The Contractor (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

 

The Contractor (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

Cast: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland, Eddie Marsan, JD Pardo, Florian Munteau, Sander Thomas. Screenplay: J.P. Davis. Cinematography: Pierre Aïm. Production design: Roger Rosenberg. Film editing: Theis Schmidt. Music: Alex Belcher. 

The Contractor begins promisingly, suggesting that it might be a hard-hitting film about the mistreatment of veterans and their involvement in private paramilitary organizations. It even name-checks the odious Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and a hero of the American right. Chris Pine plays James Harper, a sergeant in the Special Forces, who is discharged because he has been using illicit drugs to treat the pain from a knee injured in the course of duty. Left without a pension or health care and supporting his wife and young son, he reluctantly follows the course taken by his friend Mike Hawkins (Ben Foster) and signs up with an organization headed by Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland) that does contract work with the Defense department. But when James is sent off on his first mission, which involves what he is told is a biochemical warfare agent being developed by a scientist in Berlin, the movie becomes a conventional thriller involving a series of intricate double-crosses. Pine is a fine actor, and he treats the script with a respect it doesn’t deserve once it strays into Mission: Impossible territory. If director Tarik Saleh had found a way to get the serious part of the film to mesh with the improbable shootouts and hair’s-breadth escapes that James endures, The Contractor might have been a better, or at least a more enjoyable film. But he sticks with the grimly determined characters and the gloomy look and tone even when the story has turned into a routinely familiar thriller. 

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

Cast: Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole, Ruby Dee, Ed Begley Jr., Scott Paulin, Frankie Faison, Ron Diamond, Lynn Lowry, John Larroquette. Screenplay: Alan Ormsby, based on a story by DeWitt Bodeen. Cinematography: John Bailey. Art direction: Edward Richardson. Film editing: Jacqueline Cambas, Jere Huggins, Ned Humphreys. Music: Giorgio Moroder. 

Cat People is bloodier and kinkier than its source, the moody 1942 film of the same name, directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by the maker of atmospheric horror films, Val Lewton. In the earlier movie, the ravages of the prowling cat persons were off-screen, suggested but not shown. In Paul Schrader’s remake, they’re played to shock, not just to creep you out. The subtext, a fear of sex, remains the same, although the earlier film is more about a fear of female sexuality, while the Schrader version adds incest to the mix. It’s all very stylishly done, with Nastassja Kinski excellent as the woman haunted by a past she is unaware of, and Malcolm McDowell as her unstable brother. John Heard is rather eccentrically cast as the male lead, a New Orleans zookeeper, though he’s an improvement over the dull Kent Smith in the original film. The wonderful Ruby Dee has a smallish but important role as Female – pronounced Fe-MAH-ly.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Peter Farrelly, 2022)

The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Peter Farrelly, 2022)

Cast: Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Bill Murray, Kyle Allen, Deanna Russo, Paul Adelstein, Jake Picking, Joe Adler, Archie Renaux, Will Hochman, Kristin Carey, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis. Will Ropp, Matt Cook. Screenplay: Peter Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie, Pete Jones, based on a book by John “Chick” Donohue and J.T. Molloy. Cinematography: Sean Porter. Production design: Tim Galvin. Film editing: Patrick J. Don Vito. Music: Dave Palmer. 

I subscribed to the Apple TV+ streaming service so I could watch CODA (Sian Heder, 2021) and The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021), and I stuck with it because I got hooked on the series Severance and For All Mankind. (I haven’t yet dipped into its most popular series, Ted Lasso.) And having invested in yet another streaming service, I felt compelled to check out its other movies. Compared to the major streamers, the offerings are fairly thin, so I gave The Greatest Beer Run Ever a try. Unfortunately, the movie is as clunky as its title and surprisingly inept, coming from a filmmaker who won two Oscars for Green Book (2018). Based on an improbable but true story, it’s about a civilian who decides to take a duffel bag full of beer to his buddies in Vietnam at the height of the war, spurred by a kind of deluded patriotism and boozy camaraderie. But Zac Efron doesn’t have the acting chops or the confident screen presence to carry the central role of Chickie Donahue, and he’s not given much help by the screenplay’s failures of tone. Is the movie a comedy? An anti-war satire? A story whose subtext is the way American politicians exploit the naïveté of the citizenry? It could have been all of those things, but it just falls flat, with an ending which implies that Chickie has been changed by confrontation with the terrible truth of the Vietnam War but doesn’t find an adequate way of demonstrating it. There are some amusing moments, such as the way Chickie gets mistaken for a CIA agent and is able to exploit the misconception. And there are good performances from Russell Crowe as a combat photographer and Bill Murray as a World War II vet who buys into the official line that the war in Vietnam is being won and condemns the media and the protesters for their lack of patriotism. (The pro-war blue-collar milieu from which Chickie comes is treated with sentimentality, such as the woman who wants him to take a rosary to her son, who is MIA.) The real story behind the film is an intriguing one, but it’s wasted in the final product.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Mozhan Marnò, Dominic Rains, Rome Shadanloo, Milad Eghbali, Reza Sixo Safai, Masuka the Cat. Screenplay: Ana Lily Amirpour. Cinematography: Lyle Vincent. Production design: Sergio De La Vega. Film editing: Alex O’Flinn. Music: Bei Ru.

