Sure, Well Go USA picks these films up for North American distribution. But in the rest of the world, the label putting the film in theaters or on home video says it all.
“Hi-YAH!”
Love that, even though the martial arts of this one are more of the “chuck chuck chuck” of knives entering flesh.
Egyptian cinema — born shortly after the Europe and Hollywood’s film emergence, was already mature enough to produce its “Golden Age,” in the 1950s. That’s the era when it produced its first international screen icon, the great Omar Shariff.
Youssef Chahine was the Egyptian filmmaker who popularized Shariff and brought him to the attention of the world and David Lean (“Lawrence of Arabia”). Chahine was already a veteran director when he directed and took the the villainous lead in his gripping potboiler, “Cairo Station.”
The film is a vivid black and white slice of life at Cairo’s Ramses Station in the late 1950s, with classes mixing and mingling in the secular Arabic state. Chahine shows us this hustle and bustle parade of traditionally clad and more religious rural folk, riding the (British built) rails back to their small towns and villages and Westernized sophisticates with their sports coats and cleavage, shorter hemlines and rock’n’roll tastes boarding for Alexandria and ocean liners that would take them abroad.
The few films of Chahine I’ve seen have a lot more in common with Carol Reed (“The Third Man”) and Hollywood noir specialists than the great artist and social observer Satyajit Ray, his Third World cinema contemporary over in India. Chahine liked melodrama and action and a little sexual sizzle. King Farouk or President Nasser, Chahine worked his way towards “lurid” and probably got his closest to that with the sexy and twisted “Cairo Station.”
Chahine, his camera chasing dancing around passengers as the men with shop stalls or carts make and sell juices or coffee, the female soft-drink peddlers with their buckets of bottles evade the cops and the porters bicker over who gets which client with baggage. We are instantly immersed in this milieu — “entrepreneurs” dashing onto stopped (or still moving) trains to sell drinks (and collect the empty bottles), hustlers of every age scampering through an unregulated, unsafe railyard outside the terminal.
The news stand owner Madbouli (Hassan el Baroudi) is our narrator, a man up on the news and gossip thanks to what he sells, but also someone who takes in the passing scene with a studied eye.
Madbouli recalls taking in the “lame” beggar Qinawi (spelled “Kenawi” on the Netflix subtitles), giving him a job hawking papers to travelers.
“How could anyone have foreseen how Qinawi would end up?” he wonders (in Arabic with English subtitles). We know who the villain is, right from the start.
Our filmmaker shows a little vanity, and a lot of Hollywood chutzpah in the way he hides Qinawi’s face, showing him only on the ground on his damaged leg, giving the character the director himself plays a “star entrance” in the best John Ford/Alfred Hitchcock/Orson Welles tradition.
The cause and effect of the screenplay involves showing us Qinawi’s railyard shack, papered with cut-out pin-up girls, and letting us just his guilty-pervy eyes as he finds a new beauty to gawk at, eavesdrop on and lust after.
But his heart seems to belong to blowsy, loud and vivacious Hunama, played by Hind Rustum, sort of an Egyptian Anna Magnani or Shelly Winters. Hunama is the loudest, most abrasive of the soft drink sellers. And she’s wondering if the smart, burly porter Abu Siri (Serih, on Netflix, played by Farid Shawqi) might be her man and her ticket out of this hard, dangerous work.
He’s tough enough and clever enough to realize the porters are getting screwed-over by the traditional pecking order that leaves a corrupt unofficial “boss” in charge of who gets to work, taking kickbacks as he does. Abu Siri’s talking “union.”
Qinawi just creeps around in silence, an “Incel” before Incels had the internet. We sense what’s coming, and Chahine underscores the guy’s stalker/serial killer vibe by letting us see the shifting cultural dynamics in play/
The young folks are dressing more Western than ever and listening to Mike & His Skyrockets, a rockabilly combo (with accordion) that jams for the youthful hep cats on the train.
“Newfangled ideas lead straight to old,” old Madbouli mutters. Murder is the effect, a sexualized permissive culture and toxic masculinity — check out the porters catcalling female passersby — is the cause, Chahine suggests.
The suspense comes from what we fear Qinawi will do, and what could happen at any moment at a pre-OSHA railyard this recklessly run. A couple of the stunts were shot in slow motion and played by at regular speed to heighten the danger. But most are not, and it’s easy to see workplace safety regulations weren’t common on Cairo film sets back then.
No “unions” in other words.
The fights range from “stage slaps” to actual rolling tumbles down stone stairs.
And the acting is first rate, with Rustum and Shawqi shining and Chahine practically begging for a straightjacket as Qinawi.
