Movies

BLACK BEAR: ever surprising

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Aubrey Plaza in BLACK BEAR

Thanks to the unique gifts of Aubrey Plaza, writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine’s dark comedy Black Bear is a cauldron of surprises. This is an edge-of-the-seat movie where you cannot predict what is going to happen next – or at least how it is going to happen.

At first, Black Bear seems like a dark comedy of manners. And then there’s a complete reset. In a movie-within-a-movie, the tone goes from broadly comic to nail-biting, with a satisfying final payoff about the creative process. I’m not going to spoil the story by getting anymore explicit about the its construction – but the audience needs to be a bit nimble.

As Levine unspools his story, reels it back in and unspools it again, Black Bear is a roller coaster. As Sheila O’Malley writes, “This is a disturbing film, and much of it is unpleasant, but it’s also very, very funny.“

Plaza plays Allison, a film writer-director who becomes the only guest at a woodsy lakeside B&B owned by (Gabe) Christopher Abbott and (Blair) Sarah Gadon. Allison is isolating to work on writer’s block, but she soon becomes absorbed by Gabe and Blair, a couple whose unnecessary bickering signals that they are on each other’s very last nerve. Two of the characters tell significant lies, and why they lie is revealing about each of them.

As to Allison, from her first kinda-flirty-but-with-sharper-elbows banter, you can tell she’s trouble. Plaza excels in playing a character who is hiding her acidly judgy thoughts with a mask of deadpan social almost-appropriateness. Mick LaSalle describes Plaza thusly: “This is someone who has made her name in comedies, but whose distinct quality — a certain unknowability, a certain watchfulness, a certain suggestion of some underlying hostility — always seemed like it would lend itself to drama, at least theoretically.”

Blair (exasperated): You’re really hard to read.

Allison (brightly): I get that a lot.

The playwright Paola Lázaro is especially good as the harried AD trying to hold it together as shooting the last scene of the film-within-the-film becomes ever more imperiled. There’s also a very funny running joke about script supervisor who doesn’t grasp the concept of you have one job.

When you watch Black Bear, keep one thing in mind – Allison is trying to devise a story for her next film.

Black Bear is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S LETTER TO YOU: wiser and still vital

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The documentary Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, sometimes sage and sometimes exhilarating, is a companion movie to the latest studio album from Springsteen and the E Street Band.

This is an obvious MUST SEE for devoted Springsteen fans like The Wife. For everyone else, Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is worthwhile for Bruce’s comments (in narration and in song), the creative collaboration in the recording studio and the songs themselves.

Springsteen is now 71 and this film was shot a year-and-a-half-ago. He is frankly conscious of mortality, the explicit subject of two of the songs. I’ll See You in My Dreams is a heartbreaking call to friends who have passed. Last Man Standing came to Bruce when he found himself the sole survivor of his high school band, The Castiles. (BTW that’s a way cool band name for back when Ricardo Montalban was hawking “rich Corinthian leather”.)

Springsteen’s reflections bring poignancy without melancholy.

On the upbeat side, The Power of Prayer is about devotion and charismatic experience – but the kind we get from pop music. We recognize that this is from the songwriter of Girls in their Summer Clothes.

The best song IMO – and the hardest rocking – is Burnin’ Train. Turn up the volume and settle into Max Weinberg’s drumming and Garry Talent’s bass line. Sounds like an extremely tight band of 20-somethings.

In the studio, we get a glimpse into the collaborative aspect of songwriting and recording, where the musicians and producers get the charts and then start making suggestions about how to hone each song.

Writing rock music is usually a young person’s jam, with the best and the most productivity front-loaded in the earliest segments of songwriting careers. It’s remarkable that Springsteen still is imagining and forging such vital songs. And it’s remarkable that the E Street Band, almost all of them about 70, still can crush and shred.

Director Thom Zimny is Bruce’s personal filmmaker, and also made the fine HBO doc Elvis Presley: The Searcher. The quick cutting of the scenes in the recording studios allow us to miss the drudgery of repeated takes and highlight the sparks of creativity. The exterior shots of the winter-bare woods of rural New Jersey remind me of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. This is a very handsome black-and-white film.

Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is streaming on AppleTV.

SOUND OF METAL: seeking anything but stillness

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Riz Ahmed in SOUND OF METAL

In Sound of Metal, Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is a heavy metal drummer who suffers immediate and severe hearing loss, complicated because he’s also an addict who has been clean for an uneasy four years. He and his guitarist girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) have been barnstorming through a series of one-nght engagements in their Airstream RV. Ruben is emotionally devastated, and Lou, fearing his relapse, drops him off with drug counselor Joe (Paul Raci) at a twelve-step residence within an all-deaf community.

Ruben may not be using, but he may not be “in recovery”, either. His sobriety hangs on a scaffold of performance, Lou, healthy exercise and constant travel. When his musicianship is snatched away by hearing loss, he panics. The very idea of deafness paralyzes Ruben with terror.

Ruben cycles through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, escape and resistance. Will he get to acceptance and redemption? Joe tells Ruben that he needs to attain the ability to sit with himself in stillness, but Ruben wants anything but that.

Sound of Metal is a super intense ride, but there’s a payoff. The powerful ending is perfect. Director and co-writer Darius Marder follows Billy Wilder’s advice – don’t stick around.

Riz Ahmed’s totally committed and gripping performance as Ruben will likely garner him an Oscar nod. In thinking about his performance days later, I realized that Ahmed was convincing as Ruben played heavy metal, as he veered in desperation and as he mentored deaf children with gentleness and humor.

At one point, I said, “he’s acting just like an addict” seconds before Joe says something like “From where I sit, you’re acting like an addict“.

Ahmed is one of those actors who is good in everything he’s in, whether it’s a broad comedy (Four Lions), a political drama The Reluctant Fundamentalist or a psychological thriller (Nightcrawler and Una}.

Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke in SOUND OF METAL

Olivia Cooke, so good in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Thoroughbreds, is okay here as Lou. In the first part of the movie, she’s unrecognizable with unflattering bleached eyebrows.

Paul Raci, an actor who became fluent in ASL to communicate with his deaf parents, is just a perfect delight as Joe. I’m suspecting that this character actor/musician (he has a Black Sabbath tribute band) will get more movie work after this turn.

The French actor/director Mathieu Amalric is absolutely superb as Lou’s father. Amalric is a big deal actor who is cast in a lot of prestige films (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and I am usually indifferent to him. But here, he absolutely nails a character who is comfortable in his own skin, wise enough to discern what is going on with others less experienced than he and willing, with patience and gentleness, to let life play out. His character is a guy who probably hasn’t gotten to where he is by being kind, so his kindness is a choice.

The brilliant, Oscar-deserving sound design brings us to experience what Ruben can hear and not hear. Make sure that you watch this film on a system or device with excellent sound. Walter Murch will appreciate this movie (which is very high praise from me.).

Sound of Metal is one of my Best Movies of 2020. It is streaming on Amazon (included with Prime).

A MAN CALLED ADAM: all that jazz

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Sammy Davis, Jr. in A MAN CALLED ADAM

In the underappreciated 1966 drama, A Man Called Adam, Sammy Davis Jr. plays Adam, a self-destructive jazz star. Adam draws people in with his talent and charisma, and, racked by guilt, pushes away those closest to him with selfish and cruel behavior. You can catch A Man Called Adam on Turner Classic Movies on January 31.

Claudia (Cicely Tyson) is drawn to Adam and tries to save him, anchoring herself in the roller coaster of his life. Remember that, after all the ups and downs, a roller coaster always ends up at the bottom.

Cicely Tyson in A MAN CALLED ADAM

Cicely Tyson, in her first credited movie role, is radiant. Two great speeches, in which she absolutely commands the screen, showcase her talent; you can tell that this is going to be a movie star.

