historical – Page 8 – The Movie Gourmet

Cinequest: THE OTTOMAN LIEUTENANT

April 8, 2018March 11, 2017 by movie gourmet

The adventure romance The Ottoman Lieutenant, which had its world premiere at Cinequest and is now playing in theaters, is SO bad, so LAUGHABLY bad, that it’s hard to predict whether it will be quickly forgotten or linger in our memories as a benchmark in badness.

Just before World War I, a willful and affluent young American (Hera Hillmar), runs off to remote Turkey to deliver a truck-full of medical supplies to a dreamy young doc (Josh Hartnett), who is running a Protestant mission in an Armenian area of Anatolia. She encounters the title character (Michael Huisman) and sparks fly. The natural political conflict between the two men escalates in a fit of sexual jealousy. Since the title is “The Ottoman Lieutenant” instead of “The American Missionary Doctor”, we know where things are headed…In fact, anyone who has ever seen a movie knows where EVERYTHING is headed in what must be the year’s most predictable movie

The blame starts with the unimaginative story and leaden dialogue from writer Jeff Stockwell. Director Joseph Ruben contributes the cliché of horse-riding across a grassy plain, bodies rocking in the saddles and bouncing up and down rhythmically, accompanied by SWELLING music. Not once. Not twice. But three times. The kisses erupt into industrial-scale heavy breathing after precisely two counts (“one-thousand-one, one-thousand two, now let’s hear heavy breathing!”). There’s even some bad CGI of a passenger ship – kind of Titanic Lite.

The Ottoman Lieutenant also features a dreadful performance by its lead. Hera Hilmar, known for 25 episodes of Davinci’s Demons, misreads lines and generally fails to interest us at all. She’s not even interesting when losing her virginity. Would a better actress elevate this material? Perhaps, but not all the way into an even mediocre film. It doesn’t help when Stockwell has Hillmar utter the most obvious observation, “Jude, you’re angry!”, drawing unintended chuckles from the audience.

But it’s Hartnett who leaves us with the most memorable moment of The Ottoman Lieutenant. He embraces Hilmar after her character’s deflowering and then shoves her back, bellowing, “I can smell him!”. At my screening, fully one-third of the audience erupted into hearty laughter – an LOL moment unintended by the filmmakers. Later, I realized that this line was the only unpredictable moment in the film.

The one appealing aspect of The Ottoman Lieutenant is Michael Huisman’s performance. Huisman (Treme, Game of Thrones) is a very charismatic actor, and, if this movie could have been saved, he would have been up to it. The Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer is pretty good as the lieutenant’s commander. Ben Kingsley gets to emote as an older doctor made irascible by personal loss.

While watching a movie, I scribble notes in the dark; this time, The Wife snatched my notebook and wrote, “This is the worst movie ever”. Tossing multiple millions of dollars at the budget for this movie was like over-inflating a used condom.

Cinequest: THAT TRIP WE TOOK WITH DAD

February 26, 2017 by movie gourmet

The German dramedy That Trip We Took with Dad reminds the American audience that Iron Curtain-style communism was NOT monolithic. The story takes place during a significant historical moment, when the Prague Spring was slammed shut by the Soviet invasion in August, 1968. Two Romanian brothers are taking their dad to a surgical procedure, which necessitates a road trip from Romania through Hungary, Czechoslovakia and into East Germany.

The primary point of view is from one of the brothers, a young doctor. Feeling responsibility beyond his years, the doctor is very, very practical. He will do what it takes to protect his father and brother, even if it means the distasteful task of informing to the secret police.

His younger brother is a naive artist who keeps criticizing OTHER Eastern European commie regimes in the knuckle-headed belief that the Romanian commies will leave him alone. The father is a once-true believer who now blames communism for the death of his wife.

Since the brother and the father are likely to blurt out the most provocative thing at any moment, each border crossing becomes dreadfully tense for the doctor – and for the audience. As with any Odd Couple (or Odd Trio) road trip, there is also humor.

That Trip We Took with Dad is a social and political satire of Iron Curtain communist societies. Our doctor also encounters some West German lefties who naively reject Western capitalism for its exploitation and inequality, ignoring or apologizing or minimizing the lack of free expression behind the Iron Curtain.

