→ December 30, 2019
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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most frustrating filmmakers working today, a brilliant author of dialogue with a unique eye for scene and setting, prone to bombast, pretension, and general excess that nearly always ends up detracting from even his best movies. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (now on amazon & iTunes) is one of the best things he’s done, and it’s also way too long and frequently too clever by half, buoyed by a pair of tremendous lead performances and burdened by the lack of interesting women and a meandering plot.

Once is another alternate history, in a similar vein to Inglourious Basterds and even Django Unchained, although this time around Tarantino’s playing with facts is subtler until the film’s climax. He gives us two lead characters, TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double/personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and follows them from the end of Dalton’s star turn on a TV western Bounty Law through a dry spell that eventually leads him to work against type as the ‘heavy’ and to star in some spaghetti westerns, all in the late 1960s. Their paths intersect multiple times with Dalton’s neighbors, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha, his first English-language film role), and with a group of hippies who just happen to be living on the Spahn Ranch under the spell of a charismatic cult leader named Charles Manson (Damon Herriman, reprising his role from Mindhunter and a damn good likeness). Cliff picks up a flirtatious hitchhiker (Margaret Qualley) who brings him back to the ranch, which helps set the plot on its alternate path away from actual events and gives us the most Tarantino-esque part of the film, the over-the-top violence in the big finish.

This movie is quite good, almost great, but it’s way too long. All three of Tarantino’s feature films since the death of his longtime editor Sally Menke have run 160+ minutes; Menke edited all of his films before she died, and none ran that long unless you want to consider Kill Bill as a single film. There is so much fat to trim from this film that you could easily have brought it home in close to two hours; the entire tangent showing Rick working in Italy is wasted time, and many scenes, including most of the driving scenes in L.A. and Rick’s tantrum in his trailer after he flubs his lines on set, could have been cut by half without losing anything of merit.

That criticism shouldn’t take away from how strongly Tarantino establishes this setting from the start of the film. It looks incredible in every aspect – clothes, hair, cars, background – and sounds just as good. If Tarantino was trying to capture a specific moment in time at a specific place, he nailed it, both in terms of this golden age of Hollywood and the post-Summer of Love counterculture movement that helped give rise to the Manson cult. Some exposition early in the movie – the scene at the playboy mansion, which gives us a great cameo from Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen – does help establish the setting, and to try to put the audience under the spell of the film, which might have held all the way to the climax had Tarantino not gone off on multiple needless digressions like Rick’s brief career in spaghetti westerns.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also full of Tarantino signatures, which is mostly a positive thing. There’s tons of quick, snappy dialogue, especially in the many movie/TV show scenes within this movie, including DiCaprio’s Oscar-reel moment where he’s playing the villain in a western and gets to chew the scenery with the help of a precocious actress playing the little girl his character has kidnapped. There are cameos galore, including Lewis, Bruce Dern, and Lena Dunham (who … doesn’t really work here), as well as the stunt-casting of children of famous actors as many of the Manson followers (Qualley is Andie MacDowell’s daughter; we spotted the children of Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman and Demi Moore/Bruce Willis, while director Kevin Smith’s daughter is here too). The movie is full of references and callbacks to other Tarantino films, a few of which I caught, including the dead-obvious riff on Inglourious Basterds. And it wouldn’t be a Tarantino film with lots of vaguely creepy closeups of women’s feet, especially the bizarre shot of Margot Robbie’s as Tate is watching herself in a movie theater and enjoying the positive reaction the audience has to her scenes, which is kind of ruined by the way her feet, propped on the seat in front of her, ruin the perspective of the shot and make her head (covered with comically large eyeglasses) seem so small in comparison.

Between the sheer ambition of the movie, Tarantino’s reputation, and the fact that it’s a movie about movies, this feels like a lock for a Best Picture nomination. I’m assuming Pitt will submit for Best Supporting Actor, and will absolutely get a nomination, while DiCaprio seems likely to get one for Best Actor. The most prominent actress in the film is Robbie, whose lack of dialogue has received much coverage already (with merit), and while I think she does the most she can to use body language to infuse Tate’s character with that of the promising ingenue, about to embark on a career of stardom, there just isn’t enough for her to do on screen. Qualley might have more dialogue, and if there was any doubt after The Leftovers that she could be a star, this ought to end it, but she’s also a side character and only in the movie for maybe 20 minutes. Beyond that, I could see Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and definitely Best Cinematography for the unusual shifts in perspective that Tarantino employs to change your sense of scale, including the wide shots of the Spahn Ranch and the party at the Playboy Mansion (where Dreama Walker plays Connie Stevens in a wig that perfectly mimics Stevens’ look in 1969), and one for Best Makeup and Hairstyling too. For what it’s worth, though, I wouldn’t vote for this over Parasite for the top honor.

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→ December 17, 2019
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Booksmart.

I wanted to like Booksmart, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising … but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some of the films it rips off. (You can also rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best friends and massive overachievers who’ve spent their high school years studying and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to get into a good college, but never doing anything fun, only to discover that a bunch of their classmates who have partied their way through high school have also gotten into elite schools. Molly’s the Class President and has a crush on her Vice-President, Nick, who appears to be a dimwit but, of course, isn’t. Amy has been out for two years, but has never kissed a girl, and has a crush on a classmate, Ryan, although she doesn’t know if Ryan is into girls. The night before graduation, they decide to go to a huge party at Nick’s aunt’s house, and spend about the half the movie trying to figure out where the party is and then trying to get there. Once they do arrive, they go after their respective crushes, only to have things not go as planned (obviously) and then something else works out for each of them instead.

