Tag: review

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Guillermo del Toro
CAST: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Charles Dance, David Bradley
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A brilliant but egotistical scientist brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that threatens to undo both the creator and his tragic creation.


Having never read the original novel by Mary Shelley, I have no idea if Guillermo del Toro’s rendition of Frankenstein is any more or less faithful to the source material.  What’s interesting about this version is that it feels like it is.  There are long passages of dialogue and even some monologuing on the nature of life, death, and the creator’s responsibility to their creation.  del Toro is smart enough to balance these cerebral discussions with enough gothic (and gory) horror to satisfy any fan of the genre.  Call it a good example of a thinking man’s horror film.

Oscar Isaac’s performance as Victor Frankenstein puts a new spin on the stereotypical mad scientist.  He’s no less obsessed than previous versions, but del Toro and Isaac went for a slightly different vibe in his personal appearance.  Rather than a cackling lunatic with a god complex, Isaac’s doctor looks and sometimes behaves more like a self-absorbed rock star…with a god complex.  (I learn on IMDb that this was by design; del Toro wanted Victor to evoke David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Prince…mission accomplished.)

Jacob Elordi as The Creature does an admirable job of generating sympathy and empathy for perhaps the greatest misunderstood monster of all time.  The unique makeup (which took up to 10 hours to apply!) allows Elordi to emote and lend humanity to the Creature in the second half of the film, especially during his encounter with the blind man.  There is a subtle but ingenious effect where one of his eyes will sometimes glow orange with reflected light as a reminder that, when push comes to shove, this Creature is not to be trifled with.

Mia Goth is a welcome presence as Elizabeth, who is not Victor’s love interest this time around, but fiancé to Victor’s younger brother, William.  I supposed I could quibble that the screenplay does not give Elizabeth much to do.  She comes across as the intellectual equal of Victor in a few well-written scenes, but her encounter with the chained Creature felt a little trope-y, and her character’s payoff left me wanting more.

The visual style of the film is crammed with del Toro’s signature fingerprints: huge gothic structures, elaborate costume designs (loved Victor’s mother’s red outfits near the start of the film), startling dream sequences, and lots of practical effects…well, more than there were in Pacific Rim (2013) and Crimson Peak (2015), anyway.  One image that really struck me was the unique design of two coffins seen in the film.  They looked more like futuristic cryogenic chambers than Victorian-era caskets.  Watch the movie and you’ll see what I mean.

Other things I loved:

  1. Victor’s early presentation of his theories to a disciplinary board, in which we get an echo of that creepy dead guy resurrected by Ron Perlman in del Toro’s Hellboy (2004).
  2. The towering set for Frankenstein’s laboratory.  What it lacks in the whirring, crackling machinery we normally associate with his lab, it makes up for in scale, including a yawning pit several feet across that really should have had a guardrail.
  3. Being able to get inside the Creature’s head this time around.  There have no doubt been other variations where the Creature speaks, but I haven’t seen one where he is this eloquent, expressing his pain and anguish over his unwanted existence and apparent immortality (his wounds are self-healing).  This is another factor that makes this movie feel more faithful to Shelley’s novel, even if it isn’t.
  4. The no-holds-barred aspect to the violence and gore, which can be quease-inducing, but which never feels overdone or exploitative.  In fact, the moment that scared me the most in the film had nothing to do with the gore or violence at all, but with one of the doctor’s early experiments that comes to life in a most surprising manner.

Above all, there’s the tragic nature of the poor Creature’s existence, the misunderstood monster that has been so often satirized or spoofed, and the deeper questions the story raises about our own lives.  It might be tempting to listen to the closing passages of the film and dismiss them as trite and sentimental, but Frankenstein earns those moments, in my opinion.  More than any other Frankenstein movie I’ve seen, this one made me think, and jump a little, in equal measures.  Tricky stuff.

À NOUS LA LIBERTÉ (1931)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: René Clair
CAST: Henri Marchand, Raymond Cordy, Paul Ollivier, Germaine Aussey
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: A convict escapes prison and becomes a wealthy industrialist, but his life of leisure is threatened when his former cellmate turns up unexpectedly.


À nous la liberté (rough translation: “freedom for all”) is a charming, if slight, romantic farce from celebrated French director René Clair, who would later make his mark in Hollywood films with I Married a Witch (1942) and And Then There Were None (1945) before returning to French cinema for the rest of his career.  It won’t go down as my favorite French film, or classic film, or anything like that, but as a snippet of cinema’s early years, along with some mildly scandalous history of its own, it’s worth a look for cineastes.

Louis and Émile are cellmates in a French prison.  Their daily routines are marked by hours and hours of assembling children’s toys on an assembly line that looks and feels a lot like the one from Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) or even that one at a chocolate factory in a famous episode of I Love Lucy – but we’ll come back to that.  They sing, too, while toiling.  There’s a LOT of singing in À nous la liberté, not all of it clearly motivated, but serving as a kind of punctuation mark or accent piece to various scenes.

Émile and Louis attempt to escape their prison, but through no one’s fault, only Louis gets away, while Émile remains behind.  After some amusing episodes involving Louis trying to blend unobtrusively back into society, he lands a job hawking phonographs to pedestrians for a department store.  He gets so good at it that eventually he’s running the store…and eventually, improbably, he becomes the owner of the factory that BUILDS the phonographs, making him rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Trouble arrives in paradise when Louis’ cellmate, Émile, unexpectedly shows up, recently released from prison.  But he’s not looking for a job or to “touch” an old wealthy friend.  He’s in love with a girl who works at Louis’ factory, and getting a job there is the easiest way to stay close to her.  (I don’t THINK her name is ever said aloud, but she’s listed on IMDb as “Maud”, so that’s what I’ll call her.)  If Émile’s behavior sounds mildly stalker-y, well, it is, but what are you gonna do, love is love, and I’m sure I could dig up a modern rom-com or two that feature stalking as a romantic element.  Somehow.

