Gone Girl, Part 2

 

PERSUASION (C-minus) - Hey, I like Dakota Johnson, OK? This film may be an unnecessary and too-cheeky adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel, but it zips along on Johnson's charm up until its trite, predictable ending.

I'm sure there are folks out there who still stew over the idea that 1995's "Clueless" was a shallow desecration of a beloved landmark of literature, and those types will probably be appalled at the self-aware "Fleabag" style of this Netflix production. As is the custom these days in TV shows -- damn you Ricky Gervais and the original version of "The Office" -- Johnson's Anne Elliot not only narrates directly into the camera but she also throws conspiratorial side glances toward the lens, mostly to convey her ironic exasperation at those around her. She gives not only Phoebe Waller-Bridge a run for her money but Susanna Hoffs, as well. It's surprisingly endearing in the end.

And that endless appeal of Johnson is what saves things here; everything else is pretty ridiculous. Anne is supposed to be distraught eight years after, having bowed to pressure (persuasion) from family and friends, and dumping ruggedly hunky seaman Wentworth (puppy-eyed Cosmo Jarvis). She swills wine from the bottle like a desperate soccer mom, but the filmmakers can't be bothered to make Anne's heartbreak convincing, and so there is little foundation to support this Readers Digest version of Austen's novel. 

But, OK, it's Dakota Johnson wearing couture dresses and slinging a decent British accent, and we know a love triangle will develop eventually (it takes halfway through the movie for the plot to truly ripen). Wentworth is back in town, and the tables have turned -- he is a heroic naval captain, while the Elliots (led by their vain and silly patriarch, played to the hilt by Richard Grant) are having financial difficulties. But also swanning through the town of Bath is a distant cousin, Mr. Elliot (chiseled Henry Golding), a happy widower who also has designs on Anne.

In classic cheap-TV-Cinderella fashion, we're supposed to believe that Anne's two sisters are eminently more desirable than dumpy Anne (Dakota Johnson dumpy?!). Sure, whatevs, as the early 19th century millennials might have put it. (The dialogue here is annoyingly, self-consciously modern, with Anne gushing over "a ten" and swooning over a collection of sheet music that constitutes a lover's "playlist." Wink-wink.) Jarvis can be quite the big lump, but you just have to go along with the fiction that Anne and Wentworth are willing to pass up a second chance at true love by playing a game of rom-com chicken. Golding is an off-key ham as the Shallow Hal.

This all trots along efficiently at under 110 minutes. And there is spirited support for Johnson from Mia McKenna-Bruce as Anne's petulant sister Mary (though she went heavy on the accent to the point that I needed subtitles to translate) and Nikki Amuka-Bird as Anne's second mom, Lady Russell. It's all a matter of tolerance for the viewer while observing that every generation gets the Jane Austen adaptations it deserves.

BONUS TRACK

From the final scenes and end credits of "Persuasion," the lovely "Quietly Yours" by Birdy:

Gone Girl, Part 1

PETITE MAMAN (A) - It's a toss-up as to what is more appealing here -- the execution of this movie about a little girl meeting the child version of her own mother, or merely the existence of the simple idea itself. Either way, writer-director Celine Sciamma once again delves into the young female experience with sharp insights.

Sciamma's previous two features -- "Girlhood" and "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" -- provide intimate details about the lives of teens and young women and how they interact. Here, she reaches back to age 8 and has an absolute treasure in little Josephine Sanz, who plays Nelly, a thoughtful and observant girl who internalizes the awkward relationships of the adults around her.

The film opens on Nelly saying a series of goodbyes as she goes door-to-door visiting people in the nursing home where her grandmother has just died. She's sad that she didn't get to say goodbye to her grandmother. Next, Nelly and her mother (Nina Meurisse) are off to grandma's home to tend to the old lady's house and things. To bide her time, Nelly goes off to play in the woods. It's there that she meets another girl her age, Marion, who looks very much like her (Marion is played by Sanz's sister, Gabrielle). 

The trailer and the title tip us off that Nelly has gone back in time and found her mother, who lives in a mirror version of the grandmother's house, down to the cane that the grandmother used until her death, even back when she was in her 30s, when we see an alternate version of her (played by Margot Abascale). Nelly drinks in this alternate universe, watching her 8-year-old mother cope with her own depressive mother.

What a gift it would be to, as a child, get to know a parent when they were that same impressionable age. What shaped them? Did they eventually turn into their own parents? How can we use that intel to deal with them in the present day? In the wrong hands, such a concept would be treated like a gimmick, open to sci-fi tricks and cheap gags. Not here.

