Movie Nation

The great Dame Judi Dench has all but retired from acting, her eyesight not allowing her to memorize scripts the way she once did. So so you’d better take care to use this resource wisely, surrounding her with stellar supporting players and a worthy film.

“Red Joan” is a run of the mill espionage thriller, another period piece spy tale about those young, educated British idealists who sold out the West to Stalinist Russia at the very beginning of the Cold War.

Dench plays a spy uncovered decades after the fact, a “Cambridge Spy Ring” member caught and interrogated in her dotage, remembering the romance, recruitment, the ideological debates during those heady days when the world teetered on the brink of fascist conquest.

Dench’s is the first face we see, a little old lady in a row house, tending her shrubs, noting a government figure’s death in the news and abruptly arrested that same day. “Red Joan” is framed within her interrogation, her flashbacks taking us back to a time when “The world was so different, then. You have no idea.”

Present day Joan may be stonewalling her interrogators, and even her unknowing barrister son (Ben Miles). But we see it all, in depressingly familiar and melodramatic story beats.

Young Joan (Sophie Cookson of the “Kingsman” movies) was studying physics in Cambridge in 1938 when she fell under the influence of Sonya (Tereza Srbova), glamour puss bad girl on campus, a Jewish emigre who ducks into her room and invites her to a communist meeting where they show Eisenstein propaganda films.

“Everybody did it back then,” she explains to the intelligence officers questioning her. “It was the ‘in thing.’

In her memories, she was skeptical to the point of cynical about Stalin and Stalinists. But in Sonya’s “cousin” Leo (Tom Hughes), a compelling speaker and a true believer, Joan becomes “Jo Jo,” and is at least willing to hear his arguments.

Not when he brazenly suggests she steal secrets for “our Allies, the Russians.”

He’s preached communist idealism, “the chance to rebuild civilization from scratch” while she was going as far as a woman could in the scientific ferment of the race to build “The Super Bomb” during World War II. Her education put her in the charge of a researcher (Stephen Campbell Moore) in the front lines of the research.

The novelty here is that is no novelty at all in packaging this as a love triangle, the “bad boy” spy, vs. the unhappily married scientist, competing for Joan’s affections and ideology.

Joan struggles with that in the past and with her son’s disillusion in the present, rejecting entreaties to “Follow where Stalin leads” and “saving the Revolution” but somehow jolted into abandoning those doubts when America acquires the bomb first.

“It’s like I don’t know you,” is one of many pedestrian lines the cast must deliver (by Miles). Only Moore’s Max, the scientist, has anything poetic to say, inviting her into the secret world of A-Bomb research “break the machine, touch the ghost of matter.”

Dench gives a knotty, empathetic performance, reluctantly self-righteous. And Crookson is a perfectly serviceable, fiery younger Joan. The men? They’re just archetypes, and rather drab ones.

The script’s one clever touch is jabbing at the sexism of the times, the patronizing way even a woman of science could be treated by the war machine of the 1940s. Not that this motivates Joan, who is based on Britain’s “Granny Spy,” Melita Stedman Norwood.

If the film does her and her generation any service, it is in bringing up the context of the times, the idealism and lack of hindsight that today we treat as naivete. No, she and the Cambridge Spy Ring don’t get a pass. Stalin’s depredations were pretty widely known and there really was no excuse for swallowing agitprop from a good-looking recruiter.

But “Red Joan” doesn’t do much with this promising story, content to skim the surface and accept Joan’s as the only narration or version of events worth accepting at face value.

That doesn’t do her, her crimes or Dame Judi justice.

MPAA Rating: R for brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Laurence Spellman, Ben Miles, Tereza Srbova and Stephen Campbell Moore.

Credits: Directed by Trevor Nunn, script by Lindsay Shapero.  An IFC release.

Running time: 1:41

Ick.

Too short? Well, let’s see if we can further do justice to the surreal, serio-comic acid trip afterbirth that is “Saint Bernard.” You can’t say you weren’t warned, any more than I wasn’t.

It’s an unreleasable, indulgent exercise in cinematic absurdity, a daft blend of Terry Gilliam and Luis Bunuel grotesques and second year film student horror.

The sets have a DIY feel — pipes and lumberyard scraps, workshops and churches, empty concert halls and interstate on-ramps.

And hell, right in the middle of it, a sprint past Notre Dame — the recently torched Paris cathedral, not the football college.

It makes not a whit of sense, populated by a sea of bit players and C-actors — and veteran character actor Warwick Davis, who makes an appearance in the third act and only in the third act.

And yet, here it is, a nonsensical film “completed” in 2013, earning release. Somehow.