While no Cicely Tyson, Sammy Davis, Jr., is excellent as the protagonist. This shouldn’t be so surprising, given that Sammy was an artistic savant, a dancing genius also known for his crooning. (And Sammy’s Rat Pack pals Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were good movie actors, too, when they wanted to be.)

I also strongly recommend the insightful documentary Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me, which reveals Sammy’s struggle to fit into each of the six decades of his entertainment career; it can streamed on Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

American race relations figure large in A Man Called Adam. Adam faces hostile racist thugs in the South and experiences “vacationing while black” in the North. This is one of the few films that depicts tension between Northern and Southern Black Americans. We also get to here Adam use the racial slur ofay, a word I had seen in print but never heard anyone use in a spoken sentence.

Mel Torme in A MAN CALLED ADAM

The jazz in the movie s good and Sammy looks credible as a musical prodigy. In real life, Sammy was a multi-instrumentalist who did perform with the trumpet. The best musical performance in A Man Called Adam is by Mel Torme, playing himself at an after-hours musicians party.

Rat Packer Peter Lawson plays a powerful gatekeeper of a booking agent; this role, a bitter, simmering guy who is ever ready to explode into a rage, seems written for Rod Steiger, and Lawson is no Steiger. Come to think of it, this is a rare role where Lawford is not asked to be debonair. (And where are those “debonair” roles today for actors like Lawford, David Niven, Charles Boyer or Roger Moore?)

Louis Armstrong plays an old time musician, and he’s really, really good as an actor. Frank Sinatra, Jr., is OK as Adam’s goofy protege. The great Ossie Davis plays the guy who tries to warn Claudia off Adam. Lola Falana appears in her screen debut. An uncredited Morgan Freeman is a party guest – right after the Mel Torme song and before Mel tries to get Adam to play, look for a guy with a cigarette, in conversation along the back wall.

A Man Called Adam was directed by prolific television director Leon Penn in his only big screen credit. Penn (father of actors Sean Penn and Chris Penn) deploys especially inventive camera placements and makes excellent us of use of closeups. From its setting in the jazz world to the portrait of Adam’s relationship carnage, A Man Called Adam is always realistic.

Penn’s direction really elevates this movie, as does Tyson’s performance. I saw A Man Called Adam, a bit of a lost film, on Turner Classic Movies. It’s not streamable, but you can find the DVD on Amazon and eBay.

Cicely Tyson in A MAN CALLED ADAM

MAYOR: potholes and tear gas, all in a day’s work

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Musa Hadid in MAYOR

In the engrossing documentary Mayor, the camera shadows a mayor as he goes about his daily duties – and he’s the mayor of the Palestinian city Ramallah.  Director David Osit, in just his third feature, has created a masterpiece of cinéma vérité that informs us about human foibles and aspirations, nestled within the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Boy, I enjoyed this movie.  For the last forty years, my day jobs have been in politics and government, especially local government.  Just like every local American elected official, Ramallah Mayor Musa Hadid goes gladhanding among his constituents and hears face-to-face gripes about the equivalent of potholes.

So much of Mayor Hadid’s daily adventures are universal, especially dealing with his own bureaucrats.  He endures a tableful of public servants dithering about whether to name the new fountain at city hall.  He cajoles a hapless staffer to just get him a radio so he can listen to the news. He reams out a manager who ignores a sewage overflow. And, of course, between ribbon cuttings, he is beset by shady contractors.

Ramallah, however, brings its own unique challenges.  Not many mayors have to utter a sentence like “the soldiers are up there shooting at the kids.” At one point, the mayor is tear gassed in his own city hall, as the Israeli army rolls right up to the front windows.

The city has no sewage treatment plant (but there’s a Popeyes).   Palestinian rage simmers just under the surface, as some well-meaning German diplomats find out.  Mayor Hadid respectfully counters a politically correct politico who wants to spurn a visit by Prince William because Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

Musa Hadid is a level-headed pragmatist whose calm demeanor can work to belie his strong fundamental principles.  He stiffens to state that you don’t negotiate unless there’s dignity.  Most of the time, however, he is refusing to overreact. 

“The situation? It’s happening whether we freak out or not.”

