MovieMonday: The Favourite

"The Favourite" is perhaps the first comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos, a filmmaker more often described as an auteur than a director.  His previous outings have included realistic-looking stories with strange twists -- a young man who must find a mate or be turned into an animal ("The Lobster",) a doctor whose blackmailer threatens magically to paralyze and kill the doctor's family ("The Killing of a Sacred Deer".) 

This film is set in a little-studied period of English history during the reign of Queen Anne (the very good Olivia Colman), a querulous, gout-ridden, overweight dowager married to a Danish prince (who is not named Hamlet and who is absent from the story in any event.)  The queen's 17 pregnancies have yielded no children who lived past the age of two; the movie exaggerates her pathos by having her dote on 17 cute bunny rabbits who share her bedchamber.

Anyway, England is at war with France, as usual, and Anne is bossed around by Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz,) whose husband is leading the war effort.  Historical reports suggest that Anne deferred almost entirely to Sarah, but not that Sarah necessarily satisfied Anne's sexual desires or that she enjoyed striding around and shooting birds in a fancy white jacket and black breeches.

Into the mix comes Abigail (Emma Watson,) an impoverished cousin of Sarah's who takes a job as a palace maid.  Abigail maneuvers herself into Anne's favor with skin-calming herbs and also sex, threatening Sarah's influence with the queen.  

A battle royal ensues.  The question is whether Abigail is ruthless enough to beat Sarah at Sarah's own game.  This rivalry to influence Queen Anne did in fact happen, but its purpose in the movie seems mostly to accommodate amped-up ribaldry.  

Meanwhile, the English parliament is a bunch of scheming but feckless men in historically inaccurate but extremely styled periwigs and, occasionally, dots of rouge on their cheeks;  the Tories and Whigs are divided on further pursuit of the war.  

In the film fashion of the current moment, the female leads are smarter and bolder than the foppish second-banana male characters.  The formerly gentler sex now is playing catch-up -- understandable, given history.

Some people find "The Favourite" laugh-out-loud funny, and some scenes made me smile.  In the end, however, it's difficult to enjoy the idea that the elites of two centuries ago were just as smutty and crude as the ones we have today.

MovieMonday: Roma

Here is a beautifully filmed movie from Alfonso Cuarón, who won Academy Awards for directing and editing the gripping 2013 film Gravity.

It is a deeply personal effort -- set in the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, in a house very like the one where Cuarón was raised, in a family very similar to his own and in the early 1970s when he was a child.  Its main character is Cleo, the housekeeper/nanny who is much like the woman who helped raise Cuarón and to whom the film is dedicated.

It is a beautiful observation of all these moments and people, and many critics think it is the best movie of the year.

I'm not so sure.

The point of Roma is the depiction of a native woman who has come from the country to work for a family.  She is hardworking, loving and kind.  Without a movie like this, we would never have a chance to meet such a woman and appreciate the life she lives -- part employee, part family member.

There are long, leisurely scenes of Cleo at work, Cleo helping the children and Cleo occasionally bearing the brunt of tension between the children's parents, whose marriage is coming apart. 

 Cleo also is passive, which is not surprising given her station in life. So the movie gives her a boyfriend who abandons her when she is pregnant, reports of political unrest and a picture-window view of 1971's Corpus Christie riot in which paramilitary enforcers killed 100 protesting students, plus a very painful childbirth experience.

Cuarón spent more than 10 years thinking about and planning this movie.  He casted it almost entirely with non-professional actors who acquit themselves well, including Yalitza Aparicio, a preschool teacher from Oaxaca whose portrayal of Cleo feels true.  The director also wrote the screenplay and kept it entirely to himself, revealing each day's shooting scenes to the actors just before the cameras rolled.

The result is moving but not the kind of cinema that large audiences are going to find satisfying.  It feels like family life, which, when you think about it, includes events in sequence but not large plot arcs.  Things just happen.  Time goes by.

The film was purchased initially by Netflix, which planned only to stream it for its 140 million subscribers.  Later, after critics lauded Roma following showings at film festivals, the movie was released in a few theaters, perhaps to make it eligible for prizes in the coming award season.  It is now available on home screens and still at some theaters.

Viewers who admire good cinematography should see the movie on a large screen in a theater because, as I keep saying, it is beautiful.


Film Today

The most popular films at the moment are Aquaman, which introduces yet another comic book hero; a sequel to Disney's 1964 Mary Poppins; an eighth, really nice Transformers movie based on the popular children's toys from 1980s and 1990s; and an all-new Spider Man movie, the seventh 

It's tempting to conclude that the point of movies like these is to sell affiliated toys and T-shirts.  

MovieMonday: The Grinch -- and Grinches Past

Here we have the latest iteration of a holiday tale that had its debut in a children's picture book 61 years ago.  Everyone knows the story by now -- a cranky green-furred animal tries and fails to quash the Christmas spirit in a friendly village called Whoville.

This is the first 3-D computer-animated Grinch story, and it comes from the Illumination group that produced the "Despicable Me" series, among other films, all of which were very popular.

