Movies

LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING: never denying his identity, but renouncing it

by
Photo caption: Little Richard in LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Little Richard: I Am Everything traces the life of the trailblazing rock-and-roller, and it is NOT your paint-by-the-numbers showbiz biodoc. Director Lisa Cortés (Primetime Emmy winner) has superbly framed the two defining aspects of Little Richard – an unfettered confidence in his exuberant performances and an uneasy assessment of himself as a flamboyant gay man.

As one would expect, Cortés lays out Little Richard’s importance in the very beginning of rock and roll – writing hard-driving hits, many with unmistakably sexualized lyrics and performing them with then unseen animation. Before Elvis. During Jim Crow. Before African-American music was played on mainstream radio.

Most strikingly, from the very beginning, Little Richard never tried to dress or act like a heterosexual male. (Baby Boomers will recall that this was the age of an unconvincingly closeted Liberace and no other hints of homosexuality in American mass culture)

As much as we see Little Richard in later work by artists like David Bowie, Elton John and Prince, there were performers that Little Richard himself emulated. In a staggering achievement in sourcing, Cortés brings us photos and film of queer black performers of the 1940s whom Little Richard saw – and some he worked with as a teenager. I’ve seen plenty of documentaries on showbiz, LGBTQ and African-American history, and I’ve never seen much of this material.

Little Richard is a difficult case for queer people because, although he was an important role model who never DENIED being a gay man, he sporadically RENOUNCED his own sexual identity. He is a difficult case for all of us, because his music would celebrate sex as naughty fun, but then he would occasionally scare himself back into backwoods religion.

Little Richard: I Am Everything also reveals the original lyrics of Tutti Frutti, and how they were cleaned up to Tutti frutti, oh rootie.

David Bowie is joined by Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Tom Jones in appreciating Little Richard’s pioneering career. John Waters reveals that his own pencil-thin mustache is an homage to Little Richard’s.

Little Richard: I Am Everything touches on rock music, race in America, drugs, sex and sexual identity – and spends a lot of time on sex and sexual identity sex drugs. It’s a remarkable insightful profile of a complicated man who was himself very fun for us to watch.

HANNAH HA HA: what makes for human value and fulfillment?

by
Hannah Lee Thompson in HANNAH HA HA. Courtesy of Nashville Film Festival.

The indie Hannah Ha Ha is an extraordinary film about an ordinary person. Hannah (musician Hannah Lee Thompson in her first film) is content with her life in a small town – helping her dad (he would be lost without her) and giving music lessons. She touches lives, and townfolks eagerly help celebrate her 26th birthday,  But her brother Paul (Roger Mancusi) points out that she is comfortable with a path that will leave her without a career or, critically, health insurance.

Here’s the rub – Hannah’s family and her community recognize her contributions, but our economic system doesn’t.

Paul wants what is best for Hannah, but every time he talks to her, he makes her feel bad about herself, finally shaming her into finding her place in the conventional economy (which is not at the top of the pyramid). Paul’s advice is sensible – if she wants health insurance and secure housing, she will need a job; it’s just that the entry level jobs in the small town’s fast food chains are so soul-crushing for her. (The movie was filmed in Sharon, Massachusetts.)

Thompson, whose Hannah is smart, witty, capable and utterly ill-suited for life as a corporate pawn, is excellent. With her sarcastic charm, she’s sympathetic and relatable. Thompson perfectly captures how defeated even a talented person can feel when forced into a harsher environment.

Mancusi lets the audience glimpse that Paul himself is not as upwardly mobile as he thinks or portrays. Paul has bought into the “work hard and get rich” ethic, and there’s a hint of desperation and self-loathing that he’s not further up the corporate ladder. He’s like a two-bit insurance salesman who votes Republican because he thinks he’s a “businessman”; in reality, no one in the 1% is going to let Paul control capital.

Filmed in a cinéma vérité style, Hannah Ha Ha is the first feature written and directed by Joshua Pikovsky and Jordan Tetewsky, and it’s masterfully edited by Tetewsky. The 75-minute running time allows for the characters and the plot to meander without dragging.

