Classic Film Review: Looking for Lean Laughs from “Blithe Spirit” (1945)

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Roger Moore

The shifting sands of editor-turned-director David Lean‘s career took him through early adaptations of Noël Coward scripts, included some definitive adaptations of Charles Dickens and eventually settled on the sweeping epics which is he best known for today — “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “A Passage to India” among them.

One thing he was never known for was having a flair for comedy. Romances (“Madeleine,” “Doctor Zhivago,””Summertime”), sure. Casting Alec Guniness produced smiles here and there, but aside from the intermittently amusing “Hobson’s Choice,” Lean never made much effort to film “funny.”

But as Noël Coward was Lean’s champion and mentor, putting him behind the camera (with Coward co-directing) “In Which We Serve,” letting him adapt his play “This Happy Breed” and pitching in with rewrites for “Brief Encounter,” only Lean would do if Coward’s witty drawing room comedy “Blithe Spirit” was to be put on the screen.

Lean’s initiation to filming in Technicolor was such an ordeal that he dove into Dickens adaptations in black and white after “Blithe Spirit.” Technicolor had its own “consultants” on set in films using their cameras and film stock, lighting and relighting and slowing film productions to a crawl so that every Technicolor movie would look as perfect as “The Wizard of Oz” or “Gone with the Wind.” That’s no way to make comedy.

The film’s star, Rex Harrison, returning from years of military service, wasn’t sure he was up to being funny again. It kind of shows, as does his belief that Lean knew nothing about how to film comedy.

If you’ve ever seen the play on the stage, you know how hard it is to keep it moving and the witticisms landing. A 2020 film remake with Dame Judi Dench and Dan Stevens merely reminded one of how dated and musty the material, an upper class British ghost story, can be.

But in ’45, Margaret Rutherford reprised her antic stage portrayal of the “professional” medium Madame Arcati, and Kay Hammond repeated her droll and devious stage turn as the ghost of the first wife Elvira, even though Coward wanted Myrna Loy for the big screen version. The befuddled, rushed maid (Jacqueline Clarke) was a stand-out from the Broadway production of the play and came home to take the film role.

And the famed Coward wordplay crackles throughout, putting everyone on their toes, especially Harrison.

“If you’re trying to compile an inventory of my sex life, I feel it only fair to warn you that you’ve omitted several episodes. I shall consult my diary and give you a complete list after lunch.”

That line, censored from the American release of the film, was pretty racy stuff for 1945, as was the play, with its louche treatment of infidelity, the sexual attraction of one’s first wife and the like.

“Get me to bed, Charles. Then we can talk in peace.”

“A thoroughly immoral suggestion. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

The ghost of a fondly-remembered but faithless ex-wife (Hammond) is summoned up in a seance arranged by novelist Charles (Harrison) looking for material for his new book. His second wife (Constance Cummings), their doctor friend (Hugh Wakefield of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”) and the doctor’s wife (Joyce Carey) are present as Madame Arcati (Rutherford) recites her incantations and makes the table they’re gathered around thump and rise.

But only Charles sees the spirit — a vision in green makeup and ethereal light. Only Charles hears her come-ons, insults and insinuations.

“I’m pained to observe that seven years in the echoing vaults of eternity have in no way pared your native vulgarity.”

That might derail his current marriage, and with Elvira considering other options — pranks and worse — to get her husband back and have a little “fun.”

All the extra care in production design and getting the color lighting right shows. “Blithe Spirit” is a beautiful film. The Oscar-winning effects (the film’s lone Academy Award) are state-of-the-art pre-digital in-camera trickery and hold up beautifully.

And truth be told, after a stodgy, stagey start, “Blithe Spirit” finds its footing, gets up a head of speed thanks to Rutherford, Hammond and Clarkes, and finishes with a flourish.

But one can’t help but figure Lean learned his lesson with this somewhat lumbering outing.

He moved on from Coward and made his mark in period pieces both intimate and on a grand scale. And if ever Lean felt his film needed a lighter touch, he’d cast Alec Guinness, even in blackface (“A Passage to India”), to achieve that effect.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG (innuendo)

Cast: Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond, Hugh Wakefield, Jacqueline Clarke, Joyce Carey and Margaret Rutherford.

Credits: Directed by David Lean, scripted by David Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan, based on the Noël Coward play. A General Film Distributors/United Artists release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:38

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Classic Film Review: Looking for Lean Laughs from “Blithe Spirit” (1945)

Netflixable? British doctors invent IVF, facing protests and attacks as they do — “Joy: The Birth of IVF”

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Roger Moore

Well-cast, well-acted, sentimental and plucky, “Joy: The Birth of IVF” is an encouragingly upbeat account of the labors, trials and attacks endured by the intrepid British team that set out to find “a cure for childlessness.”

