Author: S. Brady Calhoun

Hollywood is a tough place. 

Director William Friedkin delivered three of the best movies in the 1970s but over the next five decades he was given fewer and fewer chances to deliver his particular brand of dark mayhem.

I think 1985s To Live and Die in LA is up there with his best work and most of the rest of his filmography is something I have avoided. Some of that is on me but I think a lot of it lies at the feet of a Hollywood system that was unwilling to take a chance on great director. 

I’m not enough of an expert in the behind the scenes machinations of Hollywood to tell you why it worked out that way. 

But when I think of Friedkin I think of a guy who like Spielberg and Scorsese should have been given free reign to do whatever he wanted for the rest of his career.

Alas, it does not work that way in Hollywood and never has. The powers that be can usually find someone younger, hungrier and worse at the job to deliver something to the box office. 

Francis Ford Coppola and Sidney Lumet and a host of others were shut down and pushed out too. To be fair, Coppola is working on the film he hopes will be his final masterpiece (funded outside of Hollywood of course). And Lumet’s final movie 2007s Before the Devil Knows You Are Dead is as great as anything he ever did. 

But Friedkin should have ended his career like Scorsese and Spielberg going from passion project to passion project.  

That’s not usually how it goes. Kevin Smith is still directing the movies he wants but he delivers on the cheap and his fan base still buys DVDs. 

Tarantino is a unicorn in this regard but he’s canny enough to deliver 10 films over 30 years and pre-announce a retirement. 

Wes Anderson keeps getting away with it but I’m pretty sure that guy is funded through subscriptions to The New Yorker and a tax on vaping devices. 

Greta Gerwig (Barbie) and Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer) have free reign … for now. 

I’ll be interested to see where they both are in 10 years. 

So for Friedkin, the director who delivered two of the greatest car chases ever filmed and some of the most devastating action sequences of all time what do we get for a final movie? 

A very small, very cheaply made play. 

Friedkin shot it over 14 days. It looks like it was filmed on an iPhone (and I don’t mean that in a good way.) 

The play, The Caine Mutiny-Court Martial is riveting. Think of A Few Good Men but if the characters involved were realistic human beings and if there wasn’t an easy answer.

Almost all of the credit for this must go to Herman Wouk who wrote the story first as a novel which won the Pulitzer Prize and then as a play. A version of it was also made into a Humphrey Bogart flick.

Friedkin’s filmed version grabbed me early and never let go. But it isn’t because of the action or special effects or camera work. 

It’s a simple story, was a naval captain insane when he was relieved of command during a storm? Or were his junior officers retaliating over his gruff command style?

Friedkin is a professional and he makes you forget the threadbare set, the lack of action scenes or even changes in location.

The actors are given space to work and, as always, great actors given great dialogue can create whole worlds. 

Kiefer Southerland, Monica Raymond and Jason Clarke use their skills to create characters who live and breathe inside a small frame.

And it is wonderful to see Lance Reddick who came to prominence as the tough Captain in The Wire getting to play a judge and bring his unique charisma to the screen one last time. 

At one point his reaction to a particular piece of testimony had me howling with laughter. No dialogue, not a joke was told, just a great actor making some magic for the screen. 

If life were like the movies Friedkin would have been given a large budget and an unlimited canvas to make a final statement, a last movie to sum up what he has to say as a filmmaker. 

Of course, nihilistic Billy Friedkin would be the first to tell you that life doesn’t work like that. 

Ultimately, this is a good movie, and Friedkin proves that he could make something great with a budget that probably couldn’t cover a Happy Meal. 

Friedkin had an amazing career. This is a great entry into his filmography. But I’m left wanting more. 

God Bless You Hurricane Billy.

Is it wrong to watch a movie because you want to see it because everyone in certain film circles was talking about how amazing the sequel is?

Well, here we are. Paddington is an English institution and its fans seem quite happy with this movie.

I thought it was charming though I doubt I ever would have picked it if not for the sequel talk.

An easy win if you are in the mood for a flick about a talking bear, English manners and Hugh Bonneville, Peter Capaldi and Nicole freakin Kidman dancing between the raindrops.

The opening with Peruvian bears who can talk meeting an English explorer and adopting his very English mannerisms is wonderfully charming.

Most of the movie glides along on this light charm. Not quite bust a guy funny but amusing. At one point Capaldi’s character Mr Curry calls Bonneville to give him an anonymous tip.

