Photo caption: Charles Chaplin in THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN. Courtesy of Showtime.
The biodocumentary The Real Charlie Chaplin has some insights, as far as it goes. The film aspires to cover these elements of Charlie Chaplin’s life and does a pretty good job:
the crushing poverty of his childhood,
his quick rise to world-wide celebrity,
his exploitation of his very young wives, and
his blacklisting.
The highlights are video interviews with Chaplin’s school mate and childhood neighbor Effie, an absolutely delightful old gal. Unusual for a celebrity biodoc, the filmmakers also do a good job in giving voice to Chaplin’s wives.
Of course, you have to pick and choose, and the filmmakers only reference Chaplin’s pioneering filmmaking as it pertains to his personal life. If you’re looking for insights into Chaplin’s artistic genius and innovations, look elsewhere.
The Real Charlie Chaplin is streaming on Showtime.
Photo caption: Toni Servillo, Teresa Saponangelo and Filippo Scotti) in THE HAND OF GOD. Courtesy of Netflix.
The Hand of God is filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s own coming of age story – and a time capsule of 1986 Naples. The kinda-fictional stand-in for Sorrentino is the directionless 16-year-old Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), who enjoys family life with his boisterous, ever-joking parents (Toni Servillo and Teresa Saponangelo). Events occur, one profoundly tragic, which pivot Fabietto into a future career in cinema.
The young Fabietto is very passive, a bobber floating on the surface of his tumultuous family and his rowdy hometown. Besides being rocked by the tragedy, he is deluged by the energy of a sexy, funny and mentally ill aunt, a formidable dowager baroness, a crazily impulsive smuggler and a bombastically narcissistic film director. He is a sensitive kid, one who is triggered into a panic attack when his mother, usually his rock, has her own meltdown.
The title of movie, as even casual sports fans may recognize, is a reference to soccer star Diego Maradona, whom the Naples soccer club broke the bank to acquire for seven seasons. As the film opens, Fabietto, with the rest of Naples, is transfixed by the possibility, then just a rumor, of getting Maradona. When Maradona leads Napoli to a league championship, Fabietto has been numbed by grief and is juxtaposed against the rest of his city in ecstatic celebration.
Luisa Ranieri in THE HAND OF GOD. Courtesy of Netflix.
The cast is very effective, but the standouts portray the key female parts – Fabietto’s mom (Teresa Saponangelo), his aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), and the Baroness (Betty Pedrazzi).
Nothing is more personal than one’s own coming of age, and Sorrentino, describing The Hand of God, says, “Almost everything is true”.
I think that, of all current filmmakers, Sorrentino (Il Divo, The Great Beauty,Youth) makes the most visually and striking beautiful movies. The Great Beauty won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. In that film, Sorrentino follows his protagonist (played by Servillo) through a series of strikingly beautiful Roman settings (including lots of gorgeously still Roman dawns.) If you’ve been to Rome, you know that it is a generally chaotic city with unexpected islands of solitude. Here in The Hand of God, Sorrentino gives this treatment to his own hometown, the grittier and more humble Naples.
The Hand of God opens with a remarkable 2 1/2-minute drone/helicopter shot that takes us from the ocean to Naples and back to the ocean; as the camera nears the city, the soundtrack gradually picks up the sounds of urban bustle.
In one very brief but inspired scene, Sorrentino shows us the casting call for extras in a Fellini film. (You can only imagine.)
How audience-friendly is The Hand of God? In real life, which this film seeks to reflect, events happen randomly. In contrast, a narrative screenplay would ideally organize the plot artificially in a way to make the story compelling. So, some viewers may find The Hand of God too disjointed to be satisfying. For sure, it’s not as good a film as The Great Beauty or Youth.
The Hand of God is now streaming on Netflix. I also recommend the 6-minute Netflix featurette with director Sorrentino discussing the film.
Photo caption: Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in BEING THE RICARDOS. Courtesy of Amazon.
