→ November 21, 2022
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Amsterdam (movie).

Amsterdam takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into … not much. I can’t even call it nothing, because it’s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015’s Joy, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon and elsewhere.)

The script is the real problem here, as it’s convoluted, undecided about what kind of story it should be, and totally humorless. It’s part mystery, part political thriller, part historical fiction, and mixes in a tepid romance, but fails at virtually all of these things, lacking the tension for the first two or the humor to make it more of a wink and a nod at all of these disparate genres. It’s based on a real episode from U.S. history known as the Business Plot, and creates three protagonists – two wounded vets from World War I in the doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and lawyer Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) plus nurse Valerie (Margot Robbie) – who get pulled into the intrigue, 39 Steps style, when someone they knew in the War shows up dead. That leads to the introduction of a Tolstoy-esque list of characters, adding to some of the confusion of the film and depriving some of the better players here of screen time, before we find out what the conspiracy is and get to the big resolution.

I’m in the target audience for Amsterdam. I like political thrillers, especially of that era, whether we’re talking about the Hitchock oeuvre or novels like The Dark Frontier or Le Carré’s best. I like murder mysteries. I love almost anything set in the 1920s or early 1930s. And I do often fall for movies that are stylish – if the dialogue matches. But Amsterdam doesn’t have a great story, neither in the murder part nor in the political conspiracy part, and the dialogue is drab.

Bale’s character is supposed to be a wiseass, but he’s neither clever nor funny enough to do it, yet he’s too smart to be comic relief. There’s something endearing about his loyalty to his fellow soldiers from their unit – which is itself rooted in kindness, although again, it’s a convoluted back story – but that’s not enough to fully define a three-dimensional character. Robbie can’t help but be endearing, but her character is weird for absolutely no reason at all, making art out of the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ wounds, something that’s explained at length and then dropped for the rest of the film. Of the big three, Washington’s character is the best defined, and the most interesting, and his understated style works well here. But there are far more actors in this film who are nondescript or actively bad, none more so than Anya Taylor-Joy, who is playing an even more shrill version of her character from Peaky Blinders. She’s supposed to be suspicious, but instead, she’s obvious – and annoying as hell when doing it. Her husband is played by Rami Malek, whose skin condition from No Time to Die has resolved itself but who’s almost simpering here. Robert de Niro deserves credit for a very by-the-book turn as the General whose help the trio needs to secure, as the moment he appeared, I thought we were in for an overacting clinic. He’s quite credible in the part and holds it even when his character has to make a pivotal, emotional speech at the climax.

And that climax is … nothing. This is based on a real story; although the veracity of the accusations of a plot to overthrow the U.S. government remains in dispute, Amsterdam treats it as real, which should make the ending far more exciting. The script here has it end in a meeting and a whimper, although there’s a tussle over a gun that feels forced, like Russell was trying to insert some action into the film but couldn’t figure out how.

I was just never engaged in the story of Amsterdam, and that’s the biggest indictment I can offer. I am an easy mark for everything this script was trying to do, but it’s so busy trying to do so many things that it succeeds at none. The film actually opens with a long flashback sequence to World War I that explains how the dead body connects to Burt and Harold, and how they connect to each other (along with Chris Rock’s character, another member of the same unit), but it comes after a ten-minute or so opening scene that sets up the murder. The flashback itself is padded with too much detail anyway, so by the time we get back to the actual story – which features Taylor Swift as the deceased’s daughter, and she’s also not very good – any momentum that there might have been at that point is long gone. And the one thing that might have salvaged Amsterdam, wry humor, is mostly absent. There are a few attempts at some Marx Brothers-style wisecracking, but those fall flat. No single character is funny, and the script is too self-serious for something this stylized or slick. It’s not actually a bad movie – it’s a movie, and a colorless one at that.

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→ October 20, 2022
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Athena.

Athena is the newest feature from Romain Gavras, son of Oscar-winning writer and director Costa-Gavras, who has a great eye for action sequences and can put you right on the edge of your seat, starting out this film with a literal and figurative bang. The script has Shakespearean aspirations, but the story doesn’t work well enough to achieve its goals or to match the quality of the action sequences.

Athena is the name of a housing complex in an unnamed French city that is home to a large population of Algerian-French citizens, and as the film opens, we see one of them, a police officer named Abdel (Dali Benssalah, who was in No Time to Die), asking for peace in the wake of the death of his 13-year-old brother Idir. A video has gone viral showing Idir’s beating death at the hands of several men in police uniforms, which serves as the spark in the powder keg of Athena; Abdel has barely finished speaking when the camera spans to the crowd, where we see a young man, Karim (Sami Slimane), lighting a Molotov cocktail that he’ll throw into the police station. This leads to a daylong standoff between Athena residents, led by Karim, who is Idir’s and Abdel’s brother, demanding the police deliver Idir’s killers to them, and the French police, with Abdel caught in the middle, distrusting his superiors and trying to avoid any further harm to his family.