Bonneville immediately recognizes his voice:

Henry Brown: Hello?
Mr. Curry: Good evening. This is an anonymous phone call.
Henry Brown: Oh hello Mr. Curry.
Henry Brown: It’s not Mr. Curry! … It’s Mr. Burry. I have some news concerning the bear.
Henry Brown: What? What do you mean?
Mary Brown: Who is it Henry?
Henry Brown: It’s Mr. Curry doing a silly voice.
Mr. Curry: It’s Burry!
Henry Brown: He says Paddington’s been kidnapped!

It’s that kind of movie.

In another scene Bonneville wears a dress. And Paddington, though a serious of small mistakes in a human sized bathroom basically destroys a flat.

It’s just that kind of movie.

I leave you with one of my favorite lines from film critic Roger Ebert reviewing a different movie about talking bears, The Country Bears.

Do they know they are bears? Not necessarily. Do any of the humans mention that they are bears? Only in passing. Are there real bears in the woods who would maul and eat their victims, or are all bears benign in this world? These are not questions one is expected to pose about a movie based on a stage show at Disney World. We simply have to accept that some of the characters in the movie are people and others are bears, and get on with it. If Stuart Little’s family can have a 2-inch mouse as a son, then why not musical bears? We must celebrate diversity.

A great artist is always themselves. 

Willie Nelson always sounds like Willie Nelson, Picasso is Picassso and del Toro is del Toro. 

So his version of Pinocchio is set during a fascist regime and features Catholic imagery, supernatural creatures covered in eyeballs, and the title character is a Christ figure.

If you vibe with del Toro’s unique sensibilities then you will no doubt enjoy this. I thought his last two Nightmare Alley in 2021 and The Shape of Water in 2017 were among the best movies of each year. 

This is … well there are reasons why I didn’t see this when it came out. I didn’t and don’t connect with its unique art style. 

And I’ve always hated the story of Pinocchio. Every version of this particular tale annoys me. This isn’t a thing I feel like examining. I hate ET too. People are allowed to both love the things they love and hate the things they hate. 

But I respect del Toro an awful lot for taking a children’s story and making it almost wholly about unending grief, the pain we carry just from living life and death. 

Ewan McGregor is perfect as not Jiminy Cricket. Nearly every movie I’ve ever seen would be improved if Ewan McGregor was the narrator. Seriously, how much better would the prequels be if he narrated them. Someone get him to a sound booth now! 

Anyway, this movie is beautiful. It’s real art instead of the two hour commercials that often play at the cinema. If you like Pinocchio or just don’t actively hate it then you are certain to enjoy this. 

And as ever del Toro is del Toro.

So I made a mistake. 

I read the book. Then I immediately watched the movie. 

Sometimes if do this backwards. I often find the book more rewarding having seen the movie first. Other times I read the book or comic long before the movie comes out. 

That distance allows me to forget the small details that often make book readers like me persnickety. 

But, even though the Remains of the Day has been on my “watch this someday list” since I saw a snippet of it on The Sopranos in the 1990s I just never got around to it. 

And then I needed a new audio book and wanted something different and then I was listening to it over the course of two weeks. 

And the movie showed up on Showtime this month and here we are. 

The book can best be described as sly. 

All of it is from the point of view of a very English butler as he looks back over his life and goes to meet a woman who used to work for him as a housemaid. 

The butler tells you about how important he took his work, how great butlers should be judged and spends time defending his master from all those scurrilous rumors that came out after the second war. 

What’s so sly and fun about it is that the butler is very clearly lying to himself, he’s so wrapped up in his role and his career that he missed so many important things. 

He missed the mistakes his employer was making, and the mistakes he was making with his father and with a woman who worked with him. 

His whole life was spent working very hard at everything that could not have mattered in the least. 

But at least the silver shined. Why even a British Prime Minister once complimented it! 

Let’s start with the best part of this. 

The cast is a dream team. It’s got Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Christopher Reeve and James Fox! Anthony Hopkins, playing a butler at the height of his powers! 

Thompson got an Oscar but the movie lost out to Unforgiven. Honestly, that’s the right choice.

The movie is probably as good as it could possibly be given the source material. That they managed a film out of a book that spends pages discussing the ins and outs of staffing plans and types of polish is impressive enough. 

What struck me and will never bother non-book readers in the least was how they had to crowbar in the Butler’s private thoughts into dialogue in the film. 

Every important thing happens under the surface in the book. These incredibly repressed English people do not express their true thoughts aloud. 

In the movie, they have to do it in dialogue at least some of the time. 

But how else to make it work? Movies are a visual medium. 

There is also at least one, possibly two instances where two characters who were separate in the book are combined into a single person. 

Which is solid screenwriting, honestly. And the movie is faithful to the point and tone of the book even if it isn’t a word for word recreation.

