For film buffs, the short and acidic 1943 thriller “Journey Into Fear” is more fun for the argument it sets up than the 68 minutes presented on the screen.
Orson Welles helped script it, took a beefy supporting role — as a head of pre-WWII Turkish intelligence — put many of his repertory company in it, including his then-girlfriend, the exotic Dolores del Rio, and thought of directing it at one point.
On the radio or on the screen, the man loved thriller novelist Eric Ambler.
But journeyman director Norman Foster, known for “Mr. Moto” serials and not a lot else, came on to run the set and made the trains run on time for RKO’s “wunderkind.” The result is a sort of dry run for Carol Reed’s later “The Third Man,” an atmospheric European mystery built around Joseph Cotten, as an American hounded by the corruption and intrigues of the Old World, with Welles in a scene-devouring supporting role.
Seeing “Fear” again recently, the academic consensus arrived at in recent years — that Welles directed or “suggested” direction for the scenes he was in, and didn’t take much interest in the rest — seems the generous way to look at it.
He was an imposing performer, and several films he appeared in give the sense that he’s taken over behind the camera as well, at least for a bit. Here, his booming baritone and height so tower over his scenes that “Journey” becomes a film about Col. Haki in the opening, and the finale.
But this story of a ballistics expert (Cotten) menaced and chased across the Eastern Mediterranean, tempted (sort of) by a femme fatale (del Rio), is least interesting when it is literally at sea — the middle acts. The plot is a trifle confusing, and probably was more so before studio mandated cuts and adding a narration.
Col. Haki’s presence livens up the opening, and the murderous finale is like a Welles version of Reed’s later “Third Man” chases and suspense — shadows, rain, a killer sidling along a balcony after an in-over-his-head hero, Howard Graham (Cotten).
“Ah, you have this advantage over the soldier, Mr. Graham,” Welles’ Haki growls. “You can run away without being a coward.”
Welles knew the strengths of his Mercury company, and parked Ruth Warrick and Agnes Moorhead in decent parts and gave his pint-sized dynamo Everett Sloane a weasel’s presence in the intrigues.
“You might take a shine to Josette! After all, this little girl is very stupid. Of course Josette is stupid too, but she has it!”
“Journey Into Fear” has experienced something of a revival among Welles fans, thanks to a restored (longer, no voice-over narration) “European cut” that runs 76 minutes. It’s a shame most classic film TV distributors haven’t replaced their versions with the Museum of Modern Art cut.
Watching it again recently, I found its interest lies in Welles the performer, much like his turn in Huston’s “Moby Dick,” a film worth seeing for “the good parts,” those being Welles as Col. Haki, and flashes of the leading man Joseph Cotten quickly became after its release.
MPAA Rating: “approved”
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorhead and Orson Welles.
Credits: Directed by Norman Foster (and Orson Welles). Script by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, based on the Eric Ambler novel. An RKO release.
Few movies grab the lonely, lost and timeless suck of freshman year at college as well as “Shithouse,” the debut feature of writer, director and co-star Cooper Raiff.
It’s a sweet, sensitive and amusing run through what being a freshman a long way from home has always been like and to a large degree remains like in the eternal college experience. I couldn’t get over how “Whoa, it was JUST like that” it was, and kids, I was in college before John Hughes was done telling everybody what high school could be like.
Alex (Raiff) is a nice 19 year-old, a loner-by-default, entirely too nurturing and human to ever wear the label “INCEL,” even by accident.
Maggie (Dylan Gelula of TV’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”) is resident advisor in his dorm at a small, unnamed Los Angeles college.
He cries on the phone with his cool, cussing mom (Amy Landecker, warm and wonderful). Alex is also the sort who, when he fellow freshman roomie Sam (Logan Miller of “Before I Fall” and “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) gets drunk — again — tries to help him to the bathroom, limit his vomit to a trash can and always gets cussed out for it.
She’s just a sophomore, not that much older — but wiser, and wholly invested in the whole college hook-up scene.