There’s a lot of promise in this premise, and the two leads are both quite good. Feldstein is wonderfully annoying throughout the movie, and handles the transitions well from earnest to flailing to, at one point, shockingly rude to her closest friend in a way that makes the character feel entirely coherent and three-dimensional. Dever has somewhat less to do until they get to the party, and even then plays an unfortunate second fiddle to Feldstein until she has her unexpected tryst and can be the main character on the screen without her co-star. Billie Lourd is hilarious as Gigi, a prominent side character with the best running joke in the film, and some of the other kids are effective in narrow roles, although half of the actors are in their mid-20s already and look it. There are a couple of gay kids in their class played by Noah Galvin and Austin Crute who play both their characters as if they’re acting in a play within the movie, and most of their scenes are well-written and funny in an absurd way. (I’d watch a movie that starred just those two.) In fact, just about all of the actors playing the students are good at what they’re asked to do – in contrast to the adults in the movie, most of whom look out of place or uncomfortable, and all of whom are poorly written.

The story is nothing you haven’t seen before, unfortunately. A couple of kids want to have fun/drink too much/get laid before they go to college, and have a hard time doing any of these things correctly at first, only to get to the big party and have things go wrong before they go right. There’s some witty banter early in the film, but the script can’t keep up the pace, and things start getting progressively weirder as the film progresses. Their principal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlights as an Uber driver, and the situation gets kind of creepy. Another of their teachers has serious boundary problems, leading to a seriously cringey movement at the party. Amy’s big moment is sort of marred by a bad writing decision at the end of the scene that was unnecessary. One of the girls ends up in jail – seriously, the entire plot is ripped from Can’t Hardly Wait, which isn’t a good enough movie to rip off in the first place – and the way they get her out is a ridiculous plot contrivance. And how are they totally unable to figure out where Nick’s aunt lives in an era where most addresses are listed online and everyone has the internet on their phones? Oh, in the span of a few seconds one of the girls loses her phone and the other’s runs out of charge, because of course it does. These characters deserved a smarter story, right up to the resolution.

It was just too easy a movie to pick apart. Very little of it seemed realistic, and the script couldn’t maintain all the energy from the first few scenes – especially the one scene in a classroom, where the one-liners are flying back and forth and the kids all show their most interesting sides. This movie took in around $22 million at the box office, beating its budget comfortably but spurring a weird social media campaign, led by director Olivia Wilde, that made it seem like the movie was a flop. The better explanation is that the movie didn’t find a big audience because the script wasn’t good enough. Feldstein and Dever did their parts, but this is a forgettable entry in the sad tradition of mediocre teen comedies.

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→ December 10, 2019
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Marriage Story.

Noah Baumback’s Marriage Story, now streaming on Netflix, landed six nominations yesterday for the Golden Globe Awards for Male Filmmakers, including Best Motion Picture and Best Screenplay, although it didn’t get a nod for Best Director. It’s a bit puzzling given how weak the film is in most aspects, with thinly-drawn characters, a story that actually isn’t all that interesting, and a stunning lack of self-awareness about how one-percenty this story is.

This isn’t a marriage story, but a divorce story. Charlie (Adam Driver, nominated for Best Actor) and Nicole (Scarlett Johanssen, also nominated) are splitting up, although she’s the more adamant of the two and eventually is the one who takes the firm steps to move from separation to divorce. He’s a somewhat successful playwright in New York and she is his muse and lead actress, but when she gets a part on a pilot in LA, she leaves and takes their eight-year-old son with her, which Charlie seems to think is temporary but Nicole intends to be permanent. Their trouble communicating, highlighted in the first of many caricatures with their incompetent mediator (who is playing couples counselor, not like an actual mediator), eventually leads Nicole to hire a strong attorney (Laura Dern, nominated for Best Supporting Actress and deserving) and to surprise Adam with divorce papers, after which the process becomes more contentious and further details of their marriage start to spill out.

The entire story is smug from start to finish, full of knowing nods to life in New York and LA. (Really, the tea and biscotti sequence was so cringeworthy.) There’s a lot of arguing about how they don’t really have any assets to divide, even though these are two hilariously privileged people. Nicole refers to Charlie as a narcissist and she’s not entirely wrong; for most of the movie, really up until he realizes that he might lose custody entirely, he’s wrapped up in himself, and comes off that way in Nicole’s retelling of their marriage and courtship, then again near the end when he’s telling his actors about mundane details of divorced life. I could have done without Driver’s weird karaoke thing towards the finish as well. What might have been interesting about their dying relationship is how the two of them are unable to hear each other, especially Charlie’s inability or unwillingness to hear Nicole and see her as an equal with agency and goals beyond his, but the script barely explores that at all, and eventually careens into two big arguments, one on the phone that introduces an element to the divorce that makes you turn completely on Charlie (with reason), and then a blowout argument in his apartment that rather confirms that he’s an asshole and ends in utterly unbelievable fashion.

