Movies

POOR THINGS: brazen, dazzling, feminist and very funny

by
Photo caption: Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe in POOR THINGS. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Well, here’s a movie unlike any you have ever seen. Poor Things begins as a Frankenstein movie, and evolves into an outrageously raunchy, funny and thoughtful feminist triumph. The kindly mad scientist Dr. Baxter (Willem Dafoe behind geologic makeup) implants the brain of a fetus into the body of a young woman and creates Bella (Emma Stone). The adult-sized Bella acts like a baby, then a toddler, then a child and so forth as her brain develops.

The key is that Dr. Baxter, confining her to his house, shields the developing Bella from all societal constructs, like common views of morality, manners, religion and gender roles. Bella is driven by the most basic natural human impulses – for pleasure and safety – without ever having learned any inhibitions.

When Bella’s teenage brain rebels, the scientist allows her independence, accepting that she will make mistakes while she learns how to navigate an outside world populated with humans behaving with avarice, lust and ignorance. One such character, hilariously played by Mark Ruffalo, is only too happy to harness Bella’s urges for sexual pleasure to his own benefit. Unfortunately for him, Bella’s brain develops beyond his ability to exploit her.

Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Poor Things is based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, so he’s the guy who actually imagined this bizarre and singular story, but director/jokester Yorgos Lanthimos has imbued it with his often zany and transgressive sensibilities. I was a big fan of Lanthimos’ absurdist breakthrough film Dogtooth, but then I didn’t like his acclaimed The Favourite and downright hated The Lobster and The Killing of a Scared Deer. I was encouraged by Glenn Kenney’s New York Times dispatch from Venice about how much he despised previous Lanthimos films and yet still loved and admired Poor Things.

The one thing that I didn’t like in Poor Things was when Lanthimos aped Wes Anderson and Terry Gilliam with some overly fanciful sets. Totally unnecessary to the story and a distraction.

Emma Stone’s performance is the year’s most startling. For one thing, she is certainly courageous and a good sport about spending so much of the movie unclothed and simulating sex. But the extraordinary element of her performance is in calibrating the subtle growth in Bella’s development.

Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo are both great, too, and Kathryn Hunter (The Tragedy of Macbeth) elevates yet another supporting role.

Poor Things won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, and made my list of the Best Movies of 2023. A feminist message is cleverly embedded in this brazen, dazzling and very funny movie.

THE BOYS IN THE BOAT: the underdogs soar

by
Photo caption: Callum Turner (center front) in THE BOYS IN THE BOAT. Courtesy of MGM.

The Boys in the Boat is the entertaining true story of the ultimate sports underdog – the University of Washington’s junior varsity rowing team, which won gold medals at the 1936 Olympics hosted by Hitler in Munich (the Jesse Owens Olympics). Again, this was UDub’s JUNIOR varsity boat.

The Boys in the Boat follows a familiar arc for sports movies – the heroes must win the Big Race (actually, three Big Races here). We’ve all seen this before, but director George Clooney gets the credit for keeping The Boys in the Boat from becoming unbearably hackneyed or corny. Best known as a movie star, Clooney has proven himself an able director: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night and Good Luck, The Ides of March, The Monuments Men.

In telling the story, Clooney emphasizes the Depression setting and how impoverished the kids on the team are, especially the main kid, played by Callum Turner. Joel Edgerton plays the taciturn coach, who must gamble his job on an unconventional decision. Few of us have a deep understanding of the sport of team rowing, so Clooney takes us on a rowing procedural.

Joel Edgerton (second from right) in THE BOYS IN THE BOAT. Courtesy of MGM.

I love Edgerton in everything, and he’s starred in Master Gardener, Loving and Zero Dark Thirty. I especially recommend watching him in The Gift, which he also wrote an directed. Edgerton is very, very good here.

Callum Turner is adequate, but Luke Slattery and Jack Mulhern are especially vivid as his two of his teammates.

This story is still celebrated in Seattle, where you can still visit the boathouse and see the team’s memorabilia. One race is staged in the Montlake Cut between Lake Washington and Puget Sound. The coolest race scene has an observation train, with bleachers on the rail cars, keeping pace with the boats racing down the Hudson River.

The Boys in the Boat ain’t the most original film, but it’s enjoyable to watch.

FERRARI: his racecars are easy, his women are not

by
Photo caption: Penelope Cruz in FERRARI. Courtesy of NEON.

