movie gourmet

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY: just a whole lotta fun

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Photo caption: Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. Courtesy of Walt Disney Studio Motion Pictures.

What everyone wants out of the new Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is to enjoy Harrison Ford’s relatable Indiana Jones survive a series of harrowing chases, and director James Mangold’s Dial of Destiny delivers. This is pure entertainment.

The opening set piece in Raiders of the Lost Ark was breathtaking to audiences in 1981, and the opening of Dial of Destiny meets that standard. Once again, the plot has the characters, good guys, bad guys and, this time, an ambiguously-motivated woman, hunting an archaeological MacGuffin. Once again, they cover the globe, dipping from thrilling action set piece to thrilling action set piece. As in Raiders, history’s worst actual villains, the Nazis, make for the best movie villains.

Harrison Ford is 80-years-old and convincingly plays Indy at the approximate ages of 41 in 1945 and 65 in 1969. The filmmakers de-aged him by four decades with astounding computer effects. I totally suspended disbelief and never thought about Indy being decades younger than Ford now is. I will say that Harrison Ford can move his body with remarkable suppleness for an 80-year-old.

Fitting for a movie with its star playing forty years younger, the story revolves around time travel.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator and star of Fleabag, co-stars as Helena, the daughter of Indy’s old pal; Helena is as smart and daring as Indy, and even more obsessive. Helena’s motives, however, are in question and Waller-Bridge brings the needed edginess to the role. Future Raiders sequels starring Waller-Bridge are possible.

Mads Mikkelsen, one of my favorite screen actors, plays the villain, a guy who aspires to be more effective than Hitler. Mikkelsen, who often plays villains in big budget Hollywood thrillers, is a brilliant actor in a wide range of Scandinavian movies, having delivered some of the best performances of the past two decades in After the Wedding, The Hunt, Another Round, and Riders of Justice.

Shaunette Renée Wilson makes a compelling presence early in the film as a mysterious secret agent. As expected, Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas come through with solid performances. There are sentimental and rewarding cameos by Ford’s Raiders of the Lost Ark co-stars Karen Allen and John Rhys-Davis.

Ethann Isidore ably plays Helena’s 12-year-old partner-in-crime. Since Ke Huy Quan played Indy’s child sidekick in Temple of Doom 38 years ago and won an acting Oscar THIS YEAR, let’s not dismiss Ethann as a one-hit-wonder.

The enormous henchman is played by Dutch actor Olivier Richters, who really is a 7 foot 2 bodybuilder.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is just a whole lotta fun.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Jennifer Lawrence in NO HARD FEELINGS. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of the Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings, and I warn you away from Wife of a Spy. Coming up: a new review of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.

REMEMBRANCE

Prolific actor Julian Sands earned 156 screen credits and will be best remembered for A Room with a View.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Macon Blair in BLUE RUIN

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • Blue Ruin: fresh take on the revenge thriller. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Revenge: The web is spun. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Listening to Kenny G.: derision, devotion and a hard-working guy. HBO.
  • Piggy: surprising and darkly hilarious. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Riders of Justice: thriller, comedy and much, much more.
  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Drinking Buddies: an unusually genuine romantic comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

ON TV

Millard Mitchell and James Stewart in WINCHESTER ’73

On July 1, Turner Classic Movies presents what is perhaps the best of director Anthony Mann’s “psychological Westerns”, Winchester ’73 (1950) with James Stewart. Winchester ’73 taps the quest and revenge genres, and it has the Western’s requisite Indian battle and climactic shootout.  Westerns were oft about Good versus Bad, but Mann makes Jimmy Stewart’s character in Winchester ’73 much more complex and morally ambiguous – and he has what we now call “unresolved issues”.  The bad guys are Dan Duryea at his oiliest and Stephen McNally at his most brutish.  The 29-year-old Shelly Winters finds herself as the object of several characters’ desires.  Millard Mitchell is perfect as Jimmy’s sidekick. One of my favorite character actors, Jay C. Flippen, shows up as a cavalry sergeant.

Stephen McNally, Shelly Winters and Dan Duryea in WINCHESTER ’73
WINCHESTER ’73

WIFE OF A SPY: espionage non-thriller

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Photo caption: Yû Aoi and Issey Takahashi in WIFE OF A SPY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

In the espionage non-thriller Wife of a Spy, the prosperous Yusaku (Issey Takahashi) runs a business in international commerce. That is increasingly uncomfortable in 1940 Japan, where the militaristic government is whipping up xenophobia and bullying those Japanese who interact with foreigners.

Yusaku is a smooth cosmopolitan who won’t be intimidated. He keeps on the road, even to dangerous hotspots like Manchuria. That’s not okay with his loving, apparently frivolous wife Santoko (Yû Aoi), who, frustrated by his absences, is getting increasingly suspicious about what he’s really up to.

