yarn, an award-winning hit in Asian markets, cut a low profile Stateside.  Partially explained by pandemic concerns, but equally by the film’s pileup of spies and counterspies on all sides of its early ‘30s Japanese Invaders/Chinese Collaborators/Nationalist Chinese conflict.  At its core, a dangerous wintry assignment for two pairs of mixed-doubles spies, patriotic Chinese Communists unaware their cover & codes have been blown when they parachute into Japanese-controlled Manchukuo for a yet to be revealed mission.  Shhh . . . they’re to find and escort an important couple across the border under the noses of Chinese soldiers working for the puppet regime.  Got that?  Well, never mind, Zhang barely gives those hostages a second’s thought, concentrating instead on crosses and double-crosses between spies & military officers as everyone tries to ascertain loyalties.  And while it may take you half the film’s running time to get a handle on who’s stabbing, throttling, garotting, torturing or sabotaging whom, the flushed, wintry look of cast, costumes & settings has massive appeal simply as glamorous artifice.*  In fact, feints toward heroic Communist rhetoric come off as de rigeur pablum, pasted on to check all the necessary boxes of officialdom and green light production & release.  Eye candy & martyrdom for the masses, courtesy of Yimou Zhang.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Equally overlooked among Zhang’s recent output (at least Stateside), the even better YING/SHADOW/’18.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/05/ying-shadow-2018.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *If M-G-M’s motto was ‘Ars gratia artis‘ Zhang’s must be ‘Artificium gratia artificis.’

MUHOMATSU NO ISSHO / THE RICKSHAW MAN (1958)

Taking a break from Akira Kurosawa classics for popular commercial fare, Toshirô Mifune unleashes his inner Wallace Berry in this broadly played piece of Hollywood-worthy sentimentality.*  A poor rickshaw driver with a rep as a wild & crazy guy, some passing advice given to a put-upon schoolboy backfires, and now Mifune’s carting the shy kid home for repairs.  All’s well soon enough, but when the child’s military father dies suddenly from a stroke, the illiterate rickshaw man finds he’s been recruited by the new widow to play surrogate uncle.  A doting mentor in manly arts if no tutor, the close bond is bound to bust as the boy grows up and starts to be embarrassed by this lower class champion.  Shot ‘solid citizen’ style, largely on exterior soundstage sets by director Hiroshi Inagaki, the film perks up here and there for some head-scratching Japanese prioritizing (called to rush the stricken father to a doctor, the wife asks Mifune if he could stop to pick up an eight pound sack of rice), as well as a superb sequence of traditional Japanese drumming where, just briefly, Mifune drops the humble-pie routine to dazzle the crowd on screen & off with sheer athleticism.  But more often than not, this is sticky stuff any way you slice it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *You can see Berry play this kind of masochistic quasi-parental slush in a late film like THE MIGHTY MCGURK/’46 . . . but I wouldn’t recommend it.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-mighty-mcgurk-1946.html

CANYON PASSAGE (1946)

On loan from R.K.O. after graduating from the Val Lewton horror unit, director Jacques Tourneur made his first color film and his first Western with this A-list effort for Universal.  (Then right back to R.K.O. for classic noir next year in OUT OF THE PAST/’47. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/out-of-past-1947.html)  Long unsung, now highly rated, CANYON’s a handsome (lenser Edward Cronjager), location-heavy production with a strong cast and an even stronger, if unconventional storyline, the rare Western you can’t summarize as ‘Stranger Comes To Town.’  Instead, Dana Andrews is an ambitious outfitter for wagon trains & growing towns, always on the road and looking to expand his trading store into a NorthWest franchise.  Currently, he’s heading back to base with gal pal Susan Hayward, ‘near’ fiancée of guy pal/financial partner Brian Donlevy, banker to the town’s gold prospectors, now in serious debt from his gambling addiction, looting client’s gold dust out of his vault and writing I.O.U.s right & left.*  And while there’s a lot of sexual tension between Hayward & Andrews, both parties are already ‘claimed,’ Hayward by Donlevy; Andrews by the equally lovely Patricia Roc.   Add to these domestic troubles tension with the local Native Americans fully aware they’re being systematically displaced by a growing community (every new home a stealth attack), before they are all but forced ‘onto the warpath,’ after local psychopath Ward Bond (chillingly unhinged) rapes & murders one of their own, a pretty girl he’s caught swimming.  Plus another murder in town after Donlevy is about to come up short on the victim’s gold deposits.  Lots of situations, yet Tourneur is so well organized, he’s got plenty of time to work in Andy Devine (and his two kids) as sidekick & local cupid; for young Lloyd Bridges to show himself as hotheaded vigilante; and Hoagy Carmichael as local troubadour, commenting on the action thru song.  Confidently handled in fluid, rangy takes (the opening reels particularly, a masterclass of ‘invisible edits' and tracking shots), the complicated story and interpersonal relationships never feeling rushed or phony.  The film’s rapid critical rise over the last decade entirely justified.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Tourneur went on to make more traditional Westerns, but another rather untraditional one, STARS IN MY CROWN/’50 may be his best in the genre.  And with a plot you can reduce to Stranger Comes To Town.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/07/stars-in-my-crown-1950.html

ATENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Donlevy’s addiction, believable, melancholic, nuanced & non-hysterical, neither actor’s meal nor award-hungry showcase.  It may be unique in Hollywood films.