It’s a story of science practiced by pioneers and science misunderstood or just plain mischaracterized by those who misunderstood it. And in this case, at least, the smart people got their way and were vindicated and lionized for it.

The script smartly shifts the focus from the two men lauded for pioneering pioneered IVF — Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy) and Robert G. Edwards (James Norton), who outlived Steptoe and became the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for this research — to to the single, qualified and contributing childless woman, Jean Purdy, who ran the lab that carried out the study, testing and impregnating.

Thomasin McKenzie brings this not-wholly-forgotten figure to life, a loner by choice and an enthusiastic young researcher who faced shunning by her mother, her church and her community for taking part in experiments the scandal-mongering British press likened to “Frankenstein.”

Jean, a nurse and embryologist, answers an ad for a lab manager with biologist/physiologist Edwards, and having the knack for capturing escaped lab mice gets her the job. As Edwards has spent the late 1960s experimenting with fertilizing mouse, rabbit and hamster eggs outside of the body, and gynaecologist and laproscopy pioneer Steptoe was pushing for less invasive laproscopic procedures for retrieving ova, they team up to begin working on IVF, in vitro fertilization — in an outbuilding of an older hospital in remote Oldhman.

The “forming the team” scenes are testy and amusing, with career outsider Steptoe not suffering colleagues of any sort gladly, Edwards close to pleading and the brash Purdy trying to shame Steptoe into signing up with insults about how no one likes him, anyway.

The script has the three seeing the future, as such screenplays often do — “You’re aware they’ll throw the book at us — the church, the state, the world. We will unite them all against us.”

But Jean sees things different.

“The mothers will back us.”

The film tracks through the glacial pace of shifting public opinion, lopsided televised debates with Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson (Nicholas Rowe of “Young Sherlock Holmes”) pushing his version of common sense alarmism about “abnormalities” in such babies and what would be done about that. The science establishment trots out “overpopulation” as an argument for not funding them.

Tanya Moodie plays the stern head nurse/matron who reminds one and all of what they’re fighting for, in a hospital that performs legal abortions and is working on a “cure for childlessness.”

“We are here to give women choice. EVERY choice.”

Director Ben Taylor, working from a Jack Thorne screenplay, leans into “cute” a tad too hard, playing up the spunky flirt Purdy, the crusty Steptoe and the unscrupulous, knee-jerk press’s excesses. The filmmakers underscore “test tube baby” failures with the “No no no no no no” song (“Nobody but Me”), a swimming outing by “The Ovum Club” (women who agreed to participate in the experiment) with Loudon Wainwright III’s “The Swimming Song” and a moment of trial-by-error success with Lee Dorsey’s original version of “Yes We Can Can.”

When Lesley Brown (Ella Bruccoleri) received the first successful fertilized ovum transplant in ’78, I was shocked SHOCKED that they didn’t use “Knees Up Mother Brown” to musically memorialize the moment.

But cloying tendencies aside, “Joy” is a welcome feel-good movie about science, a “Hidden Figures” for IVF and the sort of movie a lot of people will take comfort in as the world’s anti-science ignoramuses, anti-vaccine rubes and anti-“expert” opportunists control most of the media megaphones these days.

Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton, Tanya Moody, Rish Shah, Joanna Scanlan, Nicholas Rowe and Bill Nighy.

Credits: Directed by Ben Taylor, scripted by Jack Thorne. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Netflixable? British doctors invent IVF, facing protests and attacks as they do — “Joy: The Birth of IVF”

Classic Film Review: Hitchcock’s first take on the dainty and deadly “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934)

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Roger Moore

The earliest signs that the filmmaker would one day to be branded as “The Master of Suspense” in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent classic “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.” But it took the advent of sound, and several outings with the new technology, for him to discover that thrillers could and should be witty fun.

“The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934) has a lot of ways of showing its age. For a picture that opens on a Swiss ski slope and climaxes with an assassination attempt at the Royal Albert Hall, it’s awfully soundstage-bound. Everybody on set under-reacts to every fright and act of violence they witness or are threatened with. The “fight choreography” of the day is downright dainty.

But it is devilishly funny, such as in the ways an indulged, privileged child (Nova Pilbeam) almost gets people killed and then finds herself kidnapped, with her parents not allowed to let the world know this.

Those parents — played by Leslie Banks of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “Jamaica Inn” and Edna Best (also seen in “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir”) — seem almost relieved.

“Whisky and soda?”

It’s as if the murderous mastermind (Peter Lorre in his first English-speaking role) is wasting his breath on these Brits with his warning, “You should learn to control your fatherly feelings.”

