Woody Harrelson and Frances McDormand in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
For your Thanksgiving viewing pleasure, complete with four new movie recommendations, here are my picks for the long weekend. My top two recommendations are
Lady Bird , an entirely fresh coming of age comedy that explores the mother-daughter relationship – an impressive debut for Greta Gerwig as a writer and director.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is a different kind of Thanksgiving movie – a dysfunctional family thriller. Deadfall is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and can be streamed from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On November 29, Turner Classic Movies presents The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. John Ford was the greatest director of Westerns and this is his masterpiece, showcasing both James Stewart and John Wayne. It took one kind of man to explore and tame the West and another kind of man to bring peace and prosperity. Ford uses the genre of the Western to deconstruct the mythology of the West. It’s also a mature Ford’s contemplation of all those shoot ’em ups from earlier in his career. Jimmy and the Duke are joined by Andy Devine, Woody Strode, Vera Mills, Edmond O’Brien and Lee Marvin. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is on my list of A Classic American Movie Primer – 5 to start with.
Lee Marvin and Jphn Wayne in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCEJohn Wayne and James Stewart in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCEJames Stewart in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
In Greta Gerwig’s triumphant debut as a writer-director, Lady Bird, Saoirse Ronan plays Christine, a Sacramento teen in her final year of high school. I’ve seen lots of good coming of age movies and lots of high school movies, but rarely one as fresh and original as Lady Bird. Gerwig is an insightful observer of human behavior, and she gets every moment of Christine’s journey, with all of her aspirations and impulses, exactly right.
Movies rarely explore the mother-daughter relationship, but this is the biggest thread in Lady Bird. Christine and her mother (Laurie Metcalf) deeply need each other but just can’t get out of each other’s way, perpetually on each other’s very last nerve. Christine insists on being called “Lady Bird”, rejecting even the name her mother gave her. From the very first scene to the last, Lady Bird probes how this most complex relationship evolves.
A girl’s relationship with her father is also pretty central, and the great writer Tracy Letts’ understated performance as the dad is extraordinary. Letts can play a despicable character so well (Andrew Lockhart in Homeland), I hardly recognized him as Christine’s weakened but profoundly decent father. The dad is a man whose career defeats have cost him his authority in the family and he is suffering silently from depression. Yet he remains clear-eyed about the most important things in his children’s lives and is able to step up when he has to. It’s not a showy role, but Letts is almost unbearably authentic.
There isn’t a bad performance in Lady Bird. Ronan soars, of course. The actors playing her high school peers nail their roles, too, especially Beanie Feldstein as her bestie.
Lady Bird’s soundtrack evokes the era especially well. Thanks to Sheila O’Malley for sharing Gerwig’s letter to Justin Timberlake, asking to license Cry Me a River. It’s a gem.
Visually, Gerwig is clearly fond of her hometown, and fills her film with local landmarks. It’s not my favorite California city (and I’ve worked in the Capitol), but Sacramento has never looked more appealing than in Lady Bird. I did really love the shots of the deco Tower Bridge and the Tower Theater sign.
I don’t care for Gerwig’s performances as an actress, and, in writing about them, I have not been kind. As a director, she is very promising, eliciting such honest and singular performances from her actors and making so many perfect filmmaking choices. As a writer, she’s already top-notch. Write another movie, Greta.
Grace Van Patten, Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler in THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED)
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), writer-director Noah Baumbach’s latest family comedy, is entirely character-driven (usually a very good thing). We really don’t see anything on screen that isn’t intended to reveal something about a character – a man’s lack of confidence, his father’s vanity, his daughter’s surprising well-groundedness. The story (not really a plot) moves from set piece to set piece, beginning with a funny (and futile) search for a Manhattan parking space, each depicting the family quirks and tensions.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is star studded (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Grace Van Patten, Emma Thompson, Judd Hirsch, a cameo by Sigourney Weaver) and very well-acted. The problem is that, once I was introduced to these characters, I really wasn’t interested in what would happen to them next. I only lasted 42 minutes before reaching for the remote.