They know each other from the dorm and stumble into each other at a party Sam has let Alex tag along to, at a frat home everybody calls “the Shithouse.” She doesn’t see him thoughtfully help another drunk into the bathroom ahead of them, but before the night is done, they’ll be together — but not in the ways we expect. And we wonder if they’ll even stay on speaking terms for the entire weekend.
Dude has NO game. Girl has NO luck. Freshman boys aren’t exactly the world’s most generous or accomplished lovers, and Maggie gets a reminder of that a couple of times before the night is through.
The first funny moment? She throws “wanna hang out” and “in my room” at him hours after that party.
“Do you even know my NAME?”
Takes a while to recover from that, but she gets a kick out of offering sage counsel to Mr. “I have no friends.”
“College should be the most selfish time of your life,” she advises, and “If you keep apologizing, THEN you’ll be sorry.”
Their “random” evening includes coming to terms with the fact that her pet turtle’s died and stumbling into a late-night drunken pick-up softball game, where he fast-pitches one right into Maggie’s thigh.
“I have literally never been so sorryin my life”
And then, things take a turn.
One “tell” in this indie dramedy is the fact that the writer-director “star” gives the leading lady most of the best lines. Smart.
There’s a little slapstick, a little drama, a little judging, a few good (not great) lines and a few instances of bad sex in this “Before Sunrise.” It’s occasionally brittle but cute, and more random than “deep.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“On airplanes I do.”
The arc of the story is log but narrow. And its message — that we don’t finish college the same person that we were when we began — is one every college kid should hear and appreciate.
Gelula, a veteran child actress able to summon immature confusion and the sense that Maggie doesn’t have the answers she thinks she does at 19, is terrific. Miller’s Sam is gregarious, clueless and starts out a jerk, but comes to appreciate his computer-chosen roommate’s supportive qualities, suggesting his “jerk” is more a product of alcohol abuse. Yes, he’s an amusing drunk.
And Raiff is a skinny, sensitive cipher, more at home with the emotional moments than the silly ones. The crying is a bit much, and he is playing a “type,” but he holds his own.
He doesn’t reinvent the genre, dazzle with his ear for dialogue or show himself a master technician behind the camera.
But what he does show us is sound judgement and generosity. He cast well and had the good sense to let the more experienced players have the best lines and moments to shine. Whatever his acting future holds, I could certainly see him getting his stories on the screen as a writer-director, even if he isn’t his own leading man, even if he isn’t reliving college experiences — the precious to the cringe-worthy, every time out.
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual content and drug/alcohol use
Cast: Cooper Raiff, Dylan Gelula, Amy Landecker and Logan Miller
Credits: Written and directed by Cooper Raiff. An IFC release.
“Yucatán” is a colorful, cute Spanish con artist comedy set on a cruise ship. But like even the most entertaining cruise vacations, it is stuffed with long, dull passages in between destinations.
Overly complex, and layered with musical production numbers that pad its length, its effect is not unlike devoting too much time to the buffet. “Bloated” comes to mind.
Roberto Clayderman (Rodrigo De la Serna) is the silky-smooth — almost oily lounge — pianist and MC for the entertainment on board the Sovereign, a liner based in Barcelona. He and his lady love, the singer Veronica (Stephanie Cayo) have it pretty good, mostly because he’s enlisted a big chunk of the crew in his schemes to rook the wealthier guests out of cash via a variety of hustles.
Veronica’s in on it, with a role to play in their elaborate “wholesale diamonds” scam, staged at their first port-of-call, Casablanca.
But there’s another hustler on board for this trip. Lucas (Luis Tosar) has broken the covenant — “I work the Atlantic, you stick to the Mediterranean”). He’s snuck on board, play-acting worry and grief, swapping luggage, and busting in on a stage show for a little ukulele crooning.
The movie is about their trip, to Casablanca, Tenerife, to Recife, Brazil and ending in…you guessed it, “Yucatán.”
