The Odyssey(7/16/2026)

Warning: Review contains spoilers, including spoilers for film specific adaptations

Roger Ebert wrote a lot of very memorable positive reviews and many memorable negative reviews in his career but one that stands out notably in my memory was a decidedly mixed review: his review of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.  Ebert nominally liked the film and gave it a “thumbs up” on this TV show but his review of the film seemed a littled… bummed.  He admired the film’s many technical achievements and anticipated that audiences would love it but he seemed a little at odds that the tomes he remembered as being these kind of quaint British children’s stories being turned into these kind of bombastic modern action movies focused on battle scenes and visual effects.  Back in 2001 I thought this review was crazy, I loved those movies then and I love them now and I also think Ebert (who readily admitted he was going off hazy youthful memories of the books) was maybe misremembering some of their more martial elements.  I still don’t exactly “agree” with that review but over the years I’ve come to realize that he sort of did have a point: I might very much like the modern action movie take on the material that Jackson took but it was a choice to make those movies that way and I’m not sure they are entirely in the spirit of the source material, which is indeed a bit more laid back than what we see in that film series.  I was reminded of this when I learned that The Odyssey was going to be getting a big budget adaptation by Chrisopher Nolan, a man I don’t necessarily think of as being a natural fit for the material.  The Odyssey is, among many other things, certainly an adventure story of epic proportions but in the wrong hands it could well be turned into something that was only that while missing a lot of the strange little tangents that make it special in much the way Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (a movie that inspired Ebert to quip “Homer’s estate should sue”) is widely seen as a misbegotten and compromised take on The Illiad despite some cool fight scenes.  My fears about this weren’t exactly unfounded, I suspect Ebert would have been mixed about this film as well, but… I mean, there’s a reason I wasn’t on Ebert’s side on that one.

I don’t think Homer’s “Odyssey” needs a lot of introduction, if you live in the western world and received an even half decent education there’s a good chance you read it in school.  Indeed my main exposure to it came from 10^th grade English class (Robert Fagles translation) and have some nostalgic memories of the video we made as a final project on the book in which we Odysseus and Poseidon hash out their differences on an episode of the Jerry Springer Show.  That having been said, I did read that as a student doing homework and while I didn’t dislike the book I’m not going to pretend that it sparked some deep fascination in my fifteen year old self or that it turned me into a dedicated classicist.  I remember the broad strokes of the book but not all the details and I’m not going to claim to be an expert who can spot every single decision that Nolan made while turning this work into a film but I did feel like I remembered more about it than I expected to and will make the comparisons I can.

Before I get into what Nolan changed though I’m kind of in awe of just how much Nolan was able to include.  The Odyssey isn’t exactly the longest book in literature of anything, my old copy is about five hundred pages and that’s a verse translation, but it’s an eventful text filled with sections that are iconic elements of our cultural heritage that you can’t just casually omit.  Not too long ago they made an entire two hour feature that only covered the last few chapters of the poem so the notion that Nolan would be able to fit all of it into just three hours seemed pretty wild, and yet, he kind of pulled it off.  Just about every famous episode that I remember from the book is in here plus some events from The Iliad that are brought up in flashback and a couple of new elements are even added and yet the film does not really feel rushed or overly dense.  Nolan has also maintained the poem’s non-chronological flashback structure, which isn’t exactly surprising given that Nolan has long been known for structural trickery but his commitment to maintaining that is impressive given how much else is on his plate and for the most part he pulls it off without missing much.  There are some events that maybe get somewhat short shrift here or there with the sections on Calypso’s island in particular feeling fairly abridged despite some decent work from Charlize Theron in the role of the nymph in question, but for the most part Nolan managed to compress these events surprisingly successfully.

This is of course not to suggest that there aren’t major changes to be found here because there are, even to fairly famous episodes.  Take the adventure on Circe’s island for example; in the poem Circe is something akin to a queen living in an extravagant castle who’s thwarted because a direct intervention by Hermes and who also becomes Odysseus’ lover as he and his crew spend upwards of a year in her realm before leaving (something that would influence the larger Homeric Cinematic Universe).  Here though she’s played by Samantha Morton and is made to be something more akin to a Pacific Northwest Wicca practitioner living in a modest house, she’s thwarted through more mundane observations by Odysseus, and the Ithacans are happy to leave immediately thereafter.  I’m not complaining about any of this, it’s one of the highlights of the film and the body horror employed to depict that pig transformations is excellent, but it is kind of emblematic of some of the reinvention on display here which in many ways kind of smooths over some of the thornier elements of Greek culture from the poem and perhaps even Christianizes it.   For one, Odysseus is now a much more faithfully monogamous family man than he was in the books but perhaps more importantly it’s illustrative of how the influence of the gods on the story has been greatly transformed.  In the books the gods are always popping up in the story, often in person and just straight up telling Odysseus what to do and why they’re helping him.  Here they act more like Abrahamic gods; they certainly seem to be influencing the difficult waters Odysseus sails and occasionally offer prophesies through elaborate means, but they’re mostly off screen and work in “mysterious ways.”

That scene also plays into a larger thematic throughline of the movie in that Circe’s main motivation is that she assumes the Greek warriors to be a threat rather than someone to be welcomed under the “Law of Zeus” that the characters here keep talking about.  If I recall what my tenth grade English (shout out Ms. Matera!) told me this concept is actually called Xenia and is a sort of ethos of hospitality the Greeks held requiring them to take visitors into their homes and is the code that the suitors are exploiting to basically throw a years-long kegger in Penelope’s basement while Odysseus is away.  Odysseus and his men keep expecting to be greeted as guests under Xenia when they arrive at places like Circe’s home or the land of the Laestrygonians when they are instead feared as threats.  It’s later revealed that Odysseus himself believes this is a sort of karmic retribution for his own violation of the spirit of Xenia when his men used the Trojan horse as a dishonorable means of sacking Troy and unleashing a bloodbath upon it and that much of his demeanor later in the film is the result of guilt if not PTSD around this.  The consequences of this appear to be even larger than the trouble he faces on his own journey; back in Ithaca and later in Sparta we learn that throughout the Greek world there are reports of “people from the sea” sacking different areas, with Ithaca having added pressure to finally crown a king because of this threat.  As modern viewers we know this to be a reference to the “sea people” described in accounts of the famous Bronze Age Collapse that would in fact lead to the fall of Mycenaean Greece, suggesting that action has nearly apocalyptic consequences.

This entire Pandoran take is of course a Nolan invention, I don’t remember Homer’s Odysseus having anything like this same kind of guilt over his actions at Troy and if he did it wasn’t for the same reason and didn’t have the same effect.  This is all finally explained pretty late in the movie and once it’s laid out it makes a lot of what we’ve just seen come together and “click” with the rest of Nolan’s filmography, most obviously with his last movie Oppenheimer, which was of course also about a guy racked with guilt because his genius plan caused mass destruction with long lasting rippling consequences that may well destroy everything he was fighting for in the first place.  This is a little different than the atom bomb though as this is not just a single invention and Odysseus is not someone who passively handed it down to others, he was right their hiding in that Trojan Horse himself and got that blood on his own hands.  His ultimate sin wasn’t giving the world a new weapon (that horse trick is probably not replicable) but breaking a norm that kind of can’t be unbroken, he’s really more in the position of Truman than Oppenheimer but unlike Truman he wasn’t even really in the middle of a particularly just war, in fact this officially posits that the “face that launched a thousand ships” story was just a pretext for Greece to reclaim trade routes from Troy.

