Photo caption: Dean Martin in KING OF COOL. Courtesy of Turner Classic Movies.
Turner Classic Movies has premiered the Dean Martin documentary King of Cool, and it’s coming back to TCM on November 26. King of Cool is filled with insight into an icon who was extremely successful at being unknowable.
Dean Martin used his charm to mask his detachment. Universally beloved, his internal life was still never understood by his closest friends and colleagues – and even by his family.
Director Tom Donohoe and producer Ilan Arboleda, who had teamed for the essential filmmaking doc Casting By, faced this challenge – how does one create a biodoc on an enigma? Donohoe and Arboleda turned to the device from Citizen Kane – what was the “Rosebud” that drove and explained Dean Martin? (There’s one very fitting answer to that question in King of Cool.)
Superbly sourced, we get to hear from Martin’s closest associates, plus friends and co-workers like Bob Newhart, Angie Dickinson, Norman Lear, Carol Burnett, Barbara Rush, Florence Henderson, Lainie Kazan, Tommy Tune, Frankie Avalon and Dick Cavett,. The clearest – and most poignant – testimonies come from Martin’s daughter Deana Martin and Jerry Lewis’ son Scotty Lewis.
Despite Martin’s unknowability, King of Cool reveals a lot, including what Dino was really drinking on stage in his nightclub act, his close friendship with Montgomery Clift, and his rebuke of the JFK inauguration. There’s a wonderful firsthand account of his hosting big Hollywood parties and sneaking out to watch TV. We also get reading from Mark Rudman’s 2002 poem about Martin, The Secretary of Alcohol and hear how no less than Elvis Presley described Martin as “King of Cool”.
On a personal note, Dean Martin is on my own very short list of the most perpetually cool humans to ever walk the planet, along with Ben Gazzara, Joan Jett, Jean Gabin, Dr. John and Barack Obama.
TCM will replay King of Cool on November 26. Set your DVR.
Photo caption: KEEP SWEET. Courtesy of discovery+.
The documentary Keep Sweet traces the remarkable aftermath of the Warren Jeffs child sexual abuse scandal in an isolated settlement of fundamentalist Mormons. A decade after, a tiny community tries to wrangle a new future.
Fundamentalist Mormons broke from the mainstream Church of Latter Day Saints, chiefly over the practice of polygamy, which they call plural marriage, and founded settlements in remote corners of the Great Basin. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) created a community in the adjoining border hamlets of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.
In 2002, Warren Jeffs took over as the FLDS’ “prophet”, became the community’s absolute dictator, and implemented a reign of terror that included forcing child marriages to older men and expelling anyone who disagreed with him. This ended in 2006 with Jeff’s conviction on child sexual abuse charges. Warren Jeffs’ DNA established that he had impregnated a 15-year-old “wife”, and there was audio recording of sex with a 12-year-old. The title of this film comes from one of Warren Jeffs’ creepiest exhortations.
Keep Sweet returns to Hildale and Colorado City to find a community traumatized and torn asunder. Many of those victimized by Jeffs have returned to live among Jeffs loyalists, and the power dynamic has shifted. Of course, those on both sides grew up together in the intimacy of a tiny, isolated community.
Keep Sweet is directed by Don Argott (Framing John DeLorean, Art of the Steal, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time). It benefits from footage of the community shot by producer Glenn Meehan a decade earlier; Meehan was documenting the “lost boys” – teenage boys forced to leave Hildale and Colorado City by Jeffs so older men would have less competition for teenage “brides”.
Some of the residents are nostalgic for the Jeffs regime, in denial of Jeffs’ misdeeds, and even ready to lose their homes rather than submit to legal authority. In what I find a sometimes stunning exercise in even-handedness, Argott allows these folks to have their voice and lets the audience members make their own assessments. Argott is sympathetically protective and respectful of everyone’s humanity, no matter how misguided.
For more depth on the Warren Jeffs case itself, I recommend Amy Berg’s fine documentary Prophet’s Prey (Showtime, Amazon, Vudu and YouTube). And for an offbeat fictional narrative on fundamentalist Mormons, there’s Electrick Children (Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube); it’s a story of magical Mormon teen runaways in Vegas (and it was my first look at Julia Garner of Ozark and The Assistant). And there’s the fictional Juniper Creek compound in Big Love, led by characters played by Harry Dean Stanton and Matt Ross.
This is a compelling true story of those who choose to heal – and those who deny that there was any wound to heal. Keep Sweet opens November 24 on discovery+.
