Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Archenemy

If Earth and Krypton had the same color of sun, Superman would not have had superpowers here. However, since he arrived as an infant, he still could have had a successful career in journalism. It is a harder transition for Max Fist, a former superhero from a different world. Powerless and friendless, Fist became a mean drunk, but its still sort of a superpower the way he does it. He will need all his beer muscles when he starts fighting crime again in director-screenwriter Adam Egypt Mortimer’s SpectreVision-produced Archenemy, which opens tomorrow in theaters and on-demand.

As the Fist will tell anyone willing to buy him a drink, he was once the heroic guardian of the futuristic city Chromium, but when he smashed the dimension-destroying device invented by his archenemy, Cleo, he was inadvertently pulled through into our world. Inconveniently, the source of his powers does not exist here, so he is just an average, swiftly aging dude. Yet, he is still a minor skid-row celebrity, especially when Hamster, an aspiring neighborhood vlogger starts posting videos of his angry exploits.

Hamster’s sister Indigo always thought she was the responsible one, hustling for the dealer known as “The Manager” to support them. Yet, she risks both their lives when she makes a spectacularly ill-advised play. They will need a hero, but Hamster happens to know one who is willing to step-up. Of course, he must adapt to his mortal circumstances, even though he is still tormented by memories and visions of Cleo (who’s referenced right there in the title, so she must be important).

Archenemy is the best superhero movie since Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and probably the grungiest one ever (even grungier than American Hero). Mortimer takes all the classic superhero elements and gives them a brutally realistic twist. The Boys will probably be a lazy point of comparison for a lot of critics, because the two darkly rendered superhero worlds are nearly as violent, but Archenemy clearly has real love for the genre it subverts.

Wolfwalkers, from Apple and GKIDS

Robyn Goodfellowe is an outdoorsy young girl, who is often seen in the company of wolves. Yes, she wears a cloak with a hood, but it is black, like Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell’s heart, rather than red. At first, the lupine creatures frighten her, but she soon learns she has a mysterious kinship with them in Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart’s Wolfwalkers, which premieres tomorrow on Apple TV.

Goodfellowe’s brawny British father Bill has been dispatched to Kilkenny to hunt down the wolves running rampant in the woods outside the walled city. Unfortunately, it is going very badly. The wolves seem to have human-like intelligence to find and disarm his traps, because in some cases they do. Mebh Og MacTire and her long-missing mother Moll, the matriarchal leader of the wolfpack, are “Wolf Walkers,” who stride about as humans when they are awake, but assume lupine form when their traditional, upright bodies are asleep.

Despite her father’s stern warnings to avoid the woods (and the wolves therein), Goodfellowe quickly befriends Mebh. In fact, her encounters with the wolves brings out her inner Wolf Walker, a revelation she keeps secret from her father. He is under mounting pressure to exterminate the wolves, whom the Puritan Cromwell (not to be confused with Thomas Cromwell, of Wolf Hall, his great-great-grand-uncle) equates with Pagan licentiousness.

Moore & Stewart’s animation is absolutely gorgeous, taking inspiration from Medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts. They also distinctively blend in simple but evocative line animation to convey Goodfellowe’s POV, while she is wolf-walking. The Goodfellowes’ father-daughter story is also quite sweet—at times even touching, even though her bafflingly reckless decisions can cause acute face-palming. Regardless, Sean Bean’s vocal performance as the gruff hunter is easily one of the best viewers will hear in an animated film this year.

ADIFF ’20: Paul Laurence Dunbar—Beyond the Mask

Someone ought to produce a two-man show based on the lives of long-time friends and Dayton, Ohio residents Paul Laurence Dunbar and Orville Wright. It would be a natural vehicle to cash-in on some duo’s movie buddy chemistry, while also telling some little-known history. The truth is the pioneering aviator was a classmate of the great poet, who even helped his friend print Dayton’s first African American newspaper (during its brief tenure). Frustratingly, some of Dunbar’s best-known lines, like “I know why the caged bird sings” are now better known from other writer’s usages. The poet gets the prestigious biographical documentary treatment he deserves with Frederick Lewis’s Paul Laurence Dunbar: Beyond the Mask which screens virtually as part of the 2020 NY African Diaspora International Film Festival.

Dunbar was the son of parents who were slaves before Emancipation. The life of his father would also make a compelling film, considering how Joshua Dunbar escaped bondage through the Underground Railroad, but subsequently enlisted twice with Union Army, to fight during the Civil War. His mother gleaned reading lessons from neighborhood children to pick up enough understanding to encourage his studies. Obviously, he excelled, facing little prejudice during his school years, but a great deal after.