Baumbach has become somewhat of a brand name for naval-gazing (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, Mistress America), and his work has tended toward the Woody Allen neurotic New Yorker genre, only with less depth and FAR less comedy.
You can stream The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) on Netflix Instant, but I can’t imagine why you would want to.
Deadfall is a solid recent thriller that has flown flew under the radar. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are brother and sister running for the Canadian border after a casino heist. They wreck their car and split up. The brother sets off overland, leaving a trail of murderous carnage. The local cops are on the alert, including the sheriff’s deputy daughter (Kate Mara). Meanwhile, a bad luck boxer (Charlie Hannum of Sons of Anarchy and The Lost City of Z) is released from prison, impulsively commits another crime and is headed for his parents’ (Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson) remote northern cabin. The sister hitches a ride with the boxer. Everybody converges at the boxer’s parents’ place for an extremely stressful Thanksgiving dinner.
An essential element of this thriller is that all of the families are dysfunctional. The siblings have survived a hellish upbringing, from which the older brother has rescued his little sister; unfortunately, he has emerged as a psychopath himself and has infantilized the sister. The relationship between the boxer and his father has been poisoned by a long-festering dispute. The sheriff resents and belittles his bright and highly professional daughter while doting on her idiot brothers.
The core of the movie is the evolving relationship between Wilde’s sister and Hunnam’s boxer. Neither knows that the other is on the lam. She cynically seduces him because he is useful. But then she starts to fall for him, and, by Thanksgiving dinner, her loyalties are uncertain.
Sissy Spacek is brilliant as the boxer’s mom, who must steer over the wreckage of the relationship between her son and her husband, and who must then serve a Thanksgiving dinner to a volatile killer who is holding a shotgun on the other guests. She is a great actor, and she’s as good here as in any of her signature performances.
The cinematography, characters, acting and the directorial choices by Stefan Ruzowitzky are excellent. What keeps Deadfall from being one of the year’s best is some trite, TV movie level dialogue along the way. Still, it’s a good watch. Deadfall is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and can be streamed from Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Note: This is NOT the 1993 Deadfall, with Nicholas Cage even more over-the-top than usual.
The highly acclaimed Novitiate, Lady Bird, Last Flag Flying, Darkest Hour, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and The Square have reached the Bay Area, but only in a few theaters. Of these, I’ve only seen The Square, an ambitious satire that I liked, but which is not for everyone; I’ll be posting about it soon. Stay tuned.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the smart and bitingly funny dramedy Smoke Signals, a film about Native Americans written and directed by Native Americans. The film won the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Smoke Signals is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On November 20, Turner Classic Movies will broadcast the top heist film ever, the pioneering French classic Rififi: After the team is assembled and the job is plotted, the actual crime unfolds in real-time – over thirty minutes of nerve-wracking silence.
Woody Harrelson captures the essence of Lyndon B. Johnson in Rob Reiner’s LBJ. The best thing about this movie is the main character – probably the most complex and self-contradictory in American history.
LBJ was amazingly talented, aspirational, mean, charming, vulgar and surprisingly needy. LBJ was so masterful and tough and powerful, yet extremely thin-skinned for a politician. His eternal grasping seems rooted in personal desperation. LBJ had the need to dominate others and get everything he wants all of the time, and still needed to be loved (which is impossible when you are running over everyone else).
With all of his personal flaws, no American Presidents (except maybe Lincoln and FDR) have been able to roll up a record of legislative accomplishments in two short years to match the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start. Yes, this was a guy who was able to end legal racial segregation and systemic repression of voting rights and to bring medical security to the elderly and the poor. (And then be capable of an equally huge policy mistake – the escalation of the Vietnam War.)
How do you tell the story of a larger-than-life character in only 90 minutes? LBJ focuses on an eight-year period of LBJ’s career. We first see him in 1956 as Senate Majority Leader, at his most energetic, masterful and powerful. We then see him in his period of frustration and weakness as Vice-President. The JFK assassination makes him President, and the film concludes after the enactment of Civil Rights Act in June 1964.