Roberto will compete with Lucas for Veronica, each trying to foil the other’s con jobs along the way, both of them conspiring — separately — to separate the elderly baker (Joan Pera) from his hovering, gullible and greedy family, and him from his money.
Antonio the baker just won the Spanish lottery.
Co-writer/director Daniel Monzón (“The Biggest Robbery Never Told”) has conjured up a comedy of lush musical production numbers and wacky, over-the-top hustles. These two crooks seem capable of most everything — even tossing somebody overboard (not fatally) when the need arises.
The situations, threats and cons can be amusing. Sometimes. But the dialogue? Not so much.
A couple of helpless tourists fear public displays of sexuality in Casablanca — “Do you want them to STONE us?” That’s it. That’s the sole funny line. Yeah.
The picture never has much comic edge, and goes soft altogether in the later acts.
The Argentine De la Cerna (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) gets the dapper and devilish thing right, and the rough-hewn Tosar (“To Steal from a Thief”) suggests menace far beyond anything his character is actually capable of. Well, hijacking a tour bus on Tenerife is pretty “out there.”
Nobody really charms us, the amusing bits aren’t THAT amusing (homophobic gags and lines), only the Big Cons, the Long Game and the Longer Game laid out here have any hope of letting “Yucatán” leave you with a smile.
The cleverest thing about the laugh-every-two-minutes comedy “John Bronco” is that nobody involved tried to stretch this extended sketch of an idea into feature film length.
It’s just 38 minutes of everybody’s favorite vice principal, Walton Goggins, he-man drawling, preening and cussing through a mockumentary about a rodeo cowboy and spokesmodel so butch Ford named the Bronco after him.
Goggins (TV’s “Justified”) is the titular character, and if you learn one thing from John Bronco’s story, it’s the definition of “aptronym.”
Tim Meadows, sporting a cowboy hat and a befuddled look, plays Bronco’s manager, comparing his client’s overly-apt surname to “Jude Law, the judge” or “Orlando Bloom, the florist” or “Brad Pitt, the peach pie guy.”
We’re treated to the moment, a live interview after Bronco has test-driven this unnamed prototype Ford “four wheel drive sportscar” to victory at a Baja road rally, where Bronco goes all “just a country boy in dirty boots, just bustin’ his ass to make a livin'” thing and wins America’s heart.
His first catch phrase? What every good ol’boy wants after a big moment. “Eat some fudge!”
“John Bronco” charts this good ol’boy’s rise — Studio 54 with Sly and uh, David Keith, sitting down with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” going “diva,” and his sudden disappearance.
His biggest celebrity girlfriend? Bo Derek.
“If I’d known he was going to disappear, I never would’ve tried to kill him!”
His most envious celeb pitchmen competitors? Those would be Kareem Abdul Jabbar (goofing on his Nestle’s Crunch commercials of the ’70s) and Fed Ex motormouth John Moschitta Jr.
The whole thing plays like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch-film riff on “Ford v. Ferrari,” supersized and sprinkled with profanity, Goggins modeling assorted hats and boots and cut-off jeans so short they’d make Jessica Simpson blush.
Name-dropping, bad Lee Iaccoca impressions, a worse Tom Brokaw one, an O.J. gag and nostalgia for a beloved off-road vehicle that was never going to be a Jeep, but with the right pitch-man, came close.
“Buy a Bronco, cuz Daddy wants a pony, too!”
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Walton Goggins, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Bo Derek, Tim Meadows, narrated by Dennis Quaid.
Credits: Directed by Jake Szymanski, story by Marc Gilbar. A Hulu release.
Actor turned director Justin Baldoni, best known for TV’s “Jane the Virgin,” has staked out a unique corner of filmdom as his behind-the-camera specialty.
Dude makes weepers. “Five Feet Apart” on the big screen, the doc- series “My Last Days,” and now “Clouds” — Baldoni’s the guy Hollywood turns to when teens are terminal.
“Clouds” is about the Minnesota kid who wrote and recorded a song about being down in the dumps “in this dark and lonely hole,” lamenting that he’ll “never get my chance,” but celebrating that special someone “there with a rope” to pull him out of his funk.
