Gaby Hoffman, McKinley Belcher III and Jeff Hefner also star in this six episode series coming to Netflix May 30.
Note the interesting use of ABBA’s “SOS” to underscore what is at first alarming, then despairing, then sad and then long-shot “hopeful.”
Lovely trailer makes this one a promising Memorial Day weekend binge.
There’s a noble tradition in the acting profession, and the indie cinema. When the work isn’t there, you create something for yourself worth starring in. It’s how Billy Bob Thornton and others made their own “big break.”
There’s also a well-established route for actresses finally breaking through, getting themselves “taken seriously” by seriously dressing down for a part. Ask Charlize Theron what “Monster” did for her.
But both of these time-honored traditions are strained and stained in whatever the hell nobody’s-idea-of-struggling Nicola Peltz Beckham thought she was doing with “Lola.”
It’s a gritty and lowdown “showcase” in slumming, an attempt at a sort of Riley Keough re-invention for the well-heeled/married-well “Bates Motel” alumna. She wrote, directed and stars in this sordid and misshapen star vehicle about a small town Texas teen struggling to get her and her very young and feminine kid brother out of the hellhouse they’re being raised in.
Bonus points for casting indie icon Virginia Madsen as the monstrous mother who drinks, smokes and takes up with whatever rapist will have her as she ignores and berates stripper Lola and “home schools” a kid (Luke David Blumm) she will never understand.
It’s such a shame your Dad didn’t take you with him when he left!”
Everything else, from the nightly stripper make-up ritual to the “back room” where extra cash is collected for sex work — “Do you party, Angel?” — to the no-good high school boyfriend (Richie Merritt) she keeps around to keep her in drugs, to the Black best friend (Raven Goodwin) at the convenience store where they work and which Lola steals from, to an unplanned pregnancy is straight-up formula, the sort of down-market Southern Gothic downmarket Tennessee Williams wallow we saw in 174 indie films that preceded it.
“I’ve always thought I needed a reason to be good,” Lola narrates in the film’s opening. “But what does ‘being good’ even mean?”
Judging from Peltz Beckham’s writing her way through struggle and death and self-help group and strip club cliches, and donning all that makeup to act “cheap,” she never did figure that out.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex and profanity
Cast: Nicolas Peltz Beckham, Raven Goodwin, Richie Merritt, Luke David Blumm and Virginia Madsen.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicolas Peltz Beckham. A Vertical release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:23
“The Idea of You” is a swoony screen romance that skates on the edge of a lot of “almosts.”
A female wish fulfillment fantasy, it almost gets by on a little charm and a lot of acting effort by Oscar-winning leading lady Anne Hathaway.
It’s almost a romantic comedy, but the odd cute bits never really add up to much more than a chuckle or three.
And it almost lapses into romance-novel-adapted-into-Hallmark-movie territory, despite its A-picture budget, locations and wan pursuit of an R-rating that barely crosses the PG-13 line.
Hathaway plays Solène, a radiant and ever-so-stylish divorced mother of sixteen year-old Izzy (Ella Rubin). She’s a Silverlake, L.A. gallery owner we’re supposed to be convinced has prepped for a solo camping trip getaway (an almost comic eye-roller) while the kid enjoys a Coachella experience financed by her super-successful, cheated-and-remarried husband (Reid Scott, amusingly douchy).
Dad is just tuned-out of Izzy’s day-to-day life enough to have a arranged a pricey VIP “meet and greet” with the almost-grown-up boy band she used to love, August Moon. But Dad lets business get in the way of fathering one more time and Solène is roped into taking over as chaperone for Coachella.
That’s where she stumbles into the maturing but still “almost” grown-up lead singer of August Moon, Hayes Campbell, played by singing actor and “Purple Hearts,” “Cinderella” and “Bottoms” star Nicolas Galitzine.
