Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023)

Realistically, how distressed should you be if you can't find your mother during a family gathering? She hadn't been gone long. No reason to think anything happened. It might not seem ominous if it weren't in a movie.

In Texas, a wealthy extended family gathers for a Christmas portrait. We see them milling around with Santa hats. They get word that a young relative has died unexpectedly, then their elderly mother can't be found. Only one of her daughters is concerned. She has a flight to catch with her Polish boyfriend and wants to get the photo taken but no one else is worried.

You probably don't see that many arthouse films set in Texas. 

Free on Tubi. 

Spielberg's Minority Report (2002)

A couple of critics pointed out the hypocrisy of this film. We see how intrusive advertising has become in the future in a movie that was full of product placements. The villain used the death of Tom Cruise's son to manipulate him in a movie that uses that death to manipulate the audience. 

I thought it was a little weird that the movie opens with Tom Cruise stopping a man from murdering his wife when he catches her in bed with another man. In The Fabelmans, it was Spielberg's mother's adultery that caused his parents' divorce. Was Spielberg saying something about his parents? Probably not, although Spielberg has never shut up about their divorce and has now made a whole movie about it.  

With the help of three psychics kept floating in a pool of water, police prevent future murders but then take the would-be murderers away and freeze them. Their children can't even visit them in prison. Isn't that as disruptive to society as the murders they prevent? Instead of raiding the house and dragging the husband away, couldn't they have raided the place a few minutes earlier and told the wife to cheese it because her husband was coming? Maybe they could have gotten the couple into counseling or told the husband what his wife was up to and gotten him a lawyer or told his wife her husband might kill her and gotten her into divorce court.

I read the Secret Service/FBI report on school shootings. They emphasized that the goal was to prevent shootings, not make arrests. They even listed kids who had apparently planned mass murders who went on to live happy, productive lives.

With some drawn out chase scenes with special effects/stunts. I haven't seen any superhero movies but I imagine that's what they're like. In one chase, Tom Cruise knocks some workers off a scaffolding, presumably to their deaths. Maybe this thing would have interested me if I believed in psychics. 

Kurosawa's High and Low (1963)

Kingo Gondo, a shoe company executive, has mortgaged his house and borrowed all he could to buy a controlling interest in his company. His son is running around the house playing cowboy with the chauffeur's son. The kids run off somewhere. Gondo get a phone call. His son has been kidnapped. The caller tells him to get together a large ransom. Gondo tells his wife they'll pay whatever they have to.

Then...then the son walks in. He asks where his friend went. He can't find him anywhere.

When he realizes it was the chauffeur's son who got snatched, Gondo calls the police. The kidnapper calls again. They discovered their mistake but demand the ransom anyway. Gondo will be financially ruined if he pays.

A police procedural. Long but gripping. Like Dragnet directed by David Lean. 

Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, with Kyoko Kagawa. 

Based on the novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain. 

I came across a copy of the novel years ago. I was surprised at how closely the movie followed the storyline. Gordon King in the book became Kingo Gondo. He was a shoe company executive who wanted to produce sturdy but stylish shoes,

One improvement Kurosawa made on the book was that we don't see the kidnappers until the police find out who they are. 

One detectives drives a Toyota. It's summer and they wear short sleeved shirts, untucked to conceal their little .32 automatics. One carries his gun in his pocket. The Inspector, Tatsuya Nakadai, has a tiny .25 automatic. It's a nice change from American cop movies.

Go For Broke! (1951) Japanese-Americans killing Nazis

Van Johnson stars as lieutenant assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up mostly of Japanese-American volunteers. We see one of the men mailing food and other supplies to his family in an internment camp. Another mentions family members in the U.S. threatened with lynching. 

Some of the actors had been in the regiment themselves. I don't know how they felt about it. Men get killed unexpectedly but it wasn't a big gore fest like Saving Private Ryan. 

The movie was fairly successful in its day. You'd think it would have taught Hollywood the advantages of not using white actors to play Asian characters. 

Four years before Bad Day at Black Rock. There was a 1945 radio drama from just after World War Two dealing with anti-Japanese racism in the U.S.

The movie is public domain. I saw it on Pub-D-Hub but it's probably available elsewhere. 

Election (1999)

It was more of a non-graphic sex movie than I remembered. Sex between students, between teacher and student, a teacher and his friend's ex-wife.  

Broderick thinks he's a good teacher even as he retaliates against an ambitious, fatherless girl (Reese Witherspoon) running unopposed for president. He's mad at her for reporting his friend, another teacher, for molesting her. He gets a deeply religious yet sexually active football player to run against her. That boy's angry Lesbian sister also enters the race. 

There was a good lesson for kids when Witherspoon stops cooperating with the school's investigation without a lawyer. 

My first brush with student body elections was in the first or second grade. They had fifth graders running for student president. We had to attend an assembly to hear their speeches which were pretty much identical and made no sense to me. They each promised to keep the hallways clean. I tried to picture them giving orders to the janitors. It was grade school. No one was in the hallways unless they were being marched in line somewhere.

We had a kid in junior high who strained to come up with an original platform and I thought he did pretty well. School dances made money, he argued. They were profitable. He promised more school dances. After he was elected I saw him trying to get teachers to volunteer as chaperones but they weren't going for it.

Available on the Criterion Channel, free on Pluto, free with a subscription on Paramount. $3.59 on Amazon or $3.99 on Apple TV or Fandango. Pluto is your best bet.

The Light that Failed (1939)

Starts with two tweens having fun with a handgun. The girl fires it too close to the boy's head and momentarily blinds him. Skips ahead. The boy had grown into Ronald Coleman. He's in the British Army and murdering Sudanese. Coleman is hit above his eye with a spear. Sadly, he survives. He returns to Britain and becomes an artist painting imperialist war scenes. This was based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling and you know what that guy was like.

He runs into his old girlfriend Maisie. She probably kind of owed him after almost killing him as a child, but she's working on being an artist herself and doesn't want to resume their relationship. 

Oh, and then his eyesight starts to go as a result of his war wound. 

With Walter Huston and Ida Lupino as an impoverished young woman he hires to model.

Directed by William Wellman.

Even if I could get past the killing and the British imperialism, there was no one to really get behind in this thing.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Scream of Fear (1961)

A young woman's mother has died. She's paraplegic. Her parents were divorced. She returns to her wealthy father's villa in France. She hadn't seen or spoken to him in ten years. When she arrives they tell her he's gone, went away somewhere, but he'll be back. She hangs around with her stepmother and some household servants but starts seeing her father's corpse which appears sitting in chairs at night in the dark. She screams and rolls away each time, but when people come to see what's wrong they can't find the body.

She befriends the chauffeur who helps her investigate. There's a scene where he appears in a terribly immodest swimsuit. 

It looked beautiful, well-made in black & white. Not as scary or creepy as it might have been. There are a couple of twists at the end that weren't that surprising.

A Hammer film. Christopher Lee in a supporting role as the family doctor. Starring Susan Strasberg, Ann Todd and Ronald Lewis. Directed by Seth Holt.

Free on Tubi.