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.
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.
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.
Here’s a chance to see a brilliant movie almost nobody has seen in 43 years. The Roxie and BAMPFA are screening Joseph Losey’s slowburn thriller Mr. Klein, a searing critique of French collaboration with the Nazis. Mr. Klein stars Alain Delon as a predator trapped by his own obsession.
To make sure we understand the stakes, Mr. Klein opens with a sobering pseudo-medical exam, absurdly intended to determine if a woman is Jewish; the waiting room overflows with others awaiting the humiliating and terrifying “examination”.
Only then do we meet Robert Klein (Delon) in his splendid silk dressing gown, living in an opulent Paris apartment with his randy mistress. Klein is a bottom feeder who profits from the desperation of Jewish art collectors; when they flee France to escape the Nazis, Klein unapologetically buys their art at rock bottom prices.
Then Klein gets a Jewish newspaper delivered to his door. He is Alsatian and his name is Klein, but some Jews are named Klein. There is another Robert Klein – a Jewish Klein. What is the extent of the mistaken identity? Is it inadvertent, or is someone trying to paint Klein as Jewish? Who is this other Robert Klein, and is he masterminding a frame job? Klein hits the streets in his trench coat and fedora, trying to solve the mystery himself.
Klein’s journey becomes surreal and then Kafkaesque, as what he thinks is a whodunit is interspersed with clips of the ever more riuhkess French police hunting down Jews. Klein, at first only vaguely understanding that he, too, is at risk, is racing against the clock.
The improbably handsome Alain Delon has eyes that can switch off any glimmer of empathy – perfect for playing sociopaths. The best analysis of Delon’s gift is Sheila O’Malley‘s.
Mr. Klein showcases Delon at 41, after his iconic run of Jean-Pierre Melville crime classics: Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic. Seven years earlier, he had been able to play the young guy matched with Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura in The Sicilian Clan. Now, even with his still dazzling looks, Delon has the weight of a life lived into his forties.
Mr. Klein also features a slate of French actresses: the great Jeanne Moreau, Francine Bergé, Juliet Berto and Francine Racette. Michael Lonsdale, so good in The Day of the Jackal three years before, is also excellent here (and has his own luxurious dressing gown).
Joseph Losey and his regular cinematographer Gerry Fisher keep both Robert Klein and the audience off-balance, bouncing between Klein’s richly-colored apartment, his surreal dreamlike visit to a country estate, the noirishly mysterious haunts of the other Klein and a starkly realistic depiction of France’s most unpleasant history. Losey ironically inserts an Alsatian dog. It all culminates in Klein’s one final miscalculation.
Losey’s 1947 directorial debut was the political parable The Boy with the Green Hair. In 1951, he remade M with an inventive basement-to-roof exploration of Los Angeles’ storied Bradbury Building. Later that year, he turned the usually sympathetic good guy Van Heflin into the twisted bad guy in The Prowler. After being named at HUAC, he was blacklisted and, in 1953, successfully set up shop in Europe. His The Go-Between won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, and he made four of Dirk Bogarde’s most notable movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. He was 67 when he directed Mr. Klein.
Mr. Klein depicts the historical Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, when French police swept up over 11,000 Jews on the same day, July 16, 1942, and detained them in a stadium, the Velodrome d’Hiver; they were then transported to Auschwitz to be murdered.
French audiences in 1976 did not want to be reminded that collaboration was a mainstream phenomenon. Mr. Klein depicts French police enthusiastically hunting down Jews, theater patrons laughing heartily at a grotesquely anti-Semitic farce, and regular Parisians nonchalantly lining up for bread at the boulangerie indifferent to Jews being bused off to concentration camps.
Mr. Klein was nominated for seven Césars (the French equivalents of Oscars) and won best film and best director. Until this reissue by Rialto Pictures, Mr. Klein has essentially been a lost film. It is not currently available on the major streaming platforms, nor can it be found on DVD, except for some bootlegs from Asia.
Mr. Klein will play at BAMPFA in Berkeley on December 4, 14 & 18 and at San Francisco’s Roxie December 6-12.
Writer-director Rian Johnson’s gloriously inventive 2005 debut, Brick, was inspired by Johnson’s love of Dashiell Hammett’s novels and his own dark memories of high school.
