Reversible Mac

 A long time ago, a saw a spy movie on TV. It was dimly lit and the TV was black and white, and the cast seemed to be all similar looking gray men in trench coats. Since I couldn't tell them apart, and everyone was pretending to be something they weren't, the whole thing baffled me. I have always wondered what it was. I thought it might have been The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, but I saw it and it didn't seem right. Then I tried The Ipcress File, and that was all wrong. My most recent guess was The Mackintosh Man (1973).

It stars Paul Newman as a Brit (?) pretending to be Australian (??). He meets up with Harry Andrews, playing Mr. Mackintosh, and his secretary Dominique Sanda/ They are planning a jewel heist - a rather clever one. He pulls it off, and escapes by with the aid of a reversible Mackintosh - plain gray outside, with a tweed lining.

However, he gets caught, and sent to prison. Since I read the cover copy, I knew that he was actually a spy, who is looking to break up a prison escape ring called the Scarperers. So he gets scarpered, along with an agent who was caught spying for the Russians.

They are doped and kept out for days, then come to locked into an old house, somewhere isolated. Slightly domme-ish Jenny Runacre lets them know that they will be released after a week or so when the heat is off. Well, they let the agent go, but they know Newman is a cop, so they beat him up. But he turns the tables, and kicks Runacre between the legs - possibly the first time a woman gets it to the groin in cinema.

So he escaped, but he has lost the agent and the Scarperers. Then he spots politician James Mason's yacht and figures that he is behind it. So it's off to Malta, the yacht's next stop, along with Sanda. And so forth.

First of all, this is not a great movie. Even leaving aside Newman's ridiculous attempts at various accents (he plays Canadian as well as Australian and British), it just didn't hold up too well. Still, it starts well, with the diamond theft, and we do get some nice Valletta locations. 

Second, it is full of British character actors whose names I didn't know, but whose faces were very familiar, probably from BBC TV shows.

In conclusion, this is definitely not the movie I remember. For one thing, there is only the one scene with the Mackintosh (as opposed to Mr. Mackintosh, who dies offscreen). But also, I distinctly remember a shootout in an airplane hanger, or possibly warehouse - where everyone was indistinguishable in their trench coats. I'll keep looking 

Mescalero!

I picked Young Guns (1988) for the ladies, that is Ms. Spenser. It's famously packed with the cutest guys of 1988. But also she likes Westerns.

It starts with young Billy, Emilio Estevez, running away from the law in a western town and hiding with some pigs. Rancher Terence Stamp picks him up and hides him in his wagon. He is gathering a group of young, wild men to protect his ranch, and he decides to recruit Estevez. The other are Charlie Sheen, Keifer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Philips, Dermot Mulroney, and Casey Siemaszko. He calls them his Regulators. Stamp is trying to teach these ruffians manners, comportment, literacy and honor. It won't all take.

It turns out that Jack Palance is looking to take over the ranch, so he has Stamp killed. Now the Requlators want revenge. They go to Stamp's lawyer, Terry O'Quinn, and after trying to dissuade them, he gets them deputized and armed with warrants for Palance's gang. I think it is here where we get the classic Western movie Gang-of-Cowboys-Galloping-Across-the-Plains scene. One of my favorites.

The first warrant they are going to serve, Estevez sees a cowboy going into the outhouse, follows him there, and shoots him while his hands are occupied. That's technically not how you serve a warrant. But it gives you some idea of what kind of guy he is. Soon he is famous - his young age gets him dubbed "Billy the Kid" by the papers. And now we know who this movie is about.

Let's see, Charlie Sheen thinks he's the leader of the group but he gets shot. Actually, they pretty much all get shot, but Sheen is the one who dies. Philips is the knife expert, and gets a lot of grief as a Mexican and an Indian. Sutherland is a poet and philosopher who falls in love with a Chinese woman that Palance has installed as a prostitute in one of his saloons. And it all ends up in a big shootout at Terry O'Quinn's place.

Oh yes, and in the middle, Philips introduces the gang to peyote tea, and there's an extended trip sequence that comes to nothing, but is kind of fun.

The movie has a heck of a cast, and is a pretty good Western, but I'm not sure it amounted to much. It looks like it was very much based on history, although I only know what I read in Wikipedia. I loved Stamp, of course, and Philip is great as well. I'm not sure anyone else is really giving much, except for Sutherland, who gets to be kind of goofy, although it's Siemaszko who is the real comic relief.

Anyway, Ms. Spenser liked it, because Charlie Sheen gets killed first.

Jane Says

 I wish I could remember who recommended The Veil (2016), because it was a big hit with Ms. Spenser. I want to see what else they like,

It starts with some old news footage of a cult leader (Thomas Jane) documenting his cult, Heaven's Veil, and then the aftermath of the mass suicide that must follow. Jane plays "Jim Jacobs" very much as Jim Jones (same aviator sunglasses, for ex) with a touch of Jim Morrison sex appeal. This flashback ends with one child left alive, who says to the FBI, "Don't worry, they are coming back."