WOMEN TALKING (2022)

Now writing & directing, Canadian Sarah Polley (no acting credits since 2010) picks up on a riveting fact-inspired story involving the physical/sexual/psychological violation of women in an isolated ultra-religious sect; fictionalized in Miriam Toews' novel & here extrapolated into a sort of trial & debate among the victims on what to do.  Stay in the community as it is; remain but fight for change; or abruptly & permanently leave.   Presentation and playing are all you could wish for, but Polley seems better at executing her vision than inventing anything beyond a feminist 12 ANGRY MENNONITES.  Too many narrative & structural misjudgements (modest SPOILER Alert ahead!) like the surprise that we’re not following a 19th century period piece, but something from 2010.  What might have been allowed to seep in as possible anachronistic moments (smoking, a watch, modern vocabulary) is a ‘got’cha’ story beat ‘discovered’ as a modern tune plays on a passing car radio.  No one challenging or doubting their belief, only its practice.  The best written role going to the only male in the story.*  And the most problematic, making all the characters so articulate, especially when you consider the level of education/sophistication allowed to women in the community.*  The way this largely illiterate group figures things out, they’d fit right in to one of those near plotless George Bernard Shaw talkathon plays.  Only there, GBS provides theatrical distancing Polley can’t.  Still, the strengths in the filmmaking and the situation hold you all the way thru.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *That’s Ben Whishaw drawing on his inner Stephen Rea as the member of the community assigned to keep a record of the discussion.  Between getting his mop of hair under control and how he looks more substantial playing against an all-female cast, he’s never come off better on screen.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Not so different from how Stephen King made all the boys in STAND BY ME/'86 'tween psychologists-in-training.

PEKING EXPRESS (1951)

Paramount’s third version of this exotic Jules Furthman/Harry Hervey adventure reverses direction from SHANGHAI EXPRESS/’32, the original Sternberg/Dietrich classic, so we now start the dangerous trip at Shanghai station and train to Peking.  And that’s not the only thing they get backwards.  (Version No. 2, NIGHT PLANE FROM CHUNGKING/’43, not seen here, is a cheap programmer.)  But first, here’s the one good switch: Thanks to political changes, the bad guys no longer warring feudal lords but the newly victorious Chinese Communists.  And they aren’t even the worst element, that’d be local renegade bandits, merciless villains who interrupt the journey with a deadly surprise attack before grabbing United Nations Doctor Joseph Cotten and past-partner/fallen gal Corinne Calvet, along with Catholic Father Edmund Gwenn and other assorted business & political bigwigs.  Made on a B+ budget, director William Dieterle uses plenty of stock footage and background clips from the original (some city street scenes look darn familiar) between endless exposition in train corridors & compartments.  Mostly about stolen drugs Cotten brought in with him/mostly in the shadow of slanted Venetian blinds.  Not really bad, but you’d never guess what you’re missing if you watch this instead of von Sternberg: one of the great Hollywood entertainments, Dietrich’s top grosser, and a film that did much to move the bar past Early Talkie technical problems and usher in Classic Hollywood Golden Age.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: As you’d expect, SHANGHAI EXPRESS.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/shanghai-express-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Twenty years after SHANGHAI EXPRESS, PEKING still casts one major Chinese character with a White Guy.  Easy to forget just how long YellowFace remained a Hollywood practice, late as 1985 with Joel Grey in REMO WILLIAMS.  Was that the last one?

LIVING (2022)

Well-intentioned & relatively faithful, this refashioning of Akira Kurosawa’s uncharacteristic IKIRU/’52 replants the story from ‘50s Japan to ‘50s London* in an adaptation that retains story arc & structure from Nagasaki-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus.  This fable-like character study follows ultra-reserved mid-level city bureaucrat Bill Nighy who, after learning he only has months to live, comes alive (personally & professionally) just in time to complete a modest legacy project.  With four reels nipped from Kurosawa’s over-indulgent running time all to the good (the much-acclaimed original does hang fire), but a switch from what had been contemporary to what is now period setting distancing us by 70 years, inevitably adding squishy layers of nostalgia that risk pushing sentiment to sentimentality.*  Shot in a unique screen frame ratio of 1.48:1 (unexpectedly pleasing!), the intimate framing never feels cramped, often bursting into life.  Though it can’t quite cover the sense of manipulation that accompanies the lump in your throat.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *It’s just possible that Kurosawa saw J. B. Priestly’s LAST HOLIDAY, a 1950 Ealing Studios film with Alec Guinness whose similar elements come with a gimmick.

SCREWY THOUJGHT OF THE DAY:  *No doubt, Ishiguro felt ‘50s British social reticence would be more equivalent with Japan circa ‘52 than U.K. mores in 2022.  Or modern Japan come to think of it.