If you like suspense, you will want to check out Diabolique, to be broadcast by Turner Classic Movies on May 12. The headmaster of a provincial boarding school is so cruel, even sadistic, that everyone wants him dead, especially his wife and his mistress. When he goes missing, the police drain the murky pool where the killers dumped the body, and the killers get a big surprise. Now the suspense from director Henri-Georges Clouzot really starts.
A master of the thriller, Clouzot was nicknamed the French Hitchcock. In an achingly scary scene from Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, two truck drivers try to get a long truck around a cliff side hairpin curve – and the truck is filled with nitroglycerin. If you like Diabolique, you’ll probably also like another domestic murder – this time set in Paris – Quai des Orfevres.
I’ve always loved the good-hearted and wry Aardman Studio films like Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. Aardman’s Pirates! Band of Misfits doesn’t quite match up to Aardman’s past work. The claymation is exquisite and the jokes are smart, but the overall effect is merely amusing and guffaw-free. Silly pirate stereotypes should have been much richer fodder for the writers.
I saw this in 3D, but I wouldn’t pay the 3D premium if I were taking a bunch of kids to see it.
In this paranoid thriller, a sinister corporation sends a professional hunter (Willem Dafoe) to Tasmania to find the Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct. He is given a cover identity as a scientist, which immediately makes him a target of hostile loggers He is renting a room in the primitive cabin of a scientist who searched for the Tasmanian Tiger and has been missing and is presumed dead by everyone except his traumatized family. The scientist’s wife is so heavily sedated that she only briefly wakes into a stupor, the 6-year-old son has become mute and only the 10-year-old daughter is resilient enough to converse. The suspense begins immediately. Will he find the Tasmanian Tiger? What happened to the scientist? Is he being hunted himself?
The weirdly beautiful scenery and breathtaking vistas of Tasmania enhance the dramatic tension. The forests are so primordial that you expect to see a creature from Jurassic park bursting out.
Dafoe’s hunter spends much of the movie alone in the wilderness with no one to talk to and, being on a secret mission, he can’t tell other people what he finds anyway. So his discoveries have to be depicted by the director and their impacts reflected in Dafoe’s expressive eyes.
Overall, it’s a fine genre film, although the paranoia is over the top and some will find the ending too stark. The scenes of Dafoe’s driven hunter, solitary in the wilderness, make up for the flaws.
Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia
It’s time to revisit a spectacle. On April 29, Turner Classic movies is broadcasting Lawrence of Arabia. For decades, many of us watched this epic squeezed into tinny-sounding TVs. In 1989, I was fortunate enough to see the director’s cut in an old movie palace. Now technology has caught up, and modern large screen HD televisions can do this wide screen classic justice. Similarly, modern home sound systems can work with the great Maurice Jarre soundtrack.
Nobody has ever created better epics than director David Lean (Bridge Over the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago). Peter O’Toole stars at the moment of his greatest physical beauty. The rest of the cast is unsurpassed: Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, thousands of extras and entire herds of camels. The vast and severe Arabian desert is a character unto itself.
Settle in and watch the whole thing – and remember what “epic” really means.
Football fans may be interested in the silly comedy Pigskin Parade because it shows how college football was played in 1936. It airs on Turner Classic Movies on April 22.
Like many sports movies, Pigskin Parade ends with a climactic game – and there’s footage of real football being played in a snowstorm (in long shot) interspersed with the comic movie football (in medium shot). You can see the formations, men in motion and punt formation. I knew about the leather helmets for the players, but I didn’t know that the referees wore unstriped white Knickerbockers and baker boy caps or that the coaches sent in substitutions by written note.
Jack Haley plays a dim football coach hired at the fictional Texas State. His spark plug wife (the very funny Patsy Kelly) is the real football brain. Out in the countryside, they find a hayseed QB who can throw the ball out of the stadium and outrun a deer when he is barefoot; he is played by Stuart Erwin (who garnered a Supporting Actor Oscar nod).
In the final game, Texas State, referred to as “Texas” by the radio broadcaster, is a big underdog to Yale. Yale was indeed a power at the time. Yale players won the Heisman in both 1936 and 1937.
Pigskin Parade was the first feature film for Judy Garland and the second acting credit of over 200 for Elisha Cook Jr. Betty Grable appears before she became a star. Judy, Betty and Elisha are all billed below the comic quartet The Yacht Club Boys. (Creepiness alert: all but one of The Yacht Club Boys were way too old to be hanging around a college campus acting zany and wearing varsity gear.)
Doug Glatt is not very smart and he knows it. He struggles to find the right word in every situation. Because his only talent is the ability to knock others unconscious, he is only in demand as a bar bouncer. But Doug is not a brute – he is goodhearted and loyal, and yearns to be part of something. By chance, Doug gets hired by a minor league hockey team to become its thuggish enforcer – despite his inability to ice skate.