She finally stumbles upon his secret – he and his nephew Fumio (Ryôta Bandô) are outraged by the war crimes of the military government and are engaged in a secret plot to undermine it. Santoko, who was been a mere adornment, becomes herself embroiled.

Regrettably, Wife of a Spy is more of a snoozer than a thriller. It just takes director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) too long to get through the first and second acts.

Worse, I found the sudden dramatic lurches in the performances by Yû Aoi and Ryôta Bandô very off-putting. I don’t think I missed something cultural because I’ve watched a lot of Japanese cinema, and haven’t seen anything like this before. It’s like the director of a high school play says, “Now throw yourself on the floor!” Yû Aoi is a popular and lauded actress who has five nominations and two wins in the Japanese equivalent of the Oscars. I’m blaming Kurosawa.

I’m also mostly alone in my opinion. Wife of a Spy enjoys a high score of 79 on Metacritic and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Wife of a Spy’s advocates may be seduced by the film’s undeniable beauty. The cinematography by Tatsunosuke Sasaki, production design by Norifumi Ataka and the costumes by Haruki Koketsu are exquisite.

Here’s a novel aspect to Wife of a Spy. The hero is a traitor to his nation. Yusaku loves Japan, hates the Japanese government, and believes Japan will be better off the sooner that Japan loses the war. So, he is trying to hasten the defeat of his own nation’s military, which is the definition of traitorous. I haven’t heard that this was hugely controversial in today’s Japan.

Wife of a Spy is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and KinoNow and is included on MHz.

NO HARD FEELINGS: an amusement with Jennifer Lawrence

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Photo caption: Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman in NO HARD FEELINGS. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

In the comedy No Hard Feelings, the summer season is beginning in Montauk, and the introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is slated to enter Princeton in the fall. His over-protective and intrusive parents worry that his social immaturity will stunt his future, so they hire a financially strapped Uber driver/bartender (Jennifer Lawrence) to date him and get him out of his shell – essentially to take his virginity for a used Buick Regal.

Of course, it’s absurd that Jennifer Lawrence would have 103 minutes of difficulty in seducing a high school senior, and part of the fun is in suspending disbelief. It all makes for good, dirty fun, and No Hard Feelings is an amusing diversion because of Jennifer Lawrence.

After her stunning dramatic debut in Winter’s Bone, Lawrence has shown a gift for comedy in Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and Don’t Look Up, establishing that she can soar in wise-cracky role. She cracks wise here, too, and also shows off a gift for broad physical comedy in bits like climbing concrete stairs on roller skates.

Lawrence has achieved fame and fortune from eight fantasy movies as Katniss and Raven, respectively, in the Hunger Games and X-Men franchises. She has recently voiced her desire to return to human-scale stories, and No Hard Feelings is one of these, along with the much better Don’t Look Up and Causeway. Good for her.

No Hard Feelings skewers helicopter parents and the invasion of rich outsiders pricing the locals out of their hometowns. Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti are excellent as the parents, and Broderick’s rich guy haircut is priceless.

The Wife and I laughed together at some scenes; she laughed at some others and I laughed at some more. I liked the movie more than she did, but neither of us complained about wasting an hour-and-a-half of our lives. We talked about it on the way to dinner, and I haven’t thought about it since.

Co-writer and director Gene Stupitsky wrote for the American version of The Office, earning some Emmy nominations, so he is capable of better comedy than this, I’m not embedding the trailers because both the Sony red band trailers make No Hard Feelings look like a very stupid teen comedy and, although it has elements of that type, it’s much better that that overall.

Photo caption: Jennifer Lawrence in NO HARD FEELINGS. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Aline Kuppenheim in CHILE ’76. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – Three excellent international films are playing arthouse theaters: the gripping Holocaust thriller Persian Lessons, the Chilean suspenser Chile ’76, and the mesmerizing Italian exploration of of male friendship and self-discovery, The Eight Mountains. See as many of them as you can find.

Plus, I have new reviews of the corporate thriller Tetris, set amid the implosion of the USSR, and the insightful documentary Body Parts, about on-screen sex from a female perspective.

REMEMBRANCE

Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R.

Glenda Jackson won Oscars for Women in Love and a A Touch of Class. I most admired her as the fierce Queen Bess in the 1971 miniseries Elizabeth R. Many actors have tried on politics in real life, but Jackson took off 23 years from her acting career to serve as a hard Left Labor Party MP, before returning to the stage as an acclaimed King Lear.

CURRENT MOVIES

Cristiano Sassella and Lupo Barbiero in THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS. Courtesy of Janus Films.

