Some movie capsules to contemplate.

Next time, I’ll do my “best of the year”. Spoiler: It’s Hundreds of Beavers.

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We did, in fact, manage to catch one of the Israeli Film Festival movies, and it turned out to be the most gripping drama/thriller of the year (and based on a true story)!

Yair is a young man in Jerusalem not suited to the religious life who decides to open an electronics store. The opening points of drama come from this: It’s far more respected in his community to study the torah all day than to engage in commerce. So, with a little bit of dissembling,  he scores himself a sweet trad wife—and when I say “trad”, I mean “ultra-orthodox Jewish” tradition—and after a year of her supporting him (as a schoolteacher) decides the study life isn’t for him.

This trope astonishes me however often I see it, and the culture shock is one of the reasons I love seeing these movies. “Of course, it’s more respectable to make your wife support you!” Her parents are wealthy, too, and would support them, but the whole concept is anathema to Yair.

At some point, after mastering the Talmud, you’re apparently good to go on a secular life. But Yair’s got a problem with authority and so he keeps getting hung up on the contradiction of “listen to the Voice of God” and “the Rabbi knows the Voice of God, so what he says goes.”

So he opens a little shop. He sells Kosher computers. (These are computers that can’t be hooked up to the Internet.) He does great, but he’s limited in the capital he can borrow by the size of his shop. But he has a great idea: He’s going to sell Kosher MP3 players to the neighborhood kids. To really launch, though, he needs to get a big shop on Geula’s main drag.

Geula is the hub of orthodox activity and the shopping…uh…mecca, and a very nice store just burned up and will be available shortly. See, the store that was there sold provocative dresses, and refused to stop, and after a campaign of terror, was just burned out.

All Yair has to do is convince the rabbinical council that runs Geula that what he plans to sell isn’t Satanic, and he’s good as gold. He sells them on the MP3 player idea and before you know it, he’s opened HOME (after the keyboard key), and selling his MP3s like hotcakes.

What could go wrong?

Well, a week later, the council could call him in and tell him they’ve changed their mind. The new MP3 players are distracting the children from their studies, so they’re now the work of the Devil and must be stopped.

Yair, who’s more than a little bit of a jerk to begin with, doesn’t feel like dumping the $4M of inventory he’s bought on credit, and we are off to the races. The rabbinical goon squad terrorizes him just like they terrorized the last shop. And it’s just a matter of time before we get to the burn-un-ing.

Will that time coincide with his pregnant wife going into labor, and the Jerusalem “we-don’t-want-cell-tower” riots? You better believe it.

A really tense, exciting movie, which The Boy didn’t like as much as I because he thought the actor playing Yair was unlikable. He’s definitely belligerent, to everyone’s detriment, and has tendency to listen to things he doesn’t like with his mouth hanging open.

I kind of liked it for the same reasons: We’re never led to believe Yair is perfect, and his character arc is subtle, reflecting only a slight (but definite) reduction of his efforts to make life hard for everyone.

The movie ends with an American Graffiti style “Where are they now?” and it’s nice to know that Yair’s doing fine with a shop outside Geula, and a lot of the worst thugs went to prison.

The Glassworker

Here’s something you see…never. A Pakistani animated feature! In Urdu. (I think something’s happening with the Pakistani film industry: I’m seeing Urdu films pop up more and more.) There’s a little English in there, too, for some reason. I think “foreigners” speak it.

It’s vague, because the whole movie is basically “What if Studio Ghibli had a Pakistani branch?” So we’re in some vaguely turn of the 20th century European(?) country and “a war” is going on the whole time, and our hero is the son of a glassworker, who’s a pacifist. He’s going to get pressed into making vital power widgets for the country’s war zeppelins by The General. (Could it be any more Miyazaki?)

The General, who is not presented as a villain, but a man trying to protect his country, has a beautiful red-headed daughter who has a crush on our hero, which is reciprocated even though both fathers have an antagonistic relationship. (This aspect feels more Takahata than Miyazaki to me.)

Very good film. The Boy cited a few very minor weak points in the animation, but was enthusiastic.

The Sacrifice (1986)

I’m normally up for hours and hours of Andrei Tarkovsky’s static, brooding, ever-so-meaningful shots, but this, his last movie, just struck me as sort of dumb. A bunch of Swedes having a birthday party out in the countryside find their revelry interrupted by nuclear war.

Alexander, a well-respected actor and literary critic who retired from the active London scene to contemplate things on a barren and isolated Swedish island, where some of his friends come to visit for his birthday. The war happens, and is apparently enough to rock the ground in their isolated location, though we don’t see any effect of it.

Alexander is desperate to undo the damage, which he can only do by having sex with the town witch and sacrificing everything (of his own). And so he does.

The Boy liked it a lot. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get into it. It was sort of the reverse of our The Burmese Harp viewing on election night.

Conclave

I am not a Catholic, but I found myself being outraged on their behalf during this modestly competent film with terrific performances. Based on a Robert Harris novel from 2017, this story manages to hit nearly every cliché you’d expect from a Hollywood-based film about a traditional Christian organization.

Ralph Fiennes plays a cardinal who has to hold a conclave after the Pope dies. Stanley Tucci—my mom likes Tucci so that’s why we were there—is a progressive cardinal who is trying to keep the papacy out of the hands of two conservative bishops. The only unexpected twist in the movie (for me) was Tucci, who claims to not want the papacy, being revealed as really wanting the papacy.

Everything else was so predictable, down to the denouement, which is somebody’s idea of a “gotcha” for Catholics. Maybe Harris, I don’t know. Beyond that, the movie is better as a drama than a mystery/thriller, so it never quite moves in such a way as to let you overlook its flaws.

My mom didn’t think much of it, but she liked Tucci, Fiennes and Lithgow, and that’s why we went.

Anora

Sean Baker has a niche: He explores the seedy side of life in a curiously non-judgmental way. He’s sympathetic toward the sex trades but since he portrays them as they are, without glamorizing, you can walk away being as judgmental as you like. In Starlet, he features a young woman becoming a pornographic performer (with hardcore scenes) . In Tangerine (which also has a very explicit, if not actually hardcore scene), he gives us a slice of life of a trans prostitute in L.A. The Florida Project shows the effect on a little girl of her mother’s dissoluteness (prostitution and drug use).

These are good films. But you do have to be willing to sit in squalor for an hour-and-a-half to two hours.

Anora is perfectly in keeping with his oeuvre, except that it runs about two-and-a-quarter. This 140 minutes moves, though.

Annie is a Brooklyn stripper who gets called to a table because she happens to speak Russian. She and the Russian hit it off and soon they’re “dating” at his place. As the son of an oligarch, “his place” is a mansion. Soon they’re spending an entire week together, including jetting off to a Vegas hotel (where he has a palatial suite I’m not convinced wasn’t a set).

Oh, he laments, if only they were married, he wouldn’t have to go back to Russia. So they get married.

It’s like Pretty Woman, right? No, not really. Because what happens next is his Russian Oligarch parents find out he married a stripper. They have no intentions of letting him do that, or even stay in America where, it must be admitted, he’s doing nothing but drugs and strippers. Reality, in other words, impinges on this little fantasy.

So, once again, we have really fine film from Mr. Baker on a really seamy subject. I think this one will win some awards.

Hundreds of Beavers

It came around again! And the Barbarienne wanted to see it again, which wasn’t that easy because it was sold out again!

My original review is here. Does it hold up on a second viewing? Yes, it does. If it’s not as hilarious—because some of the surprise is gone—I also found it hadn’t worn out its welcome at all. (First time, I thought certain parts went on too long, but didn’t have that issue this viewing.)

The thing I noticed most of all this time? The story is a classic “hero’s tale” of riches to rags and back to riches again, training at the hand of a wise mentor, seeing success snatched away at the last second. Better written, storywise than just about anything else this year.

Hands down my number one pick for movie of the year. And I’m not alone. I assume I’m going to love Nosferatu, but I don’t expect to see a challenger in the next two weeks.

A Real Pain

Jesse Eisenberg writes, directs and stars in this movie about David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) touring Poland after the death of their Polish grandmother. Apparently, the two were close growing up but have drifted apart, especially since the old woman’s death.

At first, you might get a kind of Planes, Trains and Automobiles feel off this, as David is update and Benji’s a lovable slob. But Benji’s also aimless and a narcissist and given to strident emotional protests.

The Boy and I were surprised: It was funny, it was dramatic, it avoided a lot of clichés. Culkin is great. Eisenberg, who used to almost always come off as a jerk (at least until Zombieland) is brittle without being unsympathetic. In the end, remarkably similar to another movie released this year, the Stephen Fry/Lena Dunham vehicle Treasure.

If I were to point out something with the recent Hollywood selections we’ve seen (Juror #2, Anora and this), the shocking thing is just that you have people humaning like we haven’t seen much of in the Woke Era.

Heretics

I have no excuse. This one is totally on me. I was stuck in Glendale and had just missed the only showing of Invisible Raptor, and this cheap horror film—a clear attempt to cash in on the very good Heretic—was playing. I should’ve checked the website and I would’ve seen that this was an Asylum film.

Asylum’s greatest contribution to society is Sharknado. (I’ve known people who worked there and it’s a pretty crazy place, I’m told.)

This is a “found footage” film. There were no end credits.

This movie starts with about 30 minutes of teens at a high school senior pizza party. The teens are good-looking and not immediately death-worthy, but the girls were all brunettes wearing very similar outfits which  made them difficult to distinguish. It also might’ve struck me as being very ’90s if not for the fact that they’re recording everything on their cell phones.

You can skip this first half-hour because next to nothing mentioned here will have any significance later on in the film.

They spend the next 30 minutes wandering around a “haunted house”. At first this looked to me like an abandoned 1100sqft tract house, but later we see some tunnels and graffiti, which made me think they filmed it in an actual haunted maze. The set designers probably only added one thing: A recurring symbol (Baphomet, maybe?) that is never explained.

You can skip this part, too, because next to nothing here matters or makes sense. Some of the characters are going to die here, but you’re not going to remember or care who they were, because who they are doesn’t matter. (You know from the opening scene who the “final girl” is going to be.)

We close with twenty-minutes of everyone dying. Oh, and Eric Roberts shows up.

Eric Roberts. Nice “found footage” movie, guys, you’re really selling it. I’m sure all this really happened to Eric Roberts and sorry for the Roberts’ family’s losses after his recent, tragic de—

Wait, he’s still alive? Not only is he still alive, he has ONE HUNDRED upcoming movies?

Are people really scrolling through Tubi horror movies and going, “No. No. No. Ooh, Eric Roberts! Sign me up!”? I guess they must be.

So, anyway, yeah, you can skip this last twenty minutes, too.

I realized I’d made a mistake when they started playing “Never Have I Ever” and “Truth or Dare” at the senior party. I literally thought at the director, “Have you no shame? No shame at all?” Turns out: Nope. They may have just turned on the cell phones and improvised the whole thing, only that might’ve turned up something slightly novel.

Back in my day, at least one of the girls would’ve popped her top. Pfeh. These nonbinary types don’t know how to make movies!

See you next time!

The Los Angeles-Israeli Film Festive kind of snuck up on us this year, and it doesn’t look like The Boy and I will be able to catch any of them, but we still managed to see a half-dozen good-to-great films this fortnight-and-a-half.

Let’s get started.

Heretic

In what some (not me) are calling the best horror movie of the year, Hugh Grant plays a maniac atheist who lures a couple of young LDS missionaries into his house to test their faith. Top notch acting with Grant avoiding his famous and easily-impersonated acting twitches and stammers, and the two girls (Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East) giving surprisingly nuanced performances.

The major surprise of this film is how it avoids many of the expected tropes. The two girls are presented in veritably clichéd ways at first, but as the movie goes on, we’re surprised by how they respond to the various challenges they face. Hugh Grant gives a lecture on how Christianity mirrors dozens of faiths in the past—there’s a theme here of imitation which touches both metaphysical and literal aspects of the story—and his big reveal is that it’s all just a control mechanism.

But he’s a literal maniac, a cruel monster beyond even what we see right away, and at no point is he admirable. He’s basically the stereotypical Internet atheist, only more energetic.

There’s a reference here to something called “The Great Prayer Experiment” which purportedly showed that prayer didn’t work. I found that fascinating since as I was growing up, I remember reading studies that shower prayer did work. Looking it up it seems like the current “science” is that prayer actually makes things worse. Heh.

Saturday Night

I generally avoid biopics, as they tend to reduce people’s lives into very formulaic cartoons, but the Barbarienne wanted to see this—she’s a big Jim Henson fan—and it’s very entertaining, and absurd. It takes a lot of vignettes (mostly from the first generation Saturday Night run) and shoves them into the two hours before the premiere took place.

Chevy Chase is shown as an insufferable egomaniac who loses his girlfriend to an overly endowed Uncle Milty, and his future disastrous late night talk show career is presaged. John Belushi is a fragile, barely sane, self-imagined Marlon Brando who quits because Polaroid is going to sponsor the show. Dan Aykroyd is a smooth-talking lothario. Jane Curtin is skilled but clear-eyed about what’s going on while Laraine Newman is more of a wide-eyed naïf being seduced by Aykroyd. Gilda is kind of low-key and whimsical. Garrett Morris has no idea why he’s there.

First host George Carlin hates everything and everyone.

When they’re “on”, the not-ready-for-prime-time players are pretty good, though lacking even a fraction of the original cast’s charisma. When they’re in the background and to the side, it’s easy to forget who’s who.

That’s okay, though, because it’s really the Lorne Michaels story. Will he be able to get the show on the air or will they end up re-running Carson? Will he figure out what his relationship is with his sort-of wife? (They try to make a thing out of what name she’s going to use, but it’s not really a strong part of the film, just kind of ’70s weirdness.) What even is this show? Nobody can answer!

I’m sitting there going “It’s a variety show with an emphasis on comedy, a perfectly ordinary thing for 1975, just a little saucier.”

As surviving cast members have commented, while not strictly accurate, it captures the feel of the era, and I can buy that. The pace makes it such that it’s a very lively (real time) watch.

The Burmese Harp (1956)

Ever hear of it? Me, neither. The Boy and I saw this on Election Day and, while it’s a great movie, The Boy was too stressed to enjoy it much. It’s very low-key: A Japanese troop in Burma at the end of WWII has one soldier, Mizushima, who has learned to play the Burmese harp, and dresses in Burmese clothes, so he can act as a scout.

The harp ends up alerting them to danger, saving them from a deadly firefight, and identifying Mizushima at various points in the movie.

The plot is that, after trying to save a bunch of holdouts from getting shelled by the British, Mizushima is separated from his troop and has to cross Burma on foot to rejoin them, which he does in the stolen robes of the monk who saved his life. And on the journey he is treated with the tremendous respect accorded to Burmese monks, and also a witness to the mountains of Japanese corpses who died in the jungle.

The journey changes him and he’s torn between wanting to go home and feeling a need to bury his dead countrymen.

Really interesting and moving film, but probably not the best to watch if you’re biting your nails over election results. (I wasn’t but, as mentioned, the Boy was.) My two random observations were: 1) That doesn’t sound like a Burmese harp. It sounds like a western harp. 2) I wonder if all those gorgeous Buddha monuments are the ones the Muslims destroyed?

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

I wasn’t actually expecting that much from this, Maggie Smith’s breakout film, beyond a great performance from the late Ms. Smith herself, and was actually pretty bowled over. It was nuanced in a way I can’t imagine a modern film being (and by 1969, the grossly simplistic Boomer world-view was being ensconced).

It’s 1930s England, and Miss Jean Brodie (Smith, duh) is teaching her class at the all-girl school where she proudly announces she’s “in her prime”. The sole source of this is her own heart, which is the source of almost everything she does, much to the annoyance of the school staff and faculty.

So, you think “Oh, free-thinking woman sticking it to the stuffed shirts”—but, no! She’s basically loathed at her school by everyone but her students and the two men wooing her. Her professed love of her students is a weirdly narcissistic fantasy with dire consequences. She decides their fates, incorrectly, and spends a large amount of time lavishing adoration on Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini.

Meanwhile, she’s in love with the school’s art teacher. They had a fling which she broke off, and he’s been chasing her ever since. (He’s a married Catholic man with an increasing number of children as the movie goes on.) There’s a staid, dependable, wealthy guy who adores her, but she’s strongly resisting his proposals. (Although I do think they canoodle.)

And the camera is showing us all the time: This is not this woman’s prime. She’s 35 (which is ancient for a single woman in 1969) and Dame Maggie looks at least that old. (She aged rapidly, I think, and even in her 20s didn’t look that young.)

And still, for all her ridiculousness and narcissism, we still like her. We’re rooting for her. It’s a tragedy, in that sense, as she has no capability to self-correct. One can hardly imagine what lies in her future. In today’s world, we’d suspect lots of white wine and cats.

Smith won a well-deserved Oscar. Rod McKuen was nominated for the title song, which is loathsome, but his ham-handed romantic score actually works in the film proper because it’s basically white-hot irony (whether McKuen knew it or not).

(We played guess the rating after watching this, with Pamela Franklin being fully nude in this movie that features a middle-age man in an affair with a 16-17 year-old girl. It was and remains rated PG.)

Juror #2

Clint Eastwood’s (maybe) last film is a solid morality tale which I probably rate higher than most, because it’s a real movie from Hollywood, where the characters have believable motivations and are driven to desperate, even evil actions, such that the sort of happy ending crowds like just can’t happen without some sort of deus ex machina, and that ain’t the way Eastwood rolls.

Nicholas Hoult finds himself as the titular juror in a case that Toni Collette is trying. She’s trying put away a guy who allegedly killed his girlfriend and dumped her body in a ditch during a rainstorm the previous fall. Except the more Justin (Hoult) hears, the more convinced he becomes that he was the one who killed the girl.

Justin, who’s expecting a child (after losing twins on the night of the death), tries to figure out all possible ways he can of getting the accused off, but Collette is running for D.A., so she needs to put someone away for the crime. If he can’t get the jurors to acquit, if he hangs the jury, they’ll just hold the trial again. But the more he tries to get the falsely accused off, the more he risks implicating himself.

So we start with a 12 Angry Men type premise, and go into an almost “Columbo”-style reverse engineering of a crime we already know all about, and then end up with the moral dilemma.

Very solid flick. Not a crowd-pleaser, but nowhere near as dark as, say, Mystic River. It’s a shame that WB seems to have buried it. It was amusing to see Hoult and Collette reunited. (They played son and mother in About A Boy, speaking of Hugh Grant.)

Bogart: Life Comes In Flashes

I naturally adored this biography of Humphrey Bogart, which leans heavily on Bogie’s own writings (read by someone doing a mild impression of Bogart). Lots of fun and interesting vignettes detailing his struggle as an actor, as an already thrice-married man whose last wife was literally insane and shooting at him—and whom he told the already smitten Lauren Bacall he had to give another chance since she said she had given up drinking.

He seems like a decent, hard-working guy who never believed his own press.

Biographies usually tend to linger too long after the deaths of their subjects, and I appreciated that this one didn’t. (It didn’t dwell overmuch on his death, though it was a horrible one.) I thought it spent too much time on things that weren’t particularly relevant (like his mother being a suffragette and Prohibition) or which have been overdone and which weren’t enlightening. Like, Bogie and Bacall objected to the HUAC and because Bogie was that famous, both the Communists and the anti-Communists decided he was a Red.

Meh. I would’ve liked to hear more about how the Hollywood power couple started the Rat Pack, and more about Bogie’s lifetime friendships with John Huston, Leslie Howard, Hepburn and Tracy, and so on.

Still, if you’re a Golden Age of Hollywood fan, it’s a must see.

Just as I sometimes will avoid a movie that’s too over-hyped, knowing that most movies can’t live up to the buzz, I occasionally will see movies that everyone is dumping on, especially if there’s some conflicting or interesting angle to the criticisms.

For Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis I saw one review that said only “Free popcorn refills” and another claiming that Coppola had reached Neil Breen levels. But our very own Eris said she kinda loved it, and I knew, at a minimum, Coppola would lard the movie up with cinematic references, which appeal to humble fans of cinema such as yours truly.

I then compounded my woes by going to see Joker 2—I’m not typing out that French crap—and what I can honestly say about both films that Pitch Meeting covered both very accurately. In-between, I saw the restoration of 2006’s The Fall, which is a beautiful masterpiece and it got me to thinking about how the other two films failed on fundamentals without being beautiful enough to make their flaws overlookable.

Megalopolis

For fifty  years, until the release of Star Wars in 1977, Metropolis was the science-fiction movie, and is still one of the great cinematic achievements. Even today, it impresses, and it’s quite easy to forget that its underlying message, spelled out in a literal epitaph is:

“The mediator between the HAND and the BRAIN must be the HEART.”

In this case, the HAND is Communism and the BRAIN is Fascism. It’s 1927 Germany, what else could they say? Nonetheless, the ham-handed messaging practically destroys this classic.

So while it is not surprising that Coppola would take that film as the germ for what would be his magnum opus, it’s somewhat surprising that he would say “Only my movie is going to have EVEN MORE painfully inappropriate or inapt epitaphs.”

This is not his magnum opus, mind you. But it was to have been. And as I watched, I could see glimpses of his original fever-dream, a vision of a three-day cinematic experience which chronicles the rise and fall and rise of Cesar Catalina, the architect of Megalopolis, a—well, a borough in New York, apparently.

It could’ve been great: Cesar would rise from the streets to power through his sheer ability culminating in evicting all the people who already lived in the place where Megalopolis was. That’d be the first movie. The second would be his struggles in getting Megalopolis built, securing financing and running afoul of city politics threatening to end his dream. The last movie would have him thwarting his enemies and achieving dream: An advanced city of…moving sidewalks. (Coppola did the writing by himself, with an assist from son Roman, and that was a mistake.)

But the first half of this movie has tremendous charm. Like the best of bad movies, it surprises you with novel ways of being bad. Cesar (Adam Driver) can stop time! This is a metaphor for creative ability, and the only bearing it has on anything is that his love interest (Nathalie Emmanuel) can see him do this.

The rules for this time-stopping are very vague, to boot.

Not weird enough? Well, Cesar carries a bunch of roses to his apartment and when he walks in, they fly off on their own.

There’s enough in the first third or so to keep things interesting. But then we start getting into plot, which we really didn’t need and which drags the movie down.

The mixing of Shakespearean dialogue (Cesar actually does most of “To Be Or Not To Be” speech at one point) and modern vulgar slang works very poorly and most actors are not up to it. Driver actually does. It’s hard not to respect him for pulling off reciting what is essentially gibberish. (The other one who manages is Aubrey Plaza, who chews the scenery and spits out the nails as Cesar’s jilted lover, and the seductress of Shia LeBeouf, in a particularly porny scene.)

Fundamentally, though, the premise is based on the ultimate left-wing conceit: That a perfect environment will make perfect people. The wretched refuse that Cesar has rendered homeless are, one presumes, going to occupy Megalopolis even as, moments earlier, they threatened to burn it down.

But it’s not a bad looking film. There are moments that are quite nice, visually.

It was better in Coppola’s head for sure.

Joker: Folie à Deux

By comparison with Megalopolis, Joker 2 is much more successful at what it’s trying to do, and also much harder to watch. The conceit of having Arthur (Joquin Phoenix) hallucinate that he’s in a musical no one can see, except for Lee (Lady Gaga), who joins in it with him, is actually a clever way to avoid having to do lots of wordy emotional scenes between two crazy people. The choice of upbeat music, particularly themed around showtunes, is also a clever way to get the idea across.

And the idea is, Arthur, who’s not The Joker, has a cult following that is dedicated to The Joker. Lee’s attraction to him is based on him being The Joker. The world is more-or-less at his feet, if only he’ll be The Joker. So our little sad sack of an anti-hero-but-also-not-really-a-hero is given the choice of being even crazier or trying to just, y’know, be himself (which is crazy enough).

This movie has a lot of the original movie’s sense of style, evoking pseudo-1981, and the same miserable premise is here: watching a man struggle with his sanity in a cruel and brutal world.

This really doesn’t work as entertainment. There are many, many elements of the original that deflect from the misery porn: We sort of root for Arthur. Until we’re shown exactly how crazy and dangerous he is, we can kind of believe he’s turning his life around. He’s moving around the city, doing things. He’s trying to achieve his dreams and handling his failures by hallucinating. It’s something, at least.

Here, he goes back-and-forth between an asylum and a court room.

In a traditional musical, the song-and-dance numbers stop the action. This is also true of Joker 2, except that there was no action to stop. And the musical numbers are uncomfortable to interpret, much like if the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene in Clockwork Orange was the entire movie.

I realized early on, the only way to get through the movie was going to be to really pay attention to those musical numbers. That’s where the “action” was, the evolution of the relationship between Lee and Arthur was, as well as his struggle with his identity. So I wasn’t bored, though I wasn’t exactly enchanted, either.

The Boy hated it pretty hard. He doesn’t know the songs, and found that the whole identity struggle was neutered by the fact that the movie makes it very clear early on: Arthur is not Joker. He’s not wrong about this. It’s almost as if the creators were afraid to give Arthur an opportunity to at least toy with being wildly evil.

I would recommend this film to even fewer people than the original. If the two films together average half-a-billion, that’s still way too much.

The Fall (2006)

I have a full review up this film up from 2006, one of the first I wrote during the blogging era, and the Boy and I trundled down to catch it, thinking it was a one-night deal. (It actually got a little wider release, I guess because it’s a 4K restoration.)

It’s a masterpiece. Visually stunning, and using a child’s perspective as creative license, the story is both whimsical and grimly serious. I had a stye when I saw it, and had forgotten it was a tearjerker. Then my eye started stinging like crazy. Besides the beauty of this film, it handles tone shifts expertly. The little girl is a little girl and prone to silly things, and the story he tells her is very silly.

She also makes childish mistakes in trying to help him kill himself. She doesn’t know quite what he’s doing, but she knows something is off. And the switch from the whimsical to the grave is heart-wrenching.

But it’s a joyful movie overall, and well worth watching. Director Tarsem (Singh) will probably never make anything like this ever again—probably no one will. But that’s okay, this is a genuine magnum opus that knows exactly what it’s doing, and does it excellently.

Also Screened:

There were an assortment of movies, both bad and beautiful—actually, they were all pretty good, which isn’t a huge surprise given they were all-but-two reissues of films we liked. I may review one of these for next time.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988): A standard invaders-from-space story is enlivened by making the aliens literal clowns. There’s an oh-so-brief suggestion that human clowns were inspired by these invaders in the past, but just enough to allow our characters to take the adventure seriously. A limited budget meant that a couple of truly great effects were left on the cutting room floor, but for ’80s horror-comedy, this still shines and is very watchable and entertaining. The Chiodo brothers have been threatening a sequel for decades, and IMDB says they’re in production, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Lisa Frankenstein (2024): Among the many spectacular flops of 2024, Lisa Frankenstein goes overlooked. It made less than $10M on a $13M budget, so it can’t compare with either Megalopolis (less than $10M on a $120M budget) or Joker 2 (less than $60M on an alleged $200M budget), and it’s also much easier to watch as a film. It’s got a sort of Edward Scissorhands/Heathers feel and even takes place in 1989. The tonal shifts can make things feel uneven and I’m not sure if the ending made sense, exactly, but it already has a cult following, which is why I took the Barbarienne to see it. (I was the only XY chromosome in the place.) Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin.

Ringu (1998): This horror classic is weathering a bit like the old Universal classics. It’s kind of slow-moving and low-key, and suffering from its own considerable influence on the genre. It’s still good and enjoyable, but the “wow” factor isn’t there anymore.

Smile 2: The original Smile is far from a great movie—Jump Scare: The Movie, I think I called it—but it won both the Boy and I over for a couple of reasons. First, the people making it cared. This is someone’s baby, and none of it is phoned in. Second, while the beats are mostly pretty predictable, it commits and gives us a Smile monster, so we don’t have to go into the whole “well, was there REALLY a monster?” and “Maybe the real monster is the friends we made along the way!” We both had dim hopes the sequel would be able to sustain this but, by-and-large, it works well, maybe even a little better than the original. The Boy did not care for the end, which is telegraphed way early on, but is not really possible with this genre of horror. (I mentioned in my review of the first, that this is my least favorite genre of horror, and I can’t say why without spoiling it. Same here.)

The Masque of the Red Death (1964): Part of Roger Corman’s “Poe Cycle,” pretty much the best movies he made (along with “The Intruder”), and at the height of his directorial powers. Vincent Price is a decadent Italian baron who torments his peasants and brings a pretty young girl in to seduce while he tortures her father and boyfriend. Orgies abound, and the dreaded Red Death sweeps the countryside. Price actually is an avowed Satanist here, convinced that The Devil has killed God and will spare him from the Red Death if he sacrifices enough people to it. Slow by modern standards, with beautiful costumes and sets, and “exteriors” that are (wonderfully) painted soundstages, it was refreshing and held up well.

Terrifier 3: With a $2M budget and looking to pass Joker 2 at the domestic box office with over $50M in ticket sales, this movie is an even unlikelier success than Joker. I’ve waxed enthusiastic about Terrifier 2, though I am no gore-hound, because I think it really transcends its own genre. Terrifier 3 is not, to my mind, as good, but it’s still quite good. It feels more realistically brutal, which makes it harder to watch, but the main focus of the film is showing the aftermath of the previous series of events, which turned Lauren LaVera into a basket case. Certainly worth seeing, and maybe re-seeing, because there are a lot of interesting details. If you can stomach the gore, it’s a good film.

I’m a fan of Joe Bob Briggs, the premier drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, Texas, going back to the ’80s when I first caught a glimpse of him on The Movie Channel. By the ’90s, when yours truly had more or less stopped caring what was on TV, you could find me in front of the set at crazy hours on Saturday nights watching whatever crapola they had given him to host. A brief correspondence with him during my technical writing years cemented my affection for the man, who has been genuine and supportive to everyone I’ve come across who ever interacted with him.

But it wasn’t until I hauled my butt out to the Drive-In Jamboree that I considered myself a mutant, which is a name that comes from a one-man show JBB did in the ’80s, where he had people take the Mutant Oath. This begins, “We are Drive-In Mutants.” The groups I consider myself a member of (the moron horde, the jackals of 372 pages, and the drive-in mutants) may reflect on my self-image.

What was a gag forty years ago has taken on depth, especially in the past six years since a fan (now Darcy The Mail Girl) exhorted him to revive the show, and a marathon turned into a six-, soon to be seven-year run.

Your humble correspondent immensely enjoyed the second and third jamborees (the first sold out before I could get tickets), and was shocked to discover there almost wasn’t a fourth one. They were turning into big, expensive, elaborate events—I actually have no doubt they could have become something akin to Comic-Con—when what JB had wanted was for them to be a place where he and Darcy got together with the mutants to watch movies and talk about him.

So, he quit.

Darcy, on the other hand, refused to quit and started doing the con on her own. She’s the one who gets letters from the mutants telling her how important the meet-ups are. She was going to throw it with her own time and money, and drag JB there to host, whether he liked it or not. JB ultimately caved, but with the caveat: They would put up tickets—no guests, no bands, no program whatsoever—and see if people were interested in coming. Were they there for the program, or were they there for the mutants and movies.

Tickets sold like hotcakes: We were there for the movies and each other.

As much as I loved the previous years, the vibe this year was perfect. Being about the movies and the mingling made everything feel more relaxed. The music was fan music, and surprisingly delightful. The show started at a reasonable time—I didn’t notice if it was late or not. I don’t think too late because the sun was barely down. It also ran late, but nobody who is a Drive-In fan expected any less. We like to talk about stuff. A lot.

They had no sponsors this year and didn’t offer much in the way of incentives for featured guests (and some turned them down), but they ended up with a stunning line-up. Svengoolie showed up (free of charge) and hosted Saturday night’s offerings of six classic universal horrors: Frankenstein, Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Creature From The Black Lagoon. JBB is a wealth of movie trivia, of course, but Svengoolie was absolutely stunning in the “Horror Host Havoc” competition where each offered factoids about the movies and the audience decided who the loser was by pelting him with rubber chickens.

The previous night had ended with the three most iconic scream queens of the ’80s: Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer, who were inducted into the Scream Queen Hall of Fame, which is totally a thing or will be one day. To me, this was perhaps the best line-up possible, after the previous year’s Roger Corman tribute. Bauer stayed to the end (around 6AM!) and showed up the next day for signings, and your humble correspondent was bowled over by her charm and graciousness.

John Carpenter, Master of Horror

Friday night began, however, with John Carpenter. Which was as improbable as it was perfect.

Some of us were somewhat apprehensive about Carpenter. He’s famously curmudgeonly and reluctant to do these kinds of things, and we didn’t know how he’d feel about us. But he’d come down for free, agreeing to open the first movie and left after the intro to the second. He seemed somewhat surprised that JB had chosen to air Prince of Darkness at all, much less first, but JB pointed out that JC has gotten a ton of questions about The Thing, and Prince of Darkness is a much more mysterious movie.

And on seeing him in person, reacting to a variety of JB and the audience’s questions, I’d describe him less as curmudgeonly and more as uninterested in bullshit. And that includes his own. There were numerous places he could’ve launched into some pretentious arty nonsense and—well, he just didn’t. JB asked how he (“no offense but I’m not [Republican]”) could work with Kurt Russell (“to the right of Genghis Khan”) and he just said, “We just don’t talk about it.”

This used to be common wisdom.

Anyway, I think we won him over, and he certainly won us over, treating the audience questions respectfully and signing a Michael Meyers figure for a teen fan who had come up on stage to shake his hand.

Prince of Darkness

Sometimes I think Prince of Darkness is the most heretical film possible, even though it’s not excessively violent, hardly sexual at all, and fairly restrained in terms of language. But it’s also strangely conservative and anti-gnostic, with the idea being that God (like the tribal O.T. Jehovah) walked the earth, but rather than being loving and benevolent was, in Carpenter’s words “pissed off”. Somehow he gets cast out to the “dark side”—the mirror universe—but leaves behind his son, Satan, which is evil in material form.

We get into college bull-session territory from there as Jesus turns out to have been a space alien warning humans about this and trapping Satan in a container, with the idea that man will eventually evolve scientifically enough to find a way to secure and handle this evil in the future. The Church ends up being the guardian of the container and the promulgator of the lie about a good universe.

When the story begins, the last caretaker of the container dies and it begins to leak. And the quantum physics professor talking about how our concept of reality breaks down at the subatomic level is the guy who knows how to handle the substance, which can reverse entropy and possess people and emanate controlling force at a distance, while the heroes receive warning messages sent via tachyon particles into dreams from the far distant year of 1999, where things have gone to hell. If Satan gets loose, he’ll be bringing in papa from the darkside, and he’s perfectly happy to distract our heroes by possessing them and having them be menaced by street people (led by Alice Cooper).

Basically, we have an almost “Evil Dead” style situation of monsters being outside the church and anyone on the inside also potentially being a monster, which a bunch of novel horror effects both visual and intellectual, to keep things interesting. Some of these implications don’t work out, or they suggest a movie that’s superversive more than subversive.

That is, as the priest (Donald Pleasance) explains the Church’s role and beats it up for its dishonesty, the priests and especially the nuns have a “holy warrior” vibe. They are, after all, holding off the Devil and his demiurge father single-handedly, making a civilization where evil can be defeated technologically.

Another possibility is that the protagonists are in the mirror-universe—but again, it implies an inherent goodness in Man that is so powerful, it can operate in a universe which is made of evil.

I don’t think it quite achieves what it’s striving for. For one thing, the main romance (between “Simon & Simon”‘s Jameson Parker and the late Lisa Blount), while being a very typical Carpenterian romance (boy meets girl, they have sex) doesn’t have the chemistry of, say, Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall, Tom Atkins and Jamie Lee Curtis, or Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau.

If we contrast with The Thing, one of the things that works so well there is the struggle to survive personally balanced with the concern that’s one own survival could mean the death of humanity. The individual need to survive needs to be strong to be relatable, and I’m not sure we feel that in Prince of Darkness.

Prince of Darkness is the second of Carpenter’s “apocalypse trilogy”, which ends with In The Mouth of Madness). The first film in the trilogy is The Thing.

The Thing

The Thing was the thing (heh) that, in my opinion, derailed Carpenter’s career. The attacks on this film were truly outrageous, labeling it literal pornography, and WB naturally panicked and botched an almost guaranteed sleeper hit. An excellent adventure-horror or what we’d now call “survival horror”, I remember being slightly disappointed when I first saw it because of the ending. I now think the ending is perfect, and the re-emergence of this scene in the current election season explains why:

When you get past the action, the suspense, the tension, and the amazing special effects—Carpenter basically credited Rob Bottin with The Thing’s artistic success—something still remains, and is still relevant. To with, we have a closely knit society where trust is necessary for survival.

It’s quickly undermined, and the last scene underscores it beautifully, as two humans quietly freeze to death (maybe) because they can’t trust each other. (They have to both be humans, because there’s no reason for the alien to leave just one human alive.)

Even this is an over-simplification. There are other possibilities, like they’re both infected (but not yet consumed) and the thing is just lurking, waiting for its chance to spring itself on the rest of the world.

The Drive-In Academy Lifetime Achievement Award: The Hubbie

But Carpenter doesn’t really make message movies. Even They Live, which he wanted to tie into an anti-Reagan message (according to Roddy Piper, who refused), today comes across as a documentary, and an apolitical one at that, at least to those of us who are wearing our special sunglasses.

Listening to him talk reminds me a little bit of listening to Bukowski or Frazetta, in the sense that he’s very down-to-earth while at the same time tapping into a sublime artistic spirit that exists on its own plane. And if I can claim any personal experience with it from writing, I notice that what I think I’m writing about always ends up taking a back seat to (or being completely controverted by) the story that’s actually there.

“Our logic…collapses into ghosts and shadows,” as Victor Fong lectures in The Prince of Darkness.

I think Carpenter was genuinely touched by our enthusiasm, and got a little sense of who we are (not really having an idea before, which, how can you blame him?), and received the Hubbie gracefully and gratefully. (Traditionally, the award is a Cadillac hubcap, but in this case it was from a ’57 Plymouth Fury, after Christine.)

Somehow, it was perfect that he would be here for this reformation of the Jamboree: No fanfare, no big bucks, just a bunch of weirdos who like movies getting together to watch them and talk about them.

It’s that time of the year again: Spooky season! Which for us begins with the first day of Knott’s Halloween Haunt, always a Thursday. (And which, for a decade was so empty you didn’t need to buy any special fast passes, but that time, oddly, has passed. Apparently not enough people have to work on Friday any more.) Given the variability of traffic patterns, we have for years journeyed down to Buena Park in the morning and killed time at the Korean movie theater before heading off to the park. Since our little experiment with totalitarianism a few years ago, that theater cut down its weekday hours to start late in the afternoon unfortunately.

Which left us in a position to watch our second top 20 film of the year: Deadpool & Wolverine. Let me say, first of all, that we didn’t hate it. That’s important because the rest of this review might make you think otherwise. It’s mercifully short for a modern superhero flick, at two hours and seven minutes, though you sure as hell wouldn’t it want to be any longer. A fourth-wall gag has Deadpool apologizing for the movie length, in fact, which actually pretty well sums up this movie: It’s not just a commentary on the superhero genre, it’s a commentary on the commentary.

This is what Hollywood is reduced to. Watching this—or any big budget movie these days—is sort of like watching your figure skating team at the Olympics when it’s going through a bad patch. (Debi Thomas, anyone?) There’s tremendous skill and a huge talent pool and craftsmanship everywhere, but you’re just so sure someone’s going to faceplant, you’re ecstatic when they don’t, and you kind of cheer too loudly when they accomplish something awkwardly but without crashing completely.

As a comedy, it’s fine. I’ll take it. A lot of jokes that qualify as “irreverent” these days, though honestly the shots at tweaking the morality police at Disney are misses. I can believe they have a rule against characters sniffing cocaine, but nobody for a second believes this is anything other than cynical marketing. The movie is very aware that its role is to entertain, and it puts a lot of energy into keeping things lively.

The plot, which is not very important, is confusing and dumb. It’s multiverse time—something also lampshaded in the climactic fight scene with all the Deadpools, said lampshading not, in fact, providing any kind of cover for the fact that multiverses are the worst lazy writer’s device since time travel.

OK, I had to research the plot just now because it depends on you having seen Deadpool 2, apparently. The Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) from universe 10,005 flees to the 616 (sacred) universe to try to be an Avenger. He gets rejected by Jon Favreau (cute) because he’s there to win back his girlfriend, and that’s not really a good enough reason to be an Avenger. (I mean, you’re essentially an immortal being with nigh-unlimited powers. You’d think you could, y’know, save the world locally, but this guy needs approval from an entirely different universe, apparently.) So he goes into car sales, which of course he sucks at.

On his birthday he ends up being kidnapped by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), where a middle manager by the name of Mr. Paradox (Matthew MacFayden) is working up a MacGuffin (lampshaded) that will give the power to destroy timelines. Paradox wants to recruit Deadpool, but Deadpool flees and searches the multiverses to find a not-dead version of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) because that’s the title of the movie. And also universes have “anchor beings” who, when they die the universes die with them. And apparently, 10,005’s universe’s anchor being was Wolverine who, in case you didn’t know, died in Logan back in 2017.

Deadpool figures that if he can find a live Wolverine and bring him to 10,005, his universe will stop ceasing to exist.

Good lord, I write sci-fi and this is making my head hurt.

Anyway, you might just notice something else in this movie: Besides having lots of jokes, the cast is very good-looking. Bit parts and even Negasonic Teenage Warhead, whose kind of ugly attitude is part of the shtick, looks less offensive. (The actual actress, Brianna Hildebrand, is quite lovely.) I felt like this was part of the plan to be entertaining and not punishing the audience for coming to the movies.

The movie drags in a few places: The action set pieces aren’t as interminably dull as usual, because there are some good gags. There’s actually a very fine one in a Honda Accord between Deadpool and Wolverine, with the only problem being it’s both incredibly dumb for them to fight then (they’re on the run), and also completely pointless (they’re essentially cartoons). Another fight, not long after the Honda fight, features X-23, Blade, Elektra and Gambit (Dafne Keen, Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Garner and Channing Tatum, respectively) is also pretty good and has some bearing on the plot.

Primarily, however, the movie has the “Family Guy” problem (or the problem that show had in 2005, when I last watched). You can make me laugh at a gag where someone suffers horribly at the hands of a hero or protagonist, but you can’t then turn around and convince me that I should invest in the reality or heroism of these characters. At two different points in this movie, Deadpool gets a person killed for a laugh. It’s fine, good for a yuk. But then how do you sell “well, but it matters if THESE characters die?”

Not very well, I have to say. And Reynolds is a fine actor. Jackman is terrific. Really, the whole cast does a good job. But what they’re trying for isn’t something I’ve ever seen work in an American movie.

It reminded me of the other top 20 film we saw, The Fall Guy, in that it didn’t suck, it was a perfectly fine time-waster, and by the time I finish writing his review, I’ll forget it forever.

Victory

Which brings us to our second film, a Korean film called Victory which we went to because it was the only Korean film we hadn’t seen. I can say our expectations were low—much higher than they were for Deadpool 3, but still quite low given it’s a high school-based drama about girls who have lost their dance club at school and so shanghai a new girl into making a cheerleader club for their flailing soccer team.

Low stakes. Melodrama. Teenage girls. How good can it be?

And the answer is, unsurprisingly, damn good. First of all, it’s the absolute antithesis of Deadpool 3. The superhero movie thrives on sarcasm, meta-humor, nudge-and-a-wink, and the cheerleader movie exudes sincerity from every frame.

Our heroine is a 17-year-old girl—okay, not in real life, I’m pretty sure the entire high school cast is in their 20s and maybe even 30s—who wants to be a dancer. She was held back a year for fighting in their dance club (which was on campus), but ends up with her cronies at a soccer game where the school’s hapless team (motto: “It’s okay to lose!”) is embarrassed once again. When a brother and sister arrive from Seoul, the team gets a shot in the arm from the very skilled brother, and the heroine and her pals light on starting a cheerleading club as a front for being able to dance again.

There’s a fun montage where the girls in the school try out for the team, and the movie does an excellent job of giving us nine different girls who are nonetheless established as characters fairly well in a short time.

And the twist is, of course, that the heroine discovers that she enjoys cheering on and contributing to the success of the team. (She makes up a bogus stat about how everyone does 50% better when they’re being cheered on, as discovered at Harvard University in England.)

There are some other great bits, too. She’s a teen girl so she’s very emotional and she’s always saying “I’ve lost my appetite!” at the dinner table, and her father notes that her food is all gone. Her father works as a supervisor in a shipyard and at one point has to literally grovel for his job, and she’s disgusted by this. And the two fight over it, with him challenging her thought process that life is so easy, and her challenging back that he thinks life is super-hard. (I mean, he’s a single dad raising a teen daughter.)

But later she runs off to the big city and—well, life turns out to be pretty easy for her. She’s apparently just that good. This was an interesting twist that made the climactic scene very much more meaningful, even though, as mentioned it was very low stakes.

The thing about storytelling is that they’ve all been told. So a lot of the things that keep a movie fresh are being surprising, even in little ways. For example, there’s a love triangle: City boy/soccer hero likes the heroine but her childhood friend (a goalie) has been pining after her for ten years. So the cliché would be to have one of them win her over. It just never comes to that here (and one sort of suspects she wouldn’t end up with either of them, because she has bigger dreams).

Or, the fact that the local girls are kind of mean to the City Girl would, in the cliché, end up with the City Girl and the heroine being best friends, but that never really happens either. They form a team, and they work together, but the heroine’s best friend stays her best friend throughout.

There was just a lot going on in terms of character development and cohesive plot here, even though this is a fairly minor movie: The latest entry in the Roundup series and the hottest horror, Exhuma, both made around $80M at the Korean BO, compared to this film’s $3M. It just feels very self-assured, perhaps the result of not forgetting how to “human” as so many in Hollywood seem to have.

This is also the least prurient movie about cheerleaders I’ve ever seen. The girls are varying degrees of pretty, and very different one to the next, but their outfits are modest and since it takes place in 1999, they dress like Poochie otherwise.

You know how I normally say “This movie makes you feel proud to be a Korean?” It’s true, but the distinctly Asian form of fascism, where what your kid does in school might cost you your job, which is working your friends and neighbors to death, is very apparent here.

Overall, though, it’s just very wholesome and earnest. A good antidote to the decadent cynicism of Deadpool 3. We were quite pleased.

 

There were a couple of points of note on our journey to see the Irish horror film, Oddity.

It had opened on July 19th, after a flurry of other horror flicks, and The Boy and I had gambled on The Vourdalak, a peculiar French film based on a story by Aleksei Tolstoy. (That’s the 19th century’s Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, not the 20th century’s Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Even Russian authors have confusing names.) We enjoyed this folkloric tale of a French dandy who finds himself adrift in the Balkans among a family whose ancient patriarch has gone to fight the Turk and returned…a vourdalak!

Two things really stood out: First, the French dandy is a rich character, vain and spoiled and definitely #metoo bait, but while not especially brave, he has a moral core and actually does a few right things at some personal risk. It was frankly a more strongly drawn character than we see these days in serious dramas.

Second, the vourdalak himself is played…by a puppet. A large puppet, but a puppet nonetheless, or maybe even just a doll. This probably knocks a few potential viewers right out, but The Boy and I loved it. It was far superior to using CGI, and it created a different kind of “uncanny valley”, an edge of insanity to the spooky proceedings.

While it certainly must have been low-budget, there’s real brilliance in some of the camera work, in the acting, and the creation of a feeling (like The Witch) that just a few miles outside of major cities lies barbarism the courtly types are unsuited for.

But moviegoing is, for no reason I can fathom, feast or famine. There just wasn’t much out, and Oddity had already left most of the local theaters.  I dragged The Boy to the 60th anniversary of Red Desert, a Michelangelo Antonioni film, he was too tired to appreciate. On the other hand, I wasn’t tired and I also didn’t appreciate it all that much, being of that period I don’t particularly care for—the era of washed-out Technicolor—but which I sample periodically looking for gems.

This story of a depressed housewife looking for meaning in life culminates with her cheating on her husband—no spoilers, it’s obvious from the get-go this is going to happen—and discovering that only makes her feel worse. It reminded me, actually, of Melancholia, though it is nowhere as splashy nor self-indulgent. And it didn’t have the “leave your husband and child to be happy” vibe of Louis Malle’s The Lovers, which we saw back in June. Still, it’s two hours of a woman being depressed.

Our presented maintained that it was ground-breaking for pointing out the dangers of pollution, which inverted my thinking as I watched it. I was thinking “Oh, her emotional state is reflecting the pollution in the environment.” I’m sure now that’s backwards: The pollution was the external reflection of her internal state. (Again, not unlike Melancholia.)

It’s not something I would watch for enjoyment but it’s masterful in its storytelling of a kind of story I’m not crazy about. Antonioni would follow this with The Three Faces and then his most famous directorial effort, Blow Up, which per IMDB, is almost as good as Red Desert.

Also, Italians from the ’60s were weird. Bocaccio ’70—heck, almost all the Italian movies of the ’50s and’60s, have this otherworldly character of poverty being right around the corner. And here, where the characters are upper middle class (for Italians), a bunch of grown-ass adults hang out in a shed in the wharf for a day playing teenager drinking and spin-the-bottle type games. (This stuff is interesting for historical reasons, at least.)

Meanwhile, Oddity hadn’t quite gone away. It had very high ratings for a horror film (anything above 7 on IMDB is remarkable, and it was at 7.5), and we had one day to catch it at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills, after which it would only be playing in  distant Long Beach. So up, over and down we went.

There was a premiere for Neil Marshall’s new film, Duchess going on. Marshall directed the excellent horror flick The Descent almost twenty  years ago (currently 7.2 on IMDB), and he’s never made a good movie since. He’s apparently done some top-notch TV (“Game of Thrones”, “Constantine”, etc.), but that’s entirely different from the auteur films he’s famous for.

The lead actress was posing for pictures on the red carpet (horror stalwart Charlotte Kirk), which always cracks me up because (short of the mega-events), the carpets are pretty small and the surrounding environs rather shabby.

The theater itself has gotten shabbier, too, since 2019. The Laemmle family stopped leasing it in 2019 after decades. (They wisely own most of the land their theaters are on.) Most assuredly this was due to the rent-being-too-damn-high—Laemmle theaters have always been the lowest price for first run theaters (and their popcorn, which is topflight for movie popcorn). But the staff was very nice and competent, and I’m very appreciative of both in 2024.

(Movie review begins 800 words in):

The most surprising thing about The Oddity, The Boy and I agreed, is that it’s a good movie. Not “good for a horror movie” or “good for a low-budget movie” or “good for a movie made in the 2020s”—but just a good movie. And it’s good in a lot of ways we don’t see much these days. It begins with a simple premise, reminiscent of an urban legend: Somewhere in Ireland, A woman, Dani, whose husband works nights at the insane asylum decides to stay in this (gorgeous) old house that they’re restoring.

Dani’s lost her cell phone, so she goes out to her car to look for it, and when she comes back, there’s a banging on the door. A one-eyed vagrant-looking guy named Declan tells her someone snuck inside when she went to the car. (This is in the trailer, so no spoilers.) This, of course, raises the question of why Declan happened to be watching her very isolated country house. It turns out he’s a recently released patient of her husband.

Cut to months later, and we discover Dani was murdered that night, presumably by Declan.

Months later, our new widow, Ted, gives Declan’s fake eye to Dani’s twin sister Darcy, a blind psychic who runs an oddities shop where all the items are cursed (curses are removed at the cash register to deter shoplifting). She’s still a bit piqued about her sister’s death and wants to do a reading on the eye.

Well, before you can say “too ra loo ra lie”, Darcy’s invited herself and her family’s treasured wood golem to the old Irish house because (as noted in the trailer), Dani never would have opened the door to the crazy man. So what really happened?

That’s when things start to get weird.

There’s so much good here. First of all, there’s a solid underlying story. This is at heart a murder mystery with supernatural elements. The supernatural elements are pervasive without being substantial. That is, it feels like there are ghosts everywhere, but they’re not being used as a crutch for the plot. (You know, that sense you get in some horror movies of “well, wait, why did that happened?”, and the answer is very clearly, “because the movie formula requires it, and besides Ghosts Did It”.)

And I’m being tongue-in-cheek, calling it a “wood golem”: It’s essentially the creepy doll trope, only the doll is six feet tall. It mostly exists to unnerve the characters, as it’s always turning up in different attitudes and positions, even though no one ever seems to move it.

The characters are really well developed, which makes the story cohere well. For example, Darcy had convinced Dani to set up her camera so it took pictures every few minutes. This could seem incredibly contrived, except that it’s perfectly in character for occult-obsessed Darcy. Ted’s a jerk, but a somewhat indulgent jerk, who suffers his wife and sister-in-law’s interest in the supernatural while being “a man of science”. Yana, Ted’s new squeeze, is bitchy and shallow, but not to where you want to see her die for it (probably).

It’s one of those movies where you think the actors must be playing to type, they’re so natural at it. But then you realize Carolyn Bracken plays both the sweet, domestic Darcy and the acerbic, fierce Dani. (I mean, they’re twins in the movie, but I had to keep reminding myself it was the same actress.)

There’s actual blocking in this film, which is something I harp on a lot. But because today’s filmmakers are allergic to setting the camera down, actual good shots in movies are hard to find. This movie has none of that. It lets the camera do a lot of the storytelling using lighting and color and framing and blocking—moviemaking techniques, in other words—to create suspense.

And there is actual suspense in the film. For those who don’t know, “suspense” is almost like “justice”. Any modifier added to “justice” means “not”. (“Social justice”, e.g.) Well, any modifier to suspense means “Nothing happens but we can’t just say boring.” Last year’s Anatomy of a Fall, for example, was often described as a “suspense drama”. But in order for there to be suspense, at some point something has to happen. You can’t create suspense without a credible threat of action (sorry, Skinamarink!).

This movie has half-a-dozen genuinely suspenseful scenes, from the opening “will she, won’t she” open the door to “you’re not really going to stick your fingers in the wood golem’s mouth, are ya?” And it works because sometimes the dreaded thing happens and sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes a third, unexpected thing happens.

There’s comedy! I mean, very dark Irish humor, and comedy-of-manners stuff, as Darcy exploits her blindness to try to get to the bottom of things, but it works without breaking the atmosphere.

And there are jump scares that actually work! We’ve noticed lately a lot of filmmakers moving away from the jump scare, which is good because the Blumhouse formula has made them more irritating than anything. But Oddity earns its scares. It tells you, “Yeah, you’re gonna get scared. This is going to happen. You know it, we know it, and you’re gonna jump out of your seat anyway.” And jump scares are just one of many horror techniques it employs.

A lot of movies we see get worse the more you think about them (last time’s Longlegs, or Avengers: Infinity War), but this one we walked out of the theater the four blocks (the closest parking) to our car liking it more and more as we went. There’s nothing wrong with a movie that entertains you for its runtime, but it’s nice not to feel cheap afterwards.

Oddity has made only about $1.1 million, which isn’t great for a movie that opened in nearly 800 theaters. (Hundreds of Beavers was still playing at the Music Hall, and its B.O. has crept up to $500K, and it’s never been in more than 24 theaters.) Hopefully it will catch on in the home theater market when it becomes available on August 20th.

 

The paucity of big summer flicks aside, or perhaps due to said paucity, it’s been a pretty good moviegoing summer. Sure, Inside Out 2, Bad Boys 4 and Twister 2 aren’t for everybody (me, for example), there has been enough room in the cracks for more interesting fare and the quality has been strong. It doesn’t hurt that Seven Samurai is out for its 70th anniversary and, as someone who has trouble getting into Kurosawa, is conventionally entertaining (as well as iconic, influential and derivative all at once) for the entirety of its 3 1/2 hour length (plus intermission).

It also doesn’t hurt to live in a city where there are a couple dozen throwbacks every week. For example, I took the Barbarienne (who has a strong interest in art, puppetry and stop-motion animation) to see a Quay Brothers retrospective at the Philosophical Research Society. The executive summary of the Quay Brothers: Mad God for people who find Mad God too cohesive and coherent. It was fun, but not something I’d generally recommend.

And if that’s not the watchword for post-lockdown movies, I don’t know what is. We saw four new movies released in the past three weeks, described heretoforeafter in the order we saw them and, coincidentally, almost in the order of box office success.

Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favorite, Poor Things) strikes again, with this anthology of three stories, clocking in at about 2 1/2 hours. The typical anthology is one good story that isn’t long enough to be a feature, so it’s padded out with jokey garbage. This isn’t that, at least. The three stories are thematically very tight, they feature the same cast in vastly different roles (good acting, to say the least) and they highlight an issue with YL’s style of storytelling: If everybody’s acting like a weirdo, it’s hard to know what it is we’re supposed to care about.

The first story has Jesse Plemons as an office worker whose life is dictated by his boss, Willem Dafoe. And when I say dictated, I mean not only his working hours, but his diet, his drinking habits, his reading list and the time and form which has sex with his wife. When his boss instructs him to smash into another car at high speed, in a way that might cause the death of the person driving (or indeed his own death), our protagonist takes a strong stance—only to discover his life has no meaning without his boss. He then takes drastic steps to try to get back in his boss’s good graces.

The second story has Plemons as a cop whose wife has gone missing after an expedition on the high seas. (Plemons is so different in this role, I kept looking at him and thinking “What’s Matt Damon done to his face?” before realizing it wasn’t, in fact, Matt Damon.) Where the first story is immediately and repeatedly alienating, so we’re never in danger of caring too terribly much what happens, this one plays on the tropes of the loving policeman/husband mourning for his lost wife, even if in a comically lugubrious way.

His friends, another couple, come over to comfort him and he asks if they can “watch the video” as consolation and one knows immediately what’s on the video from their reactions. Their reactions (chagrin) are the expected ones, but the viewer has to try to figure out why Plemons’ would ask to watch that video at that time. OK, we can write it off to grief, but this creates an interesting stress when the long-lost wife (Emma Stone) turns up, and he becomes increasingly convinced that she’s not actually his wife.