But this daffy, amusing thriller was a template for many a Hitchcock classic to follow, and not just the 1956 remake where he had Doris Day sing for her missing child. An exotic location or two, violence in a theater or very public place, ordinary people entangled in an extraordinarily sinister plot, police who are of little use or outright impediments to justice and a blonde who either drives the action of delivers the coup de grace became as much a part of the Hitchcock brand as his already-established “cameos” and Hitchcockian twists.

St. Moritz is where we meet the Lawrences, “Captain” Bill (Banks), precocious daughter Betty (Pilbeam) and target-shooting champ Jill (Best), who is spending entirely too much time with the French ski jumper Louis (Pierre Fresnay).

“You can KEEP your Betty,” she jokes. “I’m off with ANOTHER man!”‘

She and that other man are on the dance floor when the shot is fired, from a distance and through a window. Louis seems almost embarassed by this turn of events as he is the first character to sink, ever-so-slowly, to the floor, mortally wounded.

There’s a hidden note that Bill must retrieve from Louis’ hotel room, leading to a lot of fuss from the German Swiss authorities. Because Bill and Jill have gotten their own note that warns them they’ll never see their daughter again if they turn over what they’ve procured to British authorities.

Jill’s slow, crumpling faint at reading this is silent cinema silly, drawn-out by design.

The couple returns to London without their little girl, which draws official attention, and not just from the coppers. The foreign office is onto them and wants what Louis wanted to pass on.

Dash it all, there’s nothing for it but for Bill to start his own investigation, based on the note, with his man Sinclair (Hugh Wakefield) in tow.

Sinclair will endure hyponitism, a tooth-pulling from an underworld dentist and arrest for his friend. Bill starts to put this all together when he sees that sniggering Euro-fop Abbott (Lorre) whom he met on the slopes and the sharp shooter (Frank Vosper) who bested his wife in skeet shooting in Abbott’s company.

Comic misunderstandings give way to genuine suspense as that dentist whips out his picks and laughing gas, Betty cries in fear on the phone and Abbott makes threat after threat to avoid having his carefully-planned — right down to the Royal Albert Hall concert crescendo meant to cover the sound of the shot — assassination attempt exposed.

“Tell her they may soon be leaving us. Leaving us for a long, long journey. How is it that Shakespeare says? “From which no traveler returns.” Great poet.“

“The Man Who Knew Too Much” was the start of a legendary English-language (and Hollywood) career for Lorre, who was freshly-fled from Nazi Germany when he met Hitchcock, was cast and then learned to speak English for this role.

Hitchcock’s motto that “Good villains make good thrillers” served Lorre wonderfully in a string of classic films, including “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca,” Hitchcock’s “Secret Agent,” “Mad Love” and hilariously sending up his screen image a decade after “Man Who Knew Too Much” in “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

“The Man Who Knew Too Much” trots by in a brisk hour and sixteen minutes, with clever turns and cleverer turns of phrase. Viewed now, it feels like a rough draft for the better thrillers Hitchcock would direct, starting with the crackling “39 Steps” mere months later.

But it remains a primer on thriller scripting, plotting, staging and editing, a movie Hitchcock was wise to return to after his mostly melodramatic and serious early Hollywood outings, a master filmmaker hittting his witty stride in the 1950s, where he gave us “Strangers on a Train,” “To Catch a Thief,” “Vertigo,” “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window” and his lightest, deadliest triumph, “North by Northwest,” most of them variations on the bag of tricks he first opened in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

Rating: “Approved” (TV-PG), violence

Cast: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre, Frank Vosper, Hugh Wakefield, Nova Pilbeam and Pierre Fresnay.

Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham Lewis. A British Gaumont release, a Corinth-restoration on Tubi, Amazon, et al.

Running time: 1:16

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Classic Film Review: Hitchcock’s first take on the dainty and deadly “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934)

Netflixable? Denzel’s sons open up August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson”

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Roger Moore

Denzel Washington furthers his efforts to keep his promise to “do right by” the late, playwright August Wilson by producing another film of one of Wilson’s plays, this one he assigned to his sons, actor John David Washington to star in and director Malcolm Washington to film.

“The Piano Lesson,” already the subject of a fine and far more brisk TV movie 30 years ago built around Charles S. Dutton, Alfre Woodard and Courtney B. Vance, earns a stately and cinematic treatment from the Washingtons, with Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher and Samuel L. Jackson fleshing out the leads.

The limitations of the stage demand that poetic word images to tell the story — anecdotes, reveries, backstory and events of the past recalled in the fictive present. Wilson excelled at this, with this Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece relating the experience of the African American diaspora via the story of how an old, slave-decorated upright piano made its way from Mississippi to 1936 Pittsburgh.