Ferrari takes place in 1957, when the groundbreaking auto racing figure Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) faces two crises at age 59. To attract a partnership with a larger automaker and save his company, Ferrari must win a famous road race. And, he must navigate the demands of both his wife and his girlfriend. The racing thread and the domestic thread combine to make a well-crafted, satisfying film.

Unconventionally, in Ferrari, Ferrari’s illicit relationship is anything but an exciting dalliance. Ferrari lives in the quiet countryside with his girlfriend Lina (Shailene Woodley) and their nine-year-old son. They live in modest domesticity, and Lina is supportive and generally undemanding.

Ferrari’s wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), on the other hand, is a volcano ready to blow at any moment. We learn that a tragic loss has devastated Enzo and Laura’s marriage, and Laura lives somewhere a simmer and a full blown rage. Complicating matters for Enzo, Laura is his business partner and must sign off on any Ferrari company decisions. And he must return to their Modena apartment on each workday morning.

The one thing that Lina asks for – that her son get his father’s surname – is the one thing that Laura forbids.

Driver, playing a character 20 years older than he is, is very good, and so is Woodley. It is Cruz, however, who has the juiciest role, and she knocks it out of the park. Cruz is outstanding when Laura is bitter or blazing, but beyond superb in a quieter scene where she reflects on the previous family tragedy.

I find auto racing to be the most boring of sporting endeavors, but director Michael Mann thrilled even me with the racing segments. Of course, Mann does know how to make a big, compelling movie (The Last of the Mohicans, Collateral, Heat, The Insider, Ali, Public Enemies).

Ferrari is a pretty good movie, most watchable when Penelope Cruz is on the screen.

FALLEN LEAVES: two lonely people amid the driest of humor

by
Photo caption: Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen in FALLEN LEAVES. Courtesy of The Match Factory.

The Finnish deadpan comedy Fallen Leaves is the story of two fortyish singles navigating a blue collar world that is filled with disappointment, despite low expectations. We first meet the no-nonsense Ansa (Alma Pöysti) working in a supermarket, and then the sarcastic loner Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), working in a metal scrap yard. Fallen Leaves depicts Finnish middle-managers as tyrannical idiots, so neither Ansa or Holappa get any satisfaction from their work. Neither has much of social life, although they spot each other when accompanying friends to a karaoke bar.

These are two lonely people. But, not only don’t Ansa and Holappa meet CUTE, they keep not meeting AT ALL. Holappa’s shyness precludes an introduction at the karaoke bar, and then happenstance (and Holappa’s drinking) make them keeping missing each other, until a promising encounter is frustrated again.

We know that eventually, Ansa and Holappa will find the opportunity to launch a relationship. The impediment will be Holappa’s alcoholism. Here’s a public service from the Movie Gourmet: If you answer two or more of the following questions in he affirmative, then it is likely you have a problem with alcohol:

  • Have you been fired more than once for drinking on the job?
  • Have you passed out at a bus stop?
  • Do you regularly order three shots with a beer chaser?
  • Does a bartender tell you “[insert your name}, It’s time to go home so you can come back in the morning“?

Writer-director Aki Kaurismäki creates a humorously grim world for our droll heros and their pals. The dreariest of soulless dive bars, with the barmaid in curlers, is aspirationally named the California Pub. Holappa’s buddy tells him that he is no tough guy, “but maybe you could be a tough guy in Denmark”. Kaurismäki fills the screen with lots of Finns standing very still.

Fallen Leaves is not a Must See, I but I enjoyed the yearning for connection and intimacy, framed in the driest of humor. Many critics have describe the film as bittersweet; I see it as film with humor that is bitter-tinged, and then ultimately purely sweet.

a

MAESTRO: not what she bargained for

by
Photo caption: Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, in MAESTRO. Courtesy of Netflix. Cr. Jason McDonald/Netflix © 2023.

Maestro is the dramatization of the marriage between legendary conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper, who also directed) and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan). As portrayed in Maestro, the marriage was shaped by three factors:

  • The two shared deep affection for each other, along with interests and sensibilities.
  • Bernstein’s career, driven by his genius, soared into superstardom.
  • In the first decades of the marriage, the mainstream would not accept a public figure who was gay or bisexual, which Lenny was.

Lenny was the prodigious talent and the celebrity, but Maestro is really Felicia’s story, because she faces the major conflict and because of Carey Mulligan’s sensational performance.

