Superman

Superman; fantasy, USA, 2025; D: James Gunn, S: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, María Gabriela de Faría, Zlatko Burić

Superman intervened by stopping the country of Boravia from invading the country of Jarhanpur. Since billionaire Lex Luthor has a secret pact with Boravia's dictator Ghurkos, since he plans to get a hold of half of Jarhanpur's land, Luthor starts a whole media smear campaign against Superman. In the meantime, Superman's real identity, Clark Kent, has troubles in his relationship with Lois Lane. When Superman is arrested by the US government and sent to a pocket universe, Luthor captures him thanks to alien Metamorpho who assembles Kryptonite, an element that weakens Superman. However, Metamorpho teams up with Superman, and thanks to Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern and Hawkgirl, they manage to defeat Luthor and stop his pocket universe from deteriorating into a black hole.

James Gunn is the best director of superhero movies. While other directors limit their involvment to only one superhero, Gunn repeats this several times (the "Guardians of the Galaxy" trilogy, "The Suicide Squad"), but always stays faithful to his specific comic taste and wild, untrammelled energy, which isn't "reigned in" even in those big budget mainstream productions which usually stray away from risky stuff. Congruent to the principle of "Chekhov's gun", almost all of little details play a role later on and deliver a pay-off (for instance, a random scene of assistant Eve doing a selfie of Superman being beaten up by an adversary in the background plays a role in the finale, when Eve sends all her private selfies to Jimmy Olsen, revealing Lex Luthor's plan), while Gunn inserts Superman in more complex and logical socio-political subtexts of modern times, expanding his role in the world (in a surprising twist, the hero stops an invasion of a (fictional) country from another country, Boravia, preventing a war), and even giving him a mini character-arc at the end (at the beginning, Superman was only ever watching video recordings of his biological parents from Krypton, but after a revelation, he watches video recording of his adoptive, Earth parents who raised him on a farm, signalling his shift from respect towards idealistic strength to respect towards imperfect humanity). 

As opposed to other reboots or entries, "Superman's" origin story is luckily skipped here since everyone already knows his mythology, throwing the film in medias res, whereas all the situations and relations are eventually extrapolated and caught up by viewers along the run of the storyline. Besides several comical moments, some even staying true to the director's grotesque or black humor (Superman saves a squirrel from a monster's tail; Luthor imprisoning an ex-girlfriend because she wrote a negative blog about him; the citizens of the fictional country of Boravia speak in Croatian language (!); a villain getting eliminated by being dropped from a high altitude to the ground is followed by a match cut of an aspirin falling and dissolving into a glass of water...), Gunn is also able to craft a grandiose satire on these modern times: the story is basically about an illegal migrant who is arrested by a paramilitary and sent to an unknown, undisclosed detention center without any indictment or charges, tortured and abused, because an envious billionaire has such a fragile ego that the only thing he can counter his feeling of inferiority is to implement a social network media campaign that obfuscates everything and distorts reality to always present Superman in a negative light, and even collaborate with an enemy nation for personal benefits. That Gunn is able to make such subversive stories in big budget productions is astonishing. Some flaws are the undeveloped, unorganized finale; the underused Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl; Superman's unnecessary dog Krypto; and even some lack of character development or charm in Superman here and there. Still, "Superman" is one of the most refreshing superhero movies, offering a super-James Gunn with style.

Grade:+++

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto; crime / satire, Italy, 1970; D: Elio Petri, S: Gian Maria Volonté, Florinda Bolkan, Gianni Santuccio, Orazio Orlando, Sergio Tramonti, Arturo Dominici

Rome. A Police Inspector kills his mistress, Augusta, with a blade while in bed, then takes a shower, calls the police to report the crime, and then exits her apartment. He goes to the police station and then returns to the scene of the crime with the police, ostensibly to investigate the apartment. The police question Augusta's gay husband, but the Inspector let's him go. A forensic expert finds the Inspector's fingerprints all over the apartment, but brushes it off since he was there to check the apartment, while the Inspector even admits to his superior he had an affair with Augusta, but he is nontheless not considered a suspect. Augusta's communist student lover, Pace, is brought for questioning. The Inspector has a dream that he confessed his crime to his superiors, but they won't believe him. As he wakes up on his couch, the superiors really enter his apartment.

