THE PALACE (2023)

At the Venice Film Festival, where a pretentious piece of shit will routinely get a twenty-minute Standing Ovation (good films get twenty-two), Roman Polanski’s scabrous comedy about an ultra-luxe Swiss-Alps Resort Hotel on New Year’s Eve ‘YK’ got five.  Barely enough time for all the producers & talent to get on stage.  Commercial rollout DOA.  Is it really that bad?  Well, yes and no.  There’s something to be said about Polanski biting the hand that feeds him, taking pot shots at the aging ghouls & gargoyles who populate Price-No-Object resorts & Film Fests for forced holiday fun.  And what a noxious/toxic lot they are!  Especially when catered to by impeccable hotel & personal staff while they attend to the appearance of eternal youth and the pursuit of fresh partners in bed & business.  Less Jonsonian satire than Feydeau farce; less IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD/’63 slapstick greed than the Little Foxes of Blake Edwards’ S.O.B./’81*, but with the Davos crowd & Russian mobsters in for Hollywood hypocrites.  (Note Polanski nipping Edwards’ propped up dead body gag.  Or was he thinking WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S/’89?)  Alas, we can’t recapture the air of disapproval & mortified silence of that Film Fest premiere.  (It’s like seeing Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES/’81 without Manhattan Upper East Side ambience.)  But if Polanski’s comic cruelty works better in small doses within his dramatic vehicles, there’s still a decent ratio of laughs between gross gags about overindulging in caviar, plus some fine Euro-based comedians new to you.  God knows, the ones you do know not at their best.  But if ‘the prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges,’ as Philip Barry said in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY/’40, there’s little uglier than watching them indulge their tastes & fantasies.  For optimal enjoyment, pretend you’re watching a documentary.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Anything mentioned above would do, but go for S.O.B.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/02/sob-1981.html

OR:  For those who think Polanski, now pushing 90, has lost a step, see his previous film, a muscular look at the Dreyfus Affair which received little Stateside attention.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/07/jaccuse-officer-and-spy-2019.html

MENUS-PLAISIRS - LES TROISGROS (2024)

Still going strong at 94, documentarian Frederick Wiseman brings his now over-refined fly-on-the wall approach to Michel Troisgros’s perennial three-star Michelin restaurant, an unexpectedly informal, unexpected modern establishment in the French countryside near Roanne.   Structured around two food services, lunch & dinner, we spend the bulk of our time (a rather too generous four hours) in the hushed, clinically clean kitchen, and then on the restaurant floor where chef & staff turn maddeningly loquacious.  ‘Michel, I love your stories and philosophizing, but my food is getting cold!’)  In between Ozu-like ‘pillow shots’* of an idyllic countryside, we stop at a farmer’s market and many local sources (goat ranch, farms, vineyards, honey station, cheese ‘caves’ (these masters of maturation the most obsessed), while Michel tours and son César starts officially taking the reins at the restaurant/inn.  And while a few plates have that fussy haute cuisine look (one tasting menu offers a single asparagus stalk as a course; quite a large stalk, but still . . . ), most look devastatingly yummy.  (Who had the balls to bid for ‘craft services?’)   At times, Wiseman’s refusal to interject program info self-defeats (like a waiter who won’t explain a dish), but the sheer level of craft & detail that goes into these dishes comes across as something heroic.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *The restaurant’s Zen-like calm mirrored in Wiseman’s use of those Yasujirô Ozu influenced static landscape ‘pillow shots’ in-between sequences.

LINK:  HURRY!  Free on PBS internet sites thru April 20th.  https://www.pbs.org/video/menus-plaisirs-les-troisgros-rbfnou/  

ATTENTON MUST BE PAID:  Hard to believe how many of the guests demand food substitutions or have allergy issues that put much of the menu off-limits.  You wonder why they bother to go and pay 3-star Michelin prices.  Yikes!  Better the cheese loving customer who has the cheese monger serve up six different varieties.  Mmm, cheese.

