Tag: Mig's Reviews

THE 355 (2022)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Simon Kinberg
Cast: Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Bingbing Fan
My rating: 5/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 25% (…oof…)

PLOT: When a highly advanced technological googah falls into mercenary hands, a wild card CIA agent joins forces with three international agents on a mission to retrieve it.


I can’t speak for my colleague, Marc, but sometimes it’s harder for me to write about mediocre films than about films that are either outstanding or truly terrible. It’s harder to muster up the motivation to break down a movie that’s not bad or great, but merely so-so.

That’s the situation in which I find myself, sitting down here to write about The 355, a female-led action-thriller from director Simon Kinberg, whose previous writing credits are like a roll call of woulda-shoulda-coulda superhero movies: xXx: State of the Union, X-Men: The Last Stand, Jumper, X-Men: Apocalypse, the ill-fated 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four, and so on. (Full disclosure: he did write the 2005 comedy thriller Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which I believe is highly underrated, but that might be due more to the onscreen chemistry of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt than the script.)

The 355 (the title is explained only in the film’s final five minutes, so be patient) is standard Bond/Bourne stuff: an advanced technological doodad has surfaced and every bad guy on Earth wants it. It’s a fancy-looking USB drive that, once connected to any laptop in the world and properly decrypted, can access literally any network and/or mainframe in existence. As proof, the device’s inventor uses it to first crash a military transport jet flying overhead and then, as an encore, cuts the cable to his house. Personally, I would have reversed that lineup, but that’s just me.

(If this plot device sounds familiar, well, that’s because it is, as anyone who remembers the movie Sneakers will attest…but whatever.)

The device is stolen, and the good guys need to get it back before the bad guys do. Enter the main characters of the film: Mason Browne (Jessica Chastain) for the CIA, Marie Schmidt (Diane Kruger) for German intelligence, Khadijah Adiyeme (Lupita Nyong’o) for MI6, and poor Graciela Rivera (Penélope Cruz), a therapist who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s some nonsense about them fighting each other at first, then banding together when they belatedly realize they’re on the same side.

The first major action scene is really well done, I have to say. There’s a foot chase through Parisian streets and subways that is as well done as any similar chase in the Bourne trilogy or any given Bond film. For that matter, ALL of the action scenes are competently executed…but that’s about it. There’s no flash or style, no real sense of originality.

There’s one sequence in particular that takes place in and around a fish-packing warehouse that, after a few minutes, became extremely muddled, and I lost track of who was chasing whom, and why, and how. The camera just seemed to be recording the action without getting me invested. It was curiously bland and detached.

The story itself was vaguely disappointing and unsatisfying, as well. It serves as the very definition of “by-the-numbers.” Virtually every cliche from better spy films are evident. The partner (Sebastian Stan) who’s dead…or is he? The trustworthy boss…or is he? The villain (Bingbing Fan) who lurks in the background…or is she a villain?

Now, there are uncountable films that have used these cliches to better effect, but it’s especially disappointing in The 355 because, throughout the movie, the story felt as if it was on the verge of talking about some truly interesting topics, specifically as it relates to women. There are subplots about how Mason, the CIA agent, has no personal attachments, while Khadijah, the MI6 agent, has a lover, and Graciela, the therapist, has a whole family waiting at home for her. Marie, the German spy, has some REAL problems that I won’t get into here. The story dances around the social perception of what women should or shouldn’t do with their lives. You want to be a secret agent full time? Okay, but you’ll get judged for not wanting to start a family. You want to start a family? Okay, but you’ll get judged for not being as professional or as dedicated as others in your line of work. You want to try to do both? Fine, but just when you think it can work, it doesn’t, so you should have come down on one side or the other. It’s a no-win scenario, and it happens all the time.

The movie dances with exploring this concept further, and then dances away in favor of more cliches and unnecessary plot twists. There’s even a whole sequence that feels as if it was lifted directly from one of the Ocean’s movies. Any one of them, take your pick.

There is also a moment when, out of NOWHERE, the stakes are raised in dramatic and horrifying fashion, so much so that it felt completely out of place. I was reminded, oddly, of a scene in the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes where one of the mutant baddies slowly waves a gun over an infant in a crib. To me, it felt like overkill, and that’s the feeling I got with this off-putting twist. Was it necessary? It was shocking, true, and effective, but was it necessary? I don’t believe it was. I would have believed these women were motivated enough without bringing in outside pressure. And, to be honest, it felt like it was punishing those women who dared to have a life outside of their profession and rewarding those women who didn’t. No doubt there are other interpretations, but that’s how I saw it.

All in all, The 355 wasn’t downright unpleasant or super thrilling. It wasn’t exactly a waste of time, but it didn’t exactly blow my hair back, either. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as that Tomatometer would suggest, but…

Yeah…wait for streaming.

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Joel Coen
Cast: Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Alex Hassell, Brendan Gleeson, Corey Hawkins, Stephen Root
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: William Shakespeare’s tragic tale of murder and guilt gets a stylistic re-telling with moody direction from Joel Coen and powerhouse performances from its two leads.