For his feature directing debut, Malcolm Washington “opens the play up” by showing us those past events, visualizing the supernatural element of the play — the piano’s white owner’s ghost “wants it back” — and making much that was mystical, magical and metaphorical literal in the process.

We don’t have to imagine the fraught circumstances of how the piano was stolen in 1911 or the truckload of watermelons Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his truck-owning pal Lymon (Ray Fisher) have hauled to Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods for a lucrative sale in 1936.

Boy Willie is there to visit his sister Berniece (Deadwyler) and Uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson). And he’s there to talk Berniece into selling that heirloom piano to raise the last of the cash he needs to buy a chunk of the very land their family was once enslaved on.

Old Man Sutter, last of his farming line in that part of Mississippi, has died. “Fell into a well,” Boy Willie crows. It’s the “Yellow Dog Ghost” at work, a bit of supernatural karmic revenge visited upon the morbidly obese old racist for a lynch mob he headed twenty-five years before.

If Boy Willie can just buy that land… At least Uncle Doaker seems to get it.

“As long as Sutter had it, he had us. We was still in slavery.” 

Berniece, whom we learn is widowed, isn’t selling that piano.

“Money can’t buy what that piano cost!” 

Uncle Doaker gets that, too. But he wonders about the “bad luck” that hangs over that keyboard. And their kin, the blues singer-songwriter and drinker Wining Boy (Michael Potts, terrific), sees the instrument as a curse that needs to be banished.

Berniece has a would-be suitor, the Pastor Avery (Corey Hawkins) and a little girl. Is that piano holding her back? The preacher thinks so.

“Everybody got stones in their passway. You ain’t got to carry them with you.”

But through Boy Willie’s storytelling, bargaining and pleading and Berniece’s blunt rebuffs, we pick up on the rift in their relationship and the weight of violence on African American families, then and now.

To my tastes — I’ve seen the play a couple of times, and the 1995 TV movie — director Malcolm Washington gets too caught up in the literal and loses track of the allegorical nature of the events of the play. The words do the work here.

We can duck into a jazz club where the lads try their hands at winning the attention of local ladies as a vocalist croons “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” a ‘sexy ’30s blues tune made famous in the ’70s.

But “opening up” a claustrophobic play tends to undercut the emotional, oppressive weight of the remembered family history, memories that haunt generations and literally close in around characters as the play progresses.

So “Piano Lesson” isn’t as moving, gripping, immersive and polished as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” or “Fences,” two prior Wilson adaptations to make it to the screen.

Our first time director slows the proceedings to a crawl at times, as lively “new” elements in the script make the many conversations and negotiations seem more static. But that doesn’t ruin the show.

And even though I’ve been slow to warm to Denzel’s other “nepo baby” son, John David, as an actor, he summons up the garrulous, not-thought-this-through essence of Boy Willie. Here’s a man a little too anxious to unload a family heirloom that has blood on it, a man who may have blood on himself.

The playwright Wilson sometimes spoke of the meaning of his shows sneaking up on him. And that gives filmmakers a bit of leeway in adapting his work.

The Washingtons have revived an American classic and given it new currency by serving up a visual and visceral taste of the oppression this diaspora fled the Deep South to escape, oppression which scarred such families for generations, and from the looks of things, for generations to come.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, violence, racial slurs, alcohol abuse

Cast: John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Corey Hawkins and Samuel L. Jackson

Credits: Directed by Malcolm Washington, scripted by Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Netflixable? Denzel’s sons open up August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson”

Netflixable? French Biker (OK, Scooter) Gang Goes for the Gold…and diamonds — “GTMax”

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Roger Moore

“GTMax” is a French thriller about armed robberies pulled off with the aid of souped-up scooters.

No, not Vespas. But modified small-wheel street commuters turned into “battle tanks.”

So the promise of the premise is the sight of superscooters and dirt bikes tearing through the narrow cobblestoned alleys, along the Seine and all over Paris. This promise is at long last fulfilled in the third act, and that chase is pretty impressive.

But the movie that gets us there is dumb, talky and pokey in the extreme.

It begins with a dull set-up that goes on an on — a bike-modifying gang led by Elyas (Jalil Lespert) pursued by a furious, ex-Motocrosser cop Delvo (Thibaut Evrard) draw in siblings from dirt bike racing’s royal family (Ava Baya and Riadh Belaïche).

