MovieMonday: Abominable

This is a good movie for children.  It is beautifully shot and heartfelt and generous, all of which can make a viewer overlook a plot that is about as formulaic as it possibly can be.

It starts with Yi, a young teenaged girl whose father has died and left her a violin, a photograph and dreams of the big journey he and she had planned to take together.

Yi sets out to raise enough money to go on the trip herself.  She keeps busy with small errands and avoids her mother, grandmother and friends.

One night, in her secret place on the roof of her building (probably in Shanghai,) she encounters a big white furry creature with kind eyes.  It is a yeti that has escaped the clutches of an evil rich guy and his kidnapping goons.

Yi helps the yeti hide from helicopter searchlights, feeds him her grandmother's pork buns and deduces that "home" for him is the Himalayas.  She calls him Everest.

Then with two friends from her building -- cool-guy Jin and Peng, Jin's basketball-loving younger cousin -- she sets out to take Everest back to his mommy and daddy.

The group flees to avoid capture by the Scrooge-like enemy, his witchy red-haired accomplice and the armed thugs who pursue the yeti and his friends in big amphibious vehicles.

The trek takes Yi's team down beautiful rivers, to the Gobi Desert, through gorgeous fields of flowers and to a major Buddha statue in Sichuan. As Everest gets nearer his home, he demonstrates increasing magical powers over nature.  So does Yi, who recognizes that this is the trip she had wished to share with her father.  There is the comforting suggestion that the stars in a beautiful night sky are ancestors watching over their relatives on earth.

At a time when children's movies include more than enough knowing references to pop culture and adult jokes, Abominable is sincere and generous.  It gratifies young viewers' wishes for kindness and cooperation.   The plot tensions are overdone and awkward, but children will get the general themes and focus more on the triumphs of the Yi, Jin, Peng and their big, sweet furry friend.


Films in China

This movie is a hybrid, made by DreamWorks Animation in concert with Pearl Studio, a Chinese company.  We probably will see more such projects because Hollywood is learning that it doesn't understand the Asian market as well as it thinks it does.   Examples:

-- The 2001 film,  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, filmed in China by Taiwanese director Ang Lee, was very popular in Europe and North America, but not in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong or China.

-- Twenty years ago, Disney's animated Mulan, drawn from a Chinese legend, was rejected as not being Chinese enough; some saw it as "too individualistic."  Disney now is cuing up a live-action version (as it has done with The Jungle Book and The Lion King) that presumably will aim for greater authenticity.
         On the other hand, Pixar's 2017 film Coco, was very popular in China because its references to Mexicans' ancestors and Day of the Dead events resonated with similar traditions in the Middle Kingdom.

-- Since the turn of the millennium, American-made superhero movies have sold very well in China;  Disney's Marvel, among others, has shoehorned in Chinese characters and martial arts scenes to appeal to that market.

-- Last year, Crazy Rich Asians, a very profitable romantic comedy about Chinese people in Singapore, surprised its makers when it fell flat in China.   Still, a follow-up is planned -- China Rich Girlfriend, which IS set in China.

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There is another quirk in Chinese cinema:  Certain outsiders are not welcome.  Richard Gere, a popular actor in the 1980s and 1990s, has acknowledged that he has been blackballed by major film studios for his advocacy of human rights in Tibet.  (China has dealt harshly with the Tibetan Autonomous Region since absorbing the area in 1950.) The studios are apparently unwilling to work with Gere even on films that will not be distributed in Asia for fear of Chinese reprisals.
          The point isn't that Gere is suffering -- he still works in independent films.  But China does not tolerate even mild forms of the noisy political back-and-forth that people take for granted in the US.

MovieMonday: Ad Astra

An adventurous person going out to investigate the unknown is one of the most common themes of fiction and drama.  In this movie, the unknown is external and internal for Brad Pitt, who does a nice job conveying a man's rising tension in a subtle but believable way.   It makes for a thoughtful movie.

The setup is this:  It is the "near future," and the universe is being rocked by seismic explosions.  Thousands of people are dying on earth, and nobody seems to have any idea what is happening or how to respond.