He’s got the fashionable tattoos, a piercing or two and a t-shirt torn in all the stylish places. She’s dressed like a cool mom, but with a movie star’s trademark bangs, billion dollar smile and big anime eyes. She takes notice of him, but he is instantly smitten with her. And she notices he’s smitten.
When he tracks her down to Marchand Collective, as her tony gallery, is called, we get our first sense of his youth and the sheltered nature of a “career” that began at 14. He doesn’t know that pottery and ceramics are “thrown.” But while her daughter might think of August Moon as “so seventh grade,” a former band-crush, and Solène’s already met a fanatical August Moonie (mom-age groupie) or two, she can’t help but be a little swept away by his attention. And by the Big Romantic Gesture.
He buys out her gallery to decorate “my London flat.” He’s laid-back about the papparazzi and fan attention, literally laying back in her Subaru sport maternity vehicle’s seat to fool the stalkers as she drives him to see more art, and then her adorable arts and crafts bungalow.
Could she/would she fall for a much younger man, despite the “hypocrisy” of doing a version of what her husband did — take up with a much younger lover?
“The Big Sick” and “Hello, My Name is Doris” director Michael Showalter had the time and the budget to let this June/mid-March romance unfold at its leisure, with underfilmed Silverlake, Coachella and European vacation locations and a slow seduction that feels almost graceful in the hands of our leads.
The boy band stuff, on and off stage, is convincing if cliched, with the other members and their latest girlfriends/groupies (the movie suggests the latter) barely sketched in.
They brought in comic screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt to goose the script, but even though her best writing credit (“Kissing Jessica Stein”) might have been the adorable, that was well over twenty years ago. She can’t sass-up a best seller that’s more about the adult decisions that such a “Notting Hill” affair, with cruelly-obsessed fans and a daughter sensitive to online hate, might entail.
But the beguiling, sophisticated Solène is still capable of being a little bewitched by Brit-boy Hayes’ boyish “It’s hard to trust people, innit?” The script patronizingly rationalizes her tumble by showing her 40th birthday party and the inept, “baggage” packed age-appropriate menfolk who might make a play for her, if they can just get over themselves, their “hurt” or whatever.
Watch the corrosive “Upside of Anger” if you want to see how that looks from a rationalizing older-man/very young woman romance from the male point of view.
It takes a lot of effort to achieve the “effortlessness” in Hathaway’s performance of a character seemingly tailor-made for her, but she rarely lets that effort show. She has always been grace-incarnate on the screen. There’s enough chemistry to make them believable as a somewhat ill-matched couple, but the efforts at sexual heat border on romance novel bodice-ripping.
This may do the trick for fans of the book. But for me, as sleek and slick as this all is, a “fantasy” set in romance novel affluence and the heady world of jet-setting celebrity, it never plays. The picture’s “patience” becomings trying after a while.
This you or “The Idea of You” love affair requires an elaborate but silly set-up, and once its up on its feet, it never abandons that dawdling, ruminating pace.
And the third act complications are both perfunctory and something any adult would see coming a mile away, in the story, or watching that story oh-so-slowly unfold on a screen.
Rating: R, sex scenes that are closer to PG-13, profanity
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Nicolas Galitzine, Reid Scott and Ella Rubin
Credits: Directed by Michael Showalter, scripted by Michael Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt, based on the novel by Robinne Lee. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:55
“Down the Rabbit Hole” is probably the strangest feature film on Netflix at the moment, a twisted parable of an indulged, myopic childhood based on the acclaimed debut novella of Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos.
“Fiesta en la Madriguera,” as it was titled in Mexico, is about growing up in a “palace,” the spoiled and sheltered only son of a Mexican drug lord. The novella earned comparisons to “Alice in Wonderland” and “Room,” and the Pacino/DePalma “Scarface,”when it was published, to which I’d add such “the child doesn’t really SEE what’s really going on” tales as “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”
Miguel Valverde Uribe is Tochtli, a tween we meet on his birthday, where party “guests” are all hired hands of his father, whom the child addresses by his name — Yolcaut. Dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) indulges his boy’s every whim, keeping a zoo for the boy’s entertainment, a room of the mansion turned into a giant terrarium for displaying stuffed critters and the kid’s vast collection of hats. .