Most of the side characters are painfully one-dimensional, starting with Henry, who is supposed to be 8 years old but still sits in a car seat meant for much younger kids, who whines like a younger kid, who doesn’t want to eat any food that touched the “green thing.” Baumbach wrote him like a kindergartener, and he’s played like one, which makes him kind of insufferable – just like nearly every other side character. Nicole’s mother is an atrocious character played with a nails-on-the-chalkboard childlike voice by Julie Hagerty. The expert who comes to observe Henry at his parents’ houses is impossibly mousy and humorless. The lawyers are better developed than the family members across the board, and I suppose if this were Lawyer Story that would make sense. 

Why do critics seem to love this movie? Do they see something of their own lives in it? It is anchored by a great performance by Johanssen, a solid one by driver, and some strong supporting turns by Dern, Alan Alda (just wonderful in a small role as an avuncular attorney Charlie hires), and Ray Liotta (looking roided up as a bulldog attorney Charlie consults), but Baumbach forgot to finish drawing everything around them – the other characters, the depth their back story required, or some of the realism around their conflicts after she’s served him with papers. Even the one revelation about Charlie, which of course happens all the time in actual marriages, ends up derailing the story in a way because he goes from maybe-the-bad-guy to definitely-the-bad-guy, rather than advancing the actual marriage story – and it gives us another scene with a one-dimensional side character that tries to be funny but doesn’t work either. I don’t get any of this, even though you might think that I’d be right in this film’s demographic. It feels like the story of a marriage and divorce written by someone who’s never gone through either.

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→ December 7, 2019
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Knives Out.

Knives Out might as well have been made explicitly for me. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that fit so many things I like in movies or even literature. It’s a mystery, and a fairly clever one. It’s witty on multiple levels. It’s very fast-paced, with a sort of hyper-reality to the dialogue. It left me wanting more of the same, and never felt overstuffed. It’s an homage to my favorite genre of films and novels, but never descends to parody. It’s not quite perfect, but my god did I enjoy every minute of it.

Rian Johnson wrote and directed the film, and did a similar homage to noir mysteries with his first feature film, Brick, but without the humor of this film, which is very much a British mystery in the style of Agatha Christie’s novels. He’s assembled an incredible cast, with Daniel Craig chewing scenery all over the country manor house as the pompous ‘gentleman detective’ Benoit Blanc – so we’re not even going to be subtle about the Christie allusions – who is Hercule Poirot with an exaggerated southern drawl that another character compares accurately to Foghorn Leghorn. It’s a bit of overkill, because he wrote the film like every Poirot or Miss Marple novel where there’s a bunch of eccentric characters who get very little depth or development, but given how much these actors appear to be enjoying the ride, it’s hard not to enjoy watching them do so.

Blanc, like Poirot in most of his novels, isn’t introduced until some time has already elapsed in the story. Instead we are introduced to Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, a delight as ever), bestselling mystery writer and, as of the opening scene in the film, recently deceased. A week later, two police officers (LaKeith Stanfield, woefully underused, and Noah Segan) arrive to question all of the family members, with Blanc sitting in the background and only interjecting after the formal questioning is over. The family members are all simply aghast at the implication that the patriarch was murdered – well, all except for his mother – and get worked up when Blanc starts probing. Enter Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s private nurse, a Peruvian woman whose mother is an undocumented immigrant and who can’t lie without throwing up. Blanc uses the latter feature to his advantage, while others try to exploit the former for their own ends. Marta was the last person to see Harlan alive, and knows more about the circumstances of his death than anyone else, so Blanc appoints her his deputy (in a way) and sets about solving the crime.

Knives Out is all story and dialogue, and I’m good with that. I especially love the Poirot stories because I enjoy his character – the pompous, brilliant little Belgian man with the “face fungus” and silly hat and ability to solve crimes by the “psychology” of the suspects – and Blanc offers a lot of that too, similarly enamored of his own abilities, perhaps less perceptive when it comes to the suspects’ psychological motives but more entertaining with his turns of phrase. If you’re looking for complex characters or character growth, though, it’s not here: this is an old-school whodunit that lives and dies – pun intended – by the murder and its solution, buoyed by rapid-fire dialogue that would do His Girl Friday‘s writers proud. It is frequently funny, never riotously so, but consistently amusing, and Johnson did imbue several of the characters with varying degrees of wit, with Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really inhabits her role and could carry a movie in that character) dashing off some of the best lines. So you’ll get to see a stupendous collection of actors – Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Chris Evans’ sweater, even M. Emmet Walsh – get not quite enough to do, but do a lot with what they get.

The story itself is good, but I think it’s a bit too easy to solve. I suspect I know what Johnson was trying to do, but it doesn’t quite work. I wasn’t sure I knew it until the end, and even then I realized I missed one really big clue, but it’s a bit too clear from the midpoint of the film who the most likely culprit is. Johnson does dial up the resolution to eleven, though, and perhaps the greatest strength of the script is how often little lines or events from earlier in the film pay off at the end. It rewards you for paying attention, and my attention was rapt from the beginning.

