September Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman: HBO’s PERRY MASON

Raymond Burr’s burly, dignified Perry Mason, (on TV: 1957-66, 80-90’s), is a far cry from Matthew Rhys’ (The Americans) down-‘n-out, hang-dog version, set in 1930 noirish LA (that ‘has disgraced itself as a Gomorrah where truth is bought and sold like the head of...a-rutabaga’--per E.B. Jonathan, Perry’s mentor). This was written as a prequel to the Mason of courtroom lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner’s over 80 Perry Mason novels penned 1933 on. Oddly it offers a thankless distortion, a morose and self-defeating private investigator Perry. Other changes worked. Instead of a case per episode, the entire series is about a baby’s kidnap and murder (plus some delicious side-shows).The dirty cops and officials that look the other way are pitted against a 99%’er, the baby’s mother, charged with the murder. Below, little Charlie Dodson’s eyes are sewn open to persuade his parents that their baby is fine before they let go their suitcase of $100k.

This new Mason reminded me for a second of Lt. Columbo, police detective, who trademarked a rumpled coat, run-down roadster, and the phrase ‘just one more thing’ off and on from 1968-2003 (now on Peacock and Amazon Prime), pestering his suspect (a narcissistic biz mogul, movie star, etc.), a 1%-er, living in what my mother would call a Bronx Renaissance or Hollywood Baroque style penthouse/mansion — with annoying questions until the frumpy detective could pounce — no police-forcing needed. Wily Columbo (below) with that smart brain was more in keeping with the old Perry Mason. 

No — the 2020 version of pre-courtroom maestro Mason lacks Columbo’s kindliness and in fact can’t get out of his own way, needs therapy for his PTSD. Haunted by the trenches of WWI, he’s losing his family dairy farm, now a shabby house and two scrawny cows surrounded by a small airfield. He shops for neckties at the city morgue (like Columbo, his own is stained with tomato — or is it mustard?), where the coroner says he’s got a stabbing victim with a three-piece suit if that would suit. 

Although fans of Raymond Burr's Mason are taunted by this new back-story, other pointed departures from the old show work better. Hamilton Berger, his former courtroom opposition, is now a (gay) colleague/advisor to Perry as he argues his first case; Berger insists that criminals never confess on the stand—oh no —confessions were signature moments in the old tv series. Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) is not a PI but a young black policeman, a good person, trying to do an honest job while being manipulated by crooked white cops who have seniority he can’t aspire to: an excellent 2020 update. (Below, the past -- William Hopper, left -- and present Paul Drake). 

In a further inversion of the gay facts, actor Raymond Burr was in the closet, while 2020 Mason’s secretary, Della Street, (Juliet Rylance, daughter of Mark), is a gay woman whose girlfriend is around and about. And class-act Della is a quietly determined example of a woman forging ahead in a man’s world — marvelous. 

Altogether this mystery series is fun, its satire and irony stirring the pot of 2020’s inequality mess. Check out Perry’s PI sidekick Strickland (Shea Whigham), master of worthy asides (below). 

Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) charms as the guiding angel of the Radiant Assembly of God even if you hate the holy roller thing. She and her devoted, abusive mother, Birdy (Lili Taylor), earnestly stage their own flamboyant sideshows while board members rob church coffers. (Below Sister Alice, left, with the period’s real radio evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson.) 

Perry’s mentor, EB Jonathan, John Lithgow, is irresistable no matter what he does (below). And Stephen Root is the perfect, sneering, leering district attorney.  

But I remain stumped at the anti-heroic Perry drawn for this reboot. Creators thumbed their noses at (now old-to-very old) TV Mason fans, rather than building a character that plausibly merges new and old. True it’s is a harder problem to solve — requiring less egoism, less exploitation of a durable icon and its fans.

Perry is already on the road to civility by the time he begins to lawyer the case late in the series, but the enterprise is off-key because of this unlikely origin story for sharp-witted Mason.