Brick is a hard-boiled detective story, complete with a femme fatale and a plot right out of a Dick Powell classic noir like Murder, My Sweet or Cry Danger.
The genius of Brick is that it takes place in the teenage culture of 2005 San Clemente. The characters roam the isolated school corridors where the nerd eats lunch by himself, the drama room, the vice-principal’s office, the empty football field where kids can meet after school the party at the popular girl’s house. The kingpin crime lord operates out of his mother’s basement; he and his gang emerge upstairs in the kitchen where his mom supplies breakfast cereal and dispenses milk from a pitcher shaped like a chicken.
The dialogue is Hammettesque:
I gave you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed.
The ape blows or I clam.
Bulls would gum it. They’d flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. No cops, not for a bit
Brad was a sap. You weren’t. You were with him, and so you were playing him. So you’re a player. With you behind me I’d have to tie one eye up watching both your hands, and I can’t spare it.
The noir patter works because Johnson and the cast play it dead seriously, with no hint of irony.
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.”
Brick was at that point in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s career, between Mysterious Skin (2004) and Lookout (2007), when it was becoming clear what a major talent he is.
Norah Zehetner in BRICK
The femme fatale is played by Norah Zehetner in an unforgettable performance. Zehetner works a lot, and did ten episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, but Brick may be her career-topper.
Rian Johnson went on to make another original feature with Gordon-Levitt, Looper, along with the 2017 Star Wars movie. Knives Out, Johnson’s new take on the drawing room mystery, hits theaters this weekend.
Brick is available to stream on Netflix, AYouTube and Google Play.
Timothy Bottoms, Ben Johnson and Sam Bottoms in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
On November 20, Turner Classic Movies is airing Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece The Last Picture Show. It’s a movie about kids that is best appreciated by grown-ups, especially grown-ups with some mileage on them.
The Last Picture Show is the story of 18-year-olds in a tiny, windblown Texas town in the early 1950s, from Larry McMurtry’s novel about his own upbringing in Archer City, Texas. It’s a coming of age film about teens finishing high school: the sensitive Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), his macho best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges) and pretty, snotty Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), entitled by her looks and her family’s wealth. There’s also a sweet, intellectually disabled boy Billy (Sam Bottoms). The boys’ male role model is Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson in an Oscar-winning performance), an older bachelor cowpoke who owns the town’s cafe, movie theater and pool hall.
The film was actually shot in Archer City, which took the movie name of a Texas ghost town, Anarene. (Decades later, Archer City also showed up in a bank robbery in 2016’s Hell and High Water.)
Cybill Shepherd in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
18-year-olds wonder how they will navigate the world of adults that they are about to enter. It turns out that, for the kids in the movie, if only they paid attention, there’s plenty to lean about life from the adults in Anarene. The other thing that 18-year-olds obsess about is their sexuality, super-fueled by hormones but piloted by immature brains.
It’s a remarkable thing to watch a coming of age story about 18-year-olds when you are 18 and then again forty years later when you know stuff.
When I saw The Last Picture Show at San Jose’s domed Century Theaters in 1971, I was the same age as the main characters, and I was especially interested in their sexual escapades. I was, however, discerning enough to appreciate that this was a great movie, and I fully experienced the heartbreak of the Cloris Leachman character and grasped that Sam the Lion’s authority came from his decency and dignity.
Peter Bogdanovich with Jesse Hawthorne Ficks at the Roxie
In September, I was privileged to attend one of the year’s most stirring experiences of Bay Area cinema culture. The Roxie Theater screened the The Last Picture Show – with the legendary Bogdanovich himself in attendance for two Q&A sessions, plus a screening of his hard-to-find Saint Jack (1979).
Ben Johnson in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Rewatching The Last Picture Show, I was especially struck by the subtle yet emotionally powerful performances by Ben Johnson, Clu Gulager and Ellen Burstyn
The plot is about the kids, but Ben Johnson’s character is the center of the film. Johnson underplays the part, and Bogdanovich says that Johnson didn’t even like to say lines at all. But Johnson nailed two unforgettable speeches. In the first, his eyes flash as he spits out his disgust at bullying. In the other, he recalls a love affair; as a clueless kid the first time around, I failed to connect the dots as who the woman was. Ben Johnson’s Oscar acceptance speech (you can find it on YouTube) is still my all-time favorite.
