MovieMonday: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Tout Los Angeles was abuzz about this movie last winter, for several reasons.  First, it was the ninth (perhaps last?) Quentin Tarantino film.  Second, it was a period piece, set in the city in 1969.  Third, it actually was shot in LA, which is rare now that other cities and states compete to subsidize film and television production.

The film certainly will earn out because it's different from the usual summer fare of superhero movies, horror films, R-rated comedies and animated kid-bait.  The art-house theater in my town sold out most of its screenings, perhaps because local cineastes wanted to see the thing in 35 millimeter projection, Tarantino's favored format.

Tarantino's directing career began with "Reservoir Dogs" in 1992, which was a breakout independent film and was followed by "Pulp Fiction" and all the others.  He is known for original stories and violent ones.  He also manages to recruit excellent actors.

"Once Upon" is set in 1969 and mixes themes of that moment with two stories, one fictional and the other based on real events.

There are two lead characters.  Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the self-pitying former star of "Bounty Law," a now-canceled TV western, who has been reduced to taking guest-star gigs on other shows.   Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt,) Dalton's stunt double, also has lost his less-remunerative job, but he carries himself with the kind of cool confidence that might be expected of a traditional western lawman.  The two maintain a friendship based on experience and Cliff's willingness to chauffeur Rick's car because Rick has collected a number of drunk-driving citations.

One evening when Cliff is dropping Rick at his house, the two spot and recognize Rick's new neighbors, actress Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski, who have rented the house next to Rick's on Hollywood's Cielo Drive.  (Tate played by Margot Robbie, is not a full character but a sort of confection, a beautiful cinematic object of desire.) As we know, the real Sharon Tate was murdered with several friends in her home by followers of Charlie Manson in August, 1969.

Between the setup and Tarantino's re-imagining of the Tate murders the movie goes off in many directions.

Cliff meets a hippie Manson follower and visits her group at the Spahn Movie Ranch, which was an actual setting for western films and where the Manson Family were living in the summer of 1969.   Then, always ready for a fight, Cliff trades blows with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh.) 

For his part, Rick goes to Italy to star in spaghetti westerns, based on the advice of agent Marvin Schwarz -- "not Schwartz!" (Al Pacino.)  Later Rick makes a fool of himself as a guest actor on a television show and is alternately outclassed and praised by an eight-year-old actress. 

There are recurring themes of barefooted women and Rick incinerating Nazis with a flamethrower from a movie early in his career  (possibly also a Tarantino comment on critiques of his later films' violence.)  Recognizable actors portray actual personalities of 1969.   Pop music and television of the day provide constant background noise, and well-maintained cars from the period lend authenticity to street scenes.

It is hard to describe the film further because, like all this writer-director's movies, its plot doesn't pretend to be something that actually might have happened.  Instead it is a real-looking story hatched in the brain of Quentin Tarantino and intended to be interesting and/or entertaining.  In addition, with a run time of two hours and 39 minutes, it can be described honestly as "sprawling."  Probably no other director would be able to get it released at such length; people go back and forth on whether or how much should have been edited out.

This may not be Tarantino's best film -- I haven't seen all of them and cannot say -- but it certainly justifies itself on its own terms. 

Note

It seems fair to guess that the auteur had more in mind than the Manson Family murders when he set this film in 1969.   Remember that the main characters' careers in television shows about law enforcement in the old west were ending at the same time.

That year's most popular movie was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," a new kind of western featuring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as a buddy team of irreverent outlaw scamps.  It was the same year that John Wayne played (yet another) horse-riding U.S. Marshall in "True Grit," which sold fewer than a third as many tickets.

MovieMonday: The Lion King

There are two general reactions to this movie:

     -- It will make more than $1 billion and be a classic for many years.

     -- It is not as good as might be hoped.

The Lion King franchise was launched 25 years ago with a cartoon movie described as a G-rated "Hamlet" for the children's audience.  It was wildly popular.  (The Id may be the only person yet on earth who has not seen that film.)

A few years later, the material was transformed into a theatrical musical, which I enjoyed on a trip to London, and which still plays in New York and the West End.

