The other day I was telling my wife about the latest season of Michael Lewis' podcast “Against the Rules.” If you're wondering why there's so many ads and nonstop blather about sports betting as you're watching a sports event, well, this answers it. Blame New Jersey, Ted Olson (RIP), and the John Robert Supreme Court. In Murphy v. NCAA (2018), with Olson arguing for the bad guys in front of several of his Federalist Society club members, the court overturned an earlier Sen. Bill Bradley law that prevented most sports betting in the country, and the floodgates opened.

Here's the question I asked my wife. The year before that decision, in 2017, legal sports bookies generated $300 million in revenue in this country. What was that figure in 2023?

“I don't know,” she said. “A billion?”

“Wait, you think it tripled in five years?”

“Well, I don't --”

“It's $11 billion.”

And of the two big sports betting companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, that were already in place? Lewis says, “It's as if when Prohibition ended, there were these two massive liquor companies sitting there with databases on individual Americans and their taste for alcohol. And the government ordered them to go wave a glass of whiskey under the nose of every alcoholic to persuade as many as possible to start drinking again.”

All of this is from Episode 4: “A Hard Way to Make an Easy Living.” Not pretty, much recommended.

WARNING: SPOILERS

This played at SIFF’s recent Noir Fest, and I went mostly for two guys, Philip Ahn and Keye Luke, the mentors to David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine on TV’s “Kung Fu.” I remember when I lived in Taiwan in 1987-88, and a group of us, white Americans all, mused about how we first encountered anything Chinese. The children’s book “The Five Chinese Brothers” was probably my first contact, but “Kung Fu” was a close second. That show meant a lot to me, so I wanted to check out their earlier work. But of course they're not in it much—Keye Luke in particular.

“Hell’s Half Acre” is part of its own subgenre, Tiki-Noir, film noir set in some Polynesian locale. It was made by the notoriously cheap Republic Pictures, but they did film it on location in Honolulu. A free trip to Hawaii was apparently how they attracted the talent. 

The real talent, though, is behind the camera. I’d seen some of the other festival noirs, B movies from the late ’40s and early ’50s,  and the camerawork was mostly static, recalling episodic television of the era. This one recalls “The Third Man.” Beforehand, I’d looked up the director, John H. Auer, and nothing in his CV leapt out at me, so afterwards I did the same with the cinematographer—a guy named John L. Russell. He did a lot of TV in the 1950s and ’60s: “The Virginian,” “McHale’s Navy,” “Wagon Train,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”... 

And what, per IMDb, was he known for?

“Psycho.”

Holy shit. 

He also photographed Orson Welles’ “Macbeth” and was the camera operator on “Touch of Evil.” Welles said he was the best camera operator he’d ever seen.

It’s a shame this movie didn’t use his talents in service of a better script.

All over the place
For a movie that mostly stays in Honolulu, and mostly within its red-light district, the titular “Hell’s Half Acre,” the story is kind of all over the place. I don’t know if I can even describe it properly.

A racketeer and his girl, Chet Chester and Sally Lee (Wendell Corey and Nancy Gates), attend a red-carpet affair at a Honolulu nightclub, where a spoken-word song that he wrote is performed. Mid-song, Sally pulls a small note from Chet’s … collar? I don’t even know. It’s rolled-up, like a message between eighth-grade girls, but it’s a threat from the Hawaiian gangster sitting across the club. He doesn't even know it's there, and Sally, rather than telling him about it, confronts the gangster alone. When he’s unwilling to bargain she guns him down with a bullet to the forehead. This is still that bloodless age of Hollywood gun action so a bullet to the head felt shocking. Once he finds about it all, Chet decides to take the fall for the murder.

Meanwhile, in the states, Donna Williams (Evelyn Keyes) is listening to the spoken-word song at a record store—I guess it was sweeping the nation—and some of the lyrics are the exact same words her wartime husband Randy Williams wrote on a framed photo for her before he shipped out to the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor. He was presumed KIA but could he still be alive? Is Chet Chester really Randy Williams? That would mean he actually chose the name Chet Chester, which is a stretch in itself, but she flies to Honolulu to find out.

The first person she meets is a lady cabdriver, Lida O’Reilly (Elsa Lanchester, of “Bride of…” fame), a former schoolteacher from Wisconsin who sounds British, and who came to Hawaii decades earlier and never left. She never leaves Donna, either. She drives her to the police station, where the agreeable Chief Dan (Keye Luke) agrees to let Donna see Chet the next day; and then she drives her to Chet’s old place, where Sally is living. Except a strange man, Roger Kong (Philip Ahn), tells her Sally in unavailable. We know why. He killed her. He was trying to get at Chet’s racketeering money and got too violent.

The next morning, before the tete-a-tete with Donna, the cops have Chet ID Sally’s body. A heretofore model prisoner, Chet breaks free to solve the crime himself. So now Donna can't ID him. But wait, lady cabdriver has an idea! (Yes, she's still hanging around.) She tells Donna that Chet is probably hiding out in Hell’s Half Acre, and what if Donna became a taxi dancer there? It would be a good way to question people!