The action sequences in Athena are fantastic, starting with that Molotov cocktail and Karim’s followers invading the police station to try to loot it of weapons. It ends in one of several memorable shots, this one with Karim and company standing or sitting at the edge of one of the roofs in the complex, all steely-eyed and determined and also too young to be doing this. His side will end up taking a police officer hostage, something telegraphed from the very beginning of the film, further ratcheting up the tension amid the uncertainty whether he’s going to survive, or whether any of the brothers – there’s a third, a drug dealer with anger management problems named Moktar – are going to either. It’s a grim view of modern French society and the relationship between the police and the people, although it may be a realistic one.

The script seems more concerned with keeping the tension cranked up to 11 than with advancing the plot in a meaningful way, or saying anything beyond, hey, there’s a lot of anger out there, you know? The film isn’t making an actual statement on police violence, as the police in the film respond to Abdel by saying they believe Idir’s killers were in fact far-right agitators wearing police uniforms to try to light the match and usher in some kind of race war; the uncertainty around that is enough to muddle the narrative even as it also casts Abdel’s choices in a different light.

The brothers are all Muslims, as are most of the residents of Athena, but the film does next to nothing with this information. This feels like a huge omission – the rights of Muslims in France remains a contentious issue, on top of decades of discrimination against Algerians, and Athena just ignores it. The police shown in the film are at least somewhat diverse, with Black and white officers, and of course Abdel as a Muslim officer, which could be fodder for multiple subthemes, but the movie can barely handle Abdel’s dual role as a cop and an Algerian resident of the Athena complex, with no energy left for anything else.

Even as an action movie, with plenty to recommend it on that score, Athena feels a bit like empty calories because it can’t stick the landing at all, choosing a slam-bang finish over a meaningful or even a sensible one. It’s just my inference, but I certainly thought the way the film ends indicated pretensions towards Shakespearean tragedy, but in this case, the tragic deaths are just not earned, not one of them. It just ends up aggravating you because you can’t help but feel like all that buildup was for nothing. It’s 80 minutes of a sugar rush and 20 minutes of insulin shock. For a film that starts with a ton of promise, and features some incredible cinematography and memorable shots, it ends in a disappointing fizzle.

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→ June 30, 2022
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House of Gucci.

Whoa boy, House of Gucci is a mess of a film – it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that it was nearly shut out at the Academy Awards, taking just a single nomination for Hair & Makeup (well earned), because just about nothing in this movie works at all. Other than wasting a solid performance from Lady Gaga, there is nothing remarkable about this movie at all. It’s long, and sort of nice to look at, but the story is boring, the humor often doesn’t land, and it moves like someone fired the director halfway through the shoot.

Based loosely on the actual story of the fall of the Gucci family empire, House of Gucci follows Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), an office manager in her father’s trucking firm who courts the hapless Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), heir of the majority shareholder of the Gucci fashion house. After they marry, she asserts herself and pushes Maurizio to be more aggressive at the company, leading him into conflict with his uncle Aldo (Al Pacino) and cousin Paolo (Jared Leto, looking as handsome as ever). When Maurizio does take the reins, however, his marriage to Patrizia sours, leading her to hire a couple of hitmen to kill him.

The story itself is more than juicy enough for a great movie – and perhaps the book on which this is based is better than the film – but the script is a dud. There’s very little tension in the story, much of which hinges on arcane financial maneuvers, and there’s no real reason to believe that Maurizio and Patrizia would get together. It doesn’t help that there’s zero chemistry between Driver and Lady Gaga. But the script mostly wastes some good material here: These are terrible people, most of whom aren’t very bright, and the film does nothing with all of this. It’s so rarely funny that it’s hard to understand why anyone made a movie about these people without at least trying to mine some humor from the situation – or playing it straight as a financial drama, like Margin Call.

Other than Lady Gaga, nobody is very good in this movie, and they’re just about all worse for the decision to make everyone use Italian accents – even though they’re actually speaking English. Driver’s accent is bad, and he’s really charmless throughout the movie. Pacino gets a WOO-AH! or two in, and his accent is passable. Jeremy Irons appears near the beginning of the movie as Maurizio’s emphysemic father, with an especially bad accent and makeup that makes him look dead several scenes before he’s actually dead.