Clearly Nolan has some things on his mind about the world changing or the worst because of someone’s decisions given that they were central themes of his two most recent films.  When Oppenheimer came out some people speculated that this had to do with Nolan’s guilt over the mainstreaming of superhero films with his Dark Knight trilogy and how that genre took over Hollywood but frankly I think that’s a little glib.  The over-abundance of superhero films in the 2010s was annoying but I don’t think that’s akin to war crimes and I doubt Nolan does either.  I think this is much more likely to be tied more directly to modern politics both domestically and around the world.  We’re said to be living through the decline of a “rules based order” that’s being rapidly accelerated by stupid and selfish decisions on the part of people like Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu and these things are eroding any soft power that any of the major powers ever had and are eroding any sort of geopolitical trust that ever existed.  More profoundly the shamelessness of these people seem to be inspiring a similar brazenness in a lot of people across all walks of life who seem to be adopting an attitude of “nice guys finish last” and now aren’t even pretending not to be assholes and the world is becoming shittier and shittier because of it.  In the midst of times like these it probably isn’t too hard to see why Nolan would be so focused on dangerous turning points in history and their consequences.  Furthermore I can’t help but see, under this context, the suitors as something of a stand-in for the way bad actors exploit old norms of civility and procedure that were built for more genteel times and may simply serve to keep the good people who still believe in those norms from fighting back to restore order.

So, it’s not too surprising to me to see these very relevant concerns popping up in a movie released in 2026 but was Homer’s Odyssey really the ideal delivery mechanism for them?  There are definitely going to be people who feel this isn’t really that in keeping with Homer’s poem and those people aren’t really wrong, just as Roger Ebert wasn’t entirely wrong about the Lord of the Rings movies having a pretty different tone than Tolkien’s books.  So this probably won’t be one for the classicists, at least not the ones who aren’t pretty open to revisionism, and I’m similarly not sure what people who are completely unfamiliar with this story are going to make of it.  Watching the film’s reception in places like China where I imagine this story is just as foreign as “Journey to the West” is to us may prove interesting.  But the vast majority of the audience for this are going to fall somewhere between those camps and will consist of people (like me) who mostly know this story from either hazy high school memories or maybe from just cultural osmosis and those people are likely to be unencumbered by whatever adaptation reservations I might have and are going to be extremely well served by this movie.  As long as this review is I still don’t really have time to get into every choice Nolan made in putting this thing together.  There are tons of great things here I haven’t even been able to touch on (Matt Damon’s extremely solid movie star performance at the center, the excellent casting throughout, the excellent location scouting, numerous excellent set-pieces, etc) and I have my nitpicks too (Scylla sure sticks out like typical Hollywood CGI creature for a Nolan film, that fight with the suitors at the end could have been a few ticks better, the Travis Scott song in the credits feels a bit “how do you do fellow kids,” etc.) but by and large I’m quite satisfied with it and I think its take on the material is timely and interesting.
****1/2 out of Five

Cinemap: Oceania/Pacific Part 2

About a year ago I got a foothold in watching through films from the handful of Oceania island nations that I hadn’t yet crossed off my Cinemap list.  There were too many countries in the region to cross off all at once so I knew I was only going to be able to cross off one half of the remaining films in one go and leave the rest for another day… that other day has come.  In part one of my oceania tour I looked at movies from Papua New Guinea, The Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Fiji, The Federated States of Micronesia, and Samoa.  That leaves Kiribati, The Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Tonga, and Vanuatu left to cross off, many of which are even smaller and more remote than the locations from part one but I think I have a plan for how I’m going to tackle each of them.  I don’t think there are any countries here like the Seychelles that will force me to “cheat” too much but I will be seeing some real obscure and hard to find (well, they would be hard to find without the internet) stuff with a couple of exceptions but I will actually be starting with one of the region’s more high profile films.

Vanuatu: Tanna (2015)

Vanuatu is a series of Melanesian islands situated Northeast of Australia (in fact it’s closer to Australia than New Zealand is) but Southeast of the Solomon Islands and North of the French overseas territory of New Caledonia.  In their history they have the rather unusual distinction of having once been colonized by both Britain and France at the same time in some sort of elaborate co-oppressor agreement but despite being double colonized they seem to have preserved a lot of their culture, or rather cultures, more than a lot of places.  That may in part be because they’re particularly diverse, with each of their islands having something of its own identity with slightly different tribal customs.  Most relevant to the film at hand is Tanna Island, the archipelago’s third largest, which is notable for having an active volcano on it which has been turned into something of a tourist attraction.  Like the wider country Tanna Island is a pretty diverse place with various factions including people who live a modern industrialized lifestyle but also people who have retained a more traditional indigenous lifestyle and those people are the subjects of the movie Tanna.  In fact if you’re casually watching the early portions of the movie you might be inclined to think it’s set in the ancient past when it is in fact set in the year 1987.

Tanna is based on a real event that occurred when a pair of traditionalist tribes on Tanna Island were in conflict and as part of a peace process between them a marriage was arranged between the granddaughter of a village elder and someone from the other tribe, but the granddaughter in question has already begun a love affair with another villager and the two of them run off in a sort of “Romeo and Juliet” like story.  The film was made by a pair of Australian directors named Bentley Dean and Martin Butler (the film would eventually be nominated for a Best International Film Oscar under the Australian banner) and both of those directors primarily work in the documentary space and Tanna has a distinct docudrama feel despite being scripted.  The cast entirely consists of non-professional actors from local indigenous tribes and the film employs unflashy and often handheld digital photography for its visuals.  As a basic feat of filmmaking I’m not sure this movie is particularly impressive technically or stylistically and it’s story is fairly simple, however, it’s hard to ignore the fact that this is trying to act as a fascinating window into a unique culture.  You don’t necessarily get some sort of all-encompassing look at how these people live but you do get a neat little peak into it and also get an actual story to follow while doing it.  It’s like if you picked up on Robert J. Flaherty’s style, brought it into the modern day, and did it more ethically.  That’s pretty neat.
***1/2 out of Five

Palau: Islands on the Edge of Time (1996)

Palau is the westernmost Oceania country I’ll be looking at, in fact it’s not entirely clear to me why it counts as Oceania rather than Asia as there are actually further west than parts of Indonesia but they certainly seem to be more historically and culturally similar to the Pacific island nations that tend to make up Oceania.  The nation is East of the Philippians, North of Eastern Indonesia, and North West of Papua New Guinea.  The island initially fell under Spanish influence like its neighbor The Philippians, who briefly sold it to Germany, who then lost it to Japan during the First World War who proceeded to use it as a base for military invasions during the Second World War and once that conflict was over the island entered into a complicated relationship with the United States.  That relationship began with them looking like an overseas territory like Guam for a while but in the late 70s they turned towards independence, which proved complicated (more on that in a second).  Today Palau is still part of a “Compact of Free Association” with the United States alongside the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands which involves financial assistance and easy immigration in exchange for a U.S. Military presence in the island via Navy and Air Force bases.  This whole saga is of course at the center of the movie I selected to watch from the country.