   

It’s not a bad story, it’s just a different character’s story. Rhys, a lovely Welsh actor, makes you care about the dour, blank-eyed, slovenly fellow who shouts at people, but he belongs in a series not called Perry Mason. On the plus side, it’s a splendid, artistic production, with similarities to the graphic Boardwalk Empire of HBO rather than the Perry Mason template for Law & Order and many current legal procedurals. Here is on offer every inch of 1930’s LA topsy-turvied by the depression and the evolution of silent film into talking pictures. 

Below is the ‘Angel’s Flight’ cable car ride where the crooks display the Dodson baby through the windows. (Angel’s Flight also appeared in a 1966 episode of the old Perry Mason.)

LA is a star here, a glowy, steamy mecca — 30’s crowds of fedora-topped gentlemen cascading down courthouse steps, boxy grumbling autos, ecstatic swooning parishioners, dusty roads, mountains, and a mournful trumpet — fitting replacement for a jangly series theme. What both Perry’s have in common is a desire to see more justice in the world, to do the right thing, i.e.: where bad cops are punished by the legal system rather than knocked off by each other. The series, overall a fine ride, especially the tension-filled second half, has been renewed. Next time, please, integrate more confident Perry into the whole to put hang-dog Perry in the rear-view mirror.

In Netflix's POINT BLANK, Joe Lynch has smartly remade the crackerjack French thriller

Back in 2011 we were extremely impressed with a little French thriller called Point Blank, directed and co-written by Fred Cavayé. Now Netflix is releasing a very-close-to-the-original remake of this film, again titled POINT BLANK, and I am happy to say that it is almost in every way a comparable feat.

Considering the 1967 John Boorman film of the same title (but leaving out the not-so-hot Mickey Rourke bomb from 1998), it would seem that Point Blank movies are very much worth seeing.

The new film, with a screenplay adapted from M. Cavayé's original by Adam G. Simon, has been directed by one of my favorite action directors, Joe Lynch (pictured at right), a fellow about whom -- given his achievement with Everly and Mayhem -- it might be safe to say that nobody has given us a more gleeful array of over-the-top violence and anarchic bedlam.

Mr. Lynch tones down the gleeful here, if not the violence, as the story involves a very pregnant woman held hostage and even knocked around a bit more that might seem righteous or bearable.

The movie begins with a bang (several: yes, gunshots), as a figure crashes through a window and runs away pursued by others. Who's bad and who's good will not shake out for some time yet, and so much happens in the first few minutes without our quite knowing exactly what, why or even how, that we must simply take it all in and trust that an explanation is on offer.

It is, and it leads to a lot more violence, surprise and fun as a male nurse (Anthony Mackie, above, right) taking care of that initial run-away man (Frank Grillo, above left), who's now in hospital, is forced to get that man out of the hospital and away from the police before his own pregnant wife comes to harm.

To tell much more of the plot would create spoilers, so I'll just say that along the way we meet a hard-boiled policewoman (Marcia Gay Harden, above, left) and a bunch of cops, not all of them as devoted to "protect and serve" as you might prefer. The movie's most emotional performance, and the one that finally grounds it to some kind of reality is given by Christian Cooke (below), as the frightened, angry and helpful/helpless brother of the Grillo character, caught between rescuing his bro and doing the right thing.

The other crack performance comes from a character we meet only late in the movie, though we've been hearing about him -- Big D -- for most of the film. As played the very scary, funny and surprising Markice Moore (shown at bottom), Big D turns out to be a not unsophisticated movie lover sporting a jones for the work of William Friedkin. Seems to TrustMovies that Big D and his scenes are where the movie differs most from Cavayé's original. This, and the fact that the French version offered, even later in the game, a bit more welcome surprise about the identity of the good guys and the bad.

Otherwise both films are absolute delights of their hostage-thriller genre, offering plenty of action, fun, and sure, violence, betrayal and other assorted naughtiness. Lynch's pacing, as ever, proves on the mark, and he gets good performances from his professional and well-chosen cast.

Streaming as of yesterday, July 12, on Netflix, Point Blank is certainly a shoo-in for action fans smart enough to follow and stick with a plot that has more in-and-outs/ups-and-down than the spoon-fed pablum we're usually offered, or the at-least-one-hour-too-long super-hero movies audiences still seem willing to sit through and discuss as though these were remotely intelligent or worth our nearly-end-of-times time.