Then it gets really confusing. Roger Kong spots Donna, and though she’s the one person who can ID him at the scene of crime, he doesn’t have her killed. He has her drugged—though, oddly, we don’t see that part. We just see her waking up naked beneath the sheets in the apartment of Rose and Tubby Otis (Marie Windsor and Jesse White, the future Maytag repairman). Kong is cuckolding Tubby, who’s a lush, and who tries to rape Donna. But Chet Chester (in a nearby room?) overhears, bursts in, decks him, and takes Donna to a different room … which looks like the exact same room. 

Better off
Meanwhile, people keep dying. Roger kills Ippy (Leonard Strong), an informant, while the “Hawaii 5-0”-like cops plug Tubby after chasing him near some “Third Man”-like sewers. Chet initially denies he’s Donna’s one-time husband but no, he is Randy. After Pearl Harbor he got involved in the rackets, as one does, and though there’s a son now, age 11, the kid is better off thinking his father died heroically in war rather than being burdened with the current version of him. So Chet/Randy claims. Then he concocts a heroic death for himself in this movie. He agrees to get killed by Roger Kong so the police can bust Roger Kong. Instead, the police kill Roger Kong in front of a “Make Hawaii Safe” sign.

None of it makes sense. Roger Kong kills everyone he doesn’t need to and leaves alive the one person he should’ve killed. And what musk is Chet Chester giving off? One woman kills for him, another searches the world for him. She becomes a taxi dancer to find him. No offense to Wendell Corey, who played the accountant in “I Walk Alone,” but I’m not seeing it. 

But the cinematography is great.

I'm going through and throwing away old journals, so nobody has to do it when I die, and I came across this quote that I wrote on the inside page of a journal I kept while living in Taipei in 1990:

“Not only is man not trained for work, and to all the qualities essential to fruitful labor ... but he is habituated to idleness and to contempt for all the products of labor: is taught to spoil, throw away, and again procure for money anything he fancies, without a thought of how things are made.”

-- Leo Tolstoy, 1892

Feels more relevant than ever. Also ironic that it's in a journal that I procured and am now throwing away.

WARNING: SPOILERS

If you’re sick of human voices—and who isn’t these days?—watch “Flow.” There’s no human voice in it. There’s no human in it. We gone. Mr. Kurtz, we dead. I assume.

There's no explanation for our absence other than the thousand ways we’re currently blowing it. But we have left behind a few things: drawings and statues of cats; buildings; towering statues of humans. Think “Ozymandias” but with water rather than lone and level sands.

The most monumental thing we leave behind—again, I assume—is the volatility of the world.

“Flow” is written and directed by Gints Zilbalodis of Latvia, and beautifully animated. It’s cinematic in its photography. It flows, and it’s thrilling, and it’s probably my favorite film of 2024. I have no notes, I just loved it. It doesn’t hurt that I’m a cat person. And it really doesn’t hurt that the lead reminded me of our cat Maisie: big intense eyes, sleek black coat, light on her feet, insistent, with a tendency to chirp rather than meow.

I call her my movie-star cat now.

Boat of misfit toys
Does anyone know why it’s called “Flow”? Is it the obvious water metaphor or the fact that these animals have to flow/move to survive? Everything is in flux and so they’re in flux. I believe the cat is unnamed, so I’m just going to call him Flow. Kiss my grits.

The movie begins with Flow looking at his reflection in a puddle. He’s living in an otherwise abandoned house that’s a shrine to cats—cat statues of all sizes are everywhere—and sleeps in a room upstairs that he accesses via a broken window. Outside, the world is wide and dangerous. A pack of dogs fight over a fish, Flow gets it, the dogs chase him. Then he sees them running the other way. Then Flow is nearly crushed by a herd of deer. What is everyone running away from? A tsunami.

Flow is swept up in it, makes it back to the house, but waters continue to rise. From atop the ears of the tallest of the cat statues, he spies a passing small rowboat and swims for it and claws his way aboard—and there comes face-to-face with another animal.

“Looks like a capybara,” my wife whispered to me.

It’s a capybara. He starts out curious, sniffing. He’s both officious and comic relief. When he goes to sleep, he just conks out.

The boat becomes a bit like the Island of Misfit Toys from the animated “Rudolph” TV special. It’s a place for loners, and the misplaced, and those separated or banished from their group. Our group encounters a Gollum-like lemur who is too concerned with his “precious,” a basket of trinkets, to realize the water is rising and will soon sweep him away; so the capybara drags his basket to the boat and the lemur follows. A golden lab, separated from his pack, also joins.