The imagery is creative and lovingly detailed, and the characters -- including the Grinch, in his way -- are winsome.  The narrative remains faithful to the original story's large and small elements. 

Small children will enjoy the story, as will teenagers and adults who remember earlier Grinch encounters from their own childhoods.

The themes, secular then and now, are two:  It is good to be nice, and Christmas is about more than decorations and presents.

Perhaps what is most remarkable is the enduring popularity of a very simple story.


The Grinch Evolution

1957:   Book

"How the Grinch Stole Christmas!", a 64-page picture book, was released in time for the holiday season.  Over subsequent years, it became a seasonal standard, selling many millions of copies. The cave-dwelling Grinch and his antics were the story, augmented with bit parts for his dog, Max, and a little girl, Cindy Lou, against the background of the always happy population of Whoville.


1964:  Cartoon

The estimable Chuck Jones (creator of Wile E. Coyote and other Looney Tunes stars) organized a hand-drawn Grinch television cartoon with the help of author Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel.) They added a couple songs -- notably "You're a Bad One, Mr. Grinch" -- and enlisted Boris Karloff, the famed horror movie actor, to narrate.  The cartoon ran about 22 minutes, 25 minutes with credits, and was perfect for a 30-minute children's show.


1994: The Musical

A Minneapolis children's theater group produced a musical play that later became a holiday staple at a San Diego playhouse, then moved to Broadway for seasonal runs from 2006 to 2008 and fanned out in road companies around the country.  The stars were all costumed humans, and the story was stretched, presumably with humorous pranks and songs, into a 90-minute entertainment appropriate for family audiences.


2000:  The First Movie

Director Ron Howard released a more detailed film that starred Jim Carrey as Jim Carrey the Grinch.  The story was padded substantially, giving the Grinch an origin story and paying more attention to Max and Cindy Lou.  Other characters were added, including Cindy Lou's postmaster father and her ga-ga-for-gifts mother, a pompous Whoville  mayor,  and, yes, a sort-of Grinch love interest.  Actors playing the citizens of Whoville were fitted out with unusual upturned noses and pouchy upper lips (see Cindy Lou's father at left), and new songs were added to the cartoon's music.  The whole business clocked in at just under two hours.





2018: The Second Movie

The new film is not quite as long as the 2000 one, but still is much longer than the original story.  It also is attuned to the current moment.  Cindy Lou has an overworked single mom. Whoville has a female mayor. The relationship between the Grinch and his dog is more fully developed and resembles that of  Wallace and Gromit from the popular claymation series of the 1990s.  Before outfitting Max with the book's pseudo-reindeer horn, the Grinch recruits a real reindeer, a sweet plus-sized fellow named Fred, to lead his sleigh.  In addition to a Grinch-Whoville reconciliation, the film ends with a Christmas feast.  Old Grinch songs are sung, plus traditional carols and new hip-hop numbers.


Conclusion

The original Grinch story was an abbreviated version of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" aimed at the K-3 crowd.  The basic story elements never have changed.

The appeal never seems to subside.  The original storybook is on teachers' and librarians' lists of the best 100 children's books of all time.  Regional theater troupes still perform the musical version in December.  Families still gather around the television to watch the 1964 cartoon and the 2000 movie on television and streaming channels, respectively.  The current film either will get a second theatrical release in 2019 or start streaming on premium channels as well.

For a country that increasingly seems to be populated by non-Christians and adamant atheists, that's pretty remarkable.

MovieMonday: Free Solo

More than 30 people have fallen to their deaths trying to climb El Capitan, a 3,200-foot granite peak in Yosemite National Park.  

In June 2017, two climbers, working together and with ropes to protect them, fell to their deaths.

The next month, Alex Honnold became the first person to climb El Cap "free solo," alone and without ropes.  The climb took him less than four hours and was the culmination of an eight-year ambition.  His preparation and that climb are the subjects of this documentary.

Honnold is an unusual guy who began climbing things -- trees, mountains, buildings, whatever -- when he was 11 years old.  He is now the most prominent climber in the world.  He's been featured on multiple magazine covers because, well, pictures of people tempting death while hanging on sheer mountain faces are pretty darn dramatic. 

The film, from National Geographic, which also ran a Honnold cover, was organized and shot by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who also made "Meru," a well-received 2015 doc about a Himalayan climb.

"Free Solo" has had a limited theatrical release and soon will become available for streaming online.    Still, even as it shows in fewer theaters, ticket sales per screen have remained relatively high.  

The movie itself has thrilling photography shot from the ground, by camera-bearing climbers perched on nearby ledges and by aerial drones.  These images, which show best on large theater screens, seem to appeal mostly to men who thrill to stories of physical challenges.  (Yes, there are also some intrepid women climbers.)

Then Honnold is put in context in the observations of other climbers, who describe an unusual sport and small community that I had not known existed, and also the falls that have cost the lives of dozens of them.  

As for Honnold, we hear about a distant but not abusive family upbringing and how he started to learn how to hug people when, he says, he was "about 23."  Almost 10 years later, he adds, "Now I'm a pretty good hugger."  He's an unusual character, but by no means an unpleasant one.