Letterboxd only shows eight feature films from the nation of Palau, but one of those is actually a Korean TV show, one is a 3D documentary about coral reefs of which Palau’s is only small part of, and most the rest are shows I have no access to whatsoever.  So the film I went with was this rather dry documentary that runs about an hour and has a decidedly “public television” feel to it.  The film looks at post-war Palauan history from its declaration of independence through their fight to pass a constitution with preservationist characteristics that the U.S. did not approve of up to the (then) present and also includes some peaks into the contemporary lives of some locals.  The film is clearly meant mostly for an audience of outsiders and is meant to be a rough primer of the island nation for people who’ve never heard of it.  To the doc’s credit though it doesn’t much sugarcoat the extent of American quasi-colonialism going on in in the country and is pretty openly advocating for less interference.  So the film’s heart and intellect is in the right place but it’s sure not doing much to liven up the material and make it more engaging for people who aren’t already particularly interested in this material and visually it really doesn’t have much going for it.  It’s quite the “it is what it is” proposition and its audience is going to be fairly limited.
**1/2 out of Five

Kiribati: The Curse (2014)

I’ve always felt that the pacific island nation of Kiribati (which is pronounced like “Keer-eh-boss” despite the spelling) had a really cool flag.  It’s a little wider than most flags and has a rising sun over some waves with a gold bird flying above it.  The sunrise is partly a reference to the fact that the nation straddles the international date line making Kiribati the first nation to wake up every day.  The country also notably straddles the equator meaning they’re the only nation that spans all four of the world’s hemispheres.  That’s partly a function of the fact that Kiribati is a really widely spread country with its westernmost islands not being too far from Australia but its easternmost islands actually being around the same latitude as Hawaii.  So if you drew a circle around Kiribati it would be a very large place but the vast majority of that would be ocean as there are only about 32 islands, most of which are tiny little atolls.  In fact Kiribati is one of the Pacific island nations that’s been heavily endangered by rising sea levels due to climate change with some speculating that large swaths of the population may need to be relocated at some point in the future because of this.  During colonialism Kiribati fell under the British sphere of influence and for many years were known as the “Gilbert Islands,” named after the sea captain Thomas Gilbert, who sailed with another captain named John Marshall who also got an island chain named after him.  In fact the language spoken on the island is still known as “Gilbertese” and that is (I think) the language spoken in the film I’ve chosen to represent the nation.

Like a lot of tiny Oceanian countries there’s really not much of a film industry in Kirbati and Letterboxd only attributes three feature films to the country: a National Geographic documentary about Amelia Earhart, another documentary about an anthropologist who did some work in Kiribati but other work elsewhere, and the film I chose which is probably the most culturally relevant option but maybe not the most watchable option.  The Curse is a film made by an American named Eric Larson, who has helpfully posted the entire film with English subtitles on his personal Youtube channel.  According to the description on that video Larson made the film while stationed on Marakei Island during his time serving in the Peace Corps and that this was ostensibly a project he made on behalf of the Peace Corp to act as a sort of PSA about alcoholism.  I’m not sure what filmmaking background Larson had before making this, if any, but this is plainly very much an amateur production.  It was clearly filmed on consumer grade equipment by people with no real cinematography knowledge to speak of and who have no real ability to even capture natural light on screen.  The cast is made up entirely of non-actors who are being directed by someone with no real ability to channel them towards giving authentic performances and the blunt script does them no favors.  On top of all this the thing has the gall to run a full 112 minutes and it’s quite the chore to sit through.  I’m usually pretty willing to give generous grades to movies in this series that have origins of the “just making any movie is an accomplishments” variety and some part of me feels bad giving a super low rating to something like this which is inoffensive outside of its incompetence, was plainly never meant to be a commercial product, and wasn’t something that any rational person should have felt obligated to sit through the entirety of but… at the end of the day I’ve got to call it like I see it and seeing this was not fun.
* out of Five

Nauru: Far End of the Sea (2026)

Nauru is another island nation located in the Pacific due northwest of the Solomon Islands and unlike a lot of the other island nations I’m looking at it isn’t an archipelago or collection of island, it’s just a single island.  By size it’s the third smallest country in the world behind Monaco and the Vatican City and by population it’s the third smallest behind Tuvalu and the Vatican City.  Despite that there was a time when the country had immense wealth because it was built on a giant amount of phosphate, which was strip-mined for most of the 20^th Century, which worked well for them until the mine ran dry leaving them with little else to base their economy on and with most of the island interior completely devastated and at present almost everyone lives in the coastal areas and the place is filled with abandoned mining equipment littering the place.  It’s a pretty clear case study in what happens when you ignore environmental concerns and rely entirely on mineral extraction.  As you can probably guess there’s not much of a film industry in Nauru and when I was looking scoping out options to watch from the country I had kind of assumed this would be another situation where I’d be watching some obscure documentary that barely counts as a movie but then conveniently a professionally made Nauruan feature film made just this year showed up on Letterboxd to serve as a representative of the country.

Far End of the Sea is a 52 minute movie that appears to have been funded in large part by the Nauruan government.  I’m not sure exactly what the motives behind its making was as it’s clearly not something that was meant to sell tickets, after all it’s been posted for free on Youtube.  Maybe it’s meant to be some sort of stealth tourism advertisement or maybe it was made to play at a Nauruan history museum or something.  The film was directed by Australian filmmaker Matthew Holmes and is set sometime around the 17^th or 18^th century and looks at a Scottish sailor who washes up on the shores of Nauru after a shipwreck and encounters a Native Nauruan who is something of an outcast within his own village and needs to decide whether to turn this guy over to his elders (for likely execution) or to protect him from a rival tribe and try to help him get off the island.  This is, uh, not exactly the most hard hitting of stories about the encounter between indigenous people and European explorers, in fact I might go so far as to say it’s feel good sentimental fluff but as these things go this isn’t poorly made.  Matthew Holmes is a professional who knows how to make a film and he’s been given a reasonably large budget and shoots the island pretty well.  It maybe says something about how low my standards have become for some of these Cinemap entries that this is all it takes to impress me but, well, sure would have been nice if Kiribati or Palau had funded a glossy advertisement for themselves and as glossy advertisements go this is well done.
**1/2 out of Five

The Marshall Islands: The Sound of Crickets at Night (2012)

The Marshall Islands are a chain of islands located well to the Northwest of Australia and its nearby neighbors and to the East of the Federated States of Micronesia.  The islands were initially discovered by the Spanish, would be named after a British captain who charted them, but it was actually Germany that would colonize them as a “protectorate” in the late 19^th Century only to lose them to Japan during World War I, and it was that act of colonization that would lead them to be the site of several World War II battles and ultimately fall under American control.  This would unfortunately be the backdrop for what they may be best known for at this point; their island Bikini Atoll being used as the test site for several nuclear weapons.  That atoll (which the famous swim suits were named after in questionable fashion) did have a native population who were forcibly removed from their homeland and relocated to other Marshallese Islands with the ostensible promise that they could return some day but the tests proved more permanently toxic than originally anticipated and the place still isn’t really safe for long term settlement today.  That’s a nasty bit of recent history to be sure and the legacy of this event is also notably one of the themes of the film I’ve chosen to look at from the country.

Letterboxd attributes nine feature length films to the Marshall Islands and five of them were directed by the duo of Jack Niedenthal and Suzanne Chutaro with a sixth directed by Niedenthal and two other people, most of these available for free on Youtube on their own Microwave Films channel.  I’ve been burned by these regional “Youtube-caliber” amateur regional filmmakers before but I’ll say this one fell more on the “plucky go-getters” side of the super-indie spectrum and unlike some of the stuff I’ve watched from this series the people making this film had some experience under their belts that made this feel a bit more like a “real” movie despite having been made on a total shoestring.  The film is about an old man who was originally from Bikini Atoll and was haunted by the fact that he couldn’t return and who’s had to send his daughter and one of his two granddaughters abroad and his hoping to save up enough money to reunite the family.  This situation gets kind of upended when they take in an American who washed ashore with amnesia after falling off of a yacht, something the owners of said yacht are trying to cover up… and this guy may also be possessed by some kind of island spirit who’s looking to interfere in the affairs.  So, we’ve got a real plotline here and this isn’t just some dry social realist drama and while this looks like it was shot on fairly inexpensive equipment and stars a bunch of non-actors Niedenthal/Chutaro do have some know-how about how to shoot and pace something like this and the dialogue here isn’t terrible.  I don’t think the magical realist elements of this entirely come together and the movie ends on a bit of a whimper but I was mostly interested in it for the duration of its modest runtime.  That probably sounds like it’s damning with faint praise but I actually am legitimately impressed with what they managed here compared to, say, that I-Kiribati movie I watched.
*** out of Five