Meanwhile, in a scene that goes on too long, but not as long as an actual “real” race, Michael (Belaïche) has just lost the motocross championship and tarnished the family legacy, cost them sponsorships and could bankrupt the lot of them. Sister, ex-racer turned bike-tuner Soélie (Baya) must save their skins when Elyas & Co. come calling for bikes tough and fast enough to crash their way into hijacking a shipment of jewels.

The performances are overwhelmingly…adequate.

It took four credited screenwriters (stuntman/director Olivier Schneider added his two-Euros-worth) to cook up “the accident” that made Soélie afraid to mount up again and a finale that’s too illogical to comprehend.

Everything here is generic, right down to the dialogue.

“Whatever happens, we stay alive” is the biker family’s motto. The gangsters? “They’re in this for the adrenalin rush, not the cash!”

“Trust me, OK?” is sure to be trotted out. And when you really need somebody’s attention, “Hey, look at me, LOOK at me” always works.

Well, it “works” in bad scripts. Or is supposed to. In French or dubbed into English.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ava Baya, Jalil Lespert, Thibaut Evrard, Riadh Belaïche, Samir Decazza and Gérard Lanvin

Credits: Directed by Olivier Schneider, scripted by Jean-André Yerlès, Rémi Leautier, Rachid Santaki and Jordan Pavlik. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Comments Off on Netflixable? French Biker (OK, Scooter) Gang Goes for the Gold…and diamonds — “GTMax”

“Carmina Burana” as a Ballet, because critics can’t live on Cinema Alone

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Roger Moore

Just caught an extraordinary performance of the epic Carl Orff cantata, music often repurposed in film scores, danced by the Carolina Ballet with grand accompaniment by the huge North Carolina Master Chorale, an eight piece ensemble and a flawless tech crew.

The cantata is a thunderous, overwhelming experience all by itself. John Boorman famously paired it with his Arthurian epic “Excalibur,” and I’ve never passed up a chance to hear it live since.  A brilliant, evocative/interpretive ballet with a stark, stunning design deepens the impact. Several choreographers have produced ballets based on the piece, but I have to say this one illuminated the text in ways hearing it as a vocal piece do not.

This show is a once in a lifetime event. If you live in NC or Southern VA., this is a bucket list performance and production.

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | 2 Comments

Movie Review: Kirkland Fan and would-be filmmaker makes the trek to “Sallywood”

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Roger Moore

A film buff meets his Hollywood idol and wins his dream job working for her in “Sallywood,” a lighthearted indie lampoon of show business, showbiz “types” and the indignities of “I used to be famous.”

Sally Kirkland got her start in show business in the early ’60s and finally “arrived” when she won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination for the dramedy “Anna” in 1987.

Writer-director Xaque Gruber’s semi-autobiographical comedy shows a young man from Maine (Tyler Steelman) who grew up obsessed with that film about a fading Czech actress struggling in New York, who travels to Hollywood to take his shot at being a screenwriter, and who stumbles into his idol the first day there.

It’s the sort of Hollywood cartoon where she asks Zack “Are you my new assistant?” And so he becomes just that.

Working for the 80something Kirkland means guarding the unlocked gallery where she’s showing her abstract paintings (even though no one would steal them), helping her get to auditions for McDonald’s commercials, getting her into Hollywood parties and finding her string cheese on demand.

Gruber, who’s written for TV specials and kicked around at different on-set jobs, makes his film a “My Date with Drew (Barrymore)” mockumentary, with writer Zack setting up each scene with screenplay scene headings — “INT. strip club at night,” etc. and narrating to the camera or in voice over.

“If the Dalai Lama drive the 405 every day, his message to the world would be entirely different!”

Zack’s function in Gruber’s deadpan, cringey and cutesy comedy is to be Ms. “I used to be famous. I’m not famous any more’s” audience.

Kirkland, playing a cartoonish version of herself that she trotted out on talk shows back in the day, is flirty, spacey, hippy dippy and prone to oversharing.

About her “men,” for instance — “Bob Dylan, Kris Kristoffersen, Dennis Hopper, Maximillian Schell, Robert Shaw, Kier Dullea, Ray Liotta, Jon Voight…”

“I had my first ORGASM with RIP TORN!”

Zack’s first task, a “test,” is writing her obituary, the more flowery and flattering the better. But he’s most useful when his hunky Brit filmmaker/roommate Tom (Tom Connolly) cooks up “Outer Space Zombie Chicks in Prison,” with a starring role for Sally.

“If you take a film that’s a piece of crap, but you put a star in it, then you’ve got something” should be taught in film schools. Sally will don a spacesuit and alarming wig as a sight gag.