The final story has Emma Stone as a member of a cult who’s trying to locate a “chosen one” who can heal and even bring the dead back to life. She and her partner (Plemons, again) venture into the corrupt, unclean world to seek this person out, only to return periodically to the cult’s compound and its cleansing waters. Cult members are tested for purity and forced to sauna till they faint if found to be impure (then to be banished if they are). Emma hits a snag when she is found to be corrupt and, while exiled, discovers the chosen one (Margaret Qualley, Drive-Away Dolls).

The Boy and I liked this film. (My summary: “A lot of Yorgosity, not enough Lanthimos.”) But to say that it’s “hard to recommend” is to undersell exactly how weird and alienating these stories are. They all feature weird sex (much like Poor Things and The Lobster, Lanthimos is positively daring you to find anything erotic about the proceedings) and the character’s motivations, while comprehensible are not usually relatable.

If we take the first story, e.g., our protagonist’s desire to strike out on his own is admirable, but Lanthimos tells us, well, no, he doesn’t really even exist without his boss’s say so. This is probably one of the most degenerate statements about existence that could be made. And if we look at the second story, our protagonist seems to be going insane and manifesting higher and higher degrees of cruelty—only to be proven correct. (The best part of this story and the whole movie is the end credits, which features an island of dogs, driving cars and living their best doggy lives. This is, in fact, relevant to the story.)

And in the final story, Emma Stone’s character is not particularly admirable. She’s abandoned her family. She has no moral or ethical qualms about harming others to reach her goals. And in the end her character flaws lead to her tragic failure. Yay?

So, again, we enjoyed it, but there aren’t a lot of weirdos like us, and that’s probably a good thing.

That said, it did better than than:

Kill

My first genuinely Hindu movie, which won me over by being not 3 hours long but a spritely 105 minutes, has been loudly proclaimed as The Most Violent Indian Movie Ever Made!

It’s Hindu John Wick or Die Hard on a Train 2 (if Under Siege 2 is Die Hard on a Train 1). Special Forces dude Amrit rushes to snatch his true-love’s hand from an arranged marriage (arranged by her very powerful Train Mogul Dad) only to end up on a train with them which is beset by bandits. Much like the Fast and Furious movies, this is a story about family. In this case a family of bandits.

As the good guys fight the bad guys up and down the train with Amrit climbing up and down and around the cars, supporting characters pitch in, or do heel turns, or get kidnapped and used as pawns. If there’s any real flaw with this movie, in fact, it’s that it hits the same tropes too many times. (She’s been captured…again?! Amrit thinks about his love’s fate and gets superpowers…again!) But I’m not gonna quibble. It’s an action movie that really delivers on the action, and gives you enough character to hang your hat on.

It humanized the bandits without making them sympathetic, which is a hallmark of good action films, too.

Every other sentence spoken in Hindi was actually heavily accented English. No idea what was going on there. Subtitled but sort of “so what” subtitles. It’s not like you can’t figure out what’s going on from the action.

Bonus points for every middle-aged chubby Indian dude dressing like every IT middle manager I’ve ever met.

MaXXXine

The thing about Ti West is, he makes period pieces. And they’re good just as that. His breakthrough film, The House of the Devil really captures the babysitter-in-peril era of the late ’70s, for example. And X, the first movie in the Maxine trilogy, captures the early gonzo porn/horror of those same years. Pearl, the second movie in the trilogy, suffers very slightly (for me) from being too spread out. It takes place in the silent era but is shot (boldly) in a style mimicking Technicolor. So while it’s more a dark “Wizard of Oz” instead of “Caligari”, it’s still effective and different. (I literally cannot remember another horror movie made in recent times that was shot in full, vibrant color with naturally beautiful, sunny days.)

The final movie in the trilogy is MaXXXine, which features our eponymous heroine in 1985, a literal porn star trying to break into mainstream cinema. By which we mean a trashy horror film called The Puritan 2. (That title itself is interesting: There was, of course, no such franchise in the ’80s, but there is a silent era Satanic horror called “Puritan’s Passions” with a similar plot!) As Maxine’s star rises, Los Angeles is being terrorized by The Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez) and all her friends are dropping dead from a copycat. Meanwhile her past is catching up with her as someone who knows the events of X is trying to lure her to her doom.

There’s absolutely zero mystery about who the someone is, though. You don’t even have to have seen the previous films to be able to figure out the villain.

That said, it’s a solid suspense film, not really a horror, though there are some gruesome kills and a particularly graphic scene of Maxine defending herself from a would-be rapist. It evokes, more than anything, the 1983 “classic” Angel (“Honor student by day! Hooker by night!”) with a heaping side of Body Double, without really being derivative of either. I’m not saying West nails Hollywood in 1983, but I am saying Maxine’s apartment looked exactly like the one I lived in from that era.

I will temper this by saying it looks more like a movie from the ’80s than the actual Hollywood of the ’80s, but they manage to avoid the obvious traps, like using the exact same songs everyone else does. For example, instead of “Relax”, they use “Welcome To The Pleasure Dome”, so you’re thinking, “Hey, that’s Frankie Goes To Hollywood but not the one song of theirs I know.”

Kevin Bacon plays a disreputable PI and Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monoghan play LAPD detectives, but this is the Mia Goth show, once again, and she doesn’t disappoint.

A solid ending to the series, though Maxine could be Mia Goth’s Rocky. She could follow that character throughout her life. Ending where the movie does, it’s a kind of happy ending, which almost feels odd.

Longlegs

The Red Letter Media boys did a bit on this and The Arcadian, the other Nicolas Cage horror movie out this year (so far). I found The former movie disappointing, particularly in what I saw (and what I almost always see) as a failure to think the implications of your world through. Longlegs sorta does that, too, but the way it elides over certain nonsensical details, you might just miss them.

As far as the RLM boys were concerned, Longlegs suffered from over-hype, like Blair Witch Project, with people saying this is the scariest movie they’d ever seen, and such nonsense as that.

The plot, such as it is, involves a potential serial killer who kills the families of girls born on the fourteenth of the month. Our hero, a socially awkward young FBI agent (Maika Monroe, It Follows) is on the case with her older partner (Blair Underwood! Remember him?!) and putting together the pieces from psychic flashes.

Now, she is psychic. They test her and she guesses the right number between 0 and 100, 50% of the time over a couple dozen trials. They say “half-psychic” but those odds are more than enough to break the bank at Vegas. The funny thing about this psychic-ness is that, apart from the opening scene, it really doesn’t matter. But it does set up a supernatural element.

And this movie is very much a supernatural movie, despite how strongly it evokes Silence of the Lambs, what with all the Satanic imagery and Nicolas Cage running around pretending to be a woman, sort of, at the center of all these murders. The catch is that he never actually seems to go into the houses where the families are killed. The families all seem to kill themselves For Some Reason.

You know, as I go over the movie in my head to try to relate it, I realize how little sense any of it makes. And how many disparate ideas it throws out that don’t actually go anywhere.

Still, it’s a creepy little move, atmospherically evocative, with some nice scares. Nothing in the way of jump scares. The whole thing is just a little off. But, yeah, sitting back and thinking about it for even a moment raises all kinds of questions that don’t have any good answers on screen.

Just goes to show you…something.

This is the only one of the four films mentioned to crack the top 40. But they all delivered on what they promised: It’s just a matter of whether or not anyone wants what they promised.

As I said to The Boy this very day, “My lack of devotion to franchises has saved me a lot of grief over the years.” I never cared about Wars or Treks or Runners or Dunes or superheroes. (I could’ve been roped into a DC Cinematic Universe, but whatever Zach Snyder is putting down is not interesting to me and is so far removed from the characters I grew up with, it acts as anti-nostalgia.) Now, what about Mad Max: Was I fan?

I’m gonna say no, not in the current sense of the word. I might have used the word 40 years ago, were I not nearly 29, but here’s what it would mean: “If a new Mad Max movie comes out, I’ll go see it. If one is on TV at the moment, I might watch it.” (The latter statement hasn’t been relevant since I cut the cord over a decade ago.)

I love movies, but my interest in anything serial is likely to wane quickly. One bad movie is enough to end it. It’s why I don’t watch TV. (My children are savages in this regard. Ten minutes into The Hobbit and they were whispering, “We’re not seeing the sequels.”) There’s just not ever, in my opinion, a way to sustain the talent, the budgets and the very mechanics of the universe itself. (The Toy Story series is a miracle in this regard, and I stopped watching those with #3.)

So, I don’t really care about The Mad Max Universe, and I went into Furiosa thinking, “Well, George Miller is a good director and I’ve liked all the movies so far, so let’s see this one.” The kids, who have only seen Fury Road were reluctant. The Flower, who has more important things on her mind these days, opted out completely. And I had to encourage the Boy mightily.

The Verdict? Among the five movies, I would rank it at the bottom, tied with the original Mad Max, even though it’s about as far from that movie as you could get.

Unfortunately, the first thing we have to look at is the politics of things. I loathe this, but it’s impossible for me to evaluate the movie without context. (This is not the first time for me: I will often just skip a movie if the buzz is too hot, and it needn’t be for political reasons, either.) Miller’s not a hack and Furiosa is no “girl boss”. That said, the opening sequence with the women in The Green Place, when Furiosa is kidnapped, goes too far.

We see Furiosa’s mother rescue her, and she’s tough and resourceful, as is Furiosa (who is, like, nine years old). I liked this, I liked this, I liked this, and then Furiosa’s mother is set on fire and she doesn’t even react. I get what Miller was going for here: She waits until she’s out of danger, then she jumps off the motorcycle and puts out the fire, but it just went a wee bit beyond plausibility. Was it some kind of messaging about tough women? I don’t know, but we both felt it was too much, too superhuman.

Another thing that was probably not messaging, but could sort of come across that way, is the casting of Anya Taylor-Joy. Make no mistake the actress is up for the part and fully capable of acting. But her slight build made the final scenes where she confronts her kidnapper and arch-nemesis (played by Chris Hemsworth) rather less impactful, in multiple senses of the world.

And as long as we’re talking negative things, one of the great things about the previous film was its skillful integration of CGI into predominately practical set pieces. The initial scenes of this film felt so fake, they pulled me right out. And a later scene taking place in a construction area were so preposterous as to do the same thing.

Why does audacity work so well for Fury Road and not for Furiosa? Beats me. There’s a line (we all draw in different places), and this stepped outside the that line. Look at it like Indy 1 versus Indy 2: I hated Indy 1, because I had the line drawn in one place, and then Indy straps himself to a submarine. Indy 2, I realized “okay, this is supposed to be dumb” so the raft didn’t really bother me, and to this day I still don’t get why people prefer one movie over the other.

Fury Road works hard to win us over, I think, whereas Furiosa feels like it’s taking that for granted a little.

Now, Furiosa works well in a lot of places. It is very much “Thunderdome” to Fury Road‘s “Road Warrior”. (The Boy just watched MM:BT and informs me it’s cheesy and tonally weird. So.) It’s world-buildy and saga-esque. Actually, one other negative is that it’s rather too epic, as we see young Furiosa grow from Alyla Brown to Anya Taylor-Joy, and this is a revenge story that lacks the focus of, say, the original Mad Max.

The overarching world event involves Dr. Dementus (Hemsworth), a warlord whose goal is to take over the post-apocalyptic world of The Gas Town, The Bullet Farm and The Citadel. He’s not much of a warlord, but he’s cunning and ruthless enough to be able to take over Gas Town with a few men. He runs it into the ground because, hey, warlord, not governor. His solution is to capture The Bullet Farm, and to mismanage that until the only thing left for him is to capture The Citadel. We liked this a lot: Dementus feels like a real-world current day politician who knows how to do one thing (get elected or, in this case, capture a city).

His destiny meets its fate, as it were, when a couple of lower-than-lowlifes capture Furiosa, and he takes her on as a surrogate daughter. Then he sells her to Immortan Joe in the Citadel. She escapes her fate as a breeder to join a work crew in The Citadel. This part, the main plot, while having many good aspects, is a little weak.

The Boy and I agreed that the movie didn’t really engage us very well. We found ourselves talking about all the cool little details, the backstory, the world, and really enjoying that aspect of it. But we always ended up tripping over things we didn’t like, and those things were more important to the story.

Like, it’s very cool that young Furiosa was so resourceful, but she ended up feeling not human. The idea behind the construction-site action scene was cool, but the CGI made it a little silly. Furiosa has a Mad-Max-like love interest, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burk, Only God Forgives), which is where we first get to see some humanity, but he dies really fast.

The whole revenge plot, for that matter, is more interesting than engaging. That is, the first movie (which is just Australian Death Wish, remember) shows the crime and Max’s vengeance all compressed within a pretty short length of elapsed time. If there are questions about how this changes Max, or what becomes of him afterwards, they are not significant in terms of screen time. Well, by the fifth movie, we have a pretty good denouement where Furiosa confronts Dementus, who has his own tragic backstory (unless he’s lying) which does not buy him any mercy.

So, there’s an interesting statement about revenge here, but if we examine it, we then have to examine why we watched a 150m movie where the protagonist spends her whole life in pursuit of revenge. In a savage, post-apocalyptic world, how do we even begin to judge such a thing? Are we having fun or are we just blowing 1/4 billion dollars of other people’s money?

Miller probably won’t make another Max movie. If he did, we’d still go see it. But I don’t care (or much trust) what the ratings’ sites said. A whole lot of the Fury Road magic is missing, and we are not given replacements.

RECENTLY WATCHED

La Chimera: If I told you that it was really obvious a woman directed this, would that be sexist? This flick, about genuine archaeological raiders (Italian lowlifes pillaging ancient sites) is not bad, but it is slow and ennui-ridden. Smothered in awards.

Boy Kills World: This is the one with H. John Benjamin serving as the internal voice of a young man trains his whole life to get revenge on an evil queen who murdered his family. Our bar was low going in, but the movie cleared it handily with exuberant over-the-top action-gore. Goofy fun.

The Fall Guy: And speaking of goofy fun, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blount provide the charm that keeps this silly stunt-fest afloat. Enjoyable enough with some amusing meta-humor. But I ask myself “Would I spend $150M on this?” and the answer is “No, I would not.”

The Roundup 4: Punishment: We call these Ma-Dong Seok movies “Police Brutality: The Movie” because they’re made with that old-school value that the cops are the good guys, they know who the bad guys are, and they’re only hamstrung by civil rights laws. This one goes considerably lighter than the last, and as a result is way more fun. Much punching ensues.

Following: A peeping real estate agent finds himself in the soup when the influencer he’s snooping on is violently murdered. Now, he’s a Korean peeper, which means he’s not spying on people having sex—there is no sex or nudity in this movie—but he follows them around, gets into their apartments and looks through their things, and steals something meaningless for his trophy room. A pretty good thriller which actually pretty poses the question “What the hell is social media really about?”

Run Lola Run: Franka Potente runs through the streets of Berlin, turning back time in this now classic indie/experimental film. Enough of the tropes here were successful that it doesn’t really seem experimental any more. And the characters, while lowlifes, have more depth than is generally found in a Hollywood Oscar drama.

In A Violent Nature: Ever wonder how Jason Voorhees feels? No, because you’re selfish. Cute, but drawn out, film which explores the teen-camper-slasher genre from the perspective of the beleaguered slasher. Probably too low-key if you’re not steeped in the genre.

Robot Dreams: Whimsical, charming “silent” film (no dialogue) about a lonely dog in New York City (ca 1985) who buys himself a robot pal only to “lose” him when he rusts at the beach. Nominated for best animated feature Oscar.

X: The Boy and I caught the re-release of this film, the first in Ti West’s trilogy (X, Pearl, MaXXXine) which was put back in theaters as advertising for the upcoming final entry. Ti West has a style: His movies tend to develop character and plot, only to destroy all that in a flurry of horror and violence. This entry, about a crew of Southerners determined to make their mark in the burgeoning video porn industry, has some of the best developed characters I’ve seen in recent movies. The over-confident producer, the cameraman who defends his “art” to his reluctant girlfriend—only to convince her all too well—and the hyper-creepy Pearl and Howard, old folks trapped in a ’20s farmhouse. Seldom do we see a single horror movie with a real theme, much less a trilogy. (The theme here is vanity, and it’s enhanced by Mia Goth being both the porn star and the old lady.)

The Lovers: Speaking of ennui, Louis Malle’s early film about a bored housewife was quite controversial back in the day. But sort of like Belle De Jure, in these latter days when the sex is relatively tame, does the movie have much else going for it? It’s fine, but rather trivial.

Treasure: The Barbarienne is a Stephen Fry fan so we went to see this Holocaust-themed movie (sub-genres, “children of survivors”, “Poland”). Lena Dunham is his fat, dull-witted daughter—so dull-witted she doesn’t get why he might not want to do a tour of Poland in trains—determined to discover where her parents came from, and wrapped up in self-absorption because her parents chose not to talk a lot about their time in Auscwhitz. She pulls it off, not being completely obnoxious all the time and showing growth. Fry is terrific of course, but I’m always left wondering why the people who were in the camps seem like way better people than their children (and grandchildren!) who weren’t!

Thelma: Delightful romp with 93-year-old June Squibb playing 93-year-old Thelma, who loses ten grand to telephone scams and goes on a quest to get the money back! Final role of the great Richard Roundtree. Skillfully treads the line between “fun” and “farce”, mapping a lot of senior citizen tropes to action movies—especially the Mission Impossible movie series.

A Hard Day’s Night: Comedies don’t typically hold up well, but this 60-year-old debut of the Beatles mostly does. They Fab Four come off as kind of mean jerks, which is a combination of going for a Marx Brothers feel and the Beatles actually being mean jerks. Music’s okay, too, but the movie leans too heavily on it.

The most preposterous element of the ’70s-based recent horror flick Late Night With The Devil is the notion that anyone—even the Devil himself—could compete with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.

What’s commendable about it is that it’s interesting enough to hold your attention to where the third act, which is probably going to divide people, isn’t such a big deal. (That’s good movie making!)

The story is about Jack Delroy, a host who has a late night talk show that manages briefly to challenge Carson’s numbers, only to crash and descend into a more controversial Wally George/Morton Downey style. Delroy and his sleazy manager Leo plans a last ditch spooky spectacular on Halloween to try to get that coveted top spot before being canceled by their corporate owners. The centerpiece of this spectacular? A girl possessed by the gnostic deity Abraxas, and her guardian, a psychologist with a book to sell.

Verisimilitude, no?

It’s ostensibly a “found footage” movie but it takes too many liberties to sell that, at least to anyone with knowledge of the ’70s. The Red Letter Media boys faulted it to some degree for that, but for normal humans, the departures are a good thing. The level of detail is way better than it would be “realistically”, there’s a lot more freedom with the cameras, and “backstage footage” allows for filling in the story details.

There’s also a hypnosis gag which is kind of clever: We see concrete evidence of paranormal phenomenon, and the skeptic, a James Randi-surrogate, performs a trick with similar effects with mass hypnosis. The implication there is that we, the viewing audience, were also hypnotized, and didn’t see what we thought we saw.

You could carry that hypnosis idea , I suppose, to paper in all the parts that couldn’t possibly be “found footage”, though the denouement is clearly from Jack Delroy’s perspective. The interesting thing about this is that the story is perfectly well set out in the first three acts, and David Dastmalchian (Suicide Squad, Oppenheimer, Dune, Weird, etc.) does such a fine job that, personally, I didn’t find it necessary.

I didn’t object. I did feel the script had dropped enough clues that things didn’t need to be spelled out. I also didn’t object to the splashy SFX final sequence. It was more trippy than spooky or scary, but the movie has largely succeeded by this point.

In a world awash in ’80s nostalgia, the ’70s callbacks were refreshing. The color scheme, clothing, the talk show format and guests. The RLM boys objected to the theatricality of Ian Bliss’ Haig Carmichael, the skeptic who insults and hypnotizes everyone, but then immediately concede that this sort of behavior was fairly common on ’70s TV talk shows. (Hello, Charles Nelson Reilly!) I thought Bliss nailed it, being as smarmy and unlikable as “professional skeptics” tend to be.

Actually, from Laura Gordon as the parapscyhologist to Fayssal Bazzi as the fake/real psychic and Ingrid Torelli as the possessed girl, everyone is so good, you might wonder why you haven’t seen them before.

They’re Australian. That’s why. The movie was filmed in Australia, and I think entirely cast with Australians except Dastmalchian. (Rhys Auteri, the pitch-perfect sycophantic sidekick, may not be. He hasn’t been in enough things for me to tell.)

Anyway, I didn’t realize it until just now, so excellent job on the accents. (Fayssal Bazzi has a “latin” accent, which seems to turn into a very straightforward American one under stress, which I thought was a nice touch, because it implies he’s a fraud generally, but genuine in that moment.) This helps the whole authenticity of the movie, actually, with everyone sort of familiar but not actually recognizable.

The key, though, is that the movie is spooky and dread-inducing and compelling long before you get to any serious special effects. It could literally be an artifact of the ’70s, and you would keep watching just to see if Haig was going to ever admit to anything supernatural, or if Delroy was going to crack or be exposed.

And that’s without considering the amusing little references to Billy Carter, Nielsen ratings, sweeps, Amityville, the “Brady Bunch” couture, or the “technical difficulty” cards. (The last caused some kerfuffle because some or all were AI generated.) The Pines or The Woods…whatever that secret club in California is called plays a part. (To quote Nixon: “It’s pretty faggy.”) A cult clearly modeled after Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, with a dash of Jonestown and Waco thrown in, provides Lilly (Torelli) the possessed girl who looks directly at you, yes, you!

A nice, subtle touch I haven’t seen anyone mention: When the band plays Delroy in, the bass line is very, very evocative of “Tubular Bells”. Not only does this recall the Satanic movies of the ’70s (Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist), it feels like it could have comfortably been made in the ’70s.

Ingrid Torelli, as they have her made up, could stand alongside Linda Blair or Susan Swift (Audrey Rose) without looking out of place.

This movie has a lot of enjoyable references to the ’70s without those references being the only reason for it to exist.

Genuinely engaging, in other words. The Boy said “Somebody cared about this.” That’s sort of our criterion these days: Did the people involved in making it care about it? They did, and it shows.

Currently streaming on Shudder.

How often do we see a movie that is exactly what it says on the tin? Since mainstream movies aren’t all named “Soulless Crap”, those are out. But it’s long been a practice in the indies to name your movie something you can’t really live up to. The odds of exaggeration go up exponentially when there’s a number in the title. Two Thousand Maniacs? More like two dozen maniacs. A Million Ways To Die In The West? Fifteen, tops! (It affects music, too! “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover” has about four or five ways, depending on how you count. Shrinkflation was really bad in the ’70s.)

Beaver count in Hundreds of Beavers? Literally hundreds. You lose track, there are so many. But the movie, knowing how often the audience has been betrayed, toys with us at first, giving us a couple of beavers here and there along with a lot of raccoons, bears, wolves, and other furry, skinnable critters, before the third act reveal.

But let us begin at the beginning.

Ryan Brickson Cole Tews plays Jean Kayak, a furrier in the frontier days of the country, and in the movie’s setup, we see that he is a great grower of apples—and a great purveyor of applejack, to which he finds himself in thrall. His drunkenness causes him to lose his factory and apple groves, to say nothing of his reputation, and he must find another way to survive in the perpetual winter of Wisconsin (or possibly Michigan).

He attempts to trap animals for food and fails miserably, but ultimately ends up teaming up with The Master Fur Trapper, who teaches him all the tricks. When The Master meets an untimely demise, he strikes out on his own, trading with The Merchant, who runs his shop exactly like one you might find in a computer role-playing game. A knife is one penny, a rope is two pennies, a pipe is three beavers, and so on.

In this way, our hero “levels up” and captures more and more pelts of various sorts.

But what he really wants is The Merchant’s daughter, and The Merchant demands hundreds of beavers in order to purchase an engagement ring.

But while Jean Kayak has been struggling to get ahead in the wolf-eat-dog world of fur trapping, the beavers have been making their own, possibly sinister, plans. (Even in retrospect, I’m not sure the industrious beavers were exactly villainous. It’s more a collision of world views.)

Will Jean Kayak survive the frontier? Will he get the girl? Will he be able to survive hundreds of beavers?

If the little clues didn’t tip you off Hundreds of Beavers (which is fun to say and type) is a comedy, brought to you by the masterminds that made Lake Michigan Monster. Without a lot of money, and with a lot of resourcefulness and creativity, Tews and director/co-writer Mike Cheslik have created a new, old kind of comedy.

Filmed in black-and-white (in part to hide the low-budget) and “silent” (in terms of having almost no dialogue), HoB uses the tropes and gag mechanics of the silent era and Looney Toons, then blends them with video game tropes, and non-stop, wall-to-wall gag which hit way more often than not.

I mean, by the time you’re registering that a joke didn’t quite hit, there have been two others that did. And, almost shockingly—because who remembers how to do comedy these days?—a lot of times, the joke that only got a little smile out of you comes back later in different forms, funnier each time it comes back.

Like The General or The Gold Rush (which it cannot help but evoke), or a Road Runner cartoon, the movie trains you in its comedic language. For example, there’s a gag involving a wolf whistle, which inexplicably summons an enraged woodpecker. OK, kind of cute in context, but not hilarious. As the movie goes on, Jean Kayak finds himself repeatedly tormented by said woodpecker, but ultimately finds a way to exploit this mechanism to his advantage.

It’s so ingrained that by the end of the movie, you’re just laughing at the whistle itself. A month later when seeing a different film, I poked my head into the theater showing HoB, heard the whistle, and laughed without even seeing what was on screen. (And the theater was about 2/3rds full.)

My only complaint, if I had to make one, was that it was slightly too long, in particular a very video-game-y segment in the third act.

But this is a quibble. I haven’t seen a new movie this funny in years and I don’t expect to see another until these guys do a follow-up.

Made on a budget of $200,000—apparently the various costumes cost $10K each!—it has broken $300K at the box office, playing week-after-week—three months as of today, in fact—playing in about a dozen theaters nationwide. It’s the sort of film you drag your friends to.

Tews is perfect, as he was in Lake Michigan Monster, and Wes Tanks (as The Master Fur Trapper) and Doug Mancheski (as The Trader) are great in their roles. A special shout-out to Olivia Graves as Kayak’s love interest, who enjoys tormenting her suitor. This is a tricky role just because we’re rooting for Tews and she’s making his life hard, but in a charmingly ridiculous way.

Another point of interest is Luis Rico, who plays The Indian Fur Trapper, and whose part is laden with classic Amerind movie tropes. I’m not foolish enough to believe we’ve gotten past our cultural madness, but it was sure nice to see a bunch of “injun jokes” that people were laughing at, without a single dudgeon being raised on high.

If you’re not fortunate enough to be living near one of the dozen theaters it’s in, it is available for streaming on Amazon and Apple, and will be available for purchase in a few weeks.

This is also as close to a “general recommendation” movie as I get these days. You almost have to be anti-comedy to not be able to appreciate this. Heck, you could be anti-comedy and just appreciate the craftsmanship here. The writing—the sheer effort that must have gone into packing in hundreds of gags—is admirable just as a work of art.

 

This movie just lends itself to movie poster memes.

Drive, don’t walk, away from Drive-Away Dolls. Ha!

That’s my best Jay Sherman impression, right there. Unfortunately, it also reflets my feelings about the freshman effort from newly brotherless Ethan Coen. The brothers split for no clear reason, and Joel’s first solo project was the golf-clapped The Tragedy of MacBeth, which I didn’t see, but which featured Joel’s wife, the very talented if unlikely star Frances McDormand.

Turns out Ethan wanted to partner with his wife, editor Tricia Cooke, to make movies and she co-wrote the script for the film, which actually displays its title as “Henry James’ Drive-Away Dykes”. (Henry James is a theme of this film, but more on that in a moment.)

We got a Yoko situation goin’ on, is what I’m sayin’. Or maybe even a Linda.

In the beginning, I found myself apologizing for the movie while I was watching it. It looks like a Coen-brothers knock-off. “I recognize that shot from Blood Simple. Oh, and there’s one from Raising Arizona.” And the film has a road trip with a couple of heavies, reminiscent of Fargo. There’s also a sudden violent tonal shift a la Burn After Reading, not to mention a dildo-centric plot-point (also in Burn).

But, I rationalized, this is to be expected. It’s going to be sort of like some other Coen movies, minus Joel’s contributions.

After the first dozen of my “cheap Coen knock-off” defenses, I gave up. Because not only does this feel like a poorly considered rip-off of their earlier work, it’s the most woke movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Critics, especially in the ’90s, called the Coens’ “cold”. However, it wasn’t that they were cold but that they wrote about a universe which was indifferent to man’s passions, to his drama, to his ambitions—and his morality. Their movies always had something in common with great horror movies: Anyone could die at any moment (or substitute “be thwarted” for die when talking about a comedy).

But in a woke movie, women can’t ever be imperiled, and lesbians might as well be from Krypton. You know there’s no chance they’ll die, nor are they ever convincingly in danger. (They’re only in danger once, at the climax of the film, but that’s a quick scene devoid of tension.)

So, it’s maybe 30% as clever as a Coen movie, with 0% of the chance for surprise.

The premise is this: A promiscuous lesbian (Margaret Qualley, Poor Things) is thrown out of her former lover’s (Beanie Feldstein, Lady Bird) apartment, and proposes a “drive-away” road trip with a more serious “platonic” friend (Geraldine Viswanathan) and, uh oh, by mistake they get a car that contains something in the trunk that some bad people want. (The actresses do a fine job but their characters are rather unpleasant, a persistent theme.)

So they drive the car to their destination, discovering the contents of trunk along the way, using these contents to blackmail the villain and even kill him with the help of the former lover.

Perils along the way? Uh, well, they’re driving from the northeast to Tallahassee, so they have to drive through the Deep South. That’s an obstacle, right? The police can just sense lesbians within their jurisdiction and hunt them for sport! (It’s the repressive dark ages of 1998!)

Let’s see. They’re struggling with their emotions. The more conservative lesbian constantly flashes back to being a little girl and peeping on a beautiful neighbor woman. (The sort of vignette that’s normally considered reprehensible in a hetero context, but hey: lesbians! There’s a brief peeping scene in A Serious Man, and it plays havoc with the hero’s life.)

There’s an aggressive soccer team (who are all lesbians, of course) that threatens to make out with them.

A cop picks up the conservative lesbian for vagrancy. The other one (the manic-pixie-dream lesbian?) gets her out the next morning. It doesn’t actually slow them up or present any real barrier.

There’s a flat tire which reveals the MacGuffin to the girls. The implication is that they don’t know how to change a tire, but it’s immediately a non-problem when they discover the MacGuffin. There’s no tension in the first half of the movie because they don’t know about the MacGuffin and are never in proximity to the guys who do, and no tension after because they casually (and amorally) use it as leverage against the villains.

The two heavies? Well, the tougher of the two is easily dispatched when they go to former lover’s house. The “smarter” one is beclowned by the soccer team. They never seem like a threat. They don’t cross paths much with the girls. (Contrast with Fargo, where the clownish hitmen ae also constantly on the edge of violence.)

There’s a lot of lesbian sex. In a Coen brothers movie (which this is not), sex is always played for laughs. No exceptions. Here, it’s occasionally comic, occasionally serious, rather graphic and more respectful than anything.

The big struggle is internal. What is it? I don’t know. The serious lesbian is struggling to get through Henry James’ The Europeans. Why? I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine caring less about something.

I mean, if you love lesbians, maybe this is the movie for you? But Rolling Stone didn’t like it, and they’re all lesbians over there, especially the guys. I saw one review that claimed it was a good genre film, but I don’t know what genre that would be. It’s not a chase movie or a road movie. It’s not really a romantic comedy or a caper.

The worst aspect of this—actually, there are so many bad aspects of this it’s hard to pick a worst one—are the moments of near-Coen-ness.

There are “interstitials” of a sort that are extremely evocative of The Dude’s psychedelic trips, for example. But these work in The Big Lebowski both as a character element (the dude has “the occasional acid flashback”) and as a structural element (because the noir Lebowski references frequently had nightmare sequences when the hero was slipped a mickey).

Here, there are similar interstitials—dream sequences—where a hippie girl (Miley Cyrus, not looking totally off-putting for once) seduces a younger man. This does have a story connection, but until you learn it, it’s just irritating. Whose memory/dream/hallucination is this? It’s like someone saw The Big Lebowski and put this in without understanding the character and story aspects that made it work. Ironically, because this dream explains the plot, these elements could have been better integrated than TBL’s Viking bowling women.

But that might have meant spending more time with the white, heterosexual Republican family values guy (Matt Damon). Ew.

The climactic moment of the movie, arguably, is when the villain sits down to negotiate for the MacGuffin and says “Who are you?” and the sassy one replies, “We’re Democrats.”

Hail Caesar, which is the Coen bros roughest work since their studio pictures (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers) and the only one of their movies where the protagonist (Josh Brolin, playing a highly romanticized version of Eddie Mannix) knows what’s going on, has a shining gem of a scene.

Mannix is confronting Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) over his ties to the Communist Party, and Baird is regurgitating this Marxist claptrap, when Mannix starts slapping the crap out of him, telling him he should be grateful to the studio and that he’s going to finish the movie and be grateful, and so on. It’s beautifully in character and absolutely unexpected from a modern (2016) movie.

It’s possible that the “grind” Joel references is increasing wokeness in Ethan. If so, that’s tragic, as the two were always described as one-director-in-two-bodies, and the very “coldness” they had been criticized for in the past was an unswerving dedication to the principle that “Man plans, God laughs”.

Perhaps Ethan and his wife are still struggling to find their voice. I wish them luck, but I will never know if they do. Rumors are that the brothers are getting back together for a project, but this movie was so lazy, I don’t know if even a reunion could get me back.

 

Yorgos Lanthimos. I like the way that sounds: YorGOS LANthiMOS!

Sorry, I can’t see a movie from this bizarre Greek filmmaker without going on about his name. It may be, in fact, that I don’t like his movies per se but I enjoy any excuse to say his name. Yorgos. Lanthimos.

Seriously, though, the deal with YL is this: He’s weird. He makes odd movies that, shall we say, challenge sentimentality.

Personally, I like sentimentality, so if you’re going to dismantle it, you’d better do a good job. And so it was with the very challenging The Lobster and the somewhat more accessible (Academy Award winning) The Favourite. And while I liked The Lobster (a lot!) it was definitely in the realm of Movies-I-Would-Not-Generally-Recommend. (The Favourite, arguably, hides some of its prickliness and may be more watchable.)

Poor Things is also going to be challenging, no doubt. It is a brilliant concept (enough to where I want to read the ’90s book it was based on). Take the Victorian-era tropes of the young virgin, lured to her ruin by a seductive Lothario, struggling to survive by working in a brothel, only to come back home sadder-but-wiser.

OK, now, for the young virgin, substitute Frankenstein’s monster, and you have Poor Things.

The monster in this case is Emma Stone, and if you wish to see said actress naked, simulating sexual responses, this is undoubtedly the film for you.

But, as always, for Mr. Lanthimos, this is not the point. The story goes like this: A mad scientist (a wonderfully Frakensteined-up Willem Dafoe) brings his young student (Ramy Youssef) to babysit his monster (Emma Stone). Quickly, though, we realize she’s not a monster but a baby in a woman’s body.

The movie is increasingly blunt about it’s non-literal nature. The scenery is largely CGI mattes, there are dirigibles everywhere, strange architecture—I kind of feel like Lanthimos, far from a shock-the-squares kinda guy, is someone who just wants to tell weird stories without people getting crazy about the horror they would depict were they real.

It’s odd to say that a movie that has such intense graphic violence and sex has a “light touch” but there’s a purity of intent here: It’s not trying to gross you out or turn you on, it’s trying to get you to consider why you have certain reactions.

This mostly comes out as funny, if blackly so. The lothario (Mark Ruffalo) ends up the basket case as the monster uses him for sexual pleasure without any sentimental attachment. And then, as she learns of the suffering of others, she ruins him even further to give his money to the suffering and the destitute. She has no moral compunctions about sexuality but far from leading her to endless ecstasy, she ends up frustrated and ultimately numb.

But she never grasps the concept of victimhood either, and she becomes increasingly in control of her circumstances, even as she deals with unscrupulous, exploitative people.

There’s a third act twist which is both dark and funny, as the monster discovers her roots. And the mad scientist, who is constantly talking dispassionately about the tortures his own father inflicted on him (why? for science!) ultimately, much like his monster, discovers the value in genuine human sentiment.

For all the sex, violence and depravity, it’s a pretty upbeat story, actually. But you have to get through all the sex, violence and depravity, which could be either a plus or a minus depending on your own tendencies.

Acting is top notch. The music is brilliant. The CGI is fake-as-hell but deliberately so, that sort of not-trying-to-fool-you-just-trying-to-entertain look. The costumes are fabulous, capturing a Victorian feel mixed with the absurdity of Stone running around in what would’ve been called her underwear back then.

Though the ‘gique’s niece argues that it’s much more accessible than The Lobster. Still, the ‘gique counters, it’s not going to win over her grandmother (my mother) who hates The Lobster and considers it the worst movie ever made.

Overall, it’s of a piece with the rest of the director’s work. It’s much more highly rated (8.5 on IMDB) than his next higher work, The Favourite (7.5), but ultimately it cannot escape its own Yorgosity. Lanthimosity? That is, if you don’t like this guy’s style, this probably isn’t going to win you over.

I would be surprised if it breaks the top five. If the Golden Globes are worth anything (and they shouldn’t be) it might break the $30M (domestic) box office, but I’m guessing it peters out in the mid-20s. It’s gotten nowhere near the top five, and I don’t expect it to.

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In the past three weeks, we’ve seen Monster, The Boy and the Heron, upheld the Christmas tradition of seeing Korean movies on the 24th, 12/12 and The Deadly Sea, and in the new year the 3D documentary from Wim Wenders, Anselm, and The Iron Claw. They’re all really good in their respective genres.

12/12 is a political thriller about how fascists took over South Korea in the ’80s (see 1987: When The Day Comes for the end of that story). These sorts of movies are typically super-hard to follow for us, but this one was so well done we were on the edge of our seats the whole time.

The Iron Claw is a moving drama based on a real-life wrestling family which is really terrific but also a tearjerker. Even so, it’s my recommendation of the week for “normie American fare”. It manages to portray values and people foreign to Hollywood in a respectful way. Check it out.

Last time, I noted a bunch of movies I had gone to in the recent weeks, and ran out of room: At casa ‘gique, we’re back to pre-lunacy moviegoing levels, for as long as movie theaters manage to stay open.

The Holdovers. If I say “Paul Giamatti portrays a curmudgeon in his latest role”, the reader could be forgiven for not knowing what year it is precisely. (Is Win-Win the only laid-back Giamatti role?) But in fairness, his curmudgeons are different one to the next: The misanthropy of Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) is not at all the irascibility of Miles Raymond (Sideways) or the all-out comic villainy of Hertz (Shoot ’em Up). So it is with Paul Hunham, the quiet defender of academic integrity at the religious prep academy Barton.

The year is 1970, and Hunham has been assigned the duty of babysitting the “holdovers”, kids whose parents didn’t pick them up for Christmas break. (Hunham was going to stay anyway, but only to read mysteries.) His assignment is punishment for failing a Senator’s son.) One of the students is Angus, a particularly snotty senior who is, nonetheless, the only kid in Hunham’s class who actually gets good grades. One of the fabulously rich parents shows up to take them all on a helicopter to a snow resort—all except Angus, because they can’t get ahold of Angus’ parents.

It’s an entertaining slice-of-life, as we learn the truth about Hunham and Angus, and also get a little inside to the life of the black cook, whose son went to Barton only to go off to Vietnam and get killed. There are a lot of progressive rakes to step on, and this movie largely avoids them. In the end, our three leads get their own character arcs, like real people rather than stock props.

This one gets the rare ‘gique’s mom Seal of Approval.

The Lion In Winter. I saw this triple-Oscar winning film decades ago and absolutely loathed it. However, given Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, and young Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton, I thought I should watch it again on the big screen. I didn’t loathe it quite as much, and there are parts of the movie which are nigh unreadable on an 19″ TV which are actually visible in the theater. It did not, however, jump up in my esteem like ‘saw did.

My original impression still holds up very well: The trivialization, the edgy (for ’69) presentation of royal amorality, the whole imposing of (probably your own) family dysfunction onto historical events—it’s not for me.

And it’s not particularly internally consistent, either. Early on we’re treated to Henry and Eleanor discussing Henry’s promiscuity which is limited neither to a particular sex nor even species, but a big punch line is that Richard is gay, and this is supposedly going to cause some sort of problem. I mean, make up your mind, at least, as to how you’re going to distort history and stick to it.

Ultimately, there’s no one to root for or care about in this thing, and whenever you think you might, it turns around and mocks you for it. But if you want 130 minutes of acting exercises by past and future masters, this is your huckleberry.

This is a Christmas movie. Christmas, 1183 AD.

Dream Scenario. Based on a real hoax (or was it?), this movie tells the story of a man who, for no rhyme or reason, starts to appear in people’s dreams all over the world. An intriguing starting point to a story, this A24 drama/black comedy (not horror, whatever the marketing is) gives us as a main character, a nebbishy mediocrity of a university professor (Nicholas Cage) who latches on to the mob adulation, though he’s done nothing to warrant it.

The movie becomes an allegory for “viral fame”, particularly when the unearned adulation becomes unearned disapprobation, as the professor’s role in dreams becomes more violent. Our protagonist, who even in his dream state does nothing while events unfold around him, finally takes action and fails spectacularly at every turn.

It’s not a happy movie, even at the end when we see that our protagonist very much wants to return to his old life, but can only confront even approaching that idea in his dreams. We found it entertaining but are not surprised to see it didn’t make back its meager $10M budget. (It will probably recoup its costs in other ways, though.) Terrific acting from Cage and Julianne Nicholson in particular.

Not a Christmas movie.

Deep Red (1975). I admit I struggle with Giallo. This movie, widely considered Argento’s best, is emblematic of the transition of giallo from murder-mystery/slasher to more supernatural horror. Some movies you have to turn your brain off, but for Giallo you have to drive a stake through the corpus collosum and bury the two halves in separate consecrated graveyards.

A series of often memorable visuals and wonderfully chauvinistic ’70s Italian dialogue is held together by this story: A psychic is demonstrating her powers when she senses a serial killer which nearly causes her to pass out. Later she realizes who the killer is and announces this on the phone while declaring she’s saving the answer for her book.

She is, of course, promptly murdered, as is the next person who figures out who the killer is and announces that he’s going to be coy about spreading the news. And the next person.  And this is far from the only time I found myself brought up short by illogic.

Well, it’s a deep, symbolic dream or something. I had fun watching it at the Alamo, though. Oh, the score is done by the guy who would go on to form Goblin, which would score a bunch more Argento films. (I don’t dislike the Goblin music per se but I find it very unspooky.)

Argento’s latest movie, Dark Glasses came out this year and was…fine. It made more sense than this, but “making sense” just isn’t a criterion he is graded on.

A Christmas movie!

Godzilla Minus One. Everything you’ve heard about it is true: It’s a Godzilla movie where the humans are front and center, and Godzilla’s effect on their lives is what’s important. The main story is shamelessly manipulative (and the two “twists” are pretty obvious) but it all works anyway. In a world where prequels generally suck, this prequel to a prequel—well, I’ve seen it twice.

To me, the problem with kaiju movies is that the kaiju scenes are interminable. Pointless 20-minute segments of the army futilely shooting fireworks at a guy in a rubber suit, separated by some cheesy expository dialogue. This movie actually leaves you wanting more Godzilla, but not because he’s invisible most of the time. Rather, you really feel the destruction, and you never know how he’s going to strike—tail, claw, bite, breath (fun!)—and it’s all devastating.

Many wonderful touches. The original music, for example, makes an appearance. What I especially enjoyed was the stock characters (the scientist, the captain, the “kid”, etc.) are all fleshed out and given backstories. Not enough to bog things down but enough to where you care what happens.

The SFX are typical of Asian movies: They’re less about trying to fool you and more about trying to please you. Might be the first time a subtitled Japanese film has been #1 at the U.S. box office. (For one weekend, this movie was #2 and The Boy and the Heron was #1.)

Something strange is in the air when the American-made Godzilla movies involve a super-power globalist quasi-governmental organization handling the kaiju and the Japanese one explicitly calls out the governments of the world as being useless and it takes a ragtag bunch of ex-Navy men to solve the problem.

Not a Christmas Movie.

Raging Grace. This is a straight up gothic horror with the only twist being that the maid that comes to work at the creepy old mansion full of family secrets is an illegal Filipina with a child. Really good, with the exception of a completely unneeded harangue by said maid about how much the English need the Filipinas, not the other way around—immediately followed by a scene of “save me, whitey!” when immigration shows up.

It’s a fine movie that makes it points quite well, then spells it out tediously, then tacks on an even less necessary coda. Worth a look anyway.

Not a Christmas movie.

Tokyo Godfathers (2003). This is “The Three Godfathers” but set in modern-day Tokyo. Instead of cowboys, you have three homeless: A middle-aged man with a mysterious past, a tragic trans character, and a runaway. One of four films directed by the late Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Paprika, Millenium Actress), it reminded me how we used to have transexual characters in movies and it was okay.

All of our characters are flawed and all of them exaggerate their own sins in their minds. A very human tale about redemption.

A Christmas movie.

A Christmas Story (1983). Leonard Maltin introduced this 40th anniversary presentation by saying this was a timeless movie and I couldn’t help thinking how wrong that was. It’s so very much of its time, I’m sure a lot of younger folks can’t relate to it. From the macguffin of wanting a bb gun, to crowding around a radio, to waiting six to eight weeks for delivery or getting your mouth washed out with soap—this time is so far gone and was such a small window in eternity, even I have trouble remembering it.

It’s fun, though. It builds nicely to a climax after which it just sort of peters out. It really could’ve used a quick sequel but I guess the studio didn’t really care much about it.

A Christmas movie. The Christmas movie, some might say.

Joe Bob’s Creepy Christmas: The Brain/The Gingerdead Man. A goofy, fun pair of movies that take place around Christmas, so, good enough. A shout-out for the charity auction: Bid on items of dubious historic value or buy some ridiculously overpriced merch with all proceeds going to charity.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

 

We had a lot of fun during the Mandated Lockdown—insofar as one can have fun under such circumstances—coming up with lists of Christmas classics, as can be seen here in Christmas Ornaments from 2020, and then again in 2021 when I tried to watch as many of your suggestions as I could throughout the year to produce Christmas Ornaments 2: The Deckoning, and honestly did not have a chance to go through the ever lengthening list for last year or this one.

Nonetheless, as the season kicked off, I noticed an unmistakable holiday flare to the films that were coming my way, so I thought I’d do another roundup of old and new, and normal and…more unusual fare.

We kicked the season off with It’s A Wonderful Knife. Michael Kennedy, the writer of Freaky—the horror themed Freaky Friday ripoff where a teenage girl switches bodies not with her mother but with the local slasher—and Tyler MacIntyre, the writer/director of the interesting Tragedy Girls (about two girls who develop an unhealthy obsession with the attention they receive by being in the center of a variety of murders)—team up to give us this variation on the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life.

The hook is interesting: Winnie Caruthers is a “final girl” who kills the evil serial killer/mayor of her small town (played by Justin Long, who’s having a really good turn playing scumbags), but her life ends up going badly afterwards so she wishes she was never born, and finds herself non-existent in her small town where the slasher is still running amok.

It’s one thing to parody a mid-level Disney live-action flick which wasn’t even original back in the day, and a much bigger challenge to try to parody a meticulously crafted film like IAWL. Whether you like it or not—and I suspect the contrived nature of IAWL is off-putting for a lot of haters—Capra’s film is neatly constructed where everything in the front of the film impacts George’s non-existence (and our experience of it) in the back end.

But IAWK falls apart immediately. Just for starters, our character isn’t the type to kill herself, especially over a cheating boyfriend. (Made even less lightly by the last act “twist”.) In her alternate reality, the killer’s still out there, but her mom’s a slut and her dad’s a cuck, and major changes she couldn’t possibly have impacted are seen all over the place—but she’s also able to prove she’s who she say she is by pulling out some small event that happened in her reality and you just find yourself thinking, “Well, wait, why would THAT be the same, given everything else that’s different?”

We have no angels, of course, so they have to come up with another excuse, but they still kind of cling to the idea of an angel. There’s a star that seems to have opinions about things. But those opinions shift as the plot requires. It’s even dumber than I’m making it out to be. There’s a second act twist (which The Boy thought was going to be the first act twist) involving the killer, and that throws the whole premise into question—i.e., she wasn’t “uncreated”, she’s just been transported into an alternate reality. In which the slasher isn’t the slasher but may be a demon in league with the star and…all desperate dumbness is wrapped up in a cheap ribbon by having a character from the original universe somehow “remember” what happened in the alternate.

As I said, it’s even dumber than I’m making it out to be, and as a bonus we get the now common The Message when our heterosexual lead suddenly goes gay. (Women may now enjoy the inability to have same-sex friends without sexual overtones. Merry Christmas.) The Message compounds an awful earlier scene where two boys who are completely irrelevant to the plot and are killed shortly thereafter have an on-screen make-out session for 30 seconds.. Doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s close to 1% of the non-credits runtime of this undercooked film. (After writing this, I saw Kennedy tweet “this was really a movie for OUR community”. If so, it can go into the bin next to the Christian movies that are made knowing the audience will forgive moviemaking sins because they approve of The Message.)

If you love slashers, I suppose none of this matters, and all that matters is the kills. There are a couple of good ones, including a kind of nice “guy being murdered outside a window where everyone is party”. But it’s a thin gruel to serve for the holidays.

Citizen Kane. I don’t suppose I have to say much about it. It’s fashionable to hate these days (even moreso than It’s A Wonderful Life) but when I told The Boy I was going to see it (alone, if necessary) he tagged along and spent the whole time on the way back talking about what a great movie it is. It really is. Christmas movie? When Charles Foster Kane gets a sled from his caretaker on his first Christmas away from home, you see the whole character laid out before you.

Anatomy of a Fall. A French film. Is it Christmas? I don’t know, but it’s snowing. Snowing in the craphole of Grenoble, France, where a man plummets to his death from the top floor of the couple’s “fixer” in time for their son to find him bleeding out. Did a stranger come in and push him out the window of his remote cabin? Did his wife murder him? Did he jump? This movie is called a mystery-thriller-drama, but the ‘gique’s rule is that if a movie says it’s a thriller and anything else, it’s not a thriller. It’s also not much of a mystery as there can only be one conclusion to the film that makes any sense. It’s actually mostly a courtroom drama, and a good one, but don’t expect it to be thrilling or mysterious. (Grenoble looks lovely, by the way, but it’s the home town of the dead guy who first forces his family to move there, then complains about how awful it is.)

The Sting. This one I did go see alone. I haven’t seen it since I was a teenager, when I loved it. I loved it a little less today, I think because it couldn’t surprise me. I didn’t remember the details of the heist, but I remembered the shape enough to go, “Oh, yeah, here’s where the next twist happens.” That said, it’s a powerhouse cast, besides Newman and Redford, you’ve got Charles Durning, Robert Shaw, Ray Walston, Eileen Brennan, Harry Gould, etc. The writing is tight, as each character has just a little screen time, and they all make the most of it. Costumes by Edith Head earning her her eighth and final Oscar. Scott Joplin’s ragtimes—totally time inappropriate—arranged by Marvin Hamlisch dominated elementary school piano recitals for a decade.

Not really a holiday movie but it was released on Christmas Day, 1973.

Thanksgiving. The smartest thing about Eli Roth’s slasher is that they didn’t try to make the movie from the trailer of Grindhouse. Instead, they made a good movie, which is the best slasher I’ve seen in quite some time and while gratuitously gory in parts, a far cry from the torture porn teased in the old fake trailer. This movie is actually mysterious and thrilling, even while it’s as trope-y a horror movie as you’ll find. Roth knows his stuff.

A slasher typically has an inciting incident. In the ’80s, the most common one was a high school humiliation. A prank gone wrong leads to a thirst for revenge, or what have you.  (Then the killer isn’t who you think it is, or the killer is who you think it is, but you didn’t know it was that cast member.) In Thanksgiving, the inciting incident is a Black Friday sale gone horribly wrong. A mob breaks into a RightMart and people end up dead and crippled in a scene that was genuinely gripping and disturbingly realistic.

Flash-forward to the next year and you have a whole town of suspects to choose from. And because this small New England town (in Canada) celebrates (the real historical figure) John Carver, everyone runs around in a John Carver mask which looks a little like a cross between Guy Fawkes and the Burger King.

We got tropes, people. So many tropes. But actually done well. For example, a common horror trope is having the characters be so awful, you’re rooting for them to be killed. Here, we start out with some unlikable people but as the movie develops most—the ones not killed immediately—get a shot at redemption. Even the evil stepmother (who had the idea for the Black Friday event to begin on Thanksgiving night) who is portrayed as a soulless gold-digger at first has her moment.

Storytelling tip: If the audience about whether your characters live or die, it’s more exciting when they’re actual in peril.

Anyway, the movie mostly doesn’t cheat on the mystery, so while the reveal involves an obscure motive, it’s actually hinted at repeatedly and I had noted all these “odd” little moments, that made the conclusion pretty satisfying. Roth does cheat in terms of presenting the killer, i.e., it’s a different person behind the mask so you can’t figure it out by body type, but that goes back to Psycho. If you like gore (or can tolerate it) it’s just a solid film.

I’ll be back on the 23rd with The Holdovers, The Lion in Winter and more!

By far the highest population of Jews in the world is in New York City (where the mayor just last night told them to “shelter in place”). Jerusalem has about a third, and close behind that is Los Angeles. The schools I went to growing up were 95% Jewish, to where on the high holidays it would be me and five other Christian kids sitting in a room together doodling or watching The Man for All Seasons or something on grainy VHS.

The theaters I spend most of my time at are part of the Laemmle chain, founded 85 years ago by Kurt Laemmle, cousin of Carl Laemmle, who founded Universal Studios. The documentary Only in Theaters tells of the chain’s recent struggles.) It’s not surprising, then, that we’ve seen a lot of Jewish movies, including a lot of documentaries.

One of our games in the past was “how soon will they bring up the Holocaust?” For example, things you might not think required a mention of the Holocaust (When Comedy Went To School, where it’s mentioned only briefly, or Deli Man where it’s critical to answering the question of “why don’t we get any Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe any more?”)

And I’ve been known to get snarky when a movie offers me an object lesson of “Don’t be a Nazi”, as highlighted in this review of Final Account, which holds up pretty well except for one thing: My assertion that there are only 5 or 6 Nazis in the world. My mistake being not taking into account the Muslim world. But while the documentaries can be interesting (It Is No Dream: The Theodor Herzl Story) or thrilling (Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story, Above and Beyond), the narratives may be more revealing.

Israel is a modern success story. They turned forsaken swampland and sand dunes into an economic, technological and agricultural powerhouse. They had communistic kibbutzes—and still do!—but they found more individualistic approaches more successful, and the Soviet’s propaganda machine got turned on them just as fiercely as it got turned on Europe and the U.S.

As a result, you get a lot of the same self-hatred you see coming out of Hollywood. The movie Foxtrot, which has one of my favorite lines in all cinema (“God is punishing us because we’re atheists!”), is a representative example. But even the wildly successful, made-into-a-musical The Band’s Visit has this undertone of “there must be something wrong in the system if we’re doing so well while they’re doing so poorly.”

The most pro-America movies I’ve seen in the 21st century were made by Germans (Schulze Gets The Blues) and Kiwis (The World’s Fastest Indian), oh, and China (Detective Chinatown 2). We’re so confident in our existence, we indulge in complete self-loathing. The Israelis don’t have that luxury: They’re surrounded by enemies and mostly the world is silent about the good they’ve done.

As a result, the self-loathing is never quite complete. A movie like Live and Become will show the occasional viciousness and pettiness of the state and people, without losing sight of the fact that Israel provides more opportunities for Ethiopians than Ethiopia does. But it will also turn up in some unusual places, like low-budget zombie films.

 

Unlike the US, which can play around (it thinks) with “we’re so evil we should be destroyed” without that being a major risk. Israel is surrounded by enemies willing to show it the exit, so there are plenty of reminders as to why and how the state exists (the aforementioned Follow Me and Above and Beyond, and a movie/short whose title I can’t recall where a family has to take refuge in a bomb shelter and wait out an air-raid while the grandfather calmly explains that nothing will happen, because Israel has The Bomb (maybe…wink wink).

When an Israeli movie addresses the Palestinian issue, it’s always nuanced, and (IMO) way too sympathetic. A movie like Rock in the Red Zone, which covers the “racial” issues inside Israel (Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Sephardic) shows tremendous sympathy for the Palestinians, even while the people in Red Zone can’t ever be more than 15 seconds away from a shelter, due to all the rockets the Palestinians launch at them.

Meanwhile, movies made by Palestinians universally regard Israel and the Jews as their sole problem. Where a movie shows the Palestinian perspective without showing Jews as monsters who absolutely deserve destruction, there’s an Israeli behind it. One of last years big festival winners Let It Be Morning, for example (from The Band’s Visit) director, shows the government as random and vindictive without quite celebrating blowing up random Israelis.

Tel Aviv on Fire, where a Palestinian guy ends up having to pretend to be a writer for a Palestinian soap opera in order for the Jewish sentry to let him get to his job every day is another case.

But purely Palestinian efforts? Most notable would be the Oscar-nominated Paradise Now, which is a love-letter to terrorists. But I’ll never forget 2013 when we had two nearly identical Palestinian flicks, one completely grotesque and the other a little more human—it was the completely grotesque one that got all the award attention, of course—but both adopting the viewpoint of “Well, yes, Palestinians kill Israelis. That’s their raison d’être. (The movies were Omar and Bethlehem, and I can never remember which is which. Another movie, Zaytoun, Steven Dorff, tries a softening approach by having the would-be terrorist be thirteen.)

Ultimately, my favorite movies from the area are not political but religious. Movies like Ushpizin,  God’s Neighbors, The Women’s Balcony and Fill The Void where religious people have to reconcile their faith with living in an imperfect world, recall favorably American classics like Friendly Persuasion, and are a kind of movie Americans don’t really make.

If there’s any real significance to this roundup, it’s that, whatever you hear from the “elite”, the Palestinians have a very specific idea of the source of their misery and the best way to handle it. And we’ve been fortunate enough up till now to be able to restrict our experience of that worldview to the cinema.

