Little Siberia

 The Finnish neo-noir, Little Siberia (Dome Karokoski,  2025) demonstrates the broad influence of the Coen Brothers' Fargo in world cinema.  This modest film clearly employs a narrative template established by Fargo.  The template is pretty good and the movie, therefore, is reasonably entertaining.  

Little Siberia is set in the icy boondocks in Finland in a hamlet that looks like many junction villages in northern Minnesota.  The village stands in a pine forest and possesses a few commercials buildings that look like pole-barns, houses and structures scattered around a sloping main street that local navigate on small scooter-shaped sleds.  It's always icy and the characters spend almost more time falling than they do speaking.  The villagers are mostly morose eccentrics. Everyone seems dogged by the bad weather -- it is always overcast and snowing.  The town's pastor is a nondescript pale man with a haunted look.  (The film employs the laziest of all post 9-11 cliches -- he's a combat veteran of Afghanistan and, therefore, depressed but also equipped with certain military skills.)  The Finnish church seems to have next to nothing to do with religion; the pastor basically serves as a psychological counselor and social worker.  The pastor's genitals were wrecked somehow in the war and his sperm are not viable.  This condition leads to consternation when the pastor's attractive wife (she's a fitness and dance instructor) discovers she's pregnant.  The pastor has never bothered to tell his wife about his reproductive dysfunction -- the Finns are a taciturn group.  But, when his wife announces her pregnancy, the film's hero, reasonably enough thinks he's been cuckolded.  The primary premise for the film's violent action is that a meteorite has landed near town, indeed, penetrated the car body of a drunk who was planning suicide only to be interrupted by the falling star from the sky.  The meteorite, a chunk of stone about fist-sized, is believed to be fantastically valuable.  The rock is displayed in the local museum but has to be watched around the clock because a gang of Russian thugs have resolved to steal the meteorite and sell it for profit.  The pastor, due to his military background, is persuaded to guard the museum, an activity that involves various midnight assaults and attempts to snatch the stone.  Criminality corrupts the town and pretty soon people are threatening one another and taking hostages, bad behavior all involving the town's sole treasure, the meteorite.  There are a couple of murders, a duel with sharp icicles, and, at last, the treasure (like the money in Fargo) is lost, but, nonetheless, possibly accessible to someone who knows where it is located.  

Little Siberia is marketed as a "black comedy" -- it's not comical at all and, in fact, is simply a serviceable crime movie involving some eccentric characters and bursts of surprising violence.  There's nothing in this trifle that you haven't seen before.

Pluribus

 The pod people are coming.  In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956 based on a 1955 Jack Finney novel) human beings are replaced by muted, robotic collectivist aliens.  The film has been generally interpreted as reflecting Cold War anxieties about Communism and communist infiltration of American institutions.  In 1978's remake, Phil Kauffman imagines the pod people as Nixon's minions, ultra-disciplined henchmen for a regime that seeks to abolish human individuality -- the movie is set in San Francisco and features Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.  The Communists are stopped in the '56 movie; Nixon's goons win in the '78 film.  These pictures focus on the initial onslaught of the collective hive-mind aliens on the human race.  Vince Gilligan's Pluribus, at its core a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is more audacious and intellectually challenging -- in Pluribus, the initial subjugation of the human race to the "hive-mind", occurs before the credits.  The nine episodes, all about 50 minutes long, of the show are devoted to the implications of a world-wide regime of soul-less hive-mind collectivists.  After a brisk prelude, Pluribus explores a reality in which everyone on earth, save a dozen or so outliers, are psychologically fused into one vast entity -- every man, woman, and child share exactly the same sensations, memories, expertise, and knowledge.  With the exception of the remnant, inexplicably not affected by the worldwide "joining", everyone knows everyone elses' experiences and all human knowledge is shared by the collective hive mind.  (The situation seems to some extent to be an allegory of the internet and world wide web -- everyone on-line knows potentially everything that can be known).  Furthermore, the collective mind's unitary personality is exceptionally gentle and benign.  The hive mind is a sort of Buddhist super-entity that is peaceable, kind, and devoted to the enlightenment of all sentient beings.  The pod-people in this iteration of The Bodysnatchers cannot lie or deceive, can not act with malice or cruelty and, indeed, are so pacifist that they are unable to even pick fruit, let alone, eat animal tissue -- as we learn, they subside on a milky fluid that is derived from human cadavers, people who have naturally died are converted to edible protein.  The pod-people seem wholly passive - if one of the stand-alone outliers challenges them, they have a tendency to collapse into seizures which have the effect of paralyzing the whole world, and, further, slaughtering anyone who is driving or flying or working with power machinery.  The premises of the hive-mind intelligence are convincingly developed, thought-through, and demonstrated -- the show is logical enough to satisfy its viewers with the notion that the nightmarish scenario (which may, in fact, be paradisical) is plausible enough to sustain both belief and interest.

