You too?

The #MeToo movement is a bit back burner now that other crises are bubbling over, but it is beginning to bear fruit in thematic films now coming out, on which I will comment under this rubric.  (Before moving on, let me go back and re-recommend The Tale by Jennifer Fox, one of the very best films of 2018.)

First up is All is Well (MC-80, NFX), which Netflix has mistranslated from the German.  Eva Trobisch’s film school graduation project should be “All Good,” which is what the protagonist, dazzlingly played by Aenne Schwarz, says whenever anyone asks how it’s going, even after she has been raped.  With unacknowledged PTSD, she goes about her business as if nothing were wrong, even when she finds out her new boss is actually her rapist.  As her life disintegrates around her, and she shows all sorts of repressed symptoms, it remains “All good.”  Until the devastating truth descends upon her.  This film is up in her face, quite literally, proceeding in tight close-ups, and shards of narrative that abandon context and continuity, but cumulatively are quite clear.  Worth seeing, if you can take it – trigger warning hereby proffered.

With a different approach but similar affect and effect, The Assistant (MC-79, Hulu) traces one day in the life of an entry-level underling in a Manhattan film production office clearly modeled on Miramax, even though the unnamed Harvey Weinstein character is only glimpsed fleetingly through an open door, or heard muffled through a closed one.  Played with tight control but great feeling by Julia Garner, the assistant arrives at the office pre-dawn and goes about her menial and demeaning chores with steely resolve, as the office culture gradually becomes clear, geared to enabling the depredations of the boss.  Sexual abuse is only one of the degradations suffered in this work environment.  When our girl, who looks like a young teen, a pixie of iron, takes her suspicions and concerns to HR, the head (played with delicious unction by Matthew Macfadyen) warns her not to sabotage her career hopes and not to worry because “You’re not his type.”  This is the debut feature from writer/director Kitty Green, who made the estimable Casting JonBenet and other documentaries.  That documentary background comes through in the meticulous delineation of office life, with its unspoken codes and power dynamics.  To me this film was epitomized in the scene in which the assistant uses a copier to print out head shots of aspiring actresses for the boss, as the photos pile up in the tray, as a visual correlative to the serial crimes of the top dog.  This is a horror story of everyday life, relying on suffocating detail and observation, rather than melodrama.

Athlete A (MC-85, NFX), the well-put-together documentary by wife-and-husband team Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, details the abusive climate at U.S.A. Gymnastics that emerged in the trial of the longtime team doctor, Larry Nassar.  Maggie Nichols was the title character, in a lawsuit that opened up a tidal wave of corroborating testimony, in which 500 women and girls came forward with their own tales of sexual interference.  An investigative team at the Indianapolis Star broke the story, and pursued it until the bad doctor was sentenced to 120 years in jail, and other USAG officials followed him.  After the story came out, former gymnasts came forward to testify in their own names, and at Nassar’s sentencing, many were able to confront him directly with the harm he had done.  Weaving together footage from old matches and coverage, with the on-camera memories of gymnasts and parents, and the unfolding of the journalistic and legal investigation, this film is clear, concise, contextual – and outraging.

It led me back to another documentary that I had skipped, Roll Red Roll (MC-83, NFX), about a heinous rape by high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio.  It’s not a bad film, maybe even essential, but in comparison with Athlete A, it seems slapdash and inconsequential, even if horrific and timely.

Black films matter

As America continues the long struggle to confront its original sin of racism, even more foundational than the practice of slavery, films about the black experience become more central than ever.  I’ve transferred over a few recent reviews, and will continue commenting on African-American films under this rubric.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (MC-83, AMZ) is a home movie, in many senses of the phrase.  In fact, a house may be the main character, a Victorian Painted Lady with a view of the Golden Gate.  It obsesses a young man who grew up in the house before his family lost it, having been told it was built by his grandfather (in 1946, when blacks moved into a neighborhood vacated by Japanese internment, only to be supplanted themselves by gentrification).  It’s also a homie movie, created by two childhood friends, Jimmie Fails who supplied the story and plays the lead, and Joe Talbot, who scripted and directed.  Jimmie’s friend within the film is played by Jonathan Majors, and their rapport is very convincing.  But there is nothing amateurish about this home movie, displaying remarkable polish and sureness of vision for a debut effort, unafraid to be weird and whimsical, and going to unexpected places in a familiar place.

