It’s the ultimate hopelessness of the situation that made it hard for me to buy into the uplifting ending of the new political documentary Feels Good Man. There are a lot of emotional and intellectual nooks and crannies in the picture, and what resonated with me was the aforementioned hopelessness and an impotent rage at the callousness of other human beings. First time director Arthur Jones covers a lot of ground in Feels Good Man. He paints a personal portrait of an artist who has lost control of what his art means; he captures the zeitgeist of a singularly odious time at the intersection of American politics and culture; he provides a cogent exegesis for one small part of the 2016 presidential election. Jones’s film is an engrossing look at the power of the internet to shape the world that lies beyond the screen.
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Think of Kelly Reichardt’s new film First Cow as a spiritual cousin and companion piece to P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The films are about the American dream on the western frontier in the early 1800s (Cow) and the early 1900s (Blood). There Will Be Blood is about the American dream run amok on greed and unchecked success; it’s the story of an oil tycoon told on an epic scale. First Cow focuses on, essentially, a small business owner who goes out of business before ever striking it rich – if you’ve seen the film, you’ll get the irony of my putting it that way. It’s a tale of American entrepreneurial spirit on the smallest, most personal scale.
That’s not to suggest there are no dramatic stakes (pun intended) in First Cow. The contemplative pace of Reichardt’s film and the languorous nature of her camerawork both belie the story’s dramatic tension.
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Filmmaker Jesse Moss considers Harlan County, USA to be the high-water mark of documentary filmmaking. You can see that influence all over Boys State, the new documentary that Moss directed with his wife and frequent collaborator, Amanda McBaine. The film is a masterful piece of observational, verité cinema. It’s every bit as engrossing as Harlan County – although the stakes of that film, about striking coal miners in Kentucky, are literally life-and-death – and carries on the grand tradition of the direct cinema approach of the Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman. Moss and McBaine’s largely fly-on-the-wall approach exposes the deepest flaws in our democracy – and the flaws of how we teach it to our children – while offering a fascinating inside look at a society with a one-week lifespan.
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In the glut of remakes Disney has released in which they make a cash grab by simply reshooting their animated classics as live-action versions, their 2019 retelling of The Lion King is one I missed. (To be honest, I think 2019’s Aladdin is the only one of these that I’ve seen. To me, they seem like cynical bits of content trading on raw nostalgia. I found Aladdin superfluous at best.) The general impression I got of director Jon Favreau’s remake of The Lion King is that it was a CGI – so, basically animated – shot-for-shot remake of the original; a project lacking in purpose outside of making a huge sum of money.
Inspiration for something truly original can come from anywhere, though, and singer/songwriter/megastar Beyoncé – who played Nala in the Lion King remake – used the Disney property as a jumping-off point for something fresh, stunning, exciting, and unapologetically in praise of blackness. Black is King is a visual companion art piece to Beyoncé’s tie-in album The Lion King: The Gift, in which the artist “reimagines the lessons of The Lion King for today’s young kings and queens in search of their own crowns.”
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Charlize Theron continues her ascent to the throne of Ultimate Action-Movie Hero Badass in The Old Guard, following her star turns in powerhouse action films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde. This time out finds Theron sharing her stunt-heavy, fight scene bravura with an ensemble of lesser known, but equally entertaining, actors. The Old Guard is a graphic novel adaptation that overcomes a familiar setup to deliver an energetic, exciting story that finds a way to make its seemingly invincible characters vulnerable. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood packs her movie with several competing aesthetics, and she’s mostly successful in getting them all to work in harmony.
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There’s something not quite right with the new World War II action film Greyhound. There are numerous thrilling moments contained in its taught, 91-minute runtime, to be sure. I lost count of the number of times an image, or a sound, or a stunning sequence of battleships in action gave me chills. The problem is, all those individual moments never add up to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
I felt what star/screenwriter Tom Hanks – this is the third feature-film screenplay from America’s Dad, after That Thing You Do and Larry Crowne – and director Aaron Schneider were trying to give me: a tense, non-stop thrill ride of a war film that’s lean on plot and packed with heart-stopping adventure. But it’s a little too flimsy on plot – one inexplicable scene actually highlights this fact – and the action, while quite rousing in brief moments, is too mired in CGI and rain-soaked scenery. The exciting effect is fleeting at best.
