→ November 29, 2021
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King Richard.

Will Smith is already receiving Oscar buzz for his performance as Richard Williams in King Richard, currently streaming on HBO Max, in which he gives Venus and Serena Williams’ father a more three-dimensional depiction than he’s received in extensive media coverage before this. It’s the kind of performance – playing a real person while convincingly mimicking their voice and mannerisms – that tends to win awards, but the film itself is far more well-rounded and nuanced than recent Oscar bait like Judy or Bohemian Rhapsody were.

Richard Williams (Smith) is the father of Venus and Serena Williams, and decided before the girls were even born that he would raise them to become world-class tennis players, writing out a plan with the help of his wife, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis), who also worked extensively with them to help them improve as players. They lived in Compton, and as Black players in the extremely white tennis world, faced racial and socioeconomic discrimination, with coach after coach declining to work with the girls or hear Richard’s (possibly crazy) requests for funding for a tennis academy. He does eventually coax Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) into taking them on, but Richard’s plans for his girls – including emphasizing their development as people, not just athletes – clash first with Cohen’s plans and later those of legendary coach Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), who pays for the entire family to move to Florida as part of the deal to train both Venus and Serena. Richard pulls them from the junior circuit, against the advise and wishes of Macci, driving him towards a conflict with Venus, who sees this as a sign that her father doesn’t believe in her, which gives the film its one real story arc and allows for the resolution when she re-enters the competitive sphere by turning pro.

The film, with a script written by Wilmington native Zach Baylin, starts when the girls are preteens and Richard is trying to find a coach willing to train them, and takes us up through a 14-year-old Venus Williams facing then-#1 ranked Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario (who is probably going to jail soon for fraud and tax evasion). That allows Baylin to show us Williams’ persona as more than just the stage dad from hell, hinting at his actual flaws while centering his love and concern for his daughters, and still leaving room for Oracene, whose role is often diminished or erased from the Williams sisters’ legend. We’re seldom without Richard on screen, but he is also counterbalanced by other strong personalities – Oracene, Cohen, Macci – who at least prove different perspectives and often push back against his monomania, once or twice giving him the shadow of a doubt about his plans.

King Richard is still a showcase for Smith, though, and he answers the challenge with something more than just an impersonation. The voice, lisp, and slight hunch are all true to the actual Richard Williams, but Smith gives Richard an emotional depth that is beyond mere mimicry. The movie can’t work if you don’t buy him as a loving father who’s wildly overconfident in himself and his plans, rather than the crazy, overbearing father of the media narrative when Venus and Serena first emerged on the national scene. He also has to show weakness when his plans don’t quite work – although that’s infrequent in this script – and when his wife confronts him multiple times, including an argument about his infidelities, which only scratch the surface of some of his worst behaviors. Smith maintains the veneer of confidence while hinting at some inner vulnerabilities, which Oracene exposes in that argument scene, which also gives Ellis one of her strongest moments in the script. Indeed, one of this film’s greatest strengths is the room it gives Ellis to make Oracene a three-dimensional character who is a major part of the girls’ personal and professional growth. The two young actresses who play the Williams sisters themselves, Demi Singleton and Saniyaa Sydney, both had to learn to play tennis for their roles, and the hours of work paid off, as they look more than passable in numerous scenes on the court, helping the film avoid the common pitfall of sports movies that get the sports stuff wrong.

It’s a crowd-pleaser of a film, but does so without becoming saccharin, or excessively revising history – we could hear more of the more unsavory parts of Richard’s history, certainly, but at least his infidelities made the cut – and the choice to end the film with a match Venus lost was a sharp one, because one thing the film lacks is much drama on the court. The sisters crush all opposition on their way to Venus turning pro, which doesn’t make for great cinema on its own, and including that loss – which still rankles her – at least allows the narrative to turn on a different point than the obvious point that they were just better than everyone they played. Smith deserves the awards buzz he’s getting, but Baylin’s choices, from adhering to the true story to not pandering to the audience, made this film work for me.

