Aggressive silliness

Usually not my thing.  In fact, essentially the opposite of my thing (passive sullenness?).  I am simply incapable of sharing the widespread enjoyment of entertainments like Wes Anderson movies or sitcoms like Schitt’s Creek, unless imbued (as with John Oliver for example, or GLOW for another) with substance and purpose.  But for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reveling in two goofy tv shows from decades past, escapist entertainments with a certain sauce that makes them delectable to me.  I reviewed both after a generous sampling, but have returned following the full repast, to append further remarks.
 
I expected the frantic DayGlo charm of Pushing Daisies (MC-86, HBO) to wear off, but I was surprised to find myself bingeing all 22 pie-laden episodes, from two seasons (2007-09) truncated by the writers’ strike.  Maybe I miss some things by paying no attention to major network shows, but every once in a while a winner comes into my purview.  This ABC series got a fair amount of appreciation and numerous Emmy nominations in its brief span.  Wikipedia describes it succinctly as a “forensic fairytale,” known for “its unusual visual style, eccentric production design, quirky characters, fast-paced dialogue, and grotesque situations,” often using “wordplay, metaphor, and double entendre.”  Stop for a minute and the show makes no sense at all, but it moves so fast there’s no stopping.  All the characters are finely-etched caricatures and the whole has an in-your-face quality that some might find off-putting, but I found engaging and hilarious.  Among the lead characters Lee Pace as the Pie-Maker was the only familiar face to me (as the Don Draper-ish star of Halt & Catch Fire), but each of the others has had an extensive professional career.  Anna Friel, as the Pie-Maker’s crush called “Chuck,” is British, though you’d never know it, with a theatrical background.  Chi McBride, as the sardonic but good-hearted P.I., has been in dozens of shows that I have never seen.  Likewise with Kristin Chenoweth, as the Pie Hole waitress pining for her boss; her Broadway musical background figures in several episodes.  But that all makes sense, since it requires a lot of training and experience to believably deliver dialogue at the pace (no pun intended) they are required to by the unrelentingly rapid-fire script.  The show’s relatively short run is probably a blessing; they were likely to run out of gas and push their already overextended boundaries.  Not for everybody, to be sure, but worth a sampling for anyone with a taste for verbal and visual wit.
 
On the other hand, it’s hard for me to imagine anybody not liking Freaks and Geeks (MC-88, Hulu).  Upon reviewing, the NBC one-season wonder cemented its position amid the pantheon of my favorite tv shows of all time.  This Paul Feig and Judd Apatow creation is the missing link between Happy Days and Pen15, the point at which this high-school shit got real.  Excruciatingly funny and truthful, delivered by an outstanding cast destined for great things, this show holds up after more than twenty years, which is roughly the time between its making (1999) and its setting (1980).  Some things about the teenage years are perpetual and universal, and this show nails them.  It’s a lesson in something or other, possibly criminal negligence, that this show was canceled after 12 episodes, leaving 6 in the can, only to be released elsewhere later.  But the 18 existing 44-minute episodes are a multi-course feast as is – complete, tasty, and filling (despite the spit-takes).  Don’t miss it.
 
[As of now, I have updated previous post with a review of the much-awaited Nomadland, and will continue to add new important new releases as soon as they become available for streaming.]
 

Digging into new releases

For stay-at-home viewers such as myself, the pandemic has its brighter side, since now I frequently get to see new films on day of release, instead of waiting for 3-6 months till they reach streaming availability.  So I get to weigh in here on a more timely basis.
 
So many reasons I was eager to get an early look at The Dig (MC-73, NFX)!  It’s an adaptation of a veracious historical novel about the fabled Sutton Hoo excavation in 1939.  My son is an archaeologist in England, and my current reading is Digging Up Britain: Ten Discoveries, a Million Years of History; I’ve always got my eye out for Carey Mulligan performances; and the British landscape holds a maternal allure for me.  Count me satisfied on all counts, by Simon Stone’s movie, with just a few quibbles.  Though I am a Malick-ite myself, I’m not happy to see his mannerisms adopted by young directors, especially the asynchronous dialogue, with the characters’ voices overlapping the action.  I can accept a bit of manufactured romance, especially as portrayed by Lily James and Johnny Flynn, but wonder whether the young female character’s role was undermined from serious archaeologist to light-weight ingénue.  Carey Mulligan is the widowed and ailing landowner who hires reliable Ralph Fiennes as a self-taught excavator, to dig up a group of mounds on her property.  The rest is – quite literally – history.  And a lovely warm bath of Anglophilia.
 
Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself (MC-82, Hulu) comes from stage to screen with a ringing endorsement from Stephen Colbert (as well as a variety of celebrities glimpsed in the audience).  DelGaudio is a conceptual magician and deep-think monologist, whose one-man show was filmed repeatedly during a long run in New York, and assembled into a film by Frank Oz, who artfully interweaves audience interactions from various performances into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.  Besides dazzling card tricks, DelGaudio confronts questions of identity and self-definition in an indescribable and inexplicable mix.  Each audience member upon entry chooses one of a thousand cards reading “I am [whatever],” and at the climax of the show DelGaudio goes through the audience and tells each which card he or she has picked, in an exercise of seeing and being seen.  The performer’s mesmerizing pace was a bit slow and quiet for me (the antithesis of What the Constitution Means to Me, which just kept getting louder and faster), and didn’t strike me as deep as it did some others, but was definitely an event worth sitting through.
 
Since I tend to guide my viewing by Metacritic ratings, I was exceptionally glad to see Rocks (MC-96, NFX) on day of release.  So let me add my voice to the chorus of praise.  Sarah Gavron’s film about multi-ethnic teenage sisterhood in London was written by a Nigerian-British woman and stars another (Bukky Bakray), among a cast of real high school students who workshopped their roles for a year before filming (notably, Somali firecracker Kosar Ali), lending authenticity to the proceedings.  “Rocks” is the nickname of the stalwart girl whose rocky story this film tells.  She’s abandoned by her mother and left to care for her adorable little brother.  Resourceful and prideful, she tries to cope with her mounting problems without divulging them to anybody.  The film is by turns heartbreaking, funny, and hopeful, in a parable of resilience under adversity.  And above all, a true to life coming of age story, highly particular but with an element of universality.
 

The White Tiger (MC-76, NFX) is Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of his college friend Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel (by circuitous routes they met at Columbia).  It stars Adarsh Gourav as a low-caste young man who rises from rural poverty to become an entrepreneur in Bangalore, and purportedly tells his backstory in emails to a visiting Chinese premier.  He considers himself the once-in-a-generation phenomenon implied by the title.  But the rags-to-riches story has its dark side, reminding us that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.  Observant, fast-paced, and darkly comic, the film hurtles along throwing out ideas and situations, about caste and class, capitalism and the humiliations of inequality, even if it never settles on one overriding theme or tone.  Tasty, but not filling.  Striking, but not memorable.  This is not quite the Bahrani I’ve come to know and admire, but definitely watchable.
 

Judas and the Black Messiah (MC-87, HBO) was another new release I was glad not to have to wait for, in a recent wave of standout Black-history-themed films.  This won’t join One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (not to mention the “Small Axe” series) as one of my best of the year, but is worth seeing largely for the performances in the two title roles.  Lakeith Stanfield is compelling as the Judas, an FBI informant within the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers in the late Sixties.  Daniel Kaluuya is incandescent with charisma as Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois BPP and a master of revolutionary rhetoric and organizing at an astonishingly young age.  Dubbed a dangerous “Black Messiah” by J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen, in a scary transformation from President Bartlett), he’s put under FBI surveillance and harassment by the “pigs,” and eventually condemned to extra-judicial official murder.  Shaka King’s film focuses too much on various shoot-outs, which vitiates the shock effect of Hampton’s assassination in his sleep by three coordinated branches of so-called law enforcement, and leaves less scope for the very interesting psychology and politics of the title pair.  The story is true in large measure, but a little too much movie action and romance, and not enough documentary realism and depth.  Two knock-out performances, however.

There was no recent film I approached with more anticipation than Nomadland (MC-94, Hulu), based on my enthusiasm for Chloé Zhao’s previous film, The Rider.  While I always look forward to a Frances McDormand performance, I didn’t realize how instrumental she was to this film, having herself purchased the rights to the nonfiction book of the same name and then recruited Zhao to write and direct, bringing along super cinematographer Joshua James Richards.  What a match!  Zhao has already proven adept at mixing documentary and narrative in film, and McDormand is the most natural and responsive of actors, whether she is a mere figure in the landscape or so close up that her face eclipses the outdoors and becomes a landscape all its own.  Some of the subjects reported by the book play themselves in the film, around a few professionals such as David Strathairn.  Fran McD is Fern, a fictionalized character – not only has her husband died, the Nevada company town where she lived was literally wiped from the map when the company left.  So she is reduced to living in her van, and driving around to seasonal jobs at Amazon warehouses or beet harvesting or park maintenance all across the West.  She finds a community amongst her fellow nomads, and relishes the freedom of the open road and the change of natural vistas, despite all the inconvenience and adversity.  Zhao’s touch is deft, and Richards’ camera takes it all in, and the music adds to the contemplative whole.  This is the exceptional movie that I wish I could see in a theater at maximum projection.  It seems likely to be the rare year when the best film actually wins a Best Picture Oscar, as well as Best Director and Best Actress.  I'd call this a neorealist masterpiece.

