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> I was really not watching many movies in Rocktober of ‘22, as I focused on finishing, fine-tuning and polishing the storytelling project I’ve been working on for 42 years of my life. The 9 monologue opus GROWING UP TWISTED took the bulk of my time and attention in 2022, as I prepared to publish it every other day of 2023. (Go read some, now!) But I did see some good stuff this month… and some fun superhero trash.
(All films are rated on a 5-star basis and must be over a decade old to get 5 stars.)
(Films in PURPLE have been expanded for Flix Pix)
> This month I review the following 6 films:
DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE
MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS (2022) ***
PARALLEL MOTHERS (2021) ****
POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING (2016) ***+
THUNDER BAY (1953) ***
THE STING (1973) ****
SEVEN BEAUTIES (1975) *****
– – –
DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS (2022)***
> I seem to remember the reviews for this installment of the wildly successful franchise to have been tepid at best, but liked the last Spider-Man installment, it was a real crowd-pleaser.
. And let’s face it: that’s what these big, empty superhero stories are all about. The films from Marvel Studios aren’t intended to compete with Bergman and Kurosawa. They are about making money by giving the viewers what they want- or what they think they want. (How would they know, if they’re never exposed to anything else?) Apparently, viewers want Benedict Cumberbatch in a bad haircut he would never wear, conjuring magic in a shitload of bombastic action sequences rendered with envelope-pushing special effects. These celluloid comic books aren’t really for grownups, and it’s often a cognitive dissonance to see so many adults squeezed into these silly superhero outfits. But such entertainments are for the child that remains inside the adult. I enjoy the vast possibilities of sci-fi, and there are even greater opportunities in fantasy, as the writer can completely rewrite the rules of Reality- and then break those rules at whim. Physics? The laws of Nature? Those are only suggestions in fantasy films.
. The fact that this flick is watchable, is likely thanks in part to Cumberbatch’s fellow adults Elizabeth Olsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, and Rachel McAdams. But credit also goes to the man in the director’s chair. Sam Raimi may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but he’s got an impressive track record. Raimi is a craftsman with experience.
. In THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS, modern wizard Stephen Strange joins forces with a teenage girl he keeps seeing in his dreams. Turns out this dream-girl has the unique ability to travel across an infinite array of alternate multiverses- a useful skill in today’s filmic marketplace. But also useful if you need to battle bad guys who threaten to unleash mass slaughter across the panoply of different possible worlds. That’s just not okay with our caped magicman- even if that threat comes from… himself, in a different multiverse, where the tricky doctor is really a total asshole.
– It may not be Kubrick, but this diverting detour into THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS is a fun ride, really. Even for adults- if there is any kid left in them at all.
PARALLEL MOTHERS (2021) ****
Another Pedro Almodóvar film is always a good thing. I am a big fan of this Spanish director with a singular voice that is instantly identifiable and always adventurous. He does melodrama- a heightened form of relationship conflict that almost always celebrates the feminine. His films often feel like stylish soap operas with the inter-personal fireworks of a telenovelas with really good acting, directing and production values. But they have soul. This soulful film is framed by the tragedy of mass slaughter in the Spanish Civil War. PARALLEL MOTHERS tells the story of two women whose lives intersect when they give birth in the same hospital on the same day. The older woman (Almodóvar regular Penélope Cruz, as radiant as ever), is stoked to be having a child at her age. The younger (played by Milena Smit), is a whole lot more trepidatious about the prospect of motherhood. There are always tears in an Almodóvar film, and there are plenty in this plot-heavy film. That, is only appropriate. Human relations are awash in tears. They are tools for catharsis, in the hands of a great artist like Pedro Almodóvar.
POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING (2016) ***+
It took me a while to find this obscure Andy Samberg comedy that has garnered a real cult following, but it was worth the wait. This former SNL funnyman made digital shorts that were among the very best features of this TV institution. Often partnering with talents like Chris Parnell and Justin Timberlake, these music videos where truly hysterical parodies of modern American music and culture. In this often very funny musical, Samburg plays Connor, the standout star from a trio of wildly successful hip-hop stars. Lawrence and Owen are left behind when Connor leaves the Style Boyz and catapults to the top of the celebrity heap as a solo act. In love with his own success, Connor decides to make a documentary about himself, but still nursing bruised egos from the split, his former bandmates are understandably hesitant to take part. The cameras begin to roll, and POPSTAR becomes a mocumentary, lampooning stardom and the pitfalls of success. Unfortunately for Connor, the cameras are all rolling when his second solo album drops, and falls through the floor like a lead anvil. Samberg can be a very musically funny man. He’s got great support here, with a roster of secondary players that are each as funny as Samberg, including Sarah Silverman, Chris Redd, Tim Meadows, Joan Cusack, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, Will Forte, Mike Birbigila, Kevin Nealon, Emma Stone and Weird Al Yankovic. Very entertaining stuff. Samberg is a wit.
