movie gourmet

DREAM SCENARIO: but it can’t be my fault, can it?

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Photo caption: Nicolas Cage in DREAM SCENARIO. Courtesy of A24.

In the brilliant and utterly original comedy Dream Scenario, Nicholas Cage plays Paul, a hopelessly square, middle-aged professor of evolutionary biology, who suddenly starts appearing in other people’s dreams. At first, Paul shows up in dreams and does nothing at all (which is fitting for Paul’s personality), even failing to intervene as people dream that they’re in peril. When Paul’s students publicize the phenomenon on social media, thousands of people recognize Paul from their dreams and he goes viral.

His instant celebrity takes a turn when, through absolutely no action on his part, Paul’s behavior in the dreams becomes less benign, and the real Paul becomes associated with the threatening Dream Paul. Surely, he can’t be blamed for another person’s dreams, can he?

Dream Scenario slides from a comedy of manners into a sharply pointed parody of cancel culture, social media overkill, cognitive behavior therapy and our society’s impulse to monetize everything, not to mention today’s commercial imperative to leverage everything for micro-targeted advertising. Dream Scenario is highly intelligent and hilarious.

The guy who imagined this unique premise and all the killer moments of topical parody is Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose work I haven’t seen before. This is the 38-year-old Borgli’s third feature; I can’t wait to mine his previous work and anticipate what he brings us next.

The character of Paul is not your off-the-shelf Everyman. He is, after all, smart enough to have a Ph.D., even be a tenured professor, and he’s a reliable and well-meaning, if unexciting, dad and husband. Paul has had career ambitions, now mere fantasies because we can tell right away that his social clumsiness and laziness keep him from realizing his them. He’s just too comfortable in his routines, which have become a rut.

Cage is excellent as Paul, whose natural, hard-wired response is to UNDERREACT (the opposite of most of Cage’s movie roles). He suffers each of the oddities, then indignities, then outrages ,until they reach his breaking point.

The cast of Dream Scenario is deep and excellent:

  • Julianne Richardson, as the wife who knows Paul best of anyone, for better and forworse, is stellar. Any actor who wants to learn the subtle slow burn should study Richardson’s reaction when one of her husband’s old girlfriends invites him for a coffee; Richardson lets us see her character’s building fury without a single stomp or eyeroll.
  • Dylan Gelula has an unforgettable turn as a very young woman driven by a compulsion toward a paroxysm of passion that is destined to elude her – one of the funniest movie scenes this year, and one that she has perfectly set up in earlier scenes.
  • Michael Cera is very funny as a hyper-opportunistic agency head, a paragon of insincerity.
  • The always-excellent Dylan Baker is perfect as the Cool Kid in the college town’s social set.
  • Tim Meadows is pitch-perfect as Paul’s longtime colleague/boss, who wants to dthe right thing, but can never cast side the bonds of an academic bureaucrat.

Dream Machine is one of the best comedies of the year, as funny and as smart as Barbie, which is high praise.

DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY: a movie and its time

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Jon Voight in his screen test for Midnight Cowboy from DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The remarkably insightful documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy explores the making of Midnight Cowboy and its place both in cinema and in American culture. 

Midnight Cowboy won Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, all with an X-rating. Sure, we know Midnight Cowboy as a groundbreaking film, but Desperate Souls argues that it both reflected the zeitgeist of the moment and opened new possibilities in American filmmaking.

This was a transitional period in Hollywood and in the culture. Midnight Cowboy won its Oscars at the same Academy Award ceremony that honored John Wayne as Best Actor. Midnight Cowboy’s protagonists were completely unDukelike, one a would-be gigolo and the other an almost homeless conman.

So, we have two marginal anti-heroes and their unconventional bond, along with, shockingly, incidents of gay sex, heterosexual impotence and incontinence. The director John Schlesinger himself was a closeted gay man. Anyone who was alive in 1969 can tell you that this was extraordinarily transgressive content to penetrate the cultural mainstream.

Besides the unsettling themes, Midnight Cowboy, along with The Graduate (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) pioneered the effective use of popular music on the soundtrack. Midnight Cowboy is notable for both John Barry’s Emmy-winning score and for the use of Fred Niel’s Everybody’s Talkin’, which Schlesinger used as the theme.