The apex predator in this world is a white bird with long legs and a huge wingspan, and for a time I wondered if it was an alien; but no, it’s a known quantity. They’re secretarybirds, native to Africa, who, per Wikipedia, “hunt and catch prey on the ground, often stomping on victims to kill them. Insects and small vertebrates make up its diet.” Is that what Flow is to them? A snack? At one point, Flow nearly drowns avoiding them but is saved by a deus ex machina whale, who surfaces with Flow atop. Feels Biblical. Later, a secretarybird defends Flow against the others and has its wing wounded in battle. It, too, joins the boat.

None of these animals are anthropomorphized. They remain themselves. They learn to steer the boat via rudder but that’s as close as we get to a Disney version.

Amid the turmoil, we get small moments. The capybara brings aboard plantains. The lemur, taking inventory of its stuff, places a shell on a shelf, which Flow knocks off in the manner of cats. The dog wants to play with a blue glass float in the manner of dogs. The bird kicks it once, the dog returns it, waits expectantly, and the bird kicks it into water. Now the lemur wants the boat to turn around. When the bird refuses, the lemur attacks, and both Flow and the capybara are knocked into the water.

Mostly there’s mystery. They drift through vast stone cities, all but submerged, and pass a giant statue, its human head and hand barely poking out of the water. It’s our lone representation, drowning. There’s no greater mystery, for me, than when the secretarybird heals enough to leave, and both he and Flow wind up atop a stone pillar with intricate markings. The bird is looking up toward a light. Then water droplets begin to levitate. Then Flow and the bird do. They’re being pulled toward the light, but the secretarybird nudges Flow back to earth before disappearing, as if to say, “No, you belong back there.” Is this death? Something else?

At this point, Flow sees the boat on the horizon, mews, tries to swim toward it, but it’s too far gone. Flow winds up atop a blue glass float—the same float the bird knocked into the water?—and that’s where he’s laying when the waters recede. These moments are as terrifying as when the floods came. Trees rise up, seemingly out of nowhere, like monsters, crackling and snapping into place. Rather than signaling safety, it’s yet another danger to navigate.

Us, going under

Rainbow sign
Is the whole thing Biblical? A flood in which we the wicked are drown? A boat where the animals line up 1x1 rather than 2x2? And where are the rest of the cats? We see packs of dogs, herds of deer, but Flow is the only felis catus we encounter.

Back on land, the lemur winds up with a group of lemurs, the dog with his pack of dogs, and Flow finds the deus ex machina whale beached and dying. He rubs up against it. It blinks. In a post-credits sequence we see it resurface. A flashback? Or did the waters return and it lived? And is that good?

I hope there are no answers to these questions. I like the mystery of it.

Though dog and lemur have their groups, they still rejoin Flow and capybara. In the beginning of the film, Flow looked at his reflection in a puddle, and now he does the same but with three companions. We end as we began but with community. Not necessarily the one you wanted but the one you got. And isn’t that enough?

I'm fine with most of these.

“Conclave” won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Cast award at a ceremony last night, beating out “A Complete Unknown,” “Anora,” “Emilia Perez” and “Wicked,” and for some that means something vis a vis the Oscars, but it really doesn't. True, the last three SAG cast award winners also won best picture (“Oppenheimer,” “Everything Everywhere...” “CODA”), but those movies also got a PGA, a DGA, or both. “Conclave” got zip. And push back beyond three years ago and most SAG cast winners didn't come within spitting distance of Best Picture:

• The Trial of the Chicago 7
• Black Panther
• Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri
• Hidden Figures

Last night's other SAG film awards, the leads and supportings, are more likely to be harbingers. In the last 10 years, the SAG winner for lead actor has won the Oscar for lead actor eight times. For lead actress it's seven; in the supportings it's nine each. Not bad odds.

So who won last night?

• Actor: Timothee Chalamet, “A Complete Unknown”
• Actress: Demi Moore, “The Substance”
• Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin, “A Real Pain”
• Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldana, “Emilia Perez”

If Chalamet wins the Oscar, he'll be the youngest lead actor ever, beating fellow nominee Adrien Brody, who won in 2002 for “The Pianist,” age 29 years, 343 days. In my head Chalamet is like 17 but he's actually the same number of years as Brody was (29), just fewer days on Oscar night (66).

Are we stuck with Demi Moore for lead? Probably. The proviso is that one of the few recent times SAG actress and Oscar differentiated was back in 2018, when SAG gave it to sentimental favorite Glenn Close but Oscar opted for Olivia Colman's wonderfully memorable turn as Queen Anne in “The Favourite.” Might Oscar do the same with Fernanda Torres in “I'm Still Here”? She wasn't even nominated at SAG so wasn't among Demi's competition there.

BTW: Of the seven times SAG and Oscar disagreed in the last 10 years, five involved SAG giving the award to an actor of color and Oscar going in another (whiter) direction. Is this more evidence of #OscarsSoWhite? To be honest, Oscar's choices feel better to me.

** Didn't receive an Oscar nomination

Idris' movie was Netflix, and Oscar wasn't ready to embrace that. You can make an argument for Denzel with “Fences,” but then he already had two Oscars. 2020 was a fucked-up year, so pass. Emma Stone, meanwhile, was shockingly good in “Poor Things.” 100% on that one.