And whoa boy is Jared Leto bad in this – not least for his ridiculous, that’s-a-spicy-meat-a-ball! accent, which I assume he ordered off the specials menu at Olive Garden. Is he supposed to be Mario or Luigi? I half-expected him to tell Maurizio he need-a the sheets for the table. Chef Boyardee is more authentically Italian than this pagliaccio. It’s the Little Caesar’s of accents. It’s Parmesan cheese, from Wisconsin. It’s commedia della farte. But he’s also just flat-out overacting, too, infusing the character with nothing useful at all. He turns Paolo into a two-dimensional joke, and not a funny one. He’s a moron, yes, but morons can be funny, or kind, or can elicit our empathy. Leto’s Paolo does none of these. He just sucks the air out of the scene every time he appears.

The best part? It’s over two and a half hours! One of the key plot points, where Patrizia decides to have her husband killed, is relegated to maybe ten or fifteen minutes at the very end of the film, and the aftermath just gets one small scene of Patrizia in the courtroom. It’s as if the screenwriters didn’t understand any of what made this story interesting. Lady Gaga probably deserved an Oscar nomination for her work in this mess – certainly over the impersonations that took up three of the five spots for Best Actress – but there’s no other reason to watch this. (If you still want to, though, you can rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

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→ June 17, 2022
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The Netanyahus.

Joshua Cohen won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes a real event involving Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, visiting Cornell University and the esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom. This is a travesty; in a year with several better books (at least two by Black authors), the selection of such an unfunny, narrow work for the highest honor in American literature undermines the award and robs more deserving books of attention.

The book is narrated as a memory by a professor from Corbindale College in upstate New York, a badly disguised stand-in for Cornell, who is chosen to be on the committee to interview the senior Netanyahu for a faculty position because he’s the only Jewish professor in the department. They expect Benzion to show up alone, but instead, he brings his wife and three unruly children – Benji, the middle one; Yonatan, who would later die a hero in the raid on Entebbe; and Iddo, who’d later become a physician, author, playwright. Benzion doesn’t actually reach Corbindale until the middle of the novel, so the first half is the sort of insular follies that made Netflix’s The Chair a modest hit among academics, as well as a portrait of the casual anti-Semitism of the late 1960s. Then the Netanyahus show up and trash everything, including the novel itself.

The entire family, in the book at least, sucks. The father is an intellectual, a strong Zionist who makes compelling arguments on the pages, but he’s also a selfish asshole. His wife is worse, and invites her entire family to stay with the protagonist, whose wife wants no part of this (nor should she). The two older boys are assholes, not just in the way that most teenaged boys are, but with a spectacular lack of self-awareness. I suppose Iddo is the least offensive of the bunch, but the point is that these are deeply unlikeable, one-dimensional characters who suffocate the last half of the novel with their presence, and add nothing to it.

Cohen’s writing is insufferably pretentious, right down to his frequent, deliberate choices of uselessly esoteric vocabulary words. Writing of a character “knowing at some chthonic lake-depth that …” is pointless, just a way to send the reader to the dictionary to show off your own linguistic prowess. (It means “relating to the underworld.” “Abyssal” would have worked better here, or just saying “knowing at the deepest level of his subconscious,” which uses words any middle school student could understand.) Another passage goes “logopoeic, propaedeutic,” using words only an academic might know and love – more on that in a moment. “Nugatory” does not, in fact, refer to the center of your 3 Musketeers bar, but is the rare word that describes itself: of no value or importance. In other words, worthless. The word Cohen needed was “worthless,” but he chose the more difficult one. The entire book is like this, and it is a work of supreme arrogance.

So why the heck did it win the Pulitzer? It’s not actually funny. The story is small and unremarkable, and the themes are fairly narrow. But it is a book about academia, and about Harold Bloom. At least 30% of the Pulitzer Prize Board for 2022 comprises current professors or Deans. The majority of the Board are current or former writers who would probably all be familiar with Bloom’s work. This is a book for them and about them. It’s The Artist and Argo telling Hollywood that movies are important. The Netanyahus puts a fancypants college at the center of its narrative, and takes one of the great critics and historians of literature and makes him the protagonist. The Board probably couldn’t resist. I can’t think of another explanation – I’ve read all of the Pulitzer winners, and this is the worst choice in at least 25 years. I found nothing at all redeeming in The Netanyahus except that it’s short. There were so many better books right in front of them – Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, so they weren’t obscure, and both were miles and miles better than this thing. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This made the Booker Prize shortlist, and it’s better and far more relevant to our current moment. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby were better. And that’s just among novels I read. I know it’s just a prize that doesn’t make the novels considered any better or worse, but these awards drive sales, and I’d rather see a better book get that big sales bump than this nonsense.

