by ·Comments Off on On Dangerous Ground (1951, Nicholas Ray)

“Nobody likes a cop.” A woman picks up her husband’s gun in the first second of the movie post-credits, what would Chekhov say about that? Robert Ryan (between The Set-Up and Clash by Night) is very tame for a supposedly short-tempered, violent officer on the trail of two cop killers. His team catches the guys, but Ryan is sent away to the country to cool off, where Ward Bond is on a rampage, promising to kill his daughter’s murderer without a trial. The suspect’s sister is blind Ida Lupino, so the movie stops its killer pursuits to hang out while these two assholes torment her. Her brother surfaces and spares the two men from having to kill him by falling off a cliff while running away.

Ryan in the country with Ward:

Ryan is good, at least, relative to the rest of the movie. Country and city folk have perfect diction, nothing feels authentic or lived-in – a couple shots of great truth and intensity, but a phony movie. The title always reminds me of crap 90s Steven Seagal social-issues actioner On Deadly Ground, but it turns out there was also a crap 90s Rob Lowe social-issues actioner called On Dangerous Ground.

Ryan in the city with his jittery informant, Welles regular Gus Schilling:

by ·Comments Off on Secrets & Lies (1996, Mike Leigh)

After her foster mum’s death, Marianne Jean-Baptiste consults compassionate social worker Lesley Manville about finding her real mum. Lesley gives her some options, says this should be handled delicately, and of course don’t just show up at mum’s doorstep, but Marianne is out of patience and does exactly that, getting to know Brenda Blethyn (Keira K’s mum in Pride & Prejudice and Keira’s boyfriend’s mum in Atonement) and remaining her “work friend” to the rest of the family until all the titular secrets get blurted out at a birthday party.

Brenda’s brother is Timothy Spall, his wife who nobody likes is Phyllis Logan, and mum’s other daughter (and birthday girl) is Claire Rushbrook of Adler’s Under the Skin, who brings along her boyfriend Paul. Poor Paul seems nice enough, has nothing to do while caught in this massive unloading of grudges, and when the fourth family secret within 15 minutes drops, he makes a facial twitch that justifies his entire existence in the film. As for Blethyn, she and the movie won top prizes at Cannes in a stacked year (Crash, Fargo, Breaking the Waves, Three Lives, Drifting Clouds). She’s excellent throughout, but one line delivery in particular, which I won’t detail here because I’m trying to stop thinking about it, had me upset all week. I planned to catch up on a few Mike Leigh films – maybe Meantime or High Hopes – before watching MJ-B’s comeback Hard Truths, but maybe stacking these in a single month would be overwhelming.

Josh Lewis: “So funny to make a movie as nihilistic and troubling as Naked and then immediately follow it up with Timothy Spall in this who is a contender for the nicest, warmest character in the history of movies.”

by ·Comments Off on Vanya on 42nd Street (1994, Louis Malle)

Relaxed film, supposedly a full rehearsal of the Chekhov play in a disused theater, director Andre Gregory and the small audience only seen at the beginning and during act breaks. Camera crew is onstage, so it’s an immersive drama that doubles as a distancing experiment. Everyone loves the important professor, come to his country home with hot new wife Julianne Moore, but as the days go on, all the men fall for Julianne and lose respect for the professor, who plans to repay their years of work on his estate by selling it off and making them homeless. Local doctor who never seems to go home is Larry Pine, the professor in Q, and thankfully I didn’t recognize this movie’s professor as the Police Academy commandant because that would have been so distracting. MVP Brooke Smith (the girl who puts the lotion in the basket in Silence of the Lambs).

Wallace Vanya with Moore and Lynn Cohen:

by ·Comments Off on Hollow Man (2000, Paul Verhoeven)

The effects hold up less well than Starship Troopers but they’re illustrating a cool concept (mammals becoming visible from their veins outward) – and I’m sure they were closer to cutting-edge at the time, but now when lab leader Kevin Bacon invisibles himself and becomes a skeleton I get the song “Money for Nothing” in my head.

Bacon is a science genius but kind of an asshole – his first order of business when becoming invisible is to sexually harass coworkers – so his ex Elisabeth Shue and her square-jawed labmate Josh Brolin are understandably hiding their relationship from him. Not taking the news well that he can’t be re-visibled, Bacon goes out and rapes his neighbor, kills his boss (Bill Devane of Rolling Thunder), then comes back to trap and slaughter his entire team (including Zero Effect‘s Kim Dickens). Hit or miss, still better than the last invisible man movie I watched.

by ·Comments Off on Ladies & Gentlemen… (2025, Oz Rodriguez & Questlove)

The opening mashup is as good as people said, then between each ad break they pick a particular focus: Lonely Island, hip hop, star-making performances, the dangers(?) of live television. They take pains to tell us what an honor it is to play such an important show, how vital is SNL to our culture, and if you don’t agree with this premise then it all starts to feel hollowly self-promotional, but there’s sure some good music along the way.

by ·Comments Off on A Cure for Wellness (2016, Gore Verbinski)

Valerian “Val” DeHaan travels to a secluded German manor to work out a contract for his employer – is this based on Dracula? Upon arrival he signs some papers without reading them, then starts mad hallucinating, taking too long to realize what kind of movie he’s in. Gore’s ability to illustrate a creepy horror thing with big striking images makes me wonder if I should rewatch his Ring remake.

