Blood on Melies' Moon

       Luigi Cozzi in the basement of the store he manages, Profondo Rosso              

I ran across Luigi's Cozzi's Blood on Méliès' Moon on Tubi and, expecting little, was pleasantly surprised. The 2016 film is also available on a handsome disc by the fine people at Severin Films. By any reasonable set of standards, Blood... is a piss poor film, shoddily written, clumsily staged and ineptly acted. A home movie with CGI asides. Slipshod direction has been Cozzi's trademark for over five decades, so I was prepared for a complete debacle. His directing credits include such dreck as the Lou Ferrigno starring Hercules and the Star Wars rip-off Starcrash. Nevertheless, the 'amat' in amateur means love and the love Cozzi has for films and film history permeates Blood on Méliès' Moon even when its display of film craft would embarrass a neophyte. Cozzi's quest in the film is noble and heroic even if it resembles that of Don Quixote rather than Galahad.

Besides the goofy directing credits Cozzi has amassed, he was a frequent collaborator of Dario Argento. I joked in an earlier column that I was an acolyte in the cults of various auteurs, but Cozzi really does live his life devotedly promoting the work of the giallomeister. A quick comparison of Cozzi's work to Argento's displays the latter's superiority. Argento's camera placement and use of color put him in another league compared to a camp follower like Cozzi. Cozzi is well aware of this, though, and has kept the flame of his comrade's work alive through documentaries and books. He even runs a horror film gift shop in Rome, a gialloreia if you will, called Profondo Rosso after the Argento film. The shop has a basement in which all sorts of Argento related bric-a-brac  is on display for ravenous horror fans. Inevitably, the basement becomes the setting for a series of gory murders in Blood on Méliès' Moon.

The film has a ridiculous plot, but if you are watching this flick for the plot you will be unrewarded. Anyhow, a seance gone wrong unleashes a soulless killer in Rome and all humanity is threatened. The bearish Cozzi must retrieve a lost Méliès film to avert doom. Makes sense to me! Throughout, Cozzi expresses the joy he finds in physical media. VHS cassettes and book jackets make shout outs to everyone from Philip K. Dick to Dostoyevsky. Cozzi also interweaves footage from a host of films, including his own, into the mix along with cheerfully primitive CGI effects. As he searches for his grail, he meets up with a friendly cohort of film veterans. He visits a special effects studio, a practical effects studio, and has a yummy looking dinner with Mario Bava's son, Lamberto. All this would smack of self-indulgence were it not for Cozzi's sense of self-abnegation. At one point, Cozzi awakens his long suffering wife to recount his latest nightmare: that he has been acclaimed, or is it declaimed, as the Italian Ed Wood. Well, he rationalizes, at least Ed Wood is famous.

Blood on Méliès' Moon is a tatterdemalion film and an affecting mash note to the cinema.

Michael

Jaafar Jackson

I was pleasantly surprised by Antoine Fuqua's Michael. Expecting a hagiographic waxworks, I was never bored by the, for now, all-time grossing biopic. I suspect that even if Michael was terrible, it would have been a reasonable hit given the entertainer's still fervid fanbase. This is due to a discography that will appeal to tots, teens, and other music fans until the earth is obliterated and beyond. John Logan's script covers the years 1968 to 1988, so there is no decline. Logan and Fuqua do a good job of sketching Michael's main musical collaborators: drill-sergeant father Joseph (Colman Domingo), Barry Gordy ( Larenz Tate), and Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson). Those who are omitted are cited in the film's exhaustive end credits. The main omission, besides Michael's sex life or lack thereof, is Janet. She is not listed among the film's many executive producers named Jackson and is absent from the film. Nary a peep about her.

Given the restrictions inherent in an authorized biopic, Logan does a pretty good job at outlining the rise of a pop icon. The film has a propulsive rhythm to it, with Fuqua aligning the visual choreography in sync with the music. Logan has logically constructed his screenplay. Even the gaps in the narrative, the biggest leap is from 1971 to 1978, make some sort of sense. This leap serves to introduce Michael the young man (nephew Jaafar Jackson) as we say adios to Michael the boy (Juliano Valdi). The gap also eliminates a few speed bumps, like the shift from Motown Records to Epic and the film version of The Wiz, to the film's up, up and away trajectory. Joseph (deceased 2018) is the heavy of the film, though I think he was worse in real life, and, not surprisingly, Mr. Domingo threatens to run away with the film's acting laurels. However, the cast is uniformly excellent. Jaafar Jackson is not the disaster one feared and, in particular, moves as adeptly as his uncle. The filmmakers were wise to blend Jaafar's singing voice with Michael's, as the original was singular. I also appreciated the efforts of Nia Long, Miles Teller, KeiLyn Durrel Jones, Laura Harrier, and, playing another gross and comic record executive, Mike Myers. Fuqua keeps the cast loose limbed and focused.

