December 2019

 

PARASITE (2019)

     The film introduces the seemingly hapless Kim family as they all pitch-in to make a bit of money folding pizza boxes. Squeezed into their hovel of a home, living hand to mouth, you’d never guess what this South Korean family is capable of.

     What begins as a simple story of doing whatever it takes to survive turns into an unrelenting examination of human dignity, the growing gap between those at the top and those at the bottom and the manner in which we see and treat others.

      The film, superbly acted by the entire cast and brilliantly directed by acclaimed Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho (“Mother,” “Snowpiercer”), working from a script he wrote with Jin Wan Han, veers from comic to tragic in a split second while never losing its focus on the human impact of self-centered decisions. This Palme d’Or winner is 2019’s best movie and one of the finest foreign-language pictures I’ve seen in years.

      The action kicks into gear when the family’s son (Choi Woo Shik) scores a job tutoring the high school-aged daughter of a wealthy family. The love-hungry daughter immediately becomes enamored, giving him leverage as he convinces the naïve mother (Cho Yeo Jeong) to hire an acquaintance (actually, his sister, played by Park So Dam) as an art therapist for her unruly son.

    Before long, the father (Song Kang Ho) is employed as the husband’s driver and the wife (Chang Hyae Jin) replaces the devoted housekeeper (Lee Jung Eun) who they trick out of the job.

      This is just the beginning of this incredibly dense, wild domestic horror film that sprinkles elements of master filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, David Lynch and Luis Bunuel into this very 21^st Century look at economic and social disparity.

     While I have always been reluctant to judge acting in non-English pictures as I have no way of properly judging how effectively lines are delivered, the performers in “Parasite,” all three families of the story, seemed so immersed in their roles that the almost surreal aspects of the plot came off as completely believable.

    And while Bong is clearly attacking the upper one percent, he doesn’t turn them into easily hated targets; in fact, their gullibility and self-importance makes them more pitiful than despicable.

    The huge chasm between the cramped, almost desperate lifestyle of the Kims and the sleek, cold modernism of the Parks’ home, precisely captured by cinematographer Hong Kyung Pyo, offers, without a single line of dialogue, a powerful metaphor for the challenge the world faces in 2019 and beyond.

FORD V. FERRARI (2019)

       If auto racing is a sport—the eternal debate among fans and detractors—James Mangold’s thrilling re-creation of the legendary rivalry between U.S. auto maker Henry Ford II and Italy’s race car mogul Enzo Ferrari is one of the best sports movies ever made.

      Few, if any, sports pictures have been better acted, written sans the usual portion of sentimentality and included so many thoroughly convincing and riveting competition sequences.

      Ford (a terrifically gruff and arrogant Tracy Letts) son of the iconic founder is persuaded by a young, ambitious executive named Lee Iacocca (later CEO of Chrysler and the face of the industry in the 1980s and ‘90s) that the company need to build a race car to add some sizzle to the brand and attract younger buyers.

      The designer Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) selects to put Ford in the running at the prestigious Le Mans Race is former driver Carroll Shelby, who by the 1960s was customizing engines at his Los Angeles-based company. Of course, in a classic clash of creativity and business, Shelby constantly butts heads with the other Ford executive, mostly over his instance of using rough-around-the-edges British ex-patriot driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale, yet again hitting the mark perfectly).

    As the film chronicles the experimenting and competitions leading up to the 1966 Le Mans, the brotherly relationship between Shelby and Miles serves as the heart of the story. They seem polar opposites yet share the burning desire to go faster and faster and cross the finish line first.

     Mangold, who has shown in the past that he’s a first-rate storyteller and knows how to craft a crowd-pleasing, well-acted film (“Walk the Line,” “3:10 to Yuma”), again turns out a superbly paced movie that builds toward the big race without becoming tedious or overdramatic. This picture is more accomplish than anything he’s done, combining the messy left turns of real life with the intensity of the racetrack into an entertaining feature, smartly written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller.

     The POV racing sequences make you feel like you’re part of the race; the 24-hour French race actually feels like the physical and mental marathon it must be. Phedon Papamichael, who earned an Oscar nod for “Nebraska” and has shot most of Mangold’s films, provides the inventive, edge-of-your-seat cinematography.

     Damon, a solid actor who always seems to be trying too hard, looks more comfortable, authentic, relax than usual, maybe knowing that he can play Shelby with cool command in a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, as Bale delivers in the showier, fiery role. He’s at his best in a showdown with Ford after his team failed in its first try at Le Mans.

     Still somewhat under the radar, Bale keeps delivering memorable performances as he has compiled a diverse collection of recent roles, staring with the “Dark Knight” films and then continuing in “The Fighter” (2010), “American Hustle” (2013), “The Big Short” (2015), “Hostiles” (2017) and “Vice” (2018).  As Miles, he has the rare chance to use his natural British accent while turning the renegade driver into the classic American film character: thoroughly professional, anti-authority and answering only to his own moral compass. It should earn the 45-year-old his fifth Oscar nomination.

      The supporting cast is equally strong, including Letts, Bernthal as the enthusiastic Iacocca, Ray McKinnon as Damon’s righthand man and 14-year-old star-in-the-making Noah Jupe (“A Quiet Place”) as Miles’ beloved son.

      While I have zero interest in car racing, I was more entertained by “Ford v Ferrari” than any film this year. It’s a perfect melding of the gear-head details of engineering and aerodynamics with the machismo of racing as seen through two charismatic legends of the sport.

RICHARD JEWELL (2019)

     It’s all a matter of perspective. Director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray clearly intended the moral of this re-telling of the investigation into the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing to be that both the FBI and the media thoughtlessly destroy people’s lives in the name of uncovering the truth. The message I came away with was that the press puts way too much trust in what law enforcement disperses out to them.

     If you’re unaware of the case, Richard Jewell (impressively portrayed by Paul Walter Hauser, who played a similar role as the “bodyguard” in “I, Tonya”) was the security guard who first alerted authorities to a suspicious backpack during pre-Olympic festivities in an Atlanta park. Despite his and others’ efforts, the home-made pipe bomb exploded, killing two and injuring over 100. While Jewell was first portrayed in the press as a hero, a leak by the FBI led to reports that Jewell was the prime suspect in the planting of the bomb.

      Sam Rockwell plays a lawyer and former co-worker of Jewell’s, who takes up his case, quickly realizing that law enforcement’s only hope is to pressure Jewell to admit to the crime, utilizing the media to paint him as a loner desperate for attention and Jewell’s naïve admiration for cops of all stripes.

