Actor Ned Beatty, Oscar-nominated for Network, amassed 165 screen credits, and Beatty was impeccable in every one that I’ve seen. Pudgy people (including The Movie Gourmet) are often underestimated; character actor Ned Beatty was certainly one of his generation’s greatest screen actors.
Beatty has been so prolific and so consistently excellent, that it’s now hard to grok that his most unforgettable performance, in Deliverance, was also his first movie. The rape scene in Deliverance was so shocking and so sensational that many overlook how perfectly Beatty played each of his scenes, including the one with the Banjo Boy and the one where his assailant has been dispatched by Burt Reynold’s arrow.
Norman Lloyd in ST ELSEWHERE
Actor, director and producer Norman Lloyd has died at age 106. Lloyd was the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 nailbiter Saboteur, and his career stretched through 2015 (when he was a centenarian). His most remembered role was as Dr. Daniel Auschlander on television’s St Elsewhere. Among his achievements – a 75 year marriage.
As an actor on stage, radio, television and the Big Screen, Lloyd worked with Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Anthony Mann, Elia Kazan and Martin Scorsese. He acted with stars from Dana Andrews and Burt Lancaster to Denzel Washington. Fortunately for film fans, Lloyd was a delightful, anecdote-rich raconteur.
My own favorite Norman Lloyd performance was as the highly idiosyncratic stoolie Sleeper in Scene of the Crime.
Photo caption: Anthony Ramos and Melissa Barrera in IN THE HEIGHTS. Photo credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
The exuberant musical In the Heights is based on the Tony-winning Broadway show created by Lin-Manuel Miranda. In the Heights celebrates immigrant aspirations and Latino subcultures, and it touches on the raw issues of racism and economic displacement. Vibrant, spirited and earnest, it’s perfect for this moment – when we’re emerging from our COVID cocoons.
The titular Heights is Washington Heights, the primarily Dominican neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan. Miranda’s Washington Heights is a boisterous and colorful place, filled by hard-working , marginalized people, each with his or her own dream. Life goes on with a salsa beat, and you can practically smell the carne ripiada. (Miranda himself appears in a small role as a piragua vendor.)
29-ear-old Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) runs a bodega, and employs his younger, precocious cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV). Usnavi is so infatuated with Vanessa (Melissa Barrera)that he is paralyzed from asking her out. Vanessa, a nail tech and wannabe designer, has big dreams and confidence to match. The neighborhood’s version of a magnate is Kevin (Jimmy Smits), who runs a car service, with his dispatcher Benny (Corey Hawkins). The neighborhood’s soul and anchor is everyone’s surrogate grandma, Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz).
Corey Hawkins and Leslie Grace in IN THE HEIGHTS. Photo credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
The most interesting story thread is that of Kevin’s brilliant daughter Nina (Leslie Grace), who is just back from her first year at Stanford, which she did not find to be a welcoming place. Having suffered some unsettling indignities, he doesn’t want to return, but her dad won’t hear of it. Her old beau Benny is glad to have her back in the Heights, so…What’s best for Nina, and will everyone reach that conclusion?
The local Latino businesses are being priced out, and everyone is conscious of displacement as a real and present threat. To its credit, In the Heights doesn’t oversimplify the displacement issue with cartoonish corporate villains.
The cast is thoroughly excellent (although Jimmy Smits is the weak link on singing and dancing). Gregory Diaz IV and Corey Hawkins are the standouts.
The best acting performance is by – of all people – Marc Anthony – who perfectly captures the dead eyes of Sonny’s troubled, hope-exhausted father. I had forgotten that, 1990-2004, Anthony acted in some pretty good movies: Big Night, Bringing Out the Dead, Man on Fire.
Olga Merediz in IN THE HEIGHTS. Photo credit: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) is a Silicon Valley native, son of the founder of Chef Chu’s, the beloved institution in Los Altos. Chu was a film school wunderkind and was signed to direct films right out of USC.
