Movie Nation

Novelists and screenwriters talk of the same problem, facing ethnic expectations that the white entertainment infrastructure lays on them to “write Black” characters who are cultural stereotypes and who “sound Black” to white ears.

“Look at what they publish. Loon at what they expect us to write!”

So, a dramedy with Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae that gives that racial pigeonholing a smack? No wonder this was the darling of the Toronto Film Fest.

It opens soon, very soon, a legitimate awards contender.

Based on a hit novel, coming to Netflix Jan 11.

It takes a few minutes to settle in and figure out just what the hell is going on in “Dark Journey,” a twisty and handsomely-mounted romantic thriller of the espionage variety produced on the eve of World War II.

The somewhat melodramatic World War I story is framed within a stop-and-search episode involving a Dutch coastal freighter/passenger ship and a suspiously-knowing German U-Boat crew. They’re looking for Allied spies living under cover in Sweden, one spy in particular. It’s 1918, and the German officer running the show wants to see more than just the lady’s passport.

As the tale flips back and forth, filling us in on how we got here, we see the intrigues, the wartime “neutral” trips to Paris, the cleverly-disguised maps and secret plans woven into the fabrics of French high fashion, the laborious means of decoding that and signaling, via semaphore, to offshore German agents just what the pretty “Swiss” agent has found out about French war plans.

The German aristocrat, new to Stockholm, appears to be disgraced, a “traitor to the Fatherland” but obviously on some playboy mission to Sweden to figure out the loyalties of Germany’s most beautiful agent.

Can Baron Karl Von Marwitz sell his womanizing reputation to such a degree that he will seem smitten with the fair Madeleine Goddard, dress-seller to the well-dressed and double agent extraordinaire? He’ll have to find a lot of excuses to visit Madeleine’s shop, buying dresses for his increasingly suspicious paramour (Joan Gardner).

“It used to be all girls with no clothes,” his valet gripes. “Now, it’s all clothes and no girls. Pity.”

Vivien Leigh — born Vivian Hartly in British India — was all of 24, a mercurial beauty and heartbreaker at the beginning of her big-screen career. “Gone With the Wind” wasn’t yet on her horizon. Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was 44, a screen legend immortalized in the silent classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” who’d emigrated to Britain as the Nazis came to power. He’d already made Germanic villains a specialty, and World War II would see Hollywood call for him to play a role in a “talkies” classic that rivals “Gone with the Wind” as among the most beloved films of all time — “Casablanca.”

World War I veteran Victor Saville, who’d go on to direct “Green Dolphin Street” and a late-career Errol Flynn epic “Kim,” and his British team conjure up intrigues in tony clubs and boutiques of Stockholm and Paris, in German and British intelligence headquarters, give us a glimpse of the French battlefield and settle into a confrontation on the Baltic Sea, all filmed in and around the soundstages of Buckinghamshire, UK.

Soundstaginess notwithstanding, this British production is damned impressive all around, even as we ponder the anachronistic fashions, jazzier-than-it-should-be 1918 nightclub and the peculiar pairing of Leigh with Veidt, who was twenty years her senior.

“So our pretty little dressmaker is a spy! What will people say, an officer of the Kaiser like me and a woman like you, Madeline?”

“They’ll say, the poor girl couldn’t help herself!”

The romance never really clicks for me, but it’s easy to see why this pairing was packaged. Leigh was the very embodiment of a spirited “slip of a girl,” as Madeleine is described here. And British cinema was just a couple of years past that “Women fight for Conrad Veidt” marketing campaign for the expat with the Teutonic accent and a flair for wearing monocles.

Leigh is good at suggesting the fear that’s creeping into Madeleine’s thinking as, even though we never see those who procure the “intelligence” for her elaborate double-agent schemes, we hear of their fates.

There’s a wit, sophistication and edge to this 1937 production that’s largely missing from the Hollywood fare of the early Production Code era. Even the storytelling style, that present-day sea confrontation framework, the way the narrative bounces back and forth from that, the murky ethics of it all and the daring idea of whipping up a love story involving a German spy and an Anglo-French one as the world teetered towards another world war, seems “out there” for its age.

Leigh is radiant and subtle, and Veidt suggests a softening of his Fatherland Uber Alles soldier in his performance that makes this credulous tale credible. And the script, by Lajos Biró and Arthur Wimperis, has all this inventive spycraft — dress pattern maps, semaphore communications to an anchored sailing yacht with a wireless set for signaling Berlin — that adds to the film’s air of knowing sophistication.