Wow, Oscar night snuck up on me. Six days away. See you then.

Looking for my father's review of “Silver Streak,” I came across the following with a helluva first two grafs:

I don't know what to do about any of it—if someone gives me marching orders (real marching orders, not peaceful protest marching orders), I'll march—but a place to begin, if you're The New York Times and the rest of the legit media, is to stop softpedaling the man trying to overthrow American (and Ukranian) democracy:

Jesus fuck, folks, just say he's lying, and say it in the hed: TRUMP LIES ABOUT ZELENSKY. Or: TRUMP REPEATS PUTIN'S LIES ABOUT UKRAINE. Or: TRUMP DOESN'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT UKRANIAN WAR. But whatever you do, don't make the lie the headline. The Times keeps doing that to a pathological degree, and the other side, the liars, knows they do it and take advantage. Even the “rewriting” in the sub isn't helpful. It's so ... weak. Don't be weak. Goddamnit, Times, we can't afford you to be weak. 

Everything needs to be reconfigured, because nothing is working correctly, and let's start with the Times and Post and NPR and WSJ. The world you're describing isn't the world as most of us are perceiving it. You've had 10 years to figure this out and you're just getting worse at it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

My favorite part was the pledge of allegiance. 

About 30 minutes in, we see children at a New York City public school reciting it, and you can’t help but notice what’s missing. Yes, it’s 1937, so “under God” isn’t there; that wasn’t added until the 1950s. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Here’s what they recite:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, indivisible
With liberty and justice for all

I’m 62 years old and I didn’t know that “… of the United States of America” wasn’t part of the original pledge? When was it added?

In the xenophobic 1920s, of course, when we also added a tons of caveats to Emma Lazarus’ words. Back then, patriots didn’t want people in America to pledge to any old flag, particularly foreign ones, so they added what they added, and we got what we got. And now we are where we are in the xenophobic 2020s. Plus ça change.

The kids don’t put their hands over hearts, either, as we did at Burroughs Elementary in the 1970s; they do it with a hand-to-forehead salute. Admittedly, some of these aren’t exactly spit-and-polish. A few look a little “Woe is me.” Unintentionally.

But this is what I like about watching old movies. Even when they’re bad, you learn something.

From the Vashon Island News-Record masthead around the turn of the last century.

Shirley Temple with a twist
Yeah, it’s another rote Warner Bros. flick in its Year Without Cagney. Bogart is third-billed and hardly in it, and anyway he’s hardly Humphrey Bogart. He’s a family man who gets skittish at all the wrong times. He’s about as far from “Humphrey Bogart” as I am.

It’s one-note. James Aloysius O’Malley (Pat O’Brien) is a beat cop who has a thing for rules and regulations. He’s constantly giving out unncessary tickets and citations, and no one is able to get through that thick Irish skull of his that he might want to temper things. These are the attempts: 

• The press writes mocking stories about him
• His captain orders him to be more judicious
• A family man, pulled over by O’Malley for a faulty muffler, loses his job, resorts to crime, and is sent away for 2 to 10 

Here’s what finally works:

• A little girl

And not just any little girl. It’s Warners’ answer to Shirley Temple … Sybil Jason!

Yeah, I didn’t know her, either. She’s not bad, less cutesy than some.

After the debaccle with the family man, O’Malley is reassigned to school crossing duty at PS 147 (“This will either make him or break him,” says his captain), and initially he’s as humorless as ever. 

But one kid, Barbara (Jason), engaging and lame, takes a shine to him, and little by little breaks through. He makes her a paper crown for May Day, for which she’s queen. Then he saves her from being run over by a speeding car, and, with a teacher, Miss Nolan (Ann Sheridan), he carries her home. There, amid the want (no milk, bread, etc.), she shows him a picture of her daddy, whom she says is off in Canada. It’s John Phillips (Bogart), the man whose life O’Malley wrecked. When mom comes home and sees O’Malley, she berates him. So does Miss Nolan outside. Nolan’s critique is so spot-on (“You’re not a human being, you’re a machine!”), it’s like she watched the first half of the film.

O’Brien tended to play two types, the rule stickler and the priest, and this is the point in the film when the former gives way to the latter. “Nobody ever wants to play with me—on account of my leg," Barbara tells O'Malley, crying, so O'Malley visits every doctor in town until he finds an expert who can fix her leg—pro bono. Then he convinces the parole board to spring Phillips. Then he buys toys, from “Canada,” so Phillips can give them to Barbara.

Except, in prison, Phillips is warned by a fellow con (perennial Warner Bros. yegg Stanley Fields) that on the outside the cops won’t leave him alone until he’s back in the stir. And sure enough, everyone in his neighborhood tells Phillips that O’Malley is looking for him. That sends Phillips to drinking, and sweating, and when O’Malley shows up on his doorstep he shoots in a panic and O’Malley tumbles down the stairs.

