Knives Out (2019) ****1/2

 

A dark day is coming for film-lovers. In these days of the plague, no one is making new movies. Features made before the pandemic are being released in drive-in theaters, and then to streaming, but eventually those will run out, and even our small screens will display nothing new. We will be consigned, for a spell, to re-watching the best of the films we have already seen. When that time comes, “Knives Out” will be on my list of films to re-watch.

Written and directed by Rian Johnson, the creator of "Brick," the film is a classic whodunit-style murder mystery. When famous mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found with his throat slit, it looks like a suicide, and the local police are prepared to call it just that. Someone, however, has employed private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to investigate the death. Blanc interviews each of Harlan's descendants, all of whom stand to inherit an impressive literary fortune, and each of whom turns out to have a motive for killing Harlan. The only person without a motive for murder is Harlan's nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), and she just may prove to be the key to the whole case.

I will say no more, because it's simply too good for spoilers. “Knives Out” is a deliciously suspenseful and funny tale of murder, greed, and family dysfunction, helped along by a top-notch cast that includes Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, and Jamie Lee Curtis. If it sometimes seems just a bit too Agatha Christie, just a bit like a game of “Clue,” it's because this is a classic mystery in the old tradition, where all the necessary clues are presented along the way. An astute viewer could figure out the mystery, although I'll admit that I only predicted parts of it.

The cast chew the scenery with gusto, then spit out hilarious lines like watermelon seeds. I particularly enjoyed this exchange between Ransom the bratty grandson (Chris Evans) and Benoit Blanc, who talks in an admittedly-dodgy southern accent:

Ransom: You think I'm not going to fight to protect my own, our birthright, our ancestral home...

Blanc: [laughing] That is hooey! Harlan bought this place in the 80's from a Pakistani real estate millionaire... .

Ransom: Oh shut up! Shut up! Shut up with that Kentucky-fried, Foghorn Leghorn drawl!

The film is also a not-so-subtle political allegory, as it contrasts Marta, the hard-working daughter of immigrants, with Harlan's feckless heirs. They pretend to consider Marta “part of the family,” but they really think of her as the Help. Meanwhile, each of them thinks they are entitled by birth to the wealth Harlan created.

“Knives Out” did not get nearly as many award nominations as I think it deserves; it's too much fun to watch to be traditional awards-bait. No matter. It's streaming on Amazon now, and for my money it's one of the best films of 2019. Put on your deerstalker hat, light up your pipe, and click Play. The game's afoot!

4.5 stars out of 5

Night of the Living Dead (1968) ****

 

I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to see this seminal horror film. George Romero's horror classic is THE definitive zombie film, even though the word zombie is never used in the movie.

The film starts with a pair of siblings, Barbra and Johnny, visiting their father's grave. Johnny gripes about how far they have to drive to the cemetery, how much the flowers cost, and how they are doing all this for a father they barely knew. Disrespecting the dead turns out to be very bad karma in this story. Before the scene is over, Barbra and Johnny are attacked by a shuffling, staring ghoul. Barbra escapes to a nearby farmhouse, where she is eventually joined by some other survivors, all of whom have their stories of being attacked by half-rotten, stumbling, speechless human beings. Through the farmhouse radio and TV, they learn that the creatures are recently-deceased people who have arisen with a hunger for human flesh, and that their animation may be related to a NASA probe recently returned from Venus. Soon, the farmhouse is surrounded by the walking dead, and the group must make it through a desperate night, surviving both the zombies and each other.

Romero and his writing partner, John Russo, were loosely inspired by the novel I Am Legend, which has been adapted to the screen 3 times in its own right (1964's “The Last Man on Earth”, 1971's “The Omega Man”, and 2007's “I Am Legend”). They mainly just drew inspiration from the concept of a human holdout surrounded by monsters. Otherwise, it's a completely different tale.

“Night of the Living Dead” was made for $114,000 (less than a million in 2020 dollars), and it's damned good! I recently wrote about another low-budget “classic,” 1979's “Phantasm,” which cost more than twice as much to film and is an incomprehensible mess. “Night of the Living Dead” requires some basic suspension of disbelief in terms of the underlying “science,” but otherwise the plot holds together. The story is well-paced, with decently-crafted characters who do the kinds of things that real people might do in this situation. Some of the acting is stiff and amateurish, but that doesn't ruin the film.