In the present, this little girl is grown up Lily Rabe. She has been asked to participate in a documentary about the cult, and she finally agrees. The doc is being made by Jessica Alba with a crew of six or so. They get to the creepy compound, miles from civilization, and start looking for the films and videos that they know were taken, but were never found.

They camp out, and wake up in the middle of the night to find that one of the grips has taken off with the van, leaving them stranded. In the morning, two of the crew start walking back to civilization - nearest road is ten miles, nearest town another twenty. They won't be back before dark. 

That day, Rabe leads them to a house hidden deep in the forest. This is where all the films are. The generator still works, so they start to watch. Experiment #1 shows Jane taking a lethal injection, then being revived with some kind of powers. Each film they watch shows a little more about Heaven's Veil: Jane wants power over limitless life. When dead, he can inhabit someone else's body, then be revived.

The couple who were walking to town come back to say they found the van, wrapped around a tree, with the driver dead. That driver later comes back to life and kills them. The generator goes out, and the guy who goes to fix it gets killed too. But these dead people then show up perfectly fine, and nobody else notices they were gone. Have they been possessed? (SPOILER - yes.)

This has got a little bit of a lot of horror tropes: haunted houses deep in the woods, death cults, possession, found footage. Even vengeance, since it turns out that Alba's father was one of the FBI agents that found the dead cultists, and he killed himself shortly after. It's a little slow, and not that gory, although there's a decent body count. But it has great atmosphere, and a hell of a performance by Thomas Jane. 

Avast

I mentioned that I should be blogging more of the streaming videos we watch, but I haven't been. For me, streaming is for the random, forgettable content, and for TV series. But if we something interesting, I guess I should record it. For example, The Vast of Night (2020).

It's set in a small New Mexico town in the Fifties. There's a basketball game, and the town is gathering in the gym. Jake Horowitz, a cocky kid with Buddy Holly glasses walks in and start BSing with the kids. He is a local night-time DJ. A young girl, Sierra McCormick, asks him to help her with her new portable tape recorder, so he walks her through the parking lot, taping pretend interviews with random families and giving her advice about confidence and how to duck a boring interview.

These youngster can't stay for the game - they have to work, so he walks her to her job at the switchboard before he heads to the radio station. He records her talking about science - she is enthusiastic about articles she's read. About cars that drive automatically, and a radio that tells you when to turn. (Of course, why do you need the second if you have the first?). Even phone that fit in your pocket and have a little TV on one side, across from the dial. It's a cute scene - and as a few critics have pointed out, we're now ~20 minutes in and all we have is a cocky high school graduate walking a shy 16-year old girl to her job. So it's a slow build.

At the switchboard, McCormick gets calls that are only static and a strange tone. She tunes into Horowitz's radio show and hears the same thing. So she calls him and tells him what's up. He replays the airtape and hears the sound himself. So he broadcasts it over the air and asks listeners to help identify it. 

A caller who will only identify himself as Billy tells a story of a secret military base, a mysterious object, and the same sound. He says he contracted a strange disease after that, as did many of the others in the crew. His call is disconnected, and when he comes back he notes that he and most of the crew are African or Mexican American, maybe because they are disposable, maybe because no one will believe them. But he mentions tapes, which turn out to be in the town library.

McCormick breaks into the library to get the tapes and brings them to the station. There is a scene where Horowitz threads each tape and plays a few seconds until they find the right one. When they play it on the air, the power goes out.

Back at the switchboard, it's getting weird with people shouting about things in the sky. At the station, and older woman calls and asks them to come to her to get the story. When they arrive, she tells of how her son was taken by a UFO that made those same sounds. She tells of a message they use to hypnotize humans before abducting them. Horowitz doesn't believe her, and leaves while she is begging him to take her with him. But soon enough he has reason to believe her.

First, I want to mention that this reminded me a lot of Pontypool. Both spend a lot of the movie at an isolated location like a radio station or the switchboard, with communication to the outside world restricted to a narrow channel. But Vast had a different angle, and also a different style. The camerawork combined long tracking shots and quick editing to mix up the pace. You might accuse it of being self-indulgent. I thought it was a little show-offy, but tasteful. I also liked the friendship between the main characters. He was kind of obnoxious and full of himself, always teasing her. She was not very self-confident, but as a 16-year old, she showed a lot of initiative. And there was never a hint of romance. 

In conclusion, a good streaming film, presented and paid for by Amazon. I wonder if this would have done much if released in theaters instead of to a quarantined world over streaming. 

Before the Fall When They Wrote It on the Wall

We queued up Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) partly because we'd seen another Werner Herzog documentary, and were curious about his style. How much is self-parody, how much is actual weirdness? But we also wanted to see inside the cave.

Herzog got permission to film in the Chauvet Cave along with a scientific team. This cavern contains perhaps the oldest known paintings of animals known. Herzog talks a bit about the discovery of the cave, how it has been sealed for ~20-30,000 years, and a bit about life at the time the paintings were made. He talks to some scientists who discuss some of the sensory impressions the people who made the paintings might have felt. For example, one scientist suggests that the flickering torches might have given an impression of movement, which Herzog likened to prehistoric cinema. He even brings in a retired perfumer, who is trying to find caves by smell. He goes into the cave and can smell - nothing in particular. The cave has no characteristic smell. Ah, but what he can imagine.