Jennifer Tilley plays Zack’s doting mom. Eric Roberts is Sally’s smarmy, lazy and self-serving agent. Keith Carradine a famous director who used to love Sally, Kay Lenz is his famous-director ex, the Kathryn Bigelow to his James Cameron. The late Michael Lerner plays a TV producer and Maria Conchita Alonso is a “scammer” and literary agent.

“Sallywood” is the epitome of the genre known as “the film festival comedy,” an indie film aimed at film buffs, that rewards cinephiles who recognize actors much of the world has forgotten and makes wry but unoriginal and obvious observations about “this town” and that “business.” It’s played in a lot of film festivals and won awards in a few.

But watching it, you can’t help but think it could have been more consequential — a lot sharper, sillier and sadder.

Steelman’s “Young Jiminy Glick” choice of voices for his performance, Kirkland’s deadpan dizziness and a sea of Hollywood types — producers, agents, hustlers and porn performers — with their edges rubbed off all work against an Inside Hollywood comedy that might have been.

Sally gives acting lessons to strippers and pole dancers in the film. Perhaps it’s too obvious, but having one of them “discovered” while Sally struggles on would have been a bittersweet and funny homage to her biggest role, “Anna.”

Probably one in three Hollywood “assistants” have funnier anecdotes/stories to tell than this. There’ve been funnier movies about downmarket (indie) cinema and faded stars. You don’t have to aim for “Sunset Boulevard,” but “The Big Picture,” “Swimming with Sharks” and “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” all covered similar ground on tiny budgets.

Kirkland gets to fume at all the times people who meet her think she was in the movie “M*A*S*H”–“That was Sally KELLERMAN!” — and trot out her Hollywood “underdog” persona one more time, so that’s something.

But whatever audience awards this pic has claimed on the film festival circuit, there’s no weight to it, and the sentimental lighter touches and limp jokes aren’t enough to carry it.

Rating: unrated, sexual innuendo

Cast: Sally Kirkland, Tyler Steelman, Jennifer Tilley, Tom Connolly, Keith Carradine, Eric Roberts, Nikki Tuazon, Michael Lerner, Kay Lenz, Vanessa Dubasso and Maria Conchita Alonso

Credits: Scripted and directed by Xaque Gruber. A Sneak Previews release.

Running time: 1:29

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: Kirkland Fan and would-be filmmaker makes the trek to “Sallywood”

Movie Review: “Spartacus” III, “Gladiator II”

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Roger Moore

Epic-scale filmmaker Ridley Scott turns 87 on November 30. It’s safe to assume that, like Clint Eastwood, Scorsese, Almodovar or Bigelow, any film he makes could be his last.

But Scott’s still carrying on as if he has no laurels to rest on, that for every ambitious “Napoleon” or “The Last Duel,” every attempt ( (“House of Gucci”) to step out of historical epic or science fiction, he has to focus on serving up another “Alien” sequel or prequel, that some studio’s long-cherished wish for a “Gladiator” sequel must be fulfilled.

So if we ever want to see “You Should Be Dancing,” his Bee Gees biopic, the Western “Wraiths of the Broken Land,” or sci-fi dystopia “The Dog Stars,” we’ve got to line up for “Gladiator II” first.

Computer generated imagery (CGI) has transformed cinema since 2000’s “Gladiator.” Ancient Rome and its world is a lot easier to realize on the screen. Gladiator duels in the Roman Colosseum can cover even grander bloodsports that the enslaved fought to the death in — a simulated naval battle on the flooded arena’s floor, for instance.

But for all the expansions in scale, all the back-engineering a fresh plot onto the existing one — that of a great general politically purged and enslaved as a gladiator, forced to fight for change in a tyrannically corrupt regime and his chance to save his bloodline — “Gladiator II” has nothing fresh to say on the subject or the movie genre.

Hollywood’s already made four TV series out of the 1960 Kirk Douglas-and-Kubrick classic “Spartacus,” all of them coming out in the decades since the Oscar-winning Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe epic “Gladiator” arrived and revived the setting, subject and shirtless-duels-to-the-death genre.

But that doesn’t mean Sir Ridley can’t remake his version of a “Spartacus” gladiator-as-martyr tale.

Yes, CGI means that you can stage a naval battle on a budget and pit gladiators against a warhorse-saddled foe riding a rhino or fighting for their lives against CGI zombie baboons. That doesn’t mean you should.

Everything else in “Gladiator II” has the ring of “Spartacus” about it. Soldiers (Pedro Pascal, Paul Mescal) are enslaved for the crime of defying Rome. They endure a montage of gladiator training led by a sadistic veteran (Lior Raz) of the “sport.” Their “owner” (Denzel Washington) is a sinister, vindictive operator angling for social, financial and political gain from their feats.