Johnson has already said he’d like to do a sequel with Blanc as the lead detective solving another murder, and I’m here for it – but I acknowledge I am at the absolute center of the circle encompassing the target audience for such a film. I love an old-timey murder mystery, and Johnson gave me the best new one I’ve seen or read in a very long time. It has flaws I wouldn’t forgive in a non-genre film, but great genre fiction often adheres to the genre’s intrinsic rules. I wish I could have seen Curtis fire off a few more quips or to know how Evans character became such a spoiled disaster, or gotten more mileage from the gag about the grandson who’s an alt-right troll (and looks like someone hit Mark Gatiss with a Benjamin Button ray), but this isn’t that kind of movie. Your mileage may vary.

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→ November 3, 2019
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Parasite.

Parasite won the Palme d’Or this year at the Cannes film festival, making director Bong Joon-Ho the first South Korean to win the top prize at that event, and the film has since racked up tremendous critical accolades and earned $5 million-plus already at the U.S. box office. It’s enough of a hit that it showed at my local, mainstream multiplex this weekend. It’s South Korea’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t make the shortlist. On this Friday night, there were 20 people in the theater, including us, there to watch a Korean-language film with no actors who’d be recognized at all in the U.S. I’m thrilled to see it get this kind of audience because Parasite is a remarkable, funny, dark, and deeply metaphorical movie.

This upstairs, downstairs story revolves around the Kims, an unemployed family of four living in a dank semi-basement in Seoul where they steal WiFi from neighbors who forget to turn on passwords; and the Parks, a very wealthy family in the city with two young children and more money than they know what to do with. The two families intersect when Ki-woo, the Kims’ college-aged son who doesn’t attend school because he can’t afford it, gets a job filling in as the English tutor to the Parks’ teenaged daughter, Da-hye. Seeing how well the other half is living, Ki-woo hatches a plan to get the rest of his family hired – his sister as the Parks’ son’s art teacher, his father as the chauffeur, and his mother as the housekeeper – by also getting their existing help fired. This all goes very well until one night the housekeeper returns, revealing a secret of her own, turning the film from a hilarious farce into a darker satire that ultimately ends in violent chaos.

For about 3/4 of its running time, Parasite is consistently, laugh-out-loud funny. From the lengths to which the Kims go to perpetrate their con on the Parks or to justify their increasingly unethical behavior to themselves, on to the utterly ridiculous Park family themselves. The three Park characters who have something to do in the film – their son barely speaks at all – are all deeply stereotypical, with the mother (stays at home, can’t take care of herself or the house, heavily neurotic) and daughter (acts/dresses below her age, falls in love with her tutors) both so much so that I wondered if they were meant to be caricatures. The plot to get rid of the chauffeur is amusing; the subsequent plot to get rid of the housekeeper is bananas. Even as the film starts to become violent, there are still moments of humor, including some great physical comedy, until the final cataclysm tears the cover off and reveals the swirling mess of class rage that was beneath the surface the entire time.

Bong isn’t subtle about the fact that the film is replete with metaphor; Ki-woo uses the word “metaphorical” several times, often because he is trying to impress the Parks, but the presence of the word at all felt a bit like a message to the audience to wake up and smell the symbolism. There’s water everywhere in this movie, but while it’s clean and revivifying for the Parks, it’s anything but for the Kims; while water brings the Parks a modest nuisance, it eventually contributes to the Kims’ destruction. The physical locations of their living spaces – the Kims halfway (or more) underground, the Parks on the upper floors of a house with lower floors that they never even visit themselves – correspond to their relative status and their absolute status within a South Korea that rapidly developed after the Korean War but has created substantial income inequality, especially for older citizens. The rock, the Parks’ son’s artwork, the use of American “Indian” imagery – Parasite is absolutely rife with metaphors to underscore the conflict between the Parks and the Kims.

I assume Bong’s use of Kim, the most common family name in South Korea, for the lower-class family, was not a coincidence; Park is the third-most common name, so perhaps the point was that neither of these families is all that atypical, and that Bong is trying to represent wide swaths of Korean society. He’s also created a real dramatic balance between the two families; while the Kims are rascals, they’re not heroes, and if you were still rooting for them at the time that they dispatch the housekeeper, their ruse should be enough to dissuade you. There are no heroes here, no ‘good guys;’ it’s a movie about a lot of regular people who do bad things in the quest for money and all that it brings: status, comfort, freedom from future financial worry.

I won’t spoil any of the end other than to say it turns quite violent, although in the context of everything that has come before, it felt like the inevitable conclusion after two hours of growing tension that had no outlet for release, as the Kims wanted to preserve their ruse at all costs. When one of them finally realize that the Parks will never see them as anything but the hired help – and thus as lesser people – Parasite reaches a disturbing climax and conclusion that will cause you to rethink everything that came before.

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→ October 21, 2019
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High Life.

Claire Denis’ dystopian sci-fi film High Life, which just hit Amazon Prime earlier this month, is a strange and brooding film that uses its setting to distill life to its most basic functions. By putting her characters into tense situations that force them all to confront their mortality in a more overt way than we would normally face, she explores the darkest sides of humanity … but it is a long, slow drag to get there, punctuated by some highly disturbing sequences.

Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole surviving member of an interstellar journey whose purpose becomes apparent later in the film. His only companion on the ship is a baby, the one successful child to come from the ship’s scientist’s artificial insemination program – a program that, of course, causes a lot of outrage among the rest of the crew – all of which is explained in flashbacks over the course of the film. Without spoiling too much here, the gist is that these crew members were all criminals, given the choice to go on a mission that takes them well beyond the solar system rather than face life in jail or execution. Living in such close quarters, with the added stresses of both the control of the scientist (Juliette Binoche) and her bizarre effort to breed the crew members, only increases the odds of conflict, which is graphic and violent when it comes.

Before then, however, we see much more of the quotidian lives of the crew members through flashbacks, including their work in the ship’s gardens, the favorite spot of Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the use of what fans of the film have called the “fuck box,” a masturbation machine used by most of the crew members but not by Monte. Denis appears to want to strip her characters down to the basics – food, sex, shelter – to dehumanize them, making it easier to follow some of them down into a bestial sort of madness that ultimately leaves all of them dead except for Monte.

I’m not sure why this film exists, though. Pattinson is excellent – he’s turned out to be quite a good actor – and does everything he can to prop this movie up, especially in the torpid first half, but by the end I certainly had no idea why Denis had taken any of us on this particular journey. What does the rising tide of violence that engulfs the crew actually tell us about people as a whole or these characters in particular? Are we just to think that once a violent criminal, always a violent criminal? Or are they driven to madness and violence by the realization that their mission can only have one possible end?

The look and feel of High Life far surpass the content of the film. The spaceship’s exterior has a barebones look by design, as Denis has said she couldn’t imagine this dystopian future country spending on anything superficial for a mission of this kind. The interior also looks stark and grim, again fitting the nature of the mission, also enhancing the general sense of dread around the story and the fatalistic outlook of the various people on the ship. There are little details around things like resource management – including, of course, how they recycle their waste products – that give the film a layer of additional realism that would have really paid off if the story were better.

In the end, though, I never got on board with High Life‘s plot. Pattinson is good, but I didn’t relate to the character, and I think Denis’ decision to tell the story via flashbacks ultimately robs the movie of any real dramatic tension. It’s an experiment, with a decent idea at its core, but the experiment doesn’t succeed.

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→ September 10, 2019
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Non-Fiction.

Non-Fiction‘s original French title, Doubles Vies (“Double Lives”), does a much better job of summarizing the story itself, which covers two couples — a publisher, an author, an actress, and a political consultant – who cope with aging and the changing circumstances of life by having lots of sex with people other than their partners. It’s a smart and witty film, punctuated by one of the funniest meta-jokes I’ve ever seen, that has a lot to say about the inevitability of change and our inept ways of handling it. It’s streaming on Hulu and available to rent on iTunes and amazon.

Juliette Binoche, who continues to churn out tremendous performances nearly 35 years into her career, is one of the stars of Non-Fiction, playing the television actress Selena, the star of a French police procedural called Collusion; she’s married to literary editor Alain (Guillaume Canet), who has a strained relationship with onetime star author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne), who is married to the political consultant Valérie (columnist and comedian Nora Hamzawi). Selena is having a lengthy affair with the frumpy and morose Léonard; Alain starts sleeping with his firm’s young new digital media director Laure (Christa Téret) at the first opportunity. Léonard’s last few novels haven’t sold well, and Alain thinks his newest is a dud, which Léonard takes about as well as you’d expect – but Valérie has no sympathy for him and doesn’t even seem to like him very much. Meanwhile, Alain’s professional world is facing the upheaval of e-books and audiobooks as well as the changing demographics of fiction readership, while Selena grapples with the choice of continuing on a show that has made her successful but is professionally unfulfilling.

These are first-world problems, to be sure, but they are also somewhat universal at this point. Although writer/director Oliver Assayas focused the script on the massive shifts in the publishing world – which braced for a paradigm change that would lead readers to eschew dead trees for e-books, only to see readers gravitate back to physical books – technology is leading to similar creative destructions in lots of industries, changing the entire structure of employment and the relationships workers have to their employers. What hits Alain just at work over the course of the film could stand in for any industry.

The serial infidelities in the movie are a bit harder to grasp on a metaphorical level, although they provide a good bit of the humor. Selena seems broken up by the possibility that Alain is having an affair, but we find out shortly afterwards that she’s having one too – and it’s been going on for years. There’s a comic tension throughout as you wait to see if any of the spouses might figure out what’s going on and in watching various characters squirm when they might be caught, but understanding why Alain, married to a gorgeous and successful actress who seems to appreciate art and literature, chases a much younger woman just because she’s there is at least more opaque. Is it a reaction to change by regressing into adolescent behaviors? Similarly, if Selena is a significant TV star, why is her longtime affair – one in which she appears to have no emotional investment – with the mopey Léonard, a rather stereotypical modernist author who says he rejects materialism and tries to hold himself aloof from criticism that he obviously can’t bring himself to ignore?

For plot and purpose, Non-Fiction works far better out of the bedroom. Even the lengthy discussions of art for art’s sake, with somewhat obvious complaints like how these young kids don’t read any more, work well as parallels to the natural human inclination to romanticize the past and rationalize the status quo when we’re faced with the discomfort of change. (To borrow and slightly alter a line from Spike Milligan: I don’t fear change. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.) These four people are all adrift and facing some kind of imminent upheaval at work, with the threat of the same at home, and mostly react in similar ways, driven to poor decisions by uncertainty and doubt … like most adults confronted with the potential for significant changes at work or at home.