Photo caption: Brian Wilson (seated left) in BRIAN WILSON: LONG PROMISED ROAD. Courtesy of Nashville Film Festival.
A musical genius opens up in Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, an unusual documentary about an unusual man. Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys’ songwriting and arranging master weighs in on his life and work.
As depicted in the film Love & Mercy, Wilson was afflicted with auditory hallucinations at 21, triggering painful years of what was essentially captivity at the hands of a quack doctor. Because Wilson’s affect is oddly flat and he he favors the briefest of answers, he would not be the ideal subject of a conventional interview documentary.
Instead, the filmmakers have Wilson’s old and trusted friend, rock journalist Jason Fine, drive him around important places in Wilson’s life; it’s the format of Comedians in Cars Drinking Coffee, and it pays off with oft emotional revelations. It turns out that Wilson is remarkably open about his travails and his creative process.
Completely at ease cruising Southern California with with Fine, Wilson matter-of-factly replies to very personal questions and even blurts some revelations of his own – as how he detoxed from alcohol, cocaine and cigarettes simultaneously (giving up cigarettes was the toughest).
Remarkably, some of the places in the Beach Boys origin story are now actually adorned with civic historical monuments, including the site of the Wilson family homeplace and the spot of the band’s photo shoot for their Surfer Girl album cover.
We get to see which of his songs that Brian himself listens to when he is feeling grief or nostalgia. And there are indelible moments of great feeling when Brian listens to his own music.
The film also brings in assessments of Brian’s work from master songwriters that include Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and Linda Perry; Perry says, “Brian Wilson is still trying to beat God Only Knows. Can you imagine?”
I saw Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road when it opened theNashville Film Festival. It’s opening this weekend, including at the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley.
Photo caption: Jude Hill in BELFAST. Courtesy of Focus Features.
In Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s superb coming of age story, we see Northern Ireland’s Troubles through the eyes of eight-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill). His dad (Jamie Dornan) works for two weeks at a time in Britain, so his mom (Caitriona Balfe) is raising Buddy and his older brother by herself most of the time. The family is under severe financial pressure. They are a nominally Protestant family living in a working class Belfast neighborhood, integrated with Catholics.
The movie’s opening is set on August 15, 1969, the day the Troubles intrude on Buddy’s neighborhood. Branagh perfectly captures the moment – the very second – that external events upend Buddy’s life. Overnight, his block has barbed wire at one end and a barricade at the other. Catholics are pressured to move out in a measure of ethnic cleansing.
Things get real, and the dad has the chance to move the family to Britain. There are factors that make uprooting the family a complicated decision. The audience is thinking, get the HELL out of THERE. After all, the family doesn’t know what we know – that the Troubles will persist for 29 more years.
This is autobiographical, the story of Kenneth Branagh’s own family. They escaped the Troubles by moving to from Belfast to Britain in 1970 when Branagh was Buddy’s age.
Although this story is about a specific child, telling it from the child’s point of view makes it universal. Children need security, but adult grievances, however valid, are prioritized over the security of children. The sectarians may think that they are targeting Catholics or Protestants, but the impact of their violence is to destroy safety, civility and predictability for all.
Judi Dench, Jude Hill and Ciarán Hinds in BELFAST. Courtesy of Focus Features.
The performances are impeccable, especially those by Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds as Buddy’s grandparents. (The grandfather has the best line in the film.)
And where did Branagh find this kid actor Jude Hill? He is completely believable in every scene – and he might just be the most adorable child on the planet.
Belfast is a family drama, but the family is Irish, so there’s plenty of humor.
Branagh has shot Belfast in a glorious black-and-white which amplifies both the historical period and the grittiness of the setting. The use of Belfast’s own Van Morrison on the soundtrack is perfect.
Belfast is justifiably one of the Oscar favorites. If you have heartstrings, they are gonna get pulled.
Photo caption: Negga and Tessa Thompson in PASSING. Courtesy of Netflix.
Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star in Rebecca Hall’s thought-provoking drama Passing, about the value of one’s identity and navigating in a racist society. It’s 1920s New York City and two light-skinned black women, both prosperous wives and mothers, happen upon each other for the first time since childhood. Irene (Tessa Thompson) is married to a doctor and has become a figure in Harlem society. Irene is shocked to find Clare (Ruth Negga) with her hair died platinum blonde and passing as Caucasian – even married to a racist white man.
For Irene, the reunion is unsettling because, ever polite, she doesn’t want to express her own disapproval of “passing”. Things get nerve-wracking for Irene when Clare’s husband (Alexander Skarsgård) shows up; from his very first word (which is overtly racist), it’s clear that things will go badly for Clare if he discovers her actual race. Presumably, he knows that Clare is not a real blonde, but he is SO racist that he even assumes that Irene must be white.
