Though it hasn’t gotten the same amount of publicity as some of the other contenders, Jockey is a film that many awards pundits have predicted could be an Oscar player. Much of the speculation centers around Clifton Collins, Jr., who is said to give a great performance in the lead role. Collins has been a dependable character actor for several decades now. A nomination for Jockey would be his first.
Here’s the trailer:
I haven’t really been that excited about the MCU lately. Infinity War was such a big film that, to me, it felt like the proper ending point for the whole story. Everything that follows has been a bit anti-climatic. That said, I do like the Spider-Man films and I do hope that Marvel will eventually make a movie about the low-budget European version of Spider-Man, Night Monkey.
Here’s the trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Last night, I finally watched The Mauritanian.
The Mauritanian is a film that was released earlier this year. The Golden Globes gave it some unexpected love. The Oscars ignored it. It won some awards in the UK. It’s based on the true story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was detained at Gitmo without charge for 15 years. The U.S. government claimed that Salahi was one of the men responsible for recruiting the 9-11 hijackers. Salahi claimed innocence and wrote and published his memoirs while he was still a prisoner. Salahi was regularly tortured and sexually abused while detained. His interrogators regularly threatened to bring his mother to Gitmo, where she would be gang-raped, unless Salahi told them what they wanted to hear.
It’s a horrifying story and an important one, especially nowadays when so many people have forgotten that everyone is meant to have rights under the law. Unfortunately, The Mauritanian doesn’t really do the story justice. Instead of simply focusing on Salahi (played, in a charismatic performance, by Tahar Rahim) and what he went through after being detained, the film divides its time between Salahi, his lawyers, and the man assigned to prosecute his case. As the representatives of the legal system, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, and Benedict Cumberbatch all give one-note performances. Foster somehow won a Golden Globe for her role but there’s not much to the performance or the character, beyond the fact that she’s pissed off and she’s played by a respected performer who came out of semi-retirement because she agreed with the film’s message. Shailene Woodley is not particularly believable as someone who could have passed a bar exam. Meanwhile, the film uses Benedict Cumberbatch’s likable screen presence to try to disguise the fact that it tells its story with a counter-productively heavy hand. The film wants us to think its nuanced, just because the normally heroic Cumberbatch is playing one of the government’s representatives.
The Mauritanian is a film that wants to shock and outrage us. It’s also a film that wants to move us and make the audience celebrate the activism of the attorneys played by Foster and Woodley. Unfortunately, director Kevin Macdonald takes a rather generic approach to telling this story. There’s no complexity. There’s no surprises. One need only look at a film like The Report to see how a film like this could have been effective. Instead, The Mauritanian often threatens to become as self-congratulatory as The Trial of the Chicago 7. At its weakest, it’s like an Aaron Sorkin film, without the snappy dialogue. There is a harrowingly effective sequence in which Salahi is psychologically tortured but Macdonald lessens the impact by continually cutting to Foster and Cumberbatch reading a report about the torture. It takes a moment that should have been about what Salahi was put through and instead makes it about how his attorney reacts to it. It’s as if Macdonald didn’t have faith in his audience and felt that we would need two stars to let us know that the torture we’re viewing with our own eyes was wrong.
Though The Mauritanian was only released a few month ago, it already feel like a relic from another era. One gets the feeling that a flawed but politically outspoken film like this would have gotten a lot more attention from the Academy if it had been released in 2006 or 2007 or even during the first two years of the Obama administration, back when people still believed that Obama was serious about closing Gitmo. Today, however, we take the excesses of the war on terror for granted. People are no longer shocked by them. As I watched The Mauritanian, I found myself thinking about the fact that, just two-and-a-half months ago, the U.S. blew up an innocent aide worker and his family, bragged about it, and then tried to cover it up. At one time, this would have been a national scandal. In 2021, however, it’s the sort of thing that gets shrugged off. One gets the feeling that a movie will never be made about that man or his family.
Cyrus?
He’s the one and only.
From 1979’s The Warriors (which I watched earlier tonight as a part of the #FridayNightFlix live tweet), here’s a scene that I love. Playing the role of Cyrus, the man who could bring all of the gangs of New York together, is Roger Hill. Playing the role of his assassin is the great David Patrick Kelly.
Cyrus knew what he was talking about but the world wasn’t ready for him.
Can you dig it?
I’m still struggling to get back into my non-Halloween routine of regular posting. If I remember correctly, I think I’ve had to deal with post-Horrorthon exhaustion every year since we first started the Shattered Lens. It’s worth it, though!
Fortunately, a trailer a film like Fortress can only encourage me to get back in the swing of things! Bruce Willis, Shannen Doherty, and Chad Michael Murray!? Hell yeah!
Anyway, here’s the trailer:
Georgetown is one of those films that’s been around for a while.