LBJ shows us the many sides of LBJ by tracing three of his personal relationships:
Georgia Senator Richard Russell (Richard Jenkins), the leader of Southern segregationists and one of LBJ’s most important mentors. LBJ rose to power with Russell’s guidance and loyalty, but LBJ, to find his own place in history, needed to destroy everything Russell stood for.
Lady Bird Johnson (a superb Jennifer Jason Leigh), the only person who could handle the vulnerable, needy, whiny, disconsolate LBJ.
LBJ’s nemesis Robert F. Kennedy (Michael Stahl-David). Because RFK was a martyr, the public tends to forget about his nasty and “ruthless” side, which did exist. LBJ and RFK took an instant dislike to each other in the early 1950s, a situation which built into a profound and fundamental mutual hatred.
Bill Pullman plays Senator Ralph Yarborough, a very minor character in history, but one who serves here as a composite for liberal politicians and for those bullied by LBJ.
The highlights of LBJ are found in that fateful week in November 1963. At Dallas’ Love Field, it’s clear that JFK’s star power has eclipsed the weakened and resentful LBJ even in Texas. Then we see LBJ just after the assassination, taking command and plunging into action, taking command and knowing exactly what to do when everyone else was paralyzed by shock.
The history in LBJ is very sound. I’ve read and re-read the over three thousand pages of Robert Caro’s four-volume biography of Johnson. Much of LBJ’s dialogue is word-for-word historically correct; I’ve even heard the real LBJ himself utter these words on phone calls that he taped himself.
Woody Harrelson is excellent, capturing both the human tornado and the vulnerable sides of LBJ. The fine actors Randy Quaid, Rip Torn, Michael Gambon, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber and Tom Wilkinson have all had their cracks at playing LBJ on the screen. Woody is significantly better than all of those guys, but I still prefer Bryan Cranston’s LBJ in All the Way.
Yes, it’s a Cliff Notes version, but LBJ, with its top rate performances by Woody Harrelson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, is a fine historical introduction and pretty entertaining, too.
Although I love mysteries, I have never warmed to Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot. In this year’s remake of Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh actually made Poirot marginally appealing to me. Branagh, who also directed, brings to the role a more explicit OCD diagnosis and a mustache that has its own architecture.
It’s the same plot as in the 1970s version – as the increasingly more improbable coincidences pile up, it becomes clear that they may not be coincidences at all. And this year’s Murder on the Orient Express is also star-studded, with fine performances from Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Judy Dench, Olivia Colman, Penelope Cruz, Derek Jacobi and Johnny Depp, who can pull off a pencil thin mustache better than anyone in the last 60 years.
Murder on the Orient Express begins with a spectacular overhead shot of the Wailing Wall and concludes with an amusing Last Supper tableau (see M*A*S*H*). It’s moderately entertaining, at its best when it acknowledges that it’s just a lark.
The smart and bitingly funny dramedy Smoke Signals is a film about Native Americans written and directed by Native Americans. Evans Adams plays Thomas Builds-the-Fire, an Indian nerd, a character type almost certainly unique in cinema. Adam Beach plays his oft-surly friend Victor. The two had contrasting relationships with Victor’s father, who has recently died. Thomas and Victor embark on a road trip to unearth a family secret.
Smoke Signals was written with an acerbic wit and is often downright uproarious. The laugh lines are as funny as in any screwball comedy: Sometimes it’s a good day to die, and sometimes it’s a good day to have breakfast. One of the high points is a rendition of the original song John Wayne’s Teeth.
As Thomas and Victor banter, we get to glimpse inside both Indian Country and mainstream culture from the Indian point of view. Smoke Signals unflinchingly takes on alcoholism and other issues within the Native American community, as well as resentment of how Native Americans are treated by the dominant American culture.