Eventually, Dunbar became probably the most prominent African American poet of his day—and in that day, contemporary poets were much more widely read than they are now. He had significant champions including Frederick Douglass, but even after he attained literary fame, he still experienced career ups-and-downs.

Hopefully, American Masters will eventually pick-up Paul Laurence Dunbar, because it perfectly fits their mission and it is of greater quality than at least half of what they present. Lewis does terrific work grounding Dunbar as a product of Dayton. In doing so, he also inspires fresh new respect for Orville Wright (fittingly, the city has rechristened their old neighborhood Wright-Dunbar, anchoring the district with a museum dedicated to their three favorite sons).

ADIFF ’20: Take Out Girl

As a delivery person for her mother’s down-market Chinese restaurant, Tera Wong would be considered an essential worker in 2020 parlance. Her side gig ferrying drugs did not make many state essential services lists, but her boss’s customers consider it essentially essential. Unfortunately, drug delivery is not the sort of sideline she can easily walk away from in Hisonni Johnson’s Take Out Girl, which screens virtually as part of the 2020 NY African Diaspora International Film Festival.

Wong’s mother Wavy is literally working herself to death, so she drops out of high school to work at the restaurant, even though she hates it there. Usually, her wannabe gangster brother Saren handles the deliveries, but on a day when they are slammed with orders, she makes a run to a particularly iffy customer. That would be Lalo, a fairly big-time drug dealer, who makes no attempt to conceal the product his crew is packing. The gangster gives her a generous tip, because he is impressed when she stands her ground. Nonetheless, he is genuinely surprised when she returns a few weeks later, offering her delivery services.

As an Asian teen, Wong never attracts the cops’ attention and she has a perfect justification for driving around sketchy neighborhoods at night. Of course, we know things can’t be that simple. Nate, her nice-guy ex-con potential love interest, eventually tells her his own cautionary story, but by that time, she is already in too deep.

Johnson and Hedy Wong, his co-screenwriter-lead, tell a gritty story about crime and the grinding frustration of just barely getting by. It is touch-and-go for Wavy Wong’s family restaurant during the film’s pre-Covid days. Just imagine how much difficult it would be for them if they could only open for 50% capacity. Regardless, they do not sugarcoat the implications of Wong’s decisions (despite throwing a few third act contrivances at us).

Tera Wong is terrific as the titular delivery worker. We get her rage and frustration, but she also brings fuller, subtler dimensions to her namesake. Indeed, her awkward courtship scenes with Dijon Talton (as Nate) are some of the film’s best. He impresses too, while Lynna Yee is absolutely heartbreaking as long-suffering Mother Wavy.

Isaac Ezban’s Parallel

How sociopathic must you be to rook yourself over in an alternate dimension? Admittedly, its not you, but if you can’t feel for your alternate self, who can you have empathy for? Unfortunately, a houseful of Seattle app developers does not start asking themselves these questions until it is way too late in Isaac Ezban’s Parallel, which opens in select theaters (obviously not in New York) and on-demand this Friday.

Noel and his would-be band of start-up developers live together and fail to develop their new parking app together in a messy Seattle house. Mysteriously, the previous occupant disappeared (but we see where she got to in the weird, horror-feeling prologue). After drunkenly commiserating over their latest defeat, they happen across the hidden attic, where they find a mirror that allows access to alternate dimensions and a periscope that allows them to scout out whether the coast is clear.

They soon learn DC Comics exaggerated the multi-verse. Invariably, they only find minor variations between realities. The broad strokes are the same, but the differences in the details represent opportunities, like successful art they can copy. Time runs 180 times faster during their jaunts, so they trip into the multiverse to beat tight deadlines in their own plane of existence. They can also use their doubles’ credit cards to pay for shopping sprees. Eventually, Noel also realizes there could be significant technology they (meaning he) could plunder.

As he did in The Incident, Ezban shows a knack for mind-bending science fiction that takes established gimmicky motifs and gives them a subversive twist. They way the characters exploit the multiverse is pretty reprehensible by any moral standard, but it always makes sense from a Hobbesian perspective.

Things get really crazy, in an unusually interesting way, but screenwriter Scott Blaszak’s characterization could have been a bit fuller. Largely, the multi-universe-tripping friends fit into neat boxes: the sleazy user, the failed artist, the tormented sensitive one, and the horny one. That happens not infrequently in genre films. However, the twists and turns are more than sufficiently intriguing to keep us hooked.

Ip Man: Kung Fu Master

His legend continues to grow. Initially, Hong Kong filmmakers started making films about Bruce Lee’s master, as a work-around to appeal to the martial arts super star’s fans, since the Lee family so tightly controlled the rights to his image and name. However, Ip Man films have become an industry unto themselves. This time around, it is Ip’s tenure as a police officer that will get the heroic treatment. However, you are not likely to hear about his membership in the anti-Communist (at that time) KMT. (Why do you think he suddenly had to leave Foshan for Hong Kong?)  Regardless, the Ip legend takes on superhero proportions in Li Liming’s Ip Man: Kung Fu Master, which releases on VOD this Friday.