The child is sheltered from the outside world, tutored by the failed writer Mazatzin (Raúl Briones), who turns the kid into a curious child and an avid reader. Tochtli, who is bald (“to prevent head lice”), is nicknamed “Bonehead” by everyone in the household save for the teacher. Mazatzin feeds the boy’s every new obsession, the latest being Louis XVI of France. He gives him a crown. Samurai Japan will come later.
The boy is used to a father who makes his every wish come true. Dad provided all the hired help with big wads of cash to buy an endangered woodpecker and other exotic gifts for that birthday party.
“Life is like the lottery, hijo,” Yolcaut teaches. “At least for us, we got a lot of lucky numbers.”
When the kid gets it in his head that he must add pygmy hippos to his collection of critters, there’s nothing for it but to safari to Africa and “acquire” a couple.
But there are limits to what omnipotent Yolcaut, who goes through women friends (Debi Mazar, Teresa Ruiz among them) and cash like there’s no tomorrow, can do. As the boy watches the way his brutish dad treats a compliant governor, his desire for the boy to learn but his disdain for “pansies,” Tochtli starts to form opinions even if he’s slow to ask hard questions about all the cash, the dead-of-night goings-on and the way the household frets over crime news on TV and the like.
Swiping a pistol from his father’s gun cache may be an innocent act, or just dangerously imitative of his role model. But the kid may be taking lessons outside of his father’s limited, cruel and Darwinian views.
“The world is full of pansies, men, women and children!” Yolcaut bellows. “But we are macho and can take advantage!”
The players are good across the board, with Garcia-Rulfo managing to convey a nurturing presence in an impatient, ignorant and violent man.
Director Manolo Caro is a workhorse of Mexican TV and cinema, getting jobs from Netflix and others and telling stories efficiently, with just a hint of style.
I wouldn’t call this pointed parable about wealth, corruption, innocence and The American Get Out of Jail Free card that could come with a lot of money any sort of great leap forward in terms of technique. But it’s immersive and biting and fun to parse for its deeper meaning, even if it most certainly isn’t for every taste.
Rating: TV-MA, lots of violence, profanity
Cast: Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Teresa Ruiz, Miguel Valverde Uribe, Raul Briones and Debi Mazar
Credits: Directed by Manolo Caro, scripted by, based on a novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:42
Rating: TV-MA, lots of violence, profanity
Cast: Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Teresa Ruiz, Miguel Valverde Uribe, Raul Briones and Debi Mazar
Credits: Directed by Manolo Caro, scripted by, based on a novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:42
“Checkmate” is an Argentine action that is una pelicula caseosa.
Cheesy? It’s a picture that wouldn’t last past its opening credits without a never-ending parade of cliches, tired genre tropes and banal, over-familiar plot elements.
It begins with the “retired” agent (Adrián Suar, of “I Married a Dumbass”) laying low in the outskirts of Tigre, trapping an intruder in the snare he has set in the woods surrounding his home. It’s his 16 year-old niece (Fiorella Indelicato) who has shown up to find out “what you and Dad did for a living.”
They’ve barely re-established their relationship, with Juana showing off her mad chess-playing skills, when a team of assassins storm the house in a hail of gunfire.
They shoot and shoot and shoot, and then are killed and killed and killed. Inexplicably, the last assassin tries to kidnap Agent Duque. All that bloodshed and intent-to-kill, and somebody NEEDS Duque for a “job?”
That’s what we figure out when Juana is nabbed as our intrepid undercover man is calling up his old “team” for help. Some fey villain (Mike Amigorena) who calls himself “Rey” (king), wears too much makeup and keeps capes around as part of his vast wardrobe needs Duque, nicknamed “Dwarf,” to grab something out of a top security lab.
