Movie Nation

I seem to recall diving into the original “Dunkirk” film, a black and white epic made in 1958, and never getting very far into it.

As war movies go, it’s a drab, formulaic affair, even by the “Longest Day” standards of its era. And director Leslie Norman is best-known for a minor horror tale of the day, “X the Unknown,” and lots of TV. So once I became a film snob and dug through my first copy of Halliwell’s “Filmgoer’s Companion,” I’d dismiss the film and him, no matter how much I like the genre.

Powering through it, now restored to peak condition and on Film Movement and available on BluRay, the real rub stands out. It takes over an hour to get going.

This MGM-financed Ealing production is state-of-the-art black and white of the day, intercutting documentary footage of the evacuation, German Stuka dive bombers and even bits of the actual “Miracle at Dunkirk” in with its staged recreations and fictional heroes. There is obvious rear projection of soldiers riding in vehicles, more obvious inside-studio footage recreating chunks of the beach and most-obvious-of-all “tank” footage, soldiers wading into the “surf” or clambering aboard a “little ship” to take them home. We can see the painted cyclorama behind them right down to the seams between sections and where it joins the water, meant to mimic calm seas.

John Mills was a star, a bit old at 50 to be playing an Army corporal. But Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee weren’t household names. And that’s it for the “names” in the cast.

Lee was four years away from the role that made him immortal, as James Bond’s boss “M” in the Sean Connery Bond pictures. “Dunkirk” gave him his biggest lead role, as a cynical, posh journalist, dismayed at his government’s ineptitude in the months leading to the disaster, pressed into patriotic duty when his motor yacht, “Vanity,” is commandeered by the Royal Navy.

All involved seem, first frame to last, to be soberly concerned with “getting it right,” this key piece of Britain’s World War II legend. That weighs on the film and all but suffocates it.

But it starts with great promise. A voice-over narrator and documentary footage of British leadership and world events set us up for the end of the “phony war,” after the invasion of Poland and Norway, before the German axe fell on France in May of 1940.

Lee’s reporter, Charles Foreman, is unable to get any satisfaction out of press “communique” briefings from the military, Mills’ Wiltshire regiment watches newsreels, complete with Hitler-mocking cartoons before shipping out to France, and music hall performers meant to be the Two Leslies perform the new ditty “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line.”

Garage-owner turned government manufacturer Holden (Attenborough) is more concerned with the new baby at home and turning out his allotment of Army buckles than in “doing his part.”

Britain isn’t taking all this seriously, in other words.

There’s more of this than is needed, and the Battle of France scenes, with Mills’ Cpl. “Tubby” left in charge as his squad is separated in the “confusion” of the first orders to pull back eats up much of the film’s first hour.

“I never wanted the bloody stripes in the first place,” he gripes.

There’s an intriguing “playing at war” unreality to the scenes of troops waking up in remote, scenic Belgian fox holes, realizing others have retreated, puzzled fellows in crisp new WWI-era uniforms, stumbling about, looking for their main unit, camping in an abandoned farmhouse.

And then they blow up a bridge, stumble into a long line of refugees, watch them strafed by bombers and it all hits home.

“They seem to hate us.”
“Refugees hate everyone, Tubby.”

“Dunkirk” starts to find its way after folks at home learn they’re to report any vessels over 30 feet in length to the government. Before they know it, manufacturer Holden and his “Heron” and reporter Foreman are lobbying to pilot their own boats into service, parading past Parliament and under the Tower Bridge on their way down the Thames, and then into the Channel and into the thick of it.

But that brief moment of inspiration and pageant quickly passes, and we’re into the last of our WWII movie cliches, even if they’re set against the sweeping backdrop of the beach and “mole” evacuation. Moments of panic, but a stately calm is the order of the day, grousing about the RAF, the lack of support “back home,” considering surrender.

