Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014) – whenever I watch documentaries about the troubled origins of some famously cursed production, I am amazed anew that studio movies are EVER produced — there are just so many egos and “sensibilities” pulling in mutually exclusive directions that having a watchable feature as a finished project seems miraculous. Here, a non-miracle takes place: a visionary but inexperienced director, thrown a budget of several times what he wanted with the attendant responsibilities that come with it, cracks and is replaced by what might charitably be called a “workhorse” director, who then has to deal with two famously troublesome and idiosyncratic stars, one of whom seriously didn’t give a rat’s ass. It’s like watching a $35 million train wreck in slow motion, while eating popcorn.
The Kingdom (2007) – I went into it expecting an action-thriller with terrorists as the bad guys. What I got was something much more hard-hitting. Inspired by real-world terrorist attacks against American civilian families living in dedicated areas of Saudi Arabia, this has a ferocious two-prong explosive attack taking out a hundred American and local lives. Jamie Foxx is head of an FBI team chomping at the bit to investigate, and it’s only through pulling some diplomatic strings and going around the Secretary of State that the four-person team ends up “invited” into the Saudi kingdom, largely as observers with their hands tied.
The portrayal of the multi-generational extremism that leads to such attacks on unarmed civilians is spot-on and heart-wrenching, as is the portrayal of those Saudis caught in the middle, who want to work for peace and prosperity and are instead looked on with suspicion by both sides. The violence is jarring and painful, and the scars it leaves are not glossed over.
Kahaani (2012) – We ugly Americans should expect to miss a lot of the subtleties in this movie (heck, I didn’t even realize that people in Kolkata speak Bengali, a separate language from Hindi, and I kept saying, “Where are the musical numbers?”), but even with that, this is a well-done thriller, leavened by not-inappropriate amounts of humor (we ugly Americans also sometimes think that the mood changes in Indian films are jarring). Vidya, a pregnant Hindi who’s been living in London with her Bengali husband, travels to Kolkata because her husband went there for business two weeks ago and promptly disappeared. Alone and without a support network, she can only rely in a kindhearted junior police officer and the goodwill of strangers as she tries to find out why no one remembers him at any of the places he was supposed to be… and why the only person who sort-of recognizes his face links him to a wanted fugitive who disappeared two years ago after a terrorist attack.
Touching and engaging, and if the denouement seems a little unbelievable… well, I went into it expecting spontaneous musical numbers, so…
Abandoned movies: I Do (But I Don’t).