I guess Val dreams his mom dies after his limo crashes into a Very Digital Deer. Mia Goth plays the weird girl wandering the grounds, but then, everything is pretty weird. Val finds micro-bugs in the water, later panics when his scuba therapy becomes eel-infested. He sees eels everywhere, then tries to rally the patients to revolution but instead they zombie-attack him and the doctors pump Val full of eels – in the end, this is like The Matrix, but with eels instead of technology. I guess the incestuous mad doctor/baron Jason Isaacs (military guy in The Death of Stalin) is Mia’s dad, and they are 200 years old, kept alive through eels, until Val snaps out of his zomb-eel stupor and foils their plan. Partly based on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which the guys who wrote Shutter Island may have also read. Someone should program a Cure for Wellness / Road to Wellville double feature.

by ·Comments Off on Stooges and Barbarians

Rainer, a Vicious Dog in Skull Valley (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

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We Barbarians (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

These are backstage meta-Conan spinoffs, the first one cycling through playwright trance-purgatory, the second a series of character monologues, always ending in hell and death.

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Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb (1938, Del Lord)

Curly is entering slogan/jingle contests like it’s Christmas in July, and he wins for “coffin nail cigarettes.” Three hot girls in their same hotel plan to marry them for the money, but alas, everybody is lying and poor.

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Violent Is the Word for Curly (1938, Charley Chase)

They work at a gas station and dance around a car saying “super service!” while destroying the vehicle and its posh occupants. Then after they are mistaken for those three automobile-owning visiting professors, there is a musical number, which had me briefly enraged until I gave in to the gleeful idiocy. The weird title is a play on the now-forgotten oscar-nominated drama Valiant Is the Word for Carrie about a Southern prostitute moving north.

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Three Missing Links (1938, Jules White)

They go to “Africa” and tangle with a gorilla and (another) lion… okay, that’s enough of these for now.

by ·Comments Off on Two Diaries of a Chambermaid

Diary of a Chambermaid (1946, Jean Renoir)

New maid Paulette Goddard (Modern Times) gets off on the wrong foot with mistress Judith Anderson (a chambermaid herself in Rebecca) by joking with the bearded master (Reginald Owen, the 1938 Scrooge), not realizing who he is. She meets desperate maid Louise, cook Marianne, and asshole valet Joseph, and gets to work. But this place is annoying and creepy: the valet (Francis Lederer, who started out in Pandora’s Box) is after her, the mistress is dressing her up for a visit from long-lost son George (sickly, secretive Dorian Gray), and the next door neighbor (Goddard’s husband Burgess Meredith) keeps breaking the family’s windows and eating their flowers. She announces she’s quitting and the valet goes mad, announces that he’s stealing the family’s treasures, then robs and murders the neighbor while the police are having their annual parade. Weird that I’d follow up Murder a la Mod with another movie that opens with a diary and features icepick murders.

Paulette, Burgess, and squirrel:

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Diary of a Chambermaid (1964, Luis Buñuel)

The French director had made an American film, then the Spanish director makes a French one. Now the maid is less headstrong, and has been hired to care for Madame’s dad, who wants to grab her leg while she wears special boots and reads to him. For Buñuel’s whole career everyone blabbered about surrealism, while he just wanted to put women’s legs on the big screen.

Everything is darker and more explicit in this version – Master Piccoli is allowed to sleep with the maids as long as he doesn’t get them pregnant, and Valet Joseph wants to open a Cherbourg cafe and pimp out the maid to soldiers. The valet is still a celebrated bird torturer, also a racist activist, whose 1934 “down with the republic” march gets the movie’s final words (while Renoir’s parade featured “vive la republique” fireworks). Instead of robbing the neighbor, he rapes and kills a local girl, the same day the old man dies. The maid works on helping the cops convict Joseph (and fails), but there’s no son to swoop in and save her from these awful men, so she ends up marrying the neighbor – no escape, no justice.

Madame in her laboratory:

Unlike the Renoir this one has no pet squirrel, but we do see a mouse, a frog, ants, a boar, a rabbit, a basket of snails. Supposedly Buñuel’s only anamorphic widescreen movie – maybe he regretted its mind-warping effect whenever he moved the camera. Starring Jeanne Moreau the year after Bay of Angels, and Master Piccoli after Contempt… Valet Joseph is also in A Quiet Place in the Country, Madame in Chabrol’s Bluebeard. Watched these on oscar night… they won no oscars, but Moreau got best actress at Karlovy Vary.

The Mirbeau novel was adapted again in France with Lea Seydoux, but directed by a notorious pedophile, so it’s both tempting and not tempting to watch. The book has the girl’s (not the neighbor’s) murder and Joseph stealing the family silver, then unlike both of these movies, the maid marries him and moves to Cherbourg. Randall Conrad in Film Quarterly compares the films, championing the Bunuel over the Renoir (which has no eroticism and a “deficiency in conception”):

At the least, Celestine is a moral witness to the bestiality of Joseph, something she tried to stop and couldn’t. But perhaps her secret attraction, her fear of it, and her individual powerlessness make her an accomplice to Joseph’s rise. In that case, Joseph’s assertion – “You and I are alike, in our souls” – takes on full meaning … [Buñuel] returned in his film to the France he left in the thirties, and created its portrait … The film has the closed structure characteristic of Buñuel: the end is a beginning. An individual’s gesture toward freedom not only fails but lays the ground for still worse oppression. The era that has begun, as the [fascist] demonstrators turn the corner and march up a street in Cherbourg, is the one we are still living in.