Now the Lion King has been brought to life again in a hyper-realistic version that follows the success of a very good CGI-generated remake of The Jungle Book in 2016.

My reaction to this Lion King is that it is TOO MUCH.   The story is too big, its hyper-realism is too broad, its humor and songs are too trivial, and its characters are too human to be credible when stuffed into apparently realistic animal characters.

I'm not advising against seeing the thing.  Pretty much everyone who has seen the first cartoon will go, and if other people have different reactions, I'm eager to learn them.  Meanwhile, let me talk about some of my points.


Children and Stories

The 1994 Lion King cartoon was given a G rating.  Like most Disney films of its day, it was aimed at the pre-k through middle-school demo. 

As we know, the story is about young Simba, whose father, the Lion King, is killed by Simba's envious uncle.  Then Simba, convinced by the uncle that Simba is responsible for his father's death, leaves the pride and returns after he has grown up and has learned the truth and when he is ready to take his ancestral role as the new lion king.

That first bit -- the daddy dying -- is a tough one.  Small children are aware that people die someday, but they come to accept the fact of mortality only over years.  They are resistant to entertainments that involve death.

On the other hand, small children also see cartoons and understand that cartoons are stories that are not real.  Think of Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse who battle each other (and sometimes with Spike the bulldog) but never suffer any injuries.

A child who sees the 1994 Lion King cartoon version of Simba's father's death understands the scene as having more in common with a Tom and Jerry cartoon and less in common with the child's existential fear of dying or losing a parent.  My guess is that this distance allowed children to accept the 1994 story without trauma.

In this new version (labeled PG and not recommended for children under age eight,) the animals look like real animals, talk like humans and have family relationships that read, emotionally, like human relationships.  (If you think about it, virtually all animal characters in cartoon films have less human-like emotional lives or problems.)

A couple small children in the theater when I saw this new movie were so sad they cried when Simba's father was killed.  My guess is their parents had loved the first show as children and figured this new version would be just as appealing to their own kids.  To their credit, the children dried their tears and stuck it out for the rest of the show.


Species Appropriation?  

The CGI characters in this movie are beautifully rendered and believably realistic.  You could quibble with the how well the animators have dubbed their speaking and singing, but that would be silly.  The technical accomplishment is remarkable.

In addition, this movie gives us the broad savanna, a dark cavern full of animal skeletons and isolated forest scenes with ponds and rivers.  It shows the flights of groups of native birds across wide skies and a stampede of wildebeests.  This further reinforces, certainly in children's minds, that the show itself is real.

But the story is not real.  Its "Circle of Life" song and theme imply that the Lion King is accepted and honored as the ruler and protector of all animals in the Pride Lands.  (Yes, the daddy king explains to Simba that lions eat animals and then when lions die, their carcasses feed the grass that is eaten by the herbivorous other animals and so it all works out.)

But, still, lions are carnivores.  If a tower (cq) of English-speaking giraffes, ala this narrative, were invited to the presentation of a Lion King's baby and heir, as in the opening of this film, the giraffes would send a polite note regretting that they had a previous engagement and could not join the ceremony with hordes of other tasty (to real-life lions) celebrants.  Said shorter, some ideas are more credible in a cartoon format than a realistic CGI one.

Additionally and because the story requires it, packs of hyenas are drafted as nasty, omnivorous predators, the natural enemies of all the really nice animals.  (Apparently some hyena-loving biologists remonstrated about this characterization when the cartoon movie came out, but their objections went nowhere and so the idea survives in the service of the story.)

Anyway, there is no shortage of beautiful cinematography of the wilds of Africa or of its wildlife.

Why not let children learn about the real Africa and the habits of its real animals instead of seeding the continent and its wildlife with European-based mythic human narratives?


Story Derivation

Since I mentioned that Lion King is patterned on "Hamlet," I'll add a few thoughts.

-- Yes, Simba/Hamlet's father was murdered by his uncle, Scar/Claudius, who assumed the throne, and, yes, after some dallying, the prince returned to avenge his father's death.  But the endings are different, appropriately given the age of the desired audience.