I am of two minds when thinking about Joel Coen’s take on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

First, I must admit I am no Shakespeare scholar. I can count on one hand (maybe two) the number of filmed Shakespeare adaptations I have seen, and I can count on one finger how many theatrical productions I’ve seen. I’ve only read two of the Bard’s plays beginning to end: Othello and Julius Caesar. I have acted in a production of the popular Shakespeare parody The Compleat Workes of William Shakespeare (Abridged), but I doubt anyone would find that an acceptable credential.

So I must be honest and say that, when it comes to the nitty gritty specifics of the dialogue in The Tragedy of Macbeth, I was lost for, oh, 50-60% of the time. Like, “out to sea” lost. I am moderately familiar with the story, so in those times I was lost, I was able to glean what was going on or what was being said in context. I know who Banquo and Macduff and poor Duncan are, and so was able to follow their various comings and goings as revealed in the frequent chunks of expositional dialogue.

[Full disclosure: If the name of the Ross character is ever actually mentioned in the film, I must have missed it…for the duration, I wondered what his name was, and he is a vital character in certain scenes.]

But I have to say, whatever I missed in the dialogue was more than compensated for by the sensational visual language of the film, and by the stunning performances from the two leads.

First, it was shot in glorious black-and-white, and it was all shot on soundstages, giving the director (Joel Coen, working for the first time without his brother Ethan) and cinematographer (Bruno Delbonnel [Amélie, Across the Universe]) absolute control over the lighting and shadows. The resulting visuals look like something out of the early silent films of Fritz Lang and, especially, F.W. Murnau, with compositions that must have taken hours and hours to set up, with high-contrast shadows creating elaborate framing devices on walls and floors. When Macbeth famously sees a dagger before him, it’s accomplished by shining a reflective light on a highly polished door handle. In the few shots that take place outside the castle, more often than not shadows are moving slightly in the frame, as if the sun or the clouds were in constant motion. Those shadows always seem to be sliding down over the characters, perhaps mirroring Macbeth and his lady’s constant downward spiral towards their fate.

Another factor in the visual look of the film was the decision to frame it in the standard 1:33 ratio, sometimes known as the “Academy” ratio. Basically, instead of watching the film on a rectangle-shaped viewing area, you’re watching it on a square set in the middle of the screen. One might think that doing so would limit the possibilities of visual expression, but not so. For me, it had the effect of making everything a little more claustrophobic, which I think is important in cementing the state of mind of our two main characters. As the guilt over their evil deeds threatens to overwhelm them both, the smaller screen is a constant, subtle reminder that their options are limited, and becoming fewer as time goes on.

All in all, a visual feast, in a nutshell.

But what makes The Tragedy of Macbeth even more delightful to watch are the performances. To be sure, everyone involved acquits themselves incredibly well. (Keep your eyes open for a young man named Harry Melling, aka “Dudley Vernon” from the Harry Potter film franchise.) But the two that shine brightest are Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth is as quietly vicious and malicious as they come, and it helps that her attitudes are quite at odds with McDormand’s kind, open features. It is a little startling to see the face of good-hearted Marge Gunderson fiercely exhorting Macbeth to commit regicide in sharp, clipped tones, her whispers piercing the air between them like poison darts. Her despair at her husband’s inability to calmly deal with the guilt is clearly evident; when he reveals he went above and beyond what was originally planned, her shocked “are-you-kidding-me” looks are worth pages and pages of dialogue. And, of course, in the late stages of the story, when madness finally overtakes her, when no amount of washing will wipe the blood from her hands, her animalistic howls of anguish are almost worth the price of admission.

But the highlight of the whole venture (for me, anyway) was watching Denzel Washington demolish the screen as Macbeth himself. Words fail me. I haven’t seen a performance this amazing and praiseworthy since Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. I may not be a Shakespeare scholar, but I know enough to understand that making it flow as easily as normal speech takes a great deal of research and rehearsal and collaboration. What I would not GIVE to see him reprise this role on stage somewhere! He navigates the twists and turns of Shakespeare’s tortured syntax as easily as if he was telling a story about his day at work. As with any great performance, there are peaks and valleys, and his teeth-clenching, fist-pumping outbursts are used as periodic punctuation marks, not entire sentences. There is a brief scene where he angrily berates a messenger, and his seventeenth-century taunts and name-callings are as surgical and cutting as anything from Mamet. It’s a miraculous performance, and I would not be surprised in the least if he gets another Oscar nomination. (The same goes for Frances McDormand…what a duo!)

(I would be remiss if I did not also mention the performance by a little-known actress, Kathryn Hunter, as the famous Witches. Her voice and face open the film, and if there’s any justice, it will go down as one of the great opening sequences of the movies. There are portions of her performance that must have taken great courage and trust in director Coen, to make sure she did not come off as simply a kook. She does not. She is one of the most ineffably creepy individuals in a movie in quite some time. I dare not say more without ruining the effect. But she was breathtakingly successful.)

When I walked out of The Tragedy of Macbeth, I can clearly remember thinking, “Well, great movie, but one that I wouldn’t purchase for my home video library, because how can it possibly equal the experience of seeing these precise visuals married to these insane performances, on a big screen?” But the more I think about it, the more I think I will pick up a copy when it becomes available, for a couple of reasons. First, a little extra culture never hurt anyone, and second, it will be worth the purchase price just to see Washington and McDormand tear up the screen as the Macbeths again, not to mention those stunning visuals, AND those creepy witches. This movie is really growing on me.

