Movies to See Right Now

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LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

Don’t miss the documentary An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy on PBS in May 20.

OUT NOW

  • Elisabeth Moss’ powerhouse performance as a monstrously narcissistic and drug-deranged rock star Her Smell is the acting tour de force of 2019.
  • The brilliantly original Chinese neo-noir Long Day’s Journey into Night is a Must See.
  • The Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace is, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience.
  • Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen are pleasantly entertaining in the improbable Beauty-and-the-Beast romantic comedy Long Shot.
  • In The Chaperone, Downton Abbey’s writer Julian Fellowes and star Elizabeth McGovern reunite for a pleasing character study of self-discovery in 1921 America – it’s deeper than it first appears to be.
  • Ramen Shop is a lightly-rooted dramedy about a Singaporean-Japanese family’s reconciliation. There’s also a metaphorical foodie angle.

ON VIDEO

My DVD/Stream of the Week is Love & Mercy, the emotionally powerful biopic of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Love & Mercy is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu.

ON TV

On May 18, Turner Classic Movies will show The Last Hurrah (1958): The master director John Ford is famous for westerns, but this portrait of an embattled incumbent is a classic of political cinema. Spencer Tracy plays the leader of an urban political machine. He’s got years of accomplishments and a machine in his favor, but his newspaper-owning antagonist is running an empty suit against him in a campaign that is increasingly fought on the newfangled medium of television. He’s been so successful for so long that his ward heelers have become complacent, and he’s smelling the campaign getting away from him…

Spencer Tracy (center) in THE LAST HURRAH

AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

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AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy traces the life and times of Norman Mineta, who amassed a startling number of “firsts” and other distinctions in America history:

  • The first Asian-American mayor of a major U.S. city.
  • The first Japanese American member of Congress elected from the 48 Continental states.
  • A Cabinet Secretary in both Democratic and Republican Administrations.
  • The nation’s longest-serving Transportation Secretary.

The achievements were even more remarkable given that, as a child, Mineta was imprisoned by his own US government in a WW II internment camp. And given that his political base had, during his career, an Asian-American population of far less than ten percent.

This didn’t happen by accident.  Norm Mineta is a driven man. At the same time, his ambition and will is tempered by his buoyancy and ebullience.

Documentarians Dianne Fukumi (director and co-producer) and Debra Nakatomi (co-producer) embed the story of Japanese-Americans, from immigration through internment, and on to reparations.

AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

The defining event for Mineta’s Nissei generation was the WW II internment of 120,000 Americans by their own government. The central thread in the Mineta story is that the injustice of Mineta’s internment informed George W. Bush’s resistance to treating American Muslims that same way in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Mineta being sworn into the US House of Representatives by House Speaker Carl Albert in AN AMERICAN STORY: NORMAN MINETA AND HIS LEGACY

The film’s most delightful moment may be the octogenarian Mineta sunnily taking his luggage through security at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.

[Full disclosure: I have known Norm since I served in his 1974 primary campaign and interned for him on Capitol Hill in the mid 70s.]

I saw An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy at an October 2018 special screening with Norm Mineta, Fukumi and Nakatomi in San Jose. A brisk 60 minutes, it will be broadcast on PBS in May 20.

https://vimeo.com/266805068

DVD/Stream of the Week – LOVE & MERCY: a tale of three monsters and salvation

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Paul Dano as Brian Wilson in LOVE & MERCY
Paul Dano as Brian Wilson in LOVE & MERCY

Love & Mercy, the emotionally powerful biopic of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, is the true life story of an extraordinarily gifted person facing three monsters. Wilson is a musical genius, one of the great songwriting, arranging and producing talents of his century. But his art and his very survival were tested by his tormentors until unselfish love found him an escape route to treatment, and, ultimately, his salvation.

In his first feature as a director, veteran producer Bill Pohlad chose to depict two phases of Wilson’s life, with Wilson played by Paul Dano and John Cusack.

The first monster is Wilson’s father Murry (Bill Camp), an abusive father whose adult sons still fear after they have fired him as their manager. What kind of father needs to belittle and sabotage his sons so he doesn’t have to acknowledge that their success surpasses his own? Brian Wilson is deaf in one ear from his father’s punches, but the psychological scars are even more deeply felt.

The second monster is Brian’s own schizoid affective disorder, a condition causing auditory hallucinations. Brilliantly, Pohlad has chosen to let the audience hear what Brian hears. This can be thrilling in moments of musical inspiration. And, of course, it is terrifying most of the time.

The third monster is charlatan psychologist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a Svengali-like manipulator, who over-medicates Brian, then confines him, while controlling and watching his every move. Landy leeches off Brian’s fortune and is ruthlessly protective of his racket.