We see him with his head tucked into an MRI machine for a study that reveals his amygdala is virtually dormant, which is not particularly surprising.  The amygdala is the area of the brain that, in the rest of us, reacts automatically to frightening or threatening stimuli.  

Then we learn about Honnold's home, a well-appointed van, and his demanding exercise routine and his girlfriend, a nice person but one who can be a distraction when he is climbing.  (In not entirely credible style, the two are filmed discussing their relationship and their plans and feelings, which looks like acting and seems a bit out of place in a documentary. But this is nit-picking.) 

As one climbing friend observes, "Free solo needs mental armor.  Having a close romantic relationship removes that armor, and you can't have both at the same time."

Anyway.  Alex may be fearless, but he is disciplined.  He practices every part of the El Cap climb multiple times with ropes, and he fills notebooks with observations that he memorizes about every step and handhold of his planned ascent. His girlfriend drives off as the day of the climb grows near.

Then comes the climb itself, which is condensed into less than 20 minutes, not as much as I'd have liked to see.

By the movie's end, it's tempting to wonder what next challenge Honnold will set for himself  and what it will cost him.  It reminds the viewer of the climbing friend's comment earlier on.

"If you're pushing the edge, eventually you find the edge."

MovieMonday: Creed II

This second Creed movie is well made, well acted and enjoyable to watch.  It also is a classic sequel in that it takes a popular original and then piles on More.

The original in this case is 2015's Creed, a film I admired.  "Creed" revived the Rocky franchise and gave it a fresh start.

The "Creed II" setup is this:  Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) has trained with Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) and put together a good boxing career.  He wins the world heavyweight championship and proposes to his girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson).

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, an old Rocky foe, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lungren), seethes.  The Russian fighter killed Adonis' father in a boxing match but then lost everything in Rocky IV and wants his son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu), to reclaim the family honor by defeating Adonis Creed.

Adonis wants to fight to avenge his father's death.  His adoptive mother, Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) opposes the idea.  Rocky refuses to participate.  Both believe he wants to fight for the wrong reason.  Adonis fights anyway.  It does not go well.

Then Team Adonis reforms with a new sense of purpose and prepares for a final act, which, like the final act in "Rocky IV" is set in Moscow.

In addition to more old Rocky history, this movie has many more family themes.  Adonis and his father, Adonis and his mother, Adonis and Bianca, Adonis and Bianca and their baby, Adonis and Rocky, Rocky missing his late wife, Rocky missing the son he no longer sees, Ivan and Viktor, both Dragos missing the wife and mother who abandoned them.

Again, the film works fine. Its theme -- a gutty boxer with something to prove and people who matter to him -- may draw new, younger fans to the loyal Rocky audiences who have been arguing for years about which is the best movie from that first six-film cycle.

But this movie, while good, is not great.  The story is effective but offers nothing new, as the original "Creed" did.

The question is whether there is a perpetual audience for more movies with the same plot, with or without Michael B. Jordan and/or Sylvester Stallone

World War I: Guns, Gas, Poetry and Painting

November 11, 2018

Wilfred Owen

One century ago today, World War I ended.  Germany had been defeated and signed a surrender.  All combatants agreed that the Armistice would commence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.  

I'm not sure the 11-11-11 symbolism was helpful.  Once an agreement had been reached, why not lay down arms immediately?  There were telegraph wires to send messages rapidly by then, and at least a few more soldiers and civilians might have survived if the order had gone out immediately.  As it was, 17 million persons, military and civilian, already had died.

Meanwhile, in England, church bells were ringing to celebrate the end of fighting when a telegram was delivered to the Shrewsbury home of Thomas and Susan Owen.  Its message was that their son, Wilfred, had been killed in France just one week earlier, cut down by machine gun fire as he led troops across a canal in Ors.  He was just 25.

Like the telegraph, the machine gun was a newish innovation.  More than 50 years earlier, during the American Civil War, the first multiple-shot weapon, the Gatling gun, was introduced by the North.  By World War I, Germany had refined the idea and in 1917 introduced a machine gun that could spit out 600 bullets a minute.  One of those bullets killed Wilfred Owen.

Another innovation of the war was the armored tank, deployed first by the British in the Battle of Somme in 1916 and soon afterward by the German army.  In 1915, the Germans began lobbing chlorine gas during battles; the English responded with gas attacks of their own.  The most deadly gas, mustard gas, was introduced by German forces in 1917; it too was taken up by the English.    

Owen, a tutor and teacher, had been fighting in the British army since 1915.  After more than two years at the front, he was sent back to England to be treated for for "shell shock," which we now would call PTSD.  During that period he wrote war poems that reflected his disillusionment and anger.  He left these behind when he returned to the battlefield in July 1918.  They were published in book form in 1920.

Owen had read his classics:  Homer's "Iliad," the history/poem about theTrojan War and Horace's odes about the internal battles between the assassination of Julius Caesar and the transformation of the Roman republic into the Roman Empire.  