And here I don't know if Herzog is serious or just kidding.

Then the camera crew - Herzog, a handheld camera operator and two grips with small portable LED lights, get to go in by themselves. The movie becomes magical here, as they film the aurochs, cave lions, rhinos, and horses in shifting lights. This is the real thing. 

I was amazed to see how sophisticated these drawings were. Not just the stylization of the giant horns on the rhinos, or the feeling of action, but the modeling of the 3D surfaces of the horses. I didn't know shading had been invented 30,000 years ago.

Herzog finishes by visiting a habitat near the cave, heated by the waste heat of a nuclear reactor. They farm alligators there, and some are albinos, mutants, he suggests, due to the radiation. He wonders if, in the far future, would these mutant alligators look upon the cave paintings, and see, as if in a mirror, the reflections of themselves? OK, now I know he's just pulling our legs. Or is he?

Le Vieux Carre

 I think I had watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) already, but I can't remember much about it. I assumed that was because it was subtle and convoluted, not because I had fallen asleep. Maybe I was thinking of the Alec Guinness series. Anyway, we watched The Night Manager on Amazon Prime, and Ms. Spenser got on a John Le Carre kick, so we queued it up.

TTSS stars Gary Oldman as George Smiley. But first we see John Hurt as Control send Mark Strong to Budapest to make contact with a potential defector. But a gunfight with the Russians breaks out and he is killed. Control and his protege Smiley are forced to retire in disgrace, allowing Toby Jones to take over the Circus. Toby Jones, what a perfect name for someone who looks like a Welsh Toby mug.

Jones has a secret source high in Soviet intelligence, but since there is a mole at the highest level in the Circus, he won't tell anyone. Meanwhile, is Oldman going to just go fishing? No! But he can trust no one except Peter Guillam - Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ricky Tarr - Tom Hardy. Guillam is the cold, calculating bureaucratic spy, with nerves of steel, an impenetrable poker face and unquestioning loyalty to Smiley. Tarr is more of the Swinging Sixties type spy, racing around on a motor bike and dropping off the map for extended periods after trying to turn a beautiful Russian agent.

I won't go into the plot any further than that. But not because I can't - I didn't fall asleep or get lost much at all. It was certainly tricky, but not at all impossible to follow. There isn't a lot of action, and a lot of story is watching tightly controlled men having tightly controlled conversations. But the actors seem to relish the tamped down acting style and get a lot out of it. Oldman in particular seems to disappear in the part, and the part is a bit of a disappearing act anyway, since Smiley is a grey bureaucrat.

In conclusion, if you want to see Tom Hiddleston as an amateur agent taking down charming arms dealer Hugh Laurie, try The Night Manager.

Blood Sputnik

I had Sputnik (2020) on my queue for some reason - I suppose I'd seen an early review somewhere, but I tried not to read enough to get spoiled. So I didn't really know what to expect. But as soon as Ms. Spenser read the sleeve copy on the Netflix envelope, she said, "Huh, sounds like Night of the Blood Beast."

Like Blood Beast, it starts in space. Two Soviet cosmonauts are re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, when they hear a clunk on the capsule. This isn't good. When the recovery team gets to them, one cosmonaut has no face, and the other is in bad shape.

Next we meet Oksana Akinshina, a beautiful, skilled but unconventional doctor. She is getting blasted by a review board, even though she helped the patient. After, Col. Fyodor Bondarchuk recruits her for a secret project. It is the surviving cosmonaut, Pyotr Fyodorov. The current psychologist is trying to find out what happened by hypnotizing him. Now, a disclaimer - I am very susceptible to hypnotism in movies, so I may have fallen into a deep sleep at times during this movie. But it has a certain deliberate pace, so I don't think I missed much.

Little by little, they let Akinshina on the problem. At night, when Fyodorov is asleep, a slimy alien crawls out of his mouth. This creature, who looks like an attenuated Demogorgon, lives in his esophagus when he's awake. And he doesn't know about it. They are trying to figure out how to separate them without killing Fyodorov.

Later, she discovers that the creature eats peoples heads, and they are feeding it convicts every night. Of course, they want it for military purposes.

All this is done in a deliberate, tense, almost art-house style. 

Now, if you aren't familiar with Night of the Blood Beast, you have been missing one of the great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. It's a black and white horror produced by Roger Corman, about the days when NASA was two guys in a pickup truck. An astronaut runs into trouble on re-entry, and seems to be dead when they find him. They take him back to the lab (a ranger station?) and find that he is dead, but isn't decayng. In fact, he wakes up, feeling pretty good. But a flouroscope reveals that he is full of shrimp-like alien embryos. Are they friendly? You guess.

So, not exactly the same. But clearly influenced by. You'd have to ask director Egor Abramenko.