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→ April 8, 2021
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is such a small, wonderful film that might have found its audience had it had a normal theatrical run last year, but Focus purchased it out of Sundance and sent it to streaming after three days in theaters right at the start of the pandemic, so it seems to have escaped a lot of notice. It’s a gem of a movie that takes an unsparing look at abortion and just how difficult the United States makes it for women to exercise this most basic form of autonomy over their own bodies. (You can watch it on HBO Max or via HBO on amazon.)

Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is a 17-year-old living in a rural town in northern Pennsylvania who suspects she might be pregnant, so she goes to a ‘pregnancy crisis center,’ one of those fake clinics where they try to prevent pregnant women from making rational choices, often by lying to them. Autumn decides she wants to get an abortion, so her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) steals some money from the grocery store where they work – for a truly creepy manager – and they hop a bus to New York City, where parental consent isn’t required as it is in the backwater where they live. Once they arrive, however, they realize that the procedure won’t be as quick or simple as they’d been led to believe, and they have to make some unpleasant choices to stay in the city and let Autumn get a proper abortion.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always does so much right with this story, but foremost among them is how granular it gets throughout the process. There’s an attention to detail here that puts you deeply into the story in a way that tries to express the difficulty, stress, and sheer exasperation that Autumn faces, even though she’s sure about her decision. The scenes at the pregnancy crisis center, or her intake interview at Planned Parenthood in New York, or as she and Skylar end up trying to pass the night at the Port Authority and riding the subways all give more time to the minutiae of the moment, passing in something more like real time, giving it a documentary/cinema verité feel.

There are also some small but clearly conscious choices on the part of director/screenwriter Eliza Hittman that drive home Autumn’s anguish and isolation. The intake interview – the best scene in the film, and the scene that gives the movie its title – has the camera focused exclusively on Autumn, even when the kind woman interviewing her is doing most of the talking. Autumn and Skylar are together for long periods where they don’t speak as the camera follows them around Manhattan, or just shows us the two of them trying to sleep in the station, emphasizing that Autumn can simultaneously be alone and with her cousin. If Hittman used any artificial lighting, it wasn’t evident; the whole film has a tinge of grey to it, and the indoor scenes all look like they’re lit solely by the cold fluorescent lights ubiquitous in offices and other public spaces. The script is clearly on the side of a woman’s right to choose, and expresses that view through an intensely realistic look at the process from positive test to the abortion itself, undermining any argument that this is something women do cavalierly while showing just how many obstacles our supposedly free country throws in their way.

Flanigan made their film debut in NRSA, and earned a slew of honors for their performance here, winning Best Actress from Boston and New York critics circles. The film depends so much on Flanigan that you can’t understate the importance of her work, which is superb – she’s entirely believable and disappears into this role, owning that scene in the PP intake interview that, for me, defined this film. It can’t work without a knockout performance, but they deliver one, and you can add Flanigan to the list of actresses who I think deserved an Oscar nomination over Andra Day (who did her best with a badly written role) this year. I’d also put this movie in my top ten for 2020 right now, with maybe a half-dozen possible contenders for that still on my to-watch list, including Minari, The Father, and First Cow. It’s great, and manages to educate without becoming didactic, while telling an important, compelling story.

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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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→ February 5, 2021
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The White Tiger (film).

Aravind Aviga’s first novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker Prize in 2008 for its grim, satirical look at the pernicious effects of caste and economic discrimination in India, just as the country was working to change its global image to that of a more modern society. (As if modern societies were somehow free of this sort of discrimination.) It seemed perfectly suited to an adaptation for the screen but it took over ten years for filming to begin, and the movie finally saw the light of day this winter, appearing on Netflix in January. I loved the book, and the film, which is very faithful to the original text, is also great, with some reservations.

The White Tiger tells the story of Balram, a poor child in the state of Rajasthan, who realizes early on that there’s no escape from the underclass if you’re not out for yourself, and the promise of upward mobility is a fiction for people like him. He manipulates his way into a job as a chauffeur for Ashok, the son of the village’s wealthy landlord, known just as “The Stork.” He gets the job, and tries to ensure his job security, by being obsequious to his bosses no matter the insults or abuse they throw at him, until one night, Ashok’s wife, Pinky, has an accident while driving, and they make Balram take responsibility. After that, the gloves are off, and Balram’s loyalty to himself takes priority over his loyalty to his employers. Yet Balram is no saint, and rationalizes away some of his own worst behaviors even before the accident, arguing that this is India and it’s every man for himself.