The third annual World Drive-In Movie Festival and Jamboree put on by Joe Bob Briggs, Darcy the Mail Girl and the cast and crew of “The Last Drive-In” corrected an error of the previous year by putting the Drive-In Movie Awards on Friday instead of Sunday. (Last year, it was me and about six other die-hards sitting at the drive-in watching the last short at 3:30AM.) And since the awards are really the point—looking forward to the new generation of filmmakers, rather than backward—it just makes sense to have people watching the new stuff first, while everyone is still fresh.

Last year, I made the following observation, that is even truer this year: The films themselves are of varying quality (and I mean that both in the good/bad sense and the style/sensibility sense) but they are all generally at a technical level where, had you paid to see them in a theater, you wouldn’t feel like you’d been ripped off by a cheap, fly-by-night, no-account production company (even though they are ALL basically just that, right?). In other words, the barriers to entry are no longer technical or technological. It’s down to skill and marketing and taste now. (OK, the last short was made on a budget of $100—filmed on cell-phone in a condo or something—and this shows, but it uses its limitations very creatively.)

Of the three features that were winners, one was Mutilator 2. This was especially for the fans of the original Mutilator, which has an interesting backstory and is kind of fun in a lot of ways (who thinks of combining a “spring break” movie and a “slasher”, after all?) but I don’t have any particular nostalgia for the original so I wasn’t too into it. Another was Cannibal Comedian which was more interesting, a cross between Motel Hell and The Dark Backward.

But I want to focus on the first film of the night, which was Publish or Perish, which was not only a good movie, it was polished and professional and not only as good as most of what I’ve seen this year in theaters, but better.

John Gardner, in “The Art of Fiction”, says you can’t really make great art out of campus life. Gardner (himself an academic) maintained that academia was too petty, too driven by minor grievances and social climbing to ever be the subject of much worthwhile literature. My counter-argument in the past might have been Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (in its various forms), but now I can also point to Publish and Perish, written and directed by David Liban (himself a professor at University of Colorado, Denver). Both Leiber and Liban’s works leverage the same concept: Yes, academia is petty and driven by minor grievances, so what happens when we take that to the extreme?

Publish or Perish opens with our protagonist, Jim, accepting his professorial position from the dean of a university, Dick (played by the immediately recognizable James Shanklin, who was in all those things you saw), and it becomes quickly clear the two don’t like each other. Dick is into shooting and racquetball and Jim—in retrospect, we don’t know anything about Jim’s interests, except for one thing: He wants tenure.

The catch is, it takes seven years on the job to even be considered for tenure.

The movie kicks into gear seven years after this initial interview, on the day that Jim is supposed to turn in his dossier for consideration. An accident forces him to choose between doing the right thing and losing tenure or getting his dossier in on time (and we learn later, he’s already asked for and received an extension), and he naturally goes for tenure. This initial bad decision leads to increasingly bad decisions afterwards, which act as a revelatory journey of Jim’s character.

Which is almost gleefully petty.

One plot point revolves around a student he denies an extension to (oh, the irony) who later accuses him of sexual impropriety. Well, Jim’s not that bad a guy, because he didn’t cheat on his wife with this student—but, on the other hand, his current wife was his grad student before he divorced his first wife. So she’s not entirely convinced of his innocence. And Jim, almost more than he hates the dean, hates his daughter’s boyfriend (played by Liban’s son, I think), for making “pornography” with her.

This pornography, we learn, consists of a brief topless shot in a very arty concept film. Uncomfortable, perhaps, to view as a father, but far from prurient. This doesn’t stop Jim from using it in his quest for revenge, and for ultimately destroying the boyfriend. In other words, he’s really never deliberately violent, but the evil he’ll do working in the shadows or just through inaction is boundless.

This makes for a very fun, dark comedy. A non-gory horror where the shock value lays in seeing what a ordinary, seemingly respectable people will do to maintain themselves in their chosen lifestyle.

And if that were all this was, it would be an achievement that most indie filmmakers (horror or otherwise) miss: Putting together a cogent story that follows logically from point-to-point, builds steadily and resolves itself in a glorious, splashy climax is harder than it seems. Heck, I shouldn’t limit this to indie filmmakers even. It seems like the last big-budget movies I’ve seen were “series of events that get louder,” with no real thought given to character motivations or emotional build up.

But more than that, in terms of technical craft, this is a superior film. The cinematography (by Trevr Merchant) is actually used to tell the story! It sounds like I’m being facetious, but it seems like nobody uses the camera these days except as a way to get from scene-to-scene. A lot of indie filmmakers will just set the camera down and have people talk (the Kevin Smith school), and a lot of low-budget guys have very specific maneuvers they use. You know, the drone shot, the slow pull in or pull out, the track-to-final-destination—I’m sure they all have names but once you see them, you realize they’re just mechanical ways of keeping the camera moving.

As someone who likes to break a film down in to how it’s doing what it’s doing, really masterful movie technique draws me in and makes it harder. Even so, I realized about 2/3rds of the way through that I’d seen the camera set down rather statically, shot statically from multiple angles, an occasional Dutch angle, a great tracking shot, etc., and all combined with some occasionally excellent blocking. (Nobody pays attention to blocking and composition these days because to be effective, you have to be confident enough to let the camera be still for a moment.) It was almost as if—I know this sounds crazy—the filmmakers got together and said, “What use of the camera would best convey the emotion and action of the story here?”

The music mostly slipped by me, which is a sign of terrific integration, because (as a musician) I’m almost always focusing on it. So when it insinuates itself while I’m actively listening for the techniques, it must be very well integrated. (Lance Warlock, son of stuntman Dick Warlock, and brother of soap-stalwart and horror mini-icon Billy Warlock, did the music.)

The editing was by Justin Lewis, who I’m not familiar with. Acting in indie movies can be rough, because it requires skilled actors and a skilled editor, and very often indie guys don’t realize how important editing is. (Roger Corman knows, and he talked about it Saturday night.) A good editor can both save (some) acting flubs, or make the greatest actor in the world look like a chump. Here we had seasoned stage and screen actors mixed with some relative novices which, with Lewis’ sure hand cutting the flick, gives us a film without a poorly delivered line.

More than that, these characters are largely unlikable, by design, and the cast does a lot of heavy lifting making the 100 minutes you spend with them feel worthwhile.

The whole team seemed to be a mix of skilled pros and promising newcomers, and the overall effect is as polished as you could want. Definitely going to be in my top five of the year.

The official website is here and you can rent it on Prime for $5.

UPDATE: Limited edition DVDs for sale here.

Also, now that we’re at the end of the year, do I still think it’s one of the year’s best films? Well, let’s take it from a genre perspective. You could call this a black comedy, and its competitors would be Cocaine Bear, Beau is Afraid and Dream Scenario. I consider Cocaine Bear more of a stunt than a movie. I loved Beau is Afraid but its picaresque nature makes it really inaccessible to people. Dream Scenario is also very good but hampered by an almost necessarily depressing protagonist.

The way Publish or Perish straddles that line between unlikable “hero” and enjoyable hero definitely gets it my top recommendation for Black Comedy.

Horror was weak this year: Lots of lackluster franchise entries. Punishing experimental horror (Skinarmink, Enys Mani). A surprising gothic horror, Raging Grace, marred only by needlessly lampshading racial issues (between Filipinos and the English). Oddly effusive praise for Talk To Me as being “novel”, which it isn’t, though it does have a refreshing style. A surprisingly effective Thanksgiving from Eli Roth, using all the old tropes of an ’80s slasher but using them effectively.

I enjoyed Thanksgiving and Publish about the same and for about the same reasons: Quality filmmaking and understanding of the genre and its tropes. But I’d recommend Publish over Roth’s film to anyone who wasn’t really into slashers. With Publish, You get all the excitement with just enough gore to hammer the point home, as it were.

So, two for two. Would I say best film overall? Ranking is always a challenge and kind of pointless, but of the films I most loved this year, this is one of the easiest to recommend to all but the most horror-phobic. A lot of people have been saying—and I agree—that if there’s any chance at all of you liking a kaiju movie, Godzilla Minus One is the movie to see.

If there’s any chance of you liking a dark comedy/horror/suspense film, Publish or Perish is for you.

I have lamented, particularly since the lockdowns ended, that while there have been some very good movies, the quality films that I could generally recommend have been very few and far between.

Bitching. I’ve been bitching about it.

Because I don’t see how movie theaters survive with a menu of “hyper-expensive rehash of thing people used to like” and “weirdo art movie that moviegique (and pretty much only moviegique) likes”. Success could come in the form of many more lower budget films that are accessible to a wide variety of people.

But only if they start offering them before people simply rule out going to the movies as an option, which many already have.

Which brings us to Jules: On the plus side, it’s a movie I’d recommend to “general audiences”. It’s not for the hammer-my-body-with-soundwaves crowd, to be sure, but if you like movies about people, it’s a likable one.

Jules is part of the “old guy with non-human friend” genre, which includes 2012’s Robot and Frank and last year’s Brian and Charles (which I also recommend), where a neglected senior citizen finds his life enriched by a robot or, in this case, an alien.

Ben Kingsley plays Milton, a 78-year-old man who’s just starting to show serious signs of dementia. His daughter Denise (Zoe Winters, who’s mostly a stage actress but apparently figures big in something called “Succession”) struggles between trying to take care of him/trying to get him to recognize he needs help, and just ignoring him ’cause he’s kind of an old coot.

Milton goes every week to the town council meetings where he suggests a crosswalk, and that they change the town slogan from “A nice place to call home”—because it could sound like you mean it’s a nice place to call home from (foreshadowing!)—to “A nice place to refer to as ‘home’.”

When the alien ship crashes in his yard, of course, no one believes him.

The contents of the ship are one small, blue, tender-eyed alien. The great character actress Harriet Sanson Harris plays Sandy, the chipper senior citizen who’s set her cap for Milton, and who insists the alien be named “Jules”. (Milton’s attitude is that the alien’s right there, and “he” and “him” are just fine as names.)

Jane Curtin is the too-good-for-this-small-town Joyce, who stumbles across Jules while spying on Milton and Sandy, figuring that they’re up to…some kind of canoodling or something.

Anyway, the three of them get together to try to help Jules get back to his home planet. He doesn’t talk, but he’s very empathetic seeming, so at various points, the three of them pour out their hearts and souls to him.

What’s nice about this genre is it tends to stay away from the mawkish. Like, there’s nothing at Cocoon levels of dramatic intensity. Milton wrestles with confronting his likely undignified end. Sandy has to deal with the crushing disappointment of her daughter (details elided). Joyce kind of just wants credit living her crazy life “in the big city” and getting out of it in time.

It’s sweet and funny and human, and poses the question: Do you stick out life to the bitter end, or do you…I don’t know, take off in an alien spaceship? There’s probably a way to work it out as an allegory but it’s fine if you don’t.

The acting is terrific, of course. The music on point. The writing, directing and editing are all sharp, down-to-business, not a lot of frills, here’s our story, and the whole thing comes in at under 90 minutes.

It’s probably not gonna tear up the box office. But there are parts which, if you have older parents (or you are an older parent) that are howlingly funny, such as Milton trying to explain the TV remotes to Jules, or otherwise wrestling with technology. Sandy’s backstory is full of pathos, cringe and straight-up comedy.

A full version of “Freebird” is sung.

It’s funny. It has incompetent cops and feds which feel very realistic. Heh. It just all works. Is it gonna blow you away? No, probably not, just like it’s probably not going to burn up the box office. But it’s nice. And human. And alien.

And under 90 minutes! A mini-miracle. Moviegique says: Check ‘er out.

I’ve been tracking the phenom that is The Sound of Freedom since it came out on Independence Day and beat the last entry in the Indiana Jones series, finishing number one for the day (handily) and pretty much making its budget back on day one. That turd-in-the-punchbowl aside, when the seventh (and penultimate?) entry in the Mission: Impossible series came out,  it enjoyed about one week of better box office before Freedom started beating it again.

This should be kind of big news. I don’t think the movie is technically an “indie” since Fox owned it (and Disney buried it), but it’s certainly an underdog, featuring only two “stars”, Jim Caviezel and (Oscar™️-winner) Mira Sorvino (whose part as the hero’s wife is small but significant). It’s essentially an action film, though it fits uneasily into that genre. It is, however, an issue film, and successful issue films tend to shed light on, you know, issues. Especially when “based on a true story”.

But in our insane world of absolute polarization, coming out against child sex trafficking is somehow controversial, so none of this makes the news. I’ve been staying with my mother since her fall, and she’s a lifelong consumer of ABC news where neither the topic nor the movie has come up once, as far as I can tell. She’d never even heard of the movie.

All this is well and good, and enough for your humble correspondent to go see it though, honestly, none of this has much bearing on the quality of the film.

So how was it?

It’s…fine. Overall, it’s even good. And there are parts of it that are genuinely great. Caviezel’s performance, for example, is one of the best I’ve seen not just this year, but ever. In a lot of ways, it feels like someone took a ham-and-egger action flick from the ’80s and overlaid some realism both in terms of the action and in terms of the issue, which creates an odd blend.

You could describe it as Commando, but instead of killing everyone with impunity, if Schwarzenegger weren’t bullet proof and Alyssa Milano were being raped constantly. You see what I mean. It’s sort of odd.

But this is more cultural baggage than a flaw with the movie per se. Tim Ballard (Caviezel) isn’t an action hero, but more akin to the Machine Gun Preacher: A guy who becomes obsessed with righting a particular wrong. In his case, he’s a successful Homeland Security Investigations agent who rounds up MAPs (minor-attracted-pedophiles)—if you’re like me, you’re thinking “isn’t the government more on the supply-side when it comes to pedos?”—but never actually bothers rescuing kids.

Ballard becomes obsessed with reuniting one father with his children, and the story takes us through the rather good plan of setting up a sex club so that the traffickers bring the kids to them. This would have been enough for a movie itself, but after that plan goes off, there’s a second mission, deep into drug-cartel-controlled jungle, to search for yet another stolen child—itself worthy of a movie.

I’m glossing over the plot so as not to spoil anything, but this sequence—high tension sex-club-sting set piece followed by one-man stealth mission into the jungle—definitely weakens the film narratively. (Don’t blame me, it’s not my fault reality doesn’t follow a three-act structure.) We also don’t get enough of Ballard’s home life, which means that the tension he’s most obviously feeling (between saving the stolen children and his own children growing up without a father) gets short shrift and, perhaps ironically, contribute to the ’80s-action-movie feel, where home life is a prop the villains use to threaten the hero with.

I get it, of course. The movie is two hours and eleven minutes long. And as someone who complains about the length of movies, I’m a terrible hypocrite for saying this should be longer. Nonetheless, there’s zero resistance between him doing the first thing and the going on to do the second, which makes for an odd transition, narratively.

The strongest part of the movie is the acting. The kids are tremendous, with the older sister being a seasoned actress of ten years, and the younger brother being brand new. The dialog, when it’s natural, is also good but there are a couple of clunkers. The movie’s tag line, “God’s children are not for sale,” is actually kind of non-responsive in context. And the movie’s actual title is spoken when some children are freed they start singing to celebrate this. They begin with a rhythmic beat (it’s the exact opening of “We Will Rock You”) and one character says to the hero, “Do you hear that? That’s the sound of freedom.”

I suspect this clunkiness comes from having to shoehorn everything in to 125-or-so minutes, but it’s emblematic of the movie’s unevenness. There are some brilliantly composed shots in the movie which give it an almost noir feel at times, but a lot of it is pedestrian. The music is mostly quite good, but there’s a scene where our hero is teaming up with a couple of anti-heroes in a South American bar, and the background music reminded me of nothing so much as me noodling on the piano.

When I posted this at AOSHQ, somebody noted the muddled dialogue, and I’m embarrassed I forgot about this. The sound design was a mess. Caviezel is doing the gravelly mumbling thing and early on is hard to parse because everyone else seems to be speaking in a normal voice, and all are kinda-sorta at the same volume.

Much like last year’s Top Gun, it would’ve been unremarkable as an action picture 35 years ago. And as recently as 2018, when this movie was made, a message of “child sex trafficking is bad” would be considered so trite as to be not just unremarkable but exploitational.

It is not, thankfully, exploitative. The worst is left to your imagination. This was the Flower’s big concern about going to see it. That and, she’s been burned having supported “Christian” movies in the past. (I don’t think it’s expressly Christian but, I mean, the G-word is right there.) She and The Boy also called out Bill Camp’s performance as Vampiro. (Camp is a great character actor you’ll recognize but not quite be able to place.) As it turns out, the greatest barrier to their enjoyment of the film was having to sit in the front row, because every other seat was taken.

As for the squabbling surrounding the movie, I was put in mind of an online acquaintance I had known for over a decade who didn’t care for my review of Sully. That movie, it seems, had unfairly maligned the bureaucrats of the FAA. I pointed out that I had been watching movies for decades that unfairly maligned all kinds of groups (the religious, the Republicans, the conservatives, white people, gun owners, blue-collar workers, rich people) and that I didn’t think it was such a terrible sin if the FAA took a hit. He blocked me ever after.

So, hey, if this movie unfairly maligns sex traffickers (which seems to be the argument), I’m okay with that. And if you’re not, feel free to block me as well.

If you are of a certain age, you probably heard the name “Yogi Berra” and thought “Yogi Bear? What?” because the rest of the sentence, about being one of the all-time great ball players wouldn’t really make any sense. If you’re a little bit older, you might know him best as the guy who was famous for saying things that didn’t quite seem to make sense (“When you come to a fork in the road, take it”) and to whom (like Mark Twain or Will Rogers) a great deal of pithy or silly sayings have been attributed to. You’d know he was a baseball player but you might not know how much of a player he was.

Well, Berra’s family and documentarian Sean Mullin (“Kings of Beer”, a 2019 documentary about Budweiser which might be worth a re-evaluation in Current Day) are here to set the record straight, and the result is the best documentary of the past several years.

The first thing that struck me here was that Berra was a mook. The reason this struck me is that in Painting With Fire, we learn that Frank Frazetta (whose Dark Kingdom just sold for $6M) was also a mook—and also a great ballplayer who wistfully recalled missing his tryout with a very interested major league team. (It might have been the Giants, and as I recall, he claimed to have missed it because he was “f*cking around”. So instead he just reshaped popular art.)

We need more mooks, in other words.

But after the background stuff we get the early days in baseball, interrupted by World War II. Berra landed at Normandy and his job after that was fishing bodies out of the ocean. He was wounded two or three times. Small wonder he didn’t consider baseball to be “hard”.

After the war, we’re back to baseball and the pay is low. There’s some great stuff on Berra holding out to get the same pay his buddy Joe Garagiola did ($500 or something ridiculous like that) and the machinations of a team manager gone wrong. But anyway, they couldn’t afford benches to sit on at games, so they sat on the ground. Lorenzo Pietro (that’s “Larry Peter” to you) Berra sat cross-legged and someone commented, “Hey, you look like a yogi!”

And so it stuck. Yet, there’s something almost too aesthetic about a guy being nicknamed “yogi” and then becoming famous for aphorisms. Some say we live in a simulation; I say we live in a pulp novel.

One chunk of the movie is dedicated to honoring Berra’s record. For reasons that seem shockingly superficial—he wasn’t conventionally handsome and he didn’t have the gait of a, well, a conventional homo sapiens—the press delighted in calling him names (e.g. “The Ape”) and turning him into a clownish figure. Mostly, he didn’t seem to mind, noting that no ball player ever won a game with his face.

Interestingly, the Yogi Bear thing did bother him. He didn’t like being turned into a literal cartoon character.

But as we learn, the only thing that made him mad—and this is hilarious—is a call that an umpire made where he tagged Jackie Robinson out at home plate and the ref called him safe. Decades later, people would wind him up by saying they thought Jackie was safe. (Interestingly, The Boy thought he was safe where I thought he was out. It’s really impossible to tell.) He and Jackie were friendly (and because it’s 2023, we have to know he was okay with The Gays, too).

The truth of the matter, the thing that stands out above all else, was that Berra took responsibility for the game. To a level it’s almost hard to comprehend. Like, obviously, as a catcher, you have to know everybody in the game, the strengths and weaknesses of the players and the pitchers and so on. That’s the job. (And Berra was terrible at it, until a coach drilled the bejeesus out of him.)

But as a batter, he took responsibility for hitting the ball. That is, I think—and forgive my ignorance of the game—the smart approach to batting is to only swing at balls in the strike zone. For Yogi, if it was possible to hit the ball, he hit the ball. (His batting average to home run ratio was amazing.)

But he would also coach players from the opposing team!

And wherever he went, pennants and series championships followed. As a player, he played in fourteen World Series and won ten. He had three more wins as a manager, and was on his way to a fourth (I’m guessing) when fired by Steinbrenner. As a manager, he turned around whatever team he was on. I attribute this, again, to his taking responsibility.

He loved the game.

No less inspiring was his family life, having landed a beautiful waitress from a restaurant baseball players couldn’t really afford to eat at, Carmen Short (who blessedly passed her looks on to Berra’s daughters and granddaughters) and celebrating their 65th anniversary together before their deaths (18 months apart). More than a little nice to see a ball player with a devoted family—not that there weren’t issues, of course, just that Berra was apparently a good father and grandfather.

Then there are the aphorisms. The best of them are a kind of Zen poetry like the “It ain’t over till it’s over” that gives the movie its name, or “You can observe a lot by watching”. Some is just good advice, like  “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”

It’s also fun that the anticipation of a Yogi-ism created many that weren’t really odd at all if you knew the context. The “fork” comment for example was just true: If you went to Yogi’s house you’d come to a fork in the road—and both paths led to his house. There’s even an odd little digression with a copy editor who wrote Yogi-isms (for commercials) and couldn’t really remember which were hers and which were his.

On the three point scale for documentaries:

1. Subject matter: Wonderful, joyous, definitely worthy.
2. Presentation: Mostly pretty good. There’s enough film footage and interviews to keep things from getting too static. There’s a sort of story arc of his granddaughter trying to get him the Purple Hearts he never filed for because he didn’t want to worry his mom, but there’s so much good stuff here, the focus on some recognition from a defunct government seems trivial.
3. Bias: This is a hagiography straight up, and I am here for it. For all I know, the man was a saint (except for the whole Jackie-Robinson-being-out thing) and an inspiration, and just incredibly likable. Nothin’ wrong with that.

The Boy and I were enthusiastic, and he knows less about baseball than I do. Check it out!

These days, the theaters are in such disarray, even Angela Lansbury can’t get much love.

I say this as I look around for movies and all the things I’d like to see are squeezed between nearly half of all screens being taken up with Avatar Needs $2 Billion To Make A Profit and the other half full of incredibly unappealing Oscar-bait. I mean, The Whale seemed promising by comparison. But there aren’t even that many of those.

Avatar really needs that $2 billion, yo, and they’ll flood the theaters with it until you’ve seen it out of desperation, as if there was no such thing as streaming and home media.

I mention it because—well, first because I’m about to drive to Santa Monica to give the Bill Nighy film Living a view because literally nothing is worthwhile closer—but also because Angela Lansbury was enough of an institution in Hollywood where she could legitimately have had a week playing “best of” in a world where screens were not such rare commodities (even as the seats are mostly empty). Instead, we get not even a double feature, but just one movie The Manchurian Candidate.

John Frankenheimer movies are interesting. They’re so intense and serious, but also so dated. In this movie, Laurence Harvey plays Raymond Shaw, a Korean war vet who was captured and brainwashed by Communists (Chinese and Russian) and sent back to be an assassin in the US. Frank Sinatra is Bennet Marco, an army intelligence officer who was a troop mate of Shaw and who, along with other members of the troop, got Shaw a Medal of Honor by reporting back that he had saved them all—this also due to amazingly effective brainwashing.

Marco has to unravel the puzzle, which is challenging because he’s on the wrong side of the brainwashing, while Shaw goes around murdering everyone with Hollywood-level silencers, and somehow not really suffering any really negative consequences for it. (We saw this a bit before seeing Experiment in Terror, also from 1962, which featured Glenn Ford as a hard-working but somewhat hapless FBI agent, but the similarities were enough to remind me of the various intelligence agencies’ PR pushes involving Hollywood.)

Even 60 years later, the movie has a lot of energy. The acting is top-notch. Noted Italian-American Henry Silva would begin his lifelong career of playing Asian baddies with his role as Chunjin, a Chinese assassin who can smash coffee tables with his hand but who is no match for a skinny, sweaty, 47-year-old Sinatra. Actually, I shouldn’t single out Sinatra for being sweaty: Sweat deserves a supporting actor nod for its work here.

Leslie Parrish is at her loveliest (and the only surviving member of the cast, now that Silva has passed, I believe). John McGiver, James Gregory and Whit Bissell show up in various roles: You may not recognize their names, but certainly their faces will ring a bell. (Bissell is uncredited for some reason. I think our hosts explained the reason but I have forgotten it.) Janet Leigh, fresh off Psycho, picks a sick, delusional Sinatra up on a train and dumps her fiancée, which is hardly the least plausible moment of the film.

The least plausible moments, I suppose, involve the army intelligence guy being so absolutely clueless about brainwashing that he allows Shaw to run amok. MKULTRA was still under wraps, of course, but the core concepts of brainwashing were certainly well known by the time of the movie, right? I think the implication is that the election is the 1960 one—needless to say, the evillest character in the movie is Raymond Shaw’s mother, the very Republican Eleanor Iselin, played to perfection by Lansbury.

Which is the point, after all. Eleanor’s so thoroughly and cartoonishly evil, you’d have to be alive in 2023 to believe such excesses are possible by public figures. And her husband (Gregory), the future President is such an inept puppet, so incompetently stupid, why, I can’t even imagine how they would expect him to win a nomination to the Presidency. (They don’t, actually, that’s where Shaw comes in.)

Nonetheless, Lansbury’s performance is tremendous. She’s nuanced, even if her character is not. (She’s also 37, and Harvey is 34. But she always had an older look about her.)

I suppose there’s something edgy (at least in 1962) to making the conservative Republican the tool of Communists, although in this telling, Eleanor figures she’s using the commies and will take care of them once she controls the Presidency.

I don’t know: Viewing things in the context of the American Myth, you can see here a major shot fired in the destruction thereof. At some point (pre-WWII, pre-Wilson) Americans had a view of themselves as independent, and the government’s powers were more rightly restricted to international affairs and wars. Here, if some maniac gets a hold of the Presidency, all is lost. And I think that’s been the dominant myth in the past 60 years, really.

Ironically, it undercuts the power of all future American movies.

When he introduced this at the Jamboree, Joe Bob described the backstory as: Joe Lansdale (Cold In July) was having trouble getting his work produced by Hollywood and so, when tasked to write a story for an Elvis anthology commemorating the anniversary of his death, he wrote the least filmable story ever written.

Don Coscarelli (Phantasm) read it and thought, “Perfect.” I mean, I’m assuming. Because he somehow got this movie made, and more spectacularly, it’s a really fine and ultimately serious reflection on age.

The premise is that Elvis (Bruce Campbell) is living in an old folks home in East Texas. Apparently, tiring of the crazy fame, he decided to swap places with one of his imitators and it was the imitator that ended up killing himself in Graceland. The real Elvis, unfortunately, had a terrible accident that put him in a coma for years, and he’s never really recovered. When our story begins, an Egyptian mummy has escaped from a travelling exhibit and is feeding off the seniors at Shady Rest (where Elvis is staying).

Elvis begins to suspect supernatural goings on, but of course no one will take him seriously, so he enlists the help of his friend, Jack (Ossie Davis). Jack, as it turns out, is JFK. Apparently LBJ put his brain into the body of a black man, or—I’m fuzzy on this, honestly—maybe turned him black with all the post-assassination shenanigans? Hardly matters. (The original story also had John Dillinger, but after a sex change.)

The two of them join feeble forces to fight one of the feeblest undead critters in cinema. The mummy, as it turns out, is pretty weak, and sustains himself by siphoning off the life force of the living. He’s targeting seniors because no one will notice. But they’re not exactly rich in elan vital, so the mummy never gets up to full force—though he’s fairly formidable nonetheless, sending scarab beetles to do his dirty work.

You might say, “Well, ‘gique, this sounds like goofy fun,” and I’d agree with you. But it does transcend its own budgetary limitations to become a fairly serious reflection on age, celebrity, even the meaning of life. The goofy, weird, mildly exploitative aspects of it all ground it in such a way that when it goes for an emotional note, it hits with surprising effectiveness.

Bruce Campbell has a lot to do with this. When I saw it in the theater (they had to shuffle around the few dozen copies they had, so it never played long anywhere), I was surprised to find that he could act. And I don’t mean that as a knock: Campbell has legitimate star power, which is a rarity in B-movies. He’s not someone who has to act, he just kind of has to be Bruce.

Here he does a very fine job as Elvis—without coming off like an Elvis impersonator. Part of it is the makeup, which is a much older an Elvis than ever was. (And probably older looking than it should’ve been.) Part of it is the idea that it’s maybe not actually Elvis. After all, Ossie Davis’ belief that he’s JFK is even more outlandish—and our Elvis doesn’t believe him!—which makes us question the whole premise, .

Ossie, of course, is great in one of his last movie roles. Joe Bob called out the nuanced performance of Ella Joyce as The Nurse, which I had not appreciated before. I’m not sure if she was supposed to be a Nurse Ratched-type, but she has a kind of condescending kindness that’s almost worse. It’s richer, anyway.

Anyway, I saw it once at at the time and I think once more a few years later, but not in over a decade. I was pleased at how well it held up.

 

The Laemmle Theater chain is a local Los Angeles area institution going back to the ’30s, when it was founded by one of Carl Laemmle’s cousins. (Carl Laemmle founded Universal.) The Laemmle theaters were a major player in getting movies seen in the place where they most needed to be seen, and this is a documentary about their historical involvement in making foreign luminaries like Ingmar Bergman luminous. At least to the point where Americans could see his light, anyway.

And if that’s not your cup of meat, in 2003, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room got its world premiere in two (no longer extant) Laemmle theaters, the Fairfax and the Fallbrook (the latter I came to regard as “mine” for the 15-odd years of its existence, and whose employees sometimes commented that the Boy and I were there more often than they were).

I wanted this documentary to be primarily about that. The Laemmle was a fixture in my childhood, not all that much less than Greg Laemmle’s it sometimes seems, and its history is the history of movies—movie exhibition which, after all, is how movies were mostly seen until relatively recently. Under Greg’s control, the chain expanded to more screens than ever—and contracted a little as well recently.

It’s not actually that difficult a formula: They try to keep the prices low, both on tickets and concessions, the concession quality high, and their employee quality high, too. Impossible for one of the big chains, I guess, but pretty consistent for Laemmle. They show foreign films, sure, and weird one-offs, and even mainstream movies that they think will appeal to their audiences.

I mean, check it: I’ve got a dozen AMCs within a short drive from here and they’re all showing the same freakin’ movie. The Laemmle on the West Side shows different movies from the Laemmle in Encino which shows different movies from Newhall (which is more mainstream) and so on. Same with all the Regency theaters and the Regal theaters as well. (In fairness to the local Regal, it does show Indian movies, and the AMC shows Chinese movies in Chinese neighborhoods. But around here, it’s all the same superhero crap.)

In 2019 (or late 2018), they started looking for a buyer. And the documentary, which was in process, talked about how receipts were down and how it wasn’t making sense to keep going as a business, just in terms of the profit being delivered to the family.

I’d never looked into it, but receipts being down didn’t surprise me at all. After about 20 years of having my moviegoing (100+ movies a year, recall) dominated by Laemmle, I’d struggled to find anything worth seeing in recent years. And I knew that was going to happen all the way back in 2016.

How, Blake? How could you possibly know that in advance? Because—and the kids all remember me telling them this, repeatedly—with a Republican in the White House, all the indie Death Star lasers would be devoted to anti-Republican, anti-Conservative, anti-Christian propaganda.

And the thing is, nobody wants to see that. Much like other spaces activists like to occupy, they don’t actually wish to partake of the culture, they just want to control it. But if you agree with it, you don’t want to see it because it’s boring. And if you don’t agree with it, you don’t want to see it…because it’s boring. And also irritating.

Seriously, from 2002-2008, there was a similar issue, with W in office. It wasn’t going to be extreme because everything is more extreme these days. (The Paradox of Tolerance and all that.)

Greg Laemmle is as liberal as you would expect a Jewish movie guy in Los Angeles to be, a sincere believer in all the right causes with biodegradable straws, far left wing documentaries dominate—but he didn’t, e.g., pull a Russian movie out of the theater when we were all (apparently) supposed to start hating Russia. I think he’s a good guy and an honest, hard-working businessman trying to make it in a hostile environment—but he can’t do that when the content doesn’t appeal to anyone.

I only mention it at all, really, because after deciding not to sell the chain, we had the lockdowns which, of course, were another terrible blow to the movie industry generally. And the movie details the struggle of keeping everything running even as the world was imploding, but at no point does Mr. Laemmle ever deviate from the establishment line.

Maybe that’s unfair; I don’t know. I’d be pissed if the government shut me down.

Anyway, it was fun to see all the theaters we’ve visited over the years that have come and gone, and the staff we knew who got small cameos. And the real drama of Laemmles, who seem like a great family with, uh, Mrs. Laemmle (Tish) worried about her husband, who’s just obsessed with the family legacy and what the theater chain means to L.A.

Which brings up another sore point: Here’s a genuine L.A. legacy and the doc is full of glowing interviews about how important it was—Ava DuVernay, Cameron Crowe, James Ivory—but when the chain falls on hard times, there’s crickets from the selfsame community. It should be a freakin’ slam-dunk for the Laemmles to get a low interest loan from, y’know, Hollywood. Tinseltown should be embarrassed that they: a) can’t support an indie movie chain; b) can’t supply content for an indie movie chain; c) can’t even muster charity for an indie movie chain. Item (c) doesn’t even seem to have occurred to anyone.

OK, enough. It’s a good doc. It’s more personal and more immediate than the historic one I wanted, but it’s still good, even if you’re not a regular. On the three point scale:

1. Subject matter: I’d say important, but that’s a very personal grade. Right now, there are over 100 screens that I consider “near”—near enough to go to see a movie at—and the big chains are all showing the same 14 movies. Of the 14, I’ve seen 3 (at the Laemmle). I have a mild interest in three others. Of the eight remaining, five have been out since November! Even with the lackluster flow of content, I’d be downright screwed without the hard-working Greg. (Seriously, too, I’d never get to see all the weirdo stuff that makes moviegoing fun.)
2. Bias: It’s totally biased toward the Laemmle and the Laemmles, as am I. Greg and Tish are natives to the city, and I felt a kind of loss when they moved to Portland. It was almost funny to see this sunny, healthy looking couple turn into brooding Portlandians, as they moved from a city where it’s sunny 330 days a year to one where it’s cloudy 300 days a year. I hope the change of scenery helps them enjoy life more. Even if it is life in Portland.
3. Presentation: Super-plain. There are some nice early photos but it’s mostly interviews. The material gets dramatic and tense at times, as they try to negotiate a sale, and then try to negotiate a lockdown, but it’s fairly plain stuff. This may be the first full-length directorial effort long-time actor Raphael Sbarge and it can’t have been easy trying to navigate the twists and turns over the at least 4 years this was in the works.

Obviously a special event for me and perhaps especially The Boy, who has preferred the Laemmle for as long as he’s been going to the movies. Worth a look.

A funny thing happened at the movies: We saw an actual movie! Then another! And a third! The Boy and I love weird, arty, indie flicks, but it seemed like the Anglo-American movie machine had completely forgotten how to make just a regular movie: A story about normal people trying to get along on life, presented with various obstacles they have to overcome.

These are movies that we liked and could recommend, generally—presuming the specific subject matter isn’t off-putting to you.

So, today, let’s look at Somewhere In Queens, Blackberry and What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Somewhere In Queens is written, directed, produced and starring Ray Romano as Leo, the unimpressive son in a family of Italian American plumbers. (Insert Mario reference here, I suppose.) He’s a devoted husband to Angela (Laurie Metcalf), who basically lives in fear of the cancer she beat five years ago coming back.

But the story centers around Sticks, his awkward, super-shy son. Apparently, while his brother and dad sacrifice everything for the business, he put trying to help his son first, and he did this through basketball. His son gets up good enough that he’s spotted by a scout who arranges for a tryout (and a sweet but trampy girl who ends up his first love). The kid can possibly go to college instead of straight into plumbing.

Setting aside all the issues with college these days, this is a very traditional story of values and class clashes. Leo isn’t the brightest bulb and he goes too far in trying to protect his son, but you end up liking him. You kind of end up liking everyone, even Angela, whose character is challenging.

Interesting to note the story would still work almost unchanged if it had been a Jewish family. (This is why people think Joy Behar is Jewish. From a distance, all you get is “loudmouth New Yorkers”.) Point is, it does work and the main criticism people have it is that it isn’t particularly adventurous as a story.

Well, no, but if you’d asked me prior to this whether anyone in the current system could make this movie, I’d have said no. Romano is competent all around, obviously as the lead, but also the direction and writing. I’d go see another movie by him.

Blackberry! The exciting story of the nerds who invented the smartphone and the shark who made them successful.

Here’s another classic tale: A bunch of engineers invent an amazing thing and the business world is poised to screw them over. Enter the Shark. Glen Howerton plays Jim, who grabs the daydreaming engineers lead by Mike (Jay Baruchel) by the shorthairs and whips them into a productive team.

Howerton and Baruchel are terrific. Baruchel nails the sincere devotion to making things work that the best engineers display. Toward the end of the movie, he changes his hair style from a sloppy, careless, almost juvenile haircut to a slicked back look and we know he’s lost touch.

Howerton is tremendous, of course. He’s ambitious, unscrupulous, petty and egotistical — but he’s also the force that makes the whole thing happen. He threads that needle so well that when the FTC comes after him for some shady stuff he did to poach employees from other companies (to save the business), you’re really on his side.

Screw the FTC anyway. What’re they doing in Canada?

But like the engineer, you know he’s lost touch when he’s putting his acquisition of a hockey team over a critical business meeting.

I’m not much for nostalgia—in fact I loathe it—but I have to say the scenes of nerds playing a bunch of ’90s computer games over a LAN during the workday—references to Doom, Duke Nukem, Civ II, Dune 2000), to say nothing of movie nights featuring Army of Darkness, etc., actually got me in the feels. Good times before tech became a monster.

Nice work from writer/director Matt Johnson, who also plays the uber-nerd-second-banana to Baruchel’s wishy-washy but ultimately more grounded character. The actual Jim Ballslie has apparently said he enjoys the movie, and even though it’s wildly inaccurate people should go and have a good time and not sweat it. (Totally not what Glen Howerton’s character would say.)

What’s Love Got To Do With It was perhaps the most surprising movie of the three. From the Bridget Jones people, it concerns Zoe (Lily James), a documentarian who is looking at arranged marriages. She grew up next door to a Pakistani boy, Kazim (Shazad Latif), who has decided at 32 to let his parents arrange a traditional marriage for him. She’s flabbergasted by this and we’re well set up for the two to get together—but the movie does a good job of convincing us this is impossible.

Kazim has a sister who married a non-Muslim, and she’s been excommunicated from the family. He’s determined not to do that and not having any luck finding a girl he likes (because he likes Zoe, obviously). Zoe is a mess. She’s a modern woman who tells her nieces classic fairytales about princesses who don’t need no man. She has terrible taste in men and is basically a loner, to the point where she literally lives on a ship.

But a funny thing happens on the way through this tale of a stronk, empowered wammen: the movie admits she’s a wreck.

It also doesn’t dismiss arranged marriages. And—this really took me aback—when Zoe goes to look at having her eggs freed, the director of the clinic tells her, in essence, “It’s expensive, it’s painful, and it has a 1% chance of working, why are you so dumb as to believe all these tabloid stories about 50+ year old new moms?” I did not see those little hate facts coming.

In one of the more telling scenes, she discovers that her brother-in-law is cheating on her sister, and as a palliative to the overall miserable week she’s having she has a one night stand. (Apparently her go-to for bad weeks.) Of course, the next morning not only does she feel like crap, he’s on the phone with his wife. So she realizes her own behavior facilitates the very behavior she despises.

I mean, wow. The whole thing kind of impressed me with how it adhered to these specific characters making these specific choices with these specific consequences and stayed so strongly away from “We have to say this because we need women to believe they’ll be happier if they act like crappy men.”

The setup is that the producers of Zoe’s documentary turn down her first pitches because they’re looking for something light and they can’t think of a funny angle on honor killings. That’s how she ends up doing the arranged marriage thing. The producer guys are so smarmy, so spot-on trying to be the perfectly PC who-can-we-get-funding-from? spineless,  artless, gormless and yet utterly self-confident, they were my favorite characters. When the film is done and everybody in her life hates Zoe for having made it, they call her up on the phone and say something like “love the movie, brown stories, brown struggles…but white lens.” And they cancel it.

It felt so perfect, so utterly true-to-life. So, hey, maybe we’re all sick of this garbage. Then again, the movie was shot in 2021 and underwent some serious changes, so maybe there’s something going on there.

It wraps up perhaps a little too neatly, but I’m not complaining. It’s a romance, and it needs to tie things up, and there are actually only certain ways the genre is allowed to wrap-up. That’s fine.

James and Latif have good chemistry and apparently are longtime friends in real life. Emma Thompson is pitch-perfect as Zoe’s mother in a role written for her because the screenwriter always wanted Emma Thompson to be her mother.

To say that we were startled by three movies in a row that seemed to seek nothing other than to tell specific stories of specific characters is underselling our shock. Now, none of these films are burning up the box office. What’s Love Got To Do With It? broke $2 million (unlike the other two) but it’s unlikely to break $10M. And they all got excellent reviews and wide openings.

Interestingly, all three are listed as comedies. Comedy/Drama for the first two, and Romantic-Comedy for WLGTDWI? None of them are comedies. Someone, probably a marketing guy, decided somewhere along the line that if anyone cracks a joke in a movie, it’s a comedy. Queens has a sitcom-y foundation, full of wacky misunderstanding and plans gone awry, but it’s really very serious. Just because vulgar Italian-Americans having dinner is kind of funny does not make this a comedy. BlackBerry is clever and dark and you’ll get some laughs out of its wry presentation of the business world, but whatever the intentions of the filmmakers were, it’s not really a black comedy. It is by far the funniest of the three, though.

WLGTDWI? is reminiscent of Bridge Jones, understandably, but the character even more neurotic, or at least her neuroses are treated more seriously. This is not a romantic-comedy. The characters in a traditional romcom or even a genre romance, for that matter, can’t go around diddling other people. This is a drama about people in a modern, promiscuous world, and quite frankly, the damage that that promiscuity does, to say nothing of the betrayal the characters feel from absorbing the cultural narrative about love and sex. The characters are charming and human and there are many fun moments but no way in hell is this a romantic-comedy, much less a comedy-comedy.

Still, it’s strange to have three movies released so close together you don’t have to footnote with “Well, how do you feel about tons of feces?” or “It’s terrific, but it portrays the universe as utterly devoid of any kind of divine presence, which you may find soul-crushing,” or even just “Dildos play a prominent role.” (And since I’m way behind and haven’t written the reviews for the first two yet, I’m referring to Triangle of Sadness and The Banshees of Inisherin, respectively.

It all felt very…normal. Which feels weird in 2023.

“Sometimes I write poems that fail and I call those experiments.” I don’t know where I picked that up from, but I have attributed it in my head to Robert Frost. I think about it a lot these days. The Boy and I go to a lot of movies and, invariably, most of the movies are “indie”. This isn’t a prejudice on our part: Modern American mainstream movies fail to do what is expected of them—primarily on a story level (which is why you hear me extolling the virtues of Korean, Japanese and Chinese pop cinema). But “indie” is a wide, nearly meaningless term, as it can encompass movies that are meant to be pop cinema (romcoms, action films, horror, war, etc.) that just don’t have the reach (due to budget or distribution concerns) of those in the Hollywood system.

Hell, Hollywood has been abandoning more of its own movies, particularly since the lockdowns, rather than gamble on the costs of distribution and marketing.

Which leads us to that most repulsive of modifiers, “art”. An “art film” can be succinctly described as “a movie no one wants to see”. As James Madison’s Phone pointed out, historically, the Academy Awards were given to big hits. In recent years, they’re almost exclusively art films. Some of you may recall my lament last year that while I enjoyed many of the movies I saw, I couldn’t think of any that I wouldn’t highly qualify before recommending.

But just as mainstream movies fail, art films have their own traps they fall into. I’ve heard people complain, for example, they don’t want to see romcoms or an action flick because they know how the movie is going to end. This is, of course, absurd: Everyone knows Hamlet dies, Elizabeth Bennet gets married, Carrie murders everyone. Try to get a surprise ending every time and you end with M. Night Shyamalan.

This compulsion to be different and unexpected is the main trap of the art film. The most common one we’ve seen is “movies that, rather than pick an ending, just stop”. An “arty” love story will take you that crucial moment where the character has to make THE choice and then just roll credits. It isn’t necessary to spell things out, of course, but if the audience not only doesn’t get to see the climax of the story but you’ve also given so little information about the characters that the audience can’t enjoy figuring it out, you’ve failed.

Horror is a great vehicle for experimentation. Horror movies don’t have to make sense. They can effectively mess with traditional movie pacing. They can leave questions unanswered. Since survival is the common thread among all living things, they don’t need elaborate character development. They benefit inordinately from marketing. They’re cheap to make and they can become unreasonably popular. Being cheesy isn’t necessarily a barrier to success.

And now that you’ve read this, I’ll finally get to my recipe for chocolate chip cookiesmovie reviews. I’m going to contrast four movies today: The first two of are being hailed as arty, experimental films.

Skinamarink

Shot for $15,000 and raking in a cool $2 million at the box office, Skinamarink is the latest blight our neighbors to the north have visited upon on. The title comes from a once popular Canadian kid show. What’s it about? It’s about 100 minutes of staring at walls. When we came out of the theater, the concessions guy said, “Yeah, that movie is dividing people.” The Boy and I had the identical reaction: “Really?” This has irked The Boy so much that he’s been trying to find anyone to go to bat for it (who wasn’t stoned while watching it).

I encourage you to watch the 100 second trailer, even though it is a lie. It’s cut to make it look as though something happens. But that 100 seconds more-or-less encompasses the entirety of action in the film, which is sixty times longer and actually holds each of the shots shown for minutes on end, with no movement whatsoever. The story, which I defy anyone to get from the actual contents of the movie, is that a couple of kids wake up to find all the windows and doors in their house are gone. Some sort of entity has done something to their parents.

There’s enough here for a ten-minute short. Twenty, if you’re as patient as I am. There’s an atmosphere here. The audience has to do all the heavy lifting in order to rescue fear from the boredom, and the movie trips over itself making that nigh impossible.

The kids, for example, don’t act like pre-schoolers. There’s some talk of food but not much. (We’ll get to the time issues in a moment.) Their parents, or simulacrums thereof, are in the movie briefly. But nothing changes the kids’ tone from “walking around the house whispering” mode.

The house is completely cut off from the outside world. About three days into the proceedings, the kids decide to use the phone. The phone works! They talk to 9-1-1! What are we supposed to make of this? A demonic entity turned a house into a box, removed the plumbing, but not the phone wires? Somewhere out in Toronto, there’s a house just sitting in the middle of its block with doors and windows gone like we’re in a Luis Buñuel movie?

About time: One of the lies in the trailer is the “coming soon in 19732023″ gag. But it’s not 1973. 1993, maybe. The kids are constantly watching (public domain) videotapes. A minor point, perhaps, but why? Could you not make up your mind what time period it was? An hour into this nonsense, we get a “SIX MONTHS LATER” card. And nothing else changes. Our children have gone six months without food, without light, without human companionship and they’re completely unchanged. The whole thing could have (and should have) taken place in a very short time period.

Overall, the central conceit of this movie strikes me as bogus: In a found footage movie, which this comes across as, there are gaps and oddities due to the fact that the characters are experiencing what’s happening. You only get part of the picture because your cameraman is involved in the proceedings. This movie just says “We’re aiming are camera at a doorjam for three minutes. Write your own movie here! Enjoy!”

Give me Badass Ninja, made for about the same budget, but with one-hundred times more conviction.

Enys Men

Here’s a movie that genuinely takes place in 1973, was shot on 16mm film, and uses many of the conventions of 1973 filmmaking, where the film crew’s top priority was minimizing their carbon footprint. Well, fuck.

This is a genuinely arty film, full of interesting shots and homages to one of the most melodramatic periods of cinema, scattered images of varying degrees of spookiness, and an incomprehensible narrative. Strike that: An incomprehensible narrative would’ve been fine, this is a non-existent narrative. A woman lives on the lighthouse island of Enys Men and observes lichen. (Which, now that I put it that way, strikes me as how someone would parody an art film.) Sometimes there’s a girl in the house with her. The girl is her. We know this because they say the same words at the same time and the girl is only there sometimes which is impossible because it’s an island with nowhere to go, etc. The later “reveal” that they’re the same person comes across as “well, duh”.

This is emblematic of the whole movie: Who is there and who isn’t? Were there people on the island before and she’s the sole survivor? Is she dead? She drinks a lot of tea for a dead person. What’s the deal with the miners? Did they burn witches? Did the witches get together and burn everyone else?

To avoid the trap of falling into a clichéd narrative (which all the aforementioned things would be) Enys Men opts for giving you no narrative at all. Again, very “arty”. In some ways, this a bitterer disappointment than Skinamarink because it’s all potential and there’s a lot of skill here (where Skinamarink is just a guy aiming his video-camera at the ceiling).

The Lake

On the other end of the spectrum, we have this little Thai creature feature called The Lake. This is a movie that tries very much to be in the genre throwing in the tropes of the cranky rural fisherman who discovers the monster, the hero cop who’s alienated from his daughter, the heroic young college students who save the day, the “or is it?” ending that actually seems to indicate we’re in the middle of a series somehow, etc., but it never develops anything in to a proper story. Mostly, it’s got The Monster.

And unlike most creature features, The Monster is actually pretty damn good, with the filmmakers mixing practical effects with CGI. It’s hit-and-miss, sure, as this stuff always is, but the production values are overall very professional. When the Thai figure out the basics of storytelling, they’ll be a force.

Terrifier 2

If you were to ask me what the best movie of 2022 was, I might, in all honesty, say Terrifier 2. This movie fits squarely into the slasher genre, and into the specific subgenre of splatter. As reference points: Halloween is a slasher movie but not a splatter movie. Halloween 2 is a slasher and a splatter.

I don’t really like splatter movies. While I have come to appreciate the artistry of some of the films (and it’s hard not to love the creative bravura of Tom Savini, e.g.) I tend to avoid movies that I think are just going to revel in gore. I only saw this film because the buzz was strong.

And this movie hits the mark: If you like the splatter subgenre, this movie is for you. It delivers on everything it promises, then runs for another half-hour and delivers a transcendent deconstruction of the slasher genre. If you can tolerate splatter without really enjoying it (like me) this movie might still blow you away.

It starts with a murder, naturally, by series villain Art The Clown (played by the amazingly talented David Howard Thornton), but you immediately sense that something else is going on. It’s so over the top and so public, the movie takes on the air of a fairy tale or fable. (And what are slashers if not fables?) The gore here and elsewhere is so beyond the pale and so beyond what scolds would call “unnecessary”, it’s like a dance number in a Gene Kelly musical.

The Final Girl, Sienna, played by Lauren LaVera is the perfect counterpoint to Art, gradually becoming aware of his existence, his demonic quest to kill, and becoming a rival to him, first in the traditional slasher way as the scrappy survivor trying to protect her little brother, then in a metaphysical way. LaVera, who is a trained martial artist, plays the part so convincingly that as the movie veers into its fourth, unexpected act, it genuinely transcends its own genre.

Grossing $13M on a $400K budget, it embraces its narratives, its genre tropes, and goes whole hog. The energy is like the first two Evil Dead movies, and one can see shades of young Sam Raimi hanging from the rafter with his camera to get the shots he wanted in director Damien Leone’s hiding under the bed and working the bellows for a pair of disembodied lungs. The three of them: Thornton, LaVera and Leone make a powerful team.

In Conclusion

I like arty films and I don’t regret seeing Enys Man or even Skinamarink (much). But like Picasso drawing a stick figure of a bull, I suspect that the most successful experimental movies are going to come from those who have mastered the basic tropes and genres and narratives first.

The extended award season, finally receding into the future haze of “What won for best song in 2023?”*, always tends to pique me: What is great? From school, you’d get the idea that “great” is what a professor dozens or hundreds of years later thinks about your work. And however vile academics are today (and however mediocre they’ve historically been), we have both Shakespeare and Bach today because some academic recovered them from fickle pop culture. If someone can dig up your work hundreds of years later and people can still embrace the aesthetic, that’s a measure of greatness.

However, I do think there’s great “in the moment”. Tons of, e.g., ’80s culture was the right mood (as the kids say) for the time. This is true of every era, of course, and what’s remarkable about the ’80s is that a lot of the stuff dismissed as ephemera at the time still holds up today—in contrast to the late ’60s/early ’70s, which was absolutely convinced of its own immortality and is the very definition of “cringe” today.

From a narrative standpoint, however, a great story (by my lights) is the one that tells the tale that truly is eternal which brings us to A Man For All Seasons, 1966’s Best Picture Oscar winner.

The Flower (a recent convert to Catholicism) had been wanting to watch this for some time, and we finally did. It is as great as I remembered it being, but it also maps perfectly on to the recent struggle against the lockdowns, the whole red vs. blue pill, and the dangers of going against The Cathedral (in a practically literal sense). It is odd to see a movie you know well and love and yet be shocked into wanting to check the copyright to see if it was actually made yesterday.

Of course, it couldn’t have been made yesterday now, could it? (Maybe during the Trump administration, so they could metaphorically make him the villain, like they did with Bush and The Lives of Others.)

Directed by Fred Zinneman (High Noon, From Here To Eternity, Oklahoma!) who won directing and producing Oscars, based on a play by Robert Bolt (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago) who also won an Oscar, this is the story of Sir Thomas More, who stood against King Henry VIII’s decision to split from the Catholic Church in order to secure a divorce—and who expects his adherence to the law to protect him as Henry’s sycophants (and Henry himself) try bullying, cajoling and finally tricking him into breaking the law. Anything to get his agreement, which only seems to be important because he won’t give it.

Successful, respected, principled, we seem More lose all his worldly goods, we see his family turned against him (at least insofar as supporting his principles), we see him jailed and finally railroaded with an outright lie in a court of law. And, in a scene that is apparently close to historical truth, we see him executed. (Spoilers on a 500 year old event?)

Here, More is not even expressly going against Henry VIII: He’s simply not going with him, and that is enough to spur the escalating madness. Throughout the movie, More (who is not naive) is increasingly red-pilled, as he realizes if the King wants you dead, you’re dead, law be damned. Throughout, his friends and allies are imploring him to be reasonable, because it’s better than the alternative. (Relevantly, the issue of “right” or “wrong” isn’t really at play here, except in the sense that Henry feels he’s in the wrong, and he can’t feel that he’s the wrong.)

Paul Scofield won the acting Oscar (but he didn’t show because he figured he would lose to Richard Burton, who turned down the More part). Charlton Heston lobbied for the role and appeared in the 1988 version (which I find unwatchable). The cinematography—Technicolor, before they started muddying the colors too badly for “realism”—and costumes are great and also won Oscars. Robert Shaw (Jaws) lost best supporting actor.

A young John Hurt—his first role in a big movie—plays a would-be toady to More. Leo McKern, Wendy Hiller, Orson Welles, Vanessa Redgrave (who would go on to star in the Heston version), and Susannah York round out the cast.

Historical realism? It probably ends with the costumes (and the execution scene). More’s actual track record was not one of tolerance, with any number from three to eight heretics being burned at the stake during his reign as chancellor, according to modern historians. At the same time, revisionism is so endemic, I wouldn’t believe George Washington didn’t cut down the cherry tree if I weren’t his alibi for the night.

But realism is not the point: Bolt’s More is aspirational. He is what we should all be. Principled and willing to work within the system to the extent that it doesn’t compromise his principles.

If Bolt had specific events in mind, it also doesn’t matter, because it works so well today. (Contrast with Spartacus where Dalton Trumbo shoehorns his anti-McCarthy speech into the mouths of literal slavers.) It’s the universality of this premise which is great: We will always be impressed on to conform and to compromise even our most fundamental beliefs, it seems like. With More we have a role model.

*“Naatu Naatu” from RRR.

Cameron Edward, a fiftyish host of a failed kid’s TV show, is having a difficult time. His wife, Erin, doesn’t respect him. His daughter isn’t too impressed either, though she at least seems to be somewhat sympathetic toward him, and his son barely speaks at all. His kid’s show airs at midnight, being overlooked for more traditional Saturday morning time slot. And as we quickly discover, his wife is filing for divorce.

Then, one day, as he’s biking home from work a red corvette drops upside-down from the sky. He goes to look at the driver, and it’s him. Not the current him, but a younger, better-looking version of him.

If that weren’t confusing enough, nobody seems to have heard about this odd happening and the driver of the red Corvette, one Nick Armstrong (and his car) are not only fine, but apparently slated to replace him as the host of the TV show he created.

The icing on the cake is when a rocket, a Sputnik or some similar space debris crashes in his backyard and the government won’t let him see it and won’t let him back in his own house.

Welcome to Linoleum, writer/director Colin West’s odd little slice-of-life drama which is also (erroneously) labeled as a comedy. There are funny parts to it, and “funny” parts to it, but this is straight up drama, the presence of Jim Gaffigan (as Edward and Armstrong) notwithstanding.

This is such a refreshing film to find in this, the two-thousand and twenty-third year of Our Lord. It reminded me a bit of Donnie Darko, but without the pretensions. Also refreshing: Every aspect of this movie makes sense and fits into the larger narrative, once you understand what’s going on. Anybody can drop a Corvette upside down from the sky; not everyone can have that make sense.

