The Legend of Santa

The Legend of Santa; animated silent short, USA, 2020; D: Andrew de Burgh

In 330 AD, in Anatolia during the Roman Empire, bishop Saint Nicholas spots a girl sitting on the streets and gives her a wooden doll as a gift. Her happiness inspires him to open up a shop to make toys to give as a present to kids.

"The Legend of Santa" is a quiet, gentle and touching little animated short film without any dialogues, aimed at telling its story only visually, using opulent watercolor-style animation to give the film a dreamy, innocent look. Its central theme about awakened compassion dwells on some timeless efforts to improve life through little things in history, on what every individual is able to do what is in his or her power. Despite its compact running time of 6 minutes, the director Andrew de Burgh is able to achieve an optimistic vision of humanity, and make the transitions of time an interesting symbol for the protagonist's path to the best version of himself.

Grade:+++

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm; black comedy / satire / mockumentary, USA, 2020; D: Jason Woliner, S: Sacha Baron Cohen, Maria Bakalova, Manuel Vieru, Jerry Holleman, Jim Russell, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Hanks

Kazakh reporter Borat is summoned back from retirement to travel again to USA in order to give American President Donald Trump a gift, so that Kazakh politicians would be recognized as strongmen by America. However, instead of the planned gift, a monkey, Borat finds his 15-year old daughter Tutar smuggled herself in the package. Borat has Tutar undergo a beauty treatment so that he can give her to Mike Pence as a bride. When that fails, Tutar becomes a feminist and wants to be equal to men, so she becomes a reporter herself. It also turns out Borat was infected by the Covid-19 virus by Kazakh scientists, and thus caused the pandemic in the US.  

In “Borat 2”, Sacha Baron Cohen continues with his Poe’s Law-style of comedy inversion, where he ostensibly fully embraces a party, but is in reality holding a giant mirror to Donald Trump’s (Bible Belt) America, just as “Borat” was holding a mirror to George W. Bush’s America where conservatism became an ideology whose extreme bias and apologetics became ridiculous. This mockumentary is a satirical jab at any kind of glorification of backwardness, authoritarianism or regressive inhumanity, whether it is a criticism of profit under any circumstances (the patisserie saleslady who just obediently writes “Jews will not replace us” on an ordered cake), opposition to abortion under any circumstances (even when the woman is pregnant with her own father), professional parasites (an influencer and a “sugar baby”) or just plain spoofing of politicians (Mike Pence is called “the vice pussy-graber”; Rudy Giuliani has a hilarious “Punk’d” interview). 

Luckily, this sequel is not as crude nor as a vile as the 1st film, and Maria Bakalova is a nice new partner on Borat’s side, playing Tutar, a backward woman who undergoes a transformation and becomes self-aware and critical of the patriarchy, whereby the movie embraces the power of women this time around. However, Cohen always needed a better “editor”, someone who would point out which of his material is really funny, and which should be deleted due to its misguided humor which contaminates the good impression, and some of these problems are noticeable in the tasteless sequence where Tutar is dancing and lifts her skirt up, revealing her underwear to be drenched in her period. What was the point of that? Assembled as a series of sketches, where it is not always clear which scenes were real and which were staged, “Borat 2” is a social issue essay disguised as a comedy (“I wanted to shoot myself, but could not afford to buy a gun, so I went to the nearest Synagogue!”) worthy of Cohen’s specific humorous taste, the one which culminates in the sequence where he disguises himself as Trump on a conference where Pence is holding a speech: sheer pandemonium breaks loose. However, it would have all worked better if Cohen would use elevated humor to describe the primitivism in society, and not primitive means himself.  