Plus, there’s this whole ironic subtext that shows how the assembly lines at Louis’ phonograph factories are no different from the assembly lines at the prison.  The movie is not subtle about their similarities, but how could it be?  This fluffy material is corny as all hell, but the movie never gets too schmaltzy.  And if you think you know how the romantic subplot plays out in a romantic comedy from the 1930s, check your assumptions.

The centerpiece of the film is an assembly line sequence at the phonograph factory, a scene that has been imitated many times.  More modern movies and TV shows may have improved it, but having seen this movie, it’s clear where their inspiration came from.  In fact, the most interesting backstory of À nous la liberté is the fact that, after Charlie Chaplin released Modern Times in 1936, the producers of the French film sued Chaplin for plagiarism.  Both films feature bumbling but charming protagonists who wind up working on, and screwing up, assembly lines, and both films were making a point about the increased mechanization and dehumanization of the labor force.  After dragging on for ten years, Chaplin ultimately settled (without admitting guilt), but remained friends with René Clair for years afterward.

Having seen both films now, my opinion is that the similarities between the two films are purely incidental.  You might as well say that Star Wars plagiarized Star Trek because they both have “Star” in the title.  Modern Times is funnier and faster-paced, while the most farcical scenes in À nous la liberté are played, not for laughs, but smiles, if that makes sense.  It does to me, so I’m sticking with it.

It’s also interesting to observe how Clair used sound in this film from sound’s early years.  As I said before, there’s a lot of singing, but scenes with dialogue are few and far between.  Ambient sound is almost non-existent.  Where you might expect to hear lots of noises – scenes on the assembly line, for example – we only hear background score.  It’s almost startling when one scene plays street noises during an outdoor shot.  It’s almost as if Clair – like Chaplin – was reluctant to completely abandon silent storytelling in favor of this new sonic “trend.”  As a result, while it’s not a laugh riot, the film does have a quaint likability that is hard for me to describe.

À nous la liberté is an interesting peek backwards in time to when many of the film tropes we take for granted today were shiny and new.  It didn’t get me all “riled up” at an emotional level, but it wasn’t a waste of time.  And, like I said, there are one or two surprises story-wise.  That’s never a bad thing.

THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
CAST: Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, Michael Sacks, William Atherton
MY RATING: 6/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A young wife breaks her husband out of prison in 1969 Texas so he can help reclaim their infant from a foster family.  The ensuing media circus takes everyone by surprise.


Watching Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express is like looking at one of those historical medieval tapestries of fierce battles, created by artists who didn’t yet know how to depict perspective.  There is plenty of action on display, but everything looks and feels flat.  The film took an award at Cannes that year for Best Screenplay, probably (at least partly) in recognition of how it shies away from a traditional Hollywood resolution, but even its downbeat ending is reminiscent of earlier, more resonant films like Bonnie and Clyde [1967] or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [1969].  As a stepping stone in the career of an eventual legend, it’s worth a view.  As a stand-alone film, it never quite achieves liftoff.

Based on real events, The Sugarland Express tells the story of Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn at her irrepressible, bubbly best), the young wife of prison inmate Clovis Poplin (William Atherton).  During a conjugal visit, just four months before Clovis is to be released, Lou Jean boldly busts him out because she needs his help to reclaim their infant, Langston, from a foster home.  Lou Jean herself has just finished serving time at a women’s prison, and the state, probably very wisely, determined Langston was better off with a foster family.  But they need to hurry because “I bet those Methodists are gettin’ ready to move out of state.”  Lou Jean’s delivery of “Methodists” tells you all you need to know about her feelings on the matter.

After Lou Jean breaks him out, a comedy of errors ends up in a situation where she and Clovis have hijacked a police cruiser and are holding a police officer at gunpoint.  They demand to be left alone while they drive to Sugarland, Texas, and retrieve their son, at which point they’ll release their hostage.

Now, this has all the makings of a smart, character-driven “road” movie, instigated by desperate people with no real plans for their end-game.  But for reasons I can’t put a finger on, nothing ever happens in the film that got me on the edge of my seat, figuratively speaking.  I fully comprehended the situation intellectually, but the film never got to me at an emotional level.

Could it be because we never really learn a lot about Lou Jean and Clovis in order to make them more empathetic?  No, I don’t think so, because over the course of the film, we’ll hear all about their past histories and previous brushes with the law.  The very fact they’re executing this plan to essentially kidnap Langston is proof of how unfit they are as parents.

I think part of the problem with the movie is…

…I’ve been sitting here for the last fifteen minutes trying to finish that sentence.  I can report that the film didn’t get to me emotionally, but I am struggling to explain why.  Could it be as simple as I think they’re not such great people, but the film seems to be siding with them as the movie progresses?  I mean, the movie HAS to side with them at least partially in order to make their journey mean anything.  Look at Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Bank robbers, lawbreakers, but clearly the good guys because, duh, Paul Newman and Robert Redford are playing them.

So, maybe it has to do with the casting?  The Sugarland Express had one of America’s sweethearts as a woman willing to resort to kidnapping just to commit another kidnapping in the name of maternal love.  So, we’ve gotta root for her, right?  But then we see her behaving in the most inane, brainless way for so much of the movie.  I found it difficult to side with her when I just wanted to, forgive the expression, slap some sense into her.

What about Clovis?  I could side with him.  He appears to have misgivings throughout the entire film, right up to the point of no return.  But the way he willingly goes along with the scheme because, dammit, it’s his wife…something about that also turned me off on him.  There are moments I felt sorry for him, for them both, because I could see where this movie was headed early on.  But that empathy wasn’t enough to make me feel a catharsis of tragic energy at the film’s finale.  There’s just something about Clovis and Lou Jean that wouldn’t allow me to get too worked up over their fate.

