MovieMonday: The Gentlemen

The preview above gives a general idea of the story in this movie:  Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is an American-raised marijuana magnate who has connived with members of England's landed gentry to conceal his very profitable growing and packaging operations and now wants to sell his business.

The first problem is that the potential buyer, Jeremy Strong (Matthew Berger,) a skeezy billionaire, is dickering about the price.  The second problem is that another bidder, Dry Eye (Henry Golding,) the nephew of an opium magnate, has dropped in from Asia and presents other challenges.

From there, the complications multiply in various directions.  This is not surprising in a film co-written and directed by Guy Ritchie, who made his reputation with 1998's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which also had a gleeful cacophony of complications.   When watching such a movie, the viewer is constantly thinking, "Wait -- what?" The only thing for it is to be patient, pay attention and see what happens. I'm pretty sure that all the loose ends are tied up neatly by the end of The Gentlemen, but I'd have to see it again and take copious notes to be sure.  It's that kind of movie.

Along the way are many entertaining elements.

One is the presence of an older, scruffier Hugh Grant in perhaps his best role ever.  He plays a seedy opportunist named Fletcher who has figured out and photographed many elements of the Pearson's operation, its sale and its nuances.  From this material Fletcher has written a "screenplay" that he offers to sell to Pearson's head lieutenant, Raymond (Charlie Hunnam.) What Fletcher really wants is a scant £20 million in extortion money.

Another element is the free-lance backup of a crew headed by Coach (Colin Ferrell, also seen in a new light), who runs a boxing gym.  His black and white thugs dress in plaid track suits and show up when needed as enforcers.  The group always delivers.

Third is the dialogue.  The characters are not real gentlemen, of course, but they speak in complete sentences, and even paragraphs -- all of them.  This is not common in gangster movies or, I assume, in gangster life, but seems more to be a signaling conceit (don't take this too seriously) from the script's writers.

Since the movie is about a bunch of violent criminals, there is coarse language, of course.  Perhaps most notably, the term "cunt" has transitioned into an oft-used male insult, as in when Dry Eye is called a "deluded, duck-eating cunt."  And, yes, that does sound culturally insensitive, which may be beside the point given the behavior of Dry Eye and the other characters.  These are not politically woke characters.

There are so many elements in this possibly overplotted tableau that it is easy to forget details, one of which is the near absence of female characters.  True, the American marijuana magnate is fiercely devoted to his wife, Roz, (Michelle Dockery of Downton Abbey fame, apparently) who looks like a tough gal but really has not much to do.  The only other woman is the addicted daughter of a member of the landed gentry, who seems to have got mixed up with some grubby characters, including, of course, the son of a Russian oligarch.

And, again, there is violence -- creative chase scenes and attacks and executions with guns and other implements -- but also humor.  If British law enforcement has a branch that pursues felons, well, that group does not make an appearance in this narrative.

The effect is one of a zippy, almost cartoonish story that is a more down-market variant of the James Bond (27th movie due this spring) franchise or the Kingsman one, whose last iteration was released in 2017.

NOTES

The American version of this sort of devil-may-care genre is the heist movie.  One famous one, Oceans 11, was released in 1960, then again in 2001 and followed by two sequels and by Oceans 8, a female version, in 2018.  Recent American movies in the same vein include 2017's Logan Lucky  but, also that year, the much less upbeat Baby Driver.

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One fashion note:  With only a few exceptions, all the male gentlemen in this film have beards,  from Pearson's frizzy goatee to Raymond's full and well-trimmed beard.  We know that Gen Y and millennials have been taking to mustaches again.  Could it be that chin hair isn't just for retired guys anymore?  Could facial hair be the new English equivalent of the neck tattoo?

MovieMonday: Bad Boys for Life

Twenty-five years ago there was a buddy cop movie called Bad Boys and, eight years later, a sequel called Bad Boys II.   Both were popular.  Critics liked the easy back-and-forth between detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) but hated the derivative, unoriginal, explosion-laden plots.

Now the Bad Boys are middle-aged and back for another go.  Of the three films, this is regarded as the best by far.

Mike and Marcus are older, yes, but not that changed.  The film opens with Mike behind the wheel of his shiny Porsche, handling it like a stunt driver while Marcus frets in the passenger seat.  They are in a hurry to get to the hospital to meet Martin's new grandson.  Martin dreams of retirement and playing with young Marcus while Mike has no plan to slow down, not ever.

Then problems arise in Miami.  The widow of a drug lord the Bad Boys put away escapes from prison herself and directs her son to settle scores by executing the public officials she blames.  The son shoots Mike in the stomach with an assault rifle as he pops a wheelie on his motorcycle.

