Category Archives: 2021

Don’t Look Up

Don’t Look Up   2 ½ stars

I was among the first to view Adam McKay’s new satirical comedy Don’t Look Up, just released in theaters. McKay has previously brought us The Big Short and Vice, both inventive and amusing films. In Don’t Look Up we have a star-studded cast in a movie about the approaching end of the world. Leonardo DiCaprio is Michigan State astronomer Dr. Randall Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence (who we haven’t seen much of lately outside of The X-Men franchise) is grad student Kate Dibiasky who have just discovered a new comet in the solar system. Unfortunately for them and the rest of humanity the calculations show that the five to ten kilometer wide comet will crash into earth in just six months and will cause a cataclysmic event and destroy all human life. The Don’t Look Up title refers to the faction of disbelievers who deny the facts before them including the visible comet in the sky. The parallels to the environmental crisis and the denials we see are obvious. Most people are more interested in following social media and watching what is going on with their favorite pop stars than the stories of impending doom. (Good for Ariana Grande mocking herself.) Even President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her dimwitted son Jason, serving as White House Chief of Staff (Jonah Hill) cannot be bothered with listening to science and just want to move on. (The elections are coming soon.) A lot of the humor is a spot on indictment our media obsessed culture in America, but overall the movie goes overboard on the ridiculous plot, including a tech mogul (Mark Rylance) who is more interested in profiting from the situation than saving the planet. The movie, at two and a quarter hours could have been much shorter and did not have to rely on so much CGI effects to make its point. I read that many of the stars jumped at the chance to be in this satire, but after a while I thought the point had been made. The rest was unnecessary flush and craziness.

West Side Story

West Side Story                5 stars

We’ve had a few movie musicals hit the theaters in the past year to great acclaim such as In the Heights and Tick Tick Boom. But December brought us the big one, Steven Spielberg’s remake of the classic 1961 West Side Story. This updated version has all the same memorable musical numbers of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim performed to perfection. Add to it the free flowing dance numbers done by ethnically correct actors and an updated take on the racial tensions between the white gang called the Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks and you have a sure hit on your hands. The Romeo and Juliet story brought to the blighted streets of New York requires a young cast and it was filled out with very talented actors. They include Rachel Zegler as the love struck Maria and Ansel Elgort (of Baby Driver) as her lover Tony who have some great chemistry between them. The gang leaders, Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Riff (Mike Faist) bring their race hating contempt to reality in their roles. Ariana DeBose as Anita, the girlfriend of Bernardo has some very energetic performances in “America” and her preaching to Maria about the dangerous path she is taking. Of course the presence of Rita Moreno cannot be missed with the specially created role of Valentina made for her. She was the original Anita in the 1961 version sixty years ago. At the age of 90 she shows that she has still got it. Other than the music I could not remember that much of the original movie (based on the Broadway musical), but the story of the doomed lovers in the setting of a racially tinged gang war is something that is relevant across multiple eras. I hope it is finding a wide audience.

Being the Ricardos

Being the Ricardos           4 ½ stars

Aaron Sorkin brings his quick pacing, high drama style to the subject of the TV show I Love Lucy in Being the Ricardos. It’s not a true biopic as most of the story takes place in a one week period in a fictionalized take on the lives of married couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as they and the TV show staff produce an episode of the hit TV sitcom that made Ball and Arnaz stars. Nicole Kidman portrays Ball brilliantly as the woman who was a master at creating comedy with her wit and sight gags and Javier Bardem is convincing as the Cuban bandleader who mesmerizes a crowd and is popular with the ladies. Sorkin, the writer and director uses creative license in bringing the red scare accusation against Lucy at the same time that she announces she is pregnant and she suspects that Desi has been cheating on her. The matter of the pregnancy is most memorable as the two insisted that the pregnancy be part of the show against the will of the network and the corporate sponsor. The accusation from Walter Winchell of Lucy being a communist is a reminder of the time period of this film, when Hollywood was racked by such charges. The best part of the movie involves the interaction of the actors and writers as they engage in heated discussions of how to change the script and action to get the most laughs out of the 30 minute episode. It is made clear that every aspect has to meet with Lucille’s approval. The other actors, William Frawley (J. K. Simmons) and Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) bring their own character and issues to the show. Frawley with his off screen wisecracks and Vance who is uncomfortable playing second fiddle to Ball. Though most of the action focuses on the single week early in the TV’s show’s long run, we also get plenty of background about how Lucy and Desi met and how the movie studio exec’s treated Ball until she got her chance to break through on “I Love Lucy”. Don’t listen to the critics about the casting. Nicole Kidman is completely convincing in bringing Ball’s character to the screen.