Grade:++

Ball of Fire

Ball of Fire; romantic comedy, USA, 1941; D: Howard Hawks, S: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Oskar Homolka, Dana Andrews

Eight professors have been residing in a mansion for 9 years, compiling an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, sponsored by Miss Totten's late father, the inventor of toast, who was angry that his name was not mentioned in an encyclopedia, so he set out to finance his own encyclopedia with himself in it. The professors arrived to letter S, but the linguist among them, Bertram Potts, who is compiling the section on slang, is shocked that he knows so little new slang words, so he invites a night club singer, Sugarpuss O'Shea, to the mansion to help him with the analysis of jargon. O'Shea really shows up at the mansion, but only to hide from an investigation of her boyfriend, gangster Joe Lilac. Potts falls in love with O'Shea, and proposes her, but she misleads him and only ostensibly accepts the proposal to flee safely to Lilac. Potts is disappointed and returns with his professors to compile encyclopedia, but when Lilac's two henchmen show up, threatening to shoot them unless O'Shea says yes to Lilac's marriage proposal, Potts realizes she really loves him. The professors overrun the two henchmen, and stop the wedding, saving O'Shea from Lilac and allowing her to end up with Potts.

One of Howard Hawks' lesser films, "Ball of Fire" is an amusing and well-paced screwball comedy, offering a rare glimpse inside the long process of scholars trying to compile an encyclopedia, working almost as a modern re-telling of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (the seven professors, Barbara Stanwyck's character as the Snow White and Gary Cooper's character as her Prince), but it has two problems: for one, it has too many archaic slang terms which were used in 1941, but seem dated today (words such as "hunky-dory" and "skedaddle"); for the other, it is simply not that funny. The screenplay caught the worst traits of Billy Wilder at certain moments, the one of ponderous, "geeky" talk of naive characters, which just go round and round in circles relying too much on the faint notion that all of this will carry the story because it sounds cute. None of the seven professors, for instance, is particularly funny, and just relying on them talk like geeks is kind of empty. The film has two great moments: one is when O'Shea explains to the coiled Potts what the slang "yum-yum" is by kissing him: "Here is yum." She then kisses him again: "Here's the other yum". And then she embraces him so fully, until he falls over backwards: "And here's yum-yum!" The other is when Potts serves breakfest to O'Shea and basically admits that being an intelligent scholar who only has books is lonely: "Dust settles on your heart. And then you came and blew the dust away." While the finale involving gangster Lilac is kind of corny, especially the way the professors overrun him, and the story is somewhat too far-fetched, it ocassionally has witty lines ("Richard ill. Who's Richard ill?") while the two leading actors have charm.

Grade:++

The Post

The Post; drama, USA, 2017; D: Steven Spielberg, S: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk

In 1 9 7 1, The Washington Post is in trouble. Ever since its publisher died, the newspaper is led by his inexperienced daughter Katherine Graham, and its readership is declining. The New York Times beats it again to the punch when it publishes a sensational report about the Pentagon Papers, i.e. how US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara knew that the Vietnam War could not be won, but continued sending American soldiers to die there for years, nonetheless. Executive editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, finally senses a big break when a court order forbids Times to publish any further info from the leaked report. Ben tracks down the analyst who copied thousands of pages of the classified report, Daniel Ellsberg, and decides to publish a summary of it, despite enormous opposition from the Nixon Government. This brings The Washington Post a huge surge in reputation.  

In the later phase of his career, director Steven Spielberg started exploring political themes, yet none of these movies managed to advance into one of his finest classics. As it was the case with “Amistad” and “Lincoln”, “The Post” is also a noble, well meant, but overall too didactic, schematic presentation of a social issue, in this case freedom of the press and the right of a reasonable criticism. These dry topics are simply not that cinematic, and seem more like a PowerPoint lecture. However, the movie does become more engaging in the second half, where there is a race with time to publish the report before any Government crackdown, symbolized in the passionate sequence where Ben and a half a dozen reporters are trying to read through thousands of pages of the leaked report lying scattered on the floor of a house, in order to summarize all this for their new edition of the newspaper in only one day. That is a scene specific and worthy of Spielberg, yet there are not that many of them here. Tom Hanks is again great in the leading role of Ben, who laments to his staff that they are always reading news from someone else, and not discovering news themselves. An amusing hidden criticism is near the end, where Nixon is ordering his White House staff to forbid any further contact from The Washington Post reporters, which can be interpreted as a sly jab at the Donald Trump administration in 2017, which forbade CNN from asking questions during press conferences. “The Post” is a solid film, idealistic and pure, though it is kind of obvious that the real protagonist of this story was actually The New York Times, not The Washington Post, and that a similar journalistic film “All the President’s Men” was directed with much more passion and grandeur.    

