The amiable documentary The Booksellers slips us into the obscure world of antiquarian book collectors and dealers. It’s a passion that few of us share, but, for the few, a passion it is indeed.
The subject here (old books) is LITERALLY dry. The sparks of interest come from the people who treasure and covet them. These folks are mostly, but not all, old white men. The introduction of a younger female dealer, fiery and committed, brings some welcome energy.
The conflict in this story is with the times – with the trajectory of books themselves driving the future of book collecting.
The Booksellers can be streamed from Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube and Google Play.
An agreeable star playing a disagreeable character, Gemma Arterton elevates the melodrama Summerland. Arterton plays a writer self-isolating in an English country village. Self-absorbed, crusty and even mean, she finds herself being assigned to care for a young boy evacuated from the London Blitz.
Why is she like this? We learn that she has been damaged, first by the childhood loss of her father, and then by the loss of her great love. It turns out that everyone in Summerland is damaged by loss – after all, there is a devastating war going on. And, the English are not disposed to letting out their feelings.
Summerland is about addressing the needs of one child. The war has made his parents unavailable, his guardian is reluctant and poorly-equipped, and the emotional capacity of his community is not apparent.
There are two surprises in the plot, and the biggest one is unpredictable; both are contrived – you can either suspend disbelief or not. I was watching with two women who couldn’t get past the unsympathetic behavior of the writer to embrace the story.
Once again, Gemma Arterton proves that she is versatile and can carry a movie on her own. Her work has ranged across genres to the Bond Girl in Quantum of Solace. In the light comedy Tamara Drewe, the main joke is that the main character suddenly transforms into someone who looks as stunning as, well, Gemma Arterton. In Gemma Bovery, Arteron and the French comic actor Fabrice Luchini deliver a smart, contemporary take on Madame Bovary.
The supporting cast is excellent: Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle and lots of TV), Penelope Wilton (Downton Abbey), Tom Courtenay (Oscar-nominated decades apart for The Dresser and Doctor Zhivago) and Sian Phillips (Livia in I, Claudius back in 1976).
This is the first feature for writer-director Jessica Swale, She did an excellent job directing the child actors – Lucas Bond and Dixie Egerickx (now starring in The Secret Garden) – to fine performances.
Summerland is essentially a melodrama that finally arrives at a heartwarming conclusion; as such, it’s moderately satisfying. Summerland is available from all the major streaming services
The infectious We Got the Beat by the Go-Go’s is fun itself, distilled into a song. The documentary The Go-Go’s tells the story of the all-female band.
There is a familiar arc to every documentary about a rock band. Scrappy and hungry musicians perform the music they love in obscurity, before being suddenly thrust into worldwide fame and more cash than they could have imagined. Then the bubble is burst by some combination of drug abuse, internal jealousy, creative differences, personality conflicts and fights over money. Usually the survivors look back with pride in the music, nostalgia about the good times and regrets that they didn’t handle it all with more maturity.
The Go-Go’s fits in that framework, to be sure, but it’s about women. The Go-Go’s have been the only all-female band to write their own music and play their own instruments ever to have a number one Billboard record. They achieved that in 1982, and it hasn’t been duplicated since.
All five Go-Go’s thankfully have survived and each shares her experiences in The Go-Go’s. They are an open, engaging and likeable lot.
There’s a tidbit about the gentlemanly class shown by The Police. And we learn why none of the Go-Go’s is proud of their appearance on Saturday Night Live.
This is a modest film about a singular moment in popular music. The Go-Go’s is available on Showtime.
Drawn from the experience of writer/director Karen Maine’s own youth, the sweet coming of age comedy Yes, God, Yes, aims pointed jabs at religious hypocrisy. Bobbing in a sea of peer pressure, Catholic high schooler Alice (Natalia Dyer) heads off with the popular kids to a four-day retreat.
The retreat center is buried in the woods, and the retreat itself has some cultish aspects, with overly smiley/huggy teen youth leaders squeezing out highly personal confessions Authority-with-a-capital-A is present in the form of the high school’s stern young priest. The entire program is designed to make kids feel guilty about their normal, healthy feelings and to scare them from doing what everyone does naturally.
Amusing throughout, this is not a broad comedy, and there aren’t many guffaws. Instead, it’s a piercing satire based on arch observation of human behavior. The moment where Alice is able to leverage an adult’s hypocrisy against him is very satisfying,
The ironic title, of course, is something someone cries while literally coming a age.
Susan Blackwell is a low-profile character actor who just shows up and steals movies, as she did in last year’s Auggie. In Yes, God, Yes, she’s the character Gina, who owns a lesbian bar and rides a motorcycle, and it’s another great performance.
The Wife was raised Catholic, and she enjoyed this film. Yes, God, Yes is available to stream on Virtual Cinema and will be available from the usual VOD platforms after July 2
David Halberstam (left) and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON
Dateline-Saigon documents the efforts of five journalists to cover the Vietnam War in the face of a US government which did not want the facts to be told. The five were Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan, Horst Faas, David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, who amassed a bucket of Pulitzers between them.