Chu is a master of filming dance. He has become one of the greatest directors of dance in cinema – and deserves to be ranked with the likes of Stanley Donen, Mark Sandrich, Busby Berkeley and Bob Fosse. I’m not gushing here – there;s no doubt that the guy has the chops.
The dancing in In the Heights is spectacular. The critic Jason Gorber tweeted that he was watching In the Heights a second time and focusing on the moves of the background dancers. If you do that, you will be able to confirm that the dancer to the right of Sonny in the swimming pool is indeed double-jointed.
Chu fills the frame with detailed content – and often with what seems like hundreds of dancers. See In the Heights on the biggest screen you can; The Wife and I watched it on a 65-inch television, which worked well, but a theater would have been even better.
In the Heights is in theaters and streaming on HBO Max through July 11.
This week, two new foreign films – one of them is brilliant. Plus an overlooked masterwork from 1964.
ON VIDEO
About Endlessness: The master of the droll, deadpan and absurd probes the meaning of life. One of the best movies of the year, but NOT FOR EVERYONE. Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Bad Tales: Middle schoolers must navigate adolescence in this Italian coming of age film while their fathers radiate toxic masculinity. Droll and dark – perhaps too dark. Virtual Cinema, including Laemmle.
IN THEATERS
Eric Bana in Robert Connolly’s film THE DRY, which played at SFFILM. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.
The Dry: a mystery as psychological as it is procedural. In theaters and also streaming on AppleTV, YouTube and Google Play
Augustine: obsession, passion and the birth of a science. Amazon (included with Prime), AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The Brainwashing of My Dad: some insight into our national madness. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
On June 13, Turner Classic Movies will present an overlooked masterwork. Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily (1964) is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing Englishwomen for the brass. Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War. She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.
Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy. Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it. Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.
It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network. Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe. Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.
One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
Jule Andrews and James Garner in THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY
Photo caption: Elio Germano in BAD TALES. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing.
In the Italian coming of age film Bad Tales, middle schoolers must navigate adolescence. It’s droll, dark and captivating – and, finally, perhaps too dark.
The kids head into summer vacation while their suburban families languish someplace between ennui and malaise. The fathers radiate toxic masculinity.
Co-directors and co-directors Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo won for best screenplay at the Berlinale; it’s just their second feature film.
The kids in Bad Tales are much more sympathetic than are real life middle schoolers in my experience. They’re at that awkward and confusing age where there’s nothing to be confident about. It’s the age where the boys call each other spazz and the last day of school transitions into summer vacation with a glorious water balloon fight.
The kid actors are exceptionally good. The D’Innocenzos must be both extremely adept at casting and lucky; the boys are all perfect for the ages of the characters – and just one unpredictable growth spurt or a voice-deepening from aging out of their parts.
As we observe human foibles, Bad Tales‘ overall tone is caustically amusing. But things get deeply tragic at the end, including the most cowardly behavior I’ve ever seen from a movie father – and then there’s the most insidious act by a movie teacher.
Bad Tales is streaming on on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at Laemmle.
In About Endlessness, Roy Andersson, that genius of deadpan existential cinema, probes the meaning of human life.
Andersson movies are a series of vignettes, with ponderous Scandinavians arranged or paraded in front of a stationary camera, in a way that critic Justin Change has likened to diorama. There is never a closeup. It is all superbly photographed by cinematographer Gergely Pálos.
Now, Andersson is not for everyone. This is what I wrote in 2014 about his most recent film:
Some viewers are going to hate, hate, hate the droll Swedish existentialist comedyA Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence, but it’s kind of a masterpiece. For most of its 101 minutes, dull Swedes sit and stand talking about dull things. It’s no secret that the Scandinavians (who The Wife refers to as “Your people”) are not the most lively bunch. Filmmaker Roy Andersson uses this trope to probe the meaning of life itself.
About Endlessness, with all its randomness, is more direct than A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence. This time, in a psychiatry office and in a student’s bedroom, Andersson is explicit. When a doubting priest asks the point of life without religious belief, his shrink answers, “Damned if I know. Maybe being content with being alive.”