I caught up with a slightly earlier take on gentrification in the Bay area from a black perspective, and found it even better.  Blindspotting (MC-77, HBO) is visually and verbally inventive, also a distinguished debut by director Carlos Lopez Estrada.  Written by and starring two longtime friends from Oakland, Daveed Diggs (who won a Tony for Hamilton) and Rafael Casal, the film follows them as they hang out and work together, for a trucking company mostly moving black residents out to make way for white techies.  The Diggs character is coming off a short prison term for assault and a year’s probation, and wants to keep on the right side of the law, but his blacker-than-thou white friend Casal is a loose cannon destined to blow up in both their faces, with much more severe consequences for the black man.  Much of the dialogue is rapped, both literally and figuratively, with some surreal sequences and others that are painfully real.  It’s both funny and harrowing, and all-too-relevant to the issues of the day.

A different sort of partnership gives verve and authenticity to Premature (MC-81, Hulu).  Director Rashaad Ernesto Green co-wrote the film with lead actress Zora Howard, seemingly based on her teenaged self, a slam poetry prodigy before going off to Yale and an MFA.  Not sure whether he was the prototype for the slightly older man with whom she falls in love during the summer between high school and college, but sympathy is distributed between the pair.  A vivid sense of locale in upper Manhattan, and the raucous and genuine friendship among four teenage girls as one of them faces divergent life choices, eventually subside into a somewhat more formulaic storyline about troubled young love.  The result is appealing, but unsurprising.

If you liked Moonlight, I’m here to say that We the Animals (MC-82, NFX) is very much in the same vein, but if you ask me, considerably better.  I was more engaged with this swoony swirl of boyhood memory and desire, fell under its spell more fully, found myself more in tune with its directorial choices.  Jeremiah Zagar’s debut feature, adapted from Justin Torres’ debut novel, is the story of three brothers aged 10-12 trying to navigate the turbulent waters of their parents’ thrashing relationship, while making their own transitions to manhood.  The Puerto Rican man and white woman met in Brooklyn but moved to rural upstate, where their boys run pretty wild, and they struggle emotionally and economically.  The story is filtered through the consciousness of the youngest boy, who crawls under their common bed each night with a flashlight to write and draw about their lives.  Some of the drawings morph into animation, and the film’s lyrical and elliptical style, both in visuals and narration, is also reminiscent of Terrence Malick, another plus in my book.

If festival awards or over-the-top reviews lead you to consider watching Burning Cane (MC-77, NFX), let me offer the caveat that, despite a number of worthy elements, this film by 19-year old Phillip M. Youmans is extremely dark (literally and thematically) and darn-near incomprehensible.  Wendell Pierce is the best reason to watch, as an alcoholic Baptist preacher in backwater Louisiana.  But he is tangential to the difficult-to-parse family story, presumably autobiographical, of a mother, grown son, and grandson.  All the characters are at-risk, shall we say, in multiple ways.  The camerawork oscillates between the arty and the off-kilter.  The narrative and scene-setting is difficult to follow, though it does have a sense of grim authenticity.  After the fact reviews explained some aspects of the film that may well have been there, but were lost on me in watching.  The connective tissue simply wasn’t there, with too many questions unresolved, though a case can be made for the distinctive vision of the young filmmaker.  It’s possible to discern what the film is about, without ever figuring out what actually happened.  For example, who dies at the end, if anyone?

Alfre Woodard is not dissimilar in appearance to Kerry Washington, and yet I am always happy to watch Alfre, while Kerry makes me want to look away.  Could the difference be acting ability?  Or is it soul?  Her latest film is Clemency (MC-77, Hulu), a sort of black reprise of Dead Man Walking, though rather than a crusading nun, Woodard plays the warden overseeing the executions, two of which are excruciatingly depicted.  Wendell Pierce is the husband trying to reach her as she begins to fall apart under the stress.  As a death row inmate, Aldis Hodge is the focal point, in Chinonye Chukwu’s grimly realistic debut feature.

In near succession, I also watched Alfre in Down in the Delta (1998, MC-73, CC), directed by Maya Angelou, about a rough-living Chicago woman who redeems herself and her children by going back to the bosom of family in Mississippi and embracing their legacy.  It’s all a bit Hallmark-ish, but there are scenes of undeniable power, and good performances all round.