To its credit, there isn’t a lot of “top down” history shown here, just Vice Admiral Ramsay arguing for the return of “the big destroyers” which the Navy needs to take out of action to defend the island nation from invasion and protect the convoys that will feed Britain. This “Dunkirk,” like Christopher Nolan’s far superior “remake,” is only interested in the enlisted man’s point of view, the way civilian boat owners experienced this retreat.

There are echoes of this film in other treatments of Dunkirk, including Nolan’s. There was a 2004 BBC TV movie that featured a very young Benedict Cumberbatch, the French drama “Weekend at Dunkirk” telling the story of French troops who have to decide whether to stay or evacuate, and dramas from “Atonement” and “The Snow Goose” to the Oscar winning “Darkest Hour” have touched on it, recreating it in some way.

But for all its attempts at “sweeping epic,” Norman’s film comes off as malnourished, sedentary and slack, a drama lacking any sense of the clock ticking down on men’s fates and little sense of the stakes back home. It’s a dry, almost lifeless account, with even the deaths seeming stodgy and silent-film-acting melodramatic.

Seeing it suggests what drove Britain’s greatest current director, Nolan, to tackle the subject and take his suspenseful, vigorous and more visceral approach to the material. Nobody else had done this “darkest hour” triumph justice, certainly not this mediocre 1958 epic.

MPA Rating: Approved, violence.

Cast: Bernard Lee, John Mills, Richard Attenborough, Robert Urquhart

Credits: Directed by Leslie Norman, script by David Divine and W.P. Lipscombe based on a novel and two non-fiction books on the subject. An Ealing/MGM production re-released through Film Movement.

Running time: 2:15

Suki Waterhouse stars in this May 21 release.

Creepy enough for you?

Under 10 million watched the Oscars, under 9 watched the Grammys, under 7 watched the Golden Globes.

It’s like people woke up and decided awards shows are a bore.

Or…nobody wants to see this Zoom version of the circle jerk of self-congratulation.

Or, going out on a limb here, it’s not like the winners represented movies with big audiences/ticket sales. “Movie Stars” were in short supply in the nominated films, and the biggest one of them was the guy who died.

So, after last year and this one utterly broke the habit of watching the Academy Awards, is this a death knell? Will they be streaming only in the very near future, COVID or not COVID?

Let others dismiss stories of addiction and the awful ordeal of attempted recovery as a genre where over-familiarity has bred contempt. As long as America’s endless opioid epidemic goes on and as long as there are actors willing to “dress down” to be convincing in these roles, I’m on board.

We barely recognize Mila Kunis in her first moments in “Four Good Days.” She’s a wreck, head-to-toe, playing a manic addict pounding on her mother’s door — again. Molly hides her teeth, or what’s left of them, as she begs to come in, stringing together hopes and lies because she forgot the difference between them years ago.

Only Kunis’ Jim Parsons “sitcom stammer” gives away the actress beneath the dark black roots, sallow, pimpled face and breathless patter. It’s that affectation that sitcom-trained actors can’t shake, a too-obvious mannerism designed to make recited lines sound natural.

Mother Deb isn’t falling for the fake stammer or anything else. “I’ve heard this speech for ten years,” she mutters, closing the door with a firm “Get WELL.” As Glenn Close is playing her, we know she means business.

But what “Four Good Days” does better than most films on this subject is get at the parental guilt that lingers past that last moment Deb allowed herself to have hope. It’s what lets Molly wear Deb down and gives everybody, viewers included, that sliver of “This time she might mean it, she might get clean.”

The worn-out story arc covers a lot of familiar emotional ground, with the usual touchstones of such a journey. What’s novel here is how far down the road these two are. When Molly mentions her get-out-of-jail card, “rehab,” Mom calls her bluff. Deb grabs her keys and takes her.

But the testy argument at Deb’s front door, which spanned an evening and the next morning (Molly curled up on the porch to wear Deb down.) re-convenes at check-in.

Molly’s been in and out of such facilities 14 times. She’s been using heroin and methadone, Vicodin and whatnot 10 years. They’ll take her for three days, giving her chance to dry out, and a moment for her to cuss her mother out as she leaves.

