Classic Film Review: Seminal Cinema — The Exquisite “Ju Dou” (1990) is Restored

Posted on August 31, 2025 by Roger Moore

The “Fifth Generation” of alumni of China’s Beijing Film Academy first made their marks at home and abroad with two ’80s films — Chen Kaige’s “Yellow Earth”(1984) and Zhang Yimou’s “Red Sorghum” (1988). The color in their titles was a tell.

The hallmark style of the two leading lights of this “generation” was sumptuous production design underscored by striking Technicolor compositions — landscapes and interiors immaculately framed — with the deep, rich colors used as symbolism.

The still-repressive post-Maoist government wasn’t necessarily a fan of the “symbolism” part. Any time you see bright reds and oppressive, abusive older men in such films you can bet your bottom Yuan the filmmakers are making a statement on life in a totalitarian state. Getting such movies out of the country and into film festivals, let alone international cinemas, was difficult.

Yimou’s second landmark work, 1990’s “Ju Dou,” was the breakout film for this movement, that filmmaker and his muse and star, Gong Li. A film festival darling — I first saw it at the 1990 New York Film Festival — that would become an Oscar nominee, it was the hit that paved the way for “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Farewell, My Concubine,” “Hero,” “The Emperor and the Assassin” and the masterpiece of that generation of movie-makers, “House of Flying Daggers.”

“Ju Dou” is, on its surface, a simple love triangle, a Chinese melodrama with a hint of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” about it. But setting this story in a 1920s rural dye works, full of color and with just a handful of characters — an abusive older husband (Wei Li), the much younger wife (Gong Li) he “bought” to sire an heir and the nephew (Baotian Li) whom the old man took in and basically enslaved as his loyal, overworked servant and labor force — is our clue to dig deeper for its true meaning.

Downtrodden “nephew” Tianqing is instantly infatuated with Ju Dou, even gouging out peep holes to spy on her bathing. She picks up on this and tries to foil it, for a time. As he cannot help but notice her bruises and overhear the screams from her nights with her husband Jinshan, he doesn’t just lust for her. He fears for her.

She plays on this, eventually asking if Tianqing will “let him kill me?” As work progresses and fabrics are dyed in glorious golds and satin reds, the two give in to temptation. A baby is born, and it probably isn’t Jinshan’s.

And then the old man comes to harm and faces a paralyzed future, topped off by his bride taunting him with the news that his bloodline will die with him and that her son with his adopted nephew will inherit his business and family name.

Things turn even messier than that.

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Netflixable? Britain’s Best Join or are Pursued by “The Thursday Murder’s Club”

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Roger Moore

It’s not the silliest idea ever, taking “The Only Murders in the Building” and making the building Downton Abbey.

“The Thursday Murders Club” is a lighthearted bit of senior sleuthing that takes a prime cut of Britain’s best and most experienced screen actors and turns them loose on a collection of killings.

It’s a genre even older than Dame Agatha Christie. But now it’s “like a true crime podcast,” one character suggests. Because it is. Yes, Richard Osman’s first “Thursday” novel beat the Steve Martin/Martin Short/Selena Gomez streaming comedy to the punch by a year. But the success of one spills over to the other in a film version of “Thursday.”

Given Chris Columbus’s trademark “adequate” direction, but starring a parade of Oscar and BAFTA winners led by Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan, Naomie Ackie, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, it’s a minor delight, even if the screen sleuthing here leaves something to be desired.

Mirren, Kingsley and Brosnan play three “OAPs” (old age pensioners) who have found a grand way to pass the time in their posh retirement digs, the estate formerly known as Cooper’s Chase. They dig into cold cases and try to re-investigate, reason out and solve the murders.

A woman’s death in 1973 is the latest murder to earn the attentions of the retired psychiatrist, labor union leader and mysterious “international affairs” specialist (guess who plays what) meet just after the jigsaw puzzle club in one of the drawing rooms of the Downtonish mansion turned retirement home.

They need someone with more medical knowledge to pitch in. Why not the new resident/ex-nurse (Imrie)?

But the rumors that the co-owner of the place (Tennant) aims to close it and redevelop the land — including a cemetery — with high-end housing distracts them. When the mob-connected co-owner who resists this change (Geoff Bell) turns up dead, the club — led by the focused and canny Elizabeth (Mirren) — front-burners this mystery, as their very “to the end of our lives” housing contract and future depends on it.

The plot ensares a traffic cop (Ackie) whom the club finagales a promotion to Criminal Investigation Division to help the always-eating Detective Inspector (Daniel Mays of “Vera Drake” and “Fisherman’s Friends”) and folds in literal cemetery plots and long-on-the-lam gangsters (Richard E. Grant).

The cast includes the original Indiana Jones foil (Paul Freeman), one of the mainstays of Mike Leigh’s repertory company (Ruth Sheen) an ex James Bond and a Bond villain (Jonathan Pryce).

