Year-end miscellany

A few loose ends to tidy up the past year, starting with Springsteen on Broadway (MC-87, NFX).  You might not be as old or as weepy as I have become, but I have to report that I watched and listened to much of Bruce’s solo concert (plus brief assist from Patty) with tears streaming down my face, tears of admiration and appreciation, tears of memory and joy.  Let’s be honest here, the Boss can fake sincerity, authenticity, and intimacy better than anyone, even on Broadway.  To know the guy is to love the guy, and he provided the soundtrack to large swatches of my life.  I don’t always like radically pared-down versions of anthemic songs, but once again the Boss does it better than anyone.  And he has melded his literate autobiography with a varied assortment of his iconic songs into a memorable evening with the man himself.

“Surreal” is not generally a term of approbation for me, but I confess to appreciating the surreal elements of Foxtrot (MC-90, Starz), an Israeli film by Samuel Maoz.  The film, nominally about two parents coming to terms with the death of their soldier son, has a parable-like quality, and a sort of “Appointment in Samarra” storyline.  In the first of three distinct parts, the mother (Sarah Adler) falls in a fit the minute she sees two soldiers appear at the door of the couple’s very stylish Tel Aviv apartment, and has to be sedated.  Alone, the architect father goes silent and nearly catatonic, in a brilliant performance by Lior Ashkenazi.  After a twist, the scene changes in the second part, to see the son “in the line of duty” at some remote desert outpost, where most of the comic surrealism comes in, presumably in coded satire on the whole Israeli military mission.  The third part finds us back in the upscale apartment with the parents, now in disarray, after some time has elapsed, and events we only learn at the very end of the film.  Maoz has a sharp wit and a bravura visual style, as well as genuine human empathy.  There’s plenty of the absurd in this film, but not in the filmmaking.

Andrew Bujalski is building an impressive independent filmography; after early mumblecore explorations of aimless twentysomethings looking for love and work, he has settled into the Austin TX milieu and developed a sociological interest in ordinary businesses and workplaces.  In Beeswax, Results, and now Support the Girls (MC-85, Hulu), we go inside small independent businesses to see what the inhabitants get into, in the way of love and work.  This time the workplace is a Hooters-style restaurant by a highway interchange, whose whole operation depends on the competent and empathetic manager played by Regina King, who embodies the spirit of the title.  The most bubbly of the girls is played by Haley Lu Richardson, in a role that could not be more of a contrast to her lead in the must-see Columbus, establishing her as a young actress to watch.  We follow one day of various mini-crises with deadpan humor, boisterous outbursts, and subtle attention to markers of class, race, and gender.  The film is understated in approach, but capacious in its concerns.

As a rule I don’t watch films about comic book superheroes, which means I don’t see most of the highest-grossing films these days, but I make an occasional exception when something genre-expanding comes along.  So as with Wonder Woman last year, in the name of diversity I made allowance for Black Panther (MC-88, NFX) and was pleased to do so.  Which raises the question – who will be the next Denzel?  Will it be the upstanding Chadwick Boseman, or the appealing but more dangerous Michael B. Jordan?  They face off here, for control of the African utopia Wakanda, and both come off winners, at least as action stars. Black women also get a fair shake in Wakanda, and in Ryan Coogler’s direction.  This is popular entertainment infused with a bit of soul, and all the better for it.

Chadwick Boseman plays another sort of black hero, but with a similarly upstanding character, in Marshall (MC-66, Show).  So add Thurgood Marshall to James Brown and Jackie Robinson in his pantheon of portrayals.  Unfortunately, the film takes a very early and very hackneyed approach to the career of the distinguished jurist, way before the Supreme Court, and even a decade before Brown v. Board of Education.  Here he is a young attorney assigned to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman, and forced to take on a semi-comic white partner in Josh Gad.  And it all makes for a standard-issue courtroom drama.