They can also promise her a shot of an opioid antagonist, something that will kill her ability to get high off her chosen poisons. But to do that, she’s got to spend a further four days drying out. Her glowering mother and Mom’s not-that-encouraging second husband (Stephen Root) will have to let her in, put her up and put up with her as they try to keep temptation out of reach.

Director and co-writer Rodrigo García (“Nine Lives,” “Mother and Child”) keeps the focus narrow and the camera tight on his two stars as he pulls us into their complicated relationship. Each is a little too eager to point a finger at the other, or third parties, for Molly’s condition. Doctors over-prescribing Oxy for a high school injury is a story many a family could identify with. Deb left a bad marriage, which didn’t help things. An open drama like that tends to smother the hidden one that nobody wants to see.

Close lets us see Deb’s wariness, the callouses of mistrust that has her keeping her “problem” child at arm’s length, leaving her non-addict daughter (Carla Gallo) attention-deprived and resentful.

Kunis loses herself in Molly’s selfish amorality, showing us an addict’s convenient memory lapses — “I didn’t really sell your wedding rings, did I?” — and her practiced skill at poker-faced whoppers, the time-proven lies that give her wriggle room to get back in trouble, all over again.

Movies like this invite the viewer to second guess Deb, to put up our guard against another lie, another betrayal. We’re just waiting on another chance for Molly to let “shame” and her other “triggers” break her mother’s heart.

“At this point, all I have left is hope” is a line any mother of an addict can appreciate.

“Four Days” doesn’t cover much new ground, and some moments play as simple theatrics, such as when Molly called in to give a “scared straight” lecture to a classmate’s high school students.

But the arguments feel real and lived-in, two for pushing each other’s buttons and cutting to the quick.

Close lets us see Deb’s temper and panic and guilt and desperation, and rarely lets us remember the actress underneath. Kunis isn’t in her league, but more than holds her own in a role that rides on the wreck she transforms herself into.

“Four Good Days” never threatens to become a definitive film in an oft-filmed genre. But good acting, some seriously touching moments and lofty intentions lock us in on these “Four Good Days,” and have us, like everybody on the screen, just hoping for the best.

MPA Rating:  R for drug content, language throughout and brief sexuality

Cast: Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Stephen Root and Joshua Leonard.

Credits: Directed by Rodrigo García, scripted by Rodrigo García, Eli Saslow. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:40

This July release from Searchlight and Hulu is the Questlove-produced edit of footage gathered at the “Soul Woodstock,” the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.

Sly and Nina Simone, Gil Scott-Heron and the Staples, B.B. King and Moms Mabley — an epic lineup filmed and never edited into a movie.

Now we get to see it. Looks glorious. July 2.

We all take our favorites into Oscar night, all have hopes that “THIS” will be the year that the Academy Awards become a true meritocracy, that the worthiest will win in every category.

I have lost interest in watching the telecast, and with the pandemic basically creating “asterisk years” for my favorite sports, I figured this year’s Oscars would be the same.

I was pleased to see Anthony Hopkins take the upset win for best actor. That’s not proof that “Oscars so white” is worth repeating. It’s more proof that “Oscars aren’t sentimental.” We’ve been seeing that, year in and year out. Chadwick Boseman was brilliant in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” probably his best performance. His early death made him the “sentimental” favorite.

But nobody who saw “The Father” could say that Hopkins wasn’t giving the performance of a lifetime, in a lifetime of such performances. Stunning.

The Academy electorate is younger than it used to be. There’s no “sentimental” Oscar winning these days. Glenn Close, now 0-8 in wins/nominations, never stood a chance in a weak movie, in a weak field of Best Supporting Actress contenders.

I liked “Minari,” but having seen versions of this story before, I didn’t find it the stupor mundi/novelty that others did. Yuh-Jung Yuon was talked-up all awards’ season. Never saw that as the stand-out performance by an actress in a supporting role, still don’t see it, but fine. Whatever.