The US Space Command is on the case, and so is crack astronaut Maj. Roy McBride (Pitt), who is deployed into the stars (ad astra in Latin.)   He's the right man for the job -- unemotional, self-controlled and able to "compartmentalize" his concerns as other mortals cannot.  In addition, he is the son of another astronaut (Col. McBride, seen in pictures and old transmissions as Tommy Lee Jones) who disappeared on a space mission in Roy's boyhood.

Roy chose the same career as his father, who Roy believes died long ago on the Lima Project, a mission near Neptune.   Still, when an SOS message arrives from that long-silent project, a supervisor says, "We have to hold out the possibility that your father is hiding from us. "

This sets in motion a journey that owes much to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella about a journey up the Congo River to find what what has happened to Kurtz, an agent of Belgium's cruel colonial empire.  The same theme was taken up by Francis Coppola in Apocalypse Now, the 1979 movie about a search for a mysterious Col. Kurtz who has disappeared in Vietnam.

Roy flies commercial to the moon, now a cheesy tourist destination, and from there to a space station on Mars.  Along the way he meets a space traveler who has reason to hate Roy's father and he tussles with several kinds of danger.   Roy meets these challenges and, sang-froid generally intact, proceeds alone to the space station outside Neptune and a confrontation that answers some of his questions.

There is irony in a story that sends Roy billions of miles to find out who his father was/is -- and, by extension, who Roy himself is, deep down inside.  Also interesting is the application of Christian terms to frame the meaning-of-life questions implied by such exploration.  Before takeoff, a space pilot prays for guidance from St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers.  Later a wise man says this:  "May you meet your redeemer face to face and enjoy the vision of God to the end."

Like other space-travel movies, this one has unfillable plot holes.  We don't know yet how humans will power their way from one distant planet to another, how they will fight if they encounter unfriendly forces or how they will get home, if ever.   This requires screenwriters to invent improbable solutions, which is understandable and yet a little frustrating even for viewers whose knowledge of astronomy is limited.

Except for that, the movie is interesting and moving.


Note

Ad Astra was popular at cineplexes over the weekend, but not nearly as popular as the Downton Abbey reunion movie, which apparently drew many fans of the multi-season story of a British noble family and its servants.   If I read correctly, its plot suggests a(nother) sequel may be planned.

In addition, its creator, Julian Fellowes, has been promising an American-based series, The Gilded Age, on a similar theme set in the 1880s.

The thing is, those rich guys in the 1880s were called robber barons and they were very unpopular with the common folk.  Much of their money was made in new industrial facilities, where angry employees launched the first round of labor union organizing in the US.  Today the country is much wealthier overall, but it still seems riven with resentment about inequality in incomes and wealth.

Given all that, why are audiences so captivated with stories of people with landed estates and great fortunes?

MovieMonday: Hustlers

Here is a typical reaction to this new movie, which had a very successful opening weekend.

It’s Goodfellas in a G-string. But Scafaria’s film is always a blast to watch, 

resulting in a surprising level of emotional depth.

I'm not sure I see the point.

For starters,  Hustlers doesn't have that much in common with Goodfellas.  That 1990 movie, about some lowbrow gangsters, started by making audiences laugh and then turned up the volume on the violence and cruelty, at which point the people in the theater started to think, ooh, maybe this isn't so funny.  In short, that movie showed the consequences.

This movie is about scantily clad women who entertain lascivious men with pole dances and lap dances and such.  They are not prostitutes, not even strippers.  Just making a living, you know.

The star who carries the show is Jennifer Lopez, a legitimately good actress who, incidentally, trained carefully for a beautiful early pole dancing scene that shows off her famed derriere to good effect and inspires the male clients to throw many many dollar bills (or $5 or $20 bills perhaps; the camera doesn't focus on the currency, after all) in appreciation, as well as to tuck bills into the back of her little costume.  

Lopez plays Ramona, a seasoned veteran in the club who takes a newbie named Destiny (Constance Wu) under her wing, teaching her dance moves and generally encouraging her as she gets better at attracting the men's attention and money.  Real sisterhood-is-powerful stuff.