Clare on other hand, is eager to rekindle their friendship, regardless of the risks that Irene calculates. Clare NEEDS to slip a toe back into African-American culture. She is oblivious to Irene’s disgust for “passing”, and, when they first encounter in an elegant hotel tea room, Clare even assumes at first that Irene is passing.
Despite Irene’s reluctance, Clare composes herself in Irene’s family and social circle. We watch Irene as she runs her staid household (with black servants). She puts on a swinging charity benefit, attended by her black upper crust peers and by hip white New Yorkers sampling Harlem culture. One of the latter is Irene’s friend Wentworth (Bill Camp), a literary figure of standing.
Despite her charity leadership (for the Negro Welfare League), she wants to “protect” her sons from the “race issue” by keeping them sheltered and ignorant. Her husband Brian (André Holland) doesn’t agree – he has given up on improving race relations in America and wants to relocate the family in another country.
Is anyone here satisfied? Irene keeps saying she is satisfied, meaning personally, but she does her charity work for a reason. Brian is exhausted by his practice and wants to give up on the entire nation. Clare is comfortable having made a choice that she describes in the most materialistic terms, but is still yearning for what she misses in White society.
Referring to the 1929 novel, Mick LaSalle writes,
“…it’s a great advantage that the movie’s source is in the past. If this story were attempted today, it would be about a social issue. One woman would be presented as right, and the other would be wrong. There would be a crucial realization three-quarters in, and then a moral to the story spelled out before the closing credits.“
Passing is directed by British actress Rebecca Hall, whose own American mother is multiracial. As a director, Hall puts her actors in the forefront, framing them in static shots and with piano music just jazzy enough to suggest Harlem setting. Passing is photographed in black and white, with the backgrounds washed out to emphasize the characters in the foreground (and the colors of their skin).
The performances are excellent. Negga has the showier role as the charming, flamboyant and dangerously flighty Clare. Thompson’s Irene is really the more important character, and Thompson lets us see inside this woman who is so very proper that she should be boring; but Thompson’s Irene is ever thoughtful, introspective and contained – with all her turmoil roiling inside.
Veteran character actor Camp is exceptional as Wentworth, the sardonic white novelist who enjoys his forays into Harlem and values his friendship with Irene. An actor who can make the smallest role memorable, Camp has recently played Mr. Shaibel, the chess-teaching school janitor in The Queen’s Gambit and The Beach Boys’ controlling father in Love & Mercy.
Passing is still in some theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.
Photo caption: Tenoch Huerta in SON OF MONARCHS. Courtesy of SFFILM.
In the contemplative indie Son of Monarchs, things seem to be going well for the young biologist Mendel (Tenoch Huerta). His career as a scientist at an elite NYC institution seems to be starting well, his mentor respects and encourages him, his peers invite him to socialize and he’s dating a woman with a very unusual hobby. But something is not right, and it’s that Mendel’s very identity is unresolved,.
Mendel comes from rural Michoacán, which Nature has blessed with Monarch butterflies and cursed with disasters that traumatized Mendel in his childhood. The same childhood experiences have built his passion to understand life and have estranged him from his brother and their homeland. When he has occasion to revisit Michoacán, he can no longer compartmentalize his inner conflict.
SON OF MONARCHS. Courtesy of SFFILM.
Son of Monarchs is the second feature for writer-director Alexis Gambis, who makes the most out of the visual contrast between chilly NYC and the vivid warm of Michoacán.
Tenoch Huerta is very good as the somber, restless Mendel. Gabino Rodriguez (recently in the deadpan Fauna and a very scary villain in Sin Nombre) brightens the Michoacán segment.
I first saw Son of Monarchs at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It’s now streaming on HBO Max.
Gabino Rodriguez and Luisa Pardo in Nicolás Pereda’s FAUNA. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.
In Fauna, Luisa (Luisa Pardo) and her boyfriend Paco (Francisco Barreiro), both actors, visit Luisa’s remote Mexican hometown and meet up with her brother (Gabino Rodriguez), stepping into humor even drier than the parched landscape. They intend to visit Luisa’s parents (Teresa Sanchez and José Rodríguez López).
Paco wanders into the town, looking for some smokes. He meets an older man, who makes the encounter unnecessarily awkward. It turns out that the man was his girlfriend’s father.
Luisa runs some lines with her mom, and it’s clear to the audience that the mom is much better than the “professional actress”.