I guess I identified most with the kidnapped police officer, Slide (Michael Sacks).  Maybe too much.  From the beginning, Slide is begging them to drop their weapons and turn themselves over to the police.  At first, he looks like he’s just following his training.  But then the movie progresses, and doggone it, he starts to like these two loonies, even though Clovis handcuffs him and even shoots at him a couple of times in the heat of the moment.  He can see where this road ends, and he pleads with them not to do exactly what the Texas state troopers expect them to do, because he doesn’t want to see them dead.  Because Slide never stops imploring the Poplins to see sense and do the smart thing, I guess he’s who I sided with for the entire movie.  (Well, him and his superior, Captain Tanner [Ben Johnson], who also doesn’t want to see them die.)

But…isn’t that the wrong way to approach this movie?  I shouldn’t be siding with the cops, for cryin’ out loud, should I?  At least, not in this movie.  Discuss.

From a technical standpoint, it is pretty cool to see how Spielberg, in only his second film, was able to marshal vast resources to create some arresting imagery.  The sight of what looks like literally hundreds of cop cars following the Poplins is a deceptively difficult feat, logistically speaking.  There’s a tense shootout in a used car lot that would have been right at home in The French Connection.  And everywhere, there’s bits of humor that made me smile.  From the elderly couple abandoned on the road (long story) to the solution of how to get Lou Jean to a toilet while in the middle of an extended police chase, Spielberg constantly pokes us in the ribs.  If this had gotten to the hands of someone like John Landis, it’s easy to see how this could have been turned into an out-and-out comedy with thriller elements, instead of the other way around.

One other aspect I did like was the media circus that blew up around the Poplins’ plight.  I’m sure it is yet another link to previous anti-heroic films, but while I was watching it, I was reminded of only one film: Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers [1994].  The outpouring of affection from the general public for these two, let’s face it, outlaws was both funny and sobering at the same time.  It would have been interesting to see a scene or two at the end of the film as an epilogue, so we could get a reading on what the public thought about how the police should have handled the situation.

If comparing The Sugarland Express to most of Spielberg’s later films, it certainly comes up lacking, no question.  As a lifelong Spielberg fan, I am compelled to say it SHOULDN’T be compared to his later films because it was made before he’d had a chance to hone his skills and become the populist/mainstream film icon he is today.  Look carefully at the two-dimensional storytelling and you can see the outlines of what was coming around the bend for this modern-day master.

VAMPYR (Germany, 1932)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Carl Th. Dreyer
CAST: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A drifter obsessed with the supernatural stumbles upon an inn where a severely ill adolescent girl is slowly becoming a vampire.


Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr [pronounced “vom-PEER” in this German version] is not the scariest vampire film I’ve ever seen, but it is definitely one of the creepiest.  There’s a difference.  Dreyer’s film doesn’t move with the pacing seen in more standard horror fare.  Instead, it forsakes typical plot development for scenes that linger on the horrific or the unexplained.  In its own way, it is more directly related to the films of David Lynch than to any other contemporary monster movies of the time (Dracula or Frankenstein, for example, both 1931).

The story is fairly simple, but it belies the complex imagery that awaits the viewer.  A young drifter, Allan Grey, happens upon an inn from which he thinks he can hear animal sounds, or perhaps a young woman screaming.  The village doctor, who looks like a bespectacled long-lost relative of Doc Brown from Back to the Future, vehemently denies the presence any animals or young women on the property.  The innkeeper invites Allan to stay the night.  In the middle of the night, Allan’s sleep is interrupted by a mysterious visitor to his room who intones, “The girl must not die!”  The gentleman then leaves a package on Allan’s desk and writes a most portentous message: “TO BE OPENED ONLY UPON MY DEATH.”

What is this book?  What did Allan hear?  And how do you explain the shadows he saw on his way to the inn?  Shadows of people running along the lane – with no corresponding people attached to them?  Wouldn’t YOU like to know.

Vampyr is positively drowning in atmosphere.  Dreyer apparently shot many scenes with a piece of thin gauze over the lens, creating a misty layer that makes everything feel like a dream, even when Allan is awake.  Allan goes on frequent excursions around the inn and the surrounding property, and it’s here where most of the fantastical imagery is seen, especially when it comes to disembodied shadows.  In one mildly unsettling sequence, a shadow of a man with a peg leg descends a ladder and appears to sit on a bench…re-joining itself to a peg-legged man already sitting on the same bench.

There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to just write a list.  However, I am compelled to mention one sequence in particular that exudes as much creepiness as anything I’ve ever seen from this cinematic era.

It turns out there is, not one young woman at the inn, but two: Gisèle and Léone.  Léone is seen early on, confined to her bed with a mysterious illness, which we later learn has been brought on by her contact with a seldom-seen old woman who lurks somewhere on the property.  And there are some odd injuries on her neck…UH oh.

At one point, Léone awakes while Gisèle is alone with her.  I don’t remember what they discuss, but Léone goes into this weird sort of trance.  Without the use of any strange Chaney-esque makeup or camera tricks, Léone’s face becomes an object lesson in creepiness.  Her eyes open wide, her face breaks into a creepy grin, and she slowly moves her head from side to side, while Gisèle backs away in terror.  It might be the scariest sequence in the film, one which could easily compare to any subsequent monster or vampire movie.

Later, Dreyer throws more camera tricks at us in increasingly imaginative ways.  Allan dreams of a skeleton handing him a bottle of poison.  A dead man’s face appears in the sky during a sudden thunderstorm.  Dreyer includes camera moves that would fit right into any modern film.  And in a sequence that reminded me of Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Allan watches as his own body is sealed inside a coffin with a tiny square window for his apparently dead eyes to look out of.

If nothing else, Vampyr is an interesting artifact of cinema’s transitional era from silent to sound.  Even though there is a conventional soundtrack and we hear people’s voices as they speak, a lot of expository information is provided via title cards and long looks at passages from a book of vampire lore.  Given that the vampire mythology was then not as popular as it is today, I can forgive these beats that tend to bring the momentum to a halt.