The Romans built their influence with wars of conquest, and Horace was a sort of court poet who was expected to glorify heroism and even death in battle.  

World War I wasn't that kind of war, however, and Wilfred Owen's most famous poem laid out the differences.   

One Horatian line that Owen borrowed was this:  "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,"  which translates as "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country."  Owen had seen too much.  He called that notion "The old Lie."

Here is the poem itself.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; 

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.- 

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. 

This poem is strong for its complex structure, for its imagery and for its unflinching description of a soldier's death throes following a mustard gas attack.  

Another artist, painter John Singer Sargent, visited a World War I battlefield and observed soldiers who had been blinded by mustard gas at a treatment station.  From this experience, he made this painting, "Gassed," which was completed in March 1919.
  

The painting is huge, more than 20 feet long, which suggests how strongly Sargent took its subject.  Later, when he was commissioned to do group portraits of British commanders and and statesmen, those paintings were smaller.

So that was the war:  A triumph of military innovations and the death of millions, remembered in art but without a meaning understandable to the men who fought or to their loved ones.

World War I was known for several decades as the War to End all Wars and the Great War.  Then, in 1939, came World War II, which was distinguished by more deaths, deadlier weapons and not so much art.

Hiatus

An unexpected turn of events has landed the Idiosyncratist on the injured reserve list for a week or so.

When the Id returns, there will be a rumination on the centennial of the World War I armistice and a delayed Movie Monday post.

MovieMonday: Bohemian Rhapsody

This is a perfectly enjoyable movie about Queen, the stadium/anthem band of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it pulls a bunch of punches on its way to wrapping the story into a neat, coherent package.

If you want to know how the script rearranges timelines, adds fake conflicts and ignores unappealing facts to stitch together a not particularly truthy biopic, this Rolling Stone story has the details.

That said, there is much to like, most notably Rami Malek's portrayal of Freddie Mercury, Queen's charismatic and complex lead singer.  We meet him as Farrokh Bulsara, a Parsi baggage handler at Heathrow Airport who talks his way into fronting a band he admires.  Minutes later, he has changed the band's name and his own, and the group are writing and performing many still-familiar rock classics.  

Gwilym Lee also does a nice job as Brian May, the band's cool and very capable lead guitarist; his steadiness contrasts with Mercury's moods and sinuous stage antics.  (The real Brian May is reported to have shaped much of the movie's plot, which soft-pedals Mercury's gayness and drug use, which were central to his public and private identities.  Mercury died of AIDs in 1991.) 

There are nice scenes of Queen composing songs, and also many fragments of performances.  These will appeal to Queen fans who grew up with the music and now are middle-aged, the audience demographic in the screening I saw.  Their enthusiasm, stoked by a monthslong promotion campaign, gave the film a remarkable $50 million opening weekend in the U.S.  

Here are the songs most prominent in the movie:  “Another One Bites the Dust,” “We Are the Champions,” "We Will Rock You," "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and, of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody." If you have fond memories of these, by all means go.


Context

Queen's performing career ended in 1986.  The movie's opening and final scenes focus on the enormous 1985 LiveAid concert in London's Wembley Stadium.  

The band's cultivation of crowd involvement -- clapping, stamping, singing along, echoing Mercury's phrases, etc. -- prefigure the current situation, in which musicians make most of their money from performances and not from sales of recordings.

Last summer, Kenny Chesney attracted an audience of almost 59,000 to Met Life Stadium, the New Jersey home of football's Jets and Giants.  Over the course of the six-show stand, total attendance approached 390,000 in a region not typically associated with country music.  It's clear that being part of large concert events is central to the appeal.  

MovieMonday: Gosnell

As films go, this one looks better than it should given its lean budget of $2.3 million.  The subtitle -- "The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer" -- is provocative, and the filmmakers pretty clearly are opposed to abortion, even though some of the law enforcement characters describe themselves as pro-choice.

As narrative goes, this hews to the facts.  Philadelphia police and the FBI get interested in Kermit Gosnell initially because he seems to write an excessive number of opioid prescriptions.  When they go to his clinic, they find unsanitary conditions, inadequately trained medical assistants,  several dozen jars of little tiny feet and plastic garbage bags full of aborted fetuses.

Pretty creepy.  Turns out that Gosnell's office and practice have not been visited by health inspectors for 17 years, at the explicit direction of city officials.  Further research reveals that the doctor has performed very late-term abortions, violating state law, and that at least one woman seeking an abortion died in the facility and her death was never investigated.  His assistants reveal that he has systematically killed live-born babies.

Gosnell, his medical assistants and most of his pregnant clients are African American.  (White patient sare given nicer rooms upstairs.) 

The doctor, as portrayed, is a puzzle.   He seems blithely unconcerned about his legal jeopardy and more devoted to his exotic pet turtles than to his unfortunate patients.  He says several times that he hasn't provided any services that he wouldn't provide for his own daughter.

The doctor is put on trial, convicted of several killings and sent to prison for life.


