Why Netflix is eating Amazon’s Lunch on Streaming

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

Netflix has 280 million subscribers, worldwide. People who pay for Netflix are paying for unlimited access to thousands of movies and series they watch.

Amazon Prime, the online retail giant’s answer to Netflix, has 200 million “members” worldwide, but only some of them use the video streaming Amazon platform as a part of that. We use it for goods from a wide variety of vendors, shipped free to the house.

Both produce series and original movies. But there’s a pretty big gap in video usage, and there are infuriatingly obvious reasons for this.

Netflix has their streaming tech down. You can watch Netflix movies or series etc. on your phone or a laptop at the airport, at home, at a fast food joint or waiting for your concert or sporting event to start. It’s a simple, smooth, rarely-buffered viewing experience.

Amazon? It works at home. Sometimes. Often. Depending on your wifi speed. I experience hangups — buffering crashes — that often seem tied to the “limited ads” they try to tailor (Hah!) to my “profile” with Amazon. Go to smaller devices or leave home and it can be even clunkier.

Amazon has its hit series, and every now and then, one becomes a phenomenon (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” “Clarkson’s Farm”). Their hits-to-misses track record seems on a par with Netflix’s (which produces far more series) but not with say Hulu or Apple TV, which focus heavily on series, don’t produce a lot of them, and have a better batting average in the hits-to-misses dept.

Then there’s the movie selection. Jeff Bezos and Amazon via Amazon/MGM are blowing money on the occasional film — “Red One,” “Air,” “The Big Sick,” “Manchester by the Sea,” etc. But new “originals” aren’t a weekly offering or feature of Amazon. And their acquisitions dept. doesn’t have the budget Netflix throws at even money-losers like short films.

Amazon buys a lot of bottom-shelf “entertainment,” self-financed or cheaply-made movies from assorted indie operators. If I want to review something “new” on Amazon, I am almost always disappointed in the quality. Well-intentioned piffle like “Chicken Coop” or “The Crossroads” or one I just got through, “The Window,” dominates their New on Prime” menu.

They get around this “We don’t have much, and much of it is s–t” shortcoming by mixing up menus, showing off a wide selection of “new releases” that are rentals because they’re still in theaters or just dropped off big screens, and an even wider selection of content they don’t advertise as “available for rent” by which should be more clearly marked as such.

There are other deceptions Team Bezos trots out. I started to watch “The River King,” a FilmRise title pitched by Amazon Prime as a “2024” release. It has some names in the cast — Edward Burns and Jennifer Ehle.

But I watch a few minutes of it, speculate on how much plastic surgery “work” Burns and Ehle might have had done, only to check and see that the damned movie was made in 2005. It’s “new to Amazon” content that Amazon labeled as “2024” “new.”

I think, well maybe they made a deal with Lionsgate’s limited-release/direct-to-video division. I posted the trailers to “The Thicket,” a bounty-hunter Western starring Peter Dinklage, and “Armor,” a Stallone quick-and-dirty heist picture “released” this year. Amazon has them. But it’s not until you click on the title that you see it’s only for sale or “rent.”

Kids, if nobody and I mean NOBODY bought a ticket to see these films, and legions of smaller distributors’ titles, in theaters, how do you figure it’s worth $6.99 now? It isn’t and they aren’t.

Amazon Prime’s slim pickings are most pronounced, to me, over the holidays at the end of the year, when new titles in theaters have all premiered, I run out of reviewable titles among the limited releases during the year and Amazon is where I go to catch up.

On and on you scroll — or I do — looking for something Amazon Prime has that make Prime a viable alternative to Netflix. Some classic titles, sure. Not all. And many of those are “for rent” or purchase.

The latest releases for rent just as they’re leaving theaters is an understandable “upselling.” I’d expect to pay near cinema prices for “Gladiator II” or “Wicked.”

But as a “Let’s watch a movie as part of our ‘Prime’ membership” experience, Prime just sucks.

Netflix finances film production directly or via purchasing of screen rights all over the world. And there are plenty of examples of money wasted on these films from North America, Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East or Asia. But by and large, there’s professional content on offer, even from countries whose film industries aren’t well known or necessarily well-regarded in the West.

Hulu and Apple don’t pitch themselves as true Netflix alternatives. You expect fewer series and very few films from them, or Disney+ or Max or whoever.

Amazon Prime Video, a Netflix-competitor hyped and offered-up by the most valuable retail corporation on Earth, is a joke.

It’s no wonder they don’t publicize usage rates, etc. I review a title on Amazon, even a conceivably popular one that is getting a lot of viewers, and the review only generates a small fraction of what your average review of a Netflix title — even a Polish thriller or Italian comedy — rounds up.

I don’t have access to Amazon’s balance sheets, and their business plan may have wrinkles in it that are beyond the conventional streaming model. But what seems obvious as of now is that they’re blowing money on “Red One” that could very easily have been broken up and paid for scores of Lionsgate, A24, Neon, etc. releases and produced a steady stream of actual “offerings” that make Prime membership a home video boon.