Zach Sobiech and his best friend recorded the song eight years ago, posted it on Youtube, and hundreds of millions of downloads later, he’s no longer with us, but the song is.
The movie is a messy, manipulative affair — about Zach (Fin Argus of TV’s “Total Eclipse”), his BFF Sammy (Disney singer/starlet Sabrina Carpenter of “Girl Meets World”), their songwriting and his osteosarcoma.
That’s the cancer that won’t go away, the one that twenty chemotherapy cycles can’t defeat, which happens in the first act.
Zach’s the chatty, bald kid at Stillwater High, thoughtful, always quick to joke about his illness, ready with a fill-in vamp at the school talent show (“I’m Sexy and I Know It”) when his singing buddy Sammy (Carpenter) gets stage fright.
His three siblings and his parents (Neve Campbell, Tom Everett Scott) try to cope, to wearily tamp down the grief that comes naturally after a struggle that’s drained them all.
“None of us are really promised tomorrow,” Mom offers, “we just sort of assume it.”
That girl (Madison Iseman) Zach’s sweet on at school, the one he had to stand up on their first date because he couldn’t breathe?
“I’m terminal.”
That teacher (Lil Rel Howery) who takes a special interest and has been guiding Zach’s class through their college admissions’ essays, reminding them they’ve got “One life to live, what’re you going to do with it?”
“I’m off chemo.”
“Is it because it worked, or…”
“Or.”
These scenes are touchingly played, with Iseman (“Jumanji”) just breaking your heart with the simple gesture of acting on one’s first instinct — a tearful hug.
The songs are sweetly pleasant folk-rock of the Jason Mraz (“I’m Yours”) variety, whose concert the kids go to early on. There’s also a smattering of Sam Cooke Gospel in the score.
But when I say “messy” and “manipulative,” I’m talking about things that take away from the story’s obvious connection to the heartstrings and the cast’s engagement with that.
The Catholic family tries for Mom’s idea of a Hail Mary — a trip to Lourdes, an immersion in the allegedly blessed “healing” waters.
Arguments erupt out of nowhere. One minute, Zach and Amy are fantasizing about having children together, the next he’s shoving her away. He starts fights over dinner — “Can you NOT look at me that way?”
That’s not unrealistic. Life isn’t always a neatly categorized Kubler-Ross “Five Stages of Grief (death and dying).” Parents try to find uplifting distractions for dying kids, the victim himself is unsure of what to do, to feel, grasping at and lashing out.
When the stakes are terminal, you’re trying to get *bucket list events in or to “leave a mark,” and that’s understandable.
But the film meanders between melodramatic meltdowns and coughing fits, dawdling before it finally gets around to The Song.
And that tune, dominating the third act, leads to every tiresome “Youtube hit” cliche, giving a film that lumbers along one last place to just drag.
Yes, the online success narrative really happened this time. But even the “Your song’s on the radio!” homage to “That Thing You Do” (Tom Everett Scott’s big break) plays flat and deflated here.
Efforts to give the narrative lighter moments feel as artificial and forced as Zach’s blow-ups.
The tears in “Clouds” are built in. But all this manipulation feels excessive, unnecessary padding for a story that needed a vigorous trimming to break your heart and uplift you as it does.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language
Cast: Fin Argus, Sabrina Carpenter, Madison Iseman, Lil Rel Howery, Neve Campbell and Tom Everett Scott
Credits: Directed by Justin Baldoni, script by Kara Holden, based on the book by Laura Sobiech. A Disney+ release.
If you’re missing “The Good Lord Bird” on Showtime, you’re missing one of the epic TV events of the fall.
Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard’s seven episode take on James McBride’s picaresque novel about the run-up to the Civil War, feels fresh and topical, furious, funny and crazed, a stunningly-detailed recreation of a divided America and the colorful, charismatic figures who brought “the slavery issue” to a head.