Mike wants Marcus to work with him on finding the shooter.  Marcus hems and haws and finally agrees.  Their longtime captain (Joe Pantoliano) resists but then relents a bit, allowing the two to "observe" as his younger, more tech-savvy detectives do their investigation.

But Mike is from the old school.  He handcuffs one potential witness to a metal fixture and then shouts out questions while he has the guy in a headlock.  In another case, Mike kicks open a door and aims a big pistol at a man.  (Interesting in a day when police departments are outfitting officers with bodycams.)

As the story unspools there are the now-common explosions and shootings in various settings but also something a bit unusual -- several family stories, including Martin's plus one or possibly two for Mike toward the end.  And, to be fair, there is a lot of humor in the interchanges between Mike and Marcus, two characters known to the audience and happy to lay into the plot's gags with fine timing and great zest.

The movie is nicely filmed with gorgeous establishing shots of Miami and Biscayne Bay.  One interesting touch comes when dead bodies fall out of windows in the upper stories of Miami Beach's famous Broadmoor Hotel, and -- oops! -- one lands on the roof of Marcus' wife's minivan, making a largish dent.

Perhaps the difference between this Bad Boys film and its two predecessors is that the first two were directed by Michael Bay, who is best-known for directing the Transformers movies that perhaps did not allow for much exploration of the characters' personal lives.  The current film was directed by Belgians Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who made a gang-oriented Romeo & Juliet-type film that was popular in Europe.

This is not the time of year when really promising movies are released.  In Southern California particularly, tout Los Angeles is busy seeing, or re-seeing, Oscar-nominated movies in anticipation of next month's Academy Awards program.  Except for the apparently awful new Dr. Dolittle film, there's not much new in theaters.

But Bad Boys for Life has been very well received.  A fourquel now is planned.


Note

The trailers before this movie included SIX previews whose stories involve lots of guns and shooting (just in the previews.)  Interesting drama requires conflict, and I get that there is an audience for such.  But sometimes I wonder why gun-control advocates get more cheesed off about the National Rifle Association than a film industry that courts young viewers, particularly young men, with movie after movie of handsome actors shooting handguns and assault weapons and flame throwers, and lobbing grenades, and setting off bombs.  We know that people take fashion tips from actors and celebrities.  Is it not possible that we also are influenced by watching stories in which armed fighters go after each other on the streets?

MovieMonday: Ford v Ferrari

This is a very good film that has just about finished its run in movie houses.  If you want to see it, your best shot will be to stream it on the biggest screen in your house.  It's worth a look.

It's a real story about car guys (with wrenches and in racing suits) butting heads with guys in business suits, about competing cars and competing drivers trying to best each other in various races. It feels authentic and is both moving and thrilling to watch. 

The story traces to the mid 1960s, when Enzo Ferrari has all but run his company broke in the interest of building the world's finest race cars and when he seems to have a lock on Le Mans, the most prestigious auto race in the world.  Henry Ford Jr. (Tracy Letts) is convinced by Lee Iacocca (Robert Bernthal) that Ford's grandfather's company needs some pizzazz to make its cars more appealing to the American market.  

With Ford's blessing, Iacocca leads an effort to buy-merge Ford and Ferrari, but cannot get the deal done.  Then Ford Jr. (aka Deuce) commits the company to build a race car of its own.

The technical effort is led by Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), a winning Le Mans driver sidelined by heart problems who now makes custom performance cars.

Shelby immediately seeks out Ken Miles (Christian Bale), another motorhead with great driving instincts to work on the project. 

Both men understand how cars work the way the way the rest of us understand how to read digital clocks.  They lighten their prototype, enlarge the engine, improve brakes and handling and make sure that, above 200 mph, their racer stays on the road instead of trying to launch into flight.  

Ford sends a very good car to LeMans in 1965, and, darn it all, loses to Ferrari.  Shelby credits the loss to the company suits' veto of Miles as the lead driver, and the team goes back to work with 1966 in mind.  

Along the way, there are great scenes of races, individual race driving and the kind of street driving car guys (and sometimes their relatives) do that would scare the bejabbers out of most of us.

Damon does a good job as Shelby, and Letts gives the film a difficult but committed Henry Ford. 

But Christian Bale owns the story.  He doesn't act the part of Ken Miles as much as he occupies the character of Ken Miles, a racer who died early and with a near-mythic reputation that extends to the present day.

All in all, it's a fine movie, but you have to keep in mind that, when it comes to telling real stories on film, fiction is stranger than fact.  Everything gets amped up -- the Ferrari negotiations, the tussles between suits and engineers, the minimization of the number of techs it takes to customize a great race car and perhaps even the racing maneuvers depicted on film.  This article details some of the differences.