Not only catchy through its snappy title, "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" is a memorable and bizarre satire on two concepts: "Who watches the watchmen?" ("Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?") and the spoiled arrogance of absolute power. The first concept is a meditation on the ultimate arbitrators who can abuse this power, in this case the nameless Police Inspector who oversees the investigation of his own murder (!), but the second notion is even more fascinating and daring, showing how authoritarianism at one point becomes so overconfident in itself, that it is able to explicitly reveal its criminal nature, which will then be ignored, whitewashed or explained away by the masses who are too afraid to admit they are controlled by evil, either due to their passivity or their obedience to the hierarchy of power. The Inspector in the story seems to enjoy exploring how far he can go with his hierarchical impunity, noticeable in the sequence where the gay husband of the killed woman is interrogated at the police station, claiming he didn't kill her, so the Inspector, in front of over twenty homicide employees, says out loud: "Everyone is innocent here. There's only one guilty party... and that's me!", upon which everyone in the room laughs. 

Another exchange with a suspect and the Inspector goes like this: "I want my lawyer!" - "We're not in America." - "I want my lawyer!" - "As soon as the law changes, I'll send him to you." At this point, the anti-hero demonstrates his philosophy that he himself is the law, and that he can do whatever he wants. During a speech, the Inspector shouts: "Repression is our vaccine! Repression is civilization!" Another crucial moment appears in a flashback, when the Inspector drives in the car with his mistress, and she incites him to drive through the red light—but as a police attendant stops him and asks for his papers, the Inspector just shows him he is from the police, and is given instant impunity, as the mistress looks at him with excitement: "You can commit any crime you want." The director Elio Petri crafts the film with huge close-ups of faces, sometimes even filmed in telephoto lens, to create a feeling of the weight and intimidation of these figures, though the movie does lose steam in the second half since the script was not that well written, suffering from pacing issues due to its overlong running time of two hours, especially in some didactic moralization. Despite these omissions, "Investigation" is a dark warning on the abuse of power, and the people who allow it to be abused.

Grade:+++

A Close Shave

A Close Shave; stop-motion animated comedy short, UK, 1995; D: Nick Park, S: Peter Sallis, Anne Reid

One evening, as a truck stops at a traffic light, a sheep escapes from it and hides in the house of window washer and inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit. As Wallace and Gromit wash a window of a wool store, Wallace becomes friends with its owner Wendolene, but her dog Preston secretly steals sheep to have wool and make dog food out of them. Wallace and Gromit team up with Wendolene to save a whole herd of sheep from slaughter in Preston's factory. Preston turns out to be a robot, but is crunched in its own mincing machine. As Wendolene reveals she doesn't like cheese, Wallace ends their relationship.

Compared to the excellent "The Wrong Trousers", every other "Wallace and Gromit" film is a step below in creativty, including the 3rd one, "A Close Shave", where the writer and director Nick Park simply wasn't that highly inspired. It again received critical acclaim due to its meticulous stop-motion animation and the friendship between Wallace and his dog Gromit, but "A Close Shave" is still only moderately fun. Only two moments truly stand out by some higher ingenuity: in one, while in prison, Gromit is piecing together a puzzle, and as it is completed it reveals a message: "Friday night 8 PM be ready. A Friend." Gromit looks at the calendar and his clock, and realizes it is Friday at 8 PM right now, as a sheep appears on the window and starts slicing the bars using a cutting machine. In the other, just as all the sheep escape from the back of a truck via a ladder to Wallace's motorcycle right behind it, the driver, dog Preston, hits the breaks of the truck, which causes the motorcycle to crash behind it and catapult all the sheep back into the truck. Other jokes are solid and fine, yet never really attempt to reach a higher level by conjuring up something more imaginative, as the movie slowly and steadily consolidates itself only into a movie for kids, and not a movie for both kids and grown ups.

Garde:++

Nine Lives

Ni liv; war drama, Norway, 1957; D: Arne Skouen, S: Jack Fjeldstad, Alf Malland, Henny Moan, Joachim Holst-Jensen

Norway during the Nazi occupation. Jan Baalsrud is a resistance member who arrives with his friend to Hansen, a shoemaker, for underground contact, but it turns out the previous Hansen was arrested by the German army, and that the new Hansen doesn't want to have anything to do with the resistance. Hansen secretly snitches them to the Nazis. While Jan and his crew were smuggling arms from the British Shetland islands to Norway's north, their ship is attacked and sunk by the Nazis. Only Jan survives, who walks through the snow landscape and reaches the house of Agnes and Martin, who nurture him. Jan is hidden in a barn, and then under a snowy slope, since the Nazis are searching for every house for him. Finally, a Sami reindeer herder transports Jan in a sleigh over to the neutral Swedish territory, where he is saved.