WATCH AT HOME

THE BRA

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Revenge: The web is spun. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Blue Ruin: fresh take on the revenge thriller. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Listening to Kenny G.: derision, devotion and a hard-working guy. HBO.
  • Piggy: surprising and darkly hilarious. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Riders of Justice: thriller, comedy and much, much more.
  • Drinking Buddies: an unusually genuine romantic comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

ON TV

Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A.

On June 28, Turner Classic Movies brings us one of my favorites – 83 minutes of noir hysteria titled D.O.A. This gripping whodunit opens with a man walking into a police station to report HIS OWN MURDER. The man (Edmond O’Brien) finds out that he has been dosed with a poison for which there is no antidote – and that he has only a few days to live. He desperately races the clock to find out who has murdered him and why. Much of D.O.A. was shot on location in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and one SF scene has one of the first cinematic glimpses into Beat culture. The little known director Rudolph Maté gave the film a great look, which shouldn’t be a surprise because Maté had been Oscar-nominated five times as a cinematographer. The next year, he followed D.O.A. with another solid noir, Union Station, with William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald.

TETRIS: corporate thriller amid communist collapse

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Photo caption: Taron Egerton in TETRIS. Courtesy of AppleTV.

Tetris, the story of the race for the rights to the video game, is an entertaining corporate thriller.

Taron Egerton (unrecognizable from Rocketman) plays Henk Rogers, a small-time entrepreneur who is betting everything on snaring the rights to Tetris for Nintendo. As written and as played by Egerton, Henk Rogers is an ever-earnest hustler (in the best sense), with a Ted Lasso-like moral core. Rogers is plunged into a competition where the other players, a seasoned software merchant and a British billionaire, have no compunction about cheating.

To complicate things, the video game rights are owned by the government of the USSR, which is in the throes of imminent collapse. It’s unclear who can ink the deal for the Soviet state, which always moves with cumbersome suspicion and xenophobia. Here, the Soviets don’t really appreciate the value of Tetris, but they know it’s valuable and are desperate not to be taken by Westerners.

Egerton is good, and benefits from vivid supporting performances by Robert Allam as Robert Maxwell, the blustering magnate on the precipice of financial collapse, Igor Grabuzov as a menacing wannabe oligarch and the ever-reliable Toby Jones as a crooked competitor.

It’s a fun watch. Tetris is streaming on AppleTV.

BODY PARTS: on-screen sex from the female gaze

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Photo caption: A scene from BODY PARTS. Courtesy of Shout! Studios.

The documentary Body Parts is about moviemaking and sex – and from a female point of view. That is, of course, overdue because we’ve had a century of movies greenlit, financed and made by men, operating from a male perspective and generally without accountability. Of course, movies have always reflected our society and culture. How movies have been made – and how they’re being made now – is fascinating stuff. Especially the sex part.

With Body Parts, director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and producer Helen Hood Scheer have created an impressively comprehensive survey of history and current practices. We get unflinching looks at titillation and exploitation, the casting couch and worse (Harvey Weinstein). And there are fascinating, behind the scenes procedurals on the filming of scenes of sexual intimacy, including the new deployment of intimacy coordinators in filmmaking.

Jane Fonda leads a brigade of actress talking heads who share their experiences. Of course, Fonda is an Oscar-winning movie star and a feminist icon. But before that, she was a starlet in an age where there were essentially zero women’s voices in filmmaking. While the Production Code was still in its final days in the US, she was acting in European films that were free of those restrictions, but before the women’s liberation movement had traction. Fonda’s candor (and ruefulness) adds important perspective to Body Parts.

On IMDb’s User Reviews, one perceptive contributor has noted that “men are giving this an average rating of 5.8 while women are averaging an 8.3.” I understand why women love Body Parts, but not why some men don’t. It’s decidedly not a screed, and, as a man, I didn’t find it at all scolding, threatening or unpleasant.

I screened Body Parts for the SLO Film Fest. Body Parts is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Lars Eidinger in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – The gripping Persian Lessons is opening more widely in LA and the Bay Area. Plus new reviews of the Chilean suspenser Chile ’76, the mesmerizing Italian exploration of of male friendship and self-discovery, The Eight Mountains, and the unpretentious Korean action comedy The Roundup: No Way Out.

REMEMBRANCE

Actor Treat Williams began his career with a string of interesting movies from 1976 through 1981: The Ritz, Hair, and the highly acclaimed Prince of the City. He continued a prolific and respectable career for four more decades, but his films never matched his early ones.

CURRENT MOVIES

Aline Kuppenheim in CHILE ’76. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

WATCH AT HOME

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

Siren Jørgensen in REVENGE. Courtesy of Cinequest.
  • Revenge: The web is spun. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Blue Ruin: fresh take on the revenge thriller. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Listening to Kenny G.: derision, devotion and a hard-working guy. HBO.
  • Piggy: surprising and darkly hilarious. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
  • Riders of Justice: thriller, comedy and much, much more.
  • The Bra: Just your average silent Azerbaijani comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • Drinking Buddies: an unusually genuine romantic comedy. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.