We are our choices – but who frames those choices? Hannah Ha Ha is a thought-provoking film that explores the profound question of what makes for human value and fulfillment.

Hannah Ha Ha premiered last year at Slamdance, played Tribeca, and I screened it for the Nashville Film Festival, where I featured it in Under the Radar at Nashville. It’s now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube. Hannah Ha Ha is one of the Best Movies of 2023 – So Far.

A DARK, DARK MAN: rounding up the usual suspects in Kazakhstan

by
Photo caption: Daniyar Alshivnov in A DARK, DARK MAN. Courtesy of MHz.

In the Kazakh neo-noir A Dark, Dark Man, a provincial detective is stationed in a place that is remote, even by the standards of Kazakhstan. The authorities are unaccountable and utterly corrupt, and human life isn’t so much cheap as it is valueless. A boy has been murdered and wheels having no relation to justice begin to grind.

The cop is Bekzat (Daniyar Alshivnov), a smart guy whose moral compass drives him to solve the crime, not to cover it up. But he’s also practical, and he understands that he doesn’t have the power to undermine his bosses, who have decided that Pukuar, a mentally disabled local, is the suspect.

The sordid order of things is rocked by the arrival of a nosy journalist Ariana (Dinara Baktybaeva), who uncomfortably points out that 11 suspects have died in police custody in the past year, and that this murder shares convincing similarities with a series of local murders over the past decade. It appears that someone has been getting away with serial murder while the cops “round up the usual suspects”.

In a compelling performance, Alshivnov has us hanging on Bekhat’s moral decision. Which choice will he make, and at what risk? How can he survive?

Yes, this is my first Kazakh film. Director and co-writer Adilkhan Yerzhanov uses absurdism to depict the incompetence of the rural police. The violence in A Dark, Dark Man is anything but stylized – Yerzhanov makes it up-close-and-personal and messy.

Teoman Khos is superb as the innocent Pukuar, both half-witted and pranksterish, and understanding more of what is going on than it seems.

Make sure you watch the interview with star Daniyar Alshivnov (embedded below the trailer). You will be surprised.

A Dark, Dark Man is streaming on MHz. MHz has split it into 3 episodes, but it’s a coherent 2 hour, ten minute movie that is easy to binge.

THE LOST KING: not all cranks are cranky

by
Photo caption: Sally Hawkins in THE LOST KING. Courtesy of IFC Films.

In the The Lost King, an otherwise unfulfilled woman becomes a history hobbyist and literally digs up a British monarch. That monarch is the Shakespearean villain Richard III. The woman in question is Philippa (Sally Hawkins), who joins a cadre of misfits obsessed with rehabilitating Richard III’s image, which has suffered from the view that he murdered his own 12- and 10-year old nephews to cement his claim on the throne.

The story is based on fact. The real Phillipa didn’t succeed in turning Richard into a popular Good Guy, but she led a successful campaign that located Richard’s long-lost remains, buried under a parking lot in Leicester, and reinterred them in a historically more appropriate setting. Along the way, she had to battle lots of snooty academics and officials who “knew better”.

It’s a standard underdog story with two enhancements:

  • Sally Hawkins is a singular, irrepressible actress who gets to shine in a lead role, as she did in her art house hit Happy-Go-Lucky and the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water.
  • The character of Philippa is interestingly and unexpectedly textured, with her chronic fatigue syndrome and her unusual relationship with her ex-husband (Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote).

The little cadre of Richard III cranks is especially funny.

Steven Frears is famous for directing movies like The Grifters and The Queen, for which he received Oscar nominations, and Dangerous Liaisons and High Fidelity. But it’s worth remembering that he has also made made many much smaller, but satisfying, movies: My Beautiful Launderette, Dirty Pretty Things, The Hit, Tamara Drewe, Philomena. The Lost King is one of these.

This is an enjoyable, non-challenging movie. It may not be a Must See, but it’s not a waste if time.