Hawke takes the lead role of mad prophet Abolitionist John Brown in a story narrated by another of those unsophisticated sages immersed in the passing parade of history, a little “Forrest Gump” and a lot more “Little Big Man.”
Our narrator is the young slave Brown frees, Henry — or Henrietta as Brown sees “her” — played by newcomer Joshua Caleb Johnson.
“America will never have peace until we have dealt with slavery,” the boy dressed as a girl hears “the Captain” or “The Old Man” say.
From the minute Brown gets Henry’s father killed in the Free Staters vs. Red Shirt slavers of “Bleeding Kansas,” the kid gets an up close eyeful of Brown’s commitment, fanaticism and violence, and a taste of his utter incompetence in military matters.
“The Lord puts forth his hand and touches AAaallll evil,” Hawke’s Brown thunders, “and KILLS it!”
By 1858, Brown has come to the conclusion that the time is right to “free the slaves” with blood. To make the slavers “eat lead, grape and powder.”
The boy Brown nicknames “Little Onion,” mistaking him a teen girl sees. As “lyin’ come natural to all Negroes in slave times,” Henrietta goes along with it.
Henrietta witnesses mayhem in Kansas, hiding at a brothel with a prosperous prostitute (Natasha Marc), meeting future Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (Wyatt Russell), and travels with Brown to Rochester to hear and learn at the feet of Frederick Douglas (Daveed Diggs of “Hamilton”), marveling at the great orator’s idealism, intelligence (too smart and sane to “join” Brown in the field), and quasi-polygamous home living arrangements.
There’s Harriet Tubman (Zainab Jah) in Canada, the “General” of the Underground Railroad, endorsing Brown’s final mad gamble.
At every step of the way, the child narrator listens to what confidantes like Bob (Hubert Point-Du Jour) say about Brown and his tendency to “pray” rather than thoughtfully command, to “plan” based on an idealized vision of “The Negro slave” eager to join his planned war to end slavery.
“We ride East while the harlot of slavery sleeps,” he commands. “The Old Man’s nuttier’n a squirrel turd,” mutters Bob.
The violent, chaotic early episodes show the quarrelsome collaboration of Brown and his sons (Ellar Coltrane of “Boyhood” reunites with Hawke), debating theology and strategy with a fanatic who is sure The Lord is on his side and thus not likely to die before his work is done.
Incompetent “battles” are joined, mostly lost, but Brown never fails to look the part in that famous mural, “Tragic Prelude” — wild-eyed, single-minded, terrifying.
Henrietta learns to read, and grapples with the patronizing nature of the original “white savior” figure to black people, standing up for himself even if he’s still hiding behind a dress.
The cast includes Orlando Jones, David Morse, Keith David and Steve Zahn in chewy, single episode supporting roles, and directors from Kevin Hooks (“Passenger 57”) and Albert Hughes (“The Book of Eli”) to Haifaa Al-Mansour (“Mary Shelley”) give the episodes authentic action and drive, or closely-observed studies of the circuitous, cautious path slaves had to navigate just to survive a system bent on working them to death or killing them for straying.
Hawke and Diggs are the standouts in the cast, with the former hitting home runs every time he takes on a project these days and Diggs fast translating his stage stardom onto screen leading man charisma.
The performances, the production’s gritty authenticity and the high stakes struggle mixed with droll observations about the committed but flawed people engaged in it makes “The Good Lord Bird” the TV event of the fall, and one of the best limited series of the year.
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Joshua Caleb Johnson, Daveed Diggs, Hubert Point-Du Jour, Natasha Marc, Keith David, David Morse, Orlando Jones and Steve Zahn.
Credits: Created by Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard, based on the James McBride novel. A Showtime release.
So, what can we learn about Malaysia from today’s “Around the World with Netflix” offering, the action comedy “All Because of You?”
For an Islamic country with laws against homosexuality, their cinema isn’t above making sissy jokes.
That part of the world’s passion for exceptional service is expressed every time the effeminate manager (Namron) of the Bayu Bay uses his catchphrase in English.