There’s just not enough worth watching on Prime. And making your glitchy, data-mining/data-hungry video streaming platform just an excuse for upselling users to more expensive content is just another way greed gets in the way of providing true “fair value.”

And whoever is running your “anything and anyone who got a movie made” acquisitions needs to go back to Film Appreciation class. Is it a bot that’s making these bottom-dollar buys?

The amount of Daddy’s money-financed indulgences, with a script so weak the filmmakers weren’t able to attract a single “name” to act in it, cluttering your platform shows contempt for subscribers and a penny-pinching greed that makes one inclined to cling to that Costco membership for anything one wants shipped, and to tell Bezos bye-bye. Because Amazon Prime isn’t “prime” anything.

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Movie Review: A Woman is enslaved by a “Blood Money” debt in Pakistan — “The Window”

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

“The Window” is a brutal and pitiless Pakistani melodrama about primitive practices (mostly) in the provinces, the tradition of marrying women off to pay “blood money” debts.

It’s harsh and judgemental enough to be an Indian anti-Pakistani/anti-Muslim propoganda film, but the slow-to-die practices depicted here — chiefly treating women as property, property men can abuse as they see fit — is seen all over the Subcontinent.

We meet Mina (Suhaee Abro) on her wedding day, which is anything but a happy occasion. Her father (Hameed Sheikh) has sold her in marriage to a family whose youngest son died at the hands of his son, Babar (Sami Khan). The village elders will excuse that killing with this “blood money” debt.

And Farhad (Faran Tahir), the groom and monstrous older brother of the dead man, is determined to get his full, bloody value out of this blood money.

Mina is subjected to beatings and gang rapes, clocked in a single-window cell in their property on the edge of their village. As her own father has ordained “Do not bring her up again in this house” (in English and Urdu with English subtitles) to her mother, his wife, Mina’s doom seems sealed.

“You are to spend the rest of your days in this room,” Farhad spits (literally) at her. Even his sister, Deeba (Rubya Chaudhry) has limits to the pity she shows their prisoner, who is soon chained for having the temerity to try and flee this fate.

Co-writer/directors Ammar Lasani and Kanza Zia use flashbacks to tell us how it all came to this, the ill-fated lovers who tried to flee to Lahore, only to be chased down, setting up the confrontation where someone was going to die — either from “bringing shame to my family” or from trying to carry out the “traditional” rough justice sentence for such a crime.

Other flashbacks double down on the “forbidden love” causes of all this, and underscore just how poorly women are treated in the more primitive corners of this part of the world. Mina joins in on a soccer match, scores a goal, and is promptly pummeled for it by the manly men she scored on.

Mina’s pathetic plight is ham-fistedly underscored by the one creature she can speak to without judgement, “Mr. Ant,” crawling in and out of her cell.

The acting is wildly uneven here, with some players either amatuerish or uncomfortable enough acting in English as to stand apart from the rest. The explain-it-all flashbacks are paired with simplistic fantasy hallucinations, all that Mina has to cling to as her lot doesn’t improve and more and more time passes.

The graphic nature of the violence reinforces how pitiless and hopeless this situation is portrayed. Mina has no agency in any of this. Attempts to free her or remind the village of her plight are hapless and futile.

As decades of outrage, protests and international shaming do little to lessen this savagely repressive treatment, can a movie melodrama change anything? If not, one really does wonder what the point of “The Window” is.

Rating: 18+, rape, graphic violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Suhaee Abro, Faran Tahir, Rubya Chaudhry, Sami Khan, Hameed Sheikh and Angeline Malik

Credits: Directed by Ammar Lasani and Kanza Zia, scripted by Ammar Lasani, Kanza Zia and Randy Zuniga. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:22

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Classic Film Review: A Scottish Bay, a Burt and a Baby-Faced Peter Capaldi — “Local Hero” (1983)

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Roger Moore

Oh to make the pilgrimage to Pennan, flying in to Aberdeen, recreating the journey a “Local Hero” makes in perhaps the quaintest, cutest film of that golden age of excess, the ’80s.

Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth’s “Gregory’s Girl” announced to the world a great cinema talent with an eye and an ear for “adorable.” But “Local Hero,” a Hollywood studio film (Warner Bros.) with a Hollywood legend (Burt Lancaster) adorning the cast, is where Forsyth best-blended his twee Scots sensibility to a Major Motion Picture.

It’s a classic “fish out of water” comedy, one that flips the conventions of such films, suggesting the predictable, then veering away from it. The ’80s and early ’90s were a golden age for fish out of water comedies, with this film, “The Coca-Cola Kid,” “The Efficiency Expert” and “Crocodile Dundee” among those making their merry way into cinemas around the globe.