The series is a star-vehicle for Rhea Seehorn, the actress who played against (and as love-interest) for Bob Odenkirk in the brilliant Better Call Saul series, also a Gilligan program.  Seehorn is inspiring as Carol Sturka, a fantasy novelist in the Anne Rice, bodice-ripping genre.  Sturka is fantastically successful and travels around promoting her books, which she secretly considers dreck, with her spouse -- she's one of TV's newly visible, normalized, and proud lesbians.  When the "joining" occurs, Carol is excluded for some reason that's never explained.  (Her wife dies, knocking Carol, who has alcoholic tendencies into heavy drinking and, even, drug use.)  The hive-mind sends a guardian angel to her in the form of Zosia, an attractive woman who looks like one of the "thirst-trap" characters in Sturka's novels.  Carol is adamant that she will not join the others in the hive-mind although everyone provides her with testimonials as to how beautiful and serene life will be for her as a member of the collective.  In fact, she violently resists being annexed by the collective.  Her aggression, in fact, causes world-wide spasms when the objects of her fury collapse into seizures bringing everyone and everything to its knees for a few minutes.  The first three or so episodes are broadly comical -- Carol connects with the other persons resistant to the hive-mind:  they are a motley group, mostly yearning to join with the others, although one of them, a hedonist African has figured out how to exploit the situation -- he jets around in Air Force One with a bevy of sex-slaves, travels from one lavish destination to another:  the Caribbean or Las Vegas or the French Rivera.  This amusing character is no help to Carol whose ambitions are to save the world by figuring out a way to reverse the universal utopian peace prevailing everywhere.  As it happens, Carol has a stubborn soul-mate, a Paraguayan man named Manousas who absolutely refuses to accept any of the perquisites offered to him by the pod-people -- he calls them "weirdos."  The hive-mind lets Carol do anything that pleases with her and she communicates with the belligerent Paraguayan -- after a number of misunderstandings, principally due to language problems, the Paraguayan sets forth by automobile driving all the way from Asuncion to Bernalillo, New Mexico where Carol lives.  Manousas is the proverbial righteous man who acts in accord with his ethics even when no one is watching.  (For instance, he pays for gas by leaving money in envelopes or slipped under windshield wipers as he siphons fuel out of stranded cars).  Ultimately, the bloody-minded Manousas reaches New Mexico, more than a little the worse for wear -- he's been impaled on some kind of thorn bush in the Darien Gap. Carol has been deteriorating -- after her confrontations with the pod-people have induced world-wide paroxysms, the people in her city have simply moved en masse to get away from her; when she calls them by phone, they answer:  "Our feelings for you Carol haven't changed, but we think its best to take some time off from you.  But we will still deliver anything you want--"  Carol has been asking for things like weapons and booze and one gets the sense that she is near suicide.  Robinson Crusoe-style isolation is disastrous for her and she is deteriorating psychologically.  After pleading with the pod people to come back to her, Zosia re-appears and embarks on a sexual relationship with Carol.  They jetset around the world skiing, lounging in Japanese hot baths, and engaging in the most sybaritic luxuries.  Zosia professes to love Carol and persuades her to consider joining the hive mind.  (We've just seen one of the last hold-outs, a teenager in a very remote valley in Peru, agree to a ritual in which she joins the hive-mind.)  Carol loves Zosia as well and seems about to succumb to her blandishments -- she's tempted to give up her individuality and be submerged in the pluribus of the hive-mind.  But, Manousas arrives and tells her succinctly:  "You have to make a choice:  either you save the world or you get the girl."  After some agonized deliberation, Carol decides to save the world from the beneficent but soul-less pod people.  And that's where the first series ends.

The show is wonderfully shot in a combination of extreme long shots of the Peruvian mountains or the New Mexico desert and close-ups showing the protagonists.  The New Mexico settings are stark and beautiful and the atmospheric touches are great -- Carol invades the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe and takes one of the pictures to hang on her wall, an interior decorating decision applauded by the pod people.  Small details create the sense of reality and fascination that characterizes the show:  there are coyotes who try to unearth Carol's spouse buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of her suburban McMansion.  Translation problems with a cell-phone app provide interesting complications.  The pod-people are not really eerily blank and ill-formed but to the contrary wonderfully gentle, kind, ministering angels.  In one scene, in which Carol beds down with the pod people in a public high school gymnasium,  the film all but dissolves in tenderness -- the weirdos aren't human but they are certainly not less than human; indeed, they may represent a better, more perfect form of consciousness.  Carol skeptically says to Zosia as they are going to bed on the gymnasium floor:  "What is this? Some kind of sex-orgy?" where upon Zosia says "Not unless you want it to be Carol."  Pluribus is widely acclaimed as one of the best shows ever produced and it lives up to its hype.    