JUSTINE (1969)

For vet Hollywood helmer George Cukor, a funny thing happened on the way back from winning an Oscar® . . . five years drought between MY FAIR LADY/’64 and this salvage operation.  It was old-line producer Pandro Berman to the rescue, stung when art house director Joseph Strick failed to deliver on location in Tunisia, forcing this adaptation (just one part) of Lawrence Durrell’s ALEXANDRIAN QUARTET* to return to the 20th/Fox lot with Cukor taking over.  And while already doomed by a hard to follow script (illegal gun shipments to Palestine hidden beneath the sexually charged mutating affairs among foreigners navigating a debauched 1930s Alexandria) and uneven casting (some Hollywood ringers hopelessly inauthentic and a famously inert perf from gorgeous star Anouk Aimee), what a fascinating watch it is.  Dirk Bogarde, Anna Karina, Philippe Noiret, John Vernon, outstanding whether diplomat, whore or agent, and even Aimee able to give Michael York’s tush a run for the money.  (York’s Cubist facial planes a great help here as naïf lovestruck professor.)  With Cukor’s studio artifice far surpassing what we see of the disappointing remains of the location footage.  Leon Shamroy’s lush lensing, Irene Sharaff’s riotous costuming for orgies & social events.  The thing doesn’t add up, how could it?, but you’ll savor all the tasty bits of this curate’s egg of a film.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The only comparable Cukor film is his equally compromised, equally rich BHOWANI JUNCTION/’56.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/bhowani-junction-1956.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Durrell’s four cross-pollinated novels largely untouched on film.  (So too Proust, with whom he's often compared.)  This 20th Century literary classic sounds perfect as a long-form streamer or as tony PBS fare.  Is it still read?  Or perhaps it's too politically incorrect.  (For this 1969 film, Alexandria’s infamous 1930s Child Brothel cast with veiled ‘little people.’  Actual kids only seen looking in.)

PHASE IV (1973)

‘Yes, but what I really want to do is direct.’  That old Hollywood punchline is usually tagged on ‘personality’ actors, but here, acclaimed graphic artist Saul Bass, whose posters & credit sequences for Hitchcock & Preminger are the stuff of legend, picks up the megaphone for this small-budget Sci-Fi Horror.  Even more surprising, it works!  A real creep out on an eclipse that changes the nature of all the ants on Earth, defanging their natural enemies & turning various ant species from combative to single collective.  The film a three-hander for two scientists (Nigel Davenport; Michael Murphy), sent to an isolated desert lab to work out ant communication & a plan for human survival, who wind up hosting a left-behind local (stowaway Lynne Frederick), who plays Eve to the men’s double Adam act.  Davenport the nihilist; Murphy the idealist; Frederick the author of the lab’s original sin, ruining the experiment before she's catalyst to transformation.  Not without gauche moments and all too obvious moves & motivations, but also with many memorable visuals (expected) and ideas (less expected).  One shot of rows & rows of pale poisoned ant warriors on their backs, surveyed by their black ant compatriots quite spectacular, and not only conceptually.  The end proves more than the budget (or Bass) can properly handle, but taken for what it is, this film should have led to further adventures for Bass away from his drafting table.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Why so unknown?  Best guess is that Stateside releasing company Paramount simply didn’t know how to market this sort of thing.  Pity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Scientists experimenting in an isolated lab a genre unto itself in this period.  Skipping over all those orbiting Space Station variants, you might try John Sturges THE SATAN BUG/’65 or Robert Wise THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN/’71.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-satan-bug-1965.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-andromeda-strain-1971.html

CONTEST:  Beware!  SPOILER embedded in this Contest Question.  PHASE IV’S outcome involves the evolution of a hybrid creature combining ant and human elements.  It’s not all that far from the précis of a faux trailer seen in a comic movie about the film biz.  Name the Faux Feature title and the film the trailer comes from to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choosing.

THE OUTSIDERS (1983)