Girls probably shouldn’t walk home alone at night unless they’re chador-wearing vampires who ride skateboards. That seems to be the major point made by Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home at Night. The Girl (Sheila Vand) has no name that we know of, and she doesn’t seem to go out in the daytime, but we learn that she’s a vampire when she bites off the finger of and then desanguinates Saeed (Dominic Rains), a sleaze, a pusher, and a pimp. Saeed has earlier confiscated a 1957 Ford Thunderbird from Arash (Arash Marandi) as payment for debts he incurred trying to support his junkie father, Hossein (Marshall Manesh). Arash’s attempt to retrieve his car brings him into contact with the Girl. What little suspense the film generates lies in how the relationship between Arash and the Girl will progress. Will he become her victim, as Saeed, a homeless man, and eventually Arash’s father do? Or will they find some other way of connecting? More droll than scary, A Girl Walks Home at Night takes place in Iran’s imaginary Bad City, which seems a lot like Southern California except that everyone speaks Persian and it’s more thinly populated. We meet some other characters in the course of the film, including a streetwalker and an urchin, but the most memorable is probably the cat Arash adopts, which eventually winds up with the Girl, to Arash’s surprise. Almost everything about this film, Amirpour’s first feature, defies summary, except to note that it’s extraordinarily original, confidently conceived and directed, sometimes very funny, and its black-and-white cinematography is often quite beautiful. 

Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)

 Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Ashley Greene, Anna Kendrick, Nikki Reed, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellan Lutz, Jackson Rathbone, Cam Gigandet, Gil Birmingham, Justin Chon, Christian Serratos. Screenplay: Melissa Rosenberg, based on a novel by Stephenie Meyer. Cinematography: Elliot Davis. Art direction: Christopher Brown, Ian Phillips. Film editing: Nancy Richardson. Music: Carter Burwell. 

Twilight was always going to be critic-proof, based as it is on a best-selling YA novel and featuring good-looking actors playing teenage lovers, one of whom is a vampire. The audience was ready-made, no matter what the critics said, and they mostly said their worst about it. And yet, getting around to watching it for the first time, 14 years late, I can’t find it in myself to say anything terribly harsh about it. The dialogue is often clunky, oh my, yes. The idea that vampires sparkle and not burst into flame in the sunlight is silly, as is the notion that they are somehow randomly endowed with superpowers: Some have super-strength and can read minds, others can tell the future. The invocation of Native American legends is a slightly racist plot gimmick, and one not developed in the film. It would be in the sequels, of course, which means Twilight is just a setup for more to come, and not a satisfactory movie on its own. And yet I watched with amusement and not a whole lot of condescension, partly because it’s premised on an interesting subtext, adolescent sexual confusion – vampire movies are always really more about sex than about death. And because Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were on the brink of significant careers, going on to prove that they were more capable actors than the screenplay of Twilight allowed them to show. 

Stamboul Quest (Sam Wood, 1934)

 Stamboul Quest (Sam Wood, 1934)

Cast: Myrna Loy, George Brent, Lionel Atwill, C. Henry Gordon, Rudolph Anders, Mischa Auer. Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on a story by Leo Birinsky. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: William Axt. 

Stamboul Quest is a middling spy-vs.-spy romance based very loosely (i.e., hardly at all) on the career of the World War I German spy known as “Fräulein Doktor” (real name Elsbeth Schragmüller). The film makes a nod to the better-known German spy Mata Hari, herself the titular subject of a 1931 MGM film directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro. Mostly Stamboul Quest is an excuse for Myrna Loy to slink about in various alluring states of dress and undress. There is, for example, a scene in which Fräulein Doktor (aka Helena Bohlen) takes a bath with the door open between her and the spymaster Herr von Sturm (Lionel Atwill), and a key moment in the plot turns on Helena’s slipping down one shoulder of her evening gown to allow the Turkish spy Ali Bey (C. Henry Gordon) to write a message in invisible ink on her naked back. Loy does all of this nonsense with grace and wit. Unfortunately, she’s matched romantically in the movie with George Brent as an American studying medicine at Leipzig. Brent was unaccountably borrowed from Warner Bros. for the film even though MGM had a stable of contract leading men that included Clark Gable and Loy’s frequent co-star William Powell. As a leading man, Brent was never much more than a foil for powerhouse leading ladies like Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck, and it’s awfully hard to see why Fräulein Doktor should fall in love so swiftly and thoroughly with him. Stamboul Quest is a sort of bridge in Loy’s career from the earlier roles in which she was cast as a femme fatale, often with exotic origins, and the years in which she took on the image of a witty, sophisticated wife or girlfriend, often paired with Powell, as in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) and its string of sequels.