Based on real life events of Norwegian World War II resistance member Jan Baalsrud, "Nine Lives" is one of the wildest survival and escape stories of its kind, offering moments of surprise and that feeling of persecution from which a person has to escape to another country to safety. Despite its simple and conventional directing, "Nine Lives" still works even today, but it is narrowed down only to this one episode from Baalsrud's life, and does not show his military career before or after it. Nonetheless, his plight and flight depicted here are astonishing, as if he is the original "Norwegian Chuck Norris": he survives in the cold snow mountains; suffers from snow blindness and thus has to throw snowballs in front of himself and tap with his ski pole to find them, blindfolded; he falls down an avalanche; in the barn, since the doctor cannot arrive due to a snow storm, he disinfects a knife on a candle fire and cuts some of his toes infected with gangrene... Indeed, his ability to endure all this hardship while trying to reach Swedish neutral territory is a story that deserves to be told. It is thus not far fetched when the farmers who nurture him have this exchange: "He must have nine lives!" - "And he will need them all." The exteriors of the snow landscapes have a certain aesthetic, and one stylistic idea is interesting: some 14 minutes into the film, the camera pans up through seven different mountains, all showing either Jan's footsteps left on the snow or the Nazi army in a search mission. Some moments are clumsy or heavy handed, and it is somewhat undignified showing Jan in such a unworthy situation, relying too much on others, yet the movie works both as a piece of history and an adventure drama.

Grade:+++

The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix

Flåklypa Grand Prix; stop-motion animated sports film, Norway, 1975; D: Ivo Caprino, S: Frank Robert, Kari Simonsen, Toralv Maurstad, Rolf Just Nilsen, Harald Heide-Steen Jr.

Flåklypa is a small village where poor inventor Reodor works as a cycilist repairman, employing penguin Solan and hedgehog Ludvig in his workshop. When Reodor's former employer Rudolf mocks him on TV and shows how he stole Reodor's invention to help him win in car races, Solan manages to persuade a sheikh to finance Reodor's new race car, Il Tempo Gigante. A jealous Rudolf slices an oval device inside the car to sabotage it. During the race, Reodor's car starts malfunctioning, but Ludvig enters the car and holds the sliced oval device to keep it intact, and thus Reodor's race car wins the race and surpasses Rudolf's car.

Even though it enjoys a cult reputation in Norwegian cinema, since among others it sold over 5 million tickets at the local box office, stop-motion animated film "The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix" is still heavily overrated, basically nothing more than a solid kids film. It confirms the old maxim that often some of the most popular local films lose their ostensible greatness or are difficult to understand when viewed outside the borders of their countries. The film is meticulous in technical aspects, especially in painstaking stop-motion animation and work with puppets, and eye for details, but its creative aspects are severely lacking, since it doesn't even attempt to be funny or especially creative. The director Ivo Caprino is only interested in setting up the final 20-minute race car sequence, but the first 60 minutes drag as an overlong set-up, whereas the character of the hedgehog (?) anthropomorphic animal Ludvig is disturbing looking, with a bizarre giant nose/beak placed above its mouth. The humor appears only intermittently, though it has sparse charm: for instance, when the penguin Solan is watching the sheikh through binoculars, commenting how rich he is: "Gosh, he's using dollar bills as fly-swatters!"; the image of a woman playing a harp composed out of two bicycle tires; or when the names of Italian and German race car drivers are revealed: Gassolini and Schnellfahrt. The movie needed more jokes and inspiration, since it seems it just settled at being good, never truly attempting to go beyond that. The final race car tournament is the highlight, but even that is a weaker highlight than, for instance, the wonderfully creative chariot race sequence at the end of "Asterix vs. Caesar" or the chase sequence in "The Wrong Trousers".

Grade:++

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

Baron Prášil; fantasy adventure, Czech Republic, 1962; D: Karel Zeman, S: Miloš Kopecký, Jana Brejchová, Rudolf Jelínek, Rudolf Hrušínský, Karel Höger

Tonik, an astronaut on the Moon, is surprised to find Cyrano de Bergerac and Baron Munchausen there, who mistake him for a "Moonman". Munchausen decides to show Tonik his world, so they board a ship carried by horses with wings that bring them to Earth, to a city in Ottoman Empire. Munchausen and Tonik free princess Bianca from the Sultan and escape on horses. The three see a ship in the sea and swim to it to safety, but it sinks in a sea battle. Munchausen, Tonik and Bianca are swalloved by a giant fish and find another ship inside its stomach. The fish gets stranded and the people escape from it. Munchausen, Tonik and Bianca help save a castle from a siege, but Tonik is sent to prison for suspicion that he wants to blow up the castle. Munchausen throws a candle on gunpowder which causes an explosion that catapults the castle to the Moon. 