The classic YA novel, converted by Francis Coppola into something of an homage to ‘50s melodrama & stylistics (think Douglas Sirk; Nicholas Ray; and a soupçon of Elia Kazan).  With a frankly amazing cast of up & comers (Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane & Patrick Swayze already fully-formed actors among Method Actor wannabes C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, et al.), its story, as if you didn’t know, very WEST SIDE STORY/REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but set in ‘60s small-town SouthWest where only teens seem to live, and wrong-side-of-the-track Greasers grumble & eventually rumble with cashmere-clad wealthy ‘Socs.’   Nowadays, the film plays as something of a parody of itself.  Heck, it did back then, too, but what’s become even more clear are the gender issues that drive the plot.  Not sexual issues; gender.  If readers & non-readers alike know one thing about author S.E. Hinton, it's that her manuscript was submitted with initials in hope that publishers would assume the author was male.  And something of the same thing is going on with the male heavy cast of protagonists: they’re really girls.  (Does that explain the gender-neutral nicknames?)  Sure they’re gross & rough, messy & ready for a fight, but also obsessed with GONE WITH THE WIND.*  (Have you ever met a teenage boy who’s read it?)  More touchy-feely than the budding ‘tween psychologists in STAND BY ME/’86, they cuddle for warmth, sleep with one head tilted on a BFF’s shoulder, and have æsthetic/philosophical heart-to-hearts on the impermanence of sunsets when not quoting Robert Frost.  (These deep feelings sure to be used as song cues in the soon-to-open B’way Musical adaptation.)  Getting out of the bath, they alluringly drape a towel on toned torsos to flaunt & flirt while sashaying thru the gang.  And does anyone have an actual, as opposed to an aspirational girlfriend?  Not gay, either.  Nor trans-anything.  Just girls in Greasers clothing.  It explains a lot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  This Write-Up based on the original 1983 1'31" cut.  Twenty years later, Coppola upped the running time by twenty minutes with previously deleted material and tossed his father’s lush score for something more ‘Pop’ oriented, no pun intended.

DOUBLE-BILL:  OUTSIDERS, a big, if brief financial help after ONE FROM THE HEART/’81 bankrupted Coppola’s ZOETROPE, was soon back in the soup when his even artier b&w Hinton followup, RUMBLE FISH/’83, did barely a tenth the business later that year.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Coppola reveling in visual GWTW aspects.  Dramatically tinted long shots with silhouettes bathed in over-saturated autumnal color, opening credits with titles sweeping across the screen and the cast listed by ‘house.’   A particularly neat touch at the time as those famous opening credits had been replaced by a still title shot as the infamous 70mm re-release of GWTW in the ‘mid-60s was forced to re-do the title optical since it no longer fit properly in the cropped image.  The original title design only restored years later.

THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER (1990)

The Anodyne Era in Disney animation began post-JUNGLE BOOK/’67 (last to have Walt’s direct participation) and was ended by THE LITTLE MERMAID/’89.  From this mild lot, THE RESCUERS/’77*, a little adventure in the Deep South for a pair of Manhattan mice, at least had a decent amount of charm, a feisty girl protagonist (still rare at the time), and an outstanding villain in Geraldine Page.  It also made a considerable pile of cash.  So, a belated sequel made sense as the new era got going.  Plus, it offered a great chance to try out game-changing digital animation techniques in the Aussie outback (note PIXAR getting its own section in the end credits), seamlessly blended in with regular hand-drawn leading characters and all those wacky Antipodean critters.  The vistas spectacularly successful; right up there with Chuck Jones’ Monument Valley canyons in those early Cinemascope ‘Road Runner’ shorts.  Now with vertiginous POVs!  If only anything else in here was nearly as good.  Lousy story construction and lazy character development as a fatherless boy tries to save a mammoth mother eagle from a rapacious poacher.  We leap from a prologue so OTT you’re convinced it’s a dream sequence, to pointless use of those two RESCUERS mice (why send them down from Manhattan?), to a villain drawn to look like Jack Palance but voiced by George C. Scott.  (This last one simply weird.  Though give credit to debuting director & producer (Mike Gabriel; Thomas Schumacher) for killing this guy off with the most gruesomely gleeful onscreen death in Disney animation since The Evil Queen went down in a blaze of deep purple in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS/’37.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For detail on the Disney animation revival (and this film’s major flop), see WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY/’09; and for this film’s back story the original RESCUERS.  http://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/03/waking-sleeping-beauty-2009.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-rescuers-1977.html

WEST INDIES (1979)

