There’s been a lot of controversy about the length of Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film, Killers of the Flower Moon, with many of the same people who regularly praise 150-minute comic book films complaining that Scorsese shouldn’t be allowed to devote over 3 hours and 26 minutes to telling the story of the Osage murders. You can probably already guess from my tone that I have no problem with the idea of watching a 206-minute Martin Scorsese film.
The trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon was released earlier today. (The film itself will be premiering at Cannes in just a few more days.) The trailer looks great, with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio appearing to be in fine form. (Reportedly, the film’s hero is played by Jesse Plemons but he’s barely glimpsed in the trailer. It makes sense, of course. For a lot of people, one of the main attractions of Killers of the Flower Moon will be a chance to see Scorsese’s two regular leading men, DiCaprio and De Niro in the same film. Yes, I know about This Boy’s Life but come on, that was Michael Caton-Jones. This is Scorsese!) Can you find the wolves in this picture?
Today is Frank Capra’s birthday! Capra was born 126 years ago, on this date, in Sicily.
Now, if you’ve been reading this site for a while, you should know that my favorite Capra film is It’s A Wonderful Life. However, a close second is 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. In today’s scene that I love, Sen. Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) holds the Senate floor as he denounces the corruption that he sees all around him in Washington. There’s a reason why Senator Smith is still held up as the ideal public servant. It’s just a shame that he was a fictional character.
Filmed in 1988 but apparently not released until 1990, Killing American Style is a low-budget variation on The Desperate Hours.
The film opens with a ruthless criminal named Tony Stone (Robert Z’Dar, of Maniac Cop fame) leading a daring robbery of an ice cream truck depot. All of the ice cream trucks have come back for the day and, when Tony and the boys show up, the money is still being counted. Tony quickly takes control of the situation, intimidating everyone with both his weaponry and his amazing jawline.
Unfortunately, for Tony, the robbery is not as successful as he thought. Yes, he gets away with a lot of money but the police quickly track him down to his home, where he’s in the process of having sex with his stepmother. Tony is arrested and, in record time, sentenced to a maximum security prison. (Seriously, the arrest, conviction, and sentencing all seem to happen on the same day.) Tony is put on a prison bus but then the bus itself stops to help out a stranded motorist. The motorist turns out to be Tony’s brother, Jesse (Bret Johnston). In the resulting shootout, all of the guards are killed but Jesse is wounded. Tony and his associate, Lynch (John Lynch …. hey, I wonder if that’s just coincidence?), take Jesse to a nearby ranch house.
The house belongs to John Morgan (Harold Diamond), who is a long-haired kickboxing champion. When Tony arrives, John is out of the house and beating up the dad of a kid who bulled Morgan’s son, Brandon. John is not happy to come home and discover Tony holding his entire family hostage. For that matter, Morgan’s son isn’t amused by it either.
Because they are being pursued by a grim and determined police detective (played by Jim Brown …. yes, the same Jim Brown who starred in countless blaxploitation films in the 70s), Tony and his men do not want to run the risk of leaving the house to retrieve the loot from the robbery themselves. So, they send Morgan out to pick up the suitcase from Tony’s stepmother. I guess they assume that Morgan will be able to move around inconspicuously despite the fact that Morgan is a 6’1 kick boxer with long hair. I mean, there’s no way that Morgan is going to be able to move around without being noticed by the cops.
Of course, before Morgan can get the money, he also has to get a doctor for Jesse. Dr. Fuji (Joselito Rescober) agrees to help, despite the fact that he never seems to be quite sure what’s actually going on with all the angry men who keep pointing guns at each other. When Dr. Fuji mentions that he wants to kill Tony “Japanese style,” Morgan promises that he’s going to kill Tony “American style.” It’s never really made clear what the difference is between the two styles, though the American version does seem to involve a bit more kickboxing.
Anyway, this is an incredibly cheap and dumb movie but Robert Z’Dar seems like he’s having fun as Tony and …. well, to be honest, Robert Z’Dar is really the only reason to recommend this film. He gives an enjoyably over-the-top performance, one that certainly contrasts with the more subdued performance of Harold Diamond. (For his part, Diamond often seems to be struggling to stay awake.) Hostage movies usually bore me to tears and this one had a lot of slow spots but it also had shots like the one below:
Your Place or Mine asks the eternal question: Can a woman and man be best friends without also being lovers?