Grade:++

Blue Collar

Blue Collar; drama, USA, 1978, D: Paul Schrader, S: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Ed Begley Jr., Lucy Saroyan

“I never knew how to handle money. I was always broke”. Ezekiel Brown is a blue collar worker of an assembly line in a Detroit car factory. Plagued by a shortage of money and dishonest union representatives, and in order to feed his wife and three kids, he agrees to rob the union safe with his co-workers Jerry and Smokey. However, the three only find 600$ in it, and a notebook detailing shady transactions and loans. Ezekiel decides to blackmail the union with the notebook, demanding 10,000$. When the officials find out, they offer Ezekiel a promotion into a union representative in exchange for the notebook. Smokey is killed while locked up to suffocate in a car paint room. Jerry detests Ezekiel’s “selling out” and decides to testify for the FBI.  

The feature length debut film of Paul Schrader, the screenwtiter of “Taxi Driver”, “Blue Collar” is a surprisingly bitter, strong and disenchanted independent film. Schrader was probably not immune to the aura of comedian Richard Pryor (here without his trademark moustache), and thus allowed him to randomly insert a few humorous one-liners: in one sequence, an IRS official discovers that Ezekiel lied he has six kids, when he only has three. But Ezekiel’s wife “borrows” three kids from the neighbor and lines them all up for inspection. The official asks the kids what their name is, but they do not anwser, so Ezekiel says: “That’s because they don’t talk to strangers”; in another sequence, Jerry wakes up in the middle of the night and tells his wife that he ostensibly forgot to lock the door of the gas pump, but in reality meets with Ezekiel to have a night party in a house. However, overall, Pryor’s performance is serious, and much more so in the second half of the film, delivering a rare dramatic performance, with enough subtlety and nuances (the sequence where he basically explains to Jerry why he “sold himself out”). The storyline is kind of unfocused in its theme, trying to bring across some sort of a big message about the exploitation of the working class, wealth inequality and the power play of the big people in charge, yet this kind of feels chaotic and not that well thought out to the end, or it works, but only to a certain degree. Despite a slow start and not that much inspiration, “Blue Collar” is a quality social study of the ‘underdogs’ in the world, whereas Pryor is even able to perform on pair with the veteran actor Harvey Keitel.   

Grade:++

Howard's End

Howard's End; drama, UK / Japan / USA, 1992, D: James Ivory, S: Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham Carter, Samuel West, Joseph Bennett, Nicola Duffett, Vanessa Redgrave

London, early 20th century. Helen Schlegel writes a letter to her sister, Margaret, about how she got engaged to Paul from the rich Wilcox family, yet the latter changes his mind and cancels everything. Some time letter, Helen meets Leonard Bast (20), whose umbrella she mistakenly took during a rainy day. He promised to marry Jacky, but doesn’t love her. Some time later, the Wilcox family celebrates a wedding and rents an apartment right next to Schlegel’s. Margaret becomes friends with Ruth Wilcox, the wife of Henry Wilcox, and mentions how she will have to move out of the apartment in 18 months. On her deathbed, Ruth writes a letter in which she leaves the inheritance of the Howard’s End estate to Margaret, but the Wilcox family disregards it. Some time later, Henry proposes and marries Margaret. It turns out Henry once had an affair with Jacky, but Margaret disregards it. Helen becomes pregnant with Leonard, who is killed when Charles Wilcox assaults him. In the end, Margaret inherits Howard’s End with Henry, after all.  

