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.