Fade to Black (2006)

Director: Oliver Parker

Cast: Danny Huston, Diego Luna, Paz Vega, Christopher Walken

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I think film land would forgive me for blanching at imaginary tales featuring a fictional Orson Welles (Huston). One does not want to pollute the reservoir.

Did I Like It:  I’m going to be the wrong audience for this film, right? It’s kind of like a magician trying to do tricks for another magician. This actually does happen in this film, and the notion that Welles would be flummoxed by anyone attempting slight of hand in front of him was something I wouldn’t have done… because it’s ridiculous. This goes double for the moment where he discusses “self-esteem” with another character. I’m not entirely sure anyone ever used the term “self-esteem” before 1975, and I have a real problem with Welles being concerned with it at all in 1947.

On spec, Danny Huston feels like the wrong casting for Orson, and I’m struck by how badly cast he is as the film unfurls. Can anyone—let’s put me aside for a moment—not look at Mr. Huston and think he not only doesn’t look or sound a bit like Welles, but instead is a dead ringer for his father—and Welles contemporary and leading man in The Other Side of the Wind (2018)— John Huston. There are plenty of actors who have portrayed Welles who didn’t quite fit the bill of the man, but none of them are a dead-ringer for another iconoclastic filmmaker of the time.

Also, the notion that he started to get fat only because Rita Hayworth left him? It’s the kind of pat thing that makes an idea like Rosebud the last thing anyone discusses when talking about Citizen Kane (1941).

So, yes. I have some notes.

Let’s try to look at the film objectively, as if I were not me, and the subject matter of this film was any other subject matter. The film is shot with all of the bland panache of a made-for-cable-movie which would be forgotten virtually the instant the next block of programming takes over. The murder mystery story is utterly pedestrian, and I don’t care a bit when the murderer is revealed. Sequences that place Welles in the middle of post-war Italy have a certain verisimilitude, and I think that may be the most damnable faint praise I can offer the film: it works best when Welles and its genre trappings are incidental to the proceedings.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019)

Director: Adrian Grünberg

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Adriana Barraza

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Reviews were pretty toxic so it just floated right past me.

Did I Like It: And I’m not entirely certain it deserves such a toxic review. It is no worse than my memories of the next most recent entry in the series, Rambo (2008), and I’d challenge another series whose clear heyday was in the 80s to make an entry that doesn’t serve to completely embarrass everyone involved. John Rambo kills a lot of people in an endless series of squib explosions and with an uncontrollable ferocity. It’s not like the recipe for one of these films is complex. One might feel the need to complain about the racist undercurrent through the film, but that probably disingenuously ignoring the rest of the franchise.

I say the movie only manages to avoid complete embarrassment, because it isn’t like I don’t feel a little bit bad for Stallone at the end of this one. For anyone looking for anything remotely on the same scale as Ryan Coogler’s Creed (2015), prepare yourself for disappointment. Then again, those constantly expecting a film as good as Creed are going to spend the majority of their movie-going time living with disappointment. Did we need to know more about what happened to John Rambo (Stallone) after he returned to his family home? Better yet, did we need this film to leave things open for yet another improbably sequel? The story seems so incidental to the character as depicted in First Blood (1982) that I can’t help but wonder if this was a script languishing in some B-movie producers library before someone got around to doing a Control-F and replacing Rambo with a role that could have easily been played by any aging action star.

I can’t seem to find any reference to back it up, but I have the strongest memory that at some point that there was plan to have Rambo square off with an alien invader. Now that would have been a film worth writing home about.