Next up: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a Booker Prize winner from 2004.

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→ March 22, 2022
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Don’t Look Up.

If you enjoyed Vice for its sledgehammer-to-the-forehead approach to its subject matter, Don’t Look Up, the latest film from director Adam McKay and his co-writer David Sirota, might be right up your alley. It is as unsubtle and unfunny as any soi-disant satire can get, lacking both the humor and the power of the genre in its rush just to tell you how smart it is, and in the process, it wastes an epic cast that includes five Academy Award winners.

The premise of Don’t Look Up isn’t actually that bad: Two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover that a comet 6 kilometers wide is on course to make a direct impact with earth, just off the coast of Chile, an extinction-level event that will wipe out all of humanity. They go to the feds, and end up talking to the President (Meryl Streep), who doesn’t take them seriously until she needs to distract everyone from a scandal. But when the CEO of an Apple-like tech company called BASH (Mark Rylance) who is also a major donor to the President points out that the comet holds over $100 trillion in rare metals critical to the technology industry, the plan to destroy the comet shifts to a plan to try to break it apart and mine it, much to the chagrin of the science community that believes destroying the comet is the planet’s only hope. (Cate Blanchett is the fifth Oscar winner in the movie, playing a vapid morning show host as a sort of Megyn Kelly clone.)

There is one funny joke in all of Don’t Look Up, and it has to do with snacks. Nothing in the actual plot, which is so thinly veiled a metaphor for climate change that it might as well be covered with Saran wrap, is handled in a humorous way. This isn’t actual satire. You don’t just move the chairs around and claim you refurnished the house. The writers here just changed a few details and then made everyone a genius or a moron, with nothing in between. The closest thing this film has to a real character is DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy, who gets to evolve after his appearance on Blanchett’s morning show results in him becoming a heartthrob, both to viewers and to Blanchett’s character, with whom he cheats on his wife (Melanie Lynskey), another thinly-veiled commentary, this one on the corrupting power of fame and the conflict between telling people the truth and telling them what they want to hear. Even that seems to give this script more credit than it deserves, and it takes well over two hours to get to its eventual, obvious ending.

What’s most appalling is how McKay manages to get such awful work from otherwise capable, acclaimed actors. Rylance appears to have botoxed his upper cheeks into oblivion and affects a fey, high-pitched voice, while his character also has the social skills of a sea cucumber. Jonah Hill, playing Donald Trump Jr. by another name (the President’s son and also her chief of staff), is in full douchebro mode, and serves no purpose whatsoever except as a way to mock his real-life counterpart as an insipid misogynist. Blanchett’s co-host, played by Tyler Perry, is every bland TV personality who laughs too much and makes tasteless jokes about ex-wives.

And perhaps worst of all is Meryl Streep, who mailed this one in and had it returned for insufficient postage. She’s supposed to be as corrupt as Trump, but manages to make the character less interesting, somehow. She’s venal in the most boring way, and while, yes, there’s a comeuppance coming that you will see an hour away, it’s not even that satisfying because the character is such a cipher, and Streep, who has certainly had fun playing offbeat or even unlikeable characters before, seems disinterested.

As for the film’s so-called point, whether it’s just about climate change or a broader argument about humans’ inherent tendency to avoid short-term pain even for long-term gain, this isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. It’s preaching to – or just yelling at – the choir, while talking down to anyone else who might be willing to hear an argument on the matter. The writers would rather tell you how smart they are and take your compliments than do anything that might make a difference. When the protagonist also turns into a rhinoceros, you’ve taken the farce too far.

—

This is easily the worst film nominated for Best Picture this year, of which I have now seen all ten. My personal top ten for 2021, which could still change a little depending on some movies I haven’t seen and a few that aren’t available yet, looks like this:

1. Drive My Car
2. Dune
3. The Lost Daughter
4. Licorice Pizza
5. Parallel Mothers
6. Summer of Soul
7. The Power of the Dog
8. Passing
9. Red Rocket
10. C’mon C’mon

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→ March 1, 2022
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

Jessica Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Film this past weekend for her portrayal of the title character in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, yet another in the ongoing series of crappy biopics churned out by Hollywood as Oscar bait. It’s especially unfortunate here, as Tammy Faye Bakker was a far more interesting person than this movie even considers, and wastes a solid performance by Chastain that’s more than the garden-variety impersonations that usually win these categories. (It’s streaming free on HBO Max.)