Most vignettes are absurdist and darkly funny, often about someone deeply engaged in something that Andersson sees as trivial. But, About Endlessness, contains some life and death moments, mixed among the clearly meaningless.
This time, some of Andersson’s vignettes are bracing. In one, a man has committed a horrific and irreversible act that he has come to realize, too late, was profoundly misguided.
Two other vignettes are among the sweetest you’ll see this year – one with young women bursting into into an impromptu dance, the other with a father tying his small daughter’s shoes.
About Endlessness is an art film in the best sense, an experience that demonstrates what what cinema can do in the hands of a talented artist with something to say. I recognize that it’s not for everyone – but it’s only 76 minutes, so give it a chance. I’m putting it on my list of Best Movies of 2021.
In just over a month, the 78-year-old Andersson will be out with another film, Being a Human Person.
About Endlessness is streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Photo caption: Paula Beer in UNDINE. Courtesy of MVFF.
This week, a mythical tragic romance, a preacher becomes an institution and the most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE.
IN THEATERS
Undine: Christian Petzold takes a mythical story and sets it in contemporary Germany. resulting in a romance that is operatic and supernatural and finally very tragic. But too slowly paced for me.
ON VIDEO
Billy Graham: This insightful biodoc explores how Billy Graham took evangelism out of backwoods revival tents and brought it to big city stadiums and television, becoming an institution in the process. And his fatal flaw – the need to pray with Presidents. Streaming at American Experience.
Drunk Bus: In this light and appealing coming of age comedy, a lovelorn slacker wallows in malaise until he meets a 300-pound Samoan security guy with facial tattoos. Laemmle.
My Memorial Day pick was We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company, the oral histories of regular men plunged into the most traumatic experiences of WW II and what they endured. Streaming on HBO Max.
Ed Harris and Annette Bening in THE FACE OF LOVE
The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:
The Dry: a mystery as psychological as it is procedural. In theaters and also streaming on AppleTV, YouTube and Google Play
Brewmance: barley, hops, yeast and underdogs. Amazon (included with Prime), AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play .
Hamlet/Horatio: More tragedy, less angst. Streaming widely.
Louder Than Bombs: An intricately constructed family drama. Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu and YouTube.
That Guy Dick Miller: Putting the “character” in “character actor:” Amazon (included with Prime).
Sword of Trust: comedy and so, so much more. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Run Lola Run: you’ll never see a more kinetic movie. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The Times of Harvey Milk: my favorite political documentary. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, HBO Max and Criterion Channel..
In Christian Petzold’s German tragic romance Undine, Paula Beer plays the title character, a young woman of passion and unproven emotional stability. One morning, she experiences a heartbreaking breakup and rebounds into a profound love story. The course of that love affair becomes operatic and supernatural, and very tragic.
In mythology, Undine was a water nymph, and Petzold maintains the story framework of the original legend, but sets it in contemporary times. Undine meets Christoph (Franz Rogowski). I often roll my eyes at a “meet cute”, and I sure didn’t expect one from Euro art film director Petzold, but this one really works. Christoph is capitated by Undine and persists in courting her. He becomes obsessed, she less so, and a tragic romance ensues.
Undine strives for the operatic but is too much of a slow burn (as in barely flickering at times).
I was thrilled by Petzold’s Barbara and then his Phoenix. I was much less satisfied by his Transit (also with Rogowski and Beer). I’m becoming less of a Petzold enthusiast after these last two disappointments.
Beer, as she was in Transit, is exceptionally expressive and captivating. Rogowski (whose supporting character in Victoria was the most memorable turn in that film) excels when he plays a haunted man – as he does here and in Transit.
I saw Undine at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October, and it opens in Bay Area theaters this weekend.
Photo caption: Charlie Tahan and Pineapple Tangaroa in DRUNK BUS. Photo courtesy of Filmrise.