Tonga: When the Man Went South (2014)

Most of the countries that I’ve been looking at for this second half of my Oceania journey have been countries of the Micronesian and Melanesian variety but I’m ending on a Polynesian country, which is pacific island region that gets the most attention through media like the Moana franchise.  Specifically I’m looking at Tonga, an island nation located roughly North/Northwest of New Zealand roughly between Fiji and the Samoas.  As an individual nation removed from wider Polynesia they possibly get more attention worldwide for the antics of a guy named Pita Taufatofua, who’s managed to make his way onto the Tongan Olympics team several times and has always arrived at the opening ceremony in dramatic fashion wearing and wearing traditional grass-shirt adjacent leg coverings.  That guy seems cool.  Beyond that Tonga seems like a fairly middle of the road Pacific Island nation with a lot of commonalities to other nearby nations like Fiji and Samoa, both of whom they had contact with during the pre-European contact days through the legendary Polynesian sailing prowess.  Post contact with Europe they actually managed to avoid ever being formally colonized and have maintained a constitutional monarchy that goes back to the 19^th Century, only entering into a “protected status” arrangement with the U.K.  Overall seems like a bit of a feel good story compared to some of the countries I’ve encountered.  Also, which I can’t say they have a big film industry there were more choices for me to choose from with them than there were for some other countries.

The film I’ve selected is called When the Man Went South, which is set in (mostly) pre-contact Tonga and looks at the conflict between varying factions on one of the islands.  We see this through the eyes of a guy named Flying Fox who’s traveling the island for the first time and stumbles into a war between a western village and an eastern village who hate each other for petty reasons that are supposed to seem arbitrary and absurd to the viewer.  This ties into a sort of satirical bent to the film, which I wouldn’t say I personally found terribly funny but which is certainly trying to take something of a lighter approach to history.  Most amusingly one of these village is in the habit of calling members of the other village “Turtle Fuckers” while in turn inhabitants of that village get called “Parrot fuckers,” a pair of insults that raise anatomical questions.  The film’s dialogue is in the native Tongan language but the film also has an omniscient English speaking narrator who comes in and out kind of inconsistently and the comical take on the conflict probably does more to remove tension than it does to really make interesting points or elicit actual laughter.  So I’m not sure this is entirely successful on a storytelling level and I’d say its visuals are fairly pedestrian but there’s some nice scenery to be found and it’s cool to have a movie taking a look at an indigenous culture in a way that avoids “noble savage” tropes effectively and this is likely a worthwhile watch for anyone interested in indigenous cinema.
**1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion

And with that I’ve completed another continent and have seen a movie from every country in three of the six populated continents.  This was of course the second jaunt I’ve made through this Oceania/Pacific region and between the two I’m struck by the fact that cinema in this region seems to be a bit more intrinsically in touch with pre-colonial traditions than the movies I’ve seen in some other places.  Several of the movies I watched were set in pre-contact eras or very early in the era of contact and several were about people living more or less indigenous lifestyles even into the modern era.  Even the films set more firmly in the world of the present are still about characters who are in various ways trying to keep in through with the tribal ways of yore despite living “modernized” western style life, often involving a sort of magical realism.  That said, obviously there were some pretty janky low budget films I had to dig to find and even among the “real” movies I was able to find they often felt less like capital “C” Cinema and more like earnest nice tries.  Overall it’s a cool region I hadn’t thought much about and it’s cool that some high profile members of the diaspora like Dwayne Johnson have drawn attention to the region as there’s clearly a lot of material to mine from it.

In the next cinemap we’ll return one last time to the continent of Africa to watch movies from the last six African countries that remain gray on my map.

The Invite(7/9/2026)

Warning: Review has some spoilers

The Apatow led boom of R-rated comedies we got in the mid to late 2000s and 2010s is well and truly dead and in the past, and for that matter film comedy in general seems to really be a theme of the 2020s.  You would think that this would be a disaster for the breakout star of that era, Seth Rogen, and yet the guy seems to be doing pretty well for himself.  He might not be able to bring people to theaters in droves when he makes movies like Good Fortune but he has scored successes in more behind the scenes work on movies like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Madness and he’s also been very successful on the small screen with shows like the sitcom “Platonic” or the film industry sendup “The Studio” (for which he just won several emmys).  Perhaps more interestingly he’s come up with ways to insert himself into movies that weren’t necessarily written for him and for which he isn’t necessarily trying to entirely abandon his image but which hue closer to more conventional acting.  I’m thinking of things like Dumb Money, where he’s almost playing a straight man in an irreverent but not fully comedic work, or his work as Steve Wozniak in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs or his work in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar nominated The Fabelmans.  He’s doing something more than a bit like this with his latest film The Invite, which is certainly a comedy and one where he is in many ways doing his old shtick but in a much more middle-aged and serious minded way that is fairly interesting to watch.

The film takes place largely within the (very large) apartment of a couple in their forties who have been somewhat at odds of late.  Joe (Seth Rogen) was formerly in a modestly successful indie rock band but has now been reduced to teaching music at a not very prestigious college and Angela (Olivia Wilde) appears to be a stay at home mom whose at something of a wits end at the routine she’s fallen into.  The main story begins as Joe comes home and is surprised when it turns out that this is the night of a small dinner party with two of their neighbors, a former firefighter named Hawk (Edward Norton) and his Spanish wife Pina (Penélope Cruz).  Angela insists that she told Joe about this several days ago but he doesn’t remember this and feels caught off-guard, in no small part because he has some beef (possibly born of jealousy) with that couple over the fact that they’ve been making a lot of noise during sex at all hours of the night.  Joe considers using this night as an opportunity to confront them over this but Angela insists that he doesn’t make a scene like that and the following meeting proves to be something of a contrast between these more libertine neighbors and this more uptight couple.

Given that the film only has four speaking roles and largely takes place in one location the film feels a bit play-like and indeed it does have some stagey origins (more on that later) but I wouldn’t say that’s too much of a weakness here like it sometimes can be.  Like a lot of films based on theater it does sometimes strain credulity just how much movement certain character arcs make over the course of a single night but for most of the runtime this isn’t much of a problem and the “hothouse” aspects of it all kind of build up over the course of the evening and things escalate in a believable way.  It’s also notable that Seth Rogen does not feel at all like a square peg put into a round circle here, the film is still very much making use of the brand of comedy he once established and this is very much a comedic film with a lot of the kind of frank sexual dialogue that might have gotten laughs in a movie like Knocked Up in the past but it’s done in a more middle class milieu here and in what is perhaps a more mature context.

Olivia Wilde, who both directs and stars in the film, is also an able scene partner with Rogen and is pretty able to convey how frustrated this woman is while not exactly being blameless for some of her own issues.  Wilde never really formed the identity of a “comedy actress” but did make her directorial debut with the movie Booksmart, which was something of a (very well done) last gasp of that previous wave of R-rated comedy and has brought forward her chops here.  Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz are also kind of delightful and do a pretty good job of bring these free-spirits to life without making them seem like total caricatures, though there are some limits to what this script is going to allow in that regard as these people are in some ways meant to be foils for our main couple (who are the point of view characters for all of this) more than they are their own fully formed characters.  This isn’t to say there isn’t some complexity to them; we do eventually learn some interesting things about their pasts and we do get some glimpse into their own flaws but they ultimately are not the main subject of the movie outside of the contrast.

