Movies

MANK: biting the hand

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Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried in MANK

David Fincher’s Mank is a black-and-white beauty of a film, a portrait of troubled talent in Classic Hollywood.

Mank is a character study of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) as he pens his Oscar-winning screenplay for Citizen Kane. Mankiewicz was an Algonquin Round Table wit whose misfortune was that he despised the one thing that he excelled at. He was a master writer and fixer of Hollywood movie scripts, but he would rather have been in Manhattan trading bon mots with his peers in the intelligentsia. He particularly the industrial, ultra-commercial and course movie studio bosses and despised their politics.

It didn’t help that Mankiewicz was a raging alcoholic and compulsive gambler (although not a womanizer). He was so hard to handle that Orson Welles essentially imprisoned him at a remote California desert ranch to write Citizen Kane.

Mankiewicz had one unsurpassed idea for a script – the story of media mogul (and frustrated politician) William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz had been a frequent guest of Hearst and his companion Marion Davies at Hearst Castle. The problem is that telling this story would piss off the owner of the world’s biggest publicity machine and horrify the movie studio heads who employed screenwriters. And, most poignantly, it would betray Mankiewicz’s kind friend Marion Davies.

Mankiewicz had served as the court jester at Hearst Castle, and the term comes up repeatedly in Mank, most importantly in a cutting remark by Herman’s little brother Joseph Mankiewicz.

The Wife stayed with Mank and finished it, but she advised me that Mank is much more appealing to cinephiles who already know the “inside baseball” of the old movie studio system and the making of Citizen Kane. Indeed, when the likes of Louis B. Mayer, Ben Hecht, Joseph Mankiewicz, Irving Thalberg and John Houseman popped up, it instantly resonated with me.

The entire cast is excellent, but Amanda Seyfried is beyond great as Marion Davies. Charles Dance (coming off his Lord Mountbatten in The Crown) is perfect as William Randolph Hearst. Muckraker-turned-socialist-gubernatorial-candidate Upton Sinclair is played by…(wait for it)…Bill Nye the Science Guy.

David Fincher is one of our greatest directors (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl). Fincher’s father Jack Fincher wrote the screnplay for Mank (and clearly shared Herman Mankiewicz’ acid view of the Hollywood hierarchy), so this is clearly a labor of love for David Fincher.

As a tribute to both Citizen Kane and the Golden Age of Hollywood, Mank is just gorgeous, as beautiful a black-and-white film as any directed by John Ford or shot by Sidney Toler, Nicholas Musuraca or John Alton. Mank’s cinematographer is Erik Messerschmidt (TV’s Mindhunter).

Mank is going on my list of Best Movies of 2020 – So Far. I see Oscar nominations coming for Fincher, Messerschmidt and Seyfried. Mank is streaming on Netflix.

coming up on TV: THE BURGLAR – loyalty among

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Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea in THE BURGLAR

Turner Classic Movies is presenting one of my Overlooked Noir on December 12, and you shouldn’t miss it. The Burglar (1957) is known popularly as the movie debut of Jayne Mansfield,  but it’s a fine film noir.  It starts out with a tense burglary, but once the necklace is successfully burgled, the story focuses on the heist team going stir crazy as they wait for the environment to cool down so they can safely fence the booty. They are strung so tight that even the whistle of a tea kettle is enough to startle the gang. While dodging the cops, they find that they are also being hunted by a corrupt rogue cop and his partner.

The core of The Burglar is the stellar lead performance of Dan Duryea as the chief burglar. He’s a tortured and worn-out guy – with one deep loyalty.

There are plenty of noir moments – lots of shadows, uplit faces in the darkness and amoral, grasping characters. We have not one, but two noir vixens – Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers. Asked at a bar by Duryea what she wants, Vickers answers “Basically, I’m out to find myself a man.” The characters in this fine film noir find themselves in Atlantic City, where the bad cop chases the protagonists through the House of Horrors and the Steel Pier, culminating in a final confrontation under the boardwalk.

The acting is excellent, other than Peter Capell, who gives over-acting a bad name while playing the most nerve-wracked member of the gang.  Even Mansfield is good; (The Burglar was held in the can for two years and then released when Mansfield became a sensation with The Girl Can’t Help It).