The origin story of I Love Lucy is pretty amazing, and Aaron Sorkin samples it in his Being the Ricardos, which is not as compelling as the real story. Sorkin takes two pivotal moments that threaten the show (and Lucy and Desi’s careers) – when Lucy is redbaited and when Lucy gets pregnant. These two events really happened 18 months apart, but Sorkin compresses them into one week.
In fact, just about everything in Being the Ricardos is more or less true to fact except for a totally imagined J. Edgar Hoover telephone call. Being the Ricardos gives the audience a glimpse of Desi’s business genius, Lucy’s artistic genius and their passionate and tempestuous relationship, all embedded in a procedural about the making of a TV episode.
I’ve learned a lot about Lucy and Desi from I Love Lucy, the third season of the TCM podcast The Plot Thickens, and I strongly recommend it. Here’s one of many tidbits from the podcast that is not in the movie: Desi invented the TV rerun by repeating episodes during Lucy’s maternity leave; it was possible because Desi had innovated by recording the show on film instead of kinescope, and it was a huge success because TV ownership had boomed since the original broadcasts.
Lucy and Desi are played by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. The filmmakers have used some prosthetics to make Kidman look more like Ball, but have come up short, and I found it distracting until I settled into the story. Kidman is an excellent actor, and they just should have let her play Lucy while looking like Kidman.
Sorkin’s signature in West Wing was to have characters striding around the White House, tossing off impossibly quick and witty repartee; after forty years in politics, I can tell you that real life political professionals do not talk like that. But Sorkin’s Lucy was really a quickwitted product of showbiz during the 40s, and her banter in the movie rings true – Sorkin has finally found a subject that fits Sorkin dialogue.
Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem are just fine, but Being the Ricardos is a little disappointing – it’s better to dive into the TCM podcast instead. After a brief theatrical run, Being the Ricardos is now streaming on Amazon (included with Prime).
Photo caption: Reika Kirishima and Hidetoshi Nishijima in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Drive My Car is director and co-writer Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s engrossing masterpiece about dealing with loss – and it’s the best movie of 2021. Layered with character-driven stories that could each justify their own movie, this is a mesmerizing film that builds into an exhilarating catharsis.
Drive My Car opens with an entrancing story about a teenage girl, told by a woman to her sexual partner. It turns out that the woman regularly tells stories to her husband during sex. advancing the plot after she climaxes, and the husband remembers and preserves the stories. She is Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television writer and showrunner. He is Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater actor and director, known for his work in Beckett and Chekhov. He works on his line readings while driving his beloved 13-year-old red SAAB 900 turbo.
Yûsuke and Oto’s relationship is complicated. We later learn how complicated and why.
Forty or so minutes in, the movie’s opening titles appear, and it’s two years later. Yûsuke still has the SAAB, which he drives to Hiroshima for a two-month theater residency. He is to cast and direct a pan-Asian, multi-lingual production of Uncle Vanya. His Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Taiwanese-American cast speak the lines in their languages (one being Korean Sign Language), with the dialogue subtitled at performances.
To Yûsuke’s distress, he is required by by the Hiroshima theater to use their driver, the impassive tomboy Misaki (Tôko Miura). He resents this incursion into his vehicular sanctuary, but Misaki is now driving his SAAB, and she turns out to be diligent and expert.
During the weeks of rehearsal, more stories emerge and more of Yûsuke’s own story is revealed. When Yûsuke and Misaki have dinner at the home of the theater project’s organizer (Dae-Young Jin) and his deaf wife (Yoo-rim Park), they are surprised by a deeply personal revelation.
Masaki Okada and Hidetoshi Nishijima in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Yûsuke has cast a young actor, Koji (Masaki Okada), whom we know to be unreliable, but even Koji comes through with an impassioned, and apparently true, story of his own.
There’s an outdoor rehearsal scene between two actors (Sonya Yuan and Yoo-rim Park) that becomes magical.