Later Destiny says, "2007 was the fucking best.  I made more money than a goddamn brain surgeon."  (The movie does not make clear whether that money was net or gross but, if you're someone who has not worked or spent time in such an establishment the word "gross" does apply.)

Then Destiny takes time off, moves away with a boyfriend, has a baby, returns to New York with a daughter and no boyfriend and finds, to her chagrin, that the the gentleman's club lost most of its business during the 2008 financial crisis.  Ramona tells Destiny that their new coworkers, Russians, "give blow jobs for $300 a pop."  

In short, times are much harder.  Destiny can't find retail work in the high-end stores where she shopped during the good old days.  The club owner won't let Ramona switch to half-time shifts to take care of her own daughter.  The fewer clients are sleazier and expect more attention, if you know what I mean, for less money.  It's all so unfair.

So the pair start "fishing," first going after old clients and then trolling for new ones in bars.  They spike the men's drinks with drugs and when the marks become happy and forgetful, they are dragged to the club, where their credit cards are maxed out on spending for services and champagne.  Destiny brags that, not infrequently, the women's billings run to  $100,000 a night for the club and the team.

The film has several scenes of drugged men reduced to gibbering fools, and the audience in my theater thought these were just hilarious.  

Scams like the fishing one work until they don't, of course, and in this case the film winds down rather as Goodfellas did.

I get that much of the appeal of a movie like this is the soft-core pornography of flimsily clad women, rather as the Goodfellas appeal was the soft-core violence pornography of men with guns shooting each other.

But, taken as a story, the Hustlers plot falls back on some old cliches.

For one thing, Ramona and Destiny believe their "fishing" is justified because Wall Streeters are bad guys. "You see what they did to this country -- they stole from everybody," Ramona says.  "The game is rigged and doesn't reward people who play by the rules."

Yes, Wall Streeters played a role in the Great Recession, and, yes, a lot of Wall Streeters behaved like horndogs in the decade or two leading up to that recession.

The plot in this movie applies the Wall Street = evil shorthand, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.  Are Ramona and Destiny angry because the sleazy guys stopped spending lots of money on their pole dances, or are Ramona and Destiny playing Robin Hoods in deshabille to seek vengeance for all the little people hurt in the recession?

A second cliche is that these poor women have no other alternatives and so MUST work in the gentleman's club.    Destiny, who was abandoned by her parents, is the sole support of her daughter and her grandmother.  Another woman who joins the fishing team says, "My brother doesn't talk to me anymore.  I told my mom and dad that I worked here, and they kicked me out of the house."

In this movie, the female leads are involved in what they regard as a mild version of what we now call "sex work," but the theme is as old as drama itself.  Here are some film actresses who have played strippers and prostitutes -- in some cases, multiple times:  Shirley MacClaine, Demi Moore, Natalie Portman, Charlize Theron, Mira Sorvino, Elisabeth Shue, Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, Greta Garbo, Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Basinger and Jane Fonda.

Can we declare a moratorium, even a short one, on this handy but hackneyed trope?  Male heroes frequently triumph over obstacles but seldom over obstacles that reduce them to debased sex objects.



Notes

This film is drawn from a real-life situation described in a long, long magazine article that I didn't finish.  One of the two main characters in that article is said to be writing a book of her own, and I don't plan to read that either.  The actual complainers who started the police investigation that ended the fishing hustle were two non-Wall Streeters:  a man who was so cleaned out he lost his house and a cardiologist from New Jersey.

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Am I the only one who thinks it's a little odd to release a film that congratulates women for drugging men and taking advantage of them financially less than a year after Bill Cosby was sent to prison for drugging women and taking advantage of them sexually?

MovieMonday: It Chapter Two

This horror film had a great opening weekend with $91 million in ticket sales.  The second most popular movie, released two weeks earlier, sold $6 million in tickets.

There are several ways to look at this.  Maybe It Chapter Two is 15 times better than everything else being shown now at cineplexes.   Maybe other new film releases were delayed to avoid competing with this one.  Or maybe any movie release that is based on a Steven King story -- his books have sold more than 350 million copies, after all -- is certain to be more popular than anything else available.