So what to make of that contrast?  Well, there were a couple of different routes I was thinking this might go down that it didn’t.  I had some suspicion that this may ultimately end up “both sidesing” the two couples’ outlooks and suggesting that Hawk and Pina are secretly just as miserable as Joe and Angela and while there’s some nuance there it ultimately doesn’t do that.  Hawk and Pina’s open-mindedness does end up just kind of does prove to be healthy for them for the most part.  I also suspected that this experience might end up being credited as re-invigorating Joe and Angela’s marriage on its own, which would have been simplistic, and the movie doesn’t really go there either. Alternately I suspected that the experience might specifically drive Joe and Angela apart or perhaps also infect Hawk and Pina with their same negativity, and while this is closer to what happens here that’s not really it either.  Instead the night is painted more as a sort of magnifying glass that clarifies a toxic status quo that the two of them were ignoring all along and while I might have liked the film to have been a bit more subtle about this rather than explaining it all in a literal therapy session, I would say it’s a reasonably smart conclusion to come to.

It should probably be noted that The Invite is actually a remake of a Spanish film from 2020 called The People Upstairs which was written and directed by a guy named Cesc Gay and based on his own stage play.  I don’t think that play was ever staged on these shores nor do I think that film ever got an American release and it would seem that Gay has been more interested in using localization to spread his work as this is actually not the first remake of this property.  In just a span of six years there have also been versions of this made in Italy, Switzerland, France, Czechia, Russia, and South Korea… it’s almost like this has been franchised out as if it were a fast food chain or something and that maybe makes this project feel a bit more mercenary to me than it might otherwise.  However, I think there is space to see this as a bit more personal than that.  Olivia Wilde is someone who recently had a messy divorce that played out across the tabloids and it doesn’t surprise me at all that she has thoughts of how marriages fall apart on the mind.  Of course I have no idea if her own divorce resembles what happens in this movie in any way but it does offer fuel for thought and even if this is entirely dispassionate at the end of the day it’s still a funny and well done film.
**** out of Five

June Round-Up 2026

The Furious(6/1/2026)

There’s been a bit of a vacuum in the world of kung fu cinema in the 2020s with Donnie Yen winding down his prime era career and the Indonesian action scene that The Raid brought attention to having never quite emerged like it once seemed destined to and it’s into that vacuum that we get The Furious.  This is a Hong Kong-US co-production with a pan-Asian cast that doesn’t really have much in the way of a central gimmick but is very much trying to give genre fans the fight scenes they crave.  On a storytelling level this movie is aggressively unimpressive.  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: bad guys make the mistake of kidnapping the daughter of a man with a particular set of skills and he hunts them down to save her.  Yeah, not exactly Shakespeare, and the dialogue is an even bigger problem.  Because this has actors from all over the place and it’s set “somewhere in Southeast Asia” the decision was made at some point for the movie to be in English rather any one Asian language and I’ve heard rumors that dubbing combined with digital lip adjustments may have been used.  I’m not sure if that’s true but the accent-less English dialogue here feels very out of place and monotone and does not do a lot to make up for the film’s sparse plotting, but there’s not much talking here at all (in fact several characters are mute) so this is less of a problem than it may otherwise be.  Importantly the film does mostly deliver with what people came for: the fight scenes.  I would not say that the choreography here is fundamentally doing anything that hasn’t been seen elsewhere but they’re all pretty elaborately staged and effectively shot.  Our star here is a guy named Xie Miao, who I don’t think has really gotten an international showcase before and there’s also impressive work here from The Raid alums Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian, and there’s a nicely moustache twirling villain performance by a guy named Joey Iwanaga.  The real breakout though may well be a guy named Brian Le (a stunt coordinator previously best known as the security guard who had an unfortunate encounter with a rather phallic trophy in Everything Everywhere All At Once) who plays a henchman here and despite being a hulking behemoth he proves to be really agile during the fights and probably delivers some of the film’s most creative fights.  This is probably not a movie I’d recommend to crossover audiences who aren’t going to be ready to accept some jank in order to see some martial arts goodness but genre fans will mostly be impressed and I’d definitely like to see if this leads to better things for all involved.
*** out of Five

Carolina Caroline(6/7/2026)

Carolina Caroline poses kind of a tricky film for analysis because it’s one of those movies where there’s nothing particularly “wrong” with it exactly but there also isn’t enough “right” about it to really make it stand out.  The film concerns a naïve young Texas woman who meets a handsome conman and is so stricken by him that she goes on a road trip with him scamming people along the way, an operation that eventually escalates into bank robberies.  So, 2026 Bonnie and Clyde, though these people initially seem quite a bit less violent than those two legendary outlaws.  That’s not the only movie this is derivative of though, I feel like there are something like a dozen other crime movies with nearly identical arcs and this movie does very little to really iterate on the formula or even particularly modernize it.  That having been said, as these things to this is reasonably well made.  Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner are both appealing in the leads and Adam Carter Rehmeier’s direction is solid in an unflashy workmanlike way, but they’re working with a script that does nothing new and does not stand out and it all feels like a bit of a waste.  I’m still inclined to give the movie a pass just for executing about as well as it can on familiar material and it’s perfectly pleasant to watch but in the grand scheme of things it’s going to be pretty forgettable.
*** out of Five

Leviticus(6/20/2026)

There’s a pretty long and storied history of horror films with queer themes (both positive and negative) but we have now come to the point where we can get a horror film that can cover these themes without hiding them behind several layers of allegory and coding.  That’s not to say that the new queer themed Australian horror movie Leviticus is without subtext but its main characters are straightforwardly gay and the forced most responsible for their plight is homophobia, albeit homophobia armed with some sort of supernatural curse.  The film concerns a teenager who’s recently moved to a rural area, in part because his mother wanted to leave to join an evangelical church in this place not knowing that her closeted son is a gay.  When she does learn this she allows her preacher to perform a ritual which afflicts him with a curse that results in him being attacked by a spectral force that appears in the form of whoever they are currently attracted to.  So we have a clear allegory for conversion therepy and instilled homophobia more widely, things done by straight homophobes ostensibly to “help” gay people but which really just inflicts violence on them and makes them paranoid around their own people.  It’s… very not subtle… and is made even less subtle when a character pretty much lays out the meaning in a line of dialogue at one point.  Yeah, I certainly don’t want to force horror movies to be less overt about these themes but there were some unintended benefits of that arrangement, like subtlety.  I’ll also say that while I find this setup to be interesting and maybe a little suspenseful in the paranoia it induces, I would not say the actual “horror” here is particularly scary or even that original, without the queer themes it’s kind of just a tamed down version of It Follows.  Still, I can’t be too mad at the movie, which I do think is still at least a little barrier breaking even in the year of our lord 2026 and enough of the acting and execution works to make this a decent enough watch.
*** out of Five

Supergirl(6/28/2026)

I’ve been pretty generous to the Marvel Cinematic Universe during its “flop era” but I’ve got to say that at this point even I have lost most faith in that endeavor.  While I’ve liked many, perhaps even most, of the movies they’ve put out to some extent I don’t think they’ve set up the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday well at all and I’m not sure it’s even possible to right the ship with that “cinematic universe” at this point.  As such, most hope for any kind of continuing “superhero universe” filmmaking has been directed to their distinguished competition in the form of the recently rebooted DC Universe and James Gunn’s Superman mostly delivered on that hope last year and I had fairly high hopes for its follow-up Supergirl, which felt like exactly the kind of thing that would fit into a James Gunn vision of a DC cinematic universe.  Unfortunately, things do not seem to have gone as smoothly for this second installment as people had hoped.  The film has gotten mixed to negative reviews and appears to be a substantial box office bomb opening to Morbius numbers which is disappointing to say the least.  Where did the movie go wrong?  Or did it even go wrong?  Maybe people are being unfair to it.  I’m leaning towards the latter but the film does make its share of legitimate mistakes and that makes it a little less easy to defend than I’d like.

