Movie Nation

I can’t remember where I saw his most famous feature film, but I distinctly remember catching the cut-and-paste/found objects-animated short films of Walerian Borowczyk at a college film society some decades ago.

I remember that because I mentioned to a professor of mine how this Polish French transplant filmmaker seemed to have taken on the style of Terry Gilliam, the animator and lone American in Britain’s Monty Python comic troupe.

“Oh nooo,” said the academic. “It was the other way around.”

As indeed it was. Gilliam is one of the fans and expert witnesses interviewed in “Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk,” a documentary about the provocative “avant-garde” animator and live action feature director who was on all the (European) critics’ lips in the 1960s and early 1970s.

He turned film festival notoriety into a feature directing career infamous for its censor-testing treatment of sex. Those who remember the man and his work, and those who worked with him, turn up in “Love Express” to bemoan his fate. Becoming famous for “erotic” content, even in animation that had no overt representation of naked humans, meant that he was pigeon-holed in porn.

Borowczyk went from the odd, surreal and absurdist “Goto Island of Love” to the more overtly sexual “Immoral Tales,” and wound up making “Emmanuelle 5.” If you know anything of the history of “mainstream” sex films in the ’70s and 80s, you remember “Emmanuelle” and you can imagine what the fourth sequel to that would be like.

Academics and critics, and Gilliam (“12 Monkeys”) and other filmmakers, from Andrzej Wajda (“Man of Iron”) to Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game”) and Patrice Leconte, who worked for the Pole before directing “Monsieur Hire,” “Ridicule,” etc., try to break down Borowczyk’s vision, what make his films so fascinating.

And we see clips of archival interviews of Borowczyk, who died in 2006, challenged and try to defend himself from charges that he was a “huge pervert.”

“Who isn’t?” he said (in French, with English subtitles). “I only show what everyone is dreaming about.”

He went to art/film school with Wajda right after WWII, and fled Poland to France where he could exercise “complete freedom” in his art. Within a decade, he was a Cannes darling and one of the most critically-acclaimed filmmakers of a revolutionary era in politics, art and cinema.

Here’s one of his breakthrough shorts.

While the filmmaker’s longtime director of photography, Noël Véry, is the most quoted interview subject, it is Gilliam who is the most instructive. He details how “Boro” and “Goto” and his “completely realized world” influenced not just the animation that helped introduce and separate scenes in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” but became the absurdist model for how the show’s episodes were conceived.

As Borowczyk’s career was hijacked by his own infamy, documentarian Kuba Mikurda’s “Love Express” camera captures gestures, the waving about of hands by the various interview subjects as they try to rationalize both his path and his ensuing fate.

That is the successful artistic touch Mikurda brings to the subject of his film. Frankly, despite the testimonials and many clips, I don’t think he makes the sale that Borowczyk is a forgotten master. The entire “Love Express” is interesting, in an academic sense, but feels too much “a European thing,”

By the time censorship was beaten into submission, “Boro” had nowhere else to go. The times changed, and his arty, self-conscious and obscurant films weren’t going to be anything anybody wanted to sit through just to see some skin.

Gilliam sums up the fall better than anyone else as well.

“It’s very hard to STAY avant-garde.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, sex

Cast: Andrzej Wajda, Terry Gilliam, Neil Jordan, Lisbeth Hummel, Patrice Leconte, and Noël Véry

Credits: Directed by Kuba Mikurda, script by Marcin Kubawski, Kuba Mikurda  An Altered Innocence/HBO Europe release.

Running time: 1:14

A Dec. 8 release, looks like a generic sci-fi shoot-em-up, “Clone Wars” without the capes. And space ships.

Jules Wilcox is the star in this horror tale from our friends at Magnet,the blood-curdling mean sister to Magnolia Pictures.

Travel tip? Stalkers are always in late model Jeep Grand Cherokees. That tool tailgaiting and screaming at any bumper sticker that doesn’t match his Q-Anon worldview? He’s in a pickup.

Sept. 18.

“Mad to be Normal” is an “Awakening” or “Patch Adams” Robin Williams never got around to. It’s another sympathetic big screen biography of a doctor with the audacity to listen to his patients and actually care about them.