In the highlight of Fauna, the three guys go out for a beer. The dad is fascinated by Paco’s tiny role in a big episodic TV series and has him “perform” in the cantina. It’s a masterpiece of cringe humor and comic timing.
José Rodríguez López, always deadpan, is hilarious as Luisa’s dad. Where has this actor been? Despite being nominated for a 1991 Ariel (Mexico’s Oscar) for his first movie performance, Fauna is only his seventh feature film.
More than halfway though, Fauna pivots. Luisa’s brother has been reading a mystery , and the film begins to mirror the book. The deadpan continues throughout all of Fauna’s 70 minutes.
Mexican-born writer-director Nicolás Pereda lives in Toronto, and Fauna competed as a Canadian film at the Toronto Film Festival.
I screened Fauna at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). It’s been released into some theaters, but is hard to find.
Cynda Williams and Billy Bob Thornton in ONE FALSE MOVE
The gripping contemporary neo-noir One False Move begins with a home invasion in Los Angeles. Two vicious professional robbers, with one’s beautiful girlfriend, steal money and cocaine, leaving a trail of corpses. The crime is solved right away – the cops know who did it and that the murderers are headed to a small town in Arkansas. The LA cops fly to Arkansas and lay in wait with the local constabulary. One False Move is a ticking time bomb as we wait for the criminals to drive across the Southwest to the inevitable confrontation.
This is a fundamentally noir story – there are guys overreaching for greed and ambition, a femme fatale, and a very dark secret. The screenplay was written by Billy Bob Thornton (before his breakthrough Sling Blade) and his writing partner Tom Epperson. One False Move was filmed in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, about two hours from where Thornton grew up, in and around Hot Springs.
The robbers are an odd couple that met in prison. Ray (Thornton) is white, an edgy, coke-fueled, brutal and not very smart gunsel, always on the verge of an epic misjudgement. Pluto (Michael Beach) is black, an ever-calculating crime machine – a cold, brilliant and bloodthirsty sociopath. They are accompanied by Ray’s beautiful black girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams).
When the two seasoned LA homicide detectives (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings), arrive in Arkansas well ahead of the robbers, they encounter the local Sheriff, Dale “Hurricane” Dixon (Bill Paxton). Hurricane is overeager and over-enthusiastic, and his nickname obviously comes from his being an irrepressible force of nature. He’s comfortable as a big fish in a little pond, but now he fantasizes about being a big city cop. As he charges around thoughtlessly, he thinks that this is his big chance to be the kind of cop that he watches on TV.
This was Fantasia’s hometown, where she grew up with her given name of Lila. Dale and Lila share a significant past.
Cynda Williams in ONE FALSE MOVE
As a femme fatale, Fantasia/Lila can manipulate both Ray and Dale, although Pluto is immune to her charms. She is clearly a more decent person than Ray and Pluto, and she has one relatable vulnerability. but she does things and intends to do things that are very, very bad.
This was Cynda Williams’s second film role. She was married to Billy Bob Thornton for two years, including during the making of One False Move. She has worked consistently since (playing Halle Berry’s sister in two movies), but One False Move has certainly been her best-remembered performance.
Bill Paxton in ONE FALSE MOVE
Bill Paxton left a great body of work that included starring in the topflight episodic series Big Love and a key role in Apollo 13. Big Love and One False Move demonstrate that he should have gotten more leading roles. Paxton’s Hurricane is always bubbling over, whether it’s with ambition, naivete or good ol’ boy chumminess.
One False Move was directed by Carl Franklin. who also directed the period neo-noir Devil in a Blue Dress. Franklin has directed lots of TV, including episodes of House of Cards and Mindhunters).
America’s original sin – race – is at the core of One False Move. The entire plot is predicated on something that happened when Lila was 17 – and neither that occurrence nor any of the following events would have happened if Lila were white.
Ray and Fantasia/Lila are an interracial couple, the two LA cops are white and black, and Dale unwittingly leaks his casual racism.
One False Move is on my list of Overlooked Neo-noir and can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Matt Smith, Thomasin McKenzie and Ana Taylor Joy in LAST NIGHT IN SOHO. Courtesy of Focus Features.
In Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, the contemporary fashion student Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) moves from a sheltered upbringing in rural Cornwall to London, but finds herself ill-suited for a boisterous college dorm. She rents her own modest digs and seems magically transported to her fantasy Mod London of the 1960s, where she finds a would-be alter ego, the cool and confident Sandy (Ana Taylor Joy). But she also finds the dark side of the London scene and a fifty-year-old violent incident that haunts her very bedsit.
