Deep Welles

A funny thing about Orson Welles, the greatest director in the history of movies - he didn't actually make many. And not all of them are that great. But his tribute to Franz Kafka, The Trial (1962). was pretty entertaining.

Anthony Perkins is Josef K., an ordinary man who works in an office of some sort. One morning, he wakes up to find strange men in his bedroom. They ask questions and give no answers. They have been in the room of Jeanne Moreau, the nightclub performer who has the room next to his in the boarding house. Is it her they are investigating? Are they even from the police? It seems they are, since they tell him he is under arrest. They won't tell him the charge, and tell him he doesn't need to go to prison or leave his job - yet.

He goes to work, then to the theater, but he is taken away by the strange men. He is taken to what seems to be a tribunal, and makes a fine speech, but nothing changes. He still doesn't know what he is charged with. He goes to the best advocate around - Orson Welles. Welles holds court in bed in a delapidated mansion, with a beautiful nurse or secretary, Romy Schneider. I haven't read the original Kafka: Does Josef K. get it on with her in the book? 

So Perkins goes from one frustrating situation to another. He meets with William Chappell, an artist with influence in government, and pleads with him while children peek through chinks in the walls, maybe hoping to see him pose nude? He even goes to a priest. Where does it end?

It ends as it began, with Orson Welles narrating a sort of fable on justice, accompanying animation on pin boards. This is an esoteric technique that, unfortunately, looks just like an ink sketch to me. 

Great use of atmosphere, some nice acting, and a real oddball story. It made me want to watch Kafka again, which takes the surrealism to the next level. 

Send in the Clones

For some reason, we had two clone movies for this weekend: Replicas (2019) and Gemini Man (2019). Neither was very good, so I figured I'd review them together.

Replicas stars Keanu Reeves, pretty much the only reason we watched it. He plays a scientist working to transfer the mind of a dead man into a robot. He succeeds, only to see the robot go mad and try to tear its own face off. He is assisted by a dubious and sarcastic Thomas Middleditch.

Reeves, his wife Alice Eve, and their three children go on a vacation, and because Reeves is a terrible driver, they all get killed. Except him, of course. So he gets Middleditch to come out with the mind mapper - with the great catch-phrase: "Commence the mind-mapping process!" Actually, I might have that quote wrong, but who is going to watch Replicas and correct me?

Step two, Middleditch digs up some cloning pods - but he can only come up with 3, so one of the kids has to go. It's ok, though - he edits everyone's memory so they don't remember the little darling.

So it all goes according to plan - they clones wake up and do not try to tear their own faces off. In fact, they go about their business as if nothing happened. They remember going on vacation, but don't remember anything special happening. This was infuriating to me. So there aren't going to be any questions about the missing time, the extra bedrooms? No questions from friends and neighbors about the missing kid? No, Reeves is just going to go about his business as if nothing happened - he's just glad to have most of his family back.

The only trouble is that his company is beginning to look into his activities a little too closely.

This is not Keanu's best role. It isn't even Johnny Mnemonic level. Thomas Middleditch is much better as the buddy who constantly tells Keanu that what he's doing is not OK. But he goes along out of friendship and because it's cool science.

Speaking of something that's not someone best work, Gemini Man has director Ang Lee working with Will Smith. Smith is a crack assassin, wants to retire. Agent Mary Elizabeth Winstead is sent to track him, but he befriends her and heads to Caracas to see his pal Benedict Wong. He's attacked by the most advanced assassin he has ever met, who bears a strong resemblance to his younger self.

You see, Clive Owen has cloned him and raised the clone to be even deadlier than he is. And there you have it.

The parts seem to be there, but this movie just doesn't quite make it. However, I think that Ang Lee did a fine job of directing, particularly the fight scenes. There was a lot of CGI required, and not just to replicate and de-age Will Smith. He handles it as well as any, I'd say.

In conclusion, Upgrade was better than Replicas.