Murry and Landy are so scary that Beach Boy Mike Love, known to be (and portrayed here as) a colossal jerk, almost seems sympathetic by comparison.

In the younger Dano segments, we see Brian at his creative peak, emotionally tortured by Murry and about to be driven into a breakdown by his condition. In the middle-aged Cusack parts, we see Brian, broken down by his illness, utterly helpless against and captive to Landy’s web of control.

Dano shows us Brian’s vulnerable genius. Cusack shows us Brian as gentle and genuine. The story of Love & Mercy is about how he escapes being under the thumb of his monsters, chiefly from the perspective of Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), the woman who would become his second wife. As good as are Dano and Cusack, Banks is absolutely stellar; her character must continually react to the unpredictability of Brian’s illness and the increasing horror of Landy’s tyranny.

From the beginning, Love & Mercy sweeps us up into the highs and lows of Brian Wilson’s life – and it’s a helluva life. Love & Mercy is one of the Best Movies of 2015 – So Far. Watch the end credits all the way to the end.

Love & Mercy is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu.

LONG SHOT: to be remembered as minor Theron

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Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron in LONG SHOT

The romantic comedy Long Shot looked eminently skipable to me until I read Manohla Dargis’ NY Times review, which concluded that the unexpected pairing of Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen worked. We didn’t like it as much as Manohla did, but The Wife and I had a moderately good time.

Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen play folks who grew up next door to each other as kids. Twenty-five years later, he has gone on to become a talented muckraking journalist of minor note and uncertain employability. She has become the US Secretary of State and a presidential hopeful, a glamorous celebrity and the most powerful woman in the world. When their paths cross as adults, the Beauty and the Beast connect, sparks fly and comic stations ensue. The most biting gags send up Rupert Murdoch and Fox News.

The drop-dead-beautiful Theron, of course, won the Best Actress Oscar for playing the not-drop-dead-beautiful serial killer Aileen in Monster. She has also become cinema’s best action star (male or female) with Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde. But she’s also made two of the smartest comedies of the century in Young Adult and Tully, both times bravely playing an unsympathetic character. Long Shot is easily within her range, and she’s predictably excellent.

Rogen is always good in a comedy, and he’s fine here, too. Director Jonathan Levine previously directed two even better comedies, 50/50 and Warm Bodies.

This isn’t cinema for the ages, but Long Shot contains plenty of chuckles and several hard guffaws.

coming up on TV – A BUCKET OF BLOOD: time capsule from the Beatnik Era

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hip cats digging it in A BUCKET OF BLOOD

A Bucket of Blood is a campy, minor horror film from 1959, but it’s most interesting as window into beatnik culture.  Turner Classic Movies will air A Bucket of Blood on May 13.

In 1959, the Beat Movement had been alive for a decade, but had just begun to be recognized by the mainstream culture.  Beatniks, before the usage of that word, had been glimpsed in the 1950 classic noir D.O.A. and in 1957’s Roman Holiday.   The word “beatnik”, usually a pejorative used by squares, was resisted by the Beat generation artists and thinkers.  According to Wikipedia, the term was coined by Herb Caen in his San Francisco Chronicle column of  April 2, 1958. Of course, the popular stereotype of a Beatnik stems from the character of Maynard G. Krebs (played by Bob Denver of later Gilligan fame) on TV’s Dobie Gillis (1959-63).

By 1959, beatnik consciousness was ripe for exploitation by low-budget movie wizard Roger Corman, who produced and directed A Bucket of Blood.  The story is about a loser who covers a dead cat with plaster of Paris and is acclaimed as a talented sculptor.  He embraces the hoax and starts hunting victims to cast into human “sculptures”; hence the horror and the bucket of blood.

“Beatnik” conjures up 20-somethings adorned in black turtleneck sweaters (and black leotards for women), berets, goatees and dark glasses; they’re in coffee houses snapping their fingers to applaud poetry and jazz.  And they’re conversing in hip cat patter.  Watch A Bucket of Blood and you’ll get a dose.

Can you dig it?

[Ubiquitous game show host Burt Convy, as a young actor, played Lou in A Bucket of Blood.]

Movies to See Right Now

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Hong-Chi Lee in a scene from Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Liu Hongyu, courtesy Kino Lorber.

The Must See for cinephiles is Long Day’s Journey into Night.

7’3″ tall actor Peter Mayhew died last week. His screen career centered around one unforgettable role, under a mask and bushel of fur as Chewbacca in the Stars Wars franchise.