Sonya Yuan and Yoo-rim Park in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Each component story is powerful, and Drive My Car becomes even more than the sum of its parts and builds in intensity.
Drive My Car is three hours long. While screening a movie, I take notes on an unlined notebook, and I see that I had scrawled, MESMERIZING ENGROSSING WHAT AM I WATCHING? The rest of the art house audience was as spellbound as I.
There is one soon-to-be-iconic shot in Drive My Car. After a cathartic scene, Misaki and Yûsuke drive into a reddish tunnel. Hamaguchi shows us two hands holding lit cigarettes out of the SAAB’s open sun roof. It’s an exhilarating and unforgettable shot, and once enough cinephiles see Drive My Car, it will become the instantly recognizable signature of Drive My Car.
Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tôko Miura in DRIVE MY CAR. Courtesy of The Match Factory.
Hidetoshi Nishijima (Yûsuke) and Tôko Miura (Misaki) are superb. Both characters are poker-faced, so the performances are exceptionally subtle.
I’m dismayed that Drive My Car is so difficult to find. It is currently playing in only three Bay Area theaters, in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco, plus a couple For Your Consideration screenings in San Rafael. It is currently the number one movie on many top ten lists, including mine and Barack Obama’s.
Photo caption: Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett in NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Nightmare Alley is Guillermo del Toro’s absorbing remake of the 1947 film noir classic, a cautionary fable of overreaching. Del Toro has deepened the minor characters, creating a showcase for many of our finest film actors.
It’s just before WW II and a drifter named Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) is desperate enough to take a menial job in a transient carnival. In the first scene, we learn that Stan is lethally dangerous; he also has movie star good looks, a gift of charm and enough burning ambition for a thousand carnies.
Stan befriends (and beds) the world-weary Zeena (Toni Collette), who stars in a mind-reading act. Zeena is married to Pete (David Straithairn), a master of clairvoyance acts, whose alcoholism has dropped him from vaudeville stardom to this gutter-level carnival. Stan ingratiates himself with Pete and steals Pete’s notebook of secret codes. Armed with Pete’s secret system, Stan seduces the good-hearted and pretty, young Molly (Rooney Mara), and the two head off to launch a new nightclub act in the Big Time.
Stan and Molly achieve great success and encounter Lilith, who has her own phony psychologist racket. Stan sees an opportunity for even greater riches by fleecing the rich – pretending to communicate with their dead loved ones. Pete had warned Stan against “the spook business”, and Molly has moral objections. But Stan sees Lilith as an equally ruthless and amoral partner, and he proceeds with his scheme. Will he succeed? (Hint – this is a film noir.)
Bradley is very good as Stan, a guy who will do anything to win, and who is intolerable when he gets to the top. Blanchett is superb as the sleek and cynical Lilith. Willem Dafoe is perfect as Clem, the carnival boss; Clem’s pay-by-play description of geek recruitment is one of the best scenes this year.
Del Toro wrote the screenplay with his wife Kim Morgan who is also (YAY!) a longstanding movie blogger (Sunset Gun). The source material for both movies was the William Lindsay Gresham novel. Gresham had a buddy in the – Spanish Civil War who was a carnie abd fascinated Gresham with his tales of the carnie life.
The 1947 original runs one hour and fifty minutes. With my strong bias against overlong films, I was initially skeptical of the 2021 version’s two hours, thirty minutes running time. But del Toro and Morgan invest the extra forty minutes into enriching the minor roles played by Straithairn and Dafoe, and other fine character actors: Ron Perlman, Mary Steenbergen, Richard Jenkins, Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Beaver and Holt McCallany (Mindhunters).
Willem Dafoe in NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
I recently rewatched the original 1947 Nightmare Alley, and it still stands up. I’m not usually a fan of Tyrone Power, but I’ll admit that he’s perfect as Stan, and his work at the end, when Stan is on the skids, is heartbreaking. Joan Blondell is excellent as Zeena, and Colleen Gray is compellingly adorable as Molly. Helen Walker’s turn as Lilith is brilliant, and it’s a shame that an auto accident scandal derailed her career. Ian Keith, a stage actor with very few memorable screen appearances, delivered a touching performance as Pete (in far less screen time than Straithairn gets).