Peter Riegert of “Animal House” and later “A Shock to the System” plays a young “acquistitions” closer at Knox Oil & Industries, a Houston concern with an interest in buying “Scotland, or a piece of Scotland” for a North Sea oil storage and shipping terminal.

They’ve settled on tiny Ferness. The aged and eccentric CEO, Mr. Happer (Lancaster), a man working with a shrink who figures humiliating and abusing the born-filthy-rich is a way of “treating” him (Worth a try.), is a bit distracted by to be all-in on this project. But he summons MacIntyre (Riegert), an executive chosen for these “delicate” negotiations because of the surname his Hungarian family took at Ellis Island, and in between getting his name wrong, tells him to “watch the skies” over there.

Happer thinks he’ll make his true mark on the world by getting a comet named for him.

Mac flies over, meets the multi-lingual local Knox company man Oldsen (future Doctor Who Peter Capaldi, barely old enough to shave), sees the scale-model that shows his rapacious company’s plans for buying and destroying Ferness and its bay, and they’re off.

In the grand tradition of city-slicker-goes-rural fish out of water comedies, Mac and Oldsen arrive in the one-phone/one-telephone-box village and never know what hit them.

The hotelier, bartender, taxi driver and only-accountant-in-town Urquhart (Denis Lawson) can barely be bothered to interrupt his lusty attentions to his wife Stella (Jennifer Black) to wait on them. But he, like every other thrifty Scot within earshot, knows exactly why “the Yank” is here.

The only person who doesn’t “know” what Knox Oil has in mind for this town, this beach and this bay is the fetching marine biologist Marina, whose name is so on-the-nose that she simply had to be played by an actress named Jennifer Seagrove.

Oldsen is instantly smitten, and it will take all his professionalism to keep the “secret” to himself. Because the other locals, even the Afro-Scottish priest (Gyearbuor Asante) are already seeing dollar signs, or pound notes, which is one of the points Mac and Gordon Urquhart must haggle over before a price is asked and met.

Meanwhile, the beach that the two gents in three-piece suits keep walking, the cozy pub where the locals gather for sing-alongs and Cèilidh (debates), even the hotel which has no idea what to do with “an electric briefcase” (pre-computer era), but where the three-star chefs (Stella and Gordon) know exactly what to do with an “injured rabbit” Mac brings them (they cook it), start to work on the Yank and his Scots protege.

The clever touches start with the ways Mac’s “bringing the community together to make a collective deal” go wrong for both the Houston hustler and the Ferness finagler Gordon.

One soon-to-be-rich wag is repainting his sailboat and gives it a new name — “The Dollar Bill.”

“Are you sure there are two l’s in ‘dollar’, Gideon?”

“Aye, an’ are there two g’s in ‘bugger off!'”

Writer-director Forsyth sets up characters and love interests that seem destined to derail the deal, and then surprises us when they don’t. He introduces us to the “charms” of the village, while letting us see how “charm” has its limits, and how living in such a place can seem to those stuck there.

The spry-to-the-end Lancaster brings a grand twinkle to the mad Happer, a goof more interested in shooting stars and Northern Lights than in oil.

That reckless motorbiking kid that everybody in the village knows to look out for every time they step out is Ricky, drummer in a local band and played by the “Gregory” of “Gregory’s Girl,” John Gordon Sinclair.

Riegert’s role in all of this is that of the straight man — the reactor — and he handles that with a faintly smarmy ease. He’s enjoyed a long and never-idle career, but his great run was”Animal House” through “Local Hero,” to “Crossing Delancey” and “A Shock to the System,” always great in support, rarely the lead.

Capaldi’s career didn’t truly blow-up until he tore through his profane turn in the wickedly funny political comedy “In the Loop.”

With “Local Hero,” the Oscar-winning legend Lancaster started his career’s home stretch — lots of twinkling old man roles; “Rocket Gibraltar,” “Tough Guys” and “Field of Dreams.”

About the only thing that seems dated in Bill Forsyth’s early films is the juvenile leering and ogling evident in this movie and “Gregory’s Girl,” even hinted at in his male-dominated feature debut, “That Sinking Feeling.” It’s sexist and cringey, seen today.

Our writer-director all but ended his career with “Being Human,” an ambitious and twee Robin Williams misfire that took a lot out of both of them. But he added “Comfort and Joy,” “Housekeeping” and “Breaking In” to a list of movies that suggested producers should have been beating down his door all through the ’90s and beyond.

Scotland had Connery and Lulu and Annie Lennox, The Proclaimers, Billy Connolly, Kelly MacDonald and Craig Ferguson. But nobody in recent years has done “Scotland” better than the guy who put it on the screen at its most adorable, Bill Forsyth.

Rating: PG, innuendo

Cast: Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Christopher Rozycki and Burt Lancaster

Credits: Scripted by directed by Bill Forsyth. A Warner Bros. release on Tubi, Youtube, other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:52

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Netflixable? Polish “Justice” turns Old (Communist) School in this ’90s thriller

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Justice” is a solid if somewhat unsatisfying slow-burn thriller from Poland, a drama set shortly after the country shed Soviet era Russian dominatation.