     The story is a stark example of how society, both officially and gossipy, continues to judge the value of someone by outward appearances. Jewell, who died of a heart attack in 2007, was overweight, lived with his mother and tended to overstep his bounds no matter what low-level job he held. This “evidence” seemed to be given more credence than the facts of the case.

     There has been a backlash against the film’s portrayal of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, Kathy Scruggs, who first broke the story of the FBI’s case against Jewell. In the movie, she is shown offering sexual favors to the lead FBI investigator (Jon Hamm) for a scoop. That has been disputed by the paper and other reporters and would probably never have shown up in the film if she was alive to defend herself or sue.

     That a woman, especially a reporter, is portrayed offensively in a Hollywood movie shouldn’t surprise anyone. For me, what was even more offensive was showing her crying during a press conference given by Jewell’s mother (Kathy Bates, excellent as always). That wouldn’t have happened, and neither would the scene in which Jewell and his lawyer visit the newsroom and berate her. (Oddly, they then go into a meeting with the editor, but we are never shown what came of that).  Ray, who wrote and directed the excellent “Shattered Glass” (about plagiarist Stephen Glass) and co-wrote “State of Play,” another newspaper film, should be more knowledge about how newsrooms work; he relies on tired clichés in this new film.

     In truth, there’s not much plot to “Richard Jewell,” but it remains interesting throughout because of the first-rate work of Rockwell and Hauser along with the abiding storytelling skills of 89-year-old Eastwood.

       

THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

     Setting is one of the most underrated elements of a successful film. Most great movies turn its location, both real and the sets, into another character. But few films have used the setting as the dominate element of the story like this quirky, dreamlike picture by director Robert Eggers.

     The lighthouse of the title sits on an unhospitable rocky island off the eastern Canadian coast, where two mismatched men enact a mythological tale of power, ego and loneliness. Winslow (Robert Paterson) is the neophyte apprentice, assisting the grizzled, domineering lighthouse keeper Thomas (Willem Dafoe, looking very 19^th Century), who orders around the younger man with sadomasochistic glee.

   The film, shot in gritty black and white by Jarin Blaschke —it reminded me of Guy Maddin’s gloriously bizarre creations—details in sweaty, filthy detail the unrelenting labor Winslow carries out each day to keep the pre-electricity lighthouse glowing.

    There’s not much to the story, in fact there are probably at least two too many scenes of them drinking themselves into drunken stupors and acting like children, but this isn’t a film about story, it’s about a mood, atmosphere, human character under duress and harshness of surviving day after day after day.

    The movie also offers another off-beat, unforgettably performance by the 64-year-old Dafoe, who has been a major presence, but criminally underappreciated, in American film since the mid-1980s.  Just in the past few years, he has earned Oscar nominations for his sympathetic landlord in “The Florida Project” (2017) and his heartbreaking portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in “Eternity’s Gate” (2018), while continuing as a regular in Wes Anderson films.

     This year, he also plays the central figure in the mystery of “Motherless Brooklyn” and the title character in two Abel Ferrara’s films, “Tommasu,” about an artist working in Italy and “Pasolini,” a bio-pic of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. And then he shows up in last year’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”

    Here’s something to look forward to: Dafoe is among the cast of Guillermo del Toro’s remake of the 1947 carnival-noir Tyrone Power picture “Nightmare Alley” that will star Cate Blanchett and Bradley Cooper.

 

DOWNTON ABBEY (2019)

     Few prime-time soap operas have been treated with such respect as this well-written, superbly acted British import created by screenwriter Julian Fellowes that ran on public television from 2010 through 2015.

    Starting with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, which forever changes the future prospects of the Crawley family, through the growing modernism of post World War I England, both the privileged and their help staff reflect a society that is going through seismic changes.

      Juggling no less than two dozen major character, Fellowes, who wrote every episode of the series and this movie, developed each with the kind of detailed care one rarely finds in filmed drama, allowing them come alive for viewers as if they were part of an epic novel.

    While Maggie Smith as the dowager countess of the family, Violet Crawley garnered most of the accolades, the actors who turned essential stock characters—the show owes a great debt to the British classic “Upstairs, Downstairs”—include Jim Carter as the imperious, loyal-to-a-fault butler Carson; Hugh Bonneville as Robert, the earl of the manor; Elizabeth McGovern, the American wife of Robert; Laura Carmichael as their neglected middle daughter Edith, who eventually has her day; Joanne Froggatt as the devoted wife of Bates, the master’s dresser, who fights various battles with law enforcement; and Robert James-Collier as Barrow, footman turned butler who begins the series as a despicable troublemaker but eventually earns the viewers’ sympathy. 

     Most of the cast is back for the movie, but not, ironically, the one cast member who has become a film star, Lily James, who in the series was the dowager’s rebellious young niece.  But in the world of “Downton Abbey,” she’d hardly be missed.

     The movie is a much-anticipated visit with old friends working out old and new challenges, allowing audiences to smile or tear up as we’re updated on characters’ lives. But as a movie that should stand on its own, it is hopeless. There is little attempt to re-introduce the characters or set up the relationships anew. The story revolves around a royal visit to the Abbey by King George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James).    

       Fellowes and director Michael Engler (TV veteran who worked on “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under”) rightly assumed that no one was going to wander into this film without having at least experienced a handful of “Downton Abbey” the TV series. I can’t recall a film made so exclusively for a select TV audience.  

    Yet it’s done well at the box office, with close to $100 million in receipts in North America. The line between television, be it old traditional networks, cable or streaming, and the cinema is very quickly crumbling; in another 20 years will anyone even recognize the difference?

SOUVENIR (2019)

    I’ve always prided myself on being empathetic to other’s plight in life, a trait that I think contributes to my interest in movies and the variety of lives one experience through the cinema.

    But as I age, I find myself becoming less tolerant of those who make one bad decision after another, while—in the case of film characters—expecting audiences to sympathize.

     That attitude colors my opinion of this critically lauded indie (some have put it on Top 10 lists) that came out earlier this year. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a college film student who barely seems awake most of the time. I would expect someone pursuing a career in film to be full of ideas and energy.

     But she is anything but that, which may explain why she’s attracted to low-key Anthony (Tom Burke), a well-to-do foreign minister in the British government. Even before his dark side is revealed, he comes off as a petulant, arrogantly sarcastic bore.

