Photo caption: Harry Melling in THE PALE BLUE EYE. Courtesy of Netflix.
The Pale Blue Eye stars Christian Bale as a detective pulled out of retirement to solve a murder mystery at West Point in 1830. He enlists a cadet as his assistant – none other than Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling), in his one unsuccessful year at the Military Academy. Except for Harry Melling, The Pale Blue Eye is not great.
As the two keep peeling the onion, the bodies and more weirdness keep piling up, including a distractingly incredible dive into the occult. Just when the whodunit is seemingly wrapped up, there’s one more twisty Big Reveal. The whodunit is far from thrilling, and the final twist isn’t enough to pay off.
The fine director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Hostiles) frames the whole thing in a Gothic horror patina, but that’s not enough to keep the story interesting. Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s story is a slog.
Christian Bale ably plays his character with world-weariness and just the right hint of slyness. Two of the world’s greatest screen actors, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Timothy Spall, are embarrassingly wasted in underwritten roles. Toby Jones and Gillian Anderson don’t fare much better.
Harry Melling goes big as Edgar Allen Poe, reveling in a southern accent (Poe grew up in Virginia) and the florid 18th century speech. His Poe has the confidence, perhaps from narcissism, that belies his unpopularity with peers, and his lack of accomplishment. And. of course, Melling embues his Poe with a discernible creepiness. This isn’t a big deal IMO, but Melling is made up to look just like a young Poe would have looked, before the mustache and the dissolution.
As a kid, Melling broke through as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter franchise, which he needed to finish in a fat suit because he had slimmed down so much. In the last year or so, Melling has produced some great work in The Queen’s Gambit, Please Baby Please and The Tragedy of Macbeth. Before that, he was the best element of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He is now one of cinema’s great scene-stealers.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Nadia Tereszkiewicz in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
The ever-surprising Only the Animals is no ordinary mystery. After an opening sequence with a most unusual piggy-back ride, a wealthy woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) disappears among the wintry cattle farms in France’s mountainous and sparsely inhabited Lozere highlands. We meet a series of local characters, each of whom may hold the key to the puzzle, as may the young hustler Armand (Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’ N’Drin), a world away in Côte d’Ivoire.
The intricately constructed story reveals elements of the mystery, from each character’s perspective in sequence. The first French character we meet is Alice (Laure Calamy) – cheery, good-hearted and goofy, with atrocious taste in men; Alice’s neediness leads her to make a poor decision. Then the others, whose behavior is motivated variously by obsessive infatuation, misdirected passion and psychotic delusion, plunge completely off the rails. Their individually random acts collect into a pool of perversion.
By the time we reach the satisfying conclusion, the audience has learned the what and the why (which the investigating police will never uncover), and the most seemingly disparate story lines have intersected.
The story comes from a novel by Colin Niel, adapted by Only the Animals’ director Dominik Moll, with Gilles Marchand. Moll and Marchand were nominated for the César (France’s Oscar equivalent) for adapted screenplay. (Niel himself has a cameo at the agricultural coop’s store counter.)
Laure Calamy and Denis Ménochet in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
The story is the real star of Only the Animals, but the cast is superb. Tedeschi is marvelous as the worldly woman with a private reason to get away to her husband’s rural getaway, especially when she flashes the briefest instant of anger. Calamy, recently in Sibyl and My Donkey My Lover and I, is one of my favorite international comic actresses. Denis Ménochet, César-nominated for Custody, perhaps the best ever domestic violence drama, plays Alice’s boorish and secretive husband Michel. Damien Bonnard plays Joseph, a damaged loner with an underestimated psychosis.
Nadia Tereszkiewicz plays the young waitress Marion, who turns a one night stand into a disturbing infatuation. This is only the fifth feature and third significant movie role for 25-year-old Tereszkiewicz. She now has four films in production or pre-production, including one directed by Tedeschi.
Guy Roger ‘Bibisse’N’Drin (left) in ONLY THE ANIMALS. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
N’Drin and the other key Ivorian players – Perline Eyombwan, and Christian Ezan – are also excellent.
The surprises keep popping up until the final shot. Only the Animals opens this weekend in a limited theatrical release, which will soon include the Bay Area’s Landmark Shattuck.
