Movies

UNCUT GEMS: neo-noir in a pressure cooker

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Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Adam Sandler and filmmaking brothers Benny and Josh Safdie serve up neo-noir in a pressure cooker in the relentlessly tense Uncut Gems.

Howard (Adam Sandler) is a Jewish jewelry dealer in New York City’s Diamond District, who makes his big bucks catering to NBA stars brought in by his associate (LaKeith Stanfield). He’s also a gambling addict. One of the consequences of gambling addiction is losing more than you can afford and owing money that you don’t have to very nasty people.

Kevin Garnett, LaKeith Stanfield and Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Howard has a lot – a wife and kids in a luxurious suburban house, a young mistress in a Manhattan apartment, a thriving business. But he’s always on the verge of losing it all because it’s not enough; his life is driven by the compulsion to make five figure exotic sports bets.

That means that he is constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul, shifting money, jewelry, schemes and bullshit around like a spinning plate act on The Ed Sullivan Show. Throughout Uncut Gems, the chaos elevates, as Howard bets on being bailed out by the Big Sale and the Big Bet. There’s a massive Ethiopian opal (a MacGuffin like the Maltese Falcon), a spine chilling auction and an even more gripping sports bet.

It’s clear that the inevitable will catch up with Howard – we just don’t know where it will fall on the continuum between having all of the bones in his hand broken and wearing cement shoes in the East River. Or whether his spiking blood pressure will send him out with a stroke or heart attack. Come to think of it, this probably isn’t the best movie choice for a cardiologist.

Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS

Here’s the challenge that the Safdies faced in writing this character and that Sandler faced in playing him. How do you make him just appealing enough to keep us engaged with his situation? This is a guy who, were we in the same family or community, we would dread his every approach (Here comes trouble).

This is an extraordinary, awards-worthy performance by Sandler; he inhabits a perpetually frenetic guy, fueled by his compulsions and by the resultant desperation.

Idina Menzel is superb as the wife who knows Howard best and assesses him the most accurately (and cruelly). Stanfield is very good, as are Julia Fox as the girlfriend and Eric Bogosian as a frustrated creditor. Former NBA star Kevin Garnett plays NBA star Kevin Garnett and holds his own with the professional actors.

The 2 hours and 15 minutes of Uncut Gems flies by (and you feel like you’ve been running the whole time). This is one of the Best Movies of 2019.

THE TWO POPES: surprising complexity

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Anthony Hopkins in THE TWO POPES

Refusing to play it safe, director Francisco Meirelles elevates The Two Popes from would have been a satisfying acting showcase into a thought-provoker. The Two Popes is based on the transition of the papacy from the reactionary German Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) to the tolerant, social justice advocate Argentine Bergoglio (Pope Francis).

Of course, we expect great performances from two of our greatest screen actors, Anthony Hopkins (as Ratzinger) and Jonathan Pryce (Bergoglio). These guys are great, especially Hopkins, who has the task of making us see the humanity in a cold, humorless, doctrinaire character.

The story is a natural odd couple match-up set in a moment of historical drama, and, with Pryce and Hopkins, that would be enough for most filmmakers. But Meirelles takes it up a notch with an unexpected second flashback to Bergoglio’s career as a Jesuit leader during the brutal Argentine coup in the 1970’s. I didn’t se this coming, and it illuminates Bergoglio’s experience, more complicated than initially apparent. Credit the construction and the added complexity to Meirelles (City of God) screenwriter Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hour The Theory of Everything).

BTW The Two Popes is shot in the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel, and the papal summer getaway, Castel Gandolfo. Way cool.

The Two Popes is streaming on Netflix.

MIDNIGHT FAMILY: an all-night race for pesos

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Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY. Cuurtesy of SFFILM

In his gripping documentary Midnight Family, filmmaker Luke Lorentzen takes us on ridealongs with an all-night ambulance crew in Mexico City. It’s even wilder than you may expect.

Midnight Family is set in an absurd situation with life-and-death stakes. We learn right away that there are only 45 government-operated ambulances in Mexico City, a metropolis of 9 million. The rest of the ambulances are private and mostly independents.

Competition is cut throat. The private ambulances listen to police scanners and then TRY TO OUTRACE each other to the scene. One of these independent ambulances is the Ochoa family’s business.