REGGIE: it’s not just about Reggie

by

Photo caption: Reggie Jackson in REGGIE. Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video.

After watching the documentary Reggie, I was surprised that I found spending 104 minutes with Reggie Jackson so rewarding. In the 1970s, Jackson seemed to me such an egotist, so consumed by his own stardom. Of course, the media were always asking him about himself. Here, where Jackson has the platform, he talks about himself in the context of larger issues of racial justice, economic justice, righting past wrongs and creating a more equitable future – for everybody, not just for Reggie.

The film could have been titled The Life and Times of Reggie Jackson. America’s struggle with race is in the forefront of Reggie, understandably because of the times. In addition, Reggie sees many of the pivotal events in his life as impacted by race – and he makes a convincing case.

Reggie contains lots of tidbits, many not well known:

  • Reggie’s own experiences with racial prejudice as a child and young man
  • Reggie’s shielding from the dangers of Alabama Jim Crow by minor league teammates Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers and Dave Duncan
  • His early mentorship by Joe DiMaggio
  • His chafing at Charley Findley – and Findley giving him a $2500 pay cut for “too many strikeouts” in a season when Reggie led the league in homers
  • Reggie’s prickly relationship with Thurman Munson, his incendiary mismatch with Billy Martin, and an evolved friendship with George Steinbrenner
  • The origin of the “Mr. October” sobriquet.

Reggie can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).

I’M AN ELECTRIC LAMPSHADE: the final score is Doug 1, Expectations 0.

by
Photo caption: I’M AN ELECTRIC LAMPSHADE. Courtesy of Cinequest.

In the winning and surprising documentary I’m an Electric Lampshade, we meet the most improbable rock star – a mild-mannered accountant who retires to pursue his dream of performing.

60-year-old Doug McCorkle is fit for his age and has an unusually mellifluous voice, like a late night FM DJ or the announcer in a boxing ring. Other than that he looks like a total square.

There may be no flamboyance about Doug McCorkle, but it thrives inside him. His own artistic taste is trippy, gender-bending and daring. Think Price Waterhouse Cooper on the outside and Janelle Monáe on the inside.

We follow Doug as he goes to a performance school in the Philippines (where most of his classmates are drag queens) and the montage of his training resembles those in Fame and Flashdance. Doug is a good enough sport to wear MC Hammer pants in a bizarre Filipino yogurt commercial. It all culminates in a concert in Mexico.

Doug’s quest would be a vanity project except he has no apparent vanity. He must have some ego to want to get up on stage, but compared to subjects of other showbiz documentaries, he is most humble, emphatically not self-absorbed and low maintenance. We can tell from how his co-workers, friends and wife react to him, that he is just a profoundly decent guy.

Eminently watchable, this is a successful first feature for writer-director John Clayton Doyle. The stage-setting profile of one of the Filipino artists could have been trimmed, but Lampshade is otherwise well-paced.

The final score: Doug 1, Expectations 0. I screened I’m an Electric Lmpshade for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021. It’s now available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

ROISE & FRANK: therapy dog and hurling coach

by
Photo caption: Bríd Ní Neachtain in ROISE & FRANK. Courtesy of Juno Pictures.

In the delightful and sweet Gaelic comedy Roise & Frank, it’s two years after the death of Roise’s (Bríd Ní Neachtain) husband Frank, and her grief has turned her into a reclusive depressive. An apparently stray dog insists upon intruding into her life. She becomes convinced the dog is the reincarnation of her deceased hubbie – and the screenplay cleverly gives her credible reasons to believe this. She names the dog Frank, and off we go, as Frank the dog guides Roise out of her melancholy, despite the resistance of her adult, also still grieving, son and her lovestruck neighbor. Soon, there are even implications for the local school’s hapless hurling team.

Roise & Frank was deftly directed by Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy, who overcame W.C Fields’ admonition about working with animals and children. They succeeded in keeping Roise & Frank light and funny without turning it into sitcom silliness.

