Stephen Bjork

One, Two, Three is a sadly neglected Billy Wilder treasure that deserves its own place in the pantheon of his other much more revered comedies. A box office failure on its original release, it ended up falling victim to its own topicality. The Berlin Wall went up overnight while it was being shot on location in Germany, forcing the production to move to Munich and the budget to go way overboard. Despite the otherwise innocuous nature of its story about Coca-Cola executive C.R. MacNamara (James Cagney) trying to work out a deal to market the soda in the Soviet Union, growing tensions between East and West made the political undercurrents a bit too uncomfortable for audiences to laugh at in 1961.

After the successful run of The Muppet Show on television, it was perhaps inevitable that co-creators Jim Henson and Frank Oz would take their lovable gang of misfits and make the leap to the big screen. They did just that with The Muppet Movie in 1979, releasing it while the series was still on the air. The Muppet Movie was also a major success, so they quickly turned around with a sequel The Great Muppet Caper, which opened shortly after the final episode of the show aired in 1981. The Great Muppet Caper was a bit more experimental, trading in the freewheeling Hellzapoppin’ nature of the series and the first film for a relatively linear narrative. Clearly, Henson and Oz were looking to stretch their legs a bit after having done the same thing for many years, and while The Great Muppet Caper was a less successful than its predecessor, they decided to double down creatively with their next project. The result was a film that was quite unlike anything else that had ever been seen prior to that point, at least as far as mainstream filmmaking was concerned: The Dark Crystal.

After the behind-the-scenes chaos of David Fincher’s flawed but fascinating debut feature Alien3, he rebounded with a vengeance three years later by reinventing the serial killer genre with Se7en.

Roman Polanski’s work has often been marked by an impishly perverse quality that should come as no surprise, given his own undeniably perverse nature—as at least one victim discovered, much to her dismay. Ironically enough, while he has long denied any accusations against him, he seems to recognize his own inherent impishness, casting himself in key roles for his most blackly comic films. Even when dealing with nominally serious subject matter like Chinatown, he still gave himself an unforgettable cameo as, well, a perverse little imp with a knife. Yet with openly comic subject matter like The Fearless Vampire Killers, Polanski has been bold enough to take on leading roles, so the fact that he’s front and center for the entirety of his 1976 film The Tenant speaks volumes regarding his approach to adapting Roland Topor’s 1974 novel of the same name. In many ways, The Tenant remains one of his most impishly perverse films, and the blackest of all his black comedies. Yes, it’s still a psychological thriller, but Polanski’s take on the material can’t be read at face value.

Felidae is a fascinating example of the limitless possibilities of animation as an art form. Animation is capable of telling any kind of story in any style whatsoever, from purely realistic to wildly expressionistic. The only real limit on it is the boundaries of human imagination, although Mankind being a stubbornly hierarchical animal, sometimes we try to impose arbitrary limits that shouldn’t exist. Even in the Wild West media landscape of today, some people are still far too quick to dismiss animation as “kid’s stuff.” Yet those who do try to draw a line between children’s animation and adult animation are still overlooking the fact that there’s a broad continuum between those two extremes. Felidae actually draws from both traditions. Stylistically, this feline murder mystery is as far removed from Ralph Bakshi’s anthropomorphized animals in Fritz the Cat as is (in)humanly possible, with the cats looking more like something out of Marten Rosen’s adaptations of Watership Down and The Plague Dogs than like anything out of R. Crumb. Yet in terms of content, Felidae is filled with concepts and imagery that would have made even Richard Adams blush. As one of the characters helpfully notes, “Truly these madcap activities (are) beyond The Aristocats.”

Some franchises are born; others are made. Still others are... well, made up out of whole cloth. That’s especially true of international productions, where dubbing, new titles, and creative editing can connect dots that were never intended to be connected in the first place. The most notorious example of that might be the American Robotech saga, which awkwardly stitched together three completely unrelated Japanese series: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. The same thing has happened in the world of Hong Kong filmmaking, where dubbed export versions have been tied together retroactively. Further complicating matters, the feedback loop of the import/export process has resulted in that kind of revisionism working its way back to Hong Kong, resulting in plenty of entertainment value for fans, but confusion for anyone who tries to create a straightforward catalogue of all the films. Such is the case with the In the Line of Duty franchise.

“Madness!” is James Donald’s legendary final line in The Bridge on the River Kwai, a one-word summation of everything that had led up to that point in the story. It’s also what it takes to mount epic productions on the scale that filmmakers like David Lean did. “They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore” is a common enough mantra these days, but it’s a painfully accurate one now that digital effects have rendered that level of practical excess unnecessary. Yet the era of epic filmmaking actually ended long before digital magic became reality. Just twenty years after Lean’s bridge blew up in decisive fashion, Richard Attenborough stepped behind the cameras to tell the equally mad story of another series of bridges during World War II, and on a scale that was the textbook definition of madness, too. When A Bridge Too Far was released in 1977, it was already an anachronism not just because it was a WWII movie released shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, but also because it represented the kind of expensive all-star epic filmmaking that studios were growing wary of financing. And they didn’t in this case, either. The only reason why A Bridge Too Far was ever greenlit in the first place was thanks to financial backing from another source, but we’ll come back to that later.

People’s lives can hinge on a simple turn of fate, and that’s no less true of filmmakers than it is of anyone else. David Fincher faced a crossroads after the travails of shooting his debut feature Alien 3 in 1991, with the studio, producers, and pretty much everyone else interfering with him every step of the way. The final cut that reached theatres in 1992 was anything but what he would have wanted if he’d been allowed any real creative freedom on the production, and the whole experience soured him on the film business in general. Fincher was already a successful music video and commercial director by that point, and he easily could have washed his hands of the whole affair and returned to the comfort of that milieu instead. That’s when fate intervened.

Some franchises are born; others are made. Still others are... well, made up out of whole cloth. That’s especially true of international productions, where dubbing, new titles, and creative editing can connect dots that were never intended to be connected in the first place. The most notorious example of that might be the American Robotech saga, which awkwardly stitched together three completely unrelated Japanese series: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. The same thing has happened in the world of Hong Kong filmmaking, where dubbed export versions have been tied together retroactively. Further complicating matters, the feedback loop of the import/export process has resulted in that kind of revisionism working its way back to Hong Kong, resulting in plenty of entertainment value for fans, but confusion for anyone who tries to create a straightforward catalogue of all the films. Such is the case with the In the Line of Duty franchise.

Stand and Deliver is a potent tribute to Jaime Escalante, who helped to revitalize the teaching of mathematics in underprivileged communities. Escalante was born and educated in Bolivia, but he later emigrated to the United States and eventually ended up finding a home at Garfield High School in Los Angeles in 1974. There, he started to overhaul the system in order to provide more opportunities for young people to get a head start, and by 1978 he was beginning to teach them calculus. That led to some of his students taking the Advanced Placement Calculus Test, which many of them passed. By 1982, 18 of his students passed the test, but the Educational Testing Service questioned their scores due to perceived anomalies in the results, and they demanded that 14 of the students retake the test. 12 of them agreed, and when they passed again, their original scores were reinstated.