[Click through for more reviews, with special attention to documentaries]

I’m not a devotee of Chekhov, so I approach The Seagull (MC-58, NFX, Starz) as a movie, and not an especially good one.  But I have to take note of it here as the very last DVD I will get through Netflix, after several thousands over the past two decades.    As a showcase for Annette Bening and Saoirse Ronan, among other appealing performers, and in its setting on a Russian lakeside estate, Michael Mayer’s film is pretty and pleasant to watch, and not unduly prolonged.  The wit is there, but the tragedy seems weightless, and the motivations airless.  I didn’t mind watching, but I’m not going to suggest that you do.

Well-acted by an appealing cast, Beautiful Boy (MC-62, AMZ) is too long, too disjointed, too pretty, and too dependent on music cues.  So with a tip of the hat to Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet, and a nod to Maura Tierney and Amy Ryan, we’ll move past this father-son addiction drama without further comment.

I was much more tolerant of the father-daughter dynamic in Hearts Beat Loud (MC-65, Hulu).  Nick Offerman remains a welcome face, since Parks & Recreation.  And Kiersey Clemons is a real discovery, cute as a button and a dynamite singer.  She’s bent on starting pre-med at UCLA, while her dad is on the verge of closing his vintage vinyl store in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and pining for the musical career he might have had with the girl’s deceased mother.  He urges the daughter to jam with him and write her own songs, but she also has her own life to live, including a girlfriend in this diversity-friendly film.  Toni Collette, Blythe Danner, and Ted Danson lend support.  It’s all quite sweet, and director Brett Haley is probably a nice guy, if not a particularly sharp eye.

Aside from the hybrid Paddington 2, I didn’t see much animation of interest in 2018, except for Nick Park’s Early Man (MC-68, HBO) and Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (MC-82, HBO).  While neither comes up to Wallace & Gromit or Fantastic Mr. Fox, Nick is more my sort of guy than Wes, so my preference here would reverse Metacritic’s.  You’ll know whether you like either, so I won’t spoil any surprises.

As for documentaries, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (MC-85, NFX) has garnered a lot of notice and acclaim, with Fred Rogers a seeming antidote, or at least antithesis, to the incivility of our nameless current president.  I was never a fan of the cardigan & sneakers man, but Morgan Neville’s film is more dimensional than hagiographic in its depiction of Mr. Rogers’ quasi-pastoral media mission, which seems oh-so-pointed these days, in its appeal to neighborliness.  Though informative and to-the-moment, this is not my idea of great documentary, but I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t take home the Oscar.  [P.S.  Wow, color me surprised.  Not even a nomination.  I have three nominees still to see, but I’m guessing RBG will win, while Minding the Gap remains the critical favorite.  And what, still no nomination for Frederick Wiseman, though I’ll wager, sight unseen, that Monrovia, Indiana is one of the best documentaries of 2018?]

Jonathan Olshefsky’s Quest (MC-88, NFX, direct) follows the Rainey family of North Philadelphia as they pass from Obama’s 2008 election to Trump’s.  A music producer and community activist, Christopher Rainey a.k.a. Quest, cultivates local rappers and community cohesion, in the face of dire economic conditions and endemic gun violence.  His wife is equally involved, and their daughter poignantly doubles in age in the course of the film.  It’s an intimate portrait of a family trying the make the best of life on some very mean streets.

A recent New Yorker review of its restored release led me to The War at Home (1979, NFX), which makes an evocative and reminiscent sidebar to Ken Burns’ magisterial series The Vietnam War, looking at the development of the antiwar movement from the perspective of one university, Wisconsin-Madison, from the earliest days of student action through the fatal bombing of the university’s Army Math Research Center.  It’s encouraging on one level to see public protest changing the political process, but also to recognize that the current civic discord, while dangerous, is mild compared to the Sixties.

