Movie Nation

The potent warnings about about how societies descend into fascism are scattered throughout “Fabian: Going to the Dogs,” a German drama about the people, attitudes and conditions of 1931 Weimar Germany, based on a novel published as it was happening.

Nazis aren’t seen that often in the movie, about a young ad-man’s romantic despair, distress at the decline of a friend and unemployment. He side-eyes the occasional goons, always traveling in groups, practicing random acts of intimidation. He and we glimpse the political posters papered over a somewhat anarchic, decadent Berlin. Radio reports of anti-Semitic diatribes by the fringed, uniformed political party’s leadership are sampled.

And late, very late in the third act, a seemingly responsible, educated older academic uses the word “order,” as in something the country desperately needs to restore, thanks mostly to over-dressed SA dandies kidnapping diners in crowded restaurants while everybody else either pretends not to see, or wishes someone would “do something” about this.

But in “Fabian,” such overt, chilling messaging is scattered throughout a three hour long movie. The metaphors — diners listening to (playerless) player pianos, carrying on via auto-pilot as all this is going on, a real suicide that foreshadows national, cultural suicide, the expedience of pursuing fame by prostituting oneself while love is left to languish — are equally scattered.

In a film this long, with so many conversations, so many unhurried searches, flirtations, interventions and languors and enough cigarettes sucked down to sink the Bismarck, all the distractions from the Big Theme do is make one mutter, “Gott im Himmel, get ON with it! Get to the POINT!”

Tom Schilling is the title character, a 30something WWI vet given to bar hopping at the cabarets, smoking a lot of ciggies and being late to work and with his rent. His rich, entitled pal Labude (Albrecht Schuch) may be in grad school, waiting for his thesis on am 18th writer to be accepted. But at least he’s out there, trying to organize workers into unions, agitating for change.

Whatever the Nazis, Socialists and Communists want individually, what they all scream for is an end to the Social Democrats, the status quo. Not that any of these minority parties could ever come to power, oh no. Ahem.

“I don’t believe reason and power will ever unite” to stop them, Fabian muses (in German, with English subtitles). He’s a writer, collecting anecdotes, phrases, observations in his notebooks as he prowls the night and stands in the unemployment line in the day. We see him dismissed from his ad writing job in the worst “You think you’re too smart for this work, let’s find out” ever.

But one night he meets the young “film industry lawyer” Cornelia Battenberg (Saskia Ronsendahl). And on a long, leisurely wander through the (carefully chosen, to reflect age and post-WWI decay) streets of Berlin, they chat and flirt and find out — eventually — that she’s the new tenant in his homey apartment house.

He doesn’t tell her until after the sex, of course.

Cornelia is pretty enough to be in films, not litigating contracts for them. And she knows it. A producer has his eye on her, which could be “their” lifeline, should he choose to “keep” her, with Fabian running out of cash and all.

That’s the big moral compromise at the heart of this tale of exhausted, avoidance-driven decadence. Fabian may invite homeless vets to join them at lunch in cafes, chat up his fellow veterans of “The war, the damned war” in lines. But he’s doing nothing more than taking notes.

Everybody is waiting on someone unseen to “DO something” about all this. And no one does. Maybe those guys in the brown shirts and jack boots have some ideas.

Filmmaker Dominic Graf, who directed and co-wrote the adaptation of Erich Kästner’s twice-filmed “cinematic” novel (he was best known as a children’s lit author, “The Parent Trap” was based on one of his books), saved a lot of money on sets and period recreations by limiting the light in the Weimar era nightclubs and rooms (throw pillows in a pool of light) and using unretouched and uncolorized documentary footage of the streets and people on them to capture the Berlin, 1931 effect.

A tram here, a car there, a little attention to wardrobe, and contrasting haircuts (a Hitler/Himmler buzz was the dead give-away somebody was a Nazi) and we get an idea of what this world looked like.

