Demolition (2015)

 Financer Jake Gyllenhaal's wife Heather Lind is killed in a car accident and he falls apart. Between dismantling his house, battling the father in law who never liked him (Chris Cooper), and becoming obsessed with a customer service worker (Naomi Watts) and her son (Judah Lewis), Jake learns she had been cheating on him. Cliché and mock profound, this movie enjoys hitting you over the head with a figurative sledge hammer, much as Jake might tear apart his kitchen with a real one. *1/2 

Gregory's Two Girls (1999)

 'Gregory's Two Girls' is the belated  sequel to director Bill Forsyth's career making 1981 comedy 'Gregory's Girl', about an eccentric Scottish high school student named Gregory Underwood (John Gordon Sinclair), think of it as a kind of droll proto-'Napoleon Dynamite'. It's nearly twenty years later and Gregory is now a high school English teacher with decidedly left wing political sympathies. The beliefs he extolls in the classroom inspire two students to get involved in an amateurish case of vigilantism against a local computer manufacture, into which they drag Mr. Underwood. 

Things get complicated on several fronts, the owner of the computer company is an old high school friend of Gregory's, turns out there are actual national security secrets related to the work the company is doing, a romantic relationship with the schools music teacher is on the verge of happing for Gregory, and he's been having wet dreams about one of the activist students he's now spending a lot of time alone with. 

I had some real interest in seeing what Gregory would have gotten up to after many years, and John Gordon Sinclair has some genuinely funny comic moments throughout the film, but what a weird plot to put him into. This project must have sounded better on paper then it ended up being on the screen. At times this is a cringingly awkward comedy, uncomfortable. Though the scene in which Gregory is trying to explain why he was found alone in the park with a teenage girl, to her father, headmaster, and some police officers, is worthy of Rickie Gervais. The political stuff feels random. 

Bill Forsyth the director is always interested in taking his stories down unusual paths, though maybe this one would have been better left untrod, though I do admire his guts. This turned out to be the last film he ever made. *1/2 

Sapphire (1959)

 I more or less stumbled onto this movie. 'Sapphire' is a 1959 British feature, filmed in that bold, unique kind of color that I associate with the works of Michael Powell. The body of a young woman, a music school student, is found in a public park. In time it is discovered that she was pregnant. In time it is discovered that, despite outward appearances, she was black. 

A weird mixture of things, this movie is exploitation, police procedural, melodrama, and a social issues picture. Two detectives, Nigel Patrick (who is fair), and Michael Craig (who is kind of racist) work the case. They discover that the dead girl, whose name is Sapphire was passing for white, that she seemed to have two lives, one amongst the jazz clubs frequented by Britain's Caribbean ex pat population, and one at school. She also had a white fiancé, a promising architecture student whose family and home life are emitting decidedly stressed out vibes. 

Casual racism is addressed in an open and matter of fact way that would have been foreign to American pictures of the time. It can be an uncomfortable watch, there is a lot of hate, indifference, and self justification on screen. The acting can be uneven at times, the picture sometimes feels like it's just wandering, and despite taking on the subject of racism the black characters in this all feel more like types then real people. So while surely risk taking then, the movie feels disappointingly retrograde now. Even the heroic black doctor character feels like a lesser version of someone Sidney Poitier would have played around the same time. **1/2

Death on the Nile (2022)

 In 'Death on the Nile' Kenneth Branagh reprises the lead role of detective Hercule Poirot and also directs the picture, as he had previously done in his tremendously successful ($352.8 million box office off a $55 million budget) version of 'Murder on the Orient Express' back in 2017. This film has been less finically successful then its predecessor (so far $115.1 million off a $90 million budget), but in other ways feels more successful, though on the whole still a mixed bag.

Less clunky then its predecessor, the visual and action flourishes that felt so forced on a train in the snow feel more natural on a boat on the Nile. Both films have large star studded ensemble casts and take a bit to get going. While boasting a multi racial cast and set largely amongst the upper classes in 1937, this movie almost entirely avoids dealing with the obvious topic of racism, which felt more then a little off. 