But R.D. Laing was Scottish, something of a hippy and a scoundrel who ignored his children and wives for the sake of his indulged patients, and a controversial figure to this day. He’s played by David Tennant, whose version of gonzo free spirit is lot darker than Williams’ sentimental take on such characters.

That contributes to the general downer that this highly-fictionalized surface gloss, co-written and directed by Laing expert Robert Mullan, on his life and work turns out to be.

Laing started making waves in the early ’60s and Mullan’s film catches up with him at his peak — a celebrity, best selling author, “acid Marxist” to the LSD using musicians (The Grateful Dead were fans) and generation they came from.

That’s how Angie Wood (Elisabeth Moss) encounters him, at a crowded ego-tripping “lecture.” She’s just finished school and longs to learn at the feet of the master. Of course they end up in bed. It was the ’60s, after all. And yes, she’s a composite character, based on a wife and other women in Laing’s life.

Angie meets another enthusiast at the lecture, Jim (Gabriel Byrne). She mistakes him for a colleague of the good doctor, and he lets her. Damned if he isn’t a patient.

“The madness of our patients is a result of the destruction wreaked on them, by US,” the good doctor lectures. “Tranquilizers prohibit communication…ENGAGE.”

Laing’s radical idea, the one that was shaking up the psychological establishment? He was anti-tranquilizers, preferring to indulge and listen to his patients. He sought more tangible, physical causes for illnesses, described schizophrenia as “a theory” and all this made him a revolutionary in the last years of the “lock them up/drug them up/electroshock them” era in psychotherapy.

If that barbaric age ended, it is suggested, Laing helped bring about the change.

He was resolutely against “asylums” and mental hospitals, and the film focuses on his years running a sort of therapeutic halfway house, Kingsley Hall, in London in the late 1960s. His patients there are a blend of depressives and possibly dangerous characters, with Michael Gambon playing one of the former and the suited, well-spoken Jim (Byrne) quite possibly one of the latter.

The film is a somewhat flat survey of the tropes in such stories — a film crew following Dr. Laing as he tours America, visits a mental hospital and “reaches” a patient his peers have locked up in a padded cell.

His relationship with Angie turns testy when a child enters the picture. He’s already neglecting the kids from his last marriage, and now he neglects Angie, all for the sake of his Kingsley Hall patients/friends.

“You’ve nooooo idea what these poorrrrrr bastards go true every deeeee,” Tennant burrs.

The performance is cocksure and monomaniacal and seems on the mark, seeing as how Laing, for all his eccentricities and indulgences (He prescribed LSD, because he used it himself.), is still regarded as influential today.

His communal “cure” efforts at Kingsley Hall were very much a mixed bag, and the end of this “experiment” depicted here is wholly fictional. But the sketchy veracity of “Mad to be Normal” isn’t what weighs it down. It’s Mullan’s (“This Weekend Will Change Your Life”) slow paced slog through conventions.

Limiting Moss to a “You have time for everyone but US” caricature is downright criminal.

The period mores, couture, decor and “out with the old” ethos is on the mark. And Tennant makes the man fascinating, if under and then over-explained (Let’s meet his mum, shall we?).

But like Laing’s ideas and experiments, “Mad to be Normal” turns out to be much the mixed bag, with just as much worth tossing out as there is to celebrate.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug use, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: David Tennant, Elisabeth Moss, Gabriel Byrne and Michael Gambon.

Credits: Directed by Robert Mullan, script by Robert Mullan and Tracy Moreton. A Samuel Goldwyn release, on Tubi, Amazon, et al

Running time: 1:49

OK. Sure. I mean, when the sequel came out, it played like a no-name anachronism. The songs seemed more 1982 than 1962.

And let’s be absolutely contextual here. America had just been through an “American Graffiti,” “Happy Days” and “Grease” 1950s-early-60s nostalgia thing. We KNEW how “off” “Grease 2” felt when it hit theaters and bombed in 1982. It wasn’t just the critics.

Patricia Birch, the “Grease” choreographer directed it, and the dancing was closer to a disco riff on The Twist than it was period correct. But sure, it was sexier than the original “Grease.”