In the atmospheric ticking clock drama Moka, Emanneulle Devos plays Diane, a Swiss woman whose daughter has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. Months afterward, she is still consumed with grief. Impatient with the slow and uncertain pace of the police investigation and with her husband’s attempts at finding closure, Diane launches her own investigation to find the responsible party and make them pay.
Diane starts connecting dots and begins to suspect Marlène (Nathalie Baye), a shopowner from a neighboring town in France. Diane adopts the alias of Hélène and, creepily, begins to infiltrate Marlène’s life. Moka is a whodunit mixed with psychological thriller – who is really the perp and what is Diane capable of doing?
I, for one, didn’t see the big plot twist coming. Director Frédéric Mermoud adapted the screenplay from the Tatiana De Rosnay novel.
The prolific French actress Emanneulle Devos made a splash in 2001 with Read My Lips and popped up recently in the indie Frank & Lola. Devos has a very compelling quality. She excels at playing women who are very intense and possibly dangerous, women like Diane in Moka.
Nathalie Baye and Emmanuelle Devos in MOKA
Nathalie Baye is the Meryl Streep of France, nominated ten times for France’s Best Actress award. She started off in 1972 as Joëlle the script girl in Trauffaut’s Day for Night, and had risen to international stardom by 1982 and her performance in The Return of Martin Guerre – one of the greatest acting turns in all cinema. In Moka, Baye’s Marlène is a seemingly uncomplicated woman. We correctly suspect that she’s something else under the surface, but we don’t guess what that really is. It’s great to see Baye take this supporting role and nail it.
Moka is a well-crafted fuse-burner and a showcase for two great actresses. You can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels in 1931’s THE MALTESE FALCON
When we think of The Maltese Falcon, the 1941 John Huston film justifiably comes to mind. After all, it’s arguably the first film noir and undeniably influential. It’s also got Humphrey Bogart as an indelible detective Sam Spade and an unsurpassed ensemble cast. But this is only one of three movie versions of Dashiell Hammett’s source novel.
The 1931 movie was a sex comedy, and the 1936 version was a screwball comedy. All three films are united by Hammett’s cynicism.
THE MALTESE FALCON (1931)
unclad Bebe Daniels in 1931’s THE MALTESE FALCON
The first cinematic The Maltese Falcon came out in 1931, only one year after the novel. It was directed by Roy Del Ruth with its screenplay adapted by Maude Fulton, Brown Holmes and Lucien Hubbard. Sam Spade was played by Ricardo Cortez, born Jacob Krantz to Austrian Jewish parents and recast by Hollywood into a Latin Lover.
Cortez’s Sam Spade is lecherous, cocksure, leering and pawing. Indeed, if this Pre-Code The Maltese Falcon is about anything, it’s about sex. It opens with a woman adjusting her hose before leaving Sam Spade’s office, evidence of a just-completed sexual encounter.
Bebe Daniels plays Miss Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy as sexually aggressive. She’s shown taking an obviously post-coital bath, and deals out lines like “who’s that dame wearing MY kimono?“.
At one point, a large banknote is missing and Spade takes Brigid into an adjoining room and strip searches her. This 1931 movie is the only Maltese Falcon that contains this sequence. What we see on camera is an apparently nude Brigid clutching her clothes behind the door.
As entertaining as this raunchy version is, much of the drama is drained drama from the final confrontation. Spade produces Chinese merchant Lee Fu Gow as an eyewitness to Archer’s murder, resulting in Brigid’s conviction. Then Spade shows up to jail to buy premium perks for Brigid while she is incarcerated. Off-screen, Wilmer kills Gutman and Cairo.
According to film noir expert Eddie Muller, this 1931 Effie (Spade’s secretary), played by Una Merkel, is the closest screen portrayal to the detective’s secretary in Hammett’s source novel.
The Hays Code prevented the re-release of The Maltese Falcon in 1936, which led to the 1936 remake. Because it’s so risque, the complete version of this 1931 film was not screened again in the United States until 1966.
SATAN MET A LADY (1936)
Bette Davis and Warren William in SATAN MET A LADY
That 1936 remake was directed by William Dieterle, with a screenplay by Brown Holmes. It’s more of a screwball comedy than a whodunit. And it’s an actor’s movie – with the stars riffing off their already established screen personae.
