LAAPATAA LADIES / LOST LADIES (2023)

Crowd-pleasing hit with a light feminist slant, it’s India’s official Oscar submission for 'Best International Feature Film’ and you’ll see why as director Kiran Rai hits nothing but net in just her second feature after an inexplicable 13-yr gap.  The basic plot description makes it sound like a painfully broad rural comedy of ill-manners (something on Telemundo?; a special HEE-HAW episode?) as two just-married brides, veiled & similarly dressed, escorted by husbands they hardly know, get mixed up in a crowded train and wind up being hurriedly dragged off by the ‘wrong’ husband to different cities.  Cue laughtrack & screwball sound effects.  But no!  Nothing of the sort.  Instead, a smart, touching, funny, forward looking story of morbidly unassertive ladies in 2001, too reticent or depressed by their arranged marriages to speak up for themselves.  Then slowly finding their bearings thru unexpectedly caring communities and the empowerment of individual purpose while nearly a week races by before their increasingly frustrated husbands and the seemingly incompetent police force start to connect the dots.  The film beautifully caught by director Rai as a Northern India rural time capsule and commentary on changing social attitudes & conventions, focused on the possibility of reinvention or perhaps just reintroduction.  The tidy ending too neat by half as male authority reasserts in a positive way, but it’s that kind of semi-serious dramedy and, in its way, awfully satisfying.  With a bewitchingly eccentric supporting cast, lovely leads and catchy songs to link the episodic nature of what turns out to be more than a guilty pleasure.

THE BOY AND THE HERON / KIMITACHI WA DÔ IKIRU KA (2023)

At 80+, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki is hardly the first master artist to unretire once too often.  He even called himself out in advance: ‘There’s nothing more pathetic than telling the world you’ll retire because of your age, then making yet another comeback.  Is it truly possible to accept how pathetic that is, and do it anyway?’  Well, credit Miyazaki on honesty.  Or something near it since this new film proves that in his case the spirit is weak while the flesh is willing.  Ready, willing & able as HERON proves technically fresh, even thrilling.  Especially in kinetic set pieces of fire & destruction during WWII firebombing, and in just about anything seen dashing across the screen.  (Innovative backwash motion behind the fore-figures jarring in a good way.)  It’s the memory & imaginative aspects that pall in this Japanese post-war story as ‘the boy’ deals with the loss of his mother and the replacement wife his father plans to marry that confuse, smothered under fantastic beasts (‘the heron’ and others), a time tunnel and an overstuffed narrative.  Also a wise old conjuror worried no one will continue his meta-physical labors to keep the world safe.  (Who might that old man be?)  The dreamworld, which takes up most of the film, not only an æsthetic mess, but revealing of how Miyazaki often overloads his plate (and pallette), it’s his Achilles’s heel.  Oh for the days of restraint and repose shown in past glories like TOTORO/’88 and PORCO ROSSO/’92.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/01/porco-rosso-1992.html)  An aspect of his best work perfectly recaptured in his previous swansong THE WIND RISES/’13.  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/12/kaze-tachinu-wind-rises-2013.html)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  While hardly fixing the problems, the film is better in Japanese than in its English dub.  If you’re too young to handle subtitles, you’re probably too young for the film.

DOUBLE-BILL:  BORO THE CATERPILLAR/’18; a presumptive suggestion as this late Miyazaki short (not seen here) only shows at the Ghibli Museum in Japan.

POLITICS (1931)

