MovieMonday: Fyre Festival Documentaries

Sometimes a bullshit artist is just a bullshit artist.

Above is the teaser for one of two documentaries released within four days of each other this month.  The subject in each is a failed "music festival" that arguably got more attention than it deserved when it embarrassed its originator and backers back in April 2017.

The Fyre Festival concept was the idea of 25-year-old Billy McFarland, who is described in one of the films as "an aspiring entrepreneur turned con artist."  His thought was to gather some really elite people for a luxy music festival on an island in the Bahamas. It didn't come off so well; in fact it was a disaster that could have been predicted from the get-go.  McFarland is now in federal prison.

The movie referenced above is the version Hulu bought.  It was made by offbeat documentary director Chris Smith and goes on at some length about how gullible millennials were attracted by Fyre's social media promotion campaign and who wanted to attend because of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out.) It includes portions of an eight-hour interview with McFarland, for which he was paid an unspecified amount of cash and in which he says nothing of interest.

In addition to limning the FOMO concept, "Fyre Fraud" interweaves footage from cartoons and vintage black-and-white film snippets, plus an interview with a psychologist who explains that McFarland is a "con man" and describes helpfully the characteristics of con men.  Well, duh.

The whole thing runs for 96 minutes, but it feels longer.

The other documentary appears to have been launched after the announcement of the first one and was snapped up by Netflix.  It tells the same story and uses much of the same social media footage.

It has more interviews with people who worked on the Fyre festival -- the promotion team, a "music festival consultant,"  the Fyre "producer" who looks old enough to know better but shares a vulgar anecdote anyway and the employees who seemed to know all along that things weren't going well but who just kept hoping that a great big rabbit would jump out of a hat before the disappointed customers arrived.

It's one minute longer than the other production, and it too goes on longer than it should.

Critique

Fyre is not the first failed music festival.  It is remarkable for its promotional excesses --  like paying "influencer" Kendall Jenner $250,000 for a single Instagram post -- and its abject failure to grapple with the basic issues of staging a large event in an offshore location that required lodging, food, water, toilets and electricity.

The documentaries offer the rest of us a chance to enjoy a little schadenfreude as hoity-toity types suffer a very bad weekend.  All fine and good.

What they do not do is put the essential question to the many people involved in the effort:  What the heck were you thinking?  A Manhattan socialite, the wife of hedge fundie, raised $4 million for the project and declined to be interviewed.   So did McFarland's partner, Ja Rule, the rapper who talked a big game until the whole Fyre thing blew up and then faced no criminal consequences.  (There is appropriate sympathy for Bahamian workers who didn't get paid, and apparently a crowd-funding effort has reimbursed a heroic small restaurateur who fed legions of hungry people without reimbursement.)

Even the attendees should be asked the question.  By the time McFarland came up with his Fyre inspiration, his earlier enterprise -- an exclusive metal Magnises credit card thingie for millennial influencers -- was in deep trouble and had earned an "F" rating from the Better Business Bureau.

Really.  What WERE all those people thinking?

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Our popular California columnist dishes on the three Jennifers and more.

Grandma

Jennifer Lopez is cavorting with Alex Rodriguez, the baseball player who has more nafkes than Doris Day has freckles.  You know they're getting serious now that he wants the ex-wife to slash the alimony payments from $115,000 a month to bubkes and some change.  JLo herself has more mazuma than monkeys have fleas, but she's 50 now, and wants a rich gonif to foot he bill for all the nips and tucks she'll need.

Jennifer Garner, who finally split from her shikker of a husband, Ben Affleck, is now running around with John Miller, a gonster macher who owns the CalifBurger restaurant, which is what?  It's nothing but a fancy-schmancy McDonald's without the clown but with prices up the wazoo.  

Me?  I go for the hot pastrami French dip at Langer's Deli.  It's to die for.  The best fast-food place is now long gone. It's Feltman's of Coney Island, home of the original hotdog.  They even spoke the mama-loshen there.

The other Jennifer, Jennifer Aniston, who was married to Brad Pitt for two minutes, long enough to dump her for Angelina Jolie, the queen of meshuggenehs, has now split from her other husband, Justin Theroux.  About him I know gornit.  None of his movies have I ever seen, and now they say the poor mensch is now seeing a psychoanalyst, which everyone knows is a Jewish doctor who hates the sight of blood.

And then there's Alec Baldwin.  Him I never liked.  He's so full of himself he looks gassy.  Now he's proven to the world that he's a k'nocker and a bulvan when he beat up an old man for taking his parking spot. (Editor's note:  Parking in Manhattan is a blood sport.)  His talk show they canceled -- the one where he was interviewing the Kardashians, as if they needed more exposure. 

Me?  I did like that Baldwin movie about the funny dybbuk ("Beetlejuice") with the tall girl (Geena Davis) who drove off the cliff with the other one (Susan Sarandon) in "Thelma and Louise."

