Oscar bait

Though different from all others, this is traditionally the season where Oscar contenders for “Best Picture” reach the screen, but this year, when the watchword is “unprecedented,” many are reaching the home screen rather than theaters, so I will be able to survey the candidates that much sooner.  Of those I’ve seen and reviewed already, I would include The Trial of the Chicago 7 on my nominating list, but probably not Da 5 Bloods (which is not even the best Spike Lee film of the year).  The film I am most eager to see and review is Nomadland, but until then I will add candidates to this post as I see them.  (I will do another post about other critical favorites, most of which are Oscar longshots, but will certainly be included on my best of the year list, such as the previously-reviewed First Cow and Never Rarely Sometimes Always.)
 
There’s no subject that Hollywood loves more than itself, so Mank (MC-79, NFX) is one of the frontrunners for the “Best Picture” Oscar.  And since that subject interests me, I enjoyed David Fincher’s well-made representation of Golden Age Hollywood, even while I wondered what’s in it for those without a similar obsession.  I also give Fincher points for his homage to his long-deceased father through filming the elder’s screenplay, and credit his portrayal of Herman Mankiewicz as the epitome of screenwriters who migrated from New York to Hollywood and created the talkies.  The inside-baseball is tasty, but it certainly helps to know a lot about the players, the game, and its history.  Many familiar characters parade across the screen, but few stand out on their own, without foreknowledge of the historical figures.  So this is a movie about the writing of Citizen Kane, with Kane-like flashbacks that untangle the film’s connections to Hearst and Mayer and Thalberg.  The emphasis on Upton Sinclair’s candidacy for CA governor on a socialist platform in 1934, and its undermining by a media campaign of disinformation and innuendo, gives the film a contemporary resonance.  Gary Oldman is persuasive as Mank, and so is the rest of the cast.  Recasting the black & white visual style of Kane and other Forties classics into widescreen HD video is a neat trick, but again most appealing to connoisseurs.  The character of Mank lives up to his reputation as the wittiest man in Hollywood, but we don’t get deep into his demons, or his relationships, except with Hearst consort Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), whom he betrays with his portrayal of Kane’s second wife.  I can’t imagine this film making much sense at all without a detailed memory of Citizen Kane itself, but it’s a pretty good prompt to trotting out that 80-year-old warhorse once again.
 
Chadwick Boseman’s final role makes him a lock for Best Actor, as a jazz trumpeter in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (MC-88, NFX), a sentimental posthumous choice, but well-deserved nonetheless.  Viola Davis also is an Oscar contender as the blues singing title character, in an appropriately monumental performance.  Before there was Bessie Smith, there was Ma Rainey, and August Wilson wrote this play about her in 1982.  Transferred to the screen and put in the context of the Great Migration, we first see Ma performing in a Mississippi tent, where the Black audience “know jes’ what she talkin’ ’bout.”  And next as part of an elaborate stage show up north, before coming to the main action, a recording session in Chicago.  Her backing band arrives long before Ma, much to the frantic anxiety of their white manager and the “race records” producer.  The band retires to a basement rehearsal room, and the quartet makes some marvelous verbal music, till the brash young cornetist with big plans and dreams of his own wails his featured solo, in a shattering performance by Boseman.  “The Mother of the Blues” arrives in an imperial huff, and the action moves upstairs to the recording studio, where she clashes with the white moneymen and her obstreperous young horn man.  The hot day gets hotter, till the dramatic climax.  George C. Wolfe is primarily a theater director, but I didn’t hold that against him in this adaptation, where the theatricality seemed thematically appropriate and conducive to the language, literary and musical.  This film will definitely rank among my Best of 2020.  I look forward to producer Denzel Washington’s further screen adaptations of August Wilson plays (after he directed and starred in Fences, also with Viola Davis).

One Night in Miami… (MC-83, AMZ) is another adaptation of a play, and another reason for a possible reversal to #OscarsSoBlack.  Regina King directs her first feature, in an adaptation of a play by Kemp Powers (who also was co-writer and co-director on the Pixar animation contender Soul).  It’s a fictional rendering of a real event, the night in February 1964 that Cassius Clay took the heavyweight crown from Sonny Liston, and later met with his friends Sam Cooke and Jim Brown in Malcolm X’s hotel room.  The one-act play that is enacted there is skillfully book-ended by a bit of backstory and foreshadowing on each of the characters.  The acting is excellent and the dialogue is resonant, both of that time and of this, on subjects like Black power and the purposes of celebrity.  Leslie Odom Jr. is persuasive as Sam Cooke, just as he was with Aaron Burr.  Aldis Hodge embodies Jim Brown’s glowering strength, so familiar to me from his glory days in Cleveland.  Eli Goree fits the bill, physically and in youthful exuberance, as Clay-about-to-be-Ali.  Kingsley Ben-Adir has been praised for his Malcolm, but I thought his smooth performance lacked some of the fire and steel of the original, though admittedly this film catches him in a period of doubt, between disillusionment with Elijah Mohammed and the revival of his mission in Mecca.  Each of these characters was a hero to me at the time, and I never quibbled with the veracity of their portrayal in this very satisfying film, even if some events are telescoped or transposed to this one night.
 

Even though there are several Oscar winners involved, no one is talking about an Oscar for Let Them All Talk (MC-73, HBOm), and rightly so.  Meryl Streep is always a pleasure to watch, but this film is unlikely to garner her 22^nd Best Actress nomination.  She plays a highly successful and entitled novelist, crossing on the Queen Mary 2 to accept an award in England.  For company (or material?), she invites two old college friends she hasn’t seen in decades along for the cruise.  Neither Dianne Wiest nor Candice Bergen will be in line for another Oscar nom, but it was nice to see those actresses as well, at their (and my) advanced age.  For further support, Meryl has nephew Lucas Hedges to help out and advance the plot, such as it is.  Steven Soderbergh is not in line for another Best Director Oscar either, but does deserve some credit for continued innovation in his restlessly inventive career.  He shot the film in two weeks, essentially as a one-man crew with an advanced digital camera, allowing the actors to improvise within a story outline.  One of the best aspects of the film was his roaming all over the abovedecks/belowdecks aspects of a luxury liner.  But the many attractive elements of the film do not coalesce into a compelling or revelatory – or even very entertaining – story.  Long ago, I made an Atlantic crossing on the original Queen Mary, more or less in steerage, but it was fun to see the modern version, even if the cruise, like this movie, is “a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.”

Another film that Meryl tries to save, and may even turn into a garbage “Best Picture” nom, is Ryan Murphy’s The Prom (MC-55, NFX).  I’m rather surprised to have watched it, and even more surprised not to have hated it.  La Streep is joined by Nicole Kidman and James Corden, as failing Broadway performers who try to burnish their careers by taking up a cause.  Which turns out to be a lesbian teen (Jo Ellen Pellman) who wants to take the date of her choice to her high school prom (adapted from a real news story, but for Pence-ive reasons moved from Mississippi to Indiana).  Inflated from stage to screen, the production certainly has energy and polish, and a bit of heart, or at least a paper cut-out of one.  The message of inclusivity and acceptance is hammered home, but with a smiley face.  There have been a number of admirable adaptations of Broadway shows this year, but this one does not fall within the dress circle.

Speaking of unlikely candidates in the Oscar hunt, another I was surprised to watch, and liked more than expected, was Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (MC-68, AMZ).   Yes, it’s mainly an exercise in gross-out humor, but it also works as sharp satiric documentary with many laugh-out-loud moments.  We all know about Giuliani’s performance in the film, but Pence was also pranked by Borat, as were assorted other right-wing gatherings.  Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat looks somewhat more impressive after seeing his Abbie Hoffman in Trial of the Chicago 7.