You want to find another Meryl Streep to root against, year in and year out? Frances McDormand is the nominee to beat from here on out. Another terrific turn, but hey, she’s had enough, OK?

My pick as the best film of last year was honored as Best International Feature, “Another Round.” Mads Mikkelson should have garnered a best actor nomination, but no crying over snubbed milk.

Best Doc was always going to Netflix — “My Octopus Teacher” beat “Crip Camp” — both emotional roller-coaster non-fiction features and both very good. Loved both, but I’m tickled for the filmmakers who made the winner. We’re in a golden age for nature docs.

Daniel Kaluuya was a worthy winner, but he sealed the deal with a show-stopping turn on “Saturday Night Live” as voting was underway.

My favorite animated film, “Wolfwalkers,” was always going to lose to “Soul,” which picked up music honors as well. Never bet against Disney.

“Sound of Metal” won what it was supposed to, “Nomadland” made best director history, Cary Mulligan got her Indie Spirit Award consolation prize, which suits “Promising Young Woman” to a T.

If the Oscars had been handed out in two weeks, I dare say Mulligan could have taken the top prize. Momentum. Then again, she got her pert little English nose in a twist over a critic inelegantly expressing what a lot of us said — she’s a little dainty and prim to be believable in that part. Great performance. But no. She wouldn’t scare anybody.

It won Best Original Screenplay, with “Father” winning one it shouldn’t have — Best Adapted Screenplay. I’d have pitched that to “Ma Rainey,” which got costume and makeup honors.

My bigger gripe is with cinematography. In what universe is the washed-out, video-taped TV of the ’60s looking “Mank” the best shot, best looking film of 2020?

I watch 20-30 vintage monochromatic films a month and review more than a few of them. “Mank” reminded me of the lesser efforts of the great DPs of the era. I just reviewed “Ice Cold Alex” which, being a desert picture, was similarly washed-out, but at least didn’t look like “Twilight Zone” VTR episodes.

Generations removed from a Hollywood that knew what great B & W cinematography looks like, it was honored over “Nomadland,” which was just as digital but far more striking and contrast-filled. You people…

French critics had to invent the auteur theory, a way of re-examining filmmaking artists who “pounded the same nail, over and over again” revealing themes, tropes and concepts that their cinema could reliably be counted on to deliver, for the label “action auteur” to take hold. These were and are directors whose lightly regarded films of violent combat, crime or what have you who might be passed over in discussions of “serious cinema.”

That’s how Howard Hawks was elevated to the same status as John Ford in the Western world, and how the prolific J. Lee Thompson came to merit a second look.

The British Thompson enjoyed a four decade long career that produced “The Guns of Navarone,” “Kings of the Sun” and the original “Cape Fear.” He may have made Gregory Peck’s least-favorite movie (“Mackenna’s Gold”) and become the go-to guy for Charles Bronson during his run in B-movie “Death Wish” sequels and imitations, but the consistent themes, and always well-handled action beats of his films stood him in good stead, even if they never lifted him into the “pantheon” of auteur critic Andrew Sarris’s famed “pantheon” of directors.

One of Thompson’s earliest triumphs is the newly-restored World War II North African thriller “Ice Cold in Alex,” released by Film Movement streaming or BluRay.

The stark, sunbaked desert setting makes a great crucible for a story of men (and women) tested by the elements, the enemy, each other and their sometimes flawed selves as they scramble to get an ambulance, and two nurses, through German lines, a minefield, sand dunes and the Qattara Depression salt marsh as they escape from encircled Libya to “Alex,” Alexandria in British-held Egypt.

It’s a film with melodrama, tragedy, treachery and romance, an old fashioned combat actioner with little combat, something of a new wrinkle in Britain’s decades of wallowing in “their finest hour.”

John Mills had become a big star in the decade since his David Lean “Great Expectations” breakout, and plays grizzled and soused Captain Anson, an alcoholic officer ordered to take two nurses in the battered ambulance called “Katy” out of the repeatedly-besieged Tobruk and back to Alexandria. Sylvia Syms and Diane Crane plays the nurses.

