Steven Rubio's Online Life

african-american directors series: eleven p.m. (richard maurice, 1928)

A true curio, an historic film, and a perfect fit for Black History Month. Richard D. Maurice was (and is) a little-known figure in early film making who founded a film company in Detroit in 1920. The company's first feature, Nobody's Children, was released that year ... there are no known existing prints. The exact release date of Eleven P.M. is unknown, but it came near the end of the 1920s. Those are the only two feature films known to have been produced by the Maurice Film Company. Maurice went on to become involved in railroad workers unions.

Surviving prints of Eleven P.M. are in poor shape, but it is possible to watch the film today. And it's an oddball, silent, filled with imaginative techniques, narrative complexity, and unexpected turns. One can assume a low budget, as many of the actors play multiple parts. This gets very confusing at times ... Orine Johnson appears to play a key character's girlfriend, the girlfriend's mother (those two appear in the same scene, I'm not so sure about that), and the girlfriend's daughter as a grown woman. So much of the film is confusing, as the story jumps ahead years at a time ... sometimes we see a title card reading "A few days later", other times we're left to infer on our own that years have gone by. Generous film historians have called Maurice's film "experimental", and that's certainly possible. However odd the movie gets, you're regularly reminded that there is some talent behind the camera. But having said that, the final result isn't notably better than cult trash classics by the likes of Ed Wood. The acting is variable (and that's putting it kindly), the plot is incoherent (intended or not), and while it's kinda fun to see the hero reincarnated as a dog who gets revenge on the villain, the effects are painful. It's no surprise when, after barely more than an hour of screen time, everything is wrapped up with "it was all a dream".

Eleven P.M. is worth seeing, although its presence on the Slate New Black Film Canon of the 75 best movies by Black directors says more about the few existing examples of silent Black films than it does about the quality about this film. You can watch the entire picture on YouTube.

comanche station (budd boetticher, 1960)

I'm taking on another challenge. This one is The Criterion Challenge 2025. It's the fifth annual, my first try. "There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories ... between 1/1/25-12/31/25." There is no specified order, so I'll watch them as I get to them. Today's category is North American film.

The final film in the Ranown series of Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott. Criterion released five of them in a box set, and you can see why. These are short pictures, B-movies really, made on low budgets but with plenty of talent behind the camera and the commanding presence of Scott on screen. They work as a group, even if they weren't exactly intended that way ... you could watch Criterion's box and never feel like any particular movie jolted you out of your viewing pleasure. The pleasures are minor, though. These are not grandiose, and the themes, while evident, do not beat you over the head. If you enjoy Westerns, these are like comfort food, a little better than a typical television series but not enough better that you'd notice if you weren't paying attention. I'm talking about the group rather than the movie, because Comanche Station isn't a lot better or a lot worse than the others. Claude Akins does nicely as the heel ... the heels in the Ranown cycle are often fun to watch and not completely evil. The Native Americans are stereotypically bloodthirsty. And Randolph Scott lends his authority, as he does in all the pictures.

i'm not there (todd haynes, 2007)

This is the twentieth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 20 is called "Different Strokes Week":

The biopic is a more-or-less tried-and-true staple of the movies. The desire to tell the story of intriguing, remarkable, or talented people is understandable. Yet, often, the creativity or uniqueness of these subjects is lazily stretched over the unimaginative framework of The Standard Biopic: birth, struggle, success, downfall, redemption, and death. But extraordinary skill and intriguing lives deserve more than a paint-by-numbers approach. After all, these are people who, for one reason or another, stand out from the crowd, and drafting their stories with a humdrum blueprint is almost insulting. Luckily, not every biopic is so generic.

This week's challenge is to watch a film found on Darren Carver-Balsiger's Unconventional Biopics list. Like most things, some work better than others, but at least the filmmakers thought it worthwhile to honor their chosen subject's real-life story with a deservedly uncommon approach, and that, at least, is worth a couple of hours of our attention.