Balram is played by Adarsh Gourav in his first film role, and he’s spectacular. Balram narrates the book and the movie, and the film just wouldn’t work without the right actor in that role. The character has show many faces in the story – among them simpering, wounded, and righteously angry – and make it credible that they’d all come from the same human. He’s at his best in the moments when Ashok and his family turn on him and he realizes they view him as somewhere between hired help and farm animal.  Priyanka Chopra helped the film become reality and served as executive producer; she also appears as Pinky, playing her as an Indian woman who grew up in the United States and has more worldly values, including viewing Balram as, at least, an actual person, in contrast to her husband or, worse, her father-in-law. Her character probably has the most depth after Balram’s, but I’ve never found Chopra that convincing as an actress (in English language works, though), and she’s pretty stiff in this role.

The framing device for the film feels somewhat extraneous. As the film opens, we see Balram, grown up, at the head of his own business, as he writes a letter to then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, bragging about his life story, praising the Chinese economy, and asking for a meeting. It’s mostly just padding, and it spoils a few plot points if you’re watching carefully. I also would have preferred not to see the successful Balram until he reached that point in the story.

Gourav really does drive the film. Balram is a great character, an antihero inhabiting a story that usually provides us with a simple, easy to cheer for protagonist, like some sort of modern Horatio Alger tale. Instead, Aviga’s story reveals layers of cunning and venality in Balram as a way of indicting the hollowness of India’s economic miracle, and exposing how income inequality might replace the caste system as an obstacle to upward mobility in class or just personal wealth. I suppose that actually makes it a lot like the United States, just not in the way they intended.

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→ January 30, 2021
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One Night in Miami.

One Night in Miami marks the directorial debut of Oscar-winning actress Regina King, and seems set to earn a passel of nominations, including one for King and one for Leslie Odom, Jr., the current favorite to win Best Supporting Actor. It’s originally a play by Kemp Powers, but King expands the zone here to avoid the often claustrophobic sense we can get when scripts move from stage to screen, the result gives the four lead actors room not just to breathe but to fill out their roles as four towering figures in Black history. (It’s available on Amazon Prime.)

The night in question is February 25th, 1964, when Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Hampton House in Miami, a significant upset at the time that was followed ten days later by Clay’s announcement that he had joined the Nation of Islam and would thenceforth be known as Muhammad Ali. The script brings together Clay/Ali (Eli Goree), Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), singer-songwriter Sam Cooke (Odom Jr.), and NFL star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), who had just rushed for a record 1863 yards and would later lead the Browns to the NFL championship that December. The four men engage in a wide-ranging and often contentious conversation about the civil rights struggle, their roles in it, and what responsibilities they might have given their platforms.

The script is talky, like most plays, but with four lead characters and multiple side characters appearing (two played by actors from The Wire), it doesn’t feel so much like you’re watching a play on screen, and King’s direction – particularly the shifting camera angles – gives the audience more the sense of being in the room while the characters are talking. The dialogue is quick, alternating between banter and more serious philosophical commentary (as well as some insults), so the pace only lags when we get one of the four men away from the others. And all four of these men deliver performances that would be strong enough to lead the film if there weren’t three other guys doing the same thing.

Odom, Jr., is masterful as Sam Cooke, the least militant man in the room by a mile, who comes under fire from the other men for their perception that he’s selling out, as an artist and as a Black man, for money and fame, although he has a rejoinder to the argument and the debate circles onward. All four men get their fair share of dialogue, but Malcolm X is probably the next most important character to the plot, and Ben-Adir is just as good as Odom Jr. – perhaps aided by the makeup, hair, and glasses that make him a reasonable likeness for the man he’s portraying, but also because his character might have the most emotional range of the four. Ben-Adir has to give us Malcolm X the confident firebrand, and Malcolm X the ordinary human, with large ambitions and deep self-doubts. And his character is the straw that stirs the drink of this particular conversation (which did really happen, although we don’t know what was discussed).