The reliable character actor Harry Andrews is Pugh, the venerable sergeant assigned to join him, with both men reluctant to leave the garrison there behind, with hints of hard feelings or outright bad blood between Anson and at least one man trapped there.

“You right bastard!”

Just a couple of blokes in British battle shorts, sharing a bottle and a little drive across hundreds of miles of contested desert. Well, Sgt. Pugh figures he needs to keep the old man off the sauce.

“You’ve had just about enough, sir,” is never what Anson wants to hear. But Pugh enlists Sister Murdoch (Syms) in a “keep the old man sober” scheme, something which becomes trickier as they face tragedy and face unforeseen obstacles and detours, hunting for petrol and water in a moonscape where both are scarce.

They reluctantly pick up a passenger, a thick-accented South African (Anthony Quayle, in one of his finest action performances), start having run-ins with the Germans.

As the journey progresses, Anson faces and shrinks in the presence of his demons (he was briefly a POW, and isn’t having any more of that, come what way), blood is spilled and suspicions about their passenger arise as Katy breaks down and threatens to leave them stranded more than once.

But Thompson, whose best films were often ensemble pieces just like this, reliably finds room for humor, camaraderie and even romance amid the sand, sweat and string of severe tests the crew faces in their quest to get Anson to his favorite bar, where the beer is “Ice Cold in Alex.”

It’s a good looking film (Gilbert Taylor was DP, he did “Flash Gordon” and British TV’s “Avengers”) that sets up nicely, integrates actual combat photography without undue clumsiness and immerses us in a baking Hell where there was no sunscreen and only the Sgt. had the good sense to bring a hat.

The melodramatic touches remind us to ignore the opening voice over, which notes that this story “happens to be true.” It’s based on a novel by Christopher Landon, who co-wrote the script.

Mills lived to be a grand old man of the cinema, appearing in the Branagh “Hamlet” and the Rowan Atkinson “Bean” before dying at 97.

Andrews spent decades making World War II movies in WWII-obsessed Britain, and was even in Christopher Reeve’s “Superman.”

Quayle would go on to “Guns of Navarone” and “Lawrence of Arabia,” Syms is still living and still working, turning up as royalty in Amanda Bynes’ “What a Girl Wants” and as the Queen Mum in the Helen Mirren Oscar-winner, “The Queen.”

And alert viewers will spot, in Walter Gotell, playing a German officer our intrepid crew encounters, a future Bond “Russian,” a semi-villain in several later Roger Moore 007 pictures.

Thompson? He picked up one Oscar nomination, for his most famous film (“Navarone”), got to make a serviceable “Huckleberry Finn” with Paul Winfield, a lightly-amusing “King Solomon’s Mines” with Richard Chamberlain and a very young Sharon Stone, and too many damned Bronson films (and a Chuck Norris one) before hanging it up and retiring. He died at 88 in 2002, and with the seeming collapse of the “star director” as a studio-accepted concept, probably came along at the perfect time to earn the plaudits he did, even as his reputation recedes into the salons of BluRay aficionados.

MPA Rating: “Approved,” violence

Cast: John Mills, Harry Andrews, Sylvia Syms, Anthony Quayle and Diane Clare

Credits: Directed by J. Lee Thompson, script by T.J. Morrison and Christopher Landon, based on Landon’s novel. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 2:10

This Dec. 10 awards-bait, blockbuster-in-the-making features Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, and bless Spielberg’s film buff heart, EGOT triple threat Rita Moreno from the Robert Wise version of the film from the ’60s.

Looks promising, but remaking a classic is always an iffy proposition. And Spielberg is no uh Robert Wise, let’s face it.

An impressive if not Kong opening weekend for both of new releases this weekend. The latest version of the video game Mortal Kombat earned $22.5 million obits debut and Sony Funimation cleaned up with $19.5 for Demon Slayer.