Fernando Ochoa is the head of the family, and he collects the ambulance fee from hospitals and patients. His 17-year-old son Juan is the voluble front man and driver, who careens them through the Mexico City streets at alarming speed. The Ochoa’s colleague, the even-tempered medic Manuel, rides in the back. The youngest Ochoa son, pudgy, Ruffles-devouring 10-year-old Josue, rides along as a gopher. BTW there are no seat belts in the back.

The private ambulances operate in a shady world of semi-formal licensing, so they can always be shut down arbitrarily by the cops. Indeed, we even see the Ochoas arrested while trying to take a patient to the hospital. It’s common for the police to extract bribes from the vulnerable ambulance crews.

There is an incentive to steer patients to the private hospitals that will pay the ambulance crews, so their business is, by its nature, often a hustle; there are some instances of ethical ambiguity. Aiming to depict a “wide spectrum”, Lorentzen balances life-saving heroics with the more sketchy moments. Getting payment out of a grieving family when the loved one dies on the way to the hospital is, well, awkward.

Here is the Ochoa’s business model. Ideally, they get paid about $250 to deliver a patient to a private hospital. They deduct the cost of gasoline, medical supplies and police bribes, and then split what’s left four ways. If a patient can’t or won’t pay, if the vehicle breaks down, or if the cops shut them down – the Ochoas are out of luck.

Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY. Cuurtesy of SFFILM

Fernando is silent but expressive. Carrying an alarming belly, he stoically juggles an assortment pills to treat his chronic illness. The loquacious Juan is a born front man, and basically provides play-by-play commentary throughout the film in real time. We see him downloading the previous night’s drama over the phone to his girlfrend Jessica and, by loud speaker, directing other Mexico City drivers out of his way.

Fernando and Juan sleep on the floor of a downscale apartment, and they never know if they’ll make enough money for tomorrow’s gasoline. It’s an incredibly stressful existence. How resilient can they be? Is there any limit to the stress they can absorb? As Lorentzen himself says, this is “a world where no one is getting what they need”.

I saw Midnight Family at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), which included an in-person Q&A with Lorenzen. Lorentzen spent 80-90 nights with the crew. About 70% of the film comes from the last three nights that he rode with the Ochoas.

Midnight Family joins a mini-genre of rogue ambulance cinema. The very dark Argentine narrative Carancho stars the great Ricardo Darin as a LITERALLY ambulance-chasing lawyer. In the Hungarian dark comedy Heavenly Shift (I saw it at the 2014 Cinequest), an outlaw ambulance crew gets kickbacks from a shady funeral director if the patient dies en route to the hospital.

Midnight Family is just concluding a run at the Roxie in San Francisco. I’ll let you know when it’s streamable. Midnight Family is one of the nest documentaries of the year, and on my Best Movies of 2019.

ASH IS PUREST WHITE: a survivor’s journey

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Fan Liao and Tao Zhao in ASH IS PUREST WHITE

Ash Is Purest White is writer-director Zhangke Jia’s portrait of an unforgettable woman surviving betrayal, the crime world and the tidal waves of change in modern China, all embedded in a gangster neo-noir.

Qiao (Tao Zhao), is the tough and spirited girlfriend of the provincial jianghu gang leader Bin (Fan Liao). They are the big fish in their little pond, and they are relishing life. Then circumstances change – great and unperceived economic forces are enervating their hometown and a younger rival gang emerges. Qiao takes a heroic action with severe consequnces. When she re-emerges, she finds herself personally betrayed and unsupported. The seventeen-year span of Ash Is Purest White follows Qiao as she roams across China to rebuild her life. She is at times devastated but refuses to accept permanent defeat.

Tao Zhao in ASH IS PUREST WHITE

Tao Zhao is Jia’s wife and muse. Ash Is Purest White is a sweeping epic, and it is her movie. Her performance is a tour de force. Watch her portray Qiao’s confidence in the opening scenes, her resourcefulness and ingenious cons when she is dumped out on her own and the resolve that powers her quest. Fan Liao is also excellent as Bin.

As Qiao’s journey spans almost two decades and thousands of miles, we get insights into contemporary China. Jia’s China is a place where, when the coal industry plays out in one city, the government builds a new city for hundreds of thousands of people to movie into the oil industry. Economic forces sweep across China like flash floods that inundate and sudenly recede. Qiao rides these changes like a fishing bobber on the surface of a tsunami.

Tao Zhao in ASH IS PUREST WHITE

We are familiar with movies about the Mafia and yakuza, but Ash Is Purest White is a glimpse into jianghu – their Chinese equivalent.