In a just world, so obviously not in this one, the shoo-in for the Best Documentary Oscar would be Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall (MC-88, PBS).  He’s already been given an honorary Academy Award for career achievement, but none of his forty-plus films has won, so he keeps churning them out at the age of 90, and this portrait of his hometown of Boston is one of his very best.  The notorious Brutalist building of the title provides the focus of the film, but its scope is the entire city.  And here let me tip my cap to Wiseman’s longtime cinematographer John Davey for the photo essays that separate the various segments devoted to indoor scenes and meetings – his feel for the city is remarkable.  This is the street-level Boston that I know.  More than any other Wiseman film I can think of, City Hall has a star, a main character that we come back to again and again.  Appropriately enough, it’s Mayor Marty Walsh, mostly unknown to me heretofore but a hero to me henceforward.  Son of Irish immigrants, former labor leader, recovering alcoholic, dedicated public servant, he’s plain-spoken and seemingly authentic.  Like Lori Lightfoot in Steve James’ similar – and similarly great – portrait of Chicago, City So Real, Walsh emerged as an unlikely progressive candidate in a crowded field, but now he’s into his second term after a landslide reelection.  Needless to say, I learned all this elsewhere, since Wiseman’s approach is always to throw the viewer into the scene without explanation or identifiers, and just let the matter at hand unfold in something like real time.  That’s why this film runs to 4½ hours, too long a sit even for me, but easy to break up into bite-sized segments.  If you’re familiar with Wiseman, you know what to expect, because his method never varies, patient fly-on-the-wall observation, and subtle editing to make a statement without assertion.  If you’re not, many of his films, all portraits of places and institutions, are shorter and more accessible than this, and most are available through Kanopy, if you have access through your library.  Catch up with City Hall on PBS.org till 1/20/21, by which time Marty Walsh may be President Biden’s Secretary of Labor.

P.S. (1/17/21):  Biden did name Walsh to the Labor post, but as you know, other stuff has been going on down in D.C.  I’ve rounded off this post by inserting one more likely Best Picture nominee, and will begin another post when the actual nominees are named, to culminate when I actually get to see Nomadland.

Taking a small axe to a big tree

Safe to say that the most towering achievement in filmmaking this year is Steve McQueen’s highly-personal “Small Axe” series of five films, now appearing on Amazon Prime, about the experience of West Indian immigrants to the UK (the so-called “Windrush generation” brought over after WWII, and its progeny).  This is a remarkable and creditable way to use the clout of his Best Director Oscar for 12 Years a Slave.  The series takes its name from a Bob Marley song, and could be taken to mean a small insular community taking on the institutional forces of racism and bias.
 
Mangrove (MC-90), like Stonewall, refers to both a place and a movement:  a small Trinidadian restaurant in Notting Hill, and the uprising of a marginalized community in response to police brutality.  After a loud but peaceful protest against official harassment, which turned violent when the police attacked, the Mangrove Nine were charged with “riot and affray.”  The first half of the movie follows the restaurant becoming a community center, and attracting the attention of some racist cops (pardon me, bobbies), and the second half is taken up with the Old Bailey trial of the protestors, reminiscent of, but an interesting contrast to, the contemporaneous Trial of the Chicago 7. 
 
Lovers Rock (MC-95) takes a totally different tack, portraying one night’s house party in the 1980s era of the eponymous musical genre, which bridged reggae with Motown and foretastes of hip-hop.  Not welcome in British pubs and clubs, new immigrants from the Caribbean mingle with the children of an earlier generation to celebrate their distinctive sound and the mixing culture it evokes, both sensuous and rocking.  The film puts you right in the middle of the dance floor, participating in the ecstasy and the passion for 70 intense minutes.  Also on Prime is the documentary The Story of Lovers Rock, which fills in a lot of background and context, especially on the Janet Kay song “Silly Games,” which features so prominently in the McQueen film.  After the doc, I watched the party film again, with another whole level of appreciation.  It’s a profound revelation as well as a visceral experience.
 
The next two films in the series depict the contrasting life arcs of two real individuals.  Red, White & Blue (MC-84) follows Leroy Logan (powerfully portrayed by John Boyega) as he leaves behind a career as a forensic scientist to enter law enforcement, on an unlikely quest to reform institutional racism from within.  In counterpoint, his father determinedly pursues his day in court after being beaten by a pair of bigoted cops on a bogus parking violation.  Two strong Black men who can’t see eye to eye despite their deep bond.  Only when seeing the character’s name listed as a consultant in the closing credits did I realize that this was the true story of a real-life superhero.
 
Similarly, it was only after watching Alex Wheatle (MC-77) that I learned that the title character would become the prize-winning author of numerous YA novels, even an MBE.  An outcome hard to imagine after the dire story of his beginnings in foster “care.”  His story intersects with other Small Axe films when at 16 he’s a founding member of a “sound system” like that in Lovers Rock, and at 18 he’s incarcerated for participation in the Brixton riots of 1981.  This is the slightest film of the series, but still packs a punch.
 
Education (MC-88) is short as well, and a bit more didactic, but also rings with an implicit autobiographical authenticity, about a preteen boy who is bright but dyslexic.  As a West Indian, he is shunted aside into a school for the “educationally subnormal,” which is just a dumping ground.  But his sorely overworked mother takes up his cause and becomes an activist, for a group providing supplementary schooling for those underserved by the government, something McQueen himself benefited from.  So this concludes a cycle of films about institutional racism with an affirmation that a small axe can chip away at a big tree, and hope to take it down.
 
Each film works in its own right, but collectively they become a masterwork.  [Closed captioning strongly recommended for all of them, since the patois is hard to penetrate.]
 

Amazonia

One thing I notice about an all-streaming diet of film and TV, is that channels take turns in my attention, then fade into insignificance, only to rebound at some point.  Technically, I’ve always found Prime Video the most glitchy of channels, but it seems to be buffering better lately.  And coincidentally, I’ve been finding a lot to watch.  Including a double-feature of recently released “Amazon originals.”  Sound of Metal (MC-81, AMZ) was not a title likely to attract me, but the Metacritic rating caught my eye, and the presence of Riz Ahmed (of The Night Of) lured me in, along with the theme of deafness.  He plays the drummer in a punk-metal duo, on tour in their deluxe RV, when suddenly, if not surprisingly with all that banging and screeching, he loses his hearing.  As a recovering addict he is lucky to find a treatment center that specializes in adaptations to the challenge of hearing loss, where he learns more than he bargained for.  Darius Marder directs his first film, co-written with his brother, in a manner that feels close to home and deeply involved in its topic.  With a lot to say, but not needing to underline its points, counting on the viewer to put the pieces together.  The sound design is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the film, as it passes from acutely clear to subjectively muffled to electronically mediated and back again, in a way that continuously advances the story and the viewer’s understanding of the condition.  Believe me, you don’t have to be a heavy metal music fan to appreciate this film’s deep dive into silence.
 
On the other hand, Allan Ball’s Uncle Frank (MC-58, AMZ) underlines its points to its own detriment.  Half-good, or maybe even two-thirds, this film devolves into stagy formula at the end, after beginning with a fresh approach to the relationship between an intellectual teen girl bursting out of the confines of her patriarchal South Carolina family, and her uncle who has escaped into a literature professorship up north.  Their bond is sketched in nicely, and played exceptionally well, by Sophia Lillis as the niece and narrator, and Paul Bettany as the uncle, both very appealing and convincing, which I guess are my two main criteria for acting.  So I enjoyed their interactions as outsiders at a family gathering, and then again when she goes to college and their paths cross in NYC, where she finds out that he is gay, with a partner of ten years.  So far, so good, but then they all wind up back in the viper’s bosom of the SC family, and thereafter every scene seems obligatory and not convincing.
 