-- In both plays, the late king counsels the prince -- from the sky in Africa, in a ghostly apparition in Denmark -- to live up to the role assigned him at birth.  (There is also an assurance of everlasting life, a religious idea, in the Lion King.  The Hamlet story offers no such hope.)

-- When Simba flees after his father's death, he takes up with an aimless team -- a warthog named Pumbaa and a meerkat named Timon -- "Timon of Athens," get it? They are pleasant companions who believe life is meaningless.  Some so-called scholars say the two are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, goofballs who are killed off-stage in the Hamlet narrative, which makes no sense.

-- Simba's sojourn more calls to mind two of Shakespeare's history plays:  "Henry IV, Part 1" and Henry IV, Part 2."  In those, Prince Hal's friendship with Falstaff is more like Simba's bromance with Pumbaa and Timon.

-- The end of Lion King less resembles the Hamlet story than "Henry V," the subsequent and triumphal play in which Hal assumes his role as king and leads England to victory in the Battle of Agincourt.

-- Finally, the look of Scar (see right,) the murderer/usurper in this 2019 Lion King iteration, summons immediately to mind a line from "Julius Caesar," another betrayal narrative -- "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look."

Reviews from the 1994 cartoon movie suggest that the original Lion King plot drew on a Japanese anime story and/or a Scandinavian myth.  The themes of such stories have traditional resonance.  The only question I have is how long the idea of ancestral-derived and -enforced primacy will survive in narratives over time. 


About That Play

Below is a too-quick run-through of "The Lion King" play as it opened in London after the turn of the millenium.  Among its charms were animals played by people in costumes or manipulating intricate puppets and a strong singer who opened the show with the Zulu chant — “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba! -- and then provided a musical narration to signal scene and location changes. The show also had an almost entirely black cast with the bad guy (Scar the murderer/usurper) played by an Anglo actor with a plummy Oxbridge accent.  Why not, given the story was set in Africa?



We attended that show with a second grader who sat straight up in his seat, rapt, from the moment it started until the curtain came down.  The semi-abstract nature of the animal cast was perfectly understandable and appealing to the younger person, who still recalls it with affection, unlike the more traditional Gilbert and Sullivan production he was forced to attend the next evening. 

It has been said, often and truly, that poorly done theater is awful, much less compelling than film.  But great theater is vastly superior.


Note:

Keep your eyes open to see whether Disney's renowned marketing team promotes this film as relentlessly as it did another big movie in 2016.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Our California columnist discusses talk-show celebrities of today and yesterday.

Kathie Lee Gifford left the “Today Show.” She and her sidekick Hoda Kotb were some kind of a low-rent Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, but me, I liked them better than Oprah with all her spiritual shtus and narish fad diets.

Kathie Lee’s given name was Kathy Lee Epstein. Her paternal seide was a Russian Jew, and she was Jewish until she saw a Billy Graham movie (“The Restless Ones”) and became a Holy Roller or whatever.

In New York she was known as a good hostess, (though hardly another Perle Mesta, G-d rest her soul), and wound up on the show with Regis Philbin, where she dumped her nudnik of a first husband for football player Frank Gifford.

No bargain she got with that momzer Gifford when he was caught cavorting with a stewardess/zoyne -- a surprise it should have been to nobody, since all of Hollywood already knew that Gifford had cheated with one of Johnny Carson’s wives (JoAnne Copeland) while she was still married to Carson, and Frank Gifford was married to his second wife, Astrid Gifford).

From what I hear, Johnny Carson was no mensch and it was no secret that he was a shikker. Me? I could smell his boozy breath coming through my own TV set. 

Sure, to his guests he was nice: Dean Martin, Don Rickles, Frank Sinatra, Angie Dickinson, Jimmy Stewart, Carol Wayne, but to sidekicks like Ed McMahon and Doc Severinsen? Bubkes! For them he had no time. And to Bob Hope, who was his most frequent guest, he was a real shtunk. Johnny hated that Bob Hope worked from a script, so he would ad lib to throw Bob off, who by then was so old and addle-brained, he’d shrug, slump down and say nothing like Charlie McCarthy without Edgar Bergen’s hand up his tuchis.