Duque calls in logistics man Malcosido (Benjamín Amadeo) whose way of coping with his bruxism is talking people to death, the observant Israeli Jew Iair (Tsahi Halevi) who must find a way to answer the phone, get on a plane and work his computer expertise without actually working on Shabbat, Mexican bomb expert and pilot Molo (nepo baby José Eduardo Derbez) and mistress of disguises Sofia (Maggie Civantos), whose testiness tells us that she and Duque used to be an item.
They must “Mission: Impossible” their way into this lab, retrieve something and/or someone, and swap that for Juana.
The exploding cars are impressive enough, with or without digitally-added flames. The super secure “lab” settings pass muster.
But every attempt at sending up movies like “Mission: Impossible” falls flat. A few jokes about Israeli Spanish accents and the ways Malcosido (which translates as “bad at sewing”) can be mispronouned might play in the home country. But the light bickering goes nowhere and the plot twists are so over-used there’s nothing left in them.
Not exciting, not funny, not quite sexy and pretty violent, considering the tone they seemed to be going for, “Checkmate” can’t even manage a draw.
Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity
Cast: Adrián Suar, Maggie Civantos, José Eduardo Derbez, Tsahi Halevi, Fiorella Indelicato, Charo López, Benjamín Amadeo and Mike Amigorena
Credits: Directed by Jorge Nisco, scripted by Leandro Calderone, Luis Bernardez, Matías Dinardo, Andrés Restrepo. An MGM release on Amazo.n Prime.
Running time: 1:44
It might be based on a weathered, folksy and cheesy TV series of the ’80s, but every minute of the big screen version of “The Fall Guy” reminds us it’s a MOVIE movie, a spectacle.
Break out the popcorn.
An action comedy about the movies, it’s a noisy, cutesie and violent love letter to the unheralded art of the stunt performers, the “Fall Guys” and Gals who take the tumbles, race and roll the cars and let themselves be set on fire if the script demands it.
And dammit, a lot of the time it does. They work hard for the money. Not that anybody knows their names.
“I don’t know why I’m talking so much,” our hero, Colt Severs, narrates. “I’m not the hero of this story.”
Ryan Gosling is this version of high-mileage stunt double Colt Severs — played by Lee Majors on TV — with Emily Blunt as the camera operator turned director of photography promoted (after the prologue) to director, Jody Moreno.
The players are charming, with Gosling fast becoming North America’s sweetheart, and that counts for a lot.
The laughs are here, the crowd-pleasing stunts and “fan service” touches — an homage to the TV series, a very smart stunt dog who only understands French, elaborate “fool the villains with cleverly conceived stunt craft” and movie magic bits.
But it isn’t exactly the out-of-body experience summer popcorn pic we’ve been hoping for. The relationship is tentative, wounded, and a little cartoonish, the plot more complicated and frustratingly convoluted than it needs to be.
The stunt man and the camera operator are having an on-set “fling” on a production in that prologue, which ends with Colt having a near-fatal on-set accident.
Over a year after his fall, Colt is summoned back to work by the big shot Brit producer (Hannah Waddingham of “Ted Lasso”) to double his delusional former star-partner Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, not remotely as funny as one would expect). Jody is making her directing debut on “Metal Storm,” a silly sci-fi blockbuster “and she asked for you” personally, or so Colt — cooling his heels as a car parking valet — is told.
But once in Australia and on set, he finds Jody didn’t “ask for” him. And star Ryder has disappeared. Colt is motion-captured so that Tom’s face can be “faked” over his in the stunts in the finished film. He must hurl himself back into the danger, double the fight scenes, dealing with Jody’s brittle, vengeful off-camera directions and back-story motivational speeches, delivered by BULLHORN and getting personal enough to make everybody on set who hears this squirm.
