June 2023

ASTEROID CITY (2023)

      Since his first features, “Bottle Rocket” and “Rushmore” in the late 1990s, Wes Anderson keeps finding new ways to present his off-center stories and quirky characters.

      His newest doesn’t disappoint in its creativity: it’s a stage play—shot against a one-dimensional, cartoon-like backdrop of the sun-drenched Arizona desert—about a 1955 gathering of young stargazers and their parents that is interrupted by a brief visit by an alien.

     But unlike the fast-talking, unflappable and distressingly serious characters of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) and “The French Dispatch” (2021), the odd-ball collection in “Asteroid City” doesn’t have much of interest to say and their stories go nowhere.

     Just after arriving in town, Augie (Jason Schwartzman, the star of “Rushmore and Anderson’s longtime collaborator), the pipe smoking father of a teen son (a contestant in the young scientist contest) and three young daughters, meets Midge (Scarlett Johansson), a morose move star and her daughter, another science fair competitor.

      Along with Anderson regulars Jeffrey Wright (a pompous general), Tilda Swinton (the scientist in charge) and Willem Dafoe (a Method acting teacher), the illustrious cast also includes Tom Hanks as Augie’s father-in-law, Adrien Brody as the play’s intense director, Edward Norton as the playwright, Bryan Cranston as the play’s stage manager-narrator, Matt Dillon as the town’s car mechanic, Steve Carell as the hotel manager and Margot Robbie as an actress in another play. “Asteroid City” is the definitive example that all the stars in Hollywood can’t save a pedestrian script.

     Turns out the film’s most endearing performances are given by Augie’s three little girls, Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia, played by the Faris sisters.

     Anderson has fun poking fun at the 1950s and the film offers occasional moments of droll humor, but there’s not enough there to leave much of an impression.

 

FIG LEAVES (1926), FAZIL (1928) and A GIRL IN EVERY PORT (1928)

     Few filmmakers were more responsible for establishing Hollywood as the capital of smart, well-made entertainments than Howard Hawks, whose output during movie’s Golden Age spans every genre.

     Among his films during the 1930s and 40s are the gangster tale “Scarface” (1931); screwball comedies “Twentieth Century” (1934), “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), “His Girl Friday” (1941) and “Ball of Fire” (1942); the adventure “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939); the war picture “Sergeant York (1941), the Western “Red River” (1948); and two Humphrey Bogart classics, “To Have and Have Not” (1944) and “The Big Sleep” (1946). All of these rank among the best of its genre.

       (On the subject of great filmmakers, you can find my recently compiled lists of directors’ 10 best, and sometimes 20, pictures, including Hawks and Wes Anderson and dozens of others spanning more than 100 years of filmmaking, posted on this site under “Directors’ Best Films, Ranked.” The lists reflect my ranking of the works I’ve seen of each filmmaker and, like all opinions, are subject to change on a daily basis.)     

      Hawks’ career started in the early 1920s as a screenwriter before he earned a shot at directing. I recently discovered three of his silents on YouTube.

     “Fig Leaves,” the director’s second film, shows his skills in satirizing the age-old conflicts between men and women, a theme than runs through his entire career. The film begins in the Stone Age, with a Flintstone-like couple settling into the rut of life. An inter-title near the start of the film states: “The only honeymoon in eight million years not at Niagara Falls is nearing a conclusion.”

        Papier-mâché dinosaurs and leg-propelled buses enliven the first act of the film set in the Garden of Eden before it fast-forwards to modern times where Adam’s clothes-obsessed wife Eve becomes enthralled with a pretentious fashion designer. The typical mix ups that would propel romantic comedies for the next 100 years ensue.

     George O’Brien, who was much better the next year in F. W. Murnau’s masterpiece “Sunrise,” plays the thick-headed Adam while Olive Borden’s Eve is the stereotypical Hollywood housewife, a trickster who always ends up back in her husband’s arms. (Later in his career, Hawks went a long way to turn that cliché on its head.)  

      More fascinating is “Fazil,” which displays the era’s prejudices against Islamic beliefs but, to its credit, puts a multi-dimensional Arab man at the center of a Hollywood film.

      Of course, Prince Fazil is played by the very Anglo Charles Farrell (among the most popular silent stars, mostly as Janet Gaynor’s co-star), who falls in love with a French woman during a visit to Venice. Fabienne (played by Norwegian star Greta Nissen) marries him, but then discovers a very different world when they return to his desert outpost; she’s more prisoner than wife.