     Julie acts oblivious when she doesn’t recognize needle track marks on his arms or is questioned by one his friend as to why she’s hanging out with a heroin addict.

     The low-budget, slow-moving, under-written picture barely kept me awake; if I had seen it in a dark theater, I would have been dozing 30 minutes in.

     “Souvenir,” named for an 18^th Century French painting the couple admires, offers a few interesting scenes with Julie’s mother (played by her real-life parent Tilda Swinton), but writer-director Joanna Hogg does nothing to make me care about this foolish character. Astonishingly, to me, a sequel is in the works (even indie films have Part II now).

     Here’s a tip to young filmmakers: If you want to receive good notices for your work, include something about moviemaking in your script and, if possible, cast someone related to a famous actor. Mainstream critics seems to fall for that every time.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE—FALLOUT (2018)

       After six of these, during which Ethan Hunt (better known as Tom Cruise) has aged from 34 to 57, its difficult to work up much enthusiasm for yet another evildoer from Hunt’s past with WMDs at his disposal.

    But I must admit that as action films go—and I’m not talking about those that ignore Earthly physics—this franchise continues to deliver thrilling chases, complex double-crosses and amusing banter between Hunt and his team, all of which come off as believable enough to keep me coming back.

    What isn’t believable is that an intelligence agency would keep an operative in the field who’s older than all his desk-bound bosses and has disregarded direct orders more often a rebellious teenager. Neither is the beaten-to-the-ground plot crutch that involves a corrupt or compromised agent playing a crucial role in every film. There have been more turncoats in “Mission: Impossible” films than there have been in the entire history of U.S.-British espionage.

    One particular aspect of Hunt—compared to that legendary ladies’ man Bond—is that he never has time for the sexual assignations that usually are as essential to the genre as the last-second cutting of red and green wires (or was it the blue and yellow ones?).

    Whether to maintain a PG rating (to increase box office) or something Cruise insists on, Hunt shows no interest in the temptation of either fellow agents or villainous seductresses. What kind of spy is that? In “Fallout,” both Hunt’s ex-wife (Michelle Monaghan) and ex-girlfriend (Rebecca Ferguson) play vital roles, but the only emotion the stoic agent shows is regret for putting them in harm’s way.

     In this episode, Hunt is still after the plutonium from “Rogue Nation” (2015), now under the control of renegade Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), a former IMF agent who hates Hunt and the world.  Hunt’s immediate boss (Alec Baldwin), who once wanted Hunt jailed, is now his biggest fan, while the new CIA chief (Angela Bassett) sends the hulking August Walker (Henry Cavill) to keep an eye on Hunt and maybe, if he feels the need, to kill him.

    Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are back as Hunt’s comrades in arms as is director Christopher McQuarrie, who orchestrated the previous film and is signed up for the next two.

    And then there’s Lalo Schifrin’s theme music, intensifying the action while serving as a constant reminder of the franchise/TV show’s iconic place in popular culture. It’s been in our heads for over 50 years and doesn’t seem to be going away.

October-November 2019

THE IRISHMAN (2019)

    While I’m impressed with the ability of Martin Scorsese, in his fifth decade of filmmaking, to orchestrate this epic, filled with documentary-like detail and enough dialogue to fill a season of a TV series, the repetitive conversations, aimless plot and the lack of the most basic elements of good drama left me disappointed.

     What seemed to elevate “The Irishman” over other Scorsese mob films (“Goodfellas,” “Casino”) in the eyes of most reviewers is the movie’s emphasis on the tragic end that the gangsters inevitably face. Be it prison or an early grave, the fate of these men isn’t glamorous. Yet I don’t remember the endgame for the characters in his earlier picture as being much brighter. In fact, that a couple of these guys in “The Irishman” live to an old age seems to negate the idea of comeuppance.

       The basic plot tells a rather simple story of a working stiff Philadelphia trucker, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro, in his ninth Scorsese film), who does a favor for Eastern Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) to earn a spot in his capo. Years later, Frank becomes the right-hand man of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), serving as the mob’s eyes and ears on the volatile union boss.

      But this film is all about the minutiae; Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian offer three-and-a-half hours of crooked deals, intricate negotiations (these wise guys love to talk) and emotionless murders, all done in the name of profits and personal vendettas over the decades. The legacy of crime all leads to the assassination of Hoffa, who fails to understand who’s really in charge.

     In the hands of a master, this has all the hallmarks of a great film, but it falls well short. What “The Irishman” does is give you glimpses of a great film, as Scorsese creates maybe a dozen set pieces that are superbly acted, beautifully written (based on a book by Charles Brandt) and directed to perfection. But like his previous pictures about Cosa Nostra crime families, he provides no dramatic arc or character development or even a fitting climax. These characters never change, they just keep saying the same thing over and over again, mostly in the same dark, elegant Italian restaurant, which inevitably ends with someone being taken out.  As Sheeran describes himself, “I paint houses.” (with blood, of course)

     The length of this film doesn’t help. At two hours, this might have been a masterpiece; at three plus is a slog with too much screen time filled with long sit-downs that go nowhere and way too much posturing.

     Though they have the largest roles, De Niro and Pacino, the two “Godfather” dons together again in a mob film (movie buff nirvana, right?), aren’t particularly memorable, mostly because their characters are rather one-dimensional. And, despite the de-aging computer magic, they never really look young. De Niro’s Frank doesn’t seem to age at all until he’s elderly, which made some parts of the film confusing.

     But there is a really good reason to see this film—and, despite everything I just, wrote any serious movie fan must see this film—is Pesci, who’s simply astonishing in every scene he’s in. Amazingly, the 76-year-old actor hasn’t worked in nine years, seemingly retired from movies. Yet as memorable as he was in “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” and “Casino,” he’s better here. There’s no blustering, bullying Tommy DeVito (“You think I’m funny?”) in his Russell Bufalino, just a calm, commanding boss who shows patience and consideration, but is just as dangerous. It’s a performance that surely will earn Pesci his second supporting actor Oscar.

      There was a thread in this film that the director failed to capitalize on that could have given the story the poignancy that the critics have anointed it with. Anna Paquin plays one of Frank’s daughters who grows close to Hoffa over the years (after staying clear of Bufalino) and clearly understands her father’s role in Jimmy’s “disappearance.” Yet she’s given almost no lines, offering but an accusatory “why?” at the point where her character could have been used as the moral compass of the film. But she remains in the background.