It’s about a heist that went wrong, the pitiless murders that took place when that happened and the pitiless former totalitarian government investigator brought back to “solve” the crime and deliver “Justice,” old school or otherwise.

Olaf Lubaszenko of Kieslowki’s “A Short Film About Love” stars as Tadeusz Gadacz, an aging outcast from the Communist regime, an ace detective whose “methods” don’t work in a civil rights-treasuring democracy. He’s still got the Mercedes his prior work earned him. But these days, the loner scrapes by making garden gnomes.

A prosecutor (Magdalena Boczarska) from the justice ministry brings him back. She and her boss, the justice minister (Miroslaw Haniszewski) remember the man’s brutish methods. But two weeks of such rough trade might solve a bank robbery that went wrong and got several people — most of them women clerks — killed.

Gadacz is called in so quickly that the crime scene is still active. He can poke around the bodies and note details and get a handle on the awful ways it all went down. He can check behind the cops still on the job and turn up one “person of interest” who turns out to be a body that his replacements have missed.

“I recognize when someone has made a mistake and there’s no time for them to undo it,” he muses (in Polish, or dubbed into English).

With the former protege he still nicknames “Pocket” (Wiktoria Gorodecka) Gadacz will quickly settle on a theory, suspects and a means of pinning the crime on them. Surveillance, interrogation and shoe leather work will be involved.

Here’s what’s not particularly satisfying about this version of “Justice.”

There’s no urgency, and the stakes seem low. Gadacz hardly harbors any hope that he’ll be allowed to return to the force. The “two weeks” he’s allowed to put this case to beg is charted with “Day One” through “Day Twelve” and beyond with intertitles is meaningless and arbitrary, and seems leisurely.

Gadacz and we “know” who did it. Flashbacks and shifts in point of view only confirm that. There’s no cliched “pressure from above” to solve this case. After all, they basically brought him in before the bodies were moved. He’s their first resort, not their last.

Director Michal Gazda and screenwriter Bartosz Staszczyszyn immerse us in a place and a time, reminding us of the ugliness of the communist past and the unjust, unsettling adjustment to “capitalism,” when the country is asked to celebrate a bank merger as something new and patriotic, heedless of the human cost.

But they’ve made a “ticking clock thriller” and ignored the damned clock. They give away the killers, making their movie focus only on the ways a cunning and ruthless detective traps and coerces them to deliver his idea of “justice.” That’s interesting only in the melodramatic hokum implicit in that approach — the corny, old-fashioned and unrealistic attack of “conscience.”

“I’ve got to CONFESS!”

The players are in sharp form, with screen veteran Lubaszenko anchoring the film in world weariness, and Jedrzej Hycnar suggesting sinister grievances and psychoses that justify his “smart” villain’s choices, no matter how ruthless.

And the narrative carries you along, even if it takes its sweet time, even if there’s not a lot of mystery about it as it does.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Olaf Lubaszenko, Wiktoria Gorodecka, Jedrzej Hycnar and Magdalena Boczarska

Credits: Directed by Michal Gazda, scripted by
Bartosz Staszczyszyn, A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

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Movie Review: An Estranged Father and Son find middle ground at the “Chicken Coop”

Posted on December 30, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Chicken Coop” is a drab indie dramedy about dogmatic parents, children who left home to escape that and “bonding” over home repair as they fight over literally everything else.

Decent acting doesn’t atone for low-stakes drama, low-heat scenes and dated, strained culture war jokes about vegetarianism, “California” and gun owner delusions in Red State America.

Isaac (Noah Kershisnik) and his high maintenance wife Tania (Monica Moore Smith) have shown up to help his widowed Dad, Abe (Mark Bracich) care for his tidy, small mini-farm somewhere in the unnamed Southwest.

The film was shot in Utah, and the father’s name is Abraham and the son Isaac, and Abraham cusses but doesn’t want his son to swear, so make of that what you want.

Dad’s house may be filled with loads of Lowes’ Home Improvement new fixtures, but there’s a water leak that needs to located and fixed and a relationship that has gone years without repair.

Isaac and Tania arrived the day before and didn’t even bother to call, as he has mixed feelings about this homecoming. Tania tries to be the peacemaker and butters up the “crazy hillbilly with a guitar that I fell in love with.” But she’ll have to hide their vegetarianism and other details of their lives to keep that peace. The old man’s a curmedgeon.

His pranks about not knowing where the water leak is, much less the pipe that caused it, where the tools necessary to fix that are and the like show contempt for the son who went West and make his fortune as an entertainment lawyer.

“Got any gloves?”‘

“Your sissy little hands can’t take handling a shovel?”

Isaac has a bitter streak that ties into the fact that the one parent he got along with died, and not dealing with his Dad got out of hand when he wasn’t there for his mother’s final days and funeral.