LICORICE PIZZA (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper
My Rating: 7/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 92% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The story of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine growing up, running around and going through the treacherous navigation of first love in the San Fernando Valley, 1973.


You know that old saying, “You’ll either love it or hate it”?  I’m afraid that doesn’t apply to Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Licorice Pizza.  At least not for me.

The plot: Gary, an impossibly precocious and business-savvy 15-year-old child actor, still in high school (the movie opens with him getting his yearbook pictures taken), develops a crush on Alana, a 25-year-old production assistant, and pursues her – and pursues her and pursues her – while she wrestles with her own emotions and the fact that, dude, he’s fifteen years old.  He calls a shaky truce on his emotions so they can remain friends, and in the process they…let me see if I can remember it all…go on several auditions, help Gary’s mom with her public relations business, open their own business selling waterbeds, fly to Texas (?) and back, fall in and out of “like” with each other several times by attempting to form physical relationships with people their own age, meet an actor who is clearly meant to be William Holden, and by the end of the movie they finally seem to be mutually in love with each other.  Sort of.  Maybe.  It depends on your point of view.  But moving on…

For all its faults, Licorice Pizza did keep me grinning for virtually all of its longish running time, and it also made me laugh out loud many times.  Only in a Paul Thomas Anderson – or maybe also a Tarantino movie – could you have a scene where a mixed-race couple (white husband/Asian wife) have a conversation in which the white husband speaks the most atrociously absurd, cringeworthy pidgin Japanese to his wife, and it gets an earned laugh for the sheer audacity of the scene.  Is it offensive?  Certainly, if this happened in real life, the husband would be cancelled faster than an all-Latino sitcom.  (Ba-ZING.)  But I’ve gotta be honest, that was one of the great belly-laughs in the film.  I found it funny in the same way that Robert Downey Jr. in blackface in Tropic Thunder was funny, in that the people committing the offenses are clearly dumber than sacks of sand and so have absolutely no idea they’re being morons.  But I’ll leave the Theory-of-Comedy discussion for another review…

In true P.T. Anderson fashion, the dialogue is as sharply written as anything by Sorkin or Mamet.  Not a second is wasted on unnecessary exposition or explanation.  (Although, to be fair, a LITTLE more explanation would have been preferred…more on that later.)  Each scene gets to the point, either directly or indirectly, with surgical precision.

There are some editing jumps that will keep a viewer on their toes.  The movie shows a scene of Gary testing a waterbed for the first time, then jumps to him hawking them at a “Teen Fair”, then suddenly he has his own storefront, sales reps, and a bank of telephone operators.  We can only assume that he had the capital, the licenses, and the business logistics to not only make this happen but to clearly be successful at it, at least for a while.  I mean, he is fifteen years old, so why wouldn’t he know how to do all this, right?

[Actually, now that I think about it, there IS a precedent for this plot: Rushmore, Wes Anderson’s 1998 film about another precocious 15-year-old boy who falls in love with a much older woman and spends most of the rest of the film attempting to woo her while she wrestles with her emotions and her desire for a relationship with someone who was born in the same decade as she was.  Do with that information what you will.]

When the age gap between Gary and Alana was explained very clearly at the beginning of the film, I was pretty sure the two of them could never be in a relationship, and I was taken out of the movie a little.  However, as the movie progressed, the film’s charm and effortless wit made me forget how far apart they were.  Gary behaves in such a way that I forgot just young he’s supposed to be, and I forgot just how old Alana is supposed to be.  The film expertly took me by the hand and got me rooting for them to be together, despite how – let’s not mince words – illegal it would be for them to be together.

SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

SPOILER ALERT.

So the movie does its job, that I’ll grant you.  But when the film ends, and Gary and Alana kiss and go running off screen together, and Alana finally says, “I love you, Gary”, and the credits started rolling…I stared at the screen, raised my arms in supplication to the scrolling credits, and said, “Say WHAT…?”  Because it was at that point, after the abrupt ending, that I started to have questions.  Lots and lots and LOTS of questions.

If Gary is a high school student – and he is a high school student – when did he ever go to class?  The film never shows us.  One could make the case of, well, you have to ASSUME he’s going to class.  Okay…but when?  In between auditions and plane flights to a live taping of a musical number in front of a live audience and opening not one but two small businesses where his employees seem to be composed entirely of his school-age buddies?  And one of these businesses involves him buying a large quantity of pinball machines to start an arcade.  Where is this money coming from?!  His acting paychecks?  He’s not a major star.  He’s a minor bit player, at best.  And yet, not only can he finance two small businesses on his own (he has a mother, but we only meet her twice), but the maître d’ at a local restaurant knows him by name and treats him like Hollywood royalty – he even has his own table at this place.

And let’s talk about that ending.  She says, “I love you, Gary”, and they run off screen.  What does this mean?  Does this mean she’s about to embark on a physical relationship with an underage boy?  One could say, “Well, of COURSE she’s not going to start going steady with him or anything.  She’s twenty-five and he’s fifteen!  The idea’s absurd and icky!  No, there’s no way anything like that can happen between the two of them, so this ending is just her affirming her love for him in a platonic way because that’s all they will ever be able to be to each other: devoted friends.”