The movie, which is the directorial debut of Christoph Waltz. was originally filmed in 2017. It made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019, where it received respectful reviews. It played in at least some parts of Europe in 2020. But it didn’t get a limited theatrical release in America until May of 2021 and it was released on VOD just a few days later. Some of the delays in the film’s release were undoubtedly due to the uncertainty bred by the COVID lockdowns. And some of it was probably due to no one being sure how to market a true crime film about murder amongst the rich and powerful of Washington D.C. As such, Georgetown didn’t really get much attention when it was released. That’s a shame, because it’s actually a pretty good movie, a clever mix of social satire and legal drama.
Christoph Waltz not only directs but also stars as Ulrich Mott. Mott is a somewhat ludicrous figure. His past is shadowy. He claims to have served as a member of the French Foreign Legion, though his breaks down in tears after a snarky State Department official points out that none of Mott’s medals appear to be genuine. Mott claims to have a lot of powerful and influential acquaintances, even though many of them only know him because he aggressively approached them at a party and forced them to take one of his business cards. He occasionally wears a eye patch, even though he doesn’t need it. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Mott announces that he has been named a brigadier general in the Iraqi army and he claims to be a lobbyist for the new government. Mott is also the head of a consulting firm called the Eminent Persons Group, which is later described as just being a Ponzi scheme for the rich and powerful.
It’s easy to make fun of Ulrich Mott but, throughout the film, we watch as he arranges dinners with men like future Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard. He meets with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He mentions the he knows George Soros. Mott is well-known among America’s elite, if not exactly respected. This is almost entirely due to his marriage to the much older Elsa Breht (Vanessa Redgrave), a journalist who is, at one point, described as being “the queen of Georgetown society.”
When the 91 year-old Elsa is discovered dead at the foot of her staircase, the police originally think that she may have just suffered from an accidental fall. Mott, however, declares that it’s obvious that Elsa was murdered by his enemies and that he will dedicate the rest of his life to tracking them down and getting justice. Meanwhile, Elsa’s daughter (played by Annette Bening) is convinced that Mott murdered her mother. The police agree and Ulrich Mott is soon on trial. Mott’s main concern is that he be allowed to wear his red beret in the courtroom. After all, it’s apart of his uniform as a brigadier general in the Iraqi army.
Flashing back and forth from the past to the present, Georgetown is primarily a character study of a man who has little talent and not much of a conscience but who does have a lot of ambition and a lot of charm. Mott works his way up into the upper channels of D.C. society through a combination of flattery and compulsive lying and Waltz gives such a charismatic performance in the lead role that you believe every minute of it. He’s appealingly vulnerable when he approaches the first clients for what will become the Eminent Persons Group and it’s hard not to sympathize with him when he breaks down in tears after being exposed, for the first time, as a fraud. However, as the film progresses, we’re left to wonder if the vulnerability and tears were genuine or if they were just another part of Ulrich Mott’s performance. Mott is both diabolically arrogant and almost compulsively self-destructive and Waltz does a great job of portraying those two seemingly conflicting sides of his personality. He’s well-matched by Vanessa Redgrave, who makes Elsa’s love for Mott feel real and credible. Watching the film, one can understand why Elsa initially believed in Mott and also why she stayed with him even as she discovered that he was never quite who he claimed to be,
Georgetown is nicely done portrait of duplicity and murder among America’s elite. It’s both sharply satiric and, in its way, rather heart-breaking. It definitely deserves more attention that it originally received.
Land tells the story of Edee, a woman who thinks that she wants to die. Edee is played by Robin Wright, who also directed the film.
Edee is dealing with a tragedy, one that the film provides clues to understanding without going into too much details. Edee has visions of a man and a child and it’s easy to figure out that they were once her family. There are other flashbacks of Edee’s sister, Emma (Kim Dickens), begging Edee not to harm herself. Edee meets with a therapist and says that she doesn’t want to share her grief with other people. She wants to deal with her grief alone, a perfectly reasonable request but no one that is likely to be understood in today’s age of social media oversharing.
When Edee drives out tp an isolated, mountain cabin, she says that she’s looking to start a new life, off the grid. However, as is quickly revealed by a conversation with the helpful Cole (Brad Leland), Edee doesn’t know anything about living in the wilderness. What’s more, she doesn’t appear to want to learn anything either. She has little interest in Cole’s advice. She asks Cole to return her rental car for her. When Cole says that it’s not a good idea to live in the mountains without some sort of a vehicle, Edee shrugs him off. She’s obviously not planning on coming down from the mountain.
