Mish Mash 29 (Save the Tiger, The Miracle Worker, The Count of Monte Cristo (2024), F1: The Movie)

Save the Tiger

A-day-in-the-life films (not to be confused with one-crazy-night pictures) can be a neat trick to pull off if you have the right elements strung and intertwined together.  There’s definitely a certain level of suspension of disbelief you need to adopt to get on board.  As long as you can get past the notion of “no one’s life is this crazy” it can be a fun wild ride.  And Save the Tiger works for me in that regard.

Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon (Grumpy Old Men)) owns a mid-level fashion house in LA where they design and manufacture their own line of women’s clothing.  The company is in financial trouble though so Harry does whatever he has to in order to keep the doors open.  He sets up his biggest buyer with sex workers to grease the wheels for more orders and argues with his CFO about the best approach to secure additional funding.  But his most underhanded tactic is to arrange for one of his warehouses to go up in flames so he can collect the insurance payout.

Lemmon is fantastic as a hard-nosed, tenacious businessman.  He’s depressed about the state of his company but is still unrelenting in his drive to keep it going.  He says all he wants is one more season and he’ll damn near kill himself to get it.  Stoner’s only solace is when he reminisces about old baseball.  A slight smile will peek through as he remembers the players and the game that once gave him such joy.  But these moments are fleeting as new crises constantly emerge that he must deal with.

What makes the movie work is Stoner.  Despite his questionable (or downright deplorable) ethics you want to see him succeed.  His motivation isn’t solely personal which helps.  His business employs dozens of workers who he doesn’t want to see out of the job.  So that’s nice.  This along with not wanting to fail after years and years of building his company from the ground up is admirable.  It’s his desperation strategies that make him both troubling and fascinating to follow around for a day.  Highly recommended.

The Miracle Worker

Look, I’m not someone who’s anywhere near qualified to dive deep into the subject matter of this one but I still want to give a shoutout because of how moving it is.

The Miracle Worker deals with activist Helen Heller when she was seven and first met her teacher Anne Sullivan.  Keller lost her sight and hearing months after being born and Sullivan was brought in to help train her how to communicate.  Sullivan herself was partially blind so she took her knowledge of fingerspelling, where you spell out words into someone’s hand using various shapes similar to sign language, and taught it to Keller.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds though because Keller didn’t even know what words were.  Think about that for a second.  She could mimic Sullivan’s hand gestures but didn’t understand at all what they meant or that a particular string of gestures corresponded to objects, actions or concepts.  How in the hell do you get across the idea that everything has a word associated with it and here is the word?  It’s mind boggling.

That would be difficult enough if you had all your senses but Keller was operating without sight or sound to aid her.  With those two unavailable she was effectively mute as well.  I can only very vaguely imagine not having one sense but not having two?!  I can’t even remotely comprehend what this girl went through.

With a story this tricky to convey you need some expert performances and directing and boy did they deliver.  Anne Bancroft (G.I. Jane) as Sullivan and Patty Duke (The Patty Duke Show) as Keller are phenomenal.  Bancroft runs the gamut as she shows all levels of love, contempt, frustration, enthusiasm and relentlessness to educate her sole student.  Duke gives maybe the best child performance I’ve ever seen?  She was sixteen and definitely not seven like she’s playing but that’s easily overlooked because she kills it.  Not only did I totally buy into her disabilities (Duke is neither blind nor deaf in real life) but she portrays the immense confusion and trepidation of the seemingly insurmountable task before her with equally matched ecstasy that it’s completely immersive and captivating.  You’re with her every step of the way.  Bancroft and Duke also played their roles in the play that the movie is based on and jeez, they had to do these passionately intense performances every night for almost two years.  Unbelievable.

While this piece is certainly hard to watch at times, and just exhausting with some utterly unrelenting knock down drag out fight scenes between Sullivan and Keller over teaching something as simple as how to sit at a table and eat food with a spoon, when it’s all over it’s amazingly uplifting.

 

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)

Real quick one here.  If you’re into epic stories of revenge, comeuppance and love that span decades then this is for you.  A sailor in early 1800’s France gets framed and wrongly imprisoned by his friend over a woman.  Many years later the dude breaks out, discovers hidden treasure, reinvents himself as an affluent Count and enacts his retribution.  That may sound straightforward but I’m leaving out a ton of details.

If you like the 2002 Kevin Reynolds version I think you’ll dig this one too.  The former is somewhat more action-oriented while the latter is fairly more dramatic and about incorporating more character and story elements.  Both are fantastic in my opinion.  I have no idea if this one is closer to the book but with a three hour runtime and being an actual French production based on a French novel I would think so. 

Regardless this tale is one for the ages and the filmmakers did a marvelous job.  The performances are wonderful, the production design is beautiful, the cinematography is captivating, it’s excellent all around.  I could quibble about some minor things that I wish were either left out or handled a touch differently but with such a grand focus they nailed all the big stuff.

 

F1: The Movie

To be totally honest I don’t give a rat’s ass about Formula 1 racing, or pretty much any kind of racing in general.  I’m not dismissing it, it’s just not for me.  However, what I do love are car chases and sports movies and F1 lies right in that overlap.

One of the main reasons this lit up my radar is because from the trailer the racing footage looked exhilarating and yeah, it’s goddamn cool as hell.  They strapped real (tiny) cameras to real race cars and had real actors drive the cars and shit, the results are tremendous.  POV, trailing, crowd angles, overhead, drone sweeps and all sorts of other nifty shots are mixed together to create a heart pumping montage of these cats pushing their vehicles around tight corners and down straightaways at hundreds of miles per hour.  You certainly get a real sense of the crazy speed but there are also times when you catch a car going through the right turn at the right angle that it almost looks like the thing is floating along in slow motion.  Throw in visual extras like fireworks exploding in the sky or flames/sparks shooting out the backs of the cars or rain impairing the driver’s view and it only ups the ante.  Of course the sounds of the race and score play a pivotal role in bringing the entire effect across the finish line (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

As a sports film you get the typical clash of personalities and strategies that keeps the tension high off the track as well.  Brad Pitt (The Tree of Life) plays the grizzled vet who should’ve been the next great Formula 1 driver but got derailed due to a horrific accident during a race early in his career.  Javier Bardem (Being the Ricardos) is the manager type guy who brings Pitt into the fold as a last resort to help anchor/save his team.  The only other reliable driver they have is a cocky young up and comer (Damson Idris (Snowfall)) who’s talented but lacks the experience to lead on his own.  And I like that the goal isn’t to take the top spot in the standings but only to win a single race to save their jobs so they can come back next season.  This leads to sneaky, but technically legal (?), tactics employed by Pitt to get his team the W.

This one’s a stunner in the visual department and worth seeing for that aspect alone, but the whole piece is well done.  Good performances, a solid (if predictable) story, nice pacing and editing and likeable characters.  It’s a well directed spectacle and Joseph Kosinski is the other main reason why I wanted to check this out.  He did such an amazing job with Top Gun: Maverick that I had to see what he would do with race cars.  And sure, it’s essentially the same plot and not the badass barnburner that one is, but I would still definitely recommend F1.