Yeah, but…are we just supposed to make that assumption out of thin air?  The entire movie has been working on getting these two characters together, and it ends (quite suddenly) with that happening, and…we’re just supposed to think, “Yeah, but they’re not TOGETHER-together”?  If that’s the case, I feel there should have been a little more information to make that clearer.

I’m reminded of something I read where a college professor is teaching film students about Hal Ashby’s prescient film Being There.  MORE SPOILER ALERTS, kind of unavoidable here…but the film ends with a humble gardener with an IQ in the double-digits walking serenely out onto the surface of a lake.  The professor asks his students what this final scene means.  And the students say, well, there’s a sunken pier just out of sight under the water, or the water is quite shallow, or they even theorize that the scene isn’t really happening, it’s just in the gardener’s mind.

The professor pounds on his desk and says, “No, no, NO!  What you see is what you get.  The guy is literally walking on water.  Nothing in the film mentions a sunken pier or low water levels, and we’ve never seen any of his dreams before now.  Any explanations you’re giving for why he’s walking on water, aside from his ability to actually do it, is just you bringing something the scene that isn’t there.”

That’s what I think about the ending of Licorice Pizza.  It’s problematic because, to me, it doesn’t matter what I think happens at the end when she proclaims her love and they run off.  The movie is clearly indicating they DO wind up in a relationship.  We can infer all we want about what may have happened after the cameras cut, but we are left with what the film has presented to us.  And that left me feeling weirdly uncomfortable.

To be sure, there are movies out there, acknowledged masterpieces, that depend heavily on the viewer doing some heavy lifting.  The one that comes to mind the most for me is 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film whose ending is suitably awesome and beautiful…but what in the Sam Hill does it MEAN?  Do enough reading and analysis and there are conclusions to be made that make sense and which elevate that film.

But Licorice Pizza is no 2001.  This is just not the kind of movie that lends itself to that kind of theoretical dissection.  If there are buried truths to be discovered, fair enough, but how much digging am I expected to do?  As the great man once said, “If you have to ask what something symbolizes, it doesn’t.”

First impressions are very important. And my first impression of Licorice Pizza is that, while it’s solidly acted and directed, and the dialogue is pitch perfect, the story itself leaves something to be desired.

[P.S.  A friend of mine said that if you were to switch the genders in this movie, it would never have been made.  I might agree, were it not for the fact that there have already been several films already made about that very topic, that is, an adult man in an inappropriate relationship with a much younger or underage woman.  American Beauty, Lolita, Lost in Translation, etcetera.  Maybe Lost in Translation is not the best example, as both characters are legal adults, but you get my point.  Frankly, I thought the gender switching in Licorice Pizza was kinda refreshing…up to a point.]

MATEWAN (1987)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: John Sayles
Cast: Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, David Strathairn, James Earl Jones
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 94%

PLOT: The (mostly) true story of a West Virginia coal town where the local miners’ struggle to form a union rose to the pitch of all-out war in 1920.


A few nights ago, I watched Matewan for the first time.  I haven’t seen many of director John Sayles’ films, but I’d venture to say it’s one of his best.  With loving authenticity and a keen ear for dialogue and music, Matewan depicts a nearly forgotten chapter of American history when coal miners in 1920 West Virginia attempted to unionize, the big corporation that owned the mine attempted to suppress and intimidate the workers, and everything came to a head one fateful day on the train tracks leading in and out of town.

I can’t pin down exactly why, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this movie.  When I was watching it, I tried to stop so I could go to bed and finish it in the morning.  But when I tried to sleep, my mind wouldn’t stop racing, thinking about the film, its message, its look, the SOUND of it.  I had to get back out of bed and finish it to the end before I was finally able to sleep.

The plot is nothing new, at least in broad strokes.  Small town locals take on corporate America and show them what for.  Seen it once, seen it a hundred times.  But for some reason, when this film showed scenes of company men evicting miners from their homes, or humiliating dinner guests at the boarding house where they’re staying, or spreading lies about union organizers, even employing a spy…I got mad.  I wasn’t just upset at the bad guys in a knee-jerk way, like disliking Nazis in a World War II film.  I was genuinely angry.  And I stayed angry for days whenever I thought about the movie.

Maybe it’s the thought of this particular kind of injustice depicted in Matewan that fueled my anger.  Here are people, poor people, desperate people, who lost their land, their homes, their dignity, and their lives so other men hundreds or thousands of miles away could report a six percent increase in profits at the next stockholder’s meeting.

There’s a powerful but terrible scene when the mining boss is introducing a group of new employees to the mine and its rules.  They are presented with tools…but they’re loans from the company, and their cost will be deducted from their first paycheck.  Miners can sharpen the tools with the company’s tool sharpeners…for a monthly fee.  The company provides a doctor…for a monthly fee.  The train ride to the mine was provided by the company…cost to be deducted.  The men are paid in company “script”, redeemable only at the company store.  Purchase any items available at the company store from an outside merchant…and you’re fired.

I remember thinking, this is literally slave labor.  How could anyone live like that, day after day, going down into a hole in the earth where the very real possibility of death, sudden or protracted, loomed over you every moment you’re down there?  And then to hear that the company could make conditions safer, but it’s just too expensive?  No WONDER they wanted to unionize.

Anyway.  Like I said.  It stuck with me.