Late One Night I Was Trimmin' the Glim

This one doesn't count, because we didn't watch it on Netflix: The Lighthouse. We watched it on Amazon Prime because Netflix DVD wasn't letting us watch it. In fact, right now we have 14 "Short Wait" movies at the top of our queue, and I expect 2-3 of the available movies at the top to switch over to Wait status on Monday, before they send us any. While Lighthouse was in that limbo, we decided to just stream it.

It stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two lighthouse keepers on a solitary rock, just starting a two week stint. Pattinson is a taciturn young man with past as a lumberjack he doesn't like to talk about. Dafoe is an old salt who doesn't mind taking a drop of rum at dinner. That leads to their first cconflict: Pattinson won't drink to the complicated maritime toast Dafoe offers. He compromises by drinking water - which unfortunately tastes like shit, because something got into the cistern.

The other conflict is that Dafoe won't let Pattinson go up to the light, and Pattinson suspects that he is somehow communing with it, getting some form of illumination from the intense beam.

They survive the two weeks, but there's a storm on the day their relief is supposed to come, and they do not get picked up. At this point, Pattinson decides a little drink won't do any harm. And things go right off the rails.

This was made by David Eggers (The Witch), and it takes a similar historical approach. It was based on a real event, and filmed on black-and-white stock, giving it an eerie look. While being quite scary, it also has a lot of silly humor, which both Pattinson and Dafoe are quite good at. 

Also, it had me singing "The Eddystone Light" song most of the way through.

Forsythe Forsooth

Can you believe we haven't seen Local Hero (1983) until now? We saw Gregory's Girl long, long ago, and That Sinking Feeling in theater when it was released in the US (anyone else? No?). So we were low-key Bill Forsyth fans. But Forsyth is pretty low-key, so that fits.

It stars Peter Riegert (of recent film quiz fame) as a young go-getter in a Texas oil firm. He is sent to Scotland to buy out a small town so that they can put replace the bay with a refinery. The president of the company, Burt Lancaster, asks him to watch the sky for comets or anything else unusual.  He’s an amateur astronomer, and a bit of a nut. Riegert doesn’t really like meeting in person - he’s more of a telex man. But it’s a good opportunity and from the glimpse we get of his empty life, there’s nothing to keep him from going.

In Scotland, he meets his local partner, Peter Capaldi (just a kid here) and a gorgeous marine biologist Jenny Seagrove, who is studying a scale model of the bay. Good name for the actor, because we rarely see her out of the water.

In the village, he meets inn owner and unofficial village headman Denis Lawson (kind of a Scottish Stephen Rae) and his lusty wife Jennifer Black. He doesn't quite realize it, but the villagers are very willing to sell up, as long as they get rich off of it. It's a beautiful village, but as they say, you can't eat scenery.

So we have Capaldi falling in love with Seagrove while Riegert is falling in love with the village he is set on destroying. He starts noticing the sky, including meteors and northern lights. When Lancaster finally shows up to see the situation for himself, what will happen to everyone?

It's a sweet story with interesting characters who aren't all they seem. Lawson and the villagers in particular aren't rubes or canny primitives. They love their village but would like to be rich enough to live somewhere warm. There's a Russian trawler captain who comes through with some semi-smuggled goods who has Lawson manage some financial investments for him, and so forth. And it ends with everyone happy, except maybe Riegert, who has to go back to his life.

Note: The soundtrack is Mark Knoepfler on guitar. It's lovely and unobtrusive.

Room Service? Send Up a Room!

I'm getting a little desperate for horror movies that Ms. Spenser will like. No slasher, preferably supernatural, etc. 1408 (2004) looked likely. For years I've confused it with that Shining documentary - Room 237. The only thing they have in common is source material by Stephen King.

It stars John Cusack as a sad-sack writer of travel guides with a specialty in haunted hotels. He doesn't seem too popular, possibly because he doesn't believe in the hauntings, but isn't a debunker - kind of falling between two stools there. We slowly learn that he is estranged from his wife (it seems he "went out for cigarettes") because they lost a daughter to cancer and he couldn't cope.

