Film Rolls, Round 3: Lorenzo's Oil, Perfect Strangers, and Come Drink with Me

Bruce has a slight lead over Mookie, 11 stars to 10¾, and it's a race.

Mookie rolls first:

A three, which gets him back into recent Western movies and Lorenzo's Oil

And how does Bruce respond?

A 20! Per the totally arbitrary rules, this means the next thing watched from the "new arrivals I've seen before" gets credited to his score, and that turned out to be the new Arrow Blu-ray of Come Drink with Me, but only after I finally get to see the original Perfect Strangers.

So let's see how they did!

Lorenzo's Oil

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Lorenzo's Oil sticks out in George Miller's filmography as his only feature that is not a fantasy of some sort, although it's paradoxically a film that he is particularly suited to make as a trained medical doctor. The end result is in some ways surprisingly conventional but also unique, a tightly-internal story that benefits greatly from the meticulous attention Miller otherwise brings to large-scale action and animation.

It's simple enough - Italian-born diplomat Augusto Odone (Nick Nolte) and his Irish-American wife Michaela (Susan Sarandon) learn, upon returning to Washington from an African posting, that five-year-old son Lorenzo has a deadly neurological condition, eventually narrowed down to be adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), which is so rare that not only is it often misdiagnosed, but there is little serious work being done on treatment. Lorenzo is not expected to live to see his tenth birthday and the community around the disease is mainly focused on palliative care, but the Odones choose to immerse themselves in research, with a sympathetic researcher (Peter Ustinov) assisting with science and Michaela's sister Deirdre (Kathleen Wilhoite) offering support on the home front.

On the one hand, a viewer wouldn't necessarily recognize this as being from the man who made the Mad Max series, but it's surprisingly of a piece: Miller makes sure that the viewer can feel the wheel turning, grinding the Odones down, with every time the film fades out and then in with a new date listed on screen playing like an ominous countdown. It's a long-ish movie but one that is good at increasing the weight by steadily piling pebbles on the viewers' backs rather than large weights that require a large shift in storytelling. There are moments of tension in the based-on-facts story that sometimes seem designed for a film, but others that are random enough to feel like details of a life that doesn't have to fit the script.

What's often most interesting is the way that Miller and co-writer Nick Enright handle the concept of citizen science, even if they don't ever actually use that phrase. Stories like Lorenzo's Oil are often formulaic in how they tell tales of an uncaring medical/scientific orthodoxy and parents who know best because of their gut instincts, but this one takes care to show that the Odones are meticulous on top of being emotional and personally invested Miller may not have practiced for a decade before making this film, but he seemingly the material enough to not take shortcuts or to depict being methodical as inherently cruel. Without making the comparison directly, it becomes very clear that the Odone's are not the same as people who go in for anti-vaccine woo, even if they do seem relatively reckless compared to the establishment.

Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon hold the movie down well. It's a bit odd to hear Augusto's Italian accent coming from Nolte, but there's something Socratic yet humane about the way Nolte delivers his lines, where you can recognize the diplomat and the father in conflict, laying things out for both the folks sharing the screen and the audience. Sarandon has the more conventional mama-bear role, but handles it well, and I love the devotion Kathleen Wilhoite gives Deirdre, a heightened riff on someone who loves her sister and nephew dearly even though siblings can often be more hurtful than strangers. It doesn't hurt at all that there are a couple of folks who will become stalwart supporting actors in the cast of fellow parents of ALD kids - Margo Martindale, warm and empathetic but well aware that this ends in heartbreak, and James Rebhorn, precise and involved as an activist leader because it gives him some measure of control over something devastating.

So, no exploding vehicles or talking animals. But still a precision-crafted George Miller film, and as such pretty terrific.

Perfetti sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I've effectively already reviewed this film twice, back in 2018, when Korean remake Intimate Strangers (here's the rest of the review on the Wayback Machine in case EFC never comes back) and Mainland Chinese version Kill Mobile hit theaters. I was expecting to see more, but the Mexican version never played Boston-area theaters and neither the Spanish version directed by Alex de la Iglesia nor the French version from Fred Cavayé that interested me are easily accessed, before you get to any of the 17 other adaptations made in the six years since this received its Italian release in 2016. I strongly suspect that the only reason we haven't seen an American one is that it landed with the Weinsteins just before that empire collapsed.

After three of these, I find myself a bit sad that the movies don't seem more localized, beyond China erasing one character being gay and Samsung dropping some hefty product placement into the Korean one. It speaks a bit to the sturdiness of this original script that there wasn't really a surprise to be found here on my third go-round, even three-plus years since seeing the remakes. It's a solid premise and has plenty of soapy twists that make for a good split of comedy and melodrama. Interestingly, my favorite characters remain the same across versions - here, Benedetta Prcaroli as the youthful newcomer to the group and Giuseppe Battiston as the genial but closeted bear - and I can't deny that that the gags still work even if you know what's coming. The eclipse still seems like an element that the movie doesn't really need.