ON TV

Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell and Raymond Burr in PITFALL

On June 19, Turner Classic Movies features one of my Overlooked Noir, Pitfall (1948), a noir thriller without either a conventional sap or a conventional femme fatale. Dick Powell plays a WW II vet who is bored with the post-war suburban humdrum, and Lizabeth Scott plays a gal with terrible taste in boyfriends. Neither deserves to be dragged into a thriller, but they are. Raymond Burr, again, makes for a menacing sicko stalker.

Dick Powell and Lizabeth Scott in PITFALL

THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS: two men, each finding himself

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Photo caption: Cristiano Sassella and Lupo Barbiero in THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS. Courtesy of Janus Films.

The sweeping Italian drama The Eight Mountains is a mesmerizing exploration of of male friendship and self-discovery. Pietro is the 11-year-old son of a successful engineer in bustling, industrial Turin. When his parents rent a summer apartment in a tiny village high in the Italian Alps, he meets the only local child, Bruno, also an 11-year-boy. The two become inseparable and forge the profound, lifelong bond that can only come from a friendship you are lucky enough to make in childhood.

Each summer, the two cavort together in the mountains. Pietro’s father (Filippo Timi), a force nature, revels in climbing the local mountains and brings the boys along, not afraid to challenge them with a treacherous cliff or a bottomless abyss.

In contrast to Pietro’s, Bruno ‘s family shows him neither warmth nor affection, and values him only for his manual labor. Pietro’s parents generously offer to take in the teenage Bruno so he can realize his potential, but Bruno’s ignorant and selfish father nixes the arrangement.

There’s a pause in their relationship as each man grows as a man. A family event draws Pietro (Lupo Barbiero) and Bruno (Cristiano Sassella) back together as adults. Bruno is committed to living in his mountains. Pietro has been drifting, an undisciplined wannabe writer, but he, too, is drawn to the mountains where he spent the best days of his youth with Bruno. As Neil Young sang, “All my changes were there”. Both men are sons of Pietro’s father, one literally, and both chase the father’s dream in their individualistic ways.

The Eight Mountains is a remarkably genuine portrait of a masculine friendship, between boys and then between men. It captures the way such a friendship can resume instantly after a years-long pause. And it authentically depicts how male friends can communicate without verbalizing.

This story of two men’s individual growth and common friendship over 30 years, an intimate and tightly focused human story, is juxtaposed against an epic setting. The scenes of mountaineering in the Italian Alps are stunning enough, and then part of the story moves to the Nepali Himalayas.

Directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch adapted the screenplay from a novel by Paolo Cognetti. I am getting very grumpy about movies that are too long, and I was skeptical of The Eight Mountains’ 2 1/2 hour duration (even vowing beforehand to walk out if it became a slog).  But the story really does take that long to unwind, and I’m glad that van Groeningen and Vandermeersch didn’t rush it.

The Eight Mountains is playing in select arthouse theaters. I’ll let you know when it becomes more widely accessible.

THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT: a loveable lug with a gift for the one-punch knockout

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Photo caption: Don Lee as Detective Ma in THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT. Courtesy of Capelight Pictures

Sometimes we just need an unapologetic gene movie, and the Korean action comedy The Roundup: No Way Out is just that. Our burly hero, detective Ma Seok-do (Don Lee), is a loveable lug with a gift for the one-punch knockout. Ma is also the smartest cop on the force and must suffer the fools around him. But it’s his singular physicality that makes for bull-in-the-china shop mayhem when he is forced into violence.

The Roundup: No Way Out is the third movie in the Detective Ma franchise, following The Outlaws (2017) and The Roundup, Korea’s #1 hit film of 2022.

Don Lee (right) as Detective Ma in THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT. Courtesy of Capelight Pictures

I think that much of Detective Ma Seok-do’s appeal is that, as determined as he is to get the bad guys, he doesn’t have any of the meanness, bitterness or alienation of a Dirty Harry-type cop hero. Interestingly, the character’s name resembles Don Lee’s non-stage name, Ma Dong-seok.

The plot of The Roundup: No Way Out involves the interruption of a designer drug deal, which results in two gangs racing the cops to find a missing $30 million drug stash. Each villainous gang leader villains is more ruthless and cruel than the last. This time, for a little added umami, one of the gangs is from Japan.

The charm of The Roundup: No Way Out is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are no deep themes to explore here and no message – just an amiable protagonist, some laughs and almost non-stop action.