While Nosferatu (1922) and the Bela Lugosi Dracula are much more famous, Vampyr is worth a look if you’re a horror fan.  While it doesn’t involve the kind of fear factor I tend to expect as a child of the 1970s and ‘80s, it is nevertheless creepy as hell. 

BLUE COLLAR (1978)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Paul Schrader
CAST: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Ed Begley Jr.
MY RATING: 6/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Three financially strapped automotive factory workers rob their own labor union, but when they get more than what they bargained for, their friendship and loyalty are tested.


There may come a day when I revisit Blue Collar and revise my current opinion.  It’s not impossible.  I’ll be a different person five or ten years from now.  I may have a different job with different bosses and co-workers, or I may be living in a different neighborhood in a different house.  All sorts of things could change that will affect my perception differently.  Until that happens, though, this is what I think:

Blue Collar, the directorial debut of eminent screenwriter Paul Schrader, author of Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and American Gigolo (1980), is a film with a good story to tell.  Not just good – important.  This is an important story about loyalty, friendship, and duty to your family.  Richard Pryor turns in a great performance, flexing his dramatic muscles as he seldom did, unfortunately.  Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard, and using source material from Sydney A. Glass, pulls no punches regarding corruption within the powerful auto workers union.  Character motivations are crystal clear from the opening scene to the final, cynical freeze frame.

But…but…I wish this story were contained in a film that made me care about these characters while the movie itself was playing.  Intellectually, I see the value of the story.  But as a moviegoer, I was less than moved.  Schrader’s direction is competent, but the film moves from beat to beat with the energy of a sloth.

Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) are three working-class friends on the line at an automotive plant in Detroit.  Their closeness is established in a bar scene that gave me hope for the rest of the film.  It plays almost like an Altman film, with some overlapping dialogue, simple but clear direction, and conversations that give us an instant picture of who these three disparate characters are.

It’s unclear what Smokey’s financial situation is until later in the film, but Zeke has back-taxes to pay because he has declared too many dependents for the last three years, and Jerry has a teenage daughter who is so desperate for expensive braces that she tries making some herself, with exactly the kind of results you’d expect.  Their union, which is supposed to help them, is a joke as far as they’re concerned; they can’t even fix Zeke’s broken locker door.  So, after Zeke makes some observations at the union’s local office, he and his pals hatch a plan to rob the office vault.

What they find there drives the rest of the plot, so I’ll tread lightly from here on out.  But the vault robbery is a good example of where the movie is lacking for me.  The plan is simple and relatively risk-free, but I was hoping for at least SOME suspense during the robbery.  A moment occurs when they’re about to be discovered, so they don their masks…but the masks that Zeke bought aren’t masks.  They are, in no particular order, plastic vampire fangs and a funny hat, a pair of sunglasses covered by an American flag design, and a pair of googly-eye glasses – you know, the ones where the eyeballs are attached to the glasses by long springs?  This crucial moment was ruined by the utter ridiculousness of their “costumes”; it felt like a transplant from some other Richard Pryor comedy about incompetent criminals.

After that, the screenplay feeds us important chunks of information, but there is no dynamic energy to the editing or the direction or something.  It just felt…boring.  Which is a shame because, again, there is a good story here.  The union local blatantly lies about the contents of the vault after the robbery.  An FBI agent tries to get Zeke, Jerry, or Smokey to spill what they know about union corruption, but they are too loyal to turn stool pigeon.  Zeke has to make some hard choices in one of the movie’s better scenes towards the end.  Smokey displays strength when threatened by union thugs, but he pays for it later.  And Jerry just wants to do the right thing without anyone getting hurt.

But there was just zero energy to the narrative.  I never felt carried along by the tide of the story.  And without that forward momentum, every scene felt like it was just marking time before the next.  To the degree that I understood the plight of these blue-collar workers, the movie just didn’t make me care enough to feel anything about it.  I did feel empathy for Zeke, mostly due to Pryor’s powerful, angry performance, but even that empathy was turned on its ear by the time we got to the closing credits.

There is, I guess, something to be said about how the screenplay is constructed so that, at any given point, you could say that any of the three main characters are the true lead of the film.  The story is truly balanced, and I give it credit where it’s due.  I just wish the storytelling was more dynamic.  Like I said, the day may come when my opinion of this movie will change.

Today is not that day.

…tomorrow’s not looking good, either.

THE BOYS IN COMPANY C (1978)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Sidney J. Furie
CAST: Stan Shaw, Andrew Stevens, James Canning, Michael Lembeck, Craig Wasson, Noble Willingham, R. Lee Ermey
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: [no score]

PLOT: In 1967, five young men undergo Marine boot camp training before being shipped out to Vietnam. Once they get there, the experience proves worse than they could have imagined.

[This review contains MILD SPOILERS concerning the film’s finale.]


I remember a short while ago, when I watched the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) for the very first time.  I remember asking myself, “Why did it take me so long to finally watch this movie?  It’s fantastic!”

I’ve just had the same exact experience after watching Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C, which I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) is the first attempt by Hollywood to provide a genuinely realistic portrayal of being a combat soldier during the Vietnam War.  There are some obvious parallels to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980), but this one was first out of the gate.  Company C is just as visceral, just as riveting, and just as entertaining to watch as those other films.  I have only seen a handful of Furie’s other films (including Iron Eagle [1986] and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace [1987]), so I can’t make a 100% informed opinion, but in my limited experience, this is far and away his masterpiece.  It goes on the list of my favorite war movies ever made, and I think it’s a real shame that it appears to have been nearly forgotten.

