This good-hearted documentary is about a national champion high school stage band in the 1970s. Because of the era, and because we’re talking about inner city Black kids from Houston, the backdrop is the Black Pride movement. The key character is their band leader, Conrad “Prof” Johnson, who drove them to be technically proficient and flavored their music with his own funk compositions. Thirty years later, the band members plan a reunion to honor Prof. The band members are an entertaining bunch, and there’s plenty of footage from the 70s. Thunder Soul is sure to be a crowd-pleaser and there are lots of great 70s Afros.
Thunder Soul won film fest awards but failed to get an adequate theatrical release, and is now available on DVD.
Imagine if Michael Moore directed a profile of Mitt Romney’s career as co-founder of Bain Capital. Well, the 28-minute short film When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is an even more devastating critique of Romney than a Moore film would be.
The storyline of When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is essentially 1) you are happily living in Middle America, working in a factory and paying your mortgage and your taxes; 2) Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital buys and then loots your company; 3) you lose your job and then your home; and 4) repeat several times.
Amazingly, the film was directed by Jason Killian Meath, a Republican media consultant and culture warrior. It is being shilled by a Newt Gingrich-friendly SuperPAC.
Meath’s film is heavy-handed and manipulative (as a Michael Moore film would be). Meath doesn’t have Moore’s sense of humor, but also doesn’t have Moore’s abrasiveness and self-righteousness, which makes his film smoother, more broadly accessible and ultimately more persuausive. In an appeal to Republican primary voters, Meath uses Reaganesque “Morning in America” music and imagery, and I don’t think that it’s an accident that most of Bain Capital’s victims in the film are White.
The oddest thing about When Mitt Romney Comes to Town is that it is not just an attack on Mitt Romney, but against the type of Vulture Capitalism tolerated or even promoted by all four of the current Republican presidential candidates. It’s sure to constitute a major thread of the Obama narrative against Romney or any other GOP candidate.
Gloria Grahame with Director Jerry Hopper on the set of NAKED ALIBI
Last night I had a great time at Noir City, the 10th annual San Francisco Film Noir Festival. Noir City is spearheaded by the film noir expert Eddie “The Czar of Noir” Muller. Its website also includes top rate film noir resources and merchandise.
Last night’s program was a double feature that is not available on DVD. In fact, Universal went into its vault for the negative and made what is now the only print of Naked Alibi (1954) for this screening. Naked Alibi features Gene Barry as a seemingly regular guy with a violent and unpredictable temper. Sterling Hayden is a cop from the “I’ll beat a confession out of him” school of law enforcement; Hayden’s obsession, without any apparent empirical basis, is that Barry is a cop killer. They both vie for Gloria Grahame, a sexy saloon singer with a heart of gold.
Film noir is dependent on its femme fatales and Gloria Grahame may be my all-time fave. Many of you remember her as the slutty Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life and as Bogie’s co-star in the drama In a Lonely Place. The fact that Gloria was a Bad Girl in real life doesn’t hurt. I thank Mark A. Clark and his great blog Film Noir Photos for the great photo above.
The second film was Pickup, a lively and cynical low budget indie from 1951. The writer/director Hugo Haas made several of these films in the early 50s. As usual, in Pickup, Haas stars as the middle aged sap in the thrall of a young hottie. Two things make Pickup an absolute howl. First, Haas loses his hearing; when he unexpectedly recovers his hearing, he doesn’t let on that he can hear his trashy young wife and her beau plot to kill him for his money. Second, Beverly Michaels plays the femme fatale so broadly, creating one of the most unashamedly selfish characters in screen history – a floozy totally devoid of empathy. Only Ann Savage in Detour was a nastier noir villainess.
Some of the year’s very best films are in theaters now. I especially recommend these four:
The Artist: A magical romance given us through the highly original choice of an almost silent film.
The Descendants: Director Alexander Payne’s (Sideways) family drama is set in Hawaii and contains a brilliant performance by George Clooney.
Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s revelatory 3D tale of an orphan living in the bowels of a 1920s Paris train station who strives to survive by his wits, keep his independence and solve the puzzle of an discarded automaton.
Here are my comments on some other current films, the sex addiction drama Shame, the biopic The Iron Lady and the very odd fable Albert Nobbs. Plus, I liked the lightweight feminist action thriller Haywire.
I haven’t yet seen A Separation or Pina 3D, which open this week. You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
Glenn Close plays the title character, a woman living as a man in early 20th century Dublin; the woman makes a convincing male waiter at a small hotel. She is repressed, obsessed with stashing a trove of tips to finance opening a shop and terrified that anyone will discover her secret.
Although Close is very good, the actress Janet McTeer gives the movie’s best performance; I will avoid a spoiler by describing her character. Pauline Collins is excellent as the hotel’s avaricious owner. Brendan Gleeson pops in for one of his delightful turns as the hotel’s doctor.
The fine young actress Mia Wasilkowska (The Kids Are All Right, Alice in Wonderland), however, just doesn’t seem to fit the period. She is stuck with playing the one dimensional role of an oversexed hotel maid who could be wearing a placard that says, “Knock me up”.
The problem with Albert Nobbs is that, to buy the story, you have to accept that a 50-year-old hotel worker has no idea whatsoever about certain aspects of sexuality. Now Albert Nobbs is asexual and traumatized from an early incident of sexual abuse, but that really doesn’t explain how she could have observed behavior of hotel guests for thirty years without even learning about some basic proclivities.
Another problem is that the visiting English elite is SO cruel to the Irish staff (not just with historically accurate cruelty, but over-the-top cruelty), that these story elements become broad and campy, which doesn’t mesh with the rest of the movie. Despite the best efforts of Close, McTeer, Collins and Gleeson, Albert Nobbs just doesn’t work.