He gets an unsigned postcard telling him not to visit the Dolphin Hotel in New York, and not to stay in room 1408. The manager, Samuel L. Jackson, doesn't want him to stay there, either. Too many people have died there. Cusack's editor, Tony Shalhoub, has to get lawyers involved.

So he sets out to spend the night in this creepy room. Things are OK for a bit - he has a few drinks, settles in. Then things start going haywire: everything from a creepy clock radio to shadows in the mirror to blood pouring out of the wall.

At one point, he figures that Jackson dosed him with acid in the booze. That doesn't go anywhere. The door won't open. He even tries the window ledge and discovers that all the other rooms have disappeared. There are ghosts in the room and in the air vents. And so on.

He finally wakes up and finds it was all a dream - he's back home, he's ok, he reconciles with his wife, and you can guess where this is going...

I thought this was kind of fun. I liked how crazy it all got, and the twists as he tries to come to grips with the phenomenon or to escape. Ms. Spenser, on the other hand, thought it was silly, lacked all subtlety, and went from zero to psycho in under 60 seconds. She says she recognized the heavy hand of Stephen King. Oh well. Back to the DVD queue.

If anyone out there has seen this, let me know: Better or worse with Nicholas Cage in place of John Cusack?

Current Affairs

Somewhere, I heard that The Admiral: Roaring Currents (2014) was an immensely Korean costume war film. Somehow, after Parasite, I put it on the queue. It was a ways down the queue, but these days you never know what you're going to get.

It takes place in the 16th century, when Japan was invading Korea. They had wiped out most of the Korean navy, leaving only twelve ships. Admiral Yi (Choi Min-Sik) had been suspected of treason and tortured by the corrupt and ineffectual Korean regime, but now they put him back in command. Everything seemed hopeless. The Japanese were advancing, and sending him the heads of generals. His men were deserting, and he was chopping off the heads of deserters. One of the deserters burned his turtle ship - the massive armored vessel that was the pride of the fleet. But the Admiral had one last ditch plan: the Roaring Currents.

A narrow strait between the Japanese position and the capital was known for its treacherous currents and the occasional whirlpool. So he would lure them into the strait and fight them there. This part starts about halfway into the movie, and takes up most of the last half.

The naval battles are good brutal fun. There's a lot of CGI, but a lot of practical effects as well. Really, I guess this is why people flocked to this movie (in Korea) and it got such good reviews (on twitter, I guess - I can't remember where I read about it). It also has some amazing sets and costumes, especially for the Japanese. It's funny, though. The Japanese costumes were supposedly museum-accurate, but looked sort of silly. I don't know if the effect was intentional - they are the bad guys - or just filtered slightly through Korean sensibility. Especially because the Korean costumes tended to be quite plain and simple.

There was also a good bit of Korean anguish and agony, so this isn't completely the opposite of Parasite. But I'm afraid it didn't really grab me. The naval tactics seemed to be based largely on standing still - Admiral Yi drops anchor at one point, at another goes to hang out by the shore. The tactics often look like improvisation, not clever plans. And the ships of that period looked big and boxy, and kind of clunky.

I actually preferred a much worse movie, the Thai Legend of the Tsunami Warrior. 

Sugar for Sugar

It took us a few years to get to Searching for Sugar Man (2012), but once my sister recommended it, I figured we had to watch.

It's a documentary with an interesting hook: In the late 70s, one of the most popular musicians in South Africa (for liberal, white South Africans anyway) was Rodriguez. But nobody knew who he was. Someone had brought one of his records to the country, and it had just caught on. They knew he was American. They assumed he was as famous in America as he was in SA - more than Elvis, just under Paul Simon. Most people believed he was dead - that he had killed himself dramatically onstage in the middle of a concert.

The story mainly follows DJ "Sugar" Segerman (nicknamed after Rodriguez's hit, "Sugar Man"), who tracked down Rodriguez's story. They went from his South African record label, back to an American impresario, who claimed to have no idea about his whereabouts or even existence. Then he found the record's producer, who said he'd just talked with him, and gave Sugar his phone number.

