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.

Frankenstein (2025)

 Recently, I read a review of a Netflix western called The Abandons.  This series is an upscale project starring some notable actors and featuring gorgeous scenery.  The script is rudimentary:  a motley crew of cattle ranchers defend their range against encroaching mining interests.  The two opposing clans are lead by headstrong matrons and the program tilts toward some kind of catfight between the two female protagonists.  The good guys are a rainbow coalition of Indians, feminists, and other disenfranchised people.  The villains are entrenched politically and their machine controls the organs of the law and commerce.  This is the kind of show in which the viewer has a sinking feeling when a cute and inoffensive dog is introduced -- you will win your wager if you bet that the villains will kill the poor canine before the end of the first episode.  In the essay on the show, the critic noted that the series is reasonably entertaining but, nonetheless, represents a MVC production with the initials standing for "Minimum Viable Content" -- The Abandons, the reviewer suggested, exemplifies what is wrong with contemporary cable and streaming TV, that is, shows structured to keep you watching with a sort of grim persistence but which are otherwise forgettable and meretricious.  Normally, I wouldn't put much stock into a dour opinion of this sort but perceived almost immediately what was meant by "minimum viable content" when I watched Guillermo del Toro's decidedly maximalist version of Frankenstein -- in the first ten minutes of the show, the Monster attacks a company of shipwrecked Danish sailors, clambering aboard the ice-bound vessel, hurling men into bonfires and pots of flaming oil, and sustaining about 20 mortal wounds, none of which slow him down,before plunging into icy water foaming up through slabs of ice shattered by a charge from a spectacularly lethal-looking blunderbuss.  The havoc is exquisitely choreographed; the tall ship trapped in the ice looks fabulous as does the steppe of snow extending to a horizon rimmed with colors like a gas chromatograph's output or a tequila sunrise.  The monster's roar is deep and resonant -- one can imagine what it sounded like on a theater audio system (an earthquake I presume).  The creature's pallid features and jigsaw-scarred face make him look like a saint or martyr in an El Greco painting, elongated and greyish mucous crowned with wounded and ecstatic eyes.  There is nothing minimalist about this spectacle -- everything is contrived to create the maximum impression on the viewer and del Toro manages to transform his film into a miraculous Wunderkabinet of odd and morbid sights:  there are ranges of mountains that stretch across the horizon like the menacing peaks glimpsed in the background of a Brueghel painting ("November: the Return of the Flock"); corpses are looted from a battlefield, bodysnatchers displacing sinister flocks of black ravens -- the battlefield looks like the aftermath of Waterloo, lit by flaming heaps of rubbish and freezing with snow, littered with dead bodies out to the horizon. Bodysnatchers seize hanged men who are sent to the gallows in platoons, three convicts hanged at a time and their bodies still spasming as Dr. Frankenstein inspects the teeth of unfortunates about to be executed.  Alleyways are full of butchered animals and pigs' heads line a corridor.  The mad doctor's laboratory is a pinnacle of masonry perched on the very edge of a turbulent ocean that seems to be about four-hundred feet high, a grim edifice that features a screaming stone gorgon or Medusa-head looming over the charnel house full of fragmentary corpses; ballrooms are a quarter-mile long and huge palatial mansions rise over foggy basins and autumnal trees.  There are masive explosions, vast pillars of fire, and still-life color shots that resemble some of the more grotesque visions of the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin -- a bouquet of flowers is clutched in a cadaver's hand severed from the body at the elbow, strange, glistening surgical instruments also on display.  The women look like Elizabeth Siddon, the famous pre-Raphaelite model with the flaming red hair and they wear outlandish bonnets with spirals of silk ribbon wrapped around their ice-white faces.  Corpses are carried to their graves in torpedo-shaped anthropomorphic caskets chiseled from alabaster; the dead face wrapped in lustrous scarlet is covered when the mask-lid of the sarcophagus is screwed down.  In one scene, the camera surveys a gloomy, brown alleyway in some reeking, smoky city.  A man walks down the alley with his hands clutched behind his back.  Both hands are covered by bright green gloves, the only color in the otherwise monochrome composition.  The costumes, sets, and palatial interiors are all ornate and grotesque.  Everything is immense and colossal.  (Sometimes, the extravagance of the set decorator goes awry -- in one scene, the monster shivers in the corner of a mill full of elaborate wooden gears and ratchets and flywheels; the place is infested with an army of rats, and is an exquisite creation -- there is only one problem, there's no water anywhere near this huge mill and, therefore, no way for the intricate contrivance of gears and pinions and rotating axles to be powered.)  The whole thing is colossal, vast, and teeming with elegant detail.  It's certainly the hallucinatory opposite of the idea of MVC.