Second and best of the three jerry-rigged comic/dramatic vehicles built for the great Marie Dressler and the not-so-great Polly Moran.  (REDUCING/’31 and PROSPERITY/’32 the other two.)  Best because it’s the most serious; Dressler’s better comic instincts fed off of serious, even tragic issues.  It’s a LYSISTRATA variation, here with small town ladies withholding all wifely services until reform candidate Dressler is voted in as Mayor.  Specifically, to close the illegal Speak Easy/private liquor club where a gangland shooting has just killed a local girl who was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Dressler daughter Karen Morley was there too, secretly meeting her fiancé who was ‘winged’ in the incident and is now hiding in the Dressler attic.  Yikes!  (Dressler a widow who rents rooms to Moran and stuttering husband Roscoe Ates.)  If word got out, Dressler’s run as Clean-Up candidate would be fatally compromised.  Exactly what local booze lord John Miljan is hoping for.*  Very uneven stuff under Charles Reisner’s hit-or-miss direction*, plus a BlackFace gag from a soot-filled chimney to cringe your way past.  But it hardly matters when Dressler is on form, as she very much is here.  What she does is so far removed from what we now consider acting, it can take a bit to find your way to her.  Pulling faces, physically maulng her own flesh (there’s a lot of it!), yet impossible to put up resistance.  She’ll eventually find your empathetic weak spot and pounce.  Along the way, adding an extra comic ‘take.’  (Usually some grotesque second or third look.  Topped by two or three scenes of utter seriousness, where she’ll be grounded & still as a pedestal (not a statue, a pedestal).  Watch her in discussion with her daughter once the romance comes out in the open.  At times, you wonder: ‘What the hell is she doing . . . and who else could possibly get away with it?’  With anyone else, it’d be just an actor’s trick.  Except with Dressler, it’s no trick at all, but a slice of truth.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The other two Dressler/Moran pics: REDUCING/’31; PROSPERITY/’32.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/06/reducing-1931.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/prosperity-1932.html   

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The political rumor-mongering Miljan plans against Dressler hardly different than the underhanded campaigning M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg used for real to stop Upton Sinclair & the EPIC Party (End Poverty In California) during the 1934 California Gubernatorial race.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *If you ever needed hard evidence that Buster Keaton was fully responsible for directing his silent classics regardless of what the billing says, note this film’s Charles Reisner is ‘listed’ as co-director with Keaton on STEAMBOAT BILL, JR./’28.

FEHÉR TENYÉR / WHITE PALMS (2006)

Implausibility be damned!*  Or it better be if you’re going to watch this winning Hungarian film about a boy gymnast who runs away to join the circus.  Really, that’s the story; Cirque du Soleil in on the production, and it’s damn involving all the way.  Told largely in hop, skip & jump continuity between early 2000s and early 1980s (as if we were on a trampoline which indeed we often are!), we first meet 30-ish Dongó Miklós (Zoltán Miklós Hajdu) in Canada for his new high school athletic coaching job; and then the 12-ish Dongó Miklós of twenty years ago (Orion Radies), the best gymnastic talent in a group being trained by strict/sadistic Coach Puma, a man who disciplines with a razor sharp fencing foil.  His team showing multiple swounds from his punishments.  And no relief at home as parents second his methods because they like the results.  Back in the Canadian present, Dongó slips up on the job, thwacking a teen player when the boy screws up and is immediately called on it by students and parents.  Twenty years on and his old coach hasn’t fully left him.  Back to his own youth where he finally escapes when an opportunity to be an emergency fill-in at a circus trapeze act comes up.  Here’s where plausibility hits the breaking point: making a trapeze debut without rehearsal, in the toughest trick at the Big Top and losing the safety net mid-act.  Yikes!  All this intercut with a present day gymnastic contest where Dongó is competing against the 19-yr-old he’s been assigned to work with after his slap got him all but fired.  It doesn’t all work, but still impossible not to get involved in the dramas & super-fit cast, the circus vs ‘pure’ gymnastics ethos, and the sheer athleticism of a grown Dongó, still in incredible shape.

DOUBLE BILL/LINK: Did someone mention Trapeze Act?  TRAPEZE/’56.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/trapeze-1956.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Though nothing implausible about the 1980s disciplinarian gym coach in Hungarian Communist Block days.