If you know of Tammy Faye Bakker already, it’s because she was the wife of televangelist Jim Bakker for most of her life; they met in college and she appeared on air with him for over two decades, helping him build a following and then an entire network, while also becoming a bit of a punch line herself for her excessive makeup and the way it would run when she’d cry. Their empire imploded when two scandals hit – Jim had been siphoning off donors’ money, and some of it went to pay off an employee, Jessica Hahn, who accused Bakker of raping her. The Bakkers divorced while he was behind bars, and Tammy Faye later married a business associate of theirs who himself later went to prison for bankruptcy fraud – she could sure pick ’em! – and died in 2007 of colon cancer.

That’s her story, at least the most public part of it, and that’s the story that The Eyes of Tammy Faye tells, when it bothers to tell a story at all. (Don’t even get me started on how much is made up in this film – pun intended.) This is a biopic, but not a biography. It’s not interested in telling us about Tammy Faye Bakker, the person. It’s a recitation of things that happened to her. She had an unhappy childhood. She married young. She helped Jim Bakker build his business with her puppets and her high, sing-songy voice. Her marriage crumbled, then fell apart. We get a few glimpses of her character, such as the various times she refuses to be the subservient wife when Bakker’s colleagues Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are around – Jerry Jr. isn’t depicted, as he was busy with the pool cleaner – but those are scant, because a script this perfunctory has to play the hits. (Vincent D’Onofrio is unrecognizable as Falwell, although you might pick up his voice behind the clipped speech.)

The script does show the most important anecdote from Tammy Faye’s public life, at least: her on-air, live interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor who was diagnosed with HIV in 1982. (He’s still alive and gave a wonderful interview with Religion & Politics about the experience and the new film.) It was a compassionate, non-judgmental conversation, one that was consistent with Tammy Faye’s view of Christianity, showing love and compassion for everyone without judgment, but not Falwell’s and Robertson’s. Even today, it’s hard to imagine an evangelical TV show airing such a segment. In 1985, though, it was revolutionary – and Tammy Faye remained a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community for the rest of her life, even serving as the grand marshal of a pride parade at one point. This illustrates a lot more about the person she was than a series of vignettes, like the nonsense one about how they first ended up on television after their car was stolen (never happened), shows us.

Instead, The Eyes of Tammy Faye paints by numbers – this happened, and this happened, and then this happened, and then she took a bunch of pills, and then it all fell apart. (As far as I can tell, she never appeared intoxicated or stoned on air, either.) It is a series of unfortunate events, with no attempts to connect any of them, or give the audience any understanding of the people behind them other than painting Jim in broad strokes – which may be all he deserves, as both a philanderer and a fraud – and Tammy in only slightly less broad ones.

Chastain and Andrew Garfield expend so much energy trying to sound like the Bakkers that their work feels more like mimicry than acting – which is probably unfair to them both, but more to Chastain, who also has a lot more to do than Garfield does. Garfield’s Bakker is wooden, ambitious, single-minded, and if his faith was real at some point, it loses out to his desire for money and power. That transition occurs off screen, although you could argue its impact on Tammy Faye deserved more explanation. Chastain’s performance is more central, given that she’s the protagonist of the film, yet her imitation of Tammy Faye’s voice and mannerisms, as well as hair and makeup that make it hard to recognize the actress beneath, is hard to separate from the performance. She’s probably better than Nicole Kidman’s in Being the Ricardos, but there is no way on earth I’d vote for her over Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers or Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter, and I think Alana Haim was better in Licorice Pizza as well. The Eyes of Tammy Faye also got a nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling; I’ve only seen one other nominee, Dune, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this one win. It’s just not a very good movie, despite, or perhaps because of, all the emphasis on making it look right.

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→ January 25, 2022
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Spencer.

Director Pablo Larraín has a specific vision when it comes to biographical films: He takes a very small, pivotal period in his subject’s life and shows it in minute detail, sometimes moving events from outside the window into it for dramatic purposes. He did this to good effect in Jackie, fueled by an outstanding performance from Natalie Portman; and to mixed effect in Neruda, which lacked focus and glossed over some of Pablo Neruda’s significant character flaws. Larraín’s vision frames Spencer, his portrait of Princess of Wales Diana Spencer, but even Kristen Stewart’s award-worthy performance as the title character can’t salvage this overblown mess of a film. (It’s available to rent on Amazon and Google Play.)

The time window in Spencer is three days around Christmas in 1991, when the Royal Family made its annual pilgrimage to Sandrington, near where Diana grew up. At this point, her marriage to Prince Charles was already in shambles, fully aware he was having an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and she felt (with reason) attacked and scorned by multiple other members of the royal family. She had bulimia at this time, and is shown frequently running to the bathroom after and even during meals, and appears more comfortable speaking with the staff than with those of her social class. By all accounts, she dreaded these family sojourns, but was powerless to object to them.