The source material here is a thousand-page book published in 1986 about encounters between a malign, sewer-dwelling clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård, not that you'd recognize him) and a group of citizens of Derry, Maine -- first in their early adolescent years and then 27 years later.

A first movie, called It, was released two years ago and covers the earlier part of the story when the children, who call themselves the Losers Club, battle with Pennywise and also local bullies.

It Chapter Two tells the rest of the story.   It opens with a nasty event (reminiscent of an actual one 35 years ago that I hope would not be repeated today.)  The only member of the group who has stayed in Derry, Mike (Isaiah Mustafa,) sees that Pennywise is back in Derry and then calls his old friends to tell them they are needed.  He reminds them that they promised long ago that they would return in the case of such an event.  The other losers don't want to do it, but they travel back to their hometown.

There's a nice scene early in the movie when the losers meet over dinner in a Chinese restaurant.  At the end of the meal, their fortune cookie fortunes spell out a scary message, and then other fortune cookies sprout creepy creatures, and then a lot of slime bubbles up and covers their private dining table.  When a waitress checks on the group, all the menaces have disappeared.

This introduces the main point of the plot (and presumably of King's book) which is that the horror each loser faces has its roots in a childhood experience. Now that they have grown up, they must deal with those matters and, by extension, Pennywise's personification of them.  Is there any other possible reason why the book and films are called It instead of Pennywise?

This makes for a more interesting story than one in which, say, a bunch of zombies just happen to strut into a town and normal citizens must get rid of the zombies because --- what?

That's my view, but I'm not a big horror fan.  Critics' typical complaints about this movie are that first, it's not scary enough and, second, that it spends too much time on the personal back stories of the now middle-aged Losers Club members.

Certainly the movie is long, at 2 hours and 50 minutes.  Even at that, it seems to have compressed and eliminated elements of the King novel, which is understandable, given the limits of theatergoers' patience.

(I have not read the novel version of It:  The longest novels I have read are Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is of similar length; Tolstoy's slightly shorter Anna Karenina, and Joyce's Ulysses, which is shorter still but seems longer.   To my knowledge, none of those three has been made into a successful movie.
          (Properly done, a feature film can do justice to the narrative of a short story or novella.   But a novel that clocks in at 1,010 pages?  No way.)

Still, if you are determined to see a movie and are willing to pack a nap pillow and shell out $25 for enough soda and popcorn to sustain you, this is the film to see this week.



Other Its

The two 2017 and 2019 films'  retelling of King's It story clock in at five hours and 15 minutes.

A few years after the book's release, a two-episode television "miniseries" told the story in a more efficient three hours and 10 minutes.

Next up, apparently, is a longer dramatization of the story, probably to appear on one of the dozens of current television streaming services.


"It" the Word

I didn't go to fancy schools as a child, but by the time I was in third grade I was pretty clear on when to use the adjective "its" as opposed to the contraction "it's."  If I hadn't learned it, I wouldn't have made it to fourth grade.

Last week, when I was reading about and deciding whether I wanted to see this movie, I ran across a story published in an online review that talked about the evil force in It and It Second Chapter.  There were repeated references to "It's" power and "It's" evil nature.   As if "it" were a character in the film.

I have read magazine articles by Steven King, if not his horror novels.  The man is a wordsmith whose writing is distinguished not just by competence but, more, a nice written style.   I can only imagine his distress (horror?) if he came across that same published story.

MovieMonday: Mike Wallace Is Here

The title of this documentary is meant to suggest what a prominent person might be told if Mike Wallace and his camera crew showed up at said person's office or atelier.  The reaction of the person to be interviewed was said to be "Mike fright."

Wallace, who died in 2012, was for decades the famed -- and dreaded -- interviewer for 60 Minutes, the CBS television newsmagazine that changed television news, inspired imitators and perhaps ultimately led to the dreck that passes for news on television today (not that the last is Wallace's fault.)

This documentary, composed entirely of film of the man's career, operates on two levels:  It tells us about Mike Wallace's struggles as a person, and it canvasses the evolution of television as a news medium.