Resistance

In the 45 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been more than 50 million abortions in the United States.  Americans know that Kermit Gosnell is not the face of abortion, however much the makers of this movie might wish to convey that message.

What is remarkable is the yearslong squeamishness about acknowledging what happened in the Gosnell medical office in Philadelphia.  It suggests a near paranoia about the sturdiness of public support for abortion rights.

Think about it.  Generally, we might expect the story of a doctor's criminal maltreatment of pregnant black women to be grist for a movie of righteous anger.   Just not this story.

Yes, most people in the film industry are progressives and hold pro-choice views.  But they also could be assumed to favor gun control and this hasn't stopped them from releasing many, many shoot-em-up movies.  They don't seem to worry that these will inspire more gun sales or deaths in inner cities.  

In addition, the industry doesn't shy away from stories about actual criminals.  Two weeks ago, I discussed one about a true-life bank robber.  A few weeks before that there was a story about a true-life drug dealer.  Earlier this year there was one about true-life mafia don John Gotti.

And the Gosnell pushback was not limited to filmmakers.  As Daily Beast writer Matt Lewis pointed out in a September article, the Gosnell story and movie have been played down and blocked repeatedly by news organizations, fundraisers, distributers and advertisers.   

One clue is in the distribution of "Gosnell."  As best I can tell, it is showing on only one screen within 50 miles of Manhattan, and not at all in the blue cities of Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, Seattle and Chicago.  In short, theater owners have concluded that those populations want nothing to do with a story about Kermit Gosnell.  

Honestly, I think the fears are misplaced.  

MovieMonday: Beautiful Boy

"Relapse is part of recovery."

This truth about the path out of drug addiction is said early in this movie and again and again as a father and son share the heartbreak and pain of the son's personal struggle.  

The story is a true one and drawn from the first-person books by David Sheff (Steve Carell) and his son, Nic Sheff, (Timothée Chalamet.) 

When the film begins, Nic is a successful, happy high schooler with a doting father who understands that his son smokes marijuana.  What the dad is surprised to learn, however, is that Nic has sampled ecstasy, cocaine and methamphetamine, and that he likes all of them, particularly the last one. 

Around this time, David suggests that he and his son go surfing near their home, apparently in one of the coastal towns of Marin County, north of San Francisco.

They paddle out into the water.  David is submerged briefly, and when he resurfaces, he looks for his son.  After a moment, Nic appears, standing on his board, navigating beautifully across a long, long wave.  

The scene suggests the joy of seeing a child triumph and sets up the contrast of the rest of the story.

Nick tells his parents this:   "When I tried it (crystal meth and eventually heroin as well), I felt so much better than I ever had. So I just kept doing it."  

David mobilizes, getting treatment for his son and taking him to a Narcotics Anonymous group, where we hear the "relapse" theme for the first time.

And so things continue.  Nic the person becomes a hostage to his need for dopamine highs.  He goes away and comes back again and again.  David keeps trying to find his son and to talk to him -- but cannot keep his son close and cannot change him.  Nic's emotional states range from denial to anger to lying to regret to seeming despair.   

The tense father-son interactions, while played beautifully, become almost claustrophobic and have the likely unintended effect of minimizing the effect on the rest of the family, including Nic's young step-siblings, his stepmother (Maura Tierney) and his mother (Amy Ryan), who has moved to Los Angeles. 

After seeing the movie, I read a bit about the actual Nic.  In one book passage, as he was handcuffed and arrested in front of his home, his small stepbrother ran out and tried to make the police officer set Nic free.  I would have liked to have seen this scene in the movie, instead of just the worried moms' faces.  I know that such trauma radiates through families and even out to long-ago friends.  

Long story short, this a grim entertainment but one for our moment.  It may function, as David's and Nic's books do, as an offer of hope and fellowship to others in similar situations.  The truth is this:  It is easy to surrender yourself to addiction, but breaking free is extremely difficult and a lifelong struggle.

The final credits acknowledge that Nic has been clean for some years now.  Long may he thrive.

MovieMonday: The Old Man and the Gun

Here we have a film made by and for people who love Robert Redford.

Ostensibly it is about a 73-year-old Forrest  Tucker (Redford) who's a lifelong crook -- bank robber, mostly -- and a 16-time prison escapee.  The twist is that he's really nice.  A gentleman crook, if you will. 

If anybody can pull off a role like this, it's Redford, whose acting career stretches back to the 1960s.  He's still movie-star handsome at 82 with a craggy face and suspiciously good hair.  As Tucker, he looks dashing in jackets and slacks; you can take him anywhere. 

When Texas detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck) senses a trend in recent heists and documents it, he identifies Tucker and his two pals (Danny Glover and Tom Waits) as the likely suspects.  The trio are dubbed the Over the Hill Gang.

Hunt researches Tucker and finds a man who says, "He always had a gun with him, but if you told me that he had never fired it once in his his life, I'd believe it."

He finds Tucker's daughter, who never knew her dad but whose abandoned mother "loved him till the day she died."