“FIVE star!”
American wrestling has its fans there.
“Can you smerr what de Rock ees cookink!”
And the fight choreography isn’t a strong suit, despite being close to the world’s great martial arts cinema in Thailand, Hong Kong, etc. I’ve never seen so many obvious “stage punches” in my life. At one point, the filmmakers resort to animation to cover up this problem, the ultimate “We’ll fix it in post (production)” solution.
The first two acts of this miss-or-hit comedy set up the romance that isn’t coming off. Bellman Aiman (Hairul Azreen, a convincing lump) is clueless at all the attention his gets from longtime “friend” Jane, the chef (Janna Nick).
Aiman and the rest of the staff fret over the boss’s “five STAR” edict, struggle to master English to accommodate their clientele, but flirt shamelessly with the well-heeled and often gorgeous guests. Those hot young “influencers” led by Sofia (Sophia Albarakbah) are no exception.
Still, it’s the only place the popular film star Jasmine and super rich Westerner Tengku Iksander (Josiah Hogan) and his vast army of bodyguards would stay.
The film takes an hour to set up what we can see coming twenty minutes in. Some rich guest is going to attract the wrong kind of attention. Somebody is going to try something violent.
The last third of the movie has its share of bullet-riddled mayhem, never daring to show blood. But as the hapless, goofy staff tries to rally and fight back, the villains keep breaking off and saying “I got this” at each new “threat” — villains who stop using their guns to end “fights.”
Odd, that. That’s how villains become inmates.
The violence and comedy don’t blend as smoothly as you’d like. Shrieking — sometimes in Malay, sometimes in English — “Oh my God, he’s DEAD. He made COFFEE for me yesterday!” doesn’t make us forget we just saw somebody gunned down.
The language barrier jokes extend even to the lines people who have “mastered” English get wrong. It’s not all “Yes, I eat you” when somebody wants to say “Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.” But close.
I cackled at some of the action beats, the way Jane wails like a police siren when she’s grabbed, bits of slapstick here and there.
They make good use of a lovely location, and there’s a polish to the production that the fights lack. It’s a film very much on a par with the slickest international cinema made in the genre.
If “All Because of You” wasn’t so obvious and corny, if the acting was on a higher plane, if it had better fights and bigger laughs, it might have come off.
She was the wittiest of professional contrarians, breathlessly passionate about each new love, venomously vituperative about each offense to her cinematic sensibilities.
Pauline Kael was film criticism’s original “hanging judge,” the critic’s critic in a pre-Internet age when there were fewer movies and far, far fewer people reviewing them, a pioneering woman in a mostly-man’s world who stood out, set the tone and influenced generations of reviewers and filmmakers, for good and ill.
“What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” is a mostly-flattering remembrance of the long-time New Yorker critic who reigned — underpaid and only in print six months out of the year — over decades of our experiences and memories of movies, twenty-four years in all.
With the upcoming David Fincher film “Mank,” about the less-heralded screenwriter of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” coming out, now is a good time to revisit Kael’s take on that film, her infamous “Raising Kane” essay which wrote Herman J. Mankiewicz back into cinema history, and her influence over criticism and the culture she thrived in.
“What She Said” is now on Film Movement+. And although it glosses over “Raising Kane,” which Welles friend Peter Bogdanovich called a 1971 “attempt to assassinate Orson,” and neglects to mention how further scholarship proved Kael wrong in most important regards of “authorship,” it’s a marvelous memory of the writer famous for her New Yorker work, for 13 books of essays and reviews, who polished her art doing free reviews for public radio, “performing” her writing and teaching herself to “make my sentences breathe.”
Even if you’d seen the movie and didn’t agree with her, her review could and can still make you feel “you’re seeing (the film) for the first time,” music and culture critic Greil Marcus says.
Even if you were sure of your argument, “the thing that made you mad,” Quentin Tarantino says, was her insight into something so obvious that you’d missed which “ruined the movie for you.”
