The Weekly Gravy #102

The Phynx (1970) – *½

The reviews I’d seen of The Phynx promised a truly baffling experience, and they weren’t wrong; I watched a good deal of the film with a dropped jaw, marveling at the incredible silliness of the story, the sloppiness of the writing and editing, and the surfeit of cameos, with many big names playing themselves, and a few playing characters. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, but there’s no rhyme or reason to most of The Phynx; if it was meant to be “with it,” it’s hopelessly square, and if it was meant as a spoof of its era, it falls flat thanks to a near-total lack of wit.

And yet, there’s a fascination to its sheer absurdity, a certain charm to the whole enterprise, and some legitimately good songs courtesy of the illustrious Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, especially the bright “Trip with Me,” “What is Your Sign?” and “They Say That You’re Mad.” The casual viewer should still keep clear, but the bad-movie connoisseur should find it pretty agreeable.

The story: Albania, ostensibly under the control of Marshal Markevitch (George Tobias) – were they afraid of offending Hoxha? – has kidnapped a number of American celebrities, and the efforts of Corrigan (Lou Antonio), a spy for the Super Secret Agency, to infiltrate Albania have come to naught. Corrigan’s exasperated boss, Bogey (Mike Kellin) summons all SSA agents to an emergency summit, seeking ideas for how to rescue the hostages. Finally, he decides to consult MOTHA (Mechanical Oracle That Helps Americans), a strangely feminine supercomputer, who recommends…forming a rock band?

Four young men are selected: A. Michael Miller, a surfer/bodybuilder, Ray Chippeway, a Native American fresh out of college, Dennis Larden, a student radical for hire, and Lonny Stevens, a Black actor in beer commercials. (All play themselves, essentially.) They’re abducted and brought to an SSA facility, where they’re trained, more or less, and given “hip” makeovers, after which they record an album under the supervision of producer Philbaby (Larry Hankin, doing a spacier version of what Ashton Kutcher recently did in Vengeance). With the SSA’s aggressive promotion, the record rises to #1 on the charts.

Now stars, the Phynx (that’s the name MOTHA gives them) are invited to perform in Albania for Flower Day, but first they travel to London where they meet with secret agent Foxy (Martha Raye), whom Bogey accidentally kills (I think), but not before she reveals that a map they need is tattooed in sections on the stomachs of her three daughters. So the Phynx must hold a redheads-only concert in London, sleep with over a thousand blondes in Copenhagen, and wear X-ray specs in Rome to find the parts of the map. (I’m not making any of this up.)

Finally, they get to Albania, where they’re greeted by Col. Rostinov (Michael Ansara), who’s really in charge of the country, and infiltrate Markevitch’s castle, where we learn that the celebrities where kidnapped to help remind his American wife, Ruby (Joan Blondell) of home. The hostages are assembled and agree on the need to escape, but how? The answer involves radishes (the national flower of Albania) and rock and roll itself, which destroys Rostinov’s prized tank and stone wall – which would make more sense if their music was notably high-pitched.

Not that making sense is a particular priority in a film which includes cameos from (and this is only a partial listing) Richard Pryor, Andy Devine, Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Rudy Vallee, Butterfly McQueen, Busby Berkeley, Ruby Keeler, Joe Louis, Dorothy Lamour, Harold Sakata (as Oddjob, no less), Ed Sullivan, and Colonel Sanders, but one can only imagine what they thought they were taking part in.

To be sure, if you think of the film as a glorified TV variety show, it’s easier to accept the intensely flimsy story, chintzy production values, and the parade of big names who have little to do except make a quip or two – Weissmuller and O’Sullivan get to do “Me Tarzan”/”Me Jane,” McQueen asks Vallee if he’s comfortable and he replies “I make a nice living,” and so on. It doesn’t hurt that director Lee H. Katzin (who made the middling Steve McQueen vehicle Le Mans the following year) and producers Bob Booker and George Foster mainly worked in television, as did much of the crew.