Leaving aside the story, the film is extremely well made, especially considering the filmmakers were working within an extremely limited budget.  They employed the services of Haskell Wexler, one of the gods of movie cinematography, whose credits include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).  He employed a lot of low-light and natural-light photography, and as a result, even though Matewan was released in 1987, the movie looks and feels like a classic ‘70s movie.  It’s so precisely of a particular time and place that it’s a little jarring to see contemporary actors like Chris Cooper and Mary McDonnell in scenes that look like something out of Barry Lyndon or McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

The music choices are also out of this world, especially in a scene where musicians from three separate ethnic communities start riffing on each other’s music.  It’s an eloquent symbol of the kind of community and camaraderie that was needed for the miners to succeed in their task.

The story moves onward.  The miners first rally around Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), who came to town with the specific goal of unionizing the mine.  Then things go sour when company enforcers arrive.  The local sheriff (David Strathairn) makes a bad first impression, but later reveals his true nature in immensely satisfying style.  Guns are fired.  Lives are lost.  A spy is discovered.  And everything leads to a final showdown between powerful men with the might of corporate America backing them up and a few desperate miners who just want to be treated like men instead of so much dry goods.

If you’re anything like me, Matewan will stay with you long after it’s over.  Maybe not for the same reasons, but its memory will definitely linger.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008, Sweden)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Tomas Alfredson
Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lena Leandersson
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A bullied schoolboy makes friends with the new neighbor, a girl about his age who doesn’t leave her apartment during the day and has some alarming eating habits…


A little while ago, I reviewed a movie called Klaus, a film that took an age-old pop culture trope (the origins of Santa Claus) and turned it on its ear.  I wasn’t sure when I would find another movie that would be able to do that so effectively.

Well…here it is.  Let the Right One In, a Swedish film from 2008, made huge waves at the time of its release.  Critics called it a film with “magnificent emotional resonance.”  “One of the great horror films of recent years.”  “One of the real finds of 2008.”  “A spectacularly moving and elegant movie…a remarkable film.”

Too good to be true, right?  Well, I’ve just finished watching it earlier tonight, and I can tell you, the hype is real.  While the very ending brought up more questions than it answers (where is the train going?  where are the parents?), the ride getting there was phenomenally good.  Calling it simply a “vampire movie” is almost insultingly reductive.  It poses questions about vampire lore that I had never really thought about, and it provides immensely satisfying answers.

For example, one of the most well-known rules about vampires is they cannot enter your home unless you invite them inside.  At one point in the film, a vampire hesitates at a doorway because she hasn’t been invited, and the boy asks her, “Well, what happens if you come in anyway?  Is there something in the air?”  So, she goes inside without being invited.  What happened next was totally unexpected, and it made perfect sense.  I remember thinking, “So THAT’S what they’re afraid of…”

But I’m jumping ahead.  Let the Right One In tells the story of a bullied pre-teen schoolboy, Oskar, who fantasizes about knifing his tormentors.  One day, new neighbors move into the apartment next door, an older gentleman and a preteen girl.  He meets the girl one evening out on the snowy playground in front of their apartment building.  (Her first appearance is one of the great entrances in cinema.)  She tells him her name is Eli (pronounced “Elly” in Sweden).  He says she smells funny.  She tells him they cannot be friends, even though she seems eager to make friends with Oskar.  Her eyes seem to be abnormally large, almost like a character in a Miyazaki anime.

We’ve already seen the older gentleman who moves in with her botch a food-gathering run, so it’s obvious from the get-go what exactly Eli is, and what she needs to survive.  This is all done within the film’s first fifteen minutes or so, so I promise I’m not giving anything away.

What happens after those establishing moments, I’ll leave for you to discover.  You may already be remembering countless other vampire films like Fright Night or Interview with the Vampire and thinking, “I’ve seen all this before.”  But I can assure you, you haven’t.  Not like this.

The relationship between Oskar and Eli never gets sexual (they’re both too young for that…well, Oskar is), and is handled with remarkable sensitivity and keen observation.  At one point, he buys her a snack from a vendor.  She refuses it.  He feels hurt.  So she takes one anyway and eats it.  Seconds later, she’s sick to her stomach.  What does Oskar think about this?  He’s surprised, but he takes it in stride and apologizes.  There’s something so clever about this approach, about making it between an old soul and a child, that feels fresh and new to me.  Oskar knows the term “vampire,” but clearly hasn’t seen enough movies to recognize the signs of one standing right in front of him.

Eli is forced to make a kill periodically to survive.  These attacks are done with a minimum of gore but are incredibly effective and horrifying.  There’s something instinctively creepy about seeing a little girl jump – or drop – from the shadows, clamber onto the back of her victims, and latch onto their necks with an animalistic growl.  The fact these attacks are stitched together with quiet moments, like Oskar teaching Eli morse code, creates a unique atmosphere that is impossible for me to describe satisfactorily.

(Another detail: when Eli is hungry, it’s not depicted as it is in other vampire movies, where the overpowering urge to feed makes her go mad and wide-eyed.  Her stomach rumbles.  True, it’s a little louder than when it happens to a normal person, but it feels…right.  Of course her stomach rumbles…she’s hungry.)

