Your 2023 January Movie Reviews

New year, new list. I actually want to write about all of them, but I know you, my devoted readers, are starving for new content, and I have been letting you down.

The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)

Disney Channel, Deutsch
In our cable package, Mr Radish found a standard-definition, no original audio, no subtitles Disney Channel that doesn’t show any of their Fox portfolio. Clearly “exchanging Netflix for a cheaper service with content I might actually want to watch” is unnecessary. Sigh.

The German title of this one is “A Kingdom For A Llama”, and when I saw the listing I had no earthly idea which movie that was; there weren’t any Disney-age children in my life at the time of its release.

The lack of original audio here really affected the viewing experience–Eartha Kitt! John Goodman! Robert Clotworthy! All superior to their German replacements!!–but at least the Emperor-Llama was voiced by Bully Herbig, a German comedy writer/actor who is often (in contrast to other German comedians) actually funny. The film felt very Looney Tunes with silly sight gags, and I think I have never seen a children’s film with a visibly pregnant mom character. The backgrounds were lush and reminded me of early, pre-CGI films.

It was OK. I don’t see how it spawned a sequel, but the turn of the century was a weird time.

The Pink Panther (1963)

BR, Deutsch
Mr Radish loved this as a child, but it hasn’t held up.

Batman Ninja (2018)

Netflix, English
Fighting off a chest cold and still reeling from the shame of my 2022 review, I decided to view a foreign film that looked fun. The concept of re-imagining an American comics icon as an anime hero intrigued me. Gorilla Grodd transports Batman and all the villains of Gotham to feudal Japan with a mind-control time-machine sort of device, with the intent of becoming the warlord to unify Japan and change the history of the world. Each villain takes a territory associated with an actual historical warlord, and there are plans to meet for a final ultimate battle; Bruce and friends need to disrupt it and restore the timeline, while trying to figure out who he really is without his 21st-century tech toys.

All well and good. But 1) six or seven different styles of anime were given homage, and sometimes the styles were switched every few seconds within a single fight scene. I understand this is a tribute to various anime creators, but as a n00b I found it hard to follow. At one point, there was just abstract watercolor on paper, and while it was interesting and pretty, I could not parse the action. 2) Not only the drawing styles were mixed, also the tropes–we had moving castles, *and* transformer robots *and* Captain-Planet-style “unite to create a bigger hero” *and* magical monkeys that could read English *and* a million monkey samurai that could combine to create a giant who could battle the robots *and* farmers crying over the joy of tending the soil *and* *and* *and* *and*! Yes, this is a study in Japanese entertainment culture, but cramming the entire three-credit “Survey of Anime Tropes” freshman course into an hour and twenty-four minutes was too much for anyone who isn’t already a subject expert. 3) Another technical gripe: the dialog translators and the subtitle translators seem to have been given different scripts. At one point Alfred is talking about polishing the horse-drawn Batmobile (huh huh uh huh) while the words on the screen were about the differences between Japanese and British tea.

TL;DR: Love the concept but not the instantiation.

WarGames (1983)

Warner Film, original English
I have a vague impression that this film is the reason I was never allowed to use the modem on the family Apple ][ GS when I was in high school. I was never so interesting, trust me.

Nostalgia pick; fun to see the old cutting-edge tech; Barry Corbin; best corn-on-the-cob scene of all times. Was worth the rewatch, but I liked Short Circuit better.

L’Argent (1928)

arte Mediathek, Deutsch
It is harder to watch a silent film with French title cards and German subtitles than you may expect, but I powered through this Lobster Films restoration. L’Argent is Geld which is Money, and this film was based on Emile Zola’s book of the same title–the book had been written about the 1860s, but the film was set in the present day. A fat middle-aged Paris banker needs money to impress a young hot baroness (played by Brigitte Helm of Metropolis fame). A younger business man survives a plane crash in French Guyana and returns with plans to set up oil-drilling operations there, and the banker sees a chance here to make a killing by manipulating the stock share prices in this new company then shorting him out.

The young man is also a pilot, and much time is spent on a publicity stunt where he attempts to be the first man to successfully fly across the Atlantic, going from Paris to South America. While he is away, fat banker dude introduces his innocent young lonely wife to Paris high society, sets her up with an “unlimited” checking account, then demands repayment of the money she spent on new frocks with sexual favors (just in case you didn’t realize earlier in the picture that fat fraud dude is a villain, right). When her husband returns, he hands some cooked books over the “the authorities” and the banker goes to prison without getting to bang the baroness.