Clu Gulager in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Clu Gulager plays an oil rig foreman who is the illicit squeeze of his boss’ wife (Burstyn) . Gulager did scores of TV Westerns in the 1960s, including 105 appearances as the sheriff on The Virginian. The Last Picture Show is probably his best-ever screen performance. The Director’s Cut also adds some sizzle to his sex scene with Jacy in the pool hall. This guy is trapped in a job he will never improve upon and an affair he will never control; Gulager perfectly conveys his bitter dissatisfaction.
Unlike Gulager, Burstyn was already a prestige actress. Here, she brings both searing and withering looks at the men and wise and comforting, if cynical, advice to her daughter.
This is a great film, and it’s just as timeless today as it was in 1971.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Edward Norton in MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
Edward Norton adapted the screenplay for, directed and stars in the atmospheric mystery Motherless Brooklyn. A detective’s partner is killed, and his search for the killers plunges him into a web of intrigue. It’s a slow burn paranoid thriller, along the lines of Chinatown, although not nearly as good and set in the New York City of the early 1950s and not nearly as good.
Norton gets the postwar NYC pretty much perfect. If you love the automobiles of the period, especially the Plymouths and Chevrolets, you’ll be in heaven.
The paranoia comes from the omnipotence of master urban redeveloper Robert Moses (under a different name in Motherless Brooklyn). It’s actually pretty accurate history, if a bit esoteric for popular entertainment.
Norton plays novelist Jonathan Lethem’s private detective Lionel Essrog, who has Tourette’s syndrome. Tourette’s was even less understood in the America of the early 1950s, so that creates some fodder, along with the fact that detectives who have to sneak around are not well-served by involuntary outbursts. Norton is always good, but it’s hard not to see this as a gimmick performance.
I really liked Bruce Willis as a more seasoned detective. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays the woman who must be saved, and we all want her saved. Alec Baldwin twirls virtual mustaches as the villainous Moses character, Willem Dafoe is very good as a haunted character; he is wearing his beard from The Lighthouse, but happily not the Long John Silver accent.
Motherless Brooklyn was a labor of love for Norton, and he loves it too much to edit it. The story could be told better in a movie 30 minutes shorter, One nightclub scene in particular goes on for too, too long. If you have two-and-a-half hours on a cold winter’s night, you could do worse than to stream it.
Cynthia Erivo in HARRIET. Photo courtesy of Focus Features.
I first watched the trailer for Harriet askance because the Harriet Tubman action figure I saw on-screen didn’t resemble the tiny, revered Tubman in the sepia photos. But that is because of my own skepticism of Hollywood history and my own woeful ignorance of the historic Tubman. The ancient lady in her photos and the historic Tubman are explained in this fine NYT piece Harriet Tubman Facts and Myths: How the Movie Tried to Get it Right. As Harriet’s director Kasi Lemmons says in this NYT article, “You don’t have an image of what she was like when she was actually doing this work in her late 20s, when she was this young superheroine, this completely badass woman.”
Harriet is good history. The problem is that Lemmons doesn’t trust us to appreciate Tubman’s heroism when we see it – a 100-mile solo escape from slavery, guiding 75 escaped slaves to freedom with the Underground Railroad, leading troops into battle to free 700 more in the Civil War, and becoming a thought leader in the abolitionist and suffragist movements. So we have this swelling music every time Tubman does something inspirational. The constant, obvious beatification is distracting.
Tubman is played with convincing intensity by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo was absolutely the best thing about the Steve McQueen film Widows; since Erivo’s character teamed with those played by Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki, the fact that she stole the movie is impressive. Erivo is a Broadway musical actress/singer, and Harriet uses her singing talent as well.
If you’re not expecting great cinema, you’ll appreciate this important and compelling history. Harriet makes it clear why Tubman belongs on the twenty dollar bill.
The masterpiece Parasite explores social inequity, with master filmmaker Bong Joo Ho taking us through a series of genres. Parasite opens as a hilarious comedy, then evolves halfway through into a suspense thriller and ends with a shocker and a moment of contemplative heartbreak. This is one of the decade’s best films.