And after shooting, he’s got to go and find the real “Space Cowboy” star and get him back on set. Stumbling across a corpse in a tub sets our plot in motion, as Colt is in over his head, but always ready with a fist, a piece of furniture or a firearm as bad guys set out to silence him and the movie production is threatened with being shut-down if the missing star’s absence is ever discovered.
Colt has to juggle all this on and off-set danger and get across his real feelings for Jody while taking the blows with little more than a pained smile and a thumb’s-up after every near death experience.
It’s the “fall guy’s” way. “
“The Fall Guy” has big stunts and big explosions and a couple of good gimmicks — a cell phone conversation which deconstructs the efficacy of filming two actors in ’60s-style “split screen” scenes, this conversation itself handled in split screen, for instance. People talk in movie quotes from “Rocky,” “The Last of the Mohicans” and (Universal intellectual property) “The Fast and the Furious,” to comic effect.
A couple of the filmmakers’ aesthetic choices stand out.
One is using the KISS disco anthem “I Was Made for Loving You Baby” as a kitschy recurring gag, treated with more romantic sensitivity in some scenes than the band ever gave it. And then there are the stunts themselves, epic in a few cases, and as often as not, it’s too obvious Ryan Gosling is not “doing his own stunts.”
That underscores the message and agenda of the movie, that stuntmen and stunt women, from Yakima Canutt to Zoe Bell, rarely get their due. And “deep fake” tech allows productions to paste movie star faces on stunt bodies, should they so desire. But after the third or fourth time in which even a casual viewer might say “That’s not Ryan G.,” its real effect is to take the viewer out of a movie, at least momentarily.
And considering the uncertain pacing and sort of lurching-along narrative, that’s not good thing.
Stuntman turned “Deadpool 2” and “Hobbs & Shaw” director David Leitch is at home making the stunts pay-off. But the dead patches and uncertain pauses for the love story are evident from the start and really become a liability in the later acts. As stunt man movies go, it’s a lot better than the Burt Reynolds laugher “Hooper,” but not in the same class as “The Stunt Man.”
Sequences can be both awe-inspiring and slow-footed, and character rationales seem more popcorn pic perfunctory than anything Ms. Blunt would sign off on as convincing and reasonable. I didn’t buy the romance. I’ve never seen her act more tentative on camera. She’s trying to play “in charge,” ambitious and broken-hearted. We get it. But Leitch & Co. do her no favors when they drown out her pained karaoke cover of “Against the Odds” with the Phil Collins version. Perhaps they were the “tentative” ones.
Yes, the leading lady has some agency, Taylor-Johnson gets a few scenes to get across what he’s trying to do with the character, Winston Duke (as the stunt coordinator on “Metal Storm”) and Stephanie Hsu (as a can-do, badass production assistant) make impressions.
And the wonderful Australian actress Teresa Palmer (“Warm Bodies”) is here, but her stunt double has more moments than her.
The picture is thus a mixed bag, rather like “Hobbs & Shaw” and “Deadpool 2,” and Leitch’s “Bullet Train” — violent, funny, but leaning on Gosling’s twinkling charisma and inside-the-movies jokes and pratfalls to come off, which it does just often enough to recommend.
Rating: PG-13, violence, drugs, profanity
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Teresa Palmer, Winston Duke, Stephanie Hsu and Hannah Waddingham.
Credits: Directed by David Leitch, scripted by Drew Pearce, based on the Glen Larson TV series starring Lee Majors. A Universal release.
Running time: 2:06
Amazon has this romance, from the director of “The Big Sick,” coming to Prime on Friday.
Looks cute. “Best seller” wish fulfillment fantasy by Robinne Lee, Oscar winning leading lady and all.
Don’t know the leading man, Nicolas Galitzine (“Purple Hearts”), but that means nothing in the streaming era.
Few live action comedies mimic the lurid comic book style of Japanese manga as accurately or amusingly as “City Hunter,” a gonzo beat-em-up/shoot-em-up knife-fight riot based on the comic by Tsukasa Hôjô.
