Movie Nation

France’s hope for a Best International Feature Oscar this year reside in “The Taste of Things,” a savory, exquisitely-acted immersion in The Pride of France — her cuisine — and a couple who make beautiful dishes together near the end of the 19th century.

The new film from Vietamese director Anh Hung Tran, who gave us “The Scent of Green Papaya,” is a feast for the senses and a romance as dry a glass of French muscadet. There are hints of “Babette’s Feast” and “Big Night,” and a less satisfying taste of “The Remains of the Day” in this love affair where two great cooks “converse with you in the dining room through what you eat,” and the invention and care they put into making it for each other, and us.

Oscar winner Juliette Binoche is Eugénie, queen of the kitchen, supervising helper and server Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) as she wades through each epic meal’s vast preparations. She passes through the garden, choosing cabbages and root vegetables with care. She waltzes through the kitchen with purpose, never a wasted motion, her requests and instructions spare and her mastery of every timeless cooking implement at her command effortless.

The viewer is left to marvel that she’s mixing sauces, brazing lettuce, adding layer after layer of complexity to broths and soups, meats and vegetables, courses and their many sauces (So much CREAM.) without a measuring spoon or measuring cup, and not a thermometer in sight.

We never see the fuel source to what looks like her wood stove. We’re too distracted by the steam, the smoke and imagining the aromas she is conjuring up in all those bowls, pots and pans to wonder how she does it.

Only after much prep and much cooking do we see the great chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) enter this busy workspace. He is not The Boss, not “supervising.” He is cooking, tasting, slicing, dicing, baking and stirring, in perfect sync and perfect harmony with Eugénie.

They have been doing this together, in his kitchen in his chateau, for “20 years,” we learn. After many of these culinary triumphs, shared with a quartet of his gastronome friends (Patrick d’Assumçao, Emmanuel Salinger, Frédéric Fisbach, Jan Hammenecker), he might humbly ask if she’ll leave her door “unlocked” tonight.

They are colleagues, near equals in the kitchen, with her almost certainly the better cook. They are also lovers — nothing formal, just two consenting adults taking their kitchen chemistry to the bedroom. We can see that he wants more, but that he has to broach that subject — “marriage” — with care. She is leery, fulfilled by the relationship they enjoy now.

Oh well, he jokes. As the wags all say (in French with English subtitles), “Marriage is a dinner that begins with dessert.”

Their meals together — she won’t eat with the grastronomes — are sweet, comfortable and familiar. But their cooking is where they best express their love. As they bond over their joint mentoring of a promising, culinarily precocious teen, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), their relationship is tested by his desire for more, and other impediments that suggest the wearing nature of their labor and the limits of this most indulgent of French cultural obsessions.

“Nobody” or its acting equivalents star in this gonzo “48 Hour Film Project” version of a making-a-ski-movie comedy, “Weak Layers” opens Friday.

“War Blade” is a rather dull, half-speed WWII commando picture about two Brits and some French resisters trying to storm a Nazi bunker where strange and nefarious things are going on, and not just to the prisoners they’re torturing there.

But C-movie writer-director Nicholas Winter (“Robin Hood: The Rebellion”) puts on another clinic on how to do a period piece on a paltry budget with this inactive action pic.

You don’t need to have Spielberg’s resources to shoot a World War II movie, even today. As long a you start out with more knowledge of the conflict and the genre than the folks who made “Battle for Saipan” did, and maybe have a better idea of what story to tell than the folks who made “Ghosts of War” did, it can be done.

Winter managed the former if not the latter.

Joseph Millson plays Banks, a commando given the job of checking out this bunker, which a Resistance fighter has risked his neck to have his German nurse (Alina Tamara) smuggle to his Resistance cell-leader wife (Rebecca Scott).

Banks is given “a liability, frankly” as his accomplice — a half-mad/mostly-deaf explosives expert (Paul Marlon, good) and orders to contact Ivy, the cell leader who “married a Frenchman” but whom he knew before the war.

The story the escaped German nurse — whose accent comes and goes — tells seems sketchy and far-fetched. But Banks has his orders.

“We need you to go there and make a nuisance of yourself.”

The fights are poorly-managed, stage punches arrive after the sound effect of fist smacking flesh in some cases. The shootouts (involving a DEAF guy) are clumsy.

But for all that and its funereal pacing, Winter manages a reasonably-convincing setting and realistic period look.

You don’t need to show a parachute drop, just its aftermath — commandos gathering their gear and confronted by partisans. You don’t need to show aircraft of the era. Sound effects will do. When a vintage reconaissance plane actually shows up in the finale, it feels like a treat for us and for Winter.