But “Fabian” fails to immerse us in that world, and being as leisurely as a limited series in its pacing, loses the urgency of what to later audiences can only be a “cautionary” tale. The video cinematography is grainy and 1990s TV quality.

Brothels and “kept women” and transvestites aside, it never feels all that decadent. And their world never feels as if its alarmingly spinning towards its doom, both of which may be precisely the point Graf was going for.

It’s just that dawdling this much, spreading your incidents over this much time, makes for somewhat dull cinema, with our “searching for himself” hero (Schilling looks a bit like a German Andrew McCarthy) losing track of what’s important in a smoke-screen of his own creation.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity, constant smoking

Cast: Tom Schilling, Saskia Ronsendahl, Albrecht Schuch

Credits: Dominic Graf, scripted by Constantin Lieb and Dominic Graf, based on the novel by
Erich Kästner. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 2:56

Channel surfing this evening after laboring through a three hour picture on Weimar Germany, I stumble across one of this month’s many broadcast offerings of Sidney Poitier films, the best way to honor a screen icon whose noble life off the screen was highlighted when he passed away last month.

I’ve seen “Edge of the City” before, but never reviewed it as a “classic.” And I missed the first few minutes this time, so I will have to get around to it later

But it struck me how one way many of us ignored in looking at the Oscar winner’s legacy is worth remembering as Movies!, The Grio, ThisbTV and others broadcast his movies this month.

He was a role model and a paragon of representation and much more to Black America. White folks of my parents’ generation saw him in a similar but different light.

In movies like the working class “Edge of the City” and “Lilies of the Field” and ” The Defiant Ones,” he played characters who reminded working class white America that they/we have a lot more in common with working Black folks than the divide and conquer fat cats who pull the strings.

Pair him up with Curtis or Cassavettes or Paul Newman (“Paris Blues”) and you see absolutely no difference between them and him, as a character of the same class, with the same goals and struggles, with the added burden of misguided racism stoked by The Man.

And here was this classy guy with an eye on the Big Picture, the Reasonable Black Man who doesn’t kowtow but supports, makes the extra effort to befriend, who gently forces his costar/characters to acknowledge his humanity, if that’s something they’re reluctant to do.

Even in films like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,””Paris Blues” and “Lilies of the Field,” something more interesting is happening. He is accepted as equal, if not morally superior in some ways. Lots of films such as “In the Heat of the Night” put him on that intellectual and moral high ground. “Acceptance” and “equality” are normalized.

Consider yourself invited and challenged to take another look at Poitier this month, via the movies that are served up to remind us of what a Bahamian-American original he was.

Another “timely” tale for our troubled era, based on a popular German novel about growing up, partying and carousing, during the “Cabaret” era Weimar Republic, as the Nazis were polishing their jackboots.

This one opens Friday.

The Spanish Civil War is the one modern conflict that never seems to run out of lessons to pass on to us. The intimate, epic-length Spanish drama “The Endless Trench” is one of the best illustrations yet of what being on the losing side in a fight against fascism can be like.

It’s a fictional film based on something that really happened in Spain in the 1930s. As the German, Italian, Catholic Church and Texaco-backed Falangists of Francisco Franco gained the upper hand, death squads traveled far and wide, executing Republicans or people with any suspicion of having harbored leftist views.

Many fled the country. But that wasn’t the only way of surviving this slaughter, and the decades of fascist rule that followed.

Higinio (Antonio de la Torre) hears the trucks roll into his small town. His new bride Rosa (Belén Cuesta) is awakened by the thunder of jackboots, the pounding on doors. But panicked or not, all isn’t lost. Higinio dug out a little hiding place, and that’s where he lays low as troops rush in, toss the joint and threaten Rosa, ignoring her pleas (in Spanish with English subtitles, or dubbed) that “He never hurt anyone. He shouldn’t be on a list!”

When the troops storm into the next house, Higinio attempts an escape. A neighbor (Vicente Vergara) rats him out, they struggle, and the bullets fly as our victim flees into the night.

