→ December 3, 2020
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The Donut King.

The Donut King tells a rags-to-riches immigrant story worth of Horatio Alger, but with a twist, as its protagonist – a hero to hundreds if not thousands of his fellow Cambodians – turns out to be a deeply flawed man. It’s available to stream free via hoopla if you have a library card and your system is a member.

Ted Ngoy is the donut king of the title, a refugee from the Khmer Rouge who comes to the U.S. in 1975 with his wife and children, staying in the makeshift refugee camp at Camp Pendleton when they first arrived. He finds work at a gas station when he notices the smell of fresh donuts, which leads him to get a job at the iconic California chain Winchell’s. From there, it’s all straight uphill for Ngoy, who works his way to manager, buys an independent donut shop called Christy’s, and builds a chain of 32 shops by training fellow Cambodian immigrants and leasing the new stores to them. Ngoy amassed a fortune of about $20 million, by his own reckoning, and gave generously, sponsoring a thousand families (again, in his own telling) of Cambodian refugees. At the peak of his success, he owned a $2 million mansion, which we see in the film.

Director Alice Gu shows just how broad that success was, as Ngoy helped populate southern California with Cambodian-run donut shops, and he gave several members of his extended family their starts in the United States. Several cousins shown in the film run their own shops, although one of the subplots is the way the youngest generation is turning away from the business, especially as they’ve gotten the post-secondary educations made possible by their parents’ donut enterprises.

The real story here is that Ngoy developed a gambling problem shortly after emigrating to the United States, and it eventually cost him everything. The generous, assiduous immigrant from the movie’s first two-thirds throws everything away through his gambling and, eventually, even worse transgressions. He’s a rich subject for a documentary because of these contradictions, and even family members who owe their prosperity to the first chances he gave them have a hard time reconciling their feelings about him. (His children appear to no longer speak to him, however, a subject that didn’t get the exploration it deserved.)

Gu begins the film with a good ten minutes or so of explanatory content on the Cambodian civil war, which would probably be necessary for most American audiences, using first-person accounts from Ngoy and his family as well as American TV news clips from the time. The Khmer Rouge overthrew the U.S.-backed government, killing nearly 2 million people via torture, imprisonment, and execution, and via the famine caused by the new regime’s forced agrarian schemes. We see scenes of the emptied capital of Phnom Penh, and Ngoy walks through the Tuol Sleng prison, which is now a museum of the civil war. It’s a strong opening, and predisposes you to root for Ngoy and the many other Cambodians we see on camera, discussing their histories.

Yet The Donut King doesn’t give enough time to the back end of the story – to Ngoy’s gambling and other more serious transgressions, to the changes wrought by big chains on mom-and-pop operators like those we see here, and to how the next generation might not be so willing to take over from their parents. If anything, Gu spends too much time on the young woman who’s helping popularize her family’s shop through aggressive use of social media, which is very fun, but a complete digression from any of the main stories she’s telling here. Ngoy’s own arc would be enough to support the film if Gu gave more time to his decline, and to how little he really seems to take responsibility for the damage he wrought. The digressions just aren’t necessary, and they’re the main thing keeping The Donut King from being a great film.

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→ November 16, 2020
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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm can’t match the shock value of the original Borat film, since we already know the deal and that Sacha Baron Cohen is willing to do anything for the sake of the gag, but I think in the end it’s actually funnier for it. There are still a few moments here where he and his new co-star, the Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, go too far with a joke, but Cohen seems to have also realized that the real staying power of the original was that he could get the unwitting subjects to go along with him and show their worst selves on camera – which said more about America than it did about his fictionalized Kazakhstan.

After some early setup, the once-disgraced Borat returns to America on a second mission for the Kazakh government, this time to deliver a bribe to a high-ranking U.S. official – eventually settling on Mike Pence. He’s joined after some silly plot contrivances by his daughter Tutar (Bakalova), whom he decides to “offer” to Pence as a bribe, traveling across the southern United States and speaking with many ordinary Americans and some not-very-ordinary ones, most of whom come off far worse for the encounter. He gets a bakery employee to write “Jews will not replace us” on a cake, goes into a “pregnancy crisis center” with Tutar, and spends several days living with a pair of QAnon believers. He also meets a very kind and open-minded Jewish woman after he walks in a synagogue dressed as a giant pile of Jewish stereotypes, and hires a babysitter for Tutar who turns out to be the heart of the film and so popular with fans that a GoFundMe started by her pastor has raised over $180,000.

