Photo caption: Benedict Cumberbatch in THE COURIER. Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions.
The docudrama The Courier tells the true story of Greville Wynne, a British businessman who became entangled in espionage during the height of the Cold War. British and American intelligence were getting Kremlin secrets leaked by a high-ranking Soviet official. How to sneak the secrets out of the USSR? The whole point was to use an amateur because the KGB would be less suspicious, so the untrained salesman Greville Wynne was recruited. His experience was thrilling at first, and then searing.
The ordinary, avuncular Wynne is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, without his usual creepy sharpness. Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, House of Cards, Louder Than Bombs) plays a CIA officer. Georgian actor Merab Ninidze is solid as the Russian source. Jessie Buckley plays Wynne’s wife, and it’s good to see her cast in a mainstream movie after she was such a force of nature in indies Beast and Wild Rose
Cumberbatch, who is not a fleshy man, underwent a 21-pound weight loss to make Wynne frighteningly gaunt. To me, the risk to his health was just not worth it; The Courier is not close to a masterpiece like Raging Bull or The Pianist, and I would rather that Cumberbatch had played the part as his normally slender self.
The Courier does depict real events, but it grossly over-inflates the impact of this episode on the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, the general arc of the story is historically accurate.
Keep watching the end credits to glimpse the real Greville Wynne.
The Courier is streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and redbox. It’s watchable, but not a Must See.
Photo caption: Stephanie Hayes in SLOW MACHINE. Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Films.
Slow Machine dives enigmatically into paranoia. A 72-minute art film shot on 16mm and a very low budget, Slow Machine is surprisingly engrossing.
After a night of hard drinking, Swedish actress Stephanie (Stephanie Hayes) wakes up in an unfamiliar Queens apartment. She has been brought there for her safety by Gerard (Scott Shepherd), an NYPD counter intelligence officer. It’s not his apartment, but one he uses for his work.
Stephanie is trying to get her bearings and assess Gerard while he chatters amiably, describing himself as “emotionally promiscuous”. Gerard has a rare quality – he is loquacious without being tiresome – you can’t help but listen to guy. He is transparently mysterious, if that’s a thing.
Despite initial resistance, Stephanie becomes involved with Gerard. Then an unexpected event causes Stephanie to hide out at an acquaintance’s house.
Stephanie has found herself in a paranoid mystery, but she’s mysterious herself. Shifting between accents, she often sounds like she is fabricating. She deflects men’s passes with practiced moxie, but she can be paralyzed with terror.
The story is not the point. Slow Machine draws us in as we try to figure out who these people are and what is going on.
There are lots of unexpected nuggets. Chloe Sevigny shows up and plays a version of herself. Gerard’s unseen fiance is an anthropologist studying the setups in porn movies. A touch football game breaks out. Stephanie rehearses with Gerard for an audition, and the scene becomes riveting.
Slow Machine is the first feature for co-directors Joe Denardo and Paul Felten; Felten wrote the screenplay.
Slow Machine is not for folks who need their movies to be linear or even coherent. Why is this movie so engrossing? Beats me, but it is seductive and ever watchable.
Slow Machine is streaming on Virtual Cinema, I saw it at Laemmle, and it’s coming to the Roxie.
Stephanie Hayes in SLOW MACHINE. Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Films.
Photo caption: Russell Mael and Ron Mael in THE SPARKS BROTHERS. Photo by Jake Polonsky, courtesy of Sundance Institute.
The Sparks Brothers is Edgar Wright’s affectionate documentary on a pop band that has been active for 54 years (and that I had never heard of). The band is Sparks, comprised of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, and The Sparks Brothers is one fun movie.
Ron writes the songs and plays keyboards, and Russell is the singer and front man. In the film, Sparks is described as “the best British pop band to come out of America” and “a snaky lead singer for the ladies and then the Hitler mustache”. Sparks was first produced by Todd Rungren, of all people, in 1967. (Both Rungren and Russell Mael were dating Miss Christine of the GTOs.) Pop success eluded them until they surged in the UK in 1974-75.
Then Sparks pioneered electro dance a couple years too early, came to hard rock a little late, and have kept moving on to the next project and musical style that interests them. Of course, that approach doesn’t let their fans get comfortable.
A musician says, “they don’t care about money or fame – just art for art’s sake”, which isn’t EXACTLY true. The Maels really DO want their music to be heard, and they really DO want to be popular and famous. They just won’t compromise artistically to get there.
What they WILL do is work with remarkable stamina and discipline. This is the rock first rock documentary I’ve seen without somebody’s serious drug use being a point of deflection. These guys marry an intense work ethic with their often bizarre art.
Their stage presence is remarkable. With his pretty boy looks and charisma, Russell bounds about as the quintessential front man. Ron silently stands behind his keyboard, posing with his, well, Hitler mustache (which he has now replaced with a pencil mustache).