Like the title, all of the characters are renamed but recognizable. Warren William plays the shamus Sam Spade, Bette Davis is the Brigid fatale, ditzy Marie Wilson is the Effie, Alison Skipworth is a female take on the Gastman character and Arthur Treacher’s Travers fills the place of the Cairo character. The gunsel is played as an obvious homosexual by purring Maynard Holmes (an effective scene stealer despite being uncredited). And the MacGuffin they’re all chasing is The Horn of Roland, not the black bird.
Warren William was the King of Pre-Code, a leading man who delighted in playing shameless scoundrels. That’s what audiences were expecting, and that’s what they got in Satan Met a Lady. William’s Spade is flamboyant and always looking for a quick buck (and a quickie). Bette Davis matched up well with William, as she did earlier in the political satire The Dark Horse.
Alison Skipworth was already 72 when she made Satan Met a Lady, and her jovial but devious performance is at least as good as Sydney Greenstreet’s in the 1941 version.
Quips fly back and forth in a ping pong of witticisms. And you can’t take your eyes off Maynard Holmes and Marie Wilson whenever they’re on the screen.
THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)
Humphrey Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)
John Huston directed and adapted the screenplay for the 1941 The Maltese Falcon. This is the most famous version because it is by far the best. It’s darker, and virtually every character is richer, and the performances by Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor are riveting.
Huston’s Maltese Falcon is often called the first film noir, and it’s certainly more influential than the other contenders. Huston and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (Casablanca) teamed up to create innovative camera shots and a a setting every much as shadowy as the characters. You can see The Maltese Falcon‘s look and feel in the entire genre of film noir.
Right away, audiences knew they were looking t something different. We see the shadow of the lettering “Spade and Archer” on the office floor. Spade’s phone is lit by outside streetlights when he gets the call about Archer’s demise. Many faces emerge from the shadows, dramatically lit. Spade leans over to kiss Brigid, and we see over his shoulder, out the window to Wilmer’s stakeout on the street below. Look for the shadows of the curtains blowing behind Spade in the final scene.
You can play a drinking game with the times that Brigid has bars across her, from the shadows of Venetian blinds, the stripes on cloths, and, finally, when the bars of the elevator are pulled across her face.
Bogart was a familiar face in crime movies, usually as the villain dispatched by the hero. But The Maltese Falcon put him on the A-List. Bogart’s Sam Spade was the streetwise, cynical guy looking out for himself, but who still adheres to a code, just like his upcoming iconic roles in Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and Key Largo.
Humphrey Bogart trying to assess Mary Astor in THE MALTESE FALCON
Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a tour de force. Adorable, captivating and seemingly vulnerable, Astor’s Brigid is SO manipulative. Bogart’s Spade is so jaded that he expects the worst from everyone, but even he can let his guard down for Astor’s Brigid.
Astor was an uncommonly beautiful girl, and, beginning at age 15, she made 49 pictures in the Silent Movie Era. Her best role had been at age 29 in Dodsworth, filmed while she was being tormented by scandalous child custody litigation. Here, the 35-year-old Astor is seasoned enough to play a crafty woman who uses her sexuality without looking like that’s what she’s doing.
Superb performances abound, especially Sydney Greenstreet as the affable but sinister mastermind Gutman and Peter Lorre as the fey hustler Joel Cairo. As Wilmer, Elisha Cook, Jr., delivers the finest depiction of a weak punk, wannabe hard guy before John Cazale’s Fredo in The Godfather.
This was the first movie for the 61-year-old stage actor Greenstreet and the beginning of his on-screen pairing with Peter Lorre. Huston and Edeson film Gutman from below to emphasize his girth and menace. Upon receiving really bad news, the nervous Cairo melts down and Gutman clutches at his carotid artery, but then recovers and embarks in merry greed.
Dashiell Hammett’s world view – that no one can disappoint you as long as you expect them to act only in their craven self interest – pervades all three Maltese Falcons. But Bogart’s Sam Spade, as written by John Huston, elevates the 1941 version. Ever sympathetic, Bogart’s Spade is never cuddly; his partner is not yet in the ground when Spade has the sign painter remove the partner’s name from the office door. And, as would any man, Sam can have feelings for Brigid, but he won’t be her sap.