There is one scene near the end of the book that is cut out of the movie. That scene was apparently shot and was in the dvd extras. In the book it is a key moment. In the movie Hopkins and Thompson handle it with looks. 

Again, despite my issues the movie succeeds in all sorts of ways.

For those of you who loved Downton Abbey and all the other England between the wars dramas this is among the very best of that very specific type of thing.

The book is 5 stars. The movie is at least 4 and a half.

I … probably should have read a book about Pinochet before watching this. 

Writer/Director Pablo Lorraine’s previous flick Spencer was a beautiful and well written drama. It was also a miserable time. 

This shoots for some misery mixed with black comedy. And there were definetly a few lines that got to me. 

This is the best moment in the thing (so don’t read on if you don’t want to be spoiled) is that vampire Pinochet long believed to be dead frequently goes to the presidential palace expecting that sooner or later there will be a bust of him like all the other ex-presidents.

There never is. 

“They’re so petty.” 

But the middle section is a bore. It’s saved by a fun revelation and decent final chapter that pays off most everything Lorraine set up. 

This is an angry film and you can tell how much joy the filmmakers get from insulting their loathsome real life subjects. 

I’m not sure that this is a great film but it is a great warning to all the politicians, dictators and other vampires roaming the halls of power. 

Your evil does not go unseen and the artists will have the last word.

Denzel Washington directs and stars in a movie that is mostly a filmed version of August Wilson’s play. 

Washington plays a certain kind of father and husband. A man trying to communicate his values to his sons. Before the play is over it is clear that he failed on both counts. 

Those values turn out to be mostly talk as Washington’s Troy Maxson has already made a massive mistake that will blow up his happy home life.

Through the nature of it, you hear mostly from Maxson, as he defends his life and his choices and tries hold his world together. He talks of fighting with death and meeting the devil. He talks of money and of what young men are required to do when they decide to start families. 

I could hear echos my own father when Maxson explains to his son that he made sure there was food on the table, a roof over his head and clothes on his back. 

I heard him again when Maxson takes a drunken fight too far. 

Maxson is eloquent, and I couldn’t help thinking how, in other families displeasure and approval is done not through speeches but through a series of grunts. 

A pat on the head could mean far more than a lyrical turn of phrase. 

But the language here is beautiful and the story is strong and heart wrenching. Viola Davis is transcendent. Washington remains the best actor of his generation. 

If you are in the mood for a stage play masquerading as a film then this is a great one.

I watch westerns and baseball because of my grandfather but I love murder mysteries because of my mom. 

Back in the before times we entertained ourselves every night around the television. No internet and no cell phones and there was, in middle class homes at least, only one television. I got a television for my bedroom and a Nintendo in middle school and it was a very big deal. 

But before that my entertainment choices were directed by my parents. Playoff basketball or baseball if it was on and my dad was home and if not, the night would mostly be filled with mysteries.

There was Murder She Wrote, Magnum PI, Simon and Simon, Spenser for Hire, Matlock, and, of course, Columbo. Mom, with a wry smile, would note that everyone in Hawaii wore long pants except for Tom Selleck, who wore short shorts. 

We marveled at how the most dangerous thing in the world was to be Jessica Fletcher’s friend. And, finally, how nearly every episode of Matlock began with an innocent person discovering a corpse and immediately grabbing a bloody knife or a smoking gun so they could leave their fingerprints on the murder weapon and be wrongly accused of evil. 

We teased these things because we loved them. We loved the genre. On those nights where a sporting event was on mom could be found sitting in the tv room reading an Agatha Christie novel or J.A. Jance or James Lee Burke if she wanted a mystery with New Orleans flavor. 

I grew up to be a reporter and have spent quality time with real police detectives and sat in jailhouses with murderers. Real life, and real detective work is of course, nothing like it is on the screen. 

In my adulthood I generally can’t watch the “realistic” ones. You know, where the murders are plausible and the detectives are broken. 

I’ve seen too much. 

But a detective story like this? Where the detective is as realistic as Sherlock Holmes and Tina Fey gets to play a conniving mystery writer and for reasons that don’t make any sense everyone has to spend a night in a haunted house in Venice while the bodies pile up? Sign me up! 

Kenneth Branagh has now directed and starred in three of these Agatha Christie films. He plays the silly, Belgian, genius, detective Hercule Poirot with just the right amount of seriousness, and sly style. Branagh never breaks the fourth wall but he’s not above winking at the camera once or twice.

The first two in Branagh’s series (Murder of the Orient Express and Death on the Nile) were straightforward murder mystery movies. This one brings in horror movie elements and far too many jump scares. 