The japes, leading the cops around by the nose, play acting and playing up their turns as elderly fussbudgets — “Is it HOT in here?” “I’m a 76 year old woman. Of COURSE it’s hot!” — all lean into cute. Their director, who did “Home Alone” and the early Harry Potter pictures, knows all about cute.

So when Mirren’s Elizabeth dresses down for an outing, her mentally-slipping onetime writer husband (Pryce) blurts “You look just like the QUEEN.” Which she does. Because Mirren won an Oscar playing another “Elizabeth.”

The players are the reason to relish this bon bon, with Kingsley in fine fidget, Brosnan all Irish leftist bluster and Mirren giving a comic edge to a performance that harks back to her “Prime Suspect” past.

It isn’t Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” which is just as star studded but funnier, a chatty, podcast-dependent cliffhanger series. But if you like your mysteries tidied up in feature film form, “Thursday Murders Club” will do.

As with Dame Agatha’s Greatest Hits, are more “Thursday” books about these sleuths, so maybe they’ll give us more.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, Naomie Ackie, Daniel Mays, Ruth Sheen, Paul Freeman, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Geoff Bell, Jonathan Pryce, Richard E. Grant and David Tennant.

Credits: Directed by Chris Columbus, scripted by Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcoate, based on a novel by Richard Osman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:00

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Movie Review: A Junkie’s Daughters Conspire about “What We Hide”

Posted on August 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

“What We Hide” is an engaging but unsurprising melodrama about a broken family and one teen daughter’s desperate, extralegal efforts to salvage what’s left.

Their addict mother has died. And rather than “let them separate us,” teen Spider (Mckenna Grace) convinces 10-year-old Jessie (Jojo Regina) to help her stuff Mom in a box in the barn and keep Child Welfare, the sheriff, mom’s dealer and others in the dark and at bay.

Writer-director Dan Kay’s second feature (he did “Way Off Broadway” 25 years ago) doesn’t score any points on originality. Every element in this plot has been introduced to many similar stories and fully explored. But the players hold it together even as it passes by one familiar waypoint after another.

Way down south in rural America’s Addiction Belt (Plant City, Florida), Jayce has overdosed one time too many. Pragmatic Spider gets Jessie to help deal with the body. And none of that “Shouldn’t we SAY something?” over the corpse sentimentality, either. Spider has no time for it, and no use for sugar-coating what their mother put them through.

What she’s about to put them through will be a bigger test.

“I’ll die before I let anybody break us up,” Spider vows.

There’s an overbooked social worker (Tamara Austin) who makes unscheduled visits. Spider’s bestie (Malia Baker) is the daughter of Sheriff Ben (Jesse Williams).

And then there’s Reese (Dacre Montgomery), their mother’s sometime beau and regular supplier. He’s thuggish and cunning, so fooling him and keeping him at bay will be their biggest threat.

The sisters struggle to keep up appearances, hiding mom’s car, keeping her phone active even if they don’t answer calls. Spider’s been running the household for a while. She knows when the food assistance card is renewed and how much they have to spend. Not that she makes the most pragmatic decisions when it comes to junk food binges.

Spider takes inspiration from a book she’s reading at school — “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Isn’t that on DeSantis’ banned-books list?

And she tries to keep her distance from that cute 17 year-old market clerk Cody (Forrest Goodluck) and budding photographer at arm’s length.

“What We Hide” is waiting game cinema, because we know this house of cards cannot stand.

Grace, of “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is the anchor of this narrative. She takes a stock character and makes her real enough to invest in.

Regina (“Where the Crawdads Sing”) does a decent job of depicting a 10-year-old who’s going to have to grow up too fast. “Stranger Things” star Montgomery makes a fearsome villain and Goodluck keeps Cody clear of coming off as a creepy stalker.

But the story’s drug abuse subtext and profanity provide what little edge it manages. At this stage, it’s only mildly interesting to see how a young teen cooks, how she might budget their limited cash (a pawn shop isn’t much help) and fend off a drug dealer capable of pretty much anything.

Spider’s problem solving is teen-accurate, but a tad familiar and always too-convenient. She stumbles into a document forger, for instance.

And not naming the setting robs the picture of the edge calling out the rampant rural Florida drug problem (overdoses everywhere, a sheriff not much on prevention) that Kay depicts.

So “What We Hide” is no “Winter’s Bone. But this isn’t a bad effort at capturing how the drug crisis impacts its youngest victims. It’s simply an unsurprising one.

Rating: drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Mckenna Grace, Jojo Regina, Forrest Goodluck, Dacre Montgomery and Jesse Williams

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Kay. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:43

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Movie Review: No Sleep for the “Restless,” but What About Revenge?

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Restless” is a spare, reasonably taut thriller of the “Neighbor from Hell” subgenre, the sort of movie most any member of Western or Eastern Civilization can relate to.

Writer-director Jed Hart serves up a little suspense and a few surprises even as he never quite makes all of this that he could have.