By stopping the narrative in 1988, the picture avoids the Wacko Jacko lowlights like the accusations of pedophilia and his face falling off. The flick ends with the warning, "the story continues", but I don't think anyone is brave enough to tackle Michael 2. Fuqua and Logan plant the picture with cultural touchstones (Peter Pan, James Brown, The Three Stooges) that underpin Michael Jackson's legacy. As with Elvis Presley, that legacy encompasses all that is good, bad, and weird about American culture. Michael is not as contrary to the facts as such traditional Hollywood biopics as Night and Day. It does feature plastic surgery and Bubbles the chimp. However, Michael does not have the audacity to truly portray how weird the subject was. My fantasy version of Michael 2 would include the vignette provided by that undependable narrator Dr. Z (aka Dana Gould): Bubbles, exiled to an outdoor pen after becoming too big and violent to live in the mansion, hurls his excrement at handicapped visitors to Neverland Ranch.                          

Classe tous risques

Lino Ventura and Jean-Paul Belmondo

Claude Sautet's Classe tous risques is a superb Gallic gangster film from 1960.  It is a fluid genre film that upends some of the conventions of the genre. Lino Ventura stars as Abel Davos, a lifelong hood who we first meet in exile in Italy. He has a wife and two young sons and he yearns to return with them to France even though a death sentence hangs over his head there. In order to finance this move, Abel and his partner in crime, Raymond (Stan Krol), commit a daring daytime robbery in Milan. On the run from the Italian police now, Abel and Raymond hijack a small boat and try to sneak into France with Abel's wife and children in tow. They are met on the shore by gendarmes and a gunfight ensues which results in numerous deaths including that of Abel's wife and Raymond.

The opening thirty minutes of Classe tous risques are a terrific example of terse action cinema with a minimum of exposition and dialogue. Sautet admitted he modeled his style on the lean pursuit Westerns of Budd Boetticher, especially Seven Men From Now. Sautet and screenwriter José Giovanni based the screenplay on Giovanni's noir novel, but reworked the book. The film includes an omniscient narrator, but the narration is more spare and ironic than in the novel. Giovanni was quite a sinister figure and gleaned the source of this tale from a buddy in stir. He penned many a noir tale that ended up as films including Le trou, Le deuxième souffle, and Symphonie pour un massacre. Classes tous risques was Sautet's debut as a director. He had worked as an assistant director previously for such luminaries as Jacques Becker and Georges Franju. He had just filled in on a film after the director had been fired. Ventura had been the lead in that film and, impressed by Sautet, recommended him to Classe tous risques' producer.

After the shootout on the beach, the film changes tone somewhat and becomes a mournful meditation on friendship, or the lack thereof, and fatalism. Ventura's hangdog looks are perfect for a tale that limns an arc of decline. Abel has to hole up in Nice with his two young sons. I don't recall another noir that has its protagonist in such a predicament. Thus, Ventura gets to show two sides of his talent in this role. Ever since his film debut in Touchez pas au grisbi, Ventura, a former champion wrestler, had been stuck playing, as he put it, "gorilla' roles. He does get to show off this aspect of his talent in the film, dispatching a number of opponents with brute strength in striking, well-directed action scenes. However, Abel's scenes with his sons display a vulnerability and sensitivity heretofore unexplored. Sautet even coaxed spontaneous and believable performances from those kids. Abel knows that he must ditch the tikes, but needs help. He calls up associates from his old criminal days in Paris. They seem reluctant, but do eventually agree to hire an ambulance and a driver in order to squire him and his sons covertly to Paris.

Sandra Milo and Belmondo

The driver is named Eric Stark and is played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, on the verge of stardom. Retroactive advertising for this picture made him the co-lead, but this is Ventura's picture. Belmondo pops up forty minutes or so into the flick. Abel is initially suspicious of Stark, but bonds with him after finding out he was a friend of Raymond's. He doesn't even mind when Stark picks up a skirt named Liliane (Sandra Milo), an actress they witness being abused by her manager by the roadside. Ms. Milo was the girlfriend of the producer and was foisted on Mr. Sautet, but holds her own in sterling company. Maybe it was not so hard to appear to be turned on by Mr. Belmondo, then at the height of his beauty/ugliness. More importantly for the film, the cocky young bantam Belmondo has a great rapport with the taciturn bull Ventura. Stark proves a friend  when Abel needs it, for his former companions prove slippery indeed. Noted scene stealer such as Marcel Dalio and Claude Cerval etch a memorable rogue's gallery. Abel has his revenge, but it is muted, limited, and not passionate. It is served cold by a heart in winter. Abel has had enough and walks resignedly to his fate. He melts into a crowd, as if Sautet is saying: they walk amongst us. 

Even the smallest roles in this movie give it texture and bite: an old friend of Abel's who works in at a maritime museum, a bratty step-daughter of Dalio's fishy fence, and an innocent maid at Belmondo's hotel are all memorably drawn and executed. Sautet is not a particularly distinctive stylist, but his work does seize upon the world at large in all its breadth. If I had to type him it would be as an analytic objectivist like Otto Preminger. Which makes sense since Sautet like Preminger was feted by the Mac-Mahonists in Paris. Sautet had many ups and downs in his career. Classe tous risques was initially a flop, but has built up enough of a following to land in the Criterion Collection. When Sautet was not directing, he worked as a very successful script doctor, akin to Elaine May or Robert Towne in our country. He did leave us many excellent films that he directed himself including Max et les Ferrailleurs, Un cœur en hiver, Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud, and Classe tous risques.