Whichever fantasy story 'Czech Méliès' Karel Zeman decides to make into a movie, he makes it even more imaginative due to his unusual syncretism of live action and cutout animation. One of his most critically recognized films, "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen" is a charming and elegant fairytale and ode to escapism from reality, due to the title character who lies about his stories that are so over-the-top that the viewers have to chuckle at the absurdity of it all. Zeman is closer to von Baky's "Munchausen" than he is to Gilliam's dark and grotesque "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", meaning that it is a movie with adventures, escape, danger and threats, but it's all harmless and relaxed. The storyline meanders from one episode to another, making it highly arbitrary, yet by setting people in the background of his paper set-designs, Zeman is able to create a little cult film. It starts with a comical opening where an astronaut on the Moon is surprised to find footsteps there, leading him to a crashed rocket with five people without spacesuits, including Munchausen and Cyrano de Bergerac. Using his cutout animation, Zeman conjures up a whole array of creatures: horses with wings carrying a ship from the Moon to Earth; a giant fish that swallows a ship; a giant eagle; a swordfish holding a jacket; a mermaid... But he is also able to insert a lot of humor with some moments that border on comedy. 

For instance, during the night, Munchausen has a duel with the Ottoman harem guard both with a sword and a chess board game, allowing him to move chess pieces. At one point, a dozen Ottoman soldiers enter the room, so the harem guard moves a chess piece and says: "Check!", while Munchausen replies with: "Mate!", as he stretches his hand out behind his back and shoots at the light on the ceiling, creating darkness which confuses all the guards, as he defeats them. Another guard is hitting the alarm bell, Tonik shows up and takes away his drumstick to keep quiet, then the guard throws him at the giant bell, but it swings back and makes one last alarm sound when it hits and knocks out the guard on the head. Munchausen wants to close the window with his leg, but it gets stuck, so he takes off his boot, which is left hanging on the window, as he takes care of Bianca. A steam ship shakes so much that even apples from a painted tree start falling off from the painting. Zeman doesn't have that Spielbergian sense for excitement and weight when introducing these fantasy creatures which sometimes just come and go in a minute, which feels almost superficial, and the characters are not as important as just being pawns in this giant set-up designed to create a fantasy world. Nontheless, "Munchausen" is a refreshing and imaginative non-Hollywood fantasy film.

Grade:+++

Man of the East

...e poi lo chiamarono il magnifico; western comedy, Italy / France, 1972; D: E.B. Clucher, S: Terence Hill, Gregory Walcott, Dominic Barto, Harry Carrey Jr., Yanti Somer, Enzo Fiermonte

19th century. Englishman Thomas Moore arrives to the United States to inherit a real estate from his late father. His stagecoach is robbed by three men wearing bandit scarves: Bull, Monkey and Joe. Later, when they meet again and Moore tells him who his father was, the three bandits become his friends since they worked for his father. However, criminals want to chase them away and take their land. Moore falls in love with a beauty from the nearby town, Candida, but a rough ranch administrator, Morton, wants to marry her, so he beats up Moore. Bull, Monkey and Joe train Moore, who becomes skillful enough to win against Morton in a shooting duel, and thus Candida stays with Moore.

E.B. Clucher's third cooperation with comedian Terence Hill, "Man of the East" is a fun western comedy, but it doesn't have a single unforgettable joke as did their first two films, "They Call Me Trinity" and "Trinity is Still My Name". As is the case with Italian 'Spaghetti Westerns", even comical ones, the Italian film crew again pretends to be somewhere in the Wilde West of the United States while never setting foot off Europe (in this case, the exteriors of the Plitvice Lakes). The meandering story is all over the place, not really able to decide what its plot tangle is, but Hill's physical jokes and Clucher's sense for comedy manage to carry this (overlong) film. Some jokes really do work: for instance, bandit Monkey is introduced behind bars in a prison, stealing money from the pocket of the prison guard (!) behind his back. His friend, Bull, is introduced as a mute worker at a stagecoach station, but suddenly speaks up in defiance as two bounty hunters sitting at the table badmouth his late friend, an Englishman, calling the latter a "bastard". Hill isn't in top-notch shape and is rather "subdued" as the late Englishman's awfully polite son, which works badly for him in the rough Wild West. In one of the most insane gags, after some criminals wanted to buy off their land and house, Hill's character Moore picks up some rubbery molasses from the ground, pressing it with his fingers, saying how the soil here is very fertile and that they could plant a lot of seeds here and expect a god harvest, but then Bull tells him he is actually holding horse's manure in his hand. The concept of the story that Moore should stop being polite and become a "tough man" is misguided, yet the actors all are fine, especially Yanti Somer as Candida, Moore's love interest, the opening song is catchy, the running gag involving the two bounty hunters always forgetting about the third member of the bandits who sneaks up behind them is amusing, as is the allegorical final scene about the end of the Wild West.

Grade:++