While on Prime, I noticed a BBC series from 2015 that I had never heard of, Life in Squares (AMZ).  This 3-part dramatic series on the Bloomsbury Group hit me right in the sweet spot, as I knew enough about the characters to take an interest but not enough to quibble with their representation.  The title comes from a Dorothy Parker quip that the group “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles.” The focus is on the Stephen sisters, breaking out on their own in London after the death of their controlling father, largely from the perspective of Vanessa (soon to marry Clive Bell), though also following Virginia as she marries Leonard Woolf.  Vanessa is a painter, while her husband is a philandering art critic, so she falls in love with another painter, Duncan Grant.  Problem is, he’s gay, but that doesn’t stop them from having a daughter and living together for decades.  Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes hover in the polyamorous background.  That’s a lot of characters to keep track of, and two sets of actors to keep straight through time shifts, though all the acting is quite good, except for one bad switchover.  James Norton as the younger Duncan Grant is certainly the most recognizable face in the ensemble, but the older does not match well.  On the other hand, Vanessa Bell is well served by Phoebe Fox and later Eve Best.  Literate and plausible, plus attractively designed, this is a must for Anglophiles.
 
Another unexpected find on Prime was the Georgian film And Then We Danced (MC-68, AMZ), in which we follow a group of young dancers in Tblisi trying out for the national dance troupe.  For much of the past decade my archaeologist son has been digging and researching in Georgia, so I always take a look at notable films from there, to get an idea about where he spends most summers.  Traditional Georgian dance has always been male-centric, but over recent years has become more rigidly masculine.  That’s a problem for our protagonist, who is more flamboyant and expressive.  A new dancer arrives as competition, and also as an attraction that soon grows overt, a risk to them both in the repressive atmosphere of Georgian society.  The performers and performances are extremely engaging, and implicitly carry much of the dramatic weight of this fraught gay romance.  Dancing both professional and spontaneous is at the center of this film, and creates an exhilarating experience.

One last Amazon original to close out this post:  Sylvie’s Love (MC-75, AMZ).  Writer-director Eugene Ashe is no Douglas Sirk, or even Todd Haynes imitating Sirk, but he does a nice job of resurrecting the 1950s “women’s picture” melodrama, in style and subject matter, with the twist that almost all the characters are Black.  Tessa Thompson has the wattage and appeal to carry it off, and Nnamdi Asomugha (former NFL cornerback, I discover) is a pleasing foil as the jazz saxophonist who falls for her, as they meet and part, and meet and part, over the period of 1957-1962, which is evoked nicely in music, clothes, and décor.  So a lot to like here, but not so much to actually believe, with the story fabricated rather than evoked.  Still a satisfying throwback, with some novel elements.
 

 

It's a not-so-wonderful life

By the happenstance of streaming release, I saw a strange double-feature on a recent evening, and I replicate the experience with this nonsensical pairing.  First up was the Hulu original, Happiest Season (MC-68).  Now, I am no more drawn to the fantasy of holiday family reunions than I am to the reality of them.  So-called would-be “Christmas classics” are not a party I want to attend or a genre I want to watch, but when the couple going home for the holidays is Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, maybe I’ll have a look-in.  In the event, they bring way too much emotional firepower to this piece of fluff, which descends into slapstick, also wasting Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza in the process.  Clea DuVall moves behind the camera, and earns diversity points for making a lesbian romantic comedy, but fails to make use of the fellow actresses she was able to recruit, to deliver something more honest and searching.  And less reliant on the crutch of It’s a Wonderful Life.  The movie’s not a trial to watch, except for the missed opportunity – it could have been so much more.

On the other hand, if Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You (MC-82, Kanopy) had been anything more, I’d have been pole-axed.  That’s no surprise, since Loach ranks high in my pantheon of directors, and never strays from troubling topics, this time the impact of the gig economy on gig workers, specifically a Newcastle family where the mother works as an on-call home health aide (or “carer,” as she refers to herself) without contract, benefits, or set schedule.  The father can’t find suitable work in the construction industry anymore, so becomes a franchisee in a package delivery company, where he has to buy his own van and does not get any wages but just a per-package fee for each he delivers, subject to penalties and chargebacks.  Their teen son is bright and artistic, but sees the economic dead end he faces, so acts out through graffiti and other gestures of rebellion.  The cute and also bright preteen daughter acts out the family stress by bedwetting.  It’s all pretty grim, but as usual with Loach the nonprofessional acting is remarkable, and the film’s social and moral argument delivered cogently and forcefully.  Painful to watch, the film reeks of reality and relatability, with the reward of deeper understanding of how the other half lives.

I’ve already written here about Loach’s career, but I am adapting and adding to that summary, to post with my other “career summaries” (in column to right, if you’re on a computer rather than a phone).  More and more, I think, those will become the focus of this blog.

Miscellanea

I have a number of recent films to review that I could add to prior thematic posts, whether related to Ethan Hawke’s career or the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, but I’ll collect them under this heading.
 
In Tesla (MC-67, Hulu), Hawke is the title character in a film by Michael Almereyda, as in their offbeat contemporary adaptation of Hamlet from 2000.  And like Almereyda’s recent Experimenter, it takes the biopic in a distinctive direction with experimental artifice, which works well sometimes but other times not.  As the inventor Tesla, Hawke is as recessive and inward as he was explosive and outward in The Good Lord Bird.  Kyle Maclachlan as Thomas Edison is his foil, and Jim Gaffigan as Westinghouse his partner in the “current wars” of electrical innovation.  Despite the artificial elements and elliptical storytelling, I did learn some things from this film, though the character of Tesla remains enigmatic and remote.
 
Bombshell (MC-64, Hulu) tells the story of the Fox News women who brought down Roger Ailes from his reign of sexual harassment and assault, in a film that suffered for some because the women themselves are hardly feminist heroines.  But with Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, plus Margot Robbie as a fictionalized composite character, it’s hard not to become invested in their fates.  John Lithgow plays Ailes, along with a stunningly top-drawer supporting cast.  Director Jay Roach has made a lot of comedies that I have not seen, but also political docudramas that I have liked, such as Recount (FL 2000), Game Change (Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin), and All the Way (Bryan Cranston as LBJ).  This one is highly watchable, if not totally satisfying, in its depiction of a toxic work environment at a toxic media company.
 
Miss Juneteenth (MC-73, Kanopy), the debut feature of writer-director Channing Peoples is deeply personal and closely observed, telling the story of a young single mother in Fort Worth, working two jobs and raising a teen daughter.  As a teen herself, she won the titular title, in an annual pageant celebrating the belated day in 1865 when Texas slaves learned that they were free.  She’d never been able to take advantage of the college scholarship attached, because she got pregnant with the daughter she is now grooming to take back the title, and the advantages she had forgone.  Both mother and daughter (Nicole Beharie and Alexis Chikaeze) are beautiful and talented enough to win any pageant, but each has her own dreams and desires.  Their conflict is gentle and affectionate but real, and situated in a community that is sketched in persuasively, in a film that prioritizes low-key truths over high drama.

To judge by movies, displacement by gentrification is almost as big an issue for the Black community as police violence.  After Blindspotting and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Residue (MC-82, NFX) brings the concern back from the Bay Area to Washington DC.  Merawi Gerami’s film seems lightly fictionalized and deeply personal, about a young filmmaker returning from LA to write a script about the neighborhood he grew up in, only to find it taken over by yuppies, with the friends he knew vanished, in jail, or worse.  While the approach seems excessively arty, elliptical, and self-conscious at first, the impressionistic mix – of present tense, flashback memories, and dreams – begins to gather weight and substance, helped by solid nonprofessional acting all round.  A promising debut from a second generation filmmaker. 