The family in the movie is Romanian of German ethnicity, and the story stems from writer-director Anca Miruna Lazarescu’s own family. Her introduction of the film for Cinequest is on this post just below the trailer.

THE FOUNDER: moneygrubbing visionary

January 22, 2017 by movie gourmet

In the enjoyably addictive The Founder, Michael Keaton brings alive Ray Kroc, the man who created the global corporate superpower that is McDonald’s. It’s both a vivid portrait of a particular change-maker and a cold-eyed study of exactly what capitalism really rewards.

Speaking of capitalism, it’s hard to imagine a truer believer than Ray Kroc, not even Willy Loman. When we meet Kroc, he is grinding through small town America selling milkshake mixers none too successfully. Each night he retires to yet another dingy motel for heavy doses and Early Times bourbon and a motivational speaker on his portable record player.

Then Kroc stumbles across the McDonald brothers Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch). In their Riverside, California, hamburger stand, the McDonald brothers invented the industrialization of food service, their achievement being “fast food” as we know it today. One the most fascinating sequences in The Founder is a flashback of the McDonald brothers designing the most efficient fast food kitchen possible with chalk on a tennis court. The brothers are passionate about their business, equally devoted to their product and their customers.

Kroc falls in love. Having driven through every town in the country as a traveling salesman, he can appreciate the untapped market. He persuades the brothers to let him take over franchising McDonald’s restaurants. It turns out that that the 50ish Kroc is well-equipped for the job because he’s driven, absolutely ruthless and always on the verge of desperation. He HAS to succeed. Kroc is hungry, perpetually hungry, and learns to identify potential franchisees who are not complacent investors, but are who are also driven enough to accept his discipline and run each franchise by the numbers. Egotistical as he is, Kroc is also smart enough to adopt a brilliant idea from someone else – the key to making McDonald’s his.

John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman in THE FOUNDER

Dick McDonald is a humorless detail freak with brilliant ideas; Mac is the conflict-avoidant, supportive brother, always unruffling Dick’s feathers and keeping their options alive. Both are proud and true to their values. The McDonald brothers are authentic American business geniuses, but are they too principled to fight off a double cross by Kroc?

In much of the movie, Dick is on phone with Mac listening to Dick’s side of the conversations. Both Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch are superb, but Lynch’s performance is Oscar-worthy. There’s a “handshake” scene where WE know and MAC knows that he is going to get screwed, and Lynch’s eyes in those few seconds are heartbreaking.

As far as I can tell, The Founder is very historically accurate. Thanks to screenwriter Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler) and director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side), we also meet some other historical characters – Harry Sonneborn, Fred Turner, June Martino and Joan Smith Kroc – and appreciate their contributions to the McDonald’s business.

The Founder’s Ray Kroc is shitty to his wife (Laura Dern), shitty to his partners and, basically, shitty to his core. But we HAVE to keep watching him. Do we root for him because only HE can build this empire? We Americans have a heritage of empire building. And the idea of someone building something so big and so successful with only his smarts, persistence and opportunism is irresistible to us.

This is a good movie. I’ll even watch The Founder again. And I’ll have fries with that.

https://youtu.be/KH3b6bs8llA

HIDDEN FIGURES: Woman Power, Black Power, Brain Power

January 13, 2017 by movie gourmet

Hidden Figures tells the hitherto generally unknown story of some African-American women whose math wizardry was key to the success of the US space program in the early 1960s. It’s pretty rare that someone can make a historical movie about something I had never heard of, but here we are. The screenplay is based on real events, and we see the images of the real thee women at the end of the movie. It’s a good story.

I had forgotten that engineers used to do even the complicated calculations by hand. Indeed, lots of aeronautical engineering calculations were needed to send the first NASA astronauts into space, and this was before the government used mainframe computers, let alone handheld calculators. So the answer was to have, for every room of (all male) engineers, a room full of women with the job title of “Computer” to do and check the math problems.

Hidden Figures’ heroines, including an authentic math prodigy and pioneer in computer programming, are perfectly played by Taraji P. Henson, Olivia Spencer and Janelle Monae (fresh from another acting triumph this fall in Moonlight). Remember that these women had to overcome the automatic sexism of the Mad Men era. On top of that, they were black women working in still-segregated Virginia. And, just to make things even more difficult, they were working for engineers, too!