      Standing out in a supporting cast of hundreds are Bobby Cannavale as “Skinny Razor” DiTullo, Harvey Keitel as Philadelphia mobster Angelo Bruno, Stephen Graham as Hoffa union rival Tony Provenzano and Ray Romano as Russell’s lawyer brother Bill Bufalino.

      This movie could give Scorsese, who recently turned 77, his second best picture Oscar (his first was 2006’s “The Departed”), yet it’s not among his finest films. I’ve struggled with the director’s fractured dramatic development in many of his movies—“Gangsters of New York,” “The Aviator” and “The Departed”—and though “The Irishman” is a stronger work than those earlier pictures, it still lacks any sense of rising action. Yes, it all leads to the killing of Hoffa. But the negotiations, with Frank as the go-between, back and forth between the mob and Hoffa, between Hoffa and other labor leaders, repeating the same threats and Hoffa reacting with the same belligerence, goes on so long that at some point I just wanted someone to whack the guy.

        It’s the kind of film—there are many of them out there—in which a two to three minute clip will convince you it’s a masterpiece (Rodrigo Prieto’s dark, warm cinematography doesn’t hurt). But like “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” possibly this film’s closest competitor for the Oscar, a collection of tense, wonderfully acted scenes does not always add up to a great motion picture. But somehow great filmmakers manage to make even flawed efforts worth the trip to the movie theater.

JOKER (2019)

    Bombastic, melodramatic and shameless in the way it co-opts older, better films, this re-imaging of the Joker legend is a breathtakingly intense depiction of urban violence and its effects on one disturbed man.

     At its center, Joaquin Phoenix delivers a daring, psychologically naked performance as Arthur Fleck, a clown for hire whose downward spiral coincides with the decent into chaos across Gotham City. An outcast who seems to have no friends, Fleck suffers from a condition that causes him to laugh at the most inappropriate times. He lives with his mentally unstable mother, whose rantings about Thomas Wayne, a reactionary candidate for mayor and father of you know who, fuels her son’s fantasy world of being somebody.

      In addition, Fleck longs to be discovered as a stand-up comic, imaging himself on “The Murray Franklin Show” (a version of “The Tonight Show”), trading quips with Franklin (Robert De Niro, whose work in “The King of Comedy” and “Taxi Driver” informs nearly every frame of “Joker”).

      The fate of Fleck escalates after an encounter with a trio of Wall Street bullies on the subway that spins the film into overdrive, bringing out his psychopathic tendencies and a simmering class war in the city.

      Seemingly set in the 1970s, the movie shows an excessively violence, hopeless world that a disturbed Joker finds to his liking, casting himself as the anarchist against a society in which “the haves” seem to have taken over every aspect of life. Mixed up with all of this is the idea of celebrity as the golden ticket to a better life.

     Phoenix walks a tight wire with this portrayal; a devious, occasionally charismatic personification of evil in white clown makeup who loses all sense of humanity—and there’s that hideously painful laugh—yet somehow never becomes a Freddy Krueger-like cliché. It’s nothing short of a great performance.

     At points, when the Joker starts uncovering his tragic, ironic past, the script almost slips into blaming his upbringing for his excesses; yet explain is different than excusing.

      There’s no comparison to other Jokers—this is such a different character that the director has hinted that he actually may be another character. But he does have a clear connection to the future Batman, which is smartly made by the script.     

      For a director who previous works include the juvenile comedies “Old School” and “The Hangover” (all of them…), this is a great leap forward. Todd Phillips, working with screenwriter Scott Silver (nominated for “The Fighter”), has engineered an edge-of-your-seat tale that is a far cry from anything DC or Marvel has previously offered in its so-called origin movies. You will leave the theater disturbed; and I write that as a compliment.

      Greatly enhancing the story is the surreal, over-saturated cinematography by Lawrence Sher and the dark, ominous music by Icelandic composer Hildur Guonadottir.

    “Joker” falls somewhere between film noir and horror, while there isn’t a moment that the tension level slips below 100 percent. Not for the weak of heart, the film reminded me of “Blue Velvet” in the way it draws you into its unpleasant world that you can’t look away from.

     I’m hesitant to call “Joker” a great film as it borrows too liberally from the Scorsese films (to quote Woody Allen, “If you’re going to steal, steal from the best”) and the filmmakers can’t figure out how to end it. They have three really good endings and they just pile them on top of each other. It’s that kind of film; too much of everything.

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME (2019)

     When he finds the right role, few actors can deliver laughs more consistently than Eddie Murphy.

      Of course, it’s been a long time since he made his “Saturday Night Live” debut at age 19, where he created some of the show’s most memorable characters—Gumby, Buckwheat, spoofs of Mr. Rogers, James Brown and Stevie Wonder among many others. By the time he was 26, he had starred in “48 HRS,” “Trading Places,” “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Coming to America,” all enormous hits and permanently establishing black comedians as an important part of Hollywood movies. In the late 1980s, his concert tour, “Eddie Murphy Raw,” was both thoroughly offensive and painfully hilarious.

     While he had a huge hit with “The Nutty Professor” (1996), the film also started his quick decline as he began relying on cheap, easy punch lines and his obsession with playing multiple characters (later co-opted by Tyler Perry). Murphy best comedy work in the past 20 years was his voicing of Donkey in the “Shrek” films, though he had a first-rate serious role in “Dreamgirls” (2006), which earned him an Oscar nod.

       Now, at age 58, Murphy has found another perfect role, as Rudy Ray Moore, an audaciously self-styled singer-comedian-performing artist whose improbably success in African American nightclubs in the 1970s resulted in a series of amateurish, but popular movies.

       Moore is already middle-aged when he begins collecting the profane, rap-like tales told by the pimps and homeless men of South Central LA and turns it into an outrageous club act, renaming himself Dolemite after a pimp of urban legend.

     Moore, who also makes a series of comedy records that become underground hits, stands in for all the marginally talented people working in odd jobs in Southern California (then and now) who refuse to accept “no” and find a way to achieve their dream. The great screen writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (“Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt”), director Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow”) and Murphy capture Moore’s almost desperate need for fame—it’s both heartbreaking and amusing.

     The second half of the film hilariously depicts the making, on a shoestring budget and featuring some of the worst actors in movie history, Moore’s debut film “Dolemite.” Like “The Disaster Artist” (2017), in which James Franco played real-life failed actor Tommy Wiseau, “Dolemite” goes to great lengths to duplicate the original film; as bad as it plays in Murphy’s film, the actual 1975 movie is even worse.