That’s why, in the hospital, O’Malley reverts. “I knew Phillips was no good!” he shouts at Miss Nolan. “He robs a guy because he loses a job? He shoots me because he gets a little nervous? And you want him back out on the streets!?”

Kidding. The cops are ready to bust Phillips but O’Malley covers for him, everything works out, all the kids love O'Malley and maybe Miss Nolan, too. The End.

The stickler and the priest
For the curious: Sybil Jason was discovered in South Africa, touted as Warner Bros. answer to Shirley Temple, and quickly put on the treadmill, co-starring with various Warners’ stars over a three-year period: Robert Armstrong in “Little Big Shot,” Kay Francis in “I Found Stella Parish,” Al Jolson in “The Singing Kid.” She never quite caught on. After those, she did this one, a bunch of shorts, one more movie with Kay Francis, then she signed with 20th Century Fox where she acted in support of Shirley Temple. When World War II broke out, she was in South Africa and got stuck there. When she returned to the states she was 18. She never made another movie but lived a long life.

So what was the deal with Warner Bros. and the Irish in the 1930s? They totally had a thing. Was it just dollar signs? Has anyone written on this?

Sheridan doesn't canoodle, Bogart isn't a killer. Otherwise...

The '45 re-release of the '40 film. Apparently someone became a star in the interim. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

When Warner Bros. re-released “It All Came True” in late 1945 they gave Humphrey Bogart top billing—he was originally third—but the promotion makes sense even without Bogart’s sudden stardom. His character here, Grasselli, née Chips Maguire, really is the hero of the film.

Sure, he’s a gangster who kills a guy in cold blood in the first five minutes, but the victim was a dirty rat and that’s the code. Sure, he’s willing to pin the murder on a bland songwriter/piano man in his employ, Tommy Taylor (Jeffrey Lynn), but he never does, just uses evidence in his possession to finagle a room at Tommy’s mom’s boarding house as a hideout. And sure, at the boarding house, he cheats the old ladies at cards, but they’re not playing for money, and anyway when Tommy’s girl, Sarah Jane (Ann Sheridan), takes him to task for that, telling him he took away their fun, he’s contemplative, tugging at his ear as he’d do as Philip Marlowe in “The Big Sleep.”

Yes, when Sarah Jane sings a hip-wiggling song in the parlor, he looks her up and down like a cartoon wolf, but he never does make a pass, even when she’s alone with him in his room. He treats her like a human being.

More importantly, he solves all the movie’s problems. The old ladies are about to lose the boarding house because of $1,000 in back taxes? He pays it off. And hey, while we're at it, why not turn the front parlor into a throwback 1890s nightclub—The Roaring Nineties? That’s his idea. And when one of the tenants, Miss Flint (Zasu Pitts), accidentally spills his identity to the cops, who come to arrest him, and he has evidence to blame it all on boring old Tommy? Well, Tommy and Sarah Jane are in love, and aw, what the heck, he’ll take the fall.

He gives, creates, and sacrifices. What more do you people want?

Let’s stick a gangster in…
All of which makes me think that the movie was originally written for a gangster-lead like Edward G. Robinson or George Raft. Apparently it was offered to Raft, but as usual he turned it down. Good. Doubt he could’ve done half the job Bogart does—even if the movie’s not great.

This is one of six films Bogie made between “Roaring Twenties” (when he was bullet-fodder for Cagney) and “High Sierra” (when Houston first tapped him as romantic lead), and it reteams him with “Twenties” costar Jeffrey Lynne, whom Warner Bros. was still trying to make happen. Indeed, its working title, per AFI, was “The Roaring Nineties.” They should’ve stuck with that. This one is gossamer. 

Is this the period when Warners was like “Hey, let’s stick a gangster in…” and then finds the last place you’d expect? So a monastery for Edward G. Robinson in “Brother Orchid.” For Bogart, it’s a boarding house run by two sweet old ladies and peopled with characters:

• Rene Salmon (Grant Mitchell), who wouldn’t dream of reading you any of his poetry, oh no, oh no, before doing exactly that forever
• The Great Boldini (Felix Bressart), a onetime magician, who is perpetually upstaged by his dog Fanto
• Miss Flint, a true-crime lover, who imagines men following her, though none do

The boarding house is run by Sarah Jane’s mom (Una O’Connor), and Tommy’s mom (Jessie Busley), and both hold out hope that either one of their children will come to the rescue. Neither does.

The nightclub idea comes to Chips during an after-dinner parlor session with everyone showing off their wares. He think Rene dull, Boldini hilarious and Sarah Jane sexy, but why his mind goes to the Belle Epoque I don’t know—other than, before and during World War II, Hollywood kept going there: “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Hello Frisco, Hello,” ”Johnny Come Lately." 

When the nightclub finally opens, it is indeed the Roaring ’90s—with barbershop quartets, an old lady group, the Elderbloom Chorus, who transition, humorously, into a kind of Cab Calloway number, “Flat Foot Floogie.” Even Sarah Jane skips the “Gaucho Serenade” number she did previously for a medley of oldies: “Mister Dooley,” “Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet,” “Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

Brassy and sulky
Some of the movie isn’t bad—particularly Bogie in gangster mode being mollycoddled by the boarding house matrons. Who doesn’t love that?