In the light and appealing coming of age comedy Drunk Bus, a young slacker (Charlie Tahan) is paralyzed by the disappointment of a breakup. He’s stuck driving the shuttle between a college town’s bars and the dorms (the “Drunk Bus”). One running gag is that he is fixated upon an ex girlfriend that every other man in America would find insufferably frustrating.
He needs someone to shake him up, which is what he gets in the form of a 300-pound Samoan security guy with facial tattoos (Pineapple Tangaroa). It’s all sweet and predictable.
This is the first feature for co-directors John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke.
I screened Drunk Bus, which had played at the 2020 SXSW, in March at the 2021 Cinequest. It’s now available to stream from Laemmle.
Photo caption:BILLY GRAHAM. Photo courtesy of PBS American Experience.
The fine PBS documentary series American Experience brings us Billy Graham, an especially insightful look at back at the famed evangelist.
i hadn’t though much about Billy Graham lately. When I was growing up, Billy Graham was already a national institution and the most famous American religious leader – and the world’s most visible Protestant clergyman. Then, what happened?
Billy Graham traces Graham’s meteoric rise from Boy Wonder preacher to national stardom, taking evangelism from tent revivals in the rural Bible Belt to big city stadiums and television.
That story of Graham’s talent and ambition is interesting in itself, but Billy Graham examines both the strengths of his character and his vulnerability. Graham was rigorously disciplined in refusing to enrich himself and in his strict devotion to his marriage. Almost uniquely for TV preacher, Graham was never tainted by a financial or a sexual scandal and seemed impervious to hypocrisy.
But Billy Graham explores Graham’s yearning to become pastor to Presidents – both to promote his evangelism and as a manifestation of his own vanity. That paid off for Graham with his close relationship with Ike (and Ike and Billy’s impact on the nation’s public religiosity).
But then came Richard Nixon, who Graham was naive enough to think a soul mate. Being publicly anchored to Nixon made Graham’s position as an arbiter of national morality, well, untenable.
Graham’s career – through his consorting with politicians and his pioneering use of mass media – set the stage for the Moral Majority-type politicization of culturally conservative evangelicals. Notably, he intentionally took another path.
In his final act (which I had lost track of), Graham became an international peace campaigner. He mellowed into a more tolerant, less hell-fire theology and we glimpse him on a NYC stage at age 87. I was surprised to learn that Graham died in 2018 at age 99.
There’s no better movie choice for Memorial Day than the documentary We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company. A companion to the fine 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, this oral history gives voice to soldiers as they revisit what they endured.
The Easy Company of the title was part of the 101st Airborne, a storied WW II unit of regular guys who became elite paratroopers. We meet a bunch of those guys as they recount their journey of 55 years before – their basic training, their first combat – on D-Day. Easy Company went on to play a part in WW II’s most pivotal moments: the Normandy invasion, the liberation of the Netherlands, beating back Germany’s last offensive at the brutal Battle of the Bulge and conquering Hitler’s own private getaway, the Eagle’s Nest.
These are men of The Greatest Generation, a term coined four decades later by Tom Brokaw. For those most part, they didn’t share their war experiences with their families and friends. We are hearing many of them tell their stories for the first time.
I’m a Baby Boomer, and my Dad and all of my friends’ dads were WW II vets – basically every dad-aged adult male. We knew them as grocery clerks, science teachers, factory workers, insurance agents and mechanics like my Dad. All of us kids, growing up on a steady diet of WW II movies and TV, asked them, but they would never talk about the war. I now realize that I knew men who had served as infantry in Europe and Marines in the Pacific.
One family member did tell me about getting shot down over New Guinea and spending time with an indigenous tribe before his rescue. What he didn’t relate was in a journal that I found long after his death – that the repeated terror of over twenty bombing missions finally became more than he could bear.
Above all, We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company is the story of men who experienced one trauma after another. The unit suffered over 50% casualties on D-Day. Their eleven months of combat missions must have seemed endless. They deserve, finally, to be heard.
We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company can be streamed from HBO Max.