The answer to that is that of course they can. It happens all the time. The more important question is whether or not to physically attractive people can be friends without eventually falling love. The answer there is of course not. Being the most attractive person in your social circle means that you eventually have no choice but to pursue a relationship with the second most attractive person around. That’s just the way it works.
Your Place or Mine opens in 2003, with two attractive 20 somethings named Peter and Debbie having sex for the first and what they initially believe will be the final time. The action than jumps forward to 2023. Peter (Ashton Kutcher) lives in New York City and has seemingly given up his dream of being a writer. Instead, he makes a lot of money doing …. well, I’m not really sure what Peter’s job was. It had something to do with banking and it allowed him to afford a really big apartment. Meanwhile, Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) lives in Los Angeles. Recently divorced, she is the overprotective mother of 13 year-old Jack (Wesley Kimmel) and she is a teacher. Apparently she’s not supposed to be as rich as Jack but, for a teacher, she has a surprisingly big house. She also has eccentric neighbor, played by Steve Zahn and an eccentric co-worker played by Tig Notaro. Everyone was so eccentric that it made me miss the days when the lockdowns gave me an excuse not to talk to anyone.
Peter and Debbie are still best friends, even though they haven’t actually been in the same room together since 2008. Still, that’s about to change. Debbie’s coming to New York so that she can complete an accounting program and get a better job. (Ha! Take that, teachers!) However, when her eccentric babysitter is cast in a movie, it looks like Debbie will have to cancel because there won’t be anyone around to keep Jack from accidentally eating something with nuts in it. Peter, who has recently been dumped by his eccentric girlfriend and who is having a bit of a midlife crisis, volunteers to come to Los Angeles to look after Jack while Debbie goes to New York and stays in his apartment while taking her super-exciting accounting class.
Okay, let’s pause while I catch my breath. This is one of those comedies where it takes way too long to set up the central premise. Sometimes, it’s best to keep things simple.
Anyway, Peter bonds with Jack and helps him to find some confidence. Living in Debbie’s house, Peter realizes that he has always loved Debbie. Meanwhile, Debbie goes to New York, bonds with Peter’s eccentric ex-girlfriend (Zoe Chao), and discovers that Peter has written a novel! Debbie takes it upon herself to read the novel. She takes manuscript out of Peter’s apartment and is seen reading it at various New York locations. I found myself cringing as I worried that a sudden gust of wind would blow the pages away or maybe someone would spill coffee on it. (For all of Debbie’s happiness to discover that Peter is still writing, she’s not particularly careful with his manuscript.) Without talking to Peter, Debbie gives the manuscript to an eccentric publisher named Theo Martin (Jesse Williams) and explains that the story is about a 13 year-old boy who can’t go out in the sun. It sounds like an extremely dreary read but Theo is impressed with both the manuscript and with Debbie.
I usually enjoy romantic comedies and I like Reese Whitherspoon and I’m coming around on accepting the idea of Ashton Kutcher being a movie star (especially after his excellent performance in Vengeance) so I was really hoping that I would enjoy Your Place or Mine. Unfortunately, the film itself suffered from what I call the Apatow Syndrome, in that every character had to be quirky, every joke had to be repeated ad nauseum, and there was a deliberate awkwardness to the dialogue that got old pretty quickly. As individuals, Witherspoon and Kutcher were likable but I never really bought them as lifelong friends, much less a romantic couple. They just didn’t have the right spark. Unfortunately, Your Place or Mine just didn’t work for me.
Today is the opening day of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
It’s notoriously difficult to predict who or what is going to win at Cannes. The Cannes juries can be very idiosyncratic and, traditionally, they are encouraged to spread the awards around and to resist the temptation to give too much to one film. Every year, it seems like there’s a movie that everyone says is the front runner to win the Palme d’Or and every year, it seems like that film ultimately goes home empty-handed.