And it’s…well, if not fascinating, it at least holds the eye. When you’re not averting the eye at this or that bit of gross.

The story? Or “story?” Bernard (Jason Dugre) has always wanted to be a conductor. Not a musician, just the guy who waves a baton in front of them. ‘

He’s wanted since he was a teen (Albert Strietmann plays him at that age). He’d don his white tux with tails, pick up a baton and “play” (ineptly) concerts emitting from his iPod for indulgent family and friends.

And now he’s an adult, with this handmade baton carved and whittled by a handyman in a gas mask (Satan?), unfulfilled, but still dressed to conduct.

The next 85 minutes are an ad hoc acid trip of a journey, from the embarrassment of a botched “performance” (“You call yourself a CONDUCTOR?”) to discovering “my saint. Saint Bernard!”

It’s a decapitated  dog’s head procured on the roadside.

Bernard is stalked, chased, hounded — dressed in a tux covered in dollar bills, which is how he thinks this greedy preacher (Bob Zmuda) sees him, or encased in a walking patchwork packing crate “prison” in Paris, where a French lumberjack chainsaws him free.

Lincoln and Andrew Jackson (incompetently costumed in clothes that were in fashion when George Washington was president) line up in a slow-mo rainy day football scrimmage against a kite-clutching Ben Franklin.

A store-bought chicken, plucked and gutted, parachutes out of an airplane.

I won’t go into any more detail because that would be like emptying a sack of salt on a freshly dismembered woman’s stumps. Which we also see.

The presence of Andy Kaufman’s longtime foil Bob Zmuda in this sort of tips off the tone. Surreal, inside jokes wrapped inside of other inside jokes, if indeed one credits special effects maestro turned director Gabe Bartalos (“Happy Hell Night,” etc.) of thinking or scripting this through.

I don’t.

It feels improvised on the fly.

“Saint Bernard” is surreal to the point of performance art obscure, with an endless parade of C-movie horror masks, exploding heads, geysers of blood and a Fellini film’s worth of bit players cast for their homeliness.

Might it be a cult film, enjoyed by the imbibing midnight movie classes? Maybe. But there’s a point where your mind-altering substance consumption crosses from loose and funny to nauseating.

“Saint Bernard” lives on the wrong side of that line.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence and sex, all of it gross

Cast: Jason Dugre, Katy Sullivan, Peter Iasillo Jr., Bob Zmuda and Warwick Davis,

Credits: Written and directed by Gabriel “Gabe” Bartalos.  A Severin Release.

Running time: 1:39

Ok, Warwick Davis was in “Leprechaun.” So he’s almost certainly seen the likes of “Saint Bernard” before.

This promises to be something to see, man. Horror projects directed by SFX guys (Gabriel Bartalos) generally are.

“Saint Bernard” was completed in 2013, and is just now earning theatrical and VOD release.

Beware!

A Florida documentary filmmaker I know and can vouch for is kickstarter funding the completing of his most ambitious work yet.

Eric Breitenbach, the director of “When Pigs Fly” and “Cultivating the Wild” is profiling three teachers dealing with differing student populations over the course of a school year.

He’s titled it “Ordinary Heroes.”

Take a look, and kick in if you can.

Dramaturg and actor, director, painter, storyteller, bon vivant and raconteur like no other — the great George Orson Welles was born on today’s date.

He would be 104 if he was still living, if rich food, fine wine, cigars and exercise allergies we’re the key to longevity.

In honor of #OrsonWelles’ birthday, IMDBs take a look back at his legendary film career. Which film is your favorite?

https://t.co/P5PMRw89ja https://twitter.com/IMDb/status/1125324570976817152?s=17

Here’s a TV interview he did at the peak of his film vagabond for hire years, 1960.

You saw “The Catcher was a Spy,” right?

Maybe it was just me.

Read the book it was based on? Not just me, but he does seem to be one of those figures whose story attracts a lot of biographers in print and on film. Lots of documentaries, even on ESPN about him, plenty of books and articles.

All of this written and filmed about Morris “Moe” Berg, Jewish baseball star of the 1930s who became an agent for the OSS, the precursor for the CIA in WWII.

He spoke seven languages “and couldn’t hit in any of’em,” a baseball wag of the day joked. Great catcher, slow at the plate.

Princeton grad, Columbia Law, quiz show star, lawyer, polymath…

Now he’s the subject of the latest Aviva Kempner documentary. She’s a crackerjack Jewish filmmaker who specializes in docs about Jewish pop culture figures, baseball star Hank Greenberg, philanthropist Julius Rosenwald and radio and early TV star Gertrude Berg.

The new film is “The Spy Behind the Plate,” and it premieres the 11th and opens later in May.