THUNDER BAY (1953) ***
The prolific Anthony Mann was among the very best directors of westerns in his day, as evidenced by WINCHESTER ’73, DEVIL’S DOORWAY, BEND OF THE RIVER, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, NAKED SPUR, THE TIN STAR, and MAN OF THE WEST- all great entertainments. But Mann showed a deft hand with any genre. Among his 29 directing credits, he made romances, dramas, musicals, war films, comedies, mysteries and film noir. For me, he really shined in adventure mode, and though this is certainly not among his best, any film that pairs this accomplished director with his usual leading man James Stewart and the noir staple Dan Duryea is a film I want to see. Martin and Duryea are an ambitious team, out to make a fortunate in wildcatting oil. Stewart (playing a man distractingly named “Steve Martin’), is convinced there is a fortune just offshore from Port Felicity, a backwater fishing village in coastal Louisiana. As you can imagine, the locals are just thrilled to have a big oil rig suddenly pop up right outside their prime shrimping waters, and to have the callous interlopers seduce a pair of local girls who become caught in the middle between their new fellas and their alarmed fellow townsfolk. Enjoyable. Jimmy Stewart films are always enjoyable- at least when he’s onscreen.
THE STING (1973) ****
> This George Roy Hill caper/revenge was a huge box office and critical hit, garnering much Oscar attention, and winning Best Picture of 1973.
. It seems like it would be hard for Hill to go wrong bringing back the rascally duo who charmed America in his BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID four years earlier. For THE STING, Paul Newman and Robert Redford share the spotlight, pitted against steely killer Robert Shaw.
. I saw the movie in the theaters back in ’73, and didn’t get what all the hubbub was about. At the time, I thought THE STING was okay for what it was- but I lost the thread at some point, so not understanding what the hell was going on, I can’t say I enjoyed it much. (My educated guess? I was too stoned at the time to follow the complicated plot twists that are really a big part of the fun- if you aren’t too stoned to follow them!) On second viewing (also stoned, no doubt), I found THE STING to be quite a delight.
. Hill imbued this quick-paced yarn with a delightfully detailed sense of time and place and everything from the cars to the costumes proclaims: “1936”! The capable second tier cast is led by Charles Durning, Ray Walston, and Eileen Brennan, who fill their shoes well.
. The country is paralyzed in the grip of a Great Depression. (Nothing so great about it, really. It sucks! Work is hard to come by and people are increasingly hungry. But with a separate privileged class that is not suffering the same way everyone else is, those who still have, become easy prey to those who have-not. Such is the role of the grifter: to relieve the too-comfortable from a bit of their excess resources. A nattily attired Redford plays Johnny Hooker, who has just lost a friend in a scam gone bad- murdered by Shaw’s businessman gangster, Doyle Lonnegan. Itching for revenge, Hooker is savvy enough to know he is still too green to pull it off himself, so he seeks out the aid of Newman’s elder statesman of con artists, Henry Gondorff. Reticent at first, Henry warms to the task when he finds out who the murdered man was- and who was behind the murder. Together, the cocky young upstart and the seasoned veteran hatch an elaborate plot to out-con a master con. If all goes according to plan, Lonnegan will remain blissfully ignorant that he has been scammed at all. But it’s a big gamble. A lot of things need to go exactly as planned- something that rarely happen in life, and never, ever in caper films.
. THE STING unfolds in chapters, using old-fashioned title cards drawn and illustrated to look lifted from the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. Marvin Hamlish’s ragtime score was instantly iconic, when Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” became the soundtrack of the moment. THE STING won seven of the ten Oscars it was up for, making it a very celebrated film indeed. Can’t say I found it a classic by any stretch, but it is 4 stars worth of solid Hollywood entertainment. I really missed the boat the first time.
– Perhaps I’d best not go for that second bong before viewing the next film…
SEVEN BEAUTIES (1975) *****
> This was my third viewing of the late great Lina Wertmüller’s crowning achievement, and it just keeps getting better with repeated exposures.