This was, however, an honest-to-God theatrical release, albeit one that probably came and went so quickly it lost more money than if it had never opened at all. As noted, the songs are decent and the old stars are nice to see, especially when they’ve got something to do; the Phynx themselves have little characterization, but they’re likable, and Kellin has some amusing moments as their crotchety boss, who embraces his new role as a pop-music mogul. And the garish aesthetic on display, most notably in the form of MOTHA, at the very least keeps the eyes occupied.

But for every remotely funny moment, there are at least two which fall very flat, whether thanks to Katzin’s lackluster direction, the haphazard editing, or Stan Cornyn’s sloppy script – Cornyn was a Grammy-winning author of album liner notes, but authoring a coherent screenplay was beyond him, and when you’re not shaking your head at the incredibly inane plot twists, you’re cringing at the jokes about Chippeway’s ethnicity (even if he’s often the one making them).

The Phynx is the kind of film they don’t make anymore, and with good reason – Hollywood made some embarrassing attempts to capitalize on Internet culture, but nothing quite as ludicrous as their worst attempts at milking the counterculture of the late 60s. It takes more than colored glasses, long hair, and a mix of paisley and floral prints to be groovy, and it takes more than a bunch of aged celebrities, a few songs, and a few comic gimmicks to make a movie. But damned if they didn’t try.

Score: 34

Beast (2022) – ***½

I’m always game for a tight little movie that knows just what it wants to do and does it – and, implicitly, does it well – and doesn’t try to overextend itself to set up a franchise or make some kind of a point. Crawl, a killer-alligator movie from 2019, was just such a movie, and while Beast – a killer-lion movie that just opened – has received substantially less praise than Crawl, and isn’t quite as good, it’s still quite a solid modern B-movie, bolstered by several above-average elements.

Dr. Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) takes his teenage daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) on a trip to their late mother’s native village in South Africa. There’s tension between Nate and Meredith over his emotional absence and the fact that he and his wife had separated before her final illness, and he’s painfully aware of his shortcomings, drinking too much in response. Their host is Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley), a game warden and longtime family friend, who’s been taking care of the family home.

One morning, Martin takes them on a mini-safari, showing them the wide variety of local wildlife and introducing them to a pride of lions, two of whom he’d raised as cubs. One of the pride is visibly injured, and Martin suspects poachers were responsible. They go to a nearby village to see if anyone has information, but instead find numerous villagers mauled to death – which, Martin notes, runs counter to his experience with lions.

As they go for help, they encounter a fatally injured man, and realize the lion is nearby; Martin pursues it and is badly injured, while Nate and his daughters are attacked in Martin’s jeep and crash it trying to get away. Stranded in the wilderness, with limited water and weaponry and no clear way to call for help, these four humans must try and survive the wrath of one very angry lion – one whose pride was killed by poachers, and who seems to have declared war on all humankind.

So yes, there’s a bit of a revenge angle here, but unlike Jaws: The Revenge, it makes at least some kind of sense; the lion isn’t specifically after the Samuelses, they’re just the only people around. The film pushes its luck a tad near the end, but not enough that we can’t keep our disbelief suspended. And yes, there’s a bit of an anti-poaching message here, but it’s organically deployed.

What really matters is that the film not only delivers on its promises of leonine mayhem, but balances that with a measure of human drama that meets its own modest goals. The antagonist lion may be a CGI creation – if you’re looking for authentic feline ferocity, watch Roar – but it’s a damned effective one, and when it attacks, the results are just as harrowing as you could hope for. What’s scarier, even than the actual attacks, is the lion’s sheer persistence; by the end, it’s almost demonically durable.

And while Ryan Engle’s script may not develop the human characters much beyond the level of archetypes, the cast brings them quite capably to life. Elba has always been good at modulating his imposing presence with a haunted vulnerability and does so here; Nate is a skilled doctor and looks the part of an alpha male, but his shortcomings as a father and husband have humbled him. And even as he proves himself over the course of the film, using his medical skills and sheer determination to protect his daughters, he is not moved to boast or brag; he recognizes that this is a team effort.