There are many laugh-out-loud moments in Borat 2, most of which come when one of Cohen’s jokes lands and the Americans he’s mocking do more or less what he’d hoped they would do. You’ve probably heard about the Rudy Giuliani scene – in which he doesn’t acquit himself well, at all, despite his later protestations to the contrary – but that’s not even among the top half-dozen scenes in the film for humor or impact. Borat takes Tutar to a Houston plastic surgeon, who takes the bait and describes how a “Jewish” nose would look by drawing the shape in the air – someone who’s highly educated and likely deals with high-income customers is completely comfortable trafficking in anti-Semitism. There’s a long setup to get to the pregnancy crisis center, but the result is a combination of old-school sitcom misunderstanding and the most cringey behavior imaginable by the pastor at the facility, who clearly has no concern at all for Tutar’s well-being.

Some of the jokes don’t land, though. There’s a menstruation joke that’s just about grossing out some Southern snobs at a dinner for debutantes, which is both unfunny and useless at exposing their elitism or the anachronistic nature of the whole practice. The end of the Giuliani sequence doesn’t really work either. It’s actually funnier to watch Cohen try to avoid fans who recognize him on the street in Texas than to watch those scenes or the drawn-out way in which he tries to reunite with Tutar after she runs away (thanks to the babysitter, who is beyond patient in explaining things to Tutar, including that women in the United States have actual rights).

Nothing is so damning as how easily many white Americans in this film show themselves to be racist or anti-Semitic, even when they know full well they’re being recorded, much as the South Carolina frat boys did near the end of the first Borat when they wished slavery still existed. The plastic surgeon is unapologetic for his comments on “Jewish noses” or his lecherous comments towards Tutar. I don’t think the bakery employee or the propane salesman who says his tank can wipe out a whole van of Roma people have said anything publicly or all the people singing along with the racist lyrics of “Country Steve.” And what would they say? This is who they are, and this is who we are. All Cohen had to do was turn his cameras on Americans and let us do the work.

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→ September 16, 2020
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The Personal History of David Copperfield.

When word came out in mid-2019 that Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin, VEEP) was filming an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, I read the book in anticipation of its release, also rectifying a rather large gap in my own reading history. (I’d read five Dickens novels, two in high school and three by choice, but not this one, which Dickens himself called his favourite, and which the Guardian called the third “most Dickensian” of his novels.) The movie came out in the UK last year, but its arrival in the U.S. was delayed by COVID-19, and it just hit theaters earlier this month. It is marvelous, the best 2020 release I’ve seen so far this year, with a mostly faithful script, wonderful casting, and excellent use of the humor in Dickens’ rags-to-riches novel.

If you haven’t read the book, which I had not other than one of those Moby Books’ abridged, illustrated versions back in 1981 or so, it is the life story of its title character, from birth into straitened circumstances, through his widowed mother’s unfortunate choice of a misanthropic, controlling husband, to his indenture at his stepfather’s wine-selling business, and on and on in somewhat picaresque fashion. He encounters a host of eccentric characters, a few of whom, notably the venal Uriah Heep, have gained lasting reputation among the pantheon of literary creations, with several others providing comic relief among David’s series of misfortunes before he finally turns to writing as a vocation and finds success and financial security for the first time.

The first theatrical film version of Dickens’ classic novel in a half-century, The Personal History of David Copperfield might be most notable for the color-blind casting, although I’d argue that this choice is notable for how quickly you’ll stop noticing it. The casting itself is so perfect top to bottom that casting all-white actors couldn’t have produced a comparable result, notably Dev Patel as David himself, handling the pivotal role with aplomb, adapting to David’s changing views of the world and greater understanding of the people around him over the course of the story. Characters who are related by blood don’t share skin tone, and it couldn’t matter any less.