Michelle Pfeiffer, Adrian Zmed and Maxwell Caulfield, the leads, were new to audiences. Two of them actually had careers.

Christopher McDonald and Pamela Adlon had supporting parts and were years and years away from being “names.”

The songs were racier, and they stick with you better than any bomb I can only remember seeing once has a right to.

But now it’s got some Brit-based online fan revival underway? Who knew?

True story, I was just out of school, working in a big city NPR station when the film came out. Lorna Luft and I think Peter Frechette came by to plug it. I had no idea who Lorna was. I don’t think her “Judy Garland’s daughter” “credit” was mentioned in the press kit. The station manager might have tipped me about that before I interviewed them.

I dismissed the movie, like pretty much everybody else, so the interview was a chore. But maybe I’ll take a second look at it. Just when I hoped “Let’s Do It for our Country” was erased from my memory.

Here’s the “all in” moment for Netflix’s latest dabble in super-heroism, “Project Power.”

New Orleans rapper/drug dealer and sidekick Robin (Dominique Fishback) has just been told their next impossible task by pill-popping avenger cop Frank.

“There’s like a THOUSAND guys out there,” she whines. “BAD guys” is implied.

And Frank, who takes moments like this to go all “Clint Eastwood,” instead sounds more like the actor playing him — fanboy fave Joseph Gordon Levitt.

“But you know I’m AWEsome, right?”

And there it is, the movie summarized in tone, tenor, temperament and intelligence. Love that line? Maybe you’ll love this.

Netflix teams up JGL and Oscar winner Jamie Foxx with Fishback (TV’s “The Deuce”) for a thriller about pills that give their poppers superpowers.

They threw a bag of money at the talent and another at the teamed auteurs who gave us “Paranormal Activity 3 and 4” and the guy on deck writing “The Batman” for Robert Pattinson. And what they got is another forgettable superheroes-sans-capes thriller in which the formula that various heroes and villains swallow, in the form of a glowing pill, isn’t the ONLY formula here.

The producers lured two intensely likable stars, a rising star and one killer location — a modern freighter — for an almost head-slappingly simple-minded Military Industrial Complex meets Big Pharma story.

It’s all about the brawls, as assorted characters pop these five-minute-power pills and morph into human chameleons, human fireballs or blokes with skulls so dense no mere bullet can penetrate them.

This pill has flooded New Orleans, and the cops and this interloper calling himself “The Major” (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) are trying to get to “the source” of said drug epidemic. As the cops are outrun or outfought whenever they’re dealing with somebody who has “the power” for five minutes, this isn’t exactly a fair fight.

The script’s story beats are generic in the extreme, strictly cut-and-paste. The “rapper” girl keeps getting asked to “spit.” The villains keep stopping to make speeches. The two biggest characters can’t figure out if they’re on the same side or not.

But there are moments, clever twists and references, in that screenplay. So let’s give Mattson Tomlin his due. The “city flooded with a drug” by some unseen entity is straight out of “The CIA started the crack epidemic” theory. One villain’s lecture is about Henrietta Lacks.

Levitt’s cop complains to his chief (Courtney B. Vance) about the mysterious figures intervening in many of their arrests.

“We know what happened the last time we counted on guys in suits to look out for New Orleans!” That’s a Katrina reminder of when Republicans made the city the Puerto Rico of its day, with their “let the dark people drown” ethos.

Oscar-winner Foxx mentors the young drug dealer Robin about how she should be dealing less and emulating him more.

“The power goes to where it always goes, to the people that already have it…I’ve got to work the system harder than it works me!”

It’s not the worst movie of the “power from a pill” genre, an idea that dates back decades (TV’s “Mr. Terrific” comes to mind). But that’s one overriding problem here. “Project Power” feels powered-out ten minutes in.

I like the stars, but they don’t give us enough to like here. Check out which New Orleans Saints jersey JGL wears (no accent, just a jersey).

The milieu is new, but the fights — dousing this fireball in water, ducking that guy’s steel ship’s hull denting blows there — are pro forma. Been there, seen it.