Notes

This movie is based a very popular 2010 book, Go Like Hell by A.J. Beame.  

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One thing the movie does not explain as well as it might have done is the difference between the 24 Hours at Le Mans and other races.  At Le Mans, all the cars have 24 hours to travel on the 8.5-mile track.  The winner is the car that logs the most miles in the 24-hour period.  Effectively, the race challenges the stamina of the car as well as the skill of its drivers.

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If you know about cars, it almost goes without saying that Shelby went on to have a much longer career.  In the movie he says Ford's then-hot 1965 Mustang "looks like a secretary's car," but he later produced limited-edition Shelby and Cobra models of the pony car that, if you can find one to buy today, probably will cost you as much as $1 million.  For a guy with bad health (and eventually heart and liver transplants) he kept very busy for a very long time and died at 89 in 2012.

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Trend-spotting Vogue magazine's current edition suggests this movie influenced the latest men's fashion shows in London.  

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7/20/20 -- Car guys gotta car guy.  A meticulously restored 1965 Shelby Mustang just fetched a record price at sale.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Grandma senses a decline in the quality of American celebrities.

Not too many movie stars died last year. Doris Day is at the top of the list. She was 97. She was a singer, dancer, movie star and close hawer with Rock Hudson, who’s already dead. Some of the other movie stars to go were Albert Finney, Rip Torn and Peter Fonda.

On the TV it was Tim Conway, Valerie Harper, Diahann Carroll, Luke Perry and Grumpy Cat, (which, if you ask me, was a dybbuk).

Some music people died too. Eddie Money I know from the kids. He’s from Brooklyn, a couple blocks from us, but Ginger Baker? Her I never heard of.

Old news it is that Brad Pitt’s and Angelina Jolie’s marriage went kaput years ago. He said it was because she’s a control freak, a super yenta, and she’s still at it. Long story short, Angelina’s a meshuggener. Six kids she has with their names tattooed on her arm. What? She can’t be bothered to memorize them?

 It got so bad that Jane Etta Pitt, Brad’s mother, called Angelina and demanded that she stop being mean to her son! On good authority from Tiki at the beauty parlor, I heard that Jane Pitt talked Brad into leaving that cockamamy religion, the one with outer space aliens and flying monkeys who hook you up to wires, and then you write them big checks. You know, the Tom Cruise and John Travolta Mishegoss “Church of Scientology.”

Brad is now dating Sat Hari Khalsa, a jewelry designer and holistic healer. I know, I know. Don’t hold your breath.

And then there’s this. Alissa, my great-granddaughter showed me a video of this gal who’s all the rage. Her name is Cardi B. For two minutes I watched a half-naked woman squirm around on the floor screeching like a wild banshee. This they call entertainment? She admits she used to be a kurveh, but would do it again if she needed the money. Oh, and her husband’s name is Offset. Oy vey.

 From Doris Day and Rock Hudson to Cardi B. and Offset.

This it’s come to?

Vocabulary

Cockamamy (also cockamamie):  Wacky, ridiculous.  This word was initially a New York Yiddish/Jewish translation of a French term, décalcomanie, that means the affixing of prints or engravings onto decorative objects.  Perhaps as the process fell out of fashion, the translation's meaning changed too, and that newer meaning has stuck.  The word still is most associated with Yiddish speakers, but is understood and crops up often across the Anglosphere.
              The less colorful American shorthand term for the original French one is decal. 

Hawer: Best guess is this is a Yiddish version of haver, the Hebrew word for "friend."  Grandma seems to be making a sly comment when she uses the term to describe the Doris Day/Rock Hudson relationship. 
              From a Haaretz "Word of the Day" report in 2014:  "If you’re a woman who’s 'just friends' with a male haver ... you might not want to call him your haver. Sure, it means 'friend,' but, Hebrew being sneaky sometimes, it also means 'boyfriend.'"
               Day and Hudson starred in several romantic comedies, but odds are good that they were never haverim/hawerim in real life.

Kurveh: Slut, whore.

Dybbuk: a malicious possessing spirit, the dislocated soul of a dead person.
         Plus this:  Banshee:  An Irish spirit (also familiar to Grandma) whose screaming foretells the death of a respected relative.  This is related to keening, a Celtic verb that describes human (typically female) sobs of sorrow after such a death and which closely resembles a Hebrew word with a nearly identical definition.
         

Note

The Idiosyncratist only learned of the late Grumpy Cat when reading Grandma's current file.  Described alternately as "him" or "her," the possibly gender-fluid feline starred in many promotions that seem to have netted beaucoup millions for its owners/dependents.  (In fact, GC seems to have been born with its distinctive look, not the implied attitude capitalized on by marketers to establish the brand that made Grumpy famous.)