I’ve never disagreed as vehemently with A.O. Scott of the NYTimes as over his review of Did You Wonder Who Shot the Gun? (MC-78, NFX).  I found Travis Wilkerson’s film to be pretentious and portentous, embarrassingly arty and self-involved.  Start with the senseless title, which should have been something like “Unmasking My Great-Grand-daddy.”  The white filmmaker returns to his native Alabama to look into the suppressed story of how his ancestor got away with killing a black man in 1946.  Fair enough, but not enough material for a film.  So what we get is a random series of overblown ruminations on related themes, using manipulated clips of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, endless shots of driving down country roads and through small towns to droning voiceover narration, and songs “illustrated” by lyrics flashing on the screen.  He starts out saying this is not a film about a “white savior,” but certainly positions himself as exactly that.  It’s not that there isn’t a story worth telling here, but that the filmmaker’s focus is on himself, and his relative rectitude, distinguishing himself from the racist elements of his family history.

The one good thing I can say about that film is that it stretches its skimpy material by including a nearby story from that era, which involved Rosa Parks a decade before the Montgomery bus boycott.  That led me to Nancy Buirski’s The Rape of Recy Taylor (MC-73, Starz), a film with some similarities but infinitely greater effectiveness.  Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black wife and mother on her way home from church in 1944, was abducted by a carload of white teenagers and repeatedly raped before being dumped at the side of the road.  Again, the crime was covered up and the perpetrators went unpunished, but with the involvement of Rosa Parks and the NAACP, the case got national attention, at least in the black press.  We hear the details from her brother and sister, as well as from scholars who have unearthed the facts of the case.  There is some arty filler, but the use of “race films” from the silent era, with scenes of white men abusing black women, is much more appropriate than the exploitation of To Kill a Mockingbird in the other film.  I found this film profoundly moving in its exploration of the interaction of racism and misogyny in the legacy of slavery, while the other was annoyingly self-important.

Distilling a thousand-page book into a 90-minute movie seems like a fool’s errand, but Far From the Tree (MC-70, Hulu) does a remarkable job in turning Andrew Solomon’s bestselling tome into a swift survey of various ways that parents come to terms with exceptional children, whether gay, autistic, dwarfish, retarded, or psychopathic.  An implicit celebration of difference, diversity, and acceptance, the film offers moving testimony to families accommodating to children who deviate from the norm, but are otherwise reachable and lovable.  If as Roger Ebert claims, movies are an empathy machine, this documentary is one terrific little piece of machinery.

School Life (MC-73, Hulu) was a hit two years ago at Sundance under the title In Locus Parentis, as I discovered after stumbling upon it while browsing documentaries on Hulu.  The film follows a year at the only primary boarding school in Ireland, from the perspective of the couple of longtime teachers who married the school, and each other, way back in 1972 (wait a minute, that was just yesterday!).  They live in a caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of the old estate where the school is located, and that’s apparently their whole life, at least in this film that follows the course of one year at the school.  Another married couple made this film, and I suspect one or both of them must have been a former student, given the access and intimacy of approach permitted.  Quietly observational, this doc is not put together with the scope and acuity of a Frederick Wiseman, but does seem as wise and winning as its subjects, and as charming and energetic as their middle-school pupils.

Leaning into the Wind (MC-76, Hulu) is a worthy sequel to (if not quite equal to) Rivers and Tides, continuing director Thomas Riedelsheimer’s celebration of the life and career of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, whose work is a lovely and profound meditation on nature and time.  He works with natural materials and elements, using his own hands and body to create evanescent works captured by film or photography, or solid substantial constructs that change and decompose over time.  It’s great to observe his process and products in differing environments on different continents, as well as his inconclusive ruminations on the meanings of his art, but the film does not add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Beside the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap, another standout original documentary from Hulu is Crime + Punishment (MC-88, Hulu) by Stephen Maing.  It follows the class-action suit of a dozen NYC cops who take on the now-illegal practice of monthly arrest quotas, their reasons for doing so, the public reaction, and the police response, including retaliation against the whistleblowers, but eventual change in policy.  Several of the cops are interesting characters in themselves, and there’s an illustrative parallel story of an Hispanic youth rounded up as a quota-filling “collar,” who spends a year in Rikers before his case is dismissed for lack of evidence.  Though the film substitutes access for analysis, and is far from comprehensive, it does contribute the perspective of good police on the practices that lead to unjust arrests, and even official murder, of minority citizens.