The Kim family lives in a grubby basement apartment, so much on the margins of society that they cadge the neighbors’s wi-fi and even the municipal fumigation. They can’t live on the dad’s sporadic employment in low-end jobs, so the family is always on the hustle. It helps that the Kims, especially the college-age kids, are gifted scoundrels.
The Park family lives in an icon of modern architecture. The dad is a CEO with his own driver, and the mom and two kids are pampered by their live-in housekeeper. They have never had to hustle themselves, and they don’t recognize a hustle when they see it.
The Kim son falls into a job tutoring one of the Park kids. After a series of riotously funny cons, the Kim family positions itself to take advantage of the Parks. The Kims are soon living off the fatted calf, but they must contend with one uncomfortable fact – their newfound fortune is extremely fragile because it all comes at the whims of the rich.
PARASITE. Photo courtesy of Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) .
The biggest disconnect between the rich and the rest of us is the understanding of capitalism as a meritocracy – or not. Despite capitalist mythology, working hard and taking risks is often not rewarded with wealth. Conversely, just being wealthy is not an indicator of talent or accomplishment, however entitled the rich feel they are.
Mr. and Mrs. Kim are wily, but uneducated. The Kim kids are trapped by the Korean economy economy; they have no realistic pathway to social mobility, no matter how industrious they are. The kids’ college-educated peers are all under- or unemployed.
Mr. Park is successful in business, but he is a drive-by family man and thinks he can identify the working class by their smell. His wife is a neurotic adornment, his daughter is spoiled and his son is a mess.
Why does Bong shock us with some horror? The stakes of social inequity – impacting generations – are very high and as high as life and death. Bong is reminding us of those stakes after reeling us in with all the fun.
Along with comedy, thriller and horror, Bong even gives a couple minutes of the disaster genre. The Kim’s poor neighborhood is afflicted by a pestilence of biblical scale that would be unthinkable for any affluent community. Let’s just say that the poor live in crap.
Song Kang-Ho in PARASITE
Parasite is superbly acted. The poor family’s dad is played masterfully by Song Kang-Ho. It’s his kids who are directing the scam, but it’s the dad whose slow burn resentment finally explodes.
Bong Joo Ho (Memories of Murder, Mother, Snowpiercer and Okja) makes movies so original that it’s been said that he is his own genre. His Memories of Murder, also starring Song Kang-Ho, is, for my money, the very best serial killer movie. Snowpiercer and Okja, like Parasite, also take on the issues of class and corporate greed.
Martin Scorsese recently said that people watch cinema, as opposed to “worldwide audiovisual entertainment”, to be surprised. Indeed, to view the work of Bong Joo Ho is to be surprised every single time.
Bong Joo Ho himself says, “My goal is to have the audience captivated for two hours by subverting their expectations.” Captivation, check. Subversion of expectations, check.
This is a masterwork. Parasite won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and currently has a meteoric Metacritic score of 95. Parasite will win the Best Foreign Language Oscar and is arguably the best movie of 2019.
Loro is director Paolo Sorrentino’s take on the career end of the despicable Italian media mogul and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Berlusconi character has a different name, but there’s no mistake that it is the hair-dyed, ever-grinning Berlusconi.
The movie Loro is actually the combination of two television programs. In the first, we see Berlusconi’s corruption through the POV of another amoral grasper, Sergio (Ricardo Scarmacia). Sergio seeks his fortune by collecting a brigade of cocaine-fueled escorts to sexually entertain Berlusconi. In the second half, we follow Berlusconi himself as, out of power, he is unable to climb back into power, he loses his wife and he is sexually humiliated by a 20-year-old aspiring actress. Sorrentino gets his licks in by making Berlusconi, finally, pathetic.
Lorostars Sorrentino’s frequent collaborator Toni Servillo, who is able to play the Berlusconi character as a figure powerful to get all he desires…and then not.
I had high expectations of Loro because I loved Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty and Youth. Sorrentino is a master of the eye candy and those movies are especially beautiful, but also tell stories compelingly. Ultimately, Loro is much more interesting visually than it is thematically.
Loro, which got a screening at the San Francisco international Film Festival, has just concluded a wisp of a theatrical release in the Bay Area. It can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