The entire cast is excellent, especially Mahershala Ali (hunky and compelling yet again), Kevin Costner and Jim Parsons as a particular officious and sexist foil.

We see one of the first massive, room-filling but delicate IBM mainframe computers. That, calling people “computers” and the use of the programming language FORTRAN all drew chuckles from the Silicon Valley audience at my screening.

Hidden Figures does an especially fine job in depicting the tension during John Glenn’s communications blackout. Glenn’s space capsule had a problem with the heat shield. When it re-entered the atmosphere, there was a period of a few minutes when Glenn’s communications went dead. During this time (and I remember it well), everyone on the planet was watching on TV and no one knew whether the craft and Glenn were being consumed by a fireball or on the way to a successful splashdown. Those moments were unbearable.

Hidden Figures is eminently watchable, but not a perfect movie. There are some obviously over-dramatized and over-simplified segments. I thought I heard a character – in this movie about math whizzes – refer to “an altitude of 116 miles per hour” (which should be either an altitude of 116 miles or a velocity of 116 miles per hour). And John Glenn has hair even though, in real life, he was balding at the time (perform a Google Image search for “john glenn mercury 7” if you want to see for yourself).

But those flaws don’t detract from the core story, which is compelling. The audience at my screening burst into applause, which doesn’t happen that often.

JACKIE: dreary and somnolent

December 17, 2016December 17, 2016 by movie gourmet

If you put a Chanel suit and pillbox hat on Natalie Portman and direct her to speak breathily, you’ve got Jackie Kennedy, which is noteworthy, but not enough reason to see the dreary Jackie. Portman superbly paints the portrait intended by director Pablo Larrain (No), but that vision is unconvincing and not at all compelling.

Larrain’s thesis is that Jackie moved from shocking grief to a fierce determination to enhance her husband’s legacy in the three days after the assassination, intentionally creating the brand of “Camelot”. He interweaves three stories: the assassination and funeral, Jackie’s later Hyannis Port interview with journalist Theodore H. White and a re-enactment of the First Lady’s televised White House tour.

Despite a remarkable impersonation by Portman, none of this really works. Jackie ranges from dreary to gloomy, and in case we forget, we’re prodded by an intrusive score of sad, really sad discordant music. One can imagine several cellists committing suicide after performing this score.

The real Jackie was bred to be a docent, and her confident White House tour was a television triumph. Yet Jackie’s Jackie acts like she needed one more Xanax to make it through without a breakdown. I didn’t believe Jackie’s bitter cat-and-mouse with the journalist, either.

Portman is exceptional at playing the on-top-of-the-world celebrity First Lady, the stunned and shattered victim and the laser-focused widow. John Hurt is excellent as a consoling priest. Greta Gerwig plays Jackie’s confidante Nancy Tuckerman, and manages to avoid blame for ruining a movie by herself for the first time. This is not the actors’ fault – it’s Larrain’s.

I’ll describe a movie with the word “somnolent” for the first time on this blog because I actually did drift off to sleep twice. It would have been just once, but The Wife prodded me awake both times.

[SPOILER ALERT: Bad history in historical movies enrages me, and there are two examples that appear in the last ten minutes of Jackie. First, as Jackie is preparing to move out of the White House, we see Ladybird Johnson actually fingering the fabric for new curtains, which CERTAINLY did not happen for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that Ladybird was too decent. Second, we see a flashback of JFK spinning Jackie around a White House dance floor like a polka king; of course, JFK’s chronic back condition did not allow him to move like that.]

LOVING: the love story that made history

December 11, 2016 by movie gourmet

LOVING Credit: Ben Rothstein/Focus Features — Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton in LOVING. Credit: Ben Rothstein/Focus Features

The landmark 1967 US Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia overturned state laws that banned interracial marriage. Loving is the story of the real couple behind that ruling, and it’s a satisfying love story of two modest people who would rather not have been forced to make history.

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton convincingly bring the lead characters to life. As the more vibrant character, Negga is especially winning. Edgerton is just as good as he plays the stolid and far less demonstrative husband.

Marton Csokas, with his pitiless, piercing eyes, is remarkably effective as the Virginia sheriff dead set on enforcing Virginia’s racist statute in the most personally intrusive way. Too often, actors seem to be impersonating Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night when they play racist Southern sheriffs, but Csokas brings some originality to his performance.