Above all, Sparks is ever playful, and The Sparks Brothers is very funny. They match their stage persona with lyrics like “dinner for 12 is now dinner for 10 because I’m under the table with her“. Ron and Russell Mael themselves kick off the movie with a hilariously deadpan questionnaire.
Their performances are fun and witty, and their music is peppy and catchy. The overt humor sometimes masks lyrics that are poignant and even despairing.
Growing up in LA, Ron and Russell cherished their boyhood weekend matinees with their dad, filled with Westerns and war movies. As artsy UCLA students, they admired Ingmar Bergman and French New Wave cinema as much as they did The Who and the Kinks, They had lined up a movie project themselves with the great auteur Jacques Tati that fell through because of Tati’s health. In the 1990s, they invested six years in trying to make the Japanese manga Mai, the Psychic Girl as a movie musical with director Tim Burton. When that movie also died, they were devastated.
Happily, they have written the screenplay for a movie which has actually been finished. Annette, directed by Leo Carax (Holy Motors) and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, is coming out later this summer,
I may not love their music or think that Spark is important, but I sure like these guys. The Spark Brothers is a delight, and it’s damn funny, too.
In the marvelous Riders of Justice, Mads Mikkelsen plays Markus, a soldier on active duty in the Middle East; when his wife dies in an accident, Markus returns home to tend to their teenage daughter. Then two geeky data scientists show up at his door with an anti-social hacker – and Markus learns that the tragedy may not have been an accident. Markus, a human killing machine, and the three supernerds team up on a quest for revenge.
Riders of JustIce has been inadequately described as a revenge thriller and an action comedy. It is gloriously satisfying as entertainment, but the more I think about it, Riders of Justice explores grief, revenge and mortality – they’re all in here. And it’s still very, very funny.
The key is that Riders of Justice is so character-driven. At first, Markus and his three compatriots seem to be comic types, but writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen has fleshed them out – each of these men has a personality formed by a trauma.
Markus has the laser focus of a combat commander, which he uses to deflect any contemplation of his feelings – or those of others, including his grief-wracked daughter.
Mathematician Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is just socially aware enough to recognize how inappropriate his buddies are. His partner Lennart (Lars Brygmann), with 40,000 hours of therapy under his belt, is both psychologically savvy and remarkably devoid of self-awareness or boundaries. The hacker Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro) really can’t navigate any social interaction. These guys are hilarious from their opening presentation to a bunch of corporate suits, where they present an elaborate mathematical proof that rich people buy Mercedes and poor people drive Hyundais.
Mads Mikkelsen is a favorite of mine. I can’t name a more compelling and versatile screen actor working to day. He has delivered some of the best performances of the past two decades in After the Wedding, The Hunt and Another Round. (And he was the Bond villain with the tears of blood in the 2006 Casino Royale). I recommend this wonderful NYT interview with Mikkelsen, who really used to be professional dancer (who knew?) and touches on his exhilarating dance scene in Another Round.
In Riders of Justice, Mikkelsen takes Markus’ men-don’t talk-about-their-feelings attitude just far enough to set up Jensen’s jokes and to create tension about what’s best for his daughter. It’s extreme, but not cartoonish.
Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen, who won an Oscar for a 1998 short film, co-wrote Susanne Bier’s Brothers, After the Wedding and In a Better World.Brothers (Brødre) and After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) are two of the best films of the 2000s; watch the Danish originals, not the putrid American remakes.
Jensen, with his wicked wit at the ready, has also written and directed The Green Butchers, Stealing Rembrandt, Flickering Lights and Men & Chicken.
Riders of Justice is the best movie that I’ve seen so far in 2021. Riders of Justice has slipped out of Bay Area theaters, but is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
The ever vibrant Summertime is about giving voice, the voice of mostly young Los Angelenos, expressing themselves mostly through poetry. Stretching across LA from Venice Beach to Crenshaw, director Carlos López Estrada takes us to the neighborhoods that we often see and those we don’t; he introduces us to marginalized kids who share dreams and despair in one kinetic poetry slam.
I can’t remember hearing so much poetry in a movie. Some of the poetry is rapped. This really isn’t a musical, but there are a few songs and one very powerful dance, taking over the street outside a Jons for a female manifesto responding to toxic masculinity. And some warmly goofy, multi-generational dancing erupts in the kitchen of a Korean restaurant. We glimpse the visual arts, too, including a brief montage of LA murals.
Summertime is a series of loosely connected vignettes, some better than others, with different art forms, characters and neighborhoods. The most powerful is the poem Shallow, written and performed by Marquesha Babers; it’s about a young woman who finally confronts a cruel remark about her appearance that had emotionally devastated her.
Director Estrada (Blindspotting) and cinematographer John Schmidt clearly love Los Angeles – especially the everyday LA that most of us never see.
You could pair Summertime with In the Heights for an exuberant, youth- oriented double feature. Or you could match Summertime with I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) in a festival of underrepresented LA.