We get lots of funny hockey violence a la the Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot. It’s very funny when Doug mangles his every attempt at cogent conversation. The comedy also comes from Doug’s innocent fish out of water in the cynical, sleazy and cutthroat world of minor league hockey. (He’s even reverential about the team logo on the locker room floor.)
There are lots of nice comic touches. For example, when Doug becomes a sensation, one of his fans in the stands holds up a sign reading “Doug 3:69” (Doug wears jersey number 69); we glimpse the sign for only a second, but I appreciate the filmmakers planting such nuggets in the movie. Doug is also that rarity – a Jewish hockey goon, with parents horrified that he isn’t following his brother to med school.
Although plenty raunchy, Goon is a rung above the normal gross-out guy comedy because Doug is such a fundamentally good and well-meaning person. As Doug, Seann William Scott (Stifler in American Pie) plays a naive simpleton, but one fiercely committed to his core values. It’s got to be hard to play that combination, and Scott’s performance is special.
The cast is excellent. Co-writer Jay Baruchel plays Doug’s sophomoric friend. Alison Pill (Milk, Midnight in Paris) is the troubled smart girl who can’t figure out why she’s attracted to a word-fumbling hockey goon. Liev Schreiber, excellent as always, dons a Fu Manchu and a mullet to play the league’s toughest goon. Kim Coates, who almost stole A Little Help as the personal injury attorney, plays the coach.
What writer-director Whit Stillman does really well is bring us unto the world of old money Eastern preppies with their refined manners and their odd customs like debutante balls. His well-educated characters have earnest late-night existential conversations in complete sentences. Nobody else does this, and Stillman’s dialogue has always kept me wholly absorbed. That’s why I liked his films Metropolitan and Barcelona so much.
What Stillman does not do well is absurdist film, like his current entry, Damsels in Distress, set in a Northeastern liberal arts college that is decidedly non-Ivy. Indie film darling Greta Gerwig plays the seriously off-kilter leader of some coeds who are intent on rescuing fellow students from depression, fashion mistakes and bad hygiene, whether they want it or not.
While his earlier films were earnestly realistic, Damsels is way over the top. The girls’ boyfriends are so stupid that one does not yet know his colors. Gerwig’s character is so obviously disturbed that anyone, even a horny college male, would run the other way.
That means that the patter of Stillman’s dialogue must carry the day, and it fails him. Gerwig’s two friends are one-note jokes – one profoundly stupid, the other profoundly suspicious – that aren’t that funny the first time. There are lame body odor jokes. The fraternity system uses Roman, rather than Greek letters – which is not the sidesplitter that Stillman may imagine.
For sure, there are some funny moments. At the campus Suicide Prevention Center (the word “Prevention” keeps falling off the sign) Gerwig offers a fellow student a doughnut, but then snatches it back after one bite when she discovers that he isn’t the suicidal one. One student has adopted the Cathar religion, which he associates with a certain sexual practice. But, over all, the movie is not funny. Worst of all, it’s not engaging.
Analeigh Tipton, who was very good as the smitten babysitter in Crazy Stupid Love, does especially well again as a transfer student who falls under Gerwig’s wing.
My recommendations: 1) Stillman should leave the absurdism to Bunuel and 2) the rest of us can skip Damsels to watch Metropolitan and Barcelona.
A fifth grade class in Montreal loses its teacher in just about the worst possible way – she hangs herself in their classroom at recess. Monsieur Lazhar is about how the kids face this trauma with their replacement teacher, an Algerian immigrant. The school gets a psychologist to lecture to the kids, but bans them from otherwise mentioning the suicide in class – a rule designed to minimize the discomfort of the administrators and parents. Meanwhile, the school’s zero tolerance rule against touching children means that the kids can’t get a reassuring hug.
The new teacher, Monsieur Lazhar (well-played by Mohammed Fellag), is a traditionalist who demands respect but with humor and compassion. He also seems oddly ignorant of modern teaching methods. Although mild-mannered, he is fiercely devoted to protecting the kids. That devotion keeps him from sharing his own burden with the children, for we learn that he, too, has reason to grieve.
Monsieur Lazhar was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar. The child actors are superb. It’s an uncommonly sweet and powerful film.
On April 18, you can watch Wasp Woman (1960) on Turner Classic Movies. This is notable because Wasp Woman, a slender, attractive woman wearing an insect mask, has made my list of Least Convincing Movie Monsters. The owner of a cosmetics manufacturer became worried that she was aging out of her looks and injected some wasp material from her R&D lab. She wreaked havoc until carbolic acid was thrown in her face, allowing her to be pushed to death from a skyscraper.
Here’s a guilty pleasure that has earned it way into my Bad Movie Festival and you can watch it on Turner Classic Movies on April 17. In Hot Rods from Hell, Dana Andrews’ (!) innocent family is terrorized by two teen punks and a punkette in the Mojave. This 1967 movie has the odd feel of a 1962 or even 1957 film.
Watch Dana Andrews asking himself why he is in this movie, 23 years after starring in Laura and The Ox-Bow Incident.