You only need one period-perfect command car. From the looks of things, they got the aged owner to drive it, as well (not necessarily inaccurate, as everybody wanted to “do their bit” in Keep Calm and Carry On-land.

A few WWII rifles and machine guns and a reasonable facsimile of Wehrmacht and SS uniforms will hide a world of shortcomings, although not the to commanding Nazi’s ’80s Anglo-pop bank haircut.

The third act is considerably more polished than the first, even throwing in a bloody twist or two.

But this won’t satisfy action fans or war movie buffs. “War Blade” is of value only to filmmakers with big ideas and no money, or to film schools where it might be shown as an example of what you can manage on a shoestring, a generic script and no one on set who can block, stage, shoot and edit a proper fight to the death.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Joseph Millson, Rebecca Scott, Alina Tamara, Timothy Blore and Paul Marlon

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Winter. A 101 Pictures release.

Running time: 1:31

John Huston’s adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Man Who Would be King” would have been a vastly different enterprise had he made it when he first had the idea — in his post “African Queen” 1950s.

Huston wanted his muse, Humphrey Bogart (“The Maltese Falcon,” “Across the Pacific,” “Key Largo,” “Beat the Devil,” “The African Queen”) to co-star with the then-fading “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable in a film not that far removed from the racially patronizing classic “Gunga Din,” also based on Kipling’s writing.

Conversely, a modern day take on this story would be worlds away from Huston’s old-fashioned but faintly anti-imperialist post-Civil Rights Movement/post-Vietnam War 1975 “The Man Who Would Be King.”

When he finally got the money to film this misadventure about two former British soldiers staging a coup in a remote land beyond Afghanistan, it still came off as of another era. Some attitudes expressed and tacitly embraced seem dated. And the three stars were future Oscar winners, and already a bit long in the tooth to be tackling the material.

Christopher Plummer put “The Sound of Music” behind him to play a young reporter hearing and writing down the tale, a 20something Kipling. Plummer was well over 40, and Huston had signed Richard Burton for the role, who looked decades older.

But Sean Connery and Michael Caine could easily pass for robust, years-mustered-out sergeants, making a go at being chancers of the pick-pocketing, extorting and adventuring variety, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan.

Using Morocco to substitute for India under the British Raj, Huston immerses us in the an exotic alien world of teeming street bazaars and epic mountain ranges, the perfect setting for a racially-patronizing boyish adventure about two “rascals” who set out to take over and then rob a backward, unconquered corner of the Hindu Kush, northern Afghanistan’s Kafiristan.

Our seasoned reporter and editor, Kipling, is a curious and sympathetic “Anglo-Indian” of the Subcontinent, his superiority coming from his white skin, white linen suits and connection to the occupying white Western power. But we don’t see how “enlightened” he is until he crosses paths with the combat veteran Peachy.

Peachy, we quickly learn, is a hustler who picks Kipling’s pocket, only to discover he’s stolen from a fellow follower of “The Widow’s Son.” His suit may be clean enough, but he’s common and broke and yet not at all shy about expressing his grievances at a government that’s treating him as no more privileged than the locals. He thus exercises his racial superiority over the natives as he returns Kipling’s stolen watch, blaming it on a stereotypically obsequious Indian he’s just hurled out of the moving train.

As gags go, that can make a modern viewer wince.

Peachy leans on Kipling for a favor, passing a message on to a mate he’s supposed to meet. The big and bluff and sideburned Daniel also speaks the language of their shared secret society, Freemasonry.

“We met on the level, and we’re parting on the square!”

Kipling intervenes in a blackmail scheme the two have lined-up, but keeps them out of prison, They decide their best bet for fame and fortune is to cross the mountains with rifles, their scarlet Army tunics and military knowhow, throw-in with a local ruler in his conflicts with rivals, change the power balance of the region, and then seize power themselves, looting a bit as they do, before fleeing.

They’re mad, Kipling insists. They’ll be killed.

“Peachy and me, we don’t kill easy!”

But to accomplish their goal, these two rowdies must foreswear strong drink and women, which they do, ceremoniously, with a “contract” which they sign before Kipling, using him as their notarized witness.

Donning darker-skin and turbaned disguises, they’re off to a place “where no white man has ever been and come out since Alexander (the Great).”

The two provide us of evidence of their serious intent and their qualifications for “the job” as they battle bandits and tribesmen, a raging river and snowy peaks on their way.

And once they get there, it’s simpler-than-simple to identify a hapless leader (Largbi Doghmi) and a conflict they can intervene in to set their scheme in motion.

Think I’ll review this? Given my obsession with movies featuring a vintage (butt ugly) Chevy Nova as a “car with character?”

You bet your life. Other vintage cars feature in this “road” picture.