I'm glad to have seen the root of this, although I do hope that I find de la Iglesia and Cavayé have put more personal stamps on it when I see their versions. Heck, I'd still like to see an American one, or some where they've got reason to take even greater liberties than they did in China.

Come Drink with Me

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)

Huh, I appeared to enjoy this a lot more when I saw it at the 2014 Films at the Gate (full review on The Wayback Machine in case eFilmCritic is gone for good), which just goes to show you what sort of a boost this sort of high-energy action movie gets from being seen with a crowd who's into it versus at home when it's kind of late, even with the new Arrow disc probably looking better than whatever the folks in Chinatown were projecting.

Perhaps this also indicates that this sort of Shaw Brother action movie, with its formality and dance-like action, is a bit less of a novelty for me at this point. It is, nevertheless, still a lot of fun, with Cheng Pei-pei an arresting star with a bit of chip on her shoulder and somewhat aristocratic bearing and Yueh Hua a nice complement as a more earthy potential ally, facing off against a brace of enjoyably cruel villains. And even if Hong Kong and director King Hu would build upon this in terms of technical proficiency and slicker choreography, Hu and company can still stage a heck of an action scene.

… And where does this leave us after Round 2?

Mookie: 14 ¼ stars - not bad at all.

Bruce: 17 stars - that second film keeps it from being as tight as it could be.

Reset the board, and here's the sitch:

Bruce has taken the lead in more ways than one, and it looks like it might take multiple rounds for Mookie to make up the difference.

Kill Mobile

Well, give this movie a perverse sort of credit: By being not very good and changing things up in order to (presumably) make the Chinese censors happy, it threw a monkey wrench into my plans to self-plagiarize for my reviews of the various versions of Perfect Strangers, and I had to do more than a rewrite to talk about just how this film was weaker.

The kind of ironic thing is that, while this particular version was bowlderized to satisfy Chinese content standards, the easiest path to watching the original is a region A Blu-ray from… Hong Kong. A reminder that things are apparently different in the SAR, I guess, and how weird the situation with this movie is. Also maybe not ironic but odd is that this Chinese version has the same distributor as the Korean version (with Chinese subtitles) that just played North American in November.

Ah, well. Two weeks until the Mexican version hits.

Shoujikuang xiang (Kill Mobile)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)

Kill Mobile arrives in theaters roughly a month and a half after Intimate Strangers, the Korean remake of the Italian film Perfect Strangers, and about one month before the Mexican version, with at least half a dozen other adaptations of this highly-franchisble story either already completed and released or in production around the world. I suspect, when all of them are lined up next to each other, this Chinese version will be among the lesser entries; between censorship and general timidity, it lacks what made at least the Korean version a piercing black comedy.

Wen Bo (Tian Yu) and Dai Dai (Dai Lele) are hosting a nice little dinner party with some longtime friends: Married couple Wu Xioajiang (Qiao Shan) and his wife Li Nan (Huo Siyan), who are leaving their kids at home with Xiaojiang's mother; screenwriter Jia Di (Tong Dawei) and pretty young fiancee Bai Xuejiao (Xi Mengyao); and the currently single Han Xiao (Ma Li), who seemed alarmingly ready to skip the dinner and the rest of her life before getting a reminder on her mobile phone. Addiction to those devices comes up as a topic of conversation, and psychologist Dai Dai suggests an experiment - they leave their phones on the table so that everyone can see all the messages and notifications, and calls get answered on speaker.

It's easy to see why the makers of the original film hae been able to so successfully franchise it over the past year and a half; it opens up the "friendly gathering going right to hell because something throws the equilibrium off or someone unexpected shows up" to new possibilities that don't bog things down: A text message or call can pop up, wreak some havoc, and then not hang around, unnecessarily stealing the spotlight from the characters who we're going to spend some time with. And even if you've seen another version and know some of what's coming, the execution of the jokes is often pretty good.

Intimate Strangers

I've beat the drum about how foreign film distribution has changed a ton over the last decade a lot, but the path of this one is just genuinely weird in ways that kind of makes me dizzy. At first, I noted that this was the sort of film which a few years ago might have done well in the boutique houses, but instead of having a run in its home country, it gets snapped up immediately, and before it's been out in its native South Korea for much more than a week, it's playing American theaters courtesy of an Australian distributor that is also subtitling it in Chinese for its North American release. There's a lot to unpack there - would it eventually get broader play in the U.S. if it had had time to go through the old-school distributors, winding up with Sony Pictures Classics, Magnolia, or Samuel Goldwyn, and playing places that specialize in good-for-you foreign films rather than multiplexes that play Asian movies that have been rushed to play in front of expatriate/immigrant audiences before they can get it pirated? Or would it just have played in front of whiter audiences that way? Is this just an example of how the old system of foreign film distribution is breaking down?