Like so many other war films that came after it, The Boys in Company C begins at boot camp.  More properly, it begins right outside the recruitment center (I think?) in late 1967, as several young men – boys, really – kiss their loved ones goodbye before getting on a bus.  In a weird way, this sequence reminded me of the opening scene in The Breakfast Club (1985) as each student is dropped off for detention by their parents (except for Bender, of course).  We are introduced to the boys who will become the key players: Washington, the angry black man (Stan Shaw); Pike, the country boy (Andrew Stevens); Foster, the aspiring writer (James Canning); Fazio, the Italian American from Brooklyn (Michael Lembeck); and Bisbee, the pacifist who is put on the bus in handcuffs (Craig Wasson).  Stereotypes?  Sure, I guess.  But the screenplay doesn’t limit them to JUST their stereotypes.  Washington, for example, starts out in camp as a guy who is looking out for himself, but after a surprisingly passionate speech from his drill instructor (R. Lee Ermey in his film debut!), he assumes the mantle of leadership and wears it exceedingly well.

We get the by-now standard scenes of the recruits getting their heads shaved, struggling through exhausting training runs, being called names that would’ve made George Carlin blush, and, eventually, graduation, where their reward for making it through boot camp is being assigned to combat duty in the ‘Nam.  Their problems begin even before they disembark from their troop carrier when the Vietnamese port comes under artillery fire.  It all sort of goes downhill from there.

The movie so far is nothing incredibly new, at least not to someone watching in the present day, but I had to keep reminding myself that this was probably the first time American audiences had seen a relatively honest representation of combat that wasn’t filtered through layers of self-censorship and jingoism.  M*A*S*H (1970) did show us the bloody reality of surgery in the field, but it didn’t concern itself too much with actual combat – plus it was set in Korea, not Vietnam.  A minor quibble.

There are a LOT of plot details I won’t relate here – the clueless captain, the “vital” convoy, Washington’s drug trafficking plans – because of the soccer subplot that reveals itself to be the film’s beating heart and real cry of protest.  Much like Kilgore and the California surfer in Apocalypse Now (1979), the squad captain learns that Pike, the country boy, is pretty good with a soccer ball.  There is a squad of elite Vietnamese military men who are also good at soccer.  The captain dreams up a plan: put together a soccer team of American soldiers who will play the Vietnamese men in an exhibition match.  If the American team wins, they will get a reprieve from combat and go on a “goodwill” tour of southeast Asia, including Tokyo and Bangkok.

Sounds good, right?  But complications arise when, at the match, the American general watching the match is approached by his opposite number in the Vietnamese army.  With the Americans leading at the half, the order is passed to the team: lose the match so the Vietnamese can save face in front of their own people.  If they throw the match, they will still get reprieved from combat to go play mare matches against Vietnamese teams…and lose every time.

The Americans can’t believe it.  Pike (and everyone else) wants to get back home, but he is afraid he can’t live with the shame of intentionally throwing a match, no matter what the big picture looks like.  But the orders contain no ambiguity.  Throw the match and go on tour, or win and go back to frontline combat the next day.

This is what the movie has been driving towards the whole time.  The squad has to collectively decide what is more important: winning or surviving.  I hope I don’t come off like an amateur historian here, but to me, that is the same question that could have been asked about the entire Vietnam conflict.  As a country, we had a chance to ask ourselves: is winning this war worth the price we’re paying?  How much more are we willing to spend, in money and lives?  In the film, the squad is asked to balance that equation themselves on a smaller, but no less important, scale.

Is this about honor?  Should they win the match to preserve their own personal integrity, even if it means going back to fighting in the jungle and maybe never making it back home?  Or should they throw the match, increasing their odds of making it home alive and boosting morale for their Vietnamese allies, but leaving them with a stain on their integrity?  Is this kind of thinking the reason the American government participated in possibly the most unpopular war in American history?  Because losing face was worse than losing lives?

These are questions I would not presume to think I could answer.  I know, of course, what I would have done in that situation, but I can only speculate because I have never been a soldier in a time of war.  The Boys in Company C put me right there and allowed me to understand the whys and wherefores of each major character in a way that we’ve seen in every notable war film ever since.  This is an incredibly important artifact in the history of war films, and it deserves to be seen by every movie fan.

[Trivia note: this movie was executive produced by none other than Raymond Chow, the man behind Enter the Dragon (1973) and nearly 200 other Hong Kong films, and virtually the entire movie, including the boot camp sequences, was filmed in the Philippines.]

GREY GARDENS (1975)

DIRECTORS: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer
MY RATING: 6/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Fresh

PLOT: The celebrated Maysles brothers spearhead this cult classic documentary about Big and Little Edie Beale, reclusive and eccentric cousins of Jackie Onassis who occupy a crumbling mansion in East Hampton, New York.


I have seen and loved many documentaries in my life, from the sublime (Baraka, 1992) to the absurd (The Aristocrats, 2005), from the terrifying (Gimme Shelter, 1970) to the edifying (Dark Days, 2000).  But after watching the cult classic Maysles brothers documentary Grey Gardens, I am sitting in front of my computer terminal and I am at a loss of what to say about it, beyond a summary of its contents.

As the film opens, Big Edie Beale, who celebrates her 79th birthday during the film, and her daughter, Little Edie Beale, 52, reside in a sprawling mansion nicknamed Grey Gardens in a high-end East Hampton neighborhood.  Their biggest claim to fame before this film is that they are cousins to Jackie Onassis.  To say their house is a mess is an insult to both the words “house” and “mess.”  It’s a dump, although we are shown newspaper articles that seem to indicate the house was in even worse condition before the Maysles started filming.  The state health department threatened eviction unless the mansion was cleaned up; there’s even a photograph of Jackie O pitching in with the cleanup.  Through the course of the film, the Maysles and their film crew will capture what some have described as “an impossibly intimate portrait” of a relationship between two people whose minds have retreated to a point where they scarcely notice their surroundings as they repeatedly hash out old arguments from years past.

Any fan of film has at least heard the name Grey Gardens or the names of the Beales at some point in their life.  I’m told it’s featured prominently in at least one episode of the television show Gilmore Girls.  The Criterion Blu-ray contains two interviews from noteworthy fashion designers who have both designed clothing lines directly inspired by Little Edie’s clothing in the film.  There are even pictures of a European photo shoot that replicates scenes from the movie.  This is arguably one of the most famous documentaries of all time.