Godzilla vs Kong did $4 million plus, not bad even as it lost most of its audience to the newcomers.

Well, here’s an unexpected pleasure of the beer and sweat-drenched variety.

“Golden Arm” is a brassy, scruffy comedy set in the truck-stops, honky-tonks and BFE “civic centers of arm wrestling. The hook? They’re all women, and they’re all funny. The details about the sport and punch-out bar fights that come with it are more entertaining than anything in Stallone’s last-millennium mess “Over the Top,” because “Golden Arm” is a lot more over-the-top.

The catch? You’ve got to buy into skinny-mini Mary Holland (“Veep,” and “Between Two Ferns: The Movie”) as a “contender.”

Holland, just a simple dye-job away from passing for Kristen Wiig’s sister, plays Mel, a newly-divorced baker and small-business pushover recruited by Danny “the Dominator” (Betsy Sodaro of “Disjointed”) to take her place in the Big Tournament.

Sure, Mel’s mild-mannered today. But back before Danny was a long-haul trucker and Mel was just dreaming of donuts without selling-out-to-Dunkin, they were college roomies. And Mel could throw down with the best of them.

Danny’s been injured by her nemesis. She needs a “golden arm” to get in there and take down Brenda the Bonecrusher, played by the amusingly-intimidating Olivia Stambouliah.

Mel has to hit something like bottom to even consider this. New divorce papers and red ink in her business aren’t enough. She’s got to be tricked into not “hiding behind that apron like a depressed, underweight Bobby Flay.”

Director Maureen Bharoocha, who films comic bits for Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, makes this script by the team that gave us TV’s “Love Under the Olive True” (Ann Marie Allison, Jenna Milly) jump out of the gate. That’s because the early scenes are dominated by Sodaro, a beery bulldog in a china shop.

Danny is all impulse and rage and appetites, and she’s tour guide to this underworld of trucking, flashing truck-stops “for good luck,” grimy sex, arm wrestling and brawls. She schools Mel — and us — hilariously in the do’s and don’ts of her tribe.

“Three ways to get into a bar fight…the classic ‘Just trip’em. BOOM. You’re in a bar fight. Two, steal someone’s beer or their DUDE. And three, the mean and simple ‘flick’em in the head!”

Mel was good at arm wrestling in her younger days. We’re mean to buy into kneading dough has kept her in fighting trim. Because she’s an arm wrestling savant.

The ladies get chased out of rowdy Randy’s bar, played by “Office” man-killer/man-eater Kate Flannery, and get Mel trained by Big Sexy. Dot-Marie Jones matches Sodaro, excess for comic excess in that role. Big Sexy she doesn’t want to train this “jellyfish.”

“Her whole aura is piss yellow!”

Big Sexy teaches Mel and the audience the rules and the pitfalls of this sport, the mere “eight pounds of pressure” that it takes to “break the radial humerus bone” if you put your arm in the wrong position.

Truth be told, “Golden Arm” loses a lot of steam when the ladies get to Oklahoma City for the Big Tournament. This movie’s laughs are on the road, with Randy sassing her old rival Danny for the company she keeps.

“You gonna let Kate Middleton over here tell you what to do?”

Mel is put down every which way by everybody she meets. “American Girl Doll” and “I’ve seen bigger biceps on balloon animals” are two favorites.

Sodaro and Holland have good chemistry in the trucking scenes, which mainly feature meek Mel deferring to Danny’s blue collar brio. Sleeping arrangements in the truck?

“The rule is, ‘Guests have to be the Big spoon.'”

All you want out of a comedy like this is that it begins and ends well, and doesn’t waste a lot of time during the inevitably deflating (romantic interest, tournament) middle acts.

“Golden Arm” and its winning cast are just over-the-top enough to come off

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Mary Holland, Betsy Sodaro, Olivia Stambouliah, Dot-Marie Jones and Kate Flannery

Credits: Directed by Maureen Bharoocha, script by Ann Marie Allison, Jenna Milly. A Utopia release.

Running time: 1:31