I’ve said enough already.


Notes

Most of Grandma's Yiddish here is self-explanatory, but it seems fair to note that the terms "stewardess" and "zoyne" are not synonymous.  The nicest way to describe a zoyne is as a woman of low character.  Most flight attendants, male and female, do not fit that description.

-----

Perle Mesta is a name not often heard these days.  She was a wealthy widow famed as the "Hostess with the Mostes'" in Washington, DC, during the last century, as well as a political activist, philanthropist  and the US Ambassador to Luxembourg.

MovieMonday: Stuber

Once you get past the idea that this is a serious action movie, "Stuber" turns out to be a lot of fun.  It's a bit of a hybrid -- a buddy/action/comedy with lots of cartoonish accents.

One of the buddies is a tough cop named Vic (WWF alum Dave Bautista) who wants to catch and/or kill the drug lord who has shot his police partner.  Dave's vulnerable spot is his strained relationship with his young adult daughter.

The other buddy is Stu (Kumail Nanjiani of "The Big Sick" and the "Silicon Valley" show.) Stu, aka Stuber (haha) works in a sporting goods store by day and drives an Uber by night to help the woman he calls his "best friend," and whom he secretly loves, to finance her cycling gym for women, which is to be called Spinster (haha).

Six months after his LAPD partner's death, Vic gets a tip on the whereabouts of the bad guy who killed her.  Unfortunately the tip arrives just after his Lasik eye surgery and many hours before he will be able to see well enough to drive or shoot his gun.

But Vic is motivated.  After a predictably smashing effort to drive his own car anyway, Vic drafts Stu and his Uber to take him on a night's journey through the Los Angeles underworld.

The pursuit takes the men to a gay male strip club where Stu and a performer have a heart-to-heart talk about relationships; to Stu's sporting goods store, where he and Vic battle each other with all manner of equipment; to a veterinary hospital where a shootout ensues while the vet walks dogs out back; to a battle at a sriracha factory with a predictable complication, and on and on.

Buddy comedies draw their energy from the pairing of birds of different feathers: In the crimefighting genre, there have been various male buddy teams -- think of the Rush Hour movies with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker and  "48 Hours" with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte.  Women's buddy movies seem to be more group events ("Bridesmaids, "Mean Girls," etc.), but "The Heat" with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy playing comically mismatched cops was well-received a few years ago.

The "Stuber" writer and director clearly decided to amp up the humor and not upset audiences too much with the violence that, yes, includes anonymous people getting shot but also many ornamental jokes woven into the plot.

This has upset some critics, who say the movie is too violent, but perhaps those critics haven't seen a Liam Neeson revenge movie lately.  By some lights, "Stuber" has more in common with Tom and Jerry and Scooby Doo cartoons than, say, "Reservoir Dogs."

As someone who reads screenplays sometimes, I was impressed with the jokes worked into this script -- the inventive use of a room-service cart to try to frustrate a bad guy fleeing the scene of his crime, the rich vein of Uber-in-Los Angeles stories, and the electric Uber car running out of battery as the film nears its climax, among others.

Yes, the plot is formulaic, but it fits together better than, say, 2017's "Baby Driver," which was more implausible AND featured gruesome shootouts that killed many identifiable characters.

Actors Bautista and Nanjani acquit themselves well, particularly Nanjani, and we can expect to see more of Bautista over time, perhaps as we have with Dwayne Johnson.

"Stuber" probably will not be a great success at the box office, but if you like to laugh, you might enjoy it.



Note

The other complaint about "Stuber" is that the story has no strong female characters.  This is true, but in this film the two buddies carry virtually all the action.  Perhaps if there is a remake, a woman actor could play Vickie or Susan.

One actress who has a small part in the story is Mira Sorvino, who plays Vic's LAPD boss.  Sorvino won her acting Oscar more than 20 years ago, and it is believed that her promising career was torpedoed later by Harvey Weinstein after she rejected his advances.  She seems to have been working steadily since in smaller roles, but her career almost certainly would have been more prominent if Weinstein had been held to account many years earlier.

MovieMonday: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

This unusual film tells a simple but deeply affecting story.