Anyway, while I was not particularly impressed by the plot, and last year’s viewing of The Spirit of St Louis had me screaming “why are you wasting fuel by letting the engine run while you kiss her?!?!” this was an interesting glimpse into Paris on the cusp of the Great Depression (Weltweit Wirtschaftskrise) and the early days of commercial aviation. There were too many financial-jargon monologues for my taste, but the the airplane footage was impressive. The interiors were lavish, and the ladies’ wear–even when they were just at home listening to the news on the radio–was luxurious and sparkly.

TL;DR: Radish likes sparkly things and airplanes.

The Train (1964)

arte, original English
Our cable company finally got the fourth audio channel working–last year the “Original Audio” option was just a third German audio channel (arte broadcasts everything in German and French).

Burt Lancaster stars as a member of the French resistance trying to prevent several cars of irreplaceable French paintings from being hauled to Germany, obviously without damaging them. Lots of action, stunts, explosions; lots of murders. Lots and lots of murders. A very good film, but sad.

Only God Can Judge Me (2017)

Netflix, original Deutsch
Next one up in my Watch All The Moritz Bleibtreu Project. This one was…dark and violent. Moritz plays Ricky, a criminal of German descent who works with a gang of criminals with Migrationshintergrund (not explicitly explained, but the subtitles said “speaking Arabic”) stealing money and drugs from other groups of criminals with Migrationshintergrund, until one day he gets caught–gave himself up to save the others–after a botched heist (“speaking Russian”). When he gets out after five years, he wants to open a bar, but he needs some startup capital, so he tries to get the gang back together. They’ve all moved on into different semi-shady enterprises, started families, etc, but they’ll do this one job moving heroin for a gang of dealers with Migrationshintergrund (“speaking Arabic” and “speaking Albanian”) who work out of a boxing club.

It goes poorly. During a traffic stop the heroin is stolen by a female police officer of German descent, who conveniently speaks perfect Arabic, because she needs 30K€ to bribe an organ transplant committee to save her child’s life. It seems selling a 2-kilo block of heroin in Frankfurt for a fraction of its street value is harder than you think.

This movie had a Memorial-Day-Weekend-In-Chicago violent-death-by-illegally-posessed-firearm body count, and no happy ending, not even for the children, although in the very last scene, the stripper girlfriend of Ricky’s dead brother sees her unborn baby’s heart beat on the ultrasound.

Film funded by BKM, kulturelle Filmförderung des Bundes, aka German tax dollars.

Definitely won’t be watching this one over and over again, but after watching cartoons for three hours to clear the images out of my brain so I could sleep…it was an interesting story; the ethical dilemma of the police officer, and how her decision affected her child; Ricky’s relationship with his father, his brother, and his Catholic upbringing; how corrupt bureaucracies decide who lives and dies based on what brings them the most cash.

Bright Star (2009)

Netflix, original English
This is the sort of thing I should like–Costumes! No strippers or Turkish rap music!–but it was just people crying and yelling at each other for three hours, occasionally in the rain, and I found it all a bit tedious.

Notes: Adorable tuxie gets cuddled by the voice of Paddington, and there were a lot of scenes of sewing and embroidery, which inspired me to sit on my ass and do some stitching.

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)

3sat, Deutsch
The Austrian TV channel 3sat occasionally has a “Theme Day” on Sundays, where they show nothing but movies of a particular subject or genre, and this movie was filed under “Classic Westerns.”

The Mohawk Valley is east of Syracuse, New York.

To be fair, which I hate, the movie was filmed in an area of Utah that looks nothing like central New York.

Anyway, this is a classic John Ford picture, featuring Hollywood heavyweights Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert, about life in the time of the American Revolution in a region where most of the native tribes had sided with the British. We see the death of my personal favorite Patriot, General Nicholas Herkimer who was ambushed by the Tories and Mohawk at Oriskany. In the end, of course, we prevail.

My notes: 1) Edna May Oliver steals the show as a cranky, hilarious widowed landowner who gives the beautiful helpless leads a job and a roof over their heads after their (completely unrealistically luxurious) homestead is burned to the ground, and now I have to add her to my list of actors to stalk. 2) ALL OF THE QUILTS WERE RIDICULOUSLY ANACHRONISTIC. When the baby is born, Colbert is resting under a white quilt with appliqued princess feathers that is clearly from the mid-19th century. Earlier, she walks around her giant glass-windowed cabin wrapped in a 1930s quilt with tulip blocks set on point with dark sashing. IT IS AN OUTRAGE. I AM DEEPLY OFFENDED.

SEE YOU NEXT MONTH.