Under the Silver Lake

 Two ilms adapt Thomas Pynchon novels to the screen:  One Battle after Another which is loosely derived from Vineland and Inherent Vice based on the novel of that name.  (Both pictures are by Paul Thomas Anderson.)  David Robert Mitchell's remarkable Under the Silver Lake isn't based on Pynchon but it's truer to certain aspects of the novelist's sensibility that the films based directly on his writings.  Under the Silver Lake (2018) channels the eerie obsessions and paranoia that motivates Pynchon's most accessible and shortest novel The Crying of Lot 49.  Pynchon is a writer with political interests and his larger books are full of satire:  the books mercilessly caricature characters whose political affiliations and beliefs are problematic -- subtlety isn't Pynchon's strong suit and his big, ambitious novels are full of Mad magazine parodies, film allusions, and characters with Terry Southern-style names; there's an aspect of Dr. Strangelove in Pynchon's political parables -- this is evident in the two Paul Thomas Anderson adaptations that luxuriate in characters with exotic names like Perfidia Beverly Hills, Doc Sportello, and (to cite a few examples) Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw.  Under the Silver Lake is deeply embedded in the aspect of Pynchon's writing that posits the world as a grotesque labyrinth replete with clues and emblems that present themselves as riddles to be solved.  One of Pynchon's themes is that conspiratorial forces rule reality and, although they are mostly occult, malign traces of their existence and activities are everywhere around us -- if we are willing to experience the horror of exposing these forces, we can decipher these coded messages; to live in the world is a form of cryptography -- we are obliged to decode our experiences.  Although Under the Silver Lake is not an adaptation from Thomas Pynchon, it is closer to his certain important aspects of his works (these are the arcane scientific and pop culture references) than movies actually inspired by his novels.

A slacker named Sam lives in steamy little apartment complex, a moist pit in what seems like a jungle.  One of his neighbors is a woman who walks about topless with a white cockatoo that periodically makes cries that sound like words but can't be deciphered.  Sam spies on his neighbors with binoculars and meets a beautiful young girl with a small white dog; she lives with two other young women in a nearby apartment also part of the miniature compound.  (It turns out that this woman is a call girl with an enterprise called Shooting Stars --these are prostitutes who can claim some scant relationship with TV or movie productions; apparently, Shooting Stars requires this as part of the resume of the women that it employs).  The beginning of the film is like a combination of Rear Window, de Palma's Body Double, and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye with the nude girls practicing yoga on their balcony terrace.  This being Hollywood -- or the Silver Lake neighborhood of East L.A., everyone is movie mad.  Sam's mother keeps calling him and demanding that he watch Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven (1927, Frank Borzage) and the beautiful young woman has a weird shrine to the film How to Marry a Millionaire in her apartment.   She watches the comedy in her bed with Sam.  Everyone has movie posters on their wall -- Sam favors horror films from the thirties.  Although Sam and the girl kiss, their lovemaking is interrupted by the return of the girl's two roommates.  The next morning, the apartment is completely empty and the three girls have vanished --a hobo cipher on the scrawled on the wall warns "Keep Quiet!"  Throughout the picture, various hobo ciphers appear as emblems to be decoded and the closing credits contains a little compendium of some of those secret signs.  Sam sets off to find the missing girl.  (This is notwithstanding the fact that  he has a girlfriend who comes to his apartment to have sex with him dressed in various bizarre costumes -- she claims she's auditioning for parts to justify her apparel).  All of the women in the movie periodically bark and howl like dogs.  This may have something to  do with the fact that a dog-murderer is abroad, stalking people's pets and gutting them -- all of the utility poles are festooned with posters identifying missing dogs.  Two other context or background points are important:  there's folklore about Silver Lake always being associated with failed actors who are dog-murderers; this is said to relate to an actor in the twenties who went berserk out of envy for Rex, The Wonder Dog.  A beautiful succubus like something out of Max Ernst, a willowy naked woman with an owl 's head is said to seduce men at night and kill them -- this is called "the Owl's  Kiss."  Finally, a playboy millionaire named Jefferson Sevence has also gone missing after an expedition to Catalena Island -- ultimately his corpse is found (or thought to be found) burned up in his 1935 Duisenberg; the blackened bodies of three prostitutes are found with him as well; one of the dead girls has a charred bichon frise in her purse.  