The four men are certainly more complicated than the script allows, and in some ways it makes Cooke and Brown seem more heroic than they were or are. Cooke had multiple issues with women and was killed in highly dubious circumstances. Brown’s history of violence against women and men was well-documented thirty-plus years ago, before the cultural awareness of domestic violence was a fraction of what it is today. If you knew nothing of Brown before watching One Night in Miami, you’d think he was a pretty cool cat, but this is a decidedly one-sided view of a man with a long history of domestic violence allegations.

King has done something quite marvelous here by making a stage play feel less like a stage play than just about any recent film I’ve seen that made the same shift to the big screen. The film hums along, and there’s so much good dialogue here that I’d like to watch it again to see if I missed anything – and I say that as someone who almost never re-watches films, and certainly not twice in quick succession. Much of the praise for Onie Night in Miami might be because the film and its subject are important and timely, but don’t lose sight of the fact that this is a good story, well-acted and well-told, regardless of the moment in which it appears.

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→ January 11, 2021
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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The movie adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (on Netflix) has been overshadowed by the death of one of its two stars, Chadwick Boseman, last August, making this his final film appearance. The command performance he gives here is a mournful reminder of how talented he was, and the stardom he had right in front of him, as he even manages to outshine Viola Davis, who’s already won one Oscar and is going to be nominated for another one for playing the title character here.

Ma Rainey was a real-life blues singer, sometimes called the “Mother of the Blues,” who achieved not just popularity but a measure of autonomy for herself in the 1920s, even writing some of her own songs and recording as early as 1923. The black bottom was a dance, and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was one of her singles – although I’m sure the double entendre wasn’t lost on audiences at the time. The film just covers the time of one recording session for that song, a fictional rendering of the day that revolves around Rainey and a talented, ambitious, and volatile trumpet player named Levee, played by Boseman.

This Rainey, at least, is a diva, demanding of her musicians and the producer alike, insisting that her nephew voice the introduction to the song, even though he has a stutter that makes the task a bit difficult. Levee, meanwhile, has dreams beyond merely playing trumpet in someone else’s band; he writes his own music, has put together his own band, and is busy trying to convince the (white) producer to pay for him to record his songs himself.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, like Fences, comes across like a play on screen, with all the action taking place in just a few settings, and dialogue that never stops. The actors have to convey far more than in a typical film, but they also run the risk of overpowering it, which was the main issue I had with Denzel Washington’s performance in Fences – he dominated every scene he had without Viola Davis, and it took an Oscar-winning performance out of her just to compete.

Here, Boseman and Davis don’t share a ton of scenes, so each can take over in their own way, but neither crosses that line that made me leave the theater thinking Denzel Washington had been yelling at me for an hour and a half. Although Davis’ character is in the title, Levee is the bigger character within the film, getting – in my impression, at least – more screen time and more words than Ma Rainey does. Boseman infuses Levee with both the naked ambition of his character and the innocence required to make his decisions plausible. Levee doesn’t understand how the world works, believing in some level in a meritocracy that doesn’t exist in a world that is already predisposed against him because of the color of his skin. It requires a precise performance to ensure that this character doesn’t become ridiculous. Levee is not a fool, but he’s arrogant enough to think he’s the exception, and when the world doesn’t conform to his beliefs, the cognitive dissonance causes him to erupt in unexpected violence.

Boseman is going to win the Oscar, of course, because of his tragic death before the movie was even released, but there won’t be a plausible argument that the performance itself was undeserving. He puts Levee on a knife’s edge and holds him there for the bulk of the film, so that when he breaks, as you know he must, it works, because you’ve been waiting for him to explode. It makes Davis’ performance seem showy by comparison, although she also is likely to get (and deserve) a nomination for this role.