Lucky for him Lyndsey Marshal’s here to win our empathy and our outrage.

Even when her character, rest home caregiver Nikki, is blundering in over her head with a situation she can easily escalate, but may not be able to escape or win any sense of satisfaction from, Marshal — of TV’s “Rome” (she was Cleopatra), “Hanna” and “League of Gentlemen” — immerses herself in sleep deprivation, the helplessness and a rising fury as a woman trying to cope with a loutish, noisy and bullying new neighbor in the duplex she used to split with her parents.

An empty-nester with a son at “uni” and a nursing home employer who keeps imposing on her, Nicola grasps for what few shreds of civility life in this downmarket, rough-edged subdivision affords her — meditation podcasts and classical music radio.

But her new neighbor (Aston McAuley) is given to all-night raves — loud music, coarse characters for friends, the works. Reasoning with him might work, for a while. But his unruly mates insult her and that sound system is just too tempting for the short-attention spanned and self-absorbed.

The police, in the UK as in the US, put all their efforts into an indifferent not-our-problem shrug.

“Take it up with the Council.”

And her neighbors, young and old, “don’t want to get involved.”

As matters spiral, things are certain to get out of hand. But how far will this go?

As the opening scene was Nikki heading off to the country with a load in the trunk and a shovel, and as Nikki’s week-long unraveling has revealed she has a cat, we think we know. But maybe not.

Writer-director Hart serves up a stock doofus parking enforcer (Barry Ward) who has crushed on middle-aged Nikki forever, a sister who never answers her phone to give Nikki advice and hooligan friends of that new neighbor, and other toughs who preceded this “Deano” and his substance-abusing blokes into their corner of suburban Jolly Olde.

Some are scripted to infuriate and intimidate, others to frustrate and foreshadow, in an under-developed way.

As someone who appreciates actors and actresses who commit, to the hilt, to even the indiest of indie films, I relished Marshal’s wrung-out turn as Nikki. If you’ve ever been sleep deprived for even a week, you’ll recognize the clumsiness and poor decision-making that is Nikki’s character arc from timid, polite and civil to something else.

How desperate do you have to be to basically come on to an unappealing admirer just to have a quiet place to sleep?

As someone who’s lived in dorms, apartments, marinas and long-term mortgage neighborhoods, and dealt with the biker who likes revving his Harley at 4:30 a.m., the farmer who’s moved to a subdivision and who figures butchering your shrubs and trees is doing to a favor, the party-every-night college kids and the like, I was right there with Nikki as she looks for solutions “the system” isn’t willing to provide.

Like you, I see her mistakes and how they contribute to the movie’s surprising but less-than-satisfying third act.

Sometimes, it’s not as simple as throwing a power breaker, shoveling up a belligerent old man’s massive mastiff massive poops on your sidewalk and flinging them against his door or “SWATTING” noisy, out-of-control jerks who don’t want cops knocking at their door for any reason.

Whatever lessons the movies try to deliver in “revenge” tales like this, escalations almost never pay off, no matter how impotent you feel at having your sleep and sanity assaulted. Sure, pouring powdered Quikrete into their drain pipes works. But for how long?

Some neighbors are just too dim to get Will Rogers’ maxim about freedom, rights and neighborliness and how it applies to maintaining a civil society or a community where people make an effort to be considerate and get along.

“Your right to swing your arms stops just short of my nose.”

Rating: TV 18+, violence, drugs, nudity, profanity

Cast: Lyndsey Marshal, Aston McAuley, Denzel Baidoo, Kate Robbins and Barry Ward.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jed Hart. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:31

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Classic Film Review: Hitchcock winds the “Ticking Clock” — “Sabotage”(1936)

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Roger Moore

Alfred Hitchcock polished his anecdote about how to become “The Master of Suspense” over the decades, refining his definition of “the ticking clock” thriller to the “bomb under the table” analogy he related for a TV interview very late in his career.

But Hitch figured this business of building unbearable tension early on. “Sabotage” became the textbook “ticking clock” thriller and the model for all that came after it way back in 1936.

A boy, dispatched to deliver film cans and a parcel, doesn’t realize there’s a bomb in the package. The audience knows the timer on the bomb is set for 1:45. The kid keeps getting delayed — by the friendly fruit merchant next door, by traffic, by a parade, hassled by the tram ticket collector. And the clock keeps ticking.

A monochromatic film both of its day and transcending that era in cinema, “Sabotage” is brisk, brief and ends rather abruptly. The romantic lead — not Hitchcock’s first choice — doesn’t bring much sizzle to the screen. And a couple of plot turns are old school meloddramatic.

But over 90 years later, that ticking time bomb sequence still has the power to alarm and even shock.

Hitchcock was on a roll by the mid-30s, already a “brand name” filmmaker, already doing his cameos (aptly enough, he’s glimpsed leaving a darkened cinema early on). However, his most prolific period would produce confusion in the canon.

