If you’re following special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s probe of the Russian election hack and collusion by the Trump campaign, you’ll be interested in Get Me Roger Stone, which can be streamed on Netflix Instant. The recently indicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort is a character in this documentary.
My Halloween Stream of the Week is the indie ghost story The House on Pine Street. I saw The House on Pine Street at Cinequest, and now it can be streamed from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On November 4, Turner Classic Movies presents Humphrey Bogart as Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled LA detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Bogart’s performance is iconic, and The Big Sleep is famous for its impenetrably tangled plot. It’s also one of the most overtly sexual noirs, and Lauren Bacall at her sultriest is only the beginning. The achingly beautiful Martha Vickers plays a druggie who throws herself at anything in pants. And Dorothy Malone invites Bogie to share a back-of-the-bookstore quickie.
Dorothy Malone and Humphrey Bogart in THE BIG SLEEP
Roger Stone in GET ME ROGER STONESo this week’s biggest news has been the indictment of former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort. The indictment comes out of special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s probe of the Russian hacking of last year’s presidential campaign. Earlier this year, Netflix released the documentary Get Me Roger Stone, and IMDb bills Paul Manafort third in the “cast”, right behind Roger Stone and Donald Trump.
Get Me Roger Stone is an insightful look at the career of political consultant/provocateur Roger Stone, one of the most outrageous characters on the American political scene. What’s especially relevant today is that Roger Stone and Paul Manafort together invented a new model of lobbying – where the political consultants who help get a candidate elected to high office, then sell their influence over said elected official.
Even without the Manafort angle, Get Me Roger Stone is an entertaining watch, although you might find Roger Stone himself too loathsome to watch. Stone will do anything – no matter how duplicitous – to win a political campaign. He will do anything to bring public attention (i.e., notoriety) upon himself. And he is utterly unapologetic about both. Stone is the political world’s version of a pro wrestling villain.
Roger Stone is the unmatched master of high jacking a news cycle with a preposterous smear. The man has a tattoo of Richard Nixon’s face on his back, which tells you a whole lot about him.
Get Me Roger Stone also chronicles Stone’s decades-long quest to get Trump to run for president, and then Stone’s role as an unofficial/official/unofficial Trump strategist. The documentary also touches on a Roger Stone sex scandal.
Anyway, it’s ripped from the headlines, and you can stream it from Netflix Instant.
So here’s the thing with every movie ghost story – either the ghost is real, or the protagonist is crazy enough to hallucinate one. The beauty of The House on Pine Street is that the story is right down the middle – ya just don’t know until the end when the story takes us definitively in one direction – and then suddenly lurches right back to the other extreme.
Jennifer (Emily Goss) is a very pregnant urbanist, who reluctantly moves from her dream life in Chicago back to her whitebread hometown in suburban Kansas. Unlike Jennifer, her husband hadn’t been thriving in Chicago, and Jennifer’s intrusive and judgmental mother (Cathy Barnett – perfect in the role) has set up an opportunity for him in the hometown. They move to a house that is not her dream home AT ALL, “but it’s a really good deal”. Jennifer overreacts to some crumbling plaster.
Jennifer is pretty disgruntled, and, generally for good reason – her mom’s every sentence is loaded with disapproval. Her mom’s housewarming party would be a social nightmare for anyone – but it’s too literally nightmarish for her. One of the guests, an amateur psychic (an excellent Jim Korinke), observes, “the house has interesting energy”.
Then some weird shit starts happening: knocks from unoccupied rooms, a crockpot lid that keeps going ajar. And we ask, is the house haunted, or is she hallucinating? Her sane and sensible and skeptical BFF visits from Chicago as a sounding board, and things do not go well.
Co-writers and co-directors Aaron and Austin Keeling keep us on the edges of our seats. Their excellent sound design borrows from The Conversation and The Shining – and that’s a good thing.
The Keelings also benefit from a fine lead – Emily Goss’ eyes are VERY alive. She carries the movie as we watch her shifting between resentfulness, terror and determination.
The total package is very successful. I saw The House on Pine Street at Cinequest, and now it can be streamed from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Liam Neeson in MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE
In the sagging docudrama Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Liam Neeson plays the title character – the man at the center of modern American history’s most compelling mystery. The Washington Post source known as Deep Throat was responsible for keeping the Watergate scandal alive until it dethroned Richard Nixon from the presidency. Deep Throat’s identity remained secret for thirty years. It turned out to be Mark Felt, the number two official at the FBI.