Sciamma resists every urge to exploit her brilliant idea, settling instead for quiet observation. And she is blessed to have Josephine Sanz, who carries the movie with cool confidence. She has a way of holding a gaze while she drinks in what has just happened or what has just been said to her, as the wheels in her brain spin. She eventually evolves from dumbstruck to enlightened over the span of the film's spare 73 minutes.

At one point in the few days that pass, Nelly's mother -- perhaps overwhelmed by the task of reconciling the grandmother's life -- disappears, and Nelly's kind father (Stephane Varupenne) looks after Nelly. Through their interactions, Nelly picks out more pieces of the puzzle that is her mother. 

Nelly can come off, alternatively, as timid and precocious. Early in the film, as she sits in the back seat during the drive to grandmother's house, she reaches up to the driver's seat and feeds snacks to her mother. It's a sweet moment -- a little girl nurturing her mother -- and it sets the tone for what plays out there in the woods and in her mother's childhood home. 

It's all incredibly sweet but never saccharine. By the end of this adventure, there will be certain reconciliations, but you hope that little Nelly will have absorbed enough inside dope to break a few nagging habits in the generational cycle going forward. 

Doc Watch: Rock Watch

 

FANNY: THE RIGHT TO ROCK (B) - This serviceable documentary tells an obscure story well, even if it is a bit too fawning over the all-woman rock band of the early '70s and overstays its welcome a bit. Bring up the name of the band Fanny, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who has heard of them.

The band, led by the sisters Jean and June Millington, emerged from the Philippines in the late '60s, before getting manufactured for an American record label in 1970. Despite being good musicians and championed by the likes of David Bowie, they never really had a hit -- one single got as high as No. 29 on the charts -- and it's not really a surprise why: their songs are awfully pedantic and derivative, which was typical of the post-Beatles guitar era. (Actually, keyboardist Nicky Barclay, who does not participate here, seems to have been their best songwriter and vocalist.)

Feminist filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart ("Rise," "She Got Game") never finds the right balance juggling the past and present. She goes only skin deep in excavating the era -- literally at times, as she tends to focus on the band members' looks, including their penchant for partying naked in Southern California lesbian splendor. And Hart is too enamored of the familiar go-to hook here -- a reunion of the band's core to write and record a new album after all these years. 

It is inspiring to see the women, now in their 60s, return to their roots after many years in the wilderness with various projects. But reunions -- especially those that seem artificially goosed for the purposes of a documentary -- can be as depressing as they are uplifting, a little too much rah-rah from the geezers.

But the women are truly engaging -- Jean Millington mostly raised a family, and her sister founded a music camp for girls. One drummer, Alice de Buhr, is compelling when she talks about how tough it was for a lesbian to navigate that world. The other drummer, Brie Darling, who went on to tour with many bands, including Robert Palmer's and Duran Duran, injects energy and life into the production with her vivacious personality, especially as the glue keeping the sisters together for the reunion album, despite a band member's late medical setback. Fans on board here include Bonnie Raitt, Earl Slick (Bowie's guitarist), Cherie Curie (Runaways), Kathy Valentine (Go-Go's) and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter (Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers), plus creepy superfan Joe Elliott of Def Leppard. It's a fine tribute, if slightly clumsy in its execution.

THIS MUCH I KNOW TO BE TRUE (C-minus) - It's difficult to call this a proper film. It's a series of slickly produced music videos of Nick Cave and collaborator Warren Ellis recording their melancholy music. There is no narrative structure here. 

It starts with more than five minutes of Cave trotting out a series of sculptures he has made depicting the life of the devil. He describes each piece, one after another, as if he were a fifth-grader trying to impress his grandparents. So, the theme has something to do with the devil or maybe redemption? 

But more than a half hour later, all we have are these moody studio sessions, many of them battered with annoying strobe effects. Fussy director Andrew Dominik ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") is fond of revealing the crew and equipment in the background, as if to gin up some intimacy with the viewer. To little effect, an aged, obese and oxygen-starved Marianne Faithful shows up to read a short script, which anyone could have done; why her?

You might be a Nick Cave fan, and you probably would find the music moving, the recording sessions haunting. But that doesn't make this a viable movie. In the second half, Cave and Ellis discuss their songwriting process, and that is about as exciting as it sounds.

BONUS TRACKS

I have to say, Fanny's music just isn't very strong overall. Here's a tepid version of the Beatles' "Hey Bulldog," just because:

Here's their biggest hit, "Butter Boy," with its risque lyrics out of the gate (and, no, you don't remember it):

One of the more interesting tracks from the Nick Cave movie is "White Elephant," from his album "Carnage":

 

And don't forget us! The dirge "Albuquerque":

Meanwhile, Back in the Metaverse ...