Three Minutes – A Lengthening

Three Minutes – A Lengthening 5 suns

This short documentary about a three minute section of color movie film is one of the most fascinating documentaries I have seen. A few years ago writer Glenn Kurtz found a home movie filmed by his grandfather, David Kurtz in 1938 for a vacation to Europe. Among the places he visited was Nasielsk, Poland, a predominantly Jewish village north of Warsaw that was David’s birthplace. The three minutes of film shows the faces of well over 100 people, all Jewish, who were in the street, many of them fascinated by the American who was using his new camera to film them. Of course the tragic thing is that only a year later the Nazis would come to the town and force all the Jewish residents onto the trains taking them to the concentration camps. Only about 100 people from the village would survive through the war. The filmmaker takes us through the extraordinary efforts to find the places and names of the people in this short section of home movie, leading in directions that would find some individuals still living. There are stories even about the fabrics worn by the women and the buttons of coats originating from a nearby factory. The writing has a poetic aspect to it as we realize we feel so close to these people through the pictures, but that the once thriving community was to be lost in such a short time.

Neptune Frost

Neptune Frost                   1 sun

Neptune Frost is a futuristic science fiction story set in Africa with an all African cast and filmed in Rwanda. It concerns a rebellion of miners against an authoritarian state that is led by an intersex runaway named Neptune who is able to affect events through the internet. There is much poetic language and imaginative music involved and much use of discarded computer parts to create the art in the film. Though creative, this film just did not connect with me. I think it shares some themes of William Gibson science fiction novels, but it took a while before I started to get the ideas behind it.

Licorice Pizza

Licorice Pizza                      5 stars

Over the past decade or so filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson has brought us such memorable and entertaining films as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. This year he has done it again with Licorice Pizza, a comedy romance set in early seventies Encino, California, concerning an on again, off again romance between 15 year old Gary (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and 25 year old Alana (Alana Haim). This may sound as inappropriate and implausible but Anderson makes it work and keeps us rooting for Gary in his quest for romance. It is not only Gary’s pursuit of Alana that keeps our interest, but also the many other exploits and situations this unlikely pair find themselves in. Somehow, 15 year old Gary starts a business selling waterbeds with Alana’s help as well as that of his 15 year old friends and later opens a pinball machine arcade. Gary has a mother who occasionally appears, but he is largely on his own in his various pursuits. He is even a frequent customer of a restaurant visited by Hollywood figures. Young actor Hoffman pulls off the part making you love his character, pimply face and all. Alana, who lives with her Jewish family (with her own real life family playing the part) at first finds Gary’s proposals ridiculous but later is drawn in by his persistence. The film is also noteworthy for the choice of music taken from artists of the sixties and early seventies including The Doors, Gordon Lightfoot, Wings and Blood, Sweat and Tears. There are some special supporting roles that deserve mention, especially Bradley Cooper as a narcissistic movie producer with a bad temper. His performance is worthy of an Academy Award nomination. Sean Penn makes an appearance as what seems to be a porn movie producer and John Michael Higgins is a Japanese restaurant owner who makes some very offensive racially insensitive remarks toward Asian women in some controversial scenes. Apparently the film is loosely based on the life of a friend of Anderson’s giving it an element of truth. Through much of the movie I had the feeling that this is completely ridiculous but it is still funny. Maybe in 1973 things like this could have happened. I have no doubt that Licorice Pizza will be nominated for Best Picture and it very well could win the Oscar.

The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog     4 ½ stars

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is classified as a Western but is unlike any western that I can remember. There is no gunplay or fist fighting, but there is plenty of conflict and tension in this slow moving drama set on a cattle ranch in 1925 Montana. Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), one of two brothers operating the extravagant family ranch, is a swaggering, commanding cowboy who demands as audience. When he sees vulnerabilities in others, he takes advantage of them including his own brother George (Jesse Plemons) who he berates, referring to him as Fatso. Phil’s character is established when the ranchers come across the lonely widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) at a nearby restaurant and Phil sees his chance to berate the young, effeminate teenager. George sees the beautiful qualities in Rose and soon marries her and makes her the woman of the ranch. We all have come across people like Phil before. He is the bully, who despite being highly intelligent, seeks gratification by attacking others to make himself feel important. He even goes out of his way to appear stinky and dirty to embarrass his brother when guests come for dinner. The dialogue is usually kept to a minimum with the camera focusing on the vast landscape with New Zealand standing in for Montana. The score with its eerie sounds serves to magnify the tension that we feel between the characters. I won’t give away the plot but there is a frequent reference to an older ranch hand who has passed away and was the one who taught Phil and George about ranching. This is important. The movie is based on a book and has something significant to say about what it is to be a man. There is a lot going on below the surface with these multilayered characters that makes this a first-rate drama. However, the slow pace and lack of physical action is bound to turn off some audiences.