The odd funny line or pointed history lesson or lecture on politics, drugs and “the little people” aside, this “Project Power” doesn’t add up to anything new.

This is just an overdressed, over-budgeted version of stupid.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, bloody images, drug content and some language

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Dominique Fishback , Rodrigo Santoro, Amy Landecker and Courtney B. Vance.

Credits: Directed by Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, script by Mattson Tomlin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

One of America’s greatest documentary filmmakers adds another exclamation point to her resume with “Desert One,” a thorough and moving remembrance of the failed Special Forces mission to rescue American Embassy hostages being held in Iran.

Barbara Kopple, a two-time Oscar winner and a legend in the field since “Harlan County, USA” (1977), got access to an American president and vice president, and newsman Ted Kopple, perhaps the man Americans most famously associated with “The Iranian Hostage Crisis.” But she gained entry to Iran and spoke to Iranian hostage takers and the site of the disaster as well.

And she interviewed surviving hostages, the military men who helped plan and attempt the doomed mission, which went awry when poor intelligence, equipment failures, weather and a lack of a full dress rehearsal collided on a dry desert lake bed rendezvous point that gives the film its title — “Desert One.”

We hear tape recordings of then-President Jimmy Carter’s conversations with the general in charge of this “full radio silence” special operation, hear his pointed questions and grim acceptance of what was going on and see something that’s become rare in elected leaders in the 40 years since, a public (TV) declaration that “It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation…The responsibility is fully my own.”

As we hear from the surviving veterans who detail the complex mission and how it was planned over the months after the November, 1979 seizing of the American Embassy in Tehran, the film’s purpose comes into focus. Yes, there were “too many moving parts,” as one officer remembers. Yes, losing the embassy and its CIA station members meant they didn’t have fresh intelligence and thus were flying in blind.

But the attempt itself was heroic, no matter how it turned out.

Kopple and her interview subjects give us a quick overview of American-Iranian history, this country’s decades-long Cold War support of the brutal Shah, who was installed in a Churchill and Eisenhower-engineered coup in 1953.

Former hostages and embassy employees John Limbert and Michael Metrinko recall the growing unease that “something bad was going to happen” when the Shah finally abdicated and fled in 1979. But they remained on post.

“How often do you get the chance to watch a tornado coming down your street?” is how Metrinko rationalized it.

It’s fascinating to hear, too, from an Iranian translator and actual former “student revolutionaries” and hostage takers, to give us the inside-Iran perspective.

Kopple uses eyewitness memories and hand-drawn illustrations to detail the specifics of the mission itself, and the assorted equipment failures and miscalculations that began to pile up in the middle of the Iranian night.

There’s even an Iranian survivor of the tour bus that accidentally drove up on the “Desert One” landing site.

“Desert One” is unsparing and unflinching, showing us the ghoulish Iranian display of American corpses on TV and recounting the diplomatic failures, Carter’s big public statement blunder that limited America’s options and candidate Ronald Reagan’s B-movie star bravado and bluster in second guessing the sitting president every step of the way.

The Reagan campaign’s alleged efforts to delay the hostage release is alluded to by some of the military men involved, the so-called “October surprise” effort to undermine official U.S. policy and negotiations.

But Kopple’s main focus remains those who took on the duty, did their jobs and struggled to make an increasingly unworkable situation succeed, “forgotten heroes” of Operation Eagle Claw. Her thorough and thoroughly engrossing film preserves their story and ensures that this is “forgotten history” no more.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic images of dead bodies

Cast: Lt. Col. Ed Seiffert, John Limbert Jr., Michael Metrinko, Kevin Hermening, Sgt. Richard “Taco” Sanchez, Jimmy Carter ,Ted Koppel and Walter Mondale

Credits: Directed by Barbara Kopple, script by Francisco Bello. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:47

Here’s a screwball farce from France released with more than a few screws loose.

“The Bare Necessity” or “Perdrix” as it was titled in Europe, is a collection of eccentrics under assault by other eccentrics. But piling them all into a movie, with cute but not particularly engaging performances meant to turn this into something meaningful, amounts to an overreach for first-time feature writer-director Erwan Le Duc.