Supergirl follows Kara Zor-El AKA Supergirl (Milly Alcock), the other known survivor from the destruction of Krypton and a younger cousin of Kal-El AKA Clark Kent AKA Superman (David Corenswet) but unlike him she was not raised on Earth from infancy and instead witnessed the plight of other Krypton survivors before finally being able to flee herself and she carries a lot of trauma from this.  She tries to deal with this trauma through hedonism and in order to do this she travels to planets with red suns under which her powers are diminished and thus making her susceptible to the intoxicating effects of alcohol.  While partying on one of these planets she encounters Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley), a teenager whose whole family was murdered by a raider named Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) and she wants revenge as a matter of family honor and is hoping to recruit Supergirl or some other warrior to assist her.  Supergirl turns her down initially but after she gets caught in the middle of one of Krem’s attacks her dog Krypto gets poisoned by one of Krem’s darts and the only way to save him is to track down Krem as the tries to escape in order to get the antidote and it becomes clear that Ruthye will follow her as she does this so Supergirl decides to go along with her.  The ensuing “mission” will potentially be harrowing but it could also give Supergirl a new direction in life.

The inspiration for this story is not hard to suss out. This is a film about an adolescent girl bent on revenge tries to hire someone to help them track and kill someone who wronged them and is annoyingly persistent about it and comes to learn something about the dangers of seeking revenge from the grizzled person they recruit… yeah this is openly derivative of Charles Portis’ “True Grit” and its two film adaptations.  In fact the movie almost seems to lean into this by directing Eve Ridley to closely resemble the looks and speaking patterns of Hailee Steinfeld from the Coen Brother’s 2010 version and you almost wish they had gender swapped or at least re-thought the look and sound of the character just to superficially distance this from its inspiration a little more.  This isn’t an inherently bad thing mind you, “True Grit with capes” is definitely something that could work but I’m not really sure that this pulls off the translation.  Part of the problem is that I’m not sure the stakes of Supergirl trying to dissuade this girl from seeking murderous revenge really make a lot of sense in this rather fantastical world or for this particular character.  Supergirl is setup here as something of an antihero (accusations that she’s depicted as a “girlboss” fall flat given that she’s largely defined as a hot mess throughout) and doesn’t seem to be all that above killing herself and it becomes rather odd to see her lecture this girl about not taking lives when the superhero antics we’re watching clearly involve dozens of nameless henchmen getting offed in various battles.

So, the movie’s take on revenge is extremely muddled and that’s a thematic sin that’s probably going to be an albatross around the film that’s probably going to keep the film from greatness no matter what but with the right execution the film could overcome that, and this one gets some of the way there but not all the way.  The biggest positive here is likely Milly Alcock in the lead, who definitely owns this role and manages to hit that sweet spot of making her character kind of a messy depressed person but also a likable enough hero.  Also while I take issue with some of how she seemed to be directed I think Eve Ridley was a pretty fun screen presence.  There are also some decent action scenes to be found here, nothing that’s going to totally break open the superhero movie genre but I was mostly entertained enough when the action stuff ramped up here.  I also mostly liked the various flashbacks we get to Supergirl’s past as a Kryptonian, which get us through the origin story efficiently without having it dominate the film.  In fact it kind of left me wanting more because a bit more of seeing this Kryptonian teenager trying to assimilate to life on Earth might have been interesting.  On the not so positive side; the science fiction trappings here are kind of middling to bad.  I enjoyed some of Supergirl’s “Rick and Morty”-esque nonchalance in the face of alien cultures she encounters but few of these planets or species were all that interesting and the movie could have benefited greatly from having a more “visionary” director than Craig Gillespie.  Also, while the film isn’t as music heavy as Guardians of the Galaxy the needledrops it does go for rather pale in comparison.

So, overall I think the movie is pretty mixed in a lot of ways; it’s got a promising concept, a decent cast, several good scenes but it’s brought down a bit by a flawed script and some uninspired visuals.  The thing is these are all flaws that superhero movies largely could have gotten away with pretty easily back in the 2010s when the appetite for superhero movies was unending and the most mediocre of MCU movies could still make half a billion dollars but the same margin of error isn’t there anymore.  In a vacuum I’d say this is probably better than, say, Captain Marvel and had it come out earlier it would have been much better liked but people are sick of these movies and you really need to wow people to bring audiences out and this just isn’t good enough to do that.  That’s unfortunate and an argument could be made that this will be a pretty big blow to Gunn’s DCU right as it was exiting the gate.  On the other hand the second MCU movie, The Incredible Hulk (the one with Edward Norton) was also iffy and that cinematic universe was able to recover from that pretty easily so who knows.  Personally I was a lot more willing to forgive this movie than I suspect a lot of people are going to be (I’m generally a softy for superhero flicks) but if other people aren’t into it, I get it.
*** out of Five

Closure: Miloš Forman

Miloš Forman is a filmmaker who’s long been a little easy to take for granted.  You’d think that wouldn’t be the case given that he made two all-timer Academy Award winning classics with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus and was a fairly successful filmmaker for much of his career, but despite that success he never quite became a brand name, which might partly because he never quite let him be pigeonholed into a single clique.  He began his career as one of the leading voices of the Czech New Wave, which for many directors would have been enough to solidify a reputation but Forman was only getting warmed up with that phase of his career.  One could also potentially lump him in with the “New Hollywood” crowd given that he was there to make one of Hollywood’s most successful counter-culture adjacent films of the 70s, and it would also be a mistake to define him by what appeared to be prestige work-for-hire work in the 80s and 90s.  I’ve seen all but six of Forman’s films and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to take a peak at all three stages of his career with my next project in which I’ll catch up on those six films, which will consist of two of his Czechoslovakian films, a forgotten entry in his New Hollywood phase, two of his 80s efforts, and a late career attempt at a comeback.  This should make for a much needed re-consideration of the man and his many nuances.

 

Black Peter (1964)

Miloš Forman’s debut film was called Black Peter and it’s probably one of the least discussed films in his filmography, being overshadowed by both his Hollywood efforts and also his other two Czechoslovakian films, which are considered international classics and have long held spots in the Criterion Collection.  Like most of the Czech New Wave this film is the product of the Prague Spring, a six year span in the middle of the 60s in which Czechoslovakia approached destalinization though a series of reforms that allowed for more creative freedoms than what you’d often see in Eastern Bloc countries during this period but just the same you won’t find any overt politics here as this is actually a very laid back coming of age movie looking at the life of a typical teenager in then contemporary times.  I’m not an expert on the Czech New Wave, which I tend to associate with more “out there” movies like Daisies but this film is on the “down to Earth” side of the movement and bears more resemblance to something like Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, which was also about a slightly aimless young man but I remember that being a bit more overtly comedic in its observations.  This one on the other hand seems to be a bit more interested in just reflecting a fairly universal teenage experience characterized by hanging with friends, squabbling with parents, and being inept at your part time job.  One would perhaps be tempted to assume that this was an autobiographical account but it likely isn’t.  Forman’s teenage years coincided with World War II and its aftermath and Forman, whose parents were both killed by the gestapo as resistance members during the occupation and who spent his adolescence looking for shelter, and were nothing like Peter’s.  In a lot of ways this is instead a depiction of how much easier the younger generation has it, but not in a condecening way and not blind to the personal problems these young people still have.  It’s also perhaps ironic, given that Forman’s later career is interpreted as a reaction to the repression he experienced in communist Czechoslovakia, seems to really make the place seem awfully normal (or at least this Prague Spring version of the country) with his first film with much of the “repression” being your typical teen malaise.  Overall, this is a perfectly good entrant into the coming of age movie canon but not necessarily one that does anything terribly remarkable outside of documenting the teen experience in this particular time and place and from a director who would go on to greater things, but it’s certainly perfectly well made for what its trying to be and you do see Forman’s early promise.
*** out of Five