In 2017, Grumpy Cat was named Forbes magazine's Top Pet Influencer, a competition of which the Id also was unaware.

"Influencer" is the cleaned-up descriptor for people -- or pets! -- who were called "famous for being famous" back in the olden days just after the turn of the century.

When I think of "influencers," I think of Lori Laughlin's daughter, who was admitted to USC after her parents paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to an academic fixer.  The former freshman had more than 1 million Instagram followers and sponsorship contracts with Sephora, Tresemme and Estee Lauder.  Another prominent influencer, Kendall Jenner, collected $250,000 for a single Instagram post promoting the doomed Fyre Festival in 2017.

The "influencer" phenomenon is further evidence of Grandma's thesis that we have a less distinguished crop of celebrities these days.

MovieMonday: 1917

This film won the Best Picture and Best Director prizes at yesterday's Golden Globes awards ceremony.  It will go into wide release -- will be shown at many more theaters -- this Friday.  It is handsome, handsomely done and should draw large audiences.

The story is set in France in the year of its title.  It is about two British soldiers struggling to obey an urgent order.  Except for one possible problem noted at the end of this piece, 1917 works very well.

The two soldiers -- Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) -- are called to meet their general, who explains that a 1,600-man British battalion will be "drawn into a massacre" if it follows through on a planned attack the next morning.  Air reconnaissance has established that German forces are massed and ready to defeat the action, and severed phone wires have made it impossible to notify the battalion commander.

The only way to order the attack's cancellation is by messenger.  Blake, whose older brother is a lieutenant (leftenant in Englishese) in the doomed battalion, seems to have been chosen for the job because of his family connection, and he has tapped the less optimistic Schofield to join him.

General Erinmore (Colin Firth) entrusts Blake and Schofield with written orders to cancel the attack.  He tells them to proceed on foot to deliver the orders within 20 hours and tells them that they will meet no resistance en route.

Schofield, who has seen too much, suggests waiting for nightfall to set out, but Blake resists.  "It's not your brother, is it?" And so the two lance corporals set off.

They leave their trench encampment and trudge across a muddy no-man's land marked by shell craters and corpses, then through abandoned and booby-trapped German trenches, then past a cherry orchard of felled trees (whose blossoms establish that the season here is spring) and then into the remains of a bombed-out town.

And, despite the general's assurances, Blake and Schofield meet up with trouble, lots of it, as they pursue their goal.  So it goes.

Technically, the story spools out in an unusual way, following Blake and Schofield's movements in a seemingly unbroken shot -- actually many scenes edited to feel like a continuous observation of their journey, as if the audience is there for every step.  This unusual assembly is off-putting to some, but it works well here.

This film seems to have held personal meaning for its cowriter and director, Englishman Sam Mendes, whose credits include American Beauty, Skyfall and Revolutionary Road.

The movie's last frames acknowledge Mendes' conversations with his grandfather as the inspiration for 1917.  The grandfather, a WWI veteran, was tasked as a "runner" who delivered messages between British units during that war.

Mendes studied literature at Cambridge, and presumably some history as well.  While this movie is compared often with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, its story seems to have at least a couple actual historical antecedents as well.

-- 1917 is set in France in the spring following the Battle of the Somme, a four-month horror that ended in late 2016.  After that battle, the German forces retreated behind what was called the Hindenburg Line, outlined in the map below, presumably to areas that could be defended more efficiently and with less manpower.
        It is likely not a coincidence that the movie deals with a German tactical retreat.

-- The film's idea that the Germans have retreated strategically calls to mind Napoleon's famous feint in the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz.  In that situation, the French emperor pulled back his troops along one front, effectively inviting the Russo-Austrian Army to advance in a direction where French forces were positioned to crush the enemy as it moved.
          In the movie, the general believes that the retreating Germans have set a trap for British forces by retreating and then daring the Allies to mount an attack that will be crushed.

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This viewer's reservation about 1917 is that it seems to have a largish plot hole.  Consider the general who sends two lance corporals out with information that, if delivered, will save as many as 1,600 lives.  Given the high stakes involved, why didn't the general send five teams out to deliver the same message, just in case Blake and Schofield were unable to reach their destination?  Why didn't he dispatch the troop truck that meets up with the team on their long walk?  Why didn't he order the reconnaissance planes that spotted the German force buildup to go back up and drop cancellation orders over the endangered battalion's bivouac?

Much smaller questions than these keep me awake at night.  Why not that general?



Notes

The Idiosyncratist noted the centennials of World War I's beginning  and its end.

Another good film about the war, They Shall Not Grow Old ,was released in the U.S. earlier this year.  It features restored film and quotes from the period. It now is available for home viewing.