At the intersection of #MeToo and BLM, we find the 12-episode comedy-drama I May Destroy You (MC-86, HBO), which I was finally prompted to watch when it emerged as the runaway leader in Metacritic’s compilation of top ten lists for the best TV of 2020.  The creator and star Michaela Coel is a thirtyish Brit of Ghanian descent, who based the series on her own experience of sexual assault.  A little bit Fleabag, a little bit Russian Doll, a little bit Ramy, so I can see the appeal, but feel that I have aged out of appreciation for the stresses of thirtyish hipsters in the social media era.  I was put off by the first episode, but persisted until I became intrigued by unexpected complexities, only to be quite put off again by the final two.   Coel plays the author of an internet-fueled samizdat hit, Chronicles of a Fed-up Millennial, and now has a contract for a real book, which she is struggling to write, and no wonder with all the partying, and preoccupation with social media (she makes an Instagram post in the middle of a doctor’s appointment).  She has a wild girl bestie from school days, and a gay friend obsessed with Grindr hookups, plus an Italian drug dealer boyfriend.  She wakes up from one wild night with a head wound and fragmentary memories of a sexual assault after her drink was spiked.  The series covers many different issues of sexual consent on its way to tidying up loose ends.  The energy and conviction of the performers carries the day, even when the story wanders.  But in truth, it won’t end up on my best of the year list.

And here’s an addendum to “Docs advice”:  You don’t have to be a longtime bookseller to appreciate D.W. Young’s documentary The Booksellers (MC-72, AMZ), but it certainly helps.  Antiquarian booksellers are a different breed from us humble retailers, but I can certainly appreciate their bibliophilia, collecting passion, and general oddity.  This film is well put together, and continuously entertaining in its low-key manner.  If you have a thing for books, or for collecting, or for odd sorts of people, then you will enjoy this movie.

Similarly, you don’t have to have lived through the Nixon years to be riveted and informed by Charles Ferguson’s excellent 260-minute recapitulation of Watergate (MC-73, Kanopy), but it does add an overlay of personal memory to the media record of the era.  (For example, my father died the day before the “Saturday Night Massacre.”)  Reports of breaking news back in the day are interspersed with retrospective interviews, and less happily, with staged recreations of Oval Office conversations that were caught on tape.  The unspoken comparison to the Trump administration was evident when the series came out in 2018, but even more so now (who can forget Roger Stone’s Nixon tattoo?).  The big difference is that back then Republicans with a conscience still roamed D.C., while today the species is extinct.  Another is that Nixon was smarter and more serious, and therefore even more stupid, than Trump.

One last film, entirely sui generis, falls under this heading, which I can’t recommend for the faint-hearted but also can’t ignore.  Beanpole (MC-84, Kanopy), which won an award at Cannes for its very young director Kantemir Balagov, is by any reckoning a tough but worthwhile watch.  Set in Leningrad after the end of war in 1945, it is a catalogue of PTSD and its various effects, anchored by astounding performances from two first-time actresses.  The pair, one extremely tall and startlingly blond (the Beanpole of the title), and the other small and red-haired, served in an anti-aircraft unit during the siege of Leningrad.  Beanpole was invalided out after a concussion makes her susceptible to catatonic seizures, and now works in a hospital for wounded vets.  Masha stayed with their unit all the way to Berlin, in search of revenge, but now returns to live and work together with her comrade.  Their relationship is very intense and complicated, almost incomprehensible, a mixture of affection, resentment, and terrible need.  I won’t describe any of the twists of the tale, but simply note the mastery of the filmmaking and its expressionist use of color in a drab and depressing post-apocalyptic setting.

British family affairs

The Crown (MC-85, NFX) in its fourth season remains an intoxicating mix of history, spectacle, and soap opera.  Though I watched with a subscriber to Majesty magazine – which circulates among her sisters and nieces – and had her at hand for character ID and fact-checking, I did not go into this series with any great antecedent interest in the Windsors et al.  And that despite the fact one of the earliest Christmas presents I can remember receiving was a replica of Elizabeth’s coronation carriage, from my English mother or maybe her mother, long before I got the Roy Rogers’ chuckwagon I really wanted.  Nonetheless, intelligent writing from Peter Morgan, sumptuous production, and outstanding acting have kept me riveted through four seasons.  This season splits the focus between Princess Di, whom I always considered a vapid celebrity, and Margaret Thatcher, always a political monster to me.  In the respective performances of Emma Corrin and Gillian Anderson, however, I found them objects of fascination and perhaps even understanding.  The marvelous Olivia Colman continues as the Queen, passing the baton from Claire Foy along to Imelda Staunton in the forthcoming final two seasons, a truly royal succession.  I’m also eager to see Helena Bonham Carter yield to Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret.  Can’t imagine anyone but Josh O’Connor as sorehead Prince Charles, and it’s still a shock to see him elsewhere, wrestling naked in the mud with another man in a Yorkshire sheepfold, or taking the pulpit as one of Jane Austen’s comically pompous parsons.  Lots of good performances from lesser aristos, and even commoners as well.  Come for the scandal, stay for the history, leave with amused empathy for the poor royals, trapped within their gilded privilege.  I won’t anoint this series with my all-time top ten ranking until it’s complete, but it seems a lock at this point.

As a longtime fan of Nick Hornby, I came in a roundabout way to a week’s free trial of Sundance Now, in order to watch State of the Union (MC-81).  In an interview, he mentioned taking inspiration from High Maintenance to break out of the half-hour or hour-long tv box, and deciding to do a series of ten ten-minute episodes.  In each, a troubled pair meet in a pub for a drink before going in for marital therapy, he a pint of Pride, she a dry white wine .  We never follow them into the session, but in the next week’s pub meeting we find out what happened in the intervening time.  The couple is played by Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike and they are outstanding, individually and in tandem.  They make the most of Hornby’s dialogue, and then some.  Despite its provenance and limited setting, this 100-minute series directed by Stephen Frears makes perfect sense as a movie, and ranks with the best of mature romantic comedies.

In the interests of self-understanding, I look for films, documentaries, or shows that highlight the issues of autism, so when the recent third season of The A Word (MC-76, AMZ) generated comment, I was drawn into the first season, from 2016.  Like In Treatment, this is an outstanding adaptation of an Israeli tv series that takes serious interest in human psychology.  Set in the picturesque English Lake District, it’s an hour-long family drama, with excellent writing and acting all round, and a strong streak of humor in the behavior of an extended dysfunctional family.  Almost all the actors and creators were new to me, so I won’t bother to list names, except to affirm that the ensemble is impeccable.  I’ll have more to say after I watch seasons 2 and 3 (six episodes each), but I want to enter an early recommendation on the record.  I’m not sure how they drew out the performance of the 5-year-old autistic boy, but it is remarkably convincing.  His parents are initially deep in denial about his condition, and about the whole family’s communication problems.  There’s a clueless, recently widowed grandfather; a sweet and sympathetic teenage sister; and an aunt and uncle who’ve moved in next door with their own set of marital and career difficulties.  The family business is a brewery, and the son-in-law is branching out into a rustic gastropub.  The landscape and the village characters round out the appeal of this series, but for me truthfulness was the defining characteristic, sometimes unflattering but always compassionate and perceptive.  Will have more to say when I get through further seasons. 

Show-me-time

Showtime has never made sense to me as a premium channel worth subscribing to (their only series that I followed all the way to the end was Nurse Jackie), but I do make note of films or series that seem worth watching, in order to take advantage of a month’s subscription (or free trial) when the channel presents something I really want to see – in this case, Ethan Hawke as John Brown in The Good Lord Bird, whose release had been delayed several times.  So here are a few hangovers from 2019 films that I wasn’t able to see elsewhere, and a few other shows I watched while I had the chance.

Hustlers (MC-79) is a based-on-fact caper film about high-end NYC strippers, made by and to some extent for women.  Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, and featuring a powerhouse performance by Jennifer Lopez, it begins just before the financial meltdown of 2008, when the strippers are making a decent living catering to the whims of money managers.  After the fall, the wolves of Wall Street get shorn by sheep, as the women develop a scheme to fleece the predators in turn.  The film moves fast, but doesn’t go anyplace in particular, making gestures toward sisterhood is powerful, and motherhood as madness, but coming down firmly in the realm of shopping equals bliss. 

