Fletcher Powell | Movie Review

Over the years, I’ve come to place less importance on subtlety in art. There was a time when I saw it almost as a virtue unto itself-- I felt like if you were entirely explicit about your message, that was somehow less good than if you found an elegant way to get your idea across without making it totally obvious.

How’s this for a pitch—three guys sort of like the conspiracy-minded, tech-savvy trio from The X-Files known as the “Lone Gunmen” team up with a guy sort of like Liam Neeson in the Taken franchise, and they all set out to take revenge on a biker gang they hold responsible for the death of the wife of the Neeson-type character. Can’t miss, right?

The New York Times had an article recently about how because American movie release dates keep getting pushed further and further back, there’s been a mini-Renaissance in Australia regarding Aussie-made movies, which apparently don’t typically do well in their home country. Leading that charge is a dandy contemporary noir called The Dry , which is already one of the all-time top Australian-made movies at the Australian box office.

Just by coincidence, I’ve found myself watching a surprising number of movies from 1971 lately, way more than I’d expect without doing it on purpose. Also, coincidentally, that’s exactly 50 years ago. So, with that in mind, here are some highlights from my recent unintentional 50 th anniversary film festival.

There’s a kind of movie we all know well—I’ll call it a “quest” comedy—where something causes our heroes to venture out to find something or someone, and along the way they get into all sorts of hijinks that keep pushing their goal just out of reach. They’re usually teens or college kids, looking for a party, or drugs, or something that ought to be easy to find, but isn’t.

I’m going to do something now that basically no one should ever do, which is to say I’m going to review a movie I technically haven’t seen all of. It’s not what it sounds like—I saw every second from beginning to end. But there were a few stretches of dialogue, in French, that didn’t have subtitles that were supposed to, and despite trying every setting and menu and sub-menu I could find, I couldn’t turn them on.

I’ve found myself watching a fair bit of Columbo lately. Yep, that Columbo, rumpled Peter Falk shuffling around solving murders. It’s perfect comfort viewing—you always know he’s going to get the bad guy, the fun is just in watching him do it. And I used to watch Columbo when I was a kid in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so toss nostalgia on top and it’s pretty hard to beat.

As I watched Jason Statham take the elevator down at the end of Guy Ritchie’s bleak new crime film Wrath of Man , I thought of another movie-ending elevator ride, the one that closes the exceedingly disturbing 1987 Mickey Rourke / Robert DeNiro horror-mystery Angel Heart . And I wished there were something to hint at an even more grim possibility in Ritchie’s already-grim movie.

Journalist Sian-Pierre Regis and his mother, Rebecca Danigelis, became something of a minor sensation in 2017 when word got out that, following Rebecca’s sudden firing from her decades-long hotel housekeeping job, Sian-Pierre came up with a novel way to help her cope: He asked her to create a bucket list of things she’d always wanted to do, but that her job had kept her from trying. He documents their sometimes-joyful, sometimes-profound journey in the new film Duty Free , a movie they hope will shed light on the experiences of caregivers and the obstacles facing the older generation in this country. KMUW's Fletcher Powell recently spoke with Sian-Pierre Regis and Rebecca Danigelis about the shock that set their story into motion. Sian-Pierre Regis : You know, this film in a lot of ways was a cry for help on my part. When my mom lost her job and was given two weeks pay and essentially an eviction notice, I realized that her world was crumbling and that the only person that would be

Human relationships are complicated, and there are all different kinds of them. But by and large, movies seem to tell only a few of those stories over and over. We’re leaving out a lot of people.

The old woman has lost all use for God. Her son has just died, following her husband, her daughter, and her granddaughter. And now, she simply wants to die too, to join them, feeling there was never any point to it anyway. As she tells the local priest of his own deceased wife, “She will die over and over again for the rest of your life. That’s grief. A senseless suffering. There’s no meaning to it.”

Well, here we have a movie that’s pretty much a complete mess, that only has one or two elements that really work at all, that’s even rather distasteful, but that I still found… kind of watchable? I’m not sure what to do with this.

Today is the birthday of the actor George O’Brien. There’s no real reason you’d know him, although he was pretty big in the 1920s and ‘30s. But I bring him up because he starred in the movie that completely changed my understanding of what silent films could be: 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans , from the great German director F.W. Murnau.

Spike Lee has said no person of color has ever asked him why Mookie threw the trash can through the window in Do the Right Thing . It’s only been white people.

So much of the film Quo Vadis, Aida? is focused on faces. It opens in the Bosnian town of Srebenica in 1995, as we pan across a number of men sitting on couches. If we know anything about the Bosnian genocide—and we darn well better—we know these are the faces of men who will probably be dead soon.

It’s Oscar season, which means around here it’s Oscar Shorts season! For the 35th year, the Wichita Public Library is offering the animated, live action, and documentary short films that are up for Academy Awards, and while nowadays they’re all readily accessible to just about anyone, anywhere, we Wichitans do like to remind people that for decades, Wichita was the only place outside New York and L.A. where people could see the shorts programs.

Anthony’s watch is missing. It’s possible he misplaced it, but probably someone stole it. Probably the woman his daughter hired to take care of him, not that he needs anyone to take care of him.

The review originally aired on March 26, 2020. From the 1950s through the 1970s, a summer camp in the Catskills called Camp Jened operated for kids with disabilities. In the exceptional archival film footage from the early ‘70s in the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution , we see it’s not just another place that would babysit those kids.

For whatever reason, over the past year or so I’ve found myself watching a lot of movies starring the French actor Juliette Binoche. I know people are aware that she’s good, but after seeing so much of her, I’m starting to wonder why we aren’t talking about her pretty much all the time.

The movie world is talking about the Academy Awards this week, but last week nominations for the BAFTAs came out—that’s sort of the British Oscars—and the movie that received the most nominations is one that’s not terribly familiar to American audiences. It’s called Rocks , and fortunately it’s currently just sitting right there on Netflix for any of us to watch.