Now this is my kind of category: a biopic that trashes the idea of biopics. Todd Haynes doesn't make it all up, but he does make it unimportant whether this or that scene "really happened". He doesn't think you explain Bob Dylan that way ... well, I doubt he thinks you can explain Bob Dylan, but you can sniff around the edges, get a deeper feel for the artist than you might have before you saw the film. If there's a flaw in I'm Not There (and I don't know if it should even qualify as a flaw), it's that I imagine it's unintelligible to people who aren't fairly involved in thinking about the Legend of Dylan. The film references many famous moments, but it doesn't often put them into any specific context, and the movie is useless if you are looking for a Wikipedia-style summary of Dylan's career. No, Haynes evokes some of the feelings Dylan inhabits in our collective imagination.

To take the most obvious starting point, there is no character named "Bob Dylan" in this biopic of Bob Dylan. Instead, six very different actors portray Dylan-type characters that roughly correspond to various moments in Dylan's life and career. It's not all that helpful to list them, but here goes. There's Ben Whishaw as "Arthur Rimbaud", a poetically-minded teenager; Marcus Carl Franklin as "Woody Guthrie", an 11-year-old black kid who carries a guitar with a case that reads "this machine kills fascists"; Christian Bale as "Jack Rollins", a folk singer with a career reminiscent of early Dylan; Heath Ledger as "Robbie Clark", an actor who plays Jack Rollins in a biopic; Richard Gere as "Billy the Kid"; and best of all, Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn", who is clearly modeled on the Dylan that went electric. Does it "make sense"? I doubt it, if you don't already have this stuff in your head. But if Dylan's career is part of your own history, then I'm Not There is magical, delightfully so.

And this is best exemplified by Blanchett's performance. She was nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar, and all of her fellow nominees are excellent actors, including eventual winner Tilda Swinton, and it's not like the Academy ignores Blanchett, who already had a Supporting Actress Oscar at the time and who later won a Best Actress award as well, but geez. I don't know that there is a better portrayal of Bob Dylan on film than Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn". She is remarkable.

So yes, I think the audience for this movie is fairly narrow. But within those confines, it hits the spot. It exposes A Complete Unknown for the merely good movie it is. #352 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

the story of temple drake (stephen roberts, 1933)

I'm taking on another challenge. This one is The Criterion Challenge 2025. It's the fifth annual, my first try. "There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories ... between 1/1/25-12/31/25." There is no specified order, so I'll watch them as I get to them. Today's category is Criterion Releases Never Picked in the Closet.

I was surprised to find The Story of Temple Drake to be the kind of film where it's almost more interesting to talk about its surroundings than about the film itself. The most recent one I watched was Dead & Buried ... when I wrote about it, I mentioned the big-but-not-yet famous names behind the scenes, a cast of former TV "stars" and a future horror icon, and finally, after I'd used up my anecdotes, I said a few words about the movie, which wasn't very good.

The Story of Temple Drake has a lot of those "behind the scenes" stories. It's known as a pre-Code film that is in some ways blamed for the ultimate strengthening of the Code ... Temple Drake went so far, Hollywood had to do something. It was based on the Faulkner novel Sanctuary, set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. There are stories that Faulkner wrote it because he knew it would be popular ... I guess he was tired of waiting for the general public to fall in love with As I Lay Dying. Wikipedia has some choice quotes. "Most reviews described the book as horrific and said that Faulkner was a very talented writer. Some critics also felt that he should write something pleasant for a change.... Faulkner once headed a troop of Boy Scouts but the administrators removed him from his position after the release of the book." There was rape with a corncob, syphilis, impotence, prostitution, and lots of extreme drinking during Prohibition. The book was a hit, and so the idea was proposed that it be turned into a movie. Yeah, right. Cartwheels were turned to stuff the events of the novel into acceptable form, but even then, The Story of Temple Drake was scandalous ... popular, but scandalous. George Raft had been offered the male lead, a gangster, but he turned it down because even George Raft worried his career would be ruined if he played such a worthless character (the part was taken by Jack La Rue).

And here is where the film enters history. With the final tightening of the Code, any pre-Code movie with "unacceptable" scenes would have those scenes edited out before the movie could be re-released. Often, the parts that were edited out were destroyed by the studios, leaving lots of mangled pictures for future film historians. But The Story of Temple Drake was so beyond what was allowed that editing out one scene was never going to be enough. So no editing was done, it just was never re-released. The movie essentially disappeared, for almost 80 years. But when the Code was long gone, lo and behold, there was Temple Drake, unmangled. So the version we see today is the correct one.