Elsiha Cook, Jr. finds out that Humphrey Bogart is on to him in the 1941 version of THE MALTESE FALCON
In the thriller Searching, a Silicon Valley engineer David (Jon Cho) has been single-parenting his daughter since the death of his wife. The daughter, now sixteen, doesn’t come home. Has she run away? He she been abducted? Is she even still alive? Searching is a ticking clock thriller as David and the investigating police detective Vick (Debra Messing) race against time to solve the case. There are several red herrings, a couple major plot twists and one mega-surprise.
Here’s what is really different about Searching – the movie is entirely on the character’s screens – those of his computers, but also on smartphones, television, a security video and a live funeral cam. The sixteen year-old flashbacks are shown on a sixteen-year-old version of Windows desktop.
This is NOT a “gimmick movie”. It is a complete movie that writer-director Aneesh Chaganty has chosen to tell through this device. For example, Chaganty barely gives a glimpse of the comments on on-line news reports – and no character comments on them – but the audience finds them maddening and suffers the indignities along with David. In the same vein, I also enjoyed the recent teen horror Unfriended, also told on a computer screen, and the claustrophobic drama Locke, set in the driver’s seat of an auto.
Detective Vick asks David, “Who is your daughter and who does she talk with?”, which puts the spotlight on the movie’s theme. He’s her dad, and he was certain that he knows his daughter – but he finds out that, as a teenager, she has developed into an entirely new and unrecognizable person. Obviously, that revelation brings him enormous guilt to go along with the shock, but he throws himself into the search by grabbing her laptop and hacking her social media. As any good Silicon Valley parent, he opens a spreadsheet and starts filling it with what he finds out from the trail she has left online.
John Cho’s performance is pretty much perfect. Of course, he’s already achieved popular success in two movie franchises – as Harold in the Harold and Kumar stoner series and Sulu in Star Wars. Here, he gets a full-out, adult dramatic role and knocks it out of the park. Cho modulates David’s increasing tension and desperation through the story, and he is perfect in the flashback scenes, too.
Aneesh Chaganty is a San Jose native. Although he says that only two percent of the movie was actually filmed in San Jose, Searching really nails the vibe of Silicon Valley in 2018. Locals will unmask the very slight name changes to recognize the Sharks, the SJPD, Oakridge Mall, Evergreen/Silver Creek Highs and more. (The only egregious misstep is one character referencing Highway “101” in LA-speak as “the 101” .)
Searching can be streamed from Amazon (Starz channel), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Writer-director Rian Johnson explodes the genre of the drawing room murder mystery in the gloriously entertaining Knives Out.
Knives Out opens at the country estate of a multi-millionaire author (Chistopher Plummer), where he is found dead. If he was murdered, it had to be at the hands of his sweet caregiver Marta (Ana de Armas) or a member of his icky family of ingrates (Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Chris Evans). A Hercule Poirot-type consulting detective (Daniel Craig with a Southern accent) arrives to investigate, and the game is afoot.
I’ve met plenty of folks like the author’s family, who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. That’s what Knives Out is really about – a wickedly funny send-up of totally unjustified entitlement. One of the running jokes is that they claim that Marta is “one of the family”, but none can remember which Latin American country she’s from.
Despite Daniel Craig’s turn as the famed detective, this is really Ana de Armas’ movie, and she is superb. All of the cast are excellent, but everyone except de Armas and Plummer play very broad characters. BTW De Armas plays Paloma, the Bond Girl, to Craig’s James Bond in No Time to Die (coming in April 2020).
Ana de Armas in KNIVES OUT
I recently wrote about Rian Johnson’s 2005 breakthrough Brick, which inhabited the form of another familiar movie genre – film noir. In Nate Jones’ interview in Vulture, Johnson says “One thing I don’t believe in is the notion that this is a dusty old genre and you have to find a way to flip the old tropes on their heads. The basic machinery of it, the tropes of it, are why it works.”
Johnson slyly (and without comment) inserts a shot of Marta’s mom watching a rerun of Angela Lansbury in a Murder, She Wrote, dubbed in Spanish. And the great M. Emmet Walsh has a cameo as the aged security guy who proudly explains the VHS-based security camera system.
Knives Out works as a darkly funny murder mystery and as a pointed social satire. It’s one of the year’s smartest and funniest films.