Newly released

We’re in a different mediaverse when I’m in a position to review a movie at the same time A.O. Scott is doing so in the New York Times or Stephanie Zacharek in Time or Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, so I am taking advantage of early viewing opportunities to create this open-ended post for continuing updates on brand-new releases.  Meanwhile I’ve updated and closed out the previous post with three strong recommendations, and have in process several composite reviews around specific themes, such as “Black films matter.”

Palm Springs (MC-84, Hulu) demonstrates, without redundancy, the repeatability of the premise of repetition.  Following in the footsteps of Groundhog Day and Russian Doll (and many others of lesser note), Max Barbakow’s debut feature still manages to trek a familiar path with a style, and a mind, of its own.  Having never watched Andy Samberg in movies or on tv, I wasn’t expecting more from him than goofball charm, but was pleasantly surprised by the shadings he brought to the lead role.  As his foil, the appealingly wide-eyed Cristin Milioti delivers a breakout performance.  They meet (and meet, and meet…) at her sister’s wedding, with ample opportunity to make mistakes and start over again, sometimes learning from them and sometimes not.  It remains a resonant premise (and don’t worry, I’m not going to quote Kierkegaard here), with each day offering a new take on an old idea.  And it lands at a moment when repeating the same situation every day has a definite resonance.  Furthermore, the movie brings it all back home in 90 fleet and funny minutes, virtually unheard of these days.

I’m of several minds about Spike Lee, having enjoyed some of his “Joints” a lot, but others have disoriented me, and those that some like best are not to my taste.  My own favorites are still his documentaries 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke, where the didacticism is thoroughly earned.  Most of his features have merits that are obscured by his scattershot approach and compulsion to say whatever he has to say, in whatever way and at whatever length he wants.  So it is with his latest, Da 5 Bloods (MC-82, NFX), in which he mixes genres with a vengeance, throwing ingredients in a blender to come up with a concoction that was more than I could swallow.  Some bits were tasty, but it was all too much.  The 4 surviving Bloods return to Vietnam to retrieve the remains of their fallen leader, and incidentally a cache of gold bullion.  DelRoy Lindo and Clarke Peters ably lead the group through shifts of tone and swamps of cliché to repeated shoot-em-ups and blood-splatterings, all while Spike underlines his points with mini-lessons from Black history, some interpolated and some offered up in narrow-screen flashback by the 5^th Blood.  He’s played by the Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman, while the older actors play themselves way back in 1971, referring to him in retrospect as “our Martin and our Malcolm.”  All I can say is that Spike didn’t make this film for me, so I am hardly the one to judge it.

To all the raves you’ve heard about Hamilton (MC-90, Disney+) add me as plus-one.  This movie (which truly moves) was compiled from nine cameras recording two of the final performances of the original cast on Broadway, with almost a third of the scenes also recorded with three on-stage cameras, as if you’re watching from all the best seats in the house at once.  Edited seamlessly, the performances definitely make it as a film, while retaining the flavor of the theatrical experience.  (And at $6.99 for a month’s subscription to the Disney+ streaming service, it’s quite a bargain when compared to Broadway tickets.)  I’m no theatergoer, but I have to surmise that Hamilton deserved its eleven Tonys.  Lin-Manuel Miranda won for book and score, but playing Hamilton himself, lost out to Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr.  Daveed Diggs as Lafayette/Jefferson edged out Jonathan Groff as King George and Christopher Jackson as George Washington.  As the Schuyler sisters, Phillipa Soo was nominated as female lead and Renee Elise Goldsberry won for featured role.  Thomas Kail won for direction, and directs the movie as well.  Choreography, design, and other technical awards seem amply deserved too.  As overwhelming as the theatrical experience may have been in the waning Obama years, it totally works as a movie in the dreg ends of the Trump era (as we fervently hope and pray).  This show is not just about our history, it’s part of our history.