Forgotten as soon as it premiered at the cinemas, “Howard’s End” did not age well and looks really bland today: stiff, theatrical, overlong and anemic, it is an ambitious and good, but overrated film that did not advance into a classic, contrary to what many expected. While James Ivory’s film “A Room With a View” gives period drama films a good name, “Howard’s End” gives it a bad name. While some of the blame falls on E. M. Forster’s eponymous novel, Ivory himself narrowed his range by insisting on a rushed, chaotic approach in a vague story about inheritance of the title mansion, which is overstuffed with too many characters (a dozen of them) instead of focusing on one, the heroine Margaret Schlegel, played wonderfully by Emma Thompson, who is a rare saving grace here. The messy storyline itself is kind of convoluted, since it starts three time, introducing subplot after subplot, all of which lead to another subplot, until the main plot tangle is finally set up some 45 minutes into the film (the Wilcox family hiding from Margaret that she was suppose to inherit the mansion). Furthermore, no action has any consequences on the rest of the events: when Margaret finally hears about the said secret from Henry at the end, the film undergoes one of the most awkward interrupted endings ever, not allowing for her reaction to it. The sequence where Henry admits of having an affair with Jacky is also awkwardly directed, with three strange fades to black, only for the scene to continue in the same room. This truncates Margaret’s character. Some scenes would have worked better with a different take on it: for instance, Charles Wilcox beats up Leonard because the latter impregnated Helen in an affair, but it would have made far more sense if it was Paul Wilcox who assaults, since the latter had a fling with Helen. The wonderful cinematography, lush costumes and set designs, as well as subtle messages about the dominant-subordinate relationship between a rich upper-class and a middle-class family still ring true. "Howard's End" is a quiet, ambitious historical drama, it's just that it is just so lifeless.

Grade:++

Bungo Stray Dogs (Season 1)

Bungo Stray Dogs; animated fantasy crime series, Japan, 2016, D: Takuya Igarashi, S: Yuto Uemura, Mamoru Miyano, Yoshimasa Hosoya, Asami Seto, Atsushi Ono

Atsushi is a teenage orphan who was kicked out of the orphanage, but gets a lucky break when he saves a certain Dazai who tried committing suicide in the river. The latter hires him to join the Armed Detective Agency, where people with supernatural powers battle crime. Atsushi is surprised when he discovers he has these powers himself, and can transform into a tiger. His first assignment is to battle the Port Mafia, but their leader places a bounty on Atsushi, since he wants the latter’s tiger powers. Other cases include discovering who is kidnapping people; stopping the mafia’s bomb from exploding at the Yokohama port or a train... Dazai can neutralize anyone’s superpowers by touching them. Other members of the Detectives are Ranpo, who has no superpowers and can only rely on his deductive intelligence, and Kunikida, who can “3-D print” objects with his paper pages. The ex-suicide bomber girl Kyoka is recruited into the Detective Agency.

“X-Men” meets “Infernal Affairs”: this unusual anime series takes a typical crime genre story of a Detective unit fighting with the mafia, but makes it more interesting by giving certain key players special superpowers which tend to challenge the usual outcomes of this formula. While it was helmed by the “Sailor Moon”-maestro director Takuya Igarashi and the writer Yoji Enokido, “Bungo Stray Dogs” are not always inspired or creative to the fullest, delivering a good story, yet ultimately lacking that finest touch. The tone shifts, depending on the situation: in certain episodes, for instance, minor characters are gunned down in a bloody manner; in episode 4, the Detective Agency staff decides to nonchalantly throw out a dozen criminals who stormed their headquarters, and thus there is a cartoonish shot of someone counting “one, two, three, four...” as the corpses are thrown one by one out the window. This syncretism of funny-cheerful and criminal-violent is a tad too daft, yet the balance works most of the time since the characters are treated rather respectfully. Episode 6 is the first one that jumps through the ranks of quality: it presents the character Doppo Kunikida who has a fascinating power. He can create objects written on a page of his notebook. This leads to a virtuoso set-up fight with villain Akutagawa: Kunikida shoots at a pipe in the background, which leaks water and splashes Akutagawa, creating a puddle around him. Kunikida then creates an electric shocker in his arm, and throws it in the puddle, electrocuting Akutagawa standing in it. Kunikida akso decisively solves a mystery abduction case in the same episode, realizing the taxi driver is the perpetrator, since he was the only person who was with all the abducted people before they disapeared. Season 1 of “Bungo” ends abruptly: it tickles the interests of the viewers, but seems to be jumping from subplot to subplot, introducing supporting characters and then forgetting about them, without an overarching grand vision of where all of this is heading. 