That said, having looked over the jury (which includes Ruben Ostlund, Paul Dano, Brie Larson, and Julie Ducournau) and having taken a look at the film that will be competing this year, I’m going to throw caution to wind and make a prediction.
The winner of the Palme d’Or will be Ken Loach’s The Old Oak.
It doesn’t give me a lot of pleasure to say that because I’m not a huge Ken Loach fan. I find the majority of his political-themed film to be heavy-handed and his efforts to bully other artists into supporting BDS to be reprehensible. Many of his comments about Israel have been so extreme that, even if one chooses not to believe him to be a flat-out anti-Semite, he’s still what Lenin used to refer to as being a “useful idiot.”
That said, Loach’s style of social realism has always found a more receptive audience in Europe than it has in the United States. Ken Loach has already won the Palme d’Or twice before. (“Who is Ken Loach?” trended on American twitter after he won it for I,Daniel Blake, which just goes to show you how one can be a household name in one country and totally unknown in another.) He’s in his 80s and he’s announced that, after a 60-year career, The Old Oak is his final film. This is the film that he’s going out on and it’s presumably the film that sums up his concerns are a filmmaker. This plot description is from the film’s Wikipedia page and it certainly sounds like a Ken Loach film:
A pub landlord TJ Bannatyne (Dave Turner) in a previously thriving mining community in County Durham struggles to hold on to his pub and keep it as the one remaining public space people can meet in the town. Meanwhile, tensions rise in the town when Syrian refugees are placed there but Bannatyne strikes up a friendship with one of the refugees, Yara (Ebla Mari).
This really does sound like a film that hits at every issue right now. At a time when the film industry is caught up in a labor dispute, the film is about the owner of a pub in a dying mining community. In a time in economic uncertainty, it features a small business owner trying to keep his business alive. And, it deals with the refugee crisis. I doubt there will be anything subtle or even-handed about it but then again, one could say the same thing about the previous Loach films that won the Palme d’Or. Politically, the film sounds as if it hits all the right buttons and, regardless of what I may think of him, Ken Loach is a filmmaker who definitely has his admirers.
I’m predicting The Old Oak will win the Palme d’Or. We’ll find out if I’m right on May 27th.
Who would have guessed that a film from 1968, starring Marianne Faithfull and Alain Delon, would be a little bit pretentious? I’m as shocked, as anyone.
The Girl On A Motorcycle is Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull), the wife of Raymond (Roger Mutton). One day, Rebecca wakes up, puts on a black leather jumpsuit, and gets on her motorcycle. Abandoning her husband and her home, she rides through France and eventually reaches Germany. Along the way, she thinks about how the motorcycle represents freedom and how no one is truly free unless they’re doing what they want to do. We hear her inner monologue and it’s hard not to notice that, for someone riding a motorcycle across two countries, she often doesn’t seem to be paying that much attention to the road. Rebecca has more important things to think about, like free love and Vietnam. She watches as a transport of soldiers drive past her and she silently tells them not to look at her. She drives through a city and starts to laugh while shouting “Bastard!” at the top of her lungs. Pedestrians, all of whom are unhappy and middle-aged, stare at her in shock.
Along the way, Rebecca thinks about her life. She’s married to Roger, who is a mild-mannered teacher who is so ridiculed by his students that even the local gas station attendant mentions how little respect anyone has for him. However, Rebecca is haunted by memories of Daniel (Alain Delon), who is very, very French.
How French? This French.
Rebecca first met Daniel while working in her father’s bookstore and they had a passionate affair, despite the fact that Rebecca was already engaged to boring old Raymond. Daniel even taught her how to ride a motorcycle. When Rebecca got married, Daniel sent her the motorcycle that she is now riding as a wedding gift. Rebecca is racing through Germany to be reunited Daniel, though it’s never quite clear if she’s truly leaving her husband or if she just wants to have a quick tryst before returning home. Will Rebecca make it or will the unpredictable whims of fate intervene?