Mescal, last seen in “All of Us Strangers,” is Hanno, an officer in the army of Numidia, an African nation-state coveted by second century Rome. He sees his archer-wife (Yuval Gonen) ordered slain by the Roman general (Pascal of “The Mandalorian”) who conquers the city, his adoptive home.

Hanno is enslaved along with his Numidian commander (Peter Mensah of “300” and TV’s “Spartacus”). Only one of them is destined to survive to be a gladiator, not the one who sees slavery as “something I cannot endure.”

Hanno proves himself in the arena, but not with the aim of earning his freedom from Macrinus (Washington, berobed and venal). He wants his revenge on General Marcus Acacius (Pascal), who happens to have married the widowed daughter (Connie Nielsen) of the late emperor Marcus Aurelius. And she sees something she recognizes in this young fighter, a hint that he might be Lucius, her lost-long son with the late general turned gladiator Maximus.

We glimpse and hear Maximus (Russell Crowe) in flashbacks.

Rome is ruled by two pale inbred siblings, Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn), each too inept and bloodthirsty to effectively run a nearly-exhausted empire they’re intent on expanding.

No, this “Gladiator” is no more historical than the first one. It’s all a bit of a bore, the sea of extras filling the stadium, the vast mob in the streets, the colorfully-adorned armies (and navy) marching and sailing under their SPQR banners, mere tools bent and used for political purposes.

We’re treated to a taste of the poet Virgil, quotes from the late Maximus, who has become lionized by a later generation of gladiators — “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” There’s even a twisting of a quote by non-Roman novelist Bernadine Evaristo — “When you’re a slave you don’t dream of freedom. You dream of owning your own slave.”

Continue reading →
Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: “Spartacus” III, “Gladiator II”

Movie Review: “Wicked” girlfriend, you’ve put on an awful lot of weight

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Wicked” moves from the Broadway stage to the cinema, an epic that transitions from “musical” to “intellectual property” in a bloated, lumbering, gear-grinding crash.

Whatever Disney or most any other producing studio might have done to this beloved prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” Universal smothers the life out of it, slowing it down for a tedius exercise in theme-park attraction-scale “world building.”

Casting Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in the leads can seem inspired, here and there, with kids’ TV sitcom alum (“Victorious”) turned pop pixie Grande dazzling in ways only the original stage show’s Galinda could rival.

But bringing in Kristen Chenoweth (the original Galinda) and Idina Menzel (Broadway’s Elphaba) for cute-but-pointless cameos late in “Part 1” of what will turn out to be a five hour+ magnum opus musical just underscores the bloat, the Seussian excess of production design, costumes and the joyless art deco kitsch of it all.

Whatever the charms of the stage version, they’re budgeted right out of this “product.” The songs, separated by excessive filler between the musical highlights, are robbed of much of their wit and pathos. The characters are underscored with some cute cinematic touches and undermined by dead weight scenes and dull, overdressed supporting characters.

The story is about the unloved life that Elphaba (Erivo), the Wicked Witch of the West, endured before meeting and befriending her rival Galinda (Grande) at Shiz University, which can only be seen as a derivative Ozian Hogwarts.

Elphaba has a ready response to ridicule for her green skin that includes “No, I did not eat grass as a child.” Galinda’s life of fashionable, effortless and shallow beauty has made her spoiled.

“Something is very wrong! I didn’t get my way!”

Studying under Madame Morrible (Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh), competing for the amusingly vain and handsome Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), these two will supposedly learn the depths and limits of each other’s compassion. They’ll matchmake Elphaba’s paraplegic sister Nessarode (Marissa Bode) to tall-for-a-Munchkin Boq (Ethan Slater), and understand the cruelty of caging animals, denying even some of their professors (Peter Dinklage voices a PhD goat) the power of speech.

Belittled and discriminated against for being green and thus “different,” Elphaba has grown up bitter, with her magical powers unleashed in fits of fury. Galinda’s friendship might soften that, and befriending the outcast Elphaba might make the dizzy blonde drop the “Ga” from “Galinda” as she learns emphathy and earns her own powers.

The Wizard of Oz? He’s a remote, feared and admired God, in a “Thank Oz,” “Oz help us,” Oz bless you” sense. The two star pupils will have to study hard to “find your way to the Wizard of Oz.”

Continue reading →
Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: “Wicked” girlfriend, you’ve put on an awful lot of weight

Movie Review: A Black Boy’s Odyssey through the London “Blitz”

Posted on November 21, 2024 by Roger Moore

A single photo in Britain’s Imperial War Museum — a mixed-race child snapped as he joined the sea of children being evacuated from a British city early in World War II — inspired the brilliant writer-director Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” a harrowing, moving and nostalgic day and a couple of nights in the life of a Black boy lost during the darkest days of World War II.