Since GLOW I’ve taken an interest in Marc Maron, which is cemented by Sword of Trust (MC-70), where he plays an Alabama pawn shop owner who comes into possession of an old sword with accompanying “documentation” that “proves” that the South won the Civil War.  As such, it is considered highly collectable by a certain sort, and with his spacey assistant and the lesbian couple who brought him the sword, they fall into a rabbit hole of unreconstructed Confederate white supremacists.  Written and directed by Lynn Shelton, the film is offbeat, deadpan, improvisational, and absurd, but also quite moving at times, not least in an intimate scene between Maron and Shelton herself.  They had been junkies together, but he got sober while she backslid; he clearly still loves her, but has to fend off the lure of the world they shared.  Maron and Shelton were in a personal and professional relationship themselves, which was cut off by her sudden death from a blood ailment in May of this year.  They would have been certain to do more great things together.

Reviewing Shelton’s filmography, I caught up with one that I had missed, Outside In (2018, MC-76, NFX). I’m glad I did, and sad there won’t be more.  Before Maron, she was known for her work with the Duplass brothers, and she wrote this with Jay, who also stars, as a man-child just released from twenty years in prison for a teenage crime that he didn’t actually commit.  I can’t believe they weren’t inspired by the superlative television series Rectify, though they have their own angle on the story.  Edie Falco delivers her usual insight, humor, and feeling in the role of Duplass’ high school English teacher, who crusaded for his release and sustained him throughout his sentence.  Understandably, he fell in love with her.  And understandably, with her unappreciative lout of a husband, she is inclined to accept his attentions.  Her teen daughter is played by the reliably great Kaitlyn Dever, who also forms a relationship with Duplass.  The setting is a small town in Washington state, where it is nearly always raining.  Every aspect of the film reeks of modest lives and plain truth.  Edie Falco’s glinting eye and twisted smile make the proceedings quite endearing, recommendation enough for those in the know.  Now back to Showtime offerings.

Painter Julian Schnabel may be arty and self-indulgent as a director, but he has made a number of high-quality films, and At Eternity’s Gate (MC-76) is another.  There have been many biopics about Van Gogh, but this is a worthy and novel addition, distinguished above all by Willem Dafoe’s poignant and highly believable portrayal of the artist.  More impressionistic than factual, the film successfully inhabits the mind and milieu of the painter in the last two years of his life.  It has a star-studded supporting cast, led by Oscar Isaac as Gauguin.  There are off-putting elements in Schnabel’s film, but overall it succeeds in his aim to show “what it is to be an artist.”  If I were still programming films at the Clark, this would be a natural to show and discuss.

A new film I’d been looking for just turned up unexpectedly on Showtime, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (MC-89).  With films like Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Certain Women, she has certainly established herself as one the most distinctive American independent filmmakers working today.  There’s no mistaking a Reichardt film, even when she doesn’t resort to the old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio, and First Cow may be the most Kelly yet, as she achieves what I can only call an overflowing minimalism – slow-paced, enigmatic, folktale-like yet palpably real.  Her penetration of the mythic West called to mind one of my all-time favorites McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in this depiction of 1820s Oregon, where beaver pelts are known as “soft gold” and draw a diversity of immigrants – British, American, Chinese, and Russian – to overrun the native tribes.  One is gentle-souled Cookie to a band of brutish trappers, having been orphaned and indentured to a baker back east.  Another is a Chinaman who has been everywhere and seen everything, at least in his own head.  (John Magaro and Orion Lee are excellently matched as such, and Toby Jones plays the British overlord of the frontier fort, and owner of the eponymous cow.)  They find and re-find each other in the wilderness, to affirm the message of the William Blake proverb that begins the film: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”  As usual, Reichardt is in collaboration here with the writer Jonathan Raymond, and filming on her home turf, but she has mastered the art of making the personal political, as well as appealing, and even humorous in a downbeat, deadpan manner.

The primary referent for Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life (MC-87) is Fleabag, but there are also elements of Rectify (again) and a Masterpiece Mystery like Flesh and Blood, plus a parody of various true crime serials, which means it has many points of interest but is perhaps too diffuse in focus for its six half-hour episodes, and not a promising set-up for future seasons.  Haggard effectively plays a woman who has spent half her life in prison after a teenage incident, returning to her seaside town to live with her nervous and quirky parents and to absorb the fear and antagonism of the community.  If you have a taste for contemporary British comedy, this is definitely worth a look, but not something to go out of your way for.

Which brings us to The Good Lord Bird (MC-84), which I did go out of my way for, because it traffics in the period of history with which I have been obsessed for decades, America between 1840 and 1860.  There’s a lot to be admired in this 7-part series starring the estimable Ethan Hawke as John Brown, but I also have some quibbles, shared with the highly-praised source novel.  The series seems more respectful of James McBride’s book and voice, than of any of the characters depicted (aside from Harriet Tubman).  Daveed Diggs’s Frederick Douglass is an energetic and canny caricature, like his Lafayette/Jefferson in Hamilton.  (At this moment I am almost 600 pages into David Blight’s award-winning biography of Douglass.)  Hawke as Brown is comically insane as well as authentically prophetic, but always carrying complete conviction, the actor as well as the historical character.  This makes a career-capping role for Hawke – to go with his writing and producing credits – as the most accomplished actor of his generation (a claim I’m inclined to back up in a future essay).  Joshua Caleb Johnson is also good in his debut, as the slave boy converted by Brown into a freed girl and surrogate daughter, as well as narrator of book and film.  Though I found the tone somewhat elusive and the history just a bit evasive, this series is handsomely mounted and effectively irreverent in its depiction of antebellum America.  So I’m inclined to credit the opening claim of each episode “All of this is true.  Most of it happened.”  It’s not the last word on John Brown, but an honest portrait of a still-controversial and nearly incomprehensible figure.  Lunatic or visionary, terrorist or freedom fighter, all of the above?  It’s still up for debate.

 

Docs advice

Feeling a little wan and anxious, maybe suffering from a truth-deficiency? Not getting enough fact and truth in your media diet?  I’m here to affirm to you that documentaries worthy of the name enable an encounter with realities that would otherwise fall outside one’s ken.  Melding entertainment and education in the broadest sense of each term, nonfiction films are a vehicle for learning, but moreover a vehicle for seeing and feeling.  Here are a number of genuine examples of Grierson’s originating definition of “documentary film” – “the creative treatment of actuality.”

If Frederick Wiseman were not still around at the age of 90, having just brought out another acclaimed film (City Hall, specifically Boston’s), Steve James would be easy to cite as the greatest American documentarian working today.  His latest is City So Real (MC-93, Hulu), a five-part series that follows the 2019 election for mayor of Chicago, as 14 candidates make the ballot to vie for the Democratic nomination, after Rahm Emanuel declines to run for a third term.  The surprise winner (which will I will not spoil, in case you happen not to be up on Midwestern urban politics) is then confronted in the final episode by 2020’s overlapping crises of pandemic and racial unrest.  The variety of candidates offers entry into a wide range of situations and institutions, and Steve James, as a longtime Chicagoan, nods to its reputation as a city of neighborhoods by beginning each scene with a map of the city, highlighting the name and location of the neighborhood depicted.  So this is a vast yet intimate canvas(s) of the city.  I’m not going to describe any of the characters or twists of the story, but urge you to follow along as the pageant unfolds, through campaign events and church services, board room meetings and street actions, bars and barbershops, door-to-door encounters and penthouse salons.  Beyond astute sociological analysis (and humor!), this series offers a parable of democracy in action.  There is no better bard of Chicago than James, from his groundbreaking Hoop Dreams through The Interrupters and Life Itself to his previous outstanding tv series, America to Me, all of which I urgently recommend.  Even when he wanders away to NYC’s Chinatown for the postscript to the 2008 financial meltdown, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, you are guaranteed a viewing experience that will make you feel as well as learn.  Steve James is a filmmaker to watch.