The filmmaker, Avi Belkin, was given access to many, many, many hours of television archives.  That he managed to edit it down to something like 90 minutes is impressive, but it is useful to question whether his Israeli background (not the Jewish part but the unfamiliarity with US television) limited his confidence about describing the impact of television from the late 1940s to the current day on journalism in this country.

The general story is this.  Wallace came to television in its very early days.  He was a jack of many trades -- sometime actor, sometime game show host, frequent pitch man for products from cigarettes to lipstick -- as no doubt many others were in his day.  He also did news and developed a reputation as a good conductor of interviews.

In the late 1950s, he was the face of Night Beat, a one-on-one interview program that didn't shrink from booking contentious guests, including a Ku Klux Klan Wizard.  It was new and unusual and led to another half-hour interview show and finally to Wallace's hiring by CBS, the classy home of elite correspondents like Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow.  When CBS agreed to let Don Hewitt try 60 Minutes in 1968, Wallace was an obvious choice for the team.

Suddenly television news became more than serious guys reading reports occasionally accompanied by film.  60 Minutes had a more documentary feel and ultimately created news events.  It developed a huge following.

Some of Wallace's work for the show interesting and newsworthy, but some of it is hard to watch.  Examples:

-- Wallace asked Larry King, a TV talk-show host, "How many times have you been married?" and King remonstrated.  Later, when the how-many-marriages question was put to Wallace, he resented it too.  Who wouldn't?

--  In 1988, Wallace interviewed Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator who exiled and/or ordered the assassination of enemies, who made money by accommodating the illegal drug trade, who laundered ill-got riches out of his country and who intervened (perhaps in cahoots with the United States) in various revolutions in Latin America.

           According to the documentary, Wallace's gotcha question for Noriega was this:  "How much (money) do you make?"  The only goal of a question like that is to get a bad guy's facial reaction on film.  It may have been good television, but it was off point.

-- Wallace interviewed Barbra Streisand and asked her why she had spent 23 years in psychoanalysis.  She called Wallace "a son of a bitch."  Twice.


Mike Wallace the Man

The movie shows us Wallace talking about his teenage acne, about the accidental death of his son and how it stiffened his resolve to become a serious news reporter and about his late-in-life diagnosis of depression and a suicide attempt.

Wallace was willing to say all this, which was his business, but the fact of it and the public interest in such matters are relatively new phenomena.   People are being drawn to this documentary at least in part because they felt a personal connection to Mike Wallace.  This is part of the break television has made from journalism in the traditional sense.  (Yes, television viewers "trusted" Walter Cronkite, but did they know about his emotional life?   Would it have occurred to his colleagues even to ask such questions?)


The Point

The movie seems to want to raise questions about the direction of television journalism, but more than a few critics see it as an homage to Mike Wallace and his 60 Minutes years of fame, understandably perhaps, given that its content consists entirely of news footage and outtakes.  (In fact, Wallace was no dummy and wrote serious articles and books.)

Midway through the movie, in a discussion probably filmed in the early 1980s, the editor of the Wall Street Journal describes 60 Minutes thusly:  "I think it's more obvious and has very little to do with actual journalism."

The documentary opens with a 15-year-old conversation between Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly and Mike Wallace.  O'Reilly says, "People want straight talk. You're a dinosaur."

Then O'Reilly twists the knife.  "You're the driving force behind my career."

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We know that O'Reilly was washed out of his self-named show several years ago after it was revealed that he paid millions of dollars of hush money to women he had harassed sexually.

We also know that Walter Cronkite's successor, Dan Rather, was let go by CBS (formerly the "Tiffany Network") after he ran with a story that seemed to confirm his beliefs about George W.  Bush but that was discredited almost immediately upon its release.

These sorts of scandals used to end journalistic careers, but no more.

Curiously, Rather is quoted in this documentary.  And a feature film, amusingly called Truth, was made championing Rather and his producer in the matter of the episode that got them fired.

For his part, O'Reilly launched a syndicated radio report this spring that is carried on at least 100 stations nationwide.

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A fair question is whether either O'Reilly or Rather would dare to sit for an on-camera interview with Mike Wallace if Wallace were alive today.