The movie was shot on location in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. We see Independence Hall, and it’s hard not to think of Rocky when Duryea climbs the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Burglar plays from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and is available streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, and other platforms.

[Note: The Burglar features John Facenda as his real-life role as a Philadelphia newscaster (when local TV stations aired 15-minute newscasts). Facenda later found much broader fame as “The Voice of God” for his narration for NFL Films football documentaries.]

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7: an earlier bizarre moment in our political history

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John Carrol Lynch, Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

In The Trial of the Chicago Seven, writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Oscar winner for The Social Network) brings history alive. The trial of anti-Vietnam war activists in 1969 was a bizarre moment in our political history (but not any more bizarre than the past four years).

Now in 2020, it’s time for this movie. Back in 1969, there were authoritative statements about criminality on both sides. But it’s more clear today – and indisputable – that the violence outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago was a series of police riots, pure and simple, and that the trial was Nixon’s nakedly illegitimate legal assault against all activism.

The overriding absurdity of this political trial was that it alleged a conspiracy – and some of the alleged conspirators barely knew each other and some despised the others. These were rivals within the anti-war movement and only together in Nixon’s mind.

The movie makes this most clear in the conflict between Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Abby Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen). Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society wanted to end the Vietnam politically. Hoffman of the Youth International Party (Yippies) was against the war, but sought a wider cultural revolution; the Yippies’ clownish political theater alienated the American Middle and made Hayden’s job harder. Hoffman was hilariously witty and Hayden was as funny as a heart attack. The two men couldn’t have conspired together to order lunch.

Hayden does not benefit from the Sorkin treatment. One is reminded that another activist said, “Tom Hayden gives opportunism a bad name.” THat almost tops Abby Hoffman’s own cutting appraisal of Hayden: “He’s our Nixon”.

The disparity between the defendants was emphasized by the prosecution of David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), the non-hippie, a pacifist leader from another generation. Dellinger was a suburban dad and boy scout leader, No one could see him as some punk kid, so when his outrage finally boils over, it’s one of the most powerful moments in the film.

John Carrol Lynch and Sacha Baron Cohen in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Cohen and Lynch are superb in The Trial of the Chicago 7, along with Kelvin Harrison, Jr., who plays Black Panther leader and martyr Fred Hampton, and Mark Rylance as defense lawyer William Kunstler. It’s a star-studded cast with Michael Keaton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jeremy Strong (so good as Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland).

Frank Langella is also brilliant as the villain, Judge Julius Hoffman. Langella’s Hoffman is imperious and intemperate, and utterly blind to his own racism and generational bias.

Frank Langella in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

The facts are compressed and – for the most part – kept in context. The role of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (Keaton) happened a little differently but is portrayed with basic truth. Fred Hampton didn’t actually attend the trial and sit behind Bobby Seale; but the facts and impact of his assassination are fundamentally correct.

The one thing that annoys me about The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the spunky character of the defendants’ office manager Bernardine – because it’s clearly inspired by radical Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn, who was not part of the trial, was NOT some chick answering the phone, but had already graduated from law school and was about to co-found the Weather Underground terrorist cell. I’m guessing that Sorkin wrote her in the story in a well-intentioned attempt to make the story NOT all-male. But the truth is that even the counter culture was sexist, and even male hippies saw women as adornments in 1969. The 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique did not immediately wash away millennia of patriarchy.

This, however, is a sound retelling of a salient moment in our political and cultural history. Cohen, Lynch, Rylance, Langella, Harrison Jr, are all exceptional, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 is pretty entertaining.

MY OCTOPUS TEACHER: an octopus and her human pet

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MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

As nature documentaries go, My Octopus Teacher, is pretty singular. Filmmaker Craig Foster, stewing in mid-life disillusionment, is diving in a South African kelp forest when he encounters an octopus and decides to shadow her over a year and document her life every day. The octopus takes to Foster and adopts him as kind of a pet. But My Octopus Teacher is mostly worthwhile for the amazing resourcefulness of the octopus and the harrowing shark attacks.

I knew that octopuses are wizards at camouflage and at squeezing through tight spaces. I didn’t appreciate how intelligent they are and that they commonly live for only one year.