The Oscar nominations are out, and there are few of the head scratching inclusions and omissions that we frequently see. Of the Best Picture nominations, The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo and Midnight in Paris all made my Best Movies of 2011. Although they didn’t make my Best of the Year list, War Horse and Moneyball are very good movies that I recommend. I haven’t yet seen The Help, which is, by all accounts, a fine film. Although I hated The Tree of Life, it was the biggest art film of the year and much praised by mainstream critics. The one jaw dropper is the critically scorned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which exploits 9/11 in the pursuit of a three hankie weeper.
My biggest disappointments were the snubbing of Michael Shannon’s performance in Take Shelter and the innovative screenplay by Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman for Young Adult.
The acting categories seem a little light to me this year with the exception of Best Actress, with two performances for the ages by Michele Williams in My Week with Marilyn and Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.
The sons of two Brooklyn couples have tangled in a schoolboy row. The couples meet to discuss the matter, but the personality clashes between and within the couples derails an encounter of forced politeness into comic chaos.
Carnage belongs to its actors, and the couples are played by John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster and Christoph Walz and Kate Winslet. All are very good and very funny. The Austrian actor Walz (Inglorious Basterds) is especially good; his eyes betray his indifference to parenting and social niceties, but finally gleam when he is spurred to conflict.
Carnage is directed by Roman Polanski, based on the popular comic play God of Carnage by the French playwright Yasmina Reza. God of Carnage won the 2009 Tony for Best Play.
Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist) is one of the greatest living directors, and knows enough to eschew anything showy here. He just lets the actors show their chops, which is a very good thing. Carnage is not one of the year’s best movies, but is a smart and funny comedy.
One of the first 2012 releases, Haywire is a rockem sockem spy action thriller by Steven Soderbergh, starring Gina Carano. I was not familiar with Gina Carano, who is an accomplished star of mixed martial arts. Haywire is a vehicle seeking to launch her as an action film star. And why not, for she is attractive (with “real girl”, not Hollywood, looks), well-endowed and can kick ass? She can, after all, kick ass for real, not just pretend to in a movie.
As an actor, Carano is plenty good enough. She’s way better than Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan and the Rock, and is at least as good as Schwarzenegger. And, when she beats up a swat team, it is believable (and fun).
Soderbergh is always interesting, as he moves between high brow/arty (sex lies and videotape, The Good German) and lowbrow/popular (Ocean’s Twelve, Contagion). Here he takes an inexperienced leading woman and an unremarkable story and makes the most of it. It’s a good watch.
Soderbergh delivers fast pacing and great locations (Barcelona, Dublin, New Mexico). Soderbergh and Carano benefit from a top rate cast: Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Angarano and Bill Paxton. Overall, it’s good entertainment and, for once, I’m actually looking forward to the sequels.
War Horse is a sweeping epic that traces the journey of an especially spirited horse and its series of owners before and during World War I. It’s not a critical spoiler to let you know that the horse survives, although its various handlers are all savaged by war.
It’s a movie that we could have seen in the 1950s – but a very, very good 1950s movie. The story is sentimental, but neither simple nor dully plotted. The movie is beautifully composed and shot, and many scenes recall John Ford’s use of landscapes and action. The silhouettes and sky in the final shot are lit as in the similar climax of Gone With the Wind.
War Horse is also one of the better movies about World War I, of which the central fact was its massive, brutally stupid waste of lives on a thereto unimagined scale. Along the way we see clear and accurate depictions of trench warfare, No Man’s Land, foraging, and the relative utility of cavalry, infantry, artillery, machine guns, and tanks. Spielberg doesn’t distract us from the overall horror with unnecessary gore.
Meryl Streep is the finest actress of our lifetimes, a fact reemphasized by her performance in The Iron Lady. Streep plays two Margaret Thatchers. In flashbacks, she plays Thatcher in her prime – seizing power and wielding it with complete confidence and absolutely without a nano whit of mercy. She also plays today’s elderly Thatcher, doddering on the verge of dementia. Streep is magnificent, which might be enough reason to see the movie.
It’s also always a pleasure to watch Jim Broadbent, and he teams with Streep as Thatcher’s hubbie. Alexandra Roach plays a third and younger Thatcher – forming herself in her early twenties. The fine actor Nicholas Farrell is also quite good as one of Thatcher’s mentors.
My problem is with the story. Now I’m no expert on Thatcher, although I have loathed her from afar for decades. To me, the most interesting aspect of Thatcher was her certitude – the absolutely deep and profound belief that she was always right and the will to impose her direction on everyone else. When her actions were creating widespread pain and she was hated (really, really hated) by a large percentage of her own people, why did she not doubt herself for a moment? The Iron Lady explains her conservatism as coming from her father, but leaves her certitude unexamined.
Instead, The Iron Lady‘s screenplay chooses to focus on her feminism, battling to make her way in an arena filled with men especially eager not to relinquish any power to her. (Her feminism seems to be entirely in practice, not theory, as she battles for HER due, but not to make the way easier for other women, whom she probably expects to pull themselves up by their own pumps.)
A lot of screen time is also devoted to her aged decline, which gives good fodder to Streep, but is not very important to understanding her career.
On the other hand, The Iron Lady does depict the very personal impact of the IRA’s campaign against her, with an assassination attempt and the killing of a close colleague. It also gives us an unsparing look at her bullying of friends and allies, which, of course, does not encourage loyalty. And there are telling glimpses into her family life, especially her longtime marriage.
But on the whole, The Iron Lady is long on Streep and short on understanding what made Margaret Thatcher the pivotal political leader that she was.