Parallel Mothers

Parallel Mothers              4 stars

Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar returns to the big screen with Parallel Mothers, a very feminine movie with a feminine cast, almost three years since Pain and Glory. He once again casts Penelope Cruz in the lead role, this time as Janis, a single woman who finds herself pregnant and sharing a hospital room with a 17 year old girl, Ana (Milena Smit) who is also about to give birth without any partner present. The movie is about close bonds that form between people in spite of some very messy circumstances. It really has two distinct aspects. Besides the feminine relationships that Almodovar is so known for (also Julieta and Broken Embraces starring Cruz), the movie has a political aspect being set in Spain, a country that experienced a civil war in the 1930’s. Janis persuades Arturo, a forensic anthropologist to uncover a suspected grave where the fascists of that period are believed to have murdered and buried her great grandfather and several other men from the area. In so doing we hear the stories of how this terrible event has affected the lives of the descendants so many decades after the events. Janis is a single mother, whose mother and grandmother were all single mothers and still feels ties to family that she was too young to meet. There are several interesting twists in the story about these women that I can’t go into without revealing the plot, but I will say it is about a secret that was kept for too long and the effect that has on others. Look for Parallel Mothers to earn some significant award nominations including for Cruz.

A Hero

A Hero                  4 stars

For my first new release of 2022 I had the chance to see A Hero, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, the acclaimed filmmaker from Iran who previously won Oscars for his films, A Separation and A Salesman. This time he brings us a morality play called A Hero, about a man, Rahim, who has been imprisoned for failing to pay a debt, but is allowed a two day leave to visit family. Rahim has a family who stand by him through the ordeal and a girlfriend who has found a lost purse containing several gold coins, so after some consideration, Rahim decides to try to find the owner and return the purse. With the eventual success of reuniting the owner with the lost coins with the help of his girlfriend and some prison officials comes newfound fame as his story is picked up on social media and he is proclaimed to be a hero by the community. With his fame, Rahim hopes he can find a job that will persuade his accuser to allow his release from prison, as Rahim promises to repay the debt. The story then becomes an example of no good deed will go unpunished, when certain details of the story of the returned coins don’t match up and Rahim is not able to prove what really happened. The movie has similar elements to Farhadi’s earlier works, where the characters are neither good nor bad. Their actions fall in a grey area as they find themselves trying to do the right thing in a difficult set of circumstances. I liked the story and the fact that we get to see what life is like in a foreign culture that we are normally not exposed to. The movie is a bit long at just over two hours and it sometimes gets a little tedious as parts of the story seem to get retold a few too many times. Since it is all done with subtitles, one does have to pay close attention to what is said. I expect that Asghar Farhadi will receive one more deserved Foreign Film Academy Award nomination for A Hero.

The Harder They Fall

The Harder They Fall       4 stars

Jeymes Samuel has created a fantasy western based on real people that existed in the Old West. This is a violence filled movie with heroes and villains much in the tradition of the old Hollywood westerns only with an all Black cast. It seems to be set in the Oklahoma territory where freedmen settled after the Civil War, featuring all Black towns but with white folks nearby. The film is all about style at the expense of historical accuracy, that is to say it is a crowd pleaser. The actual story is not that important, but it is about an outlaw, Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) seeking revenge against a ruthless gang leader, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) who murdered Love’s parents. Love is picking off Buck’s gang one by one until things change when Buck is freed from prison by his gang that includes badass Trudy Love (a wonderfully cast Regina King). There is plenty of tough talk, faceoffs and shootouts accompanied by a Reggae style soundtrack that will keep the audience engaged through the two and a quarter hour runtime. The dialogue is sometimes not true to the era drifting into more modern lingo, but accuracy is not the point of the film. The ending is a seemingly never ending showdown reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s westerns, stretching the limits of credibility. The all star cast is rounded out with Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield, Daniel Deadwyler as Cuffee, Damon Wayans Jr. and Deon Cole. If you are looking for a great action movie with some over the top violence, then you should not miss The Harder They Fall, available on Netflix.