Okay, enough already.

Vocabulary

This report is particularly rich in Yiddishisms, including several that are new to The Id.  Definitions follow.

Bulvan: a loud mouth or know-it-all

Dybbuk:  a malicious possessing spirit, the dislocated soul of a dead person.

Gonster macher:  a prominent man, typically wealthy.  Sometimes said gantse macher.

Gornit:  nothing.

K'nocker:  a showoff.

Mama-loshen:  Yiddish, the mother tongue.

Mazuma:  money.

Nafkes:  women of casual morals.

Shikker:  a drunk.

MovieMonday: Spider-Man -- Into the Spider-Verse

There is much to like about this new Spider-Man movie, the seventh such since 2002.  (This is on top of hundreds of Spider-Man comic books starting in the 1960s and a Spider-man cartoon television series in the 1990s.)

The challenge for this outing was to make the story fresh, and the filmmakers have done this by giving us a new Spider-Man.

The hero now is an Afro-Hispanic middle school student, Miles Morales, who has nice parents but some of the attitude problems that are common to young adolescents.  Miles begins experiencing strange symptoms after he is bit by a spider.  Then, somehow, he meets Peter Parker, the famed Spider-Man who has been rescuing New York from bad guys for many years.

Then a bad guy (Kingpin, a stock enemy in the Spider-Man oeuvre) mortally wounds Parker in his most recent battle to save the city. Before breathing his last, Parker charges Miles with taking up the role of New York's protector.  

Unfortunately Miles has no idea how to go about this.  

Then comes a bunch of sciency-sounding mumbo jumbo about parallel universes, quantum mechanics, the space-time continuum and a super collider.  The effect, somehow, is to introduce five other, more experienced Spideys --  a Parker doppelganger, a noirish 1930s character, a cute classmate of Miles', a Japanese anime girl, a computer and a toon -- who have arrived from their respective alternate universes.  

The back-and-forth among the spider individuals, plus Miles' family concerns, play together with humor and, ultimately, solidarity, and even Peter Parker's Aunt May (you had to see one of the many originals) makes an appearance as Miles slowly learns what the others already know.  

By the end, Miles is becoming the man and the superhero he was meant to be.

Besides a generous and jocular spirit, the movie also has a rap and hiphop soundtrack that feels authentic and sets the tone and pace for various scenes.


Reservation

This film is rated PG, and there is nothing in its content to offend small children.

But its totality has much in common with the frenetic pace of the opening of The Lego Batman Movie.  In fact, some of the same people worked on both projects.

Unlike the first six Spider-Man movies, this one is entirely computer-generated imagery -- effectively a cartoon for the new millennium, and a skillfully done one at that 

There is the rub.  Spiderverse is filled with camera cuts between realistic looking cityscapes and explosive-charged neon-ignited versions of same, between characters and cartoon panels of characters and between dialog and cartoon dialogue balloons -- these occur frequently and within seconds of each other.  When some big new thing happens, it is preceded by an explosion of hot-pink-to-purple bubble shapes.

The fact that filmmakers can produce this sort of thing is impressive, but I'm not sure it is an unmitigated good.  

Certainly someone who spends 10 hours a day playing video games will enjoy this movie, but after 217 minutes (on top of 30 minutes of kid-movie "previews") I left the theater feeling pretty darned jangled.

I wouldn't recommend taking a five-year-old to see it.  

MovieMonday: The Godfather in Retrospect

This movie is approaching its 50th anniversary in March.  After an interval of many years, I watched it again last week.  

It still stands as one of the finest American films.  It established the careers of Francis Coppola, its director and co/writer, and many of its actors.  It also inspired many other films with similar themes.  

We all know the story.  Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) heads a crime family in New York, but is also, in his way, a man of principle.  He protects those who matter to him

The movie itself is skillfully organized.  It opens with the spring marriage reception for Vito's only daughter, Connie (Talia Shire), an event that establishes Vito's family values, how influential he is in his community and that his older son, hothead Sonny (Michael Caan), is active in his father's organization while a younger son, Michael (Al Pacino), is not.

Then a Hollywood subplot establishes that Vito really means it when he says "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."

The balance of the movie is a prolonged war, punctuated by gun attacks, between the Corleones and the other New York gangs.  Besides the issue of whether the Corleone organization will prevail, there is a more personal question -- whether Vito's golden son, Michael, a WWII veteran and college man, will be drawn into the family business.

What distinguishes the Godfather movies is that they operated on two tracks -- as family stories and also as shoot-em-ups.

Before this movie, there were occasional crime-gang stories --  some Jimmy Cagney stuff in the early 1930s and then "On the Waterfront" in 1954, a story about a boxer (Marlon Brando again) whose ambitions are corrupted and destroyed by a Hoboken gang.  

