MovieMonday: Yesterday

"Yesterday" is the title of a Beatles song and also of a new movie about a world in which the Beatles never existed.  The premise is fun, and the story has its moments, but as a piece of work, the film is pretty darned thin. 

The setup is this:  An unsuccessful musician, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel,) gets bonked on the head by a bus just as the world's electrical grid goes dark for 12 seconds.  When he wakes up in a hospital, he finds that he is the only one alive who remembers the Beatles.  The group name doesn't even show up in Google searches.

When he plays and sings Beatles tunes, his friends and relatives are charmed and compliment his songwriting skills.   The more Beatles music he plays, the more his audiences grow.  Ultimately he is enlisted by Ed Sheeran, a popular English musician playing himself, to be the opening act at a concert in Moscow.  Jack's performance of "Back in the USSR," brings down the house and sets him on the path to superstardom.

Into the mix comes a top music agent, Debra Hammer (Kate McKinnen,) who disparages Jack's looks and has all the charm of, oh, Cruella De Vil.  She offers him "the great and glorious poisoned chalice of money and fame," which he accepts.  Then it's off to Los Angeles where, with the help of Sheeran, Debra and a huge promotion team plan Jack's  musical release, which is sure to be the greatest of all time.

This takes Jack away from his Sussex home and his former manager, Ellie (Lily James), who has known Jack all his life and always has liked him for himself. 

Jack is a tad uncomfortable pretending he composed all the Beatles tunes, but this isn't explored.  Instead, Jack has to decide who he really is and what matters to him.  And so it goes.

Danny Boyle, who directed the two edgy Trainspotting films, is the director.  Perhaps unfortunately, the screenwriter is Richard Curtis, best known for 2003's "Love Actually," a cloying mess of a film that I had forgotten, happily, until I read the credits for "Yesterday."

One way the film might have made Jack's transformation more interesting would have been to project a non-Beatles universe forward.  If the Beatles had never made their music, would Motown have been the defining genre of late 1960s and 1970s, or would there have been another decade of folk music followed immediately by disco?  Would contemporary people be humming "Gimme Shelter" and "Satisfaction" instead of "Yesterday" and "Let It Be?"  Would Bob Dylan or Elvis have taken rock more seriously? 


Notes

There have been other stories in which characters are transported into different realities, and at least one in which the means of transport is a bonk on the head.

That would be "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," a Mark Twain satire published in 1889.  Post-bonk, a mechanic named Hank Morgan wakes up in 6th century England, where he tries to apply engineering principles and American values that don't go over so well with the magicians and Catholic leaders of the moment.  I'm not sure whether I have read this book or just have read about it, but I'm pretty sure nobody reads it now.  It's more than 400 pages -- much too long for current audiences.  

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The Beatles broke up 49 years ago, in 1970.  Not many of today's moviegoers are old enough to remember John, Paul, George and Ringo.  Still, 2020's semi-centennial anniversary of the group's end is certain to be discussed endlessly next year.    Wouldn't a savvy marketer have held "Yesterday" and released it then, amid all the hoopla?  

MovieMonday: Papi Chulo

Here's a small but pleasant movie about a distressed man who can't seem to get his act together.

The man is Sean (Matt Bomer,) a television weather guy in Los Angeles.  We meet him at work as he discusses the torrid weather of the moment.  One sentence trips him up.

"The hot dry gusts are a real hazard," he almost manages to say before choking up.  Then he tries again, with worse results.  After two more tries, the camera switches back to the anchor desk.

Sean absolutely denies he was crying, but in fact he is a gay man still heartbroken over the lover who left him six months ago.  His pals at the TV station understand this.  They tell him to go home and take some time off.  "Talk to someone," several suggest.

Back at his house, Sean gives away the large potted tree that he and his ex had placed on the outside deck.  After the tree is gone, there remains an unpainted hole in the place where the pot once sat.  (Metaphor!)