“Roadkill,” a straight-up thrill-kill B-movie thriller, opens Friday.

Here’s the trailer to the first film to make use of Disney’s insanely-overextended copyright of the character the company founder created nearly a century ago.

As horror movies set in amusement parks go, “Mickey’s Mouse Trap” doesn’t seem to offer much.

But as intellectual property rights go, it’s kind of reassuring the Disney’s heirs, familial and corporate, don’t get yet more special treatment of the mouse that led to The Mouse.

Disney has, at long last, moved on from Mickey and Minnie and their peers. Mickey video games and the like may still have value for those who now have access to the creation. But if Disney was willing to let him and others go, believe me, they know better.

You hate to start the year reviewing a bad C-movie aiming for B-status, but that’s the state of the cinema between Christmas and that first weekend after New Year’s.

“Sniper: G.R.I,T.” is the latest in a series of glib, violent and dumb “Sniper” action pictures starring Chad Michael Collins and built on a tsunami of sniper “head shots” as action beats.

This time, his crew, named “G.R.I.T.” for Global Rescue & Intellegence Team, is in the spotlight for a matter of some mayhem in Malta.

I’ll bet the financing, incentive cash, etc. that got this picture made is more interesting than anything on the screen.

A blast of exposition introduces that “team,” led by Gabriel Stone (Dennis Haysbert) and their quarry — rescuing a missing comrade, Yuki, a.k.a. “Lady Death” (Luna Fujimoto) from the clutches of the cultish State of Aragon that Malta has become.

It’s led by a plumb, guru-ish Bond villain named Bubalo (Paul Kissaun, as menacing as a stoner department store Santa). He and his minions must be murdered so that Yuki can be brought back into the fold at G.R.I.T.

Ryan Robbins is here as the shooter’s local language-learning (just a single phrase, a running gag) wiseguy/sidekick.

“Who are you,” a future-target asks?

“The Piper! And your balance is long overdue!”

A lot of the dialogue is an attempt to manage that level of wit, and failing.

There are I.T. guys (Josh Brener is one), necessary in any modern picture of this genre. And that Lady Death is a badass martial artist who looks good doing sweep-kicks in her leather pants, boots and long, billowing red overcoast. That’s usually a plus.

But the fights and action beats seldom rise to “adequate,” the stunt-work lets us see how hard it is to get stunt fights right.

And by the end, we’ve figured out why the violence of choice is a gun-shot to the head. A simple, singular effect, repeated dozens of times, never cleverly, is a lot less trouble than working out fight choreography and doing the takes to make it sting.

When your plot is crap and your location may be your biggest selling point, that’s what you do.

Collins makes a bland lead, with Robbins’ never letting us forget that he’s the “tries too hard” sidekick and none of them have even a shadow of the presence Haysbert does. And he must be asking himself what he’s doing in anything this junky.

But Malta still looks like a bucket-list vacation.

Rating: R, violence, sexual innuendo, profanity

Cast: Chad Michael Collins, Luna Fujimoto, Ryan Robbins, Josh Brener,
Toshiji Takeshima, Paul Kissaun and Dennis Haysbert

Credits: Scripted and directed by Oliver Thompson, a Sony film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

The first theatrical release of 2024 is a horror tale with a pool and a “Marco Polo” gag. Let’s hope the new cinema year starts with a shriek and a gurgle.

Opens Friday.

Cristiana Dell’Anna has the title role in this Italian Catholic immigrant who made opening a humane orphanage in New York her life’s work.

Giancarlo Giannini plays Pope Leo XIII, with John Lithgow the New York mayor she had to contend with and David Morse as an American archbishop who reminds her of the long odds of her 1880s-90s success.

This Angel Studios release comes our way March 8.

Steven Spielberg mentioned in interviews over the years how a Cecil B. DeMille epic from the early 1950s changed his life. The spectacle, the larger-than-life presentation and the special effects of “The Greatest Show on Earth” turned little Steven into a kid who wanted to do his own effects and make his own epics, something recounted in his autobiographical drama “The Fabelmans.”

I was reminded of that this Sunday morning as I caught a rural Southern Baptist church’s pastor relate how DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” was his idea of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the greatest film of his youth, never challenged or “topped,” in his mind since.

These church services are the Sunday AM background noise on my monthly visits to my aged mother in North Carolina’s piedmont, which used to be tobacco farming and textile manufacturing country, and hasn’t entirely emptied out despite that cash crop and that factory work shrinking or disappearing, sending ensuing generations away to find work, college and different lives in cities near and far.

Shrunken towns all over this corner of the South point to how rural America has aged and in many cases curdled politically as the best, brightest and youngest moved away.

