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.
Six of my Best Movies of 2019 – So Far are already available to stream. This week, I’m featuring Long Day’s Journey into Night: obsession and a vivid darkness. This brilliantly original film explores memory – a man obsessed with a doomed romance from twenty years ago plunges into a neo-noir underworld. After a slow burn beginning, his search reaches its climax in a spectacular ONE-HOUR single shot. It can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
Also available to stream:
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood: masterpiece. Quentin Tarantino’s exquisite filmmaking skills blend together verisimilitude of time and place, vivid performances and a rock ’em, sock ’em story to make Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood an instant classic. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio and a host of others create tremendous performances, and Tarantino delivers the most startling ending in recent cinema. And it’s a love letter to a Hollywood that six-year-old Quentin Tarantino lived near to, but was not a part of. This is a Tarantino masterpiece, right up there with his best, Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. It’s available to stream on Amazon and the other major platforms.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco: the most stark reality, only dream-like. This uncommonly clear-eyed love letter to San Francisco is an absorbing exploration of the inner lives of two friends as they react to their changing city. The brilliantly original filmmaking by director and co-writer Joe Talbot portrays the starkly real as dreamlike. It’s available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
They Shall Not Grow Old: a generation finally understood. Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson has, for the first time, layered humanity over our understanding of World War I. By slowing down the speed of the jerky WWI film footage and adding sound and color, Jackson has allowed us to relate to the real people in the Great War. This film is a generational achievement. Now you can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Amazing Grace : pure, sanctified Aretha. This Aretha Franklin concert filmis, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience. Amazing Grace can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play; the DVD can be rented from Redbox.
Booksmart: smart, fresh and hilarious. This wildly successful comedy is an entirely fresh take on the coming of age film, and a high school graduation party romp like you’ve never seen. Directed and written by women, BTW. It’s available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
All the movies listed in this week’s OUT NOW are on my list of Best Movies of 2019. New this week: Rian Johnson’s wickedly funny Knives Out, plus I’ll be writing soon about the compelling documentary Midnight Family, opening today at the Roxie in San Francisco.
OUT NOW
The masterpiece Parasite explores social inequity, first with hilarious comedy, then evolving into suspense and finally a shocking statement of the real societal stakes. This is one of the decade’s best films.
Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson are brilliant in Noah Baumbach’s career-topping Marriage Story. A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. Marriage Story is playing in just a couple Bay Area theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.
Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic The Irishman is tremendous, and features performances by Al Pacino and Joe Pesci that are epic, too. It’s both in theaters and streaming on Netflix.
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out turns a drawing room murder mystery into awickedly funny send-up of totally unjustified entitlement.
Filmmaker Taika Waititi takes on hatred in his often outrageous satire Jojo Rabbit. I saw Jojo Rabbit at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where the audience ROARED with laughter.
In his Pain and Glory, master filmmaker Pedro Almodovar invites us into the most personal aspects of his own life, illuminated by Antonio Banderas’ career-topping performance.
If you have found the work of Ingmar Bergman just too dreary, Wild Strawberries is a great choice (December 18 on Turner Classic Movies). There’s no denying that Bergman is a film genius, and he’s influenced the likes of Woody Allen, Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, Kieślowski and basically much of the last two generations of filmmakers. But I don’t recommend that casual movie fans watch Bergman’s gloomiest movies just because they “are good for you” – I want you to have a good time at the movies.
Wild Strawberries is the story of an accomplished but cranky geezer. His indifferent daughter-in-law is taking him to be honored at his college. On their road trip, they pick up some young hitch-hikers and then a stranded couple. Each encounter reminds the old doctor of an episode in his youth. As he reminisces, he can finally emotionally process the experiences that had troubled him, helping him finally achieve an inner peace. It’s a wonderful film.
Six of my Best Movies of 2019 – So Far are already available to stream. This week, I’m featuring The Last Black Man in San Francisco: the most stark reality, only dream-like. This uncommonly clear-eyed love letter to San Francisco is an absorbing exploration of the inner lives of two friends as they react to their changing city. The brilliantly original filmmaking by director and co-writer Joe Talbot portrays the starkly real as dreamlike. It’s available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Also available to stream:
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood: masterpiece. Quentin Tarantino’s exquisite filmmaking skills blend together verisimilitude of time and place, vivid performances and a rock ’em, sock ’em story to make Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood an instant classic. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio and a host of others create tremendous performances, and Tarantino delivers the most startling ending in recent cinema. And it’s a love letter to a Hollywood that six-year-old Quentin Tarantino lived near to, but was not a part of. This is a Tarantino masterpiece, right up there with his best, Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. It’s available to stream on Amazon and the other major platforms.