Sean paints the spot, but the result looks worse than before.  He goes back to the hardware store, picks up a much larger can of paint and a bigger paintbrush and hires a day laborer named Ernesto (Alejandro Patiño) to fix the problem.

Ernesto sets to work with a sander, and after a while Sean takes him to lunch, where it becomes clear that there are only a few Spanglish words that both men can understand.

Then Sean takes Ernesto for a rowboat ride in Echo Park Lake.  As Ernesto rows, Sean tells him in great detail about his breakup and how agonized he has been.  So finally Sean is "talking to someone" -- to a perfectly reasonable person who has no idea what Sean is saying.

Events proceed from there.  Sean, who seems to have many good friends, depends instead on Ernesto for companionship and perhaps even more.  Ernesto, a paunchy man with a wife and five children, would prefer to work on the painting project but tries to be agreeable.

Hilarity ensues in the clashes among Hispanic and white workers, straight and gay people and gay men of various backgrounds.  This is a very Los Angeles thing, and there are many laugh-out-loud moments, especially as experienced by Ernesto who discusses them all in phone calls to his wife in Pico Rivera.

If there is a problem with this film, it is that Sean gets tiresome to watch.  Ernesto, (playing the straight man, if you will) handles himself nicely with the sort of patience seen in people who have large families and/or real problems.   His subtle but clearly dismayed reaction when Sean suggests they go for a hike, for instance, is a pleasure to behold.

This makes for a lot of fun, but not all movie critics dig it.

A typical comment:

             "Ernesto is the token non-white character meant to help Sean’s character grow
              and learn from his mistakes, a riff on the 'magical negro' trope."

Not sure I see this.  I can remember the bad old days when gays and lesbians were the oppressed, and this movie gives us a gay man who is behaving foolishly if humorously.  I also have met people of minority backgrounds, including poor people, who seem not to regard themselves as permanent victims of majority bias.  Is there no room to recognize minority persons as such in contemporary film?

Two thought experiments:  1) Would this be a better movie if the frantic gay guy were Hispanic and tried to befriend an old white guy who lived in a cardboard box in LA's skid row?   2) Would it be more interesting if both the characters -- the young gay man and the fifty-something pudgy hetero -- were Hispanic?  Would that sell a lot of tickets in New York City?  Or Mexico City?

If we can't enjoy the culture clashes of people from different communities, which is part of life in more places than Los Angeles and is certainly the premise of this film, what's the point?


Inaccuracies

This movie comes from Irish-born writer-director John Butler, who obviously has spent time in Los Angeles, but who gets a few things wrong.

1.  People who live in LA typically are called AngeLAYnos, not AngeLINos, although the latter pronunciation does crop up, unfortunately, from time to time.

2.  Wood decks like Sean's are not painted.  They may appear to have paint on their surfaces, but the typical application is some kind of stain.  I have lived in two houses with wood decks, and I have stained decks many times.  This is my truth.

3.  This movie is set in a hot, dry period when the Santa Ana winds are blowing in from the east -- apparently to play upon Sean's denial that he is crying (i.e., raining.)   Unfortunately, the film is set in the summer and ends around Labor Day.  In real-life Southern California, the Santa Anas are a winter phenomenon.  A similar warm weather pattern, Chinook winds, is observed (occasionally and with great pleasure) in the Pacific Northwest in early January.

MovieMonday: The Real Moe Berg?

There have been two biographical films in the last year about Moe Berg, an early 20th century character of some interest.  What the films tell us ultimately is what we already know from current literature -- that post-millennial erudition is inadequate to deal with genuinely complex characters.

Briefly, here is the Moe Berg story:

He was born in 1902 to hardworking Jewish immigrants and raised in Newark, N.J., where he excelled in baseball and scholarship.  The latter led him to Princeton University, which was unusual for a Jew at the time.  While there he earned a magna cum laude, also unusual at the time, in languages and was the star player on the school baseball team.