 

OFFICIAL COMPETITION (B+) - Sometimes a movie is just effortless fun, no matter the point being made. Here, three fine actors pull an inside job on the film industry, portraying a celebrated director and two divergent actors rehearsing for a movie in this droll comedy. 

Penelope Cruz -- with wild frizzy hair and a fuck-you attitude to match -- portrays Lola Cuevas, the ornery auteur who graces the project with her presence. She comes up with gradually more challenging scenarios to motivate her two lead actors -- the vain movie star Felix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) and the actor's actor of stage and classrooms, Ivan Torres (the veteran from Argentina, Oscar Martinez from "Wild Tales"). Lola's elaborate rehearsal set-ups -- having the men exchange lines under a giant boulder held up by a crane, or binding the men together with plastic wrap like mummies -- are meant to either puncture the men's inflated egos or to indulge her own, perhaps a combination of the two.

 

Cruz is perfectly deadpan throughout, barely able to tamp down Lola's disgust at even the slightest hint of the commodification of her art. Cruz is, somewhat ironically, the master performer in this ensemble, with her nihilistic humor. Banderas is a delight -- it's just fun to see a grizzled movie star like him or George Clooney winking at us while sending up their own pomposity. And Martinez finds just the right tone as sad-sack Ivan, who is as arrogant and judgmental as any of them. 

The comedy thrums throughout at a low hum. There are more smiles than belly laughs. This is mature filmmaking. This comes from the team of Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat, who seem to be veterans of TV and documentaries mostly. They have developed a sharp idea and, with Cruz in charge, they pull it off delightfully.

THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT (B-minus) - OK, Nic Cage fans, here is your dream come true. Cage stars as a fictionalized version of himself -- his IMDb resume is intact, for example -- portraying a goofy everyman who happens to star in movies, and who gets to unexpectedly play action hero while traveling in Europe. 

Desperate for work for financial reasons, Cage takes a $1 million non-movie gig in Mallorca, Spain, as a party guest to a rich guy who might be a bad guy. After that set-up, Cage becomes an unwilling tool of a couple of CIA agents (yawn), including one played by Tiffany Haddish (yet again), who are determined to solve a political kidnapping that they tie to the host, Javy, who is related to a lot of mobsters and fronts for them. 

Javy is played to the hilt by Pedro Pascal (TV's "Narcos" and "The Good Wife"), defying expectations at every turn regarding the question of his motives. The movie works hard to seem effortlessly blithe about whether any of this incredibly ironic storytelling should be taken seriously. Cage is perfectly fine with everyone alternately trashing and idolizing his oeuvre. He offers a mix of giddiness and resignation -- tossing in a dual role as his younger, punker and much more optimistic alter ego Nicky (apparently de-aged through CGI), who acts as conscience and cheerleader.

Writer-director Tom Gormican has only one previous movie ("That Awkward Moment") and a TV show ("Ghosted") under his belt, but he exudes confidence in his breezy, slyly funny screenplay co-written with the more experienced Kevin Etten (who goes back to a stint with TV's "Desperate Housewives").  The first half, especially, is one big entertaining goof on Cage's reputation.

But things bog down in the second half, as this devolves into a cliched spoof of spycraft and myth of the movie star. It spends too much time on Cage's fictional family -- a precocious teen daughter and an ex-wife -- who just are not interesting enough to carry the B-story. It all limps to a predictable conclusion, having nearly eaten itself whole in a self-referential orgy of pop-culture quips. 

Cage's more intense fans would probably appreciate this a whole lot more than I did. (A character is mocked for identifying Cage as the actor from "Moonstruck," which is exactly the anachronistic connection I would have made. In my defense, I have seen him in about a dozen movies, though only one ("Pig") since 2002's "Adaptation.") If you have the patience for the cheap hijinks of the second half, this is an amusing cinematic scoff.

New to the Queue

 ... at the molecular level ...

A documentary about a couple who hobnobbed with volcanoes and lava flows, "Fire of Love."

A followup on an expose about an alternative prep school that put its students' futures in doubt, "Accepted."

A debut feature about an adult daughter who returns home to care for (and reconcile with) her ailing father, "Moon, 66 Questions."

A strong debut from Nana Mensah about a second-generation immigrant experience in New York, "Queen of Glory."

A documentary about a student at a secondary school in Scotland in the 1990s whose exploits became legendary, "My Old School."

Noir Chronicles: The Rackets

 

TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (HONOR AMONG THIEVES) (1954) (B+) - Suave and stylish describes not only this classic French noir but also its dapper lead gangster, Max, trying to secure the last big score that will set him up for retirement. Of course, there are a couple of younger dames -- dancers -- who keep him and his pal, Riton, company. 