Loves of a Blonde (1965)

Black Peter was not a huge success either at home or internationally but it did manage to snag the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and this was enough to put him in the good graces of the Czechoslovakian ministry of culture and this gave him a great deal of freedom with his next project.  He cashed this clout in to make a film called Loves of a Blonde, which would be inspired by a conversation he had with a young woman he met in a train station who told him about how she’d been lured there by a young man who promised to run away with her but who had actually given her a fake address.  This film imagines a similar woman and what her wider life must be like.  The movie’s title is a bit misleading; there’s only one “love” involved and while the woman in question does have blonde hair it’s not really a defining feature and she’s not some sort of pinup bombshell, rather she’s this rather down on her luck woman working in a provincial shoe factory.  She is quite young however and in a lot of ways this is as much of a coming of age movie as Black Peter is, albeit one that’s about a woman and set in a more rural and impoverished location.  The titular blonde, Andula, is a fairly naïve young lady who finds herself having a fling with a jazz pianist who plays a gig in her town but it seems that she believes this to be a more meaningful encounter than he does and decides to take a leap to meet him at his home, which leads to much awkwardness.  This is certainly a messier take on adolescence than Black Peter but not necessarily by a whole lot; in some ways Andula’s problems seem to be in some ways a typical messy youthful experience and she seems to have some joy along the way.  The sex scene seems to have been pretty enjoyable to her and Forman shoots this (mostly post-coital) scene with a lot of fun and energy.  In fact that whole movie is generally funnier and more adventurous with its cinematic style than Black Peter was and feels more like something that would be made during a “new wave” of sorts.  The film’s take on Andula’s unfortunate but ultimately somewhat low stakes plight struck quite a chorde; it was a huge hit in Czechoslovakia and also made waves abroad and even garnered a Best Foreign Language nomination from the Academy.  These would both be the case with his next film, The Fireman’s Ball (a movie I know I saw ages ago but have hazy memories of) as well, but that movie faced more internal controversy and would also be banned a year after its release in large part because of an invasion by the Warsaw Pact nations which brought an end to the Prague Spring and by extension the Czech New Wave in 1968.  It was clear to Forman that his home country would no longer be a place to express himself and that returning there may well lead to his arrest and as such he fled to the West and mostly never looked back.
**** out of Five

Taking Off (1971)

Miloš Forman already had an eye on leaving Czechoslovakia before the Prague Spring ended but his exit became particularly pressing when the Warsaw Pact nations invaded while he was away negotiating his first American project, a position that would have put in him potential criminal jeopardy for being out of the country without permission.  As such he opted not to return and instead went straight to Hollywood and fortunately for him the studios were very much in the market for outside the box thinkers who could tap into the youth market as part of the emerging New Hollywood.  Hollywood’s interest in Forman would pay off in a big way later in the decade when he made the Oscar winning triumph One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but his first Hollywood movie went a lot less smoothly with Taking Off a critical and commercial disappointment which is close to forgotten today in part because music licensing issues have kept it somewhat out of circulation.  The film is meant to be a comedy poking fun at the generation gap by focusing on upper class parents who respond to their kids becoming hippies in the most cringe ways possible.  Specifically it focuses on a couple played by Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin who begin panicking when they come home to find their daughter isn’t there and start making crazy assumptions about what nutty hippie shenanigans she must be up to.  In reality she’s at an audition for some sort of talent show and the film frequently cuts to various hippie performances at this audition throughout the movie including a performance by a 23 year old Kathy Bates.  Eventually these parents spiral into attending a sort of support group for parents of “missing” children where they’re encouraged to try smoking weed for strictly educational purposes to humorous effect.

Between this and his later adaptation of Hair I get the impression that Forman thought that hippies and their freedom loving ways were really goovy and viewed their movement as positive, especially coming out of a repressive society that he was always pushing back against in his own way.  However, he was also pushing forty when he made this and had two children and I think he was more of an outside observer of hippies than someone who really belonged amongst them and relates more to the “square” parents here and feels a lot more comfortable depicting them.  Outside of the (rather strange) audition material the actual hippies are by contrast mostly viewed through the eyes of the parents whether it’s the mostly silent daughter of the central couple or another girl that the Buck Henry character finds himself narcing on in another sequence.  The eventual conclusion the film comes to is ultimately a fairly healthy one: that once these parents stop being hysterical about sex and drugs and instead try to talk to their children rationally like human beings they can form a much healthier connection with them.  Makes sense, but like, that also seems like a fairly obvious point which maybe shouldn’t have required two hours of farce in order to get to.  On the other hand maybe this was a bit more relavatory in 1971 when this kind of gentle parenting was more of a new thing?  I’m not sure.  This is plainly very much a product of its time that’s commenting on a very specific cultural moment and it approaches this in a more direct and perhaps minor way than a lot of other New Hollywood films.  This is plainly minor Forman, especially in terms of this era of Forman, but it’s an interesting enough watch just the same.
*** out of Five

Ragtime (1981)

After Miloš Forman triumphed with the high grossing and Oscar winning hit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest he cashed in his clout making a big screen adaptation of the musical Hair and I’d say that was probably a misfire.  1979 was the wrong time and place to make such a film: the optimistic hippie vibe was dead and gone in the post-Watergate 70s and people also weren’t nostalgic for it yet either.  That movie could have easily been Forman’s entry into the ranks of New Hollywood disasters in the late 70s like New York, New York and Heaven’s Gate but it was kind of saved by the name recognition of the IP and ended up doing okay at the box office.  Unfortunately Forman’s humbling experience ended up just getting moved out a couple years as his 1981 effort Ragtime has a lot of the hallmarks of “Late New Hollywood Hubris” despite being made a few years after the end of the 1970s.  The film was an adaptation of the popular 1975 novel of the same name by E.L. Doctorow which has been described as “historiographic metafiction,” which is to say it tells a fictional story but in a way that mixes in real historical figures and concocts fake historical events.  This same novel would be adapted into a Broadway musical in the 90s but this is more of a straight adaptation and the musical genre in the title is only a minor element of the story.  The film is set in New York around the turn of the century and looks at a number of characters in the area including a millionaire who murders an architect for placing a nude statue of his chorus girl wife, another millionaire who takes in a black infant who’s been abandoned on his property, the father of that infant who arrives looking for it, as well as various other city officials.

Structurally, this is kind of an odd movie.  It ultimately culminates around a storyline where the father of the aforementioned infant gets into a feud with a racist volunteer fire chief which escalates to heights that border on being a race war, but it takes a long time to get to that and spends a whole lot of time on other storylines which ultimately feel a bit tangential to that and there’s something a bit unbalanced about it all; it kind of wants to be more of an ensemble piece but can’t really commit to that because certain storylines are just significantly more eventful than others and take up a lot more screen time to the point where you wonder why they felt this needed such a wide tapestry.  As far as the racial politics of all this, well, it kind of fits in well with the tradition of movies about race made by well-intentioned white boomers who don’t really know what they’re talking about.  The film frankly seems to rather underestimate how all-encompassing the racism of this time and place are and includes so many “good” whites that the fire chief comes off like an exception rather than the rule.  I don’t believe for a second that this guy would have been taken this off-guard by the slight that sets him off, as if he hadn’t been dealing with shit like that his whole life.  It might have worked better if he’s been treated to an onslaught of hate throughout the film with that just being the straw that broke the camel’s back but instead he comes off as kind of irrationally over-reacting when otherwise surrounded by fairly tolerant people.