A college job I had was working Sundays at a college town radio station that broadcast a collection of (paid promotion) church services, and I learned way back then that not all “fundamentalist” rural Southern pastors are the same. One that sticks out in my mind was an Apartheid-backing racist, who made me cringe Sunday after Sunday. Another was a young, passionate “spirit-filled” lay preacher who’d come into the studios with a few of his flock, who’d be moved to tears by his sincere exhortatations.

I’ve been moved a couple of times to post on Pastor G. Barry Chambers’ Mount Harmony Baptist Church of Rougement, N.C. Facebook page about some obvious lie or propagandistic nonsense he was spouting on a given Sunday. “Conservative” doesn’t quite do justice to his politics.

But this Sunday, he moved me to fact-check him. Here.

In his “Ten Commandments” recommendation, Pastor Chambers tossed in an aside about the Southern Protestant saint, Billy Graham.

“Billy Graham was offered the part of Moses,” Chambers said. “Blank check,” name his price to play the part, Chambers added. “Turned’em down, flat.”

I apologize to my elderly mother, who may have overheard my epithet in response to that load of codswallop.

But considering the politics of Graham — an anti-communist zealot, “fluffed” into prominence by reactionary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst — and those of ultra-right-wing DeMille, whose 1956 “Ten Commandments” is laced with anti-communist messaging, it is within the realm of possibility.

Graham, as those who covered him most closely (newspapers in Charlotte, near his birthplace) noted, kept his nose clean and his ministry above reproach financially and morally (Mike Pence got his “never be alone in a room with a woman not your wife” thing from a Graham ministry edict). But he was, as the late columnist Frye Galliard noted in a profile, a “star-f—-r” of the first magnitude. He loved rubbing shoulders with the powerful, most of them reactionary, one of the most infamous of whom was Richard Nixon.

I interviewed several folks from a famous protest of a Graham/Nixon joint appearance at the University of Tennessee when that notorious event’s anniversary came up while working at a Knoxville newspaper some years back. Graham, to his credit, seemed to learn from that experience, when an amoral politician used him to legitimize his crimes with “the silent majority.” He kept most politicians, save for Reagan,at arm’s length after that.

More recently, I had to study up on Graham before interviewing Armie Hammer, who before he got famous as an actor played young Billy as a student at Bob Jones U. or whatever the school was called back in the ’40s. Hammer later got a shot at “The Lone Ranger,” “The Man from U.N.C.L. E.” and “Call Me by your Name” before his kinkiness got him “canceled.”

DeMille, you might remember from John Ford biographies and the memoirs of Hollywood editor turned director Robert Parrish, famously pushed loyalty oaths and efforts to blacklist Hollywood stars and filmmakers, aiming for some sort of right wing “coup” overturning the Hollywood heirarchy, which rarely gave him his due. His zeal to back up the infamous U.S. House of Representatives’ “Unamerican Activities Committee” efforts to censor, silence and render unemployable pretty much all of Progressive Hollywood was petty and personal in that regard. John Wayne and his lacky/sidekick Ward Bond were in on this, a form of “revenge” against their Hollywood “betters” reminiscent of a certain treasonous ex-president and his cult.

Ford, Wayne’s favorite director and mentor, famously stood up to DeMille’s “anti-American” witch hunt in a 1950 meeting of Director’s Guild of America members.

But was DeMille interested in casting Graham as Moses the Lawgiver? DeMille allegedly considered a lot of people, Burt Lancaster among them. He wanted William Boyd, who had acted in the DeMille silent epic “King of Kings” decades before he became Saturday morning movie serial and later TV cowboy (when those serial films were televised) Hopalong Cassidy.

Billy Graham’s name never came up.

But Pastor G. Barry Chambers didn’t invent this out of whole cloth. What he appears to have exaggerated was related to this reference in Graham’s autobiography, as reported in the L.A. Times in the 1990s. DeMille DID meet with Graham, but to suggest some sort of business collaboration, as Graham was starting up his own film production company at the same time.

Graham was a pioneer in faith-based movies in the ’50s into (at least) the ’80s. There were times that my rural Virginia Boy Scout troop was called in to act as voluntary ushers for these “crusade” based films. The stories were often modern parables of a struggling life made better by answering an altar call at a Billy Graham crusade (in the third act).

The Graham-as-Moses notion could be a simple mistake, but feels like “lore” and a fact-based message muddying over time, conveniently bent to fit a small town pastor’s agenda.

As no movie-lover in the good reverend’s flock was able to fact-check him in real time (a LOT of preachers could use that, from my experience), the least a film fan can do is provide that service, with links — “receipts,” as the kids say — here on the Internet.