Reviewing his filmography, I noticed one I had missed, done for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.  No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson (2010) may be James’s most personal film (though Stevie is another example),  James uses the first-person approach to dig deep into the racial divides of his hometown, Hampton VA, where high school hoops star A.I. was thrown in jail after a bowling alley brawl with whites.  The case drew national attention and eventually led to clemency from the governor, and Iverson went on to stardom at Georgetown and in the NBA.  But two decades later, the divisive spectacle still rankles on both sides of Hampton’s color line.  James’ father was a big Iverson fan, but his mother supported the hoopster’s conviction and sentence (15 years! though eligible for parole in 10 months).  The story is old, but the resonance is oh-so-contemporary.

Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me (MC-87, AMZ) is not exactly a one-woman show or a documentary, but a Tony- and Pulitzer- nominated play that has been filmed by the suddenly ubiquitous Marielle Heller.  Whom I’m reminded of most, and this constitutes high praise, is Hannah Gadsby, as Schreck combines personal experience and energetic humor into an honest and trenchant lecture on political and social concerns.  As a 15-year-old Schreck had earned scholarship money by going around to American Legion halls and competing for speeches on the title topic.  Decades later, she jumps off from her teenage words into personal and constitutional history, and the interweavings thereof.  Discussing the 9^th and 14^th amendments in detail, she covers issues like citizenship and immigration, women’s rights and domestic abuse.  Near the end, she brings in other voices, a gay man and two teenage black girls, to debate whether the constitution should be retained and amended, or rewritten from scratch, a proposition on which the audience then votes.  The whole thing is educational, funny, and even moving.

Strictly for a special taste and history, which I confess to sharing, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (MC-68, AMZ) was a rare delicacy, like that Japanese fish that can kill you if you’re not careful.  A movie about a film critic, who’d-a thunk it?  But in her 24-year tenure in that role at The New Yorker, Kael was a cultural force to be reckoned with.  For me personally, most often adversarily.  I tended to stand with the Stanley Kauffmanns and John Simons of this small world.  Even Andrew Sarris made more sense.  But Pauline Kael was provocative, a sharp blade to parry with.  Living in NYC in the mid-70s, I’d rush home from a new movie, to pick up her review and argue with it into the night, pricked by her misguided but well-articulated views.  So Rob Garver’s documentary was for me a warm bath of cinephiliac nostalgia, with maybe a shard of broken wineglass in the tub.  I enjoyed seeing all the talking heads, familiar faces and those I could finally put to a byline, but especially I liked the constant stream of very short clips from films, which illustrated or commented upon the intervening dialogue, while providing a pop-quiz mini-history of cinema during Kael’s reign.  (It put me in mind of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour compilation of film clips, in each of which a clock appears exactly matching the viewer’s time; as a museum installation, you’re free to wander in and out, take a soft seat, and watch time pass by, while also taking a trip down cinematic memory lane.)

 
Anyway, one of my pandemic lockdown projects was to go through my shelves of film books, and among those I set aside for future donation to the local library’s second-hand bookstore, was a shelf of critics’ compilations – Kael, Kauffmann, Simon, and all but a select few volumes.  I did keep two Library of America anthologies, American Movie Critics edited by Philip Lopate (he’s in the doc), and a Kael selection called The Age of Movies.  Too bad these old reviews are not searchable online, but it’s unfeasibly cumbersome to find the relevant volume, then look in the index, then flip to the review, after one has been spoiled by finding any wanted text with a few clicks.  And frankly, by now I’m mostly interested in formulating and expressing my own opinion about films rather than arguing with someone else’s.  I still enjoy the simulated conversation of checking Metacritic or MRQE reviews, but usually after I’ve written my own, having checked facts and credits on Wikipedia.

Lately I’ve developed a non-culinary fascination with mushrooms, finding and photographing striking examples.  I’m currently reading a highly entertaining and informative book called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, so I was anxious enough to see Fantastic Fungi (MC-70, Vudu) to actually pay-per-view (only $5, or $1.67 each for three viewers), even though it will probably soon join the rest of Louie Schwartzberg’s “Moving Art” series on Netflix.  I loved the time-lapse sequences of growing mushrooms, and much of the animation was illuminating (though as frequently the case with nature documentaries, I wish they labeled the film speed or means of illustration).  But after the halfway point, the film takes a bit of a turn from the scientific (and pictorial) to woo-woo speculations about the anthropology of magic mushrooms and the resumption of psychedelic research as the war on drugs wanes.  Some nice kaleidoscopic mandala sequences to go with the white coats from Johns Hopkins.  But it’s hard not to come away with some belief in mushrooms as the salvation of earth and its humans, or at least partners in their survival.

Lately released

Ambiguity is my friend, so I welcome the opportunity to include two categories under this heading.  Here are some stragglers from 2019 that have become available lately, and also some films or shows that have just come out on streaming, now that the whole production and release schedule has been upended by the pandemic.  So this post runs through the recent release of the superb Netflix series The Queen's Gambit, but not as far as the fourth season of The Crown.
 
I’m a proponent of the distinctive but always divisive filmmaker Terrence Malick, but even I turned against his last several films, as ponderous and self-involved.  But for me A Hidden Life (MC-78, HBO) marks his return to form, even if that form calls on the viewer’s patience in a way that grates on many, even critics I usually agree with.  This one squeezes into my top ten films of2019.  At first it seems a departure for Malick to be making a film about a pious Catholic farmer in the Austrian Alps at the start of WWII, but the subtext of relevance to contemporary America soon becomes clear, as the farmer resists Hitler and the Nazis, at great cost to himself and his family.  Given the setting, and the feel for the land that runs through all of Malick’s work, the cinematography here is beautiful, though perhaps over-reliant on fisheye lenses.  (Would have fit nicely with the “Epics of the Soil, Toils of the Earth” film series I programmed for a Millet exhibition at the Clark two decades ago, which included Malick’s wonderful Days of Heaven.)  As usual, he relies on fragments of narration and shards of action rather than character development and scene construction to advance his story, which is based on actual letters between the couple who inspired the story.  It was useful not to know the true story while watching the film, so that all the searching philosophical questions – of faith and morality, politics and prudence, community and individual conscience – are open-ended.  The actors are almost all German, and mostly unfamiliar, but the narration and most of the dialogue is in English.  Oh yeah, it’s almost three hours long, but worth the time if you can stand (and sit) it.
 
Renee Zellweger certainly earned her accolades, including the Best Actress Oscar, for Judy (MC-66, Hulu).  Her portrayal of Judy Garland, in the year before her death at 47 from a drug overdose, is riveting and absolutely credible to me, though the film that surrounds the bravura acting and singing is not so compelling.  Director Rupert Goold effectively showcases the star, but doesn’t fill in much around the edges of her performance.  No subsidiary character makes much of an impression, and that’s a shame when Judy’s minder for a final London run is played by Jessie Buckley!  If only she’d been able to show a little of the Wild Rose beneath her prim schedule-keeper, but all she gets to do is gaze on the star, going from skepticism to admiration.  Judy Garland was no icon for me, but there were a number of ways in which my mother resembled her, so I found this film transfixing in its singular focus, though otherwise uninspired.