I often find del Toro's films to be lavish, but empty.  (This was my impression of Pan's Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley as well as The Shape of Water which I thought was inert, overwhelmed by its design.)  Frankenstein is a better film, more powerful emotionally, and the performances of its actors fight the sets and decor to a draw -- the mere humans aren't overwhelmed by the spectacle but hold their own.  The film's narrative is clear enough and del Toro obviously admires Mary Shelley's novel because he incorporates much material from the book into his film.  The ardor with which the film was made is evident in every frame and the movie is wonderful in many ways.  I still sense something lacking in the picture and the fantastically beautiful set design, decor, and costumes seem to be compensating for a certain hollowness at the heart of the endeavor.  That said, this movie is clearly del Toro's labor of love and it is impressive in all respects.

Victor Frankenstein is abused by his fierce, atheistic father, a scientist who beats the boy with a cane (on his face no less) for failing to properly answer anatomical questions:  he won't cane the boy on his hands because a surgeon needs those instruments for his trade but the "face...that is for vanity."  Victor's mother adores her son but seems remote from her cruel husband.  When she dies in childbirth, Victor is bereft.  Shortly thereafter, the old doctor dies and is buried in the family crypt.  Victor figures out that galvanic charges can animate corpses and make them cry out, even enable them to catch balls pitched their way -- this is visualized in a macabre scene in which parts of a cadaver riveted to a board are displayed by Victor in a dissecting theater.  "It's not science, it's a crucifixion!" someone declares.  One of the curious attending the lecture with the animate corpse is a German named Heinrich Harlander; he's the scion of an arms manufacturing company.  Harlander finances Victor's experiments which take place at an immense, abandoned fortress on the cliffs above the sea. Harlander's niece, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is betrothed to little William Frankenstein, Victor's brother whose birth resulted in the death of his mother.  Elizabeth is a spectral figure, herself enamored of elaborate dissection specimens and bugs -- she reads books on entomology and, although doomed to marry William, in fact, falls in love with Victor.  After much lurid carnage, including a visit to a European battlefield with the sardonic , Harlander, Victor animates his creature. (Harlander misses out on most of the fun; he has acquired syphilis and is perishing:  "devotees of Venus, become slaves to Mercury".) The tall, emaciated-looking figure is kept chained in a huge crypt where Victor, following in the footsteps of his abusive father, torments the creature.  Despairing of the creature's intelligence, Victor sets the laboratory on fire using not a few but a thousand or so red tins full of some sort of inflammatory accelerant.  The monster escapes and hides in a mill in the middle of nowhere -- it is here that the monster reads Milton, taught his letters by a blind shepherd and a little girl.  About ten huge wolves attack and rend the blind shepherd into pieces.  The monster escapes through the forest full of skeletons dumped there from the experiments in the nearby fortress tower. A year passes and the monster shows up on William's wedding day to embrace and threaten Elizabeth.  Confronting Victor, who remains in love with Elizabeth, the creature demands that the scientist alleviate his suffering by making him a mate.  Victor refuses.  When Victor sees the creature embracing Elizabeth, he recklessly fires his revolver.  The monster can be wounded but his damaged flesh regenerates.  Elizabeth lacks this miraculous ability and she is killed by a stray bullet.  The monster and creatures pursue one another toward the North Pole, locked in a duel to the death.  The duel ends at the Danish sea-captain's ice-breaker, locked in the snow and ice floes.  The Dane is like Ahab -- he is pursuing the fata morgana of sailing to the North Pole although his men are about to mutiny.  Victor is grievously wounded.  The monster demands that the seafarers surrender the dying man to him.  When they refuse, the creature again attacks the vessel and its crew.  He breaches the boat and confronts his creator where there is a weird sort of reconciliation.  Freed from the burden of vengeance, the Monster uses his titanic strength to shove the three-master out of its prison of ice.  The Dane now understands that his pursuit of the North Pole is obsessive and as megalomaniacal as Victor's promethean effort to overcome death.  He tells his men to set sail for home.  