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Journalist and short-film producer Cara Jones chose as her first feature-length film to explore intensely personal subject matter in the documentary Blessed Child. Jones serves as the director, co-writer, and central subject in a film that documents her long process of walking away from her religion – what she now regards as a cult – while struggling to not do the same thing to her family. The film is a good first effort and is told in such a personal way that it couldn’t have been made by anyone else. The director’s unique perspective on the life she abandoned is the movie’s greatest strength.
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“It’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about.”
Yes, I just spoiled the biggest plot surprise of Palm Springs, the new romcom starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti. Luckily – both for me and the film’s marketing push (the trailer also spills the big secret) – this charming and wacky movie has plenty more going for it.
Palm Springs is a delightful reworking of the central conceit of the Bill Murray/Andie MacDowell movie Groundhog Day, in which Murray’s character is doomed to relive the exact same day over and over and over until fate/karma/the universe decides he has grown enough as a human being to be let out of his hellish purgatory. What sets Palm Springs apart is that this time, two characters – really three, but I’ll get there – go through the experience together, and it leans into the raw nihilism with which Groundhog Day only briefly flirted.
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The most striking thing about The Assistant is its utter lack of sensationalism. Director Kitty Green’s fiction-film debut – the Aussie filmmaker has focused on documentaries until now – is a #MeToo movement/post-Weinstein reckoning that focuses not on monstrous acts of depravity, but mundane workday events. It also details the insidious protection of power that allows for abuse to happen.
The film can work as a sort of litmus test. This is a movie that is far removed from the sort of sickening specifics of Harvey Weinstein’s predations as detailed in dozens of news stories. For a viewer who isn’t paying close attention, for one who doesn’t understand how a toxic work culture operates, one could think nothing that happens in the movie is all that disturbing. That’s the real horror of Green’s picture and what makes it so effective. It’s the quiet things, the knowing jokes and the looking-the-other-way, that keeps real accountability from happening.
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With his debut feature, The Vast of Night, first-time director Andrew Patterson made me feel the way I felt the first time I saw Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Patterson’s movie isn’t as polished as Close Encounters. It’s much smaller in scale and resources. Patterson, who self-funded Vast of Night with money from his television commercial production company, made the movie on a micro-budget of $700,000 over four weeks. Still, there is a sense of awe and wonder to the picture that put me in mind of Close Encounters. It’s a stunning first effort.
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Film number nine in my 100 Essential Films Series (if you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here) has been staring me in the face for awhile now. The four-hour run time alone was a little daunting. But, with the current political, social, and cultural climate, I decided it was time to tackle Gone with the Wind. It’s the last movie in a trio of them from 1939, one of the greatest years in movie history. This was a first viewing for me, aside from feeling like I knew almost everything about it via cultural osmosis. I watched it through the streaming service Vudu, and the digital transfer looked gorgeous. Too bad the film’s actual content doesn’t match the visuals.
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“Green is more important than black.” So says one of the villains of Da 5 Bloods in an exchange that leads to the movie’s action-spectacle climax. The green that the character is referring to is money – in the form of hundreds of gold bars. Da 5 Bloods is a Spike Lee joint, so it’s easy to guess what the character means when he says black. Black skin, black pride, black power, black anger. Like almost all of his work, Lee’s film is brimming with unique observations and perspectives about the black experience. This time he’s focusing on the Vietnam War, the conflict in which a disproportionate number of black men were sent to fight and die even as the struggle for black civil rights was raging at home.
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In the opening scenes of Shirley, central character and audience surrogate Rose Nemser meets the writer Shirley Jackson at a house party. Rose and her husband, Fred, will be houseguests of Jackson and her husband, literary critic and Bennington College English professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, while the newlywed Nemsers look for their own place. Fred has just accepted a job in the English department at Bennington, and Stanley is to be Fred’s mentor.
Upon their meeting at the party, Rose compliments Shirley’s recently published short story, The Lottery. She tells Shirley that reading it “made me feel thrillingly horrible.” There is no more apt description for my own emotional state while watching Shirley. It is a thrillingly horrible experience, perhaps the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. Any fan of Shirley Jackson’s work should be entranced by it.