Bríd Ní Neachtain, who played the nosy postmistress in The Banshees of Inisherin, is convincing and relatable as both the gloomy and the rejuvenated Roise. In his first screen credit, Ruadhán de Faoite is especially winning as Mikey, the confidence challenged middle schooler next door.

The dog Frank is a mutt described as possibly part lurcher, a breed unfamiliar to many of us in North America. Lurchers, a mix of greyhound and terrier or herder, historically used in hunting, are more common in the British Isles.

Roise & Frank opens on April 7th at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco, the Smith Rafael in San Rafael, and the Laemmle Town Center and Royal in Los Angeles. This is a charmer and well worth seeking out.

RETURN TO SEOUL: brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping

by

Photo caption: Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

As the brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping Return to Seoul opens, we meet a free-spirited young woman (Park Ji-min) with the decidedly non-Korean name Frederique Benoit. Freddie is French, having been adopted from Korea by a French couple as an infant. Freddie doesn’t speak Korean, doesn’t know anything about Korean culture, and is only in Korea because of a last minute pivot from some disrupted vacation travel.

Freddie travels for pleasure and loves to party – and party hard. She is certainly NOT prepared for a quest to find her biological parents, but an acquaintance gives her a tip, and she can’t resist following up. What follows is an exceptional and unpredictable personal journey told in four segments – the second five years after the first, the third and fourth just a year or two apart.

Return to Seoul features a screenplay without any hint of cliché and a stunning breakthrough performance by its lead actress.

Freddie is brash, impulsive and unfiltered. Her feelings about the circumstances of her adoption are authentic and complicated. She doesn’t seem either needy or resentful – but what is beneath the surface? After all, she does have a visceral distaste for celebrating her birthday.

Freddie is frequently impolite and often mistreats those who care for her with breathtaking awfulness; she dispatches one boyfriend with a line of staggering cruelty – and then repeats it..

As Freddie, Park Ji-min is a revelation in her FIRST FILM role. She’s on screen in every scene, and we’re always on the edge of our seat wondering how she’ll react – for better or for worse. We ‘re on Freddie’s roller coaster, and Park Ji-min is driving it.

Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Park Ji-min is a visual artist who often paints with latex. Like Freddie, she’s confident enough – in her first filmmaking – to have insisted on eschewing a blonde wig for a black leather wardrobe in the second segment because she saw the character of Freddie as a warrior. After a stunning, sure to be star-making performance in Return to Seoul, she says she’s now deciding whether to accept further acting gigs (and I sure hope she does). In the meantime, she’s become a spokesperson for Dior.

Park Ji-min moved with her Korean parents from Korea to France in her childhood. She heard of this film project from a friend who, like the character of Freddie, was adopted from Korea by French parents.

Writer-director Davy Chou is French-born of Cambodian parents. This is only his second feature, and it’s a near masterpiece primarily because Chou has created an entirety original and complex protagonist.

Freddie’s biological father is played by Oh Kwang-rok, a Korean actor of note, who delivers a heartfelt and sometimes smoldering performance.

I found Return to Seoul to be a thrilling experience, a better film than any of last year’s ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar. The Wife, while moved by the penultimate scene, was much less impressed. She thought one music-related thread had been ignored for the middle of the film, and was underwhelmed by the ending.

Go see Return to Seoul at your arthouse theater – it’s the first Must See of 2023. I’ll let you know when it streams.

TURN EVERY PAGE: two masters, two obsessives

by
Photo caption: Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb in TURN EVERY PAGE. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The fine documentary Turn Every Page profiles two American literary stars and their collaboration of over fifty years, which is, amazingly, still ongoing. Robert Caro, America’s top biographer and political writer, is 87-years-old. Robert Gottlieb, the most important American publisher, is 90. These are important guys, and their story is irresistible.

Turn Every Page is directed by Gottlieb’s daughter Lizzie Gottlieb – the only person who could get the cooperation of these two quirky masters – and she tells a great story.