What they found in Vietnam was that American policy was not working, because (among many factors) the Diem regime was alienating most of its own population, the South Vietnamese Army was less motivated to fight than the Viet Cong, and that Americans were more directly involved in combat than had been acknowledged. And the US government didn’t want any of this reported.
As Dateline-Saigon says, “When these patriotic journalists arrive in Vietnam, they had no idea they would become the enemy“, meaning the truth-wielding enemy of the US government propaganda. The reporters describe the government efforts to obscure, mislead, spin, hide and controvert the facts as a “vast lying machine” and the “Truth Suppressors”.
Quang Lien and Malcolm Browne (center) in DATELINE-SAIGON (AP Photo)
All television news viewers (especially a ten-year-old The Movie Gourmet) were shocked by the 1963 Buddhist monk’s self-immolation to protest the Diem regime in 1963. No one was more shocked than Browne, who was covering the Buddhist march, and, to his surprise and horror, had this unfold a few steps in front of him.
Sheehan is famous for uncovering the Pentagon Papers. Beginning with The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam banged out bestseller after bestseller on 20th century American history. Arnett went to cover dozens of conflicts interview Osama Bin-Laden and was a major media face of the Iraq War.
This is a Must See for students of journalism and of the Vietnam War Era of American History. You can stream Dateline-Saigon on iTunes.
Walter Mercado in MUCHO MUCHO AMOR: THE LEGEND OF WALTER MERCADO
Just about every Spanish speaker knows who Walter Mercado is – and almost no non-Spanish speaker has heard of him. To describe him as a TV astrologer is profoundly inadequate.
Decades ago, I was flipping through TV channels and happened upon Walter’s astrology show and found him mesmerizing. He was so UNUSUAL, that, late at night, I just couldn’t change the station. The documentaryMucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado will explain the phenomenon better than I can describe it.
For one thing, 99% of the show’s production value must have been in costume cost. Walter just stood in front of the camera and recited horoscopes, but he was always clad in capes that Liberace and Elvis would have considered WAY over the top. And Walter, for all the machismo in traditional Latino culture, was what we call today non-binary; Walter emanated a singular combination of androgyny and asexuality.
In Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, we get to meet the elderly Mercado, and find out about his life before and after his 25-year reign as the Spanish language TV ratings king. And why he suddenly disappeared from television.
While often jaw-droppingly flamboyant, Walter possessed a serene gentleness and warm-hearted demeanor that makes this documentary a Feel Good experience. Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado is streaming on Netflix.
Writer-director Christopher Munch notes that it’s difficult to have a serious discussion of extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth; he notes that talk of UFOs brings giggles and that “gatekeepers in the media” avoid the subject, fearing that they won’t seem smart anymore. That’s the territory he plumbs in The 11th Green. There are no lovable ETs or terrifying space monsters or flying saucers in The 11th Green, just a life-and-death conspiracy of secrets.
Suppose there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Now it’s not much of a leap that such intelligent life would have visited Earth. If THAT has happened, then maybe humans have noticed the visitors – or maybe even humans have been contacted by the visitors.
The 11th Green starts with the premise that extraterrestrials visited and made contact in the 1950s, but the leadership of that American generation, having experienced Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, has suppressed the news until the public can be prepared not to panic. The conspiracy of secrecy has survived to this day.
Our protagonist, Jeremy Rudd (Campbell Scott), is a DC-based science journalist. He has been estranged from his father, an Air Force General retired from the national security elite. When his father dies, Jeremy travels to his father’s home in Palm Desert, California, to handle the estate. There, he goes through his father’s stuff and meets his father’s peers, including a fascist general, an oleaginous spook and his dad’s nubile assistant.
As Jeremy unpeels the onion of his father’s career, he uncovers the story of the Millennium. And here’s where Munch launches his trademark Magical Realism. Weird shit starts happening – but all with its own internally consistent logic.
Ike and Mamie Eisenhower show up as characters in The 11th Green, along with a retired President Barack Obama and post-war Defense Secretary James Forrestal. (Jeremy’s father had been living in the former winter retirement home of President Eisenhower on the 11th green). You need to suspend disbelief here – do it.
I loved Christopher Munch’s previous film, Letters from the Big Man, a work of uncommon beauty. Munch’s magical realism worked there because he presented it absolutely straight, as if having a lovelorn Sasquatch in the forest setting was as normal as a squirrel. Sadly, Letters from the Big Man is currently difficult to find.
The cerebral and reserved Campbell Scott is perfectly cast as the offbeat, but always contained, brainiac Jeremy. Religiously scientific, Jeremy always follows the data, even when the data takes him to what others would find unbelievable. More than a little OCD, he makes the emergency trip from DC to Palm Desert – on a train!
I am resistant to science fiction generally, But I went with the story, and found The 11th Green to be absorbing and satisfying – and another completely original work from Christopher Munch. You can buy a virtual ticket for The 11th Green – and support the Roxie Theater – at Theatrical-At-Home.
Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo is a satisfying documentary on an extraordinarily redemptive life. A vicious criminal addicted to heroin like his gangster uncle, Danny Trejo got one lucky break in San Quentin and used the opportunity to go into recovery. Working as a drug counselor, he happened on to a movie set, and, what do you know, Danny’s got over 300 screen credits and 50 years of recovery,
There’s plenty of Danny and his friends and family in Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo, and there’s remarkable detail about his journey from the tough streets of Pacoima to, well, to Pacoima. Emphasizing an essential point of 12-step programs, Danny points out that every good thing that has happened to him has come when he has been in service to others.
Yeah, this is a feel-good story, but I didn’t find it corny. We really can’t have too much redemption these days.
Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo can be streamed from Amazon, Vudu, TouTube and Google Play.
John Lewis (on far right) in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble traces the life of civil rights icon, US Representative John Lewis. I usually don’t buy reverential biodocs, but when the subject is a freaking saint, I guess you have to go with it. The rest of the title comes from Lewis’ mantra – if you see injustice, make good trouble, necessary trouble.
John Lewis, of course, is a real American hero. As a very young man in 1965, he had been leading efforts to register Blacks to vote in Selma, Alabama, including a peaceful march to the State Capitol in Montgomery. On March 7, 1965, the march got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma when they were attached by local law enforcement and Ku Klux Klan members under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark. Lewis was in the very first rank and was beaten, shedding his own blood on “Bloody Sunday”. Two subsequent marches on the bridge and the LBJ speech that followed led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the most important civil rights legislation since 1867.
In John Lewis: Good Trouble, we see footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We see a young John Lewis being beaten in 1965, and we see an elderly Lewis in an anniversary march with President Barack Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
John Lewis: Good Trouble is well-sourced by director Dawn Porter, even though only a few of Lewis’ contemporaries survive. When the first Black president was elected, Lewis says he wept for JFK, RFK, Dr. King and the others who hadn’t lived to see it. Fortunately, Lewis has sisters sill alive who participate in the documentary.
We get an inside glimpse at Lewis’ childhood. We get to see Lewis watching footage of himself at a pivotal Nashville sit-in that he had “never seen”. And, this intimate portrait shows us some dry Lewis humor and some impressive octogenarian dance moves.
How did Lewis get to Congress? John Lewis: Good Trouble shows us the race against his longtime friend and fellow Civil Rights icon Julian Bond. My day job is in politics, and I understand that, to win, you have to do what you have to do to win; others may find this episode bracing and unsettling.
John Lewis: Good Trouble is an insightful view of a man and of a critical point in American history. You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Catherine Denueve in THE TRUTH. Photo courtesy of IFC Films.
In The Truth, writer-director Hirozaki Koreeda’s latest wry and authentic exploration of human behavior, Catherine Deneuve plays Fabienne, one of France’s most iconic living actresses. Her daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), a screenwriter living in New York, brings her family to Paris for a visit to celebrate the publication of Fabienne’s memoir.
As the film opens, an imperious Fabienne is being interviewed by a journalist so mediocre that he’s not ashamed of plagiarizing his questions – and Fabienne doesn’t suffer fools.
Fabienne is a diva who demands to be doted upon, and she is a Real Piece of Work. Fabienne has been so career-focused that she sacrificed an emotional attachment to Lumir, who received maternal nurturing from Sarah, a now-deceased peer of Fabienne’s who Fabienne had screwed out of a career-making role.
Her self-worshipful memoir is ridiculously also entitled The Truth. The book falsely paints Fabienne as an attentive, model mother, doesn’t even mention her longtime assistant and inaccurately claims that Lumir’s father is dead.
Lumir’s resentments quickly bubble to the surface, the two probe and spar throughout he movie. Each sees her own experience as a “truth”. The Truth is about their journeys to accept the other’s point of view and on what terms. It’s very funny, and, thanks to Hirokeeda’s touch, remarkably genuine.
Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Catherine Deneuve and Clémentine Grenier in THE TRUTH. Photo courtesy of IFC Films.
Fabienne is now shooting a movie where she plays the mother of a much younger French film star (Manon Clavel), and the ever-competitive Fabienne has manufactured a one-sided rivalry with her, as she had with Sarah. (The film-within-a-film is a sci fi exploration of mother-daughter angst which I think I would hate if it were a real movie).
I’ve seen four of Koreeda’s movies and they’re all brilliant: Still Walking, Our Little Sister, The Third Murder and The Shoplifters. I rated The Shoplifters among the four best movies of 2018. The Truth is Koreeda’s first film made outside Japan and in languages (French and English) other than Japanese.
Deneuve and Binoche are superb. All of the cast is excellent, including Ethan Hawke, who is a good enough sport to play Lumir’s tag-along husband, a good-hearted but modestly talented American TV actor. The firecracker child actress Clémentine Grenier, in her first film, soars as Lumir and Hank’s daughter Charlotte; Charlotte wants to become an actress like her grandma, and Clémentine just might attain that herself.
The Truth also benefits from the beautiful work of cinematographer Eric Gautier (Ash Is Purest White, The Motorcycle Diaries, Summer Hours).
The Truth may not be Koreeda’s very best, but it’s plenty good. Hirokeeda, such an insightful observer of behavior, can cut to the core his characters’ profound humanity. The Truth is streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