Instead, she plans to die in the cabin. The sight of the man and the child, standing ghost-like in the woods, does not change her mind. And yet, when Edee finds herself with her forehead resting atop the barrel of a rifle, she cannot bring herself to pull the trigger. When she is approached by a bear, she retreats to her cabin, showing that she still has an instinct for self-preservation. (Either that, or she would just rather die in a less gruesome way than a bear attack.) Edee leaves it to nature to determine her fate. She’ll stay in the cabin and starve herself to death or she’ll let the elements take her out. It’s a plan that takes the responsibility off of her.
However, there’s a nurse named Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge) and a hunter named Miguel (Demien Bircher) in the area and when they discover Edee near death in her cabin, they nurse her back to health. Miguel tells her that there are better ways to die than starving herself and, in his polite but direct way, calls her out for not appreciating the fact that she has something that most other people don’t, the ability to retreat to her cabin when life gets to difficult. Miguel is recovering from his own tragedy and is also living off the grid. He offers to show Edee how to hunt and survive. Edee agrees, on the condition that he not tell her about anything that’s happening in the outside world.
The scenery looks beautiful and both Robin Wright and Demian Bircher give effective performances as two people who don’t necessarily talk a lot but who instinctively understand that they have much in common. The film is respectful of the grief that’s felt by both Edee and Miguel without descending into mawkishness or cheap dramatics. It’s a steadily-paced movie that trusts the audience to figure things out without having to spell everything out. Land is a simple film but it works.
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More 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 100th anniversary of the birth of an actor who is very popular here at the Shattered Lens, Charles Bronson! In honor of the momentous occasion, we now pay tribute to the one and only Bronson with….
4 Shots From 4 Charles Bronson Films
Death Wish (1974, dir by Michael Winner, DP: Arthur Ormitz)
Mr. Majestyk (1974, dir by Richard Fleischer DP: Richard Kline)
Breakheart Pass (1975, dir by Tom Gries, DP: Lucien Ballard)
10 To Midnight (1983, dir by J. Lee Thompson, DP: Adam Greenberg)
With horrorthon coming to a close for another year, I figured why not allow Conal Cochran to get in a word or two.
This is from Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Playing Conal Cochran, of course, is the great Dan O’Herlihy.
We hope you’ve all had a wonderful Halloween.
Have you ever wanted to enroll in a private school so that you could investigate a murder and maybe uncover some sort of occult conspiracy? Sure, we all have! Well, don’t worry …. there’s a place for you! Welcome to Salem Academy, an exclusive all-girl’s college where students learn all the basic subjects, along with taking courses in art and human sacrifice!
Salem Academy is overseen by the feared and intimidating Mrs. Williams (Jo Van Fleet), who keeps a close eye on her students and tries to make sure that they aren’t distracted or corrupted by any outside influences. However, not even Mrs. Williams can keep Martha Sayers (Terry Lumley) from fleeing the school and going to her sister’s house in Los Angeles. When Martha’s sister, Elizabeth (Pamela Franklin), returns home, she discovers that Martha has been hanged. The police say that it was suicide. Elizabeth believes that it’s something else.
So, Elizabeth does what any vengeance-seeking sister would do. Using an assumed name, she enrolls in Salem Academy herself. She meets and befriends three other students (played by Kate Jackson, Jamie Smith Jackson, and Cheryl Ladd). She gets to know two rather suspicious teachers, Prof. Delacroix (Lloyd Bochner) and Dr. Clampett (Roy Thinnes). She also manages to raise the concerns of Mrs. Williams, who doesn’t like the fact that the new girl keeps asking so many questions about why so many students at Salem Academy have died recently.
Still, Elizabeth continues to investigate. Perhaps the secret can be found in a mysterious painting that she comes across, one that appears to be of Martha? Perhaps the teachers and the students know more than they’re telling. But who can Elizabeth trust?
A made-for-television film from 1973, Satan’s School For Girls is frequently as silly as its name. Fortunately, the film, which was produced by Aaron Spelling and directed David Lowell Rich, seems to understand just how ludicrous it is and it totally embraces both the melodrama and the silliness of its plot. This film is totally product of the time in which it was made, from the dialogue to the hairstyles to the fashions to the ending that you’ll see coming from a mile away. At the same time, that’s also why this film is a lot of fun. It’s such a product of its time that it doubles as a time capsule. Do you want to go back to 1973? Well, go over to YouTube and watch Satan’s School For Girls. After you’ve watched it, step outside and ask anyone who the president is and they’ll probably say, “Richard Nixon.” And if you ask them who they’re favorite Brady is, they’ll look at you like your crazy because everyone know that Marcia is the best Brady. If you even have to ask, it’s obvious that you don’t really watch the show. After that, you should probably try to find a way to get back to 2021 before you change the future or something. You know how tricky time travel can be.
As for Satan’s School for Girls, it’s just a really fun movie so check it out and be sure not to be late for class!
Through the Shattered Lens 