Wide-ranging and well-put-together, the HBO documentary Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists (MC-82, HBO) combines profiles of two classic NYC Irish working-class types, vivid nostalgia for newsrooms of old, and a survey of the whole era to which Jimmy and Pete were notable eyewitnesses, as reliable reporters with a distinct point of view.  So it’s no wonder that I loved it, but I’m pretty sure you’ll be taken with it as well.  Produced and directed by Jonathan Alter, John Block, and Steve McCarthy, the film weaves vintage footage, narration derived from the two columnists’ writing, and reminiscent talking heads into an attractive and effective tapestry of recent (at least to us old folks) history.

Say Her Name: The Life & Death of Sandra Bland (MC-76, HBO) definitely reveals her life (through her social media presence, “Sandy Speaks,” and the testimony of her family and friends) but does not solve the mystery of her death in custody.  Video footage of her arrest and inside the jail certainly indicates police misconduct against an “uppity” black woman, but does not necessarily point to official murder.  But the film does a service in saying Sandra Bland’s name out loud, and putting a voice and a face on yet another instance of Black Lives Matter.  Death in a Texas jail made her name known, but this film demonstrates conclusively that she had a life that mattered.

Another unjust imprisonment is detailed in The Sentence (MC-69, HBO), and I second the audience award it won at Sundance last year.  Rudy Valdez tells the story of his sister Cindy Shank, whose boyfriend was a drug dealer who got murdered, after which she changed her life, got married and had three children, until the night the police knocked on their door.  She was convicted of guilty knowledge and given a mandatory minimum of 15 years.  So Uncle Rudy spent many years filming the adorable little girls, in order for his sister (and the audience) to watch them grow up.  It’s an emotionally wrenching but uplifting experience, an act of devotion that details family attachments up against severe odds.  Cindy is far away in prison, but the entire family is under the sentence.  Like them, the audience waits for release.

I’m obliged to say something about Hale County This Morning, This Evening (MC-85, PBS), since it got the Oscar nomination I was sure Mr. Rogers would get.  So if I can’t say something nice, I will say that it is an impressionistic look at black lives in rural Alabama, but I use the term with the same disdain that academic critics coined it against Monet.  All-purpose filmmaker RaMell Ross seems to have set out to make an updated negative-reversal image of Let Us Praise Famous Men, but he is neither Walker Evans nor James Agee.  Or maybe he is Agee, wandering off into pointless purple passages.  I’m usually receptive to personal, observational documentaries with a patient eye for beauty in unexpected places, but I was quite impatient with this film’s insistent obliqueness. 

One other thing I have in mind these days is compiling my definitive list of the top 25 (50? 100?) films of my life, and I foresee doing more re-viewing of old favorites and less coverage of new films.  In that vein, I recently watched two well-remembered films that won’t make any list, but I was glad to see again. 

I was reading a book about Oxford that kept mentioning where scenes of Shadowlands (1993) had been filmed, so I watched partly for the location shots and partly for Debra Winger, whom I admire more and more. Anthony Hopkins is not so bad either, playing C.S. Lewis.  She is the Joy he was surprised by, the grief he observed, in two books that meant a lot to me many years ago, an interest now revived by my son’s residence beneath the dreaming spires.  So while Richard Attenborough has hardly made a perfect film, I found it well worth (re)watching.

The same could be said of Paul Schrader and Blue Collar (1978, Starz).  Several reviews of his last film, First Reformed, said it was his best since his first, for which I have always had fond memories, so I was happy to grab the chance to see it again.  The documentary-like scenes from the factory floor of a Detroit auto plant have a particular resonance for me, not quite nostalgia but something sharper.  Richard Pryor is astoundingly energetic and convincing, while Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto are his working and drinking buddies.  Facing hard times and financial exigencies, they decide to knock over union headquarters, and find themselves enmeshed with nefarious connections.  The film is funny and angry, and still feels true to me, though the passage of time highlights some amateurish parts.