He dives into an abandoned well, where others “on their list” hide, leading to an “I could see ALL this coming…Bullets don’t solve anything” political debate, standing knee-deep in water as Civil Guards storm by, shooting others on the run.

The wounded Higinio can’t get away, which might ensure his and the under-scrutiny Rosa’s safety. It’s back to his hidey hole. For years, as it turns out.

Three directors and two screenwriters contrive an epic story of survival, paranoia, bravery and cowardice. “The Endless Trench,” which takes its title from a surreptitiously dug escape route Higinio starts on, changes locations and with that, changes the dynamics of their relationship.

Rosa feeds him, hides him and wants something like a life, which their circumstances seem to preclude. He is forever erring on the side of paranoid caution. That neighbor, Gonzalo, really has it in for him. And we hear just enough of Gonzalo’s story to understand why that is, right or wrong.

An endurance contest begins, World War II starts and as the Allies plunge into their global war against fascism, that becomes Higinio’s hope. –“Wait for the Allied victory.” Surely they’ll come for that murderous rat Franco, afterwards.

But as years pass, and more years after that, the story that started so harrowing grapples with paranoia that grows, rather than subsiding, and something like despairing resignation sets in. It can be heartbreaking.

De la Torre, of “Marshland” and the Uruguayan political terror thriller “Twelve Year Night,” gives us a “hero” who never seems heroic. His cagey turn makes us wonder about Higinio’s “innocence” in a neighbor-against-neighbor bloodletting, and we question his manhood as he sees what his wife, who loves him as passionately as he loves her, must endure. But we never fret over Higinio’s cunning.

Cuesta (“Holy Camp!,” “Party Town”) has the more robust role. We don’t just see the physical evidence of what Rosa must endure, Cuesta makes us feel it. She married a man in troubled times, and life pretty much just stops. She stoically keeps them going, working as a seamstress. But she wants a baby. She wants to see the sea. Cuesta lets us see the resignation that Rosa is the first to embrace.

Being conditioned by Hollywood, I kept waiting for something distinctly Spanish — probably involving a knife — to transpire between Higinio and his Javert, the relentless Gonzalo, given a dogged self-righteousness by Vergara.

Some of the episodes that put Higinio on high alert and make us fear for him come from expected quarters. Others are straight-up melodrama. But the evolving interpersonal conflicts keep “The Endless Trench” on the move.

We don’t know what’s coming, don’t know how much Higinio is responsible for his fate and can only guess if his story arc will give him, his enemies or us any satisfaction, when all is said and done.

Don’t be daunted by the running time, here. This is an intimate epic that alarms as it sprints out of the gate, settles into a lingering tension and even as it is winding down, manages to keep the viewer frightened and on tenterhooks. That’s what living under a fascist regime is like.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Antonio de la Torre, Belén Cuesta and Vicente Vergara

Credits: Directed by Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga, scripted by Luiso Berdejo and Jose Mari Goenaga A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:27

This dark comedy — Oui, love makes people try to jump in rivers, sometimes — comes our way Feb. 25.

Looks sweet.

So many things have gone wrong since “Death on the Nile” was announced, cast and put in the can.

There was a pandemic that stopped the world in its tracks. Co-star Armie Hammer had his #MeToo moment, a meltdown that imperils what’s left of his career. And Disney bought out Fox, relegating the picture to a “whatever” release strategy.

It’s no wonder “Death,” the latest film of Agatha Christie’s novel and the second adaptation helmed by and starring Sir Kenneth Branagh, has a dispiriting hint of “Oh, that’ll do” about it.

It’s not nearly as much fun as “Murder on the Orient Express,” even as the production values — the set design and Hollywood trickery involved in recreating a late 1930s steamer excursion up the Nile — dazzle, the cast impresses (at least on paper) and the Christie plot bears up beautifully under the strain.