Being a magazine critic, publishing after newspaper and TV reviewers had weighed in on a film, she set herself up as that ever-against-the-grain contrary voice. “Bonnie & Clyde” was widely panned, but she called it “the most excitingly American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate’…The audience is alive to it.”
“Last Tango” she raved about, “Hiroshima Mon Amour” she ridiculed, “2001” she panned. She hated Kubrick, “a strict and exacting German professor,” and others felt her wrath, first film to last.
She championed Spielberg and Lynch, Altman and Demme and De Palma, Coppola and Scorsese, and courted acolytes — “Paulettes” — critics who would amplify the echo of her influence.
Her reviews were given to hyperbole, pro or con, filled with personal anecdotes and memories from what original “Paulette,” the critic-turned-screenwriter/director Paul Schrader calls her “stunning recall” of movies and scenes she hadn’t seen in decades. She was the last living critic to have a memory of movies from the silent era, seen as a little girl growing up in California.
“What She Said” samples her acrid radio reviews for Berkeley’s KPFA in the late 1950s and early 1960s — “The big picture is almost necessarily the bad picture,” she said of the early years of widescreen (CinemaScope, etc) film. Impressively well-read, only she would approach “Lawrence of Arabia,” widely accepted as a masterpiece then and now, as a movie that remade “my” T.E. Lawrence into an iconic “narcissist and a sadist…I wish it had never been made.”
The documentary tracks Kael’s rise, with lots of testimony from daughter Gina James, who was eyewitness to everything her single-mom (before that was accepted in society) went through. Yes, critics are “judgemental.” Kael “couldn’t NOT be critical,” of her daughter or others.
Like anyone, she could be thin-skinned when the roles were reversed. As much droll delight as she takes in reading (on the radio) her hate mail on the air, it always stung.
She grew so powerful in the mid-70s that she overstepped her bounds, pushing for Coppola to cut “Ride of the Valkyries” from “Apocalypse Now” pre-release, selling her soul to professional time-suck Warren Beatty, who paid her in a production job with Paramount. She’s given credit for getting the studio to take a chance on David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” here, although credit hog Mel Brooks would probably laugh at that.
Sarah Jessica Parker reads from Kael’s reviews throughout the documentary, others read the thank-you notes from Jessica Lange, courtly massaging notes from Woody Allen and Kevin Bacon and hate letters from Gregory Peck and George Roy Hill.
Peck blamed her for taking away precious years from his working life, Ridley Scott swore off reviews after she “was so wrong” about his “Blade Runner.” David Lean admitted to being so depressed after an encounter with her at a New York Critics Circle event that he all but quit film. Her “cruel” side is discussed by New York friends and competitors.
But there was a generous side, too, which I experienced first-hand. I met her on my first trip to The New York Film Festival — she was sitting a row or two ahead of me, and coughing so much during a screening that I gave her a cough drop, only recognizing her (Munchkin short) when she thanked me after the movie.
Whenever I was writing a newspaper piece on a legendary filmmaker from the past, I’d try to get her on the phone for a quote — nobody did better blurbs than Kael. It was a circuitous process, thanks to her six months on/six months off job at the New Yorker. But they’d dutifully pass on the phone message, and even if she had no particular enthusiasm for Garbo favorite, silent film (“Flesh and the Devil”) and early sound era icon Clarence Brown (“The Yearling”), or others, she’d return the call.
The portrait of her in “What She Said” may lean too far in celebrating her, and I was disappointed in the thinness of the treatment of that defining “Kane” essay (I wanted this to be homework for “Mank”). But writer-director Rob Garver has gotten at the essence of the woman — a frustrated playwright who turned criticism into “short stories and sonnets,” as one fan says.
Mistress of the mean blurb, she’d have done OK in the far more crowded reviewing landscape of today — online and on Youtube, etc.