Tamara Deverell should win the 2022 Academy Award for production design; she deserves it for Lilith’s art deco office suite alone, never mind for creating the extraordinary world of the carnivals.
Nightmare Alley is the first film i”ve seen with geek credits: Paul Anderson as Geek #1 and Jesse Buck as Geek #2. I also stayed to the end to see no animals were harmed – bad things happen to chickens, so the CGI effects in Nightmare Alley are pretty cluckin’ effective.
The final line is one of the all-time best. Nightmare Alley is one of the Best Movies of 2021, and is currently in theaters.
Photo caption: June Squibb, Amy Schumer, Jayne Houdyshell, Steven Yuen, Beanie Feldstein and Richard Jenkins in THE HUMANS. Courtesy of A24.
A family grown apart checks in with each other in The Humans, Stephen Karam’s film version of his Tony Award-winning play. The family, living their separate lives, hasn’t gotten together for a while and it turns out that each member has experienced a significant life event.
The occasion is the first time the youngest daughter (Beanie Feldstein) has hosted a holiday dinner. She and her partner (Steven Yuen) have just moved into a decrepit apartment in NYC’s Chinatown and haven’t finished unpacking.
Her taciturn dad (Richard Jenkins,) and no-bullshit mom (Jayne Houdyshell) have brought the senile grandma (June Squibb), and her lawyer sister (Amy Schumer) shows up, too.
Deadpan humor results from the young’s couple’s blissful obliviousness to how hopelessly dilapidated the apartment is. They are embracing NYC charm but are choosing to overlook the stained and chipped tiles, exposed pipes and wiring, ancient fuse box, and the excruciatingly slow, tiny elevator adorned with male appendage graffiti. The parents and sister take it all in with polite silence.
There are also, of course, the eye-rolling moments of parent-adult child interactions and the well-known quirks of each family member. This all sounds like familiar movie fodder, but The Humans is NOT AT ALL sit-commy.
Big, life-changing things have happened to each family member, and they are about to be revealed. There’s the whispered admonition “Don’t wait until after dinner.” If you need to see a family that should be more depressing than yours, this is your movie.
Richard Jenkins in THE HUMANS. Courtesy of A24.
The Humans was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play.While off-Broadway, the script won the 2016 Obie Awards for Karam’s playwriting and Houdyshell’s performance.
The entire cast is excellent, especially Houdyshell and Jenkins.
The Humans must be the least stagey movie set completely in one apartment. The playwright Karam really uses cinema – this is not a theater performance on video. The camera stares at the apartment’s flaws, and the apartment becomes the seventh character. We hear dialogue off camera – some is atmospheric and some is important and revealing.
The Humans moves from wry to shattering as it authentically probes how we accept our failings and those of our loved ones – or not.
Photo caption: Simon Rex in RED ROCKET. Courtesy of A24.
The dark comedy Red Rocket is Sean Baker’s portrait of a human trainwreck named Mikey. Mikey is introduced when he steps off a bus, with no luggage and bearing the wounds of a fistfight he has lost, returning to his hometown of Texas City, Texas, after 17 years in Los Angeles. When he re-introduces himself to the locals, he is invariably met with an unhappy “What are you doing here?“. He is there because he is no longer viable as a porn star, and he has burned every available bridge in Southern California.
A fast talker with a gift for gab and flexibility with facts, Mikey begs for shelter from his estranged wife Lexy and her mom Lil; they greet Mikey with well-earned wariness. Mikey is one of those people who churn through life leaving a trail of relationship carnage. He’s always on the lookout for some opportunity for someone else to get him something he wants, regardless of the cost to the other person.