This year's MOTHER! AWARD goes to Luca Guadagnino's re-imagining of SUSPIRIA

After this past Tuesday's South Florida critics' screening of SUSPIRIA -- the remake/re-imagining by Luca Guadagnino of the 1977 Dario Argento movie of the same name -- several of us were chatting about the film, and mentioned how it reminded us in some ways of last year's uber-divisive movie, Mother! This current Suspiria, we agreed, is as likely to be nearly as divisive, with the negative feedback perhaps stronger than the positive.

There are a lot of reasons for this, starting with the remake's enormous and uncalled for length. The original ran 97 minutes, this one lasts 152.

Both films' plots send a young and talented dancer to a famous European dance academy that doubles as a witches' coven. But Signore Guadagnino, pictured at left, has used all that extra time to gussy-up his movie with a bunch of themes and ideas that go nowhere and never add up to more than mere poorly-thought-out excess.

The director, along with screenwriter David Kajganich (based on the original by Argento and Daria Nicolodi), tosses in everything from family dysfunction, Baader-Meinhof terrorism, psychotherapy, guilt and shame to World War II and The Holocaust, some sort of coming apocalypse, a modern dance recital, satanic rites, and enough guts and gore to fill a dozen so-so slasher movies.

Worse, none of this ever really coalesces. It just piles up rather conspicuously, as the two-and-one-half-plus hours wear on. "What the fuck was he thinking?" may frequently occur to you along the way, about the fellow who earlier gave us much better movies, including I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name.

Guadagnino does possess a visual eye, at least, so there are compensations to be had now and then. And he has rounded up another first-rate cast -- even if he uses them rather poorly. Almost no characterization can found anywhere here. Even the usually fabulous Tilda Swinton (above) can barely bring to life Madame Blanc, the school's choreographer. Swinton fares much better playing the role of Dr. Josef  Klemperer (below), credited to Lutz Eberdorf but now known to be Swinton in some excellent make-up.

Although the leading role and main draw would seem to be Dakota Johnson (below), who plays the "star" student, Susie Bannion, you may find yourself, as did TrustMovies,

more interested in Mia Goth (below), who plays Susie's friend, a plucky but unlucky young dancer named Sara. Ms Goth works wonders with very little, while Ms Johnson proves pretty drab and one-note throughout.

In the film's opening, Chloë Grace Moretz (below) gets a nice scene as one of the academy's more frightened students, but then disappears from the proceedings until returning a good deal later as pretty much a corpse.

Yes, there's a bunch of meaningless scribbles and symbols, and eventually that maybe longed-for ritual so the blood can spurt and splatter.

The weirdest and most effective scene (for those who appreciate extremes) is probably the one early on in which a dancer (Elena Fokina, below) alone in another room is somehow pummeled, jerked, beaten and scrunched to death via Ms Johnson's oddball dancing. Go figure.

Some of us older viewers might take pleasure in seeing a few of Europe's noted actresses -- Germany's Angela Winkler (below, left),  France's Sylvie Testud and Holland's Renée Soutendijk (below, right) -- playing supporting witches. Winker gets the most screen time, while Testud and Soutendijk are utterly wasted.

Fans of the original film's star, Jessica Harper, can see her do a small cameo as the good doctor's dead wife. Otherwise, wait for all the climactic blood-letting and see what you think. I could only roll my eyes and mutter, "Oh, please" and then "So what?" All this is not just grueling but noticeably ugly, just as is the junky-looking poster for the film, at top.

From Amazon Studios, the new Suspiria opened in our cultural coastal cities last week and hits South Florida this Friday, November 2, at some of the local venues. To find the theater(s) nearest you, try clicking here, and I think some of these may appear....

Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga's A STAR IS BORN: It's great -- for about half the running time

It's a good thing that A STAR IS BORN -- the current film is at least the fourth go-round, under the same title, for this much-filmed tale of a younger woman who becomes a star under the tutelage of an older man whose life and career are flailing and failing -- is so energized and fulfilling during its first half.

This probably means that the hordes of fans of its two stars, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga (at right and below), will easily hold on through the movie's much more tiresome and cliché-ridden downer of a second half.