OUT NOW

  • Elisabeth Moss’ powerhouse performance as a monstrously narcissistic and drug-deranged rock star Her Smell is the acting tour de force of 2019.
  • The brilliantly original Chinese neo-noir Long Day’s Journey into Night is a Must See.
  • The Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace is, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience
  • In The Chaperone, Downton Abbey’s writer Julian Fellowes and star Elizabeth McGovern reunite for a pleasing character study of self-discovery in 1921 America – it’s deeper than it first appears to be.
  • Ramen Shop is a lightly-rooted dramedy about a Singaporean-Japanese family’s reconciliation. There’s also a metaphorical foodie angle.

ON VIDEO

My Stream of the Week is the slow burn thriller Hunting Lands, an indie from the 2018 Cinequest. Now everyone can stream Hunting Lands from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

On May 13, Turner Classic Movies will air the 1964 serial killer movie The Strangler, with its brilliant and eccentric performance by Victor Buono.
And on May 14, TCM presents Orson Welles’ Shakespearean masterpiece Chimes at Midnight. Welles’ genius was in braiding together parts of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, some Richard III, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor into a cohesive story of what he called “betrayal of friendship”.
Orson Welles and Keith Baxter in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

Stream of the Week: HUNTING LANDS – in this thriller, we watch the watcher

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Marshall Cook in HUNTING LANDS

In the slow burn thriller Hunting Lands, Frank (Marshall Cook) is living a solitary life as a subsistence hunter in a forest cabin, a long pickup drive outside his northern Michigan hometown. Frank is a guy with serious wilderness skills, loading his own ammo and field dressing the large mammals that he fells with a single shot. He witnesses a serious crime in the woods and is immediately driven to make things right – but not in the way we expect.

Frank has nobody to talk to, and we see him silently triage the situation and begin a hunt for the perpetrator. Silent observation comes naturally to a hunter, and we see him wordlessly patrolling the small towns in his pickup, as he tracks down his human prey. We see what Frank sees, and one of the most pivotal characters is only seen in long shot until the last 15 minutes or so.

HUNTING LANDS

HUNTING LANDS

Hunting Lands is the first feature from writer-director Zack Wilcox, a story-teller who is thankfully willing to let the audience connect the dots. Because Hunting Lands is only 83 minutes long, Wilcox can take his time watching Frank watch others. Even as Frank is still and quiet, the audience is gripped by what he is going to do next.

An original character, Frank seems unusually self-aware for a hermit. When he finally gets in a conversation, he turns out to be an articulate guy who understands and can explain why he has become a recluse.

Wilcox follows Billie Wilder’s screenwriting advice – “don’t hang around”; the ending is not even one second too long. And Wilcox knows that a little ambiguity about what happens afterwards can pack a punch.

Cinequest hosted the word premiere of Hunting Lands. You can stream it now on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

HUNTING LANDS

Movies to See Right Now

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Elisabeth Moss in HER SMELL

I am aware that the new Avengers movie is taking up about forty percent of Bay Area movie screens. Be on the lookout for Her Smell, which is playing hardly anywhere, and the brilliant new release Long Day’s Journey into Night, along with Aretha Frankin’s gospel concert film Amazing Grace. 

Writer-director John Singleton, who died this week, was the first African-American nominated for the Best Director Oscar (for Boyz in the Hood) and remains the youngest person ever nominated for that award.

OUT NOW

  • Elisabeth Moss’ powerhouse performance as a monstrously narcissistic and drug-deranged rock star in Her Smell is the acting tour de force of 2019.
  • The brilliantly original Chinese neo-noir Long Day’s Journey into Night is a Must See.
  • Werner Herzog’s admiring biodoc Meeting Gorbachev is uncritical but insightful, especially as we meet the unfiltered Gorbachev himself in 2018 interviews.
  • The Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace is, at once, the recovery of a lost film, the document of an extraordinary live recording and an immersive, spiritual experience.
  • In The Chaperone, Downton Abbey’s writer Julian Fellowes and star Elizabeth McGovern reunite for a pleasing character study of self-discovery in 1921 America – it’s deeper than it first appears to be.
  • In Teen Spirit, Elle Fanning plays an underdog teenager who has the chance to win a talent contest and become an instant pop star – yes, it’s a genre movie, but it’s a pretty fair one.
  • Ramen Shop is a lightly-rooted dramedy about a Singaporean-Japanese family’s reconciliation. There’s also a metaphorical foodie angle.
 

ON VIDEO

The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming-of-age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West.  A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pedro Pascal and young Sophie Thatcher make Prospect well worth streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play.