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There’s a section of the new(ish, I’ll get to that soon) Netflix documentary, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, that discusses the all-important set and setting concept. It has to do with the state of mind a person is in before they embark on an experience with hallucinogenic drugs. Focusing on a positive mindset (set) and putting oneself in a comfortable setting with people one trusts makes it much more likely that one will have a good experience on the drug. The same basic idea is true of watching the documentary, too. To use the parlance of someone you might score psychedelic mushrooms from at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert: Don’t let any negative vibes near your aura while you watch it, man, or you’ll, like, be in for a real bad time.
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Just about every person who participated in the Biosphere 2 experiment -- and subsequently the new documentary about it, called Spaceship Earth -- talks about the scientific goals of their undertaking. As noble as these scientific aspirations were for the project, it’s pretty clear that they were secondary to more emotional and psychological interests. One of the eight members who volunteered to live inside an airlock-sealed facility for two years -- they called themselves biospherians -- recalls her first thoughts just after the door to the outside world was shut and locked on day one. She describes turning on the rain in the vegetation section of the biosphere and gaining a sense of peacefulness. She wanted to wash the air, to wash out the impurities of the world she left behind and "begin anew." She soon discovers, as do we, that it's not easy to begin anew when messy interpersonal human dynamics are involved.
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The main issue I have with Rob Garver’s documentary about Pauline Kael, arguably the most influential film critic ever to write about movies, is that it’s too reverential of its subject. In Garver’s film, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, we do get the warts, but they’ve been airbrushed, even if only slightly. The film also tries to pack an entire lifetime into its 100 minutes, which often gives the feeling of rushing through the major events of Kael’s life.
Those few reservations aside, What She Said is a consistently entertaining and enlightening look at Kael. Every person – this writer most certainly included – wrestling with their movie obsession, as well as the movies themselves, owes her a great debt.
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“The problem is concentration of ownership…” The entirety of French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument about what’s wrong with our society and how to fix it can be boiled down to those six words. Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, and Piketty’s nearly 700-page examination of wealth and income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, goes into exhaustive detail on the subject. It was published in the original French in 2013, and the English translation released in 2014 reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list a month after publication. New Zealander filmmaker Justin Pemberton has turned the tome into an eye-opening, and at times a rather eye-popping, new documentary.
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I came for Nicolas Cage, I stayed for Richard Stanley. In the newest adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft tale, Color Out of Space proves itself to be a delightful throwback to horror movies in the vein of Event Horizon and the original The Evil Dead. It’s a well-paced, atmospheric shocker that entertains as it horrifies.
Set on a rural farm on the east coast, Color Out of Space centers on the Gardner family. Husband and wife Nathan and Theresa have moved their three kids, teenagers Lavinia and Benny and younger son Jack, to Nathan’s father’s old farm. It’s a classic getting-out-of-the-rat-race setup, with the characters all making adjustments to their new lives.
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“Flash! AH-AH!” Like millions of other movie fans my age, I grew up watching (and watching, and watching, courtesy of my parents’ HBO subscription) the 1980 cheese-fest Flash Gordon. The movie was a cash-grab attempt by producer Dino De Laurentiis to capitalize on the success of a little movie called Star Wars. Ironically, George Lucas’s original idea was to make a Flash Gordon film, but when De Laurentiis wouldn’t sell him the rights, Lucas went off and created the Star Wars universe instead.
The star of the De Laurentiis produced and Mike Hodges directed Flash Gordon was Sam J. Jones, a relative unknown in Hollywood. The sci-fi spectacle about a New York Jets quarterback who travels to another planet in order to save Earth from a sadistic despot was only the actor’s second credit after the Blake Edwards comedy 10. The documentary Life After Flash covers the production, release, and legacy of Flash Gordan as well as Jones’s ups and downs in life following his big break portraying the comic strip hero.
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always (NRSA) is the kind of stripped down, deeply personal filmmaking that is a worthy successor to the independent cinema of someone like John Cassavetes. That director’s work on films like A Woman Under the Influence, Faces, and Shadows emphasized naturalistic performances and a gritty realism born of their limited budgets. In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, director Eliza Hittman focuses on a young girl with few options and little support while dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. The film is filled with grace and compassion; it’s a luminous example of humanism in art.
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