KISMET (1920)

With Otis Skinner as Hajj, the wily Baghdad beggar seeking revenge for himself & marriage for his motherless daughter over the course of one eventful day, Edward Knoblock’s KISMET was for decades one of the great barnstorming companies crisscrossing America’s theaters.  Surprisingly, the play (and for that matter the even more successful musical version in the ‘50s) was never revived on Broadway.  Equally bad for its rep, all four film versions pricey disappointments: this stiff 1920 silent; 1930 in 70mm; 1944 with Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich and TechniColor; 1956 with CinemaScope, Vic Damone (!) and hit tunes deftly lifted from Russian classical composer Borodin.  And while the 1930 spectacular (still with Skinner after two decades in the role) is now lost, the three extant versions make for fascinating comparison as the old play gets progressively defanged of its bloodthirst and nasty tone.  Hajj, beggar/magician in 1920 has mellowed into beggar/poet/philosopher by 1956; his daughter no longer threatened with rape by an enormous half-dressed Black bodyguard; hand amputation for theft not repeated four times for comic effect, but merely serving as a song cue, and so on.  The unbowdlerized 1920 version, directed by Louis J. Gasnier (its surviving physical elements in poor shape) must have been seen as a high ticket item with elaborate trompe-l'œil backdrops and handsome practical sets.  But Gasnier, who shoots & edits in reasonable fashion for the period, gets stuck filming a lot of actors ‘mouthing’ play dialogue and sawing the air with wild hand gesticulation, like a parody of bad silent cinema mime.  Standards in screen naturalism had risen quite a lot by 1920 once Mary Pickford taught everyone how to act with your eyes rather than your hands.  A bit of stage history, but not much of a film.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  You can easily see what this ought to be by screening Douglas Fairbanks’ THE THIEF OF BAGDAD/’24 and future Hajj Ronald Colman in IF I WERE KING/’38.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/thief-of-bagdad-1924.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/05/if-i-were-king-1938.html

EMILIA PÉREZ (2024)

Jacques Audiard’s audacious new film is probably more great achievement than great moviemaking, but definitely something you’ll want to see.  Best known Stateside for UN PROPHETE/’09 (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/06/un-prophete-prophet-2009.html), Audiard continues his interest in drug underworld stories with this wild take on a Mexican drug lord running a powerful cartel of vicious enforcers with an unusual request for rising young mob lawyer Zoe Saldana.  Give up her current position and take him on exclusively.  All he wants is to keep his power and assets while he ‘disappears,’ transitioning to female before seamlessly returning to wife, kids, assets and power as the ‘dead man’s‘ cousin.  (Or is it sister?  I got a little confused.  His/her children eventually call her Auntie.)  But wait!  Audiard tells the whole tall tale as an ‘integrated’ Mexicali Musical, tunes ranging from Mariachi to Salsa.  ¿Sounds mad, impossible, si¿  It’s enthralling.  Beautifully detailed, staged and acted, even if half the numbers run together melodically.  Best is a serious lament for all the victims, the ’disappeared,’ which ends with a sort of star-filled sky effect of the grieving faces.  (Very Busby Berkeley!)  Told with the structure & style of a ‘40 film musical, but in a world more like ‘50s TechniColored melodrama.  It makes other pastiche cinemaniacs (like, say, Todd Haynes or Canada’s Guy Maddin) look like pikers.  Karla Sofía Gascón is a revelation as Perez, but everyone is superbly cast.  And should you get a case of the giggles at some inappropriate moment, don’t worry, happens regularly with ‘50s melodrama auteurs Sirk, Ray & Minnelli.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL:  Stylistically, this is the EVITA/’96 of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s dreams.

THE MISSING JUROR (1944)

Bargain-basement Columbia Pictures programmer wastes a dandy idea, not in execution (not bad at all), but in development (what does a pencil cost?).  Worth a look anyhoo as an early Budd Boetticher pic.  Known for his lean ‘50s Westerns with Randolph Scott, Boetticher only had two assists and a formulaic BOSTON BLACKIE behind him at the time.  Here’s that dandy idea: George Macready, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife gets a last-minute reprieve from Death Row when nonconformist reporter Jim Bannon uncovers the real murderer.  Yet just a few months later, jurors who’d voted to hang the former prisoner start turning up dead.  Five out of twelve so far and the police still think it’s coincidence.  Meantime, with the reprieved killer having gone mad in jail, and hanging himself before being burnt to a crisp in a fire, who could be out for revenge?  More importantly, who’s next to go of the seven remaining jurors?  Yikes!  Reporter Bannon gets rehired to interview the surviving jurors, but the hits just keep on coming.  Boetticher does a more than decent job with what he’s given, but the film is all but entirely bare-faced exposition, especially the first half, and Macready, with one of the most distinctive voices in Hollywood history, a poor choice for a double role.  (And that stock library music track also not much help.)  Onward Boetticher, onward!