Many of the side characters are superbly cast as well, but none more so than Hugh Laurie as the befuddled Mr. Dick, which sees Laurie at his Woosterian best, and also gives that character a bit more to do than just to serve as comic relief. Mr. Dick’s host, David’s aunt Betsy Trotwood, is played by Tilda Swinton, who can certainly dominate a film in the wrong way when she gets to play a severe character; here, she gives Aunt Betsy more depth than the character has in the novel, making her more sympathetic and thus making it easier to understand why David is so generous to her as her own circumstances decline and he finds their relations reversed. Ben Whishaw delivers an unctuous, loathsome performance as Uriah Heep, complete with bowl-cut and affected speech that Patel later mimics to great comic effect. Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, has a lot of fun with the shifty but good-hearted Mr. Micawber, making him a little less exasperating on the screen than he is on the page.

The movie is brisk at two hours, and spends far more time on the first half of the novel than on the second, with great length given to David’s childhood and early adulthood, including his relationship with Mr. Micawber and time in a boarding school where he meets James Steerforth (Aneurin Barnard). That choice gives us rather more prologue than David requires and rushes some of the resolutions, so that David’s marriage to Agnes is treated almost as an afterthought, and the unmasking of Uriah Heep plays out in a far less satisfying manner, because the audience has so much less time and reason to despise him, and also has less time to appreciate Whishaw’s deft portrayal of Heep’s scheming nature. The first half of the novel is important, but the second half is the payoff. The film gives you all of that payoff in the last thirty minutes, and it’s still fun, just condensed.

Iannucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell play the story extremely straight until close to the very end. The compression of the last half of the book requires a large change to the arc with Dora, which the screenwriters handle in a way that also comments on Dickens’ original story, where David marries Dora, realizes it’s unsuitable because she’s dull and needy, so Dickens has her conveniently die after suffering a miscarriage so that David can marry Agnes. Dora here is even sillier than she is in the book, making her a great comic presence, but rather than kill her off, the writers give her the perspicacity to find her own way off the stage. The Ham/Emily/Steerforth subplot, itself rather tangential to David’s own narrative, also has a rather significant change that I would argue is less successful even though Dickens’ own handling of that arc relied too much on coincidence.

I had no trouble following the plot, because I’d read the novel recently, but I do wonder how well viewers could follow the plot, especially the last half hour or so, if they had no exposure to the book or previous adaptations. It’s the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy problem – a novel of 500+ pages is hard to condense into a two-hour film without losing something, and you’d rather lose details or exposition than plot or character development. Perhaps the Emily subplot could have gone instead, as essential as it is on the page, because so much time is spent on David’s childhood visit to the seaside hovel where she lives, to give us more time with Heep and David at the law firm so we better understand their rivalry and why Heep is so odious. (We do see plenty of Mr. Wickfield, played by Benedict Wong, in various stages of inebriation.) Yet The Personal History of David Copperfield is joyous because of what Iannucci and Blackwell retained – Mr. Dick, Dumb Dora, the Micawbers – and how well Dev Patel brings that title character to life.

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→ September 3, 2020
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The Burnt Orange Heresy.

The Burnt Orange Heresy adapts the best-reviewed book by pulp author Charles Ray Willeford, a short 1971 novel where Willeford took aim at the worlds of art and art criticism inside the framework of a thriller. For about 80 minutes, it’s a great ride, a long con with a handful of actors at the tops of their games … and then it flubs the ending as severely as any film in recent memory, comparable to First Reformed but with so much less to redeem it before the missteps.

James Figueras (Claes Bang) is an art critic giving a talk to American tourists about how important art criticism is when Berenice (Elizabeth Debicki) wanders in towards the end of the talk; the two strike up a flirtatious conversation and quickly end up in bed. She says they’ll never see each other again, but he seems to have other ideas and invites her along for a weekend at the country house of the wealthy art dealer Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger, his first film role in two decades). It turns out that Cassidy wants to involve Figueras, who has some shady dealings in his past, in a scheme to steal one of the last paintings by the reclusive artist Debney (Donald Sutherland), who lives in the guest house on Cassidy’s estate and hasn’t released any paintings in a half century. This plot has unforeseen complications, of course, leading to tragic consequences.

While the film sets up the plot, this film is as tight as any heist movie from recent years – tighter, say, than Widows, a superior film overall that also featured Debicki – and largely gets you on the wavelength of the characters. I’m not totally sold on the chemistry between Bang and Debicki, but the dialogue works and when they disagree, the tension builds slowly from within. (It helps that they are both giants; Bang is 6’4″, Debicki 6’3″, so they’re eye to eye – and it’s funny how they tower over Jagger and Sutherland.) Bang is a very convincing con man; the entire opening sequence, where he delivers his seminar to the happy tourists, is a clinic in grabbing an audience’s attention and holding them rapt. He’s weirdly charming, although I’d say his charm works more when he’s playing the art critic than when he’s wooing Berenice. Jagger, meanwhile, is clearly having the time of his life as Cassidy, hamming it up in a way that might not work for a veteran actor but here, where you can’t exactly forget who he actually is, it works to his advantage.