Jue Huang in a scene from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Bai Linghai, courtesy Kino Lorber.
In the singular Chinese neo-noir Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Luo (Jue Huang) embarks on a search to find the mysterious woman he dallied with twenty years before. As he follows the clues, he plunges into an atmospheric underworld of dripping darkness and people who don’t want to talk. Along the way, he encounters the sultry, down-on-her-luck floozy Wan Qiwen (Wei Tang), whose lethal, fedora-adorned boyfriend does not want to relinquish her to Luo’s quest.
After a low burn beginning, Luo’s search reaches its climax in a spectacular ONE-HOUR single shot. It’s nighttime and both the exteriors and interiors are lit to evoke a surreal world stained by noirish danger. The shot requires the camera to follow Luo and Wan Qiwen, together and separately, inside and outside, between various levels and twice past a nervous horse, all while other characters interact with them. It’s right up there with the magnificent shots in Children of Men, Goodfellas, Touch of Evil, The Secret in Their Eyes, Atonement, Gun Crazy and the one-shot film Victoria.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the triumph of writer-director Bi Gan, who never forgets that he is telling his story in the medium of cinema. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is so atmospheric that sometime we feel the dankness of his set designs. Repeatedly, the richest of colors stand out against noirish backdrops. Wan Qiwen is unforgettable in her satiny emerald green dress, lit by Luo’s headlights as he tracks her by automobile in a dark tunnel. (Bi Gan has acknowledged his admiration for Wong Kar-wai, and Bi Gan has created a film as visually intoxicating as Wong Kar-wai’s.) Ban Gi used three directors of photography; the second cinematographer prepared the final shot for the third. There are recurring themes of spinning rooms, flooded floors and dripping ceilings, single flames and sparklers. The soundtrack centers on ambient sound, with very few musical cues.
Wei Tang, Yongzhong Chen in a scene from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Liu Hongyu, courtesy Kino Lorber.
All of this enhances the story of Luo’s obsession with a doomed romance (and possibly more than one doomed romance). He can’t sure that what he hears is true – or even that what he sees is real. It’s a world filled with dissolute and murderous men and unreliable women. Luo asks a man, “Is that child yours?” and is answered, “She was a master story teller” (not a complement in this instance).
Bi Gan says, “It’s a film about memory”. Indeed, he has Luo say, “The difference between film and memories is that film is always false. They are composed of a series of scenes. But memories mix truth and lies. They appear and vanish before our eyes .”
That final shot is in 3D. Bi Gan says, “After the first part (in 2D), I wanted the film to take on a different texture. But I believe this three-dimensional feeling recalls that of our recollections of the past. Much more than 2D, anyway. 3D images are fake but they resemble our memories much more closely.”
Hong-Chi Lee in a scene from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Liu Hongyu, courtesy Kino Lorber.
This film is entirely written by Bi Gan, with no apparent relationship to the identically-titled 1962 film of the Eugene O’Neill play, the famed four-hander with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell. The Mandarin title of Bi Gan’s film is literally Last Evenings On Earth, a title which came from a short story by Roberto Bolaño. Bi Gan just liked the title Long Day’s Journey into Night and thought that it fit the spirit of his film.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the biggest Chinese art house hit ever, and won an award at Cannes in 2018. It opens this weekend in the Bay Area.
I regret that I’m a latecomer to the thriller Searching, which has been in theaters for a while – this is a damn good movie. A Silicon Valley engineer David (Jon Cho) has been single-parenting his daughter since the death of his wife when the daughter, now sixteen, doesn’t come home. Has she run away? He she been abducted? Is she even still alive? Searching is a ticking clock thriller as David and the investigating police detective Vick (Debra Messing) race against time to solve the case. There are several red herrings, a couple major plot twists and one mega-surprise.
Here’s what is really different about Searching – the movie is entirely on the character’s screens -those of his computers, but also on smartphones, television, a security video and a live funeral cam. The sixteen year-old flashbacks are shown on a sixteen-year-old version of Windows desktop.
This is NOT a “gimmick movie”. It is a complete movie that writer-director Aneesh Chaganty has chosen to tell through this device. For example, Chaganty barely gives a glimpse of the comments on on-line news reports – and no character comments on them – but the audience finds them maddening and suffers the indignities along with David. In the same vein, I also enjoyed the recent teen horror Unfriended, also told on a computer screen, and the drama Locke, claustrophobicly set in the driver’s seat of an auto.