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The hangout for reporters and the paper’s editor is a little joint called Wally’s Grotto, a spot where you can get morning ham & eggs for 30¢ and a drink late at night.  Do places like that exist?  When does poor Wally get to sleep?

FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024)

Once pundits gain some perspective on the films of 2024, they’re likely to label it as the year Hollywood misread the room.  With FURIOSA as box-office under-performing bellwether for an unheralded line-up of costly misfires (100 to 200 mill budgets) that either flat-out tanked or remain longshots to recoup.  (Warners & Lionsgate hit particularly hard.)  Non-starters include a musical JOKER sequel; the vanity epic MEGALOPOLIS (a sacrificial film fest fave that fell flat); preordained tax write-off ARGYLLE; the current Yuletide dud RED ONE . . . and we’ve hardly scratched the surface.  Of the lot, George Miller’s FURIOSA perhaps the most curious and hard to explain.  This origin story for one-armed warrior Furiosa looked like a safe bet to bring in the FURY ROAD fan base, but was no better received than TOY STORY origin film LIGHTYEAR/’22.  Was it a case of: ‘‘Haven’t we seen this before’ or simply ‘Accept no substitutions.’  Anya Taylor-Joy losing not only an arm but also Charlize Theron’s charisma.  Trying too hard?  That’s the case for a lot of the film's problems, including writer/director Miller, pushing eighty and fighting to prove he’s still got the action chops needed for this post-apocalypse tale of rival survivor clans trying to reach a ravaged earth’s promised land.  It’s telling that the major set piece, a wonder to behold, concentrates on stupendous vehicles and road action rather than on hardly differentiated characters.  At least top-villain Chris Hemsworth sticks out, giving a dastardly go as he tries to locate his inner Laurence Olivier and finds he ain’t got one.  He huffs & puffs & growls.  In general, casting agents ignored for a line-up of aging WWE types.  On the other hand, those who enjoyed FURY ROAD certainly should have a look.  Though they may be disappointed to see that Miller seems to have fallen victim to CGI sweetening where he once disdained its use.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned above, FURY ROAD/’15.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/11/mad-max-fury-road-2015.html

AMBP:  The most farfetched idea in the film?  Furiosa adjusting instantly to one-armed motorcycle driving.  One hard left turn and it’s Wipe-Out.

VAAZHAI (2024)

Twelve may be on the young side for coming-of-age/sentimental education tales, especially with sex not much of a factor, but in 1999 young Sivanaindhan (M. Ponvel) must grow up awfully fast after his boyhood adventures with BFF Sekar suddenly end when village tragedy strikes in this fact-based film from Mari Selvaraj.  (NOTE: The film posts the usual fictional disclaimer, but if anything, seems closer to being true than usual for these things.)  We’re in a rural Indian village where plantain & banana groves offer the main employment opportunities, even for Sivanaindhan when he’s not excelling at school and sharing a crush with Sekar for the pretty, young teacher down the hall.  Hitching a ride on her motorcycle perhaps his top life experience till he realizes he’s lost the family cow while out riding.  These sorts of crises and his constant lying to squirm his way out of trouble & backbreaking field work his main goals within the long unchanged societal standards of 1999 India.  1999 but it might as well be decades earlier, giving this story a tone not so far from a Booth Tarkington PENROD book.  (Penrod at times quite the juvenile delinquent!)  But there’s little to prepare us for the real life U-turn from childhood pastorale (even one blinkered by rural poverty) into devastating personal loss.  Writing & directing as if it were his own story (was it, perhaps peripherally?) Selvaraj keeps a bustling tempo to match the resiliency of his leads, switching over to a metallic b&w for heightened intensity in non-linear flash-forwards, yet not ashamed to show us brilliant colors favored for even the humblest of garments.  The jumps in tone & use of Indian ‘pop’ songs give off a distinct vibe you may have to adjust to, but is both effective and affective in a very specific manner.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Mira Nair’s debut, SALAAM BOMBAY/’88 brings us an urban-India childhood experience from nearly the same period.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/02/salaam-bombay-1988.html