Spencer also dealt with bulimia for about a decade, which included the time period of this film, and food is both a substantial theme and major framing device. This could have been a major point in a different script, but here, it’s lazy, and because the script has Diana behaving erratically – undressing with the curtains open, wandering the fields at night, talking to birds/ghosts/inanimate objects, breaking into her abandoned childhood home (which was not, in fact, abandoned at the time) – it comes across as just more evidence that Diana was crazy, rather than suffering from mental illness. Diana says in the film that she feels like she’s in a “cage,” with very little control over just about any aspect of her life, and the script seems to equate her eating disorder, which can be about exerting control over something, with her demand that she be allowed to select her own dresses. It comes across as unserious, accentuated by claustrophobic camera work that has Stewart crashing down hallways, drunk on despair.

Stewart is doing a fair impersonation of Diana, particularly in facial expressions (sometimes too much so), but by the time the story gets to Sandringham and she has to interact with other characters, she’s far more effective, and in many cases seems like she’s the only thing reining in this Woman on the Verge script. If she weren’t credible, and actually a bit restrained, the movie would have gone completely off the rails within a half an hour, because nobody else in the movie gets more than a smattering of lines or screen time. Sally Hawkins plays a fictional character, Maggie, the royal dresser to Diana, wearing a bad wig, with the movie’s dumbest twist, a complete waste of a very talented actor. I would guess the second-most lines belongs to Sean Harris as Royal Chef Darren McGrady, who would later become Diana’s personal chef, although the film also makes their relationship improbably casual. (The real-life Chef Darren weighed in on his Youtube channel on what’s real in Spencer and what’s not.)

The hair and makeup on Stewart are remarkable, helping make the transformation more credible – it’s easier to forget the actor behind the role here than in, say, King Richard. Jonny Greenwood’s score is way over the top, however – there’s too much of it, and it’s too loud, as if this is supposed to be a psychological horror movie rather than a biopic. It’s at its worst in the first half hour of the movie and then tapers off to sort of a dull roar, a rare miss for the Radiohead guitarist.

As if Spencer isn’t enough of a tortured watch with its melodramatic fabrications, the entire concluding sequence is such obvious arrant nonsense that it takes you right out of any suspension of disbelief you might have had going. None of this happened, because none of it could have happened. It’s all bollocks. I would be happy to see Stewart get a Best Actress nomination for this, but I couldn’t recommend this movie for any other reason.

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→ April 7, 2021
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The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

Many, many people told me The United States vs. Billie Holiday (streaming on Hulu) was bad, but my God did they undersell it. This movie sucks.

And it’s not that it sucks from the get-go; the first half-hour is actually okay, so you think, oh, this might be a serviceable music biopic about a really pivotal figure not just in music history, but in American civil rights history. The second half hour is worse, and you start to see the lack of focus in the script. By the last half hour, though, this thing is so far off the rails that you might start to question whether this was even a movie in the first place. It’s so bad that I can’t even really begin to argue Andra Day’s awards case, because she’s stuck in this very terrible, badly written, badly directed movie.

There’s a good story here, even if this movie doesn’t tell it. Billie Holiday was hounded by the federal government for nearly two decades because of “Strange Fruit,” one of her signature songs, a song written by Abel Meeropol about lynchings. Because she refused to stop singing it in live performances, they harassed her, cut off her license to perform in NYC cabarets (which I can’t believe was a real thing until 1967, and arrested her on drug charges. Holiday was an addict, and her celebrity also made her a useful target for post-Prohibition hardliners looking for other ways to regulate the behavior of Americans. Holiday’s life naturally offers the peaks and valleys you’d want in a Hollywood biography.

Instead, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan Lori-Parks’ script for The United States vs. Billie Holiday adds one ridiculous fabrication after another, and suffers from ham-fisted directorial work from Lee Daniels (The Butler, Precious) that do Holiday and the viewers a series of injustices. Day is good, I think, and she certainly does an expert impression of Holiday’s speaking and singing voices. Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight) is in a similar boat, doing what I think is great work in a terrible role as Jimmy Fletcher, the real-life undercover agent who entraps Holiday in a drug sting, although in movie world they end up having an affair. He’s working for Harry Anslinger, who truly did hound Holiday to death; Anslinger is played here by Garrett Hedlund, and calling his performance “one-note” would imply one more note than it actually contains.