But first, the “tough dame” would’ve had to learn to type.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, film sex scenes sampled
Cast: Pauline Kael, Paul Schrader, David Lean, Molly Haskell, Gina James, Alec Baldwin, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Carrie Rickey, John Guare, Quentin Tarantino, Greil Marcus and the voice of Sarah Jessica Parker.
Credits: Written and directed by Rob Garver. A Film Movement+ release.
The chief failing of your average horror collection is often such a movie’s greatest strength. Getting a coherent look and theme out of an anthology is a bear when you’re dealing with many directors, productions crews and “visions.”
A “VHS” or “ABCs of Death” or “Three Extremes” is only as good as the filmmakers invited to participate, and if they’re good, there are frights and we see ideas — sources of dreads and horror — we’ve never considered. But even the best of them are often a visual mess.
That’s what sets “The Mortuary Collection” apart. It’s more of a “Tales from the Crypt” package, all conceived, scripted and directed by Ryan Spindell, but more importantly all sharing a production designer and director of photography.
The thing looks just beautiful, and having the wonderful character actor Clancy Brown as a creepy old mortician “telling” the tales lends it gravitas and ups its cool quotient.
But the stories from Spindell, heretofore a maker of short films (including an earlier version of a “story” told here), are wildly uneven in tension, suspense and horror.
A couple carry the weight of being pitched as “morality tales,” with a lesson being taught, “comeuppance” being served.
One is of limited ambition and running time — basically an exercise in well-lit “creature feature” period piece. And a fifth “story” is the framing device, the old mortician (Brown) and “rhapsodist” (or rhapsode), who deals with the dead and the grieving, intoning a funeral oration and later giving a tour of the place with a young woman (Caitlin Custer) applying for a job there.
That framing story is florid, plummy and almost-amusing, as Montgomery Dark tells the applicant Sam stories from his Raven’s End (the town’s name) funeral home “archives of the various ways which clients have found themselves passing through our hallowed halls.”
They’re the stories of how people died and ended up there, Sam says, cutting to the chase.
So we see a woman nosing around the guest bathroom of a house hosting a 1950s party, perhaps a pickpocket or thief. But when she opens the medicine cabinet, something reaches out to grab her. Can she shut the door and keep it shut until somebody in the party hears her screams and comes to help?
A 1960s “client” was a frat bro (Jacob Elordi), lead Lothario at Sigma Delta fraternity at Raven’s End Tech. We meet him handing out condoms, “keeping everybody safe” at freshman orientation, assuring the coeds that “the patriarchy is dying” and that a sexual “revolution is coming,” and they’ll be in its vanguard.
Yeah, everything about that’s absurdly anachronistic, but never mind.
Then one (Ema Horvath) shows up who is as brazen as he is. It’s just that their night of unbridled (artfully blurry) sex has consequences. Horrific consequences.
A couple (Sarah Hay and Barak Hardley) marries “til death do us part” in the ’70s, only for the wife to become ill with the husband looking for ways to end her misery and his obligation. The helpful doctor (Mike C. Nelson, who plays the same doc in every story) gives him a way out.
Only things don’t go according to plan.
And then there’s the short film that Spindell has remade here, “The Babysitter Murders,” a jumbled assault within assaults involving an escaped murderer from the local asylum and babysitters. This ’80s tale is the only “story” to have a title, and sets the tone for the framing story/job interview “finale,” which is similarly muddled in terms of plot and “message.”
Brown plays a glorious archetype, and more scenes — or even voice-over — of him “telling” the stories would greatly add to the “fun” here. He could even tidy up the incoherence of some segments and underline the point of others.
“The world is not made of atoms. It’s made of stories!”
Because as gorgeous as “Mortuary Collection” is to look at, as seamlessly as the mismatched stories flow into one another, I have to say I agree with Sam’s review — delivered in character after one particularly unsatisfying tale of death.
“I was expecting something with a little more…substance.”
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence, sex
Cast: Clancy Brown, Caitlin Custer, Christine Kilmer, Jacob Elordi, Barak Hardley, Mike C. Nelson
Credits: Written and directed by Ryan Spindell. A Shudder release.