Ip believes in the law and in China, so he has no patience for the Foshan gang that has aligned itself with the local Imperial-supported, opium-importing Japanese business council. As the film opens, Ip single-handedly faces the entire gang, while San Ye, the leader of the patriotic (but still criminal) Ax Gang settles business with the opposing gang’s leader. Rules are still rules, so Ip still must take the Ax leader into custody. Unfortunately, that leaves him vulnerable to the corrupt cops on the force.

Naturally, his daughter blames Ip for her father’s death, even though the honest cop is secretly protecting her, under the guise of the masked vigilante, “The Black Knight.” To humiliate the local population, the Japanese syndicate sponsors a martial arts competition, with the Imperial Army’s karate champion taking on all comers (flagrantly copying a page from Wilson Ip’s original Ip Man, but whatever). Of course, he only gets one challenger, Ip Man, who will be more than enough.

Li’s Kung Fu Master does not connect on an emotional level the way Donnie Yen’s first three Ip Man films did and it lacks the stylish grandeur of Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster. It is definitely less ambitious in nearly every respect, but what it sets out to do, it does really well. Action director Sun Fei’s fight scenes start of big and over-the-top—and only get more so as the film continues. Dennis To’s Ip is typically outnumbered something like 70 or 80 to 1, but it is never enough. Eventually, you’d think the hapless gang-members would look around and realize: “we’re going to need a couple hundred more guys.”

Taiwan B-Movies: On the Society File of Shanghai

It wasn’t called “Scar Literature” for no reason. This adaptation of the Mainland stories that chronicled the crimes of the Cultural Revolution during the brief respite of the “Beijing Spring” period literally turns on the source of one of the protagonist’s scars. Technically a “B-movie,” Wang Chu-chin’s On the Society File off Shanghai is also loaded with wider historical and cultural significance, as viewers can see for themselves, now that it is currently screening online (for free) as part of Anthology Film Archive’s Taiwan B-Movies series.

Former respected military nurse Li Li-fang has been arrested for the most likely fatal attack on Wang Hai-nan, the black sheep son of a high-ranking PLA officer. Public security inspector Shung is under pressure to simply find Li guilty and close the case. However, he insists on mounting an investigation to uncover her motives. Shung always has been politically unreliable like that, but he is really pushing his luck this time around.

During the course of the investigation, Shung discovers Li and Wang were lovers, who recognized a shared aversion for the Maoist madness underway in each other. Unbeknownst to both, Wang’s mother (long divorced by his ambitious father) was Li’s mentor at school, but the disgraced principal tried to keep her connection to her son secret, for his own protection, after she was denounced during the Cultural Revolution. In fact, Shung has to win a staring contest with the Red Cadres still tormenting her, just to ask her a few brief questions about Li.

Society File is one of the films that made Liu Hsiao-fan a star, specifically in the Taiwan Black Movie subgenre of female revenge films. Li Li-fang is not exactly the sort of avenging angel she would eventually become, but she is certainly intense—especially her classic, career-making scene, in which she stabs her chest, just to prove how fearless she is. When you watch her, you can see how she could become a Taiwanese exploitation icon.

Your Honor, on Showtime

The law in Louisiana is not technically based on the Napoleonic Code (a common misconception), but it is considerably different from most state law. Less bound by precedent, it gives judges much more interpretive latitude (that sort of sounds like the New Orleans way, doesn’t it?). Judge Michael Desiato is considered one of the more enlightened arbiters of the law. He cares about justice, but he loves his son more, so the judge uses all his knowledge of the justice system to protect him in Your Honor, creator Peter Moffat’s adaptation of the Israeli TV show Kvodo, which premieres tomorrow on Showtime.

It was already a fateful day—the anniversary of the death of Desiato’s wife. Unfortunately, it quickly gets much worse for their son Adam. He just wanted a private commemoration, but he takes a wrong turn through gang territory. Due to the resulting stress, he suffers a serious asthma attack, during which he accidentally collides with a motorcyclist. It turns out that was the son of notorious mob boss, Jimmy Baxter, whom he leaves for dead in his panic.

Judge Desiato had convinced his son to turn himself in, but he aborts that plan when he discovers the identity of the victim. Instead, the jurist opts to conceal his son’s involvement, fearing the Baxters’ reprisals. He is a lot better equipped and informed to perpetrate a cover than the Kennedys after Chappaquiddick, but he still misses a lot. Things get messy, in terms of unintended costs and consequences by the end of the second episode (out of ten), but Desiato has no choice but to keep digging.