There’s a playfulness and modernization to that casting that pays off. Oscar nominee Sophie Okonedo plays a world-weary blues singer along for the odyssey, a woman whose sexy guitar-playing and singing — dubbed in tunes by Sister Rosette Tharpe — leave the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot (Branagh) blushing and a tad flabbergasted. The real Tharpe came along just after the film’s time-setting, but as the film’s opening scene puts poison gas on the World War I battlefield, and deployed by the Belgians whom the younger Poirot is serving with, a year before the Germans unleashed that horror on the world, we’re reminded this isn’t meant to be taken terribly seriously.

But there’s still something bordering on sublime in this sequel, with its dinner jackets and evening gowns, Poirot (WWI) back story, oversexed jitterbugging to birth-of-rock blues that wouldn’t exist for a decade, sexy sirens and femme fatales and murders most foul, all in the name of money.

Gal Gadot is Linette, the “Golden Girl” heiress whose first trip to a nightclub dance floor allows her to steal Simon, the fiance (Hammer) of her “best friend,” the somewhat less rich but romantically ravenous Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey). Poirot witnesses all, and renders words of warning.

“Ah love, it is not safe.”

It is the wedding party of Linette and Simon, seeking to shake stalker Jacqueline, that books this luxe steamboat passage up the Nile, with Poirot a late add-on guest. Other relatives and friends are played by Russell Brand, as a doctor, Oscar-winner Annette Bening, Letitia Wright (“Black Panther”) as the niece of our invited-entertainment, blues singer Salome (Okonedo), and a reunion of the former comic duo Dawn French (“The Vicar of Dibley”) and Jennifer Saunders (“Absolutely Fabulous”).

“Death on the Nile” is a movie of immaculate compositions, flawless model and digital effects, and juicy observations on love and money.

And we learn more about our mysterious and famous hero. We’ve seen the WWI affair that left Poirot single, in need of his elaborate mustache, now a bachelor who loses himself in tiny, exquisite desserts.

“Love fever,” he laments. “I was sick with it once. It left me enough regrets to last a lifetime.”

Salome is similarly jaded. “I’ve had a handful of husbands, each one of’em a handful.”

But after a near miss at some famous ruins, a second murder attempt at one of the passengers succeeds. There’s a body on board, and a murderer amongst us. Poirot, invited to more or less prevent this sort of thing, must figure out who it is, and as others are knocked off before they dock (the crew is largely removed from this story) the survivors wonder if the Belgian case-cracker is all he’s cracked up to be.

Besides, every fresh body or injury reduces the field of suspects, making his deductions easier, right?

I love Branagh in this part and I liked this movie. Some of the tinkering with the plot — anachronistic as it is — adds surprises, even if you’ve seen the earlier big screen version of this, from 1978, that’s making the rounds on many streaming services these days.

And yet for all its costumed, beautifully-decorated luxury and star-glossed sheen, “Nile” is a letdown from Branagh’s take on “Orient Express.” He casts funny people like French and Saunders and Brand, and there’s nothing funny, pithy or witty for them to say or do.

The script is as arid as the desert just beyond the river’s banks.

Branagh and Gadot’s characters are ably fleshed-out. Bening, Okonedo, Mackey and Wright have enough scenes to make strong impressions. Tom Bateman, as a loud, ever-smiling Poirot pal with a secret lover on board, has far too many. And Hammer’s faithless fiance seems reduced in scope, perhaps thanks to afterthought editing.

There’s little in the way of vituperative envy in the potential villains, little the viewer can invest in as we try to deduct from what we and Poirot observe and take in.

That adds up to a “Death on the Nile” that never lets us forget its quality and attention to detail, but forgets to be much in the way of fun.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, some bloody images, and sexual material

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Gal Gadot, Annette Bening, Sophie Okonedo, Armie Hammer, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Leticia Wright, Emma Mackey, Russell Brand, Tom Bateman, Alia Fazal and Susannah Fielding.

Credits: Directed by Kenneth Branagh, scripted by Michael Green, based on the novel by Agatha Christie. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:07

Nothing like making a movie with Cannes built into it.

This looks hilarious.