      Watching the 1975 film after I saw the new picture, I laughed at its ridiculous script and filmmaking and how foolish the out-of-shape Moore looks and acts in the role of a Blaxploitation hero. While in Murphy’s film, you laugh while caring about Moore, understanding and admiring what he’s gone through to get where he is.

    Murphy shows both the bluster of Moore and his deep insecurities; he knows he has stretched his skills beyond imagination even as he shows supreme confidence to others.

     For anyone who misses the old Eddie, “Dolemite Is My Name” is a must see. It’s also one of the best films of the year.

WOODSTOCK (1970)

     The fiftieth anniversary of the Charles Manson murders has been rehashed ad nauseum (abetted by Quentin Tarantino’s take on the Hollywood scene at the time) usually featuring Joan Didion’s overused observation that the murders marked the end of the 1960s.

    Maybe for those who lived in Los Angeles, or those who saw it as some indictment of the counterculture lifestyle, but to me the end of the 1960s, at least the spirit of the era, was the three days of peace, love and music in rural upstate New York. If not the end—I’ve always maintained that “the Sixties” lasted well into the 1970s—but the culmination of what seemed possible for a generation of young people fed up with an American conservativism that demanded conformity, a pre-conscribed life.

      The last hope for change—King, Bobby Kennedy—had been taken down the previous year. Nixon, a pitiful discard from the 1950s, had been elected president.

     But gathered at Max Yasgur’s farm in August 1969, actually in Bethel, N.Y., was a group of people who saw another way of living, fueled by drugs (for better or worse) and this relatively new form of musical expression called rock ‘n’ roll.

     I re-watched the documentary recently, a so-called director’s cut coming in at four hours—and was more impressed with what director Michael Wadleigh (and a couple of young filmmakers/editors, Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese) captured of the landscape of uninhibited humanity that the rest of the media dismissed at the time as dirty hippies.

     This film is more about reflecting the personality of the 400,000 concertgoers, what must be considered a fair representation of the rock ‘n’ roll generation, than what happened on stage. These future doctors, lawyers, journalists, accountants, CEOs seemed to be destined to reshape the course of America. How this ship steered into the 1980s, I’ll never understand.

    Just like the politicians they despised, this generation, espousing a gentler, less competitive, less angry society, failed to deliver on their promises.

     The documentary doesn’t delve into the fascinating fiasco of organizing the festival (see Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock” for that), but it captures the insanity that ensues when tens of thousands showed up without tickets (face value: $6 a day), turning it into a free festival and a financial nightmare for the organizers.

      To call Woodstock a music festival is both overstatement and understatement. The bands and solo performers didn’t just play a few songs, as the film leads you to believe, and give way to the next act; they played entire concerts. The Who performed the entire “Tommy”; the Grateful Dead wouldn’t give way until the weather forced them off stage. It was more a series of concerts than a music festival.

    But it’s clear that for much of those in attendance, the music was a minor part of the experience, they were really there because it was the place to be.

    The choice of artists included in the film is regrettable as many delivered what can charitably be described as uninspired performances. Part of the problem was that everyone was stoned.

    Most memorable are Joe Cocker, wearing a tie-dye shirt, spasmaticly playing air guitar and creating one of the signature moments in rock ‘n’ roll with his cover of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends”; Richie Havens, showing off his powerful voice and pure passion in “Freedom”; Santana, almost unknown at the time, becoming overnight stars performing “Soul Sacrifice”; and Jimi Hendrix, who, in an early morning set, effortlessly sliding from his now famous version of “The Star Spangled Banner” to an anthem of equal power,  “Purple Haze.”

    But the music was just the background to a generation staking claim to the culture—amidst the crowds, the rain and mud and unsanitary conditions. Yet it was only the music that prevailed; little of the optimism for the future they carried with them to upstate New York lasted very long. “Woodstock” provides an unfiltered view of that fleeting moment.

JUDY (2019)

       If there were any doubts that stars still hold the power in Hollywood, this chronicle of Judy Garland’s final tragic months puts them to rest. Without Renée Zellweger no one in their right mind would have financed a film about a singer-actress who is virtually unknown to any filmgoer under the age of 50.

     Yet as much as I admire the determination of the actress and the filmmakers to bring “Judy” to the screen, the picture fails to go beyond the heavy-handed cliché bullet-points of Garland’s downfall.

      If you know the story of this iconic performer nothing in the movie will surprise you. Focusing on her 1968 engagement at London’s Talk of the Town, it depicts a broke, desperate, volatile Garland, who is stumbling through the final months of her life, making one bad decision after another. It’s sad to see such a talented performer, or anyone for that matter, so depressed and uninterested in life.

     She does come alive on stage—when she isn’t too high to perform—and there the film offers a peak at the reason many call her the greatest entertainer of the Twentieth Century. Few have ever opened up to audiences so nakedly. Zellweger, too, finds another level of acting in those scenes, capturing the vulnerability and emotional overload that Garland brought to her songs.

     The actress, who established her musical chops by playing Roxie in “Chicago” (2002), makes the most of Judy’s nervous energy, her stagey mannerisms and rabbit-like head movements. Truthfully, it’s hard not to give a memorable performance playing Judy Garland (Judy Davis was equally impressive in the 2001 miniseries).

     This film, directed by British stage director Rupert Goold and based on a Broadway show “End of the Rainbow,” looks like its entire budget went into paying Zellweger; the production values aren’t even cable-TV level and the script, by Tom Edge, is a collection of scenes lacking any connecting thread.

     Especially stilted and clunky are the flashback scenes of her being bullied by MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, which play like dream sequences as they are so unconnected to real life. Yet they are crucial to the film’s theme of mitigating Judy’s own responsibility for her downfall. There is plenty of blame to go around for the early demise of this incredible talent—she was 47 when she died in 1969—but most of it lands on the actress herself, who let one man after another control her life.

     For those unfamiliar with Garland’s work beyond her Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” check out her performances in the beloved family musical “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944), commanding the screen when she was just 22; and in the second version of “A Star Is Born” (1954), a role she was born to play. But for the jittery, heartbreaking version of Garland, you need to see outtakes from her 1963-64 television variety show. She’s in her early 40s but looks 60 and sings every song like her life depends on it.