Fred Rogers is having a posthumous moment, perhaps as the antidote to Fred Trump’s damaged son, with the well-made feature A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (MC-80, dvd) following hard on the heels of the worthy documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (MC-85).  In Marielle Heller’s film, Mr. Rogers is played by another famously nice guy, Tom Hanks, and the impersonation is instantly believable.  Matthew Rhys is a cynical investigative journalist who is assigned for his sins to write a short profile of Mr. Rogers for an Esquire feature on “Heroes.”  He immediately goes looking for the feet of clay, but instead finds himself molded by Fred’s soft and pliable nature, in the process coming to terms with his difficult father, played by the always-welcome Chris Cooper.  Heller neatly weaves together three levels of representation: the near-factual reality of the situation, the on-set production of Mr. Rogers PBS show, and the animated world of puppets and toys that the show inhabits.  She also combines humor and heart into a pleasing and affecting lesson in learning to control your difficult emotions, and reaching a place of peace, kindness, and forgiveness.

Reading about a forthcoming film that I am extremely eager to see (Ammonite, set in 19^th-century Lyme Regis and starring Kate Winslet and Saiorse Ronan), I saw references to director Francis Lee’s previous debut film, God’s Own Country (MC-85, Kanopy), a 2017 Metacritic “Must-See” that I wasn’t able to track down till now.  The short take on this film is “Brokeback Mountain on a Yorkshire farm,” but it’s very much its own thing, and grounded in its own reality.  The film starts rough, with the hungover lead Josh O’Connor puking into a toilet, and proceeds to a tumble that is decidedly dirty, but winds up becoming tender, while remaining tough and true.  He’s the disaffected son of disabled sheep farmer Ian Hart, also living with grandmother Gemma Jones.  While his high school friends have escaped this harshly beautiful landscape for uni in the city, he’s stuck with responsibility for the farm, which he evades desperately with binge drinking and anonymous gay sex.  A migrant Romanian farm worker comes to stay for lambing season, and demonstrates a gentler approach to animality, in strikingly realistic scenes that reflect the director’s own experience growing up on such a farm.  The evocative cinematography is by Joshua James Richards, who’s made a name for himself with The Rider and other Chloé Zhao films (their forthcoming Nomadland has a Metacritic rating of 98!).  All round, this film is grimly beautiful and emotionally satisfying.
 

I don’t go out of my way to watch teen sex comedies, but good reviews have been luring me to quite a few recently.  Pen15 (MC-86, Hulu) is another – a Metacritic rating in the 80s and a brief too-silly sampling did not induce me to watch the first season, but when the second garnered an average up into the 90s, I gave it another shot.  The show really starts to click halfway through season one, in the 5^th or 6^th half-hour episode, and runs brilliantly into its second, with seven pre-pandemic episodes now released, with seven more to come.  Written by and starring Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, playing versions of themselves twenty years ago, as 7^th graders in 2000.  There are two lead-in gimmicks, the pair impersonating 13-year-olds among a cast of actual middle-schoolers, and cultural name-checking in the era just before 9/11.  The portrait of female friendship is delightful, as girls become women, and the horrors of puberty are treated with honesty and humor.  Maya and Anna, both as characters and creators, are engaging and empathetic, and go for authenticity more than jokiness.  Maya is the short dark one, with a Japanese mother played by her real mother.  Anna is the tall gawky blond, somewhat more self-possessed, but stressed by her parents’ marital difficulties.  Truthful and funny, thoughtful and stylish (direction by Sam Zvibleman), with characters that make for enjoyable company, this is an entertaining show that probes for something more.  (If you don’t believe me, check out this New Yorker review that came out a day after I wrote mine.)

Another tale of two teenage girls who mean everything to each other, Never Rarely Sometimes Always (MC-91, HBO), is directed by Eliza Hittman, who certainly has an unsettling talent.  All three of her films deal with underage sexual abuse in way that is never overt or sensational, but always troubling – very quiet real-life horror films.  In each we are deep within the experience of an at-risk protagonist, sharing her (or his) limited viewpoint, without context or connection.  Those the viewer is obliged to bring, through an act of attention, amounting to love, for these appealing and vulnerable children.  This time it’s a 17-year-old girl in a backwater PA town, affectingly played by Sidney Flanigan, who finds herself pregnant, and desperate to take care of the problem without telling anyone.  Her only confidante is her cousin, well-matched by Talia Ryder.  Together they bus into New York City, with a destination in mind but with no plan and no clue.  Most of the film takes place on buses or subways, or in the stations of same, interspersed by visits to clinics and offices, where the medical and social workers are sympathetic and helpful, but incapable of grappling with all the dysfunction in the poor girl’s life.  Shot with documentary immediacy, the film is somehow tedious yet all-consuming, like the girl’s plight.  Her name is Autumn but the springtime of her life is blighted by abuse.  We begin with a high school throwback talent show, where she delivers a tragic rendition of a Sixties pop tune that sets the tone for the entire film, which finally centers on the scene where the title takes on an overpowering resonance.

One more film about the sexual travail of teen girls tends to fall between the stools of comedy and tragedy represented by the two previous, and is therefore not a must-see.  Yes, God, Yes (MC-71, NFX) is neither funny nor heart-wrenching enough to stand with them, but it is a glimpse into the same era as Pen15 from the perspective of a parochial school girl, appealingly played by Natalia Dyer.  The film is written and directed by Karen Maine, and seems autobiographical, but innocuous and undistinctive.  The 16-year-old girl has been turned on by the sex scene in Titanic, but doesn’t know what to do with the feelings aroused.  Her Catholic school education isn’t enough to suppress those feelings, so she goes on a weekend retreat where instruction in chastity can’t compete with the sexual shenanigans in the summer camp-like setting.

I’m a believer in documentary as the essence of film art, but here I comment on several brand new ones that don’t qualify as art but do offer useful information and analysis.  Agents of Chaos (MC-79, HBO) is a two-part, four-hour examination of Russian meddling in American politics from the ubiquitous and highly-skilled Alex Gibney. Conveying an immense amount of information and commentary in a highly-digestible form, this series covers trolling, hacking, Wikileaks, and the strange mutual seduction of Trump and Putin.  It tells the story of what the Russians did to us, giving the deep backstory on how their techniques were tried and tested in Ukraine, and after the successful takeover of Crimea, they looked around to see where else such could be applied, and lo and behold, our 2016 election.  But even more, it tells the story of what we did to ourselves.

 
So a useful companion piece is The Social Dilemma (MC-78, NFX), directed by Jeff Orlowsky who also made the excellent Chasing Coral.  I didn’t really need to be reminded of the dangers of social media, but it was gripping to hear so many contrarian voices coming out of the tech industry itself.  When one of the guys who invented the “Like” button tells you to beware of it, that’s a telling argument.  And there are many similarly informed arguments made in this film, interspersed with examples of social media’s malign effects on a fictional family.
 
All In: The Fight for Democracy (MC-78, AMZ) involves two women whom I definitely admire: political activist Stacey Abrams and filmmaker Liz Garbus.  So I was happy and inspired to watch it, but can’t claim to have learned much from this solid civics lesson, though I do recommend it to anyone who is not well-versed in the history and tactics of voter suppression.  (I favored Stacey over Kamala for VP, as a forceful and committed speaker if nothing else, but I have to shamefacedly admit she’ll need to do an Oprah and lose some weight before she’ll be a viable national candidate.)

It’s hard to believe that Alex Gibney is an individual and not a consortium of documentary filmmakers, because he’s just out with another: Totally Under Control (MC-80, Hulu).  This timely film, released in a rush before the election, covers the federal government’s role in the coronavirus disaster, focusing not so much on Mafia Don’s personal idiocies, but instead, with a deafening chorus of whistleblowers, on the administration’s ideological and political calculations, which crippled the government’s response.  If you start with the premise that “government is the problem, not the solution,” you clear the field for the grifters and grafters to profit while the public suffers.  Make money for your friends and allies, instead of taking the steps necessary for public health in a pandemic.  This film lays the whole thing out step by sickening step.  If you can bear to relive it, this will give you a new and fuller perspective.