So, I hit play on my Blu-ray player and started watching.  The cameras do indeed capture intimate moments between mother and daughter.  Little Edie’s fashion sense involves never being seen without something covering her head, whether it’s a turban, a sweater, or a dishtowel.  Big Edie spends – based on what I saw – most of her days in bed, leaving only to take in the sun on her porch or to use the restroom.  Sometimes she leaves the bed to eat a meal, but Little Edie usually brings the food to her mother.  In one sequence, Big Edie cooks corn on the cob on a hot plate while sitting in bed.  She shares her bed with one or more of their many cats, as well as various boxes, books, binders, and photographs.  The mattress is dotted with water stains and what appears to be rust.

But wait, there’s more.  There is a hole in the top corner of a wall in one of the hallways.  This is where a raccoon lives.  At one point, Little Edie leads the camera crew to the attic to perform her version of pest “control.”  She empties a loaf of Wonder Bread onto the attic floor.  Then, as an added treat, she empties an entire box of dry cat food on top of the bread.

Now, why am I mentioning the state of their surroundings instead of recounting the delightful (I guess) eccentricities these two women proclaim at each other night and day?  Because I could not take my eyes off the backdrop of the house itself, which is as much a character in the film as the Overlook Hotel is in The Shining.  There is a room that Little Edie is in the process of decorating, but it looks as if her design process is stuck at a fourth-grade level.  The grounds of the mansion appear to be in utter disarray, overgrown and wild, with unchecked vines and bushes threatening to swallow the house itself.  Every corner of Big Edie’s bedroom is laden with stacks of boxes containing old photo albums and vinyl records, many of which feature Big Edie herself.  (She was a recording star back in the day, apparently; she doesn’t sound half bad.)

We are treated to many scenes featuring Little Edie talking to us about her past, how her mother curtailed her ambitions to be a model in Europe in order to come back home and take care of her.  How her mother sent away one of her suitors because she, Big Edie, didn’t want another cook in her kitchen.  We hear from Big Edie talking about how wild Little Edie was, how she was so hard to handle, so she had to treat her sternly.  There’s a scene where Little Edie sings and sings, and it’s clear she is not as gifted as her mother was, but do you think that’s going to stop her?  No, ma’am, not even when Big Edie begs for a radio so she can listen to something else, ANYTHING else.

I’m watching all of this play out, as the directors capture remarkable footage and whispered conversations.  It is undeniably bizarre, yes, and some of it is mildly entertaining.  (Little Edie’s dancing scenes are worth the price of admission.)  But I could not stop asking myself this question while I was watching: “Why?”  Why is this movie necessary for me to watch?  What do I gain by becoming a fly on the wall and being privy to conversations between two people who would be better off if they lived in separate houses?  In separate states?  What am I missing?  I would imagine I could find all those answers in various other online reviews or movie blogs, but if those answers didn’t occur to me while watching the film, who should I blame?  My own preferences, or the film itself?  Yet another answer I don’t have.

I’d like to think my cinematic taste is relatively evolved, although I was a bit of a late bloomer.  I didn’t see the gangster masterpiece The Public Enemy (1931) until recently, and I have yet to see more than one film by Abbas Kiarostami.  But I love a great documentary, and this has a reputation for being one of the genre’s best.  So, why did I not respond to it as enthusiastically as so many other people have?  What am I missing?  How is this entertaining?  This might hit more poignantly with mothers and daughters, but I’m just speculating.

I have no answers.  I can only promise that, at some point, I will watch this movie again because I do think it deserves another chance.  I don’t know when that will be, but when I do, I’ll try to ignore the house and focus more on the characters.  I’ll keep you posted.

THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Willam A. Wellman
CAST: James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, Joan Blondell
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: An Irish-American street punk tries to make it big in organized crime during Prohibition.


Having just finished watching Little Caesar (1931) a few days ago, I popped in The Public Enemy, expecting more of the same, if I’m being honest: a fledgling gangster picture, rough around the edges, not spectacular, but historically important.  I could not have been more wrong.  Where Little Caesar at times seemed to be going through the motions, The Public Enemy crackles and sizzles and pops off the screen, still capable of shocking and surprising me nearly a century after it was released.  If that’s not the definition of a masterpiece, well, it damn sure oughta be.

James Cagney gives one of his most indelible performances as Tom Powers, a kid who grew up tough with his best friend, Matt Doyle.  We meet them first as kids in 1909, raising a little hell, teasing Matt’s sister, disdaining Tom’s goody-two-shoes older brother Mike, and learning to treat the law and police officers as a necessary evil.  They supplement their income by stealing watches and giving them to a small-time hood, Putty Nose, who gives them a pittance and treats them like Fagin treated Oliver Twist.  Six years later, they’ve grown into young men (Matt is played as an adult by Edward Woods) who are still in league with Putty Nose, but when a planned theft goes awry, Putty leaves Tom and Matt dangling and wishing only for revenge.

(I enjoyed this back-story approach, as opposed to Little Caesar, which by comparison feels like it plunks us into the middle of a story already in progress and wastes no time waiting for us to catch up.  I know I probably shouldn’t critique a movie by comparing it to another, but I can’t stop myself, sue me.)

It’s during this botched robbery that we get the first glimpses that this movie will pull no punches when it comes to violence, or at least as much as it could in 1931.  A fleeing accomplice is shot at least twice in the back by a patrolman.  He chases Tom and Matt into a dark alley.  We see gunshots flare in the darkness with no clear idea of what’s happening.  Tom and Matt reappear, toss their guns away, and run off…and in a poignant button to the scene, we see a close up of the patrolman’s gun hand lying lifeless under a streetlamp.  We see nothing graphic, but we know exactly what’s happened.  The Public Enemy will use this device many times throughout the picture, to great effect.