Bryan Cranston has instant credibility as Judge Desiato and the New Orleans locations add a great deal of pizzaz. The supporting cast is also mostly strong and engaging. However, each one-darned-thing-after-another that Moffat tries to spring on viewers is really never particularly shocking, at least based on the first four (out of ten) episodes supplied to the press. The series certainly functions as a respectable thriller, but it is basically on the level of Suspect, the okay 1987 Peter Yates film, starring Dennis Quaid.

Of course, Cranston is compulsively watchable as Desiato. The best moments of Your Honor (so far) feature the craftiness he so aptly projects whenever the judge is retrieving evidence or constructing alibis (taking a page out of the playbook followed by the father in Sheep Without a Shepherd).

Wander: Consider it Conspiracy-Town

It turns out Roswell isn't the craziest town in New Mexico. In this film, the fictional dirt village of Wander is way more sinister. Nobody would want to go there, but apparently those there have a hard time leaving. Arthur Bretnik, a barely licensed PI and trafficker of conspiracy theories will go there hoping to find answers in April Mullen’s Wander, which releases today on VOD.

Bretnik was once a cop, but he lost his job and his family when he wouldn’t back off investigating an irregular murder, even after the body mysteriously disappeared. Obviously, Bretnik still suffers from emotional and neurological damage caused by the convenient accident that finally sidelined him, but he fared better than his late wife and their now brain-damaged daughter. These days, Bretnik co-hosts an Art Bell-ish podcast with his conspiracy theory-mongering crony, Jimmy Cleats and mostly chases down low-rent insurance cheats for money.

Cleats brings him a client who might be a little too perfect. Her daughter died at Wander’s city-limits, under suspicious circumstances she would like Bretnik to investigate. She can also pay pretty good money for his services, even though she is in the country illegally. Of course, Bretnik is totally hooked when he discovers the body had a mysterious non-bullet hole, much like his victim back in the day. He is the last to believe it was a coincidence his client came to him, but he also believes he finally has a chance to uncover the “truth.”

It is hard to figure who this film was really intended for. The shadowy extra-governmental conspiracy Bretnik chases is the sort of yarn that could appeal to the wacky QAnon crowd (seriously, does anyone think Trump could keep his mouth shut about it if he were really fighting some global child abusing cabal?), but the victims are largely illegals, whom the film bends over backward to express sympathy for.

Okay, so whatever. The surprising part is Wander functions pretty well as a thriller (notwithstanding the terrible title). In many ways, it is like a redo of Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory, with Aaron Eckhart taking on the Mel Gibson role and Heather Graham serving as the Julia Roberts analog (in this case, Graham represents an upgrade).

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future

It is the Incredible Journey of jellyfish movies. It also follows in the long Japanese cinematic tradition of disaffected young adults. However, unlike the “Sun Tribe” movie characters, Yuji Nimura and Mamoru Arita are decidedly working class. The latter is also clearly sociopathic. Yet, they both have a strange affection for Arita’s pet jellyfish in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future, which re-releases today via the Metrograph’s virtual cinema.

When the film starts, the two slacker friends are working at an industrial laundry, but they might take off at any time.  Nimura thinks they will be like the two guys in Route 66, so he is surprised when Arita decides to move on without him. Nevertheless, he readily agrees to care for Arita’s jellyfish, at least until he returns for it. It turns out that will take much longer than either of them anticipated, because of a shocking impulse Arita indulges.

This turn of events leaves Nimura in a confused state of depression, which only deepens when he accidentally allows the jellyfish to leak into the canal. However, he finds some unlikely companionship with Shinichiro Arita, his friend’s father, who is even more estranged from the rest of his family than he was from Mamoru. Nimura even starts to learn the junk dealing trade, until he is distracted by sightings of the jellyfish in the waters flowing around the city.

If you learn nothing else from this film, you must remember jellyfish are poisonous. They can also be hypnotic, at least when filmed by Kurosawa and cinematographer Takahide Shibanushi. This is definitely a film of stark yet subtle shades, shifting from black-and-white to sepia tones, and back to grainy gray-scales, with the spectral colors of the jellyfish most haunting of all. You can tell just by looking the title holds all kinds of ironies.

It is also strangely absorbing. This is really not another horror film from Kurosawa, but it is certainly some kind of genre movie. Major crimes are definitely major crimes and there might even be the hint of the supernatural. More importantly, it offers a meditation on friendship and human connection. Kurosawa vividly and compellingly shows viewers how the passive Nimura’s problematic friendship with the dominant Arita continues to have a corrosive effect on his subsequent relationships.