There followed a career as a journeyman shortstop and then catcher (after a serious knee injury) plus a law degree at Columbia University to fulfill his non-religious father's wishes.  Bernard Berg was said to regard sports as narakeit, or non-serious, and never deigned to attend one of Moe's games.

Berg's language skills led him twice to Japan in the 1930s as part of baseball goodwill efforts and, per him, to capture 1936 film footage that came in handy for planners of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo following the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.

Later Berg enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Bill Donovan-led precursor to the CIA that aimed to catch up with established German and Japanese intelligence services. Berg's mandate was to investigate how close Germany was to developing an atomic bomb.

Berg, who died of illness in 1972, kept his own counsel.  He had a reserved nature, and even the people who knew him best describe him as an enigma.

So here we go.


The Spy Behind Home Plate (2019)

This documentary, released in a limited number of theaters last month, is the more accurate of the Berg films.  Both titles play up the baseball player/spy dichotomy, apparently to attract viewers.

This film is by far the better of the two.  It relies on old films, many archival interviews including one with Moe Berg's brother, and many photos of Berg in uniform, with legendary baseball greats, with a woman he romanced and in his travels to Europe and Asia.

Perhaps to deal with the absence of available public information about Berg's spy work, the movie offers broad and interesting context about the formation of the OSS under extreme time constraints as the US Manhattan Project developed an atomic bomb and worried whether it could complete the task before Germany did.


The Catcher was a Spy (2018)




This movie bombed last year, and it is not hard to see why.  It casts Berg as a baseball player/action hero in World War II and amps up the known story to make it even more dramatically appealing than in fact it was.

This fictionalized Berg is awarded agency and then congratulated for it in everything he does.  In 1936 he follows foreign policy instructions to make films later used by Jimmy Doolittle.  He seeks out a fellow Princeton alum to get himself into the OSS.  He bravely dodges Nazi gunfire that kills many others in a Rome under siege to find the friend of a key German physicist.   After a nonreligious and non-affiliated  life, he calls up a former girlfriend and attends his first Friday service at a synagogue (in a Zurich crawling with Nazi agents and with the apparent assent of the OSS) before his critical mission. He outwits the German physicist intellectually, with mental chess plays.  He concludes, against OSS orders, that the physicist is not a danger and does not need to be assassinated.


Films at Odds

Beyond the foregoing, what seems really to have set off Berg fans about the 2018 movie were its repeated suggestions that Berg was gay or at least bisexual.   Probably in response, the 2019 documentary goes to some lengths to assert that he loved Paris for its "wine, women and song," and to emphasize his long romance with a Boston pianist.

The whole issue strikes me as silly.  In 1930, when Berg was 28 and of prime marriage age, almost 42 percent of American men were bachelors.  Certainly some were gay and in the closet, but Berg, as we have said, was a private man and also a baseball player who rotated from team to team and city to city, which would tend to frustrate family ambitions.  Additionally, neither of his siblings married.

Maybe he was private and reclusive because he was gay.  But it is also possible that he was conflicted between his father's wishes for him to have a law career and his own preference for baseball.  Or maybe being a prominent Jew at Princeton and in baseball conflicted with his background, which he neither embraced nor denied.

And, just maybe, Berg had a screw loose.  In the documentary, much is made of his love of reading and how he carried a bag of newspapers, in various languages, in his many travels before the war.  Of this, one of the interviewees said, "But if you would touch one of his newspapers, it was dead to him and he wouldn't touch it."

After Berg's work in baseball and the spy game, he never held another job and lived alternately with his brother and his sister.  In his later years he is described in the 1995 Berg biography that was the source material for both movies, as difficult to boring to self-centered.  None of that, if true, invalidates his accomplishments.

Moe Berg was a man of remarkable intellect and talent.  It should not come as a surprise that his life's path was not a straight one.


Note

The 2019 film includes an interview with Franklin Foer of "The Atlantic" magazine.  Foer notes that a 1941 submission, "Pitchers and Catchers" by Berg, remains "one of the most anthologized articles in sports writing."  It's a good read.