 

Back to the well

Pretend It’s a City (MC-77, NFX) is an extended 7-episode encore to the 2010 documentary Public Speaking, and I see no reason not to repeat my review of that:  It’s “basically Martin Scorsese’s My Dinner with Fran, and your response with be predicated on how you feel about Fran Lebowitz’s animated gestural tabletalk.  Her acerbic, self-assured New Yawker commentary on any subject that comes to mind, and her cultivated Oscar Wilde-in-drag persona, will determine whether you are drawn into this portrait or put off, delightedly amused or definitely not amused.  Count me among the amused.”  Padding the proceedings  with shots of Fran walking down the streets of Manhattan, or across the large scale-model Panorama of New York from the 1964 World’s Fair, does not alter that assessment.  Nor does mixing in a few other interlocutors.  Feel free to pick and choose among the episodes, but don’t miss the finale, “Library Services.”
 
I’ve written two previous recommendations for earlier seasons of Call My Agent! (MC-84, NFX), but its fourth and final season seems to be getting more attention, perhaps out of pandemic viewing desperation.  This hour-long French comedy/soap opera follows the fate of a well-established but always-on-the-run media talent agency, with an enviable roster of stars, who make cameos episode by episode, frequently making fun of their own public personae.  It’s all quite hectic and comic, with tantalizing glimpses into the film business and behind the masks of fame, well-acted and lushly-lensed.  It helps to have some grounding in French film, but you don’t have to recognize the celebrities to enjoy the show (though this season’s high point is the fifth episode, starring Sigourney Weaver).  But you will have to work to keep up, both with the action and the subtitles, unless you are blessed with facility in française.  The series finale tries too hard to wrap things up with bow, but otherwise I found the whole very satisfying.
 
The History of Swear Words (MC-63, NFX) is surprisingly entertaining and informative, covering one naughty word in each 20-minute episode, six so far but likely to go further, I imagine, with a winning format established and many more swears to cover.  Nicholas Cage hosts, and a mix of linguists and comedians comment, in fast and fun succession.  Pick your favorite swear word, and give an episode a try.
 
I was happy to re-visit some high (and low) points of the Civil Rights Movement in John Lewis: Good Trouble (MC-70, HBO).  Dawn Porter’s posthumous portrait is not entirely hagiography, but would have benefited from digging a bit deeper into his personal relationships, either with MLK as mentor, Stokely Carmichael as rival, or Julian Bond as friend-turned-adversary, not to mention the rather perfunctory treatment of his wife.  Still an admirable life history of getting into good trouble, marked by 44 arrests for nonviolent protest, and a long and productive career as a legislator, worthy of remembrance.
 
I went back to the well of Britbox programming for a free week’s trial, to catch up with a variety of shows related to previous favorites of mine:
 
Though the term has apparently been around for a while as a variant of “sitcom”, I first heard “sadcom” applied to Don’t Forget the Driver (BCG) and it strikes me as a useful rubric.  These are half-hour comedy shows that are as serious as they are funny, and don’t shy away from painful topics.  Besides starring Toby Jones, this one has a bit of that Detectorists vibe, as he plays a travel coach driver in a seaside town on England’s south coast, again bonding with a long-lost grown daughter.  As he drives a bus-full of codgers to the military cemetery at Dunkirk, he comes back with a young female stowaway, come from Eritrea to find her immigrant brother.  Other episodes visit Hampton Court or a donkey sanctuary.  Without ever mentioning Brexit or the immigration crisis, the show comments on Britain’s insularity in subtle ways.  There are a plethora of characters and complications, too many in fact, as the final two episodes (of six) add more instead of satisfactorily resolving those already established.  So as much as I enjoyed this show in the early going, I wound up not eager to see any further seasons.
 