There are some sequences in My Octopus Teacher that are just astonishing. The underwater photography, especially the scenes just below the surf in the first fifteen minutes are among the best I’ve ever seen. The cinematographer is underwater specialist Roger Horrocks.

Foster himself narrates the film. The Movie Gourmet doesn’t cotton to the simpering of grown men, so I wish I had turned off the sound for the first fifteen minutes of his personal angst and the final ten minutes when he forges a blissful father-and-son shared interest in the ocean.

I do admire Foster for two things. First, he generally didn’t interfere with the course of nature (i.e., rescue the octopus from shark attacks). And he didn’t give her a human name. Good for him.

Off South Africa, the octopus’ major predator is the pajama shark, so named because of the stripes that resemble old-fashioned vertically-striped pajamas. Pajama sharks are especially well-equipped to attack in the narrow and deep crevices where octopuses hide out.

I can’t really blame the sharks because octopus is one of my favorite foods, too. It takes some mastery (which I haven’t as yet attained) to cook them so they’re not rubbery. So, I order octopus every time I see it on the menu (usually at Greek, Spanish, Mexican or Portuguese restaurants).

My Octopus Teacher is streaming on Netflix.

BORGMAN: an adult scare for Halloween

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BORGMAN

Technically, the Dutch thriller Borgman is a horror film, but it’s horror for adults, without the gore and with lots of wit. The shock doesn’t come from monsters unexpectedly lurching out of nowhere. The entertainment comes from the OMG moments of the “don’t ask the weird guy into your house!” and “don’t let the sinister guys watch your kids!” variety.

The setting is the architecturally striking and well-tended home of an affluent Dutch family and their Danish nanny. The husband is an aggro corporate schemer and a real scumbag – selfish, racist and chauvinistic, with the capacity for a violent rage. His wife Marina is repressed and neurotic. But they are highly functional until a homeless guy, Camiel Borgman, happens by, and circumstances compel them to put him up. Borgman feels entitled to more and more outrageous impositions – and soon it’s apparent that he’s even more sinister than he is obnoxious.

What if Charles Manson wasn’t a drug addled hoodlum, and his deranged charisma worked on the affluent mainstream? Borgman leads a crew of normal looking but murderous henchmen, who operate with the ruthless efficiency of Navy Seals. (Watch for the scar near the younger woman’s shoulder-blade.) Vaguely gifted with mind control, he can apparently create dreams by squatting naked and gargoyle-like above Marina while she slumbers with her husband. There is violence aplenty, but it tends to come through a bonk on the head or some poison in a glass.

Dark comedy stems from the matter-of-factness of the murders and body disposal (as in tossing corpses into a lake and then diving in for a relaxing swim). Every once in a while, there’s a hilariously sinister moment, like the supremely random appearance of some whippets that seem more like hellhounds.

BORGMAN

The acting is uniformly excellent, including the kids, but Jan Bijvoet as Borgman and Hadewych Minis as Marina are stellar.

Some questions are never answered (who are those three guys at the beginning and why are they hunting the homeless guys?). Is this a cult or aliens or what? The audience needs to accept some ambiguity. But the overall story arc is clear – no good is going to come of these people once they meet Camiel Borgman and his friends.

There is a subtext here: is this family so bourgeois that it deserves its fate? Fortunately, this subtext isn’t as in-your-face as in some recent self-loathing Eurocrap like Happy Days or Finsterworld, so it’s not at all off-putting. But Borgman can be enjoyed without going there at all.

Borgman is superbly written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam, a 62-year-old Dutch actor with only a handful of writing and directing credits.

I don’t often recommend a horror movie, but I’m all in on Borgman. Take it from me – you haven’t seen this movie before, and it’s endlessly entertaining. Borgman is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Hulu.

DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA: a most human vibe

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DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA

David Byrne’s American Utopia is the concert film for David Byrne’s (currently paused) Broadway show, directed by Spike Lee. The songs are organized to explores themes of humanity and human behaviors and attitudes, and some are overly political. It’s a thoughtful and entertaining show.

To isolate the humanity on stage, Byrne has very intentionally pared away all the glitz. What remains is just Byrne and his band, which serves as a chorus – two dancers, two guitarists, a keyboard player and six percussionists. All are barefoot and clad in identical grey suits that are well-fitting descendants of Byrne’s Big Suit from Stop Making Sense.