Tania? She’s here to be taunted about her “fad” diet, her “liberal” state and her ideas about how she wants to humanely catch and move the mice that bedevil the mini-farm when Abe is sure they’ll “kumbaya their way back over here.”

Nobody comments on her California ideas about a winter wardrobe, the 24-7 perfection of her makeup or hair that looks freshly curled and blown-out in every scene.

None of it adds up to a laugh, and the creaky arguments about “safety” and gun ownership and the like are just ways to avoid talking about the real rift here.

And that real rift? It’s as played-out as the screenplay-ordained quarrels.

The “Chicken Coop” of the title makes for a poor metaphor about the limited, but safe and provided-for life this piece of semi-rural America offers and a mealy-mouthed excuse for one more snappish explanation about “where our food comes from.”

The streaming revolution means that every indie film, documentary and import out there has at least a chance of finding an audience and making a mark beyong the ever-growing film festival circuit. But not all of them merit this wider exposure, and the ones that don’t always fall short in the most important element — the screenplay.

Rating: 13+, profanity

Cast: Mark Bracich, Noah Kershisnik and Monica Moore Smith.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joseph DeGolyer. A Bridgestone Media release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:37

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Classic Film Review: “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” Murnau invents the Vampire Movie (1922)

Posted on December 29, 2024 by Roger Moore

It has been many years since I had seen the original “Nosferatu: A Symphony in Horror,” an “inspired by ‘Dracula'” vampire film that truly invented “the vampire movie” when it came out in 1922.

In this historic silent masterwork the expressionistic director F.W. Murnau and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner conceived a whole chapter in the future Language of the Cinema in creating one of the most influential movies ever made.

Even the passing decades cannot dim the movie’s signature images and moments, something the latest “Nosferatu,” Robert Eggers’ worshipful new version starring Alexander Skarsgård, Lily Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe summons up in scene after recreated scene.

It’s been remade more than once — Klaus Kinski! –and its myth even inspired a creepy and most entertaining “making of” thriller “Shadow of a Vampire” starring John Malkovich as the celebrated director Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, the actor playing the title role in this “unauthorized” adaptation of “Dracula,” getting deep/deeper/deepest into character as he did.

Watching Murnau and Wagner and their cast in the 1922 film is a way of further illuminating Eggers’ homage, as the modern director pays tribute to the pioneering filmmaker in shot after shot, effect after shadowy effect.

The remake is pretty close to a note for note recreation. But watching the 1922 film again reminds us of untidy touches in the script, the conventions of the “Dracula” story that were filmed as written, or added for Henrik Galeen’s script, and then abandoned because there are sharper ways of moving the action from point A to B and more that could be made of assorted characters not scripted to their full potential in that original script.

“Vampire hunters” named “Van Helsing” were for the future.

The names of the cities may change, the time-setting may be moved up five years, but the mid-19th century “plague” parallels are still here, the Dickensian attire and Gothic architecture — easier to envision in pre-WWII Germany and Slovakia — hits the viewer like Buster Keaton’s Civil War comedy “The General.” It can be like watching a documentary shot in the 1840s.

It begins, as “Nosferatu” always does, with real estate and a realtor in the thrall of that big fish client interested in a ruined property on his books. Knock (Alexander Granach) leers and grins through his sinister assortment of teeth at the idea of sending young estate agent Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) off to close the deal in far off Transylvania, “the land of spectres.”

Adoring newlywed Hutter is loathe to leave his bride Ellen (Greta Schröder), but as anybody who’s dealt with a real estate agent will tell you, money is money, even if the boss hints at the “sweat” and especially the “blood” this deal will cost Hutter.

He makes the overland journey while wife Ellen has nightmares about what’s to come. Hutter finally reaches the village next to the castle, only to find the locals recoil at the name of the resident of that castle.

A “phantom” carriage fetches Hutter to the castle, warnings of “werewolves” (plainly a hyena) in the forest be damned. And then he meets the count (Schreck), a man with bugging eyes, ears he hides under a hat and a yen for doing business after dark.

We take the “the midnight hour” remarks here with a forgiving eye, as day and night sequences in this classic film — which exists in many prints, restorations, entertitlings, etc. — are a jumble of scenes, most of them plainly shot in daylight. So much for the Count fearing “the living sun.”

Hutter finds himself awakening after the “deepest sleep” to find “mosquito bites” he describes in a letter to Ellen. He reads a book on vampyres and starts to get the willies about who and what he’s dealing with in the fastness of this imposing, seemingly inescapable mountain redoubt.

Ellen’s mania at Hutter’s absence grows and the friends who take her in consult with a couple of “professors” who are of little help. And Hutter’s escape won’t end their peril because as the narrator has mentioned on silent film intertitles from the start, this is an account of “the great death of Wisborg,” a “plague” that engulfed the port torn, and assorted other port towns in that year.

