Recent Viewings, Part 2

[Rev. Powell]

The two M.10orda mentioned are both good and recommended. Beyond that Spike Lee's work is iffy, considering his big reputation. I enjoyed CHI-RAQ (the Greek play "Lysistrata" set in Chicago gang culture), but I don't expect a lot of other people to.

[Rev. Powell]

THE ABSENCE OF MILK IN THE MOUTHS OF THE LOST (2023): A schizophrenic milkman ghost (or something like that) helps a grieving mother deal with the loss of her child (currently trapped in a netherworld where she's pursued by cigar-smoking demons). Also, lots of shots of cows. Microbudgeted surrealist films with inconsistent sound quality are not for everyone--thus the low rating--but if you can overlook the technical issues, the imagery here can be memorable at times, and the film has a good heart.

[M.10rda]

The two M.10orda mentioned are both good and recommended. Beyond that Spike Lee's work is iffy, considering his big reputation. I enjoyed CHI-RAQ (the Greek play "Lysistrata" set in Chicago gang culture), but I don't expect a lot of other people to.

As with DA 5 BLOODS, I really liked about 25 minutes of CHIRAQ... which, iirc, is either 1/6 or 1/7 the running time of CHIRAQ. Again, Lee doesn't know when to say when.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" (2016)
The daughter of the Empire's greatest weapons designer joins a Rebel commando unit on a mission to steal the top secret plans to the under-construction Death Star. Lots of action packed blasting, zapping, and exploding ensues in this prequel that leads directly into the events of the original film. At its core, "Rogue One" is basically an old fashioned war movie ala "The Dirty Dozen" in Star Wars wrapping, and as far as I'm concerned it's the best of the "new" Disney-era SW films.

[M.10rda]

"Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" (2016)
...as far as I'm concerned it's the best of the "new" Disney-era SW films.

Aaaaaaaaaaagreed.  

[M.10rda]

MIRAGE (1965):
This offbeat mystery/thriller starts off extremely well, w/ a lengthy, enigmatic introduction in a blacked-out office building that allows director Edward Dmytryk and his DP to create maximum intrigue through chiaroscuro. Once the lights come back on, MIRAGE maintains the audience's interest for well over an hour, even as it settles into a more leisurely storytelling style. As it approaches its climax, however, the film starts providing answers that are in no way as interesting as the questions it originally raised.

For most of its running time, MIRAGE seems like Hitchcock in his more psychological veins. Gregory Peck comes home from work after the aforementioned power outage and gradually realizes that he A.) is the target of some complex criminal enterprise and B.) has no idea who he really is or what he's been doing with his life for the past two years. That's a good premise, certainly, and MIRAGE also has a good supporting cast: Walter Matthau as a good guy who provides comic relief while he tries to help Peck remember his past; George Kennedy as a bad guy who's trying to do bad things to Peck; and paranoid thriller veteran Kevin McCarthy as a guy who's somewhere in the middle of the morality spectrum. There's also a nominal femme fatale, played by the charming if not at all smoky or spicy Diane Baker, who alternates between eluding Peck, following him around, and indulging him in long elliptical dialogues that consume about a third of the running time and convinced this viewer that surely they must be adding up to more than just a romance subplot for Peck. Spoiler warning: They don't. 

MIRAGE could've used a thorough rewrite. I gave it the benefit of the doubt that it was just assuming the time-honored noir tradition of moseying nonchalantly from character-driven setpiece to setpiece and eventually it would reveal the hidden links among its deceptive structure. Instead, when you get to the end, you're handed a bunch of revelations that were poorly hinted at early on or otherwise their set up was completely neglected. That's naturally unsatisfying and then the longer you think about the inexplicable questions raised in the exposition, the less sense the resolution makes. Baker ends up just being a love interest with no clear intrinsic connection to the plot, so all those dialogues w/ Peck were just frittering away our time. Peck himself seems pretty uncomfortable as a James Bond or Cary Grant in NXNW type. He handles the dialogue well but some of the action scenes are edited in a weird way to make it look like Peck just couldn't deliver a punch convincingly (or take one).

There is an interesting scene where Peck and Baker break into a random apartment and are met by a wide-eyed little latchkey child. There are many other mild diversions throughout, as well. It was perfectly watchable once.

3/5 But I wouldn't watch it again.

[Rev. Powell]

THE AWAKENING OF THE BEAST (1970): This gets an "incomplete" grade, because Arrow screwed up the disc: the subtitles cut out about halfway through and don't return. I don't think more dialogue would have helped much, though. The first part is some psychiatrist relating drug "cases" to a panel, which mostly involve weird perverted hippie sex. In the second half, from what I gather, they shoot volunteers up with LSD and they all have vivid color hallucinations starring Coffin Joe. These are almost entirely dialogue free and actually pretty cool, much better than the first part, although they go on too long. The asses with faces drawn on them in magic marker are much creepier than you would predict. I would guess this merits a 2.5/5 if properly subtitled.

[indianasmith]

BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F (2024)

Last fall I watched all three BEVERLY HILLS COP movies back to back and thoroughly enjoyed them.  I had no idea this decades-later sequel was even in the works until I saw the preview on Netflix last week, but I tuned it in and was pleasantly surprised.  Nearly all the old crew returns - Axel, Taggert (now LAPD Police Chief), Billy (Judge Reinhold returns, he has NOT aged well), and Sergei.  The plot is fairly thin - Axel's daughter Jane, now a defense attorney, is defending an accused cop killer whom Billy, now a private investigator, believes to be an innocent man, set up by the corrupt Narcotics Bureau Chief, Police Captain Cade Grant.  Billy is kidnapped, Jane is threatened, and so it's up to Axel and Boby Abbot, a younger cop who used to date Jane, to crack the case and save the day.  Shots are fired, stuff blows up, and you get to hear a bunch of different cops groan, yell, or mutter the name "Foley!!"  All in all, it's - well, what you'd expect. Which is to say, mindless fun with some characters we still love, even if the eighty something Taggert looks like he belongs in a nursing home!