The story is lucidly told and so spectacularly illustrated that its various plot holes are not really apparent.  The film is divided into a prologue (the monster's attack on the ship in the high Arctic), Victor's story, the Creature's story, and an epilogue (the final encounter on the ship, the reconciliation between Victor and his creation, and the Monster's generosity in freeing the ship from the ice.)  The writing, by del Toro, is crisp and excellent -- there are many great lines.  I have my reservations about this film, but can't exactly pinpoint them -- I'm afraid it's some kind Puritan instinct in me:  the movie is so lavishly beautiful that I attribute flaws to it, just on the basis of its visual splendor.  There's no doubt in my mind that the picture is often thrilling, majestic, and, even, intelligent.    

 

Tarr Bela I used to be a filmmaker

 The Hungarian director, Bela Tarr, is inextricably connected to the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the author of the scripts for Tarr's most famous films.  Krasznahorkai was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and, so, there has been a brief flurry of interest both in books written by the novelist but, also, in the films adapting those novels to the screen, Tarr's Satantango, Damnation, The Werckmeister Harmonies, and other pictures that Krasznahorkai wrote specifically for Tarr:  The Man from London, that adapts a Georges Simenon crime novel and The Turin Horse, the director's last film.  Jean Marc Lemourne's film Tarr Bela I used to be a Filmmaker documents some aspects of the production of the monumentally grim The Turin Horse and tours some of the director's earlier works, most notably Satantango and The Werckmeister Harmonies.  None of these films are exactly a walk in the park -- Satantango is seven plus hours of unremitting misery, cat torture, mud, drunkenness and suicide; The Werckmeister Harmonies (an adaptation of part of Krasznahorkai's novel, The Melancholy of Resistance) concerns a village in rural Hungary destabilized and thrown into hysteria by a traveling sideshow exhibit featuring an enormous embalmed whale; the townspeople riot and end up destroying their own hospital. The Turin Horse is set on the windswept Hungarian steppes and remorselessly documents the poverty of a man and woman who live in a primitive stone hut in the middle of nowhere.  The wind blows ceaselessly and leaves swirl around in the air, an odd effect since the nearest tree is about two miles away crowning a hill in what looks like central North Dakota.  As a consequence, Tarr Bela is singularly morose, images of a group of elderly people staggering around in the mud as they film the long takes that comprise The Turin Horse.  (The title refers to the legend that Friedrich Nietzsche went mad when he saw a teamster beating an old horse in Turin; sobbing, Nietzsche is supposed to have thrown his arms around the long-suffering beast before proclaiming himself both the Crucified One and Dionysius -- so far as I can see, and I've sat through the movie, the film has nothing to do with this anecdote.)