. This great Italian treat (perhaps the best Italian film I’ve ever seen), came onto my radar in the year it came out, when my friend Mike Pulte was visiting me, gushing about the movie he had just seen. Based on his enthusiastic endorsement (“This film made me glad to be alive!”), I went into the city to see it for myself. By the time I got to the comic/grisly dismemberment scene, I started wondering what the Hell Pulte could have been talking about! He meant those words in an entirely different way than I heard them. He meant, that compared to the horrors of World War II Europe, his 1975 L.A. life was a paradise. There are horrors on view in SEVEN BEAUTIES, but Wertmüller manages to render them all with an anachronistically comic touch.
. In one of the most unforgettable film roles ever rendered for the screen, the great Giancarlo Giannini inhabits classic cinema jester ‘Pasqualino’, a very small man with a very big image of himself. His introduction scene is hilarious and iconic, as impeccably dressed and groomed Pasqualino struts down the avenue, cock-of-the-walk, alpha dog in his mind, greeting the common man magnanimously and flirting brazenly with every skirt that passes. Pasqualino is charm, with a man attached. Every woman he winks at titters with the thrill of catching his eye. (SEE the scene below, in Italian, but without subtitles. You don’t need them.)
. It is the pre-war 30’s, and neither Pasqualino nor the rest of Italy has any idea of the shitstorm about to break. Our hero is a garden-variety Sicilian criminal- a con man waiting to take advantage of any opportunity the presents itself. After all, as man of the house, he has seven “beauties” at home to feed and clothe: his aging mother and six ginormous sisters. Six humongous wads of women to find husbands for before they fall prey to economic pressures that turn them into prostitutes, like other single women their age. It’s a lot of responsibility for one man. When the oldest girl becomes the “sweetheart” of a sleazy local pimp, Pasqualino is outraged by the affront to his family honor, setting off to wreck revenge on the cad. His actions lead to incarceration in a madhouse, which is enough to drive a man crazy. When he sees his chance to exchange a straight-jacket for Army fatigues, he jumps from the proverbial frying pan into the almost literal fire.
. When we meet him, Pasqualino has gone AWOL, deciding the barbarism of war was not his thing. No advantage in it for him. But the war has other plans for Pasqualino. There is a bunk in a concentration camp that has his number on it. In the camp, torture and murder are casually dispensed all around him. He never knows if he will be next. He meets fine Spanish actor Fernando Rey, playing a political prisoner: an anarchist who decides it is better to die in shit than live in it. The personification of a survivor, our rascally hero swears to do whatever it takes to survive. But what tools does a man like Pasqualino have in his tool-chest? Stripped of his finery, not much… Except that part of him that (he thinks) is irresistible to the ladies. And what do you know? The commandant of the camp is a lady. Yup. You are imagining correctly. Filthy, bedraggled, emaciated Pasqualino convinces himself there is only one road to survival in this hellhole- to seduce the woman in charge! Did I mention that SEVEN BEAUTIES is a farce?
. Pasqualino is Wertmüller’s Italian-Everyman: a man who thinks with his dick and acts with his balls. She is skewering the Italian machismo mercilessly. You will never see a funnier scene than hopeful, condemned Pasqualino struggling to catch the eye of the beefy, bored, lethal commandant. (Odd fact: this terrifying ball-breaking Nazi was based on a real German commandant who was infamous for sexually degrading her prisoners, though I’m not sure she ever said, essentially: “First you eat, and then you fuck” to one of her prisoners…)
. Giannini is that rare actor who doesn’t need lines, as long as we can see his eyes- which is all we see at first. The only actor I could compare him to in this regard is Omar Sharif as Doctor Zhivago. What a performance! Every moment resonates in those deep, watery eyes. It is simply spectacular film acting. (It’s a pity this great actor is relegated to minor supporting roles in American films, even though he has long since perfected his English. He deserves better. So do we.)
. Surviving the war, Pasqualino is more determined than ever to weather whatever excrement life throws at him, vowing to make lots and lots and lots of Italian babies- an army of little Pasqualinos to protect him from the capricious vicissitudes of the world. Wertmüller had a bleak view of her countrymen- and men in general, I gather. She saw them as survivors- but as amoral survivors, willing to make any compromise for advantage.
– Ouch. It’s a tart brew! But tasty. And wicked fun. Even on the third viewing.
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I’ve been watching a lot of South Park lately. So frickin’ funny, even when it is outrageously gross, violent or profane. Nobody skewers sacred cows better than Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Until our next go-round, this is KPK shouting: Viva Cinema, cowgals and cowguys!
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