When this movie hits the final stretch, though, it breaks a leg so gruesomely it should be taken off the track and shot. While it may adhere to the plot of the book, it hinges here on a character doing something so incredibly stupid that it destroys any suspension of disbelief, and then robs us of a fairly critical resolution to a particular arc. That forced decision does get a series of double entendres in an I-know-what-you-did ending, but by that point, I’d thrown in the towel on the plot.

If the novel’s intent was to parody the art world, it comes through in pieces in the film – and, although I’ve seen several reviews that say that aspect of the film is pretentious, I never found it so. It doesn’t expect you to know anything about fine art, and the wry humor of its satirical elements will work even if you don’t follow that world. But for the heist arc, and the way various hints and implications don’t actually pan out in the end, turned this movie from a B+ to a failing grade.

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→ August 18, 2020
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She Dies Tomorrow.

She Dies Tomorrow is the latest film from actress/director Amy Seimetz, her first since 2012’s Sun Don’t Shine, both of which she also wrote. It’s a strange, subtle psychological thriller that doesn’t quite stick its landing but still gives the viewer plenty to ponder beyond the strange behavior on the screen.

The protagonist Amy (Kate Lyn Shiel) wakes up at the start of the film and realizes that she is going to die tomorrow, a fact she repeats regularly through the rest of the film, and she drops steeply into malaise, which scares her friend Jane (Jane Adams), who then breaks into Amy’s house to try to save her. Unfortunately, whatever has convinced Amy that she’s at death’s door is contagious, and Jane begins to say that she is going to die tomorrow, exchanging her fairly cheerful demeanor for a flat affect, eventually leaving her house in her pajamas to go to her brother and sister-in-law’s small cocktail party. She’s not exactly a hit there, telling everyone she’s going to die tomorrow, but when she leaves everyone else who was there has caught the bug too. Each of them devolves in their own way, and the film is deliberately ambiguous about some of what happens, but it doesn’t really go well for anybody.

She Dies Tomorrow is the slowest of burns; there are long passages where it seems like nothing is happening, such as when Amy plays the same classical piece four times in a row without any other action on the screen. It’s dark, but also often quite funny, as in the bizarre dolphin discussion at the cocktail party, or Jane’s reaction when the lights go out, or, depending on your perspective, in Amy’s obsession with having her skin made into leather goods after she dies. But the plot itself is short – not thin, but brief, with the spread of this fear-virus just about the only real thing that happens before the last few scenes. (There’s one brief bit of violence, but it’s off screen, and I think the script leaves it unclear who actually perpetrated it.)

The point of this film isn’t what happens, however, but how the characters react to this intense conviction that their deaths are imminent. Most tumble quickly into a “nothing matters” reaction, giving the entire movie a Camus/Sartre sort of atmosphere, although Jane’s reaction is a more intriguing combination of numbness and hilarity (which is why Adams is the real star of the movie, even if she’s not the one on the poster). Amy decides to joylessly try some dangerous activities, and eventually goes back to the vacation home she’d visited with her then-boyfriend, who may be the person who gave her this contagion. Jane’s brother and sister-in-law understand she gave them the pathogen, and believe she also gave it to their daughter, and discuss this with absurdist nonchalance, even as they consider whether to seek some sort of revenge. Jane eventually wanders into a house occupied by two women who say they also have the fear-virus, and who are confronting their imminent demise with thoughts of what they’ll miss about life, even without really considering whether there would be any ‘them’ to miss it. Jane’s response is to ask to swim in their pool, which produces a tragicomic scene as she does so while the two women sit outside and talk, apparently oblivious to and unperturbed by their visitor.