The story here is somewhat scant, although that seems typical of stage adaptations to screen, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom adheres to the play’s use of just a few settings, with the bulk of the film taking place in the recording studio or in the musicians’ room below it. That also means we don’t have much time for back story, and outside of the two main characters, everyone is pretty one-dimensional. The producer who takes Levee’s songs and promises to look them over might be well founded in history, but he’s nothing but a penny-pinching, greedy white man taking advantage of Levee’s race and ignorance here, bordering on a dangerous stereotype. (It’s worth noting, however, that Wilson and this script both changed one word of the lyrics to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” here substituting “new baby prances” for “Jew baby prances.”)

Levee’s big speech towards the end of the film broaches questions about being Black in a society that has always treated Blacks as second-class citizens when treating them as citizens at all, and even goes beyond that to an existential question about Blacks and a God who seems to have forsaken them. It is the clip I expect we’ll see when Boseman’s name is announced at the Oscars in April, because it is his biggest moment and the best pure writing in the script. I imagine this will earn a Best Picture nomination as well, but the reason to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is for Boseman’s performance – not because he’s gone, but because he’s just that good.

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→ January 5, 2021
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Soul.

Soul just doesn’t have one.

I’ve avoided joining the chorus bemoaning the decline in the heart and spirit of Pixar’s scripts since their original batch of ideas, which more or less ended with WALL-E; since then, only Inside Out has met their earlier standard of greatness, although I might concede the point on Toy Story 4, a good movie that didn’t really need to exist (other than to give me a reason to say “traaaash?” to the kids). But it’s true: They’ve gone downhill since they exhausted the first set of concepts, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that they’re getting back on track. Onward was dismal all around, enough that I have forgotten numerous times that I actually saw that movie in 2020. Some of the sequels have been entertaining, but they’re not very novel, and none has matched its predecessor for ingenuity or insight.

Soul was somewhat more promising, not least because it was the first Pixar movie to star a Black protagonist and feature a largely Black voice cast. That’s praiseworthy, as is the work that went into avoiding the stereotyped depictions of Black Americans in animation throughout history. The score is also great, between the original jazz compositions by Jon Batiste and the ambient background music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (both of Nine Inch Nails). And of course the movie looks fantastic; Pixar’s ability to create realistic-looking landscapes and city scenes has long surpassed my mind’s ability to comprehend it. I know what I’m watching isn’t real, and yet I hesitate.

That makes it all the more disappointing that Soul‘s story is just so flat. It’s Inside Out in the afterworld. It’s Brave without the cool accents. It’s It’s a Wonderful Life with less schmaltz. There’s just nothing new here at all. It doesn’t even offer us something on its main subject – death, and the meaning it ascribes to life.

The quest takes Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a music teacher and jazz pianist who falls down a manhole and ends up on the verge of death – with his soul departing his body in a sort of celestial error and heading into the Great Beyond – on the very day he finally gets what he believes will be the big break in his career. Once there, he runs into 22 (Tina Fey), a wayward soul who has no interest in going to earth and inhabiting a meatsuit as a human being. Joe gets the idea that he can use 22 to earn his way back to his own body, which, of course, goes awry, so the two have to learn some Great Lesson and realize that what they originally wanted was, in fact, not the thing most likely to make them happy.

There’s a lot of humor in Soul, but too much of it comes from side characters. Rachel House is great as Terry, an accountant of souls in the Great Beyond, but she’s just re-creating her policewoman character from The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (which is fantastic, by the way – both the movie and her role in it). Graham Norton has some good lines as Moonwind, a sign twirler on Earth who is a sort of pirate soul in the Great Beyond. Daveed Diggs is mostly wasted in a minor role as a friend of Joe’s, and Richard Ayoade and Alice Braga are underutilized as two of the many counselors in the Great Beyond who are all, for some reason, named Jerry. Fey gets some big laughs when her character first appears, but the script doesn’t keep 22’s manic energy going for very long, and Joe is just a straight man here.

I could live with all of that if the script had anything to say on its main theme, but it doesn’t. This is pop philosophy at best, some pablum about appreciating the life you have, and living it to its fullest, rather than striving for, say, what culture or society tell you are the marks of success or of a happy life. The elegy to life as one worth living is a good message, but hardly one we haven’t seen hundreds of times. It’s the main point of It’s a Wonderful Life, and that movie is 75 years old.