There's almost too much in this film.  Sam attends various debauched parties looking for the lost girl, although the evidence suggests that she's the woman burned in the car with the dog in her purse.  He goes to a bookstore and buys a 'zine in which cartoons explain the legends of Silver Lake.  Later, he visits the cartoonist who seems to be a full-blown paranoid conspiracy theorist.  His bar buddy is also a conspiracy theorist who urges Sam to pursue the clues.  Sam believes that Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune blinks her eyes in a sort of Morse Code.  Using that code, Sam decodes a song by Jesus and the Brides of Dracula that contains in its lyrics a message about James Dean and Isaac Newton.  This message leads him to a rendezvous with the King of the Homeless, a shabby man wearing a cardboard crown who apparently rules over a subterranean terrain of maze-like pits, tunnels, and luxury bomb shelters that, in fact, turn out to be pharaonic tombs for an ultra-wealthy death cult.  Sam follows clues to mansion atop a mountain -- it's portrayed by painted matte image on the camera lens.  In the mansion, there's an evil old man called the Songwriter doodling on the piano; he claims that he has embedded clues in the lyrics of all popular songs dating back to Beethoven's Ode to Joy.  He mocks Sam for his naivety and Sam beats him to death with Kurt Cobain's guitar -- the Songwriter's studio is full of souvenirs of famous musicians.   Sam follows more clues and ends up in a gulch on Hollywood Mountain where he meets with a man and three girls that are members of the death cult.  Sam is poisoned but rescued by the Homeless King who later prepares to torture him on suspicion that he is the dog murderer (Sam has dog biscuits in his pocket.)  Sam talks himself out of this dilemma.  He now knows the whereabouts of the beautiful young woman who is still alive but immured under a million tons of concrete awaiting the opportunity to "ascend" with her patron, a plutocrat member of the death cult.  Sam returns home -- his car has been repossessed and he is about to be evicted from his apartment due to nonpayment of rent.  He flees to the bare-breasted neighbor's apartment and has a romantic encounter with her.  The cockatoo shrieks and Sam asks what the bird is saying.  The woman doesn't know.  This summary elides many parties including a wild one in the crypts under the Hollywood Forever graveyard.  After insulting a homeless man, Sam and Millicent Sevence, the daughter of the missing plutocrat go swimming in the Silver Lake reservoir.  Someone shoots at them.  Millicent is shot and a plume of blood pours out of her body -- she is filmed in a way that duplicates a Playboy magazine cover of a model under blue water clutching at her chest; Sam found the Playboy magazine in his father's toolbox and it was the first image to which he masturbated. The movie is full of weird coincidences.  After the party in the crypt, Sam passes out.  He wakes up on Glora Gaynor's grave, next to her headstone.  At the end of the movie, Sam disconsolately watches a video version of Seventh Heaven that is mother has sent him.  

I like this movie a great deal and recommend it.  It's witty and continuously entertaining.  This is one of the only movies that I've seen to have on staff a world-class cryptographer as consultant.  This is the celebrated cryptographer Kevin Knight who deciphered the so-called Copiale Cipher, a 105 page manuscript written in code that resisted all efforts to decipher it between the mid 18th century and 2012 when the results were published.  (What was the manuscript about:  apparently arcane initiation rituals used by group of Freemasons called the "Oculists" -- they were, in effect, Shriner eye-doctors.   

The Mastermind

 Most people seriously overestimate their abilities:  we all think we are excellent drivers, skillful and proficient writers, and able to successfully multi-task.  Most people rate themselves as excellent in their professional capacities.  And, yet, of course, mediocrity reigns.  We are heroes to ourselves but feckless so far as the rest of the world is concerned.  Kelly Reichardt's new crime film, The Mastermind, explores the incongruity between our self-confident pride and the actual measure of our abilities in the context of a fairly standard heist picture.  In films of this sort, a crime is planned, a team assembled, and, then, the heist consummated; because crime doesn't pay, the second half of the movie documents the unraveling of the scheme, the accomplices betraying one another, and the ultimate failure of the enterprise --the model for this genre (or, perhaps, its most successful example) is John Huston's 1950 The Asphalt Jungle; in that movie, a group criminals commit a crime and are hunted down one-by-one:  the film shows us how the fate of the men depends entirely on things outside of their control -- the Professor, the film's criminal mastermind, is arrested because he tarries in a cafe and is in the wrong place at the wrong time.  None of the thugs are too smart and the bravest, but most dim-witted, ends up face-down in a pasture with a couple of curious horses nuzzling at him.  Reichardt's minimalist picture follows the same pattern but is, even, more dispiriting.  Several disaffected kids carry out a heist at a suburban art museum, stealing four canvases by the American expressionist, Arthur Dove -- the crooks aren't ambitious enough to snatch paintings by more famous artists:  the museum has a couple of iconic pictures by Frederick Erwin Church and a canvas by Thomas Cole.  Third-rate crooks steal third-rate pictures.  Almost immediately, the plan goes awry.  One of the co-conspirators informs on his colleagues; other more accomplished thieves snatch the pictures from the gang-leader and, then, hold them for ransom before returning them to the museum.  The so-called mastermind goes on the run, but unsuccessfully.  This summarizes the film's plot.  The film's interest lies in its meticulous staging and carefully detailed, if ultimately opaque, character studies.