Mayor is being described as a dark comedy, which day-to-day local politics anywhere may well be. At one point, Mayor Hadid faces a LITERAL dumpster fire, which is, of course, also metaphorical.

Hadid and his high school- and college-age kids share am appreciation of irony and a robust sense of humor.   After each day filled with indignity, frustration and provocation, they relax with mutual teasing,  Even at city hall, there’s some amusing banter about Ivanka Trump.

Mayor is one of the Best Movies of 2020.  I watched Mayor on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle.

NIGHT STALKER: THE HUNT FOR SERIAL KILLER: a good man tracks down evil

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Gil Carrillo in NIGHT STALKER: THE HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER

The true crime limited series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer tells a story of a public justifiably terrorized by profound evil, but it is elevated by one genuinely good guy.

In a five-and-a-half month 1985 crime spree, the serial killer nicknamed the Night Stalker inflicted unspeakable atrocities, mostly in a swath of Los Angeles. There were at least 14 murders, along with rapes and child rapes, brutal beatings and mutilations – enough carnage to ultimately to earn him 19 death sentences. And, to make it all even more sensational, he embraced Satanist symbology.

This was not a serial killer case to be solved by a profiler. The victims were of different ages, genders and races; his weapons of choice and his horrific acts all varied. There was no pattern to the crimes except that they were all nighttime home invasions.

Instead, it was a case for two dogged detectives, armed only with a single shoe print, trying to piece together more physical evidence. Frank Salerno, was the seasoned star detective of the LA Sheriff’s department, a local celebrity for cracking the notorious Hillside Strangler case. His partner was a fresh young cop who had just made detective, Gil Carrillo, underestimated by everyone except Salerno.

The whodunit and the man hunt make for a great story. It’s a roller coaster, with at least two breathtakingly squandered opportunities and a huge gaffe by, of all people, Dianne Feinstein,

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is graced by the the testimony of survivors, victims, journalists and witnesses who encountered the Night Stalker face-to-face.

But the man reason I recommend Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is Gil Carrillo, who is an intoxicating story teller. As professional detectives can be, Carrillo is a disciplined observer who has the gift of narrative, whether in a bar or in a courtroom. He also wears his salt-of-the-earthness on his sleeve. I’m sure that Carrillo can be as terse as any cop on the street, but he lowers his guard here, and lets his humanity flow. The good guy, Carrillo, not the evil guy, is the real star of this movie.

And now a creepy possible connection with The Movie Gourmet. Many of my acquaintances have heard my “rats in the toilet” story from 1983-84, an episode that culminated when a city crew eradicated a colony of sewer rats from the sewer main under South 16th Street in San Jose. I later learned that, at the time, the Night Stalker himself was working as a San Jose sewer worker.

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is streaming on Netflix.

MLK/FBI: about America then and about America today

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MLK/FBI. Photo courtesy of IFC Films.

In MLK/FBI, Sam Pollard, the master of the civil rights documentary (Eyes on the Prize), takes on the FBI’s quest to discredit and even destroy Martin Luther King, Jr. Over many years, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI targeted King with wiretaps, bugs, surveillance and informers. The FBI built a trove of audio tapes of King having extramarital sex; these tapes are now in the National Archives and will be released publicly in 2027. The tapes themselves are not included in MLK/FBI, but the film reveals the many secret FBI memos that discuss them.

Pollard bookends MLK/FBI with historians considering the questions of how we should process the behavior on the tapes and how we should face the actual tapes when they are released six years from now.

MLK/FBI documents the moment that Hoover and his top lieutenant William Sullivan became obsessed with King – and the moment they tried to force him into suicide. From their perspective, if King’s movement wanted to upend the racial inequities that included legal segregation, then of COURSE he must be an anti-American subversives. They started by red-baiting King for associating with communists, and then moved to focus on sexual behavior.

MLK/FBI reminds us who we were back in the 1960s. King had not yet been martyred and many in the mainstream shared Hoover’s discomfort with racial progress and his driving fear of communism. When MLK and Hoover had a public spat, the polling documented 50% of the American public siding with Hoover and under 20% with King.