Time passes.  Tom’s older brother, Mike, enlists in the Marines for World War I.  No love is lost between the two of them when Mike learns of Tom’s criminal activities.  When Prohibition is enacted, Tom and Matt get even more involved in those activities, working for a sharply dressed mobster, “Nails” Nathan.  They start making more money, buying fancy new cars and clothes.  (One of the funnier scenes occurs when Tom is getting fitted for a custom suit by a tailor who is so far in the closet he’s finding Christmas presents from 1889.)  They meet a couple of molls, which leads to the famous “grapefruit” scene that had women’s groups up in arms…maybe it still does, I couldn’t say.  And they get better at their jobs, in deeper with the mob, and suddenly…

But I’m summarizing again.  That’s how this movie has gotten to me.  I am so enthused about it that I want to shake people by the collar and say, “If you love gangster movies, don’t make the same mistake I did by not seeing The Public Enemy until I was [age deleted]!  It’s sensational!  Here, let me tell you about it…”

Director William A. Wellman (The Ox-Bow Incident, 1942) displays a directorial style that, to my untrained eye, transcends the era in which he was working.  Made in 1931, it feels like it was made ten or fifteen years later, in the vein of the best films of Wilder or Hawks.  Martin Scorsese even calls it “the birth of modern movie acting,” and it’s hard to argue with him when you’re watching Cagney command every single second he’s onscreen, whether he’s whispering sweet nothings into a girl’s ear or playfully chucking his mom on the chin or contemplating gruesome violence as his face twists into an evil grin.

I feel it necessary to mention once more the shocking violent acts perpetrated during the film.  Again, we rarely actually see the violent acts themselves (like the infamous ear scene in Reservoir Dogs [1992]), but that just makes them land even harder.  The camera either tracks off the impending scene or stays behind while gunmen march into another room, leaving us to hear the violence instead of seeing it.  It’s practically Hitchcockian, and it’s perfectly executed.  This method makes the film feel even MORE modern.  Re-shoot this movie, shot for shot, line for line, with all of the tools available to the modern filmmaker, and it would still work, even in a world where Goodfellas and The Untouchables exist.

So, run, don’t walk, to either your friendly local streaming service or to your favorite online retailer and buy or stream The Public Enemy today.  And don’t thank me.  Just promise to tell YOUR friends how awesome it is.  Because it really, really is.

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1973)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: John Cassavetes
CAST: Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, Fred Draper, Matthew Laborteaux (for all you Little House fans out there)
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 89% Fresh

PLOT: Domestic turmoil gets a whole new definition in director John Cassavetes’ landmark portrait of a family in psychological free-fall.


I am a newcomer to the films of John Cassavetes.  The only one of his films I’d seen prior to A Woman Under the Influence is Love Streams (1984), a character study of a woman, played by Gena Rowlands, whose determination to only be herself puts her in conflict with the people and expectations around her.  As a director, Cassavetes seemed only to be interested in putting real people on the screen.  I don’t mean that other great films don’t do that kind of thing, but few directors have made films with scenes so genuine that I had to fight the urge to cough and look away because I felt like I was intruding on a private conversation.

A Woman Under the Influence is about a woman, Mabel Longhetti, a mother of three, who is similar to the woman in Love Streams in that she is constantly waging a battle between how she wants to behave and what is expected of her.  The difference this time is that Mabel is clearly suffering from…well, I’m not going to embarrass myself by putting a name to it because I’m not a psychiatrist.  She seems to be overly anxious all the time.  ALL.  THE.  TIME.  Her husband, Nick (Peter Falk), appears to be sympathetic with her anxiety, almost to a fault sometimes, but he tends to explode at her when she tries to be the life of the party.

How has this relationship lasted through three children?  Nick promises Mabel a romantic night at home, but is unexpectedly called away when a city water line bursts.  (He works in construction.)  She assures him everything’s fine on the phone…and promptly walks out of the house, goes to the nearest bar, and picks up a random dude and brings him home to spend the night.  But hey, Nick’s no angel, either.  After a long shift at work, he impulsively invites his entire crew of roughneck buddies to his modest home for a spaghetti dinner…cooked by Mabel, of course.  Mabel anxiously tries to “act normal” by being friendly and chummy with Nick’s co-workers, but she overdoes it, and Nick blows up at her.

Later, there is a remarkable scene where Nick brings a doctor to the house to see if he can talk Mabel down from one of her episodes.  Gena Rowlands adds these brilliant physical tics and peculiarities to Mabel that, in someone else’s hands, would be showboating, but with Rowlands, they come off as so real that it felt like I was watching a documentary.  I read on IMDb that Cassavetes did very little rehearsing, if any at all, so a lot of what we see in this scene and elsewhere was improvised on the spot.  It’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.  Had it not been for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Rowlands would have walked away with the Oscar.

A Woman Under the Influence was one of the first movies to really make waves as a truly independent production, predating the modern indie movement by some fifteen years or so.  Is it a movie I enjoyed watching?  Yes, but not in the same way that I enjoy watching The Goonies or Avatar.  This was like watching There Will Be Blood or Sophie’s Choice.  It’s an amazing example of acting as a craft, as an art form.  Not a single scene felt scripted or contrived.  I never knew Peter Falk had this kind of range as an actor.  I’d heard that Gena Rowland’s performance was the stuff of legend, and now I understand the hype.  If I have to be honest, I didn’t care for the very end of the film, a scene that seems to indicate that nothing will keep Mabel and Nick apart, even though they are not good for each other, in my opinion, especially considering what happens in the scene immediately preceding it.

This is a shorter review than I might normally write, but words are failing me with this one.  I’ll start describing one scene, then another, then another, and soon I’ve just recapped the entire film, which I don’t want to do.  This movie is searing, uncompromising, authentic.  To do it justice, I’d have to go away for a month or two and write an old-fashioned research paper (remember those?) complete with outlines, bullet points, and a bibliography.  Whatever you may have heard about Gena Rowland’s performance is 100% true, and then some.  In an earlier review of Peter Hall’s The Homecoming (also 1973), I mentioned that I did not have a lot of space in my head for blistering dramas about dysfunctional families, but I’m glad I made room for A Woman Under the Influence.  It’s a master-class of direction and performance.