Hard to follow or not, strained “relationship” to sell and all, “Dark Journey” is a still a classic whose appeal reaches beyond the cult of “Vivien Leigh completists,” an espionage thriller that might have benefited from The Hitchcock Touch but manages to have its moments even without the Master of Suspense’s input.

Rating: approved

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Conrad Veidt, Joan Gardner, Anthony Bushell, Robert Newton, Philip Ray and Henry Oscar.

Credits: Directed by Victor Saville, scripted by Lajos Biró and Arthur Wimperis. A London Films production, on Roku, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:17

It’s looking like a HUGE Thanksgiving week-weekend at the box office, thanks to the fact that not one but THREE blockbusters targeting three different audiences are now in theaters.

Funny how that works. You don’t have to run away from a potential blockbuster, saving your potential blockbuster that would reach a family audience, or adults into epics. You run it out there, get as many screens as you can, and clean up anyway.

“Bragging rights” may — MAY — go to “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” — which Deadline.com is projecting to pull in north of $43 million *$29 million, Fri-Sun) over the Wed-Sunday holiday, its second weekend of release. No, the movie isn’t all that, the replacement stars are more adequate than serious upgrades and the story being told — the How Donald Sutherland Turned Evil saga — isn’t particularly interesting, not as its written and acted-out here. But that YA audience is all in for the violence aimed at the Future YAs of America.

Disney’s “Wish” is the latest sign that their story department and development process for animated projects is misfiring, that the House of Animated Mouse has lost its way. This should have run away with the weekend and just isn’t good enough to generate that sort of buzz.

But parents, desperate for something ANYthing that isn’t “Paw Patrol” or “Trolls” tripe, are showing up. It’s heading over $38 and may blow up bigger, depending on how Saturday and Sunday play out, $20 million over the Fri-Sun. stretch, per Deadline.. I’m guessing this leapfrogs the “Games” by Sunday. But we’ll see.

Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” is sucking audience away fans of LONG epics based on history from “Flowers of the Killer Moon.” Scott’s film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the petulant, callous egomaniac (Brits like Scott still have a bone to pick with Boney-parte), may clear $33 ($19 million, Fri-Sun) by Sunday night. Deadline says $29 is the low end of expectations.

It’s two and a half hours long, and if you liked it, you’ll want to sign up for Apple TV+ because Scott promises a 4 hour (Editing schmediting) cut there.

If you figured Phoenix is miscast in the part, you figured right.

“Trolls Band Together” is adding $18-19 million this 5-day weekend.

Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” is cruising towards $10 million. It’ll be safely in the black by Dec. 1.

Amazon/MGM’s class warfare creeper “Saltburn” is bombing. They didn’t preview that in much of the country, so cry me a river over their lousy $3 million five day take. I may try to get to that, or maybe I’ll just watch it fade away in week or two, because if the studio doesn’t care, why should anybody else?

“The Marvels” is still in the top ten, and “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is ending its theatrical run.

As always, I’ll be updating these figures as the weekend progresses.

Phylicia Rashad also stars in this dramedy, which Vertical landed (typically the distribute pictures larger studios have passed on) and which opens Dec. 8, streams Dec. 15.

Not a lot of pop or laughs or heart in this trailer. A teensy bit. But not a lot.

What Eddie Murphy has become, presented here without comment. Ahem.

Dec. 1, Amazon Prime Video.

Adam Sandler voices an aged lizard who wants to escape to the Everglades but finds himself dispensing life advice to fifth graders in the classroom where he’s one of the resident pet reptiles in “Leo,” an animated comedy that’s passably animated but generally unfunny.

The life lessons “Call me Leo (not Leonardo), that’s less ‘Ninja Turtley” passes on — often in song — include “You’re not that great” and “Don’t cry, crying’s for weaklings,” which is what passes for “against the grain” parenting these days.

A missing lesson in this film packed with alumni of “Saturday Night Live” and Sandler offspring is that success is about being born to or friends with somebody famous, which is a lot more important than whatever else you learn in fifth grade.

But since one of Sandler’s kids is the stand-out voice performer here, we won’t dwell on the cronyism/nepotism/tribalism that has informed much of career, outside of the odd break from character.

This Netflix production follows Leo and his pal/fifth grade “pet” partner Squirtle the Turtle (Bill Burr) after Leo hears a parent mention the life expectancy of his sort of lizard — 75 years.

Leo’s been in Fort Myers Elementary for 74 years and counting, and he’s facing his mortality, the fact that he never got to see the Everglades and the fact that despite decades in the classroom, he never learned Fort Myers is in Southwest Fla, on the coast, not “Central Florida,” as he says.