I can’t even express how much I loathed the last half of this movie, though. The lighting is weird the entire time, not in a way that evokes its era, but in a way that makes you want to adjust your television, or maybe go get a glaucoma test. Then Daniels decides to start shifting within scenes from full color to black and white and back again, adding nothing except confusion and delay. Holiday’s childhood trauma comes to Fletcher not from her telling him about it, or one of her confidants doing so, but because he shoots up with her retinue and then sees her memories during his high.

Day’s performance might be the film’s only redeeming quality, although this movie is way beyond redemption. The character is just so poorly written that it’s hard to say whether this is a great performance, or a game performance along with a great impersonation. Holiday gets off some great one-liners and a clever soliloquy or two, but there’s no depth to the character here, and especially no real exploration of just why she continued singing “Strange Fruit” even though doing so jeopardized her career and her liberty. There’s a completely made-up scene where she and Fletcher just happen upon the aftermath of a lynching, but it’s so late in the movie that it can’t explain anything, and its inclusion here is so inept that it seemed like it might have been intended as a dream sequence or memory – except that Fletcher wouldn’t be in a memory like that, so, no, this is supposed to be real.

Nobody saw The Nest, but I would have given Carrie Coon a nomination over Day, and if the Academy was going to nominate an actress from a bad movie, they could just as easily have gone with Sophia Loren for The Life Ahead (more of a mediocre, sentimental movie than an outright mess). I just can’t get over what a crime it was to take an American musical icon who took a principled stand on race and turn her into a two-dimensional figure at the heart of a disjointed, overdirected film like this one.

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→ March 12, 2021
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number9dream.

David Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream, is beautifully written but the most derivative of the five novels of his that I’ve read so far. Mitchell is an unabashed fan of the works of Haruki Murakami, but here he picks all of the wrong parts of Murakami’s works to mimic, with a story that never comes together and ends on a note that would make even less sense if you haven’t read his first novel, Ghostwritten.

number9dream is ostensibly the story of Eiji Miyake, a 20-year-old student who was raised by his mother and later his grandparents, and who sets out from his rural island home to Tokyo to try to track down his father’s identity. Along the way, he has a series of improbable encounters with yakuza, hackers, detectives, and, of course, a beautiful woman in whom he takes an interest. Mitchell divides the book into eight chapters – the ninth is the ending – each of which roughly comprises one of those adventures in Eiji’s quest to figure out who his father is and force some sort of meeting with him.

I enjoyed Murakami’s two big novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, tremendously, even acknowledging some of Murakami’s flaws as a writer (such as his inability or unwillingness to write compelling female characters). His use of magical realism and creation of immersive dreamscapes make for incredibly compelling reads that I find I can’t put down – but when he hasn’t been able to cast that spell, as in Killing Commendatore, it becomes tedious, like you’ve seen behind the magician’s curtain and realized how every trick is done.

number9dream feels more like the latter kind of Murakami novel, probably because Mitchell is trying too hard to emulate another writer, when, as would be clear in some of his later novels, he’s best when he’s just being David Mitchell. The series of events that befall Eiji are so improbable, often with over-the-top violence that borrows from Murakami’s worst instincts in that department – even those two Murakami novels I most enjoyed have one scene of horrifying violence apiece – that I couldn’t get caught up in any parts of the story or, most importantly, the major mystery of who Eiji’s father is or whether he’ll find him.

Mitchell’s use of dream/fantasy sequences early in the novel is also offputting, and he just drops that gimmick well before the halfway point. Eiji’s crush on Ai, a server at the coffee shop he visits at the start of the novel while following a lead on his father through the lawyer who has coordinated payments from his father for his care and upbringing, is fine, but the way she reciprocates doesn’t feel realistic at all to the character or women in general, falling into white-knight fantasy territory as well. There isn’t a well-written woman in this book, in fact, which I don’t think is typical of Mitchell – but it is typical of Murakami and the latter’s worst trait as an author.

I’ve read five of Mitchell’s eight novels so far, and this is easily his worst. It’s derivative, but worse, Eiji and his quest are just not compelling storylines – more so once it becomes clear early in the novel that if he finds his father at all, it’s not likely to be a satisfying resolution for him or for the reader. Eiji looking for his father is a good start on narrative greed, but Mitchell doesn’t keep it going, because ultimately Eiji’s reason for trying to find his father’s identity appears to be nothing more than curiosity – it’s not money, it’s not a strong emotional need, it’s just a mystery this goofy kid wants to solve. Maybe that’s uncharitable to Eiji or Mitchell, but I know the author can craft more gripping plots than this one, yet the most interesting parts here are the non sequiturs that hint at his other books (such as the Voorman Problem). I’ve got three Mitchell novels left to read and I imagine this will end up at the bottom of my rankings once I’m through.