Through Ellie’s eyes, the story shifts between today’s London and that of 1965. Edgar Wright brilliantly weaves Ellie and Sandy into scenes and shots together. Wright also gets the period and place just right – you just expect Oliver Reed or David Hemmings to step into the picture at any moment (or Terence Stamp).
Is Ellie in an alternative reality – or fantasizing – or hallucinating? Ellie has a rich fantasy life, as well as a “gift of seeing things?”. Of course, she’s also the right age for a psychotic breakdown, and she has a disturbing family history of mental illness.
Last Night in Soho begins as the is she going crazy? subgenre of horror, and then morphs onto a straight horror movie. Wright shrewdly waits to the last minute before revealing who the evil force really is.
Thomasin McKenzie, now age 22 after juvenile roles inLeave No Traceand Jojo Rabbit, projects an other-worldliness – so, if anyone could happen upon a portal to another time and place, it’s McKenzie
It sure is fun to watch the charismatic Ana Taylor Joy (The Queen’s Gambit, Thoroughbreds). Taylor Joy seems like the quintessential Brit, but she is of Argentine-Spanish heritage, lived her first six years in Argentina and her first language was Spanish.
Matt Smith is good as a guy with both charm and cruel lethality. Smith was superb in a much different role – the young married Prince Philip in 20 episodes of The Crown., and also did 54 episodes of Dr. Who as The Doctor.
I love Terence Stamp. Stamp, of course was a Pretty Boy star during the actual 1960s (Billy Budd, The Collector, Far from the Madding Crowd). I’ve felt that his best work has been in his middle age and since (The Hit, The Limey, The Adjustment Bureau). Here in Last Night in Soho, still ith striking features and dead-cold eyes, he looks dangerous from our first glimpse of him.
Speaking of the Swinging London of the 1960s, no woman was more symbolic than Diana Rigg, famous for her role as Emma Peel in The Avengers. Last Night in Soho was Rigg’s final screen performance.
Another 60s stalwart, Rita Tushingham (A Taste of Honey and Doctor Zhivago), also appears.
Edgar Wright broke out with the delightful Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (and the less funny The World’s End) before showing us all in Baby Driver that he was more than a low-brow funnyman.
Last Night in Soho is a clever, entertaining and sometimes artsy horror movie, but in the end, it’s just a horror movie.
Photo caption: Lambert Wilson in DE GAULLE. Courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
De Gaulle takes us to a pivotal moment in French WW II history that is no longer well-understood by most Americans. The French Army has collapsed in the face of German invasion, and the fall of Paris is both inevitable and imminent. The French government is considering asking Hitler for an armistice, seeking to end the slaughter and to repatriate its 2 million POWs.
Charles de Gaulle (Lambert Wilson) is also losing his battle to convince the government not to surrender, but to keep fighting the Nazis from outside France itself, based in France’s colonial possessions. In this moment of catastrophe, de Gaulle is virtually alone in imagining that Great Britain, joined by America’s industrial might, could someday liberate France. It doesn’t help that, for the authoritarian and anti-Semitic French military establishment, Hitler isn’t so abhorrent.
Writer-director Gabriel Le Bomin has focused De Gaulle on only two weeks of WW II history – between June 5 and June 19, 1940. Every minute counts – and the clock is ticking.
It’s a similar approach as in Darkest Hour, where all of the story takes place in May, 1940, as Churchill is facing England’s moment of existential peril. In fact, the Darkest Hour (Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and HBO Max) would complete an excellent double feature with De Gaulle.
The tension is enhanced with a parallel thread – the political crisis has isolated de Gaulle in London while his family, completely out of communication, is scrambling to escape the Nazis in France.
Aloof, shy and an egomaniac, de Gaulle was easily dislikeable. Le Bomin has humanized him by including his most relatable attributes – his relationship with his wife and kids, especially his daughter with Down’s Syndrome.
Le Bomin and Wilson had to meet high expectations on the portrayal of an icon. After all, De Gaulle’s appearance, speech and mannerisms are as familiar to a French audience as those of Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy and Muhammad Ali are to an American one.
I wouldn’t have immediately thought of Lambert Wilson for the role. Wilson, known for the Matrix franchise, is handsome and physically graceful. But, for starters, Wilson is tall enough, at 6-2, to play de Gaulle, just under 6-5. Prosthetics and makeup completed the physical transformation. Wilson’s acting craft took him the rest of the way – capturing de Gaulle’s stiffness and the physical awkwardness that some very tall people have.
I streamed De Gaulle on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle.