Mikey basically has the worldview of a pimp, and the plot in Red Rocket is basically whether he hurl himself into well-deserved self-destruction before he can damage folks who don’t deserve it, including Lexy, Lil, his dim-witted neighbor Lonnie and the underage target of his affections, Strawberry.
Mikey is a scumbag, and Red Rocket only works as entertainment because Simon Rex (who has worked in porn himself) is very good as the loquacious and pathetically self-absorbed Mikey.
Sean Baker’s trademark is making excellent movies (Tangerine, The Florida Project) with non-actors. Here, Bree Elrod (Lexy) and Suzanna Son (Strawberry) have some professional experience. Shih-Ching Tsou (Miss Phan the doughnut shop proprietor) is a longtime Sean Baker collaborator who has been a producer of his previous films and has bit parts in them.
The rest of the cast are first-timers. Brenda Deiss is perfect as Lil, and she doesn’t look or behave like any professional from Hollywood. Brittney Rodriguez is very funny as the tough-as-nails enforcer of a family dope ring, and she is compelling enough on screen to find a pace in other movies.
Baker makes Texas City into a character in his story. In virtually every exterior shot, the smokestacks of petrochemical plants are visible. (And it helps to know that Texas City is about a 35 to 40 hour $200 bus ride to and from LA.) Pickup trucks are very popular, but Mike has to make do with a bicycle.
Sean Baker is the writer, director and producer of Red Rocket and, unfortunately, its editor – it’s 20 minutes too long. Red Rocket is not nearly as good as Baker’s best – Tangerine and The Florida Project, but it’s pretty good.
Photo caption: Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in DON’T LOOK BACK. Courtesy of Netflix.
In the wickedly funny Don’t Look Up, filmmaker Adam McKay and a host of movie stars hit the bullseye as they target a corrupt political establishment, a souless media and a gullible, lazy-minded public.
The satire begins when an astronomy grad student (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculates that it will certainly strike Earth in 6 months and 14 days. This is a very big comet, so the scientists have pegged it as an “extinction level event”. In other words, the approaching calamity is apocalyptic enough to rule out any post-apocalyptic movies.
They get an immediate audience with the President (Meryl Streep), and they expect that their news will trigger an urgent, globally-coordinated effort to deflect the comet before it can end life on Earth. That rational and responsible response is not what they get. (Then again, you wouldn’t expect that vaccinating everyone against a deadly pandemic would be controversial, either.)
Instead, they find a public consumed with celebrity fluff and eager to turn any substantive conversation into tribalism. And a very greedy capitalist, who steers the US response into the ultimate example of privitization.
The media is represented by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as the hosts of a popular television infotainment show. Expert in cynically dumbing down every subject, Blanchett and Perry are hilarious every time they are on-screen. Never sexier in a movie, Blanchett also gets to play a sexually voracious social climber (“I’ve slept with two former Presidents“).
McKay’s takedown of the media includes a televised meltdown worthy of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network.
Other comic highlights:
Mark Rylance as a tech billionaire, kind of a worst case cross between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. He bullies his way through every situation with a forced confidence (although mere mortals in his presence are advised “not to make eye contact and to avoid negative facial expressions”).
Noah Hill as the President’s son, Chief of Staff and Brat-in-Chief. This is what the Trump kids would be like if they were witty. ‘You’re the working class, and we’re the cool rich.’
Ariana Grande as a vacant pop diva who is ultra savvy about social media.
Lawrence’s grad student just can’t get over a general’s (Paul Guilfoyle) scam with snacks.
Melanie Lynsky plays the astronomy professor’s long-suffering wife, and no one throws off a muttered killer line better than Lynsky.
In The Big Short, McKay took us inside the subprime mortgage scam. His genius was in taking the story of guys in front of their computers figuring out the current and future values of other people’s home mortgages. – and turning it into an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Watching The Big Short, we laugh, and then we get mad.
Don’t Look Up is very funny but is it a somber prophecy in the clothes of a comedy? It’s very plausible that everything really would happen this way. In fact, the human response to Climate Change IS NOW happening this way (although it will take more than six months and 14 days to end life on the planet). And our rocky test drive with COVID does not inspire confidence, either.