His earlier 1936 film, based on a play that was inspired by the works of W. Somerset Maugham, was titled “Secret Agent.” “Sabotage” is based on Joseph Conrad’s oft-filmed novel “Secret Agent.” And in the most confusing addition to that “artist is someone who pounds the same nail over and over again” allegory, Hitchcock Americanized this plot and put it on the road across country in WWII for the similarly-titled “Saboteur,” the most delightful variation on that theme.

A foreigner (Oscar Homolka) runs a London cinema, a hard way to make ends meet in the middle of the Great Depression. He’s married a young American (Sylvia Sidney), who sells tickets, and taken in her much younger brother (Desmond Tester) in the bargain. Living behind the auditorium only saves them so much.

But Karl Verloc has a side gig. He’s taking money from a mysterious man whose overseas employer wants to strike “the fear of death” in the hearts of Londoners. The film opens as Verloc dumps sands into the works at a London power station, crashing the city into a blackout.

As the Brits laugh off this convenience, that act of sabotage plainly wasn’t serious enough. Another act is called for, this one widening the conspiracy. A bomb is to be set off during a Lord Mayor’s celebration at “the heart of the world,” Picadilly Circus.

Verloc must visit a bomb maker (William Dewhurst) and confer with other conspirators (Peter Bull plays one) if he expects this side hustle to finally pay off.

It’s just that the fruit-seller’s clerk next door (John Loder) is paying a lot of attention to him. And his wife. “There’s a mystery about me,” he teases after he’s stuck his nose in her business over refunds for tickets sold the night of the blackout. Mrs. Verloc is put out, and flattered by the attention.

That clerk in a white coat is actually Sgt. Ted Spencer of Scotland Yard. They’re keeping an eye on this menacing-looking movie-theater operator with the sinister name.

The people or foreign power pulling the strings are never identified. The script walks a tightrope between making them anarchists of novelist Conrad’s era or German or perhaps even Soviet puppetmasters.

Hitchcock demonstrates, early on, his grasp of what Hannah Arendt labeled “the banality of evil” when talking about ordinary Germans carrying out the Holocaust.

Bushy eyebrows and sketchy side-eyeing aside, Verloc is a little man, a cowardly cog in a machine who may protest participating in any act that will cause “loss of life.” But he does it.

He’s the fellow who entrusted the bomb to his wife’s teen sibling because the police are watching him too closely to “make the delivery” himself. His amorality is dissociative and narcissistic, prefiguring an American politician with heedless “burn it all down” to save himself proclivities.

Mrs. Verloc may be in the dark about everything her husband has going on, but we see the bombmaker’s family listening in as he discusses details of what he’s built and what it will be used for. That’s his side hustle. He runs a pet shop.

That celebrated “ticking clock” sequence is one of the most studied in all of cinema for a reason. The zooms in on the “parcel,” the masterful editing, the coded message and clockwork superimpositions, the syncopated score mimicking a clock’s ticking right down to the Jack Russell terrier he pets on that tram is all of a piece — building suspense, manipulating our fear of what might happen and to whom.

Generations of filmmakers, film scholars and film fans latched onto Hitchcock thanks to this and the many versions of such sequences the legendary filmmaker served up in the decades to come.

The 1930s “made” Hitchcock, sharpened his skills and established his reputation for tense thrillers with a dash of style, romance, edge and manipulations that could be obvious and sometimes downright fun.

“Secret Agent,” “Sabotage” and “The Lady Vanishes” weren’t Hitchcock’s very best work. But each of these key stepping stone hits set the table for future classics as this cinematic artist would identify the nails that he would, indeed, “pound” “over and over again” on the screen.

Rating: “Approved,” violence

Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oscar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder, Matthew Boulton, William Dewhurst and Peter Bull

Credits: Directed Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Charles Bennett, Ian Hay and Helen Simpson, based on a novel by Joseph Conrad. A Gaumont/British Picture Corp. release on Tubi, Plex, The Roku Channel, HDNet, etc.

Running time: 1:16

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Movie Review: “The Last Ronin” wanders Futuristic Russia looking for Bullets

Posted on August 25, 2025 by Roger Moore

“The Last Ronin” is a derivative, dull and exeptionally slow martial arts variation of the Hero Wanders the Wasteland quest that we’ve seen in scores of martial arts sagas, Westerns and sci-fi over the centuries.

A man of violence meets a girl and her “delivery” to “The Wall” or someplace beyond it becomes his quest.

This time, the wasteland is in a post-Putin Russia. Because it’s not like the Russians needed a translation of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” Vladimir Propp led the way and others were eager to join in boiling down the number of plots in all of fiction and folk tale tradition to just seven. Or maybe six.

Yuri Kolokolnikov has the title role, a guy who may not call himself a Ronin or even know that it means “wandering unemployed soldier/samurai.” He just dresses the part — all in black, samurai blade at the ready — walking the desert that’s all that remains of human civilization after climate change, famine and world war have turned the planet into Death Valley or something damned near like it.