All of those cities, it turns out, Count Orlok had just passed through.

Comparing the “new” and old “Nosferatu” isn’t as simple as you’d think, as the decades of “Dracula” and “Nosferatu” adaptations make it tricky to know where “Dracula” ends and the knock-off “Nosferatu” script begins when it comes to the conventions and tropes of these films — the “familiar,” the damsel in danger, the sea voyage, etc. I’ll leave that parsing of puncture wounds to the scholars and vampire cognoscenti.

Suffice it to say the original “Nosferatu” is a cinephile’s bucket list title, and the fact that it’s available for streaming as Eggers’ film comes out is just icing on the cake.

Because whatever version of this twice-restored film you see (Tubi has a 1:29 restoration, and there are versions as long as 1:34), what punches through the cinematic century that has passed since its first release is the creepiness of the milieu, the authentically ancient or 19th century settings and the primal nature of the horror.

Eggers and generations of film remakes have gotten more graphic in that “fear of being eaten alive” phobia this story taps into. But fear of an insidious, wasting illness, the “plague” with no possible cure and little means of resistance, is timeless.

Fear of the inadequacies of science among the superstitious has reached a modern day peak.

The idea that ahistorical and historical monsters have evil, compliant henchmen always in their thrall never goes away, even if that craven “familiar” is named Renfield or Knock, Goebbels or Kushner, and only some of them deal in real estate.

The comical camp that turns up in Eggers’ film wasn’t new, either. By 1922, the world knew the “Dracula” plot, and when the no-doubt-he’s-a-vampire Orlok purrs “Your wife has such a beautiful…neck” at seeing a locket depicting Ellen, it might have been as funny then as it is now.

Like “Citizen Kane,” when it comes to horror, what came out before this 1922 masterpiece — and “Haxxan” and “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” of the same era — is a world apart from what followed. Horror got sophisticated and the table was set for the glory years of Tod Browning, Universal Studios horror and all that came later.

Learning that cinema audiences wanted to be frightened, and in ways mere stage shows couldn’t provide, was a turning point.

In this film school graduate/CGI settings and special effects era of movie storytelling, any horror filmmaker not studying “Nosferatu” shot by shot and any period piece director not taking a hard look at silent cinema’s painstaking recreations of the 1800s and early 1900s is missing the boat.

Sometimes that boat isn’t an actual time-and-weatherworn sailing brigantine, and sometimes the name “Demeter” is emblazened across her stern.

Rating: unrated, TV-PG

Cast: Max Schreck, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach, Gustav von Wangenheim
John Gottowt and Gustav Botz

Credits: Directed by F.W. Murnau, scripted by Henrik Galeen, based on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” A Sala46 World release on Tubi, other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:29 (or 1:34)

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Netflixable? Polish investigator tracks a bloody-minded killer, “Colors of Evil — Red”

Posted on December 29, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Colors of Evil: Red” is a well-acted, sinister and solidly built Polish serial killer thriller based on a novel by Malgorzata Oliwia Sobczak.

We follow an intrepid and “new” prosecutor/investigator (Jakub Gieszal) and the judge (Maja Ostaszewskya) whose daughter might be a serial killer’s latest victim as one picks apart clues pointing to a rigged system and the mother fears she knows exactly how she and her lawyer-husband (Andrzej Zielinski) “failed our daughter.”

But one of the ways this glib, twisty thriller missteps — apart from a narrow focus that doesn’t see widespread corruption as cultural rot from the country’s tortured, 20th century history, and the jarring, jaunty rock tunes that underscore police raids and the like — is in how it stubbornly it clings to victim-blaming.

Yes, college-age Monika (Zofia Jastrzebska) is beautiful, promiscuous and hellbent on getting what she wants. When insulting the bartenders and the manager (Wojciech Zielinski) of Gdynia’s Shipyard Bar doesn’t land her a job, she sleeps with the guy and becomes an insider there, and that manager’s girlfriend.

That doesn’t mean she deserves to be murdered, her lips sliced off and her body dumped in the Baltic Sea.

That’s where the cops gather and the new guy, Bilski (Gierszal) find her. The coroner (Andrzej Konopka) notes the similarity to an earlier case, the blustery department chief (Zbigniew Stryj) says the guy convicted of that gruesome killing just got out of prison (!?), and there it is.

“Case closed!”

Only the shellshocked, newly-arrested and re-accused “killer” mutters about being “framed again,” before jumping out a police station window. Some of the cops seem a little too eager to move on. And there are all these connections between the judge, her husband, that club and the Cypriot mobster Kazar (Przemyslaw Bluszcz) who owns it and “runs things” in an underworld sense on this corner of the Baltic coast.

As Bilski noses around, with threats of “transfer” hanging over his head, as the judge starts to ask questions, some of which she knows the answer to and which endanger her life, we start to wonder who else in this small world justice system might be implicated.