JB is the son of a local judge.  He has a solicitous mother who loans him the money necessary for the heist.  It's a modest sum and she thinks her boy is making cabinets -- a lousy criminal, JB is a skilled cabinet-maker; at least, there's something that he's good at.  JB is married, has a mousy wife and two bratty sons. The film is set in 1970 -- Nixon is the President and war in Vietnam, although winding down, is still triggering big protests on campuses and near federal buildings.  JB thinks he's a bold individualist and seemingly wants nothing to do with the protests in the streets.  Ironically, in the film's last scene, JB gets the beat-up by the cops and is whisked away in a paddy van, implying (I think) that he will be arrested for the heist -- by this point in the film, warrants are out for his arrest.  JB assembles a team of fools and ne'er-do-wells.  The most reckless in the group is a black kid named Gibson who, notwithstanding JB's orders, brings a revolver to the heist -- this is fortunate because were it not for the gun, the crooks would have been arrested at the museum; it's less fortunate, however, because the gun ups the stakes. The crime, involving a stolen car as a getaway vehicle, is completely botched.  Teenage girls see the criminals snatching the canvases and sound the alarm.  (An old couple observes the crooks pulling down the canvases on the wall, but think they are maintenance men simply implementing a re-hang in the gallery.)  Everything goes wrong.  JB's kids are not in school due to a teacher work-day and, so, he has to watch them when he supposed to be stealing the paintings.  Within hours of the caper, the black teenager with the gun robs a bank, gets arrested, and, immediately rats out his accomplices.  JB takes the paintings and puts them in an elaborately constructed and elegantly designed cabinet-like box.  Every film of this sort requires a suspense sequence.  Reichardt obliges by staging a terrifying sequence in which JB climbs up a very frail-looking ladder into a hayloft to put his loot into the cabinet that he has dragged up there.  The ladder looks sketchy and JB isn't too sure on his feet and we expect that he will fall and be badly injured.  He does knock the ladder backward and has to leap out of the hay mow, landing in pig manure.  No sooner is he back at home when some sinister men confront his wife; they seem to be mobsters although they claim that they are special art cops.  A little later, more mobsters arrive, big, beefy and surprisingly affable thugs who make JB give them the paintings.  The dragnet is closing on JB.  He flees from Massachusetts to what seems to be upstate New York.  By this time, he has abandoned his wife and two boys.  His old art school buddies welcome him at their rural home, but the wife doesn't want him around -- it's too dangerous.  Without much money remaining, JB takes buses and stays in grim-looking upper rooms in boarding houses or motels.  Ultimately, in Cincinnati, he mugs an old woman for funds to buy a bus ticket to Toronto.  He gets swept up into an anti-wire protest in which a bunch of jolly local cops are busting heads with their nightsticks and ends up detained in paddy wagon, whereupon the movie ends with a shot of the police clowning around with a hat dropped by demonstrator.  

The film is influenced by Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville -- it has several elaborate scenes detailing criminal procedures (laboriously putting the canvases in the cabinet, casing the museum, altering a passport for the trip to Toronto that never takes place.)  These sequences are shot in silence, unpretentiously but effectively.  The entire movie has a washed-out appearance, as if shot on super 8 or 16 mm and, then, blown up with the images appearing somewhat hazy and slightly out of focus; the color schemes are monochromatic with the only color provided by the paintings.  There are dispiriting rural landscapes all grey and brown and shabby taverns (memorably a place called "The Salty Inn") with everything muted and faintly claustrophobic.  The movie that the film most closely resembles is Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us, a picture set during the great Depression about a gang of hapless bankrobbers (and starring Shelley Duval) -- The Mastermind has the same bleak interiors, blurry landscapes and sense of hopelessness and betrayal.   I liked the movie.  Reichardt's pictures attune you to tiny details and nuances and it's fun for me to explore the images, looking for things are significant but half-concealed.  I'm not sure that the film would appeal to all tastes.  Thieves Like Us was released in 1974 -- that is forty years after the events in the Great Depression that provide the context for the movie.  It's remarkable to me that The Mastermind is about events in 1970 some of which I can readily remember --1970 is more distant from today than the Great  Depression was from Altman's picture; The Mastermind is set fifty-five years in the past.  There's an early scene that epitomizes JB's selfishness.  He takes a small figurine out of a display and puts it in his glasses case.  He, then, slips the figurine into his wife's purse.  As they are leaving the museum, he kneels to tie his shows as his wife walks out ahead of him with the two boys.  JB is testing to see if there's some kind of electronic marker on the objects in the museum.  He wants to see if the figurine triggers an alarm.  It does not, but the import of the scene is that he allously casts the risk on his innocent wife.  