Detective Vick asks David, “Who is your daughter and who does she talk with?”, which puts the spotlight on the movie’s theme. He’s her dad, and he was certain that he knows his daughter – but he finds out that, as a teenager, she has developed into an entirely new and unrecognizable person. Obviously, that revelation brings him enormous guilt to go along with the shock, but he throws himself into the search by grabbing her laptop and hacking her social media. As any good Silicon Valley parent, he opens a spreadsheet and starts filling it with what he finds out from the trail she has left online.
John Cho’s performance is pretty much perfect. Of course, he’s already achieved popular success in two movie franchises – as Harold in the Harold and Kumar stoner series and Sulu in Star Wars. Here, he gets a full-out, adult dramatic role and knocks it out of the park. Cho modulates David’s increasing tension and desperation through the story, and he is perfect in the flashback scenes, too.
Aneesh Chaganty is a San Jose native. Although he says that only two percent of the movie was actually filmed in San Jose,Searching really nails the vibe of Silicon Valley in 2018. Locals will unmask the very slight name changes to recognize the Sharks, the SJPD, Oakridge Mall, Evergreen/Silver Creek Highs and more. (The only egregious misstep is one character referencing Highway “101” in LA-speak as “the 101” .)
7 Splinters in Timehas to be the trippiest film in this year’s Cinequest. The detective Darius (Edoardo Ballerini – Corky Caporale in The Sopranos) is seriously confused. He can’t remember large chunks of his past. And then he’s confronted by an exact look-alike in a most unlikely place. Soon, even more doppelgängers arrive in the story. Darius is trying to figure out what’s going on- and so is the audience.
We go from place to place and, possibly, from time to time. And Darius and/or his lookalikes keep showing up. It’s as if one’s life were depixelated, digitally compressed and then defectively reassembled. Artifacts from other periods of time – Polaroid camera, rotary phone, microfiche viewer – are clues that time travel may be involved here.
Story threads are braided together, some more vividly nightmarish than others. There’s plenty of eye candy and sometimes there’s the feeling of Fellini on Dexedrine. If you like your movies linear and unambiguous, you will likely be impatient until the explanation in the last 20 minutes. But it’s fun to settle in and try to figure out what is going on.
7 Splinters is the feature film debut for writer-director Gabriel Judet-Weinshel. To depict Darius’ different realities (what he calls the “fractured psyche”), Judet-Weinshel used 8mm, 16mm, 35mm film and analog still film, along with the full range of digital, from low-resolution 30-frame video to the large format digital Red Camera. The effect is very cool.
Greg Bennick is excellent as the hyperkinetic mystery figure Luka. Lynn Cohen is a howl as the salty curmudgeon Babs, Darius’ elderly neighbor. Both are effective counterpoints to Ballerini’s chilly and stony Darius.
The beloved character actor Austin Pendleton plays The Librarian, a much more pivotal character than initially apparent. Pendleton has a zillion screen credits, including Frederick Larrabee in What’s Up, Doc? and Gurgle in Finding Nemo. I think I heard his character say, “You are the lizard warrior”. It’s that kind of movie.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of 7 Splinters in Time. The film is listed under its alternative title of Omphalos, so you can find its screenings here in the Cinequest program.
Greg Bennick and Edoardo Ballerini in 7 SPLINTERS IN TIME
Although I love mysteries, I have never warmed to Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot. In this year’s remake of Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh actually made Poirot marginally appealing to me. Branagh, who also directed, brings to the role a more explicit OCD diagnosis and a mustache that has its own architecture.
It’s the same plot as in the 1970s version – as the increasingly more improbable coincidences pile up, it becomes clear that they may not be coincidences at all. And this year’s Murder on the Orient Express is also star-studded, with fine performances from Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Judy Dench, Olivia Colman, Penelope Cruz, Derek Jacobi and Johnny Depp, who can pull off a pencil thin mustache better than anyone in the last 60 years.
Murder on the Orient Express begins with a spectacular overhead shot of the Wailing Wall and concludes with an amusing Last Supper tableau (see M*A*S*H*). It’s moderately entertaining, at its best when it acknowledges that it’s just a lark.