The main drives of this movie are Edward reclaiming his youthful dreams of doing something fantastic—like building a working rocket from the detritus that fell from the sky—and reclaiming his relationship with Erin, and secondarily the relationship between Edward’s daughter Nora and Armstrong’s son Marc. Toward the end of the second act, I began to feel like the movie was focusing too much on the Nora/Marc relationship, only to discover I was completely wrong.

The movie never gets so enamored of its central conceit that it loses sight of its characters, their drives, and their essential humanity. West, perhaps because he wrote the story, is content to let it play out without going overboard with tricky photography, though there are plenty of nice shots.

I suppose it must be asked, alas, if it is woke or woke-ish? In normal times, I’d say no, not at all. Though it certainly leans on the trope of the evil Christian—Nick Armstrong is the movie’s main foil and a hypocritical churchgoer. Nora, who is clearly attracted to Marc, but denying it, claims to be either lesbian or bisexual, while Marc wears women’s underwear but this all works out to be typical teenage posturing. The movie itself itself is a validation of heterosexuality and “normal” lifestyles. Which is a weird thing to type, but I know also that some of y’all are hypersensitive to any odd sexuality (and who can blame anyone for that after the past decade’s full-on cultural onslaught?), so I feel obliged to point it out.

For what it’s worth, the film’s other villain is Erin’s wine-drinking Karen of a friend, Linda, who speaks in new-agey terms while positively salivating at the thought of Erin dumping Cameron and slutting it up for a while.

Top-notch acting all around. Of course we’re sympathetic toward Cameron, but Gaffigan manages to create a sympathetic vibe for Nick as well. As a character, Nick could’ve been drawn with a little more depth (though there are story reasons why he isn’t), but Gaffigan doesn’t give off monster vibes. I attribute that partly to Gaffigan’s performance but presumably also West didn’t want him to appear that way either.

Even so, I felt like Rhea Sheehorn (as Erin) had the more challenging role: She starts off a little shrewish, as her doughy, aimless husband meanders through life and she has given up on her own dreams in exchange for a little security. As Cameron becomes more obsessed with building a rocket, she gets more convinced he’s going through some midlife crisis, and it’s really Linda, with her glib “take the big city job and start over again” attitude that causes her to reflect on whether or not that’s really what she wants. The subversiveness of this movie (in 2023) is that not abandoning your loser husband but helping him through the tough spots is actually celebrated. It’s a fine line for an actress to walk and remain appealing, and Sheehorn pulls it off beautifully.

The teen would-be lovers, played by Katelyn Nacon and Gabriel Rush, also do a good job. Marc (Rush) is cowed by his father but also defiant. Nacon is appealing despite the (again, very teenage) outsider-ism, too-cool-for-school attitude. As the movie unfolds, her relationship with her father (whom she insists on calling Cameron) is one of the strongest aspects of the film: When you get to the end of the film, you want to re-watch it in light of all the new information. The kids do well in the movie.

As I watched this, I sorta figured the cast was relatively low profile to keep the budget down. That said, Tony Shalhoub (“Monk”) has a surprising role as a nursing home director. Michael Ian Black (“The State”) didn’t even register with me as Cameron’s unctuous boss who gives his show to Nick.

The music is just so. Not too heavy-handed. Not not-there-at-all.

Overall, it’s a nice little movie. (Again, it’s not a “dramedy” or a “comedy/drama”, unless you view a “drama” as being completely humorless. It’s a drama where odd things happen.) It’s the sort of movie you’d expect to be any movie studio’s bread-and-butter, and (while very modern) pleasantly recalls old school melodramas.

It also very much feels like an expanded version of the intro to another recent classic, but I can’t say more without spoilers.

I was going to subject you all to a post about The Whale but an eleventh hour viewing the new Bill Nighy picture, Living, changed my mind. They are, in many ways, similar pictures, in that they are low-stakes dramas, primarily acting vehicles that rely heavily on their lead actors with all parties keenly aware of the prospect of winning awards “late in life”. (Brendan Fraser, the “pretty boy” action/comedy star at 52 and Billy Nighy at 71, who didn’t really break through internationally until he was about 50.

But my capsule for The Whale is pretty much, Brendan Fraser (and the other actors) are great in a story that is just really gross (in many meanings of the word). I can’t recommend it unless you’re a Fraser completist. (Actually, I have a 1,200 word review castigating it because, while I didn’t hate it, it gets more loathsome the more I think about it, and the more keenly I become aware of how its twisted obeisance to wokeness destroyed a potentially fine story.)

Living, on the other hand, while super low-key and very, very British is easy to recommend, if you’re in the mood for a drama, and almost the anti-Whale. It chooses, at every point, to lowball the delivery and let the audience bring their own intensity to the proceedings.

If you know Nighy from his lighter roles, Shaun of the Dead or Love, Actually, this movie may surprise you. All of the little comic tics—the ones that made it apparent he was the voice behind Davy Jones in Disney’s Pirates series, e.g.—are gone. Nighy is a buttoned-down functionary in a massive post-war English bureaucracy whose main talent is calmly burying things no one wants to handle.

One day, he gets the bad news: He’s going to die. Soon.

Now, “man (or woman) gets walking papers, goes berserk” is common enough as a setup to be a subgenre. (The comedy version, like Joe vs. the Volcano, typically has the hero discovering at the end that he’s actually fine.) Comedy or drama, the point of the journey is to put into focus what’s important in life—what it means to be living.

Living, which is based on an Akira Kurosawa screenplay and hews pretty closely to it as far as I can tell, has our protagonist, Williams, dabbling with the obvious. He finds a disreputable fellow to go drinking and clubbing with. Then he finds himself enamored of one of his underlings, though less in a sexual way than an admiration for her joie de vivre. This leads him back to his job, of all things, where he decides to actually do it and get something, however small, done.

This movie transcends many others of its kind because it doesn’t end with the death of the main character. Williams definitely finds some joy and redemption in his last act of bureaucratic defiance—the building of a playground in a bombed out grotto between low-rent flats—but it’s not like most movie moments where the playground gets built and everyone lives happily ever after. No, he leaves behind a legacy for his colleagues to follow.

It’s a legacy they embrace heartily and then just as quickly abandon as things go back to normal. I mean, this isn’t a fairy tale. We can’t pretend that English bureaucracy got better from 1953, can we?

But there is a secondary character, a young version of Williams auspiciously named Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp). He joins the bureau the day before Williams gets his prognosis, and Williams sees in him the potential for change. The last part of the movie, then, becomes an arc where Wakeling grows to understand Williams more, and to understand what this last gesture should mean for him personally as well as the world at large.

I don’t need to tell you the acting is good. It’s freaking English. They have a crèche where they genetically engineer good actors. As someone who appreciates Shatnerian levels of hamfoolery, it was very nice to see acting that was low-key without being flat and dead (which is how American actors define “natural”). As someone who loves Nighy’s comedic tics, I missed them here, but only briefly: His performance is unlike anything I’ve seen out of him; he becomes this other person to where it seems like his face has changed shape.

Aimee Lou Wood is very appealing as the girl who’s too lively for County Hall. With her overbite and wide-spaced eyes, she’s very “girl next door” (cf. the French girl next door). It’s very hard for me to place the other actors correctly with their names as 90% of the photos I can find are of Nighy and Wood at an event for the movie. But there’s a character, the one who shows Nighy a “good time”, who reminded me of Orson Welles.

I mention this because the movie is shot very interestingly. It begins with stock footage, I believe, from about 1956, over which a classic font is used for the title and copyright notice, very much like Pearl. And then the opening shots of the movie are filmed (again like Pearl) as though they were in Technicolor, with a beautiful shot of a train going through the English countryside. In fact, a great many of the shots are provocative: Drab bureaucrats marching up and down stairs completely oblivious to the staggering beauty around them. And then most of the conversations are shot Finch-ian, with faces in heavy, heavy shadows. (A particularly great one had Wood’s camera-side in utter darkness, except for a tiny point of light reflecting from her earring.)

But a great many of the shots evoked The Third Man. Long shadows. Post-war wreckage. Things swallowed up by or emerging from darkness.

In contrast to the acting, the lighting of this film is very dramatic. It never gets into showy movement or cartoonish angle-tilting, but it’s one of the most thoughtfully aesthetic movies in terms of composition, blocking and lighting, than I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s nigh (heh) perfect in that it succeeds fully in what it’s trying to do. The only part I felt was a little overplayed was in the final notes of the score. The Boy disagreed with me, but I felt like the score (which was just right all the way through) was trying to do some (unneeded) heavy lifting. The most minor of points.

It may not be one’s cup of tea, as it were, but I don’t expect to see a better Oscar-bait movie this season. And I don’t have to list 40 caveats about political correctness or gross sex stuff.

The anti-Japanese animus is so prevalent in Korean pop cinema, I sometimes forget to take note when I leave the theater of all the Koreans walking out of the Daiso store with their “Hello, Kitty” merchandise. And so I was a little surprised to discover the great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda directing an all-star Korean cast in a movie about baby brokers and abandoned children.

If you’ve followed along with my Korean pop cinema journey, you might recall Ma Dong-Seok’s homage to Over The Top called Champion, where I discovered that Koreans call the orphans that adopted by Americans and Europeans “the Abandoned”. Since orphans are routinely referred to as “abandoned” in this movie, that term may not be specific to children adopted by foreigners. It’s a real issue and sore point for Koreans, as is the topic of baby drop boxes, which apparently first started in 2014 and the focus of some negative attention. (They make it easier to abandon a baby on the one hand, and they prevent abandoned babies from dying on the other.)

That, however, is a topic for a documentary, and this move is the sort of exploration of family we have come to expect from Kore-eda, who first came to our attention with Like Father, Like Son (where two families discover their six-year-old sons were switched at birth), and followed up with Our Little Sister, After The Storm and Shoplifters, all of which deal with unusual families. His movies avoid melodrama, relying on empathy and provocative situations rather than big acting and splashy events.

As such, Broker has that best quality of Asian cinema: that of being able to tackle serious, even dark subjects while actually being a fun watch. We liked it so much we felt like we needed a Kore-eda film festival to re-watch all his movies. They seem like they’d get better over time.

The story is simple: Our two brokers, a middle-aged man, Sang-hyeon, has his accomplice Dong-soo working the Sunday overnight shift at the orphanage. When a girl (named So-Young, heh) drops off her baby, Dong-soo grabs it, erases the tape and hands the baby off to Sang-hyeon, with the idea that they’re going to sell it. The wrinkle is that So-Young comes back to the orphanage the next day to get the baby and of course there’s no record of it. Rather than risk police involvement, Dong-soo cuts her in on the deal. But when they meet the potential parents, they try to haggle over the price (by insulting the baby’s eyebrows!) and So-Young refuses to sell.

Now, all of a sudden, the movie is a road picture, with our protagonists traveling all over Korea to find a good price for the baby to whom, of course, they’re increasingly attached. At one point, they end up with an older orphan boy who is “too old” (eight?) to be adopted, and the five of them engage in various hijinks and impromptu acting as they spontaneously create cover stories for their situation. In essence, they’re forced to imagine the family they would like to be.

And now you have a mom in the car with the men her baby could become as a result of her choices. Dong-soo, for example, was himself an orphan, but he claims to have liked it and he’s kind of a celebrity at his former orphanage. Sang-hyeon is divorced (and pining for his ex) and alienated from his daughter, while also in serious debt to a local gangster. The young boy, Hae-Jin, is high-spirited but how long can he withstand being rejected?

They can’t escape the darker parts of life forever: So-young is a prostitute. The events leading to her abandoning her baby are not pretty. Sang-hyeon owes money to the same gang that pimps out So-young—and the connection goes further than that, which I won’t spoil, but N.B. that the gang is a traditional family. Our thugs do not come from a broken home, ironically.

Adding another dimension to the proceedings are two lady detectives who, tired of being relegated to checking plates on potentially stolen cars, stake out the orphanage with an eye toward catching baby brokers. They form an extension of our dysfunctional family—the role usually taken on by spinster aunts. They want the bust, but it gets harder and harder for them to see their way clear to playing everything by-the-book.

An earlier Hollywood could’ve done this story, sort of, with a ridiculous (but wonderful) happy ending. Kore-eda is a little more grounded in reality. There’s a hopeful ending. He’s not going to tie up everything with a nice little bow, but he’s also not going to bury you in ennui and despair.

From a movie-viewing perspective, the punchline to me was that this is a very Japanese film. Korean movies make Korea look beautiful: The hills are lush and green, and the homes are picturesque and rich with tradition. Kore-eda makes it look like just another place. That’s very appropriate to the movie. There is a discussion of regional pride (the way people in America might talk about being from New York or from The South), but as always Kore-eda’s characters are meant to appeal to our shared humanity.

The acting is top-notch. Song Kang-ho (as Sang-hyeon) was in this year’s Emergency Declaration as well as (the underrated) The King’s Letters, (the overrated) Parasite, Snowpiercer, Lady Vengeance, The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Memories of Murder—a fair percentage of modern and influential Korean classics. Despite being one of the biggest actors in Korea, he always seems to disappear into the role. Similarly with Bae Doon, playing the dogged female detective, who co-starred with Song in Lady Vengeance and played his shrewish, melodramatic sister in The Host.

Gang Dong-won (Peninsula, 1987: When The Day Comes) and Ji Eun-Li (a K-Pop teen mega-idol who goes by “IU”) also just vanish into their roles (the younger baby broker and the mother, respectively), which in some ways are more challenging. Dong-won has some aspects of the “comic relief sidekick”, but he does that without becoming clownish or unappealing. This is important, or the feelings he develops for Eun-li would just seem pathetic. For her part, Eun-li has to dance on the edge of audience sympathy. She convinces us she’s capable of bad stuff, but then also convinces us she’s capable of good as well.

A particularly poignant scene between Ji (as the mother) and Bae (as the female detective) has them arguing over the fact that it’s more “respectable” to have an abortion than to give your child up for adoption, a sentiment Ji’s character rejects and Bae’s character has seemingly never considered. Although it was perfectly natural and not at all political, it made me pretty sure Broker wasn’t going to win any Oscars. (The movie also won the “ecumenical prize” at Cannes, which probably works against it winning awards from heathens.)

QUICK HITS

Skinamarink: Run, don’t walk, as fast you can away from this. A 10-minute idea padded into a 100-minute film.

The Old Way: Nic Cage as Clint Eastwood in the surprisingly solid story of a retired gunfighter who takes his daughter on a quest for revenge. Nic Searcy as the lawman trying to hold him back.

The French Brigade: A “very French film” where “very French” doesn’t mean “sexually weird”. A lovely little bit of pro-refugee propaganda about a snooty woman who finds herself making genuine chefs out of (mostly sub-Saharan) immigrants.

Babylon: The worst thing to happen to Singin’ In The Rain since A Clockwork Orange! A very fine 3+ hour film about silent movie stars and their inability to transition to sound from the director of Whiplash and La La Land.

The Whale: Brendan Fraser shows he still has his chops in this confused, bombastic melodrama from the guy who brought you Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream.

The Runner: Cool slice-of-life story about an Iranian orphan boy after the revolution who lives in a rusted out boat and hustles refundable bottles and shoe shines.

No Bears: Your reminder that there are brave filmmakers in the world, in this case Jafar Panahi who pokes the Iranian Revolutionary lunatics and is currently in jail. I’ll be watching that while you’re reading this!

In 2000 and 2001, a serial killer ran amok in Iran killing prostitutes. Serial killers killing prostitutes is probably as old as prostitutes, or serial killers, and you’ve seen it a million times, but you haven’t seen it in post-Revolutionary Iran.

What’s the difference?

Well, what that means is the second act ends with the capture of the killer, and the third act concerns the popular support for the killer among hardline Muslims.

Remember, kids, all cultures are equally valid!

The cat-and-mouse part of the movie, the first two acts, is nothing special in the world of serial killer movies. Although there is a moment of explicit fellatio, which was as shocking as the movie opening with—and staying focused—on a topless woman—while also not being filmed in Bakersfield. (It was filmed in Lebanon, I believe.) One interesting aspect of this is the movie’s focus on the killer which is…I don’t want to say sympathetic…but remarkably empathetic. The Spider, as he’s known professionally, is a family man whose neighborhood is increasingly being encroached on by prostitutes.

He’s a little weird. He has some PTSD from the Iran/Iraq war. No real attempt to explain his behavior is made, which is just as well.

The other interesting thing about this is the protagonist Rahimi is played by Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who allegedly just signed on as the casting director and ended up playing the part because the actress who was going to play it ducked out over fears of playing the part without a hijab. There’s a sort of rough quality to the performance (although Amir-Ebrahimi is a seasoned actress) that lends some credence to the idea. That is to say, it feels less like Zar is acting and more like she’s actually concerned someone might murder her, and she’s going ahead anyway. (A meta-performance, almost. It’s a distinct and original quality they might not have gotten with the original actress.)

The third act is where the movie comes home both as a statement (and it is a statement) and an aesthetic product. The Spider is defiant. He’s not sorry. He was cleaning up the streets.

And, wackily enough, people agree with that sentiment.

I mean, hell, I could see their point. And the movie doesn’t shy away from the seamy nature of the business, which is doubly seamy and weird in a society where you might get stoned for not wearing a head scarf.

But, man, you’d think there’d be someone saying “Hey, prostitution is bad, but let’s see what steps we can take before murder.” I’m sure—I hope anyway, there were people in real life doing just that, but the movie focuses on the Spider’s supporters. Also, the Spider, knowing he has support becomes increasingly convinced he’s going to get away with it. And the movie shows, in subtle ways, that he’s losing his grip on reality.

As the result, the end is quite a surprise to him, as it will be to the inattentive viewer.

The coda to the film has the Spider’s son (who idolized his father) demonstrating how he will carry on the family tradition, using his sister as a handy victim. (This is playacting, I hasten to add: He does not kill his sister.)

In our world of microaggressions and hypersensitivity, where some shriek that everything political action that doesn’t go their way is “just like sharia”, it can be almost difficult to process actual sharia, actual patriarchy, actual misogyny.

We had to go out of our way to see this, first because it was stubbornly staying in Santa Monica when we were short on movie choices, and next because our first attempt to see it—there were no subtitles and our Iranian is rusty. (The number of issues we’ve had with exhibitions is rather perplexing.) But ultimately we were glad we did.

Most of the Korean movies we go see are what you might call “popcorn movies”. (I mean, for us all movies are popcorn movies, and I think we take some perverse pleasure in chomping on big handfuls of popcorn as the host of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona or Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel is pontificating on “1962, the greatest year in the movies!” Love ya, Stephen!) But by “popcorn movies” I mean, of course, crowd-pleasers, the movies that the general public is going to enjoy, or so it is imagined when they are created. This is as distinguished from the Korean movies that generally make it over to our art houses, like Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite or Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring.

Korea has not had the complete schism between their art films and their popular films, as we have in America. Think, e.g., Kramer vs. Kramer being the #4 box office in 1980 (and would’ve been #2, except for the ten million it pulled in in December 1979) and people going “huh?” when you mention Coda or Nomadland (the “best picture” winners for the past two years).

I don’t even know where you’d put Park Chan-wook, quite frankly. He worked with Bong Joon Ho on Snowpiercer, for example, and it was his Handmaiden that actually started us on the road to seeing popcorn Korean films—even though it really isn’t one itself. I’m pretty sure his vengeance trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance) define the Korean revenge picture to this day. I’d pronounce him sui generis: He’s one of these auteurs who makes the statement he wants to make and has the skill to cross popular and critical lines.

If you wanted to, you might criticize him for sensationalist or graphicness: Oldboy is shocking, as is Handmaiden, though entirely in different ways. The latter is as sexually graphic a film as I’ve seen in the past five years. And yet, the sex and the graphicness of it, seems absolutely vital to the story and the characters in it. And Oldboy would make a Greek blush.

Out of all these, he now gives us Decision To Leave which has literally nothing of the sort. He’s back at the noir well, for sure, with plenty of nods to Hitchcock (think Vertigo) and we have the central dramatic tension between the hero and the femme fatale—which is entirely chaste.

How’s that for shocking?

I mean, it kind of is, right? And just as the graphic sexual scenes created an interesting depth to Handmaiden that went beyond titillation into intimacy, the absence of them here does the same thing.

Our hero is a detective investigating a rich man who has fallen off a cliff and died, and the obvious culprit is his much younger wife. I don’t think I need to explain the twists and turns that follow which are artfully done, but follow the traditional path of our protagonist thinking she’s guilty, finding evidence, finding exonerations and ameliorations, finding more evidence, finding out that she’s apparently lying, finding out that she’s not lying but has a checkered past, but the checkered past has a good reason, etc. etc. etc.

This is all entertaining and well done, but it’s also just window dressing for the love story. He’s obviously (and almost immediately) in love with her, even though he’s married. But not only do they never make sexual contact—actually, I’m not sure they make physical contact at all—Seo-rae, our femme fatale, dresses most modestly at all times.

I’ve noted in the past that Korean popcorn movies tend to have demure depictions of females. The bad girl in The Bad Guys: Reign of Chaos, for example, wears blue jeans and a (slightly ) short shirt. It’s kind of cute, like how Rita Hayworth in Gilda is a virgin. (She doesn’t dance like a virgin!)

But we are talking about the guy who directed Handmaiden, so he’s not doing this as a sop to censors or the morality squad. And it’s actually aggressively modest: Tang Wei (Long Day’s Journey Into Night) is lovely but is she lovelier than Lee Jung-hyun (Peninsula)? As the wife of the detective, she’s certainly not less sexually accessible. In fact, while the two are separated most of the week, she insists they have sex whenever they’re together, to stay bonded.

The movie follows what you might call the “usual” twists and turns until a climactic moment at what would be the end of most noirs.

But here it’s just the beginning. This is where the comparisons to Vertigo start to really kick in, though the director claims to only unconsciously have been influenced, and I believe that, since the parallels are more in the kind of surreal quality of the proceedings, and the contentious relationship the hero and the femme fatale have in the final portion of the movie.

And the whole thing is done with any sex or seduction so deeply buried as to raise the question, what is love? Is he in love with this woman or just obsessed? Does she have any real feelings for him or is she using him? Is there any value in compromising one’s self to protect someone else, even if that someone else is just an illusion? Is the whole business of living an illusion?

OK, I’m going off the deep end a little bit there. But it’s a great variation on classic noir tropes, sort of sweet and mordant, and it made me think I needed to see it again almost right away.

I saw this one alongside Hansan, which made for a terrific double-feature. Where the historical drama reinforces the idea of Korea, the country, Emergency Declaration showcases Koreans, the people, as they view themselves today (plausibly). I should note that some Korean criticisms of the film thought it was too mawkish, too manipulative, too try-hardy, and too long.

These criticisms are valid, yet they mostly didn’t bother me. (Some of the manipulativeness was unnecessarily heavy-handed. The lily was gilded, as it were.)

The premise is this: A crazy bioengineer looses a nightmare diseases in the closed cabin of a plane on its way to Hawaii. (As we saw in our last airplane-based movie, OK Madam, Hawaii is a popular vacation spot for Koreans.) This is discovered on the way, and the initial thought is that the plane will land in Hawaii and everyone will be quarantined until the matter is resolved (or they all end up dead).

There’s gonna be spoilers, but I think you could probably guess all the twists-and-turns. The movie isn’t really about clever, surprising moments: It’s an exercise in hypotheticals.

The USA refuses to let the Korean flight land, to the point where the US government is willing to blow it out of the air. So they turn back. Next stop: Japan.

Do I even have to say how the Japanese feel about having a plane load of sick Koreans land on their little island? In a Korean movie?

The part here that didn’t quite work for me is that I’ve seen enough Korean movies to not even find it remotely plausible that a Korean plane full of infectious would be allowed to land in Japan. This is the downside of painting the Japanese so cartoonishly evil in every movie: I don’t buy it for a second when you say they’re going to do something decent. (In real life, I think the Japanese would handle it as a matter of pride and humanity. The US, probably, too, though the US government might decide to bring the plane all the way over to LAX to infect the maximum number of people. Tell me I’m exaggerating. I dare ya.)

The real point of the story, though, is how everyone reacts to the unfolding situation: Each disappointment at being turned away, Top Men searching for answers on the ground, and people starting to die on the plane—this all plays out in classic disaster movie form, with bits of society reacting in different and evolving ways to the progress of the plot.

Korean movies tend to paint modern Koreans in pretty much the same way: They’re selfish, vain, short-sighted, afraid…until they’re not any more. When confronted with a terrible choice, they will make a sacrifice over harming others. But they’ll go through the various emotional stages on their way to making peace with doing what’s right.

I dunno, that feels very universally human to me, and carries the whole thing through some of the more preposterous/poorly designed parts.

In particular, the loophole that keeps the movie from being utterly depressing is a potential cure, which is being hidden by the (American run, heh) pharmaceutical company that engineered the virus (though didn’t let it go, can’t be TOO on-the-money). State functionaries work to discover this, and use the power of the state to force the company to admit they have it.

Part of the Korean Myth is that their government still works on some level.

Disaster movies tend to be long and mawkish and kind of clunky because they’re trying to build this class-crossing melodrama, and Emergency Declaration is no exception. It features an all-star cast including your favorites from such films as Parasite, Ashfall, I Saw The Devil (2010, Korea), Beasts That Cling To The Straw, and even OK! Madam! Box office may have been a bit disappointing but are well ahead of the likely Oscar contender Decision To Leave, and also the upcoming Broker (where the great Japanese director Kore-eda directs a Korean cast, including many of the people in this movie).

I was not exactly clamoring to see Terrifier 2, the sequel to the barely noticed (by me) 2016 movie Terrifier, about a slasher Killer Klown-type terrorizing a…I mean, honestly, does it matter? Not really. And when (the great) Darcy The Mail Girl said it was the goriest movie she had ever seen, that didn’t really move it up my scales much. In fact, it moved it down. I’m not really a gore guy. I don’t like to rule things out on the basis of gore, but if I feel like gore is all a movie has to offer, I have concession stand popcorn (with artificial butter flavoring) to make me nauseous. (This was not playing at our beloved Laemmle, at least when we were looking.)

But it was Halloween and the pickings were slim, as they had been pretty much all year. (Although, as noted previously, it was a pretty good year for horror films of various sorts.) So the Boy and I trundled off to see Art The Clown have his way with the hapless residents of Manalapan, New Jersey?

Well, whatever. Off we went, and the otherworldly clown immediately launched into some savagely gory nonsense. It had a distinctly supernatural feel to it (which a lot of movies mishandle by making the literalness or the reality of the killer a matter of plot convenience). But Terrifier 2 gets that part right: Art The Clown is a demon of some sort. This also sets the tone for the movie: The director, Damien Leone, wants you to have fun, so he immediately tells you “this isn’t real…just relax”.

He’s no faceless killer a la The Shape or Jason, and he’s no wisecracking goofball like Freddie. He’s just pissed. Really, really pissed. (Courtesy of David Howard Thornton who right now is running around as the Grinch in the holiday horror Seuss rip-off The Mean One.) So the first couple of kills are really, really gory. To the point where you have to laugh at how over the top it is. It’s not a scoffing laugh, however, it’s a kind of uneasy laugh—the movie uses this extreme violence to create an air of menace around Art that permeates all of his subsequent actions, no matter how innocent. (One of Art’s characteristics which we have to assume is for himself, or for us, the audience, is to occasionally function as a non-homicidal clown. As if such a thing existed.)

The movie drips with style and blood as literal proceedings are peppered with nightmares that feel very real. The quality of the film is sort of nightmarish, so this trope is rather effective on its own, but like much of the movie, it doesn’t rest on being just a competent spooky slasher. The supernatural elements get amped up as our heroine discovers through her dreams a kind of anti-Art status.

Look, you guys know how I feel about long movies: Every minute you spend over an hour-and-a-half had better be well justified. This movie clocks in at nearly 2:20, but that last third of the film elevates it from fun, gory slasher to something that has an epic fantasy feel.

And here we, perhaps, see a kind of resonance with the extreme gore: The movie that isn’t afraid to go completely HAM on kill scenes then musters enough creativity and budget to posit some kind of cosmic struggle between good and evil—not in the “final girl vs. the slasher” sense but in demons vs. angels. In this case, our angel is Laura LaVera.

Commercially, it doesn’t make any sense. No one wants a 2:20 minute slasher. As Malignant showed us last year—and as any bold or daring horror movie shows—people have a real limit to what they’ll tolerate. On a $250,000 budget, why would you ever stretch the length out rather than focus on a shorter film.

Well, because writer/director Damian Leone wanted to. Apparently, this was his goal from the get-go over ten years ago. And The Boy and I could do no more than clap appreciatively and respectfully at the result. We were surprised on multiple levels: The quality of the film as a slasher, the scope of the film as something more, and the fact that it flies by despite being as long as it is.

I suppose I should say something about the effects: The best thing I can say is that I didn’t notice them. I understand they were almost entirely practical with a few digital tweaks, and the movie does have an almost “throwback” feel. But they do what effects are supposed to: They get the story across. (Leone is a big FX guy, too, apparently.) You tell me why a guy with a quarter-mil can do this while the bigwigs throw money in to CGI. Probably it’s just harder and messier. But it works super well here.

Obviously, it’s not for the queasy. But I found myself taking the extreme gore in the spirit it was intended. Art is a badass mime, and you don’t mess with those guys. And soon it was just part of the experience, the universe, and it comes across as more weird than sensational, if that makes sense.

A pleasant, even shocking surprise, well deserving of the $12M it earned. Doubtless destined to be a seasonal classic.

A group of young men approaching their 30th birthdays and who have frustrated theatrical aspirations take one last stab at becoming a success by staging a shocking play wherein they trap the audience and beat the tar out of each other (and their actresses).

Which they finance with a heist.

Which…

Look, this is one of those movies that is not shown in temporal order. The current moment (the putting on of the play) is threaded with the earlier stories of how the boys are looking down the barrel at ordinary lives (gasp!), with not a lot of romantic prospects, job prospects, and only a string of unsuccessful roles behind them. Then there’s the heist. Which goes wrong. But they still put on a show.

There’s a kind of surreal quality to it since, I’m pretty sure, you need to come up with your cash up front when you’re putting on a show (and if you don’t, fraud is easier and safer and involves less jail time than a heist), and they do the heist on the day of the show and as I say, it goes wrong but The Show Must Go On. (Because if it doesn’t you have to refund the tickets.)

This is low budget, to be sure, and kind of dizzying in its story-within-a-story structure: What is real, what isn’t? As The Boy pointed out, there were clues that you might think were just sloppiness, but it’s actually a pretty tight story where the pieces all fit together at the end. Kind of impressive.

We liked it. We found it interesting. It managed to do some sophisticated things without becoming overly infatuated with its own technique or cleverness, which is refreshing in its own way.

Also, apparently, if you want to be in the entertainment industry in Japan, you’ve gotta run criminal scams. I don’t mean wholesome things like pornography rings or fraudulent accounting like in the good old USA, but “call old Thai ladies on the phone and get them to send you gift cards”. And money laundering, but I guess that’s the commonality between us. The Lingua Franca, if you will of criminal/entertainment activities.

Anyway, good and interesting micro(?) budget film. Toys with you enough to be interesting but not so much as to be irritating.

Based on the director’s real-life experiences, says he.

How about some Spanish surrealism?

No?

I’m not surprised.

Luis Buñuel famously got his start pairing up with Salvador Dali for Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) which is sixteen minutes of special effects. OK, it’s called “surrealism” but who are we kidding? Special effects are surrealism. If you’re a weirdo Spaniard and you call it “surrealism”, though, it’s now art and not just crass entertainment for the unwashed hordes.

Which is neither here nor there, I suppose.

The Exterminating Angel has the following premise: Some hoity-toity types have a dinner party and when it’s time to leave…they can’t.

There’s your movie.

It goes from humorous, as the various guests find reasons they can’t leave, to the point of encouraging others to leave but they’ve decided, spontaneously, to sleep on the floor of the living room they can’t leave, to almost science-fiction-y, as we discover nobody can get in to the house, and various strategies are tried, to horror, as the various guests suffer physical deprivation over time and some give in to despair.

A lot of faint-hearted Catholics swear to God that they will put their lives right if only they are freed and…well, I’m not sure what happens after that. I mean, I know what literally is portrayed, and I get the denouement, in the literal sense, and I get that it’s sorta ironic, I suppose.

But I don’t get what it’s about. If there’s a message here, it escapes me. Unless the message is that we are very little in control of things in the universe and our feelings about what happen have very little bearing thereupon.

Which, meh.

For all that, it’s an entertaining film, because the reactions of the people are amusing and have the ring of truth. What would these people do in this impossible situation? Probably this. That may be enough.

The Boy and I liked it, and I think it may be regarded as Buñuel’s  best work, although I think he has also done some more traditional narrative movies (Belle de Jour and The Obscure Object of Desire, e.g.) and I wouldn’t avoid them.

If you want something non-traditional, this isn’t the most difficult movie to watch.

Horror movies, like classic Pixar movies, tend to be based on fun but flimsy pretexts that can make for a wildly entertaining moments but which hard to sustain—increasingly difficult, even as commercial exigencies demand that sequels be made.

I’m reminded of this every time I see Halloween. (Or any of its sequels, come to think of it, except 3, which is a mistake on its own terms, at least.) Halloween‘s premise is ridiculously simple: A child murders his sister and her boyfriend with a knife and is committed to an insane asylum where, instead of receiving treatment, his doctor becomes convinced that he has no soul and is the embodiment of pure evil.

In 1978, this was kind of a batty premise instead of the most tired cliché in movies, and the whole thing is strung together with a kind of funhouse attitude where the big shock is that the doctor is right: The Shape (nee Michael Meyers) is not human. He’s Evil.

And he’s evil in such a way that a relatively minor injury makes him lie flat on his back as though he were dead, but only for a minute or so, until Laurie Strode lets her guard down. Seriously, I think she kicks him in the shins at one point and he falls down “dead” and she’s, like, “Oh, wow, what a relief he’s finally gone.”

The great final shot (of him) makes the movie a fun campfire story but, boy, it doesn’t make for an interesting premise for a series.

Clean, confident directing energy from John Carpenter, oozing style, and the first movie about a psycho killer that didn’t look like it was made by psycho killers and that played at the mall where you didn’t have to worry about getting killed by psychos.

The acting is…what would you call it? Legitimate? Jamie Lee Curtis, P.J. Soles and Nancy Loomis as the Carpenterian urbane chicks, and there are dudes in this, too, somewhere, but Donald Pleasance is the only one (besides The Shape) that matters.

Iconic music by Carpenter. Finished at #9 for the year, raking in $47M on a third of a million budget, so it’s only natural that it would ruin the film industry and the lives of everyone involved. (I exaggerate. Slightly.)

Carpenter didn’t want to spend his life making this movie over and over again, so when he made II, he completely (and utterly arbitrarily) killed Michael Meyers. But as we know, Evil Never Dies, unless Evil Dies Tonight.

One of the ways I used to amuse myself at the end of the year is by going to Box Office Mojo and looking at the bottom of the list to see which movies I saw I made up a measurable portion of the box office for. Mojo stops at the top 200 now as IMDB/Amazon continues on its journey to destroy everything good in life (their redesign of the people pages is not only ugly and clunky, and I guess designed primarily for phones, it also robs the site of certain beloved functionality). So this year I went to The Numbers, which does not actually list To Leslie, even though the list goes down to Indemnity with a box office of $347, and it does list this movie has having over $1,000 in sales (internationally?).

I’m guessing that this flick, like some other odd ones (Ninja Badass anyone?) didn’t get any kind of formal release and only appeared in theaters by special arrangement. And by theaters, I mean a theater, and the one I saw it in. The Boy and I account for about 2% of its total box office.

Which is kind of a shame. My refrain for 2022 has been “Who did they make this for?” I loved The Northman, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t have spent $80M on it. I wouldn’t have spent $30M on it. Because I couldn’t answer the question “Who is going to want to see this?”

It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback, of course. But I am right.

To Leslie is more in the line of The Whale, a movie for actors to act in. It’s not going to be a big draw in the best of circumstances which, from a release viewpoint it didn’t have, which is a shame because it probably could draw some via word-of-mouth. That is to say, a movie about a woman on the skids a few years after winning the lottery isn’t a good starting point for putting butts in seats, but way, way too many of these movies like to show their characters hitting the skids—and then leave them there because, that’s like, life, man, and this one has a lot more respect for its characters and the audience to cop out like that.

In this movie, Andrea Riseborough (Oh, Mandy!) plays Leslie, who wins the lottery and blows it, big time, in the worst possible ways, and has now hit the skids. When the movie opens, she’s being thrown out of the motel she was staying in. She contrives to move in with her son (played by Owen Teague), whom she abandoned when she won the lottery, and who is wise to her many alcoholic tricks. He quickly kicks her out and she ends up going to live with some people who are not her parents (Stockard Channing and Stephen Root) but are willing to help her out if she follows some rules.

Which of course she can’t and ends up sleeping in an abandoned restaruant.

Marc Maron (!) is the motel manager that gives her a chance and another chance and another chance. And the problem of course is that when you’ve burned so many chances, nobody believes you when you try to turn it around. And in this movie, the upright characters—even some who were trying to help—also demonstrate their lack of grace and humility at times. Their humanity, if you will.

Everyone’s great in it. The supporting cast includes Allison Janney and Stephen Root, which would just about be reason enough to go see any movie. (I thought Maron and Janney had producer credits on this, but I can’t find any evidence of that.)

Anyway, Oscar bait for sure, but without the kick-em-when-they’re-down, unrelenting despair of a lot of such films. The movie gets you rooting for Leslie, and ultimately for most of the losers she hangs out with.

The Boy and I liked it, but obviously you’re going to have to be comfortable in the gutter for a while. At least the movie play on your sympathies and then abuse you for having them. (*kaff*thewhale*kaff*) Somewhat reminiscent of A Love Song, which I see I haven’t posted a review for yet…

I didn’t have a chance to catch X, Ty West’s slasher about a porn crew in the ’70s that goes out to make a movie in a rural area only to be terrorized by the demonic old people who live next-door. Or something, remember, I didn’t see it.

I generally like West. As The Boy and I say when we see one of his movies, “He’s trying to do something.” He’s not, in other words, doing a paint-by-the-number, let’s have a jump scare at the 12:00, 15:00 and 23:00 minute mark thing that characterizes the Blumhouse era of horror movies.

And I’m not knocking Blumhouse: I’ve enjoyed many (most?) of his movies and I really enjoy the novel concept of paying your actors rather than trying to screw them with dishonest accounting practices.

But horror—all art, really, but horror especially—needs a constant infusion of daring ideas, risky approaches, things that are unsettling, unnerving, even disgusting, or it quickly starts to feel empty. Which brings us to Pearl, a kinda-sorta “What would a modern horror movie look like if it’d been filmed in Technicolor and starred Judy Garland.”

My thoughts went to Judy Garland and Meet Me In St. Louis. Imagine my embarrassment when the obvious Wizard of Oz parallel was pointed out.

Pearl is a girl who wants to be in show biz. Her father’s had a stroke and her mother is a harsh prairie type. She wants to get off the little Kansan farm (I have no idea if it’s actually Kansas) and become a showgirl or maybe be in one of the movies. She’s just a tad psychotic, however.

If we track the full on Oz parody, her mother is both Auntie Em and the wicked witch. Her father is both Uncle Henry and The Tin Man, unable to speak from his chair, just moving his eyes from side to side. The Wizard/snake oil salesman is a man who comes peddling movies (including those kinds of movies) a la Brinton, and who promises to take her away from all this.

The scarecrow? It’s a literal scarecrow she f—you know, some pre-production elements of the 1939 movie had a love interest between Dorothy and the Scarecrow! This movie demonstrates what a bad, bad idea this is.

Ultimately, besides the wonderful and dare-I-say subversive premise of shooting a horror movie as though you were shooting Oklahoma, this is an actor’s picture. Mia Goth must, and does, carry the film, including a lengthy, climactic speech (which might even be expository if you’ve seen X). Honestly, it’s as much a tour-de-force and demonstrating of acting chops as Brendan Fraser’s in The Whale, and will probably go unnoticed as horror generally does.

Is it for everyone? Of course not. It’s a horror movie and it’s very unsettling in parts. Because of the circumstances and Goth’s performance, you have an inclination to sympathetic toward Pearl, but at no point does the movie suggest that she isn’t a monster at her core. You might be able to appease her for a while. As long as things go well. But the murderous intentions are just barely below the surface. They only need an excuse.

As a metaphor for actors, there may be something there, too, but who am I to say?

The Boy and I liked it and will probably get out to see the third movie in the trilogy, which takes the sole survival of the first movie and puts her ahead a few years to the early video years of porn. It’s not especially interesting as a concept, but I will like seeing how West interprets the dawn of the direct-to-video era.

It is odd to simultaneously recognize The Myth and its use in keeping entrenched power systems entrenched while simultaneously enjoying the entertainment that it produces. As we often say coming out of Korean movies, “it makes you proud to be a Korean”. Even if you’re, y’know, not, at least until transracialism is appreciated the way some other trans are. This crystallized for me this year in a way it hasn’t in the past. Hansan: Rising Dragon is such a clear example, it and It’s A Wonderful Life (and Best Years of our Lives) for that matter really helped me grasp the power of The Myth.

In this movie, a prequel to The Admiral: Roaring Currents, Admiral Yi is the focus of a successful naval battle which stymied the Japanese invasion of Korea. (At least somewhat; The Myth should never be taken for actual history.) The Koreans are outmatched by the Japanese in most regards except that they have “turtle ships”, which are boats with their decks completely shielded and covered with spikes. These have a devastating effect on the enemy morale—the Japanese call them “sea monsters”.

The dramatization of the events here has the somewhat effective turtle ships having certain defects, and a patriotic engineer struggling to redesign them in time for the battle. The Japanese, over-confident and jockeying for position between them to be the first to invade China, get a lot of screen time here so that the Korean tactics will be a surprise for the audience as well as the Japanese (all played by Koreans).

Besides the noble Admiral Yi, who must stand against the (classic Korean trope) stodgy, fearful bureaucratic military and the engineer who struggles to overcome the limits of technology, we also get a spy girl who sacrifices her body to the Japanese monsters in order to help get intel out, and most significantly, a turncoat Japanese soldier who is critical in the Korean war effort.

“This isn’t a struggle for land between powerful forces, is it?” he asks Yi after being tortured. Yi says, “No, it is a battle of good versus evil.”

By contrast, the Korean myth positions the Japanese as evil (often not in a historical context, either, just generally) whereas the American Myth just has the British as some guys we’re pretty closely related to but have some disagreements with. Granted, the British never tried a genocide against us. Multiple times. Over centuries. So The Myth isn’t always wrong or even much exaggerated.

The drama is all very heightened, of course, and this is very effective when it comes to the battle scenes. It is impossible not to cheer for the virtuous Koreans as they thwart the evil Japanese invaders (spoilers?) even if, like The Boy and I, you find the depiction of the actual battles somewhat dubious.

How successful was this film? Well, it was the number two movie in Korea, with about half the receipts of the #1 movie, The Roundup. Curiously, Box Office Mojo doesn’t note the actual sales for this film, even though it gets The Roundup right and (the much less successful Korean popcorn flick) Alienoid. But to put it in perspective, Hansan would comfortably be in the top 40 of American films for 2022 (around 30)—and 98% of that came from South Korea which has less than 1/6th of the population. It feels a little bit like a Maverick: Top Gun situation—except that South Korea is steeped in their own myth, unlike the USA, where Maverick stands alone.

To me, the interesting part of this is that it’s not like the Koreans don’t know it’s a myth. As noted with the earlier Joeson era story of the birth of the Korean written language, there are considerable debates and controversies around the story, both broadly and in details. But most seem to recognize that the exigencies of telling a dramatic story require certain dramatic flourishes, and can point that out without having to absolutely hate and destroy The Myth.

We had so much fun with it, we watched it later at home along with The Admiral and it was well worth seeing again. Even if we did eat sushi while watching it.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAN!

OK, I’m fine now. Just had to get it out of my system. Beam me up, Scotty.

I think that’s how it plays out. Kirk gets super-mad at being tricked by Khan, even though he’s tricked Khan. There’s a lot of tricky-dicky stuff going on in this, the second, far lower budget, far less grandiose, and far more successful film. For that we can blame Nicholas Meyer, author of The Seven Percent Solution and director of Time After Time as well as the two of the three good Star Trek movies. (Those two being this movie and VI. The third good one—and best one—being Galaxy Quest. Meyer also wrote the screenplay for Star Trek IV.)

It’s a complete ham-and-cheese-on-wry as William Shatner cuts loose against Ricardo Montalban in a scenery chewing contest framed by a space Moby Dick plot (with Shatner as the White Whale so, y’know…) and it all, amazingly, worked then and still works now 40 years and some six-hundred plus hours later, with the vast majority of those hours driving down the quality-to-noise ratio. (As Futurama put it: “You know, 79 episodes, about 30 good ones.”)

But for me, anyway, I can’t really connect the movie with much that came after it—and honestly not a lot that came before it, despite it being based on an original series episode. The Movie may as well not have existed. The aesthetic continuity is non-existent to the series. At 62, Montalban looks great but his crew all look like kids—I assume that’s the genetic superiority—down to their perfectly coiffed 1982-style hair.

That’s the funny part, I suppose: From a technical perspective, from a visual perspective, it’s all “good enough”. (And it actually survives, FX-wise, better than some much higher-budget films.) But from a dramatic perspective, it’s top-notch.

Hell, this thing could work as a stage play.

Khan’s motivation is simple: He wants revenge. And we can see his point, really. Kirk’s motivation is also simple. If you are trying to recall the film, you might think it has to do with a former lover and heretofore unknown/ignored son. But it’s way simpler than that: He hates to lose.

This movie, along with VI, are so good because of their joie de vivre. Everybody’s having a good time here. The actors, maybe, but the characters for sure. It’s high melodrama with cosmic stakes. (IV is also like this, though it has a bad case of the sillies, too.) If you were looking at why this movie worked compared to the dozens of other attempts to carry series dramas onto the big screen, I would say it’s because it builds on the lore—it doesn’t just mine it.

Like, today, they would scour every minute of the original episode and bring every side element in as “fan service”. The “Botany Bay” would make an appearance or something. If they didn’t bring back Madlyn Rhue, they’d have brought back her character (probably with a younger actress). But Meyer felt that her death would make Khan’s desire for revenge more dramatically potent. (Rhue had MS that she was struggling to conceal at the time but that was apparently not a factor in her not being in the movie.)

That’s the point: Meyer knows how to tell a good story and he’s going to tell it using whatever as a framework (Trek, Holmes, H.G. Wells). You don’t have to know or like Trek to like this.

We saw this on Labor Day—the staff screwed it up, of course. (Theaters are running skeleton crews and there’s a good 50% chance that any given “special presentation” is going to be messed up.) Apart from people packing the theater to see a 40 year old Sci-Fi movie from a moribund franchise, there weren’t many people in the other halls. (The theater has since been purchased by another chain. Which maybe explains a lot.)

It’s that time of the year again, when we misplace Christmas by spreading it from August to December 25th, instead of starting it on Christmas Eve, and instead of a rundown of our favorite non-Die Hard Christmas movies (see Christmas Ornaments and Christmas Ornaments 2: The Deckoning) I thought we’d talk about that most Christmas-y of animals, the ass. You see, while you weren’t paying attention, Equus asinus was making its way back into our cinematic hearts: Donkeys, burros, mules and asses—I’ll be honest, I can’t really tell them apart—have figured prominently in four motion pictures released in the US in the past six months.

I think we’re about six months from Francis the Talking Mule getting a three-picture deal at Universal. And isn’t Gus about the only Disney property they haven’t redone with crappy CGI?

The Chinese may say 2023 is the Year of the Rabbit—I’m guessing it will be the Year of the Ass. Let’s read the breadcrumbs.

My Donkey, My Lover and I

My journey to awareness began with this slight, charming (and oh-so-French) film about a “young” schoolteacher who stalks her lover and his family through the French countryside on a walking tour made popular by Robert Louis Stevenson. I have a full review here, but the movie teases the donkey as a metaphor for our heroine’s troubles in life, while never losing sight of the fact that it’s really just a donkey. Recommended light fun, if you can take all the French.

Triangle of Sadness

Ruben Östlund, who directed the subtle, low-key Force Majeure is back with a vengeance with this (English-language) feature about a couple of influencers who win a trip on an exclusive boat full of very rich people. The cruise goes very, very bad, and this movie is the hands-down winner for “most excreta and vomitus in a 2022 movie” and a front-runner for the all-time record. Call it a high-falutin’ “Gilligan’s Island”, but this manages to make commentary on class and society without oversimplifying or delivering the usual bromides.

The “triangle of sadness” in question is what a photographer calls the area between the male influencer’s eyebrows going up his forehead. The movie itself isn’t sad in the emotional sense, though it’s certainly a commentary on the sad state of humanity.

The appearance of a burro, and the complete inability of the largely useless ultra-elite to grasp what that means, is pivotal to tipping the audience to the resolution of the plot. If you like satire and commentary on sexual and class relationships, the two-hours and twenty minutes of this actually roll by quickly.

The Banshees of Inisherin

I have trouble keeping the works of the McDonagh brothers apart, to be sure, and this one by Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, In Bruges) feels a lot like his brother John Michael’s Cavalry. (John Michael also did The Guard, which is closer in tone to what we were hoping for.) It’s 1923 and Pádraic has woken up one morning to find that his old friend Colm no longer wishes to speak to him. He feels so strongly about it, in fact, that he threatens to cut off a finger for every time Páddy talks to him.

Much like his brother’s Calvary, the sheer godlessness of this movie is striking. There is a priest, several scenes in a confessional, and big questions about the meaning of life and companionship, and somehow McDonagh makes it feel like Inisherin is rock hurtling through a cosmic, nihilistic void. Despair is only tempered by not the bleakest possible ending.

Páddy’s best friend (especially after Colm abandons him)? A donkey. A donkey with a taste for human fingers. (Or maybe it was a little pony. I wasn’t paying attention.) It’s a great movie, but it sure as hell ain’t a nice one.

Eo

Finally! Leave to Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski (whom I only know from the 1978 horror film The Shout, with Alan Bates) to push the humans to the background and make the donkey the star! Eo is reminiscent of Warhorse, though without the ponderous Spielbergian touch. The Kuleshov effect—where two images are juxtaposed to encourage the audience to project emotion on to the scene—is paramount in movies about animals (y’know, ’cause they can’t really act), and this movie is no exception.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Surprise! GDT’s well-regarded remake of Pinocchio is completely ass free. Despite donkeys being prominent in the source material and every previous interpretation of it ever, del Toro opted to avoid these particular fantastic elements. Nonetheless, this is a worthwhile effort, and the best Pinocchio in 80 years. The music is not as catchy or memorable as Disney’s, of course, but the visualization manages to be highly and uniquely aesthetic without being the only reason for the film to exist.

There’s a lot of good here, so much so that when it misses, it kind of hurts. In particular, the movie has two major themes which it fails to develop. Early on, Geppetto is shown to be a religious man, building a crucifix for the local church when his son is killed. This gets resolved on Pinocchio’s first day of life and then never re-enters the story. It’s also an anti-fascist polemic—but GDT only seems to be able to view this in the most shallow “Italian fascism bad” (much like his previous movies’ “Spanish fascism bad”).

The traditional version of this story has Pinocchio disobeying his father (and society) by not going to school, and suffering as a result. GDT gives us a school dominated by fascist indoctrination—and then completely punts any sort of question of what it means to be obedient in a corrupt society.

Worst of all, it is completely ass-free.

In Summary: Asses

All four of these movies have been both critically and popularly well regarded, though none have made as much at the box office as The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent which to me makes Hollywood’s next play obvious: Nicolas Cage starring in a remake of Francis Goes To Washington.

 

Years ago, TCM played The Philadelphia Story and followed it immediately with High Society. I loved the former, and five minutes into the latter, shut it off. I dislike much about post-War Hollywood, even though it was much better than what was to come, and I found the slick, color production and the slick musical numbers distasteful. A harsh judgement, to be sure, but one I thought might be tempered if I didn’t try to follow the original so closely with the remake.

Almost four years have passed since I last saw The Philadelphia Story, so when TCM brought it around this year, it seemed the best shot for me and this picture. And?

My initial impressions, while harsh, were not incorrect. I can now appreciate, at least, the amazing box office power of Crosby and Sinatra in their first (non-short) collaboration. On the other hand, avoiding direct comparison to the 1940 film allows me to see this version’s flaws more clearly. What’s good? Well, Louis Armstrong is good as the meta-narrator. Celeste Holm is good as Sinatra’s pining partner. Lydia Reed is good as the savvy little sister. Cole Porter’s “True Love” is good. Frank and Bing’s chemistry is good.

I’d go further and say, no, these were great elements. And they make up very little of the movie.

The bones of the picture—a love quadrangle between Kelly, Sinatra, Bing and John Lund—is really, really bad. Consider: The premise of the story is that Tracy Lord is a snooty high society girl with exacting moral (and other) standards. She’s cold because nobody lives up to them, including her father and her ex-, and she warms up because she fails to meet her own standards and realizes humans are flawed, and finding a flaw is not reason for summary execution. Also, she realizes if she goes with someone who treats her like this perfect goddess, she’s going to lose out on being a woman. (As I said in my original review, referring to such a film being made today: Can you imagine?)

You can say a lot of things about Grace Kelly, but she was not one who came off as cold. She could express fury, sure, but not the kind of Ice Queen aura that Hepburn did. Hepburn notoriously said when someone told her Kelly studied her to prepare for this role, “She should have studied harder.” More study wouldn’t have helped: I can no more imagine her pulling it off than I can imagine her roasting someone like Hepburn did her.

Meanwhile, the rakish cad that is her ex-, no longer Cary Grant but Bing Crosby. You can say a lot of about Crosby, but rakish cad fits none of it, even in his youngest days. He does not have innately, and does not demonstrate, the edge of Grant.

Sinatra’s ok. You can’t really see him going for Celeste Holm and nothing here changes that. He doesn’t have Jimmy Stewart’s affable idealism but the part works just as well from a more cynical angle—well, again, except for the Holm relationship.

The Cole Porter tunes are mostly forgettable. It pains me to say it. Even “True Love” doesn’t quite land. Worse, the songs are utterly generic, like he had them chambered for whatever the next project was. (I have recently read Abe Burrows biography, and having worked with Cole Porter on a project he said that Porter always got this kind of review: Not up to his usual greatness. Sorry, guys, I don’t even remember the songs. And I have known and played “True Love” for decades but I don’t think I could do it the way it’s done here.)

Ultimately, I can’t quite divorce it from the original. Had I been unaware of the 1940 film, I would rank this with any number of forgettable Doris Day pictures of the same era: Pleasant enough, flimsy, with a cast that feels somehow wasted. But even by 1956, the time for this story had long passed and I suspect the same group could’ve come up with a much better picture more suited to the times.

Finished #8 at the box office well below King and I the same year and despite being a success financially and having a very successful soundtrack, didn’t spur much in the way of future Sinatra/Crosby crossovers. The two would work together again, but not in anything this splashy.

 

It’s been a pretty good year for horror. Per IMDB, there have been 10,858 horror feature films released in 2022—not counting TV movies or direct-to-video (is that even a real category any more?) or TV episodes—and at least three have been, by our estimates, pretty good. If we narrow down the list to those with more than 1,000 votes on IMDB, i.e., movies that someone beyond the cast-and-crew saw, that leaves 85 films. In the top 11 (by user rating), three are Telugu—I guess I need to check out the exciting world of (checks map) Indian horror…East Indian…Eastern East Indian horror. There’s also a Hindi movie and a Malalayam movie, so five of the top eleven are Indian—and one of the remaining is Indonesian.

In the remaining five we have Dr. Strange and Prey which I’m not going to consider horror movies.

Where the hell am I going with this? Well, for one thing, it’s hard to feel like American culture is all that central any more. And for another, the three remaining horror films happen to be the last three movies I’ve seen, plus the TCM for Poltergeist. (And, oh, the new Walter Hill Western, but let’s not ruin it.) So let’s take a look at those and get spooky season into full gear. I’ll have full reviews for all these later on in the month.

SMILE

Coming in at #11 is Smile. If The Ring and It Follows had a baby, it would look like this. Call it Jump Scare: The Movie. A green director directs a bunch of people I don’t know (and also Robin Weigert, who played Calamity Jane in “Deadwood”, and Kal Penn, better known as Kumar) in a type of horror I intensely dislike—I won’t say what kind because that would be a spoiler—and it all works pretty well.

The acting is good. The atmosphere is good. It doesn’t have a paint-by-numbers feel, though its only real surprising aspects are in the nature of the effects (e.g., “I didn’t expect her head to do that exactly”). It could have been about fifteen minutes shorter, and would have been served by removing a lot of the backstory. Maybe that will work for some viewers, however. For me, there’s a giveaway to what kind of movie this is (that kind I dislike, as I mentioned) and that makes the exposition painful no matter how well acted or written.

I don’t usually do this, but I immediately thought of a better ending, that would’ve redeemed the whole thing.

This movie is very urbane and effete and, intentionally or not, a fair condemnation of the blue-pilled world. It would be interesting to see the a sequel play out with a group of marines as central characters.

PEARL

Coming in at #6 is Pearl. If Judy Garland and Vincent Minelli had skipped Meet Me In St. Louis and decided to make a horror movie about a crazy girl axe-murderer, well, it probably wouldn’t look anything at all like Ti West’s prequel to X (which was released in June of 2022!). West is responsible for the not-really-a-’70s-satanic-cult movie House of the Devil, which I also liked. I always feel like West is trying to do something, to say something different, and to get out of the box that horror’s been squeezed into.

The movie has a traditional score with a Technicolor-style color palette. (And I wept once more that it was not actually in Technicolor.) It’s almost Lynch-ian in its use of a “happy” style mixed with grisly content. And where the actorly parts of Smile worked against it (I felt), acting is the raison d’être of Pearl. And Mia Goth, whom I don’t really know from much, is here for it, delivering the whackadoo goods while somehow still provoking our sympathies. (There is a grimy parallel here with The Wizard of Oz: analogues to the Tin Man, the Wizard, the Lion and even a literal scarecrow, along with Pearl’s desire to escape the farm.)