Next up: I’m many books behind in reviews, but right now I’m reading both Barack Obama’s A Promised Land and Tim Grierson’s This is How You Make a Movie.

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→ December 29, 2020
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The Prom.

The thing with musicals is that, even if the plot is good, shouldn’t you remember at least one of the songs after you’ve watched it?

I actually liked The Prom, which has received some scathing reviews and mixed marks overall, even with some obvious flaws, from a hackneyed plot to the choice to cast a straight actor as a gay character at the center of the film, but the biggest problem with the movie is that the music just isn’t any good. I couldn’t sing or hum a single tune from the movie within a few hours after we turned it off. No musical can work like that, even when the feel-good story feels good, the lead actress is a star in the making, and some great actors are quite game for a script that doesn’t always serve them well.

The premise of The Prom, which was a Broadway musical before coming to Netflix and may have seemed fresher or more current when it debuted, is familiar: A high school in Indiana cancels its prom rather than let a student bring their same-sex partner as a date to the event. The student, Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), is out, but her girlfriend isn’t. Her principal (Keegan Michael-Key) is supportive, and sees this as a civil rights issue, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) heads the opposition, spouting some typical bromides about family values, life choices, and ‘won’t somebody please think of the children.’ (I found it interesting that they cast a Black actor in that role, perhaps to avoid bringing race into a story about defending  LGBTQ rights.) Four Broadway actors, two of whom have just learned their brand new show has received such savage reviews that it’s likely to close after just one night, get wind of this story and decide to head to Indiana to rally behind Emma – and give their own careers a boost of good publicity. Needless to say, this isn’t how things go once they arrive.

The four actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells, all of whom throw themselves completely into their rather absurd characters. Streep plays the diva, Corden her flamboyantly gay co-star, and both profess to be rather unaware of how the hoi polloi might live (although we later learn that’s a put-on). Kidman is a permanent understudy who never got her big break, and Rannells is “between gigs” and happens to be tending bar at the afterparty for Streep and Corden’s show. Kidman is, unsurprisingly if you’ve seen much of her work (like To Die For), the film’s secret weapon, sporting a convincing New York accent and giving her slim character her all, especially in her one big song, “Zazz,” a gentle satire of Chicago’s “All That Jazz” that unfortunately lacks the dancing part that would seal the homage. Rannells has even less to do, but does it well, especially in the song that sends up the show that made him a star, The Book of Mormon, where he responds to the argument that the Bible forbids homosexuality with a song that points out that it also forbids tattoos and the wearing of hats.

The story doesn’t really work if you squint at it, although that’s true of a lot of musicals, and many of the classics have plots that are little more than afterthoughts in service of the music. The resolution relies on a rather substantial plot contrivance, something the viewer knows for most of the movie, that is just too convenient. Some of the subplots actually work better – Key’s principal being a huge fan both of Streep and of Broadway in general, James Corden’s estrangement from his parents – but the script strains too hard to make the main storyline, which itself feels a few years out of date, work.

It succeeds in spite of itself, in large part because of Pellman, who makes her film debut in The Prom and looks every bit a star in the making. With her girlfriend still closeted, Emma carries most of the weight of the kids’ part of the storyline – her girlfriend is the only other teenaged character with any depth here – and Pellman is more than able to carry her share even in scenes with Streep and Kidman, two great actors who can be dominant on-screen, and when she finally gets a scene of her own, singing “Unruly Heart” as her character starts a Youtube channel and takes charge of her own side of the publicity battle.

Corden has come in for a fair amount of criticism for the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay character, and for doing so with some effeminate flourishes that lean a little bit into stereotype. I can’t argue the point, but from a straight performance perspective, Corden was fine. He’ll never not be Smithy to me, but he was more than adequate here, and was enough of a presence to counterbalance Streep, who is the good kind of hammy for most of the film, even though the script really lets her down in several ways.

But all of this comes with the basic problem I had with The Prom: There isn’t a single song in it that I could still recall a few hours after we finished the film. I enjoyed the experience of watching it, but a musical without good music is a rather empty shell, with barely enough plot to fill a short film. The Happiest Season, a holiday film on Hulu starring Kristen Stewart, had a rather similar plot at the core of its story, and handled it more deftly and with bigger laughs, even though it relies on some hackneyed tropes in its story. So while I liked The Prom just enough, there’s no staying power to it, and, unlike with most musicals, I have no real interest in watching it again.

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