Think about it – this was one of the most compelling people in America for thirty years. Deep Throat was clearly one of a handful of men so well-positioned at the center of government power that we would know him, but no one could finger him. The intrigue was brilliantly captured in All the President’s Men, in which Hal Holbrook played Deep Throat.
In Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Neeson plays Felt as a stolid, principled and crafty bureaucratic survivor. Somehow the character just isn’t that personally interesting. The story attempts to flesh him out with a troubled wife (Diane Lane, always superb, even in this thankless role) and a runaway hippie daughter.
As we watch Mark Felt, it gradually becomes apparent that this is a one-note character in a one-note movie. The leaden, pseudo-dramatic soundtrack doesn’t help. Mark Felt also fumbles the chance to get some spark out of Watergate icons John Dean, John Erlichman and John Mitchell. The real-life mystery is so much more interesting than this movie. The movie may be irresistible to Watergate buffs like me, but probably should be resisted.
Mark Felt was directed by Peter Landesman, who recently made the near-masterpiece Parkland. Parkland explores the JFK assassination from the viewpoints of the secondary participants. Mark Felt, however, is not a work of directorial mastery.
Marton Csokas is excellent as weak-willed and overmatched FBI Director L. Patrick Gray. Nixon handpicked Gray to be his stooge only to leave Gray, as henchman John Erlichman indelibly described, to “twist slowly, slowly in the wind”.
In Loving, Csokas, with pitiless, piercing eyes, was remarkably effective as the Virginia sheriff dead set on enforcing Virginia’s racist statute in the most personally intrusive way. Too often, actors seem to be impersonating Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night when they play racist Southern sheriffs, but Csokas brought originality to that performance. Here Csokas is able to portray a man of ability and ambition, but not spine.
The great but personally turbulent actor Tom Sizemore showcases his talent once again in the film’s most showy role, a bitter and cynic relic of the FBI’s most sordid skullduggery. Sizemore brings a magnetic cocktail of menace and humor to the role. Besides Diane Lane, the always welcome Bruce Greenwood and Eddie Marsan show up in minor roles.
Perhaps needless to say, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House has made my list of Longest Movie Title.
Janet Leigh in PSYCHO and 78/52: HITCHCOCK’S SHOWER SCENE
Slim pickings in theaters this week. I’ll be writing about Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down the White House, which I really can’t recommend. I haven’t yet seen The Florida Project.
My pre-Halloween DVD/Stream of the Week is Unfriended. It’s on both my lists of I Hadn’t Seen This Before and Low Budget, High Quality Horror of 2015. Unfriended is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
October 30 on Turner Classic Movies, we meet Robert Young as one of cinema’s least sympathetic protagonists in They Won’t Believe Me(1947). A decade before Father Knows Best and two decades before Marcus Welby, M.D., Young plays a weak-willed and impulsive gold-digging womanizer. He’s married for money, but he also wants his girlfriend (the rapturous Jane Greer) AND his second girlfriend (a gloriously slutty Susan Hayward) AND his wife’s money. He’s making every conceivable bad choice until, WHAM BANG, circumstance creates a situation where he can get everything he wants …until it all falls apart. They Won’t Believe Me has one of the most ironic endings in the movies.
Robert Young and Susan Hayward in THEY WON’T BELIEVE ME
Claes Bang in THE SQUARE. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The Square, the social satire from Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund is one of the most ambitious movies of the year. Often LOL funny, and just as often uncomfortable, The Square hits moments of triumph that would constitute a great movie if they were braided together more cohesively.
The Square is set in a world that is ripe for mockery – Christian (Claes Bang) is chief curator at a Stockholm museum of modern art. The museum is funded by the very rich, and the art is impenetrably pretentious, inaccessible to all but those predisposed to deconstruct it (or at least pretend to). One installation is described in straight-faced mumbo jumbo as “relational aesthetics”. Another is a roomful of conical piles of rubble, with a museum guard rebuking visitors with a stern “no pictures!”.
Christian is comfortable in his privilege, but he is curious about exploring social inequity – but only as an intellectual exercise. Christian is interested in street beggars (and finds one especially ungrateful one), and The Square is filled by “help me” moments. He is victimized by a robbery that seems like performance art, and sets off on an adventure called the “Tesla of Justice”, which goes horribly awry.