[M.10rda]

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1965):
Watched this sort of unintentionally in sequence w/ BURN AFTER READING and MIRAGE, which should demonstrate that my OCD permeates to a subconscious level. It's far and away the best of the three "spy"-ish movies, and as it came out the same year as MIRAGE, it surely exists in no intended conversation w/ that film... except perhaps that both may have come into being as a response to success of the 4 or 5 Bond films that had been released by that time. But THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (adapted from John LeCarre's novel) exists in a whole different cinematic universe than James Bond or the frivolity of MIRAGE. It's the genuine article, served straight with no distillation or chaser.

In a brief opening sequence, we meet Alec Leemis (Richard Burton), an MI6 middle manager in Berlin who's worried about his job security - he's got a bad track record keeping his agents safe. Time abruptly passes and we see Leemis finding a new job in a book depository, making time w/ a cute commie librarian (Verna Bloom), and harassing an elderly grocer while blackout drunk. Is he spiraling out of control following his termination from the spy trade, or is he the honey pot in an elaborate scheme to snare a major Red agent? The best thing about THE SPY WCIFTC is that it provides almost no exposition upfront and a misleading paucity about halfway through. Otherwise the viewer is on their own for most of the film: you just have to figure out the meaning of the increasingly fraught events you're watching and maybe you're right and maybe you're wrong. Me, I was definitely kept guessing until the bleak final twists.

The film is taut yet supremely understated and looks great in gritty B+W. All of the acting is solid or better. Ubiquitous 60s German guys Peter Van Eyck and Oskar Werner play the impossibly evil Nazi cipher Mundt (whose name was borrowed by the Coens for John Goodman's character in BARTON FINK) and his disarmingly reasonable Jewish colleague Fiedler. Unforgettable looking character actor Michael Hordern shows up in a few scenes and Bernard Lee, the original M in the 007 films, amusingly plays the grocer who Leemis antagonizes. After the ponderous and pointless romantic subplot in MIRAGE, I was nervously hopeful that Verna Bloom's librarian was going to play a more important role here than just arm candy for Burton. She does.

And Burton, well, I'm unlikely to do a comprehensive dive into his Cainesian catalogue of notoriously bad movies, but I feel safe in deducing that Leemis must be among his very best onscreen performances. Granted, getting and remaining blackout drunk for most of the film and glaring grimly into the middle distance mightn't have been a particular challenge for Burton, but few actors have done it better. Somehow he communicates aaaaaaall the existential pathos of the Cold War. GREAT MOVIE!

4.5/5
Trivia for Drama nerds like me: a trial scene near the end explicitly and almost surely consciously quotes Arthur Miller's early 50s red scare play THE CRUCIBLE.

Also, George Smiley (played by Gary Oldman a decade ago) shows up in several scenes, lurking ghoulishly in the background...

[Rev. Powell]

MEST3K: QUEST OF THE DELTA NIGHTS: One of 2 MST3Ks I had never seen before, only one to go! This is a sort-of historical fantasy set at the dawn of the Renaissance, with a kid star (who looks like a member of the then-popular boy band Hanson) meeting up with various rogues (including a young Leonardo da Vinci?) and a busty princess to complete an anticlimactic quest about something or other. The movie's not terrible but it's bland and generic. Meanwhile, Pearl is concerned that the movies are not causing the levels of pain that they should, so she sits in on the first segment of the film (while Mike plays poker with Bobo and Observer). Overall it's a pretty cool episode. 4/5.

[M.10rda]

MEST3K: QUEST OF THE DELTA NIGHTS:
Meanwhile, Pearl is concerned that the movies are not causing the levels of pain that they should, so she sits in on the first segment of the film

Never fear, Pearl - you always caused me tremendous levels of pain during your appearances. 

[Rev. Powell]

MEST3K: QUEST OF THE DELTA NIGHTS:
Meanwhile, Pearl is concerned that the movies are not causing the levels of pain that they should, so she sits in on the first segment of the film

Never fear, Pearl - you always caused me tremendous levels of pain during your appearances. 

She was terribly written in Season 7, but by the middle of Season 8 I grew to love the revamped character.

[M.10rda]

That may well be... at some point I started changing the channel when she'd appear and then check back later to see if they'd returned to the movie.

[Gabriel Knight]

MEST3K: QUEST OF THE DELTA NIGHTS:
Meanwhile, Pearl is concerned that the movies are not causing the levels of pain that they should, so she sits in on the first segment of the film

Never fear, Pearl - you always caused me tremendous levels of pain during your appearances. 

Ugh, so real. I never saw a more unfunny person than that woman.

[Dr. Whom]

My Oni Girl (2024)

Yatsuse Hiiragi, a schoolboy who has trouble standing up for himself, meets Tsumugi, an oni girl who has come to the human world to look for her mother. He leaves home joins her in her quest.

This is another attempt by Studio Colorido to make a Ghibli clone, and it is not a bad one at that. Unlike your typical wannabe Ghibli, they have dialed down the whimsy, which makes it all the more watchable. In fact, these are the least magical oni I have ever seen.
Not a great masterpiece, but it kept my interest.