Then there are the robberies.  During one, a bank teller starts to cry as she stuffs cash into Tucker's briefcase.

"Cheer up!" Tucker says.

When she tells him it's her first day on the job, he consoles her.   "There's a first time for everything.  Chin up.  You're doing a great job!"

Along the way, Tucker courts a ranch widow, Jewel (Sissy Spacek), and they talk about the meaning of life over coffee and pie at a diner and as they sit in wooden chairs on the front porch of her house.  

In short, everybody likes the guy.  Heck -- what's a million bucks of theft against a winning personality?

There actually was a Forrest Tucker, who stole his first bicycle at 13 and made his first prison break two years later after a conviction for car theft, establishing a pattern that continued through his life.  A New Yorker article by David Grann was the source material for the movie, which shifts some of the timeline but is essentially true to the story.

The acting here calls to mind some of the Redford's previous work, particularly his two good-natured buddy-outlaw films with Paul Newman in 1969 and 1973.  But those were made a long time ago. I wasn't surprised to find that I was the youngest person in the theater when I saw the movie.

The film itself is nicely done and works because Redford is a compelling enough actor to keep an audience interested as he charms everyone he meets, including the detective who pursues him.  Still, the action is thin and there is barely enough of it to fill the movie's economical 93-minute running time.   

If you're a Robert Redford fan, by all means go.

MovieMonday: A Star is Born

This latest Star-Is-Born movie (more about the others later) is, by my lights, the best of the bunch.

The story is well known by now:  An ambitious but obscure young woman is observed by a very successful older male star who drinks too much and whose career has peaked.  They marry, he promotes her rise as his own career declines and there is a bittersweet ending.

What distinguishes this version is character development.  The established star, Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) cares deeply about music and songwriting.  He has a backstory that explains this and gives some context to his alcohol abuse and his contentious relationship with his much older brother and manager, Bobby (Sam Elliott.)  

The action gets going one night when, after a concert, Jackson stops at a drag bar for a drink and hears waitress-by-day Ally (Lady Gaga) sing "La Vie en Rose."   They talk for while and recognize that they have a shared interest.  

"I think you might be a songwriter," he observes, and in fact she is.  He admires her work and pulls her onstage to perform at his next mega-concert.  Ally, reluctant at first, sings one of her compositions to an arrangement that Jackson has prepared especially for the moment.  From there her career and their relationship take off.  

Eventually Ally gets an agent, Rez (Rafi Gavron,) who promotes not just her music but Ally! -- a star with a new orange hairdo and flashy dance numbers.  This redirection from pure music, together with Jackson's personal problems, cause stress in their marriage.  And so it goes.

In addition to acting in this movie, Cooper co-wrote the script, and directed and produced the piece  The more-nuanced-than-usual plot plays to his strength -- he's been nominated for three acting Oscars -- and gives first-time actress Gaga support while her singing and her character's career trajectory balance her end of the story.   It works well.



Early Iterations



"What Price Hollywood," a 1932 film directed by George Cukor is the story of a waitress who catches the eye of a bibulous film director.  He helps her become a star as his own life spirals downward.

This film is the template for the four subsequent "Star Is Born" movies.   Some are better than others, and each in its way reflects the moment in which it was made.   

The 1937 version of "A Star Is Born" is about Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor,) a naive young woman who lives on a farm in North Dakota and wants to be a movie star.  Her granny dips into savings to send Esther to Hollywood, where, after much disappointment, she meets a handsome movie star, Norman Maine (Fredric March,) whose "work interferes with his drinking."

Maine courts Esther and promotes her to his studio, first getting her a small part and then a starring role.  The studio pros rename her Vicki Lester, her career takes off and the two marry.

The love of a good woman straightens Maine out -- they drink milk at dinner -- but he loses his studio contract and slips back into his old habit.  

Like "What Price Hollywood," the film depicts a glamorous industry that must have appealed to a country mired in the Depression.  Scenes are set in the film studio, at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, at the see-and-be-seen Ambassador Hotel swimming pool, as well as (then) Grauman's Chinese Theater and Sunset Boulevard's Walk of Fame.  

The 1954 version of "A Star Is Born," resembles the 1937 in almost every detail, but with music.   Esther Blodgett is played by actress/singer Judy Garland.  

As before, Norman Maine (James Mason) has a drinking problem, but Esther Blodget/VickiLester (Judy Garland) likes the guy.  "Drunk or not, he's nice," she observes.

They become a couple as he promotes her career and then marry.  Her rise and his decline proceed apace, punctuated with some great musical numbers typical of the era, most notably "The Man That Got Away."  

"A Star Is Born" was revived again in 1976 with a plot updated for the rock and roll era.  It has a notably dissolute star, John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson,) who meets Esther Hoffman (Barbra Streisand) in a coffee house where drinking is banned, darn it, after a big stadium concert.  

Inexplicably, the two take to each other, and he promotes her music, which is nothing like his own.  The movie pairs an intensely focused Streisand with an amiable Kristofferson stumbling, falling, drinking and snorting cocaine, which may reflect the actors' relative personalities and levels of ambition.  