Well, it's not just that, because the end credits reveal that this is a remake of a 2016 Italian film, which played Tribeca that year and got pretty good reviews internationally. You would think that Perfetti Sconoscuiuti ("Perfect Strangers") might have gotten U.S. distribution, although, given the speed of the old system, it's entirely possible that it could still be working its way through the pipeline, with the labels mentioned above trying to strike a bargain. Even more than the Korean remake, that seems like something the art-house guys would go for.

(Fun trivia: Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" seemed like an odd song to be a ringtone which becomes part of the soundtrack in the Korean movie, but it apparently traces back to the Italian one, and I wonder how it works there.)

So here's the thing - while I'm writing the review for this one, I get an email from a publicist stating that a Mexican version ("Perfectos Desconocidos") will be released by Lionsgate/Pantelion on January 11th. The Italian version is barely mentioned, as an afterthought at the end of the email, and although a part of me thinks that this is kind of insanely close for two versions of the same movie to come out in the U.S., part of me is also thinking that the overlap for these two movies is basically guys like me who are going to use the heck out of their AMC Stubs A-List even if they're the only person in the theater who needs the subtitles. Pantelion and Tangren may be releasing what is effectively the same movie two months apart, but they're targeting two different audiences.

But are we done? No! Those two remakes are apparently the sixth and seventh takes on this material - it has already been remade in Greece, Spain, Turkey, and France. The Mexican one, in fact, is opening there about a year after the Spanish one opened in its home country (heck, it played Mexico in December of 2017). And here's the kicker - at least a couple of these movies have a lot of talent behind them. The Spanish one is directed by Álex de la Iglesia and the French one by Fred Cavayé, and while I guess de la Iglesia doesn't have quite the fandom in North America that he used to and Cavayé is basically a guy who made one movie that got some attention here (Point Blank) even though Mea Culpa also made it over… It's not unreasonable to expect those versions to have gotten some North American attention. Heck, it turns out I was pretty impressed with The Fatal Encounter from the Korean director, so it's not like he's a no-one.

What to make of this? I honestly don't know. Maybe this is just a good idea for a movie that plays better when localized, and the Italian studio was smart enough to realize this and started to franchise it immediately, and in America that led to someone like The Weinstein Company getting both remake and distribution rights and deciding to sit on the original. It's happened before. Maybe that's what's happening now, and it's not just a matter of the pipeline from Europe to the United States being a dated anachronism while the one from Asia (minus Japan) is fast for the hits but invisible to those who have traditionally watched foreign films… But I think that may be more the case than not, and when the original Perfetti Sconoscuiuti and its more notable variations do arrive in the U.S., they'll just quietly be on VOD or some streaming service with zero fanfare. This doesn't seem ideal.

Ah, well. In unrelated but amusing news, the director of this movie, Lee Jae-kyu, has chosen a Western name ("J.Q.") that both tickles me and makes me feel very silly when I include both at once.

Wanbyeokhan Tain (Intimate Strangers)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)

Intimate Strangers is in its second week atop the South Korean box office and I readily admit that it's hard to imagine a remake doing the same here (or a threemake, considering this is an adaptation of the Italian Perfect Strangers); it's the sort of relationship-oriented movie for adults that has a hard time finding a place these days. It's a pretty good one, though, and I can't fault it for using kind of a cheap trick to keep people talking afterward. It works, after all.

Doctors Seok-ho (Cho Jin-woong) and Ye-jin (Kim Ji-soo) - him in cosmetic surgery, her in psychiatry - have just moved into a fancy new place, and as such are having a housewarming party with the guys Seok-ho has been friends with since meeting in kindergarten 40 years ago and their partners: Cranky lawyer Tae-so (Yu Hae-jin) and his wife Soo-hyun (Yun Jung-ah), who has been engrossed in a poetry class of late; serial entrepreneur Joon-mo (Lee Seo-jin) and younger wife Se-kyung (Song Ha-yoon), whose family helped finance his new restaurant; and Young-bae (Yoon Kyung-ho), a genial fellow despite being recently divorced and out of work, whose girlfriend can't make it because she's sick. There was a fifth member of the group, but he recently got caught in an affair with a girl half his age, and when the guys comment that he was foolish to leave his phone unlocked, Ye-jin suggests a game - they leave their phones on the table so that everyone can see all the messages and notifications, and calls get answered on speakerphone.

Even if this wasn't a direct remake of another film, there's a long and storied history of friendly gatherings going right to hell because something throws the equilibrium off or someone unexpected shows up. Here, the "game" with the phones is certainly more than a bit artificial - it is the sort of thing that people might talk about but easily find an excuse to bow out of in real life - but it turns out to be a nifty way of maintaining focus: A text message or call can pop up, wreak some havoc, and then not hang around, unnecessarily stealing the spotlight from the characters whose everyday hypocrisy is supposed to be the focal point, or be awkwardly shuffled off-stage. There are certainly downsides to this sort of upper-middle-class melodrama only briefly stepping outside of its comfort zone, but it certainly allows a piece with a potentially unwieldy ensemble to do good work without getting pulled in other directions.

Full review at EFC.