The Perdrix family is the focus, a quartet of “partridges” (the French translation of the name) living in a town in the Vosges mountains, near the German border. They’re something of a mess. But we don’t really dissect them until after the inciting incident that hurls an irritated and irritating free electron into their universe.

Juliette, played by Maud Wyler of “Blue is the Warmest Color,” is minding her own business, having pulled her car over so that she can sit on a picnic table and write in her daily journal.

Damned if a nude woman doesn’t pop up out of the woods and steal her orange BMW.

Well, an orange BMW driven by a naked woman can’t be hard to track, right? But the unflappable police captain, Pierrot Perdrix (Swann Arlaud of “By the Grace of God”) doesn’t give her much hope. His lack of urgency, when her car had everything she owned in it, is infuriating.

There are nudists, passing themselves off as “non-essentialists,” disturbing the peace there, he tells her. Stealing people’s clothes, and sometimes even their cars, is in their MO.

A guy with a “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” poster in his office might be a little too small-town philosopher to ever get in a hurry. Juliette huffs out and starts “canvasing” the town herself, using a drawing of the nude woman and her car to hunt for answers.

But having everything she owns stolen puts her into a fix, as well as a huff. She tracks the captain down at home, invites herself to dinner, and that’s where she and we are thrown in with “the wacko family” (Juliette’s words) called the Perdrixes.

Pierrot’s preternatural calm might come from his mother (screen legend Fanny Ardant), a libidinous widow who dispenses love life advice on a nightly radio show she hosts from their garage. She may have listeners, but as no one ever calls in, the family assumes the worst, with Pierrot, his highly-strung, newly-divorced single-dad brother “Juju” (Nicolas Maury) and perhaps even Juju’s tween daughter disguising their voices, calling in and seeking “help.”

Wyler’s Juliette is a manic, Katherine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby” grenade tossed into the middle of the uneasy calm of this Partridge Family. She chatters, judges, backhandedly compliments and irritates the hell out of Juju. After dinner, she takes Pierrot’s phone and gets into a heated argument with his mother on her call-in show.

You just know she and this too-laid-back captain are meant for each other. If only the lazy SOB and his tiny, touchy-feely squad of gendarmes would put some effort into finding her damned car.

Well, it’s hard to get much of anything done with a vintage tank parked in front of their gendarmerie. Yes, there are WWII reenactors in France, with enthusiasts donning the uniforms of the Free French, or the Resistance, and their German oppressors — faking firefights.

No, the deadpan organizers of the reenactment assure the deadpan cops, no weapons will actually be fired. Yes, they might need a road or two blocked, maybe a police escort.

“Escorting…Nazis?”

“Oui.”

The ingredients are here for something silly and droll, a French Wes Anderson comedy or David O. Russell satire.

I found the leads cute, in an opposites attract “chemistry” sort of way. But their occasional sparks don’t lift any of the nonsense they’re caught up in or are merely observers of. They literally stand and gawk at the spectacle of grown men playing WWII, shaking their machine guns to simulate shooting, faking deaths in combat.

Dramatic meltdowns by most of the leads — Juju is a wildlife biologist given to cursing out school kids who don’t pay attention to his wetsuited lectures in a local pond, Pierrot finally loses his cool at Juliette’s insults — point to a more fractious and fun movie that might have been.

Ardant is generally wasted, husky radio voice notwithstanding. The whole nudists getting down to the “bare necessities of life” thread is a non-starter. And a single profundity in the dialogue isn’t much to show for a 100 minute movie.

“My mother used to say, ‘Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.'”

As “twee” is a word often used to describe Wes Anderson’s comedies, it’s worth pointing out to Monsieur Le Duc how very difficult that tone is to achieve. He doesn’t get down to the bare necessity of that here.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with nudity, profanity

Cast: Swann Arlaud, Maud Wyler, Nicolas Maury and Fanny Ardant.

Credits: A Kino Lorber release.

Running time:

Foreigners and locals meet and mingle and ponder many things — including love, in this Tokyo tale based on a Catherine Hanrahan novel. Sept.18 is when this one hits theaters.

Only you know what your tolerance is for dark, grim stories that offer little hope for justice in an unjust world, little hope for hope itself, for that matter.