Flashbacks do a half-decent job of explaining how Monika got in over her head with seemingly no means of escape, lessening the character’s “shaming” and blame.

But director Adrian Panek is unsparing in his focus on the lurid and the stomach-turning. The sex is explicit, the nudity plentiful and the blood flows in more than one scene that our Onassis-glasses mob chief covers with tasteless, sexist jokes.

“Colors of Evil: Red” may be a page-turner, keeping us engaged as tiny bits of foreshadowing reveal new suspects much later on. But it’s never more than a mixed-bag as entertainment, playing up its torture porn elements and wallowing in the sordid and the violent even as it takes a shot at humanizing the victim we first see, time and again, as having effed around and then found out.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic, bloody violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Jakub Gierszal, Maja Ostaszewska, Zofia Jastrzebska, Wojciech Zielinski, Zbigniew Stryj, Andrzej Zielinski, Jan Wieteska, and Przemyslaw Bluszcz

Credits: Directed by Adrian Panek, scripted by Lukasz M. Maciejewski and Adrian Panek, based on a novel by Malgorzata Oliwia Sobczak.

Running time: 1:51

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Netflixable? “Girl Haunts Boy,” a teen romance for tweens

Posted on December 28, 2024 by Roger Moore

Here’s an exceptionally mild-mannered Netflix teen romance built around a couple of cute young leads made “stars” by earlier Netflix outings.

Peyton List (“Kobra Kai”) plays a flapper teen who swipes a magic ring and dies in 1928, only to come back and haunt a teen (Michael Cimino of “Never Have I Ever”) who finds that same ring in the present day.

It’s sweet enough and harmless enough for tweens, with tragedy and almost wrestling with death and the way life “moves on” from it, but kind of chickening out on that. It’s not remotely edgy enough for your average teenage streaming consumer, or anybody older.

Bea has the flapper haircut the flapper hat and the sassy, rebellious air of a 1928 city teen who wanders off from a museum tour in Spectral Valley, USA, only to find a pair of ancient “lovers’ rings” and make off with one.

Next thing she knows, she’s hit by a car. Possibly a Dusenberg.

Cole is a kid who moved to Spectral Valley with his mom (Andrea Navedo) for a fresh start. Moving into an enormous, nicely-restored turn of the last century Queen Anne house could make that easier.

But Cole, a guitarist who hasn’t played since his beloved guitar-mentor Dad passed, stumbles across a hidden compartment in his closet with a photo album suggesting a young life interrupted long ago. A ring stashed there confirms it.

Because lonely loner Cole puts the ring on, and damned if this flapper Bea doesn’t appear. Cole might recognize her as such since he’s studying “The Great Gatsby” in school.

Bea is a font of “Doozy” and “bees knees” slang, lost in a world of “selfies” and social media and the like. There’s a real pop culture communication barrier, even after Bea learns how long she’s been dead and just how much the world changed.

Youtube tutorials bring her up to speed. No, Cole doesn’t have the heart to tell her what happened to Amelia Earhart. No, she can’t “leave this house,” until magically, as if the screenwriter sensed the need to change scenery, she can.

List is an engaging presence, even if her character here has no edge. Jazz baby flappers typically liked jazz, illegal booze, smoking and the company of jazz baby men. Even her “stealing” is played as “sweet.” Cimino’s take on the brooding Cole is as watered-down as everything else here.

The most interesting character here is Lydia, that one kid in every high school (movie) who can sense the dead and is totally cool when they manifest in front of her. She’s given a nice spark by Phoebe Holden.

The cast also includes Brandon Michael Hall as a curiously ineffectual literature teacher who can’t get his kids to grasp the book “starring Leonardo DiCaprio,” “The Great Gatsby.” Judging from the interpretations laid out here, the screenwriter doesn’t “get” “Gatsby” either.

But events conspire to point Bea and Cole to some sort of “closure” and reconcilliation with death, even if their chaste attraction suggests they shouldn’t.

“Girl Haunts Boy” is unchallenging all around. But for kids too young to be studying “The Great Gatsby,” it could be “the bees knees,” or “chill” or whatever replaces “cool” this week.

Rating: PG

Cast: Peyton List, Michael Cimino and Phoebe Holden

Credits: Directed by Emily Ting, scripted by Cesar Vitale. Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

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Movie Review: A Tale Trapped at “The Crossroads,” Never Going Anywhere

Posted on December 28, 2024 by Roger Moore

“The Crossroads” is the sort of movie you get when you park two attractive but bland young actors on a modestly scenic piece of real estate and take romance pretty much off the table.

A stunningly dull chat-a-thon of silences, evasive question-and-answer conversations, abrupt, contrived arguments, literary name dropping and cliched third act “diagnoses” explaining much of what’s come before, it’s as good an argument as any against “keeping things simple,” tuning out the outside world and such.

You’d die of boredom.