But much of the movie is just off. When Miss Flint figures out the new tenant is Chips Maguire, it’s Sarah Jane who figures out how to shut her up. She reads her a “news story” about how a rat was tortured before he was killed, and it’s gruesome, and Miss Flint practically faints. All of this is treated as comedy.

Overall, Sheridan is too brassy and Lynn too sulky to be interesting, and they definitely don’t match. The director is Lewis Seiler, who did a bunch of Bogie’s forgettable B movies: “Crime School,” “King of the Underworld,” “You Can’t Get Away With Murder.” This is their second-to-last movie together. Bogie became a star and Seiler didn’t direct those.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I wish it were less relevant.

Not that I think America 2025 is in the same situation as Brazil 1970. We’re not. But they didn’t think they were in the same situation, either. After Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is taken away, friends assure his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres, Oscar-nominated), that he won’t be harmed. He’s a congressman, after all. Well, former congressman, since his tenure was revoked when the military junta took power in April 1964. With U.S. support, I should add.*

* Is our current situation another case of the chickens coming home to roost?

You’d think more bells would be going off for them. The country was just heaving: new Constitution in 1967, different leader in ‘68, who, in December, per Wikipedia, “gave the president dictatorial powers, dissolved Congress and state legislatures, suspended the constitution, and imposed censorship.” Then that president had a stroke. Then Gen. Emilio Garrastazu Medici took over. He did most of the damage. Damage means: incarcerating people, torturing people, killing people.

So no, the U.S. isn’t there yet. We, like Eunice, are merely surrounded by people who, in Bob Dylan’s words, philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears.

Just there
For a time, I watched “I’m Still Here” as a kind of primer. As homework. And for a time I took solace. Look, even under authoritarianism, life continues. People go to the beach, girls talk boys and play volleyball, friends come over for parties and dancing; couples play backgammon and fathers and sons play loud games of Foosball late at night.

Until they don’t.

Initially, it’s very slice-of-life. What’s the drama? Not much. Other than the impending one, it’s just life. The Paivas have five kids, all girls except for the youngest, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), who, as the movie opens, finds a dog on the beach and works both sides of his parents to keep him. Yes, the eldest, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), and her left-wing friends are pulled over and harassed by the Army after the Swiss ambassador is kidnapped; but she’s going away to London to study, and be safe, and maybe become Mrs. John Lennon. Meanwhile, soufflés are made, and parties hosted, and every once in a while Rubens takes a cryptic phone call or passes something to a late-night door-knocker, but then he resumes being his charming self.

And then there’s a different knock on the door and he’s asked to come along with the men there. He does. “I’ll be back soon, sweetie,” he tells his wife. We never see him again. And the plainclothes men don’t leave. They stay behind and close the curtains. Who are they? Why are they there? That’s the menace of it. Nothing is known and all is accepted. Two of the men are vaguely hippyish, one more militaristic, but they all have a blankness in the eyes. What politeness they have makes them more menacing. They don’t trash the place, they don’t threaten anyone. They’re just there.

At one point, she offers them food, and they eat, and there’s something about the way the men, sitting on a couch or in a chair, set aside their plates with the crumbs on them—not dismissively but also dismissively—that felt so gross to me. Like such a violation. Director Walter Salles (“Central Station,” “Motorcycle Diaries”) filmed the movie in sequence, which Fernanda Torres said helped all the actors get a better sense of the escalating fear and oppression. All of that is translated to us. I think of the Robert Frost line about holding something back for pressure; in these scenes almost everything is held back and the pressure is overwhelming.

And then the mother and eldest remaining daughter are taken into custody. On the way, they’re asked to put a bag over their heads. They do. When it’s removed, half-blind and disheveled, Eunice is immediately photographed. Pop! She’s questioned. A mugshot book is brought out and she’s asked to point out people she knows. She doesn’t know many. Her interrogator is disappointed, disbelieving, angry. She wants to see her daughter. Where is her daughter? Instead she’s put in a small, grimy cell. She’s returned for more questioning and more mugshot pointing. Her husband’s face appears in the book, and then her daughter’s, and then hers. How much time has passed? How many days? She begins marking time on the wall. On the 12th day, she’s released. A guard walks her out, saying he doesn’t agree with what’s going on. But he’s still helping it go on.

The daughter is home—she was released after the first day. It’s late and the kids are asleep, and the mother doesn’t wake them. Instead, she takes a shower and tries to wash it all off, scrubbing until she’s pink.

The family is still watched—a Volkswagen with two men on the other side of the street—and Eunice can’t access money because it’s in the husband’s name. But she still has means. She has a lawyer, connections. They’re an upper-class family with books on the shelves and tons of friends. Some rally, some are distant. She’s looking for evidence that her husband was actually taken because the authorities deny it. That’s how they disappear you. They take you and then say they didn’t take you. A schoolteacher friend can help but won’t. “My husband is in danger,” Eunice tells her. “Everyone is in danger,” the teacher responds.