Ash is Purest White is on my list of Best Movies of 2019, and it’s streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE IRISHMAN: gangsters – an epic reflection

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Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in THE IRISHMAN

I know that I’m late to the party with these comments, especially since I saw The Irishman at its first Silicon Valley screening. Since then, I’ve been ruminating on why it’s so good.

The titular Irishman is Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a WW II vet, who starts out as a truck driver who diverts his meat deliveries to his own “buyers”. He meets Mafia leader Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), who mentors him, and Sheeran becomes a professional hit man. Through Bufalino, Sheeran also becomes close to Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Like Hoffa, Sheeran and Bufalino were real people. Scorsese takes Sheeran’s life through the decades in this gangland saga.

The Irishman is based on real events. Even the Frank Sheeran appreciation banquet with Jimmy Hoffa and Jerry Vale really happened. Of course, Scorsese ‘s solution to the What Happened to Jimmy Hoffa mystery is imagined, but it does conform to one of the more credible hypotheses.

Besides Bufalino and Sheeran, the characters of real life gangsters Tony Pro Provenzano, Fat Tony Salerno, Angelo Bruno and Crazy Joe Gallo figure in The Irishman’s plot, and we also glimpse Allen Dorfman, Tony Jack Giacalone, Joe Colombo, Sam Giancana and Albert Anastasia.

There is plenty of familiar mob lore – I particularly love the reference to a nickname, “the OTHER Whispers“. But this is a less glamorized Mafia than is usual for a gangster flick – the violence is decidedly unheroic. The toxic impact upon family members is unvarnished.

The Irishman is also a comment on the decline of the Mob. By the end, for all the omerta, we’ve reached a world where these guys (except for Frank Sheeran) routinely rat each other out. When we see the aged Sheeran in the retirement facility, we understand that his storied criminal career hadn’t gotten him any more creature comfort than if he had retired with the Teamster’s pension of an honest trucker. – and he might have instead had the support of an affectionate family.

DeNiro is excellent in The Irishman, as are all the cast members. I really enjoyed Steven “Little Steven” Van Zandt in his cameo as crooner Jerry Vale. British actor Stephen Graham has gotten a lot of plaudits for his as Tony Pro. Four other performances stand out for me.

Joe Pesci has made his acting career playing hair-trigger, tinderbox gangsters. In contrast, his Russell Bufalino is completely contained and ever in control. At one point, Hoffa refuses his request, and Bufalino does not explode or threaten; Pesci’s eyes barely register that Bufalino has made n irreparable decision.

Al Pacino, of course can play chilly (Michael Corleone in The Godfather or volatile (in Dog Day Afternoon and thirty other roles). Here, he perfectly captures Hoffa’s strong will, audacity and smarts (the key to his success) and his hotheadedness (his Achilles heel). This is one of Pacino’s many Oscar nomination-worthy performances.

Anna Paquin and Marin Ireland play the grown-up versions of Sheeran’s daughters. Sheeran’s murderous life has impacted them in ways that he will never understand. As adults, the daughters are no longer afraid of their father and become estranged from him. Paquin shows us her character’s feelings with very few lines. In one brief but riveting monologue, Ireland tries to connects the dot explicitly.

Al Pacino in THE IRISHMAN

Hoffa is an especially interesting character who really hasn’t been captured onscreen as well as he is here. Hoffa was a strategic genius who recognized that putting every Teamster workplace under a single, unified national contract would give the union unmatched bargaining power – from the capacity to essentially shut down all of the shipping and transportation in North America. To accomplish that, he needed the Teamster locals on the coasts to temporarily stagnate their higher pay until the lower-paid locals in the middle of the country could catch up. Because the East Coast locals were mobbed up, he needed – and sought – the cooperation of the Mafia. So, his dalliance with the mob was strategic, aimed at getting him power for his members, not to personally enrich himself as would the garden-variety crook.

Netflix’s investment allowed Scorsese to use a computer special effect to alter the appearances of DeNiro (age 76), Pacino (79) and Pesci (76) so they could play flashback scenes of their characters thirty years before. I knew this technique was used before I saw The Irishman, but I didn’t notice it.

The Irishman is a three-and-a-half hour movie. As The Wife noted, that is indulgent. But it doesn’t drag, and I enjoyed every minute of Scorsese’s masterwork. I saw it in a theater, but The Irishman is streaming on Netflix.