This wasn't the first zombie movie made (Here's a good article on the genre.), but it's the most influential. NOTLD established the basic rules of zombie lore that persist to today: Zombies are reanimated corpses. Being bitten or scratched by a zombie leads to illness, death, and zombie resurrection. Zombies are slow, but persistent. The only way to kill one is to destroy the brain. Pretty much every zombie tale since, right up to the TV show “The Walking Dead,” either follows these rules or is known for how it deviates from them. For example, when people talk about the 2002 film “28 Days Later,” they always describe the zombies as “fast-moving,” to distinguish them from the standard Romero-type.

If you like horror, then don't put off watching this one any longer. Be careful what version you get, though. Due to a bizarre copyright oversight, the movie is in public domain, and there are all kinds of cheap copies out there, as well as a colorized version and one in 3d. I recommend checking out Amazon Prime, which has the original, black-and-white version in the original aspect ratio, ready to stream. Now, more than ever, it makes sense to watch a movie about being stuck in a house, looking out at a world teeming with people who might kill you! LOL!

4 stars out of 5

A Bridge Too Far (1977) ****

 

When it comes to war, stories of glorious victory abound, but I'm particularly fascinated when a defeat is considered worthy of re-telling. The tale of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae comes to mind. In WWII, Operation Market Garden, an Allied defeat, has sparked numerous books and two movies. 1946's “Theirs is the Glory” was a documentary-style re-enactment of the operation, with some of the roles played by actual veterans of the battle. It's actually pretty gripping. 1977's “A Bridge Too Far” is a dramatization of the events, with an ensemble cast including Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Robert Redford, and more. It would almost be easier to list the big name actors of the time who weren't in the film.

As a military operation, Market Garden was borne of impatience, which is always an invitation to disaster. After D-day, the Allied forces had made steady progress, pushing the Germans back across France, but Allied progress slowed as their supply lines became strained. Eager for a quick end to the war, General Bernard Montgomery planned to drop 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines in The Netherlands. It would be the largest airborne assault, ever. These troops would seize and hold bridges along a narrow highway to the town of Arnhem, where the key bridge crossed the Rhine River. Ground forces would then break through German lines and quickly advance up the road to Arnhem. Controlling that road and the crossing over the Rhine would have given Allied forces a major route into Germany, an advantage that, it was hoped, would end the war by Christmas 1944. In retrospect, it would have been great had it succeeded, as Hitler went on to launch the counter-offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge in December of that year, taking many Allied lives.

The great weakness of the plan was its absolute reliance on speed and surprise. The surprise part worked; the Germans apparently didn't see the attack coming. Had the operation also gone as speedily as planned, with the Allied tanks proceeding nonstop up the road to Arnhem, they likely would have had a great success. As happens in life, and especially in war, there were speed bumps. Once they had set their hearts on the operation, Allied commanders refused to listen to new intelligence that indicated German tanks in the Arnhem area. They plowed ahead, relying on the plan for speed and on their initial assessment that the German resistance would be nothing but “old men and boys.” From missing equipment to pockets of heavy German resistance, a series of snafus and delays dragged the advance out over days, giving the Germans at Arnhem time to get their act together and rout the lightly-armed airborne division there. By the time Allied tanks and artillery arrived, it was too late. The Germans had heavily fortified the bridge over the Rhine, leveled the town, and decimated the 1^st Airborne Division.

It's easy to see, in retrospect, how the operation failed. Commanders created a culture where inferiors became afraid to mention problems that might call the operation into question. Their reliance on speed relied on everything going right, and experienced soldiers should have known better. Many of the delays were of the kind that could never be anticipated individually, but should have been planned for in aggregate.

Critics called “A Bridge Too Far” tedious, boring, and very, very long, which perfectly describes the battle it depicts. I think it's a brilliant film about the true nature of war, in which moments of terror and carnage are bracketed by hours and days of tedium and frustration. There were plenty of Allied forces to defeat the Germans, they just couldn't get to where they needed to be on time. One group of soldiers was getting pounded by German artillery, while thousands more had to wait hours at a time for vehicles to crawl up a narrow road. The movie is very long, but I found it a fascinating, technical war movie. It's a cautionary tale about the limits of Great Power in the face of hubris, and it should be required viewing for military officers, or for anyone who wants to embark on a grand project.