While today, a male public figure would likely not be ruined by consensual heterosexual sex outside of marriage, that was not the case in the 1960s. Then it was still controversial about whether a divorced person – or even someone married to a previously divorced person – should be elected to high office.

And MLK/FBI says a lot about our society today. Although this salacious material was leaked to many journalists in the 1960s, none actually made it public. I find this particularly sobering, because today there is no way that the temptation to generate clicks, likes retweets and ratings would have been resisted – it would have gone viral, as we now say, probably with history-changing consequences.

MLK/FBI can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

coming on TV: WITNESS TO MURDER

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Barbara Stanwyck in WITNESS TO MURDER

On January 16 and 17, Turner Classic Movies is airing the gripping and hard-to-find Witness to Murder. Richter (George Sanders) and Cheryl (Barbara Stanwyck) live in neighboring apartments. Cheryl believes she has seen Richter murder someone, but Richter’s clever and ruthless duplicity makes it appear that Cheryl is just crazy. Will Police Lt. Larry Mathews (Gary Merrill) believe her before Richter can make Cheryl his second victim?

What a wowzer first scene! Witness to Murder opens with a gripping scene that economically sets up the plot. “Operator, get me the police! Hurry!” We know immediately and certainly that Richter really committed the murder and that Cheryl really saw it. Throughout the movie, the audience knows this and Richter knows this, but no one else does, and neither does Cheryl herself during segments of the story.

Cheryl reports the murder and the police (Larry Mathews and sidekick) respond. However, Richter has concealed the crime so well that cops can’t find any evidence that a crime occurred. Could Cheryl have been mistaken? Or dreamed it? or made it up? or hallucinated? Is she neurotic and mildly hysteric or is she psychotic and delusional?

Larry develops an immediate attraction to Cheryl, and, despite her apparent emotional instability, begins a courtship.

Richter (malevolently) and Larry (paternalistically) begin gaslighting Cheryl, trying to convince her that she really only imagined what she saw – trying to convince her that what seemed so real, was not. Cheryl starts doubting herself.

Of course, Richter knows that he committed the murder, and he knows that Cheryl knows. To get her out of the way, he schemes to have her seen as crazed stalker. His scheme drives her to an outburst that serves as a pretext for locking her up in a psychiatric facility (with an interview by an oddly brusque shrink). Richter’s attempts to murder Cheryl continue right into Witness to Murder’s Perils-of-Pauline ending.

See my complete post on Witness to Murder, for more on the filmmakers and supporting cast. It’s one of my Overlooked Noir.

On this weekend’s TCM broadcast of Witness to Murder, film historian Eddie Muller – the Czar of Noir – will provide his always insightful intro and outro. Witness to Murder is not available to stream; I own the DVD. Be sure to DVR it when it airs on Turner Classic Movies.

George Sanders in WITNESS TO MURDER

ON THE ROCKS: waste of talent

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Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in ON THE ROCKS

The inoffensive but unsatisfying On the Rocks, which can technically be described as a romantic comedy, wastes of the talents of Sofia Coppola, Bill Murry and Rashida Jones.

Laura (Rashida Jones) suspects that her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans), the striving CEO of a startup, is cheating on her. Her father Felix (Bill Murray), a worldly art dealer and serial womanizer, encourages her to stalk Dean, and propels them into increasingly crazy dad-daughter escapades.

The problem is that the suspicious wife plot is so tired that not even the considerable talents of Murray and Jones can make it sparkle. From Shakespeare through Howard Hawks to I Love Lucy, we’ve seen comedies based on mistaken perceptions, so we should expect SOME new element or nuance. This is, after all, from the writer-director of The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. The dad-daughter issues in On the Rocks just aren’t enough.

I did enjoy the character of Felix, for whom wordly is a gross understatement. Completely at home with the billionaire class, he also knows every cop, concierge and maître d’, and glides smoothly among all of them with charm and craftiness. He also can’t resist hitting on anybody without a visible Adam’s apple.