Usually with movies like this, I end by pointing out the film is poor. But in fact, The Story of Temple Drake is excellent. Miriam Hopkins is at her 30s best in the title role, and La Rue is marvelously scary. The use of close ups was extensive and added to the terrifying nature of what we were seeing. There were some fine films from Hollywood in 1933, and Temple Drake stands with them, perhaps best-paired in a double-bill with Design for Living, which also starred Hopkins. What a delight to finally encounter this film.

geezer cinema: flow (gints zilbalodis, 2024)

It's nice when a movie gets a lot of almost excessive praise, and then lives up to the hype. Flow is one of those movies. It takes genre standards and then fiddles with them enough to make something new, miraculously resulting in a family movie that isn't forcefully sappy. It's the story of a cat that experiences a flood, with the film showing the efforts of the cat to survive.

Someone working on that movie knows a lot about cats, because the Cat acted as realistically as any movie cat I can remember. Dog lovers might get a similar feel from the Dog, in this case a yellow lab. The underlying message is very quietly expressed: in a disaster, the only way to survive is for disparate types, some enemies of others, to work together.

If I had to identify exactly what makes Flow so special, I'd point to the absence of human-spoken dialogue. I can't imagine this working with a celebrity voice cast. All we hear are the sounds of nature, yet we get the gist of what is happening. This absence of human-spoken dialogue is enormously helpful ... the narrative evolves in what feels like a natural way, without the kind of documentary tricks that in the 50s would turn a wolf or an eagle into a substitute human. The music on the sound track is very effective at leading us through emotional moments. Again speaking as a cat person, the mews of the Cat were heartbreaking at times, and I can't remember the last time I felt so invested in a movie having a happy ending. I simply did not want the Cat to die.

I did find the animation to be touch and go. The settings are gorgeous, but the animals are drawn in some more old-fashioned way, and at times, they looked blockish (the Dog in particular took me back to my Commodore 64 days) . I have a feeling I'll be arguing with myself for years about whether this is better than The Wild Robot or a bit shy of that fine film. (I've changed my mind three times and I only saw Flow last night.) What a pleasurable argument to have.

touchez pas au grisbi (jacques becker, 1954)

This is the nineteenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 19 is called "Marty's Friends Week":

It was a huge deal when Martin Scorsese, father of famous TikToker Francesca Scorsese, joined Letterboxd. He also happens to be one of the most acclaimed directors of all time, with a career spanning around 60 years and surprisingly only 1 Oscar. He does have a Palme d'Or, making him the first winner to join Letterboxd, a club that now includes Sean Baker and Wim Wenders. If you're looking for a double feature or "companion" film to Taxi Driver or any of his other films, he has a list for you.

This week's challenge is to watch one of Martin Scorsese's Companion films, and for extra credit, make it a double feature with the corresponding Scorsese film.

Scorsese suggested pairing this film with The Irishman. He wrote, "It was all about the emotions of the characters, the friendships, the betrayals. It was about the gradual, inevitable unfolding. [It involved} very carefully, painstakingly planned criminal enterprises ... and in each one everything is very cool, deliberate, quiet throughout: even the violence and the betrayals happen quietly."

Grisbi is indeed cool and deliberate. Becker seems to be creating his own version of French noir here, with noble-but-flawed protagonists, nefarious women, and events that don't go as anticipated. The stakes feel low key, until they don't. Jean Gabin is perfect as the thief who is ready to retire ... he was pushing 50 when this film was made, his career had been in a slump, but his tired face touched audiences, and he entered another peak for his films. Besides Gabin, the cast is interesting, with Jeanne Moreau in an early performance, Italian Lino Ventura in his first film, even former Miss America Marilyn Buferd. The ensemble offers at least the illusion that the underworld we are seeing is accurately portrayed. Even Gabin, the big star, blends into the atmosphere.