But “Watch List” is a bleak but riveting thriller worth girding yourself for and immersing yourself in. It’s a Filipino film directed by American Ben Rekhi (“The Ashram”) about a newly-widowed mother of three, a recovered junkie, caught up in the authoritarian slaughter of President Rodrigo Duterte.

“Extra judicial killings” is one of those phrases, like “ethnic cleansing,” that tidies up a murderous horror. That’s what “Watch List” is about, the rapid descent of a half-compliant culture into off-the-books but state-sanctioned murder and “disappearances.”

A police van empties out in Quezon City’s District 120. It’s part of Operation Tokhang, which news footage shows the Filipino strong man authorizing. They’re rounding up everybody ever caught and convicted of using or selling drugs, giving them the chance to “voluntarily” surrender.

Arturo (Jess Mendoza) answers the pounding at the door, insists he’s clean and long ago did his time for his crimes. Nope. “Volunteer” to go in, because you’re on the list. “Just come with us,” (in Filipino, with English subtitles) the cops urge.

But his wife, Maria (Alessandra de Rossi) asks questions, gets mouthy. Now they want to know HER name. A quick glance at the clipboard “list” produces an officious “HERE it is.” Maria’s “Let me SEE that” falls on deaf ears.

They’re both ordered to “register” and face the perp-walk jeering of neighbors, even as the grinning cops assure them that the signing in, oaths they must take, and dancing that’s to start their latest “rehabilitation” is “nothing.”

They go home. Arturo kisses her and their three kids good night before going to work. He never comes back, gunned down in a drive-by. The cops are there within moments, but no, there were no “witnesses.” Strangely, all the CCTV cameras at the scene “were down.”

Lt. Ventura (Jake Macapagal) shrugs, says they have no leads, makes Maria sign some papers, and that’s that.

But good luck finding a job as a widow with three kids when you’ve been on the news, when everybody nearby knows you were a drug user and “once an addict, always an addict,” because the murderously corrupt government keeps telling them that.

The Catholic Church? The iconography is everywhere, but there is no priest or sanctuary that can offer Maria comfort. All that’s left for it is for her to beg for a job, as an informant, with the very people she suspects arranged the murder of her husband, and covered it up.

Ventura makes the arrangement. Alvin (Arthur Acuña) will be her handler, allegedly a “vigilante” but actually an undercover cop. She will find information, get dealers to sell to her so that they can be “caught in the act.”

Or so she thinks. Being taught to fire a pistol from the back of a motorbike tells her, and us, this is how it’s done. If you’re on the “list,” judgement has already been passed. No arrest, no trial, just execution.

Maria’s “real” motive for getting mixed up in this is to protect her kids, the oldest of whom (Micko Laurente) is already spending too much time with a drug dealing cousin (Timothy Malabot).

Can she save him and his siblings? What will she do once she knows how these “EJKs” (extra judicial killings) are meted out, who stands to gain and where the corruption really lies?

British born Italian-Filipino actress de Rossi perfectly embodies a woman with a past, but with little in that past to help her in her newly-widowed predicament. Sure, she can be of help to the cops.

“If there’s one thing I remember, it’s how to score.”

She tries to assure her confused, grieving children that their father was not a pusher, that he was “a good man.”

But the more she learns, the harder it is to hide her despair and her desperation. The same thing could happen to her that happened to Arturo, and Maria is willing to cross a lot of lines to prevent that. de Rossi never lets us see the gears turning, what Maria might be planning to do with all she learns and the terror that’s being unleashed on her country’s most vulnerable.

Director Rekhi maintains that mystery and steadily ramps up the suspense as we follow his heroine down a rabbit hole filled with vipers.

And the deeper she and we go down that “Watch List,” the more doubts we have that anybody will get out of this alive, much less with a sense that justice will be done or will even be allowed.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse

Cast: Alessandra de Rossi, Jake Macapagal, Arthur Acuña, Jess Mendoza, Micko Laurente and Timothy Mabalot.

Credits: Directed by Ben Rekhi, script by Ben Rekhi, Rona Lean Sales. A Dark Sky/Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:39