“Twelve Years a Slave” and “Small Axe” filmmaker McQueen used that photo to sweep away the whitewashed history of Britain’s “finest hour,” a trial by fire that’s almost always been depicted as a united, forthright and all-white country, loyal to its king, relying on the Royal Air Force, keeping calm and carrying on.

“Blitz” restores the many immigrants there to that not-that-calm story, and the ghoulish opportunists, the officious prigs behind early government blundering and the impersonal tragedy of it all in an odyssey undertaken and experienced by a nine year-old mixed race boy evacuated from the city, but determined to get back to his mum.

It’s sentimental, as such “Hope and Glory” enterprises always are. But “sentimental” gets a bracing reimagining through McQueen. The “truth” about the past wasn’t the misty lore of generations of WWII movies. It can include minorities of various stripes facing discrimination and outright hostility, and a Nigerian-born air raid warden (Benjamin Clémentine) reminding racists that “there is no segregation” in the Underground, where one and all take shelter from German bombing, and that using racism to “divide us” is just the sort of thing “Hitler” does.

Saoirse Ronan is Rita, a Stepney East Ender who keeps her Rosie the Riveter scarf around her blonde scalp as she’s building bombs for the war effort. It’s September of 1940, and the Battle of France has been lost. The Battle of Britain — an air offensive — is just ramping up. And city Britons and those from the south of the country, closest to the German bombers and under threat from Nazi invasion, are evacuating their children, en masse, to the north.

Rita’s boy George (Elliott Heffernan) is a prime candidate. He’s nine, living with her and her father (Paul Weller) in a townhouse, with danger arriving every night from German bombs plummeting out of the gloom.

We meet George’s Grenadian father via flashbacks, Rita remembering their jazz club courtship and the racism that “took him away.” We don’t know what happened, or if they got around to getting married.

George doesn’t want to get on that evacuation train, but he does. Slack supervision by the few adults in charge and the state of rail safety in those flimsy, wood-and-steel carriages (with doors everywhere) make it easy for George to make a break for it.

That begins his quest to “get home” and maybe apologize to the mum he told “I HATE you” to when he departed.

George will meet fellow escaped evacuees, kind strangers and a gang of “artful dodger” thieves who rob bombed stores and pillage the dead before the authorities can remove the bodies, because McQueen knows his Dickens.

George will face racism and deny being “Black,” until he meets that no-nonsense air raid warden (Clémentine) whom even the bigots have to listen to.

Rita will work, get dolled-up to go out pubbing with the girls — “Hey, sailor!” — and sing a sentimental song on the radio when the BBC comes by their factory for a morale-building broadcast.

She doesn’t know George is missing, and George doesn’t know that she’s not yet looking for him as they experience air raids and the comraderie of sheltering in the tunnels — where everybody had a “talent” or even an “act” to keep everybody else enterained.

In a lot of ways, “Blitz” is McQueen’s most conventional film, serving up the cliches and tropes of many a Blighty during “The Blitz” movies. But the melting pot world of foreign-born Brits who appear here — from an all Black big band at a club to the Caribbean islanders and Africans living in besieged Britain — freshen up those plot conventions.

McQueen may oversell the idea that Britain was as diverve in 1940 as it certainly became by 1950, but pretty much everything we see here is historically defensible if not literally ripped from this or that page from history.

Showing a swank nightclub where plentiful fresh food, drink and a Black big band let the swells pretend there isn’t “a war on” seems off — with the U-boat war/Battle of the Atlantic raging and the country under strict rationing since the preceding Jan. But nothing else here earns a “Surely that never happened” dismissal.

McQueen’s bomb-lit fires and post-bombing calamities above and below ground are vividly, impressionistically real recreations, adding to the sense that we’re experiencing not just history, but history forgotten or erased.

Ronan is properly feisty and stoic, and a believable new-to-running-a-drill-press factory woman and amateur (wavering pitch) singer.

Character actor Stephen Graham makes a properly demented leader of the gang of thieves.

And young Heffernan impresses as a child who uses grandpa’s parting advice to deal with bullies and bigots at every turn — “All talk and no trousers!” His George is just the sort of plucky, reckless kid we’d want as a tour guide through a familiar war-is-hell-on-Earth setting, a tour that lets us see this moment in history through fresh eyes.

Rating: PG-13, violence, sex, some profanity

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan,
Benjamin Clémentine, Harris Dickinson, Paul Weller and Stephen Graham.

Credits: SCripted and directed by Steve McQueen. An Apple release on Apple TV+.

Running time: 2:00

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: A Black Boy’s Odyssey through the London “Blitz”