Most, but not all, of the of the songs are Byrne’s or by the Talking Heads. The biggest show-stoppers are the Talking Heads’ vintage anthems Burning Down the House and Road to Nowhere and Janelle Monae’s Hell You Talmbout. This is no run-of-the-mill jukebox musical.

Stop Making Sense, of course, is one of the greatest of concert films, directed by Jonathan Demme. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that great directors make great concert films (e.g., Martin Scorsese and The Last Waltz; DA Pennebaker and Monterey Pop). Given the constraints of the contained set and material, Spike Lee does a great job of projecting the vibe of American Utopia.

David Byrne’s American Utopia is playing on HBO.

DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD: funny, heartfelt and frequently bizarre

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Dick Johnson in DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD

Documentarian Kirsten Johnson and her dad face the end of his life in this funny, heartfelt and frequently bizarre film. Dick Johnson Is Dead is so highly original that I would place it in its own genre – docufantasy.

Kirsten’s father Dick Johnson is an 85-year-old psychiatrist whose increasing forgetfulness and frailty is forcing hm to leave his Seattle house and move onto Kirsten’s NYC apartment. As generally sunny as he is, his loss of vigor and independence is hard on him. His impending loss of memory (and of life itself is hard on them both.

Kirsten chronicles the familiar – the doctor’s appointments, the closing of her dad’s practice, the selling of his car and the downsizing of his possessions. And then she grapples with his mortality by staging a series of fictional demises – as he “dies” in a series of quirky accidents, like getting a large appliance dropped on him from a highrise. Other scenes imagine Dick in heaven, dancing with her mom, and dining with Frederick Douglass and Buster Keaton.

DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD

Dick Johnson is indulgent with his daughter and one helluva good sport. There’s even a Seattle “funeral” while Dick is still alive and able to watch from the wings.

Offbeat as it is, the core of Dick Johnson Is Dead is wistful and deeply personal. Dick Johnson Is Dead is streaming on Netflix.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

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Roger Livesey in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

The 1943 masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is a remarkably textured portrait of a man over four decades and his struggles to evolve into new eras. Written and directed by the great British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this is a movie with a sharp message to 1940s audiences about modernity, as well as a subtle exploration of privilege that will resonate today.

The character of Clive Candy, when we first seem him as an old man, is the butt of a humorous scene, being made fun of as out of touch and ridiculously old-fashioned. Candy, a veteran of sabre duels between 19th Century gentleman officers, still naively thinks that wars should be fought according to rules. Made in the urgency of wartime 1943, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp pointedly delivers the message that the old fuddy duddies should get out of the way. Only modern men can fight the quintessentially modern threat – the Nazis with their propaganda and industrialized genocide.

But Powell and Pressburger can make this argument without emasculating or demonizing Blimp; he is a good man, just a good man whose time has passed – and it is what it is.

We see flashbacks of the younger Clive Candy and see his bravery, steadfastness, loyalty, sentimentality, romance, and his occasional wit. He is a man devoted to a code of behavior. always profoundly anchored to doing the right thing and willing to sacrifice (in both love and war).

Candy is also a creature of privilege, and he’s clueless about that privilege. He is an upper crust Englishman in a class-driven, all male and all-white power structure. His day job is serving an empire whose premise is the suppression and exploitation of darker skinned peoples peoples. He never has to compete, on the merits, with women or with the working class or people of color. He just assumes that he should be a military leader and that England should have an empire; but he also unquestionably shoulders the duties and obligations that goes with the leadership and the empire.

Roger Livesey plays Candy as he ages over the forty years. Livesey often played decent and genial romantic leads, and I usually find those roles pretty bland. But here Livesey convincingly depicts a man who believes that he must never change, even as he faces heartbreak or changing times.

Anton Walbrook excels as Candy’s German peer, an officer of Candy’s generation who realizes in the 1940s that their time has passed. I’ve lately warmed to Walbrook, who was typecast as romantic, European dandies early in his career; his later work, in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The 49th Parallel, Max Ophul’s Le Plaisir and La Ronde and the 1940, less well known version of, Gaslight, is excellent.