Pearl is rated substantially higher (at 7.5) than West’s other efforts (X and House of the Devil are mid-sixes) and that score may come down over time as more people see it. (That’s just how these scores work.) Still, The Boy and I were quite pleased.

I didn’t get out to see X, though I wanted to, and I will try to catch it before the follow-up (it’s a trilogy!) MaXXXine is released.

BARBARIAN

Coming in at #3 is Barbarian. Arriving on a rainy night at the worst AirBnB in history, Tess (Georgina Campbell) discovers that Keith (Bill Skarsgård) already has the place. After some wrangling, with Keith showing genuine concern for Tess’s wellbeing, they end up sharing the place for the night as mysterious things happen. The next morning, Tess realizes she’s in one of those Detroit neighborhoods Nature is taking back, and things get spooky from there.

No spoilers, but some nice twists in this creepy flick. Justin Long plays a #metoo Hollywood guy who actually owns the place and comes out to get it ready for sales. (Long, the perennial nerdy kid of Galaxy Quest and Dodgeball is 44, and finally starting to show his age.)

Though ultimately covering well-worn horror ground, there are good mysteries, twists-and-turns, with the characters mostly doing smarter (or at least justifiable) things. Long’s character arc is not the one I was expecting nor hoping for, but I shan’t quibble. Writer/director Zach Cregger (who’s probably best known for acting in the series “The Whitest Kids U Know”) has turned in a very solid, entertaining entry in the horror/thriller category.

POLTERGEIST (1982)

It may not surprise you, dear reader, to know that your humble author, who did not care particularly for Jaws, Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, also thought Poltergeist was a pile of ridiculous crap. I had not seen it since it’s original release nearly 29 years ago, so I took The Boy to see it when TCM showed it a few weeks ago. I wondered if I would re-evaluate it more positively (as I had other blockbusters of the era), and what also The Boy would think.

Somewhat surprisingly, the answer is no, this movie is exactly as dumb as I remember it. I was able to appreciate certain aspects of it more, however, that before got completely lost in the dumbness. The production and sound design is solid and effective. As leads, Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams were perfect choices. Elements of director Tobe Hooper that are allowed to seep through the cracks—like the ghost hunter who goes for a snack and ends up peeling his whole face off—don’t necessarily hold up as effects but they hint at a much better (scarier) movie.

The Boy felt like it was two competing visions (Spielberg’s desire to make a family-friendly ghost house movie vs. the guy who directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and noted that Jerry Goldsmith’s score comes off as almost psychotic. Dominique Dunne’s character is absolutely useless to any aspect of the story, and I couldn’t help but notice that her character was not old enough to drive but old enough to have a history with a Holiday Inn on the highway.

I feel like a lot of Spielberg’s output at this time was just ripping off Twilight Zone episodes and making them longer, louder and much worse.

THE BLACK PHONE and MAD GOD

You’ll notice that the top ten for 2022 did not include The Black Phone or Mad God. As it turns out those movies were officially released in 2021. The Black Phone is a solid, simple horror King-esque thriller (from Stephen King Jr.) probably trying to cash in on the whole “Stranger Things” popularity but good nonetheless.  It was actually made when the director parted ways with Marvel over Dr. Strange 2. (Using our above IMDB criteria, Black Phone comes in at #8 for 2021.)

Mad God is a surrealistic fever dream, just a series of nightmarish images with no real plot or purpose. If this is the sort of thing you like, well, this is really it; I can’t think of another film like it. (It finished at #14 for 2021.)

Full review of Black Phone here. Full review of Mad God here. The latter was also part of my Six Different Minds post.

On tap for the rest of October, we have Dark Glasses from Dario Argento (spoiler: more cohesive but somewhat disappointing than Argento fans would expect), Terrifier 2 (which is apparently much better than the first and potentially the goriest movie…ever?), Don’t Look At The Demon, Neill Marshall’s (The Descent) The Lair, Daniel Stamm’s (13 Sins) Prey for the Devil, and of course Halloween Ends (we can only hope).

Stay spooked out there!

I am far behind on my movie reviews, which happened a lot a few years ago, but which I had been rather disciplined about since about 2015. The lockdowns knocked that into a cocked hat, somehow—and as someone who personally came through the ordeal largely better off than I went into them, I am still discovering the ways the incipient police state messed with my head—and I sit here wondering how best to celebrate the season.

Last Thanksgiving, I talked about that most thankful of movies, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and the year before that I covered Friendly Persuasion (1956). Prior to that I wasn’t theming around holidays. I am grateful, really, that I have so many options to choose from this year, even if it seems like, some weeks, with 40 titles playing, there isn’t one worth seeing. So I looked through the backlkog: The Manchurian Candidate, a classic that is well worth discussing, or The Exterminating Angel—Luis Bunuel’s surrealist story about a dinner party no one can leave. I also just saw Only In Theaters, which is a decent documentary on the Laemmle theater chain in Los Angeles that barely made it to the pandemic and was dealt blow after blow with the unending, uncertain lockdowns—which seem to provoke exactly no reflection on the part of the owner as to whether any of it was necessary. (And it is no surprise to me that the indie movie box office was down enough in 2019 to threaten the chain’s viability, but I’ll save that for a dedicated review.)

But while gratitude plays a big part in that movie, it’s not really the tone I want to set for the week, and so I went to the well of possibly my favorite director, Ernst Lubitsch, and possibly my favorite film Heaven Can Wait.

Based on a play called “Birthdays”, and bearing no relation to the play “Heaven Can Wait” (which served as the basis for 1941’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan as well as the 1978 Warren Beatty Heaven Can Wait), Lubitsch’s film is a series of vignettes centering around one Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), a spoiled rich kid at the turn of the century who grows into an equally spoiled man who, on dying, decides he might as well go straight to Hell since he certainly won’t be welcome in heaven.

You often have heard me say “they couldn’t make this today”—at least until I retired that phrase—but the interesting thing about this movie is that the moorings that make it work simply don’t exist any more. Sort of like remakes of Mildred Pierce or The Women, where the tensions on which the drama is based no longer exist, the problem with a modern Heaven Can Wait would be that today we’re all Henry Van Cleve (sans the charm, as I noted here in this review of While We’re Young).

The vignettes the movie is centered around are all charming in their own right: As a baby, Henry’s nurse is a two-faced canoodler, doting on him in front of his parents and neglecting him to make out with her policeman boyfriend. As a boy, his weakness for (future) women leads him to give away both his beetles to a girl in exchange for being allowed to walk her home. As a teen, he kisses a girl, and is beside himself with the thought that now he must marry her—until an enterprising French maid/tutor explains that, in 1887, it isn’t necessary to marry a girl just because you kiss her.

The French maid presumably teaches him a lot of things, and his life of dissolution begins in earnest. He embarrasses his hard-working, wealthy-but-still-solidly-middle-class family with his cavorting with “musical-comedy girls”. He shows no interest in doing anything of productive value.

And one day he meets Martha Strabel (top-billed Gene Tierney).

This is over a half-an-hour into the movie! But it’s love at first sight and Henry professes—in complete earnestness—how his love for this girl he’s seen once has cured him of all his wicked ways. He’d do anything for her. He idealizes her above all else in the world.

Martha has the choice between marrying Albert, respectably, staying in Kansas as a 23-year-old spinster (because her parents cannot agree on anything, including acceptable suitors for her), or scandalously marrying Henry. Albert loves her, insofar as he’s capable of such things, but he’s so convinced of his own correctness in all matters that a preview of her life with him—where he corrects her for sneezing inopportunely (during Mrs. Cooper-Cooper’s coloratura, no less)—presents a picture of dull misery, even if secure in certain ways.

Albert’s correction drives her literally into Henry’s arms, where it’s quite clear that the two make each other as happy as they’ve ever been. But Henry can’t live up to his own ideals, and after ten years of employing the same manipulative tactics that worked so well on others in his life, Martha leaves him. (This could be analyzed from an Aristotelean perspective, but I’ll spare you.)

I often forget this part, but when Henry goes to retrieve her, he actually does reform. It’s a little vague as to whether or not he runs the Van Cleve enterprises, and certain that he never pursues it as much as he pursued showgirls—and it’s also a little vague how much of his “settling down” is due to simply aging—and this is the thing about Lubitsch. Explaining him is like trying to explain a joke. Or maybe more like trying to explain a haiku.

Martha understands Henry and loves him and doesn’t regret her life choices for an instant, even when she’s left him. She won’t speak a bad word about Henry to others and won’t have anything bad said about him in her presence. When Henry says “if I hadn’t met you I’d hate to think where I’d be right now,” she replies sweetly, “probably outside some stage door, or even inside the dressing room, and having a wonderful time.” And while that’s true, it doesn’t alter the fact that he’s much happier with Martha.

Maybe this is why we root for him. And maybe because, come Judgment Day, he’s not presenting himself at the Pearly Gates trying to charm his way in. He recounts his own life unflinchingly, but not lugubriously or dismissively, because he feels the weight of his own sins. His redemption, such as it is, comes in an act of confession—to the Devil (a pitch-perfect performance by Laird Creger, right before he was lost to a Hollywood weight-loss surgery fiasco).

It has, of course, great performances from a fun and interesting supporting cast. In particular, Marjorie Main and Eugene Pallette as the Kansas pig-farmers, the Strabels, who act out their aggressions on each other by reading spoilers from the comic strips at the breakfast table. Charles Coburn as Grandpa. Spring Byington and Louis Calhern as Henry’s stiff, befuddled, and over-indulgent parents (this is not a trope invented by the Baby Boomers). Allyn Joslyn as Henry’s morally-upright, apple-polisher cousin. Dr. Clarence Muse (Jasper, the Butler) who probably portrayed porters more than anyone in Hollywood history. (He was a fan of “Amos & Andy” because it showed black people in white collar jobs.)

They’re all actors who, if you’ve seen any Golden Age movies, or even a lot of ’50s/’60s TV shows, you recognize instantly, and Lubitsch characteristically imbues them with their own drives, making the world seem alive. There are sometimes villains in his movies: Bela Lugosi as the Soviet commissar in Ninotchka or Mr. Matuschek’s (unseen) wife and his treacherous employee in Shop Around The Corner, but there is no real bad guy here—just people with conflicting sensibilities.

If we’re all being judged for our sins, it may well be that we are our own harshest critics, and the people who love us are more forgiving than we are (than perhaps we feel we deserve, even).

And that’s something to be thankful for.

The Boy and I had gone down to Knott’s for a daytime tour of the Halloween Haunt, and since the park is right next to the Korean movie theater, I had planned to see and review The Devil in the Lake for you all. But as happens occasionally—actually, I think it may have happened last on Halloween—there were no English subtitles for the film yet.

But Knott’s was more-or-less the birthplace of the modern horror “switchover” that so many theme parks do these days, and on this tour, I was surprised to learn that the guy who got the ball rolling was none other than Larry Vincent, the local Los Angeles horror host for about five years in the ’70s. He had a show called Seymour Presents, and some of my earliest TV memories are being trapped in a snowy cabin in Lake Arrowhead and watching Little Shop of Horrors with “Sinister Seymour” as the host.

Larry got the idea to take his show live one year, so he went up to Magic Mountain. The show was apparently a hit, marred only by the constant sound of roller coasters. So he took the idea to Walter Knott, who had just built a theater that would be far more suitable for spooky hijinks. Knott liked the idea but insisted they do it up big, with a three-day celebration the weekend before Halloween 1973. The rest, as the say is history.

And the tour we took was very interesting, but not what I wanted to talk about. The remembrance of “Seymour” and the appearance of Cassandra Peterson on Joe Bob Brigg’s Halloween special last weekend got me thinking about horror hosts and the nature of commentary, or “meta” entertainment.

The Horror Host

Home video technology has gone through multiple iterations with each succeeding wave of technology repeating almost fractally. As TV became commonplace, but content limited, many larger metropolitan areas needed content, they needed it fast and they needed it cheap. Network consolidation happened gradually and never comprehensively, and then cable came along and instead of geographical lines, we saw demands geared toward genres (The Comedy Channel and the original American Movie Classics, e.g.)  and demographics (MTV and the Cartoon Network). More bandwidth brought more specialization (although never an ESPN 8, talk about a missed opportunity) which the old conglomerates (like Disney and WB) are still struggling to absorb.

And of course the Internet blew the demand into millions of tiny hyper-specialized pieces. And while YouTube has too much control this, too, shall pass. (If the fractal pattern continues, with even more independent and idiosyncratic entertainment niches.)

One of the odder manifestations of the need for content is the rise of the horror host. Television stations with limited film libraries (not always legitimately sourced, as in the early days of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” on KTMA) needed to entice people to watch, and they did it with commentary on the movie itself, or at least thematically appropriate schtick.

Vampira and Zacherle

Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi, better known as Maila Nurmi, and even better known as Vampira was the first. She had a short run in ’54 on the local (L.A.) ABC station followed by another short run in ’56 on KHJ a local (L.A.) independent station. From what I can tell, while the popularity wasn’t sustained, it was intense, and Vampira became burned into the public consciousness. In later generations, perhaps ironically, it would be her brief appearance in Plan 9 From Outer Space that kept the image and character alive.

In Philadelphia in 1957, John Zacherle debuted the character of Roland on “Shock Theater”, a ghoulish horror host who broadcast from a crypt with his lab assistant Igor and his entombed wife. At the final movie intro for “The Last Drive-In” which Joe Bob Briggs presumed would be his last intro on his last show (for the movie Pieces of all things), he gave a lovely tribute to the recently deceased host (d. 2016 at the age of 98!) as well as a brief (insofar that anything JB does is “brief”) horror host history.

Briggs makes the distinction that Vampira hosted in the sense of appearing in the interstices to tell corny jokes that weren’t particularly related to the film, whereas the films were central to Zacherle’s performance who did things like cut his own reaction shots (the Kuleshov effect) into the film. I’m not sure that these two branches of hosting are cleanly separable, since I think Vampira did do some movie commentary, and Elvira certainly has over her various iterations. (And Briggs is certainly in the Zacherle camp but he also traditionally begins his shows with an off-topic commentary.)

However, Zacherle’s injection of his own material directly into the existing stuff (mostly cheaply licensable RKO pictures) is significant as a major progenitor to “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in the ’90s, and to wide swaths of YouTube accounts today.

Unlike Vampira, Zacherle kept his character alive for decades in a variety of different formats: Besides guesting on many other horror hosts’ shows, he filled in on “American Bandstand” (!), recorded a number of songs including a minor hit in the “Monster Mash” era (“Dinner with Drac”), and edited a couple of collections of horror short stories. His last credited “Roland” appearance on IMDB was in the ’80s for a “last” show not unlike the Briggs marathon in 2018, though he kept playing the ghoul into the 2000s—into his 90s, in other words, and was definitely the inspiration for the flood of horror hosts to come.

Svengoolie and the Locals

In much the same way there were local kiddie show hosts, a thousand late night horror hosts blossomed, all with their own stories and bits. In Fort Worth, Bill Camfield played kid show host Icky Twerp by day and Gorgon, host of “Nightmare” after dark. In Detroit, Sir Graves Ghastly had a show that ran from the ’60s to the ’80s. In Portland, Suzanne Waldron played Tarantula Ghoul, and had an intense short run ended by a scandalous pregnancy. In Brazil, an aspiring horror filmmaker creates a character called Coffin Joe who ends up escaping the confines of the movies to become his own character. “Moona Lisa”, the alter ego of a San Diego-based newscaster (who had a brief bit as a Siamese twin in Saboteur!) had a show through the ’60s and briefly took over for the ailing Larry Vincent in L.A. and even appeared with him at Knott’s for one year.

Meanwhile, Ghoulardi out of Cleveland was a breakout hit who might have achieved national prominence had Ernie Anderson not wearied of portraying him (lured out only one before his untimely death to appear on “Drive-In Theater” in the ’90s). Svengoolie, out of Chicago, deserves special mention. Originally created by Jerry Bishop, the character was taken over by Rich Koz (original “Son of Svengoolie”), it’s sort of “the show that wouldn’t die”, running initially from 1970-1973, brought back in 1979 with Koz until ’86, brought back again in the ’90s, ’00s and currently runs today on MeTV.

The mythos/community of Svengoolie reminds me of “The Simpsons” with jokes and characters and memes built up over decades, but I also see it as a kind of cultural artifact: the horror host gig is “postmodern vaudeville” as Briggs would say, and to watch Svengoolie is like holding up a fun-house mirror that reflects somehow back to the 19th century.

Elvira

The greatest of all these—”great” meaning “large or immense”—was certainly Elvira. In the early ’80s, after Sinister Seymour had passed and “Fright Night” petered out, KHJ wanted to bring back Vampira. They invited Maila Nurmi back who quit when the producers rejected her idea of getting Lola Falana to play the part. (Falana was pulling down $100K/week in Vegas; I’m not sure how Nurmi thought KHJ was going to entice her away with a cheap horror host gig. But Nurmi seems to me to have been highly unstable.)

Enter former go-go-girl, pin-up girl, showgirl, starlet and someone you totally wouldn’t expect to fall for the old “just take off your clothes for a test shoot, honey”-bit Cassandra Peterson. Peterson was also a Groundling and had created a “Valley Girl” character that would serve as the basis for the new Vampira. Since Nurmi had withdrawn her support, Peterson decided to model her new character after Sharon Tate’s in Fearless Vampire Killers which would’ve been quite different from anything in the horror host world before (or since!).

But the suits said, no, all black. And although they had no notes on her improbably plunging neckline, they did tell her to make the slit in the leg higher. The 71-year-old Peterson, who has now retired the wig (not for the first, but possibly for the last time), has a memoir out called Yours Cruelly for those interested in more details. Elvira’s Movie Macabre ran from 1981-1986, but the character lived on and on and on in movies, video releases, merchandising, and—to tie this back to the beginning—became the face of Knott’s Halloween Haunt for decades.

The Boy and I her saw retirement show at Knott’s 2001—and then (with the Flower in tow this time) her most recent retirement show in 2017. It was a fun, polished act, being performed by a sexagenarian in six-inch-heels, which probably impressed me more than anything. (I hope I can rock heels like that when I’m 65!) In last week’s appearance on “The Last Drive-In” she talked about how much work it was as part of the reason for retiring—and I cannot quibble with that.

Why did Elvira take off and go national where others failed to break out? Was it the boobs? It was probably the boobs. Except boobs were prominent in most hostesses going back to Vampira. No, I think it was a mix of things: Syndication was getting to be a huge factor. Elvira’s character dovetailed perfectly with Frank Zappa’s (only) hit song: “Valley Girl”. Elvira was sexy but dealt in pretty safe (again, vaudeville level) double-entendres rather than overt crudeness. And Peterson’s dedication to performance (even while she felt Elvira would be a short-term gig) came through. Also: Boobs.

The Cable Guys

Cable created a whole new world for hosts, as well as new libraries for them to exploit. The horror host had expanded into a “general schlock” host. USA’s “Up All Night” (primarily hosted by the buxom Rhonda Shear and the late, great Gilbert Gottfried) seemed entirely focused on teasing the audience. From Shear’s provocative outfits to her guest players (b-movie starlets like Michelle Bauer, Darcy DeMoss, Monique Gabrielle, etc.) to the movies, which were insanely varied and might be a Spielberg or Woody Allen movie one week but might just as well be a (heavily edited) Marilyn Chambers erotic anthology or the latest entry in the “Bikini Beach Squad Car Wash Ninjas” franchise.

An honorable mention here to Pat Prescott of “Night Flight” who, even as a voice only, was a constant companion through that new iteration of content creation: All manner of public domain movies, shorts, music videos, comedy bits, etc., stretching out over long nights, suitable for whether you were partying or studying or just staying up because your parents were out of town.

This same era saw the concept of riffing a movie in the movie—remember Zacherle’s Kuleshov effect back in the ’50s!)—continuously integrated into the film itself in the form of “Mystery Science Theater 3000”. The movie was practically incidental to the experience. So even when John Bloom’s drive-in film critic persona Joe Bob Briggs who would introduce his show with, “You know what? Just go ahead and switch over to Rhonda Shear because we’ve got nothing but dogs tonight,” you stayed tuned in—or at least switched back for his closing commentary.

The Joy of Idiosyncracy

While the oft-cited Joe Bob and aforementioned Ghoulardi are with us today, and MST3K and Rifftrax thrive, the hosts of tomorrow are, without a doubt, being founded on YouTube. My own kids, who are not big fans of any of the hosts of the past, watch commentators like Danny Gonzalez and of course Red Letter Media. And there are literal horror hosts as well, in the exact same mold as Vampira or Zacherle. And that’s cool.

The thing about horror hosts—or any of these “meta” commentary characters—is that they are touchstones in our lives much the way other elements of popular culture are: Wherever you are now, if you were a kid in Miami 50 years ago, the name M.T. Graves will take you back, or the opening to “Creature Feature” if you were a Bay Area kid in the ’70s. If “House of Wax” is on, you might remember the 3D frenzy of the ’80s, and Elvira throwing popcorn at you.

You might even remember the movie itself, but it’s not necessary.

I recently read The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by John Burnham, one of two books Michael Malice recommends (along with The Righteous Mind) for understanding the current political situation and it had the side-effect of crystallizing for me what it is that I like about Korean movies. I caught the Korean disaster movie Emergency Declaration and followed it up with Hansan: Dragon Rising, and both of them underscored a central point raised in The New Machiavellians. I then caught two Western movies: A Love Song and Medieval, which tended to reinforce what I was thinking. So let’s dive in!

The New Machiavellians

As I understand it, Machiavelli’s premise is that all countries are (by necessity) ruled by a small group (maybe even just one) person, and this person or group stays in power by virtue of a myth. Once pointed out, this seems obvious—and I think it’s fair conclusion that Machiavelli was reviled primarily for giving the game away. The myth, ultimately, bears no connection with actual governance as the oligarchs involved are primarily motivated by maintaining their own power.

I often say, on coming out of a Korean movie, that it made be proud to be a Korean. Although the sentiment is tongue-in-cheek, it references a very real experience: In just a handful of films—actually within the first few films I saw—the myth was a clear expression of a national identity that, while it showed flaws and humility, did not contain self-abnegation—even in cases where it arguably should have, from a strictly historical standpoint.

Hansan: Dragon Rising

This story of Admiral Yi, the 16th century naval officer who scored devastating wins against the Japanese with both tactics and technology—super-cool “turtle ships” that spook the Japanese enough that they name them bokaissen, after sea monsters. Struggling with a bureaucracy/royal court that has no shortage of cowards, narcissists and traitors, Yi boldly takes the correct action to defeat the real enemy (always and forever the Japanese).

The theme of “man with integrity does the right thing for Korea in the face of corrupt, cowardly bureaucrats and hostile foreigners” sums up a great many Korean movies, both historical and contemporary. Critical to this theme is that the Korean people themselves deserve competent leaders who do not oppress them overmuch and who recognize that their job is to serve the public, not exploit it. (In the Machiavellian sense, this myth has nothing to do with what actually happens, but we’ll come back to that at the end.)

This is the #2 highest grossing Korean movie this year. A similar American movie might be The Patriot (2000)—and that was more successful overseas than in the U.S.

Emergency Declaration

The next movie on my double-feature was actually a fairly old-school disaster movie: Emergency Declaration. A maniacal terrorist infects a plane with a deadly disease, creating multiple crises as the issue becomes where should they land? Should they land at all? The classic formula of having many people from many different walks of life (though all Korean, of course) gives you the melodrama of social clashes in parallel with the desperate race on the ground to solve the problem.

One of the heroes of the drama is the Minister of Transportation, a no-nonsense woman who shakes down the evil PharmCo (and its white American CEO, heh) for information and accountability. The responsive, intelligent bureaucrat is far more common in Korean films than in American films. The Korean myth still includes the possibility of functional government, with a strong hint of foreign influence being behind corruption. The shocking thing about this movie is that the terrorist is Korean—I would’ve bet $50 that he would be all or part Japanese.

Ultimately, when the dust settles on the various dramas, we’re left with a message that Koreans are fundamentally decent people, and while they can be selfish and short-sighted, when push comes to shove, they’ll do the right thing and even sacrifice themselves without complaint to save their friends, family and countrymen.

Critics are very lukewarm at best toward this movie for some reason. I found it incredibly effective even as I marveled at how manipulative it was. Although critics compare it to The Host, to me it felt right at the tone of, say, The Poseidon Adventure, though with stock characters that aren’t quite so melodramatic as the doubtful priest, the cop married to the hooker with a heart of gold, etc.

The American equivalent? Independence Day would be my closest analogue. (Earth is invaded, sure, but it’s America that saves the day.)

A Love Song

Just by virtue of having three weeks between these blog posts (at Ace of Spades HQ), I had time to stumble across A Love Song. This is a low-key slice-of-life story starring Dale Dickey (Hell or High Water, Winter’s Bone) as a widow who meets up with childhood near-boyfriend Wes Studi (Last of the Mohicans, Mystery Men) on a campground out in the Utah desert.

The most pro-American movies I’ve seen in the past 20 years were the German film Schultze Gets The Blues (2003) and the New Zealand film World’s Fastest Indian (2005). This is the first American film I can think of in that time period which captures some of the feel of those pro-America movies as the hopeful widow meets an assortment of characters that represent and reflect American decency. (It has what yaboi Zack might call a “statistically improbable black lesbian couple” who work fine as a characters in an individual movie, but in 2022 feel more to me like genocide on the down-low.)

It’s probably not fair to compare a low-key indie that maxed out around 100 theaters and made a quarter-of-a-million dollars to Korean big-budget summer flicks, but then again, how many American big-budget flicks can we compare for our purposes? (We’ll talk about the box-office elephant in the room at the bottom.)

Medieval

Medieval seemed to pop up from nowhere, and actually maxed out around 1,000 theaters, with a million BO in America and a million BO foreign. I had not heard of it but The Boy and I ventured out to see it before it vanished as mysteriously as it came. It has Ben Foster as the Czech hero Jan Žižka (zhizhka)—which should actually be the title of the movie—and Michael Caine as a (fictional, I believe) go-between trying to stabilize the teetering Holy Roman Empire by getting King Wenceslas IV to Rome to be blessed by the preferred Pope.

For giggles, I checked Medieval on RT and it had a score of 37/72. The Boy and I side with the audience here: It’s got problems, and director/judo champ Petr Jákl is definitely more comfortable with action scenes than drama, but it also fits beautifully into the discussion of the Western myth. Because while the Koreans are constantly reinforcing their myths, with so many Joeson-based films they have to compete with each other on terms of action, romance, adventure as well as historicity, this is the only 2022 candidate for promoting the myths of Western civilization that I can find and it’s an also-ran about the last time things really went to hell (the 14th century).

This is a pretty light year for Koreans, actually, in terms of serious historical drama but even so, two of their big popcorn movies (The Pirates, as well as Alienoid, which I plan to catch this week) have a big heaping helping of identity myths.  Medieval, alas, is no 300, either in terms of its action or myth-building.

Oh, No, You Read The Content

The box-office elephant alluded to earlier is, of course, Top Gun: Maverick. From the perspective of the American myth, it’s actually not very powerful. The original Top Gun spurred enlistment in the Navy and I’m fairly confident the sequel did not. It’s almost atavistic in its vision of a competent military—although, come to think of it, the military isn’t that competent in the movie, is it? But it has this little spark in it. Here’s a movie about America and Americans and we don’t suck and we’re not rotten to the core—and Americans showed up in droves, as did people worldwide in countries where it was allowed to be shown.

It’s the runaway #1 film in America—and also France, the U.K., Sweden, Italy and so on. (It’s #2 in Korea behind The Roundup—but ahead of Hasan.)

They used to say the only color Hollywood cared about was green—it was all about the money. That was never true, but never more obviously so than in the wake of Passion of the Christ, which should have resulted in a bunch of serious Biblical epics by true believers (or Jewish immigrants, like in the Golden Age of Hollywood). No matter how starved people are for the American myth, I don’t believe we’ll see much from Top Gun: Maverick. They’ll put it all on Cruise, or the lockdowns or anything else.

The #155 movie at the box office in 2022 USA is Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America: I can 100% guarantee we’ll see more like that. Another Top Gun—or even Top Gun-style blockbuster? I’d bet against it (barring a huge shakeup).

The hard question, though, is…is that a good thing or a bad thing? Quite apart from doomed Hollywood, does it at this point make sense to shore up the American myth? The opening of New Machiavellians is the 1932 Democrat party platform, where they swear to rein in expansive government and to balance the budget. In the sense of doing anything to shore up the complete nonsense of politicians whose entire ethos is “what do I have to say to get you to do what I want?” I can think of little more evil.

But in at least one sense, the myth has value: As a group, we are not our government or our “elite”, and when I think of those most pro-American movies (Schultze and Indian), what stands out is how Americans are portrayed as decent, generous, kind to strangers—probably not for nothing they don’t spend a lot of time in the cities, now that I think about it—which is an aspect of the American myth which is true, irrespective of the “intellectual” narrative.

And it makes for much better moviegoing: I would rather see a movie about good people, even if they’re not in my “tribe”. Hence, Korean movies it is.

My long-running gag whenever reviewing a French film is to wait until the movie strikes its inevitably libertine sexual plot-point and say, “I know, right? French!” Foreign movie distribution is a funny thing, and we seem to get movies from particular countries in streaks, so it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a French movie (that wasn’t part of a revival), and My Donkey, My Lover and I throws a curveball in my well-worn saw.

Our protagonist is Antoinette, a young—wait, we’ll get back to her age—sexy school teacher carrying on a torrid affair with one of her students’ parents. In fact, when we meet her, she’s changing (in her classroom, after instructing her students not to peek) into a sexy dress so she can lead them in a song which is just wholly inappropriate for the 2nd graders (approximately) that they are. But which goes over really well with the crowd of parents because, y’know, France.

Her illicit plans are shattered, though, when she discovers that the wife of her lover Vladimir has scheduled a journey across the Cevannes—the same journey made by Robert Louis Stevenson as a young man in an attempt to cure him of his disapproved-of attachment to an older woman. Antoinette settles on a mad plan: She’ll also take this journey and “coincidentally” run into Vladimir and his family.

Now, this is already French up to the gills right? Except there’s a slight air of disapproval about the whole thing. Wait, that may be too strong: There’s a less than hearty endorsement of this affair, as opposed to the usual “sophisticated” view of the French. Maybe it’s just the recklessness of the act that could cause a family breakup? But I’m reading too much into it.

The point of the story is how Antoinette learns to re-view her life through her relationship with a donkey. I liked this because it’s sort of gently mocking. I felt like writer/director Caroline Vignal was sort of taunting the viewer a bit: “I dare you to take this donkey as an allegory,” she’s saying. “Because it is! Except when it’s just a donkey.” Ultimately, this works as a story of a how a rather self-absorbed woman learns to get just a bit outside herself by being forced to deal with an animal that demands her attention in the here-and-now.

This works in a large part because Lauré Calamy (as Antoinette) is very appealing, without being lionized. You can see how she ended up where she was. You can get caught up in her passion without exactly admiring it. You can laugh at and with her as she deals with the donkey. And mostly with. She seems so genuine and harmless that when she goes up against The Wife—who is perfectly within her rights and defending her family—you feel sympathetic for her ever getting entangled (even though it was very much on her). The husband ultimately comes off as a jerk, which is fair.

Now, the funny thing is Calamy is beautiful in a girl next door way (if France is next door). She’d never make it in Hollywood because she has greater than 5% body fat (which I sometimes suspect is at the root of why European actresses look better longer without drastic work being done). And, doing the math, she was 44 when she filmed this in 2019! Yet her character’s practically an ingenue. The wife of her paramour is about six months older, on the other hand, and looks much older than 44. The actor playing her husband is actually 34…I don’t know what’s going on here!

Probably they just got people who fit the idea of what they wanted to portray and hired appropriate actors without stressing about calendars. The Europeans are like that. And it all works. Olivia Cote as Eléonore is likable—but don’t mess with her. Benjamin Lavernhe de la Comédie Française—which is how he’s billed, so I guess he was on loan—is very charming but also kind of a shallow jerk.

And our Antoinette? Well, she’s also pretty shallow, but likably so.

With all these vaguely moral undertones it wasn’t until the third act—when we discover that sex with the wrong person is remedied by sex with the right person that I felt like I could really trot out the old I know, right? French! saw.

I feel like it’s basically a shallow movie overall, and it gets by on charm, but then again, so what? That’s not such a bad thing.

 

During a worldwide pandemic, sudden amnesia is striking people and forcing them to start new lives completely removed from their old existences.

And then I went to the movies!

The thing about Apples, a Greek movie, is that apparently filmed before the Mass Formation Psychosis of 2020. The Boy and I were intrigued by the premise and since he’s out of town, I went to see it on my own.

Our protagonist Aris sits alone, depressed, in his apartment, mostly in the dark with just enough flashes of the news to give us the necessary background on the amnesia thing. And after a while of this he gets on a bus, and by the time the bus gets to the end of the line, he’s forgotten who he is.

Since no one picks him up or identifies him, he’s placed in the hands of bureaucrats who have a system to handle the amnesiacs. The process involves doing normal things and taking photos of it: He goes to the park. He goes to the store. He goes to a party. He has casual sex.

They tell him up front “you’ll never get your memories back”. Sure enough, everyone he meets with the same condition has forgotten everything forever. This includes whether or not they like apples. That is, their amnesia goes down to the memories of what they like and don’t like.

Now, where do you go with this intriguing premise? Turns out, nowhere at all. There’s a semi-twist that was obvious enough to me from the get-go (if not the trailer) that I’m not convinced it was meant to be a twist. Like, normally a filmmaker would do some sleight-of-hand to explain why the thing that was just thoroughly detailed didn’t apply, but this just goes right ahead and says, “Yeah, we said it and it means exactly what you think it means.”

Which is fine by itself. The problem is the movie feels like half a movie. Not that you don’t feel all ninety minutes of it. Just that the denouement feels like it should lead to something more. Our hero basically ends up where he started.

There may have been something more, something deeper in the metaphor of the apples, but I actually ended up feeling like that whole bit (which was fine as a story element) was pseudo-profound. That is, something that didn’t really have any great significance but was stuck in there to make you think that it did. I see that the director Christos Nikou worked with Yorgos Lanthimos on Dogtooth and this does kind of have that Yorgos feel. But for whatever reason, it did not resonate with me.

It was at least less frustrating (and substantially shorter) than Memoria.

OK, let’s put our cards on the table: The ’80s were really stupid, and nowhere was this more clearly reflected than in the cinema. Except maybe the politics. And the music. Oh my God, and the fashion. The fashion should probably be at the top of the list. Did I mention the politics? I did? OK, let me mention them again because: dumb.

Hollywood had discovered, thanks to Spielberg and Lucas and Corman, that it was still possible to make money at the movies. The trick was to make movies that people wanted to see. The Shark and the Space Wizards and what-not made execs realize that their tastes weren’t perfectly in line with the moviegoing public—i.e., the people whose money they wanted. Nowhere was this more prevalent than in the action movie, which could be downright jingoistic even with a vein of ’60s counter-culture anti-Americanism running through them.

This was true of 1986’s Top Gun at first, too. “Mixed” reviews and a modest opening gave way to one of the biggest box office hits of all time, and the first video to sell a million copies, which is a big contributor to its staying power. Someone got the bright idea to cross-promote it with McDonald’s and sell it for $20 rather than $40-$60 (the going price for a recent movie on VHS) and a classic was born.

Director Tony Scott was a master of style and…yeah. Style. And Top Gun oozes style. For characterization, it rests heavily on the talent of its young crew (Cruise, Kilmer, Edwards) who are so macho, nobody at the time so much as hinted at any homoerotic overtones in the volleyball scene. For plot, there’s hardly any, and it veers into the goofy. It’s hammy and ham-handed, and it all kind of works in that ’80s way.

I wasn’t, therefore, really clamoring to see Top Gun: Maverick. Consistently, however, I heard nothing but good about it. And on and on. Damn movie is still playing! It’s in its third freaking month and is #3 at the box office this weekend! That’s nuts! (Update: And it is now the only film to be #1 on both Memorial Day and Labor Day!)

Setting aside that the movie is just a goofy, from a technical standpoint, as the original, it’s so much better than the original, it’s—well, it’s almost dangerous (to quote the original) because it shows that a reboot/remake/sequel/whatever can be really good and successful. Even if, in 2022, we (or at least I) completely lack the ability to believe “there’re some bad foreigners we need to blow up” but just like in the original, the foreign threat is just a MacGuffin for our characters to test their mettle.

The premise is that Maverick, now testing ever faster jets even while the Air Force is more interested in drones, has to be called back to Top Gun to train the new recruits for a special mission. There he meets back up with old issues, especially Goose Jr. (ably played by Miles Teller), Penny (with Jennifer Connelly being an excellent choice to replace Kelly McGillis) and of course Iceman (Val Kilmer).

Not only that, did you ever notice that the Top Gun cadets are jerks?

Heh. The sort of behavior they engage in is what we call toxic masculinity today, with the only real twist here being that it’s not even remotely exclusive to men. There’s a nice bit of subtlety here: At first, you’re looking at Cruise and Connelly, and the other older actors like Ed Harris, Jon Hamm, Charles Parnell who, even in small parts, seem to be acting circles around the younger actors, who are kind of glib and callow and—say, that’s exactly how the cast of the first movie was!

Even though they don’t necessarily get a lot of screen time, they get some motion as far as their characters go, and by the end, they’ve all developed into characters to some degree richer than anything in the original.

Cruise famously still looks young, but in my opinion, not terribly so and so much the better for him. He’s still got the smile and swagger but it’s tempered by so much life experience. Although he can and does look vital when he needs to, he can look like the weight of the world suddenly dropped on him. His character is still reckless but not inconsiderate (which is a neat trick). He’s an anachronism, and he knows it, and that brings a genuinely fascinating dimension to his character. The movie spends some of its nostalgia points wisely by taking its callbacks and adding that thirty year spin—such as Maverick escaping out the window from Penny’s bedroom, only to be caught by Penny’s daughter.

Val Kilmer doesn’t get a lot of screen time and, due to his vocal issues, does most of his acting via text. But I thought—and The Boy agreed so I don’t think it’s a nostalgia thing—that he was just a powerhouse in his big scene. The way that is handled is remarkably effective, and Kilmer is still up to the task.

It’s a series of well-made choices, which is just rare in this kind of big-budget filmmaking. And it builds up so much good will that by the time you get to the final act—a true homage to the dumb, goofy action tropes of the ’80s—well, it pretty much had won me over and sucked me in, even as I’m chuckling at how outlandish it is.

Does it make sense to call a movie humble, especially when the movie is about very un-humble people? It felt genuinely humble and humbly genuine, down to the opening where Cruise thanks the audience for showing up to the theater. A common trope today is “Why go to the movies when the people who make them so clearly hate me?” And this movie doesn’t hate anyone. It’s genuinely feel-good.

Domestic box office-wise, adjusted for inflation, it will be in the all-time top 30. Worldwide, where adjusting for inflation is too complicated, I guess, it’ll finish in the top 5, maybe higher—without a Chinese release. Some people think Hollywood will learn something from that; I think Hollywood’s thinking “Hey, we could’ve earned another $250M, if we didn’t piss off the Chinese Communists!” I’m not actually sure what the hell there is for the CCP to object to, but catering to them doesn’t seem to produce better movies. Hell, sometimes they just laugh at you when you cater to them.

While it’s way better than the original, I do think it’s somewhat over-hyped. (Not that I blame anyone involved for hyping it. It’s a huge victory over lockdowns and ennui.) But you know, I haven’t seen the original since it came out and still don’t particularly care to. But I’ll almost certainly watch this again.

I was wondering to myself when I wrote this up: Was Luc Besson ever very successful? Wiki says The Fifth Element “was a strong financial success, earning more than US$263 million at the box office on a $90 million budget.” That’s worldwide, which means I think by today’s standards $270M would be considered “break even”, right? $90M plus $90M for US advertising plus $90M for the rest of the world. I dunno: Researching things from the dawn of the Internet is challenging. The only thing I could be sure of is that critics have never much liked Besson.

But the further we get away from a movie in time, the better we can evaluate it on its own merits, apparently. Whether it’s It’s A Wonderful Life or Sleeping Beauty or The Big Lebowski, some films take time to appreciate. And, of course, some films that were hits at the time don’t age that well. So where does The Fifth Element fit in the scheme of things? Overblown? Underappreciated?

I’d say: yes and yes. What worked about the film in 1997 still works today. The performances, the set pieces and the little moments, the score, the production, the set design, the art design, the sound design, the music—as a feat of filmmaking, it’s still quite remarkable. It’s a bit over two hours and feels epic, like there’s a cast of thousands (with two or three dozen listed on the credits). It does successfully what Lucas—not to pile on the guy—never managed with the prequels: It feels alive, futuristic, alien, operatic.

Most of the stuff that didn’t work back then still doesn’t work, though I for one care a lot less (about what doesn’t work). There is not a lot of there there. For each cool scene, e.g., you are left with a bunch of questions about how what you saw makes sense in any context at all. In our futuristic police state, e.g., three or four different groups try to pass themselves off as Korben Dallas and his wife. This raises no security flags whatsoever. In fact, we witness a scene early on with Dallas in his apartment being rousted by cops who of course have access to his photo, but none of the people pretending to be Dallas make any attempt to look like him while collecting his galactically-famous prize.

It’s a good scene. Just like Gary Oldman is a great villain who is literally evil and a one-man-evil-band on a—well, speaking of Sleeping Beauty, he’s about Maleficent level. He employs millions, maybe hundreds of millions, and he can casually fire bunches of them for no real reason. He doesn’t answer to anyone. He is essentially a exemplar of Evil Corporate Guy. Just like Bruce Willis’ Dallas is a paragon of Tough Guy, who can walk into a room full of warriors and just shoot the leader between the eyes—the leader that the warrior race utterly depends on but also apparently take no pains to protect.

Hey, that’s another great scene. Makes no sense at all.

The movie puts cool ahead of anything else at every moment and…you know, that’s okay. Amongst a host of dumb, mega-FX summer flicks, it stands out for still being entertaining.

Willis and Oldman are in top form, and it may be the best role Milla Jovovich ever has played. (Although what exactly she’s playing is unclear.) But her delivery of the language she and Besson invented is really perfect and I feel like subsequent roles she’s had haven’t really put a lot of great words in her mouth. She also gets a great range of emotions to display and comes off very likable.

Back in the day, I found Chris Tucker’s androgynous Ruby Rhod nigh-unbearable. He’s dialing schtick up to ten and yet, by today’s standards, he doesn’t seem all that outré.

It does sorta make you wonder why Valerian was such a stinker. A lot of people blame the two leads, but they’ve both gone on to turn in respectable performances elsewhere. The mysterious “chemistry” one’s always hearing about? I mean…did Bruce and Milla have chemistry here or were they just two charming and hot people? Dunno.

I do know that the universe of The Fifth Element feels more real to me, and looks better than its 20-year-newer predecessor. On the other hand, it may just come down to Besson. Making movies is hard, the movie business is hard, and it takes a lot out of people. Almost nobody who was hot in the ’90s is still hot now. (Tom Cruise and Milla Jovovich, basically.)

I would say that this movie, rather remarkably, is more or less just the same experience as it was back then. Weird, really.

A young boy and his grandmother who have been separated from their family enlist the help of a documentarian to reunite. There’s a concise capsule review for you of Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, which elides only that the boy and his grandmother are, in fact, shell creatures.

Over a decade ago, future ex-spouses Jenny Slate and Dean Flesicher-Camp created the whimsical Marcel for a series of shorts and a couple of children’s books. In this feature, a newly single Dean (played by Fleischer-Camp) discovers the shell creatures at his AirBnB after splitting with his girlfriend, and decides to make a documentary about them.

Dean’s backstory is lightly told, mostly as the curious Marcel probes the reluctant filmmaker about his situation, and is one of the many light and artful touches to a story that could have been twee and insufferably shallow. Slate provides the voice of Marcel, and back in 2010, this was her first voice-acting role and would lead to a robust voice career (“Bob’s Burgers”, Despicable Me, The Secret Life of Pets, and most famously as Bellwether in Zootopia) augmenting her somewhat desultory acting career (My Blind Brother, Hotel Artemis, Venom).

The focus here is on Marcel who is, of course, very cute. As we’re introduced to him, we discover his modes of travel (inside a tennis ball, for example, for high speed movement, and putting honey on his shoes so he can walk on walls and windows), his means of support (formerly snacks from humans, now a garden), and his relationship with his elderly grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini). Apparently, long ago (Marcel is not good with time, which sets up some good gags) the owners of the house split up and in a rage the man dumped all the contents of a drawer into his bag and left.

Marcel and Connie were not there because they were early to the shell family’s weekly viewing of “60 Minutes”.

After a series of entertaining sight and verbal gags—Marcel is not sarcastic or caustic, but he is very pointed in his questions—Dean lights on the idea of making Marcel a YouTube channel to see if anyone can help him find his family. This section of the film is fairly interesting commentary on the utility of Internet fame, where Marcel discovers that his main interest to the “influencer” world is as a prop to their self-aggrandizement.

Ultimately this leads to attention from “60 Minutes” and the real prospect of reuniting with his family.

There’s your story: Short, sweet, cute, but also showing how the struggles of life are universal: We deal with dreams, loss, friendship, family, fame, and all from the perspective of a one-eyed shell.

I almost didn’t go see it. The whole “60 Minutes” bit and lionization of Lesley Stahl made me wonder if there wouldn’t be some other messaging in there. But there isn’t really: It’s a simple story, well told. And it’s a fairy tale, so I don’t mind that it takes place in a semi-functioning world (unlike our own) where journalists actually do fearlessly seek out the truth. Stahl’s earnest recreation of her interviewing style as she talks to a stop-motion-animated shell only highlights the absurdity of our current establishment.

It’s weird to have this as a consideration for a children’s movie, but this is where we are. (It recalls to me somewhat my experience of Ghost Writer, where in order to avoid seeing a movie about anal rape, I had to go see a movie by Roman Polanski.) But Marcel is probably saved because it’s a passion project for Slate and Fleischer-Camp, who I’m sure they’re reliably left (and Slate starred in the pro-abortion film The Obvious Child) but a good artist tells a good story first and foremost, and this simple adventure is a good story—a hero’s journey that understands the hero has to have some troubles and overcome obstacles and so on.

After a limited release, the film took off, sorta, and ended up with about $7 million at the box office. (DC’s Super-Pets, by contrast, has made $70 million—but on a budget of $90 million, which is a tad higher than Marcel, and with much less interesting results.) I was amused to see the Chiodo Brothers name on this for the animation—I know them best for Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Robocop, An American Werewolf in London—but they’ve been around a long time and have done plenty of family fare as well (Elf, “Goosebumps”).

I suspect the film will really take off in streaming, but it hasn’t shown up on any services yet.

The Boy said, after the movie was over, that he found himself thinking “Hey, this is a lot like a Stephen King story…but a Christian is shown in a sympathetic light.” I informed him that the author, Joe Hill, was Stephen King’s son. “In other words, we just saw a story about an abusive anti-religious alcoholic who beats his children, but I’m sure it’s not autobiographical.”

I kid the King. I hear he’s a real nice guy. Like many celebrities, he’s a good example of why neither politics nor religion should be discussed outside of very narrow spaces.

Anyway, Black Phone? Good movie. One of the screenwriters was wandering around Joe Bob’s Jamboree and seemed like a real cool dude. If I had to pick him out of a lineup, I would’ve gone with C. Robert Cargill but this is why you shouldn’t trust me with a lineup. Since everyone was saying it was the guy who also wrote Sinister and Doctor Strange, it had to have been Scott Derrickson. Who also directed this film after “creative differences” on the set of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

The creative differences probably being that the last thing Marvel Studios wants is creativity.

So, whadda we got here? Kids in the “Stranger Things” era are being kidnapped and killed by a local masked villain known as The Grabber. Our protagonist, who lives at home with his abusive dad and his shining sister, is a wuss who lets his sister get beat, who gets beat up by school gangs, and who generally has a hard time confronting difficult things. Needless to say, he ends up a victim of aforementioned serial kidnapper. His only hope? The vengeful spirits of those who have gone before him, but who are rapidly losing their identities and memories.

Sure we’ve seen it before. But have we seen it…uh…set in Denver in 1978? Probably not?

Originality isn’t really the thing here. There are elements of The Shining, of Carrie, and especially of Silence of the Lambs. I mean, the entire third act feels like the climax of Silence of the Lambs. None of that really matters.

The execution is top-notch. There’s no sin in telling the same story others have told if you do it better, and this is, as the Boy termed it, a “solid thriller”. The pacing is dependable. There’s no reliance on jump scares. The atmosphere is terrific: It’s not dogmatically color-coded in cyan so you know it’s a horror movie. The menace feels very real because it’s not relying on supernatural cues but on the fact that it’s the ’70s and kids just went places and were occasionally kidnapped. The characterization is mostly excellent, occasionally a little type-y just because you’ve got quite a few of them who are both important and have very little screen time in your 100 minute movie.

The worst and most graphic violence in the movie is fights our protagonists have with bullies. Which is plenty violent, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like the movie’s “R” is largely due to the language—which very accurately reflects 1978 playground language, as I recall it.

There’s very little violence involving The Grabber himself. Ethan Hawke is getting a lot of praise here for channeling Ted Levine, and there are elements of Francis Dolarhyde here, though I’m not sure whether it’s more Ralph Fiennes or Tom Noonan. He’s doing exactly what I’d expect Ethan Hawke to do, so I’m not sure what all the ooh-ing and ah-ing is about. I mean, it works, but who was surprised by that? Hawke conveys—without the movie ever having to show, and only exposits through past victims—a sadistic, perverted, self-pitying monster. The movie doesn’t need to show anything because we know what he’s done, broad strokes, and he gives enough hints to be horrifying.

Nice.

Jeremy Davies, as the abusive father is quite good, treading that line between utterly despicable and utterly pathetic. The little girl, Madeleine McGraw, does a great job with her part, even if it does feel a little…go-girl-ish? I’m going to assume this character will feel fine in a more normal time than we’re currently in. It’s kind of necessary for her to be aggressive because her brother is so passive.

Mason Thames knocks it out of the park as Finney, our hero. He’s passive, which we understand given his environment, and his situation is totally unfair but we for God’s sake want him to stand up for himself and what’s right and all that. Thames manages to keep Finney likable, not just sympathetic, and his character arc is what the movie is all about.

The Boy was not blown away. But he really liked it, as did I. It’s such a simple, uncomplicated story that it almost feels strange to praise it. But then you think about the little details, the great performances and the attention to the story—this isn’t some franchise piece somebody crapped out for a quick buck. It has heart and rewards you, rather than punishes you, for having seen it.

In a vain attempt to reduce the size of my coverage of Joe Bob’s Drive-In Jamboree, I summarized a lot of things. Then that was too long, so I split it into two posts. You can see the first part of the weekend here at Ace’s (where comments will get you banned) or here at Moviegique’s (where nobody comments and we don’t know how to ban).

Today let’s talk about Sunday on a sweltering summer day in Memphis. (I actually found it quite pleasant but I’m used to 100+ weather.)

Hogzilla

Sunday night began with a riff of Hogzilla. Led by “Mystery Science Theater 3000’s” Jonah Ray, and helped by “The Last Drive-In” team (Darcy the Mail Girl, Austin Jennings and John Brennan) as well as riffs from the crowd, it’s safe to say this movie doesn’t really get any better with time. Darcy dug up a print to air a season or two back to torment Joe Bob with—to this day, the slightest provocation will get the crew and audience chanting “Hogzilla! Hogzilla! Hogzilla!”—its major crime, really, is claiming to star Joe Bob when he’s in very little of the movie. (This, of course, is a low-budget tradition.) That and, the rest of the cast is aggressively unlikable, which I think is less to do with them than a kind of cheap way to add tension when your monster budget is low to non-existent (also a low-budget tradition).

There’s not much to it, alas: It’s just a slasher movie with a giant feral boar taking the place of the slasher, but otherwise behaving exactly as a slasher does, down to picking off people alone and…well, I guess he doesn’t hide the bodies or anything but they seem to pop up unexpectedly anyway. This is the sort of movie that runs 90 minutes (if you count the very, very slow moving end credits) and really needs some riffing to get through. Ideas for Hogzilla 2 were floated, as well, such as Hogzilla 2: Pig In The City and 2 Hog 2 Zilla.

This is one of those movies that isn’t even going to make it to cult status.

The 2022 Hubbies

 

The Sunday night close-out and the ostensible reason-for-the-season was the Drive-In Academy Awards (the “Hubbies”). I actually re-scheduled my flight and took Monday off so I could be here for this, and I don’t regret it. Out of 250 submissions, ten winners were picked and then screened after the announcements. I missed two of them because I was waiting in line for an autograph, but the one takeaway I have from the eight I did see was: Wow, the technical level of the indie film has gone through the roof!

Of course, I’m seeing the top 4%. The other 96% almost certainly contained some more amateurish stuff, but the first one up was “Polybius“, based on the urban legend about a video game with a sinister effect on young minds. (If you go to the Wiki link, there’s an FBI meme in the offing: The FBI you wish you had fought crime; The FBI you’d settle for are evil high-tech geniuses; The FBI you get raids arcades because a kid has a seizure playing Tempest.) Trailer.

Anyway, this very ’80s premise was executed on a level to where you didn’t notice the budget. That’s kind of a big deal, I think. If you can walk away from a 20-minute $50K short just thinking about the contents of the short and not how they cut corners, that’s really something. For scale, consider the budget of the 1960 Little Shop of Horrors was over five-times that (adjusted for inflation) and used existing sets, and still feels inescapably cheap (for all its amusing aspects).

So, something is going on here which is potentially very good. Tom Atkins is in this one, by the way, and damn, can he still act. I mean, he’s 86 and he can’t hear very well, but he still projects strength and authority on screen. Very impressive.  (Atkins won a Lifetime Achievement Hubbie.) Writer/director Jim Kelly was floating around and seemed like a hell of a nice guy, too. From Mount Sinai, New York.

I missed the feature winner Greywood Plot because I was standing in line to get an autograph. Joe Bob and Darcy The Mail Girl powered through the weekend on a couple of hours of sleep (after which they ran off to do a show above the Mason-Dixon line) at least partly due to JB’s insistence that he see everyone. He was dead on his feet—on his butt, actually, since he was sitting—by the time I got to him and still managed a sincere smile and chit-chat. (Trailer here.)

From Josh Stifter and Dan Degman of Crystal, Minnesota, Greywood is the tale of wannabe influencers who end up on an all-too-successful cryptid hunt. Kudos for the trailer effectively giving a brief shot of the monster. That’s just a rare thing period. (They either don’t show it or you wish they didn’t.)

The animated short The Mechanical Dancer, was not only as good as anything I’ve seen from a studio, it’s legitimately aesthetically superior to anything I’ve seen recently. A stop-motion-looking cartoon done in the style of the 1920 film The Cabinet of Caligari, this takes elements of that plot with a twist of Frankenstein/Bucket of Blood…it’s just nice to look at. Josh and Jenna Jaillet are professional artists and have produced something that you might find in front of a Pixar flick, minus the corporate blandification. From Sunrise, Florida.

Threshhold: A voice-over artist is haunted by ghosts…or is she just crazy? Or both?! (Entire short here.) Directed by Mike Thompson of Louisville, Kentucky.

Last Day for Videos: A documentary about the closing of the last video store chain in America. (Entire short here.) Nostalgic, melancholic, and oddly affecting considering video stores were about a 35-year phenomenon. Hell, you nearly 29-year-olds probably barely remember ’em. Directed by Chad Campbell of Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Be Mine: This black comedy short reminded me heavily of a Julie Nolke bit gone horribly wrong, when a guy on a Valentine’s Day date is ready to take his relationship with his new “from out of town” girlfriend to the next level, only to realize he knows absolutely nothing about her. From Ryan and Anthony Famulari of Long Island, New York, I cannot for the life of me find a trailer or even a still of this, and “Be Mine” is a title shared by about a dozen horror shorts made in the past decade. But it made me laugh out loud!

Lethalogica: Calling this “micro” budget probably doesn’t do justice to the word “micro”. The budget was about $800 per director Tony Reames and co-writer Haley Leary. Leary stars in the film with Luke Tanner as a couple who have a slight misunderstanding that unfolds in a very drive-in way. From Georgia. No trailer I can find.

The Thing About Beecher’s Gate: Another micro-micro, made for about $250 over two weekends by Jeremy Herbert of Olmsted Falls, Ohio, the premise of this 26-minute short is that a new deputy in a small town must undergo a hazing ritual (or is it?), guarding a shed overnight which—well, let’s say it’s inspired by Assault on Precinct 13 and leave it at that. This was entertaining to me, but somewhat disappointing in that it’s clear that the events of the night don’t play out as planned, but it made me wonder what the “going right” could’ve possibly meant. Trailer.

Mannequins:  Directed by David Malcom from the UK, this story of mannequins playing out horror stories is fun, unusual and also has a kind of arty feel. Mannequins haven’t been this sympathetic since Kim Catrall! (Entire short here.)

The last film was a full-length feature called HeBGB TV. Sketch films are always kind of hit-and-miss but the noteworthy aspect is that there are some hits, and the technical/aesthetic quality is overall a pleasant callback to those old Rubinstein TV shows like “Tales from the Darkside”. From Jake McClellan, Adam Lenhart and Eric Griffin of Lancaster, PA. This is just a remarkable first time effort!

The takeaway for me was this: You could sit through these and think, “Hey, these are pretty good.” As opposed to “Hey, these are pretty good for the budget.”

JB has decided next year the Hubbies will be the first night instead of the last, which is a good move. Winning a Hubbie isn’t necessarily a ticket to fame and wealth or even to being able to make another movie—the people who get that far should be feted by the crowd that loves them best. We were up past 3:30AM Monday AM seeing these, and a lot of people had to leave beforehand.

I had no regrets a few hours later when I stumbled through the Nashville airport: Totally worth it!

The sixth and final film in our accidental series of passion projects, this one written and directed by Cooper Raiff, Cha Cha Real Smooth is the story of a recent college graduate, Andrew, who is kind of aimless and living at home with his much younger brother (Evan Assante), his mom (Leslie Mann), and his stepfather (Brad Garrett) that he doesn’t much care for. His plans are so inchoate that they basically involve working at the Meat Sticks in the mall until he can get enough money to join his college girlfriend who is spending a year in Spain and pretty much has told him their whole college deal is over.