There is more to the story, of course, about Oskar’s bullies and Eli’s incompetent roommate and the suspicious bar regular whose friend was killed, and so on.  Better to leave the rest as a surprise.  And there are LOTS of cool surprises here.  This feels like the kind of movie Guillermo del Toro might have made if he had gotten there first.  (Oh, wait, he did make Cronos…I stand corrected.)

ROSETTA (1999, Belgium)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Cast: Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 90%

PLOT: A poor young woman, teetering on the edge of desperation, struggles to support herself and her alcoholic mother.


The word “neo-realist” is used several times in other reviews or movie blogs where this little Belgian film is discussed. I’m not a film scholar, so I can’t claim to know precisely what that term describes. Without searching for the dictionary definition, I think it refers to a film in which the predominant theme or tone is that of real life, happening to real people. A favorite method of creating this tone is to use non-professional actors in all the key roles, so one never gets a sense of acting from a performance, only reality.

If I got that right, then Rosetta is definitely a neo-realist film, and I typically do not like neo-realist films. I have seen Bicycle Thieves (1948) a couple of times, and while I acknowledge its place in cinema history and its craftsmanship, the appeal of the film (commonly called a masterpiece of Italian neo-realism) eludes me. It’s not my favorite genre and/or time period.

But Rosetta undercut my preconceived notions of the genre and had me riveted from its opening moments to its severely unconventional ending, ninety short minutes later.

The determining factor is the camerawork, at least at first. We immediately follow this young girl, Rosetta (a gutsy, award-winning performance by Émilie Dequenne), maybe 16 or 17 years old, who is walking briskly through a factory floor, though we’re not sure why at first. As she walks, the camera follows her, hand-held, unsteady, very queasy-cam, but it lends a sense of immediacy to the shot. The camera is almost running just to keep up with Rosetta, and I was instantly curious. Where is she going? Why is she walking so fast? Is she about to punch someone out?

But no, she’s about to be fired for being late, and when her boss intercepts her, she refuses to go quietly, to a point where security has to be called and chases her through the entire building. Why so desperate? Aren’t there other jobs to be had for someone her age out there?

Apparently not. This will be a theme throughout the film: her constant hustle to get a paying job. At one point, someone offers to hire her and pay her under the table, but she refuses: “I want a real job.”

Wherever she goes, the handheld camera follows right behind her, like a paparazzo who won’t give up. We only get a handful of long shots, like when she crosses a busy street after getting off a bus. Virtually every other shot is right behind her or right next to her. The effect creates the idea that Rosetta’s life is composed mostly of sleep and hustling to make that next dollar, or franc. In between, she maintains her trailer home with her alcoholic mother, a woman who is so pitifully down the road of addiction that she demeans herself with the landlord of their trailer park to pay for their water, just so she can keep the money to pay for more liquor. Rosetta ruthlessly tries to keep her mother in check, constantly berating her for her behavior, their familial positions clearly reversed.

Rosetta is not a happy film. How can it be? It simply follows this girl’s life from one crisis to another. But I was totally engrossed in a way that reminded me, for some reason, of another movie, Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, which was also shot and filmed in such a way that the actors (most of them recognizable and famous) didn’t feel like actors, and as such felt more real than many other films.

So…what is the takeaway from this movie? Is Rosetta a good person? She has noble intentions, I believe, but she is forced to be strong and calculating as a way of keeping her and her mother afloat. At one point, she meets a young man, might even like him, but at one point, on the shore of a small lake, he falls in and appears to be drowning…and Rosetta takes an awfully long time to decide whether to help him or not. After all, if he dies…she might be able to take his place at work.

I just watched a video essay on Netflix about how it’s not always necessary for you to like a character in a movie in order for it to be enjoyable. Overall, I’d agree with that assessment, especially with Rosetta (though What About Bob? is the CLEAR exception). This film was both dazzling and simple, a neat trick, involving a character I didn’t always agree with, but who I believed made the only choices she could make in her situation. I found myself asking what I would do in her place. Left to fend for myself with no steady job and an alcoholic parent, how would I fare in this world? How would you? Rosetta answers that question in a way that makes sense for the lead character. Her answers may differ from yours. Discuss.

FLIGHTPLAN (2005)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Robert Schwentke
Cast: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean (who, miraculously, does NOT die in this film)
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 37%

PLOT: A bereaved woman (Foster) and her daughter are flying home from Berlin to America. At 30,000 feet, the child vanishes, and nobody will admit she was ever on the plane.


I get it. Flightplan strains at the leash of credibility. A lot. In order for the plot to work, the audience has to believe that a number of people would have to be involved in a massive conspiracy, a cacophony of coincidences that screams “CONTRIVED” to any sane moviegoer.

But, as ridiculous as it seems, the movie still works incredibly well, even upon repeat viewings. Director Robert Schwentke has not exactly distinguished himself since this film (credits include R.I.P.D., Red, and the last two Divergent movies), but Flightplan displays a surefire command of tone, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere while keeping the camera free to move around the plane along seemingly impossible paths.

This film is a classic example of what Roger Ebert called a “locked room” puzzle. A girl is missing on an airplane – admittedly a very LARGE airplane, but still. There are only so many places she can be. The plane is searched, but she’s nowhere to be found, leaving only two possibilities: she was never there to begin with, or someone’s lying. But who? And why? She thinks she recognizes an Arab passenger on the plane…was he staring in her apartment window the previous night? Is she going crazy, or has there been an actual kidnapping? That’s the central mystery, and it carries the movie for most of its brief running time.