The title character, Jimmie Fails (played by a man named Jimmie Fails) is emotionally attached to his grandfather's house in San Francisco's Fillmore district, the site of Jimmie's fondest memories.

When he visits the house, he touches up the paint on the window sills and tends the plants in the yard.  The residents resent him, but he is well-intentioned and means no harm.

Jimmie currently shares a room with his friend, Mont (the also terrific Jonathan Majors) in Mont's grandfather's house in faraway Hunter's Point.  Mont is a careful observer who sketches what he sees and aims to write a play.  Both men have ho-hum jobs.  They move around town on Jimmie's old skateboard.

Eventually, the Fillmore house becomes vacant, and Jimmie and Mont move in as squatters.  Events proceed from there.

What makes the movie special is its tonal harmony.  Jimmie's sense of dislocation is personal -- childhood time spent in a group home, a later period living in an old yellow Eldorado sedan -- but of a piece with that of San Francisco itself.

In the film, groups of tourists zip around on Segways and in buses that look like cable cars while listening to tunes from the 1960s.  Homeless people crowd stairways to Bay Area Rapid Transit stations.  A gray-haired man, naked but for shoes and a fedora, strolls to a bus stop.  (For many decades, city activists have advocated for nudist rights.)

In Mont's traditional black neighborhood, workers in hazmat suits collect toxic trash while a street preacher urges "purification" and for people to fight for their homes and their lives.  Across the street, a group of five trash-talking young black men form a sort of Greek chorus of anger and brittle hostility.

Eventually, the Victorian home is put up for sale.  Jimmie tries sincerely to convince a banker that he will take care of the house and make every mortgage payment, but the listing price, $4 million, is clearly out of his reach.  There is no place for people like Jimmie and Mont in the city where they and their grandparents were born.  Jimmie's longing is palpable but unsolvable.  In San Francisco, he is not the only one.

The movie was co-written and directed by Joe Talbot, another San Francisco native and a longtime friend of Jimmie Fail.  Each regrets that the city's gentrification effectively leaves no room for those who have spent their lives there.

The acting, cinematography and musical score are all excellent and carry this theme without ever putting it into words.  But the message is unmistakable in a film worth seeing.


Note

With most movies, you get standard plots.  If you go to a superhero movie or a horror movie or a young adult comedy, you know pretty much what to expect.  This may satisfy some, but the sameness tends to dull the level of interest.
          "The Last Black Man" is one of several recent African American-derived films that have broken out of traditional constraints.  Two notable others are 2016's Moonlight and last year's Blindspotting, which largely was an observation of current-day Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco.

San Francisco over Time

The San Francisco that tourists visit today -- loved for mid-19th centuryVictorian homes like the one in this film -- got its first growth spurt when its deep port and banks accommodated shipping and finance for the California gold rush.  (A half century later, Seattle came into its own as the jumping-off point for prospectors during another gold rush in the Yukon.)

African Americans began arriving in the city in the 20th century as part of a national migration out of the rural South.  The Fillmore neighborhood in the film was sometimes described as a West Coast Harlem, but in fact it had a broadly diverse population that included Anglos and Asian Americans.  After World War II, there came a trend of government-initiated "urban renewal" projects in San Francisco and other cities; the result, and probably intent, was to move minorities out of convenient and pleasant neighborhoods.

Housing was always expensive in San Francisco, but by the1980s the city's dynamism was at a low point.  People who relocated there did so for lifestyle preferences and often at some cost to their careers.  The largest industry was tourism, and middle-class families fled for suburban schools and affordable homes.  By 2000, San Francisco was home to more pet dogs than children, a ratio that seems not to have changed in the intervening years.

The city's latest trend of gentrification can be attributed to the tech boom -- Cisco, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. -- that brought great wealth to the Bay Area and re-established San Francisco as the West Coast's premier financial center and a desirable home for newly rich techies.

The Millennium Tower, 52 stories of expensive condos built to conform to San Francisco's very strict earthquake and engineering standards, has sunk more than 15 inches and tilted almost as much since its opening 10 years ago.  It can be seen as the symbol of a city that ain't what it used to be.