So it is with the rest of the cast. Copley is always welcome and makes Martin warm and likeable in the early scenes, and sympathetically diminished – but not depleted – once the lion attacks him. He’s not exactly the comic relief, but his bright energy complements Elba’s pathos well. It’s a matter of record that Elba’s daughter Isan wanted to play the role of Meredith, and was very unhappy when she didn’t get the part, but Halley is very good and convincing as the daughter who’s deeply – and realstically – frustrated by her father, and works quite well with Jeffries, who’s comparably charming and grounded as Norah.

Some of the credit must go to director Baltasar Kormákur, a solid director of action who’s a decent director of actors as well – at least if his underrated Everest is anything to go by – and who pulls off the fleeting dream sequences, which seem to tap simultaneously into Nate’s memories of his wife and deeper memories of his ancestors, with unpretentious skill. He’s helped by veteran cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, who does the expected fine job with the South African landscapes but also pulls off some graceful tracking shots which enhance the tension at key moments, as does Steven Price’s solid score and Glenn Freemantle’s sound design.

All these elements reflect the modest professionalism that makes a good little movie, and such a film is Beast. I doubt I’ll ever need to return to it, but I’m glad I decided to check it out.

Score: 77

My Man Godfrey (1936) – ****

I’d seen Godfrey many years ago, but about all I remembered were the nifty opening credits, rendered in lights along a model skyline of New York. I was also familiar with the premise, of course, and the story itself had no major surprises, but I was able to discover the real joys of the film as if for the first time: the delightfully witty script and the pitch-perfect cast who bring it to life.

In brief, Godfrey deals with Godfrey Smith (William Powell), a “forgotten man” living in a dump on the banks of the East River, who is recruited by socialite Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) to help her win part of a charity scavenger hunt – and more importantly, to help Irene beat out her snobbish sister Cordelia (Gail Patrick), who’s already rubbed Godfrey the wrong way. Irene immediately feels a sense of responsibility for Godfrey (and some guilt at using him), and asks him to serve as the Bullocks’ new butler.

The next morning, Godfrey learns just why the Bullocks go through so many butlers; Irene’s mother Angelica (Alice Brady) is cheerfully scatterbrained, Cordelia is passive-aggressive and manupulative, their father Alexander (Eugene Pallette) is a crotchety businessman, Irene is blithely impulsive (she rode a horse home and left it in the library), and Angelica’s hanger-on, Carlo (Mischa Auer), is an aspiring pianist who’s better at eating his fill and acting dramatic than at doing anything remotely productive. Housemaid Molly (Jean Dixon) knows how to handle them, but few others can.

Still, Godfrey manages to hold his own, even as the besotted Irene begins to pursue him, the scheming Cordelia tries to undermine him, and Godfrey’s secret past threatens to undo everything he’s tried to do with his life – for Godfrey is himself from a wealthy Boston family but left his old life behind after a bad break-up, finding a certain freedom in the world of the “forgotten men.” He’s determined to do some good in the world on his own terms, and he will – but Irene is just as determined to have his hand and heart.

George Bernard Shaw had a concept of the “Life-Force,” and in his play Man and Superman, the pursuit of his hero Jack Tanner by Ann Whitefield illustrates this concept. Ann is determined to marry Jack and have children with him because she is driven by the Life-Force, and Jack’s stubborn resistance is played for laughs; he is clearly fighting a losing battle, both against his own feelings for Ann and the Life-Force itself, and the play ends with them engaged.

Godfrey’s resistance to Irene is motivated not by philosophy or politics, as Jack’s resistance ostensibly is, but by a vaguely described heartbreak – and maybe just a bit by the role he has assumed in her life as a servant; after all, he may have tried to put his wealthy upbringing behind him, but the class stratification he grew up with doubtless left its mark. Nonetheless, one look at Irene, gazing dreamily at Godfrey, and you know there’s no other possible outcome. This being a comedy, however, Godfrey is the last to learn.