The main character in The Turin Horse is the relentless gale-force wind.  The documentary shows the film crew using a helicopter to whip the lone tree on the horizon into a flailing frenzy.  Pushing wind machines on wheels, the grips move alongside the tracking camera while another worker throws out handfuls of dry leaves for the wind to whip about.  Tarr complains about shots through the hut window in which the tree is motionless and simulated gale not visible.  The hut itself, which seems like a primeval kind of grotto in the movie, was built from the ground up from field stone with a heavy gabled roof -- it's surprising to me that this set was laboriously constructed, downhill from the lone tree and beneath a bare grasscovered ridge.  (The characters set out for the edge of their world, the grassy ridge, reach the place, and see that there is nothing beyond the ridge but an endless, empty steppe -- so disappointed they come back to the stone hut where they eat roasted potatoes but nothing else.)  If transfer of information is the purpose of a documentary Lemourne's film is, more of less, a failure.  We don't really learn anything about Tarr except that he is a wizened curmudgeon with a three pack a day habit -- he isn't endearing or charismatic.  He boasts about this being his last film and, when he has his crew dig a pit to hold the enormously heavy camera for a low-angle shot, he says that they should delve the pit three meters deep and bury the camera.  The crew is polyglot and, sometimes, Tarr directs in Hungarian; at other times, he uses English.  The crew goes to the collective farm where Satantango was filmed for a special screening of the enormous movie -- the collective farm is in ruins, falling into the weeds on the Hungarian plain.  The water tower advertises in English "Industrial Park for Sale."  The female lead in The Turin Horse (she has about 6 lines) was the strange-looking girl with the cat who kills herself in Satantango.  She's now all grown up, but still pretty odd-looking and miserable.  (She was raised in an orphanage and felt that Tarr and his longstanding female editor, Agi, became her parents during the shoot.)  We see some rehearsals.  Two actors sit in a bar bathed in red light and talk about their work with Tarr.  One of them is named Jani, an actor who has appeared in a half-dozen films directed by the difficult Tarr.  Later, Tarr uses a cell phone to summon Jani to the location on the desolate plain.  He demands that Jani sober-up before coming on the set and that he not drink on location.  There are more scenes with the wind machine, more mud, more vantages through the rock hut's window showing dogs prancing around in the gloom.  Tarr says directing is "not a democracy" -- it's feudal he tells us.  The mob in The Werckmeister Harmonies has advanced through the rural hospital, looting and burning -- in the final room, at the center of the medical complex, they encounter a wrinkled, emaciated old man naked and standing in a bath.  This discomfits the mob and they sullenly leave the scene of the crime.  

At the beginning of the film, Tarr says that he has a repertoire company with whom he always works.  And he tells us that he has worked with Krasznahorkai for 23 years.  (The film was made in 2013).  Yet, mysteriously, Krasznahorkai is absent from the movie and doesn't appear in a single shot.  Nor is he ever mentioned except as aforesaid.  

The Beast in Me

 The Beast in Me is suspense thriller mini-series (eight episodes) on Netflix that is accomplished enough that you can watch 2 or three episodes in a row without tiring of the thing.  Most mini-series are repetitive and, because designed to be consumed an episode at a time, are repetitive, overly explicit as to plot points, and crammed with filler -- generally three or, even, four episodes too long in an 8-part mini-series.  This is not the case with The Beast in Me (2025), a show that is lean enough to be rewarding when watched a couple shows at a time.  Only one episode, an extended series of flashbacks providing backstory as the seventh episode seemed superfluous -- that show spells out subtexts that an alert viewer has already figured-out and feels, just a wee bit, like padding before the program's finale.  