However, Max (Jean Gabin) thinks too much about making sure Riton (Rene Dary) gets taken care of. Max sets his friend up for a score with the shady Angelo (Lino Ventura), who happens to be making time with Riton's gal, Josy (a young Jeanne Moreau). And Angelo soon figures out that Riton would make for good leverage to interrupt Max's completion of the fencing of the gold bars, Max's ticket to retirement. 

Director Jacques Becker, adapting a novel with two other writers, has a thoroughbred in Gabin, who imbues Max with a laissez-faire attitude -- toward his career, toward the other ne'er-do-wells, and toward randy Lola (Dora Doll). There is a sense of fatalism about Max from the start; you know this probably won't end well, but you're not sure whether he'll make his great escape. A final kinetic shoot-out is well-staged, and, in noir fashion, not only do shadows get cast, but there's a gloomy shadow cast over the entire gripping 83 minutes.

FORCE OF EVIL (1948) (B) - John Garfield big-foots around this snappish drama about a ruthless lawyer trying to make a killing in the numbers rackets as they transition to legitimacy. However his reckless behavior might bring down the numbers operation of his low-level estranged brother.

The plot is a little too densely woven, but the trick is just to prowl along with Garfield, who barks a lot as Joe Morse, who works for the king of the numbers racket, Ben Tucker (Roy Roberts). He comes up with a scheme to combine operations and put his frumpy brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), in charge of it. But Leo has a bum heart and a conscience -- he doesn't want to rock the boat -- and his loyal crew can't abide the scheme. 

This is written and directed by Abraham Polonsky (1969's "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here"), who stuffs some intellectual ideas into his characters' snappy dialogue, and sometimes that comes off as distracting. He has an assured visual sense, sometimes breaking the frame up into different angles and shades, especially during a climactic confrontation shot at shoe level.

Garfield flickers with a modern sensibility, especially when Joe is trying to woo one of Leo's employees, innocent Doris (Beatrice Pearson), toying with her half the time and pining for her the other half. But Doris is just a distraction to Joe, who is more turned on by corruption and is determined to be the kingmaker who emerges with the most money and power. Besides, Joe has Tucker's wife (the slinky Marie Windsor) on the side, so he's not hurting for female attention.

BONUS TRACK

Here's a montage from "Touchez Pas"; do I detect the seedlings of "The Godfather" theme in its theme song?

Life Is Short: Thunder Struck or Dumbstruck

 

A colleague recommended "Thor: Ragnarok" on the premise that the presence of Taika Waititi ("What We Do in the Shadows") as director lent this superhero wank a wry cleverness that set it apart in the Marvel universe. I didn't catch the vibe at all.

What I mostly experienced was leading man Chris Hemsworth, a cipher on the screen if there was ever one, and the comedy equivalent of Boris Karloff tap-dancing on the Ed Sullivan show. Or Kim Kardashian hosting "Saturday Night Live." Or a tree trunk doing standup. In other words, comedy is a heavy lift for Hemsworth the he-man, and humor is certainly not his first language. 

Jeff Goldblum shows up as some sort of eccentric quasi-bad guy, and he is as silly as ever. But Hemsworth bantering with Mark Ruffalo (Hulk/Bruce Banner)? Not just unfunny, but painful to watch. Tom Hiddleston does his mopey thing; Tessa Thompson looks patently uncomfortable as the alcoholic (?) Valkyrie; and Cate Blanchett slinks around as a Cruella de Vil type, perpetually in search of her motivation. 

The three writers are all Marvel lifers, almost exclusively, and this seems nested with obscure inside jokes and elbow nudges. You'd have to be a true diehard to follow the plot and care about who is doing what at any given time. Meanwhile, the CGI violence is run-of-the-mill cartoonish; at times it literally makes no sense how a certain superpower randomly overwhelms another one. Why doesn't Hulk just stomp out Thor and put Hemsworth out of our collective misery?

Title: THOR: RAGNAROK (2017)

Running Time: 130 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  70 MIN

Portion Watched: 54%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 59 YRS, 8 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 78.8 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Switched to a documentary on Netflix.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 110-1

Doc Watch: Rolling Back, Part 2

 

THE JANES (A) - This is one of the most meticulous documentaries you might ever see, one that perfectly succeeds in telling its story.  Directors Tia Lessin ("Citizen Koch") and Emma Pildes revisit the group of women in Chicago who helped women get abortions during the five years or so before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in January 1973. This film could not be more timely, now that Roe has been overruled.