All this is conveyed by Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch’s script (from Hatch’s novel), which is overflowing with good lines: “All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people;” “You don’t know anything about him. He hasn’t any recommendations.” “Well, the last one had recommendations and stole all the silver;” “My ancestors came over on the boat. Oh, not the Mayflower, but the boat after that;” “Do you think you could follow an intelligent conversation for a minute?” “I’ll try;” and the wonderful closing line, “Stand still, Godfrey. It’ll all be over in a minute.”

And all of those lines are perfectly delivered by the cast, who are uniformly excellent. Lombard is so giddy and lovable as Irene, and so sympathetically funny when she tries to make a show of how sad she is. Powell is so crisp and snarky as Godfrey, so clever at keeping his head above water while dealing with the Bullocks, yet so outmatched by the sheer force of Irene’s adoration. Brady is wonderfully giddy and silly, tossing out one-liners so freely you can hardly keep up, and Pallette, with his croaking voice, is the perfect peevish counterbalance to her breezy absurdity. Patrick’s elegant arrogance is as spot-on as Dixon’s own down-to-earth snark, and Auer is amusing as the quintessential mooch.

Lombard, Powell, Brady, and Auer were all nominated for Oscars; as this was the first year of the Supporting Actor and Actress categories, Godfrey became the first film to be nominated for all four acting categories. It was also nominated for the script and for Gregory La Cava’s direction, which is very solid throughout but shines brightest in the hilariously chaotic scavenger hunt early on. But it somehow wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, one of the strangest snubs in Oscar history – not just because they obviously liked the film, but because it’s so good. (Universal’s only Picture nominee that year was the now-forgotten Three Smart Girls.)

That hardly matters, since Godfrey is an established classic, one which has survived a long-forgotten remake (with David Niven and June Allyson) and countless low-grade public domain home video releases. It’s in the Criterion Collection, there’s a solid release from Universal, and there are probably uploads with good picture and sound taken from those releases. Seek them out and enjoy.

Score: 91

Bullet Train (2022) – ***

I’m not sure if comparing Bullet Train to Snatch (for its snappy criminal patter, time-splintering editing, and elaborately linked ensemble of rogues, one of whom is Brad Pitt) or Snowpiercer (for being set mostly on a train and featuring several action sequences in those close quarters) is doing it a favor. It’s not as sharply written, as vividly acted, as deftly balanced, or as good a role for Pitt as the former, and it’s not as thrilling or imaginative as the latter. It is, on its own terms, a pretty enjoyable action-comedy – not as clever or virtuosic as it aims to be, but genuinely entertaining in the moment.

You’ve got Ladybug (Pitt), a syndicate operative who’s been in therapy and is trying to think and act positively. You’ve got the Princess (Joey King), who looks and sometimes acts like an innocent schoolgirl, but has a ruthless scheme in mind. You’ve got Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) and his brother Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a pair of British criminals who dress sharp, trade quips, cause mayhem, and in the case of Lemon, see the world through the prism of Thomas the Tank Engine. You’ve got the Father (Andrew Koji), a desperate man looking to get revenge on whoever threw his young son off a roof (the boy is injured but alive), and the Elder (Hiroyuki Sanada), the Father’s father, with his own plans for revenge. You’ve got the White Death (Michael Shannon), the most brutal gangster around.

You’ve also got White Death’s son (Logan Lerman), the Hornet (Zazie Beetz), an expert poisoner, the Wolf (Benito A. Martinez Ocasio), a Mexican operative seeking revenge for the deaths of his wife and boss, Maria (Sandra Bullock), Ladybug’s faintly exasperated handler, a boomslang (a venomous snake stolen from the zoo), and a briefcase full of ransom money that everyone wants to get their hands on. And you’ve got the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, where most of the film takes place. But you’ve also got a number of flashbacks illustrating the characters’ backstories – and shared connections – and I’m going to stop there, because it takes the full running time of the time (126 minutes) to lay everything out.