Here’s a bonus treat: Jason Gorber dissects the soundtrack in The Slash.

63 UP: a generation faces mortality

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63 Up is the latest chapter in the greatest documentary series in cinema history (and on my list of Greatest Movies of All Time). Starting with Seven Up! in 1964, director Michael Apted has followed the same fourteen British children, filming snapshots of their lives at ages 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49. and 56 – and now at age 63. Choosing kids from different backgrounds, the series started as a critique of the British class system, but has since evolved into a broader exploration of what factors can lead to success and happiness at different stages of human life. (Apted was the hands-on researcher, not the director on Seven Up! and then directed the next nine films in the series.)

We have seen these characters live roller coaster lives.  The surprise in 56 Up was how contented they seemed to be, having independently reached a stage in their lives where they live with acceptance and satisfaction; the subjects had already weathered their broken marriages and other dramas and seemed to have settled into themselves.  The same is true of 63 Up, but there is more reflection in light of mortality.  There’s a death and a life-threatening illness, but all the characters understand that they’re longer at the beginning of their lives.

Because Apted includes clips from earlier films to set the stage for each character, you don’t need to watch all nine movies.  Because there is so little conflict in 63 Up, it would be ideal to first screen an edgier film like 35 Up or 42: Forty Two Up.  The earlier films are difficult, perhaps impossible, to find streaming, but the entire series (Seven Up!, Seven Plus Seven, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up, 42 Up, 49 Up, 56 Up) is available on Netflix DVDs. 56 Up is streamable on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Kanopy.

The theme of the series at the outset was “Give me a boy of seven and I will give you the man“. This time, Apted asks this question directly of the subjects, with varying results.

As usual, the voluble Tony and the utterly unpredictable Neil are the stars, but I got more out of the stories of Symon and Paul than I had ever before.  The biggest surprise for me was the earnest do-gooder teacher Bruce, who I hadn’t ever envisaged as a jovial family patriarch.

63 UP

Michael Apted is a big time director (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist).  It is remarkable that he has returned so faithfully to his subjects in the Up series. 

I saw 63 Up at the Mill Valley Film Festival, with Apted in attendance. Apted is now 78, and hopes to direct 70 Up if he still has mental acuity. Apted acknowledges that his biggest mistake was not including enough girls at the outset (four girls out of fourteen kids); he’s tried to address it by expanding the roles of several of the male subjects’ female partners.

The Up series is significant and unique cinema – see 63 Up if you can.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL: still the best after 68 years

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Alastair Sim in A CHRISTMAS CAROL

On December 23, Turner Classic Movies brings us that Holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, and I’m talking about the 1951 version with Alastair Sim. Since the 1908 Tom Ricketts silent version, this Charles Dickens story has been made over 60 times for the screen. Scrooge has been played by George C Scott, Bill Murray, Rich Little, Cecily Tyson, Patrick Stewart, Jim Carrey and Kelsey Grammer. (But NOT, to my knowledge, by Nicolas Cage, Christopher Walken, Toshiro Mifune or Zac Efron.)

Alastair Sim’s performance as Scrooge elevates this 1951 version; Sim perfectly modulates Scrooge’s transformation from impervious meanness to vulnerability. A Christmas Carol was, by far, the highlight of Sim’s screen credits; he was primarily a stage actor, who appeared in 46 West End productions. It’s a simple but compelling story, and everyone can relate to the curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge, his touching backstory and his joyous redemption.

KNIVES OUT: born on third base and thought they hit a triple

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Daniel Craig in KNIVES OUT

Writer-director Rian Johnson explodes the genre of the drawing room murder mystery in the gloriously entertaining Knives Out.

Knives Out opens at the country estate of a multi-millionaire author (Chistopher Plummer), where he is found dead. If he was murdered, it had to be at the hands of his sweet caregiver Marta (Ana de Armas) or a member of his icky family of ingrates (Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Chris Evans). A Hercule Poirot-type consulting detective (Daniel Craig with a Southern accent) arrives to investigate, and the game is afoot.

I’ve met plenty of folks like the author’s family, who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. That’s what Knives Out is really about – a wickedly funny send-up of totally unjustified entitlement. One of the running jokes is that they claim that Marta is “one of the family”, but none can remember which Latin American country she’s from.

Despite Daniel Craig’s turn as the famed detective, this is really Ana de Armas’ movie, and she is superb. All of the cast are excellent, but everyone except de Armas and Plummer play very broad characters. BTW De Armas plays Paloma, the Bond Girl, to Craig’s James Bond in No Time to Die (coming in April 2020).