It's the second film I've seen directed by Jacques Becker (I also saw the later Le Trou), and he is a solid, confident film maker based on those two movies. He was once an assistant to Jean Renoir, which isn't a bad way to learn a trade, and I think you can feel a similar affection for Becker's characters as that shown by Renoir. Grisbi is a bit better than Le Trou, I suppose, but while I don't want to damn with faint praise (for it is no insult to say Becker falls short of Renoir), neither film strikes me as a classic. Very good, worth seeing, and what's wrong with that?

geezer cinema: september 5 (tim fehlbaum, 2024)

September 5 is a tense, compact thriller based on fact, when ABC, who were broadcasting the Olympics from Germany in 1972, was stuck into the middle of the ultimate in breaking news, as Palestinian militants entered the Olympic Village and took Israeli athletes hostage. This basic story would seem to be impossible to screw up ... the real-life tension can't be avoided. And Tim Fehlbaum doesn't screw up.

But the premise of the movie strikes me as a bit off. The film makers aren't trying to hide anything, and while my misgivings remained at the end of the movie, they were the same misgivings I might have had before I'd even seen it. Because the focus isn't on the hostages. It's on the ABC people sending the news across the globe. The central issue has nothing to do with Middle East politics, but instead with journalistic ethics (and some professional turf fighting tossed in). We admire the ABC crew as they work in real time to tell the story unfolding before them, and we feel for them when in the heat of the moment they get something wrong (reporting, along with most of the media, that the hostages were safe when in fact they were all eventually killed). The crew is doing their best under trying circumstances, and it is there Fehlbaum identifies the tension.

My complaints about all of this don't feel right, but those misgivings won't go away. The film sticks largely with the facts ... there is a German woman who works as a translator who is an invention, but for the most part, we see actors portraying real individuals, and of course, it's all supported by existing footage, most powerfully of Jim McKay, whose online presence is part of American news history. You could show this to a journalism class that wondered how it used to be. No actor could convey the immediacy of McKay's now-famous lines:

When I was a kid, my father used to say "Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized." Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They've now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning, nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone.

look back (kiyotaka oshiyama, 2024)

This is the sixth bonus film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Bonus Week 6 is called "Letterboxd Top 250 Week":

As I'm sure many of you can relate, Letterboxd has personally enhanced my movie-loving experience and I am very grateful that it exists and for the kind of community it can create as with the Letterboxd Season Challenge that so many have taken part in over the decade. As Benjamin Milot pointed out when he created this theme as the first bonus challenge on LSC's 5th anniversary, Letterboxd itself is the ultimate host for LSC and we honor it by watching one of the movies currently on its Top 250 Narrative Feature Films list.

This bonus challenge is to watch a movie from Letterboxd's Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films.

Kiyotaka Oshiyama makes his feature debut with this film, an anime adaptation of a manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto. It's a coming of age tale of two girls, both talented artists, who team up to create a manga that becomes popular. The film is gorgeous to look at, and the characters and their relationship to each other are appealing. The approach to the film is artful, but I fear it was too artful for me, who often struggles to follow complicated narratives (that's on me, not Oshiyama). In this case, the two girls grow up, and that part of the story is clear and interesting. Serious events occur, and the girls growth into adulthood is believable. But then there are what appear to be reverse time jumps that I didn't follow, and I was no longer sure if what I was seeing was all part of one fractured timeline or if in fact we were experiencing multiple times. Most people will probably get through this without any problems, despite my own confusion. In the meantime, it's beautifully drawn, with touching characters.

the lower depths (jean renoir, 1936)

I'm taking on another challenge. This one is The Criterion Challenge 2025. It's the fifth annual, my first try. "There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories ... between 1/1/25-12/31/25." There is no specified order, so I'll watch them as I get to them. Today's category is the 1930s.

I recently updated my Letterboxd list of the top 100 directors of all time. I usually try to come up with some new methodology for making this list, and one thing I always check is the position of Jean Renoir, because if you just asked me on the street who the best was, I'd say Renoir, but when I concoct some method to adjust for my subjective approach, he's never #1. On this latest list, I have him at #6, up from #9 the last time I did this. I love all of the directors ranked above him, but I can't honestly say any of them are better than Renoir.

It's funny, I say this even though I'm still woefully behind on seeing his films. The Lower Depths is only my 8th, which Letterboxd tells me means I've still got 80% of his movies to go. But of those I have seen, two are acknowledged classic (The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion), a few more are as-good-as classics (especially including French Cancan), and all of which are at worst wonderful. The Lower Depths doesn't change any of that, although I'll admit it's "only" wonderful.