Adam Beach and Evan Adams in SMOKE SIGNALS
Smoke Signals’s screenplay was written by Sherman Alexie, based on his own novel. Alexie set the core of the story on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation on which he grew up. It was directed in 1997 by then 28-year-old Chris Eyre. Eyre, a Cheyenne-Arapaho, has since directed the Native American-themed Skins and Edge of America, along with episode of Friday Night Lights and American Experience.
Adams is hysterically funny as Thomas, and Beach is a capable straight man. Smoke Signals also features the fine Native Canadian actor and actress Gary Farmer and Tantoo Cardinal and the Native American actress Irene Bedard. Michele St. John and Elaine Miles are very funny as Victor and Thomas’ reservation friends Velma and Lucy.
The film won the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Smoke Signals is available on DVD from Netflix and to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
So the highly acclaimed Novitiate, Lady Bird, Last Flag Flying, Darkest Hour and The Square have reached the Bay Area, but only in a few theaters. The festival audience favorite Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri arrives next weekend. Of these, I’ve only seen The Square, an ambitious satire that I liked, but which is not for everyone; I’ll be posting about it soon. I liked LBJ, an effective Cliff Notes history lesson. I’ll also soon be writing about LBJ and Murder on the Orient Express. Stay tuned.
IDA
Because the big Prestige Movies are arriving in theaters and Oscar campaigns are being launched, I’m giving you a movie that you can compare to 2017’s Oscar Bait. The Polish drama Ida won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture and the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Ida was my pick as the best film at Cinequest, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature. Ida is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
On November 15 , Turner Classic Movies presents the Otto Preminger masterpiece Anatomy of a Murder (1959). This movie has everything: Jimmy Stewart’s portrayal of a wily lawyer, content to underachieve in the countryside, Stewart’s electrifying courtroom face-off with George C. Scott, great performances by a surly Ben Gazzara and a slutty Lee Remick, a great jazz score by Duke Ellington and a suitably cynical noir ending. That jazz score is one of the few movie soundtrack CDs that I own. The music perfectly complements the story of a murder investigation that reveals more and more ambiguity as it proceeds. Stewart’s character relaxes by dabbling in jazz piano, and Duke himself has a cameo leading a bar band in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places).
James Stewart (right) and George C. Scott (seated) tangle in ANATOMY OF A MURDER
The big Prestige Movies are arriving in theaters and Oscar campaigns are being launched, so this week I’m giving you a movie that you can compare to 2017’s Oscar Bait – the recent Polish drama Ida.
The title character is a novice nun who has been raised in a convent orphanage. Just before she is to take her vows in the early 1960s, she is told for the first time that she has an aunt. She meets the aunt, and Ida learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust. The aunt takes the novice on an odd couple road trip to trace the fate of their family.
The chain-smoking aunt (Agata Kulesza) is a judge who consumes vast quantities of vodka to self-medicate her own searing memories. But the most profound difference isn’t that the aunt is a hard ass and that the nun is prim and devout. The most important contrast is between their comparative worldliness – the aunt has been around the block and the novice is utterly naive and inexperienced (both literally and figuratively virginal). The young woman must make the choice between a future that follows her upbringing or one which her biological heritage opens to her. As Ida unfolds, her family legacy makes her choice an informed one.
The novice Ida, played by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is very quiet – but hardly fragile. Saying little, she takes in the world with a penetrating gaze and a just-under-the-surface magnetic strength.
Superbly photographed in black and white, each shot is exquisitely composed. Watching shot after shot in Ida is like walking through a museum gazing at masterpiece paintings one after the other. Ida was directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, who also recently directed the British coming of age story My Summer of Love (with Emily Blunt) and the French thriller The Woman in the Fifth (with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke). He is an effective and economic story-teller, packing textured characters and a compelling story into an 80 minute film.
Ida is also successful in avoiding grimness. Pawlikowski has crafted a story which addresses the pain of the characters without being painful to watch. There’s some pretty fun music from a touring pop/jazz combo and plenty of wicked sarcasm from the aunt.
Ida won 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture and the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. Ida was my pick as the best film at Cinequest, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature.
Ida is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