And because there are so many moving parts to the story, and because the film handles them pretty deftly – Elisabet Ronaldsdottir’s editing is one of the film’s strongest elements – the film goes down pretty smoothly in the moment. But I doubt I’d feel the need to ever go back to it, because it just doesn’t hit the heights of a truly great action-comedy. I think it really needed a good comedy director – David Leitch is a solid action director, and can do comedy decently well, but more so when building off of an existing dynamic, as in Deadpool 2 or Hobbs & Shaw. Imagine what this could’ve been if Lord & Miller had directed it.

And while the action scenes here are decent, Leitch seems more constrained by the setting than inspired by it, with most of the really memorable action beats coming via flashbacks or when the characters exit the train, either on purpose or by accident. There is one really good sequence where Ladybug and Lemon try to beat each other up without making too much noise – they’re in the “quiet car” – but otherwise the action scenes on the train are fairly unremarkable.

The comedic scenes tend to work better, though more because they come so thick and fast and are brightly performed than because Zak Olkewicz’s script (from the novel Maria Beetle by Kōtarō Isaka) is so witty. For example, Lemon’s fixation on Thomas the Tank Engine isn’t really all that funny, but Henry’s delivery – at once coolly menacing and oddly sweet – makes it work. And cutaways like one which traces the progress of a water bottle are amusing more because the film throws it at us so randomly than because it’s funny in of itself.

Henry and Taylor-Johnson are the real MVPs here; their patter may not be quite on the level of Tarantino or even Ritchie (well, Ritchie at his best), but their byplay is delightful and the contrast between Henry’s dry smugness and Taylor-Johnson’s tightly-wound irritability is enjoyable throughout. Also good are Sanada as the thoughtful old man who’s ten steps ahead of everyone else (or has found the kind of inner peace that frees him from trying to be), Shannon as the Russian gangster whose accent is almost as over-the-top as his villainy, and King as the calculating youngster who can play innocent at a moment’s notice.

On the other hand, Pitt isn’t quite at his best, though it doesn’t help that Ladybug’s spiritual-growth gimmick is never as funny as the film wants it to be. His ridiculously bad luck – and in particular his tendency to get blamed for things that aren’t actually his fault – is more interesting, but the script isn’t sharp enough to make it really stick. Pitt gets the job done, and seems to be having fun, but I can’t help feeling he’s slightly miscast. Beetz continues to be underused in major films, though her brief role is amusing; she punctuates nearly every line with the word “bitch,” which becomes a gag in of itself.

The film looks all right – it looks slick, at least – but it could’ve done more with the Japanese setting and the setting of the train itself. The best shots, again, come when we leave the train; a brief scene set on a platform in the morning mist is especially attractive, and some of the flashbacks boast suitably stylish imagery. It does sound good and have pretty good visual effects (some of the CGI isn’t exactly seamless, but in the cartoony context it’s workable), but it’s not superlative in any department. Then again, it didn’t need to be – it delivers two hours of solid entertainment, and that was enough to keep it at #1 for two weeks. I just don’t know how many viewers saw it a second time.

Score: 74

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) – ****

I saw Three Thousand Years of Longing in the largest auditorium at my local independent cinema, and was completely alone at a 9:30 Thursday evening screening. That doesn’t bode well for this $60 million film’s chances of turning a profit, despite the studio having cut a trailer which tries to sell the film as a gaudy, bawdy fantasy romp. It’s one of the more misleading trailers I’ve seen in recent years, up there with the trailers for Hail, Caesar! which made the film look…well, like it had a plot. (Coincidentally, that film also had Tilda Swinton in it.)