The Beast in Me (2025) alludes to Trump's career as a Manhattan real estate developer, features a stand-in for Donald's grim father, Fred, in the form of the wonderful character actor Jonathan Banks who plays a variant on the omni-competent enforcer qua grandfatherly hoodlum, that is Mike Ehrmantraut in Better Call Saul;  there's a community organizer and alderwoman who stands in for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and agents provocateur at protests, and an FBI that seems cheerfully corrupt.  This colorful stuff is all background to a hard-edged duel between a female author, the Pulitzer prize-winning Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) and a billionaire property developer, Niles Jarvis (the show's surrogate for Trump) who is widely reputed to have killed his first wife and got away with murder.  Jarvis lives next door to Aggie in an exclusive neighborhood on Long Island called Oyster Bay.  Aggie has an enormous empty mansion, a  hunted house as it were that is exploited for various chases, jump-scares, and long, lonely corridors pulsing with sinister shadows.  As in most shows of this sort, Aggie comes equipped with trauma --  her bratty eight-year old son was killed in a car crash for which Aggie is partly responsible.  The crash and resulting grief have made Aggie haggard and hollowed her out except for a core rotting with rage against the drunk driver, a teenage boy.  Aggie has mercilessly harassed the kid, criminal activity that makes her a chief suspect when the kid turns up dead, wrapped in clear plastic like a choice piece of meat, and tucked into a corner in her dead child's bedroom.  Aggie is proudly lesbian and has an aggrieved ex-wife who is in the art business and runs a gallery.  The sinister plutocrat, Niles Jarvis has built a jogging trail connecting some of the property through woods in the neighborhood.  He wants all the neighbors to agree to easements through the woods so the jogging path can be paved and rendered operable.  Everyone is intimidated by Niles and agrees except for Aggie who doesn't want the woods desecrated.  This sets up a couple of hostile encounters with the oligarch.  Jarvis admires Aggie's writing and, after some tense jockeying for position, agrees to Aggie writing his biography.  In the course of writing and researching the biography, Aggie interviews various witnesses about the mysterious disappearance of Nile's first wife, Madison.  On the basis of various clues, Aggie concludes that Niles did, in fact, murder Madison.  Niles discovers that Aggie knows that he killed Madison and has proof in the form of a suicide note opportunistically used to imply that the woman has killed herself.  Complicating the situation are several subplots -- an FBI agent is obsessed with proving Niles' guilt; he is having an affair with a fellow agent also tangled up in the nefarious activities of the Jarvis family; the AOC lookalike clashes with Jarvis and his formidable father about a big development project that will gut a working class neighborhood.  Further, Niles Jarvis, acting on Aggie's expressions of rage about the drunken teenager, abducts the boy, leaves a spurious suicide note, and keeps the kid in some hidden location (possibly a storage locker) where the boy is half-naked, fettered, and seemingly periodically tortured by the villain.  Jarvis has a bad temper and a propensity to beat his victims to death with blunt objects -- it becomes increasingly obvious that the villain did, in fact, kill Madison; he has apparently killed others.  When Niles Jarvis figures out that Aggie has evidence proving he killed Madison, his first wife, the writer becomes his target and, of course, he tries to intimidate her into silence, frame her for murder, and, otherwise, attempts to destroy her.  Jarvis has a "Stepford Wives" spouse with a typical over-made-up and botox-stretched Mar-a-Largo face.  She befriends Aggie and, slowly discovers herself, that Jarvis is a psychopathic killer.  This sets up a climax in which Aggie is suspected of murder and has to flee a dragnet that is closing in on her; at the same time, Jarvis' wife who is pregnant, understands that, for the sake of the unborn child, she must detach herself from the vicious  oligarch. Jarvis goes to prison and Aggie, who still admires his chutzpah and intelligence, visits him in the hoosegow, gathering additional materials that she incorporates into another bestseller.

There's a lot of stuff in the teleplay but it's all intelligently deployed and well-organized.  Until the last episode, the plot is mostly plausible -- some suspension of disbelief is required near the end, but his is acceptable.  Claire Danes is gaunt, unattractive, and seems perpetually harassed -- but she gets a scene in the middle of the show in which she parties with Jarvis, ends up very drunk, and some sparks of attraction flash between her and the villain.  This is an excellent scene that humanizes both of these rather stylized and schematic characters.  Matthew Rhys is suave, charismatic, and sinister in the role of the villain.  All of the supporting characters are imagined with great intelligence and are persuasive in their roles, including the bug-eyed figure who mimics Ocasio-Cortez and ends up as prone to corruption as everyone else in the cast.  The set design, lavishly decorated million dollar condominiums, Manhattan art galleries and huge buildings under construction.  A signal that the set design will be voluptuous and rhetorically exact occurs in an early scene.  Aggie Wiggs is urinating in her bathroom.  She gets up from the toilet and an overhead shot depicts a puddle of urine in the bowl -- a nice touch, I thought.