Emily Coupe arrives at the titular filling station/convenience store/diner on the border between Arizona and New Mexico, jumps out of a car with her backpack, guitar, torn tight jeans and pink hair extensions, only to be “rescued” by “a cowboy” played by Nick Ballard.

“Star” is her name. She wants to be a singer-songwriter. But she’s fled LA, heading for “Dubuque.” Not that she gives this away any time soon.

Logan isn’t especially friendly, but he offers her a lift in his ancient Ford pickup, talks about “weather comin'” (We can see the skies. Nope.) and takes her to his remote farmhouse.

Don’t get your hopes up. This isn’t a horror movie.

Star is closed-off, working out some things. Logan is shut-down, dealing with his own issues. The script has them spend 95 minutes doling out even the tiniest hint of information about their names, their backgrounds, the time setting we’re dealing with and the problems they’re struggling to overcome.

Director Douglas A. Raine and screenwriter Ginia Desmond break that fundamental convenant they’re honor bound to take with the audience. Tell us what your movie is about, tell us who the characters are and don’t bore us to death waiting around for something — ANYthing — to happen.

Only somebody who thinks leaving LA for Dubuque is a fun idea could conjure up a leading lady dense enough to say “A clothesline? I’ve never used one.” Even if you haven’t, honey, there’s no danged sense admitting it.

Only a “cowboy” who hides his rodeo trophies in haystacks, who actually farms “hemp” now (not that we see “work” of any sort) when he isn’t reading “The Invisible Man” (H.G. Wells, 1897), with the Quran and select works of Carl Jung on his DIY bookshelves, could offer up this as a comeback.

“You’ll have to figure it out.”

Rating: profanity, adult subject matter

Cast: Nick Ballard, Emily Coupe

Credits: Directed by Douglas A. Raine, scripted by Ginia Desmond. A Desktop Entertainment release on FreeVee, Amazon Prime, etc.

Running time: 1:35

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Classic Film Review: Danny Kaye goes Marxist as “The Inspector General” (1949)

Posted on December 27, 2024 by Roger Moore

How might a moviegoer in 1949 have responded to Danny Kaye in the musical version of Gogol’s “The Inspector General?”

Watching it anew, my hot take is “It’s a Marx Bros. musical with Kaye trying to play all four Marx roles” — trying, it’s pretty obvious, entirely too hard.

Blame it on the over-exposure to “White Christmas” as a child, the fact that I distinctly remember being consistently disappointed by broadcasts of Kaye’s classic comedies on TV as a kid, and throw in the legions of tales about what a trial he was to work with, serve, deal with on an airliner or simply meet (Google “Danny Kaye” and “nasty” or “jerk”), but I never warmed to the patter-singing “Court Jester” of his era.

But here’s a Technicolor musical comedy, one of several tailor-made for his talents, capturing Kaye at his peak. “Inspector General” is quintessential Kaye, with mistaken identity, pratfalls and mugging, slapstick and tongue-twisting tunes.

“An Inspector General generally inspects, that is, they expect him to inspect generally, if they’re expecting an Inspector General. But an exceptionally generous Inspector General who made an exception and had no inspection would cause suspicion which in my condition I couldn’t except…”

Kaye is Georgi, a performing assistant in the “magic elixir” hustling Roma (Gypsy) Yakov’s (Walter Slezak) sideshow, traveling Napoleonic Europe in the months after the Battle of Austerlitz. Georgi isn’t heartless enough to play their con to the hilt, which starts a riot and sees only those two among their traveling company escape.

And Yakov doesn’t need the “illiterate millstone” that dead-weight Georgi represents. The starving redhead is soon on his own.

But the corrupt-to-the-core town of Brodney, where every member of the extended family of the mayor (Gene Lockhart) and constable (Alan Hale) is on the payroll and on the take, has gotten word that The Emperor has sent an Inspector General to survey and assess the communities of his new empire. And public stealing, pilfering, robbing from the poor to make yourself rich can get “your neck stretched.”

This Inspector General travels in disguise, learning a town’s open secrets, like the funds raised to buy a new organ for the church that disappear, as does the organ (“It caught fire!”). Paranoid, the collection of character actors playing the town’s inbred ruling class keep an eye out.

That’s how they confuse the starving stray Georgi for a Napoleonic envoy. They wine and dine him, and once Yakov has stumbled into this case of mistaken identity, they bribe Georgi (at Yakov’s suggestion).

The not completely innocent Georgi think he and Yakov are righting a wrong, but Yakov is no Robin Hood. “Grab everything for yourself” is his motto.

The mayor’s daughter (Elsa Lancaster) sets her cap for the uniformed official who simply must spend his time in Paris and Vienna. But the Inspector General takes a fancy for the proletarian serving maid, Leza (Barbara Bates).

With the town plotting ways to either buy him off or cut his throat, and with Yakov playing the angles so that he doesn’t have to share the looted spoils of their bribery, Georgi barely has time for courting and singing a few tunes, much less for plotting an escape.

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