Branagh’s style as a director is usually to fill the frame with lush city scapes and scenery. These things always look good in a way that is classic and formal. On the downside, the movies might actually be better if he broke a few rules. On the plus side they have the benefit of ignoring current trends. You could release these to the cinema at any time in the last 50 years and they would not feel out of place. 

I don’t know if that means they will stand the test of time but they will not embarrass their director or their actors 20 years from now. 

I figured out most of it before the end (not because the movie gave away a ton of clues but because if you have seen and read as much of this as I have you can generally know where it is going. There was at least one twist I missed though.

Regardless, you don’t go to these things for the murder mystery plots anyway. You go to marvel at Branagh’s mustache and watch the guest stars (Michelle Yeoh! Yellowstone’s Kelly Reilly! Tina Fey’s mouth scar!) ham it up. 

And you go because you know your 72-year-old mother will love it. The tickets and the popcorn were my birthday present to her.

I like old westerns for several reasons. 

First, they remind me of the time I spent in my grandfather’s living room. He held court in a t-shirt and slacks and spent his afternoons watching whatever was on TBS.

In those days Ted Turner’s folly was known as The Superstation and you could count on either a Braves game, a war movie or a western.

I still watch Braves games too. 

Second, the Western is of course, the myth America tells about itself. We (umm some of us) conquered the west and made it safe for civilization. America is such a good thing that we gave it to the west and we will give it to the rest of the world too.

That’s the tale you get until the revisionist westerns that came along in the late 1960s and 1970s.

What your ancestors did was not evil as long as you are the one telling the story. 

Red River is the kind of movie where Native Americans show up to kill cowboys and settlers without any explanation given other than, that’s what they do. One character laments that he doesn’t understand why they always have to burn the wagons.

After a quick opening and a quick ending (off screen) to a wagon train the movie moves on to setting up it’s rancher/cattleman mostly main character.

At one point Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) announces to two Mexicans that he now owns all the land north of the Rio Grande for his ranch. 

The Mexicans explain that the land is owned by someone else and that it was granted to that person by the King of Spain. 

Dunson replies that the land is owned by the person who takes it and keeps it. Then he kills one of them just to prove his point. 

And there you go, America’s complicated relationship with Mexico as told by Hollywood in one scene.

Dunson spends a decade rounding up all the cattle in Texas and Mexico, branding them and getting them ready to sell.

But beef prices in Texas are close to zero so a cattle drive will be required.

One more thing, this is the kind of movie where the hero can shoot a gun out of bad guy’s hand rather than kill them. America was never that innocent, but it was that innocent inside the movie theater.

Anyway, the flick is mostly concerned with the cattle drive and it is as interesting a cattle drive as you could hope for from a movie made in 1948.

The greatest cattle drive on film remains the mini series Lonesome Dove.

But Howard Hawks was one of the best directors of his generation and this film is a nice showcase. Other critics point to his craftsmanship with the scene of the cowboys celebrating when the drive begins and the stampede. Sorry that’s a spoiler but if you do a cattle drive movie without a stampede you have done it wrong.

Walter Brennan plays the same craggy, comic relief character he always plays on these things. 

And Montgomery Clift delivers a nice bit of early James Dean/Marlon Brando energy as Dunson’s adopted son. 

This is supposedly the movie that left John Ford impressed with Wayne’s acting ability. Ford, of course, had already made a bunch of movies with The Duke. 

“I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act,” he said. 

Red River delivers a compelling narrative as the men battle the elements and then battle each other as they struggle to complete their difficult task.

Wayne plays a man who slowly loses his grip and then eventually turns to villainy before the final showdown. 

The ending wimps out considerably. That is, I suspect, a reason why Red River isn’t in the same conversation as The Searchers. 

The rest of this is fun cowboy stuff.

Harry Stoner wakes up screaming. 

For the next 24 hours we will follow him as cajoles, begs, and pleads with the people around him on a critical day for the life of his clothing company. 

Stoner (Jack Lemmon) has achieved the American dream, a successful business (as long as the IRS doesn’t look too close), a happy marriage (as long she doesn’t look too close), with a big house, a fancy car, a maid and a daughter in a European boarding school. 

“I miss the kid,” Stoner says in one of the many complaints he will make about his life. 

Stoner is upset at how hard it is to make a semi-honest buck, how America has changed in some undefinable way (it has to do with how hippie kids are just giving sex away, how banks won’t loan out money like they used to and professional ball players used to be tough guys and now they are all wimps. 

I’m not sure they understood PTSD in 1973 but the World War 2 veteran is also clearly going through an episode. In another complaint he points out that the beaches of Normandy where so many boys gave their lives are now filled with vacationers wearing bikinis. 