It should also be noted that this was something of a wildly ambitious mega-production which reportedly cost upwards of $32 million to make.  To put that in perspective The Empire Strikes Back also cost $30 million and Raiders of the Lost Ark cost $20 million and Gandhi cost $22 million.  You can certainly see some of that on the screen with a lot of pretty elaborate sets and costumes but this also isn’t necessarily a trying to show off how “epic” it is at all times so it isn’t quite a “spectacle.”  Also, while the film managed to get James Cagney out of retirement in a rather notable coup (he’s fine in it), it doesn’t otherwise have what you’d call an “all star” cast at least in terms of the fame at the time of the people involved so in some ways you have a movie that needed to be a blockbuster to justify its budget but was actually kind of un-commercial in a number of ways and it ultimately paid for that.  It would be a mistake to paint this as being some sort of humongous disaster because it wasn’t exactly; it got fairly respectful reviews and managed to earn eight Oscar nominations and if they were doing ten nominees in Best Picture at the time it likely would have been among them.  It didn’t win any of those Oscars though and was generally viewed as a movie that “wasn’t quite there.”  As for the box office, it reportedly made about $20 million of its $30 million back, which is bad but not Heaven’s Gate territory, so Forman kind of “got away” with this one which is fortunate because it meant the studios trusted him with another $20 million budget to make Amadeus three years later.  However, I don’t think time has been too kind to this movie, in fact for a production of this size it feels downright forgotten and given that its racial politics haven’t aged tremendously I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon, but having said all that I do think it’s still interesting as a product of its time and Forman does do enough from a production standpoint to make this hard to be too mad at.
*** out of Five

 

Valmont (1989)

After the surprise box office and award season triumph of Amadeus Miloš Forman was back on top and had a lot of freedom to pick his next project and he chose… poorly.  His next movie would be Valmont, a film set amongst the 18^th century French aristocracy and concerns a libertine named Vicomte de Valmont who is challenged by wealthy widow to seduce and deflower the virginal fiancé of her lover leading to a great deal of intrigue.  Does this plot sound familiar?  That’s because this is an adaptation of the 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” which was of course also the same source for Stephen Frear’s Dangerous Liasons, which came out one year before Valmont to much success and completely overshadowed Forman’s film.  So we’ve got a Dante’s Peak/Volcano situation but with a specific 18^th Century French novel rather than a vague concept like “volcanos,” how did that happen?  Well the reason this source material was on the mind likely had a lot to do with the fact that in 1985 a Christopher Hampton penned stage adaptation of the novel opened on the West End and later Broadway with Alan Rickman playing Valmont to much success.  Frears’ Dangerous Liasons was a licensed adaptation of this stage version while Forman’s Valmont was a direct adaptation from the novel but I have my doubts that he would have thought to make this movie at this time without the stage version and I doubt he was blameless in creating this cinematic game of chicken and he really probably should have flinched rather than go through with this because even if he’d managed to finish his movie first I have my doubts that this would have worked out in his favor.

I should probably note that while I have seen Dangerous Liasons it’s been ages and my memories of it are a bit hazy so I’m not in much of a position to do a deep dive comparing the two and what they changed.  That said I do remember enough to know that the tone here is a bit different.  Dangerous Liaisons generally seemed a bit more interested in the wider society of decadence that it was set in where this one seems to be a bit more personal and focused on the characters as individuals.  That probably accounts for the one major change I do remember, which was the ending.  Frears’ film, like the novel, and even like the later modernized teen adaptation Cruel Intentions end with all the sordid details of what happened in the story being exposed to the public and kind of blowing up the society that in question but that doesn’t happen here and instead the survivors are kind of left to stew in the situation.  In fact the movie generally seems to be a bit more sympathetic towards its central protagonist (and title character) despite the fact that it’s about his attempts to deflower a fifteen year old for sordid reasons.  That’s not to say that Forman condones his actions but notice that he casts Colin Firth in the role rather than someone like John Malkovich who can be a bit more convincingly sleazy.  The focus is more on Valmont’s obsession with the Marquise de Merteuil to the point of being willing to do damnedable things in order to bed her rather than his role in a more sordid societal web.  I… don’t think that’s the more interesting take, or at least it’s not the more entertaining.  This actually cost quite a bit more to make than the Frears movie despite having a less buzzy cast and obviously grossed substantially less while also getting worse reviews.  It was just a fail any way you cut it and Forman was lucky to bounce back from it in the 90s to some extent because he really squandered a lot of goodwill with this.
**1/2 out of Five

Goya’s Ghosts (2007)

Miloš Forman mostly bounced back from the failure of Valmont pretty well and had a pretty successful 1990s.  Neither The People Vs. Larry Flynt nor Man on the Moon reached the critical highs of something like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but they were both mostly viewed a decent award season also-rans which have their fans.  For whatever reason though it seems Forman had a falling out with Hollywood during the 2000s however and during that decade he would only make one last movie and he’d make it in Europe, albeit in English and with top level talent in front of the camera.  That film is Goya’s Ghosts, which I remember being released to very little fanfare in the summer of 2007 and if Forman’s name wasn’t on it I question whether it would have even gotten that, but that’s not to say the movie is completely worthless.  The Goya of the title is of course the famed Spanish painter Francisco Goya, who is played here by Stellan Skarsgård, though this is not strictly a biopic so much as it’s a fictional historical drama in which Goya is one character.  In fact I highly suspect that this movie was sold to investors as something which would do for Goya what Amadeus did for Mozart, spin a drama around years of interaction between a master artist and another character, in this case a fictional clergyman named Lorenzo Casamares (played by Javier Bardem) with ties to the Spanish inquisition and later the French revolution after Napoleon conquers Spain.  The thing is, Casamares is no Salieri.  He’s got interesting elements to him on paper but not interesting enough to carry a movie and he’s not a clear counterpart to Goya like Salieri was for to Mozart.  In fact Goya feels a little tangential to a lot of this stuff; the idea seems to be that the film will illustrate the politics that inspired the painter but he’s largely an observer rather than a participant in it all and he’s not even a point-of-view character for much of the film so it all seems a bit odd.  I’ll also say that this maybe lacks some of that production excellence that characterized Amadeus; there are decent sets and costumes to be found but Forman’s compositions feel a bit lazier and he doesn’t seem to work as effectively with cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe as he did with longtime collaborator Miroslav Ondříček (who retired around 2001).  Ultimately the Amadeus comparisons with this film aren’t entirely fair and this film would probably seem a bit more impressive if it wasn’t the end point of a legendary filmmaker, but it’s definitely a mediocrity to go out on in a lot of ways.
**1/2 out of Five

Conclusion

Forman would live another eleven years after the release of Goya’s Ghosts but didn’t make any more films and seemed to keep a pretty low profile during those years.  Having finished seeing his entire filmography what are my takeaways.  Well, I’m very glad to have seen Loves of a Blonde, that one’s certainly a gem and I’d love to see Criterion finally get that a blu-ray/4K release and it also made me want to revisit The Fireman’s Ball, which I saw a very long time ago and barely remember.  A boxed set of those Forman’s three Czech films would be very cool.  As for the rest of what I watched… obviously these are lesser works but all of them are interesting in their ways.  Taking Off is quite the time capsule of its era, Ragtime is an admirably ambitious swing, Valmont is an interesting case of “twin films” comparison, and for its flaws Goya’s Ghost is still a thematically fitting final film given his pet themes of repression and revolution.  I’ll also say that watching these lesser works from throughout Forman’s career has given me more appreciation of his wider career, which is one that’s often been easy to take for granted.  He wasn’t the most prolific filmmaker but I don’t think any of his movies were total failures and when you have stuff like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus under your belt it’s real easy to cut some slack for the occasional Valmont.