Turned out he was from Detroit, and he was still there. He worked construction (destruction, actually, ripping down derelict houses) - "hard labor" he called it. The guys he know in local bars had some idea he was a musician, maybe even knew he'd made a record. Sometimes he'd play a small gig. But mostly he was just another guy struggling to get by.

So Sugar got him out to South Africa for a concert - he sold out a big hall for a week. He totally killed. Then he went home, and back to construction. He gave most of the money away. He did some shows like this every few years and didn't let it go to his head.

This is an interest doc, although I understand that they may have fudged some of it for dramatic effect. But they seemed to have gotten Rodriguez pretty well. He has Mexican ancestry, long dark hair and sunglasses. He walks all over, sometimes with his guitar, stooped over, beaten down by a hard life. He doesn't seem to like to talk about himself, or money or art. He seems to be mostly concerned about the problems of the poor. I kept waiting to find out his dark secret, but there doesn't seem to be one. He has three daughters (shown in the movie) by two ex-wives, who all seem pretty together.

But you don't care about that, right? What about the music? It's a mix of soul and singer-songwriter - folk music with some funk. Maybe Richie Havens is a good comparison. The songs are poetic and conversational at once. And they mention sex by name, which really got the Afrikaans kids going. I found myself humming "I Wonder" for weeks after. But I haven't ordered one of his records yet.

Not a Sequel to The Host

We finally got to see Parasite (2019). It's not that we've been holding off, although I did wonder just how gut-wrenching it would turn out to be. It's been at or near the top of my queue for months. But I now have between 10 ad 15 "Short Wait" or "Long Wait" movies at the top of my queue. And "Short Wait" seems to be "Never" in Netflix talk. Sometimes one or two will open up in the middle of the week, but Mon or Tues when Netflix sends my movies, no luck.

But somehow Parasite got loose. It Bong Joon Ho's story of the Kim family, a dad, mom, sister and daughter who live in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul. They are desperately searching for Wi-Fi, holding their phones in any corner of the apartment, since their phone service has been cut off. That's how low they have sunk. Then the son, who has failed his college entrance exams, gets a tip from a friend who got in to college. He's tutoring a rich girl, and wants the son to take over while he's on his term abroad. So he gets the daughter to dummy up some papers showing him as a college student and heads over to meet the Parks.

The Parks live in a gorgeous house with a serene garden. The mom is young, good-looking and kind of ditsy. The daughter he'll be tutoring is shy but seems romantically inclined. They have a young son who is wild - his mother is convinced he's an artistic genius. And the dad runs a software company. They also have a young driver and a matronly housekeeper.

Soon, the Kims have managed to get all their members into the Park household: The daughter as an art therapist for the boy, the father as driver, the mom as housekeeper. When the Parks go for a camping trip, they all spend the night in the mansion. And then it all starts to come apart.

I'll skip the twists, because you either know them or I would spoil them. I just want to say that this is much less of a horror film than I expected, although it has some blood and a body count. There is no fantasy element like in Get Out, or sci-fi like in The Host. But there sure is a lot of social commentary on the stratification of Korean society into the Have-Everythings and the Have-Nots.

The thing that I particularly noticed was how fluid the social boundaries seem. As poor as the Kims are, they are smart, skilled, and have little trouble fitting in with the Parks (at least as servants). All the skills they need, they pick up from a few YouTube videos - or Mr. Kim goes to a Mercedes dealer to get familiar with the car he's going to claim he has chauffeured for years. But as Mr. Park says, the Kims all have a certain smell - like boiled rags, like semi-basement apartments, and they can't get away from it.

I guess this won a ton of Oscars, including Best Picture - the only ever awarded for a non-English language film. Good for the Academy.

What About When the Fact Becomes Legend?

I'm not really a big fan of westerns, but I figured I should get around to watching John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). After watching Little Big Man, I thought I should take a look at what I've heard is the first of the revisionist westerns.