Grade:++

The Palm Beach Story

The Palm Beach Story; comedy, USA, 1942, D: Preston Sturges, S: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Rudy Vallee, Mary Astor

New York. Gerry is sad that her husband Tom, an architect, is struggling financially, so she decides to leave him and marry a rich man so that she can provide money for Tom. On a train, she meets the rich Hackensacker who decides to help her buy clothes that she lost in the train waggon. Once in Palm Beach, Gerry meets Tom again and introduces him as her brother, and immediately Hackensacker’s sister Centimillia falls for Tom. He even agrees to finance Tom’s idea for an airport. In the end, Gerry and Tom make up again. Luckily for Hackensacker and Centimillia, Gerry and Tom how a twin sister and brother, respectively, so the latter marry the rich siblings.  

One of Preston Sturges’ lesser films, “The Palm Beach Story” is a rather tiresome comedy based on a forced and a confusing premise. While Claudette Colbert is again charming, she is unable to overcome the lack of inspiration in the storyline. Except for a delicious comedy ‘twist ending’, the jokes are rather thin, as if they were not that well thought out beforehand: the first good joke happens only some 20 minutes into the film, when Gerry wants to secretly leave her husband while he is still asleep, and clumsily pushes a goodbye letter under his blanket, but accidentally wakes him up, ruining the “surprise”. The train sequence, where Gerry cannot sleep because the passangers are partying like crazy, is a mess, with only intermittent sparks of good humor (two hunters trying to shoot a thrown cracker, but only break the glass on the windows with their bullets; the train conductor getting so fed up with the wild passangers that he simply disconnects their train waggon (!), leaving them stranded on the railroad tracks). The film tries to persuade the viewers that Gerry only loves her husband by searching for a rich new husband, but it does a lousy job at it. Overall, thanks to the performances and zany wit, “Palm Beach” is good, but it attests that not every movie from the 30s and 40s is always automatically a classic.  

Grade:++

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; comedy / musical, USA, 1953, D: Howard Hawks, S: Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Elliott Reid, Charles Coburn

Lorelei and Dorothy are two stage singers and dancers who take a ship to Europe, since Lorelei is engaged to the rich Esmond. Since Lorelei is only interested in money in a man, Esmond’s father hires a reporter, Malone, to spy on her, fearing she is a bad choice for marriage. Indeed, Malone makes photos of Lorelei hanging out with the old Mr. Piggy, owner of a diamond company. When Lorelei steals the photos, Piggy gives her a diamond tiara for present, but once in Paris, his wife sues Lorelei for theft of the tiara. The tiara is returned to Piggy in court, while Lorelei and Dorothy marry Esmond and Malone, respectively.  

A rare and peculiar teaming up of director Howard Hawks with actress Marilyn Monroe resulted in this effervescent comedy with four tiresome musical numbers (except for the one where Jane Russell comically tumbles into the pool by accident, knocked off by one of the jumping divers), which is not quite a classic, but is at times too good not to be seen. The two leading actresses show how it is done right by delivering refreshing (female) comedic performances, and Monroe is even able to make Lorelei, a plane gold digger, appear good-hearted at times. Some of the gags are incredible, and simply have to be mentioned for their sheer audacity: in one of them, Lorelei is stuck while trying to exit from a cabin through the window, so a little boy helps her camouflage in front of Mr Piggy by holding a blanket under Lorelei’s head, to make it seem as if she is sitting outside. When Mr Piggy hears the boy’s voice under the blanket for a minute, Hawks makes a delicious joke by having Monroe ditch her trademark effeminate voice and have her talk in an uncharacteristically deep voice, feigning that she has “laryngitis”. Hawks also throws dozens of jokes throughout the story, whether in the form of dialogue (“We have to get his pants, too. I’ll do it alone.” - “No, we will do it together. Two heads are better than one.”) or sight gags (the delicious scene where Russell puts on a blonde wig and pretends she is Marilyn at the court, with a really good impression of the latter’s voice and mannerisms), but there are also several ‘empty walks’ here and there, while the ending glosses over Lorelei’s money exploitation character as if it is harmless, without any moral or lesson to dispute such attitudes.     

Grade:++