 

ON TV

On May 7, Turner Classic Movies brings us a fantastic comedy, My Man Godfrey (1936). An assembly of eccentric, oblivious, venal and utterly spoiled characters make up a rich Park Avenue family and their hangers-on during the Depression. The kooky daughter (Carole Lombard) brings home a homeless guy (William Powell) to serve as their butler. The contrast between the dignified butler and his wacky employers results in a brilliant screwball comedy that masks searing social criticism that is sharply relevant today. The wonderful character actor Eugene Pallette (who looked and sounded like a bullfrog in a tuxedo) plays the family’s patriarch, who is keenly aware that his wife and kids are completely nuts.

William Powell and Carole Lombard in MY MAN GODFREY William Powell and Carole Lombard in MY MAN GODFREY

MEETING GORBACHEV: uncritical but humanizing

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Mikhail Gorbachev in MEETING GORBACHEV

Meeting Gorbachev is Werner Herzog’s admiring biodoc of Mikhail Gorbachev, unquestionably one of the 20th century’s most pivotal figures. Herzog filmed three conversations with the then 87-year-old Gorbachev in 2018.

Gorbachev is revered in Germany – particularly by Werner Herzog – for allowing the peaceful, and startlingly quick, reunification of Germany. This biodoc is, to a fault, uncritical. At one point, Herzog even tells Gorbachev, “I love you”.

As the leader of the USSR, Gorbachev’s concepts of Perestroika and Glasnost transformed the political, economic and foreign policy of the Cold War superpower. More than any other individual, Gorbachev can claim credit for ending the Cold War, abolishing and destroying mid-range and short-range nuclear weapons, and the unchallenged independence of the Iron Curtain countries.

Gorbachev is also a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportions. He was intending to reform the USSR, not to destroy it. A coup by fossilized communists knocked him out of power but couldn’t be sustained, spinning out of control and leading to a chaos taken advantage of by the strong man Putin,.

Herzog’s film is excellent in its well-researched and well-told story of the rise of Gorbachev from a modest agricultural backwater – a talented achiever on the rise. Herzog’s irreverent sense of humors, as always, peeks through in the state funerals of Gorbachev’s predecessors, each more absurdly funny than the last.

The greatest gift of Meeting Gorbachev is, as the title suggests, is the unfiltered Gorbachev himself – now a grandfatherly raconteur. We get to appreciate his intellectual curiosity and his clarity of thought and direction. His charm and charisma, even at 87, help us understand how he rose to world leadership.

Werner Herzog and Mikhail Gorbachev in MEETING GORBACHEV

Herzog was a charismatic and innovative leader of German New Cinema. Between 1972 and 1982, he created the art house hits Aguirre:The Wrath of God, Strozek Nosferatu the Vampyre, and Fitzcarraldo.

In 1997, Herzog switched gears with the underrated documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly and followed it with great docs like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World. Most remarkably, Herzog has also become one of the greatest narrators of English language documentaries; somehow, his German-accented narrations are hypnotic. (In 2007, Herzog slipped in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nicholas Cage in the Klaus Kinski wild man role and cinema’s funniest iguana hallucination.)

Meeting Gorbachev played at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). I saw Meeting Gorbachev at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club.

Stream of the Week: PROSPECT – a girl’s battle of wits in outer space

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PROSPECT

The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming of age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. The teenage girl Cee (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her dad (Jay Duplass) as he pilots their tired spaceship from planet to planet, seeking to extract something precious (hence the title Prospect as in prospectors). It’s an enterprise for misfits and hustlers. She has grown into an able assistant. He is a skilled pilot and prospector, but is very erratic in his judgment.

Sure, this is a future version of our world, but these characters live in a bottom-feeding sub-culture; their space travel hardware comes from the surplus store and has the look of NASA’s Mercury program – far less sleekly hi tech than the dashboard of a 2013 Prius. It’s a choice by co-writer and co-directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl to reinforce that we’re dealing with folks living on the margins.

Isolated by circumstance on a planet that is only populated by a few other sketchy transients and some disturbing settlers, Cee is thrown into a series of life-and-death situations. She must depend on her wits to survive a sequence of that can only be resolved through negotiation. I saw Prospect before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. In the screening’s Q&A, co-writer filmmakers Caldwell and Earl affirmed that the story is centered on negotiation and that they drew from that under-recognized subgenre, the “loquacious Western”.

Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher in PROSPECT

A key character that Cee must deal with is another rogue prospector Ezra (Pedo Pascal), a man of wit, charm, lethality and devoted self-interest. Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) makes Ezra one of the most compelling and funniest movie characters of the year.

Someone has labeled Prospect at “True Grit in space”, which isn’t far off. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also evoked. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pascal and young Ms. Thatcher make Prospect well worth streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play.