The Last Dance (MC-91, NFX) is another program to which I add my superfluous praise.  Michael Jordan stuck too many daggers in the hearts of the Cleveland Cavaliers for me to be anything like a fan of his, and of course I would argue for LeBron as the real GOAT, but MJ was an epitome of excellence and an inescapable cultural figure for two decades and more.  So there is ample material for ten hours of documentation.  The frame is provided by the story of the 1997-98 season, as the Chicago Bulls go for their second “three-peat.”  The season started with the GM announcing it would be coach Phil Jackson’s last year, and MJ promptly announcing it would be his last as well.  Remarkably in that situation, the team granted extraordinary access to a camera team over the course of the season.  The series slides back and forth along a timeline between that season and flashbacks to all the defining moments that led up to this “last dance.”  Early episodes cover the background of MJ and Coach PJ, as well as Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and other key players.  There’s plenty of memorable game action, as well as latter-day interviews with many of the participants.  Despite the appearance (and maybe the reality) of candor, this is definitely Michael Jordan’s effort to cement his legacy, and fend off LeBron’s claim to supplant him as the best basketball player of all time, just as MJ himself supplanted Magic and Bird.  Maniacally competitive to the end, though leavened with wit and self-awareness, he remains an amazing and towering figure. 

Perhaps you are like me, averse to so-called reality-tv shows, and especially dating ones.  For Love on the Spectrum (MC-83, NFX), two things overcame my aversion, that “Universal acclaim” from Metacritic, and as another program that explores autism, from which I always learn things about myself.  This five-episode series from Australia is charming and funny, sympathetic and insightful, and you don’t have to be on the spectrum to find it delightful.  All of the potential daters are extremely quirky and almost painfully sincere, but the series is much more about our common humanity – and the universal quest for connection – than their particular handicaps.  If my recommendation was superfluous for the previous two shows, I’m certain you will thank me for pointing out this obscure gem.

Reminiscent of Rohmer, Rebecca Zlotowski’s The Easy Girl (MC-85, NFX) may look like a T&A movie but is actually something quite different, though there is some notable T&A in it, courtesy of Zahia Dehar, sort of a Gallic Kim Kardashian.  But the movie belongs to her 16-year-old cousin, played memorably by the humbly-beautiful Mina Farid, as she follows the brash young woman of the title, who is not looking for love but sensations and adventures, luring men into providing whatever she wants.  That includes two men on a yacht in Cannes harbor, who take aboard the pair, the tycoon acquiring the va-va-voom girl for the expected reasons, while his art-buying advisor takes on the younger girl for fond mentorship (the dedication of the film to someone with the same name as this character suggests the autobiographical subtext here).  Despite the sun-kissed sensuality of the Riviera setting, this film is less about sex than money and power, race and class, freedom and vocation.  Easy on the eyes, but well worth watching – and thinking about.

In My Skin (MC-78, Hulu) is difficult to categorize in several ways.  Billed as a coming-of-age dark-comedy, it bears some resemblance to End of the F***ing World and Sex Education, but it’s more realistically dark than comic.  At five half-hour episodes, it could easily have been released as a movie, along the lines of Diary of a Teenage Girl.  This teenage girl is Welsh and played winningly by Gabrielle Creevey.  Her home life is a disaster, with a bipolar mother and an alcoholic father, but she compensates by lying constantly to friends, teachers, and schoolmates.  Rather than fault her for the lies, the series makes them understandable as a survival strategy, in a nearly unendurable situation.  It’s clear that the show’s creator, Kayleigh Llewellyn, knows whereof she speaks.  Both the series and the actress won the Welsh tv awards, for whatever that may be worth.  The series is in English, but benefits from captioning.

While the Criterion Channel is always a cornucopia of classic cinema, sometimes it also presents brand new classics-in-the-making, including the latest from the Dardenne brothers, Young Ahmed (MC-66, CC).  For starters I’m going to appropriate one reviewer’s summary of the Belgian duo’s work:  “social realist, heart-rending, minimalist, highly suspenseful, and borderline-spiritual.”  Though it does not rank with their best films, their latest certainly fits that description.  In this case, the specimen of humanity who draws their close observation is a 13-year-old Muslim boy in French-speaking Belgium, newly radicalized, by the absence of his father or the onset of puberty or any other reason – the filmmakers do not try to explain, but only to depict.  With their usual Bressonian spareness and transcendental aspiration, they show us the boy’s fumbling attempts at a purifying jihad, and the pained reactions of the women around him – mother, teacher, would-be teen crush.  We never come close to getting inside his head, but his actions tell a story, with rising tension till a climax you may find either revelatory or abrupt.  If you follow the Dardennes, then you will want to see this; if you’re not familiar with them, start with Kid with a Bike (also CC), Rosetta, or Two Days, One Night.