Variety has been calling this second weekend of the “last” movie in the Super Friends, erm “Avengers” franchise a $145 million mover and shaker. And this Sunday projection mysteriously matches that “Estimate.” But how far will it be off when the harshiggt of Monday rolls around

Friday to Friday, the three hour blockbuster was down 75 percent. Saturday was much better, Sunday much worse.

$145 million is an average 60 percent drop. In thinking actuals will be in the $140 range.

“The Intruder” didn’t blow up, but it did $11 million+, enough to edge the underperforning “Long Shot.”

“UglyDolls” bombed. Under $9. Maybe it’ll be a hit in China, which is where the financing came from.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/

It’s set in Portland, and what’s more indie than “Portlandia?”

It’s about tween sisters, one of whom is obsessed with horror movies and is filming one of her own.

Indie movies are often about indie filmmakers making indie movies. Because. You know, imagination.

And all the Greater Portland film festivals loved “Zilla and Zoe.” Because it does look darned cute and a tad twee. Rebellious, even.

Love the Rainn Wilson impersonator at the costume shop.

The works of Luis Barragán, Mexico’s most famous architect, are austere, clean, linear and angular; blank, windowless walls or towering obelisks, brightly painted with stucco textures, water and trees strategically placed within the viewer’s aspect, even when standing in a garden or courtyard, staring skyward.

His most famous works in his native land — Fuente de los Amantes, Casa Gilardi, Torres de Satélite and Faro de Comercio  — have a modernist minimalism that can easily be overlooked. Which is probably why, years after his death, those in charge of his legacy in Mexico sold his professional archives — drawings, writings, photographs, etc. — to a Swiss furniture tycoon, or more precisely, the tycoon’s Barragán-obsessed wife.

No buyer in Mexico could be found.

The writer and artist Jill Magid came to her Barragán mania more recently. But as she endeavored to intensify her study by visiting the works and the artist’s studio in Mexico, taking inspiration and using his art to inspire her own, she found herself blocked by this Swiss couple and their foundation.

“The Proposal” is the name of the art project she concocted to address this idea of “What happens to an artist’s legacy when it’s controlled by a corporation?”

Like Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock or more recently Stan Lee (still tweeting away, post mortem, as is Hitchcock), Barragán has his legacy controlled by an entity, not a family.

The Swiss couple, Vitra furniture magnate Rolf Fehlbaum and archive director Federica Zanco, have blocked any use of images of the architect’s work, stopped earlier documentaries from being made by banning the use of images of that work and even trademarked the name (“Without the accent.”) Barragan.

It’s the damnedest thing.

The story goes that Rolf proposed to Federica, who suggested that instead of a pricey ring, she’d rather have her favorite architect’s archive. For $2.5 million it was hers, to curate and dig into “as a scholar.”

Mexico’s art community was upset and has tried to gin up outrage over this affront to national pride, this cheap sell-out of their artistic patrimony. And ever since this happened in the mid-90s. every time an an artist or researcher or anybody approached the archive for access to further their research, Zanco has politely but firmly begged off — decades of letters insisting this book or that exhibition is coming up — “Unfortunately, we are struggling on closing a major project” — collating and organizing to do, etc.

“Legacy always remains an open question,” Magid notes in her narration for the film. Barragán’s is now controlled by an enthusiastic, litigious and uncooperative — my words here, not Magid’s — rich dilettante.

Magid envisions a project of her own, a years-long correspondence, travel and filming, narrating and communing with the artist’s work (she stays in his Mexico City studio for a while).

But “every time I try to find Barragán, I encounter Federica.”

Magid sees them caught in a love triangle, with the architect (who died in 1988) at its center. That leads her to “The Proposal.”

“The Proposal is an artwork and a catalyst. Its intention is to question the status of Barragan’s archive in Switzerland, and its possible return to Mexico.”

She is denied permission to film here or there, which she skirts. She sends flattering letters to “Dear Federica,” and receives polite rejections, sometimes hints of “copyright violation” and “intellectual property” litigation.

And yet, she persisted. She gets Barragán’s family involved, and the Guadalajara government. The flattering notes seem to wear Federica down, just a smidge.

Magid’s film is in keeping with the Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s ethos, quiet interludes, a little music (she gets to thumb through Barragán’s old LP collection), a film of minimalist beauty for a man who had, as his Pritzker Prize tribute noted, “accepted solitude as man’s fate.”

There are interviews with the Manhattan gallerist and the widow of Barragán’s business partner, who sold the archives, as well as members of the Mexican arts community and guardians of the buildings and “personal” archives there. We see snippets of news coverage here and there of the controversy attached to this remote, secretive “foundation” and its ownership of a vital part of Mexican artistic history.