From documentary to docudrama, in the realm of the just-released, I have to enter a strong recommendation for The Trial of the Chicago 7 (MC-76, NFX).  Written and also directed by Aaron Sorkin in his trademark rat-a-tat, walk-&-talk style, with a minimum of dramatic license but an all-star cast, this is a film that is true to the time depicted, and to our own.  Referring to one of the (many) defining events of my young adulthood, I was alert to the film’s relation to my own memories, and in spite of a few dissonances found it entirely convincing.  Little things threw me off at first, like the respective heights of Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) as Abbie Hoffman and Jeremy Strong (Succession) as Jerry Rubin.  But any mismatches were soon overcome by outstanding acting.  By Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall), for example, as William Kunstler, or Eddie Redmayne (Theory of Everything) as Tom Hayden, all part of a pageant of familiar characters played by familiar and welcome actors (including Frank Langella as the judge and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the prosecutor).  Witty and true to life, this film works as both history and entertainment.

One more well-received – and artful – new documentary to cite:  Dick Johnson is Dead (MC-89, NFX).  I found Kirsten Johnson’s highly-praised directorial debut Cameraperson to be unwatchable, and this follow-up to be indescribable, but definitely watchable in its uniqueness.  It’s a portrait of her psychiatrist father, who is gradually succumbing to the dementia that has already taken her mother.  She moves him from their old home in Seattle to her apartment in Greenwich Village, where she enlists him in a film project revolving around fantasies of his death by various accidents, along with tongue-in-cheek yet deeply-felt enactments of his funeral and arrival in heaven.  Good-humored in its attempts to forestall grief, and charming in its title character, whom we see through his 86^th birthday, as well as in the filmmaker’s affection for him, this documentary may be hard to figure but not hard to like.

In passing, let me offer a firm shrug of the shoulders to Flesh and Blood (MC-75, PBS).  I’m far from a regular viewer of Masterpiece Mystery, but the presence of Imelda Staunton led me to give this a try.  And indeed she is the best, if not the only, reason to watch this derivative ensemble piece.  As is typical of British tv, the ensemble’s acting is quite good, led by Francesca Annis (best remembered as Lady Macbeth in Polanski’s Macbeth) and Stephen Rea (think back to The Crying Game) as two widowers getting together much to the anxiety of her children, and the sweet but intrusive neighbor (Imelda).  This four-part series follows the Big Little Lies template of starting with an apparent murder without revealing the victim, and also in its reliance on coastal scenery and luxurious surroundings.  In this case, the White Cliffs of Dover and adjoining beaches are featured prominently.  So it’s not a hardship to watch by any means, but hardly expands one’s horizons.  (A side note: these days I’m rarely able to make a distinction between programs shot on film vs. hi-def video, but with this one I was constantly aware of the latter’s visual deficiencies.)

On the other hand, let me offer a big thumbs up for The Queen’s Gambit (MC-78, NFX).  At times, whoever at Metacritic is assigning rating numbers to reviews seems rather prejudicial.  The reviews for this Netflix limited series are mostly raves, and so is mine.  So many good things about it, with my only quibble that the seven episodes might better have been cut to the canonical six (there’s a reason why a sonnet has 14 lines), or expanded indefinitely.  Written and directed by Scott Frank, from a novel by Walter Tevis (The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Color of Money), with vast sweep to go with psychological insight, the series revolves entirely around the transcendent performance of Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon, the chess prodigy who goes from Kentucky orphanage to World Championship match in Moscow.  With production values to rival The Crown, the story spans the Sixties, with the focus on the chessboard, though tournaments in Mexico City, Las Vegas, Paris, and the Soviet Union are convincingly rendered, and Beth certainly registers the changes in style through the decade (cf. Mad Men).  Outstanding acting all round, but special mention has to go to Marielle Heller – the estimable director of A Beautiful Day... (see above) – as Beth’s adoptive mother who goes from mad housewife to confidante of her gifted daughter, and to Bill Camp as the reclusive orphanage janitor from whom she learns the game.  The boys and men that Beth humbles on her climb up the ladder of chess mastery are also well portrayed.  I’m no more a chess player than I was a billiards player, but the variety of ways and places that the game is cinematically depicted keeps the viewer leaning in and hanging on the action.  But it all comes down to the stunning looks and bewitching gaze of Anya Taylor-Joy, as she navigates the perils and promise of her chosen obsessions.

Emma. (MC-71, HBO) is likewise graced by Anya T-J and likewise undervalued by Metacritic.  I feel quite proprietary about Jane Austen, and quite severe about some pop culture appropriations of her novels.  Anya can’t supplant Kate Beckinsale as my favorite Emma, but rockets ahead of Gwyneth Paltrow and Romola Garai.  In Autumn de Wilde’s directorial debut, she starts out in Wes Anderson or Marie Antoinette territory, with an arch, pastel-toned, anachronistic approach, but soon settles into quite faithful adaptation, with good performances all round, hitting all the high points of the story.  Bill Nighy is amusing as Mr. Woodhouse, and Johnny Flynn makes a believable Knightley, and other familiar faces from British TV admirably fill out the subsidiary roles.  The settings and costume design are delightful, as expected, justifying the punctuation that announces the film as a period piece.  All round, quite satisfying to Janeites and newbies alike.

The next section of this composite review is a follow-up to my “Black films matter” post.  First off, The 40-Year Old Version (MC-80, NFX).  Radha Blank wrote and directed, as well as starring in, this highly but not totally autobiographical – self-aware and serio-comic – take on the Black artist’s life.  Besides the nod in the title, this black & white (in several senses) film takes after She’s Gotta Have It and Manhattan, but is distinctively its own thing.  In fact, like its creator, the film is many things: social satire, romantic comedy, personal catharsis, document of NYC street life and art-making spaces.  Possibly too many things, with a run-time over two hours, but consistently entertaining and thought-provoking.  The character Radha was formerly cited as a “30 under 30” playwright, but has since failed to have her work produced and gets by teaching a high-school drama class.  She finds a new outlet in the world of hip-hop, where spitting rhymes becomes a vehicle for truth.  Personally, I’m too old to have ever made the transition from R&B to Rap, but this film suggests I may be missing something.

Time (MC-94, AMZ) is a powerful collaboration between two strong Black women, director Garrett Bradley (award winner at Sundance this year) and subject Sibil Fox Richardson, who goes by Fox Rich as a New Orleans businesswoman, motivational speaker, mother of six boys, and tireless advocate for her husband Rob, incarcerated at Angola on a no-reprieve 60-year sentence.  They were both arrested for a desperate and hapless armed robbery attempt; she took a plea bargain for 12 years and was out in 3½, he went to trial and was subjected to punitive retribution.  So Fox has to raise her boys without a father and hold her tight-knit family together through two decades.  One thing she does is take a wealth of home movies, which make up a good portion of the film.  Bradley is the daughter of two painters, and takes an artistic, associative approach to the material, mixing her own footage and Fox’s into a fluid amalgam, a meditation on the many meanings of doing time.  This film makes a highly-personalized companion to Ava DuVernay’s more comprehensive documentary 13^th, advancing the case for mass incarceration as the new slavery.

Driving While Black: Race, Space, and Mobility in America (MC-92, PBS) offers abundant history and context to the many dimensions of DWB, from the days when slaves weren’t allowed to leave the plantation, to the rise of Jim Crow and the KKK terrorizing Blacks who wandered into White space, to the segregation of transport, to the development of the automobile and The Green Book, through the decimation of black neighborhoods by interstate highways, all the way to the horrifying results of way too many white-on-black traffic stops these days. This comprehensive and well-put-together informational documentary by Gretchen Sorin and Ric Burns makes a valuable contribution to the current vital public conversations on the legacies of racism.