No, Three Thousand Years isn’t a romp, nor, despite its eccentricities, is it as brazenly bizarre as you might expect. It’s much more akin to the films of Sergei Paradjanov, especially in the flashbacks, whether set in the court of the Queen of Sheba, the palace of the Ottoman sultans, or the private chamber of an Istanbul merchant’s youngest wife. Here, forbiddingly opulent tableaux, with touches of the earthy and grotesque, illustrate the stories told by a djinn of his illustrious past. I haven’t seen all (or most) of Paradjanov’s Ashik-Kerib, but what I know of it – the use of narration, the fabulistic tone, the elaborate visuals – sounds very much like what George Miller has crafted here.

The story, based on A.S. Byatt’s short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” follows narrative scholar Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) as she travels to Istanbul for a conference. During a presentation, she’s struck by the vision of a man dressed in the robes of a bygone era, and later is given a striped glass bottle as a gift. While examining it, she releases the djinn inside (Idris Elba – two Elba films in one week!), and he naturally offers her three wishes.

But Alithea knows all about the pitfalls of wishing, and instead asks to hear about the djinn’s past. He tells of his relationships with the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), with Gülten (Ece Yüksel), a servant in the Ottoman imperial harem, and with Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), the youngest wife of an Istanbul merchant. All three of these relationships end unhappily – he fails to dissuade Sheba from her affair with King Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad) and is trapped in a bottle for 2,500 years, he grants Gülten’s wishes to bear the child of the unlucky Prince Mustafa (Matteo Bocelli), resulting in her death and his being trapped in a purgatorial state until being bottled for several centuries more, and he frustrates Zefir until she wishes that they’d never met – trapping him until Alithea came along.

All the while, he tries to encourage Alithea to make her wishes and free him forever, but she hesitates – and does she do so out of fear for how the wishes might go awry, or because she truly has nothing to wish for, or because she fears to make herself vulnerable enough to wish for her heart’s desire, having long ago accepted a solitary life?

The first three-quarters of the film are a mix of the djinn’s memories and his conversation with Alithea in her hotel room; the contrast between the sterile comfort of the hotel and the vivid settings of his stories is easy to overlook. The final quarter of the film takes the action back to London and tries to resolve the djinn’s place in our modern world as well as his relationship with Alithea, who speaks professionally about how humanity has let its mythological heritage fall by the wayside, but who might be the rare person to really appreciate all that a djinn has to offer.

I won’t try and argue that Three Thousand Years is an unqualified success. On a broad level, it lacks a certain emotional weight; it’s a thoughtful and sincere film, but a somewhat detached one a lot of the time. And while the script by Miller and Augusta Gore is mostly quite good, and Margaret Sixel’s editing has its strengths, the pacing, especially in the final act, is somewhat rough; I’ve heard that test screenings went badly, and I have to wonder if there was some last-minute retooling.

I won’t even try to argue that it easily earned **** from me; until the quietly lovely final scene, I wasn’t sure if it could get over the hump or not. But it does, and there’s enough excellence in the rest of the film to merit my approval.

Swinton is perfectly cast as Alithea, with a fundamental sense of wonder and romance and a love of storytelling simmering under her academically well-behaved exterior, while Elba’s djinn has an immensely trustworthy gravitas and warmth – or is it all a trick? The rest of the cast give mostly visual performances – the Turkish characters speak Turkish, a choice I appreciate – but they’re effective: Lagum is stunningly beautiful, Yüksel is poignantly besotted, and Gölgedar is convincingly gripped by the possibilities of infinite knowledge. Also effective are Kaan Guldur as the vicious Murad IV and Jack Braddy as his innocent brother Ibrahim.

And of course, it boasts rich visuals, with opulent sets, lavish costumes, and smartly composed shots (hampered only slightly by the use of CGI – there’s some neat use of line animation, however). If the Paradjanov comparison doesn’t suit you, perhaps The Fall would do; not only does it boast a similar aesthetic, but it also touches upon the nature of stories and the interplay between a story and its telling. That film made little money in theaters but seems to have developed a following; perhaps this one will as well. It deserves at least to find those who will appreciate it for what it is – which is not anything like Mad Max, except perhaps the quietest and most human moments of that franchise.

Score: 87