Filmmaker Nancy Buirski, who died in September, builds her case with superb sourcing. She hit gold with the unique perspective of Jennifer Salt, who observed her father, screenwriter Waldo Salt, and the director John Schlesinger birth the film; she also acted in the movie and came to date its star, Jon Voight. Voight himself bookends the film with emotionally powerful reflections.

Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy also includes Voight’s screen test, and I dare you to explain why the filmmakers, after watching it, said THAT’S THE GUY.

As I write, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy is number 21 on my carefully curated list of Longest Movie Titles.

This is a strong film, and a Must See for cinephiles, especially Jon Voight’s intro and outro. saw Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and you can stream it now on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Dominic Sessa, Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in THE HOLDOVERS. Courtesy of Focus Features.

It doesn’t get any better on The Movie Gourmet – five new reviews of The Holdovers, Rustin, Cypher, May December, The Stones and Brian Jones, right on the heels of recent reviews of Napoleon, The Lady Bird Diaries and The Killer.

The year’s best film so far, Oppenheimer, is now available on VOD for $19.99, and the second-best, Anatomy of a Fall, is still playing some arthouses.

When we het to the Holidays I pause my regular WATCH AT HOME feature The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE) and replace it with the movies from my Best of 2023 list that are already available to stream.

REMEMBRANCE

Joss Ackland in LETHAL WEAPON 2

Joss Ackland was one of those stage-trained British actors who could elevate a role in any film, as he did in Lethal Weapon 2, The Hunt for Red October, White Mischief and over 200 other screen credits.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in PAST LIVES. Courtesy of A24.

From my Best Movies of 2023 – so far:

  • OPPENHEIMER: creator of a monster controlled by others. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • PAST LIVES: a profound and refreshing romance. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • THE MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO SEE TITANIC: wow – laughs, thrills, love. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • RETURN TO SEOUL: brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • BARBIE: a marriage of the intelligent and the silly. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • FREMONT: self-discovery and a fortune cookie. Amazon, Vudu.
  • HANNAH HA HA: what makes for human value and fulfillment? Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.

ON TV

Coming up on Turner Classics on December 4 is Death of a Gunfighter, which I’m not recommending, but I wanted to note that it’s the first movie with a “directed by Alan Smithee” credit. Robert Totten began directing the film, but he was forced out by the star, Richard Widmark, and replaced by Richard Fleischer. Fleischer refused the directing credit because Totten had directed more of the movie, and Widmarks refused to allow Totten to be credited. Widmark and Fleischer agreed that a fictional “Al Smith” would be credited, but there had been a real life director by that name, so they made up “Alan Smithee”. The Alan Smithee credit has since been used by the likes of John Frankenheimer, Dennis Hopper and Ivan Passer to decouple themselves from movies. As I write, “Alan Smithee” has 140 directing credits listed on IMDb.

RUSTIN: greatness, overlooked

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Photo caption: Colman Domingo in RUSTIN. Courtesy of Netflix.

We all know of the March on Washington, culminating in Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people filling the National Mall. It’s one of the most iconic and important moments in American history. Rustin introduces many folks to the overlooked greatness of Bayard Rustin (Colan Domingo), the organizer of the event.

Bayard Rustin was an important civil rights leader who was relegated to the background of the movement, and sometimes even ostracized, because he was a gay man. In the 1950s and 1960s, being a former Communist didn’t help, either.

Rustin’s mentor A. Philip Randolph (played in Rustin by Glynn Turman) is the other most overlooked male civil rights leader. Randolph’s two greatest accomplishments, the integration of the military and of the defense industries, occurred before television (and were filtered by the white mainstream print media). A personal note from The Movie Gourmet: my decades-long career has been in politics, and one of my very first political day jobs was funded by the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Here is more on Randolph and Rustin from the APRI website.

Rustin takes us behind the scenes, and we see the strategic disagreements, petty jealousies and jockeying for status between civil rights leaders. It’s important that the leaders came from generational strata. In 1963, Randolph was 74. Rustin was 52. NAACP head Roy Wilkins was 61, and Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was 55, both at the peaks of their careers. MLK was a rising superstar, but still only 34. John Lewis was still only 23.

In birthing the March on Washington, Rustin was fighting the overt attacks of J. Edgar Hoover and Strom Thurmond and the covert obstructionism of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Rustin also had the contend with the antagonism of Wilkins and Powell. But, Rustin had two cards to play – the respect demanded by Randolph and the rock star sizzle of MLK.