The first thing that stands out about the movie is the character of Andrew (played by Raiff). Andrew is a really nice guy. Genuinely nice. Not perfect by a long shot. But a big part of his aimlessness comes from knowing that he wants to do something good and not being able to figure out what that would be.

Attending a flailing bar mitzvah with his family, out of a sincere desire to make things better, he…makes things better. He gets the party started. He gets people dancing. He does such a good job, people hire him as a professional party mover. This path leads him to Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt).

The attraction between the decade-older Domino and Andrew creates immediate tension because Andrew is really cool and gentle and excellent with Lola but Domino has a fianceé she is conflicted about on the one hand, but not in the movie-logic “Well, the young man who hasn’t even started his life should totally hook up with the mother with the teen daughter” way. The tension weighs on Andrew and he begins to lose his general coolness.

He acts like a dick, in short. And we see that, to some degree, his intense romantic feelings are a way of diverting from his aimlessness.

This all works remarkably well. Minefields abound (from the standpoint of building a narrative). Andrew could be smug and unlikable (as is the way of the youth) but he’s not. Even his aimlessness is less a The Graduate-style inchoate loathing for The System, Man and just a “I want to make the world a better place, I just haven’t figure out how yet.” He could also be movie-perfect and he is not.

Here’s another refreshing aspect of the film: The characters in the movie that are positioned as his antagonists (his stepfather and his would-be girlfriend’s boyfriend), far from irremedial villains, are actually real live people with their own goals and feelings. In fact, wherever one might be tempted to reduce a character to a particular type, some atypical (for a movie) depth of character turns up.

Well, okay, there is the Prick family. Literally listed in the credits as Little Prick and Mr. and Mrs. Prick. Little likes tormenting Lola and as awful and cartoonish as it sounds, yeah, that’s well within the realm of reality, as well as the parents who indulge their children’s cruelty.

The acting in this is award worthy. I have never seen a better performance from Mann. I’ve never noticed Johnson that much (though she was good in Black Mass), but here she is supremely effective: maternal, sexy, vulnerable but not stupid, you can understand both Andrew’s attraction to her and her conflict. Brad Garrett could be the butt of all the antics, but with very little time, he is a big part of young-Andrew-not-quite-getting-things. So, too, with Raul Castillo, who you could easily believe is abusive—he’s cut, he’s angry, he’s a lawyer—but ultimately is more mature and sensitive than Andrew.

Vanessa Burghardt. I was just commenting to The Boy that Tropic Thunder had really put a stop to the I’m-Mentally-Handicapped-Give-Me-An-Award genre. This, thankfully, is not that. Burghardt does good here. The movie does a good job of portraying the essential weirdness of certain types of brain injuries without glamorizing it, and Burghardt’s performance is more true-to-life than awards-bait.

Raiff himself does an excellent job in the lead. As I said, the minefield is not small. Pulling off writer, director, producer and lead is done more frequently than it’s done well, and it’s done well here.

It made a nice close to the six flicks.

 

I have a massive write-up already on the whole weekend in Memphis, where we spent all night watching drive-in movies, the days in a convention, and even a morning trip to Graceland, but it’s too long for a Saturday Evening movie post, so here are the movie highlights. Even this is massive. Oy. I’m cutting this into two bits.

Halloween III: The Season of the Witch

One of the bones of contention between Joe Bob and Darcy the Mail Girl has been Halloween 3. It’s been a comedic whipping boy for him since it came out, while for Darcy it’s a beloved classic, perhaps second to only Scream as her favorite horror movie. Darcy is a genuine fanatic and expert on horror movies, who can rattle off the names of Giallo directors from movie titles like Death Walks On High Heels (“Ercoli!”) and Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have The Key (“Martino!”) and has interviewed I think most of the cast and crew on her podcast Geek Tawk.

So when JB let her program the first movie on Friday night, she naturally picked H3 and invited the stars Tom Atkins and Stacy Nelkin, as well as director Tommy Lee Wallace, to watch with them and make Joe Bob defend his stance on the film. She even had “The Last Drive-In” director Austin Jennings create a supercut of all the Joe Bob H3 bashing done over the years, on The Movie Channel and TNT, which cut had to be shortened for time.

The conventional wisdom, I think, on H3 is that it would have been more successful had it not been named Halloween, that people went to see Michael Meyers slashing up teens and they didn’t get that and were disappointed. I don’t know about that: I was the exact demographic that movie was aimed at, I knew exactly what Carpenter was doing and respected it. I certainly didn’t want to see just another movie about teens being carved up after the (literally) dozens of slashers made in the 1978 to 1982 period.

While that may have had a chilling effect on its box office (it made around $15M on a budget of $2.5M), I’d be just as willing to bet the downright mean violence of Halloween II had as much a suppressing effect. (The original Halloween has virtually no blood, and is powered by style and atmosphere, so the sequel was kind of an unpleasant shock to me.) But the biggest suppressor is doubtless the movie itself: Enough people saw it for it to take off via word-of-mouth, had people liked it enough.

I’m doing a full break down on this, but the summary at this late date is this: Like a lot of the older films we used to discard, there’s a tremendous amount of skill at work here. The third act is genuinely bravura as is its commitment to the sort of horror which, while not bloody, is genuinely horrific in its implications. The acting is fun, the camerawork top-notch, the music effective. But the first two acts really don’t feel much like a horror movie. (As Joe Bob quipped that night, “It’s sort of become ‘Murder, She Wrote’, hasn’t it?”) The upshot is that, unless you’re fully bought into it from the get-go, the movie’s logical leaps keep hitting you in the face—and the movie doesn’t do what it needs to in those first two acts to help you buy in.

That said, I will watch this again, just for the filmmaking and to try to pin down why it isn’t as great as I think it should be.

This first night was our early night for the weekend. We got out around 1:30-2AM.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School

I’ve reviewed Rock and Roll High School—holy crap, six years ago, “Rocktober” 2016—when Mary Woronov came to a local showing. At the Jamboree, we had P.J. Soles,  and I think this movie gets better every time I see it. A JB pointed out (after yelling “F*#& John Hughes!”), this was the “last” high school movie that dealt with all the usual high school issues with a truly light-hearted attitude. My fellow mutants and I were calling out the Savage Steve Holland—with me embarrassingly referring to him as “Screaming George”, mashing up The Real Don Steele’s “Screaming Steve” character with special FX artist “Screaming Mad George”—classics One Crazy Summer and Better Off Dead and no doubt there have been others, but there was a definite angsty sentimentality to Hughes work which has encouraged me to keep most of his films away from my kids. (Exception.)

P.J. Soles was in attendance and a live version of the title song was attempted, more or less successfully, and I have to say that she really sells the Riff Randall character (and in a way I don’t think her #1 competitor, the rather younger Rosanna Arquette, would have been able to). There’s also something endearing/refreshing about story arc not about being “in love” with the Ramones, but just loving the music and wanting them to sing the songs she’s written. (This may have something to do with it being the realization of director Allan Arkush’s high school fantasies about, like, The Rolling Stones or a male group of that generation.)

Bubba Ho-Tep

The second film on Saturday night was Bubba Ho-Tep, and I can honestly say that it was the first time I’ve ever been in an audience with not only a group of people who had already seen it but who, like me, saw it during its initial short-run, which consisted of director Don Coscarelli and his team running the 32 prints of the movie around the country. The backstory of this movie is awesome: Back in the ’90s, someone put together a collection of essays and short stories reflecting on Elvis, who had been dead 15 to 20 years at that point. Joe R. Lansdale (Cold In July), an East Texas writer a grossly neglected-by-Hollywood, came up with what he considered the most unfilmable story possible. (In this case, the “unfilmable” has more to do with the completely a-commercial aspects of the story rather than, say, The Naked Lunch style of unfilmability.)

In an East Texas old-folks home, Elvis (Bruce Campbell) lays rotting away after an accident left him in a coma for 20 years, and rather disabled with a…genital deformity. When members of the home start having their souls sucked out by an ancient Egyptian mummy (who has acclimated to life in Texas enough to adopt the local clothing customs), he rouses himself to fight it, with the help of John F. Kennedy, played by Ossie Davis.

If you haven’t seen the film, you doubtless have questions. How is Elvis alive and why doesn’t anyone know it’s him, for example. Or, why is JFK black? How did an ancient Egyptian mummy end up in East Texas?

While the story explains all these things, to some degree, the magic of the movie is in the dramatic poignancy of the characters, realized by the performance of the actors. I feel that needs italic emphasis because it’s not what you would reasonably expect. But it’s the first time I saw Campbell and thought, “Hey, this guy really can act!” (This is not a dig: Campbell is a classic “movie star” and I think generally when people hire him, they don’t want acting, they want Bruce. Here he’s Elvis-as-a-human-being without being a cheesy impersonator.) Ossie Davis, despite being near the end of his life, is a powerhouse. Even the relatively minor part of the nurse, played by Ella Joyce, has just the right mix of nursely-authority and warmth.

It holds up really well after 20 years, I have to say. We were out of the drive-in by around 2:30-3, because we had to get up the next morning for our field trip to Graceland.

 

We were on a streak of seeing truly odd and unusual movies—unique, even—when we decided to catch this more conventional Danish film about a middle-aged man who flees to the forests of Norway to get in touch with his Viking heritage. There is little more disheartening than seeing the way modernity has sapped the Vikings, the Scots, the Western US and Canada—places we associate traditionally with vigor and independence—and one feels that our hero, Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) shares those sentiments as he bumbles around the forest with his cell phone and poorly crafted bow.

The story is that Martin has, under pretense of going on a business trip, decided to just live in the wild. Without telling anyone. Including his wife. He’s also completely unprepared, really. When we first see him, he manages to put an arrow in a little deer but not actually kill it. Desperate for food, he raids a nearby convenience store. This is our first real indication he’s actually in the modern world, although we’re not actually surprised by this.

Martin looks soft. He looks modern. His skin and hair are well cared-for, even if he has let his beard grow out. He’s in the woods but he’s got his little cheats: A tent, a sleeping bag, the occasional convenience store raid—though as he rationalizes later on, stealing from others is about the most Viking thing you can do.

Enter into this less than idyllic scene, one drug mule named Musa (Zaki Youssef, The Looming Tower). Musa’s with his two buddies on his way to make a drop off when their car hits an elk. An elk, for those who don’t know is like a miniature moose, but since the car they’re in is also a miniature, it’s totaled and the two buddies are incapacitated. Musa, realizing the penalty for failing to make a drop-off and not wanting to get busted by the cops, heads off into the woods to find the little town where his relay is stationed.

Instead, he finds Martin who chases off the cops he believes are looking for him for the convenience store thing. Musa convinces Martin to go to the nearby Viking village—a kind of Nordic themed Renaissance Festival—which also happens to be on the way, while the cops (who really would rather be anywhere else) are reduced to explaining their failure to their crusty old boss.

Eventually, the two drug buddies recover, hijacking the car of a man and his shrewish, pregnant wife. Martin thinks he’s found heaven-on-earth in the Viking village where a classic Nordic giant greets him as a kin—right until the flirty grilled-meat wench tries to ring him up on her iPad and spoils the illusion. (We had a bunch of those Danish grilled meat places try to take hold here pre-pandemic but they don’t seem to have last. Also, I swear they were all called “döner”—er, maybe with a slash through the o and not the umlaut—which is how “kebab” filtered through Europe. Hardly classic Viking.)

Anyway, you can see what’s going on here. Martin, the decent family man feeling robbed of his Viking birthright by modern comforts; Musa, the lone wolf but essentially not evil criminal; his two drug buddies, genuinely murderous thugs; the hen-pecked powerless husband; the crusty old sheriff (Bjørn Sundquist, Dead Snow, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters) from an older time… We’re struggling with the concepts of masculinity.

I think Martin had the right idea, even if his execution lacked any sort of reasonable plan or path to success.

Overall, it’s an effective film. Somewhat melancholy and low-key as Scandinavian movies tend to be but with a rather surprising third act: This isn’t really a comedy or played for laughs overall, as the question of what it means to be a man takes on a literal life-or-death situation. Director Thomas Daneskov’s last project was a miniseries documentary called “Just Boys IRL” about teen gamers meeting for the first time and I can’t help but think that informed this movie.

Worth a watch.

Resisting the urge to see Mad God again when venturing down to the tony side of town, the Boy and I opted to see Ninja Badass on its last day. It was a surreal experience on a number of levels. First of all, this is a truly bizarre film—a comedy, sort of an action comedy, sort of a buddy picture where the buddies swap out mid-film, a kind of editing tour de force where the final product is way slicker than the source material somehow.

Second of all, it was Q&A night, but the only other people in attendance besides us were the writer/director/editor/star Ryan Harrison, his mom (who was in the movie) and his pal (who was not by virtue of being in L.A. when shooting was done).

I was more enthused by it than the Boy, who said, “I think you like bad movies more than I do.” Well. Fair enough. But there’s “bad” and there’s “bad” and so many other shades of “bad”, and this movie has a lot of good to it, and only a few bad things that genuinely work against it.

The premise: Rex (Harrison) who lives with his mom (Harrison’s mom, Tara, “Miss Hot Body 1988”) wants to upgrade to the pet store hottie but she’s captured by Big Twitty’s Super Ninjers Squad, and he must rescue her if he’s to have any chance of a lovelife. He and his best pal Kano (Mitch Schlagel) seek out the grand master Ninjer Haskell to learn the necessary skills to succeed. Haskell confronts Big Twitty (Darrell Francis) and ends up an arm short, and through a series of vicissitudes I didn’t quite follow, Kano vanishes and Rex continues his journey with BT’s daughter Jojo (Tatiana Ortiz). Jojo is looking to improve her relationship with her father, which task is complicated by the two of them always trying to kill each other.

I assumed from this that Schlagel had to drop out and Ortiz filled in in spots. He does return later for the shocking twist.

None of this is super important, of course. This is a micro-budget film and passion project, and this really shows in the editing. It succeeds on the whole by moving you from moment to moment: The cardinal sin of the low budget feature has always been boredom—which generally wins out because padding the film to feature length is more important, traditionally—and Harrison does a lot to keep things interesting. If you don’t like a particular bit, another one is coming along in five sec—well, there it is already.

The film’s biggest weakness is that it feels like there isn’t quite enough material to cohesively hang together on the one hand, and more than enough material that other parts don’t feel developed.

The film’s next biggest weakness is the sound design. I don’t think there is any per se, and while I wouldn’t call it a nit-pick, it’s so common as to be practically de rigeur in low budget indies going back to the beginning. Still, it’s a definite minus. While I could hear the dialog quite clearly, it was always accompanied by loud background noise. A lot of it. Like an ambient microphone recording that had been boosted to make the dialog clear. (Our particular showing was way too loud, too, hurting our ears.)

Despite the disjointedness of it, and the extremely broad nature of the comedy, it manages to hang the funny bits and the outlandish bits together in such a way that you still sort of like and root for the characters by the end, especially Rex and Jojo.

And despite taking over a decade to make, there isn’t the sense of ennui that you seem some other extended projects. Harrison commits to the bit, follows through, and comes up with a surprisingly funny 100 minutes.

Can I recommend it? Well, it’s not for everyone™. It’s crude. There is a lot of sexual humor. There is a ridiculous amount of ridiculous violence. The word “ninja” is pronounced “ninjer”. There is a penis more or less right off the bat. (I didn’t ask Harrison if it was his.) He turns his mother into a running “yo mama” joke. (What a good sport! Actually, both seemed like real sweethearts.) There’s dracophilia. Sorta? Does it count if the dragon is one of those Chinese parade puppets? But also sort of a real dragon? I don’t know.

It defies classification, really. If you’re looking for something different and you’re not overly sensitive (both metaphorically and literally, given the visuals and audio) this will turn the trick.

I had spotted this film in the upcoming features for our local bijou and then the trailer, airing on Shudder during the intermission of “The Last Drive-In” got us all excited, so we trundled off over the hill to catch it when it opened just a few days later.

Mad God is an effort that’s been constructed over 30 years. A product of special-effects impresario Phil Tippet’s studio, boosted by some crowdfunding and Shudder money, presumably, it could perhaps best be described as a stop-motion Inferno. It begins with the Tower of Babel (or something like that) being consumed by smoke and fiery clouds, which led me to believe that this was, literally, about an angry god. But madness of the other sort prevails.

After the tower is (presumably) destroyed along with the world, we have a future where the world is in ruins, hellish and dystopic, and yet actually pretty sane compared to what is to come. An agent is sent into the earth below where we see layers of Hell (or something close enough to it as to make no never mind) where life is tortured and destroyed, and maybe even created—only to be tortured and destroyed. The agent is on a machine. He’s got a suitcase with a bomb in it. He’s gonna blow up Hell or something.

I could describe the whole plot as I perceived it and it wouldn’t really be even slightly spoilery. It also wouldn’t match up at much what I presume the canonical description of the plot (per Wikipedia) is.

It’s not really about the plot, though. I realized that early on and just enjoyed the visuals trying (but not too hard) to make sense of the proceedings. It’s a novel creation, a truly unique filmed experience, sometimes beautiful in its horror. The Boy was so taken by the first half of the film, the second half disappointed him somewhat, as he didn’t feel it tied things together that well. We agreed, leaving the theater, that we could turn around right then and watch it again.

To say that it’s not for everybody is to do violence to the phrase “not for everybody”. This is genuinely weird, more than occasionally uncomfortable, existing outside of normal concepts of “morality”—existing outside normal concepts of “normal”. It’s disturbing. And this is me saying that.

Just as much as it isn’t for everybody, it is really, really for us. Seeing someone’s “completely different mind working on full blast” is one of the reasons we go to the movie, and this delivers in spades.

It’s the sort of movie that rewards you for watching closely, and gives you lots to speculate on. Maybe the imagery is just random and meaningless, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like every set-piece, every 5-second shot for that matter, has a backstory and could be the basis for a whole ‘nother story. If the movie doesn’t quite delivery a satisfying “why”, it makes up for it by giving lots of potential answers.

We saw this right after Crimes of the Future, and any movie that makes a Cronenberg body-horror seem tame in comparison has definitely got something going on in my book!

 

My kids primarily know David Cronenberg from an early “Rick and Morty”, where Rick carelessly but typically turns the entire population of planet Earth into grotesque monsters that they call “Cronenbergs”. There’s even a Rick and Morty mutation that refer to each other as “Cronenberg Rick” and “Cronenberg Morty”. IMDB lists the Canadian primarily as an actor, stating that he’s best known for being the obstetrician in Dead Ringers and the gynecologist in The Fly. (I’m sensing a theme, here, David.) His first major acting role was as the evil Scarecrow-esque psychiatrist in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, a movie worth watching—but only the director’s cut. (It’s a long, long story.)

Despite his roles in that and the fact that he’s maybe done more acting recently than directing, and despite the fact that his most recent movies have been what you might call “respectable”—Map To The Stars, A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises, A History of Violence—I think it’s fair to say that his greatest contribution to cinema, his essential Cronenberg-acity, is from his earlier films, specifically The Brood, Videodrome, The Fly, even Naked Lunch, which define the aesthetic of Cronenberg body-horror.

Scanners, obviously, is one the movies he’s most known for, but the body horror is limited to that one famous scene, and doesn’t have quite the “look”. No, Cronenberg’s aesthetic is so remarkable that you know it the instant you see it.

Needless to say, the introduction to Viggo Mortensen’s character in this movie, entombed as he was in one of several inexplicable and bizarre, not-really-science-fiction-type chairs and beds, put a rather big smile on my face. (The Boy, not having any association with the style thought it was interesting but could sense his own ignorance. Interestingly enough, we’ve never had a Cronenberg-fest locally in his lifetime that I am aware of.) It was also nice to see that Cronenberg, who turns 80 next year, could still direct an old-school dystopic body horror flick like he did 40 years ago—and even get some walkouts at Cannes.

I would hope it goes without saying that if you don’t like that kind of movie, you aren’t going to like this. But if you do, I felt this was a solid example, even if IMDB rates it at the bottom of his output. To me, it made aesthetic sense and just enough “logical” sense that I could follow the plot, understand the motives, and get what the overarching point was.

The story: In a grimy dystopic future, people no longer get pain or infection—this provides an amusing potential why for the griminess: people don’t clean or take care of things because there are no consequences to NOT doing it—but they are growing novel organs rather mysteriously. Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Seydoux) are performance artists: He grows these organs and she publicly excises them through a baroque surgery device, the technology of which seems to have been lost or forgotten. The two have a reasonably lucrative gig doing this—although money never seems to change hands, so the payment may be in fame or attention or something else. They definitely (especially Saul) have a kind of rock star status.

The Government is taking an interest in these new organs, however, starting a Novel (or National, though which nation?) Organ Registry which Saul must visit—this is a little murky, actually. He’s got to register the organs, so it’s a public function, but it’s also a secretive thing that no one is supposed to know about, at least not yet. This kind of Kafka-esque situation includes a bureaucrat, Timlin (Kristin Stewart), who develops a thing for Saul.

It’s a good time to remind yourself that Kristin Stewart can act when they let her. In this she has a nervous sexual energy that threatens Caprice but is mildly amusing and flattering to Saul.

Anyway, there’s a secret police (I mean, any movie involving the government that doesn’t have a secret police is bigger fantasy than this, amirite?) agent named Cope who takes the position that there is a transformation going on in the world, and this transformation is from human to something inhuman, with all the implied menace. The core of the story centers around a murdered child whose internal organs may reveal something about the nature of this transformation, and Cope wants to shape the outcome of the investigations of the boy and round up all the pro-noveux human types.

So we got ourselves a paranoid, futuristic body-horror conspiracy fetish movie.

Sort of interesting to me: I couldn’t remember a Cronenberg horror movie with a major black character in it—I mean, he made the early ones in Canada in the ’70s initially—and I thought it was interesting that Cope was played by a black man (a Guinea actor named Welket Bungué) and his concern was with, essentially, racial purity. It was a nice touch, even if purely coincidental.

But the main issue is where Saul stands on all this. Because even he’s not sure. In fact, we get the impression that he, too, is rather repulsed by what his body is doing (body horror, after all) and views his surgical performances as a way to fight that. But he’s also increasingly sick, and some of the crazy conspiracy theories are starting to make sense to him.

I liked it quite a bit. It was different (in the overall marketplace sense; it fits in well with Cronenber’s oeuvre) and weird and distinctive.

Sexual fetishism plays a role here. Cronenberg has never shied away from highly charged eroticism which is both rather explicit and absolutely necessary to the plot. (A History of Violence‘s extended mutual oral sex scene between Mortensen and Bello, e.g.) Here we discover that Saul is good at…well, whatever passes for sex in this weird future, but not at the old-fashioned kind. And there is an extended scene of Caprice naked which serves to remind one (in case one had forgotten since The French Dispatch) that Ms. Seydoux looks awfully good naked. Anyone else, you might think it’s cheap bait, but it’s so critical and perfect to have the contrast between the oddly mutated Saul—an uncomfortable future—and the practically perfect Caprice.

The only weakness, to my mind, was the unwillingness to crank it up a little bit. The ending seemed so obvious and inevitable to me—which is in itself a kind of achievement when you’re dealing with something this surreal—that I thought Saul could have used a bit more drama to goose his arc. But even this, I know, is deliberate, and I wonder if it’s just to keep everything as grounded as possible under the circumstances.

Anyway, I’d recommend it up there with Existenz, e.g. I think it makes its point and is interesting and disturbing. The Boy also liked it though he didn’t have a strong a positive reaction as I did.

Ma Dong-seok! Ma Dong-seok!

Thus goeth the chant on the way to Koreatown to see The Roundup, the latest Ma Dong-seok cop action flick. We like Mr. Ma. He’s got charisma. So the fact that this is a sequel to 2017’s The Outlaws (“based on a true story!”) didn’t bother us even though none of us have seen that older film. You can tell it’s a sequel, though, in the sense that there are many characters you’re sort of supposed to know to go along with the new characters who are central to the current story.

But it’s kind of nice in this regard: The people from the previous film feel like fleshed out characters even if you haven’t seen the first flick. They have their traits and interests and goals, and it’s a good reminder that you don’t need a lot of screen time to build a character.

The story is about Korean tourists in Vietnam being kidnapped and held for ransom and/or murdered. Ma plays Ma Seok-do (which I think would be like Jean-Claude van Damme playing a character called Claude Jack Van Damme, but what do I know?) a loose cannon cop who doesn’t respect international borders when it comes to justice.

I’m not really exaggerating here. Ma has a bad habit of making his own people look bad in the papers (at least according to his boss) and to get rid of him for a while, sends him to do an extradition in a foreign country. Classic. It reminds me of a blend of American films from the ’50s to the ’80s, with a sincere patriotism, good-natured enthusiasm and a genuine good-vs-evil narrative. I do find the comical treatment of police brutality grating, as I have in American films. On the other hand, I liked the whole “Hey, we’re supposed to bring justice, why does it matter what country we’re in?” ethos.

The supporting cast is strong, from the genuinely evil villain to the wacky comic-relief—a low-level grifter whose schemes are constantly being thwarted by Ma, but who ends up saving the day, even if unintentionally. There is that whole kind-of, “Sure, there are petty thieves and con-men, but when you’re up against real evil, even they’ll be on your side” trope which is nice.

Good action. Nice twist at the end which is explained after the fact. I’d sorta figured it out but the explanation was helpful. Otherwise you could walk away thinking Ma was just magic and had successfully guessed where the bad guy would be.

The Flower came with us for this one. Ma Dong-seok may be the only contemporary movie star* she’s ever gone to see a movie because he was in it. She even toyed with going to see The Eternals, as someone who hasn’t seen a marvel movie since 2015, but we both figured there wasn’t going to be enough Ma to make it worth our whiles.

*Ma Dong-seok and Clint Eastwood. Even though he’s barely contemporary, she’s been a fan of his since and because of Gran Torino, so he counts.

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (say that name three times fast, or once slowly for that matter) has been showered with awards over his 20-odd year career, and Memoria is no exception, garnering six awards and nineteen nominations from places like Cannes, Ghent and Chicago, where it won a Gold Hugo! (I was unable to ascertain why the Chicago International Film Festival awards Gold and Silver Hugos but Mr. W has three previous nominations with this film being his first win.

This is a spare, moody, slow-pa—ok, it sucked.

I kid. Sorta. The Boy and I didn’t hate it per se it but it spurred some discussion about why the tactics used here have worked so well in other films and didn’t land for us here.

The story is that Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is—well, here let me give you the capsule from the movie’s website:

Ever since being startled by a loud ‘bang’ at daybreak, Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is unable to sleep. In Bogotá to visit her sister, she befriends Agnes (Jeanne Balibar), an archaeologist studying human remains discovered within a tunnel under construction.

Jessica travels to see Agnes at the excavation site. In a small town nearby, she encounters a fish scaler, Hernan (Elkin Diaz). They share memories by the river. As the day comes to a close, Jessica is awakened to a sense of clarity.

Huh. Well, we didn’t guess that she was in Bogotá to visit her sister. I didn’t get that she was traveling to see Agnes—it actually seemed to me like she was going out to try to solve the mystery of the big badaboom. I didn’t really get that she wasn’t able to sleep until she explicitly says so well into the picture. (The handling of time is murky, deliberately, I’m sure.) So in the movie’s 135 minute runtime, I got about 40% of these six sentences. And not a whole lot else.

The Boy and I have been captivated by a number of slow-moving films in our day, setting aside Kubrick and Lean whose movies tend to have big payoffs, there’s Stalker, which is much longer than this film and has shots as long or longer, though generally with some motion to the camera or the characters, or some revelatory or purposeful intent. In this movie, you watch the fish scaler take a nap. I mean, there’s a purpose to it, but…oy. The camera sits there for I don’t know how long. Another scene takes place where Jessica listens to music through headphones—you hear none of it.

And that’s the whole movie, really: A camera sitting in one place, with one very static image.

There’s a scene where Jessica stops by a classroom (?) where a jazz combo is playing and the camera holds on her, in the midst of this small audience, as she listens to the combo playing. And listens and listens and listens. Now, the longer you hold a shot on a character observing something, the greater the expectation you create for the reverse shot. The audience wants to see what’s so damn fascinating! An Airplane!-style riff at this point would’ve been to reverse the camera to reveal everyone was just looking at a radio, e.g. This two-minute Saturday Night Live/Steve Martin sketch plays on the concept by never switching to the reverse.

In fact, I can think of way more comedic uses of the technique than dramatic. And horror uses, where it usually results in disappointment (because the reverse shot is of the monster, and…monsters are hard and usually disappointing). In drama, it’s typically used to show a character’s emotional change, a curve up or down as the character has various realizations about things and becomes more despondent (usually) or happier. It’s also not typically done as a medium-shot in a crowd scene, because it can be hard to read changes from that distance.

Maybe that was the point: Maybe we were being shown Jessica’s increasing alienation from reality. But if that’s what was going down, it was too subtle for either me or The Boy to pick up. And that’s only one type of static shot. There’s another where she’s looking at an art installation (I think that’s what it was) for a good several minutes, and again the camera is at a medium-to-long range so…I mean, alienation is a thing you’re communicating with that, but do you really want to alienate your audience?

I would describe the story thusly: Jessica hears a loud noise that wakes her up one night. She lives her life not knowing whether the noise is real or not. Further, people she interacts with seem to disappear not just physically but from the memories of everyone around her. Is she crazy or is something else going on?

Here’s another technique that works against the film: The mysterious noise is often followed by car alarms going off in a pattern. One starts, then another, and this builds till all the alarms are going off. Then they die off one-by-one until they’ve all stopped.

Now, for myself, when a film director shows me something and there is no character around to observe it, I take it as literal. There can’t be an unreliable narrator if there’s no narrator. The car alarm symphony is shown from a completely neutral location the first time, signaling to me that it’s actually happening.

The second time we hear the noise, Jessica is walking along the street and the entire city appears to be reacting to the noise. I took that as proof that the noise was real. There was a little sleight-of-hand there, potentially, though, and maybe everyone was reacting to something else unrelated to the noise. But there’s an entire character that just vanishes from the story, too, and who never existed according to the other characters (including complete strangers who would have to have known) so in retrospect I would have to say that Jessica is hallucinating the whole time.

I don’t think you could even argue very strongly that her sister is real, or the archaeologist, or any other part of the story for that matter. Why am I sitting here?

In the long run, this struck me very much like Under The Skin in that it’s basically a B-movie plot that’s done in such an abstract way that critics finally allow themselves to enjoy it. For myself, I kept waiting for there to be something—anything—on these long shots to justify them. Even as studies in acting, the camera is too far, or Swinton is too subtle (for me) to enjoy.

But I suppose that’s the kind of thinking that keeps me from winning a Gold Hugo.

For me, taking the Boy to go see a Finnish horror movie has a real “we’re back!” feeling to it. (For purposes of this review, we’ll set aside the question of whether Finland actually exists.) It helps that Pahanhautoja is odd and interesting and tragic, very contemporary and has a somewhat ballsy take on “is this literally happening? or is this a metaphor?” (See also Northman, The.)

A beautiful 12-year-old girl, Tinja, lives with Mother and Father (that’s all they’re called) and her brother Tero in a lovely little home in a tract in the woods, with their lives being a perfect Instagram drama staged by Mother. Played by Sophia Heikkilä who channels the ancient primal spirit of Karen, Mother must have everything perfect all the time: Matching clothes, expensive and fragile furnishings, overt demonstrations of strong sexual attraction to Father, champion gymnast daughter, and so on. So, in the opening scene, when a crow flies in (another Northman parallel) and smashes up the joint, we’re not surprised when Mother kills it.

Tinja is awoken later that night by the cries of the crow who, it turns out, is not dead but limping along in pain with a broken neck. The upshot of this odd, supernatural sequence is that Tinja ends up with a suspiciously large egg she nurtures in secret. The suspiciously large egg grows suspiciously larger, and Tinja becomes increasingly clever about hiding it while we (and she) learn more about the true dysfunction in her family.

At the end of the first act, the egg hatches.

This is important, cinematically, for a lot of reasons. You could do an entire movie, e.g., where Tinja hides the egg that grows bigger and bigger until…well, in that kind of story, the hatching could be the climax and would tend toward an entirely metaphorical reading like, say, Rhinoceros. In this movie, the egg hatches—with a nice mix of what appears to be puppetry and CGI—and the problem gets worse. So while we’re given prompts to see it as a metaphor for the onset of menses and eating disorders, among other common modern problems, it’s the movie’s misguided characters who make those interpretations, only to be taken by surprise by a literal monster.

This monster has a tendency to try to eliminate anything or anyone that slightly annoys Tinja. I mentioned earlier that Tinja is beautiful, and this is important. Early on she gets a new neighbor her own age, who is as beautiful if not more so than she. And who is better at gymnastics. And who has a yippy dog who barks when Tinja’s trying to sleep.

You get the picture.

Mother, of course, is the real monster in this movie. Besides demanding the feigned perfection, she utterly disregards her son, and her apparent love for her daughter—well, let’s digress here for a moment. One of the first blog posts I ever wrote (back in 2007) was on the line between parenting and friendship. Many arguments can be had on where the line might be drawn, but we can probably all agree that enlisting your daughter in your adulterous schemes is well over where any non-narcissist would draw them.

Interestingly, Mom’s lover (who quickly moves from secret to right out in the open) is the only male in the movie worth a damn. A widower with an infant child, he is the polar opposite of the nebbishy Father—a strong, sensitive handyman who is the only adult in the movie who deals with Tinja with any level of compassion or understanding. He lives in an old, rustic farmhouse that Mother cheerfully describes as a “fixer-upper” and at which she brings Tinja to spend the weekend. Mother, it would seem, is preparing to replace her old family with a new one, with Tinja being the only thing she plans to bring with her. And even Tinja’s role is clearly disposable with an adorable new infant for Mother to hyperfocus on.

Even with Tinja resenting her mother’s impending dissolution of the family and her subsequent replacement, she’s not a monster, and this is ultimately what powers the film. We empathize with her. She’s trying hard to please her mother, whose constant demands on her make it impossible for her to forge any friendships elsewhere. Nonetheless, she’ll sacrifice the approval she craves to do the right thing. She’s just a kid with a situation that’s gotten out of hand.

I’m not sure how I feel about the ending, which is a step up from “oh my god, I hated the ending”. It did not have a “twist”, for which I was grateful, but I felt like maybe there should have been some kind of coda. “What happens next?” is necessarily not a bad place to leave the audience, though, and almost any extra material after the obvious climax of a horror movie

Overall, a worthy watch and, as noted, one that really made things feel “normal” for your moviegoing correspondent. Sadly, the ten-day period that gave us seven interesting movies would be followed by three weeks of nothing and the local AMC being shut down. At least today we would have a chance to see the latest Ma Dong-seok movie.

Years ago, when we saw Violence Voyager, The Boy introduced me to a concept he had picked up on the Internet called “someone’s different mind working on full blast”. And, truly, the Internet is both a source and a destination for such things. In the span of about a week, we had the opportunity to see six such films. These are movies that do not feel like “product”: They are someone’s vision, someone’s fever dream, someone’s wild hallucinations put to celluloid.

For the most part, they’re way more entertaining than 90% of the movies that will make it to the top 20. I’ll have independent reviews of each of these in the upcoming days but since I couldn’t pick one to single out, here are capsules of each.

(Note: This post originally appeared at Ace of Spades HQ Saturday Night Movie Thread for 25 June 2022.)

Crimes of the Future

This is pure classic Cronenberg which, I have to say, it’s kind of heartening that he can still make this kind of movie. He has a unique vision—he basically defined his own genre of body horror that, for the most part, other people don’t even try to imitate. And that’s for the best. Sometimes he hits with me and sometimes he doesn’t—I like there to be a kind of logic that I can follow, and this movie definitely has that. The premise is that humans, inexplicably, are growing new organs. Viggo Mortensen has a career as a performance artist who grows these organs so that Léa Seydoux can extract them on stage.

The government has set up a registry to keep track of all these new organs, with at least one strain of thought being that the presence of these organs transmogrifies former humans into…something else. The paranoid subplot doesn’t quite have the oomph you’d hope for—it’s all very low-key given the topic which in itself is very Cronenberg—but I enjoyed it. The Boy was less sure what to do with this one, not having any experience with the genre. It’s not a starter film, for sure, like The Fly.

Memoria

This one has awards up the yin-yang from Cannes and, by our lights, was the only read dog in the bunch. It’s super static. Now, the Boy and I love static movies, generally. Kubrick and Lean, for example, but even more to the point, Stalker. (Or, in my case, Schulze Gets The Blues.) What I’m getting at is, we’re not impatient. This one, to me, reminded of Under The Skin: It’s basically a B-movie plot about Tilda Swinton wandering around Colombia having either a psychotic break or being haunted or something, and the lack of action makes it “arty”.

Actually, if you take it that she’s having a psychotic break, the movie both makes more sense and is more pointless than the overt answer to the riddle of “Where’s That Loud Banging Coming From?” The Boy had sort of assumed that early on, whereas I felt the movie gave too many cues that things were happening in the real world. Unfortunately, the answer is hugely unsatisfying. But, like, I said: Lots of awards.

Mad God

This is many someone’s different minds working at full blast, and over 30 years, as Special FX impresario Phil Tippet has allowed a variety of animators to gain experience by working on bits and pieces of this fever dream. What’s it about? I’m not sure, exactly. I think it’s about a guy in Hell who ventures into Worse Hell in order to blow it up, but doesn’t make it, and then…something happens. Well, look, lots of things happen. Lots of weird, inexplicable, nightmarish things.

I could tell early on that the narrative wasn’t really going to make a lot of sense, so I kind of let it all wash over me, whereas the Boy loved the first half so much, he was somewhat disappointed by the second half not quite feeling tied together. Both of us felt we could go see it again right after seeing it the first time. Kickstarter and the Shudder horror streaming channel had something to do with this, and it is available to watch on Shudder. It’s a hell of a funhouse ride. Very dark and disturbing.

Ninja Badass

We ventured out to see this one a few days after Mad God, and it was, apparently, “closing night” with a Q&A featuring the director. Sadly, it was just the Boy and I, as well as the director, his mother and a friend of the family who had turned out, which is a shame. This is a colorful, chaotic mess of a comedy that’s also oddly rather polished. Written, directed, starring and edited by Ryan Harrison, this is the story of a weird loser whose (unwilling future) girlfriend is captured by ninjas—”ninjers”, because it’s Indiana, I guess—and who must rescue her if he’s ever going to graduate from the blow-up doll and move out of his mother’s house (Miss Hot Body 1989, played by his real mother).

On his journey, he’s accompanied by his friend and a girl ninja, but they all have competing ideas about how things should go down, and at one point the friend disappears—I suspect some of this due to the extended length of time the movie took to film—and comes back in a surprise twist that didn’t quite make sense.

It’s funny, in parts, and resists the urge to completely beclown every character—the denouement makes everyone seem almost normal. The editing kept it super lively. It was too loud in the theater, and the sound mix was too chaotic (perhaps covering up for unevenness in ambient recording?), but while I liked it more than The Boy, it kind of stuck with both of us. Too many films go for that “cult classic midnight showing” thing—this one feels like it’s eminently re-watchable. It’s jam-packed.

Wild Men

Of the six movies, this was the most “normal” of films. A Danish film written and directed by Thomas Daneskov, this is a story of a guy who decides he wants to chuck modern life and goes out into the Norwegian wilderness to live like a Viking—a life for which he is completely unprepared. His path crosses with a drug courier, and the two go on a journey that takes them through a Viking-re-enactment village, being pursued by cops and a bereft wife, and gives the filmmakers a chance to ask, repeatedly, what it means to be a man.

Because, let’s face it, Scandinavian dudes are seriously cucked. To my way of thinking, the doof who wanders off into the wilderness was the guy who had the right idea (even if a poor execution). But the characters are (all too) real and the journey interesting. Also, as always, Norway is gorgeous to look at. I wish they’d shot this on film.

Cha Cha Real Smooth

Produced, directed, written by and starring Cooper Raiff (Raiff Cooper?), Cha Cha tells the story of a fresh-out-of-college, directionless romantic named Andrew, who is working at the Meat Sticks and trying to raise enough money to go out to Barcelona (where his girlfriend went and is already cheating on him, though he’s not exactly Mr. Faithful, either) because he doesn’t really know what else to do. The thing that makes the movie work is that Andrew is really nice, like, a genuinely good person, and in a successful effort to salvage a bar mitzvah that’s dying as a party, he ends up being a professional party starter.

At one of these party he meets young mom Domino (Dakota Johnson) and manages to get her autistic daughter on the dance floor. The three of them begin a relationship, complicated by Domino’s fiancée, and the ten-year age difference—a problem she recognizes but he does not. The thing that makes this movie really stand out is all the characters feel real, feel like they have genuine motivations, and just because they piss off Andrew doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy human beings.

The dangers in the story were immense—Andrew could have come off like a supreme douchebag—yet we ended up comparing it favorably to other character-driven classics (like from the ’30s and ’40s). Top notch acting all around. Leslie Mann is amazing. Johnson is more appealing than I’ve ever seen her. Brad Garrett is a kind of a bump-on-a-log that we come to respect. Etc. A shockingly pleasant film, if you can imagine such a thing.

Bonus: Top Gun: Maverick

Totally not in this category but is also good. Better than the original by a long-shot.

In what might be a metaphor, an allegory, perhaps a parable, when the self-proclaimed Palestinians make a movie by themselves, it’s usually a horror show about how Jews are monsters and it’s therefore a good thing to kill them while when they work with Jews, there’s a lot more empathy toward all viewpoints. Whatever it is, it’s probably not a coincidence.

You don’t necessarily know what’s what going IN to one of these movies, however.

The director and co-writer Eran Colirin also wrote and directed The Band’s Visit, a relatively early (for me, 2007) Israeli film experience (after 2004’s Ushpizin which remains one of my favorite movies ever), so I needn’t have worried. This is actually much like that film in terms of pacing and tone.

I would describe both films as “interesting”, actually. Kevin Smith once said that in Hollywood when someone says your movie is “interesting” that means they didn’t like it. Well, fine, we needn’t be constrained by Hollywood “manners”: When I say something is “interesting” I mean it, and it’s a good thing.

Sami is an Arab Palestinian living and working in Tel Aviv who comes back for his little brother’s wedding. We get the usual tropes of “successful city dweller returning to his rustic roots”: The village people hold Sami in a kind of awe and he is very concerned about keeping his distance from these rubes, both embarrassed by their behaviors and his connection to them and ashamed of his shame. His father is building him a house using day laborers, as if he were going to return home. He has a mistress in Israel, a Jewess no less, and has no interest in his hot but bitchy (with good reason) wife.

He flees the ceremony with his wife and kid only to find himself trapped. Apparently due to—well, we never really know if it’s pending nuclear war between America and Iran, a political shakedown, or an attempt to find terrorists amongst the day laborers—and when he retreats back to his brother’s pad, he discovers both his brother and his brother’s new bride eager to take his kid and—as becomes increasingly apparent—keep as far away from his hot new (constantly texting) wife as possible. Turns out he also has (or wants?) a Jewish mistress, and a job amongst the Chosen People in Israeli, and to get out of the old country.

What the hell’s going on here? Well, again, if it were a purely Arab film, this would be part of a Jewish scheme to…I dunno…steal the precious bodily essences of strong Arab men.

What we get instead is an interesting mixture of a lot of life’s complexities. The town thugs are busy rousting people and cooperating with the (seemingly) unreasonable demands of the Israeli authorities. The vital security issue being address apparently only requires a single guard on the border. Sami and his wife Mira are having trouble, sure, but Sami’s parents weren’t a picture of good marital health either.

They can’t even connect with the day laborers, because the day laborers look at them and think “These guys have it easy.”

Meanwhile Sami’s pal, whom he’s been avoiding since he moved to the city, is scraping by trying to impress his (slutty) ex- and Sami, but has just got himself in hock with the local thugs.

It’s a mess, as life often is, and one can relate to it in a purely apolitical fashion. The Palestinians here don’t want anything other than basic freedom and decency. They’re so cowed they can barely gin themselves up for a protest at the border.

It’s always dangerous to try to apply movie narratives to the real world but I tend to believe there is some truth in this. While not neglecting the extremely virulent anti-Semitism that exists (and receives generous funding) in those territories, I think there must be those who would be willing to put their love of their children over their hatred of Jews, as Golda Meier put it.

Pray for peace.

Did you know that there was a plan by angry Jews to poison the bread of SS being detained in American POW camps after WWII as revenge? It’s true! The Jews were working in a bakery that was feeding the camp and they were going to poison the bread, with the main problem being that they didn’t want to poison the Americans.

This was Plan B.

What was Plan A, you ask?

Poisoning the water supply in Nuremberg to kill as many Germans as possible.

The 35th IFF gives us a movie about the band of rebel Jews who decide “an eye for an eye” means six million Germans should be killed. This is based on a real story though of course certain liberties were taken. I’m not sure, for example, that the six million number was being bandied about by Jewish survivors in 1945. (Wikipedia uses the number as well and seems to put it in the mouth of the head of the movement so…maybe?)

Our protagonist is Max, a Jew recently freed from the camp (sans deceased wife and child) to go to his old homestead only to get the tar beaten out of him by the German who stole it in his absence. (This is an entire sub-genre of post-WWII movies.) While fantasizing of revenge, he runs across a group of soldiers—the British army had divisions of Jews which were, of course, called Palestinians—whose extracurricular activities involve finding everyone who helped with the Shoah and killing them.

Max (August Diehl, The King’s Man) enjoys this a little too much, and when the Palestinians are recalled (presumably because Israel looms), he falls in with British Intelligence, which is trying like the dickens to stop all the revenge killings. They figure Max has a chance to get in with Nakam, a small group of terrorists plotting to carry out the eponymous Plan A. Nakam is rightfully suspicious of Max, but when he manages to get a sensitive job at the water treatment plant (by pretending to be SS, no less), they ultimately absorb him into their ranks.

The tension in the movie comes from the whole will he?/won’t he? struggle of Max as he decides what side he’s on. Does he want to stop Nakam? He’s pretty pissed. And just because the war is over doesn’t mean the Germans actually like Jews all of a sudden. (The arc of Germany, as seen in a variety of movies, seems to have been “nothing happened”, “we’re sorry” and now “we will never erase this stain on our souls”.)

Indeed, the weakness of the film is that you don’t really get a sense of Max’s struggle—because he doesn’t really seem to be struggling, at least not with the question of whether or not poisoning six million people is a good idea. He’s struggling with his trauma, he’s struggling with not being outed as a Jew, but mostly he seems okay with the plan. Excited, even.

In fact, Anna (Sylvia Hoeks, Blade Runner 2049 and Sylvia Kristel in the upcoming biopic), a Nakam member who strongly distrusts Max only to end up in a relationship (of sorts) with him becomes the film’s real main character after a while: She is at least as traumatized as Max is by the loss of her child, but she can’t completely dissociate herself from the idea that German’s also have children who have done nothing to warrant being murdered. She becomes the focus of the audience attention as she genuinely does seem to struggle.

Obviously, the historical outcome of the story is known to all of us in advance (unless you want to go Galaxy Brain on Jewish conspiracies) so the main interest of the movie is the aforementioned struggle and the movie is somewhat weaker than it might be. There are some interesting elements as far as planning goes, and as far as not wanting to poison completely indiscriminately, and also whether the consequences of a successful terrorist attack on this level might thwart the Jews attempt to claim Israel.

We did like it, but it didn’t quite gel for us. Like a lot of the Israeli films, it was at least interesting and different.

We moved seamlessly from an actual documentary about Albert Speer into a dramatization of the events of April 7th, 1980, which is probably a very significant date if you were alive at the time, and living in Israel.

Assuming you’re too young or not Israeli enough to know, the broad strokes are this: A small group of terrorists invade the Misgav Am kibbutz to get hostages and thereby negotiate the release of their fellow terrorists. They screw up and end up inside the kids’ dormitory. An abortive attempt at a quick rescue results in a dead soldier, and the Israelis are forced to pretend to negotiate with the terrorists until they can mount a better raid.

Apparently one title for this film was The Longest Night, and while it’s only about 80 minutes long (excluding credits), it’s plenty long enough. Even with a 20 minute lead-in where you get to know some of the people, you’re still looking at a solid hour of wondering when kids are gonna get murdered. The action scenes are done shaky-cam, which I get, but which I felt was kind of mistake. The shaky-cam creates a chaotic situation where you don’t know what’s going on and are reduced to being anxious about the results, which is fairly reflective of real life violence.

On the other hand, the shaky-cam creates a chaotic situation where you don’t know what’s going on and are reduced to being anxious about the results. I think I might have preferred the other extreme, where the action was all done in a remote way.

It’s not a bad movie; we liked it all right. (I wouldn’t say we enjoyed it, exactly.) One thing about being short is you can make a clean statement—say about the traumatic existence of being a Jew surrounded by animals who will kill your children—without wearing out your welcome. You can give a sense of the experience without seeming to be lecturing.

I pointed out to the Boy that there are certain things the Jewish side of the conflict does in their movies that the Arab side does not. In this movie: a) the terrorists goof, they end up in the kid’s dorm accidentally; b) some of the terrorists are conflicted, they don’t want to be there; c) commonality is shown between the Arabs and Jews. I’m sure (c) is true—it can be hard for those of us not caught up in the conflict to tell them apart. I read the (slim) Wikipedia entry and didn’t see any evidence of (a) and (b).

Interestingly, too, the Wiki describes the deaths that occurred, and the movie changes the order and nature of those deaths. I presume this was just for greater dramatic purposes.

In the real incident, the terrorists come in and immediately kill a 2-year-old. Obviously, if they had done that in the movie, that would’ve undermined all of (a), (b) and (c), and removed a considerable amount of tension.

The group was the Arab Liberation Front which, naturally, had me thinking of Life of Brian. I half wanted one of them to start cussing out the Liberation Front of Arabia.

Did you know a lot of Nazis have IMDB entries? Literal, classic Nazis, not these Ukrainians or Trump supporters I’m always hearing about. Like, Adolf Hitler has many entries as “Self” and “Archive Footage” and, okay, writer (for Mein Kampf), but also “commissioned by…” for Triumph of the Will and “worst boy” for Airplane! My favorite would be the “Thanks” credits: for Blubberella (Uwe Boll, you scamp!) and a much milder acknowledgement from the great Downfall.

Tangentially, are people actually watching Downfall? I love the Hitler memes (and am very sorry Bruno Ganz didn’t) but that’s a damn good movie and Ganz is just wonderful.

Albert Speer, an architect who became Hitler’s war minister and boosted the slave labor quotient, also has some IMDB entries. On Triumph of the Will, e.g., he was the production designer. He served a similar role on Leni Riefenstahl’s first propaganda film, Victory of the Faith. These from the ’30s.

He also was the author of an Emmy-Winning 1982 TV miniseries, Inside the Third Reich.

Wait, what?

This documentary details how Speer, one of the few big Nazis to escape capital punishment at Nuremberg, set out to rehabilitate his reputation, to the extent where he had Hollywood player Andrew Birkin (The Name of the Rose, Perfume) out at his house thrashing out an essentially heroic biopic that would—after his death and much amelioration—become Inside the Third Reich.

It’s a fascinating little tale, and as noted by other reviewers, it is important to realize that the tapes you hear while listening to this are recreations. The filmmakers declare these were strict reproductions and done for clarity’s sake, since the old tapes are badly degraded, and to be honest the content is sufficient to make any points needed without dramatic enhancement.

Speer, clearly, is looking for historical salvation. He’s either savvy enough (or completely unsavvy, I guess) to cop to a lot of things. He pressed internees into slave labor. He had a broad picture of the war effort. He was Hitler’s right-hand man in a lot of ways. A lot of times he’ll say, “I don’t think I heard that, but I wouldn’t have objected to it, if I had.”

But he didn’t know about the Holocaust.

Did people know? Didn’t people know? That’s often the Big Question that comes up in these sorts of things. Everybody had more-or-less the same facts, I think. For some people that was sufficient to “know” but for others, I think, they told themselves if they never looked, they’d never “know” and they therefore were not responsible.

But with Speer, the Herculean effort it would take to “not know” even in this specious sense strains credulity. His story has him leaving right at the time the Jew-exterminating was being discussed, every time, over and over. If this kind of not knowing is excusable in some contexts, it certainly wouldn’t be here.

In fact, the impression I got from him, over-and-over, was that he didn’t care. He says as much in multiple places. He wanted to build things. Jews (et al) were not his concern. This seems no less monstrous to me.

Birkin’s also an interesting player in the drama that unfolds. It’s an exciting history and would be red meat to any writer wanting to tackle the most difficult of subjects. But the two discuss, frequently, that they’re mythologizing Speer for the sake of drama. Speer of course knows that will serve to reclaim him but Birkin’s creative drive seems to be blinding him to the implications. At a couple of points, he calls Carol Reed (The Third Man, Oliver!) who keeps pointing out the dangers of eliding the very real facts of Speer’s case.

And they’re both right, really: The better story, dramatically, is of a man who finds himself caught up in a massive evil and is at a loss as to what to do; the actual story, apparently, is that Speer went along with it and either didn’t care or downright engineered it.

Eventually, sanity prevailed and the movie was never made. The miniseries incorporated some less self-serving material and presented probably a fairer picture than Speer’s memoir.

To paraphrase Uwe Boll in Blubberella: Thanks, Hitler, for making all these great movies possible! (I guess?)

This was the first film we saw as part of the 35th Israel Film Festival which came early this year (probably due to being canceled last year).

Well, here ya go! A nice little English movie with established actors and producers and what-not that does what nice little English films should do: Treat us to an adventure with fun characters living their quirky little lives and “taking the piss” with (with? on?) overbearing government bureaucrats. This is a time-honored tradition in England, even if it only results in more bureaucrats over time.

Kenneth Bumpton (Jim Broadbent) is a poor old crank living in a cruddy English village, unable to hold down a job because he’s just got so many damned opinions about everything in the unjust world of 1961, while his long-suffering wife (Helen Mirren) pleads with him to just do something to help out their actual household. They have a son who’s got ambitions to be a boat-builder (which ambitions seem to be out of his class, ’cause England), an older son who’s dodgy, and they also have a deceased daughter Mrs. Bumpton doesn’t want talk about.

When the movie opens, Kenneth is on trial for stealing a very expensive painting of the Duke of Wellington. Flash back six months and we find that among Kenneth’s hobby horses of worker rights and racial justice, he really thinks TV should be free for old people, and he expresses his opinions by writing (presumably) bad teleplays and sending them to the BBC and also by setting up petitions no one signs. He harasses TV fine collectors by arguing his TV can’t get the BBC and therefore he shouldn’t have to pay the tax. (He’s removed something from the TV but I wasn’t sure—I mean, a tuner is a tuner, right? You can’t really remove the “BBC piece”, can you?) He rails at the news story that government paid millions for an old painting instead of using that money to give old people and vets free TV.

He promises his wife he’ll settle down after taking one last stab down in London to make his point heard. After the trip turns disastrous, the titular painting goes missing and turns up in Bumpton’s house. He tries then to ransom it for the money to go to the cause and, as we see from the opening scene, ends up on trial for grand larceny.

I question the whole goal of getting TV to seniors so they won’t be lonely. To me that would be a nightmare scenario. Lord knows the Marxian revolution Bumpton imagines has been a nightmare scenario to everyone who managed to survive one. His efforts to stand up for his “Paki” co-worker had a very good chance to get them both fired, so even when his heart’s in the right place, his follow-through could use some work.

But you can’t help but like the guy, and his wife, and that’s what makes the whole movie work. The little guy fighting against the system lands a blow against all odds and manages to embarrass it quite nicely. David & Goliath-type stuff. I feel like most modern governments would just drone him, so as bad as the U.K. was back then, I think we’re in a much worse place as far as tyrannical rulers, and on that level it’s easy to sympathize. The sub-plot with the dead daughter gives things a little emotional depth they would not have otherwise had, and the resultant breaking down of Mrs. Bumpton’s barriers toward speaking of it gives Mirren a good arc to sink her teeth into. Subtle, yet moving, played perfectly off Broadbent’s character’s larger emotionalism.

Broadbent and Mirren ooze charm, of course, and even though they’re too old in calendar years for the parts, they’re just right for 1961-era 60-ish people.

It’s English and as one expects, the acting is good down to the extras in crowd scenes and the pigeons in Piccadilly Square.

The last film of director Roger Michell, who probably hit his peak popularity around the turn of the century with Changing Lanes, Notting Hill and Venus. Not a bad one to go out on, really.

I think this was technically released in the US for the 2022 Oscar season so I don’t think it got the nominations the producers were hoping for, and I don’t think it quite cleared its $14M budget, though it did score some noms in the AARP movie awards. I’m not making that up.

Still, worth a watch.

In the category of “movies you didn’t know you needed”, how about a Korean version of Love, Actually? Anyone? Anyone? @JulesLaLaLand?

Confession time: I saw Love, Actually when it came out and thought it was “fine” and never thought of it again for about ten years when I realized it was a bone of considerable contention. The aforementioned Jules has a number of criticisms—well, okay, mainly one, that it’s just eight under-developed screenplays—and I can’t argue with that. Partly because it’s true, and partly because it’s been 20 years, and any sort of reflection on the film (apart from some performances and a tragically prophetic plotline for Liam Neeson) would—well, let’s just say I don’t see how I come out a winner by dwelling on it.

Too, I do recall that the connections between the stories in Richard Curtis’ film felt tenuous and contrived like, “Well, let’s thread these stories together…somehow.” But again I watched it and moved on back in 2003.

Nonetheless, the poster for the Korean version recalled the English film enough that I intuited that the Korean movie was emulating it. And the Korean movie, the title of which I still don’t really know—apparently made for TV according to IMDB!—tackles two of the main issues with the original film: It has only six stories, instead of eight, and the stories are more tightly woven together, all taking place in a fancy hotel between Christmas and New Years. It’s also less preposterous. Do these changes help?