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

 Daniel Craig is a good businessman (or has an excellent agent); at the point, where he has become too old to be plausible as 007, Craig has made himself indispensable to a mystery franchise, the Knives Out series.  Knives Out is self-consciously retro -- the movies have the atmosphere of a tony, beautifully acted British mystery, the sort of thing featuring prestigious actors (slumming from their Shakespeare roles) solving crimes in beautifully shot mansions and bucolic villages -- these are the kind of shows broadcast on PBS as part of its Masterpiece Theater Mystery series, introduced with plummy enthusiasm by Alan Cumming.  Like Masterpiece Mystery, Knives Out is light on gore, witty, and features plots that are, by my standards, excessively intricate. Craig acts the part of Benoit Blanc, an eccentric New Orleans private detective, who (like Poe's protagonists) solves crimes for the pleasure of exercising his highly developed faculties of ratiocination.  Craig is a little campy in his vanilla white suits, like a slightly brawnier version of the novelist Tom Wolfe.  He speaks with a soft lisp most of the time but can command the stage when this is required -- typically in the fourth act of the show when the detective has to explain, at tedious length, how the murder was committed, why, and whodunnit.  Benoit Blanc is now considered one of the classic sleuths, on par with Hercules Poiret and Mrs. Marple.  The Knives Out franchise features top-rank actors populating the program, often turning up in showy cameo parts.  The whole thing has a slightly cozy aspect:  the crime is committed amidst a group of people, mostly eccentric and neurasthenic;  the suspects are isolated in a country manor setting.  The writing is witty and the movies are, if anything, overly ambitious -- they purport to contemporary commentary, are politically alert and timely, and, even, explore themes that are more sophisticated than one might expect in this genre.  Rian Johnson writes these films and directs them as well.  All Knives Out pictures have been wildly successful on Netflix, the streaming service that owns the franchise, and, no doubt, the formula will be repeated in a number of future iterations much to the benefit, I think, of the canny Daniel Craig.  

Wake Up Dead Man:  A Knives Out Mystery (2025) is crammed with all sorts of stuff, but, nonetheless, projects a certain staid, and intrinsically moral, perspective on the murderous events that it depicts.  The show, as I've noted, has some elements of classical British "cozy" mystery -- it takes place in a pleasant small-town setting, involves whimsical and eccentric characters (one guy has built a moat around his house), and is, more or less, genteel; the movie is self-evidently a sort of throw-back relying in large part of the charisma of its star-powered cast.  Josh Brolin plays a fearsome Catholic priest, Monseigneur Wicks, whose Christian Nationalist ravings from the pulpit have reduced his congregation to about a half-dozen crazies, all of them suitable as suspects once the murder plot gets underway.  A young priest is dispatched to the parish, located in upstate New York at a place called Chimney Rock.  The congregation consists of an embittered medical doctor (his wife has left him), a failing science fiction writer, a young right-wing podcaster, a sort of Charlie Kirk figures, a female lawyer, and several sad elderly people affiliated with the Church, Martha, a half-crazed acolyte to the Monseigneur -- the part is played by Glenn Close -- and a cynical janitor and maintenance worker (Thomas Haden Church).  There are complicated backstories -- some of the characters are related by blood in surprising and Gothic ways.  Although initially amiable enough, the alpha male here, Wicks, tries to intimidate the upstart young priest (who seems like he is a liberal Democrat or "libtard" as one of the characters has it); he makes the young priest, Father Jud, take his confession which always involves lurid masturbation fantasies.  There is dissension in the parish when Father Jud tries to set up his own prayer circle and bible study group.  Then, Wicks is stabbed to death in a small cubby-hole, a closet-sized recess next to the altar.  The police are called, led by an indefatigable police chief (Mila Kunis imitating Selena Gomez in the Only Murders in the House series).  The killing presents the classic features of a locked-room mystery and can't be solved.  Enter Benoit Blanc, who takes over the case for his own amusement.  He jousts verbally with Father Jud -- Blanc is a strict rationalist, an atheist, and an enemy to religion.  The story contains many twists and turns and can't really be described without spoilers.  It suffices to say that the plot involves, in effect, two mysteries -- how was Monseigneur Wicks killed and by  whom? and how does it happen that Wicks is resurrected and stalks about like Lazarus in the movies' third act.  The viewer here gets two mysteries and their solution for the price of one with some ornate speeches about faith and politics thrown in a for a good measure.  The movie divides neatly into four acts:  in the first act, the characters are introduced, the Wuthering Heights backstories involving scandal, hatred, and violence, are established and we learn that every one of members of the congregation has a good and sufficient reason to hate Wicks.  Act Two involves the solution of the locked room mystery ending with Wicks' apparent resurrection; Act Three is about solving the mystery of the dead priest's revival together with another murder that is collateral damage to the resurrection; Act Four is a lengthy speech, some of it boomed out of the pulpit, by Benoit Blanc in which the various unsolved or enigmatic aspects of the plot are discussed and, then, assigned solutions.  I dislike this sort of resolution to a mystery -- that is, the long and tedious lecture on the clues and how they can be amassed to solve the various questions posed by the plot.  To me, this seems anticlimactic and, since some of the mysteries rely upon very obscure bits of evidence, capriciously interpreted, the viewer usually walks away from the show with the vague sense that he or she has been cheated.  The plot-solution as finally announced typically relies on bits of evidence never properly disclosed to the viewer.  To its credit Wake Up Dead Man plays pretty fair and is carefully written -- there's nothing sloppy about this movie and the solution to the various crimes and enigmas does make sense.  To my taste, the movie takes itself too seriously -- I would like the show better if it were funnier and more over-the-top.  This film is most avowedly not a thriller, not a crime picture, nor a police procedural -- it's British-oriented genre mystery with a big-name cast.  My problem with the movie is not with its execution, or acting, or plotting (all of which are impeccable); I just don't really have much interest in the formula itself.    