The Girl on a Motorcycle was directed by Jack Cardiff, a veteran cinematographer who first found acclaim working with directors like Michael Powell, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Huston. Not surprisingly, the film is full of striking shots. Unfortunately, Cardiff was 54 when he directed The Girl On A Motorcycle and he had been involved in the film industry since he was a child. Watching the film, one gets the feeling that Cardiff was trying a bit too had to appeal to a young counterculture audience that he didn’t really have much of a natural affinity for. As such, Cardiff drags out every psychedelic trick in the book. Do you want excessive use of the zoom lens, ludicrously skewed camera angles, pointlessly surreal flashbacks, portentous narration, extreme close-ups, retina-burning solarization effects, and an ending that feels like it was stolen from Godard? The Girl On A Motorcycle has all of them! For every impressive shot of Rebecca riding on her motorcycle, there are several more shots that feel as if they were filmed in migrainevision.
There’s also quite a few shots that make remarkably poor use of rear projection.
The Girl On A Motorcycle is definitely a film of its time. To give credit where credit is due, Alain Delon is handsome and charismatic as the enigmatic Daniel. The viewer gets the feeling that Rebecca is probably idealizing him and assuming that he has more depth than he actually does but it’s still easy to understand why she would not be able to resist the temptation. Marianne Faithfull seems a bit lost as Rebecca. She smiles a lot and she laughs a lot but her inner monologue is flatly delivered and, as a result, the character comes across as being vapid. The ideal Rebecca probably would have been a young Helen Mirren.
As it is, The Girl On A Motorcycle is a time capsule of the 60s aesthetic (albeit an aesthetic translated through the lens of a director who seems to be trying too hard to remain relevant). Due to a few flashes of nudity and some sex scenes that are so psychedelic that they’re nearly impossible to watch, Girl On A Motorcycle was the first film to be slapped with an X rating in the United States. It seems rather tame today.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1987s Survival Game! Selected and hosted by Rev. Magdalen, this movie features Mike Norris! So, you know it has to be good!
Following #MondayActionMovie, Brad and Sierra will be hosting the #MondayMuggers live tweet. We will be watching 2003’s TheRundown, starring Seann William Scott and The Rock! The film is on Prime!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Survival Game on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! Then, at 10 pm et, switch over to Twitter and Prime, start TheRundown, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag! The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1972’s Call Her Mom! It can be viewed on YouTube!
While all of the other college campuses across America are in turmoil with protests and student walk-outs, Beardsley College remains at peace. It’s a place where the 50s never ended. Everyone is perfectly behaved. No one is into politics. Fraternity Row is a peaceful place, largely due to the elderly housemothers who keep the frats in order.
Except for Alpha Phi Epsilon, that is. The A.P.E. House is known for being the wildest house on campus and every housemother that they get walks out on them. If they can’t find a new housemother, they’ll lose their charter. President Chester Hardgrove (Van Johnson) and Assistant Dean Walden (Charles Nelson Reilly) are practically salivating at the possibility of kicking A.P.E. off of campus. And who can blame them? Take a look at how wild these guys are:
These guys are crazy! They wear yellow sweaters! They play tennis indoors! Occasionally, they leave a towel or two hanging on the bannister. A.P.E. is out of control!
A.P.E. tries to find a new housemother but the word is out that A.P.E. is no good. Not a single elderly woman in town is willing to work with them. However, when the members of the frat realize that there’s not actually an age requirement for housemothers, they offer the job to Angie Bianco (Connie Stevens), who works as a waitress at the local pizza place. Angie accepts the job.
It’s a scandal! All of the older folks say that Angie is too young and too attractive to be trusted as the housemother for A.P.E. Angie, however, proves herself to be a lot tougher than anyone was expecting. The members of the frat soon come to respect her. However, President Hardgrove is determined to force her out of the job and off of the campus. Rumor has it that she’s encouraging the A.P.E. brothers to hold rollicking 20s style parties and she’s also allowing them to dance!
Check out this decadence!