Maybe. It felt like the two main characters Big Businessman and Hotel Maid had stronger character development than Prime Minister and 10 Dowling Street Maid. And their story arcs allowed/required them to care about other people in a larger sense I don’t recall from the 2003 film. For The Boy and I, having to sort out six stories and distinguish all the characters was a minus Koreans doubtless wouldn’t have as much trouble with. Then there’s that highly memed but rather troubling story arc with the guy from “The Walking Dead” pining after Keira Knightly when she’s just married his best friend—I didn’t sense any equivalent of that, thankfully.

The Boy was not super-impressed. I liked it a little bit more. With both of us, of course, the bar for Korean movies is pretty high and this would definitely be on the lower side.

I did find it amusing that the Christmas carols played in the movie were Jesus-heavy. I seem to recall that the ones in Love, Actually were pretty non-denominational, except for “Silent Night” in the aforementioned “lie to your new husband scene”.

Also somewhat interestingly the movie was popular enough in Korea that it was (or is going to be) shown as a six-episode TV show, with the stories fleshed out a bit more. That might actually work better.

It’s not really rolling the dice to go see a Mamoru Hosoda film. Even if he’s never quite hit the heights he did with the first film of his we saw (Wolf Children), he’s always more interesting than his story premises might suggest. In this movie, he returns to a Summer Wars-style virtual reality, where an unassuming girl takes the (virtual) world by storm and finds herself involved with a destructive player who eludes the ruling authorities and creates havoc at community events.

The beautiful Belle finds herself captivated by the “beast” and ultimately finds her way back to his secret castle. At certain points, here, rooms in the castle are directly lifted from the 1946/1991 Beauty and the Beast and the movie teases a plot like that film—and then it veers in an entirely different and ultimately more interesting direction.

This shift and the heroine’s comically aggressive friend who arranges Belle’s meteoric rise and runs cover for her are the highlights of the film, as well as the animation and music.

It probably won’t knock your socks off, but it’s a fun movie with a serious undercurrent, and that unique Hosoda flavor.

 

Of the various genres we’ve experienced in Korean cinema, the crime dramas are often the hardest to follow. Since the plots tend to be deliberately murky and the characters often look alike, it’s very easy to get confused. Similar to watching film noir, however, the point is very often the style, the melodrama, the cool characters—the plots don’t even have to make sense.

So it’s sort of ironic that Policeman’s Lineage is well acted with strongly drawn characters and a very easy-to-follow plot, and ultimately ends up being somewhat paint-by-the-numbers and forgettable. It’s not bad—it’s quite entertaining, even—but it doesn’t stand out four months later (which is when I’m writing this review).

The plot is a classic “rookie by-the-book cop is enlisted by Internal Affairs to investigate a heroic, high-profile cop who isn’t so by-the-book and also seems to be quite wealthy”. Add a dash of “my father was a cop but he’s in jail now” and you get that kind of gangster story James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart cut their teeth on back in the ’30s.

When you go back to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, you have this situation (probably not the first) where the P.I. pretends to be crooked because that’s the best way to deal with crooks. And since then, you have the drama in these sorts of movies coming from the tension of “is he or isn’t he (corrupt)?” A common trope these days is “Well, he is, but not without principles because he sold out in order to do good” or somesuch nonsense. And there’s an interesting chemistry—an excellent chemistry between the two leads—that ends up defusing the tension.

The elder Cho Jin-woong (The Spy Gone North, The Handmaiden) radiates such moral uprightness that even when he physically throws the protégé (Choi Woo-sik,  Parasite, The Divine Fury, Train To Busan) down and threatens to kill him, you don’t get a sense that he’s doing so for any venal reason. In other words, you kind of feel like Cho is the only genuinely honest guy around and the real tension is whether or not Choi is going to go “by the book” rather than do the right thing.

So it’s still interesting and enjoyable, but almost along a more “is this going to be a Shakespearean tragedy or buddy cop action comedy?” line. Ultimately it didn’t quite pack the punch of a really dark crime drama or the fun of a action comedy, but it was still very watchable.

When Robert Eggers makes a movie, I presume two things: 1) That I’m going to like it; b) That I’m not going to recommend it to most people.

This is a lot of prejudice considering I’ve only seen one movie of his, The Witch, all the way back in 2016. Though time is different these days, as if two years had been stolen. He also made The Lighthouse, which I did not see, but which sounded much like The Witch: Something The Boy and I would enjoy but wouldn’t recommend to someone whom we didn’t know had a taste for kind of slow-moving, tension-building historical dramas.

Despite this limited info, I was correct: I did enjoy The Northman and I would not recommend it to very many people. But not because it was slow moving, rather because it’s too alien to most people’s understandings and, let’s be honest, most people don’t go to the movies to expand their horizons. I was not surprised by one old lady a few seats in front of us who scoffed, finding the whole thing outrageous, apparently. The RT 89/63 split makes perfect sense, except I even think that 63 is a bit too high for a general audience. (This isn’t a movie that a “general audience” would go to, so it self-selects for people more likely to enjoy it.)

I would describe it this way: Imagine, if you will, Christianity had never conquered Scandinavia. The Vikings, instead (somehow) had continued to thrive as a culture and make their colonies in America stick. Fast forward a few hundred years and Hollywood is formed by Norse Pagans, and they want to tell a religious story, like the Ten Commandments.

This is the movie they’d make.

Allegedly based on the same legend that inspired Hamlet, our protagonist is Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, What Maisie Knew, Melancholia) who as young boy sees his father murdered and his mother raped (in the classical sense of “carried off”) by his uncle and, barely escaping swears revenge. Twenty, thirty, forty years later—Skarsgård is 46 so, yeah—he comes back for revenge. Except that he can’t go back for revenge because his treacherous uncle was immediately displaced by King Harald and is currently unemployed! In Greenland!

OK, Iceland, but you get the idea: Amleth is going to Iceland to wreak havoc and settle an ancient blood debt without any clue of what’s going on any more. It’s strictly revenge for revenge’s sake.

This is not, generally speaking, a crowd-pleaser. It doesn’t reach the excesses of a Korean revenge flick, thank Odin. But it is, at points, basically a slasher film from the slasher’s perspective.

It’s also not really the interesting part of the movie, though this is well done. The interesting parts, at least to my perspective, and why I relate it to, like, the Viking Ten Commandments is that the mythic nature of the story is teased but ultimately validated, and in spades. (Shades of The Witch.) The film is filled with omens and agents of the gods that all incline Amleth to act in the way he does. There’s a scene lifted straight out of Conan—though it wouldn’t surprise me if Howard himself had lifted the story from mythology—but this story is done in a coy fashion, a kind of “did it? or didn’t it?” happen.

Hallucinogens make the issue murky.

But by the end, if we are to believe anything in the story, I think we have to take the mystical elements at face value. The gods want blood and they reward those who spill it.

The Vikings are shown in all their brutal glory: They rape and pillage and enslave and it’s hard to actually root for anyone or anything, with the possible exception of Amleth’s slave lover, Olga (Anna Taylor-Joy). She seemed to be a Christian capture but she’s pretty fully pagan by the end so I don’t know what’s going on there. Other than, wow, who thought this little girl would be such a good actress. She mostly just has to emote her way through The VVitch, which was pretty low key, but she’s got some range.

Amleth’s mother is played by Nicole Kidman in some quality scenery chewing scenes. Her various “beauty treatments” seem to have settled in, and she’s rather convincing and eerie as a kind of ageless, almost goddess-like figure. I remember being disturbed by her face in Paddington, by contrast and—say, she’s doing a lot of villainess roles lately, isn’t she? Well, she’s good at ’em. I can’t claim I understood her character here. Was she insane or was she crazy like a fox? (Another Hamlet parallel!)

Clae Bass plays Fjolnir, the uncle of contention. Ethan Hawke is dead dad. Bjork gets to be the sorceress she was always meant to be. Willem Dafoe fits right in there with a small role.

Good acting. Good action, mostly. The final battle is a sword fight on a river of lava, and it’s way better than the last one of those you saw, swearsies. It’s hard to tell who is who in that fight, which I think is deliberate, and underscores the fact that there’s no victor possible in a conventional moral sense but also that we, the audience, don’t necessarily care who wins.

Now, look, if you were a Viking descendant living in a Pagan Norse America, you probably wouldn’t have any problem rooting for the characters in this film—actually either Amleth or his uncle, frankly. One of the things the movie does, in its own weird way, is validate the morality of the characters which was both ubiquitous pre-Christianity in Europe and really, really awful.

So for me, I kind of like that, especially in a historical context. (I’m not crazy when Palestinians do it today, mind you.) When they say a movie is “challenging” this, I think, is a shockingly high-budget example of just that. It bombed in theaters, but may have made its money back streaming; I don’t know how those things are, really, and I presume it’s because Hollywood is hiding the real numbers until they figure out how to extract maximum cash from people. I also presume that they poured money into this because they still kinda-sorta understand “good” in terms of movie craft, but don’t at all understand their alleged audiences. And that’s why everything is a sequel or a franchise based on 30-80 year old property.

The Boy really liked its historical accuracy, right up until the fights, which he felt were dumb Hollywood schlock, all the more painful because the rest of it (at least in terms of the armor and weapons he’s so fond of) was so close.

A narrow recommendation at best, is what I’m saying.

If you are a close reader (and who got time for that?) you may notice that I don’t actually recommend movies very often, at least in any unqualified sense. Some of y’all read my review of Everything Everywhere All At Once and mistook my enthusiasm for that film as a recommendation, even though I qualified it six ways from Sunday. There are a lot of reasons to dislike the film, from vulgarity, to absurdity, to a fairly close hewing to political correctness, to say nothing of its occasionally hyperkinetic style.

The last time I recommended a film outright was on of the Christmas Ornaments suggestions, Joyeux Noel, and even there I didn’t qualify only because of space constraints. The point is, really, that there aren’t a lot of General Audience pictures these days. If we go back 40 years to what some ignoramuses claim is the greatest year in movie history, our top ten certainly seems more “general” than the top ten of the past decade: E.T., Indiana Jones, Rocky III, On Golden Pond, An Officer and a Gentleman, Porky’s, Arthur, Star Trek II, Best Little Whorehouse and Poltergeist. (And I only liked four of those at the time!) You have to infer that any unqualified recommendation has the disclaimer “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.”

I do recommend movies, but I do it for individuals that I know. For example, I don’t think my mother or The Flower will like Everything but I think the Barbarienne will. What I try to do here is give you a sense of my experience watching something so that you’ll get a sense of whether you might like it regardless of how I felt.

Seems like a big lead-in, no? But that’s because we got another Nicolas Cage movie: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Some hate him, some love him and for some (probably most, though they’re quiet) it depends entirely on what he’s doing in the movie, and it is the last group that has the most to gain or lose from any given review of a Cage picture. So what is he doing in this movie?

Everything.

Cage plays himself, sorta, “Nick” rather than “Nic”, a Hollywood actor who has all the same roles as the real Cage (with a fictionalized family) but who is in desperate need of constant validation, to the point that he grossly neglects his soon-to-be-ex-wife and daughter while running himself to debt with reckless purchases and living at the Sunset Towers. Play It Again, Sam!-style, he is advised by his alter-ego, a digitally de-aged version of himself from the Wild At Heart years who insists he’s not an actor he’s a movie star and that’s what matters in life. It is hard to know which is more pathetic: This young, stupid Cage or the older, neurotic one who is bullied by him.

When he loses out (cameo by David Gordon Green, who directed him in one of his best roles, Joe) on his dream part his agent suggests he do a birthday party for a billionaire in Spain who’s a big fan. Neal Patrick Harris plays the agent, and I found this to be the only miscast—not because NPH doesn’t kill it but because he’s recognizable and it sort of breaks the illusion that you’re watching Cage’s real life. (This, again, is idiosyncratic: I don’t know that he’s generally any more recognizable than, say, Sharon Horgan who plays Mrs. Cage and is all over TV, apparently. Or Pedro Pascal, who’s apparently on “The Mandalorian”.)

The Spanish billionaire (Pascal) turns out to be really cool and the only man in the universe who loves Cage as much as he loves himself, a love which bonds the two in what turns into a rather charming buddy picture. This second act is full of references (most of which I didn’t get because I’m not really a Cage fan) and as the two decide to write a script together, it turns into a fun meta-ironic description of the movie we’re all watching at the moment, to the point where when they talk about the third act needing to be a dumb action picture to attract audiences, you know that’s more than light foreshadowing.

Because, unbeknownst to Cage, the CIA is using him as a spy because Spanish billionaire is actually an evil drug cartel leader—or is he? The CIA coerces him into doing stuff, ostensibly to rescue a kidnapped girl.

This part was interesting because, I don’t know about you, but I’m not at a place in my life (if I ever have been) where I can accept the CIA’s word for anything. So while I had no trouble accepting that there were bad guys afoot, I couldn’t really see the CIA as good guys. Intriguingly, the movie also seems to take that stance: The CIA may or may not be right, but they’re certainly grossly incompetent here. That struck me as very believable.

Anyway, the whole spy thing gave us yet another marvelous way to poke fun at actors, stars, and other delusional people and the movie has such a breezy, good-natured sense of humor, you really regret the inevitable third act descent into a dumb action picture. Now, it’s not all bad: This is what gives “Nick” his chance at redemption, when he finally has to prove that he cares about his daughter instead of just using her as a means to get attention. And it’s still pretty light and fun, with a seamless transition into an actual in-movie movie to give us the “Hollywood ending” but in a tongue-in-cheek manner that allows Cage to mock the at-times over-the-top style he’s notorious for. It’s just not quite up to the light-hearted lunacy of the first two acts.

The wonderful thing, if you like Cage at all, is that the movie does give him the chance to act in a broad range of styles. He’s almost Woody Allen-esque at the beginning. Well, okay, a kinetic version of Allen, anyway. When he finds a friend in his biggest fan, this is by turns subtle and comically not, especially when he’s acting as a spy. And despite the corniness of the action-y resolution, you get here the very sincere Cage that feels very real. You end up rooting for the guy.

Directed by Tom Gormican and co-written with Kevin Etten, one or both of the two wrote apparently the script on spec meaning without any up-front cash or assurance that Cage would go along, and initially he wasn’t interested. At one point, apparently, Cage considered playing the Spanish billionaire, but even irony has its limits. Some good cinematography from Nigel Buck and a flexible score from the great Mark Isham, as well as just fun location shots (although supposedly Majorca, actually…Budapest?) round out a pretty darn good “general audience” picture.

It is rated R, for language primarily. There is some drug use, too, most notably an acid trip done for laughs and probably for some commentary on the thinking processes of “creatives”. And there is a kind of interesting message outright stated twice: “Never shit on yourself”, Nick says (right after screwing something up, I think) and “This is why I must trust my shamanic instincts as a thespian” when he realizes how screwed up the CIA—who didn’t trust his shamanistic instincts as a thespian—is. “Never shit on yourself” and “trust your instincts” is actually pretty solid advice, even if you are a neurotic Hollywood movie-star/actor.

We followed this movie up with a Finnish horror movie called The Hatching, The Northman, The Duke, Speer Goes To Hollywood, Plan A, April 7, 1980, and when this is posted I’ll be watching The Raft. The last four are part of the Israeli Film Festival and, with the Finnish horror flick, really made us feel like we were “back”. Sadly, our local indie theater’s demo—elderly American Jews and assorted Middle Easterners—has not come back with us, and this bodes ill for its future.

But for now, we’ll soldier on.

Well, that just happened. The Boy is off on vacation and I’m trying to get back into the moviegoing habit, which ain’t easy, because: a) arbitrary demands for masks and passports could pop up at any time; b) available screenings suck. But I thought I’d roll the bones for the animated shorts which are always hit-and-miss, but at least not usually 100% misses.

In fact, the first two shorts lulled me into a false sense of security that the last three exploited most expertly, leaving me in WTAF mode. The shorts were longer this year (sounds like a fashion statement) so there were only the five noms and none of the honorable mentions. The clearly best one, Boxballet, had about zero chance to win before the limited Ukrainian incursion Biden, Zelensky and Putin are playing out, but now probably will stand as a way for the Academy to rid itself of all those Russian sympathizers it’s been cultivating for the past six decades.

I digress. On to the shorts:

Robin, Robin (UK): A half-hour story about a robin raised by mice. Mice are sneaky. Robins are singy. Combined, you get a robin who sings about how sneaky she is. Overall, very cute indeed, if a little bland. A magpie (Richard E. Grant) sings a song about stuff that conceptually reminded me of Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid but with a melody like Be Our Guest. Gillian Anderson chews the scenery as an evil cat.

Boxballet (Russia): In some ways the perfect short story for our time. An up-and-coming beautiful ballerina and a pug-ugly boxer meet and fall in love, and both are presented with unethical options for getting ahead in their respective fields, but at an incalculable cost to their dignity and happiness. I don’t even remember if there was dialogue in this one. There was some background chat (untranslated from Russian but in that clear TV accent that makes it super easy to parse) and a few titles like “Supermarket” but primarily the story is acted out. Truly excellent and memorable and reminded me a bit of the great, melancholy short We Can’t Live Without Cosmos from 2016. A very pure idea and story told in a touching way.

At this point, there was a card saying “Hide yo kids! Hide yo wife! Shit’s about to get real!” And you never really know what sort of thing is going to happen. Back in 2016, “Prologue” had this and it had some violence and nudity but I didn’t think I would necessarily rush a kid out of the theater. But, yeah, the next two get weird.

Affairs of the Art (UK/Canada): If anything represents modern Anglo culture better than a 60-year-old narcissist lamenting her life and indulging in weird art projects at the expense of all those around her while idolizing her literally psychopathic, childless sister, I don’t know what it is. When I say “psychopathic,” I’m not kidding: The narrator’s sister tortures and kills small animals and I guess the twist is that she goes out to Hollywood to get a lot of plastic surgery and taxidermy rich people’s pets. I don’t say the film approves of any of these characters—it didn’t seem to take a stance—and the thing about shorts (animated or otherwise) is that they don’t have to be to your taste. But, man, it ain’t charming, and if it’s meant as straight-up satire—I still would give it a meh.

Bestia (Chile): Dog decapitation and bestiality are the highlights of this Chilean short, allegedly based on alleged allegations. What this comes down to is Pinochet. Hollywood, of course, loves Communists, but it hates fascists, even when (like Pinochet) they just step down after a vote. An office worker takes her dog to a place every night where it rapes (and kills?) people. I don’t know. The only thing I’d say about this one is that it’s at least a genuine horror story and has some merit on that level. But you’re probably not going to like it.

The Windshield Wiper (US/Spain): This one is also emblematic of the decline and fall of Western civilization, in this case a series of vaguely connected images about disposable relationships in the modern world. The only “adult” content here is an actual, if ordinary sex scene, of an R-rated nature. It was relatively welcome after the previous two shorts, and I’m sure the whole thing resonates with a lot of modern people. It didn’t do much for me. I’m not really a fan of the animation style.

We have a saying, tongue-in-cheek but inherited from my mother’s father who said it in earnest: “We could all be dead tomorrow!” The ultimate rebuttal to someone worrying about some future event, I guess? The Windshield Wiper has an almost clichéd (almost?) use of indie folk-rock type songs, including one called “We Might Be Dead Tomorrow,” which made me actually laugh, particularly as a basis for romantic relationships one hopes to persist.

2 out of 5 ain’t great; I was glad the Flower opted to stay home.

UPDATE: “The Windshield Wiper” won the Oscar.

Sandwiched between the 1972 Best Picture Oscar-Winner Godfather and the 1974 Best Picture Oscar-Winner Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola directed a low-budget, low-key character study called The Conversation. A modest success (returning 3-4x its budget, but orders of magnitude less than Godfather) and a critical darling, I tried watching it once on the small screen and could not get into it. Even though it’s the opposite of the epic gangster flicks, I still would primarily recommend it be watched on the big screen: it’s a movie that demands a lot of attention to detail. It is very clearly among the best of Coppola’s films.

Released four months before Nixon’s resignation but conceived in the mid-’60s, Coppola claims to have been shocked at how closely the technology used by the White House Plumbers mapped with what he filmed. (He wrote, produced and directed.) It’s no surprise that the movie still resonates on the topic of privacy, even though the story itself (the eponymous conversation) is just solid thriller material that works as pure entertainment without the larger themes.

The Conversation has three major aspects that show our protagonist Harry Caul in different lights: It is a mystery; it is a deep-dive into the questions of privacy; it is a showcase for the hottest privacy invasion technology of the ’70s. Let’s take the last first because there’s a big sequence that takes place at a security convention, and it’s kind of amazing nearly fifty years later.

The convention is pretty standard, complete with booth bunny and a bunch of nerds and creeps talking technical details, but the sense of wonder as you see tiny bugs and phone taps that are activated by calling the subject’s phone is unparalleled in 2022 when you realize everyone: a) carries around and lives with devices designed for spying on them; b) has more invasion privacy power by sheer accident than pros did in ’74.

The point of this convention is to horrify us: These highly paid creeps have access to technology that allows them access to every private conversation we think we’re having. It’s meant to make us paranoid and it still works! Only now the highly-paid creeps are massive corporations and corrupt governments whose entire basis of operation is violating privacy. This aspect of the movie gives us the most “heroic” view of our protagonist, played expertly by Gene Hackman.

Harry is a true professional: He is excellent at his job, he builds his own equipment, he is sought after and has a kind of integrity in that he refuses overtures that could be very profitable and takes no personal interest in his subjects: He does his job without prurient interest, and even without human curiosity as his assistant (the sadly short-lived John Cazale) points out.

But this focus on the job underscores the fact that Harry is a literal tool. He takes a job to listen to “the conversation” (between Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) and rejoices in the technical aspects of the task (in sequences very reminiscent of Blow Up and later echoed by Blow Out), but when his client (Robert Duvall) has his heavy (Harrison Ford) running interference, he begins to suspect that the young couple’s lives are at stake.

What’s more, when one of Harry’s rivals (Alan Garfield) turns the tables on him, eavesdropping on him as a joke, we can see that Harry really, really doesn’t like it. In fact, Harry is paranoid: His lover (Teri Garr) knows nothing about him, he makes business calls from pay phones, he is alarmed when people wish him a happy birthday, and he spends considerable time cajoling the spare key from his landlady.

As he becomes increasingly agitated at the prospects of his work being used for nefarious purposes—something that has happened before to disastrous consequences, we learn—his sense of urgency to do something, to get involved, to try to stop a tragedy, dramatically highlights his limitations. Besides being a tool, Harry’s a coward, and his insistence professional ignorance raises an insurmountable barrier as far as knowing whether or not he’s serving good or serving evil.

The dramatic climax of the film comes at about 90 minutes, and could’ve gone any number of ways. It could’ve been completely ambiguous, for example, with Harry completely unaware of what his actions resulted in. (It’s not, but how 1974 would that have been?) This is followed by about 20 minutes of twists and revelations in which we see very plainly the effect of trying to avoid responsibility in the name of professionalism.

Shot in Technicolor, though the drab ’70s version of it (which suits here), with deliberately wonky sound in parts and a lot of repetition of parts up front, I still don’t think I could sit through it on the small screen. A use of Jazz Age classics heightens the sense of paranoia. Like, you can understand being on a secret mission and hearing “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along”, only to later hear someone else singing it—that might make you suspicious because who in 1974 was singing that song? Also, because the music is so upbeat in contrast with the tone of the film, it’s almost ironic in and of itself.

Composer David Shire (who would go on to win an Oscar for Norma Rae) slips in some traditional music later on in the film; I didn’t catch exactly when. The first part of the film, however, is all diegetic—the music all has a source within the film—and the shift is subtle and effective, as is the whole transition from an almost documentary feel to a more traditional cinematic experience.

That Coppola guy could make a movie, once upon a time.

I’ve been a Michelle Yeoh fan going back to Supercop in the ’90s. She and Maggie Cheung and the late Anita Mui were kind of the chop-socky version of the American Scream Queen trio (Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer), and were a credit to any film they were in. It was on the strength of that I ventured to the theater to see Everything Everywhere All At Once.

However, if I had known that Daniels had directed the picture, I would’ve gone without trepidation. Daniels is the name Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert go by when they’re directing music videos, but I know them for their freshman feature effort, 2016’s Swiss Army Man. The simplest possible review is probably the most accurate one: If you liked that, you’ll probably like this, too, because it is very, very tonally similar. Or, to put it in another light, this is the Matrix trilogy, if 2/3rds of the Matrix trilogy didn’t suck.

In EEAAO, Yeoh plays Evelyn, a Chinese immigrant running a hectic laundry business that she’s trying to expand. She’s getting heat from a goblin IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis) for her copious, dubious business expenses. (A karaoke machine for a laundromat?). Also from her father (the great James Hong, still kicking ass at 93!) who has always considered a failure because she’s not a son.  She transfers this paternal disdain to her kind of dopey, affable husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, best known as Short Round from Temple of Doom) and her chubby lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu, “The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel”).

Comics Matter host “Yaboi Zack” has talked about having “black woman PTSD syndrome” in comics where, if you see a black woman in a comic, you just cringe because you know exactly how that character is going to play out just through the process of eliminating all the ways it can’t play out in modern politically correct terms (and just heuristically seeing the way all such characters play out in current day media). And I have to admit, I cringed a bit—still knowing nothing about the movie—what have I gotten myself into?

Fortunately, Joy is not a cartoon cutout or a stand-in for some virtue. There is a message about acceptance, of course, but the message is a universal one. Hsu has to run the gamut from villain to victim, and she does well.

The movie kicks into gear pretty fast when Waymond—and I feel like I would be attacked for naming a Chinese character Waymond, or Wichard, or Bwian—suddenly switches into super-secret agent mode, and the plot begins to resemble that of Highlander (or more closely, Jet Li’s 2001 bomb The One) with Evelyn on the run from a multidimensional villain who believes—well, we start with “the villain wants to kill you” and evolve into something much more interesting.

This would have been fine as a film, really. Even at 60, Yeoh can fairly convincingly pull off some martial arts moves—though let’s give a shout out to her stunt double (Kiera O’Connor) as well as Hong’s (Alfred Hsing), Curtis’ (Elisabeth Carpenter) and Hsu’s (Gemma Nguyen)—and a quality action film is as welcome as it is rare.

But while there’s plenty of action, the multiverse concept is used to explore various ideas and relationships between the characters, with the notion that they are the same people (somehow) but in different circumstances, their antagonisms and affections might be reversed or altered in previously unthought of ways, and the things they think are so important in one reality don’t even occur to them in others.

This also would have been just fine, because a good philosophical/dramatic hook in a sci-fi/action film is even rarer than a quality action film. Mostly sci-fi is ham-handed or murky and almost inevitably ends so far up its own ass, it feels like being lectured by a dorky 14-year-old on the perils of climate change. But I hasten to point out again the Daniels are the guys who did Swiss Army Man.

That film, you may recall, also tackled the really big philosophical issues but the main plot mechanic was, literally, flatulence. Here, there are two comedic aspects that keep the film grounded and interesting. First, in order to fight interdimensional enemies, our protagonists have to make decisions that take them along unlikely paths toward universes where they have specific skills. Like, Waymond needs some martial art skill, but to get to that universe where he has that skill, he has to eat a tube of lip balm. Or he’ll have to give himself four separate paper cuts, or chew the gum off the bottom of the desk, et cetera. As the movie progresses, these decision paths require increasingly bizarre actions. And as random as these things are, there’s an aesthetic logic to it that pays off in the climactic sequence, which maps more or less to a fight scene but isn’t exactly.

The second is that the presence of the multiverse allows for very jokey things to occur, like an earth where everyone has hot dogs for fingers. But the twist there is that, when the Daniels introduce us to a concept like that, they go from the outlandish joke (a view of a primeval earth where sausage-fingered apes wipe out normal-fingered apes) to the very earnest representation of people living in a modern society where their fingers are basically useless, and how they evolved to deal with that.

You may notice a similarity to “Rick and Morty”, which has done similar gags for their “Interdimensional Cable” shows. But whereas that cartoon revels in nihilism, EEAO lets us view nihilism (it’s a bagel, literally) and then lets Evelyn find meaning the only way meaning can be found in an infinite universe of random particles. I found this to be a winning combination, just as I did Swiss Army Man‘s absurd path to something with meaning. The Daniels clearly want to talk about the Big Issues, but there is really the sense that they do want to converse and not lecture, which is the mark of great art.

Tonally, these shifts—from broadly comic to deadly serious to melodramatic—won’t work for everyone. It’s rare for an American movie to do it well, and it’s going to be jarring for some. But if you can enjoy those kinds of swings, it’s as well done here as I’ve ever seen.

Excellent performances:

Yeoh could still carry a movie, though she doesn’t have to here. In a way, her part is the most straightforward since as our central character, she’s the stable point from which we view the other universes. Her arc is at times subtle and is probably the most relatable, as she views the different outcomes different life paths would have brought her to, which (in a very Buddhist-feeling vein) is presented as a kind of “grass is greener” trap.

By contrast, Hsu’s role is broad: She’s bratty, moody, and by turns sympathetic and unsympathetic, very human and inhuman. It’s a tough role and she handles it well. Quan, who hasn’t worked much as an adult, is very effective in his low-key role. (Fun fact: Quan worked as a stunt choreographer on the aforementioned The One.) Intriguingly, the universe where Evelyn and Waymond are the most “successful” is the one where they don’t get married. Waymond and Joy are, besides being well-fleshed out character, opposite poles for Evelyn to play against, and the movie literalizes this in a way I didn’t pick up on even in a second viewing.

Jamie Lee Curtis is fantastic. Initially, as the Javertian IRS agent bound and determined to make the Wangs pay their fair share, she is the movie’s primary antagonist. She segues seamlessly into a soulless minion of the Big Bad. And she factors in to the Wang’s multiversal existence.

The editing by Paul Rogers, who doesn’t have an extensive resume at this point, is Oscar worthy. The score by Son Lux (a New York based experimental group) is seamless across the tonal shifts. The sound editing, production and design, generally, is masterful.

I said last time that I would (probably) stop saying of old movies “You couldn’t make THIS today!” Here, at least is a movie you couldn’t have made at any time in the past. Granted, the limitations would have been largely technical—that is, I don’t think there’s much about the story that would have been objectionable over the past 40 years—but this is a highly artistic use of technology that is used to tell the story.

The Boy was out of town when I went to see this, but when he came back, we went to see it again, and he found it entertaining (though he was too jet lagged to take it all in). I concur, to the extent that a second viewing, knowing all that was coming, was enjoyable just to see so many clues that seemed ell-oh-ell-so-random! the first time and realize they pay off later on. There are few movies (apart from kiddie fare) that are this dense and also this carefully constructed, while seeming so utterly chaotic at times.

I get tired of saying it—so this may even be the last time—but you can’t help but notice that The Quiet Man is one of those classic Hollywood films that couldn’t possibly be made today. I think I’d be shocked to see one you could make at this point. The (semi-) positive aspect of this, I suppose, is that, like the Korean and Chinese films that took up such a substantial portion of my pre-lockdown viewing, these classics feel fresher and bolder and more fun than they might have only a few years ago, to say nothing of more interesting in terms of their commentary on the Human Condition.

Which, ultimately, The Quiet Man is in its own beautiful, charming way. The plot is one of the simplest: Sean Thornton, an American from Pittsburgh, returns to his family’s old home in Castletown, Ireland, where he meets and immediately falls for Mary Kate Danahar whose brother, Will, he alienates by purchasing the old family farm, thus creating the barrier to his ultimate happiness with Mary Kate.

The wrinkle is that Sean is a peaceful man, a “quiet” man, because he doesn’t fight. Will constantly offends him and Mary Kate, and Sean’s reaction is to not care. He’s an American, so he’s shocked to find that as the Danahar patriarch, Will can prevent their marriage. He’s wealthy, at least by Irish standards (though nobody seems to pick up on that), so he doesn’t understand Mary Kate’s attachment to her dowry, or the 350 pounds that Will has specifically refused to hand over.

This ultimately boils down into Mary Kate losing respect for Sean and thinking he’s a coward, at which point we learn Sean’s secret, and what he must overcome to win Mary Kate’s love.

The Flower pointed out to me, quite astutely, that the moral of the movie was that Sean had to learn to fight with love. And of course, the movie ends with one of the most extended brawls in movie history (John Carpenter having used it for inspiration for the Roddy Piper/David Keith battle in They Live) and almost certainly the most joyous. The entire village swarms around Will and Sean as they roll from hill to street to field to river, everyone drinking and cheering.

I can’t even.

The movie trucks in stereotypes, romanticization, idealization and is so heteronormative, Disney Co. is probably lobbying to have it burned, and it’s absolutely wonderful and completely inoffensive to those not looking to take offense. Much like Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954), it comes from a time when cultural differences were a topic of amusement, rather than a profit center for useless PhD holders.

I don’t suppose anything has to be said about six-time Oscar-winner John Ford, who won for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and this film, as well as for two WWII semi-documentaries (The Battle of Midway and December 7th: The Movie) but who (I don’t think) ever went to the ceremonies. He was not even nominated for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, The Searchers, My Darling Clementine, Mister Roberts or Fort Apache.

About our three principals, John Wayne (Oscar for True Grit), Victor McLaglen (Oscar for The Informer) and Maureen O’Hara (honorary Oscar in 2015), what can we say? They’re all too old (by at least ten years) for the parts they’re playing and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Wayne is at his Wayne-iest, but it couldn’t feel fresher than it does in this fish-out-of-water scenario. McLaglen is convincingly belligerent but somehow still likable as the antagonist.

O’Hara is the engine that drives the picture, though, and she has the toughest role. One has no trouble believing the “meet cute”, if you can call it that, considering it’s just John Wayne driving along the road while she’s foraging or something, and she sort of flees and sort of looks back, and you know the two are instantly in love (because it’s Wayne and O’Hara!), but O’Hara has to play hard-to-get but not too hard because she’s already crazy for Wayne, and also she’s a mercurial red-head, and also an older unmarried woman—the look she shoots anyone when they call her a “spinster” is priceless—there’s more acting here than Meryl Streep has done in her entire career. But it never seems like acting.

It may have been that her pedigree as “The Pirate Queen” wasn’t strong enough to land her even a nom for this role (Shirley Booth would win for Come Back, Little Sheba, but the rest of the nominees were in movies you probably never heard of), and that just goes to show you the Oscars have always sucked, just not as hard as they have in their recent, more violent incarnation.

Not based on any previously written source material, Ford called on frequent collaborator Frank S. Nugent with a fellow named Maurice Walsh, who had some expertise in Irish matters, I think. Victor Young provides the delightful score, Technicolor the delightful color, Winton Hoch would win his third Oscar for cinematography.

In the end, this is just a joyous and fearless representation of a culture that has a sense of humor about itself (or had, at least), by people who loved it, and who didn’t have the culture cops bearing down on them. I look forward to future times and art forms where this can be true again.

And just as mysteriously as they arrived, the passport requirements vanished. I was actually able to go see a movie, sans mask, sans documents, with the only downside being it was the Norwegian contender for best international picture, The Worst Person in the World. I kid (somewhat) but it’s not exactly a crowd-pleaser. While y’all are reading this I will be seeing a Korean double-feature (the political thriller Kingmaker and In Our Prime, which appears to be a Korean Good Will Hunting) and tomorrow I’ve got The Quiet Man. Could things be returning to normal?

Well, at least until they figure out how to screw them up again, anyway.

Last Friday, on the other hand, was the premiere/beta of season 13 of the ever abiding “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and the “Gizmoplex” which is a sort of streaming service/virtual theater concept. For those unfamiliar with the show, it took the concept of movie “riffing”, where an existing filmed entertainment is played and humorous comments are made over the film’s original soundtrack and mainstreamed it by setting up a flimsy but vital framing story: That of a man shot into space by mad scientists and forced to watch these movies as part of their evil experiment.

Over the series’ initial 11-year-run it had many homes—starting with a copyright-law-dubious season 0 on a local Minneapolis UHF channel, leading to the Comedy Channel which was absorbed by Comedy Central, and finally to the SciFi channel—and many cast changes. When it was canceled after season ten, many attempts were made to revive the general format with and without a framing story.

The three main riffers of the last MST3K seasons, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett went on to do “Film Crew” and then found success with “Rifftrax”, which provides pure riffs both integrated with movies and—through an ingenious app—allows you to play the commentary over films you already own unriffed. (This also gets around the prohibitive licensing issues for many movies.) Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff have been touring and recording as “The Mads are Back” since 2015. MST3K creator Joel Hodgson himself refurbished the concept in 2007 with  the fairly successful “Cinematic Titanic”, reuniting himself, Beaulieu and Conniff, and MST alumni Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis Weinstein (who started with season 0 of the show at age 17!).

In 2015, 16 1/2 years after the show’s “final” cancellation, creator Joel Hodgson—having spent half a decade acquiring rights and clearing a path—announced a Kickstarter to bring back MST3K. This would raise a record $5.76M to create new episodes with a new cast for Netflix. Setting aside all the differences that a couple decades will make, season 11 must not have been what Netflix wanted, since season 12 was streamlined for binge watching: Six movies released all at once, for back-to-back viewing in a gimmick called “The Gauntlet”. Exeunt Netflix.

Last year, Joel launched another Kickstarter, racked up another $6.5M and started on season 13: 13 episodes plus a concept called the Gizmoplex, which most people look at and say “Oh, it’s a streaming service,” but there’s a distinct emphasis on community experience. More on that in a bit. Unencumbered by Netflix, but encumbered by lockdowns, Hogdson & Co. nonetheless managed to film all 13 episodes in under a year, and made the first episode available on March 4th, 2022—

A riff based on the Mexican wrestling “classic” Santo in the Treasure of Dracula, wherein the titular Santo invents time-travel, sends a girl back to her past life to discover she was romantically involved with a Dracula and that said Dracula had a treasure they try to retrieve in current day 1969 “to help the children”.

I set that apart because I don’t want anyone to think I’m making it up. It’s pure MST3K glory, taking an insane movie and just running with the various concepts and cultural oddities therein. It’s made all the more wonderful by the fact that El Santo was a kind of Mexican legend and a decent fellow, and the only quality print remaining is “the European cut” which features a lot of nudity El Santo did not approve of. (He was a friend to all the children!)

With all the different riffing ventures, there is of course some overlap in movie choices but Santo is just very MST3K. Rifftrax, by contrast, does a lot of popular films. It is, for example, the only way I would (and have) watched the Twilight series. Rifftrax also does a lot of infamous cult movies (recently, for example, they took on the Canadian microbudget/wth-is-this flick Feeders). I don’t see the main three rifffers doing Mexican wrestling pictures. (MSTie alumni Pehl and Bridget Jones Nelson get a lot of mileage out of old Sherlock Holmes and teen-sploitation films under the Rifftrax banner so I could see them doing it.)

The Netflix years got mixed reviews from fans of the old show and while I liked them, this felt like real MST3K. This episode paces jokes more like the original run. That’s important, I think. The movie has to have enough room to breathe on its own; this makes the riffs funnier when they come. It feels less frenetic. The new riffers (Jonah Ray, Hampton Yount, Baron Vaughn) are fairly seasoned by this point and much more comfortable. This season will also feature episodes with the latest “experiment” subject played by the charming Emily Marsh, as well as new voices for the robots, who I believe all worked together on the live tour.

The Netflix era had one fewer host sketch, which season 13 has restored. This also helps the pace. One serious flaw with Rifftrax, for my taste, is that sometimes you really, really need a break from the film. It’s hard to watch Manos: The Hands of Fate straight through with no interruptions! Also, the sketches allow the crew to develop both the show universe and the in-movie gags. This episode featured an instant classic: a sketch where Crow (Yount) and Tom Servo (Vaughn) are being “interviewed” by ’80s era wrestling announcer (Ray) and say increasingly nice things about each other in an increasingly belligerent manner.

Due to the lockdowns, the visuals are hampered by having everyone in front of a green screen: A critical part of the charm of MST3K has always been a reliance on low-budget models and sets reminiscent of the movies being riffed. Nonetheless, the joy over having a new episode and the episode being such a high quality, generally overrides the misgivings over details like this.

Now, the Gizmoplex? That’s another story. Historically, it’s the sort of thing that has never worked. That is to say, it is in part an attempt to create an experience out of what people commonly view as interface elements. The idea that you can browse in the lobby hang on in the lobby or have an avatar in the theater has not been one that has caught on much in the past although the emphasis here is very much on “a place you can bring your friends to share experiences with”, and this might be the definitive factor. It reminded me a whole lot of what Joe Bob Briggs aims for on “The Last Drive-In”, with the show airing on Friday night and not being available for streaming right away, and during which Joe Bob and Darcy—mostly Darcy—interact with the viewers.

In this context—that of a cult following that can throw together 7 figures for a new season—community building in a virtual space could work. We shall see if it does here. Indeed, the only thing that would concern me, were I Hodgson, would be that even though the latest campaign raised more money, the original “Bring Back” campaign in 2015 had a third more backers. Ultimately the idea is for the Gizmoplex to fund future MST3K seasons—something that seems somewhat unlikely to me to occur by the summer (where they’d have to have enough money to start making season 14), but I’m hopeful and curious.

The new season should be available to the public in May. The Gizmoplex itself I suspect will roll out piecemeal over the next year.

It’s Christmastime again, which of course means It’s A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and the Grinch, Die Hard and all the Shane Black movies, but last year I compiled a list of Christmas-themed filmed entertainment that were lesser known or at least lesser exposed. That list is here, and included: The Shop Around The Corner, Holiday Inn, The Bishop’s Wife, The Holly and the Ivy, White Christmas, the MST3K episode “Santa Claus Conquers The Martians”, the Rifftrax Live! episode “Santa Claus”, “The Tick Loves Santa”, Joyeux Noel, In Bruges, Rare Exports and Krampus. A little something for everyone in that list.

But can I come up with another quality list this year? I think I can, especially after stealing all your ideas from the last movie thread.  Before getting to the lesser known items, I wanted to take a little time to re-appreciate some of the classics which grinchier hearts in the past may have dismissed:

A Miracle On 34th Street (1947, Comedy, Drama): It’s easy to misremember this as treacly plum pudding, but its every major plot point and the behavior of most of its characters is shockingly cynical. The underlying premise is that due to the self-serving interests of everyone involved, a crazy man is going to be authenticated as Santa Claus.

Elf (2003, Comedy): Yeah, I know, and I agree. The man-child schtick gets old fast and Will Ferrell is the King-Prince of Man-Children but under the sure hand of Jon Favreau and a relentlessly good-hearted core—well, if you’re ever gonna like anything Will Ferrell, this is probably it. Terrific holiday soundtrack. Pre-saturation Deschanel.

Christmas in Connecticut (1945, Romantic Comedy): Some of us like our Christmas movies to start with U-boat attacks, is all I’m saying. Peak Barbara Stanwyck with great support from Sydney Greenstreet and S.Z. Sakall in this screwball comedy that would form the basis of about 9,000 sitcom plots in the TV age. Remade in 1992 by director Arnold Schwarzenegger and starring Dyan Cannon, Kris Kristofferson and Tony Curtis. ISYN.

Now, on to the lesser known gems.

The Three Godfathers (1936/1948, Western): This came up a lot in last year’s thread. There are half-a-dozen versions of this tale (including 2003’s Tokyo Godfathers) about three desperados who find themselves in charge of a baby on Christmas, basically having to decide how bad of a badman  each wants to be. The 1936 Boleslawski version features Chester Morris, Lewis Stone and Walter Brennan, and is largely superior to the version that John Ford made in 1948 to honor Harey Carey, which boasts John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, Harey Carey, Jr. and Ward Bond, but lacks the edge of the earlier film perhaps due to Wayne not being convincingly “bad” enough to provide the tension.

La grande illusion (1937, War, France): It’s just not Christmas for me without a WWI story, and this (the greatest of Jean Renoir films) is the story of French soldiers escaping from a German POW camp. A big Christmas party is involved. The title is a wry reference to a 1909 book The Great Illusion, which argued that war made no economic or social sense, and which was used by the experts to “prove” that there would be no World War I. The author then won a Nobel Peace Prize for his book…in 1933.

Remember The Night (1940, Romantic Comedy): Before Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray teamed up for murder and love in Double Indemnity they teamed up for laughs and love in this Preston Sturges penned offering from Mitchell Leisen, director of “the dregs of 1939” classic Midnight, the most excellent 1924 Thief of Baghdad, and that episode of “The Twilight Zone” where Roddy MacDowell crashes on Mars.

Susan Slept Here (1954, Comedy): In Who The Devil Made It, Peter Bogdanovich interviews the great Hollywood directors and also Frank Tashlin, a brilliant cartoon director who moved on to live features like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Girl Can’t Help It, and this. As a premise, “35-year old screenwriter takes in a 17-year-old runaway in the days leading up to Christmas” is a sketchy one, but the movie has some charm if you can get past the fact that 22-year-old Debbie Reynolds plays 17 way more convincingly than 50-year-old Dick Powell plays a 35 year-old for whom the 24-year-old Anne Francis is aging out. Actually, Reynolds is so good…I don’t know, maybe fast-forward past the Powell parts.

Blood Beat (1983, Horror): I’m a sucker for Vinegar Syndrome’s archaeological expeditions into lost ’80s horror, and this year they made quite a splash with New York Ninja—an unfinished film they edited together and ADRed with era-appropriate actors like Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Linnea Quigley. A few months ago I “discovered” this very odd VS offering from rural Wisconsin, about a guy who brings his girlfriend home for Christmas only to discover she has a psychic link with the samurai ghost that’s murdering the neighbors. Apparently, Jay of Red Letter Media watches this every Christmas, and he and Josh did a “re:View” of it this past week.

The Lemon Drop Kid (1951, Comedy): Based on the title of a Damon Runyon story, Bob Hope plays a swindler who needs to raise $10 Gs or a gangster will axe him on Christmas. Bob Hope in movies mostly irritates me but if you don’t suffer from that limitation, this one is not bad. Partly directed by Frank Tashlin.

I’m not a big TV watcher as you may or may not know, but last year I managed to come up with some TV show episodes, and you guys brought up some forgotten classics:

“A Muppet Family Christmas” (1987, Children): Of course none of us nearly 29-year olds can appreciate it, but our parents might enjoy this crossover of Muppets, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and Muppet Babies. The story involves the Muppets going to Fozzie’s mom’s house for Christmas where they encounter their Sesame Street ancestors and Fraggle Rock offshoots, with Jim Henson doing a cameo as a dishwasher. The Swedish Chef plots to cook Big Bird for dinner while Kermit frets over Miss Piggy fighting a snowstorm. Features third-act mega-Christmas Carol medley. Available all over YouTube but completely unobtainable legally due to licensing. (My youngest recommended this one.)

“The Homecoming: A Walton’s Christmas” (1971, Drama): Did I say parents? Our grandparents might enjoy this pilot for “The Waltons”. Loaded with charm, if somewhat hampered by pedestrian editing (a consequence, I believe, of a show meant to be frequently interrupted by commercials), featuring Patricia Neal and Edgar Bergen in a rustic Great Depression story. Directed by Fielder Cook whose film Patterns (teleplay by Rod Serling) was mentioned back in the February movie thread, and who was kind of a TV movie titan, managing to pull off well-respected TV versions of Brigadoon and Harvey, as well as a less respected Miracle on 34th Street.

“The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas” (1973, Children): Based and red-pilled worker bear (Tommy Smothers) is canceled when he challenges the Cathedral bear-narrative by searching for the conspiracy known as “Christmas”, said to happen when all blue-pilled bears are hibernating. He ends up living in the alien world of New York City away from all he ever knew and loved. Complete with organic foods, mini-dresses and astrology, this actually made me laugh-out-loud with some remarkably au courant observations.

“Santa and the Three Bears” (1970, Children): Similarly themed but not as woke, this concerns a ranger and bears in Yellowstone, totally not meant to be confused with Jellystone, with the kiddie bears wanting to stay awake to experience Christmas and a mother wanting them to sleep. Tubi has an unending stream of Christmas cartoons from this era which I think are short enough to avoid being interrupted by commercials.

“Mr. Monk and the Miracle” (2008, Mystery): I like this episode not for the (frankly absurd) plot but for putting Monk’s correctness against his complete inability to comprehend faith and consequent misery and neuroses.

“Joe Bob Ruins Christmas” (2021, Horror): Every year people bitch about the movies shown (for EVERY holiday) on “The Last Drive-In” so this year, Joe Bob and Darcy ruin Christmas by exchanging movies as gifts, each picking one that the other has been wanting to host for years. One of them gets his wish and the other gets the cinematic equivalent of a pair of argyle socks. Opening with a dissertation on the 90-mile journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem that winds up as a screed against cancel culture, the interstitials are used to auction off various odd memorabilia to raise money for four separate charities that relate (very roughly) to the Nativity story. (The auction and merch selling for charity runs until Tuesday here.)

You guys mentioned a ton of other things, and I actually ended up finding a ton of stuff in building this post up, so I’m already good for next year. Keep the recommendations coming and maybe we’ll do Christmas in July!

When I was a boy, the greatest of the secular holidays—if you’ll forgive the oxymoron—was Thanksgiving. It sat defiantly on a Thursday and, fortified by the mythology of America, simultaneously closed the stores and clogged the airports and the bus stations. Gourmandizing aside, it was—and still is—a holiday that defied commercialization because its elemental substance was gratitude. So it is perhaps unsurprising that, encroached on one side by the increasingly commercialized Christmas and on the other by a Halloween metastasized from ever -expanding childhoods, Thanksgiving has not been a font of pop culture. Or, as Loudon Wainwright III put it:

Suddenly, it’s Christmas right after Halloween
Forget about Thanksgiving, it’s just a buffet in-between

(Wainwright’s thoughts on Thanksgiving can be found here.)

Up until a few years ago, when John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles emerged from the cinematic soup of the ’80s as a modern Thanksgiving classic (and setting aside the second best Peanuts special), the film I most associated with Thanksgiving was The Best Years of Our Lives. So ingrained was this in my head, I was rather surprised on a recent viewing to discover Thanksgiving makes no appearance in the film whatsoever—though it was released one week before Thanksgiving in 1946.

No Thanksgiving, but a whole lot of giving thanks.

Directed by William Wyler from a screenplay by Robert Sherwood (Rebecca, The Bishop’s Wife) from a novella/poem by MacKinlay Kantor (who also wrote the book Follow Me, Boys! was based on), it would be the top grossing film of the decade and win seven regular Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay and both Best Actor Oscars, and two special Oscars.

Our story begins with three servicemen returning from the war: An army sergeant (Frederic March), a Navy Petty Officer (Harold Russell) and an Air Force bombardier (Dana Andrews) who share an uncomfortable 16-hour plane flight to get to the fictional town of Boone City where each discovers that while the town  hasn’t changed, they and their relationship to it has.

There’s nothing more American than the fact that their status in the military service has nothing to do with their non-military lives. (See this Al Jolson song, “I’ve Got My Captain Working For Me Now”.) Sergeant Al (March) was a wealthy banker, Petty Officer Homer (Russell) was a solidly middle class high-school sports star, and the highest status among them, Bombardier Fred (Andrews) was a soda-jerk from the wrong side of the tracks.

Al returns to loving wife Milly (top-billed Myrna Loy) and two children who have grown to adulthood in his absence. Milly is so patient and so adept at handling Al that daughter Peggy thinks (Teresa Wright) that they’ve never had a single marital difficulty. Although Al finds himself welcome back at his old job (in charge of G.I. loans), he wants to use his gut sense about men—his faith in their abilities as he saw them during the war—as a basis for making loans. (This is literally illegal now.) And he finds himself dealing with the stress by drinking.

Homer’s difficulties stem from the loss of his hands. Russell won two Oscars here, both for best supporting actor and an honorary one for supporting disabled veterans because the Academy assumed he couldn’t win the regular Oscar, not being a professional actor. It’s a powerhouse of a performance because Homer, who has already wrestled with his disability, has to repeat the grieving process with practically everyone he comes into contact with.

In an excess of decency, he wants to free his best girl Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell) from feeling obliged to stay with him while she struggles to make him realize her feelings haven’t changed.

The main arc of the movie belongs to Fred. A genuine war hero who ends up working for the kid who probably was too young for the draft and whose home-town pharmacy was bought out by a big conglomerate, he’s also suffering from what we now call PTSD, and his party-time pin-up gal wife Marie (Virginia Mayo), whom he married two weeks before shipping out, doesn’t really have anything in common with him any more and also really hates that he can’t hold down a job. The movie’s great irony being that the least grateful and understanding person in the film, Marie, is the one who bitterly utters the words “the best years of my life”.

Complicating matters further is that an encounter with Peggy convinces Fred that she, rather than the bubble-headed bimbo, is what he really wants in a wife. This doesn’t go down very well with Al.

I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that things more-or-less all work out for the best, and some critics, especially in later years, would regard the movie as too “neat”, but the whole point of the film is giving thanks. When Homer is describing the process of how he has to put on the harness that holds his hook-hands, he says, “I’m lucky. I have my elbows. Some of the boys don’t.” (Sort of a variant on “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”)

It isn’t really “neat”, though: All three of our heroes have to face the fact that life is going to be full of new challenges. Al’s challenge is moral and institutional, Harold’s is physical, and Fred basically has to start over. But a big part of giving thanks, as it turns out, is not giving up—and the guy who stands in the future suggesting a movie like this should end in despair is like the conspiracy theory guy (Ray Teal) who calls the servicemen “suckers”: he deserves a sock in the jaw.

With a relentlessly emotional score by Hugo Friedhoffer (and directed by Emil Newman), and occasionally blocked so arrestingly that a home viewing has the vital advantage of letting you pause and rewind to appreciate it, this is a unique film that has me choked up for almost the entirety of its 2:50 runtime, every time I watch it—and feeling that I need to be more thankful.

See, the thing is, The Amityville Horror had about one thing going for it: It was “based on a true story” during a glorious time when we still believed in Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle and Nessie and so forth. So it racked up a whopping $86M at the box office, finishing only behind—I’m not making this up—Kramer vs. Kramer, the #1 film of 1979 and the only film of the year to be a “blockbuster” (at the time defined as “a movie that breaks $100M at the box office”). It would beat out the first Star Trek movie, Rocky II, The Jerk, Apocalypse Now, and many other films that fit into that category broadly defined as “good”.

The 1982 sequel dropped precipitously—about on a par with the Exorcist sequel—and then an attempt at 3D made it clear that there was no cash left to milk from this poor cow. But as we all know: Evil Never Dies and nothing is more evil than someone who owns a horror franchise, and five years after the 3D attempt, Barry Bernardi (who up till then had been mostly co-producing John Carpenter films) found himself really enjoying a book (I guess, this already sounds preposterous) called Amityville: The Evil Escapes. He sent it to Sandor Stern, who had written the first Amityville script asking him to write it and direct it, and Sandor said “Sure, but this book sucks, let me do my own thing.”

So it wouldn’t be until Amityville: The Next Generation until the book called Amityville: The Evil Escapes would actually be film.

Sandor’s “own thing” turns out to be an evil lamp sent to Oceanside, CA—a lovely place for a haunting—where it kills assorted people in Jane Wyatt’s life. Jane has just taken in her daughter Patty Duke and her three kids. On the other hand, who cares? This is a silly movie with some good actors who just aren’t going to overcome the silliness, through no fault of their own.

Of course, Kevin, Bill and Mike cracking wise doesn’t help. I mean, for taking it seriously. Good riffs here, and another gimcrack song from Kevin, a little Beach Boys-y number called “2000 Miles From Amityville”.

The initial short is also pretty great: It’s a work safety film that  is obsessed with tomatoes-as-fruit and ends with our lecturer playing toreador with a forklift.

Hope we get to see more of these boys in the future.

“The most ferociously original horror movie of 1982.” — Stephen King

That quote of Stephen King’s could not have come earlier than June of 1982 when John Carpenter’s The Thing had just been released, which has essentially the same plot—monsters that can turn into anyone kill a group of people one by one—as well as truly ferocious (and revolutionary) special effects, but we’ll cut the ole Maine schlockmeister some slack here: His glowing praise made the movie’s success possible, launching the career of Sam Raimi and perhaps tangentially the Coen Brothers (who leaned on Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell for their film debut, Blood Simple).

It’s possible The Boy had never seen this—as a toddler he was a huge fan of Army of Darkness, and when he was older Evil Dead II—so I was tempering, somewhat, his expectations. The acting in this film is some of the worst ever recorded, and in a charming intro by Bruce Campbell (for the 40th anniversary showing at a drive-in) he notes that his most famous work is also his worst. (My rebuttal would be that he really didn’t turn in a good performance until 2002’s Bubba Ho-Tep, so there was a fairly high chance of that happening anyway.) Someone asked him for advice for actors and he said something to the effect of “Do anything because you’re going to suck at first.”

The girls do better than the guys, and Richard DeManincor (as “Scott”) does better than Bruce, but you can see the beginnings of what would become the more successfully hammy and manic performances Campbell turns in for the highly regarded Evil Dead II, which today would probably be called a “soft reboot” rather than an “incoherent sequel”. (It is supposed to be a sequel, except Ash dies at the end of the first movie, and even if he hadn’t died, why the hell would he take another girlfriend into a cabin in the woods?)

And you can’t really talk about this movie without covering the occasionally shockingly bad special effects. A 1950s era lightning strike on a tree (which Sam Raimi got removed from some early cuts). Several composites of the moon being occluded by black smoke. The jarring stop-motion animation. Bruce Campbell made reference to George Lucas’ Star Wars CGI shenanigans and basically said you won’t see any of the here: All the wires are still visible, and you can see the hose pumping blood. Which actually leads me to the point of all this, because I never have seen those wires and hoses. I was even looking this time.

From a 20-year-old Sam Raimi’s endless well of energy, and his intuitive sense of moviemaking, we get a movie that basically dares you to not take it seriously. Some apologists have suggested that the camp moments in the movie were deliberate, to which Raimi has responded that everyone involved was deadly earnest. This movie is powered by that force: Ellen Sandweiss’ brittle emotionalism after being raped by the woods; Bruce Campbell asserting that they can’t bury Shelly, whom they’ve just hacked to pieces, because “she’s our friend”; DeManincor’s Scotty’s decision to flee and leave the injured Linda to her fate. A single wink-wink to the audience would ruin it all.