It starts with white-haired Senator Jimmy Stewart and wife Vera Miles arriving in the town of Shinbone by train. They are met by Andy Devine, and are headed to a funeral. A newspaperman wants to know what they are doing in town, so he tells them in a flashback.

He came to Shinbone before the railroad, a raw lawyer with nothing but a few dollars and some law books. His stage is robbed by the titular Liberty Valence, Lee Marvin, and his gang including Lee Van Cleef and Strother Martin. When he attempts to defend the honor of a lady passenger, Marvin beats him and leaves him to die. John Wayne and Woody Strode come along and rescue him, delivering him to the inn where Vera Miles is working. Wayne is clearly courting Miles, but she is intrigued by this vulnerable but principled tinhorn.

Stewart takes a job washing dishes at the inn for room and board, and wants to practice law. John Wayne lets him know that the only law in Shinbone comes from a gun. Sheriff Andy Devine is too fat and cowardly to defend the law, and Valence is the toughest man around - except Wayne. But Stewart refuses to get a gun, standing on principle.

The time comes when Marvin calls Stewart out, and he'll have to face him in a shootout. SPOILER - Marvin is shot. As many people have complained, this should be the last act. But now, Stewart is a hero and gets to be the delegate to the territorial convention. When opposition pol John Carradine says he is unfit to lead because he is nothing but a gunslinger, this destroys his confidence in himself. So Wayne tells him the truth - REAL SPOILER - Stewart missed Marvin, but Wayne shot him from a side alley at exactly the same time.

So the flashback concludes with the newspaperman throwing away his notes with the classic line, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".

Now, I thought this was a decent Ford western. Good cast (even if you're not much of a John Wayme fan), great black-and-white cinematography, interesting story. Ms. Spenser, on the other hand, hated it. She thinks Wayne is a blowhard and a phony, was disgusted by the casual racism against Strode, and definitely didn't love the message. The whole point of the movie seems to be something like "You can have all the principles you want, but only a friendly asshole with a gun can save you."

You know, I can see her point.

Red Anna

We were going to skip Luc Besson's Anna (2019), but I started feeling like we were never going to get a Black Widow movie, and Red Sparrow just didn't cut it.

It starts in cold-war Moscow, with a bunch of average people being detained by the KGB. Then we meet our star, Sasha Luss. She is selling matrioshka dolls in a flea market, and a talent scout offfers her a job modelling in Paris. In real life Luss is a model (although she was also the alien princess in Besson's Valerian), so that fits. In Paris, this naive Russian beauty gets involved with a Russian scumbag and arms dealer, who turns up dead. How will she get out of this?

Cut to six years earlier. We find Luss leaving her violent junkie boyfriend to join the KGB. Her trainer is Helen Mirren looking very Rosa Klebb. So she was not so naive, and in fact, is a super-spy. We get to see one of her first missions - a hit in a fashionable cafe. Mirren has given her a gun but no bullets, as a test, or possibly to get her killed. Tough love. This fight is great, but maybe we've seen it before. Offhand, I can think of a similar fight in The Spy Who Dumped Me. OK, Besson does it better.

But that is a problem with this movie. We've already seen a lot of the best scenes, maybe done better, maybe not. There's a car chase, for instance, that was just fine, not really first class. We expect something better from Luc.

But the cute "XXX years/months earlier" flashbacks are kind of fun. I should have posted a spoiler, because the first one took me by surprise. I figured out the last one, though.

I should mention Luke Evans and Cillian Murphy as her KGB and CIA handlers. They are OK. I like Luss a lot in this role - obviously it isn't hard for her to play a Russian model, but she also seemed to handle the action well. But Mirren is the real star - probably true of any movie she is in.

It is a Good Day to Watch

I don't know what to say about Little Big Man (1970). It's been a favorite movie since I saw it when it was new. I was 14, on vacation with my family in Helsinki (English, with Finnish subtitles). I don't think I've seen it since, and was surprised by how much I had remembered.