The attempts to force Angie out of her job makes national news. Soon, Angie and the frat brothers are featured in Time Magazine. President Hardgrove points out that he’s never appeared in Time Magazine. While an group of middle-aged women march outside of the A.P.E. House and demand that Angie be fired, the younger female students rally to Angie’s side. Suddenly, Beardsley College is home to a protest! (The protest is about as a wild as the 20s dance party at the A.P.E. House.) President Hardgrove realizes that keeping Angie at the A.P.E. House will actually lead to the college getting more donations but Angie has decided that she has to quit. Not only is she in love with A.P.E.’s sponsor, Prof. Calder (Jim Hutton), but a member of the fraternity has decided that he’s in love with her and he’s going to drop out of school to be with her.
Can A.P.E. convince Angie to come back?
Call Her Mom is a silly movie that was obviously meant to serve as a pilot for a television show, one in which I imagine Angie would have solved the fraternity’s problems on a weekly basis. Seen today, it’s mostly memorable for its thoroughly innocent portrayal of college life. A.P.E. House is the wildest frat on campus but no one is ever seen drinking. Certainly no one is indulging in anything stronger than perhaps a Coke or a Pepsi. I imagine this show was an accurate portrayal of what most parents hoped college was like. That said, Connie Stevens and Jim Hutton made for a cute couple. Hopefully, there were many good times in the future for the residents of A.P.E. House.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today is the birthday of one of my favorite American directors, the one and only Sofia Coppola! In honor of this day, here are….
4 Shots From 4 Sofia Coppola Films
The Virgin Suicides (1999, dir by Sofia Coppola, DP: Edward Lachman)
Lost In Translation (2003, dir by Sofia Coppola, DP: Lance Acord)
Marie Antoinette (2006, dir by Sofia Coppola, DP: Lance Acord)
The Bling Ring (2013, dir by Sofia Coppola, DP: Harry Savides and Christopher Blauvelt)
The Mother is a professional assassin, a former U.S. military operative who has spent the last 12 years isolated in Alaska, hiding out from two of her former associates, drug lord Hector Alvarez (Gael Garcia Bernal) and mercenary Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes). In the past, The Mother went to the FBI when she discovered that Alvarez and Lovell were involved in human trafficking. Lovell reacted by killing a bunch of FBI agent and attempting to kill The Mother’s unborn child by stabbing The Mother in the belly. (I actually gasped in shock at this act of violence.) Both The Mother and her daughter, Zoe, survived.
The Mother left her daughter to be raised by an FBI agent named William Cruise (Omari Hardwick). But, twelve years later, Zoe (Lucy Paez) is kidnapped and The Mother has to come out of hiding to rescue her. It’s a mission that will lead The Mother and Cruise to Cuba and which will eventually bring Lovell and his men back to Alaska. Along the way, The Mother learns how to forgive herself and to how to open up emotionally and Zoe learns why her mother abandoned her so many years ago. Zoe also learns that nature can be ruthless and unforgiving.
The Mother isn’t really a bad film as much as it’s just a very predictable film. It’s very much from the Taken school of cinematic action, with a parent doing whatever is necessary to protect their children. This is another one of those films where everyone tends to be very grim and there’s a lot of scenes of people coldly threatening each other. The film opens with the FBI interrogating The Mother and the dialogue was so familiar and the attitudes so reminiscent of every single action film and television show that I’ve seen recently that I had to take a few minutes to remember which film I was watching. Even The Mother’s eventual trip to snowy Alaska caused me to have flashbacks to both Those Who Wish Me Dead and the recent Dexter revival. Oddly enough, it also reminded me of Sound of Metal,if just because The Mother‘s one friend in Alaska was played by Paul Raci. It was nice to see Raci again. With his haunted eyes and his kindly voice, he’s the type of guardian angel that everyone would want to have. But again, it just all felt so familiar.
Jennifer Lopez gives a convincing performance as The Mother. Though the film may be predictable, her commitment to protecting her daughter no matter what was undeniably moving and she and Lucy Paez has a believable mother/daughter relationship. That said, Jennifer Lopez is always at her best when she’s allowed to play a character with a sense of playfulness and there’s little of that to be found in The Mother. It’s a grim film about serious characters and it hits all of the expected beats with efficiency but not much more. When it comes to 2023 Jennifer Lopez films, I still prefer the appealingly silly Shotgun Wedding.
Through the Shattered Lens