Murray is winning as Felix, but he can’t elevate the predictable screenplay. As we watched On the Rocks, I said to The Wife, “I’ve always said that I could watch Blil Murray reading the phone book, but this IS Bill Murray reading the phone book.”

On the Rocks is streaming on AppleTV.

ANOTHER ROUND: humanity buzzed

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In Another Round, filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg once again explores human foibles with humor and cold-eyed insight – and profoundly to boot. And, in Another Round, Mads Mikkelsen delivers one of the year’s finest performances.

Mikkelsen plays one of four middle-aged male teachers – each in some sort of personal rut and struggling with career burnout. The other three are played by Thomas Bo Larson (love this guy whenever I see him), Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe.

Grasping on to some convenient pseudo-science, the four decide to try living their lives with an alcoholic buzz – trying to maintain a steady blood alcohol level of 0.05 from morning through 8 PM. Now THERE’S a good idea.

They all should be trying SOMETHING new. Mikkelsen’s history teacher Martin is mailing in his job performance, so much so that his students and their parents confront him, worried that he won’t cover enough history for the kids to pass their exams. His marriage is comfortably civil but passionless.

With the boost of a drink or two, Martin and his buddies become more lively. Less inhibited, they fly back into their passions and share them with their students.

Suddenly, Martin is a man of spontaneity, shocks wife Annika (Maria Bonnevie) with a surprise vacation, and rekindles romantic sparks.

So far so good. But then they decide to try more is better, and try raising their blood alcohol level to 0.10. things don’t go as smoothly, and then they go on an epic bender and blow well past the 0.10.

The drunk behavior is realistic. So, some is funny slapstick, some is cringeworthy and some is heartbreaking. There’s a buffoonish moment in a supermarket, and we think that it would not be not amusing to be there in that moment. But when, out at dinner, Mikkelsen utters “It’s the little things“, the quip is hilarious.

Their experiment with alcohol treats each of them differently. One guy comes out ahead – he doesn’t suffer any long lasting consequences and even finally gets a girlfriend. Another guy blows up his marriage, but only temporarily, and he’ll be able to look back on this episode as a cautionary tale.

But alcohol abuse does not fit well with latent depression, with tragic results for one character.

Martin has the most complicated experience because he is predisposed to addiction. When it’s time for the guys to end the experiment, he can’t. There’s a moment when he receives a text message in a restaurant hallway, and we think “Leave right now!“, but he goes back inside for another drink. Will he be able to recover from the addiction? Another Round’s final thrilling scene ends with a euphoric dance – and leaves us with that question. (I think I know the answer.)

Mikkelsen’s performance is stellar. Usually we see Mikkelsen in charismatic roles; here he begins the story as a hollow shell, beaten down by the disappointments and responsibilities of life. He allows us to glimpse the talent, charm and vigor of his younger self. Finally, we see him thinking through each life choice (and choosing another round usually wins out); his Martin is not a hedonistic brute – he understands the consequence of each drink. Technically, his portrayal nails the various stages of drunkenness (which much be harder than it looks because even good actors don’t always get it right).

You’ll recognize Mikkelsen, a big star in Europe, from After the Wedding, the 2006 Casino Royale (he was the villain with the tears of blood) and TV’s Hannibal. He won the 2012 Cannes Best Actor award for his performance in Vinterberg’s The Hunt.

A groundbreaking writer/director, Thomas Vinterberg is an astute and cold-eyed observer of behavior. He broke through with Celebration (Festen), that darkest of dark comedy, and directed and the thriller The Hunt (Jagten). (And he can even do bodice rippers like Far From the Madding Crowd.) Vinterberg has worked before with all four of the main actors in Another Round.

Vinterberg also uses Another Round to comment on the drinking culture in his native Denmark (and, presumably, the rest of Scandinavia). This is a society that doesn’t blink at binge drinking, even by teenagers.

I watched Another Round on Virtual Cinema at Laemmle. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2020 – So Far.