The story parallels its predecessors, but the whole thing is a mess.  This may be why nobody wanted to make another star-is-born movie for the next 40 years.  

Notes

Viewed with 2018 eyes, these movies present some interesting male-female dynamics. 

         

All the films feature a man whose career declines as he helps his wife's career explode.  Not one of the movies speculates out loud that the man feels himself reduced as a man by his diminished status.  

        

In the last three films, the female roles -- obscure women who triumph -- are played by already-famous stars.  Before her 1954 performance, Judy Garland had established herself as a singer and acted in 30 films, including "The Wizard of Oz."  Barbra Streisand had appeared in nine films and recorded 20 popular albums.  Lady Gaga's pop music was so popular that she was the halftime star in the 2017 (LI) Super Bowl.

I don't know what if anything to make of all this, but we talk a lot about the patriarchy these days.  These stories and their players don't quite fit the narrative. 

----- 

        

"I just wanted to look at you again,"  is a line that Norman Maine says twice in the 1937 film -- first as his relationship with Esther is developing and then toward the end.  

It's a simple and moving way of bracketing the plot arc.  Not surprisingly, it was picked up and used in all three subsequent movies.

MovieMonday: Smallfoot

This well-intentioned film is based on a long-forgotten book whose story has been kicking around Hollywood for at least two decades.  The resulting, much-revised script has been turned into a nice but sub-optimal animated movie.  

The hero is Mogi, a young, white-firred bigfoot (yeti, sasquatch, whatever) who lives in a happy community of similarly oversized Chewbaccas who live above the cloud line at the top of a Himalayan mountain.

Mogi's community has an origin story -- that it was pooped out by a larger being, which is less funny that it sounds -- and customs.  Each day begins when Mogi's father, the designated gong ringer, catapults himself a great distance to set off a noise that awakens a sleepy snail (the sun, hahaha) that lights the world as it oozes across the sky.

The village leader is Stonekeeper, a wise man who administers the rules of the place, as received in images on stones.  (Holy Moses!) The stones instruct that smallfoots (i.e., humans,) do not exist and that the known world ends at the clouds that sit below the village.  Obedience is expected. 

Mogi has followed the rules, but he succumbs to curiosity. With the help of other science-oriented yetis led by Stonekeeper's cute and smart daughter, he journeys below the clouds and sees forests, an airplane and town of smallfoots.

The fun ignites when Mogi meets up with Percy Patterson, the front man for a film company whose documentaries are not selling.  (This is illustrated when Percy performs his version of the1980s Queen song, "Under Pressure," which apparently is a great favorite with the pre-K to elementary-school demo.  FWIW, the rest of the film's music is, well, meh.)

Integrity-challenged Percy has been planning to film a fake Bigfoot to promote his program, and naturally, he meets up with Mogi.  The two make friends over time, then the story of the stones is revealed, then dangers arise and are averted, and then comes the happy ending.  

Like Aesop's fables long ago and animated offerings now, the story has a moral: "Be nice to other people and animals/primates of any size."  The more subtle themes -- think for yourself, challenge authority, be skeptical of all dogma -- may not resonate so much with small children but are standard grist for American drama.  No reason not to start early, I guess.

The best "Smallfoot" scenes are interactions between humans and yetis, particularly when they talk to each other.  Each group speaks its own English, but human ears register bigfoot talk as threatening growls;  when yetis listen to smallfoots, the messages are indistinguishable squeaks. 

Some famous actors and others voiced the characters in "Smallfoot," including Channing Tatum, Danny De Vito and LeBron James.  I'm sure that all did yeoman work with their lines, but I'm not sure it made much difference in the overall quality of the movie.

I watched "Smallfoot" in a theater with children aged four and up who seemed to enjoy themselves.  In American animation these days, it could be worse.




Note

"Smallfoot" is the fifth film from Warner Animation Group (WAG), which was founded in 2013.  Three of its five releases have featured Lego characters, and at least one (perhaps two) future Lego movies are in the works.  It's difficult to see such projects as dramatic releases and not product promotion.

There's nothing terrible about any of the WAG movies, but none comes close to the silliness and fun of Warner Bros.' storied animation shops, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes.  I do hope children today are being introduced to Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Tweety and the rest of the gang. Those cartoons were made for fun, not moral uplift or product promotion.

And while I'm on the topic, let me also mention the 100+ short films of The Three Stooges, which were released long ago by Columbia Pictures and are available now on many streaming services.  These may look crude and insensitive, but I know for a fact that children love watching silly grownups when they are frustrated and let loose their ids.    

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.  Seriously. 

MovieMonday: A Simple Favor

Here's a hybrid:  a noir-comedy-thriller whose original source material is a chick-lit novel with the same name.  Sadly, no single leg of this stool is sturdy enough to hold up any of its parts. 

I haven't read  the book -- "A Simple Favor" by Darcey Bell -- but have seen several other films directed by Paul Feig, who has earned some cred on women-driven projects, most notably, "Bridesmaids" in 2011, "The Heat" in 2013, and "Ghostbusters" in 2016, which I still maintain was unfairly reviled.