The film is a celebration of ordinary people rising up to address a problem despite the obstacles. As one of the Janes -- Peaches (some women use their full names; others don't) -- summed things up about that period in Chicago: "It was a town where people did stuff." One of the leaders -- seen only in an interview from the 1990s -- sums up the mission: "We had a duty to disrespect a law that disrespected women."

The tone is set from the start, as one of the dozen-or-so women tells her personal story about getting an illegal motel abortion through a mafia connection, ending up abandoned in the bathroom with another woman after their procedures. That menace never really goes away, even as the Janes get proficient in shuttling hundreds of women a year through the process. As outlaws, they defied not just the legal system but also the medical establishment. The members also took on the chauvinism of the male-dominated anti-war movement they were affiliated with. The women, almost all of them white, acknowledge their own privilege that afforded them leeway with the law.

The presentation of the unassuming women, who ran the underground network sometimes with the cooperation of mobsters, is impeccably rendered, both narratively and visually. Just the archival footage of Chicago in the late '60s and early '70s is worth watching; it is painstakingly researched and rendered in support of the women's interviews. The level of visual detail -- shots of el trains or signs hawking S&H green stamps -- is an intoxicating immersion into a very specific time and place. Found footage of a random woman wearing a yellow dress and white-rimmed sunglasses bookends the film and speaks volumes just on its own.

The filmmakers are equally meticulous with the story they tell. Some of the women still have the index cards used to keep files on the clients who called them, down to the detail of the amount each person was willing to pay along the sliding scale. We meet "Mike," the main abortionist who was not a medical doctor, though he had been trained by one. We hear from a woman from a clerical consultation service, who worked with the Janes and wasn't fazed by funding from Hugh Hefner's Playboy company.

In true noir fashion, the filmmakers introduce a retired Chicago police detective, of the classic Irish variety of the era, who reluctantly acted on a tip and threatened to unravel the operation and rain serious legal consequences, all while the clock ticked down to the release of the Roe decision. 

But the core of the film is the women, repeatedly seen in vintage photographs from the day in contrast with their grey-haired selves today, still full of passion and compassion. Their camaraderie is apparent even as their separate personalities emerge over the course of the film. One recalls her college days, helping a classmate cope with complications -- a truly sobering experience, as the Jane was high at the time. Another Jane was raised in Catholic schools and relates the relief she felt in falling in with a group of women who were not cruel to each other. This film is a valedictory these idealistic and daring women.

Doc Watch: Rolling Back, Part 1

 

WHO WE ARE: A CHRONICLE OF RACISM IN AMERICA (A) - I dare you to watch this presentation by Jeffery Robinson and not learn something about the history of the United States. This is an expansion of his lecture on the history of racism. It would be belittling to compare it merely to a TED talk; this operates on a much higher level  -- a Theodore talk, maybe.

Robinson marches punctiliously through American history starting with the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619 through to the present day. A prelude to the story involves a current-day interaction between Robinson and a Confederate cosplayer defending a traitor's statue and spouting zombie lies about the Civil War being about economics and not slavery. Robinson shakes the man's hand but walks away shaking his own head.

Such frustration undergirds this entire exercise. Robinson -- launching from a quote by George Orwell about who controls the past -- repeatedly tells his lecture audience that the proof of the white supremacy in our DNA is in the clear words of the founders of the country and those who fought to perpetuate "southern culture." He digs deep for lacerating words that expose the hypocrisy of anyone who would rewrite history in order to gaslight the rest of us. The indictments of former presidents Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson are based on the men's blunt utterings that are still shocking today.

Robinson does not shy away from the horrors of violence against black people. He hits the road to visit with older women -- a survivor of the Tulsa massacre 100 years ago and the daughter of a man lynched in Alabama in 1947 -- and young black people who are preserving the history of slavery, opening eyes about the role of New York financiers, and tearing down Confederate statues in Memphis. (Robinson's own story of growing up in Memphis will bring the proceedings full circle; this is personal for him, and that's a good thing here.)

One of his most scathing rhetorical points involves a hot take on reparations. He points to Congress' 1862 gift of compensation to former owners of freed slaves and Lincoln's land-grant program as handouts to whites to give them a leg up in creating generational wealth, a disparity that exists to this day. A clip of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in May 1967 breaking this down is powerful.

Robinson is kind but tough, earnest without losing his sense of incredulity. He grounds this exercise in academic rigor and suave storytelling. The project is guided by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, who profiled their father, the rabble-rousing civil rights attorney William Kunstler, in 2009's "Disturb the Universe." They have a touch for poking at our collective conscience.

This bald narrative is designed to nag the viewer and seep into that poisoned collective DNA. But how many open eyes and open minds will dare to engage with it?