It's framed as an interview with Jack Crabb, Dustin Hoffman in heavy makeup as a 120-year old man, the last white survivor of Custer's Last Stand. His tale starts when he was a young boy, on a wagon heading west. A band of Pawnee massacred the wagon train, except him and his sister. They are picked up by a Cheyenne, and taken back to their village. His sister escapes, but Jack stays on and is raised as an Indian. Although he is small, Chief Dan George declares him brave and names him Little Big Man.

When the Army attacks, Jack declares himself white, and is taken in by the Army. He is adopted by a religious family, who possibly misjudge his age due to his small size - although the wife seems to think he is old enough. He goes on to become a snake-oil salesman, a gun fighter, a muleskinner for General Custer, and finally, returns to his Cheyenne family. But these stories don't end happily for the Indians...

What I remembered most about the movie was the sexy scenes - particularly when his Indian wife convinces him to service her three sisters in one night. It's the kind of thing that sticks in a 14-year-old's mind. I think I got most of my early ideas about native culture from this movie - things like the contrary people, who do everything backwards, and the men who act as women.

All in all, I'd say the movie holds up. The humor can be a little broad, but that's what I liked. Dustin Hoffman seems to spend a lot of screen time looking woodenly perplexed. But either he  got over it, or I stopped noticing. It was funny to hear him talking Frontier instead of Brooklyn, but I guess he pulled it off. The treatment of native issues was about as good as it gets, not just for 1970, but for any movie made by Euro-Americans,

On this re-watch, I say like Dan George, "My heart soars like a hawk."

Scary Stories to Watch on a Screen

I can't remember why I queued up Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019) - probably because of Guillermo del Toro's involvement as producer. Glad I did. It's a lovely little throwback.

It is set in a small Pennsylvania town in the 60s. Three high-school seniors, Zoe Colleti, Gabriel Rush and Austin Zajur are getting ready for a last Halloween together, where they plan to prank a band of bullies (and incidentally, Zajur's sister who is dating the head bully). They run into the drive-in and hide from the pursuing bullies in a drive-in. They jump into the car of a stranger, a Mexican-American kid "just passing through", Michael Garza.

Since he's saved them, and it's Halloween (and she kind of likes him), Colleti invites Garza to see a haunted house. The local legend is that the family who founded the mill had a deformed daughter that they kept locked up. Children learned that they could sit next to the wall of her cell, and she would tell them scary stories. But then kids started to die. Now, the daughter is dead, and the family gone, but some say, if you ask her to tell you a scary story, she will - and you may not live. So, I don't think I would ask...

They find the cell that the daughter was kept locked in, and Coletti even finds a book of scary stories that looks like it was written by the daughter. Then the bullies show up, and lock the door from the outside. When Garza's sister, Natalie Ganzhorn, objects, they throw her in too.

They get out (with some help?), and Coletti finds a new story in the book. It's about a bully being stalked by a scarecrow - and we watch it come true. Although they don't have any proof, the bully has disappeared. Then, she sees a new story appearing letter by letter in the book. It's "The Big Toe" (I know that one!), and the character's name is that of their friend Gabriel Rush. She calls him and tries to make sure he doesn't eat the toe. But soon, he's gone too.

So we have a plucky band of teens being stalked by a supernatural curse. Coletti is the cute goth girl whose mom ran off leaving her with her dad, not played by Michael Chiklis, but looking like it. Zajur is the annoying jerk, and Rush the (possibly gay) theater kid - although for a gay lad, he is very interested in Zajur's sister. Garza is an outsider, a kid with a car who claims to be "following the crops", but actually has a secret.

The concept of scary stories writing themselves, then coming true is a good one. The part about the locked up daughter is a little clunky, in my opinion. We don't see her (until the very end), we don't know if she is evil or sympathetic (both, it turns out), and she just doesn't seem to be much of a presence. But the combination of nostalgic kid-pic and scary-but-not-too-scary horror makes this just what we were looking for. And even though the body count was a little high, there's a sequel coming up that promises to make everything right. Looking forward to it.