Binoche is wonderful, as always, although her character is more unlikeable than many roles she’s had before; Selena is a bit full of herself, especially about her job, and thinks nothing of advocating for her paramour to her own husband. Canet has the larger role, as we see so much more of him at work, and the subplot around his publisher is more significant than that around Selena’s TV show or Valérie’s work for a leftist candidate (a rather neglected side story). Macaigne is fine as the aloof, self-absorbed author, but I found zero reason to think that Selena would want a long-term affair with him, and the relationship between Léonard and Valérie is almost as befuddling.

Non-Fiction may also have clicked for me more than it would for many viewers – I’m not that much younger than these characters, am divorced, and work in a similar field that is also going through a lengthy period of tectonic-type changes. So much of the dialogue, which is fast-moving despite the weight of what Assayas wants to say, is insightful about facing changes as you get older that I found most of the film’s non-adultery content resonated with me. And that metajoke near the end is just (chef’s kiss).

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→ August 7, 2019
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Climax.

Gaspar Noé has a strong reputation among critics for provocative movies that often skirt the line of good taste, and seems to revel in his ability to shock or even repulse audiences while similarly challenging them with his stories. This year’s Climax is probably his best-received film, even though it was made with just a loose outline, employed mostly non-actors, and took just a few weeks to film. It’s a nightmare come to life, one that is more revealing than horrifying, but also clearly crosses the line into poor taste.

Climax is based loosely on an actual story of a French dance troupe whose afterparty was spoiled because someone spiked their drinks with LSD, although in that case no serious harm came to any of the dancers. That is not true in Noé’s retelling here, as the party devolves into Lord of the Flies-level savagery because someone spiked the punch, made by the troupe’s den mother Emmanuelle, with LSD or a similar psychotropic drug. (The very end of the film makes it seem like it was LSD, although the dancers never know this.)

Things don’t fall apart until about halfway through the brisk 93-minute film; the first half includes an impressive, long modern dance number that incorporates numerous styles and presents more to the viewer than the eye can possibly follow. The party starts out well enough, but eventually the dancers who drank the punch start to feel unwell; no one speaks of hallucinations, but they become disoriented and paranoid, and start to revert to base instincts. As it becomes clear that the punch was tainted, they begin to band together to try to identify the culprit, blaming Emmanuelle, then blaming the two dancers who didn’t drink it, never considering that the person who spiked the punch may in fact have consumed it themselves. This devolution also sees them lose many of their inhibitions, giving in to violence and sex, and by the time the police arrive the next morning there are several dancers dead or grievously wounded, while others are simply damaged by what’s occurred.

The drugs really are beside the point in Climax, which explores the nature of fear and how quickly we come to distrust others when we think we’re in danger. Noé wrote an outline and some general directions but asked the actors, most of whom were professional dancers without acting experience, to simply act as they would if under the influence, showing them videos of people who’d taken LSD or other hallucinogens. There are two professionals in the cast, Sofia Boutella (Selva) and Souheila Yacoub (Lou), who do more heavy lifting than anyone else, the former as the de facto social leader of the group, the latter the one character with something resembling a storyline.

Noé’s hand is all over the film even though there wasn’t a proper script. There’s one continuous shot that runs over 40 minutes, shifting perspectives and angles, drifting to different characters, that helps convey the dancers’ disorientation to the viewers. He also moved the closing credits to the beginning of the movie, and the typical title card with cast listing to the middle, which felt more like a gimmick to me than an important change. (Plus Adam McKay did it better in Vice.) He made one truly regrettable decision, the part of the film that crosses the line into needless suffering; Emmanuelle’s son is at the party, and while I won’t spoil it, what that child is put through did not need to be in this movie at all. Noé could have accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish without that. Assuming the boy’s inclusion was an active decision by Noé, it was a blatant attempt to shock the audience for shock’s sake.

Several days after watching Climax, I can’t decide if I think the film is good. I would say I didn’t enjoy watching it, because it is so unpleasant (by design) to watch the dancers lose control of themselves and their situation, wandering around a dark building that looks like an abandoned school or mental institution. I also couldn’t stop watching it, and was past the halfway mark before I even thought about how much time might have passed, and it’s certainly had me thinking about it in the time since I watched. There is something essential about stories that remind us of the thin line between the way we live and utter anarchy, of the tiny genetic barrier that separates us from chimpanzees, of the social norms we take for granted that allow us to live our daily lives. When one brick is removed, the entire edifice could collapse. Noé is willing to stare into that abyss and show us what he sees.

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→ February 13, 2019
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High Flying Bird.

Steven Soderbergh’s newest film, High Flying Birds debuted in select theaters as well as on Netflix on February 12th, which means everyone can watch it now just as it’s getting reviewed – and it’s good, flawed but good, and likely of interest to most of you here since you’re probably a sports fan of some sort if you’re reading this in the first place. It’s also notable because for at least the second time Soderbergh has filmed a feature entirely on iPhones, which is sort of a mixed bag for the viewing experience. The movie really stands on two pedestals: the righteous indignation of its plot, with the screenplay by Tarell Alvin McCraney (who wrote the play that became the film Moonlight) and a standout performance from the always-compelling Andre Holland.