The currency in this world of “The Laws of the Scorched Earth” is bullets. Very “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” But our Ronin is impractical. The only firearm he carries is a vintage Colt .45.

Russia may have spent almost all of its 7.62 mm bullets, all its tanks and a generation of its youth trying to conquer Ukraine. But nobody and I mean NOBODY is going to have :45 caliber rounds any within walking distance of this tale.

But the blonde girl (Diana Enakaeva) has bullets. She can pay him to get her to The Market and on to The Wall, beyond the reach of The Commune she escaped from.

They must contend with crossbow-armed hunters, Ninjas of assorted agendas, a cannibalistic cult that gets high on mushrooms before flying into a fury and so on.

“Runners” dressed up in “Star Wars” Sandpeople cosplay costumes carry communications through this hellscape.

There’s this French-speaking king with a crown of ammo sitting on a throne made of AK47s who has a need for this blonde teen.

Kolokolnikov has a past and a future in film. An imposing, bald Russian hulk who can handle fight choreography? Get him on the phone, William Morris! Nobody else here makes much of an impression. Static scene after static scene makes it hard for Ms. Enakaeva and others to hide their boredom.

The settings are striking but flatly shot and blandly color-corrected. Characters slow-walk through most every scene, and the fights are nothing to brag about.

The “universe” depicted here is “Russian” in ways faintly racist and not exactly wholeheartedly anti-fascist.

The reason one makes mention of the fact that there are only so many “plots” to choose from is that every film or play or novel or TV series is a variation on a timeworn tale. As we’ve all absorbed scores of versions of every “plot,” a review becomes a simple compare-and-contrast exercise.

“The Last Ronin” compares to a lot of films with the same basic story and a nearly identical setting. It’s inferior to pretty much all of them.

But hell, with a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tale titled “The Last Ronin” due out at Christmas, why not contract for the title and stream it and hope for the best? That fans will think it’s a leaked copy of the latest TMNT tale?

Rating: Unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Diana Enakaeva, Yuri Kolokolnikov,
Daniil Vorobyov, Robert Yusupov and Yerden Telemissov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Shishkin. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:55

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Netflixable? Turkish ex-con is an “Abandoned Man” until his Niece Comes Along

Posted on August 25, 2025 by Roger Moore

An embittered ex-convict finds new purpose in his life when he’s forced to care for his adoring and adorable pre-school niece in “Abandoned Man.”

This Around the World with Netflix melodrama is an Istanbul tale that never quite rises to the level of “weeper.”

Çagri Vila Lostuvali’s film, titled “Metruk Adam” in Turkish, traffics in cliches and traverses a well-worn “redemption story” path in a narrative in which we can’t help but believe the wrong character is “redeemed.”

Because Baran (Mert Ramazan Demir) has every right to be bitter. He was 14 when his drunken older father Fatih killed somebody with the family car. Baran’s dad insists the kid take the rap rather than “ruin your brother’s future.”

What the hell?

The kid grows up in the horrors of a Turkish prison. And our director and her screenwriters know the rep those instititutions have. They don’t need to have seen “Midnight Express.” Or “Airplane!”

Baran is released 15 years later and tries to give Fatih (Edip Tepeli) the brush off. But the guilt-ridden sibling, an engineer, married with a little girl, drops to his knees and begs.

It is little Lidya (Ada Erma) who seals the deal. She and her stuffed giraffe Baby are too cute to resist. Her Mom, Arzu (Burcu Cavrar), on the other hand, couldn’t be less welcoming. She apparently doesn’t know how Baran ended up in prison. She just knows the brother that she married has a drinking problem and that’s put the family in a bind.

Baran would rather be homeless than take their charity, and all of Fatih’s pleas fall on deaf ears.

“You can’t beg your way out of this one,” Baran mutters (in Turkish with subtitles, or dubbed).

His hope is to use the auto repair skills he learned in prison to open his own garage with fellow ex-con Esat (Rahimcan Kapkap). But the one they have their eye is already rented. Or is it? Ex-con Baran is naive to the con artists of the outside world and loses his cash.

And Esat, brother Fatih and Esat’s hardcase boss (Ercan Kesal) can’t or won’t stake him.

Homeless and unemployed, all Baran needs is for his drunken brother to crash the family car, kill his wife, put himself in a coma and leave Baran to take care of a pre-schooler.

One melodramatic trial after another faces our hero — beaten up on the job cleaning toilets at a nightclub, losing the chance at more than one rentable garage. The scripted responses to these trials can seem Pollyannaish and simplistic. The filmmaking is competent but never more than pedestrian.

A flashback shows the horrors of Baran and Esat’s early prison life and the reason our hero says “When you take the life of another, you carry their coffin.”

Only Lidya can soften the hard-hearted garage boss, and Baran, who takes her in even though he’s homeless and has to take liberties with other folks’ property to keep her.