      The picture grows more melodramatic as most silent romances do, but Farrell and Nissen are both memorable as this culture-crossing couple.

      A better picture, among Hawks’ best, is “A Girl in Every Port.” Dominating this first-rate production is Victor McLaglen, who later became a regular in John Ford films, winning a best actor Oscar for “The Informer” (1936). He plays Spike Madden, a hard-drinking, womanizing sailor who finds a girl and a bar fight in every port. But he keeps losing his girlfriends to slick fellow sailor Bill (Robert Armstrong, best known for “King Kong”), which provides both the comedy and the fisticuffs throughout the picture.

     Seeing McLaglen’s performance in this silent and the similarly themed “What Price Glory” (1926), it’s clear he would have been a much bigger star if not for the coming of sound, when he became primarily a supporting player.

     Spicing up “A Girl in Every Port,” is one of the most charismatic actresses of the era, Louise Brooks, playing an alluring circus girl, who flirts with both sailors. The next year she would give one of the silent era’s defining performances as Lulu in the G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box.”

    A couple of future stars show up uncredited: Myrna Loy and William Demarest.

 

MASTER GARDENER (2023)

     Walking into a Paul Schrader movie is like turning into an unfamiliar, dark alley: what lurks at the far end remains a mystery until it erupts into violence or opens into sunshine.

      There’s a bit of both in his latest, the third film in his recent trilogy about troubled, introspective men who stand outside contemporary norms. Though not as powerful or transcendent as “First Reformed” (2017) or as disturbing as “The Card Counter” (2021), the writer-director’s new study of a loner (all offshoots of his masterful script for “Taxi Driver”) takes place at a Louisiana mansion where Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) serves as head gardener for the huge, lush property.

       Sigourney Weaver plays Mrs. Haverhill, the owner, who rules her kingdom with quiet ruthlessness and treats Narvel (occasionally calling him “sweet pea”) as her surrogate slave. The order of things is disrupted when Haverhill brings on her niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a mixed-race young woman as an apprentice gardener on Narvel’s staff.

     Even though it’s contemporarily set, the metaphors are hard to miss as the Old South, with its lingering white supremacy, struggles to find a place for the Black woman.

     Like Travis Bickle with Iris, Narvel acts as savior for Maya, who is hooked up with drug dealers, something she inherited from her addicted mother. While the story arc doesn’t reach the metaphysical heights of “Taxi Driver,” it takes the darkest road to the inevitable Schrader salvation.

     Edgerton (“The Great Gatsby,” “Loving”) gives a less showy performance than either Ethan Hawke or Oscar Isaac did in Schrader’s two previous films (though all three, like Travis, dryly narrate as they write in their journals) but he’s perfect for this role; a man whose sordid past colors every line he speaks.

     Swindell, of the TV series “Trinkets,” holds their own, especially in a contentious scene with her character’s aunt, while the talky script gives Weaver the juiciest role she’s had in years. Her Haverhill has both the cool civility of a Southern matriarch and the cold arrogance of nobility. A constant presence in Hollywood for the past 44 years, starting in 1979 with her unforgettable heroine in “Alien,” Weaver has brought intelligence and strength to every role.

      Schrader, a critic of contemporary films and its audience, remains an outsider who somehow finds a way to make his kind of movies. Though his name (as director-for-hire) has been attached to some bad films, the 76-year-old has produced one of the most interesting filmographies of the last 50 years--“American Gigolo” (1980), “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), “Patty Hearst” (1988) and “Affliction” (1997) were his best of last century—not to mention his scripts for Martin Scorsese. And, considering his last three pictures, he’s still going strong.                                          

 

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (2023)

      I’ve never warmed up to Nicole Holofcener’s group-therapy films—“Lovely & Amazing,” “Friends with Money”—inevitably struggling to gather much sympathy for her characters as they fret over life’s minor downturns. Sure, I do the same thing, but please, don’t make a motion picture about it.

      Her latest won me over as it’s clear in “You Hurt My Feelings” that the writer-director sees the foolishness and wasted emotional energy in the ways Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who starred in one of the director’s best, “Enough Said”) and Don (Tobias Menzies, who played the middle-aged Prince Phillip in “The Crown”) face their problems.

     I’m also pre-disposed to appreciate the farcical skills of Louis-Dreyfus, maybe the greatest TV comedian of the past 30 years. She plays a writing teacher who is working on a novel after publishing a memoir of her childhood (she was yelled at!). Holofcener takes digs at both the glut of tear-filled memoirs and the too-often worthless writing classes.