(There’s a neat section where Foster’s character (who, coincidentally, helped design the plane they’re on), monkeys around with the plane’s electronics and gets the oxygen masks to fall, to create a diversion for herself. Tell you what, that would get MY attention.)

The final resolution is…well, let’s say it answers all the questions of what happened without addressing HOW it happened. A lot of folks found that unsatisfactory (thus the 37% on Rotten Tomatoes), but the movie is so well-made and executed that, by the time the credits rolled, I didn’t mind it so much. But, you know…that’s just me.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1984)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (12/17/1984)
Director: Clive Donner
Cast: George C. Scott, David Warner, Joanne Whalley, Edward Woodward, Susannah York
My Rating: 10/10

PLOT: In 19th-century London, a bitter old miser who rationalizes his uncaring nature learns real compassion when three spirits visit him on Christmas Eve.

——————————

[SPOILER ALERTS! (For anyone whose souls are so dead they have never seen or read A Christmas Carol before…)]

The TV version of A Christmas Carol that first aired on CBS in 1984, starring the legendary George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge, is the best version of Charles Dickens’ story that I’ve ever seen.

Oh, but let me tell you why.

Without exception, every other version I’ve ever seen, including live theatre versions, have made humor and lightness their prevailing mood. The musical Scrooge (1970) does have its share of dark moments towards the end, but the darkness is derailed by an unnecessary detour into cartoonish humor (while in the depths of Hell, no less). I’m not saying that making the story fun is wrong, necessarily. After all, it’s a Christmas story, with a strong message of redemption, so why shouldn’t it be a joyous experience? Right?

Ah…but this 1984 version takes a novel approach. It realizes what I’ve always known all along: that this is, above all, a ghost story with a Christmas message. And not all ghost stories are merry and bright.

Take the Ghost of Christmas Present, for example. In this version, he’s played by Edward Woodward, with a deep booming voice, an absurdly hairy chest, and hidden stilts making him upwards of 7 feet tall. His eyes twinkle, but something about his grin and hearty laughter gives you the sense of a cat toying with a mouse. There are moments when he berates poor Scrooge for his vices, and his voice becomes intense, and the smile vanishes from your face, and he tells Scrooge that his life may be worth less than MILLIONS of other souls like Tiny Tim, and…it’s quite a moment. It reminds you that this is a morality tale.

Another example, of course, would be the ever-popular Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. In every other version I’ve seen, this specter doesn’t speak, just points, usually with some kind of musical flourish. This version is no different, except the filmmakers ingeniously use an intensely creepy sound effect whenever this Ghost points or nods. It’s like someone pulling a violin bow across a huge piece of sheet metal. The effect is not comic or melodramatic. It’s deeply unsettling.

Of course, yet another reason to love this version is the towering performance from George C. Scott as the proto-Grinch, a man for whom Christmas is just an “excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December.” He injects moments of sly humor if you watch carefully (to the mute Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he mutters, “You’re devilishly hard to have a conversation with”), but for the most part he plays the character completely straight with nary a grin to be seen except on the rarest occasions. This is an aspect missing from every other version. The prevailing wisdom seems to be to amplify and overdo the character of Scrooge, so he’s not as unlikable, I guess. Not this time. Scott creates a mean, heartless, ruthless businessman who would as soon bankrupt you as say two words to you. Even Albert Finney’s interpretation in Scrooge, as completely as he disappears into the role, is not as dark and merciless as George C. Scott’s version.

It’s that darkness that appeals to me here. Yes, yes, the ultimate scenes of happiness and redemption are all there – the boy on the street, Scrooge skipping around his room, “giddy as a drunken man”, the massive turkey – but I love this version because it remembers its roots. This is a gothic ghost story, and as far as I’m concerned, any version of A Christmas Carol would do well to remember that.

KLAUS (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

KLAUS (2019)
Directors: Sergio Pablos, Carlos Martínez López
Cast: Jason Schwartzman, J.K. Simmons, Rashida Jones, Norm MacDonald, Joan Cusack
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The origin story of a certain jolly fellow in a red suit is told with beautifully enhanced hand-drawn animation in a film that deserves to be ranked with the best holiday classics.


I was not prepared for this.

Netflix’s Klaus from 2019 is one of the most beautiful, magical, and relentlessly original holiday films I’ve ever seen.  And heart-rending.  There are emotional beats in Klaus that rival anything in Pixar’s catalog, from the opening sequence of Up to the finale of Inside Out.

Short review: Go. Watch it now. Why are you still reading this?

Long review:

It starts an unspecified number of years ago somewhere in what appears to be Scandinavia, but it could be anywhere.  Or nowhere.  Jesper (Jason Schwartzman) is the ne’er-do-well son of the postmaster general, or something like that.  Determined to make a man out of his son, Jesper’s father assigns him a task: start a post office in a remote northern village on a desolate island and generate 6,000 letters in a one-year period or get cut off from his family’s substantial wealth.

The visuals in this forbidding village could warm the surrealist cockles of Tim Burton’s heart.  Rooftops aren’t so much pointed as sharpened.  Wide-eyed children make snowmen that would give Calvin nightmares.  A generations-long feud between two families on either side of town seems to be their only purpose for staying in town in the first place.