“The right path is under the shadow of what’s wrong.”

But too many incidents and “tests” feel contrived, too many characters lean on the phrase “I’m begging you” too many times to count, and the whole enterprise barely rises above insipid as things turn cloying.

Our “Abandoned Man” is never moved to tears, and neither are we. And as for “redemption,” his dead-weight, sheltered and rehab avoiding brother is the natural candidate for that.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Mert Ramazan Demir, Ada Erma, Rahimcan Kapkap, Burcu Cavrar, Edip Tepeli and
Ercan Kesal

Credits: Directed by Çagri Vila Lostuvali, scripted by Murat Uyurkulak and Deniz Madanoglu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

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Movie Review: Saget’s Farewell, “Daniel’s Gotta Die”

Posted on August 24, 2025 by Roger Moore

Bob Saget’s last movie was mercifully slow making its way to its widest possible audience. The beloved “Full House” dad and adorably potty-mouthed stand-up comic died in 2022, in Orlando.

As bad luck would further have it, his last movie was titled “Daniel’s Gotta Die.” And it sucks.

This Canadian farce stars a bunch of sometimes amusing also-rans trapped in a “Knives Out” that doesn’t work. It’s yet another descendents-plot-violence-against-each-other-when-a-rich-relative-dies tale (“Greedy” featuring Kirk Douglas was another among many), with “the family” gathered in a beachside mansion to meet and mete out their fates.

The familiar faces here are The World’s Oldest Punk Rocker, Iggy Pop, as the dying-then-dead patriarch, character comic Mary Lynn Rajskub of “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Safety Not Guaranteed” and TV’s “24,” Jason Jones, aka “Mr. Samantha Bee” of TV’s “The Detour” and Saget, as the rich guy’s aide and “fixer.”

The star, the “Daniel” who’s “Gotta Die,” is Joel David Moore, best known for a recurring character on TV’s “Bones” and a face in the mostly-animated “Avatar” action franchise. The cruel truth is he lacks the presence to carry a picture, and the dully-written character he plays offers him no lifeline.

Daniel is an aspiring chef who is the only member of his family who stayed close to the rich father (Pop) that raised him. The others — Mia (Rajskub), Victor (Jones) and Jessica (Carly Chaikin) — were sent off to boarding school and remained estranged from the old man, if not estranged from his money.

Dad doesn’t want a deathbed reconciliation. He argues with Daniel, tells him “You couldn’t last a weekend with” his brutal siblings, and then makes a reunion of the lot of them a condition of his will.

Drug addict Victor, high finance power player Mia and ditzy “influencer” Jessica and Daniel will fly from Toronto to what looks like a Florida mansion to bond and “for the first time in your lives,” “work.”

As we’ve seen Mia throwing her Wall Street success weight around, dumping her busy work on her put-upon assistant (Varu Saranga), we’ve got another clue of the quality of this project. She’s “worked hard” to get where she is. But that’s conveniently tossed aside by a sloppy script that has their father envisioning them fending off iguanas as they chop coconuts — “real work.”

No dice. Carter (Saranga) gets that task.

Victor is dumped out of a car trunk when he arrives at the airport. Yeah, he’s deep in debt. Mia barks orders, Jessica live-streams and Daniel cheer-leads.

The bitter assistant Lawrence (Saget) has access to the safe and all these envelopes to hand out to one and all if they “don’t bail” out of a weekend in which they deal with the fact that Daniel is slated to get all the money and only his “generosity” to his siblings will earn them their share.

Let the plotting — poison, machete attacks, etc. — begin.

The plot “twists” are obvious.

Almost nothing plays as funny, not Daniel’s “positivity,” not his Black nurse girlfriend’s (Chantel Riley) cracks about “crazy-ass white people,” not Iggy’s ironic screen presence or Saget’s droll scheming.

Jones manages a few slapstick chuckles as the most desperate of the lot, the one consigned to do the dirty work for others.

“Daniel’s Gotta Die” is instantly forgettable. So if you want to remember Saget more fondly than his “final film,” scroll through Amazon Prime a bit deeper and pull up the filthy, dark and hilarious documentary “The Aristocrats.” It’s about the dirtiest joke comics have been telling each other, going back decades, and the supposedly squeaky clean master of that drawn-out, revolting and ironic anecdote about the most depraved “family act” you ever heard of.

Nobody told “The Aristocrats” joke better than Bob, who deserved to go out in a better movie that “Daniel’s Gotta Die.”

Cast: Joel David Moore, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Jason Jones, Carly Chaikin, Chantel Riley, Varu Saranga, Iggy Pop and Bob Saget

Credits: Directed by Jeremy LaLonde, scripted by Matthew Dressel. A Brainstorm Media film on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:31

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Documentary Review: Not just a band, but Prophets Warning of a Grim, Dumb American Future — “Devo”

Posted on August 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

Some kids dug the beat and found it “easy to dance to….” just so long as you knew The Robot.