Solace
When did I realize the family wasn’t fictional? Probably when they skip to 1995 and the boy, Marcelo, is now a well-known author in a wheelchair. The movie is adapted from his memoir of the same name.

By 1995, Eunice is a civil rights lawyer—she got her J.D. at age 48—and that’s the year the government, now civilian, lets her know her husband is dead. She holds up the death certificate before the press and smiles. A different kind of director would underline the moment—maybe give us the smile but the doubt in the eyes, like the final shot of Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill—but Salles doesn’t play that. He knows the Paiva family personally, so I assume he knows. Throughout, Eunice has held that aristocratic stoicism of putting best faces forward. When they leave Rio de Janeiro, she tells her children to smile for the press. She smiles here. The final shot is the family smiling in 2014. Plus I assume Eunice is genuinely happy to get the certificate. She’s happy for the closure. That’s the sadness of it. They leave you in such a state of unknowing that in the end you’re happy just to find out that they killed your loved one in cold blood.

Did we need the 2014 scenes? I might’ve ended with the death certificate. That said, I like the touch of having the elderly Eunice, wheelchair-bound and suffering Alzheimer’s, played by Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro. Some part of her awakens when she sees a news report of the disappeared, including Rubens.

“I’m Still Here” is powerful, particularly the incarceration scenes, but it’s a bit too slice-of-life. It’s a family going through authoritarianism and coming out the other side, damaged but resilient. I guess I take some solace in that. If the Portuguese have a word for soupçon, that’s how much solace I take.

I visited Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere site the other day for the first time in a long while. It was fun. You never have to wonder how Wells feels about something; it's out there.

Example: this post about the best actress race. Movie critic Kris Tapley thinks that if “Anora” wins best director/picture, as it's predicted to after its DGA/PGA wins, why won't it also win best actress for Mikey Madison? Doesn't that often happen? Best pic leading to best lead somebody?

Wells says, no, Demi Moore is going to win it, but she's going to win it because of a dishonest narrative.

In early January, in her acceptance speech after getting the Golden Globe, Moore said that a '90s producer told her she was a popcorn actress and would never be a serious actress and woe is me: “That corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it...” 

I thought that was bullshit when she said it, but everyone else seemed to flip: “Oh, she's so brave!” Amazing to me the narratives people buy. Jeff Wells didn't even reach for his wallet:

For the sixth or seventh time, Moore's narrative is dishonest. She was not forced into a popcorn box by mean old Hollywood executives. She walked right into that box of her own volition, and she totally reaped the spoils (mainstream fame, huge paychecks, flush lifestyle) until she aged out. And then she pivoted into a body horror flick just like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford pivoted into hag horror in the early '60s. ...

I've never read or heard that Moore tried to prove her arthouse mettle by appearing in edgy Sundance films, and she never tried to be in a critically-approved, Cannes-worthy, outside-the-box feminist statement film, and certainly not in a body-horror film. She only took the lead in The Substance when she calculated that she'd aged out (duhhh) and a role like this was her only likely shot at revitalizing her career.

100%.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Does “Passage to Marseille” hold the record for flashbacks? By the middle of the movie, we’re watching one man, Capt. Freycinet (Claude Rains), tell a story in which another man, Renault (Philip Dorn), tells him the story of a prison break, during which Renault again tells a third man the story of a fourth man, who is Matrac (Humphrey Bogart), our ostensible hero.

I was half hoping, like plate-spinners on “Ed Sullivan,” they would keep it going until we lost the thread completely. Or until we landed on something interesting.

Yeah, it’s not a good movie. It has half the cast of “Casablanca” but it’s about a thousand miles from “Casablanca.”

It begins contemporary, 1943 or ’44, as Capt. Freycinet, a leader in the Free French Air Squadron, shows a reporter, Manning (John Loder), their undercover operation: how planes and hangars are hidden amid haystacks and cows in the serene English countryside. Manning is impressed. Particularly by one pilot, Matrac. What’s his story? 

“To begin with,“ Freycinet says, ”I’ll have to take you far away from here…”

Lambasting Daladier
That’s how we wind up in the middle of the Atlantic, aboard a ship, Ville de Nancy, bound for Marseille with a cargo of nickel ore. I’m guessing it’s spring 1940—after the war has started but before the fall of France. The ship then chances upon a small canoe with starving, half-dead men inside. Maj. Duval (Sydney Greenstreet) says with assurance they’re escapees from Devil’s Island, but we’d already heard him say with assurance that the Maginot Line is invincible, so we know what his opinion is worth. Except this time he’s right. The men admit as much to Freycinet. But they have a cause: They’re on their way back to fight for France. Like free men! And that's when Renault tells Freycinet their story.