There are lots of laughs in The Square. Christian admonishes a colleague not to use Comic Sans font in a threat letter. There’s a very funny tug of war in a post-coital spat. A self-congratulatory on-stage interview with a precious artist wearing a blazer over pajamas, is disrupted by an audience member with Tourette’s who ejaculates “cock godammit” and the like, all while the audience pretends it’s all ok. And there’s a riotous thread with PR guys making a BS pitch that results in the very most counter-productive promotional video (think Springtime for Hitler in The Producers).
Östlund is very gifted at finding the humor in interruptions. The most serious, intimate and formal discussions are interrupted by a baby crying, construction noise and lots of cell phones ringing.
And, finally, there is a museum opening gala with a “welcome to the jungle” theme. This segment of The Square could stand alone as a sort film and probably win an Oscar. (Again, completely universal terror is interrupted by a ringing cell phone.) But, it’s unclear how this fits inside The Square’s themes.
Elisabeth Moss and Claes Bang in THE SQUARE. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The Square is very well-acted. Claes Bang is exceptional as Christian, exuding the ennui of Marcello Mastroianni in 8 1/2, Gabriele Ferzetti in L’Avventura and David Hemmings in Blow-up.
As an American journalist, Elisabeth Moss (who is always excellent) gets to show us her playful side, which is a treat; there’s a wonderful Moss moment when her eyes tell us she’s made a decision about her sex life while in the restroom line.
The most stunning performance is by Terry Notary as the performance artist at the gala. Notary, a stunt coordinator, choreographer and movement coach, is a master of motion capture, and his work has been featured in the Planet of the Apes and The Hobbit franchises and Andy Serkis’ Jungle Book. It’s one thing to imitate an ape, but Notary’s performance in The Square plays off of and dominates a banquet room full of other actors. It’s a really singular performance.
Terry Notary (on table) in THE SQUARE. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
I loved Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, which made my list of Best Movies of 2014 Force Majeure was Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. It is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video. Force Majeure was a satirical drama with some very funny moments; The Square is a satirical comedy with some very serious themes.
The Square is a movie that my head liked a lot, but it didn’t thrill my heart. Filled with brilliant moments, it just doesn’t hold together as one cohesive great movie.
[SPOILER: At the end, Christian tries to be genuinely helpful by making amends – but he is proven ultimately and ironically helpless.]
It’s the favorite month for scary movies, so The Movie Gourmet is featuring Hitchcock’s classic Psycho, with two superb 2017 accompaniments.
I recommend that you start with the six-part series of podcasts Inside Psycho. Podcaster Mark Ramsey begins with the real-life crime that sparked Psycho’s origin story and takes us through the purchase of the book rights, which turned out to be a very one-sided business deal. Ramsey puts Psycho in the context of Hitchcock’s career moment and reveals the film’s stepchild status at Paramount (it was filmed at Universal with a TV crew). He gives us a deep dive into the filming of the shower scene, including the censors’ search for the nudity (was it really in there?). We even learned about Hitchcock’s demands as to how Psycho would be exhibited – rules that changed the movie-going habits in our culture. Ramsey even tells us what happened to Marion’s car.
You’ll enjoy the movie more after you’ve listened to this podcast. Go to your podcast app and search for “Inside Psycho” or access the Inside Psycho website.
For your next course, I recommend this year’s documentary 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene, named for the 78 setups and 52 cuts in Psycho’s shower scene. Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe takes us through aspects of the movie, but drills most deeply into the notorious shower scene. Philippe brings us noted composer Danny Elfman to comment on Bernard Herrmann’s famously screeching strings. We hear from Walter Murch, the brilliant film editor who invented the field of movie sound design, about the visual imagery and sound effects. And Amy Duddleston, the film editor on the 1998 Gus Van Sant Psycho remake, ruefully recounts how it’s all even harder than it looks.
Here’s a representative nugget from both Inside Psycho and 78/52. Before her shower, Janet Leigh as Marion enters the bathroom, tears up paper notes and flushes them down the toilet. Amazingly, this is the first flushing toilet in hitherto prudish American cinema. Seconds later, of course, come more shocks.
And here’s a treat, we meet the perky and amiable Marli Renfro, the Playboy Bunny and pin-up girl who was Janet Leigh’s nude body double in the shower scene. That scene took seven grueling days to film. Jamie Lee Curtis relates her mom’s weariness with the strategic moleskin that kept slipping off. Renfro was just happy to pick up the extra paychecks.