Ordinary Love (MC-73, Hulu) might be an ordinary film, except for the highly-distinguished presence of Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson.  They are a long-married couple, with a well-honed patter of affectionate insult, who have to contend with her diagnosis of breast cancer.  There is plenty of interest in simply watching Lesley and Liam interact, so I was thoroughly engaged, but the story plays out in a rather antiseptic environment.  And I don’t just mean the hospital.  I got no sense of what city, or even what country we were in, where they live in a handsome but highly-generic upper-middle-class home, doing no work apparently, and having no friends, family, or history.  Aside from a dead daughter, who is alluded to but about whom nothing is revealed.  So it’s just a year in the life of the couple, mainly the course of her treatment.  The direction is serviceable, but it seems the playwright who wrote the film from his own experience with his wife determined the outcome, truthful but with a narrow focus and rather stagey surround.  But who cares about the backdrop when you can simply look at Lesley and Liam giving a masterclass in screen acting, and maybe even in ordinary love.

The Trip to Greece (MC-69, Hulu) is the fourth in a series starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and directed by Michael Winterbottom (fifth, if you include Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story – and you should), so we know what we’re going to get, two old frenemies traveling in some spectacular locations, eating amazing food at picturesque restaurants, and taunting each other with boasts and insults, while competing in celebrity impressions.  This one makes a half-hearted attempt to follow Odysseus’ journey from Troy back to Ithaca, and makes explicit the preoccupation of the whole series with aging and mortality, in a way that tends to deflate the sardonic hilarity that precedes it.  Still, Greece is a nice place to visit, in the company of a pair of funny guys conversing and playacting, in the great tradition of My Dinner with Andre.

I was happy to finally catch up with The Bread Factory (MC-91, Kanopy), one of Metacritic’s top films of 2018.  Patrick Wang’s two-part grab-bag film is definitely not for everyone, and in the course of its lengthy run-time, I sometimes wondered whether it was for me, but in the end, taken as a whole, it’s a coherent and engaging statement on the place of the arts in everyday life.  The eponymous Bread Factory is a community arts center in an upstate NY town, which has been mothered for forty years by a lesbian couple, played by Tyne Daly and Elisabeth Henry.  Their place is threatened by a flashier new center, headlined by a “Chinese” pair of conceptual artists, promoted by marketing specialists who are trying to steal away TBF’s educational funding.  Meanwhile, over the course of the two-parts, TBF rehearses and mounts a production of the Greek tragedy Hecuba, as one of its manifold efforts at community engagement.  Offbeat and frequently funny, with a large cast of actors more earnest than slick (incl. a rare sighting of Buffy’s Spike!), this group portrait of town and institution plays like a mash-up of Robert Altman and Frederick Wiseman.  Since I rather despair of describing the totality of this pleasingly small-scale, home-made 4-hour epic, or of guessing whether you might like it or not, I’ll defer to the picture’s trailer to give you a sense of this “What the …?” experience.

As someone who lives more in my own head than in the real world, I am highly susceptible to the writing and directing of Charlie Kaufman, but for the less weird, the best reason to watch I’m Thinking of Ending Things (MC-78, NFX) is Jessie Buckley, who is on incredible run from Wild Rose to this, with some high-profile tv-series in the same period.  She dazzles like her shock of red hair, spirited in emotion, with a quick tongue and expressive face.  The credits list her character as The Young Woman and she is called a number of different names in the course of this long and winding film.  She’s the one who’s thinking of ending things with the Jesse Plemons character (who – tellingly – does have a name), even though they are driving deep into the country to visit his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) for the first time, despite an impending snowstorm.  I’m averse to giving away any of the film’s twists or easter eggs or cultural appropriations, but they are abundant, as are off-beat laughs and thought-provoking philosophical propositions about time and identity. Charlie K. is clever as hell.  I would have been more ecstatic about this movie if it had ended at the two-hour mark, but still found it witty, profound, and wonderfully performed all round.