“Kasane” director Yûichi Satô, action choreographer Takashi Tanimoto and a legion of effects animators, “bullet time” masters and the garish neon and strobe-lit city of Tokyo — with its strip clubs, drag clubs and endless cosplaying conventions — make this candy-colored extravaganza pop off the screen.
And star Ryohei Suzuki (of “Egoist”) carries it on its merry, dumb way with the loopy, leering womanizing smirk and action hero swagger the title role requires.
Ryo is a swashbuckling detective, a do-gooder who hunts down missing persons based on requests scrawled on subway chalkboards. He is quick with his fists, quicker with his feet and a real dead-eye private eye when it comes to gunplay — shooting to wound or disable, often from impossible angles (backwards), never ever missing, no matter what revolver or semi-automatic he’s emptying.
He’s also a bit “pervy,” into porn and pretty women, sometimes in that order. This latest “Find my sister” request came from a woman he only knows as “Miss Sweater Melons.”
Luckily, he’s got ex-cop (Masanobu Andô) as a partner to keep him on task and maybe tamp down the stalker/ogler tendencies. When he loses that partner to the citywide outbreak of drugged-up people “losing all control” and flipping out, violently, Ryo is saddled with that partner’s naive sister, Kaori (Misato Morita).
They must track down the subject of Miss Sweater Melons’ search, a wild child cosplayer named Kurumi ( Asuka Hanamura), get to the bottom of this new drug’s purveyors, keep the police detective Saeko (Fumino Kimura) at bay and maybe get a little help from the Old Man of the Underworld (Isao Hashizume).
Legions of henchmen and a masked Brown Bear monster meant to be this story’s “Bane” must be fought and bested if they’re to save the day.
Yes, the plot is strictly formulaic, from the hero’s trench coat to his partner’s eyeglasses to the “car with character” Ryo drives — a ’70s vintage Mini Cooper.
But Suzuki makes a grandly is entertaining tour guide to “the world I live in” for Kaori and by extension, the viewer. Ryo is recognizable on the streets, catnip to the ladies and popular at a local drag club. He’s fit and cut and not shy about taking the stage as a stripper if it’ll get him into the underworld night club’s black-room casino.
And yes, he’s “kind of pervy.” It’s as obvious as his outgoing message on voice mail.
“I’m currently nursing a boner and can’t get to the phone…”
“City Hunter” never overcomes the cliched story or the cartoonish nature of the violence. But we can ignore that because the filmmakers get the pro forma details right. Montages of city CCTV cameras capturing drugged folks “losing all control” (in Japanese, or dubbed), over-the-top brawls, high-stakes one-on-one fights, garishly decorated discos, and a visit to a cosplay convention that embraces the fun and the creepy nature of it all (Japanese men’s obsession with panties, and photographing pixies wearing them).
And Suzuki makes the silly story fun to follow between fights with a giggling, juvenile charisma that is hard to resist.
The film becomes a manga that doesn’t transcend the “comic book” nature of it all. It wallows in it, and is all the more fun for it.
Rating: TV-MA, gunplay, bloody violence, nudity
Cast: Ryohei Suzuki, Misato Morita, Asuka Hanamura, Masanobu Andô, Fumino Kimura and Isao Hashizume
Credits: Directed by Yûichi Satô, scripted by Tatsuro Mishima, based on the manga (comic book) by Tsukasa Hôjô. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:44
There isn’t much that would recommend “Scandal” to a cinephile who isn’t trying to finish off The Complete Works of Akira Kurosawa. It’s a sentimental, maudlin melodrama with comical flourishes, not as ambitious or epic as the director’s best work.
But the immaculate compositions — sampled above — and the crisp editing, the vivid slice of Japanese life sanpled and the depictions of post-war Japan’s rapid “Americanization” make it a fascinating artifact. And Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, two of the most important Japanese screen actors ever, star in it, with singer-actress Shirley Yamaguchi (her music was in “Crazy Rich Asians,” “House of Bamboo,” etc.) and 290 credit character actor Eitarô Ozawa, who plays the villain.