Similarly with There She Goes (BCG), which I thought might be along the lines of The A Word, but this series is both more jokey and more grim than that favorite of mine.  Based on the real experiences of the show’s creators with their developmentally-disabled daughter, Rosie’s problematic behavior is much more severe than Joe’s autism, perpetually acting out and creating mayhem.  The parents are played by David Tennant and the BAFTA-winning Jessica Hynes, in two seasons of five half-hour episodes.  Initially put off, I wound up getting through six episodes in all, before my free week of Britbox expired.
 
More than worth the price of admission was a late postscript to another favorite of mine, Upstart Crow (BCG).  I watched all three seasons a while back, and loved Ben Elton’s surprisingly truthful parody of Shakespeare, as played by David Mitchell (of Peep Show fame).  In “Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow: Lockdown Christmas 1603,” instead of the usual bustle of characters, we have the Bard sequestered with Kate (a delightful Gemma Whelan, who could not be more different from Yara in GoT) in a London plague year.  He’s trying to compose Macbeth, and the two of them are coping with all the restrictions that have such a contemporary Covid resonance.  Lots of laughs on a revisit with these two characters.  And not a bad slimmed-down introduction to the series, if you're not familiar with it.
 
I’d been wanting to see the Christmas 2019 ten-year reunion of Gavin & Stacey (BCG), but I wound up finally finding it on HBO Max rather than Britbox.  Not an essential addition to the canon, but a pleasant reminder of characters and storylines from an enjoyable series.
 

On HBO Max as well, I discovered a newly-revived show I’d missed altogether in its 22-episode run in 2007-2009 – Pushing Daisies (MC-86) is certainly a distinctive piece of work from creator Bryan Fuller, with whose work I am otherwise unfamiliar.  Is it a fantasy-mystery, or a zombie-romance, or a comedy-drama?  Yes, all of the above.  With candy-color visuals and a Dr. Seuss narration, full of wicked double-entendres that whip by.  Also with eye-popping design, witty writing and direction, and an excellent cast.  Lee Pace, in a far cry from his subsequent starring role in Halt & Catch Fire, is the child-like “Pie Maker,” proprietor of the pretty-enough-to-eat Pie Hole.  He’s got one secret power, a touch that can bring the dead back to life.  A second touch will kill them off again, but if untouched after one minute they will continue living and someone else will die.  Sort of a ridiculous premise, but this show embraces it in a big Technicolor hug, and moves fast and funny enough that you never question it.  The Pie Maker is recruited by a gruff P.I. (Chi McBride) in a scheme to claim rewards for solving murders, by briefly waking the dead as witnesses to their own killers.  Anna Friel is the childhood crush, who’s been murdered herself, so when the Pie Maker reanimates her, he can’t bear to give her a second, deadly, touch – ever.  Kristin Chenoweth is the Pie Hole waitress with a thing for her boss, and suspicions about the new girl hanging around.  Each 44-minute episode covers a clever enough mystery, and encompasses all manner of comic romantic contretemps, in a pastel make-believe universe.  
 
Then I took another look-see at Freaks & Geeks (MC-88, Hulu), one of my all-time favorite shows, finally available on streaming.  I didn’t catch the show’s abbreviated single season in 1999, but caught up with it on DVD in 2004, when the series’ seminal quality was already established, and so many careers launched, creator Paul Feig and producer Judd Apatow above all.  I developed a crush on main character Lindsay Weir (who vacillates between the freaks and the geeks) and have looked for Linda Cardellini performances ever since.  James Franco, a poor man’s Ethan Hawke, has been all over the map – acting, writing, directing, whatever.  Seth Rogen and Jason Segel have rather improbably established successful starring roles in the movies.  Martin Starr has gone from delightful dork to sardonic satanist Guilfoyle in Silicon Valley.  This tale of life in a Michigan high school in 1980 mixes truth and hilarity in a way that will resonate with anyone who has mercifully survived an American high school, anywhere in any era.  Highly recommended.
 
Also went back to the well by looking at Lonergan again.  Kenneth Lonergan cemented his exalted place in my esteem with Manchester by the Sea, but recently I’ve gone and re-viewed his two previous films, also favorites of mine.  In retrospect, the most striking aspect of You Can Count on Me (2000, MC-85, HBO) was the first impact of Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, who have continued to surprise and engage for two decades.  But Lonergan’s perceptive and funny writing, the Upstate NY locations, and the supporting cast all contribute to the story of two adult orphans, the irresponsible younger brother and the seemingly responsible older sister, more alike than different, and relying on each other to negotiate an unsatisfying parentless world.
 