Someone has to manage the fast food store, and someone has to drive the limo. Invisible in their own city, the characters in Summertime demand to be seen and heard. One uses a spray can of paint and another weaponizes Yelp. They all have something to say.
This is a good movie – and it’s sui generis. I missed Summertime at this year’s Cinequest, but you can stream it from Frameline through Sunday night, June 27.
Truman Capote (left) and Tennessee Williams in TRUMAN AND TENNESSEE: AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION. Photo courtesy of Frameline.
Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation brings us a double-barrelled biodoc of two literary giants, one who remade American theater and the American novel in the 1950s and 1960s. Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams were both gay men from the Deep South, who attained fame and descended into addiction. They also knew each other.
Truman and Tennessee tells their stories from their own letters and from being interviewed on TV by the likes of David Frost and Dick Cavett.
The words of Capote are voiced by Jim Parsons, and those of Williams by Zachary Quinto. There is no third-party “narration”. It’s an effective and increasingly popular documentary technique, used in, for example, I Am Not Your Negro.
The film’s structure allows us to harvest insights about each writer’s artistic process. There are plenty of nuggets like Tennessee Williams’ frustrations with the cinematic versions of his plays, all dumbed down to comply with the movie censorship of the day.
Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation can be streamed from Frameline through Thursday night, June 24, and opens in theaters on June 25.
Photo caption: Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin in SUMMER OF 85
In Summer of 85, writer-director François Ozon pours on the romance and nostalgia. This is a dreamy tale of first love leading to obsession and, finally, a tragedy. Ozon tricks us into thinking that this story is much, much darker than it turns out to be.
In a Northern French beach town. two teen boys meet cute via a capsized watercraft. Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) doesn’t know his way around the locale (or a lot of things), and is fascinated by David (Benjamin Voisin). whose mom (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) runs the local fishing supply store. Alexis is utterly captivated, and the two become inseparable…until one of them is distracted by a bright shiny thing.
Ozon (Swimming Pool, Potiche) adapted the screenplay from an Aidan Chambers novel. Summer of 85 is a teen coming of age story embedded in Ozon’s reflection on how we remember our youth. Remember that teenagers tend to look at everything on their lives as momentous, and they magnify the drama.
Summer of 85 has garnered an astonishing 12 César nominations (the French Oscar equivalent). Some viewers will not be satisfied by the ending of this well-crafted film.
Summer of 85 opens tomorrow, June 18, in Bay Area theaters, including the Landmark chain.
William Bulger in MY NAME IS BULGER. Photo courtesy of discovery+.
The documentary My Name Is Bulger traces the life of one fascinating man – made even more compelling by the life of a second man. Bill Bulger, one of nine kids raised in the projects, was a political wunderkind. First elected at age 26, his 35-year career in the Massachusetts State Legislature was topped by 18 years as President of the State Senate. No less than the squeaky clean former Governor Michael Dukakis credits Bill Bulger for cleaning up the previously corrupt institution.
Now, here’s the kicker – while Bill Bulger was dominating Massachusetts politics, his brother James “Whitey” Bulger was the state’s most fearsome crime lord.
Politics is public, and crime is private. Politics requires self-promotion, and crime requires secrecy. The brothers Bulger are parallel studies in power.
For decades, my day job has been in politics. It’s not unusual for politicians to deal with embarrassing, and even unsavory, relatives, but what do you do if your vocation is politics and your older sibling is a notorious criminal?
Very bright and armed with wit and charm, Bill Bulger was able to artfully, even miraculously, keep his career separate from Whitey’s. As Whitey became more infamous, Bill was able to delay being hurt by the association. It was widely known that Whitey had been in Alcatraz as early as 1959.
We meet Bill Bulger himself, now 85, and several of his adult children (who also remember their “Uncle Jim”). Dukakis appears, along with another former governor, William Weld. There’s also a former crime partner of Whitey’s. And we hear from the recently released Catherine Greig, Whitey’s longtime girlfriend and fellow fugitive, captured with Whitey in Santa Monica.
As sympathetic to Bill Bulger as is My Name Is Bulger, it doesn’t hide his opposition to busing in the 1970s, a political necessity that put him on the same side as South Boston’s ugliest racists. Nor does it shy away from the moment Whitey became a high-profile fugitive and Bill was cornered into taking the Fifth.
William Bulger in MY NAME IS BULGER. Photo courtesy of discovery+.
My Name Is Bulger is told from the point of view of Bill Bulger’s family. The Bulgers are understandably resentful of Bill’s political enemies in the press (and former Governor Mitt Romney). It’s more difficult to appreciate the family grudge against the government for harshness to Whitey, who, after all, was convicted of 19 murders.
For the story of how Whitey was able to use the FBI to eliminate his competition in the local Italian Mafia and the Irish mob, I also recommend another recent doc, Whitey: The United States vs. James J. Bulger.
My Name Is Bulger will stream on discovery+ beginning June 17.
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.
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.