Now we’re on Devil’s Island, nine miles off the coast of French Guiana, and the men are doing backbreaking labor in the heat and the swamps and the mosquitos. These men are:

• Renault, our narrator, who turned coward during battle and wants to redeem himself
• Petit (George Tobias), a hefty farmer with serious guns and a serious hatred of Germans
• Marius (Peter Lorre), playing trying-to-fit-in Peter Lorre
• Garou (Helmut Dantine), young, handsome, idealistic

They become friends with Grandpere (Vladimir Sokoloff), a former prisoner who makes a living collecting and selling butterflies. He wants to use the money to escape, but he's told they need one more man, Matrac, currently in solitary confinement. Who’s Matrac? Grandpere asks. Is he a patriot?

Is he a patriot!?! 

And that’s when we flash back yet again. (At this point, I would’ve loved a cut to Manning, perplexed, saying, “Wait, who’s talking?”)

So in 1938, Matrac, wearing the traditional Bogie fedora, is a crusading publisher lambasting Edouard Daladier over the Munich Accords with a J’Accuse! headline. For that, a mob of—I guess—pro-appeasers descends on his newspaper and destroys it. At this point, Matrac takes the stenographer/obvious love interest Paula (Michele Morgan of “Le Quai des Brumes”) and heads to the French countryside, where they get married. Ah, but during an idyllic shopping excursion she sees a headline—Matrac is wanted for murder! It’s a trumped-up charge, led again by pro-Daladier forces, but now they’re on the lam. And now he’s caught and sentenced to 15 years on Devil’s Island.

And that’s why we need Matrac, Renault tells Grandpere. (Or Freycinet tells Manning that Renault told him that he told Grandpere.)

The escape from prison is relatively easy, as escapes go—shadows on the wall—but at the beach they find the boat is smaller than expected and can’t support their weight. Someone will have to stay behind. The man who initiated everything, Grandpere, winds up volunteering, reasoning that he’s old, and these other men are young and can fight. But he asks them to swear an oath on it. They do … save for Matrac, in back, silent and gloomy. Maybe he's not such a patriot after all? Maybe he’s cynical like Rick and sticks his neck out for nobody? Yeah, that’s the feeling they’re going for. Or trying to.

So now, only one flashback removed from our start, all we need is the reason why Matrac goes from holding a grudge against France to fighting for her with all his heart.

You can thank Sidney Greenstreet. Once word reaches the ship that France has fallen, Capt. Malo (Victor Francen) alters course for England. So Maj. Duval, an opportunist and maybe closet fascist, takes over the ship. On deck, guns trained, he offers this realpolitik benediction: “Men, a new order has been born in Europe. France has been given the privilege of being a part of it.”

Especially the criminals, he adds. You’ll all be exonerated. For a moment Matrac looks like he’s considering the offer. But then the cabin boy, who admires Matrac beyond all reason, shouts “Vive le France!” and is decked by one of the mutineers. So Matrac decks that guy. Now it’s a melee. And now they retake the ship. But a German bomber gets their coordinates and makes one pass, two passes. On the third, Matrac shoots it down. Marius dies, but he dies a free man, while Matrac, to the astonishment of the captain, shoots the surviving Germans in cold blood.

Then the cabin boy dies, admiring Matrac unequivocably, as everyone does.

Too tragic
As mentioned, “Passage to Marseille” reunites much of the cast from “Casablanca”—not just Bogie, Rains, Lorre and Greenstreet, but Helmet Dantine, the handsome prisoner who, in “Casablanca,” was the handsome husband Rick lets win at roulette, as well as guitarist/singer Corinna Muna, who sang at Rick’s. And that’s just cast. The director is the same (Michael Curtiz), one of the writers (Casey Robinson), Max Steiner, etc.

Doesn’t work. Apparently they were originally thinking Jean Gabin (in exile in Hollywood) for the lead. I could see that. Not that he's bad, but Bogie’s a bit American for all this.

As for where they are now? Or in 1944? Garou is the air force’s best mechanic, Petit a tireless member of our groundcrew, while Renault, his cowardice long past, is pilot of the plane Matrac is on—in the midst of a bombing raid over Germany. It’s Matrac's five-year-old boy’s birthday, a boy he’s never met, even if his bombers occasionally divert over the town of Romilly to drop a message. That’s the plan for this evening but all the other bombers return except for V for Victor. No, wait, there it is! Renault lands the wounded airplane. And Matrac? More than wounded.

“He got two Messerschmidts. He didn’t get the third one.”

And then the movie just keeps going. 

But maybe good. At Matrac’s cliffside burial site, all the men gathered somberly, Freycinet reads the long letter Matrac had written for his boy but never got a chance to deliver; and it includes these lines about the men he fought with:

Their deadly conflict was waged to decide your future. … My son, be the standard bearer of a great age they have made possible. Because it would be too tragic if men of good will should ever be lax or fail again to build a world where youth may love without fear, where parents may grow old with their children, and where men may be worthy of each other’s faith.

Yes, it would be too tragic.