ADIFF ’20: Mr. Weekend

No film noir anti-hero ever starts a movie in media res to marvel at all the shrewd decisions they just made. That is especially true of Charlie Jenkins, a small-time under-bookie, who handles payouts and collections for his far more powerful and dangerous boss, Big Slim Fizz. He tries to turn a bad collection into a big score, but obviously he is in over his head in director-screenwriter-producer McKenzie Woodward’s Mr. Weekend, which screens virtually as part of the 2020 NY African Diaspora International Film Festival.

Jenkins always liked old-school gun-dealer Hyman Steinberg, even though he is always especially reluctant to pay up. However, booking a ticket to Thailand when you owe $67K is definitely a no-no. Worry not, he assures Jenkins, because he has a multi-million-dollar bag of crystal LSD to flip. However, when Jenkins returns, Steinberg is in the process of being murdered, so instead, he sneaks away with the drugs under their noses.

Naturally, Jenkins wants to move the illicit merch fast, so he can run-off with his prostitute girlfriend, Nora Fiddledown, even though some very angry people are out there looking for the drugs. He also has to settle Steinberg’s debt, to keep Big Slim Fizz off his back. It sounds like a great plan, but we know things get dicey from the prologue.

Mr. Weekend hooks viewers right from the start, with one of the best opening credit sequences in years, thanks to its clever title design, accompanied by Mulatu Astatke’s eternally cool “Tezeta.” Woodward maintains the vibe impressively, immersing us in Jenkins’ dodgy bookmaking milieu. The film nails the noir elements, notably including Jenkins’ cynical narration and Evan Avtal’s super-slick black-and-white cinematography.

ADIFF ’20: Back of the Moon

Badman ("Bra Max") is a Sophiatown gangster who wants to be a Robin Hood. Unfortunately, his gang, “The Vipers,” wants to double-down on being a gang. This inevitably leads to conflict at a most inopportune time in Angus Gibson’s Back of the Moon, which screens virtually as part of the 2020 NY African Diaspora International Film Festival.

Badman is a gangster in the James Cagney-Angels with Dirty Faces tradition, who serves as the guardian of Kidonkey, a brainy orphan and generally tries to peacefully coexist with the Gerty Street neighborhood. Unfortunately, it is slated to be forcibly demolished by the Apartheid authorities, after this fateful night. Badman was already considering mounting a futile last stand against the cops, before “Ghost,” his chief rival and lieutenant in the Vipers started challenging his authority. Things come to a head when Ghost and his cronies abduct Eve Msomi, the vocalist at the Back of the Moon club.

Msomi is scheduled to leave South Africa for the London production of a jazz musical that sounds a lot like King Kong, the show that launched Miriam Makeba’s international career (which happened to be about an ill-fated boxer). Off stage, Msomi has been seeing “Strike,” an up-and-coming fighter, who frequently abuses her. Of course, saving the grateful Msomi from Ghost inevitably earns Badman Strike’s wrath as well.

Gibson (who co-directed the Jonathan Demme-produced, Oscar-nominated Mandela documentary) pulled off a Roger Corman-worthy feat when he successfully wrapped Moon using temp sets that had been constructed for a TV show his company was producing. They definitely look convincingly like 1950s back-alleys. The noir atmosphere is heavy and evocative. However, the limited locations make the film feel a bit stagey (but that’s not the end of the world).

In fact, Gibson’s intimate stage turns out to be an effective showcase for Richard Lukunku, who burns up the screen as Badman. He personifies “dangerous charisma.” Frankly, there are times he portrays the gangster with uncomfortable brutishness. Yet, he is also keenly seductive and sensitive in his scenes with Moneoa Moshesh (as Msomi). She is a fine torch singer, but Lukunku outshines her on-screen.

Tripping with Nils Frahm, Recorded Live

Musician Nils Frahm's photographer father Klaus Frahm produced covers for a handful of ECM jazz records, including one of their biggest hits, Pat Metheny’s As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, as well as the hidden gem, Tom van der Geld’s Path. Nils Frahm’s music could be described as a fusion of electronic-ambient and classical, so it could well appeal to a lot of ECM fans’ aesthetic sensibilities. Clearly, he has hooked plenty of others listeners too, because his concerts always become sold-out events. Benoit Toulemonde capture a particularly notable concert at the historically significant Funkhaus Berlin in Tripping with Nils Frahm, which premieres tomorrow on MUBI, with the accompanying live album releasing simultaneously.

There are no talking head soundbites in Tripping—just Frahm’s music. Frankly, breaking away from what is clearly a carefully thought-out set list would be a terrible distraction. It is much wiser to let Frahm make his own case through his music. In addition to the piano, Frahm mixes in a number of keyboards and synthesizers (some of which could even be considered retro). Yet, the overall effect of his sonic layering feels fresher than a lot of ambient-techno music.