     Her husband is equally ineffectual as a therapist who starts to doubt himself when he overhears dismissive comments from a patient.

       The big dilemma comes when Beth eavesdrops on a conversation in which her husband admits that he never liked her unpublished novel, even after a dozen readings.

     The film explores the role of lying and uncritical support, especially between married couples. Unfortunately, the couple’s best friends (played flatly by Michaela Watkins and Arian Moayed) add little to the story, except to reinforce the notion that too many people are not very good at their chosen professions.

     Jeannie Berlin, an Oscar nominee 50 years ago for “The Heartbreak Kid,” brings some senior humor to the film as Beth’s spunky mother.

 

THE NORTH STAR (1943)

       Even during an existential conflict with Hitler and Fascist aggression, many Americans were uncomfortable with an alliance with the communist Russia.

      Thus, President Franklin Roosevelt “suggested” that playwright Lillian Hellman write a semi-documentary script about a simple rural Soviet Union community that comes under German occupation. What producer Samuel Goldwyn turned it into was not quite what Hellman imagined (though the film earned her condemnation during the congressional hearings a few years later). The first third of the picture is nothing short of a pageant of idyllic life and bountiful crops in a Ukrainian village populated by ridiculously happy citizens—all scored by Aaron Copland. This while Joseph Stalin was literally starving Ukrainians by the thousands by redirecting food to his troops.

     Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter play the leaders of a small group of comrades who are outside of town when the Germans roll in and then fight their way past the Nazis to deliver guns to a militia of Ukrainians.

      Back in the village, Dr. Kurin (Walter Huston) debates ethics with the German doctor (Erich von Stroheim, of course), who is taking blood from children to use for injured Nazi soldiers.

       During the war years, Hollywood studios regularly filled screens with propaganda, but the lengths “North Star” goes to paint Russia as Shangri-la lacks anything resembling subtlety.

     What distinguishes this film, beyond the sincerity of the cast, is the high-profile artists involved: beyond Hellman, Goldwyn and Copeland, Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics to the folk songs, master production designer William Cameron Menzie served as associate producer, legendary cameraman James Wong Howe shot the film and two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone directed.

       While now remembered as a film that the HUAC used to label Hollywood as being too cozy with Communists, in 1943 it earned six Oscar nominations and certainly doesn’t flinch in its portrayal of the inhumane brutality of the Third Reich. 

 

MARLOWE (2023) and PEEPER (1975)

      As pleased as I was to see the return of Raymond Chandler’s legendary detective to the big screen, I am positive that the number of contemporary filmgoers who recognize the name Philip Marlowe wouldn’t fill the smallest theater of a 16-screen facility.

    But the bigger problem, even with a first-rate director (Neil Jordan), an Oscar-winning screenwriter (William Monahan, “The Departed”) and a veteran movie star in the title role (Liam Neeson), turns out to be that the picture fails on almost every level, filled with dubious motivations, unexplained relationships, a hard-to-follow plot and a Marlowe who seems well past retirement age.

    Based on the 2014 novel “The Black-Eyed Blonde” by John Banville, the movie, set in 1930s Los Angeles, sends the world-weary private eye on a manhunt for Nico Peterson (Francois Arnaud), a movie studio flunky who had an affair with Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger), the daughter of a famous movie star Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange).

     Marlowe quickly determines that Nico was killed in a recent car accident and just as quickly figures out that the questionable death was staged. The script bounces the detective between Clare and Dorothy, who both treat this 70something Marlowe as a potential lover. 

        Danny Huston and Alan Cumming, playing the bad guys behind the plot’s rather creaky scheme, inject some energy that is sadly lacking from either Neeson or Kruger. Marlowe is so underplayed that he almost seems like a supporting player in his own movie.

     Lange, of course, steals every scene she’s in, even as her character says little of consequence. And the wonderful Irish actor Colm Meaney shows up in the final act though he was clearly needed right from the start.

     Jordan, responsible for some of the best British films of the 1980s and ‘90s (“Mona Lisa,” “The Crying Game,” and “The End of the Affair”) lets the disorganized plotting overtake what should have been a story about an aging detective looking for morality in a corrupt city. Or, at least, an entertaining exercise in nostalgia.

      I’d like to report that another private eye picture set in L.A. and starring a UK star, “Peeper” captures what “Marlowe” fails to, but it’s just as bad. I’d never heard of this Michael Caine-Natalie Wood comic crime picture until it showed up on FXM, which shows, commercial-free, an unusual collection of films from all eras.