The two began their collaboration with Caro’s 1972 The Power Broker, which has become de rigeur among observers of and participants in America’s politics and government. The two then launched the greatest political biography in history, Caro’s four-volume revelation of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Caro is defined by his meticulousness. To understand the background that molded LBJ, Caro moved his family for three years to the Texas Hill Country. Turn Every Page contains plenty of nuggets for Robert Caro geeks like me:

  • The moment when Caro and Gottlieb decided to abandon a Fiorello La Guardia bio for the LBJ project.
  • The space over Caro’s refrigerator, into which is crammed, a few pages at a time, carbon copes of his entire oeuvre.  
  • How a change in the health of LBJ’s younger brother, Sam Houston Johnson, opened up the reality of LBJ’s childhood family for the first time. 
  • How Caro’s incredible doggedness led him to find a man thought long dead, who handed Caro the smoking gun evidence for his biggest literary revelation.

Note: Turn Every Page discusses the Big Reveal in the second LBJ volume, Means of Ascent – that LBJ’s victory in the 1948 election for US Senate was stolen. What Turn Every Page leaves out (understandably because the movie is about the LBJ books, not about LBJ) is that Means of Ascent also proved that the preceding US Senate election was stolen FROM LBJ.

Those of us who are addicted to Caro’s LBJ series have been awaiting the final volume nervously, in light of the actuarial inevitabilities and Caro’s unsatisfying response that it will be published when he is ready; Turn Every Page doesn’t offer any different answer.

Gottlieb is arguably even more important than Caro. He broke through in 1961 by discovering Joseph Heller and publishing Catch 22. Since then he has guided the completion and publication of the work of Toni Morrison, Salmon Rushdie, John LeCarre, John Cheever, Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, Barbara Tuchman, Nora Ephron, Jessica Mitford, Antonia Fraser, Doris Lessing and a host of celebrity memoirs by the likes of Bill Clinton, Katharine Hepburn, Bob Dylan and Lauren Bacall. As obsessive as Caro, but in different ways, Gottlieb is also a bit of a Renaissance Man, with a surprising role in ballet and as an offbeat collector.

Turn Every Page has concluded its all too brief run in arthouse theaters, but I’m sure it will be streaming (or perhaps televised) soon; I’ll let you know when you can see it.

Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb in TURN EVERY PAGE. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

SANSÓN AND ME: a life discarded in a moment

by
Gerardo Reyes as adult Sansón in Rodrigo Reyes’ documentary SANSÓN AND ME. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.

In the documentary Sansón and Me, director Rodrigo Reyes explores how an unremarkable 19-year-old living a decidedly non-monstrous existence could be locked up for life. Reyes, one of our most imaginative filmmakers, has a day job as a courtroom interpreter and met his titular subject at his California trial. Sansón, a Mexican immigrant, although apparently not the triggerman, was convicted of a murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Reyes travels to Sansón’s hometown, a modest fishing village between Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco and enlists Sansón’s family members to re-enact pivotal moments in Sansón’s childhood. It turns out that the family has more than its share of troubles and that the village is less than idyllic. Reyes then uses local, non-professional actors, to depict Sansón’s sojourn in California’s Central Valley, up to the killing in the grubby agricultural town of Dos Palos. It doesn’t take Sansón very long to get in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sansón made a bad decision and was also profoundly unlucky. For that, the remaining decades of his life have been discarded by the state, which Reyes paints as an unfathomably disproportionate consequence.

Two years ago, Reyes invented his own genre of documentary in 499, what I call a “docu-fable” because it is all as real as real can be (the documentary), except for a fictional, 500-year-old conquistador (the fable). That movie’s title reflects a moment 499 years after Cortés’ conquest of the Aztecs in 1520; the conquistador and the audience discover that the dehumanization inherent in colonialism has persisted to plague modern Mexico – essentially the legacy of Mexico’s Original Sin. I’m hoping that Reyes’ permanent day job becomes filmmaker.

Sansón and Me is rolling out in theaters and plays the American Cinematheque on March 24.