He blinks slowly and walks slowly and lives for the bugs fed to him or that cross his tongue’s kill radius in the terrarium he calls home. But now, as a no-nonsense, computer-eschewing, dream-killing “substitute” (Cecily Strong) teacher takes over from the pregnant and popular Mrs. Salinas (Allison Strong), Leo feels his time running out.

The teacher’s determination to teach these kids “discipline” and “responsibility” by getting one to take a classroom animal home each weekend gives Leo his chance. He’ll make a break for it. Then that first self-absorbed chatterbox (Sadie Sandler, on the money) takes him home, accidentally discovers he can talk, and he’s handing out life advice.

Maybe stop talking so much, “ask a question” in conversation and show an interest in somebody else for one. You know, “listen.”

Other kids face “common sense” advice about vanity, insecurity about their looks (being as hairy as dad), their divorcing parents, their practice of bullying, which isn’t making them popular, all sorts of things kids today face.

Even the eyebrow-raising pearls of wisdom are pretty tame. Alas, so are the one-liners, the comic situations and complications and the perils of the “real” Everglades.

The film, with three credited directors and three credited screenwriters, begins with promise as Leo and Squirtle instantly size-up kids’ as “types” on the first day of school — “parents going through divorce,” “first child” in a family (spoiled), born bully, born mean girl, “cheese doodle kid” and the like.

But those insights turn out to be the comic highlights of the picture, with “Mother of Godzilla!” par for the course among the punchlines, and the animation only occasionally crossing the line from static to slapshticky.

Sandler fans will find more to cling to here than I did, as I long ago lost all patience for his lazy brand of “moron” comedy packed with cronies and relatives. Sandler trying on a funny voice that isn’t funny, and then singing in it isn’t exactly “new.” What’s novel about it is how he’s lost the knack for inventing amusing, offbeat characters and funny things for them to say (he co-wrote the script) or sing.

Rating: PG, innuendo, bits of “rude humor”

Cast: The voices of Adam Sandler, Bill Burr, Cecily Strong, Allison Strong, Jason Alexander, assorted Sandler children and that Schneider fellow.

Credits: Directed by Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel and David Wachtenheim, scripted by Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler and Paul Sado. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Medical experiments that are revealed just as World War II is ending, with a tortured humans and “creatures” as their results.

You could call this a series, seeing as how this 1945 Korean Dec. 22 and Jan. 5.

Let’s label it a movie in two parts. It looks intriguing, and looks to be another way of Korea reminding the world what the Japanese did to the people there.

This 2024 series looks like yet another variation on a “galaxy far away” theme, sort of a “Guardians” and “Firefly” riff — without laughs.

Jude Law leads a cast of…kids?

Too old, too tall, too American, too introverted and mumbly to be a mesmirizing leader of men and commanding presence at court, perhaps your first thoughts on hearing about a new big screen “Napoleon” were “Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte? LOL.”

I know mine were. The new Ridley Scott movie didn’t really disabuse me of that prejudice, either.

As a screen subject, “Napoleon” foiled Stanley Kubrick and sorely challenged anybody else who took a shot at rendering the emperor/conqueror in a big screen epic.

He’s been played by Brando and Rod Steiger, Herbert Lom, Claude Rains, Tom Burke, Daniel Auteuil and Armand Assante among others. Few register.

Ian Holm got two cracks at making Bonaparte an object of fun, as a whimsically grumpy commander who loved people (dwarves) shorter than himself in “Time Bandits” and an even grumpier exile in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Scott’s magnum opus is a collection of red letter dates in Bonaparte’s rise and fall, a couple of brilliantly realized set-piece battles, and the big love story that is a part of the man’s myth.

We see his cold-bloodedness, his cruel calculus and flashes of ego.

But do we learn anything about the man who brought public education, The Napoleonic Code and measurement standardization to Europe, used science to govern, a dictator whose arrival promised to end European nobility and the class structure that benefited from monarchies and winner-take-all economies? Do we glimpse the potential greatness which prompted Beethoven to compose his “Eroica” symphony for the young commoner who promised to bring down the kings?

No. We get instead a bit of a pot-bellied slob, with Phoenix’s costumes somewhat less custom-fit than most of his co-stars. We get the petulance and the ego.

“You think you’re so great because you have BOATS,” he bitches about the British.

What we’re treated to is very much an Englishman’s idea of Napoleon, gauche and common and bloodthirsty and callous, two and a half hours of that. Scott has announced that the film will be over four hours long when it transitions to Apple TV+. Yay.