The cool kids loved the performance art kitsch of it all, groups of five dressing up in yellow ponchos or garbage bags with flower pots on their heads at costume parties.

“Are we not MEN?”

And the smart kids? Maybe they got it. A year or two of college, that first exposure to “Dadaism,” taking a minute or two to ponder “In the beginning was the end,” they were “people that wanted to know why we were saying the things we were.”

And what “Devo,” “the Band that Fell to Earth” was saying — after “Listen up, you spuds” — was words of warning about a culture in decline, a populace dumbed down by reactionary politics and money-uber-alles media promoting gridlock blocking big solutions to big problems that were glaringly obvious by the late ’60s and early ’70s.

“We’re not cynical at all,” Gerald “Jerry” Casale might quip in a TV interview. “We just watch the news.”

The latest documentary from “Tiger King” director Chris Smith is a deep dive into Devo, the “de-evolution” prophets whose mechanical, quick and jerky electronic pop and dark and adorable music videos dominated the early MTV era.

Smith lets the band co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Casale expound on the philosophy behind the performance art of this most “visual” of New Wave bands — that humans are “mutant apes” descended from the apes who ate the brains of other apes and are thus more “devolved” than “evolved,” and doomed to dumb down as the limits of evolution become obvious.

“Devo” takes us back to 1970 Kent State University, where Mothersbaugh and Casale met and bonded just in time to live through the Vietnam War protests and Kent State Massacre carried out by the National Guard, sent there by Nixon-backing Ohio governor Jim Rhodes.

If you lived through that and didn’t figure out the country was “devolving,” you didn’t want to see it.

We follow the band’s birth and formation, track through intentionally off-putting and “punishing” early shows, and pick up on a series of unlikely “Big Breaks” — catching the attention of David Bowie, a record deal, a “Saturday Night Live” appearance, and then music fans “misinterpreting” the meaning of “Whip It,” causing the band to lean into the masturbation analogy, to hilarious video effect.

Mothersbaugh and especially Casale, both of whom enlisted siblings to join the cause/band, came off then and come off now as the Smartest Guys in the Room — witty, thoughtful artists looking for an outlet for their visual and philosophical ideas and finding it in a band.

They got there before Talking Heads. They made music videos and avant garde films before MTV ever existed.

And they spoke and speak in movie analogies — “Island of Lost Souls,” “Metropolis,” “Inherit the Wind.” Casale, billed as Gerald V. Casale, directed their music videos and “films” and branched out to do that for other bands from The Cars and Soundgarden to Rush, and even TV commercials.

All this attention to seriocomic philosophy, politics, an unlikely obscurity to success story and “film as a part of (their) visual aesthetic” points to the film’s only serious shortcoming.

As somebody who’s interviewed Mark Mothersbaugh about his extensive film scoring career — “The Lego Movie,” “Minecraft Movie,” back to “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tennenbaums” and “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” — I wanted to hear how these guys learned their instruments, created their “sound” and learned to play. So fast. So very fast.

But the laugh-out-loud appearances — not just performing music but “performing” interviews — more than compensate for missing “It used to be about the MUSIC, man.”

That makes “Devo” a delight, even if you were never into the band, even if you weren’t in on the joke.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity,

Cast: Mark Mothersbaugh, Jerry Casale, Robert Mothersbaugh, Bob Casale, Jim Mothersbaugh, Neil Young, Brian Eno and David Bowie.

Credits: Directed by Chris Smith. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

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Movie Review: Post WWI Germans learn there’s no recreating “Eden”

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Roger Moore

The setting is forbidding, the political parable heavy-handed and human nature “inevitable” in “Eden,” Ron Howard’s dip into real history for a sociology lesson that can apply to today.

It’s an all-star rendering of a true story of Germans who tried to experience a new way to live on a tropical island — Floreana in the  Galápagos Archipelago — during the Great Depression.

Despite having “It” girls Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney and Vanessa Kirby in the cast with Jude Law and Daniel Brühl, the Oscar-winning Howard found himself with a difficult-to-market survival tale, a movie possibly tainted by its reception at a Toronto Film Festival premiere, one that virtually no one wanted to distribute.

But the picture reaching theaters is a solid yarn, a well-acted and suspenseful thriller that covers well-worn “Lord of the Flies” ground about ugly features of human psychology that show up when “society” doesn’t smooth out the rough spots.

After the horrors of World War I, a Spanish Flu pandemic and with the Great Depression finishing off the Roaring Twenties, the philosphy-obsessed German physician Friedrich Ritter (Law) and his life partner, Dore Strauch (Kirby) set off to uninhabited Floreana Island to live simply and escape from society to a place where the Nietzsche-adoring Ritter could formulate a “new” philosophy that could save humanity from the doom he saw awaiting it.

He’s German. He’s seen what happened there and what’s brewing in the poisonous politics of the present. And given the second World War we all know is coming, he wasn’t wrong.