It’s not scaled to the scope of the breakthrough period pieces that made Kurosawa’s reputation. And it lacks the emotional depth of the more intimate films of this period in his career. But it’s pretty entertaining and well worth a look.
Mifune plays a dashing artist whom we meet on a mountain overlook, painting Mount Kumotori in front a few simple, happy locals. A pretty stranger (Yamaguchi) shows up, having missed her bus. He offers to give her a lift to the inn in Kaminoyu, where they both happen to be staying.
Of course he rides a motorcycle. And he’s fond of his pipe. Ichirô Aoye isn’t really famous, but he cuts quite the figure. But singer Miyako Saijo, once he realizes who she is, has paparazzi on her tail. She IS famous, and the paps would love nothing better than to snap a few candid shots.
A chaste but friendly and perhaps indiscrete visit to her room, pointing out the views from her balcony is where they’re photographed, in bathrobes.
Amour Magazine is thrilled to publish it with a ginned-up story headlined “Love on a Motorcycle.”
“Shouldn’t we check?” the reporter wonders (in Japanese with English subtitles). Naah, the editor cracks. “The picture PROVES it!”
Aoye finds himself plastered all over walls and telephone poles as Amour Mag sells out and becomes the talk of the town. When he finally motorcycles up to their office, he takes his time reading the article in front of the editor and the smirking publisher (Ozawa). Being a badass, after a suspenseful minute or three, he punches publisher Hori right in the kisser.
He’ll SUE! Well, maybe they’ll sue each other, even though lawsuits were very rare in Japan back then.
As his outrage is covered by other publications in a gossip-obsessed Tokyo, a down-on-his-luck lawyer (Shimura of “Iriku” and other Kurosawa classics) comes to express sympathy, share his “injustice” outrage, and offer to take the case.
Aoye’s favorite artist’s model (Noriko Sengoku) may see the warning signs in the slovenly legal eagle. But even a visit to the drunk’s racing-form filled dump of an office won’t dissuade Aoye once he’s met the man’s tubercular teenage daughter (Yôko Katsuragi).
“A man’s family reveals his character.”
Besides, as he tries to enlist a very-reluctant Saijo in the suit, “The important thing is that we’re in the right. How can we lose?”
Oh, let us count the ways.
The second act of “Scandal” shows us how the case is sure to unravel, how the weepy old man representing them is one big liability. And the third act is taken up with a long and very Japanese court trial.
Mifune was always a riveting screen presence. But one thing you pick up on in his early films with Kurosawa is this head scratching affectation that he brings to scene after scene, expressing befuddlement and rising fury. It’s a wonder his hair survived those years.
The patience his character shows with Trainwreck, Attorney at Law, seems far fetched. But the film has this idealism about The New Japan, a new justice system, freedom of the press pushing back for their “right” to “harass.” That’s what Aoye is idealizing and choosing to believe in.
He throws himself into entertaining the sick teen (Yamaguchi sings “Silent Night” to her in Japanese), motoring in with a Christmas tree on the motorcycle, taking the old man out drinking for New Year’s Eve (Mifune and Shimura sing “Auld Lang Syne” in Japanese).
None of it adds up to all that much, but “Scandal” is engaging and immersive, serving up bits of old culture and tourism in collision with a changing society and an early Western-style Japanese “media circus.”
And Mifune and Shimura soldier through this slight film with a hint of warmth and pathos to go with the promise of working in the masterpieces to come.
Rating: TV-14, innuendo
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Shirley Yamaguchi,
Takashi Shimura, Yôko Katsuragi, Noriko Sengoku and Eitarô Ozawa
Credits: Directed by Akira Kurosawa, scripted by Ryûzô Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa. A Shochiku production now streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:45
All in one promo/preview.
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