     Scripted by W.D. Richter (“Brubaker”), from a novel by Keith Laumer, and directed by Peter Hyams (“Capricorn One,” “2010”), the film wastes its high-profile leads in a storyline that liberally pilfers from Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” and Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.”

     Caine plays Tucker, a Brit relocated to Southern California after World War II, who accepts a vague request from a very loud, insistent Eastern European immigrant (Michael Constantine) to find the daughter he gave up for adoption decades ago. Soon Tucker forces his way into a wealthy family’s home where he holds a pointless conversation with an overweight man sitting in a high-backed bamboo chair (Thayer David as the Sydney Greenstreet character), eyes the sexy older daughter (Wood in the Lauren Bacall role) and argues with the younger daughter (Kitty Wynn). All the characters in the film act as if they’ve read the script instead of reacting to the events in the moment.

      Veteran crazy man (on and off screen) Timothy Carey plays a thug who spends the movie chasing Tucker for no discernable reason, while Wood pretends to romance Tucker for equally unexplainable reasons. The extent of the satire never goes beyond plagiarizing great writers of the past.

     The most interesting aspect of the picture is the opening credits, which are recited by a Bogie imitator (Guy Marks) as he stands at the end of a long, dark alley. If there is another film with spoken credits, I’ve never seen it.

    Nothing that follows comes close to the cleverness of those first few minutes. 

     

MARIUS (1931), FANNY (1932) and CÈSAR (1936)

      Four decades before “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings,” French playwright Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy was adapted into one of the era’s most acclaimed trio of movies.

     Beautifully filmed on the docks of the French city of Marseille, this simple, heartbreakingly honest story (combined in the 1961 American film “Fanny”) explores themes of responsibility, staying true to one’s principles and the enduring power of love. 

     The life-changing decision faced by Marius Olivier (Pierre Fresnay), the son of bar owner César (Raimu), is center stage in the first film, directed by Hungarian immigrant filmmaker Alexander Korda. Setting the mood and pacing for the entire series, “Marius” introduces the community and relationships: lifelong friends Honore Panisse (Fernand Charpin) and Cesar, who never stop arguing; the young beauty Fanny (Orane Demazis), who they’ve all known since she was a child; the comedy asides of dockworker Felix (Paul Dullac) and Fanny’s hysterical mother (Alida Rouffe).

     In “Fanny,” the girl left behind is the focus as Marius has gone to sea and she finds herself pregnant. (This plot turn kept the films from getting released in the more puritanic U.S.)  But the much older widower Panisse, a successful store owner, steps up and marries Fanny, knowing Marius is the father of her expected child and that she still loves the young man. Marc Allégret, who had a long career in French cinema, directed the middle film.

    In one especially funny and poignant scene, Fanny reads a letter from Marius, who is on a ship doing scientific exploration, to César, who over-reacts to every revelation.

      The final chapter, made four years later and directed by playwright Pagnol, is about Fanny’s now teenage son who carries Panisse’s name, learns that Marius, who has returned from sea, is his real father. “César” brings the many spokes of the story together in an upbeat, but unblinkingly real conclusion.    

      Beyond the elegant, down-to-earth screenplay, what stands out in this trilogy is the acting of Raimu, who has been called by no-less than Orson Welles as cinema’s greatest actor. Born Jules Muraire, he was a French dance hall star early in the century, but only dabbled in film before starring in the 1929 stage production of “Marius” at age 46. His performances in the three Pagnol films elevated his reputation. Raimu remained one of the most acclaimed and beloved French performers until his death in 1946.

     Fresnay later had roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934) and Jean Renoir’s “The Grand Illusion” (1937), while Demazis continued to work in film into the 1980s.

     Pagnol emerged from the trilogy as one of France’s leading literary and cinematic figures, later directing into the 1950s, including “The Baker’s Wife” (1938) and “The Well-Diggers Daughter” (1940) while continuing his work as a playwright and novelist. “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring,” based on his scripts, were among the most acclaimed French films of the 1980s.

 

PHOTOS:

Scarlett Johansson and Jason Schwartzman in “Asteroid City.”  (Focus Features)

Director Howard Hawks

Tobias Menzies and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in “You Hurt My Feelings”  (FilmNation Entertainment)

Laim Neeson digs through the underbelly of L.A. in “Marlowe.”  (Parallel Film Productions)