This one of the Best Movies of 2021. I saw Don’t Look Up in a theater, but it will be streaming on Netflix beginning December 24.
Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry in DON’T LOOK BACK. Courtesy of Netflix.
Photo caption: Filmmaker Robert Weide and Kurt Vonnegut in KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME. Courtesy of IFC Films.
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is an uncommonly rich biodoc of the social critic/humorist/philosopher Kurt Vonnegut. Most importantly, there’s a heavy dose of Vonnegut himself, which is very entertaining because Vonnegut was so damn funny.
All of the Vonnegut is because filmmaker Robert Weide, early in his career, began to make this documentary of his literary hero, with Vonnegut’s participation. The film had to be paused and restarted several times, mostly due to the usual indie film obstacle of funding. Finally, Weide became very successful as the producer and director of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and didn’t have the time to finish. As a result, Weide collected hours of filmed interviews with Vonnegut in different decades.
Over the years, Weide and Vonnegut developed a personal friendship that facilitated even more access and allowed Vonnegut to be even more forthcoming.. Weide filmed Vonnegut in visits to the homes in which he had pivotal experiences (including the one where he found his mother after her suicide on Mother’s Day).
In Unstuck in Time, Weide adds lots of file footage and interviews with all of Vonnegut’s kids (he sired three and raised his sister’s four sons).
(Incidentally, Vonnegut’s hometown is Indianapolis, which has embraced him posthumously to the extent there is a multi-story Vonnegut mural in downtown Indy.)
Vonnegut’s anti-war attitude came out of his especially horrific experiences in WWII, and he had his share of peacetime family tragedies. But I need to emphasize that Unstuck in Time is anything but grim because of Vonnegut’s humor. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is in some art house theaters and streaming on Amazon and AppleTV.
Listening to Kenny G is director Penny Lane’s surprisingly revelatory biodoc of smooth jazz icon Kenny G. Lane chose Kenny G as a subject to focus on the dramatic and passionate conflict of opinion about his music. Kenny G has sold over 75 million albums and has millions of fans, many of whom have gotten married to his music. The consensus of music critics and academics, however, is that his music is insipid, shallow, commercial crap.
It turns out that Kenny G and his critics may disagree about whether it is Good Music or Bad Music, but not on the underlying facts that Kenny G isn’t trying to challenge listeners, to express ideas or to engage in any cultural conversation. He is just trying to be very technically proficient and to make people feel good, especially relaxed and romantic.
We spend a lot of time with Kenny G, a nice guy who is very comfortable in his skin. He doesn’t show the least bit of bitterness toward those who spew torrents of bile at his work. Kenny G, who comes from the any publicity is good publicity school of public relations, is the perfect subject for a documentary film, very accessible, open and transparent. What you see is what you get. And he gladly points out the moments that he got lucky.
Listening to Kenny G works – even if you have zero interest in Kenny G – because of the Penny Lane’s imaginative approach. Lane (Our Nixon,Hail Satan?, NUTS!) has become one our funniest and most trenchant documentarians. Just watch the faces of the critics as they try to express, in a socially acceptable way, their views of Kenny G’s music.
Near the beginning, Lane asks Kenny G what he loves about music and gets this UNEXPECTED answer: “I don’t know if I love music that much. When I listen to music, I think about the musicians and I just think about what it takes to make that music and how much they had to practice.”
What Kenny G DOES love is doing something very well. His need to be the very best, without a bit of self-consciousness, drives him to work relentlessly at his skill on the saxophone – and at golf and aviation.
And here’s something I didn’t know: Kenny G’s Going Home from the Kenny G Live album has become the unofficial national closing song for businesses in China; every day, the song is looped over and over for the final half hour or so that businesses are open.
Listening to Kenny G is streaming on HBO. I highly recommend the 32-minute interview with director Penny Lane in HBO’s Extra Features.