Indeed, although I’m lukewarm about Maestro, Mulligan is one of the two best reasons to see it. The second is a magical six-minute scene in which Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in 1973; it is as spectacular cinema as we’ve seen (and heard) this year.

Bradley Cooper’s Lenny is a jumble of ebullience, creative energy and conflict-avoidance; he was always, perhaps compulsively, the life of the party. Sharing her life with a guy who sucked out all the oxygen in the room was enough of a roller coaster ride for Felicia. Felicia was pretty open-minded about her husband’s dalliances with other men; but his wanting to bring his male lover (Tommy Cothran, played by Gideon Glick) into her family was a bridge too far.

It seems that Lenny primarily valued Felicia for having his children and accompanying him to trendy parties; the NYT’s Manohla Dargis impeccably describes those as “those fabulously glamorous New York parties that mostly exist in old Hollywood films or in biographies of very important dead people.” He didn’t need her as a business adviser, a creative partner or even a muse, but she was much more than his beard. Her admiration for his artistry wasn’t that of a wannabe or a groupie – Felicia, as a working New York theater actor, was an accomplished artist herself.

So, as was common in the era, its was Lenny who defined their relationship, not he and Felicia together. Carey Mulligan inhabits a character who enjoys the initial exuberance and who slowly observes that Lenny is not going to deliver what she believed that he originally committed to.

Bradley Cooper is an excellent director, as demonstrated by A Star Is Born. Here, he is very cinematic, switching aspect ratios and toggling between black and white and color.

Sarah Silverman is delightful in a very small part as one of Felicia’s friends.

Back when the trailer was released, there was a tempest in a teapot about Cooper’s prosthetic nose, to make him resemble Bernstein, a familiar figure. Bernstein’s his family stepped in and quelled the silliness. But, I was distracted by another prosthetic, the folds of wattles and neck fat on Cooper playing the old Bernstein

I’m decidedly not a fan of classical music (although I did like Amadeus); The Wife likes classical music, and she liked Maestro a bit more than I did. We were both engrossed when Mulligan was onscreen, but I was bored when she wasn’t.

This is a BIG, ambitious movie, and all of my favorite critics liked it more than I did. It’s the kind of movie (like Kramer vs. Kramer or Spotlight) that may garner lots Oscar buzz (with Netflix support), but that we won’t remember in a few years. Maestro is in theaters and streaming on Netflix.

THE CRIME IS MINE: better after Huppert shows up

by
Photo caption: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Isabelle Huppert and Rebecca Marder in THE CRIME IS MINE. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Set in 1930s France, the breezy French comedy The Crime Is Mine is a proto-feminist farce. Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz of Only the Animals) is an actress struggling to find jobs because she won’t submit to the casting couch. Her roommate Pauline (Rebecca Marder) is a lawyer who law firms will not hire because of her gender. Madeleine seems to be the last person seen with a murder victim, a lecherous producer, and falls under police suspicion.

Pauline “defends” Madeleine with an ingenious strategy – confess to a killing that she didn’t commit, claim self-defense and ride the resultant wave of publicity to fame and riches.

The central joke, of course, is that a protagonist is trying to be proven guilty for a crime that she did not commit. The other novelty is that, in a decidedly non-feminist time and place, two young women without means must survive with dignity by their own cleverness and moxie.

I found all this mildly amusing until mid-film, when Isabelle Huppert shows up, playing a once famous diva of the silent screen. This character is unashamedly venal, and Huppert, as we can always expect, goes all in. She’s hilarious.

French comedian Dany Boone is a talented comic actor, and makes another welcome appearance here in a supporting role.

Director François Ozon is known for his light comedies like In the House and Potiche (as well as his recent drama Summer of 85),

As funny as Huppert’s performance is, the overall experience of watching The Crime Is Mine is more cerebral than emotionally engaging. The Crime Is Mine releases into theaters on December 25.

CASH ON DEMAND: film noir’s Christmas Carol

by

Turner Classic Movies has gift-wrapped a present for us on December 18. Cash on Demand, made in 1962 by the British horror schlock studio Hammer Films, is a ticking bomb suspenser and a Perfect Crime movie. It’s also an unlikely Christmas movie, with characters that evoke Dickins’ A Christmas Carol.