For a while, I’d been looking for the extended three-hour cut of the highly-divisive Margaret (2011, MC-61, HBO), and it finally turned up as an “extra” to the contested initial release version on HBO Max, certainly amplifying my understanding and admiration for one of this century’s great films.  Anna Paquin is outstanding in the central role, as an intelligent but difficult Manhattan prep school student, who causes a bus accident and then has the victim (Allison Janney) die in her arms.  In buried reaction to the trauma, she begins to go off the rails, damaging herself, her mother (J. Cameron-Smith, Lonergan’s wife and always excellent, especially as the mother in Rectify), her teachers (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), and even the best friend of the deceased (Jeannie Berlin).  This was one of those times when the longer version seemed shorter, because it made more sense, having more time to adumbrate its themes.  Incorporating more “city symphony” passages, additional scenes, and a different sound design, clarifies the overall subject as post-9/11 New York City (it was actually filmed in 2005, with subsequent years of litigation).  Much as I liked the somewhat shorter version, the longer is more capacious and deeply resonant.
 

Spiked

Spike Lee has never operated on the principle that “enough is enough” – he always goes for “just too much.”  Sometimes his subject requires it, and too much is the only way to go, but sometimes, he overpowers a perfectly decent little movie with bombast.  In light of his two well-regarded films in 2020, both in the top ten of this critics’ poll, I revisited a couple of career peaks to re-assess him at this best.

Da 5 Bloods I reviewed here earlier, little suspecting it would be receiving all sorts of award consideration at the end of the year.  But I am much more enthusiastic about David Byrne’s American Utopia (MC-93, HBO), his film direction of the Broadway stage show created by the former Talking Heads frontman and all-round aesthete (I remember an installation of his as the very first exhibition at MassMoCA in 1996).  The show itself is a visual, aural, somatic experience of great intensity, with music, dance, and exultant percussion creating a spectacle that Spike transfers to the screen with panache.  And a bit of his typical excess, in contrast to the perfect stage-to-screen transfer of Hamilton, in a year when Broadway itself was shut down.  Just because you’ve got a dozen cameras recording doesn’t mean you have to use all the angles; the busyness of Lee’s direction sometimes detracts from the show, whereas Hamilton’s always seemed to highlight just where your attention should go. To compound the invidious comparisons, I revisited Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, and appreciated his direction of a Talking Heads show from 1984.  One thing I can say for sure is that David Byrne’s energy somehow has not diminished over more than three decades, but he’s made major progress with choreographers and set designers.  Having fallen in love with the Color Guard championships, he arranged a concert and subsequent film called Contemporary Color, pairing the marching band teams with popular performers.  Here he adapts the concept of percussionists as dancers, and vice versa.  All are attired like him, in identical gray suits with bare feet, and all in perpetual motion.  The whole is very exhilarating, even if the music is not especially familiar to me, though Byrne’s Aspy aspect rings a bell.

My estimation of Do the Right Thing (1989, MC-93) went way up on a recent re-viewing.  I’d always found the ending problematic, but in the wake of George Floyd and all the other names that have now come to light, the choke-hold murder of Radio Raheem and the subsequent riot seem all too prophetic.  And what a charge to see Giancarlo Esposito, the tightly-controlled, steely-eyed Gus Fring of BB/BCS, back when he was Buggin Out.  Not to mention a young John Turturro, and Spike himself as Mookie.  The portrait of the Brooklyn neighborhood, and the rising tensions of a hot summer day, are wonderfully evoked.  Say what you (or I) will, the man has been rolling good joints for a long time.

Now that it’s possible to watch Malcolm X (1992, MRQE-83) disentangled from Spike’s merchandising and self-promotion, one can appreciate his effort to create a magnum opus worthy of the historic figure, an Afro-American counterpoise to Gandhi, going for a similar sweep and impact.  Denzel Washington is the definitive screen Malcolm, through all the changes that Spike rings on his life history, from “Detroit Red” zoot suits and Boston crime spree, to Nation of Islam/Black Power stalwart, to his Mecca pilgrimage toward racial reconciliation and subsequent assassination.  A more focused approach, such as Ava DuVernay’s portrait of MLK in Selma, might have been more persuasive ultimately, but in this epic life-spanning effort Spike earns his self-indulgences, such as an early song and dance sequence to one-up Busby Berkeley.  The best effect of revisiting this film will be the impulse to re-read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, or maybe the highly-praised new Les Payne biography, The Dead are Arising.