       To me, it’s one of the greatest TV shows in history, hard-to-look-away-from reality TV before the term had been invented and an invaluable record of a masterful singer at the height of her powers (her duet with an impossibly young Barbra Streisand is sublime). Garland sings with the emotional intensity few performers have every matched while looking like she ready to suffer a nervous breakdown at any moment. That’s Judy Garland in a nutshell.

HUSTLERS (2019)

       This well-reviewed film about a group of strippers who drug and then steal from rich clients fails on so many levels that it’s hard to take it seriously.

     Yet writer-director Lorene Scafaria (“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World”) working from a magazine article on the real-life events, hasn’t turned it into an over-the-top comedy (which might have worked better), but wants audiences to see this as a female empowerment story.

      I love films about low-life criminals, mobsters and psychopaths, but please don’t turn their bad behavior into a social justice issue.

    The story revolves around Destiny (a badly miscast Constance Wu), a stripper who, though hardly a neophyte, seems utterly clueless about the ins and outs of the job. Then, for no good reason, the New York City club’s star attraction Ramona (Jennifer Lopez, completely over the top) takes her under her wing.

     I have no idea about the particulars of the real people these characters were based on but there isn’t much calling for 50-year-old exotic dancers (Lopez) or even those in their late 30s (Wu), which is clear by the fact that all those around them are in their 20s. But the age of the stars is the least of this story’s problems.

      Working at a club frequented by Wall Street types, the women seem to be making tons of money, yet they quickly become desperate when the club hits the skids, along with the rest of America, when the 2008 recession hits.

     For some reason, Destiny and Ramona, up until now inseparable, stop communicating until a few year later when Ramona decides they should start picking up men at bars, drug them and steal money from their credit cards. It was never clear to me why these men stopped going to the strip club, yet now are willing to spend big bucks on the same girls.

    Neither is it clear why these women find nothing wrong with robbing these men; the film seems to be saying that they are seeking revenge for the way these men screwed the economy. And what do they do with their growing riches? Buy more expense clothes and bags and act like the second coming of the “Sex and the City” women.

     Equally ridiculous is that Destiny, who clearly is unhappy with her life in the sex industry, doesn’t use the criminal profits to try to change her life.

    But it gets worse. Near the last part of the film, a magazine writer (stiffly portrayed by Julia Stiles) plays a key role as she is seen interviewing both Destiny and Ramona. The clumsily inserted scenes add nothing except confusion to an already jumbled script.

    Despite the age problem, Lopez is clearly fully invested in the role, giving a convincing performance amidst all the foolishness. The same cannot be said for Wu, who comes off as an insecure kid playing dress-up.

     I cannot imagine that a film celebrating a group of men drugging women for financial gain would have garnered the same praise “Hustlers” did.

AD ASTRA  (2019)

      Trying to duplicate the personal angst of space exploration as found in “Gravity,” “Interstellar” and to a lesser degree, “Prometheus” and “The Martian,” this journey into deep space plays out like a tough-guy private eye adventure in which the crime is just the excuse for the protagonist to unearth the meaning in his life.

     James Gray, one of the most grounded of directors, made a similarly themed film in 2017, “The Lost City of Z,” about a Nineteenth Century Amazon exploration. “Ad Astra” (Latin for “to the stars”) is a long way from most of Gray’s dark, intimate stories of immigrant communities (“Little Odessa,” “The Immigrant”).

     Pitt plays Roy McBride, a taciturn astronaut who is sent on a top-secret mission to find out what the heck is going on with a spaceship sitting above Neptune, where deadly power surges are emitting from. The ship, not coincidentally, is (or was) piloted by McBride’s father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), long thought dead.

    So off goes McBride, with old pro Pruitt (Donald Sutherland) as his guide, to the Moon and then Mars and then, ridiculously, Neptune. To explain the craziness of this: Mars is about 55 million kilometers from Earth; Neptune is about 4 billion kilometers.

     And though I’m not a stickler for sci-fi films’ scientific accuracy, if I’m to take the film seriously I do expect a level of believability that’s a big step above comic book movies. “Ad Astra” fails that test more than once in especially crucial moments.

     I was also bothered by the blatant copying of the narration style from “Apocalypse Now,” which shares this film’s literary model, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Both films portray an accomplished, reserved man sent into unknown territories in search of a father figure who’s “operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct” (to quote “Apocalypse Now”). It all originates with Marlow heading into the jungle to find Kurtz in the 1899 novel. But McBride’s narration not only sounds similar to screenwriter Michael Herr’s narrative deliver by Martin Sheen in Francis Coppola’s film, but Pitt duplicates the world-weary tone of Sheen.

       Then, in case you don’t get it, he hops into a ship heading to Mars, not unlike the boat Sheen’s Willard (the renamed Marlow character) commandeers to motor into the Vietnam jungle. And McBride, like Willard, has no problem killing those who interfere with his mission.

    Though the film implies that this is the near future, the film’s depiction of an elaborate Moon-based community and Mars station tells me we’re looking at maybe 500 years in the future, unless Congress has a major change of heart about funding space exploration.

    What Pitt’s McBride does, pretty much alone, to get to and then escape the ship hovering over Neptune is right out of a DC or Marvel entertainment. Yet it’s hard not to admire the ambitious theme and character study writer-director Gray (and co-writer Ethan Gross) bring to a sci-fi action film.  

July 2019

 

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)

     Quentin Tarantino remains a master at creating wonderfully acted, cleverly staged scenes filled with quotable dialogue and winking sarcasm. Yet he seems to have little interest in delivering a fully developed, meaningful drama.

     As much as I enjoyed a solid two hours out of this two-hour and forty-minute homage to Hollywood of the 1960s, the writer-director fails to weave the movie’s many memorable scenes into a compelling, coherent story.

      What he does produce in “Once Upon a Time,” down to the hubcaps, cigarettes and radio DJ The Real Don Steele, is a heartfelt, impeccably rendered trip down memory lane, with a pair of Hollywood clichés—Rick Dalton, a second-rate, hard-drinking actor reduced to guest roles on TV series and his loyal, tough-guy stunt man Cliff Booth—serving as our guides.

     Ironically, Tarantino casts two of film’s biggest stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, as these working-class members of the industry. And both deliver convincingly. Without these star performances, the film would have fizzled into nothing.

     Di Caprio’s Rick once had his own TV Western, “Bounty Law,” but his career has stalled. An agent—for some reason we never meet Rick’s actual rep—played by Al Pacino at his hammiest (which is saying something), suggests he consider a spaghetti Western, following in Clint Eastwood’s footsteps. But the real point of the scene, set at the famed Hollywood watering hole Musso & Frank Grill, is for Pacino to outline Rick’s career.