Holland plays Ray, an agent who represents multiple NBA players, including recent #1 draft pick Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg). The NBA is in a lockout as the movie opens, right before what I presume is Labor Day, which means players aren’t getting paid, which means Ray isn’t getting paid, which means his agency is crying poverty (with Zachary Quinto playing his one-dimensional boss). So Ray, with the help of his former assistant Sam (Zazie Beets), concocts a scheme, on the fly, to try to force owners to improve their offer to the players’ union, involving Erick and his teammate, the arrogant star Jamero Umber, playing an ‘impromptu’ pickup game at a charity event run by Ray’s friend and mentor Spencer (Bill Duke).

With MLB potentially heading for a work stoppage, and players taking to social media every day to talk about the deteriorating situation – revenues are rising, but player compensation isn’t, and obviously the best free agents are still unsigned – High Flying Bird feels incredibly timely even though it’s about another sport and incorporates a racial theme not as present in MLB. Slavery is mentioned multiple times – and its mere mention is worked into a successful running gag – while it’s no accident that the owners who appear on screen are all white, while every player, agent, or other representative is African-American. The script carefully avoids any discussion of dollars, focusing instead, as it should, on the distribution of the spoils; once you start bringing dollar amounts into any discussion of the salaries of professional athletes, you provoke the emotional bias that makes people say “$10 million to play a game?” and then I have to reach for the rum again.

There are many facets of Soderbergh’s direction and McCraney’s script that don’t work. Foremost among them is Soderbergh’s inclusion of snippets from interviews he conducted with three current NBA players – Karl-Anthony Towns, Donovan Mitchell, and Reggie Jackson, which means I was today days old when I learned there was an NBA player named Reggie Jackson – discussing life in the NBA, especially as a rookie. At the beginning, the answers help provide some context for what’s about to happen, but Soderbergh interrupts the film twice with more snippets in the final 20 minutes, which wrecks the tension and the flow of the narrative as he’s trying to wrap up both the global storyline and the set of storylines for Erick, Sam, and Ray. Many characters who play important roles in the plot are utterly one-dimensional, including Kyle Maclachlan’s bespectacled NBA owner (complete with trophy wife who speaks to her dog in nauseating baby talk). Sonja Sohn is well-cast as the NBA Players Association’s main rep, but the side story of her trying to start a family with her wife/partner doesn’t fit anywhere in the rest of the story.

And then there’s the editing and cinematography, which ultimately knock this film down from great to good for me. The picture quality is excellent, and most of the time you’d never think anything was filmed on something other than high-end equipment, but Soderbergh chooses some very strange angles, often filming people from an angle a little too high or low and distorting the viewer’s perspective. (Insert film angle optimization joke here.) There are also some very abrupt edits where scenes seem to change before a character has finished a sentence, and while Ray and Spencer in particular work some long pauses into monologues, Soderbergh doesn’t let any moments at the ends of those soliloquies breathe.

Holland is always great – he had side roles in Moonlight and 42 – but this is the most substantial part I’ve seen him tackle, and he’s not just good but credible from the opening scene (which has Ray and Erick engage in some very clever banter, a pace I wish the film had tried to keep up in later scenes). Ray gets preachy with Erick a few times, which does give an ironic aspect to the sermon Jamero’s mother drops him, but Holland’s charisma and particularly his tight, highly modulated delivery makes him compelling where he might have been exhausting. Beets and Gregg are also solid in supporting roles, although I didn’t find the chemistry between them all that evident even though the two characters do get together. Duke is just a delight even though his character plays the same short melody over and over through the film.

High Flying Bird will leave you with zero doubt as to its take on the late-stage capitalism of professional sports: The athletes are still treated like chattel, by mostly white owners, and many fans don’t care or side with the owners because they think the players’ high salaries should be enough, rather than considering whether the players are getting their fair share of revenues, or, as the script points out, how many hands reach into a player’s paycheck before it reaches him. Meanwhile, MacLachlan and his wife are planning to jet to Australia for a long weekend on their private plane, and he manages to patronize the hell out of Sonja Sohn’s character (in a subtly homophobic way) and isn’t much better to Ray. There are clear good guys and bad guys here, and unlike most coverage of labor issues in American sports, McCraney’s take is at least directionally correct. It’s a film worth seeing and discussing, and if the book that Scott carries around all film in a sealed envelope, revealed at the very end, gets a little bump in sales as a result, so much the better.

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→ January 28, 2019
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FYRE.

My prospects ranking package began its rollout this morning for ESPN+ subscribers with the list of 15 guys who just missed the top 100.

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By now there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen FYRE, the Netflix documentary on the ill-fated music festival to be held in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017 that turned out to be a giant con run by its founder Billy McFarland and musician Ja Rule. (There is a competing Hulu documentary on the festival that I have not seen.) Netflix chose to release this briefly in theaters, which will qualify it for awards consideration in the next cycle, and for sheer entertainment value it’s among the top documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I love a good con in fiction, but this con happened in real life, and the most amazing theme of FYRE is how so many people working on the festival saw the con happening in real time and did nothing to stop it. Fyre itself was originally an app that would allow people to book celebrities for events, streamlining a process that was opaque even to people with the money to do this but not the access. At some point, McFarland – and we’ll get to him in a moment – had the idea to create a music festival to promote the app, and then plowed ahead with the concept, despite lacking any experience in running festivals, and then hired a bunch of people he knew to try to run the event, half of whom didn’t know what they were doing and half knew what they were doing but couldn’t execute given the constraints of time, money, and location. Many of these folks appear on camera and voice their concerns that it was never going to work, but as far as I can tell, none of them actually quit the organization – one was fired for raising these issues – or did much beyond say that they thought the plans were in trouble.