Loving is directed by one of my favorites, Jeff Nichols of Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud (which he calls his “Arkansas Trilogy”). Nichols specializes in leisurely paced dramas that evoke their settings in the rural South. Nichols’ languid style works well in telling stories that have moments of shock and violence. However, there is no dramatic courtroom face off or thrilling high point as we watch these people live their workaday lives, so Loving drags a bit in places. Nevertheless, Nichols does an excellent job of depicting the ongoing dread of racist terror that these people lived under.

Michael Shannon, who owes his career breakthrough to Nichols’ Shotgun Stories and stars in his Take Shelter and Mud, shows up in a sparkling cameo as a LIFE magazine photographer. If you perform a Google image search for “Richard Mildred Loving”, you’ll find the real LIFE photos, which make it clear that Nichols went to great lengths to make the characters and the settings look very, very much like the Lovings and their environment. I don’t need “lookalikes” in a historical movie, but the makeup and wardrobe on Edgerton and Negga (and especially Richard Loving’s mother) are remarkably close to the real people. And the scenes at the drag race and on the Loving’s sofa are recreated in almost chilling accuracy.

I studied Loving v. Virginia, along with other major civil rights and individual rights cases, in law school in the mid-1970s . Then, the idea that a government could outlaw a marriage between people of different races (and even the word “anti-miscegenation”) already seemed ridiculously obsolete and perversely quaint. But I hadn’t realized that the ruling in Loving v Virginia was only 8 years old at the time I studied it. California had such a law, too, which wasn’t repealed until 1948, and I have a friend whose Filipino and Mexican-American parents were kept from marrying by that statute.

History is made by real people. Loving is both good history and a watchable personal story.

DVD/Stream of the Week: FREE STATE OF JONES – sound and compelling history, with a sizzling McConaughey

October 11, 2016 by movie gourmet

Mahershala Ali and Matthew McConaughey star in FREE STATE OF JONES — Mahershala Ali and Matthew McConaughey in FREE STATE OF JONES

Free State of Jones is the compelling story of resistance to the Confederacy and to white supremacy by Southerners during and after the Civil War. Matthew McConaughey stars as Newton Knight, an overlooked but quite singular figure in American history. It is little-known, but the Confederacy actually lost control of some Mississippi counties to poor white farmers who tired of fighting a war to benefit the rich slave-holders.

I am a pretty serious Civil War history buff, and I was planning to skip Free State of Jones entirely until I found out about writer-director Gary Ross’ commitment to taking the history seriously. In fact, Ross has posted a very impressive website which outlines the historical events and figures depicted in the movie and even links the primary historical source material. I’ve never seen such a credible effort by a filmmaker to explain how he got the history right. Here’s a New York Tines article about the movie, Ross and his website.

In the second act of his career, McConaughey has delivered brilliant performances in excellent movies (Mud, Bernie, The Paperboy, Killer Joe, The Wolf of Wall Street, Dallas Buyers Club, True Detective). Here, he positively sizzles as the intensely principled and determined Newt Knight. The rest of the cast is excellent, too, especially Mahershala Ali (House of Cards) as an escaped slave turned Reconstruction political organizer.

Free State of Jones effectively combines the elements of political drama, romance and war movies into an absorbing drama, one which connects the dots between the 19th Century and the 20th and beyond. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix (and coming soon to Redbox) and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

FREE STATE OF JONES: sound and compelling history, with a sizzling McConaughey

July 2, 2016 by movie gourmet

ALL THE WAY: LBJ comes alive

November 12, 2017May 25, 2016 by movie gourmet

Lyndon B. Johnson, one of American history’s larger-than-life characters, finally comes alive on the screen in the HBO movie All the Way. Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Trumbo) is the first actor who captures LBJ in all his facets – a man who was boring and square on television but frenetic, forceful and ever-dominating in person. All the Way traces the first year in LBJ’s presidency, when he ended official racial segregation in America with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

LBJ was obsessed with gaining and keeping political power, and he was utterly ruthless and amoral about the means to do that. His tools of persuasion included deceit, flattery, threats, promised benefits and horse-trading. He was equally comfortable in playing to someone’s ideals and better nature as well to one’s vanity or venality. In All the Way, we see one classic moment of what was called “the Johnson treatment”, when LBJ looms over Senator Everett Dirksen, and it becomes inevitable that Dirksen is going to be cajoled, intimidated or bought off and ultimately give LBJ what he wants.