In a stellar, commanding performance, Colman Domingo is charismatic as Rustin. Domingo has been so good in everything I’ve seen him in: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola, Selma and Lincoln. Glynn Turman brings gravitas and moral authority to Randolph. In ingenious, against-type casting, Chris Rock is excellent as the funny-as-a-heart-attack Roy Wilkins. Jeffrey Wright PERFECTLY captures Adam Clayton Powell.

Ami Ameen has the challenge of satisfying audience expectation in portraying MLK. He gets the speech patterns and mannerisms right, while inhabiting a still-young MLK growing into the leader he was just becoming.

If you want to learn more of Bayard Rustin, I recommend Matt Wolf’s award-winning, but hard to find, short doc Bayard & Me, which features Rustin’s longtime partner Walter Neagle’s recollection of his life with Rustin; it’s an important insight into both Civil Rights and LGBTQ history.

Rustin was directed by George C. Wolfe, whose previous feature, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was my #2 movie of 2021. We need to see more movies from this guy.

Rustin is now streaming on Netflix.

THE HOLDOVERS: three souls must evolve beyond their losses

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Photo caption: Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Paul Giamatti in THE HOLDOVERS. Courtesy of Focus Features.

As we meet Paul (Paul Giamatti) in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, he’s teaching ancient Greek and Roman civilization at a New England boarding school, a place where the very rich stashed their inconvenient sons in 1970. Paul appears to be grossly overqualified for his job and is an intellectual bully. Not only does Paul detest the entitled twits in his classes, he is a full-blown misanthrope who doesn’t engage with his adult peers, either.

Not one to curry favor, even with his boss, Paul is punished with the assignment of staying on campus during the Christmas break with a few students stranded by their parents. He is joined by Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who runs the school’s kitchen. Circumstances narrow his small band of student wards to one – Angus (Dominic Sessa) , a boy whose mother is concentrating her attentions on her new husband.

All three are emotionality wounded. Mary is grieving the loss of her only son, killed in Vietnam. Angus, having lost his father and not fitting in his mother’s new family, has essentially been orphaned. Much later, we learn that Paul wasn’t born to be the martinet that he has become; his personality and his self-isolation have also been formed by traumatic events.

So, a movie that starts out looking like a comedy of manners evolves into a three-track journey of emotional recovery, as each main character must learn how to navigate life beyond the losses they have suffered.

The acting is superb. As we expect in every performance, Giamatti is pitch perfect as a man much more complicated than he first seems. Yale-trained Broadway and West End actress Randolph is excellent here; (she also plays Mahalia Jackson at the March on Washington in Rustin.) Dominic Sessa is a revelation in his first movie appearance – charismatic, sly, canny and soulful as Angus. Carrie Preston really sparkles as one of Paul and Mary’s co-workers.

The Wife noted The Holdovers’ period verisimilitude, with every detail perfect for the 1970 setting. At Christmastime, Paul and Angus go to a famous movie; I checked, and it was released on December 23, 1970!

At first, I saw The Holdovers as a much smaller film than Payne’s masterpieces Sideways and Nebraska, but, the more I think about it, it’s uncommonly thoughtful and insightful. The Holdovers is in theaters and already streaming on Amazon.

CYPHER: the year’s most original movie?

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Photo caption: Tierra Whack in CYPHER. Courtesy of Hulu.

Filmmaker Chris Moukarbel toys with us in Cypher, an ingenious narrative in the form of a pseudo documentary about rapper Tierra Whack.

As in any music doc, we meet Whack (smart, genuine and naturally charming) and trace her artistic emergence. Whack’s real life team and Moukarbel’s real-life crew play themselves. Fifteen minutes in, they meet a fawning fan in a diner, an interesting woman who soon veers into conspiracy talk. Whack continues with a world tour, on the road to shooting a music video. Whack and Moukarbel are unsettled when secretly-filmed video of them shows up on social media. Moukarbel is hounded by the unbalanced daughter (Biona Bradley – perfect) of the woman in the diner. The intrusions become increasingly menacing, and are tied to the same conspiracy theory. Reeling, the film crew visits the daughter, but the threats only escalate, all the way to a showdown on a video shooting set.

It’s hard to tell when the story dips in and out of fiction, and this is definitely not a movie you’ve seen before. Cypher reminds us that we can enjoy and appreciate moies, even when we’re not sure what’s going on.