As dated as such films inevitably are, the collaborators here ensure that this 1950s melodrama never feels like an artifact, but merely another era in the passing parade of Egypt’s rough and tumble underclasses, perhaps one less divided by religious conservatism than the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt of today.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Farid Shawqi, Hind Rustum, Youssef Chahine and Hassan el Baroudi
Credits: Directed by Youssef Chahine, scripted by Abdel Hai Adib and Mohamed Abu Youssef (dialogue). A Columbia Pictures release on Netflix, other streamers.
Argentine filmmaker Daniel De La Vega runs a lot of standard horror tropes through a South American filter in “On the 3rd Day,” a well-mounted by seriously-unsurprising demonic possession thriller.
When the old man, Enrique (Gerardo Romano) takes a call and loads his “cargo” into his ancient Chevy pickup, because a caller summoned him for “your last trip,” we have an idea of what’s up.
It’s a coffin-shaped box, after all.
When a mother (Mariana Anghlileri) packs her little boy (Octavio Belmonte) in the back seat, we can guess what’s coming. Even the “distraction” that causes the collision, this moment when “worlds collide,” seems pro forma.
Cecilia wakes up, injured, in an abandoned house. Her boy is missing. It’s only when she makes it to a hospital that she realizes just how much she doesn’t remember, and who else has gone “missing” from that night.
Over the course of what plays as basically one long night (probably not), Cecilia will see visions of her son, in his red raincoat, in mirrors. She will have nightmares.
And others associated with that night will go missing.
The thin Alberto Fasce and Gonzalo Ventura script manages to find time for odd detours — the abuse Cecilia was fleeing, the old couple at the filling station whom she flees to after “escaping” a house where she wasn’t so much imprisoned, but dumped.
The police are introduced and put “on the case” as the missing persons pile up. But that entire story thread leads nowhere in this unthrilling dubbed-into-English thriller.
A couple of “solutions” present themselves to Cecilia’s plight. Does she need a priest, or a hypnotist (Osmar Núñez) to recall what happened and find her boy? Her doctor Lautaro Delgado) opts for the latter, leading to a mesmerizing and often-off-topic session that adds more clutter than clarity to the film.
Director De La Vega throws some spooky effects and seriously conventional “demon” costumes at this utterly generic story, which might have kept its secrets and worked better had mother Cecilia seemed more frantic or old Enrique seemed more conflicted.
But the film’s serious shortcoming is relying on a mystery that we guess instantly, and not serving up any real frights and stylish touches to distract us from the conclusion we see coming early in the first act.
Rating: Unrated, violence
Cast: Mariana Anghileri, Gerardo Romano, Lautaro Delgado and Osmar Núñez
Credits: Directed by Daniel De La Vega, scripted by Alberto Fasce and Gonzalo Ventura. A Shout! Factory production on Shudder.
Running time: 1:25
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The faith-based biographical drama “The Lady of Heaven” has faced sanction and banning, even having its trailers banned, in pretty much the entire Islamic world. Now Muslim protesters, calling it “blasphemous,” have gotten it yanked from cinemas in Great Britain.
This is, of course, a shameful and cowardly act, but quite understandable given the history of Islamic fundamentalist violence against the Free Speech West. Charlie Hebdo, anyone?
Right wing anti-Islamic columnists and newspapers are having a field day over this. British news and websites refer to “Lady” as being “Banned.” No. Cinemas have merely decided it’s not worth the hassle and security issues to show the movie. “Banned” is what happened in the Islamic theocracies of Asia and the Middle East.
Yes, Catholic panties were all in a twist over Monty Python’s “Not the Life Story of Jesus” comedy. The Cambridge comics spent a lot of time on the telly (shoving aside the penguin on the telly) defending their movie from the humorless and the “How DARE you!” crowd in the late 70s.
But their movie wasn’t banned. Islam is the world’s only religion that not only hates criticism or careful documentation of the life stories of The Prophet and those surrounding him. They condemn it, sanction it and even draw blood over it.
Sorry, that’s not how things work here in the West, folks.
As somebody who had to cross a picket line to see Martin Scorsese’s controversial film of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which was sort of America’s Christian “Life of Brian” moment, close examination for religious claims, fact-based debate and criticism are considered fair game.
Many in the West have an eyerolling view of Islam over its intolerance of such questioning. What are these protestors afraid of? Why were those who codified “Thou shalt not depict/question The Prophet” into the Koran or its interpretation hellbent on doing that? What were THEY afraid of?
“The Lady of Heaven,” which I reviewed some while back, takes pains to get around the many restrictions on how Muhammed, his family and the conquest-oriented origins of his faith are depicted. It still manages to lay some blunt facts out there for the faithful to mull over.
How DID Islam turn into what is widely perceived as a violent global patriarchal cult, all but enslaving women in places where its most extreme practitioners hold sway? A movie that suggests the faith has been twisted in some ways, and was grimly-flawed in others by its founders, was sure to stir up debate.