4 stars out of 5

Straight Time (1978) ****

 

Most crime movies are about clever criminals who pull off elaborate heists that either succeed or else fail because of genius on the part of a cop or a single stroke of bad luck. “Straight Time” is one of the few to show criminals as the self-destructive idiots that most of them are. It's probably the most realistic crime movie I have seen.

Fresh out of prison, Max Dembo (Dustin Hoffman) tells himself it's time to go straight, but he immediately screws up, failing to check in at his halfway house. This gets him a lecture from his condescending parole officer (M. Emmet Walsh). Given another chance, he gets his own apartment, then immediately gets together with an old criminal associate (Gary Busey), who shoots heroin in Max's apartment, the evidence of which eventually gets Max a weekend in jail and leads to his inevitable spiral back into crime.

Before things go south, Max does make a token effort at going straight. He follows his instructions to report to the employment office, where he gets a crappy factory job, but meets a cute girl. Jenny (Theresa Russell) seems like a girl from a nice family, but she is intrigued by the confident ex-con and eagerly gets sucked into his orbit. Meanwhile, Max is committing armed robberies again, and his self-destructive impulses drive him to take bigger and bigger chances.

The sad thing is that a good life should be within Max's grasp. He does some stupid things, but he's got some smarts. You'd think that the chance to be with a gorgeous babe like Jenny would make a guy want to either go straight or at least be more measured in his life of crime, maybe play it safe. But maybe if Max were the kind of guy who could do that, he never would have been able to attract Jenny in the first place. “Straight Time” is, ultimately, a movie about how we all are who we are, and we just can't help ourselves. For Max and his friends, returning to prison or being killed seems easier than having to do straight time.

4 stars out of 5

Knockaround Guys (2001) **

For Matty Demaret (Barry Pepper), life should be pretty good. As the son of a mobster, Matty has plenty of money, a fancy car, and few responsibilities. What he lacks is respect, both self-respect and the respect of his father. Matty really wants to break away from the family business and live a straight life, but no one will hire the son of the notorious “Benny Chains.” (Dennis Hopper)

Resigned to making his career as a mobster, Matty convinces his dad to entrust him with retrieving a bag of cash from across the country. Matty stupidly dispatches his hapless pilot friend Johnny (Seth Green), who naturally screws it up, losing the bag of cash at a small, Montana airport during a fuel stop. Desperate to retrieve the money to save face and save his father, who is counting on the cash, Matty leaves Brooklyn for Montana, with a couple of friends in tow (including Vin Diesel). In Montana, these fish out of water have to contend with skater punks, local yahoos, and a shady sheriff, not to mention pressure from Matty's father and uncle (John Malkovich).

This is a perfectly good setup with an excellent cast, so it's puzzling why the film is so lackluster. I think the first problem is that all the good actors are playing the Brooklyn Mafia guys, leaving the local Montanan roles to underperform. The skater punks are supposed to be funny, Jay-and-Silent-Bob types, and the sheriff is supposed to be a menacing, Brian Dennehy-from-”First Blood” character, but none of the actors can pull it off. The other problem just comes down to bad writing. In one scene after another, these characters do what makes the least amount of sense. In one scene, for example, Vin Diesel's character is about to get into a bar fight, when he says “500,” then launches into a long-winded monolog about how that's how many street fights he's been in, or maybe how many he aspires to. It's not even clear, because the scene is so poorly-written. You could use this movie in film school as an example of what not to do as a screenwriter.

“Knockaround Guys” is basically a mess right up until the climactic showdown, at which point it gets kind of cool, but then it degenerates right back into a hackneyed mess. The movie was panned by critics and ignored by audiences, actually losing money, which is remarkable considering the top-shelf cast. It probably didn't help that it came out right around the 9/11 attacks, but honestly, this movie deserved to fail. If John Malkovich and Dennis Hopper didn't fire their agents for getting them into this, they are nicer than I am.

2 stars out of 5