The ending of She Dies Tomorrow contributes to this terse script’s ambiguity, as we see Amy waking up on the rocks by the sea in a dress, and it seems like at least some of what came before this might have been a dream, which is extremely unsatisfying when it comes to plot; if you’re going to do that, just lean into it and put Bobby Ewing in the shower. The film works much better instead if you view it as an interpolation on several responses we might have to realizations of our own mortality and the finite nature of our lives, to how we might react if the plans we’ve made for the future turn to dust before an empty hourglass. She Dies Tomorrow doesn’t judge its characters or advise us on how to cope with the calamity of so long a life when it may be cut short at any moment. It’s as terrifying as any stock serial killer wearing a mask and wielding a weapon.

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→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ July 24, 2020
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The Old Guard.

The Old Guard, now available on Netflix, is an extremely competent action flick that checks just about all of the necessary boxes, with a mostly credible story and some solid character development for its two leads, played by Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne. It’s also a superhero story that has to fit some of the conventions of that particular subgenre, and has some regrettable song choices that often detract from what’s happening on screen, but the two lead actresses are so good, and Theron especially has some incredible fight sequences, that it managed to be better than I’d expect from this sort of film.

Theron plays Andy, the leader of a group of four mercenaries who, we learn very early in the film, can’t die – or, more precisely, don’t stay dead for more than a few seconds. Their bodies heal quickly, even ejecting bullets from their skin, so while our heroes do feel pain, they’re impossible to kill, and have dedicated their long existences to doing good in the world. They’re hired by an ex-CIA man to go rescue a group of kidnapped schoolchildren in South Sudan, but that mission goes awry, leading them to try to figure out who was behind the failure. Around the same time, a new immortal, Nile (Layne), appears to the four heroes in their dreams, so Andy goes on a separate mission to take Nile into their fold, knowing that she can’t continue to live in the human world when she can’t die or even age normally.

There’s a villain, of course, a pharma CEO who is rather one-note as a character and is played perfectly by Harry Melling; if his name isn’t familiar, I won’t spoil why, because the moment when you figure out where you’ve seen him before is pretty incredible. He wants the immortals’ DNA because he sees a way to save humanity, and to turn a tiny little profit too, of course, but while his words seem to favor the former, his actions entirely point to the latter, and he ends up a stock Big Pharma/evil scientist character – as does Anamaria Marinca, who won wide acclaim for her leading role in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but is wasted here as Melling’s lead scientist. The antagonists’ entire argument is that the immortals have an obligation to share their gift, which is presumed to reside in their genes, with the rest of humanity, but that rationale denies the immortals any agency in the decision, and ends up reducing them to the status of lab rats in the eyes of the scientists here.

Based on a series of graphic novels by Greg Rucka, who also wrote the screenplay, The Old Guard feels like an attempt to start up a franchise, especially with the way the ending of the film perfectly sets up a sequel – but it’s effective in that attempt. Andy and Booker, the next-oldest of the four superheroes, are well-drawn, distinctive characters, with varying views on the responsibilities that accompany their gift, while Nile gains depth from her struggle to accept her new powers and the imminent loss of her connections to her family. The other two heroes, Joe and Nicky, both needed a bit more to do as well as some more back story, but they’re notable because they’re a couple, apparently the first out gay superheroes in film, and the script plays that fact as totally unremarkable beyond one interaction with a homophobic mercenary.

The history of this crew is that they go around the world saving people who need saving, trying to do some good, but we don’t actually get any of that in the story here, which is a little bit disappointing since the fight scenes are exceptionally well done (especially when Theron is involved). The two subplots are the battle with Melling for their freedom and survival, and the integration of Nile into their group once they make her understand and accept what’s happened to her, neither of which shows us the Old Guard (who never call themselves that) doing the thing they would typically do. Perhaps that will come in the sequel.

The music in this movie doesn’t just suck, although I would argue that most of the songs on the soundtrack are indeed quite bad, but it’s poorly deployed, with electropop songs playing during what should be tense action sequences. This is the kind of movie that would benefit from less music, or no music at all, given how dark some of its themes are and how brutal the violence can be, although the camera seldom lingers luridly on the violence as it does in, say, Deadpool, where the gore is kind of the point. I was far less bothered by the formulaic parts of The Old Guard, which could just be unavoidable in the genre, than by the obtrusive nature of the soundtrack, which often seemed at odds with the movie’s underlying themes about mortality and meaning. It may be a movie about superheroes with impossible powers, but The Old Guard at least tries to be more serious and thoughtful than the standard MCU film, and by and large it succeeds.

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