MovieMonday: The Secret Life of Pets 2

This is the sequel to a very popular 2016 children's movie, and it sold less than half as many tickets as the first one did in its first weekend.  Given the quality of the piece, that's appropriate.

The premise behind both films is that pets have more active lives than their owners know.  In the first iteration, sometimes called SLOP, a neighborhood cast of dogs, cats and birds has wacky adventures and a lot of fun. 

This one tries too hard and goes too far.  It opens nicely with the same terrier, Max, who shares an apartment with a big shambling dog named Duke and their owner, Katy.  In short order, Katy marries and with her husband brings a new baby, Liam, into the home.

Max worries initially about being displaced by the baby, but over time he grows fond and ultimately protective of the little guy, rather as he adjusted to the introduction of Duke in the first movie.

Then the locus broadens.  The family pays a visit to Katy's uncle's farm, where Max meets a hardworking farm dog named Rooster.  By the time the visit ends, Rooster has taught Max some some alpha-dog behaviors that come in handy later.

Meanwhile back in the nabe, the cats and dogs are organizing to rescue a baby Siberian tiger from an evil circus master (because circus troupes always park their trucks near big apartment buildings in New York City.)

The circus master looks and dresses like the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard of Oz," and he's just as mean.  He also directs a bunch of wolves that snarl and threaten the nice pets and the sweet, apparently toothless tiger.

(One question:  Is it wise to make wolves, who are cousins of dogs after all, the bad guys in a movie that ennobles all its other animals?  There are active efforts across the American West to restore the native wolf population, and naturalists are touchy these days.)

As in the first movie, a cute white bunny named Snowball is actually a mouthy tough guy.  The big gray cat, Chloe, returns and teaches a Pomeranian named Gidget how to act like a proper feline.    These are pleasant diversions from the larger events in the over-ambitious script.

In the climactic scene, Max "channels his inner Rooster," and the pets prevail.  But you knew that.

Children probably will enjoy this film, but it isn't nearly as much fun as the first one. 


Notes

The Idiosyncratist is going to stop naming "actors" who "voice" animated characters.  Yes, Harrison Ford spoke Rooster's lines, but nobody would have guessed it if the studio hadn't released his name.  Similarly, the new Max voice, Patton Oswalt's, seems pretty much like old voice, that of now-banished Louis C.K.   And while the screenwriters may have written the Snowball part with Kevin Hart in mind, people don't go to movies to hear Kevin Hart.  These are nice side gigs for actors, but rarely additive to the overall effort.

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One review of this film is a distinctive one on a website called The Wrap.  The cranky critic's point is that the movie is too damned heteronormative, which reminded The Id of early journalism days when The Id, too, knew everything.  One of the satisfactions of adult life is letting go of the need to tell others what to think and believe.  

MovieMonday: Booksmart

Unmet Expectations

This film opened with very high hopes.  Crowd reactions to a March showing at SXSW had been great.  Early reviewers couldn't decide whether it was just as good as 2007's  "Superbad" or even more super-duper.  Promoters were so sure it would sell beaucoup tickets that they opened it on 2,500 theater screens, an ambitious number for an indie film, and waited for the crowds to arrive over Memorial Day weekend.

The crowds did not arrive.  To be fair, "Booksmart" could not have been expected to be more popular than "Aladdin," the new Disney movie starring Will Smith.  Still, the filmmakers and promoters must have been disappointed when it ranked seventh in ticket sales, two slots behind the third week of "Pokemon Detective Pikachu."  Ouch. 

Last week, "Booksmart" promoters figured the audience would be larger, based on enthusiastic reports from viewers the previous weekend.  Instead, the results were worse; sales dropped more than 50 percent, and the number of tickets sold was half as many as for that dratted Pikachu thing.

What happened?  Since I had no interest in a Godzilla movie or an Elton John biopic I decided to give it a look.  I was one of three grownups (and nobody else) at a pre-dinner showing last Friday. 