He sends letters talking up his philosophy and their contemplative vegetarian lives there which get published in newspapers and create an allure in “a world that’s gone crazy.” Maybe one can “get away from it all.” But whatever the purpose of his letters, he draws fans. “Eden” is about what happens when a family of them move to join them on the semi-arid volcanic rock they’re living on.

Heinz Wittmer (Brühl) is, Ritter decides, “a man broken by the war.” Scarred, widowed and recently remarried, Wittmer quit a civil service job, sold most of their possessions and brought young bride Margret (Sweeney), his tubercular teen son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) and their dog, along with supplies and tools, to live on the island near their idol.

Grumpy Ritter, resenting the distraction, directs them to one of the two tiny springs on Floreana, encourages them to set up housekeeping there and waits for them to fail.

“Life here is gruesome,” he warns them as he smirks to Dore, whom he’s claimed to “cure” of her multiple sclerosis in his letters. “Failure is inevitable!” As inevitable as the coming cataclysm back home, he figures.

But while the Wittmers may not be intellectuals, conjuring up a philosophy that will “save” the human race, they are prototypical pragmatists. With Harry getting some of his strength back in the hot, dry climate, Heinz’s muscle and Margret’s stoic practicality, they set up house and home and garden, tame a wild cow (left behind, like the wild pigs, wild dogs and Dore’s “pet” donkey, by passing sailors over the years) and do all this in a fraction of the time that the distracted intelligentsia managed it.

Ritter is barely adjusting to the fact that their failiure isn’t “inevitable” and that they may not take his “I’m no longer a DOCTOR” barks seriously when Margret gets pregnant when a boatload of other fans show up.

Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (de Armas) is a flamboyant bon vivant with grandiose dreams of a “Hacienda Paradiso,” “the world’s most exclusive resort hotel,” which she will build on this “Eden” that the exaggerating doctor described in his published letters.

She’s got a South American “engineer” (Ignacio Gasparin) to help her start construction, and two lovers/helpmates (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace) to provide the well-digging, foundation-laying muscle.

Fat chance of that. They’ve been dropped off with a vast array of her luggage, lots of alcohol and canned goods, tents and a Victrola. But the good doctor pitched this place as a perfect setting for the “grandiose.” Maybe they’ll fit right in.

The baroness is arrogant, privileged, rude and manipulative. And those aides and “bodyguards?” We and the locals notice they’re wearing sidearms.

Let the “Lords” start lording over the “flies” and let’s see where this takes us.

This true story, complete with scandal, violence and political and social allegories built in, has been a part of popular culture — books, articles — in the decades since it happened. It could have inspired such film narratives as “Swept Away,” and it was the subject of a broadly-distributed 2013 documentary, “The Galapagos Affair.”

Howard and screenwriter Noah Pink (“Tetris”) set up a simplistic dynamic made for conflict, and let it play out accordingly. Stealing food and trying to set rivals against each other in a forbidding place with little survivable margin for error ensures that there will be blood. But whose?

The script and Howard, pursuing one last “dream project,” attracted a stellar cast and they do not disappoint. Law gives a fanatical edge to his dreamer. Kirby’s flintiness is channeled into an embittered, brilliant beauty, de Armas vamps and schemes and has never been more hateful and Brühl perfectly captures a pacifistic Everyman faced with neighbors who could cripple his family’s odds for survival.

And while this isn’t the movie that “made” Sweeney’s big screen career, it is her most impressive performance outside of TV’s “Euphoria.” She embodies the shrinking violet “hausfrau” who is no competition for the more vivacious, sexy and cunning other women on the island. Sweeney lets us see Margret’s pragmatism in her realization that everyone needs to get along. But while she may be steely enough to face childbirth amidst a wild dog attack (Whoa) alone, she is slow to figure out her trust in the doctor, Dore or the baroness is misguided.

Margret and to a lesser degree Heinz embody one message in all of this, that defaulting to kindness and mediating conflict is the way society should function. But the other lesson for life today here is the harder one to swallow.

There is no escaping fascism and the cruel creeps who embrace it. The utopian doctor may dream of “true democracy” inspired by a new philosophy. But the way of human civilization is “Democracy, fascism and then war,” he preaches. “It is INEVITABLE!”

That World War they all lived through wasn’t “humanity at its worst.” It was “humanity at its truest.”

“Eden” isn’t the subtlest allegory about life in troubled times, but Howard rarely makes a bad film and he hasn’t here. From its eyes-averting grimness to its eye-rolling obviousness and “inevitability, “Eden” is a parable that plays.

And whatever the box office prospects, nobody in this cast should run away from this resume credit. There isn’t a false note among them.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas,
Daniel Brühl, Felix Kammerer, Ignacio Gasparin, Toby Wallace, Jonathan Tittel and Vanessa Kirby.

Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, scripted by Noah Pink. A Vertical release.

Running time: 2″09

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