I screened Cypher for the Nashville Film Festival. Cypher is now streaming on Hulu.

THE STONES AND BRIAN JONES: casualty of rock

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Photo caption: Brian Jones in THE STONE AND BRIAN JONES. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The Stones and Brian Jones tells the story of the ill-fated co-founder of The Rolling Stones. Most of us remember that Jones was fired from the band when his abuse of alcohol and drugs kept him from being able to record and perform with the band. This film delves into:

  • Jones’ unhappiness with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard’s diversification of the Stone’s portfolio beyond American Blues.
  • Jones’ insecurity about his role in the Stones being eclipsed by the band’s primary songwriters, Jagger and Richards.
  • Jones’ complex relationship with his parents.
  • The essential testimony of Jones’ girlfriends and those of other Stones (but not from the late Alita Pallenberg, who emerges as a villain in the story).

The most revelatory moments in The Stones and Brian Jones come from Jones’ bandmate, bassist Bill Wyman, who explains Jones’ musical contributions by pointing them out as we hear Stones songs.

Wisely, The Stones and Brian Jones doesn’t spend much time on Jones’ very unmysterious death. Somebody who mixes large amount of barbiturates and alcohol daily just isn’t going to survive very long, especially when they also get in swimming pools alone at night. Jones’ death occurred before premature substance abuse deaths of celebrity music figures (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Mama Cass, Jim Morrison, Gram Parsons, Keith Moon) became more commonplace.

This is a competent and extremely well-sourced doc, which helps us understand someone who played a key role in forming an iconic band, but it’s not a Must See rock documentary. The Stones and Brian Jones is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

MAY DECEMBER: a seat-squirmer of a psychodrama

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Photo caption: Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, in MAY DECEMBER. Courtesy of Netflix.

Todd Haynes’ May December is both absorbing and unsettling. The TV actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) has been cast in a movie to play a real-life person Gracie (Julianne Moore) who,20 years before, had been embroiled in a tabloid scandal. that made her notorious. To research the role, Elizabeth visits the hometown of Gracie and her husband Joe (Charles Melton) to meet them and other people touched by the scandal. I’m not going to spoil that original scandal because Haynes unspools the story so skillfully; it’s a jaw-dropper.

Right off the bat, we notice two things. First, Elizabeth and Joe are both 36 years old, and Joe’s wife Gracie is much older. Second, although Joe and Gracie’s home and family seem very vanilla, Gracie’s behavior is a little off.

Haynes is known for visually rich, female-centered melodramas like Carol and Far from Heaven. This is far more psychodrama than melodrama.

As we and Elizabeth see Gracie with her children (the youngest are graduating from high school this week), she seems a little more than just a socially awkward bossy mom. She can act like a bossy mom with her husband, too. It’s not long before she veers from oddball quirks into the indisputably inappropriate.

As we consume news, we occasionally ask ourselves, What kind of person would do THAT? Or What kind of person would even THINK of doing that? Some people have a blind spot and feel no shame for something shameful they’ve done, justifying their own behavior and firmly seeing it as misunderstood by others. May December is a movie about such an abnormal personality, and the carnage she has wreaked.

Julianne Moore keeps us squirming in our seats throughout the film. Portman, who initially brought the story to Haynes, is equally superb in a role that grows from reacting to Gracie’s dysfunction into her own issues with boundaries. Both Moore’s and Portman’s performances are awards-worthy. Cory Michael Smith is also outstanding as Gracie’s son from an earlier marriage. It’s a vivid and memorable performance.

Casting director Samy Burch wrote the screenplay, her first feature, from her own story co-written with Alex Mechanix. Burch’s pacing in revealing more and more of the backstory is the key to May December’s effectiveness. When she drops in some exposition, it meshes with the behavior we’ve already seen from Gracie. Burch gives Gracie a couple stunning lines and Elizabeth has a killer line, too. When a characters say, “This is what grown-ups do“, it’s devastating.

Incidentally, for those who find the story farfetched, it is clearly based on an 1996 occurrence in Burien, Washington.

May December is in theaters, just before it streams on Netflix on December 1.

Movies to See Right Now – Thanksgiving Weekend Edition

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Photo caption: Sandra Huller in ANATOMY OF A FALL. Courtesy of NEON.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – we’re in that time of the year when we’re flooded with eagerly anticipated movies, and I’ve posted new reviews of Napoleon, The Lady Bird Diaries, The Killer and Alan Pakula: Going for Truth. Plus a recommendation of tomorrow’s TCM telecast of the classic film noir The Narrow Margin, one of my favorites.