The film also tries to arc the hell out of Poirot which the more I reflect on it the less I liked, perhaps by giving the central character 'closure' Branagh was trying to free himself from the expectation of making more of these. Chrisite's story is solid though and succeeds at being what it sets out to be, enjoyable diversion of some intelligence, though of no great depth. This is probably the last time we will see Armie Hammer on screen, because of cannibalism, which makes him sound like his own Agathe Christi story. ***

The House of Rothschild (1934)

 'The House of Rothschild' tells the story of the famous German Jewish banking family, the great financers of 19th century Europe. George Arliss plays several generations of Rothschild patriarchs. Loretta Young and Robert Young have a Jew/Gentile romance. The screenplay is by Nunnally Johnson, who would later adapt 'The Grapes of Wrath', among other fine films. 

It is notable that this movie, which directly addresses anti Semitism on screen even as Hitler was in ascendency in Europe, was made by 20th Century Fox, the only major Hollywood studio at the time without a Jewish studio head. Darryl F. Zanuck was a protestant of Swiss extraction from Wahoo Nebraska, however his name and position no doubt caused many people to assume he was Jewish. So Zanuck would have been familiar with anti-Semitism but also at a certain distance from it, that may have been what emboldened him to address the issue on screen so early and so openly. 

This is a handsomely mounted film and Arliss is great it in it. He really was an odd looking man, yet a consistent money maker for 20th Century and they used him well. George's wife Florence also appears in the film and it's fun to see the easy chemistry the two have with each other. ***

Evil Under the Sun (1982)

 'Evil Under the Sun' is an adaptation of the 1941 Agatha Christie novel of the same name. The story concerns a murder at an Adriatic island resort in the 1930's. Peter Ustinov plays the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, a role he would play around a half dozen times on both film and television, his take on the character is a little different from the now better known David Suchet and Kenneth Branagh versions and it took me a while to warm to it. To warm to the whole thing really, at first it felt very small scale BBC, but the film eventually opens up and becomes quite fun. It even has a sequence, establishing where all the characters are at a given time, which is perhaps my favorite in any Poirot film I've seen. The movies Cole Porter score really serves to elevate and enliven the whole thing. ***

Doctor Syn (1937)

 In watching 'Doctor Syn' (1937) I quickly realized that I had encountered this story before. There is a Hammer Film version from 1962 alternately known as 'Captain Clegg' and 'Night Creatures'. Dr. Syn was the creation of English novelist Russell Thorndike (1885-1972), who over the course of seven novels chronicled the adventures of his title character, a reformed pirate who reinvented himself as a clergyman and uses the profits of his smuggling to do good in the world. 

The story here deals with Captain Collyer (Roy Emerton) of the Royal Navy, come to the village of Dymchurch on the south east English coast to hunt for smugglers (turns out Dymchurch is a real place). Collyer comes to suspect that the notorious pirate Captain Clegg isn't dead, but operating a smuggling ring in the tiny community. Dr. Syn must try and keep Collyer off his tail, protect his co-conspirators, fend off the murderous intentions of a mute former colleague dubbed simply 'Mulatto' (this part hasn't aged well), and of course find time to help two young lovers get together. 

This was Arliss's last film role and he is rather enjoyable in it. The movie is hampered most by night shots that are simply not clear, and some other rather 30's trappings. Margret Lockwood (the female lead in on of my favorite films, 'Night Train to Munich') plays the young orphan unaware that the kindly vicar is really her father. John Loder plays her love interest. 

Also of note are the spectral 'Marsh Riders', a 'Scooby-Doo' villain type cover for the smuggling operation. Peter Cushing played the lead character in the Hammer version, while Patrick McGoohan had that part in a Disney 'Wonderful World of Color' TV production in 1963, which I think I might have seen at least part of when I was a kid. The Arliss version I give **1/2