Stoner spends his day having what looks like familiar arguments with his wife and his co-workers. Jack Gilford turns in another of his great crusty performances as Stoner’s accountant and business partner. 

Before we meet him Stoner tells his wife that Phil Greene (Gilford) is worried about the business. 

“He’s always worried,” she replies. 

And indeed he is. But it’s clear that the business is only half of his concern, his other headache is Stoner who has not yet met a line he won’t cross to make the business succeed. 

You would give up on all this, if it were coming from a different actor, but from Jack Lemmon it’s something close to poetry. 

Lemmon used his star power and two years of his own cajoling to get Save The Tiger made. He performed in the movie for scale after the studio gave them a tiny budget ($1 million) and a shot. He was rewarded with his second Oscar and one of those performances that stands the test of time. 

Great actors know which roles will work for them and this war vet in the midst of an emotional and moral decline is the perfect Lemmon vehicle. 

I watched this movie fifty years after it was released and it is has lost none of its power. Even its concerns remain. Apparently, a movie about an America in decline will always be relevant. 

Spoilers below:

The moral question of the story is whether or not Stoner will hire an arsonist. If he burns down one of his factories he can have what he really wants (the money he needs to fund one more season). 

Now, naturally I assumed that the arsonist (Thayer David) would return with news that the arson went bad and someone died. 

But the screenplay is too smart for that. Instead, the arsonist does return and Stoner makes a choice that sells the last bit of his soul away. 

None of this is heavy handed. There is no denouement where a judge or a cop points a crooked finger at Stoner and shouts, “Crime does not pay.”

Stoner is surely doomed but what form that doom will ultimately take is left up to the viewer to imagine. 

As the movie took its final few turns I kept thinking about tigers. And how, so few of them exist in the wild. 

The ones who survive live in cages.

Not only the movie of the year but most likely the movie of the decade. 

Instantly up there in the high reaches with Apocalypse Now, Godfather II, There Will Be Blood and the best of Scorcese. 

Although spiritually and visually I think it’s close to Apocalypse Now the other touchstone movie is Titanic. The audience knows the ship will sink and we know what will happen when the scientists at Los Alamos test the bomb. 

And yet, it is almost unbearably tense. It’s the mark of a director who can absolutely own an audience and do anything he wants. 

Here’s a filmmaker at the height of his powers delivering important material that acts as a lecture and a magnificenty entertaining biopic.

A movie that contains multiple arguments and can carry several opposing views. Oppenheimer suggests that America is the greatest country ever and is simultaneously the most dangerous civilization in existence. So dangerous that we may someday be responsible for the end of humanity. 

It argues that the left wing radicals and the conservatives who opposed them were both correct. 

It argues that the bomb must be built to stop the Nazis, that ultimately using the bomb on Japan was necessary and that everyone involved should feel great shame. 

The movie is not shy and refuses to give anyone easy answers. Nor does it turn Oppenheimer into a hero. It argues both that Oppenheimer was calculating and naive. That he felt pride in his work and real shame and suffered psychological damage over the deaths he caused. It also argues that he publicly martyred himself so that history would look more favorably upon him. 

I have quibbles. It’s races so hard through every section that more than once I wished it would stay with a scene instead of cutting away. 

And it feels like it is always cutting away, either to another interrogation in a different time period or to Nolan’s special effects. The explosions, rumbling sound, shaking and star device is ever present and perhaps a symptom of not trusting the audience to sit through the material. 

I write that because I felt it but I also freely admit that those issues are the equivalent of turning to Picasso and asking him why all his lines are cube shaped. 

Nolan is a master and this is his masterpiece. Any argument any of us make is just personal taste and not legitimate. 

After all, it’s a three hour movie that keeps its audience enthralled not only at every minute but at every second. If it’s visually akin to Apocalypse Now, and materially similar to Titanic then in its rhythm it’s like Goodfellas. Which is, this is another movie that swiftly covers an entire life. 

The difference may be that all of Oppenheimer is the equivalent of the final third — cocaine addled — section of Goodfellas. 

Every actor is right for every role, every actor gets at least one scene to make their case and every performance is flawless. There isn’t a false moment even among the people who are largely required to stand in the background or look with awe and wonder on the great man. 

Here let me list some of them for you: 

Cillian Murphy, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, and Robert Downey Jr. 

It’s the casting equivalent of getting the 1927 Yankees. 

Finally, Oppenheimer is the concluding argument that Nolan and other filmmakers have been making about the theatrical experience. 

I would argue that a great film is great whether you see it in IMAX or on an iPad. But there is no doubt that if you can, you should see Oppenheimer in the biggest and best movie theater you can find. 

It will set your world on fire.