Long unavailable (its rep undoubtably helped by inaccessibility), now restored, French-Moroccan filmmaker Med Hondo built an agit-prop historical, from Daniel Boukman’s play ‘The Slavers,’ into an unlikely piece of Brechtian Epic Theater.  A big, colorful pageant play about the West Indies struggle for independence, interspersed with musical numbers, staged entirely on a former slave ship (looking incongruously spic-and-span).  It opens in the 20th century as a plebiscite is being debated in what looks like a symbolic kangaroo court of current West Indies rulers: Continue as a French Colony or Risk Independence?  We then jump back to cover episodes from a long miserable history of White domination: slavery; the sugar cane trade; forced immigration to supply cheap labor to Europe; collaboration by ambitious locals; waffling sentiments from a hypocritical Catholic Church.  All the usual suspects.  Ambitious as hell, but Hondo fails short; one more political playwright downed by following what German playwright Bertold Brecht says (intellectual distancing & didactic lessons) rather than what he does (emotional involvement & theatricality).  Here, the caricatures are as stiff in personality as Hondo is in his staging.  (He’s very big on keeping his cast seated.  Movement reserved for the chorus.)  The songs repetitive; dances out of an exotic floorshow.  And it’s not as if this were a great period in French lyric theater; mostly plotless revues for the tourist trade.  Imagine one of Roberto Rossellini’s late, arthritic ‘teaching pictures’ done as a stage musical.  Those films also well reviewed.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Richard Attenborough, a large budget and an all-star cast fall just as short taking on WWI in the form of Brechtian Epic Theater in OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR/’69.  OR:  For eye-popping Hollywood horror on the slave trade, SLAVE SHIP/’37.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/fascinating-and-appalling-this-little.html

FEMME (2023)

Writer/directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping seem weirdly unaware that their well-received debut pic (an expansion of their 2021 short) is such a catch-all of (not-so) New Queer Cinema clichés in every character arc & story beat.  Not badly handled, and very well cast, it feels like an unintentional period piece. 1980s?  (R-rated today, perhaps an X back in the day.)  With George MacKay as a heavily tattooed ‘Boy-O’ type, hanging with his gang of carousing macho bros,  but secretly cruising on the ‘DL’ for a quick lay.  Enter Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Black Drag Queen, between sets, out of ciggies and off to the corner store for a fresh pack, still in full drag.  Calling out MacKay for first ogling and now threatening him, he’s beaten up and left on the street.  Turns out the appeal is mutual, just submerged.  But before too long, domination tropes between alpha male and omega mate start to get complicated.  Dominate male grows feelings; Submissive male gets off on rough treatment.  Tucked in the relationship are the best scenes in the film with Stewart-Jarrett acting as if he’s also going on the ‘DL,’ but in the opposite direction from the opposing team.  The worst scenes involve Stewart-Jarrett’s roommates, a throwback to ‘Fag Hag’ tropes, here split between a gal roomie as confessor and a male roomie in an underhanded play to bust up the inconvenient new coupling.*  Discouraging to see something this retro get so much attention.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Sure enough, a ‘90s novel titled FAG HAG, with the same plotline, was optioned if never filmed.  A 1998 film called FAG HAG unrelated to the book.

THE TRUST (2016)

Separating the wheat from the chaff on mid-career Nicolas Cage projects will no doubt make a fit subject for a PhD thesis some day.  Till then, we’ll have to rely on hearsay to make informed choices.  This one, from a period of mostly cable films churned out six per year 2016 thru 2019, seems reasonably representational and reasonably good . . . within limits.   Playing a crooked Las Vegas cop with crooked cop partner Elijah Wood (the difference in height & width giving off a pleasing Mutt & Jeff vibe), the pair stumble across a possible cash rich drug operation moving deposits from casino to industrial district where it’s warehoused.  But what exactly are they stockpiling?  Cash?  Goods?  Checks?  Chits?  Chips?  Breaking in will require special skills & special tools; along with the filmmaking chops seen in Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI/’55, apparently  not available to writer/director brothers Alex & Benjamin Brewer.  Instead, they opt for tone & atmosphere from the 1980s Neo-Noir revival which only partially hides holes in plot, characterization & motivation.  But Cage keeps the eccentric line readings down to a minimum, Wood stands up nicely to him, and there’s a neatly constructed, decently executed triple-twist ending involving a surprise guest at the heist.  (Plus, Jerry Lewis, in a last appearance, a cameo as Cage’s slightly out-of-it Dad.  Given nothing to do, he still overplays.)  Only 23 of these things left from this period.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Did Cage buy the same brand of black hair dye Steven Seagal uses?

DOUBLE-BILL:  As mentioned RIFIFI/’55.