     Too much of the picture takes place on the set of “Lancer,” an actual Western series in the late ‘60s that starred James Stacy (played by Timothy Olyphant), on which Rick has a guest appearance as the villain. The tedious sequence, sparked only by a cute performance by a pretentious child actress (10-year-old Julia Butters), just reinforces Rick’s lack of confidence.

     But it’s not like there’s anything else that the director can cut to. Large chunks of the film chronicle Rick and Cliff hanging out or driving past Los Angeles landmarks or just loafing around home.

      Rick lives in a classic mid-century house on Cielo Drive (just north of Beverly Hills), next door to up-and-coming actress Sharon Tate, while Cliff lives in a trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-in with his dog Brandy. This all becomes relevant by the end of the film, but what I kept wondering was why these two Hollywood hunks, in an era of rabid promiscuity, not only don’t have girlfriends, but are never seen even hooking up. I guess Tarantino didn’t want a woman interfering with their buddy chemistry.

     The point of the film, if you can find one, becomes clearer when Cliff takes a young hitchhiker (the ultimate ‘60s “chick” played by Margaret Qualley) to Spahn’s Movie Ranch in the San Fernando Valley. (He even turns down sex with her, asking, in a nod to 2019, for ID.)

     Having shot Westerns at the ranch, Cliff is surprised to find a collection of hippies living there with the approval of the owner (a grumpy Bruce Dern). The dramatic irony is that the audience recognizes this crowd as Charles Manson followers who will soon visit Cielo Drive. To Cliff, they are just dirty hippies—a regular target of the film.

     Tarantino doesn’t hide his self-indulgence: He fills the screen with fictional movie and TV series scenes along with posters of both real and fictional movies. He sends Tate (Margot Robbie, with little to do except look the part) to Westwood where she is surprised when she walks by a theater playing a movie she’s in, “The Wrecking Crew” starring Dean Martin. With child-like joy, she revels in the audience laughing at her pratfalls. (Should I wonder why this first-run theater is playing a movie from the previous year?)

       Later, the camera follows her to the Playboy Mansion where Steve McQueen (British actor Damian Lewis, looking like the actor’s twin) comments on her living arrangement with husband Roman Polanski. 

   It’s all very amusing in a sophomoric way yet so many of the scenes seem to be there only to show how cool the Westside of LA was 50 years ago.

    After “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained,” no one should be surprised by the director’s penchant for rewriting history, thus “once upon a time,” but the final act left me dazed and cheated. As I don’t want to play spoiler this early in the film’s run, I’ll delay to a later date my thoughts on the ending.

    Reportedly, Tarantino, at 56, is considering retirement from filmmaking after his next picture—an entry in the “Star Trek” franchise. That seems crazy, but just as crazy is his exulted status in the industry considering his thin resume: one great film (“Pulp Fiction”), 25 years ago; three good ones (“Reservoir Dogs,” “Inglorious Basterds,” “Jackie Brown”); and five that showed potential before self imploding. His ego would never allow it, and it’s a bit late now, but what Tarantino has always needed was a co-writer.

     But when Cliff recalls his encounter with Bruce Lee on the set of “The Green Hornet” or Rick and Cliff drink beers while watching Rick’s guest appearance on “The F.B.I.” or when the camera lingers over a fictional movie poster that include real, but offbeat actors fifth or sixth billed or anyone mentions Rick’s film-career highlight, “The 14 Fists of McCluskey,” “Once Upon a Time” is pure delight for anyone who loves movies as much as the director. Maybe that’s good enough…in Hollywood.

   

GUNMAN’S WALK (1958)

     Like current complains about the unending number of superhero movies, I wonder if moviegoers of the 1950s lamented the onslaught of cowboy films?

      From classics with major stars such as “The Searchers,” “High Noon” “Shane,” “3:10 to Yuma,” “Johnny Guitar” and “Naked Spur” to lesser-known gems like “Ride Lonesome,” “7 Men From Now,” “Silver Lode,” “Day of the Outlaw,” “Jubal” and “Forty Guns,” Westerns dominated Hollywood’s output that decade.

     You can add to the list this little-seen, sharply writing picture of a psychologically racked relationship between a father-son set in a frontier town.

     A major teen heartthrob of the era, Tab Hunter, stars as a tightly wound, volatile young man who hates everything about his father Lee Hackett (the always solid Van Heflin) but shares both his self-centered approach to life and unbridled hatred of the Native Americans they live among.

     The conflicts escalate when Ed pushes an Indian, who was working for his father, to his death while both are pursuing a white wild horse. The man killed was the brother of Clee (Katherine Grant, then newly married to Bing Crosby), who works in the town’s grocery store and has drawn the eye of Ed’s more tolerant younger brother Davy (James Darren, another ‘50s heartthrob and later TV star). The father, who all but runs the town, finds a way for his son to avoid murder charges, but things soon go from bad to worse.

    Briskly directed by Phil Karlson, best known for his well-acted film noirs--“Kansas City Confidential,” “99 River Street, “The Phenix City Story,” among others—the film is both a powerful condemnation of racism and a complex study of a son who is doomed by the way he reacts to his upbringing. It’s no surprise that the sophisticated script is by Frank S. Nugent (from a story by Ric Hardman), whose screenplays for John Ford are central to the development of the genre.

    In most of his roles, Hunter is a wooden, vacant presence, undercutting at least two potentially first-rate films, William Wellman’s “Lafayette Escadrille” and Stanley Donen’s “Damn Yankees.” By the 1960s, he mostly worked in TV, including a short run with “The Tab Hunter Show.” But as Lee Hackett, he uses that stiffness (or Karlson does) to perfectly capture this disturbed, self-destructive man. This is a character that would fit nicely into any of Karlson’s dark alleys of noir.

THE FAREWELL (2019)

     The difficulties faced by immigrants trying to balance the old-country values of their parents with living as an American has always been the source of conflicts. While Hollywood did it’s best to hide the country’s diversity for years—except for the occasional Jewish story of culture struggles (“The Jazz Singer,” “Humoresque”)—this century has seen it become a popular plot-device.

     One of the best of this sub-genre is “The Big Sick” (2007) and “The Farewell” matches it. At the center of the new film is a deception: while the dispersed family gathers for a wedding (real life not the fantasy of “Crazy Rich Asians,”) in mainland China, the focus is on saying goodbye to Nai Nai, the matriarch whose cancer diagnose has been kept secret from her.  