And, we’re not done yet. I’ve also seen May December and The Stones and Brian Jones. I’ll be writing about them soon, along with The Holdovers, which I hope to see this weekend.

When we get to the Holidays, I pause my regular WATCH AT HOME feature The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE) and replace it with the movies from my Best of 2023 list that are already available to stream.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

From my Best Movies of 2023 – so far:

  • OPPENHEIMER: creator of a monster controlled by others. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • PAST LIVES: a profound and refreshing romance. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • THE MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO SEE TITANIC: wow – laughs, thrills, love. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • RETURN TO SEOUL: brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • BARBIE: a marriage of the intelligent and the silly. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
  • FREMONT: self-discovery and a fortune cookie. Amazon, Vudu.
  • HANNAH HA HA: what makes for human value and fulfillment? Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
Photo caption: Petri Poikolainen in THE MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO SEE TITANIC. Courtesy of Cinedigm Entertainment Group.

NAPOLEON: but didn’t they name a complex after this guy?

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Photo caption: Joaquin Phoenix in NAPOLEON. Courtesy of AppleTV.

Of all living filmmakers, Ridley Scott would seem the most well-equipped to pull off a boundless EPIC, but his Napoleon, other than three spectacular battle scenes and a little sex, is boring, underwhelming and a little confounding. As The Wife said exiting the theater, it’s a slog, and she wasn’t referring to the winter retreat from Moscow.

For better or worse, Napoleon covers Napoleon Bonaparte’s entire public career – from his emergence in 1793 at age 24 to the beginning of his final captivity on St. Helena in 1815 at the age of 46. It’s kinda like a college survey course in the Napoleonic Era. Napoleon’s historical accuracy is solid, and, for a Hollywood movie, remarkably unusual.

Even with a running time of 2 hours and 38 minutes, there’s a lot of ground to cover. He did fight 61 battles, and it took the SEVENTH Coalition of opposing nations to defeat him. So, we get the briefest of glimpses of Napoleon’s mother, his second wife and other major figures in his life and times.

Here’s what is great about Napoleon – three extraordinarily spectacular battle scenes, depicting the Siege of Toulon, and the famous Battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo. They are amazing to watch, and the first two help us to understand Napoleon’s military genius (and the third, Wellington’s military genius). A segment of Austerlitz where Napoleon orders cannon fire to break the ice under enemy forces is one of greatest and most unforgettable battle scenes in cinema history.

Napoleon also does a pretty fair job with the the relationship between Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) and his first wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). It was a very uncomplicated one: he was utterly captivated by and devoted to her, and she just wasn’t that IN to him. Josephine was a survivor and an adventuress, who navigated through her misogynistic environment with a gift for canny manipulation. He finds that even making her an empress isn’t enough to quell her promiscuity. Phoenix and Kirby do a good job with this part of the story.

But, oddly for a biopic, Napoleon fails to help us understand Napoleon. Sure, he’s ambitious from the start, but why? And why does he need to keep conquering, at the risk of overreaching and losing everything? After all, didn’t they name a complex after this guy?

Joaquin Phoenix was so vivid as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, as Commodus in Gladiator, and as Freddie in The Master; he was so original and authentic in Her and C’mon C’mon. But, in Napoleon, his performance doesn’t unwrap the package of Napoleon’s psyche. I can’t say it’s Phoenix’a fault, but the collaboration between Phoenix, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa doesn’t pay off.

Scott does point out in an end title that 3 million lost their lives during the Napoleonic Wars, which raises the question, to what end? This guy with an insatiable appetite for power and conquest was starting wars with some twits who had been born into underserved monarchy.

Here’s a random digression from the movie Napoleon. Was Napoleon’s military prowess overrated? This is ironic, because Napoleon rose on his merits. But the forces he was defeating were led by royalty and aristocrats, who were given command of armies, not by their own training and demonstrated skills, but by the accident of birth. Alexander I of Russia, for example, started out as an immature, headstrong nitwit and aged into a fullblown nutcase. Maybe Napoleon was analogous to MLB Hall of Famers who never had to face black ballplayers. Hmmm.

Napoleon is now in theaters, and will stream on AppleTV on a date TBD.