The film is based on a play by Maxim Gorky, and was filmed a year before Grand Illusion. One point I found fascinating is that after writing the screenplay, Renoir showed it to Gorky to see what he thought. I admit to knowing little about Russian literature, and I assumed Gorky was a contemporary of 19th-century Russian writers like Dostoevky, but Gorky was still alive and available for Renoir. The film tells the story of a Baron on the way down, and the people in "the lower depths" he would meet in his poverty. Among them is a thief, Pépel ... they meet when the Baron catches Pépel in the act of stealing from him, only to assure his new-found friend that he had nothing, everything was lost. Eventually, the Baron takes residence in the same flophouse as Pépel, along with various other characters. The film is pretty stagy ... its origins are obvious, and most of what we see takes place in that flophouse.

It's known for the excellent acting. Louis Jouvet plays the Baron and the great Jean Gabin was Pépel ... their acting styles were different, and meshed perfectly with their characters. Suzy Prim was Pépel's former lover. The story isn't unusual ... rich man turned poor, poor people remaining poor. As usual with Renoir, everyone is treated with a humane touch, even the villains. There is something universal about Gorky's play ... Renoir was able to keep its spirit even as he moved the setting to France, and in the 1950s, Kurosawa moved it to Japan during the Edo period, with the inevitable Toshiro Mifune as the thief. The transition from Russia to France is mostly seamless, although it takes a bit of getting used to hearing French characters with Russian names like Vassilissa. The Lower Depths is not where I would start if I was beginning my Renoir experience, but it's a fine addition to his canon.

Here, Pépel has been arrested for robbing the Baron:

film fatales #222: the fits (anna rose holmer, 2015)

This is the eighteenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 18 is called "American Neorealism Week":

One of the most famous movements in the history of film is Italian neorealism, which was a way for Italians to contend with the social and economic crises that led to WWII and Mussolini's fascism through movies. These films centered on poor or working-class people and were shot with low budgets, on location, and with non-professional actors. Hollywood, with its big studios, big budgets, and big movie stars is the exact opposite and so most American movies fail to tell the stories of the ordinary people living in the Unites States or Canada today. There are a few directors and movies that do focus on depicting poor and/or oppressed people without prejudice in their filmmaking, and shine a light on the real people that make up a large portion of the world and who reveal the vast disparities in quality of life and in the social and economic structures that play such a pivotal role on the people all around us.

This week's challenge is to watch a movie that could be classified as American neorealism. Here is a list from Keyser Soze to help out.

I think this challenge is a bit misleading. Italian neorealism existed, yes, and the above description is accurate enough. And if you treat all American movies as coming under the "Hollywood" umbrella, you will definitely find big studios, big budgets, and big movie stars. But there are more than a few "directors and movies" that "shine a light on the real people".

The Fits is as far from a big-budget Hollywood movie as you can get. It's reminiscent of the Italian neorealist movement. But I don't have problems finding movies like The Fits. Sure, it's not as easy as just turning up at the local multiplex to watch the latest Marvel movie. But you can find films like The Fits. I don't say this to brag, but only to make a point: there are 186 films on "Keyser Soze's" list above, and I've seen 76 of them. OK, I watch a lot of movies. But The Fits stands on its own, not as part of an emergent American neorealism but as a strong first feature film from a director working on a small budget with non-professional actors.

The Fits is an interesting slice-of-life drama with gentle fantasy elements. The title confused me at first ... I thought perhaps it referred to the outfits worn by the young dance troupe at the center of the story. Then, when individual troupers began having unexplained seizures, I thought the titular reference was to those "fits". And that's closer, but while there are indeed unexplained seizures in the movie, at the end, they remain unexplained, and the movie is the better for it. Writer/director Anna Rose Holmer isn't making an explicit horror film, nor as far as I can tell is she making a metaphor for adolescent young girls, the way something like Ginger Snaps does. (Among other things, Ginger Snaps is an explicit horror film, of course.)

Holmer extracts great things from her non-professional cast, most obviously the delightfully-named Royalty Hightower in the lead. Hightower has continued acting since making this film, and she has great promise. But that promise is already fulfilled in The Fits. She is in virtually every scene, and while she doesn't have a lot of dialogue, I feel like we got to know her character in some depth. It's a very low-key movie, and I admit I'd probably rather watch Ginger Snaps for the umpteenth time than revisit The Fits. But it's a solid film.