(So far, I’m thinking, okay, kinda weird, not sure where they’re going with this…is this scrawny dude gonna be Santa?)

One thing leads to another and Jesper travels to the other end of the island to visit the isolated house of someone known locally only as the woodsman.  Here he discovers shelves and shelves of handmade toys, gathering dust.  One of these toys finds its way into the hands of a child back in town who wrote a letter asking for a toy…

And here is where the story’s streak of inspired originality really took off.  Virtually every aspect of the legendary Santa Claus is given its own special origin story, from the reindeer to the sleigh to the concept of a Naughty List, right down to getting coal in your stocking instead of a present.

Aha, you say, but this has already been done!  I liked it better when it was called Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, on TV in 1970, with Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, and Keenan Wynn!

True enough.  But Klaus ups the ante by imagining this tale in a way I’ve never seen before.  I’m finding it difficult to express my admiration without giving away key aspects of the film that make it such a delight.  It’s all done so organically, so naturally, that something happens, and you think, “Well, of course they think reindeer can fly, after seeing that!”  I found myself laughing out loud due to the sheer ingenuity on display.

I think it’s a great companion piece to that much-maligned holiday classic, The Polar Express.  Both films approach the Santa legend from different angles, but neither one talks down to its intended audience.  Here is a mystical figure, possessed of magical abilities beyond mortal man.  Both films treat him with the kind of childlike reverence he deserves, and if he’s a little scary sometimes, well…he is always watching…

But none of that would be enough to achieve perfection on its own.  What makes this movie perfect are the heart-rending emotional beats that come as complete shocks to the viewer.  You may notice that I haven’t mentioned Mrs. Klaus, nor is she listed on IMDb.  There’s a very good reason for that, but you won’t get it out of ME.  You may also be asking yourself, well, if this hermit woodsman turns into Santa Claus, what’s the deal with the postman?  Great question!  Watch the movie and find out.

(Pay attention to the wind…that’s all I’ll say.)

These and other surprises pop up here and there, like searching through old clothes and finding folding money in the pockets.  The finale might make you cry like a baby if you’re not careful.  You’ve been warned.

Klaus is buried treasure, lost amid the hubbub of many other films from that year that have been forgotten.  This one does not deserve to be forgotten.  It belongs on any list of classic holiday films, old and new.  If you’ve made it this far in the review, congratulations, thanks for reading, but now it’s time to GO WATCH THIS MOVIE.

Now available on Netflix.

HOUSE OF GUCCI (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Salma Hayek
My Rating: 5/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 61%

PLOT: An outsider marries into the Gucci family, and her unbridled ambition triggers a downward spiral of betrayal, revenge, and violence.


Watching Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci was a curious experience.  I could see glimmers of a great entertainment through bars of slow pacing, a meandering story, and unanswered questions.  The performances are top-notch, no question, but they are at the service of a movie that doesn’t seem interested in meeting their level of passion.

Inspired by true events, the movie tells the story of Patrizia Reggiani, a young woman from humble beginnings who meets and eventually marries Maurizio (Adam Driver), one of the heirs to the Gucci fashion empire.  Patrizia is played with fury and fire by Lady Gaga, who seems destined for another Oscar nomination.  Her character is portrayed as a latter-day Lady Macbeth, someone who sees through the deceptions of her new husband’s business associates and manipulates people and events for her family’s benefit.  In true tragic form, her ambitions threaten to derail everything she loves.

Adam Driver plays Maurizio as a rather slow fellow who disinherits himself so he can marry Patrizia but finds a way back into the fold via his uncle, Aldo (Al Pacino), who sees Maurizio as a good substitute for his own disappointing son, Paolo.  Paolo is played by Jared Leto, in another of the film’s performances destined for Oscar recognition.  Buried underneath flawless makeup and a skin cap, Leto portrays Paolo as a self-deluded buffoon whose fashion designs aren’t so much daring as unfortunate.  (Apparently, pastels and brown were never meant to mix…who knew?)

I mention the performances because they are the sole highlights of the film.  For two-and-a-half hours, these performances play against a backdrop of one dreary scene after another. Sure, the performances are fun to watch, but at the end of the day, if they don’t have anything interesting to say, it gets a little boring.  We get behind-the-scenes intrigues and betrayals that seem to owe more than a little to earlier crime epics by Scorsese and Coppola, but there was nothing to get really excited about.  Nothing grabbed me.

Ridley Scott’s films are normally way more imaginative than this.  They look better.  The cinematography is usually more inspired.  I’m not talking about his action or sci-fi epics, either.  I mean his small-scale triumphs like Matchstick Men or Thelma & Louise.  What happened here?  Was he not inspired by the story?  There is great material here, more than enough back-stabbing and lying and cheating to go around.  Yet everything is subdued, and plods, and inspires more yawns than anything else.  I didn’t experience any kind of excitement or passion one way or the other for any of the characters, or for the story.  It just didn’t make me care.

By the time House of Gucci is over, we’ve seen betrayals, marital infidelity, divorce, back-stabbing business deals, sex, and murder.  I have a friend who wrote a stage play that has almost all of those things, and it was WAY more entertaining than this film.