The Scrooge is the manager of a bank branch (Peter Cushing) – everyone’s most despised boss. He revels in the tyranny of his miniature fiefdom and never misses a chance to make the jobs of his underlings unnecessarily onerous or humiliating. The Bob Cratchit (Richard Vernon) is the dedicated and able bank clerk, who is doing his best while under the manager’s sadistic thumb.

The manager gets his comeuppance when a posh customer (André Morell) arrives. The manager’s kowtowing and boot-licking is interrupted by the discovery that the customer is actually pulling a heist and forcing the manager – by threatening his family – to help.

The crook has apparently thought of every possibility and devised a perfect heist. Cash on Demand becomes a bank procedural as we learn about 1862 state-of-the-art vault security.

There’s a deadline – the vault needs to be emptied at a certain time or the manager’s family will come to grief. All of Cash on Demand occurs in real time and all inside the bank, under the inescapable face of the wall clock.

Andre Morell’s bank robber, while ruthless, is generally jovial – the very model of clubby affability. Cash on Demand is a study in contrast between the cool-as-a-cucumber crook and the bank manager, who looks absolutely stricken throughout the movie.

Cash on Demand is sometimes available on TCM Watch and can be streamed from Flix Fling, but your best bet is to DVR its Monday airing on TCM. It’s on my list of Overlooked Noir.

DREAM SCENARIO: but it can’t be my fault, can it?

by
Photo caption: Nicolas Cage in DREAM SCENARIO. Courtesy of A24.

In the brilliant and utterly original comedy Dream Scenario, Nicholas Cage plays Paul, a hopelessly square, middle-aged professor of evolutionary biology, who suddenly starts appearing in other people’s dreams. At first, Paul shows up in dreams and does nothing at all (which is fitting for Paul’s personality), even failing to intervene as people dream that they’re in peril. When Paul’s students publicize the phenomenon on social media, thousands of people recognize Paul from their dreams and he goes viral.

His instant celebrity takes a turn when, through absolutely no action on his part, Paul’s behavior in the dreams becomes less benign, and the real Paul becomes associated with the threatening Dream Paul. Surely, he can’t be blamed for another person’s dreams, can he?

Dream Scenario slides from a comedy of manners into a sharply pointed parody of cancel culture, social media overkill, cognitive behavior therapy and our society’s impulse to monetize everything, not to mention today’s commercial imperative to leverage everything for micro-targeted advertising. Dream Scenario is highly intelligent and hilarious.

The guy who imagined this unique premise and all the killer moments of topical parody is Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose work I haven’t seen before. This is the 38-year-old Borgli’s third feature; I can’t wait to mine his previous work and anticipate what he brings us next.

The character of Paul is not your off-the-shelf Everyman. He is, after all, smart enough to have a Ph.D., even be a tenured professor, and he’s a reliable and well-meaning, if unexciting, dad and husband. Paul has had career ambitions, now mere fantasies because we can tell right away that his social clumsiness and laziness keep him from realizing his them. He’s just too comfortable in his routines, which have become a rut.

Cage is excellent as Paul, whose natural, hard-wired response is to UNDERREACT (the opposite of most of Cage’s movie roles). He suffers each of the oddities, then indignities, then outrages ,until they reach his breaking point.

The cast of Dream Scenario is deep and excellent:

  • Julianne Richardson, as the wife who knows Paul best of anyone, for better and forworse, is stellar. Any actor who wants to learn the subtle slow burn should study Richardson’s reaction when one of her husband’s old girlfriends invites him for a coffee; Richardson lets us see her character’s building fury without a single stomp or eyeroll.
  • Dylan Gelula has an unforgettable turn as a very young woman driven by a compulsion toward a paroxysm of passion that is destined to elude her – one of the funniest movie scenes this year, and one that she has perfectly set up in earlier scenes.
  • Michael Cera is very funny as a hyper-opportunistic agency head, a paragon of insincerity.
  • The always-excellent Dylan Baker is perfect as the Cool Kid in the college town’s social set.
  • Tim Meadows is pitch-perfect as Paul’s longtime colleague/boss, who wants to dthe right thing, but can never cast side the bonds of an academic bureaucrat.

Dream Machine is one of the best comedies of the year, as funny and as smart as Barbie, which is high praise.

DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY: a movie and its time

by
Jon Voight in his screen test for Midnight Cowboy from DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The remarkably insightful documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy explores the making of Midnight Cowboy and its place both in cinema and in American culture. 