Ana de Armas in KNIVES OUT

I recently wrote about Rian Johnson’s 2005 breakthrough Brick, which inhabited the form of another familiar movie genre – film noir. In Nate Jones’ interview in Vulture, Johnson says “One thing I don’t believe in is the notion that this is a dusty old genre and you have to find a way to flip the old tropes on their heads. The basic machinery of it, the tropes of it, are why it works.”

Johnson slyly (and without comment) inserts a shot of Marta’s mom watching a rerun of Angela Lansbury in a Murder, She Wrote, dubbed in Spanish. And the great M. Emmet Walsh has a cameo as the aged security guy who proudly explains the VHS-based security camera system.

Knives Out works as a darkly funny murder mystery and as a pointed social satire. It’s one of the year’s smartest and funniest films.

MARRIAGE STORY: the comedy helps us watch the tragedy

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MARRIAGE STORY

Noah Baumbach’s family dramedy Marriage Story, one of the very best films of 2019, traces two good people who care for each other at the end of their marriage.  It’s a heartfelt film about a personal tragedy that has some of the funniest moments on screen this year.

Charlie (Adam Driver) is a theater director and Nicole (Scarlett Johannson) is an actress.   They are married with an eight-year-old son Henry.  Nicole’s career is taking her to California, while Charlie’s is anchored to his beloved New York.  Adults might be able to manage a bicoastal relationship, but the kid needs to have his school and his friends in one place or the other. 

The two try to complete an amicable divorce, but their disagreement over the kid’s primary home unintentionally plunges them into a litigation nightmare, with a cascade of stress added by the lawyers and the courts.  It’s been written elsewhere, but I need to add that Nicole and Charlie are horrified by a system that is working as designed.  There’s a wonderful shot of Charlie and Nicole sitting apart on an near-empty subway car, exhausted, bereft and unable to support each other.

In a masterstroke, Baumbach introduces his lead characters with each spouse’s assessment of what is so lovable about the other.  Then we sober up when we learn what prompted the essays.

We relate to both Charlie and Nicole, and Driver and Johansson perfectly inhabit these good folks, slipping into a deeper nightmare with each step in the process.  Near the end, the two have the raw argument that they had each been too nice to have before.

I think that the reason Marriage Story works is that Johansson and Driver can go through their characters’ pain with complete authenticity while amidst all the funny supporting characters.  

Laura Dern and Ray Liotta play top echelon Divorce Lawyers to the Stars. Alan Alda plays a sage older attorney who has lost something off his fastball.  Dern’s riotously funny performance is a lock for an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.  Dern, Liotta, Alda, Julie Haggerty, Merritt Wever and Wallace Shawn are each hilarious.  Azhy Robertson (Juliet, Naked) is very good as the kid.

At one point, the court appoints a child evaluator to visit Charlie and judge his relationship with his child.  Having any stranger parachute into your home, with your parenting rights at stake, would be stressful.   Martha Kelly is superb as an especially humorless evaluator, an oddball impervious to Charlie’s charms and oblivious to any of his positive attributes.  As things start going wrong, Charlie gets more and more desperate and the scene gets funnier.

Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver in MARRIAGE STORY

Director Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is informed by the end of his own marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. He acknowledges “a connection to the material”, but that it’s not only about his divorce. He is generous enough to write the character of Charlie with self-absorbed cluelessness about his impact to Nicole’s career aspirations.

I liked Baumbach’s first movie The Squid and the Whale, about his own parents’ divorce. But my reaction to all his subsequent work until now has ranged from to indifference to antipathy; “detest” is the adjective that springs to mind. Despite my bias, I gotta admit that Marriage Story is so, so good that it solidifies Baumbach’s place as an American auteur. Baumbach should head into awards season as the favorite for the screenplay Oscar.

A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. It’s a masterpiece, and among the very best cinema of 2019. It’s a Must See. I saw Marriage Story in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  You can find it theaters now, and it will stream on Netflix beginning on Friday, December 6.

Tomorrow night: Warren Oates’ best

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Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

One of my favorite actors is Warren Oates, whose crowning achievement, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, plays on TCM on December 6. This is a Sam Peckinpah film, one of those 1970s neo-noirs that was perfect for Oates. Oates plays a hard scrabble grasper, and you just know things are not going to go well for him.