The opening scenes of the Olds Delta 88 (a family car that’s been in most of his movies) are not quite Manos: The Hands of Fate level bad, they’re still the sort of rough-cut, badly overdubbed kind of thing you see in horror films all the time, but the instant the car hits the rickety bridge, the camera transforms into a weapon, a hostile entity—literally, as it represents the Force In The Woods. Dutch angles, shots with improvised tracks (they couldn’t afford a dolly), Sam Raimi hanging from the rafters by his legs to get a back-to-front shot of Campbell’s head, as Ash begins to realize he’s in a demonic madhouse…these were filmmakers taking their best (and probably only shot) at getting noticed.

It not only becomes easy to overlook the film’s flaws, it becomes hard not to. I was not particularly a fan at the time, but I liken it today to re-viewing Mel Brooks movies: When I watch them now I see a man whose sole interest is in making me laugh, and nothing is beneath him in that task. I see in Evil Dead a passion to scare me, to win me over, to make good on the promises of the ’70s exploitation horrors (which often were quite dull and almost always ploddingly pedestrian in their presentation), and a tremendous amount of care which one doesn’t see in low-budget flicks that aren’t “arty”. The foreshadowing of the demonic peek-a-boo with Ash and Cheryl’s flirtatious peek-a-boo early on; Bob Dorian reading the exact description of what’s going to happen later on in the film; the Joel Coen-edited scene of Ash securing Cheryl to dismember her, which act he cannot go through with, even if it seals her fate and his; the endless dark basement where Ash gets his first (fake) scare that he realizes he has to go back into later on.

The rape scene is somewhat controversial even today, with Raimi claiming to regret it today. I believe this claim; Raimi seems like a rather gentle spirit who was driven to get whatever he felt he needed to on film. I hated it at the time. I had (and still have) a very low threshhold for “rape as entertainment”. In retrospect, though, I think it actually adds pretty well to the horror of the situation. Nobody believes Shelly when she says the woods have attacked her, and she doesn’t go into details—they wouldn’t believe her. (So, if you like, it works as a metaphor for unheard victims.) It’s suitably audacious and fits in with the random demonic torture that is the movie’s theme.

Joel Coen was working for an Edna Ruth Paul who, I think, was from a time when credits were not so exhaustive. She probably deserves considerable credit as well, given the film was originally nearly 2 hours long. I would like to see the two hour cut, but my guess it would be much, much worse.

Even Joe LoDuca’s score—his first—rises above the time when cheap synth tracks and drum machines ruled the earth.

It’s just one of those cases where the energy and talent exceeds well past the limitations of the budget and the constraints of the genre, and it was delightful to see it again, 40 years later, with a grouchy, jowly Bruce Campbell still grousing about Raimi and (producer Rob) Tapert poking his injured ankle with pencils to get him riled up before a scene. The Boy was much enthused.

 

Pete: “I’m votin’ for yours truly!”
Everett: “Well, I’m votin’ for yours truly, too!”
[they look at Delmar]
Delmar: “Okay. I’m with you fellers.”

The Coen brothers professed a certain glee in putting the highly intelligent Classics major Tim Blake Nelson into the role of the affable dunce, Delmar, for O Brother! Where Art Thou and it was the sort of breakthrough role that could get you typecast for years; it’s certainly the role I most remember him for, at least until now. In Old Henry, Nelson plays a farmer with a backstory who stumbles across an injured man (Scott Haze, Venom, also in Bukowski with Nelson)  and a satchel of loot that badman Stephen Dorff (Blade, Zaytoun, and many child acting roles like The Gate) and his rowdies would like very much to recover.

In other words, writer/director Potsy Ponciroli has given us a good, old-fashioned Western, and The Boy and I (and the six other people in the 16-seat theater) liked it!

The story follows a simple path—you could see Clint Eastwood doing this 30 years ago—where a tough, laconic farmer in 1906 New Mexico (?) on a hardscrabble farm has trouble relating to his teen son, who’s champing at the bit to get out into the big city, while Old Henry is there admonishing that things aren’t necessarily that great out there. He’s smart enough at first to not take the money or get involved with the injured man but in that a twist that ensures we have a movie, his wisdom is fleeting and he does, in fact, get involved.

Now, he’s attracted the Bad Men who claim to be sheriffs, and he’s none too sure about the injured man he rescued, who also claims to be a sheriff. Horseplay ensues. Gunplay also. And it’s all cowboys all the time.

Quoth The Boy, “Cowboys are cool.”

Tim Blake Nelson pulls off the hardass role quite believably and actually kinda looks more like those old cowboys did—not that rugged handsomeness of even a just pre-geriatric Clint Eastwood. He looks like he’s had a hard life. He’s narrow shouldered and stringy. He doesn’t move in a cool, stylish way, but in more unpredictable, kinda dopey looking ways that might actually keep someone from being able to draw a bead on you.

Gavin Lewis as the son, Wyatt, is annoying but it’s not his fault. His character is the punk kid, semi-whiny teen—nowhere near Skywalker annoyance levels, mind you—and you know he’s going to come to some understanding of the world that—well, let’s just say it’ll all come to tears, ’cause it kind of has to. Dorff is menacing, Trace Adkins (An American Carol, The Lincoln Lawyer) is stalwart as Old Henry’s brother-in-law, and the cast does a fine job all around.

The cinematography (by John Matysiak) makes wonderful use of the terrain, and makes me weep this wasn’t shot on film. Lots and lots of good shots that fit nicely in those classic Ford/Hawks-type styles, though not nearly as dry looking. (Westerns make me thirsty.)

The music (by Jordan Lehning, who collaborated with Ponciroli on an early project called Super Zeroes) was also very effective, both in when it was used and how effective it was.

I mean, it’s weird to have so little to say about it, I guess, but it’s just a good, fun, old-school Western that doesn’t seem to pack even the meagerest agenda, and just seems to be about making a good, old-school Western. There’s a twist of the sort that normally makes me roll my eyes, but it worked for me here.

The Boy liked it a little less than I did, but we both were very happy to have seen it. Cowboys are cool.

You know how you see an old movie—and I think we can call Scream an old movie, as this was the 25th anniversary showing—and you say, “They all look so young!”? As I was watching this, I was thinking, “I don’t think I’ve seen any of them since this movie came out!” Well, sure, Scream 2 and Scream 3. Rose McGowan on Twitter, I guess that counts. At first I was inclined to draw some sort of conclusion from this, but “ever thus” in Hollywood: Young 20-somethings are not likely to be icons 25 years later. Where was the Brat Pack in 2010? Frankie and Annette in 1990? You get your occasional Judy Garlands and Tom Cruises, but fame is fleeting.

Of all of the cast, W. Earl Brown as Courtney Cox’s toady cameraman is about the only one I recalled seeing much after this came out, as he is one of those character actors who turns up all the time and I was a fan of “Deadwood”. I realize at this belated date, Brown is dressed exactly like Silent Bob in Clerks and has very little dialogue. This is not an accident. This whole movie is so chock full of knowing cultural references that it’s surprising how well it holds up, only occasionally annoying the viewer. (Well, your mileage may vary.)

From Wes Craven’s cameo as a rugby-sweater wearing janitor named “Freddie”, Linda Blair as an obnoxious reporter yelling “The public has a right to know,” Henry Winkler as the principal who keeps the Fonz’s leather jacket in his office closet, to all the (slightly) subtler nods, like “Billy Loomis” (Dr. Loomis is Donald Pleasance’s character in Halloween) recreating Johnny Depp’s climb-in-throw-the-window scene from Nightmare on Elm Street, Jamie Kennedy’s character, Randy, yelling “Turn around Jamie!” at Jamie Lee Curtis while the killer is coming up behind him, or for that matter, Randy explaining the entire plot in the video store down to the red herrings.

We wouldn’t get a movie this meta again until Cabin in the Woods. One of my pet peeves, however, is this notion of The Final Girl, and specifically Jamie Lee Curtis, being virginal. JLC did four non-Halloween horror films (before going on to get topless for the first time in Trading Places, as noted by Randy here) and in none of those is she a virgin—something she’s noted ironically over the years. (In The Fog she jumps into bed with Tom Atkins within minutes of him picking her up as a hitchhiker.) Friday the 13th played up the sexuality of the teens (because it’s a narratively cheap way to get nudity into your film) but the first (contemporary) victim in F13 is a girl whose sole crime is liking animals and children the Final Girl was having an affair with the middle-aged head counselor. (I don’t think there is a virgin in the F13 series until maybe #7.) Yes, Nancy is a virgin in Nightmare on Elm Street, but by the time you get to Nightmare 5, the Final Girl is pregnant.

What I’m saying is that “virginal final girl” trope was ginned up ex-post-facto by Carol Clover in her 1992 book , and it was far more a staple of teen comedies than it ever was of horror. (And not just a staple but the staple and sole plot point of all ’80s teen comedies.) So it’s kind of irritating that it turns up in the mouth of a supposed horror expert. The first “Final Girl” (at least according to Joe Bob), Sally, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre is probably not a virgin. Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas is actually in the process of arranging an abortion—her virginal pal is the first victim. Graduation Day, Happy Birthday To Me, Final Exam, The Initiation, My Bloody Valentine, Funhouse—and if you want to stretch the definition, we could include Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley as non-virginal final girls.

But I digress.

Horror-comedy is a challenging genre, and we can probably find the best examples of in the late ’80s and the early ’90s, when bad spoofs like Saturday the 14th and Student Bodies gave way to more interesting mixes, like April Fools Day, The Lost Boys, and Fright Night. As the horror movie petered out after the orgy of slashers spawned in the wake of Halloween (and gave way to the erotic thriller), and Wes Craven looking to get out of the horror biz, it was more than a little gutsy to make a slasher movie by 1996 even with a comedy element.

This is an entertaining film, and clever (perhaps too clever) and does a good job with the suspense, comedy and mystery aspects. Despite the oft-repeated, would’ve-been title Scary Movie (later cribbed by the Wayans brothers for a comedy spoof that would end up having more sequels than Scream), it’s not very scary. Well, scratch that, it is scary, but in a suspense-movie way, not really a horror-movie way. The movie takes great pains to keep itself out of supernatural realms and “ghostface” is decidedly mortal and rather easily injured.

The initial kills are nicely gory and the movie went through some 50 gallons of blood, still the violence seems so tame to me, I’m sort of shocked that they struggled to get an R and left a lot of stuff out (but I’m willing to admit to being jaded on that front). Beyond that, though, it feels more like a whodunnit, with a mystery story’s calculation—a feeling that is compounded by the movie’s meta-commentary, such as when Sydney loses her virginity. It’s not the worst movie deflowering by a long-shot, yet its unlikelihood—that her change of heart would come at that exact moment in time with a boisterous party (after all the girls have left, no less), and its self-conscious tweaking of the trope (explaining the significance of the topless shot downstairs while using Skeet Ulrich to block the same shot as it’s going on upstairs) begins to feel, as I said, a little too clever, like the characters are just pieces in a puzzle.

The characterization, in retrospect is thin—though “thicker” than most horror movies, if we’re being honest—while the acting is top-notch. Neve Campbell is likable and more believable than your average 23-year-old high-schooler. (Drew Barrymore, who was actually two years longer looks way too old to me, but perhaps that’s just because she’s been in the public eye so much longer.) Matthew Lillard clocks in at 25, but acts like such a doofus it works. (Molly Ringwald turned down the role, not wanting at 27 to still be playing high schoolers. It was probably a wise choice.) I didn’t care for Rose McGowan’s performance at the time, as it felt too on-the-nose blond bimbo, but in retrospect I’d say she actually manages to pull it off. David Arquette and Courtney Cox have a genuine chemistry that would lead to a 15-year marriage.

It’s fun and frothy and very safe feeling. Not in terms of who lives and who dies; the movie does a fine job with that aspect of the horror movie ethos. But you’re not going to see anything offensive here beyond the basic Camp Crystal Lake blood bath, which is doubtless why it was so successful and probably led to the subsequent spate of well-produced, well-crafted, well-acted PG-13 horror movies of the next ten years starring a crop of fine young actors who cut their teeth in television.

The house, which was pretty packed, applauded at the end—I didn’t look closely but I assume these were people who had bought into the franchise’s original three movies (Wes Craven also tried a New Nightmare kind of gag in 2010 with Scream 4, which in turn led to an on-again/off-again TV series) and were maybe even bringing their kids to this one.

And we’re getting a remake/reboot next year. So, whee.

I remember when I first heard Juliet Landau announce she was working on a documentary about vampires. It was on Twitter and it was at least five years ago. (I had to check: I would’ve guessed more like ten.) It’s been a while, is what I’m saying, and it finally went to streaming last year after the brief fall reprise from lockdowns. I wanted to see it on the big screen and I finally got my shot when it played for one night at a local theater, with Ms. Landau and her husband Deverell Weekes in attendance (who actually gave us a spare ticket). Ms. Landau was brightly greeting everyone who had communicated with her on social media and the house was pretty full. (We neither stayed for the subsequent Q&A nor the after-party but it seemed like a friendly feeling all around.)

Now, something happened in the making of the vampire documentary (which is actually still being edited, I think), which was that she got it in her head to meld the documentary stories with a more traditional narrative and produce this film, A Place Among The Dead. The premise is that she’s interviewing Gary Oldman, Ron Perlman, Robert Patrick, and there’s some recurring Incident That Happened 15 Years Ago with a serial killer who thought he was a vampire. She then goes back to the scene of the crime (in beautiful Santa Barbara city!) to investigate what happens.

There is a moment of brilliance early on here where she’s constructed this parallel between vampires and actors: the narcissism, the hunger for attention, the vanity and desire for eternal youth—that essence of the glamour of constructed beauty. The cinema verité aspect combines with a more traditional aspect and we see characters (especially her) in their most unflattering views, often immediately juxtaposed with their more traditional look. An actress (Meadow Williams?) whose work I’m unfamiliar with and who isn’t in the actual documentary, as far as I can tell, appears in such flattering light with such heavy makeup, it’s impossible not to view it as some sort of statement. (She’s in her 50s and she doesn’t look it here, though she doesn’t look entirely human, either.)

This movie is chock full of the sort of raw, emotional acting that actors do in acting workshops with other actors. The movie begins with pictures of her parents (Martin Landau and Barbara Bain) and phrases they presumably said to her about not being pretty enough, about not daring to challenge them, etc. which is brutal. She’s a compelling actress, and the vampire metaphor makes a strong comeback at the end, when she has to face the serial killer/vampire.

The Flower sort of wanted to see this, as a fan of the old “Mission: Impossible” series and someone who went through a “Buffy” phase and when I told her about it, she said she would’ve liked to just given Landau a hug. (Barbara Bain apparently said Juliet would never be as pretty as she was, which was funny to us because we’ve always thought that Juliet looks like both her parents, but somehow makes it work better.)

That said, the rest of the movie—the bulk of it—is hard to take seriously. The basic idea here is a sort of “found footage” type thing, but it’s constantly undermined by, on a mechanical level, the profusion of reverse shots (and occasional visible camera man), and worse, on a narrative level, the framework of a police procedural—where we’re supposed to accept the Santa Barbara police working closely with an actress to catch a serial killer, doing things like inviting her into a (potentially hot!) crime scene and admonishing her and her husband (who is actually documentary cameraman, by the way) not to touch anything. Also, since we, the audience, are there to see Landau, and not her husband, he holds the camera while sending her into the supposedly dangerous locations ahead of him. In the hands of Christopher Guest, it would be high comedy.

The last act just goes full on Blair Witch Project, down to being lost in the woods alone for no reason and giving a long, impassioned, apologetic speech to the camera, in this case the speech being oriented around her husband. Which is nice. But between that and the extended mega-death-scene—oh, geez, and the extended chanting spells in Spanish scene—you’re gonna be feeling your butt by the 70 minute mark. Those last 4-5 minutes are going to hurt.

It needed much tighter editing, but it was barely feature length as it is.

I was glad I saw it, and pained mostly by the potential greatness that’s not realized. The raw materials in tighter rein could’ve been brilliant as a micro-budget film can be. The Boy, having none of the backstory—you wouldn’t necessarily even get that there was a documentary, originally, going on, if you weren’t plugged into Landau’s social media accounts—had a hard time following what was going on, and was left with a bunch of people he didn’t know (though he liked Gary Oldman anyway even without knowing who he was, because he’s Gary freakin’ Oldman) talking about vampire stuff that was a little too on-the-nose, and then some very goofy and highly improbable serial killer (or is it a vampire?) hijinks.

I’m afraid this narrows the audience for the film tremendously.

“It was awful!“

I had asked The Boy what he thought about the new Clint Eastwood Cry Macho, and he said, “It was okay. What did you think?” I said, “Yeah, it was okay.” A nearby lady then exclaimed “It was awful!” and The Boy said something about opinions at that point.

You have to give Eastwood half-a-star for being 91 and starring in and directing his movies, I say, but you don’t have to give him any more than that, and there are aspects of this movie that are challenging, let’s say, to the viewer. Let’s talk about the good: Eastwood still has a fair amount of vitality for his age. He knows redemption stories better than anyone. He knows how to make a story that is complex without being complicated.

In this case, he plays a washed-up cowboy, Mike, who’s been carried by his employer, Howard, (Dwight Yoakam) f0r the past few decades(?) since the death of his wife and kid and his subsequent slide into alcoholism. Howard’s had enough, and fires him, but doesn’t kick out of the house he’s apparently let Mike stay in, but he does send him down to Mexico to fetch Howard’s son (Eduardo Minett) from his crazy mother. Mike (reluctantly, natch) agrees and goes down to Mexico City(?) where he finds the crazy mother living an opulent life and the boy out on the street cockfighting, because the mother will otherwise pimp him out to her friends. Eastwood and the boy set out back to America, said trip complicated and extended by crazy mother (Fernanda Urrejola), who has enough money and power to get the cops riled. (The economics of this are never explained.)

So, we got ourselves a road picture, a buddy comedy, a fish out of water, a bildungsroman and a gray caper, or whatever you call it when old dudes pull shenanigans.

The good aspects are when Eastwood pulls off a few of his old tricks: He throws a decent punch, he holds a gun briefly, he even rides a horse. (And they got a very skinny stunt double for the horse-breaking scene, so it’s not so obviously not Clint.) There’s a nice warmth to the proceedings, with Eastwood not hammering the crusty side of his crusty but benign character. The supporting actors have their moments, sometimes, and are affable enough. The story is interesting for the most part, though it doesn’t bear a whole lot of scrutiny.

The bad aspects largely stem from Eastwood being 91. This is his 30th year (since Unforgiven) of playing a badass cowboy (or cowboy in spirit) who is trying to redeem himself for his sins, even though the harms visited him in his life appear to be completely unrelated to said sins. If I had to guess, I would say his character age in this film is supposed to be mid-60s, and the age difference is distracting.

Old folks, for example, have trouble breathing sometimes, and this shows up in an inability to say a complete sentence without breaking for a breath. And I suspect it shows up here also as an unwillingness to do another take when you’ve flubbed a line. As I mentioned in Indiana Jones and the Walker of Impending Mortality, things read differently on old people than they do on younger ones (like running crouched when you’re old just looks like your spine is curved). There are places where this is hidden well, and when it’s not, it’s jarring.

The most difficult part is in accepting Clint as a romantic lead, when he spurns his charge’s mother’s sexual advances: We can believe she’s crazy and slutty, sure, but hot for nonagenarian? Even if it’s Clint Eastwood?

And the main plot point of the story is the elder cowboy teaching the younger one the tricks of the story in a small Mexican town where the pretty owner of the diner makes eyes at him, and offers him (in a plot sense, she doesn’t outright say this) a chance for a peaceful life with a family as she raises her recently orphaned granddaughters. “Aha,” you think, “at least he’s getting it on with a grandmother, right? Not like, say, in The Mule where he has a threesome with girls who might be his great-great-granddaughters.”

“Oho,” says I, “this grandmother is still young enough to be his granddaughter.” (Natalia Traven, the Mexican grandmother, is 52 as it turns out. You do the math.)

As I said, we liked it okay. There’s enough going on that I’m willing to suspend belief.  It’s just that said suspension gets to be a bigger and bigger ask with every movie.

Is it too soon to do another Nicolas Cage movie review? I swear that guy makes movies faster than most people can watch them. And this is going to make a great contrast with the relatively sedate (dare I say mature?) Pig, because this is probably the kind of performance people are thinking of when they say they don’t like Mr. Cage, and the sort of movies they think he’s making. Malignant is tame by comparison.

If you want something more conventional, I offer you the blandly pleasant Free Guy, the well-meaning-but-occasionally-shockingly-amateurish Tango Shalom, or Malignant. I guess people are talking about and shocked by the latter, but it was essentially a solid slasher with a well-telegraphed reveal which you’re either going to buy or not. No, no, you want weird? Let’s get weird.

Here we have the…I don’t know…43rd? film by Sion Sono (director of such hits as Why Don’t You Go Play In Hell? and Bad Film) about a bank robber (Cage) in a dystopic Old West town (called “Samurai Town” and full of samurai and geisha as well as cowboys) who is turned loose (although constrained by a leather suit with time-bombs wired to his arms, neck and ‘nads) by the evil governor (Bill Mosely) and sent on a mission to retrieve his “granddaughter” (Sofia Boutella) who we’ve seen escape through the mysterious Ghostland into a city where forlorn urchins listen to Enoch (Charles Glover) as he reads them things like Wuthering Heights, as the wretched men of the town work night and day pulling a rope to keep a giant clock from advancing.

Sure we’ve seen it before, but have we ever seen it with Nick Cassavetes playing a psycho ghost named Psycho who, underneath his penchant for blowing children away, is actually a decent sort of guy? I think not!

This movie is what you call a pastiche: The premise is Escape from New York (or more likely Escape from L.A.), the setting is Mad Max (Beyond Thunderdome especially, but with elements of Road Warrior), there are costume elements that reminded me strongly of Running Man, there are story elements from westerns (the bank robbery reminded me of Peckinpah, if he’d made his shootouts in a brightly lit banks where everyone was wearing primary colors, and the giant clock recalled Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, as did elements of the ersatz Old West towns), and there are action sequences and blood effects that are straight out of samurai movies (Lone Wolf and Cub leapt to mind).

None of it makes a lick of sense. This is kind of interesting to me because the screenplay writer (Persian?) Reza Sixo Safai, whom we know around here for his role in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, apparently spent over a decade trying to get this made. Enough time, one would think, to iron out the kinks, were one so inclined.

So, we have to assume that it isn’t really trying to make sense, and indeed embracing that is about the only way you’re going to enjoy this film. The Boy and I? We enjoyed it. One thing that won me over early on was that it’s quite beautifully shot. Some of these Japanese directors will turn out two, three…six!…movies a year, and yet they’ll often be more interesting visually and more engaging than the bland, focus-tested, color-coded fare we get in America.

The tone is, shall we say, uneven? It’s mostly pretty serious, with heavy overtones of the weird—dreams, fate, ghosts—but it does occasionally and quite consciously get silly in places, not always to the best effect. Much worse is how many truly great things were left on the table: The big clock has no meaning, really. There’s a whole theme about time that doesn’t really go anywhere. There’s a heroic samurai whose backstory just kind of peters out. It’s a tale of redemption, in the classic western mold, but it’s too busy doing other things to give weight to the various story elements that make that sort of story resonate.

Hats off to the 57-year-old Cage doing a pretty good job as an action hero. We’ll see how he fares in 2028, when he’s 66—Harrison Ford’s age in Indiana Jones and the Walker of Impending Mortality. (I can’t even hear about the Indy 5 shoots without wincing.)

This is not for everyone, obviously. Hell, it’s not for most people. And if it hadn’t been so visually interesting with over-the-top performances, it would’ve been boring. More than anything it would’ve felt like one of those ’80s Italian versions of Mad Max or Escape From New York; Italians also don’t care much about making sense. But we were glad we saw it. We had some laughs and least manage to get out into the city ahead of the impending vaccine passport fascism.

I sold the latest James Wan horror to The Boy by reading him part of Joe Bob Briggs’ review (“4 stars! Check it out!”) which emphasized the bat-guano elements of the plot, and he said if he had any particular surprise in the film, it was how it was basically just a solid slasher flick. Which, if you’ve seen the movie, tells you something about how far the bat-guano meter has to be pegged to register around here. And it’s true, if you’ve seen—oh, let’s say for no particular reason at all—Frank Hennenlotter’s 1982 cult classic Basket Case, this may seem tame by comparison.

The story here is of a troubled woman, Madison (Annabelle Wallis) who becomes the focus of a crime investigation when her abusive husband—no spoilers here but if seeing a pregnant woman get beat is a deal broken for you, consider the deal broken—turns up dead after an apparent home invasion. Not long after, doctors who all worked on the same remarkable case 30 years earlier start turning up dead, another woman goes missing, and Madison seems to have a psychic link to the murderer.

Sure we’ve seen it before! But have we ever seen it with…uh, wait, yeah, we’ve seen it with just about everything. Wait! Seattle! Have we ever seen it set in Seattle?! (Probably.)

What sets the movie apart is what you might call “the third act ask”. At the beginning of the third act (or the end of the second, depending on how you parse these things), the nature of the killer is revealed and it’s really, really silly. And a little cheat-y, though really only in the ordinary sense of horror cheats. That is, you aren’t being asked to accept anything that isn’t standard for the genre—just a lot all at once. It’s kind of a horse pill of horror. That said, it’s also basically the only possible non-mundane resolution of the issue, so the Boy and I embraced it wholly—and it’s probably why the $40 million dollar movie flopped and has let’s-call-them-“mixed” reviews.

The thing is, this feels like a real movie. We all sorta enjoyed Free Guy, by contrast, but that movie feels like a series of programmed sequences, possibly generated by the world’s dumbest AI, with as little human interaction as possible to screw it up. Wan, on the other hand, can have a black female detective (Michole Brianna White) who feels like a real character, who isn’t perfect, a dumb blonde little actress sister (Maddie Hasson) who flirts with the male detective (George Young) and gets excited when she thinks the police are using psychics but who’s also true-hearted and brave, a cute nerdy CSI gal (Mercedes Colon) who’s also crushing on the detective.

I mean, the thing is, whatever else you might say about it, it felt like the director gave a damn and took some risks.

Apart from the budget, Malignant is like Wan’s other unsuccessful post-Saw projects like Dead Silence and Death Sentence. The former took a crack at the ventriloquist-dummy genre (pioneered by the silent Gabbo, probably most famous now as the source for a setup on “The Simpsons”) and the latter squarely in the vein of post Death Wish revenge horror flicks. As a horror guy, I’ll take any of them over Furious 7 or Aquaman.

The 3rd Act Reveal is followed by a “empty the precinct house” slaughter similar to The Terminator though really reminding me of Maniac Cop 2. That went a little long for my taste. Also, I didn’t super care for the sequel set up, though I don’t suppose there was any other way to do that. I guess we won’t have to worry about seeing a sequel, at least. We could always just watch Basket Case 2, I suppose.

It was that time of the year again again, as in last year was the first time Knott’s Halloween Haunt was canceled in its history, and this year it was back on (and the crowds were back with a vengeance) and we were looking for movies to see in Buena Park before the show. Usually we go to the CGV, which features Korean films, but they were not doing any shows before 4PM, nor was the AMC. However, the nearby Krikorian was open before noon, even, and we decided on a 2:30PM showing of Malignant. Typically we go for earlier shows and a double-feature, but there weren’t two movies we wanted to see.

The catch being, unfortunately, that the later we start the journey, the more traffic there is, and we actually didn’t get there until after 3PM, leaving us with just enough time to catch this goofy answer to Ready Player One: The Ryan Reynold’s vehicle Free Guy.

It was exactly the sort of porridge we expected, though we all liked it more than we expected.

The premise is that Reynolds is Guy, an NPC who works at a bank in a “Grand Theft Auto”-style game. One day he catches a glimpse of Jodie Comer (Millie/MolotovGirl), and something in him changes, and he begins to break his routine in order to interact with her. The in-game conceit is that players wear sunglasses and NPCs do not and through a series of mishaps Guy ends up putting on the glasses and discovering the game elements, like floating first aid kids, wads of cash, weapons or whatever.

Since he’s not acting correctly, everyone assumes he’s a PC who’s found a way to hack the game so he can wear an NPC skin, but Guy knows no other world than the simulation, and begins to level up to impress Millie. Back in meatspace, Millie’s real mission in the game is to uncover that Soonami, helmed by Antwan (Taika Waititi), stole her revolutionary code, that she wrote (or co-wrote?) with an old friend named Keys (Joe Keery) who now works for Soonami.

It’s basically Frankenstein or maybe Short Circuit, and it contains the usual libels against gamers. Millie and Keys’ revolutionary idea was to have code that evolved (I guess like “Spore”) and have players watch the NPCs rather than kill them (I guess like “The Sims”) but Antwan stole it for his GTA game for…reasons…and it’s somehow the reason for the game’s success, even though the entire plot hinges around Guy achieving sentience just as the game is being phased out.

Look, it’s stupid. I mean, really, really stupid.  Not Cryptozoo stupid, but close. But it’s lively and enjoyable and full of fun background gags and Ryan Reynolds is cute and Jodie Comer is cute so shut up and eat your popcorn.

The movie is stupid vague about Keys’ role, except to be the neglected love interest. He basically has the worst sort of role feminists complain about for women: He exists for the girl, who’s the real hero, to discover. They’re presented as a platonic team working on Nobel prize-worthy code, but for no conceivable reason (other than “so the movie can happen”), he’s just a game admin for the guy who ripped him off.

As bad as that is, Antwan is actually worse, embodying the worst stereotypes of Silicon Valley bosses, but who somehow codes the Final (in-game) Boss, and whose only answer to trying to prevent his thievery from being discovered is to take a literal axe to the game servers.

So, so dumb. The overarching message is dumb, too: It presumes the notion that enjoying simulated violence reflects a character flaw, and wouldn’t it be better just to, you know, be nice? Last I looked, one of the biggest video games of all time is Minecraft, which destroys the basis of the question before it’s even asked.

This is just one of those movies where you can enjoy it at the moment and only at a few points feel the edges worn down by focus test groups and relentless fear of alienating anyone. I mean, we could, anyway. There are many nice little touches to the film, like a guy in the background who just runs into walls (“that’s me!” I says) and the cute little bit about Millie using an English accent filter (she’s actually English, but does a good American). Millie’s alter ego is still Jodie Comer, though I swear they did some tricks to make her look different, especially at first. I mean, digital tricks like straightening her nose, not just “shapewear” (as The Flower called it) and makeup.

The only thing that made me want to walk out was at the very end, there’s a brief moment where Captain America’s shield makes an appearance (with a semi-cute/semi-nauseating Chris Evans cameo) and then a (completely useless) light saber, and then I realized “Oh, I’m watching a Disney product.” Actually, if I’d known that I wouldn’t have gone.

But mostly, it’s fine. Like most Hollywood product these days, it lacks any kind of reason to care much about it beyond superficial characteristics of the stars, and the glitzy CGI. You’ll see it, you’ll forget it, except for a vaguely beneficent feeling. Unless you start thinking about it, like I just have.

A man in dire financial straits whose family has big problems to boot determines to save the day by a winning a competition.

Sure we’ve seen it before, about a million times, even when the competition is a dance competition, maybe even when it’s a tango competition. But have we ever seen it when the competitor is a Hasidic rabbi who is forbidden to touch his dance partner (since she is not his wife)? I think not!

Well, that idea and a kind of geniality is about all Tango Shalom has going for it, which I enjoyed but The Boy felt frustrated about because it’s not better. In fact, we both agreed it felt like someone’s first movie. It’s not, though: The director is Gabriel Bologna, whose parents Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor (character actors who shared an Oscar nom for their adaptation of their own Broadway play, Lovers and Other Strangers) are both featured in the film.

The good here: It’s a broadly comic movie that has a few laughs and treats its characters sympathetically. It also moves along at a—well, I’ll call it an interesting pace, because it’s breakneck in some places and in other places ridiculously slow, and I actually kind of liked the shift in emphasis between from what would normally be considered major plot points to extensive montages of our hero wandering around Crown Heights wrestling with his religious dilemma. I also like the balls-to-the-wall absurdity of solving the dilemma by dancing the tango with a balloon to prevent the two bodies from ever touching.

And, look, as I’ve said, for me that was enough. Also, I find particular enjoyment where people’s moral codes are put to the test (Friendly Persuasion, God’s Neighbors, Machine Gun Preacher, etc.)—even if, as in this case, the solution is clearly a gross technicality and entirely against the spirit of the prohibition. And it’s not that these are the only good aspects to the movie, but by God, they better be enough for you because this movie feels shockingly amateurish at times.

I’m following Len Kabasinski’s latest shoot, Pact of Vengeance, and looking at the stills and re-viewing of his works, and one of the thing that strikes me is how ragged everyone ends up looking. Contrast that to someone like Anna Biller (The Love Witch) where every scene is going to be beautiful and everyone’s going to look beautiful in it. (Biller lugs huge lights around for her shoots and works as her own grip and gaffer, as well as shooting on film. It’s not for nothing she has two feature credits to Len’s 10 to 20.)

So it’s a little shocking to see everyone look so ragged in this film—more toward the Len side than the Anna side, if you know what I mean—and also look stiff and unconvincing a lot of the time. It’s hard to say where the fault lies, though I suspect this was a team effort. A clue may be in the dancing scenes: Our heroic rabbi, Moshe (Jos Laniado, who co-wrote the script) has to dance, obviously, and we’re all familiar with the tricks used in movies to make it look like someone is dancing when they’re not. The two basic ways of handling this well are to do a really good job with the shot transitions (and these days, they’ll CGI in a face, a la Black Swan), or to kind of ham it up and let the audience know we’re all in on the joke. (I’m pretty sure the Naked Gun movies pulled this trick, and I saw Elvira do it live once quite hilariously.) Here it looks like Laniado knows a little footwork, but the camera is trying to convince you he doesn’t because it’s so choppy—and the stiffness in his upper body makes it really, really hard to suspend belief. It’s a very strange effect, overall.

There are a lot of strange effects, like Moshe’s brother (played by his real-life brother, Claudio) seeming very old. The “aesthetic imbalance” between Moshe and his wife (played by Judi Beecher) is not so obvious, especially with the “Karen” haircut they give Beecher, but Claudio seems just a bit too ready for the retirement home to be wooing Marci Fine. Meanwhile, it’s sweet to have your daughter playing your daughter, but Justine Laniado does not look like she could be the offspring of Jos Laniado and Judi Beecher—though she does like she could be the offspring of Jos and the woman who starred in his 2009 short about tango—and does not sound here like she’s ever done a line reading before.

These are little jarring moments. The big jarring moments are what diminished the experience for The Boy. Like, when Moshe meets Viviana Nieves (the lovely and graceful Karina Sminoff, who seems to have done something to put her lips into a permanent “duck” state), she gets a phone call and, in about 30 seconds, ends up being dumped by her fiancee/dance partner, and instantly coming up with the idea to replace him with the dancing rabbi.

Then we get, I dunno, forty minutes of the rabbi struggling with his dilemma. I actually felt like, oh, the whole movie is going to be about him struggling over it, and the dance competition is going to be a kind of afterthought. But the movie goes for almost a full two hours—and to its credit only feels overlong at the end, and during some of these “How am I going to dance the tango, Hashem?” sequences.

So he goes to a rabbi, a priest, an imam and a mystic. No, really. And they’re all as useless as you might imagine. The movie struggles in its feel-good attempt to equate religions because it’s frankly hard to say all religions are the same but also have a value beyond fortune cookie bromides. The rabbi says “On the one hand…but on the other hand…but on the other hand…” and goes on and on like that which is broad enough as a stereotype to qualify as antisemitism. The priest and the imam both say something along the lines of “Find a way to do it without sacrificing your beliefs.” And the Hindu gives him a balloon. The balloon that he uses to dance with.

The balloon is another issue where the lack of camerawork shows up as the point is to show how it keeps him from touching his dance partner but there are tons of shots where it looks like they’re smack up against each other, balloon or no balloon. And through a conspiracy to hide what he’s doing from the rest of his community, Moshe unites his warring family, and isn’t that what community is all about?

The ham-fisted, after-school special message of the movie is “All religions should get along because they all serve God.” I mean, this gets down the final scene where the rabbi, the priest and the mystic are sent a banana by the imam who can’t go to a wedding reception, where the peels represent the various religions and the banana is God. Subtlety is not to be found here, people, though I give the movie credit for showing the Muslims being hostile to Moshe, even though the imam does try to help. On the flip-side, the mystic looks like an absolute creep. I don’t think it’s the actor’s fault, but man, it’s a hard line between “being serene” and “looking zonked out”.

I could find fault with it endlessly, but I didn’t really. I was willing to go along with the absurdity and ham-fistedness for what struck me as reasonable cause. It’s a big ask, though, and the Boy wasn’t into it. Looks like they trying to maneuver the film into a My Big Fat Greek Wedding indie-breakout mold. Worth a shot, I guess, and anything that shows broad, ethnic humor doesn’t have to be mean and can be allowed to exist seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me.

I realized, when watching this, that there is a distinct subgenre of horror film where the horror is a metaphor for depression. The Babadook and Lights Out are two other relatively recent popular films where this is true—I mean, overtly true, where the filmmakers have just openly said, “Yes, this is a metaphor for depression.” (Certainly the trope in film goes back to the German expressionists, and we hardly need mention Edgar Allan Poe.) The ending of Lights Out caused some controversy because if you’re going to be very thorough—that is, following through on the metaphor and mapping it back to real world behavior—it’s not exactly a great message to send depressed people. That’s just peanuts compared to this movie’s ending, however.

A funny thing happens, though, when you take the abstract concept of depression and turn it into an external force that can be confronted: It becomes interesting to watch and strangely hopeful. (Cf. when you turn it into an external force that will destroy everything, which becomes boring and nihilistic).

We went in completely blind to this movie and I think its little reveals and twists are important to enjoying the film, so I’m going to speak in broad generalities: Basically, the film is about recently widowed Beth (Rebecca Hall), and how the death of her husband Owen (Evan Jongkeit) undermines everything she thought about not just her life, but life in general. She’s a school teacher lives in a lovely custom-built house deep in the woods on a lake. She’s got a friend (Sarah Goldberg) and a friendly neighbor (Vondie Curtis-Hall, whom you’ll all remember as the star of “Cop Rock”) but she’s mostly just pissed off and wants to be alone.

Now, this is an interesting choice. Most movies play up the sympathy angle for young widows but Beth has a got a chip on her shoulder a mile wide, bordering on the unlikable even given her very recent tragic loss. There are two layers two this: The first and most obvious being the death of her husband; the second being that she was actually always a kind of difficult person and it was her husband who kept her more balanced. She is dark and atheistic and nihilistic and, really, one gets the sense that it was her relationship to her husband on which she grounded herself.

And the movie is a process of undermining that entire relationship while also challenging her worldview as she is most decidedly haunted.

Director David Bruckner (Southbound, The Ritual) takes us down a rabbit-hole where we are free—some might say encouraged—to speculate on the base nature of Owen’s secret life. He takes us far enough down to where I was pretty sure there was no getting out. That said, the ending worked for me, though it does not necessarily bear close scrutiny and good lord, you don’t want to go too heavy on the “solutions for depression” metaphor.

This movie walks a fine line in a lot of ways. I’ve mentioned that the lead character is borderline unlikable, but there is a lot of “and then she wakes up” which is often just a lazy, sloppy device for getting out of a mess created by the urge to create funhouse horror, but it’s actually developed here in an interesting and even deep way. There are a few jump scares but not too many and, this is an odd thing, they’re more directed toward Beth than they are toward the audience. That is to say, I don’t think the director was trying to get us to jump out of our seats, but to alarm and disturb the main character, making her more sympathetic and growing the horror from a sense of her fate rather than, e.g., “oh my god that loud noise was so scary ha ha it was just a cat”.

Another line, which it actually treads really well, is the “if the ghost is someone you loved, why is it scary?” line. And the character development, and relationship development is trickled out in a way that you really, really want what the main character wants—for the things that she believed were true to be true.

The acting is solid. This is basically the Rebecca Hall show and she’s up for it. I said to the Boy, “Look, it’s Rebecca Hall!” and he said, “Who [tf] is that?” and I said, “I don’t know, but she’s billed over the title!” We’ve seen Ms. Hall in about a million things over the past 15 years (The Prestige, Frost/Nixon, The Town, Everything Must Go, and The BFG, just for example) but this is the first time I can recall seeing her headline a film, and it’s a genuinely great performance of a difficult role.

The music is just right, the cinematography has some brilliant moments, and a low-key, satisfying ending was preferred over, say, the house exploding (thank you Steven Spielberg). We were pleasantly surprised, as moviegoing has just been a series of “let’s see something that we won’t absolutely hate” these days (cf. Cryptozoo).

If you’re up for an atmospheric, non-gory haunted house-type story, you could do worse.

 

I thought we would go see Demonic, the Neil Blomkamp film, but the reviews are so bad on it that it seemed like a “watch the trainwreck” kind of affair. Then I thought maybe we’d see The Macaluso Sisters, about five Sicilian orphan girls who rent out doves to make their way—but the reviews on that were 100% critically positive (with no real human beings having seen it). And the critic reviews referred to how “haunting” it was more than the reviews for Demonic, and talked a lot about childhood trauma.

Childhood trauma movies are to critics what movies about feet are to Quentin Tarantino. No, I have no idea what that means, either, other than I got a seriously bad vibe off of that kind of critical response. So I says to The Boy I says, “Screw it, let’s see what’s at the Nuart”—our local and relatively famous “cult cinema” theater which is now owned by Landmark.

Cryptozoo: A crudely animated film about a world where an old hippie grandma wants to keep the cryptids of the world (gorgons, unicorns, krakens, whatever) in a Disneyland-type environment that normies can visit and ultimately grow to accept the monsters that live among them.

It’s a profoundly dumb film and animated at the level of “South Park” (the ’90s era TV show, not the movie) with a kind of Yellow Submarine sensibility and a color palette reminiscent of Fantastic Planet—but despite this, it was still almost certainly the best choice of the three films.

Directed by Dash Shaw, the creator of My Entire High School Is Sinking Into The Sea, this is the story of Lauren Grey (Lake Bell, In A World), a woman who’s The Best At Hunting Cryptids, on a journey to track down the Baku, a Japanese dream-eating monster which is apparently the most powerful thing ever (it’s not really explained) in competition with a similar (male) hunter working the U.S. Army who has a dream of capturing all the cryptids to use in the war in Vietnam. You see, it’s 1967 and…

The first thing struck me about this movie was how utterly prosaic it was for a movie about cryptids. The next thing that struck me was how perfectly aligned with modern political correctness it was. There are no positive human male characters in the film, except for the black guy who is going to marry the white (Hispanic? Italian?) gorgon, and he’s not only a minor character, he’s clearly gay. (I have no idea who voices him—Dash Shaw, maybe?—as this is the whitest movie you’ll ever see, but we did laugh out loud whenever he spoke. The “black men are not allowed to be masculine or aggressive” is a weird one. This guy’s entire main scene he does lying on his back in bed.)

Even among the male cryptids, the only one that qualifies as good is a sasquatch-y type thing that has been domesticated by hippie grandma (Grace Zabriskie, playing something other than a ball-buster for once in her 40 year career). Oh, and there’s a sniveling grade-school age hand-torso thing who’s being beaten by his mom (probably). The other male cryptids are universally destructive, if they’re mentioned at all.

The thing is, I’m sure it’s unconscious. Watching Hollywood product today is like watching a play in medieval Europe. “Gosh, how will they ever get out of this mess? Oh, Jesus saves? What a surprise!” That is, they’re so steeped in dogma at this point, they can’t conceive of any other way to tell a story.

None of this would bug me much, and it might not bug you. You might just enjoy this little morality play where Man tampers in God’s domain—excuse me, Woman tries to Control Nature, and it all goes wrong.

But I’m on this kick of late (say the last 20 years or so, really starting with the Harry Potter movies) where I say, “OK, you’ve changed the rules of the universe to allow for some impossible thing. Now, how does the universe unfold in response?” It’s really noticeable in the fifth movie, I think it is, where some sort of wizard camp-out is broken up by death-eaters. And I say to my self, “Self, every dadblamed one of these consarn wizards is carrying the magical equivalent of a Colt .45, except that it never misses or runs out of bullets. HOW IS ANY OF THIS HAPPENING?”

This is really underscored in mainstream comics where someone will say they saw aliens or something and the authorities will respond with “Oh, you saw aliens? Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” Like the whole world hasn’t witnessed alien attacks. It’s lazy.

In this case, there’s a kind of sloppy storytelling which makes it seem like everyone’s aware of cryptids because except for the first two characters everyone else in the movie is either aware of cryptids or IS a cryptid. Also the movie starts in 1967, which you have to suss out (that’s a ’60s idiom!) from the two hippie characters encountering their first cryptids, then flashes back to the end of WWII where Lauren encounters the Baku as it eats her nightmares, and nobody believes her. But this, too, is not a big deal.

Where it falls apart is the whole concept of the cryptozoo. Joan (Zabriskie) has a vision getting people to come to accept cryptids and to this end, she’s collected all the cryptids of the world she can find into one place, and with such security that literally a naked hippie chick can bring the whole thing crashing down. It begs the question of how all the creatures were collected in the first place? Lauren? How’d she manage to get the kraken and the giant worm? Since the creatures appear not to be supernatural, what does the kraken eat? And is that a salt-water lake? Who built it?

Who built the giant (but apparently easily scalable) unguarded, unmonitored, electric fence? Given that most of the creatures are apparently capable of (and relatively indifferent to) murdering humans, what was the plan for having families come visit the cryptozoo? Not just murdering, but mind-controlling (will-o-the-wisps) and raping (satyrs and centaurs) as well!

Who changes the tires on the Batmobile?!

Or to quote a line from a classic TV series, “repeat to yourself it’s just a show, I should really just relax”. Take it as a fable (that you’ve heard a million times before) and you’ll be fine. For me, well, this is one I’ve heard my whole life and I regard it as a call to apathy, and this presentation rather childish.

I rather enjoyed the crazed cryptid hunter’s fantasies of using cryptids as weapons. Like “Now we can use dragons to burn villages in Vietnam!” A feat previously impossible, I guess. My favorite was “We can use hydras for crowd control!” Well, look, all the hydras are gonna do is eat people, which is admittedly cool, but probably much harder logistically than just shooting them.

The Boy said, “I think I liked it more than you because the hippie guy dies in the first five minutes. Also, monsters are cool.” Fair points.

Imagine, if you will, a kind of John Wick story where instead of being an assassin, he was a chef, and instead of his dog being killed, his truffle pig is kidnapped, and instead of shooting everyone who gets in his way, he instead devastates them with psychological and culinary insight. That’s Pig. Also instead of Keanu Reeves, it’s Nic Cage. (Not to be confused with the 2019 Iranian flick Pig, the sadly overlooked satire of the Persian establishment and film industry.)

It means very little at this point, I suppose, but this is the best new American film since the lockdowns.

Now, some people don’t care for The Cage, who gets a whole lot of memeing for his freakout roles, like Mandy and much, much less for his understated and powerful performances like, oh, Matchstick Men, and gets almost no acknowledgement at all for when he has an understated performance where he breaks out the crazy as appropriate, like Joe—or, say, something like Color Out Of Space, where he’s even-handed to the point of  madness. So I suspect he won’t get the accolades he deserves for Pig where his personality is that of a normal (albeit severely depressed) man who has opted for living life as a hermit.

Cage plays the once famous chef, Rob, who acts as a supplier of truffles for Amir (Alex Wolff, From Up On Poppy Hill, Hereditary) in a pretty sweet deal for the latter: According to Truffle Farm, truffles retail from anywhere between about $40/lb. for the cheap ones and over $1,500/lb. for the pricey ones. Judging by Amir’s car and watch, etc., he’s doing okay for himself reselling the truffles, given that his Master Restaurateur/mobster father (Adam Arkin, The Sessions, A Serious Man) has cut him off. OK, he’s not really a mobster (I don’t think) but given the cutthroat food service industry he may as well be.

While Rob’s odyssey through Portland is unusual in a lot of ways and, yes, somewhat reminiscent of John Wick, it’s more of a condensed reality than a surreal one. That is to say, the whole movie takes place over 3-4 days, and you see some strange things but nothing fantastical. About halfway through, Rob makes a speech about Portland’s inevitable demise due to a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami, and I thought, “Well, is this why some people are gaga about this movie?” Nihilistic speeches don’t really ring my bell, though I had been entertained up to that point, I was worried the movie was going to just slide into pretentiousness.

And some of you might feel that it does, to be fair, but that monologue is the first of several—and the only one that’s nihilistic. It reflects Rob’s depressed state where every other action or speech shows something greater underneath.  The next speech Rob gives on his journey is to a financially successful chef played by David Knell. Knell did most of his film and TV work in the ’80s—he was the lead in Sean Cunningham’s teen-sploitation “classic” Spring Break and had small roles in Splash, Total Recall, Turner and Hooch and so on—and his part here consists primarily of listening to Cage strip him bare. It’s a truly great bit of acting, and par for the course in this film where “there are no small roles”. (A lot of credit has to go to David Blackshear, senior editor, and all the editors who make these difficult scenes pop.)

When Rob comes out of the forest, he connects with Edgar (Darius Prince) who’s doing the Paul Giamatti role. (I briefly wondered if it was Giamatti, but then I just decided I sort of expected him to be there, and then The Boy asked me after: “Hey, was that Paul Giamatti?”) Alex Wolff has to be the sorta “normal” guy to Cage’s forest hermit. Arkin, of course, knocks it out the park with a role you see going one way which then flips to another. There are small, moving roles played by Dalene Young (a prolific writer of teleplays in the ’80s and ’90s) and Gretchen Corbett (who might be known to your grandparents as “the girl who played Jim Rockford’s lawyer”), and every part is done with care and attention to details that elevate the whole.

For example, Young’s character (who run a mortuary/wine cellar?) is masked by shadows, while Cage and Corbett’s interactions are done from a high-angle medium shot. It conveys very well the idea that these are characters from the past, like the shades Ulysses encounters in Hades, though it’s inverted since Rob has more or less consigned himself to a living death.

And there’s something else I noticed: The story is about identity. Two things about this shocked me. First of all, it’s actually about something, in a way that’s reflected not just narratively but in the construction of shots and atmosphere. Second of all, it is fairly meticulous in its approach. Amir is the obvious candidate: He wants to be someone who can win approval from his father, and he’s so far gone down this path we almost never get to see the real him. But so is Finway (Knell) and Amir’s Dad (Arkin), and ultimately so is Rob. A third shocking thing, and probably why this movie will ultimately be ignored, is that it’s genuinely about identity and demonstrates the hazards of following fashion to please an unthinking, uncaring mass—a totally off-brand and even radical message for an American film.

But everything in the movie pays off, ultimately. (Well, maybe not the Fight Club thing.) Down to the level of something I noticed in the very opening scenes where Cage is truffle-hunting with his pig—a detail which I think most filmmakers would expect you to overlook—is revealed to be essentially the keystone of the whole thing at the end of the second act.

Damn, son. That’s filmmaking. We liked it a lot, and we liked it even more as time passed.

This is the first time I’ve ever taken a movie recommendation from Alex Jones who mentioned this movie during this interview with Michael Malice. Stay tuned to find out if I ever take another one, after this brief message from our sponsor: I HATE EVERYTHING.

I’m getting freaking PTSD from these awful, awful trailers they’re playing before the movies, to which I’m already coming in 15 minutes past marquee time to avoid the bulk of. I hate the biopic of Aretha Franklin so much already. Why? Because they make it look like she wrote “Respect” as opposed to getting it from Otis Redding. (Where Redding got it is another matter.) This was followed by a trailer for the new Candyman, which trades its spooky gothic plantation origin for a modern hands-up-don’t-shoot narrative. I’m not a big Candyman fan but as I recall, he was a badass even in the midst of genuine slavery, and not some poor waif gunned down by rogue police.

No.

That is, I’m not taking any more movie advice from Alex Jones. Now, in fairness, he didn’t say it was a good movie, he just said that the movie shows the bad guys are the people in charge. This is true. In fact, the thing that keeps this movie from being awful as it wants to be is its complete and utter incoherence. We dipped out after the first one—which, holy cow starred Ethan Hawke and Lena Heady—not because we didn’t like it, but because we both agreed that as a concept it was just too stupid to sustain. (Beware Pixar!)

This movie was so stupid, I was tempted to go back and look at the second film in the trilogy to see if they just got progressively stupider, only to discover it’s not a trilogy but a pentalogy with a freakin’ TV series spinoff. We regretted not going to see the Escape Room sequel. Or, hell, Pig again.

This entry in the already dubious pile of crap that is the Purge Cinematic Universe has us believe that the purge has gone off, once again without a hitch, and people just go back to normal the next day. The one good part of this whole movie, story-wise is that the actual purge night is only a small fraction of the film. You could easily have believed they were going to do the whole as one extended night, but we get a little break before realizing that people aren’t going back to normal the next day.

Which is, of course, the obvious stupid thing that was obvious and stupid from the first movie.  The “Star Trek” episode (“Return of the Archons”) that the movie rips off at least has, as its premise, that the inhabitants of the town are mind controlled by a rogue computer, and their “festival” day is a release valve for repressed emotions. It’s a dumb explanation but at least it’s an explanation. In the Purge-verse, the idea is that people just cut loose one day and then go back the next day to normal.

And also that the good people cower while the (often mercenary) vandals, rapists and murderers run amok. Oh, and also that the good people get caught outside during the purge.

All of this is too stupid to contemplate, and this film may be the ne plus ultra of the America-hating we saw in the first film.

So, in this profoundly dumb entry, “the purge” doesn’t stop and America falls to these gangs of roving purgers who are (probably?) hired by the richies that run things or who may have just decided to take things over for themselves. Our “heroes”—we got one separatist guy who actually gets a chance to reform, which is almost novel—are going to flee to Mexico. And when they get there, they’ll all be expected to speak Spanish.

Also, the Mexicans and the Canadians are only giving Americans a short window to escape—failing which they’ll trap all the refugees in a fascistic hellhole where they will be murdered, raped and enslaved. But Americans have that coming, right?

See, that’s the thing with a movie like this, that wears its politics on its sleeve: It refutes itself with its own stupidity. It also reveals a special brand of cowardice that’s so far from American Exceptionalism, you can tell there’s no one around who understands or dares express the idea. You get a movie made like this which looks exactly like the Antifa/BLM riots but you have to make the baddies White Supremacists. You have to, of course, there’s literally no way you could make a movie about actual villains.

The White Supremacists ultimately come up against Native Americans who are, I guess, illegal immigrant smugglers—and have been fighting this war for 400 years, or something, they say—but they are woefully underprepared when six dudes in dune buggies show up. The Boy groused about this: It’s one of those action scenarios where it’s not clear why anyone is doing anything, nor how many bad guys there are, since the number seems to be “however many we need till we’re done with our action piece.” Two of the bad guys get into a firefight with the heroes in a little mud hut, are killed, and the other bad guys don’t even notice.

What would really happen—and why The Purge is just a left-liberal fantasy—is that the rioters would run amok in the cities where leftist mayors give them free reign and then they’d stop before they got to the country—hell, the suburbs—where America’s ONE BILLION GUNS live. They’d end up with empty cities, where they would starve to death, and they’d be killed pretty quickly the instant they tried anything elsewhere.

But you can’t have that. No, the story is: All the good guys are disorganized, unarmed cowards who would flee the instant they met trouble. Literally anyone who would fight for America is a villain.

Dumb. Hateful. Tedious. But Alex is right about the frogs.

At some point, when you take yourself to your sixth ’60s/’70s era French film with Alain Delon, you have only yourself to blame. Fortunately this was only our second such film, having skipped Indian Summer, Le Samourai and some others that our local indie chain insists on showing for some reason, and this one was a heist film. It recalls Rififi, though France was certainly not spared the countercultural revolution, and this film is nowhere near as fun as that one.

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way: There are no female characters to speak of in this film, which means the saving grace of La Piscine (copious female pulchritude) is limited to a very gratuitous bit with Anna Douking, who is Alain Delon’s ex-squeeze and now with the guy who left him holding the bag, and who listens from that guy’s bedroom as the two talk. Completely naked, of course. Apart from that, you get showgirls in shockingly modest uniforms.

By the way, I may be mixing up Alain Delon and Yves Montand, so.

Anyway, a guy gets out of jail after serving his time and goes to shake down his old partner, who is a mob boss now (or something). Meanwhile another guy is being taken to jail and stages a daring break, fleeing from his train into the woods and finds himself in the trunk of guy #1. The two bond through a some evading the police and murder, and end up (in spite of even their limited decision making skills) planning a mega-jewel-heist. Their compere on this adventure is an alcoholic sniper, and much like Rififi (IIRC), the heist goes just fine. It’s the subsequent aspects of the crime that go wrong.

Apparently this is a great movie. They tell me this is a great movie. I don’t know why they tell me this. A lot of times, when they tell me things like this, I can see what they mean even if I don’t agree. This is one where I don’t get it at all, really. It’s quite slow, which is not an issue per se (cf. Stalker). The characters are okay, I guess. It seems like a fairly conventional, somewhat grim story.

The cinematography’s okay but nothing to write home about. Nothing special about the blocking or set design (though the alcoholic’s house is kind of cool in an awful sort of way). The use of music is kind of interesting—there isn’t any at first, probably for about 15 minutes. Then there’s some ambient music. Then there’s some regular orchestral stuff. That stuff works.

I guess it all works, eventually. And I will say that I had trouble telling people apart, particularly—and this is key—the mob boss and a saloon owner being coerced by the police. In the end, the characters meet their fate by believing a clearly untrustworthy person implicitly. I thought that was kinda dumb. Sorta like, “Well, the movie has to end, so let’s do this.”

The Boy liked it somewhat more than I did, though he had similar issues. For a 1970 French film, it was acceptable.

If you had told me that forty years ago, the Academy Award for best picture went to a film about Man’s relationship with his religion versus his duty to his nation, I probably wouldn’t believe you. Because I had never seen Chariots of Fire, the true-ish-to-life story of the 1924 English Olympic track team. If the Internets are to be believed, this movie began as an attempt by producer David Puttnam (Midnight Express, Foxes) to create something with a sort of Man For All Seasons level of drama, and he very nearly makes it.