Frahm establishes the trance-like mood right from the start with the hypnotically catchy “Fundamental Values.” “My Friend the Forest” has an almost pastoral vibe, but the classical influences are even more pronounced in “All Melody,” especially in its synthesized chorale elements. A little later in the set, astute ears might recognize “Says” from executive producer Brad Pitt’s Ad Astra, quite appropriately, given the space age vibe.

Throughout the evening, Frahm demonstrates impressive technique on the piano and assorted keyboards, as well as a shrewd conception of how to incorporate and “play over” multi-tracks and overdubs. He has a fine touch, but he can also power his way home with cascading runs that build towards the concluding climax of “More.” Frahm doesn’t merely wear a set of headphones and press a button—he really plays.

Beast Mode: A P.G.A. Horror Story

As the producer of the biggest box office bomb in Hollywood history, Breen Nash would kill for a hit. He more or less does so unintentionally, when he unknowingly sets in motion a bizarre pseudo-lycanthropic monster in an effort to save his latest production. The show must go on, but the price will be high in Chris W. Freeman & Spain Willingham’s Beast Mode, which releases today on VOD.

Nash applied Truman’s advice regarding DC to Hollywood and got himself a dog for his best friend. He doesn’t even kid himself about the rest of his associates, but somehow, he still managed to package a deal to produce Beast Moon with surly, hard-partying Huckle Saxton. There is no deal without Saxton, so Nash is understandably concerned when he accidently backs over the troubled star with his car. He feels bad, but the deal still needs to be finalized, so he hires a lookalike to take Saxton’s place.

The nicer Saxton is the star’s spitting image, except for his blemished face, but fortunately Nash can call in a favor with old school makeup goddess, Zelda Zine. She knows a guy who has this cream derived from a rare South American flower that works wonders. The only drawback is it literally brings out the beast in people—round midnight. Suddenly, nice Saxton isn’t so nice anymore and neither is everyone else who came into physical contact with the cream.

Freeman, Willingham, and co-screenwriter Drew Fortune tell a nutty, chaotic story, but they certainly find fresh ways to skewer Hollywood. Seriously, this is not like dozens of other tame show business satires. They really draw blood, so to speak.

Ikarie XB-1, Restored and Uncut

They set off to seek out new life and new civilizations three years before the original Star Trek launched. They found a strange form of space madness five years before the first Soviet adaptation of Solaris (and nine years before Tarkovsky’s classic). It too was loosely based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, but for years it was only known as Voyage to the End of the Universe, in a cut that was heavily edited and redubbed by American International Pictures (AIP). Happily, Jindrich Polak’s Czech science fiction masterwork has been fully restored in its entirety, which releases this Friday, via Film Forum’s virtual cinema.

Ikarie was also considered an influence on Kubrick’s 2001, at least in terms of its sleek space-age design. It is just as moody and brooding as the 1968 Solyaris, but also displays some of groovy vibe of vintage DEFA sf films, like Eolomea. You can tell just by looking at Ikarie that it must have been influential. The narrative sounds relatively familiar, but keep in mind, it was the product of the early Cold War-era-1960s.

Sometime in the future, a crew of scientists embark on a fifteen-year journey, searching for life in the Alpha Centauri system. As we can tell from the in media res prologue, one of the crew goes raving mad and will threaten the safety of all abord the Ikarie. It doesn’t just happen. The deranged Michael will apparently be infected with something. The question will be—is it the doing of mysterious aliens, or is it perhaps somehow related to the evil derelict NATO space vessel they find drifting from a dark era long-passed.

The very idea of a NATO starship does not make sense, since the North Atlantic Alliance has never been involved in space exploration—just maintaining the peace and containing Soviet expansionism, but obviously Ikarie XB-1 had to incorporate some kind of propaganda to earn its release. In most other respects, the futuristic crew do not sound much different than Star Trek’s Starfleet. Regardless, story is really just a vehicle for the wonderfully retro sets and Jan Kalis’s absolutely stunning black-and-white cinematography.

The Ikarie model is just okay (a bit like Space 1999’s Eagle), but the interiors will make sf fans swoon. Admittedly, the antiquated robot owned by crew mathematician Antony Hopkins [definitely not “Sir Anthony”] is transparently modeled after Robbie the Robot, from Forbidden Planet (1956), but that adds to the retro charm. Yet, there is a grace to spacefaring scenes that clearly prefigure 2001 (all that’s missing is The Blue Danube accompaniment).