Feb. 18 this one hits theaters.

“A Grand Romantic Gesture” is a wistful romance in a minor key, a flash of “love, the second (or maybe last) time around” with no flash at all.

It’s always a shame when a romantic comedy with characters who aren’t teenagers falls short, doubly-so when it’s a rom-com built around a clever conceit — two 50something amateurs cast as the leads in a suburban Canadian workshop production of “Romeo & Juliet.”

They’re shoved on stage, try to start their lines, and our Juliet giggles self-consciously, and speaks for them and us and anybody not soaking wet behind the ears when she protests, “I don’t REMEMBER being young!”

British character lead Gina McKee (“Notting Hill,””In the Loop”) is the newly-laid off Ava, bums-rushed into taking a cooking class by a husband (Rob Stewart) and married and pregnant daughter (Rose Reynolds) who talk as if she isn’t even in the room as they plan her unwanted “retirement” for her.

Her rage-whisking her ingredients tells one and all that class isn’t for her. But she’s conned into joining this other adult ed class down the hall, the one with a pretentious ditz (Gregory Ambrose Calderone) director who would rather have two people he figures are the right age for the priest and the nurse as his leads than have his girlfriend fall in love with the dude he’s cast as Romeo.

Thus, Simon (Douglas Hodge of “The Great” and “Joker”) is paired up with Ava, and Shakespeare’s poetry and the romance of it all gets the better of them. Well, him first.

“Give me my sin again,” he reads, and lays one on her, smack dab on the lips.

“No MAKING OUT on the stage,” director Ryan protests as Ava recoils. But boy, does that smooch get her thinking. And dreaming. And imagining.

As her daughter’s life comes a bit undone and she moves back home, as Ava keeps the fact that she changed classes and isn’t learning to cook as her first secret, all gets far more complicated as the leads start to develop feelings for each other, on and off the stage.

Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin breaks up this longish/slow-building rom-com with snippets from the play as intertitles — “Tempt not a desperate man,” “A Madness most discrete,” etc.

She further breaks up the continuity with testimonials/confessions to the camera, what look like counseling sessions for Ava, Simon and Simon’s wife Roz (Linda Kash).

“Marriage isn’t for sissies. Rule Number One? You want to stay married, don’t fall in love with someone else.”

I like the leads and their “Should we/should we not” chemistry, even in the low-speed, flatly-shot conversations that point them towards love. And the dizzy daughter and her dizzy marriage (Dylan Llewellyn plays her puppet-obsessed flake of a husband) plays as dopey cute.

But “A Grand Romantic Gesture” botches such gestures, the few attempted, and never produces a stand-out moment that tugs at the heart or tickles the funny bone. A random amusing line here and there is about all we’re left with. A self-absorbed young woman bumps and brushes by Simon and Ava, which the native Brit feels is out of character.

“That wasn’t very CANADIAN of her!”

Not enough is made of the difference between the “acting” part of the romance, and the “real” part. Stumbling towards a psychological explanation for their behavior is a scripted afterthought.

That, coupled with the deflating nature of the “gestures,” with nothing “grand” or particularly “romantic” about any of them, leaves this Canadian comedy dead on the page before it dies on the stage.

Rating: unrated, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Gina McKee, Douglas Hodge, Rose Reynolds, Linda Kash, Dylan Llewellyn, Rob Stewart

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:48

A bigger Saturday than expected pushed the latest”Jackass” film comfortably above $20 million on its opening weekend.

That’s probably about twice its production costs. $23 million, it’ll probably end up with $35-40 million, all in.

Johnny Knoxville, if he hangs it up as a comical stunt dummy, will have started in five movies that opened at #1. And those are just the ones with “Jackass” in the title.

“Moonfall” didn’t get off the ground, at all. A $10 opening in a pandemic isn’t terrible, but the thing allegedly cost 15 times that. Soooo.

“Spider-Man” managed another $9million+.

“Scream” the Requel pulled in just short of $5.

“Sing 2” cleared $4 million.