"The Godfather" was followed by two sequels, and the trio of films grossed a billion dollars in US ticket sales, which was pretty good money back in the day.

The popularity and profits led to many other Mafia movies, most of which were heavier on the gunplay and lighter on the family themes. Some of the most prominent were "Mean Streets" (1973), "Scarface" (1983),  "Goodfellas" (1990), "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), "Pulp Fiction" (1994), "Donnie Brasco" (1997) and 2017's Baby Driver.  (To be fair, there was also the long-running "Sopranos" series on HBO, which was largely character-driven.)


Verisimilitude

So how true to life is "The Godfather?" 

Two points:

-- Mario Puzo, who wrote the novel that was the source material for "The Godfather," based his story at least in part on another writer's description of his own father, a small-time thug.  After Puzo's death in 1999, that second writer wrote about their work relationship and said this:

"Before The Godfather, who knew that criminals had families and believed in justice? The greatness of The Godfather is that, except for the material derived from The Honored Society and some Congressional hearings, it is entirely a work of fiction, the invention of a great story teller. It's really a shame that it caused people to believe that crime was romantic and honorable and heroic, that the Mafia was ever anything more than guys hustling lots of cheap scams in order to be able to live in Kew Gardens, Queens.

"But Mario didn't really know much about crime. I did, and so I see the book as a great work of art, while others want to see it as some kind of history."

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From a wide-ranging Vanity Fair story about the making of the original film, here is producer Albert S. Ruddy's account of quietly arranging a mafia-only preview screening of the movie.  

"'There must have been a hundred limousines out front. The projectionist called me and said, "Mr. Ruddy, I’ve been a projectionist my whole life. No one ever gave me a thousand-dollar tip." That’s how much the guys loved the movie.

"They not only loved it—they adopted it as their own, employing the term Puzo invented (the Godfather) and frequently playing the movie’s haunting theme music at their weddings, baptisms, and funerals. 'It made our life seem honorable,' Salvatore 'Sammy the Bull' Gravano, of the Gambino crime family, later told The New York Times, adding that the film spurred him on to commit 19 murders, whereas, he said, 'I only did, like, one murder before I saw the movie.… I would use lines in real life like, ‘I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse,’ and I would always tell people, just like in The Godfather, ‘If you have an enemy, that enemy becomes my enemy.’”

MovieMonday: Stan & Ollie

This is an affecting story of two famous comedians' career decline, leavened with many of their classic routines.  It's nicely told and charming to watch.

The two, of course, are Laurel & Hardy, mega-stars of short films and feature movies between 1920 and 1940.  Played here by Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly, respectively, they are introduced on the Hal Roach Studios lot in 1937 as the pair are working on the set of "Way Out West," arguably their most popular film.  There is some tension between the two about their staggered contracts with the studio and with Roach himself.

Then the story shifts forward 16 years, when Stan and Ollie arrive in England for a series of live performances.  They are older, and their popularity has faded; the plan is to wow audiences and build interest in a new Robin Hood-based film script that will revive their careers.

The indignities -- dingy rooming houses, small venues with empty seats, an oily promoter -- do not dissuade the two.  The job of performers is to perform, after all.  They are good-natured and submit to silly promotions that generate good will.  By the time they arrive in London, Laurel & Hardy are selling out the 2,000-seat Lyceum Theatre and staying at the Savoy.

Interwoven into the tale are multiple repetitions of various pieces that actors Coogan and Reilly recreate very nicely.  Laurel & Hardy worked in a day when physical comedy, facial expressions and silly mixups were popular, and these are still amusing today. 

The men's wives, two very different women, add to the fun when they arrive in London.  Ida Lauren (Nina Arianda) needles Stan in real life as Ollie does on stage, and Lucille (Shirley Henderson) is devoted to Oliver. Both marriages, like the relationship between the comedians, are comfortable and generous at heart.

At one point, Stan and Ollie fight about a possibly manufactured-for-the-script old resentment, and then Ollie's knee and heart give out.  

None of the tension rises to violence or even curse words, which may be true to the time or reflect that the film was written by an Englishman (Jeff Pope), directed by a Scot (Jon S. Baird) and filmed by the BBC.  

If you can take a gentle, thoughtful movie that is humorous and sweet-but-not-saccharine-sweet, you might like this one.  


Notes

There are many Laurel & Hardy shorts and movies on Youtube. "Stan & Ollie" features a famous scene from 1932's County Hospital.

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Hardy's iconic line, "Well, here's another nice mess ...." does appear in the movie but not until rather late in the show.

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Both men had several marriages, which along with Hardy's fondness for gambling and Laurel's for alcohol may have strained their financial situations.  

Early on, Hardy swears he will not marry again but instead will find a woman he doesn't like and buy her a house.  This got a great laugh in the theater, but is generally credited to Lewis Grizzard, an Atlanta columnist who wrote it many decades later.