Finally, there’s a fun montage of Psycho references in later movies and popular culture. In what must be a spectacular half-joke, the documentary is dedicated “to Mother”. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.
Janet Leigh in PSYCHO and 78/52: HITCHCOCK’S SHOWER SCENE
And then, of course there’s the original Psycho itself. It’s still effectively shocking – both in killing off the star one-third of the way through (almost unthinkable even today) and in the climactic reveal. Anthony Perkins is wonderful as Norman Bates, especially in how he gets us to understand immediately that Norman’s awkward oddness may be an indicator of more severe insanity.
Psycho is one hour and 49 minutes long. The key is to stop watching as soon as poor Simon Oakland shows up on-screen as the shrink Dr. Fred Richman. The usually reliable character actor Oakland was thanklessly tasked with delivering an interminable five-minute lecture on Norman Bates’ diagnosis. It’s painful overexplaining and brings downs the Psycho experience. You’ll thank me.
You can rent the original Psycho on DVD from Netflix, stream it from iTunes, Vudu and YouTube, or catch it on Turner Classic Movies or elsewhere on TV.
In the very satisfying horror film Unfriended, it’s the one-year anniversary of a teenage girl’s suicide, and her bullying peers convene via webcams on social media. But their computers are hijacked by an Unknown Force who starts wreaking revenge. The kids become annoyed, then worried and, finally, panicked for their lives.
Here’s something I’ve never seen before: the entire movie is compiled of the characters’ screenshots. The critic Christy Lemire says that “Unfriended is a gimmick with a ridiculous premise, but damned if it doesn’t work”, and she’s right. Writer Nelson Greaves and Director Levan Gabriadze came up with this device, and their originality pays off with a fun and effective movie.
It’s on both my lists of I Hadn’t Seen This Before and Low Budget, High Quality Horror of 2015. Unfriended is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.
Harry Dean Stanton in LUCKY. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
This weekend, I’m going to try to catch The Florida Project and Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down the White House. Of the movies that I HAVE seen, I like the often funny and stealthily profound Lucky, starring the late Harry Dean Stanton.
My DVD/Stream choices of the week are Woody Harrelson’s overlooked gems. The best, Rampart, is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Netflix Instant, Amazon, YouTube and Google Play. But check out The Messenger, Zombieland and True Detective, Season 1, too.
As they say, life begins with fifty Gs. On October 22, Turner Classic Movies presents Raw Deal(1948), with some of the best dialogue in all of film noir, a love triangle and the superb cinematography of John Alton.
When there’s a movie that is supposed to be good for you, but you really don’t enjoy it, I call it an “eat your broccoli” movie, and the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time is an example.
An estimated 75% of all silent movies have been lost. Dawson City: Frozen Time is about the discovery of hundreds of silent films. It turns out that Dawson City, a mining hamlet in the Canadian Yukon, was the last stop on a movie distribution circuit. When a movie played Dawson City, it was already two years after the initial release, so the distributors didn’t find it worthwhile to pay for the return of the film. Accordingly, many movies from the silent era were stored or disposed of in Dawson City, where they were uncovered by a construction bulldozer in 1978.
That’s all interesting enough, and 5-10 minutes would be enough to tell this story, and then we could focus on the most compelling of the actual Lost Films, and that could make a fine documentary. But the two hours of Dawson City: Frozen Time is a loooong two hours.
There are some interesting documentary nuggets. One example is an illustration of how hand grenades were manufactured for WW I.
Baseball fans will treasure clips from the 1919 World Series, which is infamously known for the “Black Sox” scandal. Some Chicago White Sox stars took money from gamblers to throw the series. In Dawson City, we actually get to see some of the suspiciously inept plays by the heavily favored Sox.
The best part is about two-thirds through – a montage of found films. The images are compelling, and the performances have a surprising magnetism.
By far the worst part of Dawson City is its off-putting score. The drone of discordant chords (is that an oxymoron or just impossible?) played on various keyboard instruments is distracting and then finally unbearable. I was annoyed enough, but then The Wife, from another room in the house, called out, “That music is TERRIBLE”.
I need to tell you that I’m outside the critical mainstream on Dawson City: Frozen Time, which has an impressive Metacritic score of 85. Major critics that I highly respect have described it as “instantaneously recognizable masterpiece”, “thrilling”, “hypnotic” and even “elevates…to the level of poetry”. But not for me.
Dawson City: Frozen Time can be streamed from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