Long Day’s Journey into Night: obsession and a vivid darkness. This brilliantly original film explores memory – a man obsessed with a doomed romance from twenty years ago plunges into a neo-noir underworld. After a slow burn beginning, his search reaches its climax in a spectacular ONE-HOUR single shot. It can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
They Shall Not Grow Old: a generation finally understood. Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson has, for the first time, layered humanity over our understanding of World War I. By slowing down the speed of the jerky WWI film footage and adding sound and color, Jackson has allowed us to relate to the real people in the Great War. This film is a generational achievement. Now you can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Amazing Grace : pure, sanctified Aretha. This Aretha Franklin concert filmis, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience. Amazing Grace can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play; the DVD can be rented from Redbox.
Booksmart: smart, fresh and hilarious. This wildly successful comedy is an entirely fresh take on the coming of age film, and a high school graduation party romp like you’ve never seen. Directed and written by women, BTW. It’s available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
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.
Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver in MARRIAGE STORY
Of the four top movies of the year, you can still find Parasite in theaters and you can already stream Marriage Story, The Irishman and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.
Watch out for the very special opportunity to see a virtually lost film from 1976, Joseph Losey’s Mr. Kleinat the Roxie and BAMPFA.
If you enjoy Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, check out his equally inventive take on another genre, the neo-noir Brick.
OUT NOW
The masterpiece Parasite explores social inequity, first with hilarious comedy, then evolving into suspense and finally a shocking statement of the real societal stakes. This is one of the decade’s best films.
Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson are brilliant in Noah Baumbach’s career-topping Marriage Story. A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. Marriage Story is playing in just a couple Bay Area theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.
Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic The Irishman is tremendous, and features performances by Al Pacino and Joe Pesci that are epic, too. It’s both in theaters and streaming on Netflix.
Filmmaker Taika Waititi takes on hatred in his often outrageous satire Jojo Rabbit. I saw Jojo Rabbit at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where the audience ROARED with laughter.
In his Pain and Glory, master filmmaker Pedro Almodovar invites us into the most personal aspects of his own life, illuminated by Antonio Banderas’ career-topping performance.
Harriet is excellent history (and Harriet Tubman belongs on the twenty dollar bill), but it’s not great cinema.
The atmospheric slow burn neo-noir Motherless Brooklyn gets postwar New York City right, but it’s too long.
Loro, Paolo Sorrentino’s send-up of Silvio Berlusconi is much more interesting visually than it is thematically.
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.
Six of my Best Movies of 2019 – So Far are already available to stream. This week, I’m featuring Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood: masterpiece. Quentin Tarantino’s exquisite filmmaking skills blend together verisimilitude of time and place, vivid performances and a rock ’em, sock ’em story to make Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood an instant classic. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio and a host of others create tremendous performances, and Tarantino delivers the most startling ending in recent cinema. And it’s a love letter to a Hollywood that six-year-old Quentin Tarantino lived near to, but was not a part of. This is a Tarantino masterpiece, right up there with his best, Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. It’s available to stream on Amazon and the other major platforms.
Also available to stream:
The Last Black Man in San Francisco: the most stark reality, only dream-like. This uncommonly clear-eyed love letter to San Francisco is an absorbing exploration of the inner lives of two friends as they react to their changing city. The brilliantly original filmmaking by director and co-writer Joe Talbot portrays the starkly real as dreamlike. It’s available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Long Day’s Journey into Night: obsession and a vivid darkness. This brilliantly original film explores memory – a man obsessed with a doomed romance from twenty years ago plunges into a neo-noir underworld. After a slow burn beginning, his search reaches its climax in a spectacular ONE-HOUR single shot. It can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
They Shall Not Grow Old: a generation finally understood. Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson has, for the first time, layered humanity over our understanding of World War I. By slowing down the speed of the jerky WWI film footage and adding sound and color, Jackson has allowed us to relate to the real people in the Great War. This film is a generational achievement. Now you can stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Amazing Grace : pure, sanctified Aretha. This Aretha Franklin concert filmis, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience. Amazing Grace can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play; the DVD can be rented from Redbox.
Booksmart: smart, fresh and hilarious. This wildly successful comedy is an entirely fresh take on the coming of age film, and a high school graduation party romp like you’ve never seen. Directed and written by women, BTW. It’s available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
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.