"Did you like that?" I asked the other woman as we left the theater.

She winced a little.  "I think that's just the way movies are now," she said before hurrying off to join her husband.


The Movie

The two lead characters are high school seniors Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever).  Molly, the class valedictorian and student body president, has been accepted at Yale.  Amy is off to Columbia after she spends a summer in Botswana "helping women make their own tampons." 

Amy, who came out in 10th grade, has the hots for another girl, Ryan (Victoria Ruesga,) who, says Amy, exhibits "gender performance different from her sexual orientation."

Molly is straight and a figure of fun at the school.  On one occasion, while she sits in a cubicle in an all-genders restroom, she hears one of the guys standing by the sinks say, "Her vagina is probably stuffed with diplomas."

Molly and Amy have been best friends for, like, forever.  They can talk about anything together.  Says Molly:  "I once tried to masturbate with an electric toothbrush but got a horrible UTI (ed: urinary tract infection, I believe).  Horrible, horrible."

That's the first 15 minutes or so.  Oh, wait, I forgot the students pelting each other with water-filled condoms in the school hallway.

This sort of fun apparently is standard at Molly and Amy's high school or maybe just senior year there.  The two are distressed to learn that all their studying and seriousness was for naught -- other, less disciplined students who partied their high school years away still were admitted to Yale and Stanford -- the horror!  (This part of the movie can be described most charitably as naive.  In upper-middle-class schools, ALL the students know exactly which colleges their peers have been invited to attend.)

The BFFs decide they must remedy their never-any-fun regrets by going to a particularly raucous party on the night before commencement.  The problem is they haven't been invited and so do not know the address.  They end up at two other parties, one led by a group of drama students and the other an empty affair on an unpopular rich kid's family yacht.  Along the way Molly and Amy take a Lyft, driven by their doofus white male principal (natch) but finally find their destination with the help of their favorite teacher, a smart and beautiful African American woman (also natch) who supplies them with sequined outfits and wise advice.

During the party Amy is frustrated in her attempts to connect with two different girls.  Molly is happy to be noticed by a crush of hers, the dim bulb student body VP who was one of the guys laughing at the vagina-diploma joke.  (But, seriously, Molly is really really smart.)

There comes a climax when Molly and Amy disagree.   Under all the vulgarity, it seems, this is a story about the ups and downs, and the ultimate tensile strength, of female friendship.  Yeah, right.

To be fair, the actors in this film do a good job.  The dialogue and the humor are more ribald and gross than in the usual comedy film.  The cinematography is also quite distinguished.  But the story is hard to take.

Go see it if you like.  I can't recommend it.   OR the Pikachu movie.

Reflections

The Idiosyncratist enjoyed loud moments in the last year of high school, but nothing like the ones in this film.  If any of the Id's younger friends said "Booksmart" rang true to their experiences, the Id's reaction would be one of dismay.

A couple questions:

1) The well-regarded actress who directed "Booksmart," announced that she would prefer that supporters of Donald Trump did not attend.  (The Id's interest in politics is equivalent to the Id's interest in metallurgy, and so no offense was taken.) The film is strewn with feminist references and "Resist" symbols and all that, which is fine.  It goes to lengths to promote its diverse cast, to less credible effect.  Did the enthusiasts who thought "Booksmart would be a hot seller deliberately dismiss large segments of its potential audience?  Is adolescent vulgarity the exclusive province of white, upper-class progressives?  Could that assumption have limited audience enthusiasm?


2) After "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Superbad," "Juno," and too many others to name, is there no room for tales of young people from different backgrounds?   Why don't we see their coming-of-age stories -- the funny ones (which I know for a fact are there) as well as the frustrating and ennobling struggles?  Imagine a comedy set in a majority Hispanic or African American high school, or even this -- an Asian-majority school where the college admission struggle is more like the one portrayed, sorta, in this movie.  Is any of these ideas unthinkable or, dare it be said, too diverse for our very progressive film industry? If not, where are those films?