    In fact, the news is also hidden from granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina, the scene stealer from “Crazy Rich Asians”), who lives in New York, because her parents don’t believe she can keep it secret from her grandmother.

   But after learning the truth she shows up, much to the delight of Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao), and struggles each day with the knowledge of her grandmother’s illness.

    While the film, written and directed by Chinese -America Lulu Wang based on personal experience, offers plenty of family-gathering humor, it also looks at the deeper issues of identity and origins and duality. Not that much happens, but like most family gatherings, every conversation is steeped in personal histories and unresolved grievances. (Though an American film, much of the dialogue is in Mandarin with English subtitles.)

      Wang portrays the dynamics between Billi and her parents (superbly played by Diana Lin and Tzi Ma—the busiest Chinese actor in Hollywood since his villain role in “Rush Hour”) without sentiment, revealing deep-seated emotions that never slip into melodrama.

     Awkwafina, a New York City native born Nora Lum, shows in “Farewell” that she’s not just a comic foil, creating a complex, unsettled woman who anchors the film. Her unusual voice is scoring her plenty of work on animated films, but her subtle acting skills may turn her into a major Hollywood actress. Toward that end, next year she’s set to co-star with Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep in “The Prom.”

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (2018)

    The idea of Melissa McCarthy playing a has-been biographer who turns to literary forgery to remain financially afloat sounded very appealing. But it turns out that despite the good reviews and Oscar nominations for the actress and co-star Richard E. Grant there nothing more to the film than what’s in the trailer.

     Based on an autobiographical tell-all by writer Lee Israel, the film offers an interesting setup as Lee (McCarthy), faced with little support from her publisher after a recent failure, first dabbles in illegality by penning a short “letter” from Dorothy Parker. Parroting the famous 1920s writer’s cleverness, Lee sells it for hundreds of dollars. She’s found her new profession.

     She strikes up a rather odd—and clearly doomed—friendship with a neighborhood character/itinerant barfly, a scene-stealing Grant, who has been playing this kind of role since “Withnail and I” in 1987. It’s an unlikely friendship that you would think a smart, previously successful writer would have been a bit more cynical about; it seems clear from the first second he enters her life that he’s looking for a meal ticket and is about as trustworthy as Lee’s fabricated letters.

    The second half of the film plods along, waiting for the inevitable moment when authorities discover her scheme.

      Sometimes real stories are the hardest to adapt into interesting movies. Neither the script by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty (nominated, for no discernible reason) nor McCarthy are able to do much with this character—she’s irascible and pitiful, but that’s about as complex as she gets. McCarthy’s comic instincts push the character to being more common and a bit denser than you’d expect of someone who made their livelihood from researching and writing biographies. The film, directed by Marielle Heller, becomes repetitive as it runs out of ideas. 

    While it seems clear that much of Lee’s troubles began with her messy breakup (that happens before the film story begins) with Elaine (Anna Deavere Smith), the script just barely touches on that.

     Considering how females have dominated the best seller list for the past 20 years, a film about a woman writer is overdue, but “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” doesn’t offer enough story to support the character or strong enough performances to hold up the flimsy plot. 

TOY STORY 4 (2019)

     For moviegoers of a certain age, Woody, the now vintage cowboy doll voiced by Tom Hanks, represents every child’s favorite toy and their emotional connection to that plastic-cloth product.

    This latest update on Woody’s world feels more like a class reunion than a movie, but it does move the franchise story in a direction that could make for an interesting “Toy Story 5,” and isn’t that what it’s all about.

     In this film, Woody becomes the caretaker of a spork (that’s right, a plastic utensil) constructed by young Bonnie on her first day of kindergarten. The film quickly becomes tiresome as Woody, now a rarely played with toy, realizes that his only point in life is to safeguard Forky, who keeping trying to jump into the trash, from where he came.

     The film comes to life when it moves to an antique shop where Woody spies a clue to the whereabouts of his long-lost love, Bo Peep (Annie Potts).

     The final act is all action, with a band of ventriloquist dummies and a desperate baby doll pursing Woody and Bo Peep. The rest of Andy’s old toy collection receive little screen time, though Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) performs his usual heroics despite himself.

    While it doesn’t come close to what Pixar achieved in “Toy Story 3,” one of the best modern animation movies, the film is colorful, sentimental and a reminder of the iconic nature of this franchise.

TORCH SONG (1953)

         In this backstage musical, Joan Crawford plays Jenny Stewart, a Broadway star who is simply insufferably demanding. With empathy for no one, she rails against the director, the stage manager, other actors, her agent and has no time for her mother (Marjorie Rambeau, who scored an Oscar nomination for the rather slight performance) or her younger sister. Jenny Stewart makes the real Joan Crawford look like a saint.

     The high-maintenance actress doesn’t even turn down her vitriol for the new rehearsal pianist (Michael Wilding) who was blinded in the war. Midway through the film, which lacks any real plot other than Jenny’s blazing bitchiness, I assumed that the only way the picture was going to redeem her character was to have her suffer a crippling accident.

    That wasn’t in the cards; instead we’re supposed to “understand” her when she falls for the pianist, who had admired her from afar before the war.

    But then the film crashes and burns in stunning fashion when a production number in Jenny’s show is done in blackface. It’s beyond shocking to see a star of Crawford’s caliber, along with a dozen or so dancers, donning this offense face paint, doing a “Porgy and Bess”-like song. Now I understand why this film never shows up on TCM.

     In the 1920s and 30s, this kind of act was accepted without a thought; it was a popular style of entertainment in the era of singers Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. In the 1939 film “Honolulu,” the great tap dancer Eleanor Powell applies blackface to imitate her real-life dance mentor Bill Robinson. But by the 1950s most Americans found it offense.

      I’m not sure what director Charles Walters (“Easter Parade,” “High Society”) or Crawford were thinking when they added this pointless dance number. It completely negates the casting of a black woman (Maidie Norman) as Jenny’s personal secretary, which itself was rather surprising for a ‘50s film.

    To add insult to injury, India Adams, who’s singing is dubbed in for Crawford, isn’t given any on-screen credit. Surely, Crawford didn’t think audience thought that was her singing? (Go to Youtube to compare their voices.)

     Crawford made many bad films in her career, in fact, more clunkers than winners, but this is worse than most and not even bad in a funny way.