(Unless you count "Pride and Prejudice," my forays into chick-lit ended after I read as many Nancy Drew mysteries as I could get my hands on in third grade.)

When it comes to this film, I'm not sure whether the story is unfocused or too true to the sprawling plot of the book.  For me "A Simple Favor" is simply a favor too far.

 Here are the three main characters:  Emily (Blake Lively), an impossibly glamorous Manhattan career woman; Stephanie (Anna Kendrick), Emily's country-mouse suburban friend, and Sean (Henry Golding,) Emily's handsome husband whose job is to react to the other two.

After Emily has befriended cloddish, houswifey Stephanie by plying her with gin martinis and advice -- "Stop saying you're sorry!"; "You are so nice I have no idea how you survived this long!" etc. etc. etc. -- she asks for the "simple favor" that is the title of book and film.  

Emily phones to ask Stephanie to watch Emily's son for a few hours while Emily attends to an emergency at work and Sean is out of town.  Sweet, naive Stephanie agrees immediately.

After about five days, Stephanie gets curious.  She applies some of the lessons she has learned from her sophisticated friend and does some "sleuthing" (as Nancy Drew used to do.) Things just get curiouser and curiouser.

Then Sean (Emily's husband, remember?) comes home from nursing his hospitalized mother in London, and he and Emily seem to get interested in each other.  Then the police get involved.

Then a body turns up in a lake.  Then the names "Faith" and "Hope" turn up.  Then the police stir the pot some more and Stephanie does more research to discover who Emily really is.  Then come about five new plot twists (maybe more; I lost count) and several rabbits are pulled out of hats.  

Many questions are answered in a final humorous gunshot scene.  Then the coda reveals each character's happy ending.

If you choose to see the movie, ignore the acting.  Anyone could act in "A Simple Favor," even playing the Emily role if given the right wardrobe and hair styling.  The biggest bit of character development occurs in Stephanie, who has an often-referenced mom vlog ("Hi moms!") and over time wears nicer shoes and socks.

This isn't the actors' fault.  The characters are unsympathetic and flat, and except for some brief added sex scenes (hurray, R-rating!) they don't have much to do except recite their flat lines.  

To be fair, the movie is enjoyable to watch, but not nearly enough to justify a drive to the cineplex.  

Maybe later in the fall, when serious films are released "for your consideration" as the ads in Los Angeles papers suggest, there will be better options. 


Note

Feig and team have added a bunch of French music, including a couple of breathy Brigitte Bardot numbers, to the score to enhance the idea that the film is stylish and chic.  Not quite enough, alas.

MovieMonday: White Boy Rick

It's hard to know which is more surprising about this movie -- that investors paid $29 million to make it, that theater owners were willing to open it on more than 2,500 screens last week, or that Matthew McConnaughey agreed to appear in the thing.

The essential problem is the script.  Scripts are reviewed pretty carefully by funders, actors and actors' agents before they commit themselves to projects.  And this script stinks.

The story, drawn apparently from stomach-churning reality, is about Rick Wershe, Jr., (newbie Richie Merritt), a young teenager who gets involved in the crack cocaine dealing community in mid-1980s Detroit.   The African American dealers give him the moniker that is the film's title.

WBR, a dropout, lives with his junkie sister, Dawn (Bel Powley,) and dad (McConnaughey) in an old house across the street from his grandparents (Bruce Dern, Piper Laurie), who are there to reaffirm the family theme and complain when their car is stolen.

Dad's a devoted father who worries about his daughter and raises money by buying fake AK-47s, which he outfits with silencers and then sells at huge profits to gang members.   His goal is to open a movie rental store.

WBR sees the luxy gang life, carries guns frequently and sometimes shoots rats for sport as Detroit declines around him.  He is recruited by law enforcement as a snitch and gets shot for it.  Then, in a move for which the film congratulates him, he decides to help his family by selling crack again.  He succeeds nicely until the law catches up with him at age 17 and deals with him harshly.  

The movie ends on a note of outrage about the lengthy prison sentences that were handed down for non-violent drug dealers during the crack epidemic.  This is a worthy point but an old one, and not one that justifies the dismal squalor of the story that precedes it.  Without the dismal squalor, however, the movie wouldn't have been made.

"White Boy Rick" has been described in some reviews as "action comedy drama."  For me it was 116 minutes of unremitting punishment.


Note

Rick Wershe's life-without-parole sentence was ended by the Michigan parole board after 29 years, at which point he was transferred to Florida for another sentence.  Apparently he introduced his sister to someone who helped her sell cars and some of the sold cars were stolen; Wershe (but not his sister) copped to two more felonies and may be released in a couple years, when he is 50.  He has three children and six grandchildren.  

Wershe also has a loyal cadre of supporters who say that, while in prison, he helped law enforcement round up a bunch of crooked cops who were prosecuted and sentenced.  The movie might have benefitted from information about this.   Wershe has acknowledged and apologized for everything.  He may yet have a life ahead of him.