There’s also a lot of footage of Magid — gazing, strolling, writing, showering and dressing. Hey, she put five years of work into this (God bless foundation grants). She’s going to get her closeup.

The film and the filmmaker recognize Federica for her passion for the architect, and by inference condemn her selfishness and laxity about doing something with the archives.

I was reminded of “The Fountainhead” (the artist’s rights to control their work) and “Citizen Kane,” as well as the legacy stories of Disney and others as the film’s travelogue, detective story, artistic act of persuasion, mediation and public shaming unfold.

“The Proposal” is serene, patient and sucks you into this quandary with skill. To her credit, Magid makes us care, even though we’re not sure what she’s got in mind or if she’s as persuasive as she thinks she is.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jill Magid.

Credits: Directed by Jill Magid. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:26

Cities that go too long without championships become the stuff of legend — endless punchlines to the rest of the sporting universe.

Boston, Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit all endured mythic losing streaks in this sport or that one. How Detroit’s long hockey drought ended, with a quintet of the first Russian players to slip into the NHL, is the celebratory subject of “The Russian Five.”

Joshua Riehl’s film is playful and fun, with the odd somber moment, a marvelous appreciation of the brutal beauty of the game when it’s played with the grace these players brought to it in the 1990s.

It begins with the cloak and dagger machinations of people like Red Wings exec Jim Lites, flippantly recalling sneaking this and that player out of the not-yet-former U.S.S.R. in hotels, through third party countries, answering angry phone calls from the U.S. State Department afterward.

This was at the behest of general manager Jim Devellano, a folksy, Canadian-accented slow-talking hustler who started gambling on “wasting” draft choices on very young Russian stars in the hope that some of them could be lured across “The Iron Curtain.”

“How do you get a guy to defect?”

They made it up as they went along, using the Detroit Free-Press hockey writer (Keith Gave), who just happened to speak Russian, to get to players like Sergei Federov and Vladimir Konstantinov.

A doctor was bribed to ensure that a player was diagnosed with cancer that could only be treated in America. There was another time Lites set up a secret rendezvous in the Drake Hotel in Chicago, where the Soviet National Team was playing an exhibition game, bringing a contract, $10,000 in cash, brochures for the nicest riverfront apartments in Detroit, and for a new Chevy.

That’s how you sell Detroit to the Russians — the river, a Corvette and good ol’ American greenbacks.

As Devellano assembled this team in the ultimate example of “playing the long game,” the NHL was exposed to a new style of hockey — pass happy instead of the “dump and chase” with lots of body-checking that Canada had turned it into.

“When they were on the ice, they had the puck all night,” a former teammate remembers.

But as the team’s “five piece unit” was pieced together, and the glorious, high-scoring style took root, the Big Prize eluded them. And the fans and the institutions of hockey built something “like the Mountain of Everest of pressure,” Federov recalls.

Here’s a dismissal by a print columnist of the day, there’s a doubt from then-coach Scotty Bowman or Lites or Devellano as the Red Wings “which had become, overnight, the RED Wings,” failed to win Lord Stanley’s Cup.

They’d have to “toughen up, play the Canadian way,” that back-bacon blowhard Don Cherry, the TV commentator who presided over the game for decades, fumes on the air. ” “I don’t want’em here, the players don’t want’em here. What is this? ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ or ‘Hockey Night in Russia?'”

Actor and Detroit area native Jeff Daniels is here to give us perspective how where Detroit’s image, of itself and to the world, was at the time.

The cute culture-clash nature of the new teammates pops up in old home movies where the Russians celebrate Blockbuster, where they can rent “Terminator” movies, Hellman’s Mayo and Corvettes. The Americans had to develop a taste for vodka and drinking sessions built on constant toasting.

And here’s former teammate Darren McCarty calling Vyacheslav Kozlov “the most miserable” so-and-so ever to play the game, and explaining the difference between a “sucker punch” and “cold cocking” somebody.

It’s a fun movie right up to the sobering reality that even the best moments are going to have sadness injected into by the cold, cruel world.

Still, “The Russian Five” manages to give us a lesson in the players who helped the NHL evolve and softened Cold War tensions as they did. It’s good to remember they’re not all Putins over there.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jim Devellano, Sergei Fedorov, Viacheslav Fetisov, Igor Larianov, Wayne Gretsky, Vladimir Konstantinov , Vyacheslav Kozlov, Jeff Daniels

Credits: Directed by by Joshua Riehl, script by Keith Gave, Joshua Riehl and Jason Wehling. A Lucky Hat release.

Running time 1:38