Arguably, the cast acquits itself quite well, especially considering what a strong stylistic stamp Polak put on the film. Otto Lackovic delivers a Shatner-worthy freak-out as Michael and Radovan Lukavsky provides Picardian steeliness as Macdonald, the first officer, who makes all the hard decisions. Of course, the Ikarie has its share of expendable crew members too, just like the Enterprise.

76 Days: Scenes from the Wuhan Lockdown

One of Hao Wu's Mainland-based co-directors preferred to remain anonymous in the credits of their film documenting Wuhan during the lockdown. That is totally understandable, given how tightly the CCP regime has controlled information regarding the outbreak. However, there is one name conspicuously missing from the film: Dr. Li Wenliang, the “whistleblower” doctor who was arrested and forced to recant his warnings of a coronavirus outbreak, before eventually succumbing to Covid-19 himself. His full story needs to be told, but Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, and anonymous focus solely on the anguish that resulted inside four overwhelmed Wuhan hospitals, struggling to keep up with pandemic in 76 Days, which releases virtually this Friday.

There is no background or context provided during 76 Days, just an immersive examination of the triage, in the style of a Wiseman doc, but with more urgency. It is hard to say whether some of the action was recorded in Dr. Li’s Wuhan Central Hospital, now also known as “Whistleblower Hospital,” because Wu did his best to obscure details that could identify people and places during the editing. His efforts were aided by the head-to-toe PPE-gear that almost entirely renders the medical personnel anonymous. Of course, this also presents a “dramatic” challenge, but the catastrophic nature of the situation still comes through, in scene after scene.

Perhaps the most poignant sequences involve a young couple, who are desperate to finally see their infant daughter, who was born while her pregnant mother was in treatment for Covid. Nicknamed “Little Penguin” by the hospital staff, the unnamed baby has yet to be held by her parent’ arms, but at least they are all expected to survive. The prognosis is not so good for other patients.

Indeed, opens with the chilling scene of a hospital employee wailing for deceased father, whom she is not allowed to see, due to safety protocols. In shaping his codirectors’ footage, Wu largely avoids overtly political references. However, there is a weird incident involving a distressed elderly patient, whose son on a cell phone basically tells him to suck it up and start acting like a Party member.

Taiwan B-Movies at AFA: Taiwan Black Movies

Before Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, there was Woman Revenger and Lady Ninja. Starting in 1979, there was an explosion of ROC exploitation filmmaking that not so coincidentally coincided with Taiwan’s super-charged economic growth and the development of the democratization movement. Hou Chi-jan surveys the films and their cultural significance in Taiwan Black Movies, which screens as part of Anthology Film Archive’s free online retrospective, Taiwan B-Movies.

Sort of euphemistically (but maybe not really), the Taiwanese “Black” or B-movies are referred to by critics as the “social realism” films. In fact, the film that launched the genre, Never Too Late to Repent, was a very realistic depiction of prison conditions. Those that followed cranked up the violence to levels previously unseen in local cinema, while pushing the sexual envelop as much as they could at the time.

Back then, the KMT was still anti-Communist (whereas it is now infamous as Taiwan’s pro-CCP party), so adaptations of Mainland “Scar Literature,” novels chronicling the horrors of Mao’s regime, could count on a little slack from the KMT censors. Ironically, the awkwardly titled On the Society File of Shanghai would give rise to a major Taiwanese exploitation subgenre: the women’s revenge film. Indeed, a number of the clips seen in TBM look like they could have come from a dingy print of Lady Snowblood, or something even tougher.

Hou’s talking heads represent a fairly wide spectrum of film criticism. Collectively, they probably express just as much disdain for these films, as they do admiration and nostalgia. Each point is also vividly illustrated with relevant film clips, but sadly, a number of these films are obviously not well preserved.

Holiday Gift Guide: Valley of the Gods

This film is like a clown car loaded with symbolism. No matter how hard you try, you will probably never finish unpacking it. It also has some striking natural scenery and a really interesting supporting cast packed in there. Lech Majewski is probably best known in North America for the wonderous “cinematic painting” The Mill and the Cross and he brings the same genre-defiance and distinctive visual sensibility to bear in the fabulistic Valley of the Gods, which is now available on DVD. It would indeed make quite a memorable gift for any fan of Jodorowsky-ish auteurs on your shopping list (but be warned, they will keep talking about it for months to come).

Either a lot happens in Valley, or maybe not that much. Engineering titan Wes Tauros is about to secure the uranium mining rights for the Navajo Nation’s Valley of Gods (near Monument Valley), where the spirits of their ancestors are thought to reside. The deal has split the community, largely but not entirely along generational lines, between those who value the spiritual over the material concerns and those desperate for greater opportunities.