LBJ was so notoriously insincere that one of the joys of All the Way is watching LBJ tell completely inconsistent stories to the both sides of the Civil Right battle. Both the Civil Rights proponents (Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and the opponents (the Southern Senators led by Richard Russell) must determine whether LBJ is lying and to whom. Each of them must make this calculation and then bet his own cause on his perception of LBJ’s real intentions.

But LBJ amassed power for two reasons – he needed to have it and he needed to do something with it. Along with the LBJ’s unattractive personal selfishness and the political sausage-making that some may find distasteful, All the Way shows that Johnson did have two core beliefs that drove his political goals – revulsion in equal parts to discrimination and poverty. We hear references to the childhood poverty that led to the humiliation of his father, to the plight of the Mexican schoolchildren in Cotulla, Texas, that he mentored as a young man, and his outrage at the discriminatory treatment suffered by his African-American cook Zephyr.

Bryan Cranston brilliantly brings us the complete LBJ – crude, conniving, thin-skinned, intimidating and politically masterful. Besides Cranston’s, we also see superb performances by Melissa Leo as Lady Bird, Anthony Mackie as MLK, Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey and Frank Langella as Richard Russell.

All the Way is remarkably historically accurate. It does capsulize some characters and events, but the overall depiction of 1964 in US history is essentially truthful. As did Selma, All the Way drills down to secondary characters like James Eastland and Bob Moses. We also see the would-be scandal involving LBJ’s chief of staff Walter Jenkins, a story that has receded from the popular culture. Vietnam is alluded to with a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is fitting since Vietnam grew to become LBJ’s nemesis and the national obsession only after the 1964 election.

All the Way was adapted from a Broadway play for which Cranston won a Tony. I saw three movies in theaters last weekend and none of them were as good as All the Way. LBJ’s 1964 makes for a stirring story, and All the Way is a compelling film. Seek it out on HBO.

ELVIS & NIXON: the eccentric meets the quirky

April 24, 2016 by movie gourmet

Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey in ELVIS & NIXON

In December, 1970, an addled Elvis Presley was isolated and indulged by his hangers-on and feeling cranky enough to shoot out a TV set in Graceland. He decided that he needed a “federal agent at large” badge, and his quest sparked an impromptu visit to the Nixon White House, resulting in the all-time most requested photo from the National Archives (below). All this really happened, and the historical comedy Elvis & Nixon imagines the details, with the iconic characters fleshed by two of our finest screen actors, Michael Shannon (Elvis) and Kevin Spacey (Richard Nixon).

In the movies, Shannon usually projects a hulking menace, but here he uses his imposing presence to dominate and suck the oxygen out of a room. Of course, Shannon doesn’t have the sexual energy of Elvis, but his intensity makes up for it. As impaired and wacky as Shannon’s Elvis is, he can be a charming flatterer and knows how to make the most of his celebrity and sexual power. He wins over Nixon by bringing up their common distaste for commies and the Beatles, and shamelessly complementing Nixon’s homely looks.

Spacey goes beyond impersonation of Nixon’s well-known mannerisms to reach the seasoned pol, the cagey and amoral tactician, the doting father, and, above all, a man submerged in an unquenchable pool of resentfulness. In particular, Spacey perfectly delivers one classically Nixonian chip-on-the-shoulder monologue. And few can portray social awkwardness as well as Spacey.

In Elvis & Nixon, Nixon forces himself to keep a straight face as Elvis explains that “I want to go undercover”. Because his movie experience has given him a mastery of disguises, Elvis continues, he can infiltrate the Rolling Stones and the Black Panthers, slipping back and forth between them with no one the wiser. [Note: There were only five Rolling Stones – wouldn’t they have noticed a sixth one?] The real Elvis reportedly coveted the federal badge so he could take his guns and drugs on airplanes.

The two men size each other up and probe. Each man is using the meeting for his own ends. The humor comes from Elvis’ eccentricities and the hopelessly square and insecure Nixon’s reactions.

Elvis & Nixon is not a guffaw fest, but it has a few LOL moments. Otherwise unadorned, the Elvis-Nixon meeting itself is bizarre enough, but Shannon and Spacey make it especially worthwhile.