McFarland appears here only in footage from the planning meetings, because it turns out they pretty much filmed everything as they were trying to make this festival happen, but isn’t interviewed directly; he does answer questions in the Hulu documentary, the producers of which paid him to do so. What FYRE does give us, however, is a sense of just what a grifter McFarland really is: he’d previously come up with Magnises, a members-only club with a credit card-like passport that would give members access to exclusive events, an actual club to visit in Manhattan, and discounts on hard-to-get tickets to concerts and shows. While it delivered on some of its promises, eventually the company started overpromising and underdelivering, or just not delivering at all, leading to a surge in complaints and cancellations just as McFarland was bragging about massive membership growth – and also turning his attention to Fyre.

His ability to get Magnises off the ground and even build some kind of customer base set up the Fyre fiasco in two ways: It became clear that he was very good at getting publicity, and he started a pattern of trying to separate wealthy or high-income millennials from their money. The Fyre Festival wasn’t just poorly run, but poorly funded, and the company took money from would-be concert goers for things that didn’t exist, like housing on or near the beach, and eventually came up with the idea of wristbands that attendees would use to pay for “extra” events like jetskiing but that was just a scam to get working capital so the concert wouldn’t go under before it started.

Of course, the most entertaining parts of Fyre come down to the depths of the scam, and how McFarland appears to be so privileged that he can’t understand the word ‘no.’ I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen the film, but the Evian water story has quickly become a meme, with good reason. People did get to what was supposed to be the concert site, only to find it wasn’t ready for anybody, with just some hurricane tents propped up on the beach and inadequate supplies or housing for the people who did show up, with the concert cancelled just hours before the event was supposed to begin, and no plans to get all these people back home after they were flown to the site on a chartered plane. McFarland appears to have tried to just keep a half-step ahead of the people while stealing their money, and I think the most shocking part (other than the Evian bit) is that he is eventually arrested over this scam, gets out on bail, and immediately sets out to begin another grift, this one even more blatant than the previous ones.

Nobody feels sorry for the well-heeled Fyre Festival customers who were willing to fly to the Bahamas for what was essentially billed as a luxury version of Coachella and kept handing over cash without doing much to see if the people taking their money were reliable. I can’t say I felt a lot of sympathy for them either, but that schadenfreude was not a major part of FYRE‘s message to me. I can’t get over how many people worked on this project, knew it was a dumpster fire on a flatbed rail car that was slowly going off the tracks into a ravine, and stuck around – even when they weren’t getting paid. One person, never identified, did leak details to a site that called Fyre Festival a scam and probably contributed to its downfall (or at least to the rise of skeptical media coverage of it), but everyone we see here except for the one who was fired kept working here until the event was cancelled. (The guy who was fired – the one real voice of reason here – is the same guy who brags that he learned to fly by playing Flight Simulator.)

This event never gets off the ground were it not for a clever social media campaign that made heavy use of ‘influencers,’ notably those on Instagram, who were promised compensation if they would simply talk about the festival and post its image of a blank orange square. (I don’t know why either.) The documentary skirts the subject too much for my liking, because ultimately, influencer culture is itself a fraud. Yes, if you have a large social media following, you can direct people to buy certain products and services, just by nature of the volume of eyeballs on your content. That absolves the influencer of any responsibility for what they appear to recommend, which was later codified by the FTC into guidelines requiring influencers to disclose “material connections” to brands they recommend, and to do so in a way that will be clear to most users. I have a large Twitter following and modest audiences on Facebook and Instagram (the latter of which I’m using more, mostly just for fun or silly posts), and so I am offered a lot of stuff in the hopes that I’ll recommend it – sometimes things just show up at the house. I have a simple policy: I won’t recommend anything I don’t like or use myself. I have told publishers not to send items. I declined a gift card to a restaurant chain (no, not Olive Garden) because there was a quid pro quo attached to it. Granted, I am not an “influencer” using it as my primary source of income – but maybe that’s not the most ethical way to make a living, either.

As for the Hulu version, I’ll probably watch it because I have a couple of close friends who’ve urged me to do so, even just so we can discuss it, although the consensus seems to be that FYRE is better. And it is wonderfully bonkers at so many points. Ja Rule has a quote near the end that is a jawdropper. The Evian story and McFarland’s third scam, while out on bail, are both are-you-fucking-serious moments. The Lord of the Flies (Lord of the Fyres?) scenes on the beach and later at the airport are both enough to make you screw up your faces in disbelief, although those beach scenes made me a little uncomfortable as these well-off young adults complained over conditions that probably a billion people in the world experience as their normal. It’s shocking in so many ways, none more so than the grifter Billy himself, who must be some sort of sociopath for the ease with which he lies to people and to cameras while gleefully helping himself to others’ cash.

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