I don’t mean to disparage the importance of Soul‘s representation, which will probably be its most lasting legacy, and perhaps continue to create opportunities for filmmakers, in and beyond animation, who are themselves people of color or wish to build stories around people of color. Soul is superficially entertaining, easy on the eyes, and well-paced. It’s better than Onward, or Monsters University, or Finding Dory, but not as good as Coco, which had something to say and spotlighted an entire culture, or Inside Out, which sits in the top echelon of Pixar’s films for its pairing of real insight on the human brain and the powerful emotional resonance of its story. Soul, for all its jazz, just didn’t move the needle.

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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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→ December 14, 2020
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Yes, God, Yes.

Yes, God, Yes is a delightful indictment of the way many puritanical religions, in this case particularly Catholicism, treat basic human sexuality, in a devilishly satirical, 80-minute comedy that features plenty of little nods to the culture right around the year 2000. Starring Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things) as Alice, who gets an unexpected window into the world of sex via an AOL chat room, the story follows Alice as she goes on a four-day indoctrination retreat with her Catholic school and encounters the rank hypocrisy of the religion.

Alice’s morality teacher, Father Murphy (of course), teaches that sex is only for procreation, and that when it comes to sexual desire, boys are like microwaves (turned on easily, no warm-up required) while girls are like conventional ovens. This useful lecture comes right before she receives a pornographic image from a creep she encounters in that online chatroom, which leads her to try masturbating for the first time – something she’s been told, repeatedly, will send her to hell. She’s also the subject of a nasty rumor that she engaged in a sex act with another student, but she doesn’t even know what the act is because she’s unfamiliar with the term used for it. She then heads off on that retreat, which is Kairos by another name, where she discovers that many people in charge of the endeavor don’t exactly practice what they preach.

Masturbation, specifically a girl masturbating, is at the heart of the story here, and that alone makes Yes, God, Yes rather unusual – if that act appears at all in movies, it’s usually boys doing it, and usually just played for laughs. That’s notable in and of itself; women’s sexuality is generally ignored in movies, or seen as something immoral or sinful, as in horror movies that kill off any of the teenagers having sex. To this film’s credit, Alice’s masturbation isn’t treated as a joke, but as a natural part of the story, and a way to keep throwing her into religious doubt. Her sneaking around also lands her in trouble, which in turn lets her see what some of the other campers – and authority figures – are up to.

The script doesn’t pull its punches on Catholicism – not its treatment of all non-procreative sex as sinful, not its inherent subjugation of women – and even ends with a coda that depicts devout Catholics as both provincial and uncurious, even as Alice realizes there’s a world beyond the walls of her parochial school. The film doesn’t delve into questions of faith, but deals with the real-world impacts of the man-made doctrines, which require willful ignorance of human biology and sexuality, and allows the question of why these myriad rules even exist when the Christian Bible has barely anything from Jesus himself about sex to lay unanswered at the edges of the story. Once Alice goes through the looking glass by seeing that single pornographic image, she’s on a path where she’s going to question far more than just what the Church told her about sex.

Dyer was one of the weaker actors on Stranger Things, partly because her character wasn’t that interesting, but also because she played Nancy so flatly, only coming to life when she got involved in a combat scene. She’s better here, because she has more to do, although I still don’t get a lot of energy from her performances. She’s at her best in Yes, God, Yes when Alice is befuddled, confused, or surprised by something, but less convincing when she’s angry, spiteful, or, in one scene, trying to be passionate. The film does rest largely on her, as there isn’t another major character and most of the secondary ones are pretty one-note, and in that sense she is more than up to the task.

Yes, God, Yes premiered way back at SXSW in March of 2019, but the pandemic wrecked its release schedule, and after a very limited run in drive-throughs and via virtual cinema, it went to Netflix in October. At a scant 78 minutes, it’s just the right length for its subject, and if you’re a lapsed Catholic like me, I think you’ll especially enjoy it.

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→ 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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