That initial hour or so of this overlong, 135-minute movie moves like a house afire, as director, co-star and co-writer Cooper brings the tale easily into the 21st century, while Ms Gaga proves that her acting chops are nearly as good as her singing.

Cooper and crew toss in everything from a gay BFF (Anthony Ramos, below, right) and a drag club, at which our heroine used to waitress and now sometimes sings, to her dumb-but-loveable dad (Andrew Dice Clay, above, right) and his pals to place us resolutely on her side. Further, the several set pieces that dot the first half are handled with such energy, speed and specifics that they win us over completely and make the character's rather meteoric rise seem pretty believable.

Interestingly, Cooper dispenses with much of the expository dialog and situations that we usually see in films such as this so that things move faster, even as the pace grow more breakneck. What dialog there is may not be crackerjack, but we don't really care since the film is barreling along so quickly and enjoyably.

Granted, someone's rise is generally more lively and fun than someone's fall, but the enormous difference here drains way too much energy out of the film, which grows consistently slower and more ponderous as it reaches its uber-clichéd and tearful conclusion.

Further, Cooper has turned his character into way too much a good guy (his only real fault is that nasty addiction to drugs and alcohol) while making the real villain of the movie the heroine's evil manager (Rafi Gavron) -- who not only tells her to do all the wrong stuff, career-wise, in terms of her "being true to herself," but is also practically single-handedly responsible for her hubby's sad fate. So nasty and over-the-top is this guy that, though clean-shaven, you would not be at all surprised to find him twirling his non-existent mustache.

This switch in time, energy and concern from our heroine to our non-hero reduces Gaga's role to second tier -- which is too bad, since she was the spark in part one. She is given too little to do and not nearly enough decent dialog (it becomes more noticeably so-so in the second half) so that her performance begins to rely more and more on the usual clichés. (That's Sam Elliott, below, right, who plays our drunken hero's off-and-on estranged older brother.)

All this may not matter much to major fans of the two stars. But it did to me. And it may to others out there who recall the earlier iterations of A Star Is Born. While this re-telling is a whole lot better than the 1976 Streisand fiasco, it does not hold a candle to the Cukor/Garland/Mason version from 1954.

A Warner Brothers release running two hours and fifteen minutes, the movie opens nationwide this Friday, October 5. Click here to find the theater(s) nearest you.

Unnecessary and so-so remake of the year: Michael Noer/Aaron Guzikowski's PAPILLON

TrustMovies does not in any way want to demean or make seem less awful the experiences of those poor prisoners condemned to life (and often death) in the penal colony of French Guiana, which was composed of several prison "camps," one worse than the next. The common name given for this multi-prison was Devil's Island, any escape from which was thought impossible.

Still, it must be said that sitting through this oft-times interminable two-hours-and-seventeen-minute, "Let's- keep-trying-to-escape-from-this-hell-hole-until-we-go-nuts!" remake of PAPILLON felt like a prison sentence in itself for this particular viewer.

The original Papillon, which arrived on screen back in 1973 -- directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and offering the stunt-casting pairing of that golden boy narcissist Steve McQueen and Oscar-winner/scene stealer, Dustin Hoffman -- was no great shakes in itself, clocking in even longer at two hours and thirty-one minutes.

In the new version , directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Noer (shown at right), with a screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski, which he adapted from both the memoirs by Devil's Island prisoner Henri Charrière and the original screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. the shakes are a good deal less. Just about everything concerning this latest Papillon seems adequate but little more.

This adequacy begins with the film's two stars, both of whom I have greatly enjoyed elsewhere -- Charlie Hunnam (above) in just about everything in which he has ever appeared, and Rami Malek (below), whom I know best from cable TV's fun and fierce Mr. Robot series.

Mr. Hunnam spends his time either playing action hero or showing us his soulful/dour side, while Mr. Maleck handles his weak-little-nerd-with-glasses role as, well, a weak little nerd with glasses. Neither actor has much of a chance to do more, given the one-dimensional screenplay which gets the story told but not much else. (The occasionally soaring musical score, by David Buckley, seems to take the place of acting or writing in terms of pointing up the important moments here.)