John Ecas was a copywriter with the Tauros company, but he is now concentrating on his midlife crisis and pining for his wife, who left him for her hang-gliding instructor. On the advice of his unconventional shrink, Ecas has embraced absurdity as a means of therapy. It was during his resulting misadventures that he crossed paths with Tauros, in his incognito homeless avatar. Ostensibly, Ecas is summoned to Tauros’s grand castle in the sky to serve as his Boswell, but the weirdness that unfolds could just be the novel he is finally writing.

There are a lot of visual references going on in Valley—so much so, astute viewers may start to second-guess how much they are projecting themselves. Regardless, cineastes will inevitably see echoes from dozens of films, starting with the grand vistas of John Ford’s classic Monument Valley westerns. Ecas’ trippy spirit walk brings to mind John Cassavetes dropping-out in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest. Tauros is frequently likened to Howard Hughes within the film, but his Xanadu is also reminiscent of Hearst Castle, while his statue garden is shrewdly compared to the Medusa’s lair. Fittingly, the great Keir Dullea appears as Ulim, Tauros’s trusted butler and confidant, because there are elements of the wildly over-the-top climax that bring to mind 2001.

So, basically whatever you might want to see, you can find in Valley, maybe even kaiju. Of course, John Malkovich is perfectly cast as the eccentric and arbitrary Tauros. Dullea is aptly mysterious and a little bit unnerving as Ulim. Plus, the great John Rhys-Davies is wonderfully sly as Dr. Hermann, Ecas’s erudite analyst, who we can’t be absolutely sure truly exists. These are three of our favorite thesps, whom Majewski shrewdly uses in ways that play to their strengths.

ADIFF ’20: The Last Mambo

You have to give Latin Jazz credit, because it never lost its popularity with dancers. Bop and free jazz became the stuff of serious listeners, but Latin Jazz had people dancing the mambo, son, and cha-cha-cha, eventually morphing into salsa—and if you’re not dancing to salsa, there’s something wrong with you. New York gets a lot of attention in Latin music histories, but the Bay Area also had a distinctive scene that gets its due credit in Rita Hargrave’s The Last Mambo, which screens virtually as part of the 2020 NY African Diaspora International Film Festival.

Those who know their jazz history recognize San Francisco’s Fillmore District ranked alongside LA’s Central Avenue and New York’s 52nd Street. Hargrave and musician Wayne Wallace (the associate producer) make a case for Oakland too, especially the beloved Sweet’s Ballroom, where terrific local talent like Merced Gallegos, Carlos Federico & the Panamanians ruled the roost. It is actually surprisingly entertaining to watch Wallace’s walking tour of the former Raider town’s old musical haunts.

Sadly, Gallegos and Federico can only be seen in archival footage now, but Hargrave incorporates (relatively recent) interviews with the legendary Pete Escovedo (you might also recognize his percussionist daughter, Sheila E.), as well as the late, great Benny Velarde (the percussionist with Cal Tjader’s breakout group).

Small Axe: Lovers Rock, on Prime Video

They call it a "blues party" but they really aren’t playing the blues. Yet, this 1979 West London get-together is not so different from a swing-era Harlem rent party or a hill country hootenanny. It is all about feeling the groove and hopefully your dance partner, while someone makes a little change at the door in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, the second installment of his Small Axe film sequence, which premieres today on Prime Video.

They had to take all the furniture out to fit all the people they expected, but space will still be tight. Of course, that is the point. This is way, way before the era of social distancing. If Martha and her friend Patty meet a fellow they are interested in, they will definitely want to dance slow and close. Franklyn obviously catches Martha’s eye and vice versa. Unfortunately, his wingman crashed and burned with Patty, but that will not sabotage their mutual attraction.

Some of the music heard in Lovers Rock isn’t what fans of the subgenre might immediately think of “Lovers Rock” either, particularly not Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting.” Menelik Shabazz’s The Story of Lover’s Rock (which used an apostrophe) provides an excellent survey of the music, which derived from reggae, but was smoother, more romantic, and less political than the Jamaican-based variety of the period (ironically, considering the polemical nature of the other Small Axe films). However, it features the song that was arguably Lovers Rock’s greatest hit, Janet Kay’s “Silly Games,” in a truly show-stopping sequence. First, we watch the dancers grind to Kay’s record and then we hear the entire house sing the lyrics as an ecstatic a cappella chorus.

McQueen would have been a terrific music video director during the 1980s—and that is not meant as a slight. Quite the contrary. Every shot seems to marry-up seamlessly with the beats of the soundtrack, while cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s close-ups bring out the passion and the frustration of the characters. However, the sense that one of the more predatory guests is likely to overstep the bounds of propriety before the end of the night adds an uneasy vibe that prevents viewers from casting their cares away and simply enjoying the show. Of course, that also gives the film most of its dramatic tension.