DEBATE is what’s called for, here. And by the way, if you haven’t seen the movie, put down your placard and go home. You’re “condemning” something you have no real knowledge of. If you can’t LET yourself see the movie, ask yourself why that is?
And if you didn’t want to live in a society that values free speech and open debate, why did you emigrate to one?
If the Catholic and Protestant, Jewish and every other religion can grit its teeth and take it, Islamists have to see how insecure and inferior their faith comes off, with adherents losing their collective minds over a movie or ANYthing that suggests that maybe the flawed founder of that faith was human, wasn’t perfect, and that those jockeying for power after his death had venal self-serving intentions.
I can’t recall which publicity house pitched me the movie some while back, but like the filmmakers, I had to bend over backwards to footnote the damned review because while every religion can and should be critiqued, I’m still just reviewing a movie that does that. My main concerns are the quality of the production and the performances and the veracity of its “true story” script.
That Muslim fundamentalists won’t even allow people to see it without threats and protests damns them in the eyes of the world. They come off as childish, intolerant and violent fanatics,
The producers of the film should stream it, let anybody who wants to see it find it online that way. Now that it’s got controversy surrounding it, they should make their investment back. Let the outspoken and superstitious avoid it, if they must. There’s no way to put the Internet genie back in the bottle. Not here in the West, anyway.
If this is a “Life of Brian” moment, the world is watching to see if you actually start the process that “The Lady of Heaven,” a middling, overly-careful hot-button biopic, advocates. What we’re waiting to see is if you finally grow up.
“Nude Tuesday” is a a deadpan, daft and seriously off-center comedy from The Other Land Under, New Zealand. No, it’s not their first. The presence of Jemaine Clement in the cast reminds us of that.
But this screwball/screws-loose “Couples Retreat” farce plays around with a prejudice foreign film fans have had since the movies learned to talk. The film has a story, but all the dialogue is gibberish, a sort of Muppets “Swedish Chef” meets The Minions mush of what sounds like Danish or maybe Dutch or perhaps German that’s gone Scandinavian.
That doesn’t matter, because as any film snob (or those put-off by snobs) will tell you, it’s SUBTITLED. So of COURSE it’s more “important.”
Screenwriter and co-star Jackie van Beek and co-writer/director Armagan Ballantyne showed their finished film, about a couple sent on a ditzy get-away with some relationship/sex guru (Clement) on what looks like New Zealand’s wild and snowy South Island, to comics in Australia and elsewhere.
The subtitles are thus written by a comic, who invented (in the case of edgy Brit comic Julia Davis) dialogue that changed the situations, added in sexual indiscretion confessions and ran even further with the wordplay of the enterprise.
“I vibrate on your frequency,” our over-sexed guru/therapist “Bjorg” (Clement) says as he touches Laura (van Beek) intimately, right in front of her hapless husband Bruno (Damon Herriman). “Together we tremble!”
References to a “toothy vulva” and “You biggened my mister” were not what Clement or anybody else had in mind when they were gibbering, which adds a comic irony to the enterprise.
Group therapy sessions include the introduction of livestock — animals that “choose” to be with this or that couple; a pig with these folks, a goat chooses to hand with Bruno and Laura. The rooster?
Look, “the feathery gigolo” has chosen “our lesbian potters. Enjoy some c–k, ladies!”
Davis must have a working knowledge of the comedy stylings of Jemaine Clement (“Flight of the Conchords,” “What We Do in the Shadows”), I must say. Her fleshing out the story is most convincing with the words that aren’t really coming out of his mouth, printed out on the screen beneath him.
The oddest touch for me in this experiment in improvisation was the inclusion of gibberish versions of very familiar pop songs on the score. It takes a moment to recognize “Sea of Love,” “Time of the Season” and Kenny & Dolly’s finest duet.
The soundtrack plays like “The ‘Despicable Me’ Minions Sing the Hits,” and it’s a hoot.
But when the bouncy beat of “Road to Nowhere” rolls out, you have to wonder, “Why didn’t they use the original David Byrne gibberish in this case?”
Not all of it works, but more than you’d expect does. Sure, there are entirely too many d–k jokes (a failing stand-up’s best friend). But there is nudity, it is comic and the actual “Nude Tuesday” may just involve a dip in a glacial pool high up in the mountains.
And “experiment” or not, what actor’s going to risk hypothermia or “shrinkage” just for a gag? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.
Rating: unrated, comic violence, full frontal nudity
Cast: Jackie van Beek, Damon Herriman, Chelsie Preston Crayford, Ian Zaro, Byron Coll and Jemaine Clement.
Credits: Directed by Armagan Ballantyne, scripted by Jackie van Beek, Armagan Ballantyne, with subtitles by Julia Davis. A Cornerstone release.
Movie Nation 