WEEKEND (France, 1967)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jean Luc Godard
CAST: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Fresh

PLOT: A married couple go on the road trip from hell to visit the wife’s parents, intending to kill them for her inheritance.


You don’t risk the time it takes to do this…unless the act itself has meaning. – Detective Somerset, Se7en (1995)

In my personal opinion, there are few things more dangerous than a skilled director who genuinely has something to say.  Oliver Stone.  Stanley Kubrick.  Martin Scorsese.  Spike Lee.  Even Kevin Smith (Dogma, 1999), among many others you or I could name.  Give these guys a finished script and a camera and watch the fireworks from a safe distance.

In 1967, iconoclastic filmmaker Jean Luc Godard became disgusted or disillusioned or just plain pissed off about the class division in France and around the world, especially with how the middle class/bourgeoisie had forsaken human connection for the accumulation of material wealth.  So, he dashed off a screenplay, gathered up a crew and some actors (including a lead actress that he specifically did not like, because he needed her to play a CHARACTER he did not like), and made a film that defies classification or genre.  Is it a comedy?  A drama?  Satire?  I’m still not sure.  All of the above?  None of the above?  Weekend stands stubbornly apart from anything I’ve ever seen, thumbing its nose at the world with one hand while flipping the bird with the other.  It is many things, but timid it is not.

The movie begins with a simple enough scene, interrupted by title cards that say things like, “A FILM FOUND IN A DUMP”.  A husband and wife calmly discuss their plans to murder her parents so she can get her inheritance.  They might as well be talking about what movie to see tonight.  When the husband leaves the room, the wife takes a call from her lover.  In the driveway of their house, a fight breaks out among three people about…what?  Doesn’t matter, they’re never seen again, and the husband and wife observe the fight without commenting on it or making any attempt to stop it.

This is followed by an extraordinary scene, in a film full of extraordinary scenes, in which the wife, apparently speaking to her analyst, describes, in graphic detail, a sexual encounter she had with a strange man and his other mistress.  Meanwhile, Godard’s camera does a slooow zoom in to the woman’s face, then a slooow zoom out to reveal she’s in her bra and panties, then another slooow zoom in, and out, and in, and out, and you get the idea, right, wink, wink, nudge, nudge?

Is Godard being too obvious in this scene?  Clearly.  So, what is he trying to say here?  By being so blatantly obvious, is he parodying earlier French New Wave and Italian neo-realist films, some of which invested a lot of screen time in long conversations about nothing?  Sure, let’s go with that.  What’s with that in-and-out camera move that I read someone describe as “masturbatory” that occurs during the explicit discussion?  Is he also poking fun at other filmmakers who lack subtlety?  Yep, that works, too.  In a weird way, I was reminded of Tarantino’s Kill Bill cycle, movies that took every kung fu trope imaginable, turned the volume up to eleven, and then turned it up some more.  That’s what Godard is doing here.  Why?  As Robin Williams once said, “Because we’re French.”

That’s just the first two scenes.  Later, there is a justly famous tracking shot (really two or three that are spliced together) that lasts for nine minutes and covers 300 meters of ground.  It tracks past an endless traffic jam as our “heroes” try to get around them on their way to kill her parents.  The camera passes cars, convertibles, trailer trucks, a flatbed with two caged lions and a monkey on a leash, horns honking, people yelling at each other.  THIS part reminded me of some of the best “Family Guy” gags where something is spun out for a ridiculously long time, where the duration of the event becomes the gag, instead of the gag itself.  In the film, it actually did become kind of funny…until finally, nine minutes later, we see the cause of the traffic jam, and my jaw dropped.

Car accidents are a recurring motif throughout the film.  Perhaps they represent Godard’s assertion that his country was, at the time, more or less a trainwreck.  With other filmmakers, showing just one or two car wrecks would get the point across.  Not Godard.  They’re everywhere.  And you don’t get just twisted and burning metal; there’s also broken and bloody bodies adorning the wrecks and the roadside.  And through all of this (and more), our main characters walk or drive, apathetic to the chaos, asking everyone – even the dead bodies – how to get back to the main road, blind to the madness around them.

Godard adds intertitles at random intervals, some of which are laden with French cultural references that escaped me.  Some of them didn’t even get translations on my Blu Ray.  One of them says “THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL”, which is the title of a famous film by Luis Buñuel…sly wink to the cinemaniacs in the audience.  Go Godard, celebrating geek culture before it was cool.  Some of them are repeated while the film backtracks as if the projectionist is having a spasm.  At one point, the film jumps and skips forward as if there was a bad splice in the reel. At another, a scene occurs in a field full of abandoned cars. Then, JUMP CUT, and the cars are now a flock of sheep. Take THAT, audience expectations!

At every stage, Godard is constantly reminding the viewer that they’re watching a movie.  One of the characters even says, “What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people.”  Later there are scenes that approximate some kind of revolution.  Battles are fought.  The gunplay looks curiously amateurish.  There’s a scene with a pig.  I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that it was definitely harmed in the making of this movie.  Same with the chicken.

The chaotic nature of the movie was mesmerizing, like…a car accident that you can’t turn away from.  To fully analyze every historical, literary, and cinematic reference would be like trying to catalog every single pop culture reference in Ready Player One [2018], and that’s something for which I have neither the time, the inclination, the education, nor the space to do.  Weekend is not for everyone, he said, blatantly stating the obvious.  But I ultimately enjoyed it because it’s not that often I get to listen to the voice of a really angry filmmaker.  I may only understand the basics of what Godard is angry about, but that doesn’t diminish the power of his statement.