Midnight Cowboy won Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, all with an X-rating. Sure, we know Midnight Cowboy as a groundbreaking film, but Desperate Souls argues that it both reflected the zeitgeist of the moment and opened new possibilities in American filmmaking.

This was a transitional period in Hollywood and in the culture. Midnight Cowboy won its Oscars at the same Academy Award ceremony that honored John Wayne as Best Actor. Midnight Cowboy’s protagonists were completely unDukelike, one a would-be gigolo and the other an almost homeless conman.

So, we have two marginal anti-heroes and their unconventional bond, along with, shockingly, incidents of gay sex, heterosexual impotence and incontinence. The director John Schlesinger himself was a closeted gay man. Anyone who was alive in 1969 can tell you that this was extraordinarily transgressive content to penetrate the cultural mainstream.

Besides the unsettling themes, Midnight Cowboy, along with The Graduate (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) pioneered the effective use of popular music on the soundtrack. Midnight Cowboy is notable for both John Barry’s Emmy-winning score and for the use of Fred Niel’s Everybody’s Talkin’, which Schlesinger used as the theme.

Filmmaker Nancy Buirski, who died in September, builds her case with superb sourcing. She hit gold with the unique perspective of Jennifer Salt, who observed her father, screenwriter Waldo Salt, and the director John Schlesinger birth the film; she also acted in the movie and came to date its star, Jon Voight. Voight himself bookends the film with emotionally powerful reflections.

Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy also includes Voight’s screen test, and I dare you to explain why the filmmakers, after watching it, said THAT’S THE GUY.

As I write, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy is number 21 on my carefully curated list of Longest Movie Titles.

This is a strong film, and a Must See for cinephiles, especially Jon Voight’s intro and outro. saw Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and you can stream it now on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.

RUSTIN: greatness, overlooked

by
Photo caption: Colman Domingo in RUSTIN. Courtesy of Netflix.

We all know of the March on Washington, culminating in Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people filling the National Mall. It’s one of the most iconic and important moments in American history. Rustin introduces many folks to the overlooked greatness of Bayard Rustin (Colan Domingo), the organizer of the event.

Bayard Rustin was an important civil rights leader who was relegated to the background of the movement, and sometimes even ostracized, because he was a gay man. In the 1950s and 1960s, being a former Communist didn’t help, either.

Rustin’s mentor A. Philip Randolph (played in Rustin by Glynn Turman) is the other most overlooked male civil rights leader. Randolph’s two greatest accomplishments, the integration of the military and of the defense industries, occurred before television (and were filtered by the white mainstream print media). A personal note from The Movie Gourmet: my decades-long career has been in politics, and one of my very first political day jobs was funded by the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Here is more on Randolph and Rustin from the APRI website.

Rustin takes us behind the scenes, and we see the strategic disagreements, petty jealousies and jockeying for status between civil rights leaders. It’s important that the leaders came from generational strata. In 1963, Randolph was 74. Rustin was 52. NAACP head Roy Wilkins was 61, and Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was 55, both at the peaks of their careers. MLK was a rising superstar, but still only 34. John Lewis was still only 23.

In birthing the March on Washington, Rustin was fighting the overt attacks of J. Edgar Hoover and Strom Thurmond and the covert obstructionism of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Rustin also had the contend with the antagonism of Wilkins and Powell. But, Rustin had two cards to play – the respect demanded by Randolph and the rock star sizzle of MLK.

In a stellar, commanding performance, Colman Domingo is charismatic as Rustin. Domingo has been so good in everything I’ve seen him in: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola, Selma and Lincoln. Glynn Turman brings gravitas and moral authority to Randolph. In ingenious, against-type casting, Chris Rock is excellent as the funny-as-a-heart-attack Roy Wilkins. Jeffrey Wright PERFECTLY captures Adam Clayton Powell.

Ami Ameen has the challenge of satisfying audience expectation in portraying MLK. He gets the speech patterns and mannerisms right, while inhabiting a still-young MLK growing into the leader he was just becoming.

If you want to learn more of Bayard Rustin, I recommend Matt Wolf’s award-winning, but hard to find, short doc Bayard & Me, which features Rustin’s longtime partner Walter Neagle’s recollection of his life with Rustin; it’s an important insight into both Civil Rights and LGBTQ history.

Rustin was directed by George C. Wolfe, whose previous feature, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was my #2 movie of 2021. We need to see more movies from this guy.

Rustin is now streaming on Netflix.