Caught Stealing

Caught Stealing is a brutal, serviceable neo-noir.  Set in 1998, the movie is about a handsome and appealing kid who becomes entangled in a clash between different groups of mobsters vying for a 4 million dollar pay day, ill-gotten funds that are locked away in a storage compartment.  I don't recall the source of the money -- it's immaterial to the movie in any event.  Several picturesque and psychopathic members of the Russian mafia are looking for the cash; they are allied with a crooked lady cop.  Two Hasidic mobsters also appear, criminals so vicious that the other crooks fear them -- they have a propensity for gouging out people's eyes.  The action is more-or-less non-stop with the naive hero rocketing about NYC like a silver ball in a pinball game. The protagonist is named Hank and he's a cheerful alcoholic bartender in a dive in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan.  Hank was scouted by big league baseball in his High School year, but crashed his car in a drunk driving incident, killing his best friend in the accident and, further, destroying his knee and, thereby, ending his career in the major leagues before it even begins.  (We see the crash every twenty minutes in a spectacular flashback.)  Hank's next door neighbor at his apartment, a punk with a huge rainbow colored Mohawk, returns to England because his father is dying -- Russ, the Mohawk-punk, asks Hank to care for his cat.  No sooner is Russ out the door, the Russian mafia descend on the scene, savaging poor Hank, who is just collateral damage, to the extent that one of his kidney's is kicked to pieces in the assault.  Hank wakes up sans one of his kidneysin the hospital.  His girlfriend, played by Zoe Kravitz, warns him that he can't drink any more and that he had better get rid of his stores of booze (he has bottles stashed everywhere).  The bad guys are indignant about the fact that Russ has absconded the scene (they think) to enjoy his four million dollars in stolen drug money in Tulum, Mexico.  They think they can torture Hank into telling them where Russ is hiding.  Poor Hank gets persecuted and harassed some more.  There is additional collateral damage and Hank has to go on the lam himself.  Then, the really nasty mobsters intervene, Lip and Schmully, the Hasid "scary monsters" complete with hand grenades, machine guns, huge patriarchal beards and curled forelocks.  (Lip and Schmully are amiable enough when they're not busting heads and they are good sons to their mother, Bubbe played by Carol Kane.  A lot more people get killed.  Hank, who seems a rather dim bulb, figures out a way to get the "scary monsters" to kill off the other bad guys in competition for the four million.  The film's carnage ends happily enough.  Hank gets away-- we see him kicking-back on the beach at Tulum.  Furthermore, he finds a way to send his mother, played by Laura Dern for one 30 second shot, a couple million bucks.  Mothers and sons are a sort of theme in the movie:  Lip and Schmully are extravagantly faithful and loving with respect to Bubbe; Hank is always calling his mother to discuss baseball with her and their beloved team, the San Francisco Giants.   

Caught Stealing plays like an amiable, if violent, mash-up between the Coen Brothers and a crime picture by a hard-boiled neo-noir director like the British Ben Wheatley or the Safdie Brothers.  In fact, the film is directed by Darren Aronofsky.  The movie is well-made with plenty of clever twists and turns and it chugs along efficiently -- it has a break-neck pace and the poor hero has lost his kidney (and his girlfriend, killed execution-style) in the first half hour.  The body count is implausibly high. A certain taste for the sordid and grim-looking locations near Coney Island mark the film as the work of Aronofsky who seems to be slumming here. The picture is made with plenty of  flash and pizzazz.  The action is all heightened, amped up to the edge of surrealism and there's lots of taut, bitter dialogue.  Griffin Dunne appears in long-shot -- I didn't recognize him until the credits identified the part and there's lots of well-known talent in the picture.  There's nothing new in this tour of murder and mayhem, but the picture is entertaining, even companionable for its two-hour running length.  I was sent on a mission to meet a girl in Alphabet City on the lower East Side and, so, some of the movie looked vaguely familiar to me -- the dingy sidewalks and decomposing store-front bars, the alleys clogged with garbage, the drug dealers transacting business on street corners and on the stoops of grim cast-iron buildings the color of congealed smoke. The movie's sufficiently atmospheric and pungent that you can almost smell it.  But my adventure was in1982 and the movie (released in 2025) is set in 1998 -- I guess these areas have long been gentrified.     

Jay Kelly

 Jay Kelly (2025) feels like a vanity project for George Clooney.  This is an implausible reaction to an interesting, and mostly charming, movie.  Why in the world would the gorgeous George Clooney need to pat himself on the back, or attest to his artistic integrity or, for that matter, cry mea culpa for his neglect of family or friends -- an ostentatious display that is just another aspect of pride albeit inverted?  Clearly, the movie is about George Clooney and revels in his presence -- he dominates just about every scene in the movie and, in fact, when he is off-camera, the picture's energy lags.  As evidence of Clooney's stardom, his supporting actor, Adam Sandler, is, more or less, eclipsed by the radiance emitted by the leading man, a fellow who compares himself to Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper while mournfully surveying his glamorous visage in the mirror.  Any actor who can eclipse Adam Sandler (who is also very good in this picture and even gets to shed a tear) is, indeed, a giant of the silver screen. 