The always coolly reliable Deborah Kerr appears in multiple roles, playing three different women who show up in Candy’s life.

Powell and Pressburger insert plenty of humor and smart filmmaking to tell this story. The montage of mounted animal heads that spans the period between the world wars is especially witty.

Clive Candy is a creature of his time – which TLADOCB unsentimentally depicts as having passed. But there is value in this man. Just like with Wille Loman – attention must be paid.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp airs October 15 on Turner Clssic Movies and is available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV and the Criterion Channel.

Roger Livesey in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

THE ARTIST’S WIFE: she finds her gifts

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Lena Olin and Bruce Dern in THE ARTIST’S WIFE

In The Artist’s Wife, sixty-something Claire (Lena Olin) is married to a famous, much older, painter Richard (Bruce Dern). You get the idea that Richard has always been a handful, but he is undergoing some disturbing changes. He is increasingly confused and mean, even abusive. Claire is the last to recognize and accept that Richard is sinking into Alzheimer’s.

We see glimpses of Richard as a good catch – affectionate and witty – and he is a superstar of the art world. Now, however, Richard is creatively blocked and drinking more. And the dementia is showing itself in more and more inappropriate behavior, from cruelty to his students to the impulse purchase of a $94,000 clock.

Claire was a painter herself, having sidelined her own career to support Richard’s. Now, seeking relief from Richard’s decline, she rents a studio and starts working herself. More than anything, Clare is generous, and she finds ways to give other great gifts.

The Artist’s Wife is Lena Olin’s movie, and her performance is the best thing about the movie, as her Clare ranges from clueless to desperate to persistent to tipsy to seductive to hurt and, finally, triumphant.

Let’s remember that, in 1988’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Olin played the girlfriend even more beautiful than Juliette Binoche. She can still rock bikini underwear.

Speaking of beauties from the 70s, Stephanie Powers (Hart to Hart) appears (and briefly in full frontal nudity).

Ultimately a Feel Good movie, The Artist’s Wife is streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

SHE IS THE OCEAN: women celebrating the oceans in science and sport

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Ocean Ramsey in SHE IS THE OCEAN

Inna Blokhina’s visually stunning documentary She Is the Ocean explores passion and possibilities. The passion is for celebrating the world’s oceans through science and sport. The possibilities are the great achievements that women can and have achieved in its pursuit.

She Is the Ocean introduces us to a stable of women with astonishing accomplishments, including:

  • Keala Kennelly, the woman’s pro surfing champ who now competes in men’s pro surfing events.
  • Andre Moller, who surfs the monster wave Jaws and paddle boards on the open ocean between Hawaiian Islands.
  • Anna Bader, a championship cliff diver whose highest dive has been from almost eight stories and who trains while pregnant.
  • Marine biologist Ocean Ramsey, known as the Shark Whisperer.
  • Teen surf prodigy Coco Ho, who by age twenty has been voted the world’s second most popular female surfer.
  • Oceanographer Sylvia Earle, still at it 65 years after her first dive, who led the first team of female aquanauts in 1970 and set the record for a single 1000-meter dive.

These women are tied together by their passion. Ramsay says, “I feel more comfortable and more graceful under water. I spend more time with the sharks than my family.“

This Spring, well after She Is the Ocean was completed, Brazilian pro surfer Maya Gabeira conquered a record wave in Portugal, so a woman now holds the Guinness record for surfing the biggest wave ever.

Cinta Hansel in SHE IS THE OCEAN

But the core of She Is the Ocean – and its passion and possibilities – is Balinese Cinta Hansel, the ten-year-old middle daughter of surfer and board shaper Bruce Hansel. Since she was eight, Cinta has aspired to be a world class surfer. Her dad has helped her, and she has become a prodigy. She is absolutely determined, and the joy she feels in the surf is infectious.

Inna Blokhina and her team of cinematographers and editors have created a visual masterpiece in glorious 4K. The underwater and surf shots are stunning. One “money shot” is of Ocean Ramsey getting a tow from a Great White. Another is Andrea Moller standing on her paddle board a few feet from the giant tail of a whale.

You can watch She Is Ocean on October 16 in a virtual screening from the Balboa, the Vogue and the Rafael in the Bay Area.