The scenery is pretty enough -- seaside, island, jungle stuff -- and the director and screenwriter cram in as much glamour, sex and sin as possible in the first few minutes. Because, after that, it's all prison-plus-escape-attempts, all the time.

The tale itself is indeed one of the greatest "great escape" stories ever told, even in this not-so-hot version. Perhaps the 45 years between the release of the original film and this remake will introduce a bunch more movie-goers to M. Charrière and his semi-fictional story.

Papillon, released by Bleecker Street, opens nationwide this Friday, August 24. I'll post South Florida theaters once they're sent to me. Meanwhile, you can click here and then scroll down and click on FIND THEATERS & TICKETS to view the screening locations nearest you.

That popular Herman Koch novel, THE DINNER, gets a second go-round via Oren Moverman

Comparisons may be odious, but they're unavoidable when two movies, based on the same popular novel (The Dinner by Herman Koch) follow each other to the screen with only a couple of years in between. TrustMovies did not read the original work, but he did see and cover the first of those films, a fine Italian version with an all-star cast, some 18 months ago (you can find his review here). That initial version is, in every way, better than the latest rendition of THE DINNER, which opens this week. That said, there are a number of good reasons to view this new film, adapted and directed by Oren Moverman (the filmmaker is shown below).

The best reason is to see actor Steve Coogan (below) -- long a terrific comedian who's very good at impersonations, too -- give the performance of his life (so far). Coogan plays one of two brothers (Richard Gere plays the other) who are usually at odds with one another, and what this actor slowly unveils is something to see. To call this performance a revelation is to short-change it entirely. Where your sympathy lies will turn upside down and sideways before the film is finished.

Essaying the roles of the brother's wives are two of our finest actresses -- Laura Linney (below, left) playing Coogan's, and Rebeccs Hall (below, right) as Gere's -- and both are as good as we've come to expect, though Ms Hall and her enormous talent are nowhere near embraced by this far too circumscribed role.

Gere himself, below, continues to give one excellent performance atop another, and he is first-class here, as well, playing the very successful brother (a politician about to begin a run for higher office). Coogan plays the "lesser" brother, always in his sibling's shadow.

The plot hinges on the two couple's children, one of which is heavily involved in a violent incident at a local ATM (below). How all this comes out, and what the quartet of characters intends to do about it makes up the meat of the movie.

As we learn more about that ATM incident, and about the people we're dealing with, sympathies waver, change, and then perhaps change again. Front and center is the narcissistic and entitled culture in which so many of us live today, whether we be the folk who can afford the five-star restaurant at which the titular dinner takes place, or simply those who are the hangers-on.

Mr. Moverman makes far too much of that restaurant, its food and the presentation (above), for we've seen this sort of thing too many times before. He also goes all out in a section of the film midway along in which Gettysburg (below) and its place in the mind and heart of the Coogan character is explored in too much length and detail. While it may make clearer what all this means to the character, it also stops the movie dead in its tracks for a time.

And yet, those four excellent lead performances, together with the engrossing tale that is spun, are good enough to carry the film, keeping us more than hooked and, of course, wondering what we might do if pushed into similar circumstances.

The original Italian version, which I highly recommend, can be purchased or rented/streamed via its U.S. distributor, Film Movement, and can also be streamed currently on Netflix. Meanwhile, you can view the new American version via the information below.

From The Orchard and running a little-too-long two hours, the film hits theaters around the country in one of the widest openings I think this little distributor has so far seen. Here in South Florida, it will play in the Miami area at Regal South Beach 18, AMC Sunset Place 24, AMC Aventura 24; in Ft. Lauderdale at the Silverspot Cinema, The Classic Gateway Theatre, AMC Broward 18 Pompano; and the West Palm Beach area at the AMC Indian River 24, The Living Room Theaters, Regal Shadowood 16, Regal Royal Palm Beach 18, and the Movies of Lake Worth and Movies of Delray, In New York City it plays the AMC Empire 25, the AMC Lowe Lincoln Square and the Landmark Sunshine; and in Los Angeles, it opens at The Landmark in West L.A. (and elsewhere), Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates and/or to find a theater in your area.