Clooney plays a Hollywood star, now about sixty years old, and taking stock of his life and career. In an opening sequences, built from a lavish tracking steadi-cam sequence shot (with Orson Welles and Altman style overlapping dialogue), we see Jay Kelly, Clooney's character, "wrapping" a movie.  Evidently, it's some sort of neo-film noir because Kelly dies slowly from a gunshot wound while speaking a mournful soliloquy about the meaningless of it all -- a little pooch trots up and licks the dying man's hand. After the elaborate shot is completed, Kelly is disappointed with his performance and says to the director:  "Can I get another?," meaning "can we re-shoot and improve the scene."  (The director says "no" -- they already have eight takes.) Kelly is divorced, with two children (Jesse is 33 with another daughter about to leave home to tour Europe who is 18).  Kelly is melancholy between projects.  He has lunch with an old friend, a director, who begs Kelly to "lend his name" to his new project -- the man is obviously out-of-favor in Hollywood and no longer bankable. Kelly, rather coldly, refuses.  A few days later, the old director dies.  At his funeral, Kelly runs into a man who studied acting with him.  A flashback reveals that Kelly stole the young man's ideas at an audition, got the part that the young man was seeking and, for a good measure, stole his girlfriend as well.  Kelly and the old colleague from their method-acting class go out for a drink.  Things deteriorate when the man (he is now a child psychologist) gets drunk and begins to berate the movie star.  Kelly breaks the man's nose and gets a black eye in return.  This contretemps alarms Kelly and he decides impulsively to embark for Tuscany where he is supposed to be awarded some kind of "tribute" -- this part of the movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense:  do small rural towns in Tuscany routinely sponsor film-festivals for American movie stars so that they can award them bouquets of blown-glass roses?  Here you will have to suspend your disbelief.

Kelly with his entourage consisting of Adam Sandler (his agent) and about a dozen other people including a chef, make-up man, and a menacing-looking security guard, take the star's private jet to France.  Kelly wants to catch up with his daughter who is touring the Louvre with a new boyfriend and her friend Rio.  (Kelly can track the kids because they have access to charges put on Rio's credit card, actually her mother's card).  The young woman is appalled to see her famous father appear in Paris.  Everyone gets on a train to Tuscany where various adventures ensue -- at one point, Kelly chases a purse-snatcher running at an impressive sprint for a sixty-year old man and, then, wrestles the bad guy down to the ground.  In Tuscany, Kelly meets his own father -- he's about ninety and still fancies himself a womanizer.  (This sad, but memorable, sequence is extracted almost shot-for-shot from a similar scene in which Marcello encounters his father on Rome's Via Venuto in Fellini's La Dolce Vita.)  There's a big orgiastic dance scene ala Paolo Sorrentino in The Great Beauty.  Kelly's entourage, one by one, is leaving him -- his make-up lady and publicist go back to Paris; his father, flown to Italy, gets sick from too much excitement and departs, the security guy's foot gets broken which takes him out of the game, and, at last, even  Adam Sandler has doubts about his thirty-year long relationship with Kelly.  Kelly wanders around in a picturesque dark forest, lost, and grieving his past betrayals of friends and colleagues and his failures as a father. With Sandler weeping at this side, Kelly watches a montage from his pictures at the tribute -- with bittersweet irony, he says that he's dissatisfied with the image and himself and says:  "Can I get another?"  

The film is directed without ostentation by Noah Baumbach.  The script is good although heavily influenced by other, better films.  George Clooney seems hesitant to play the Hollywood star as ruthless and cold-hearted, although there is plenty of evidence of this aspect of his character.  Clooney is so ingratiating that you don't realize until the film is over that Jay Kelly is amoral and, even, capable of behaving viciously.  Kelly's fame is based upon stealing ideas from his best friend in acting school.  Although he is accommodating to his fans, pausing often to sign autographs, he bullies the people around him and turns a cold shoulder to the old man whose direction years earlier made him a star.  He whines about being alone when people in his entourage are constantly serving him -- his factotum gets him drinks without being asked to do so, gliding silently up to the protagonist from time to time with a cold beverage.  We see him skimming his pool in a brief scene and this seems a task too mundane for the glamorous movie star -- sure enough, a pool boy shows up and takes the skimmer from him with a sullen look as if he has caught Kelly in the midst of playacting.  Furthermore the resolution of one important plot point turns on Adam Sandler's character literally blackmailing someone -- this is all handled in a jocular manner.  Some of this is ugly stuff but Clooney is so pretty, we let him get away with it unscathed.  It's my contention that Clooney, who is indeed a charismatic movie star, had never been in a feature film that fully exploited his charm and intelligence.  He seems to dwarf that material in which he chooses to appear.