January 2019

2018 OSCAR NOMINATIONS

        I can’t blame the Oscars for what was a very forgettable year in American cinema. While reporters were falling over themselves congratulating the Academy voters for nominating an unprecedented number of foreign films in a variety of categories, the reason might have been that the domestic options were so limited.

     Even with the small numbers of quality films, good ones were still ignored, but that’s hardly breaking news. I wasn’t surprised that my picks for the year’s best two films, “A Private War” and “First Reformed” were left out of the nominees, though you would have though the Academy voters would have noticed the career-best performances by Rosamund Pike and Ethan Hawke (both previous nominees) in those films. At least “First Reformed” writer-director Paul Schrader scored a writing nomination for the film, a first for one of the preeminent screenwriters of the past 45 years.

     I was very pleased that Willem Dafoe’s heartbreaking portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate” was recognized along with Glenn Close’s scorching performance in “The Wife.” But where is Charlize Theron’s astonishing work in “Tully,” as a mother struggling with postpartum depression? If it had been released in December, her nomination would have been a sure thing.

     The truth is that even when movies (like “A Private War” and “Tully”) focus on women, the new and improved Academy membership still ignores them unless they are high-profile releases.

     And while I can’t imagine anyone thinking that “Black Panther” is among the year’s best eight films, it seems obvious that the supporting work of Michael B. Jordan and Letitia Wright from that film deserved recognition. Excellent work by Claire Foy as Janet Armstrong in “First Man” and Millicent Simmonds as the pissed-off daughter in “A Quiet Place” were also left off for the overrated performances of Emma Stone and Rachel Weitz in “The Favourite.” In fact, the two women playing royals in “Mary Queen of Scots,” Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie, were more deserving of nominations.

    Of course, if the voters followed my recommendations, no one would watch the Oscar telecast. But if “Roma” is the night’s big winner, as most predict, it will be yet again another best picture that few moviegoers have seen. Some articles have indicated that the expanded Academy membership includes many more non-America voters, explaining the increased representation of foreign films. If that is the case, the “diversification” of the voters may not turn out as expected: instead of more spots for American minority actors and directors, foreign artists will receive more Oscar love. The best laid plans….

    I can see a day when half the best picture nominees are Marvel, DC or some variety of superhero films and the rest are movies available only on streaming services. If the Academy wants to remain relevant, it may have no choice. Who really wants to see a movie on the big screen in an actual theater, anyway?

    My list of the year’s best, still a work in progress, was difficult to assemble as I simply didn’t care much for what I saw in 2018. Maybe it’s just me getting older, but I’m starting to believe that this may have been the worst year for American films since the early 1930s, when the industry was still trying to figure out how to use sound.

     The final version, along with my acting choices, will show up on the blog site later this month.

     1. A Private War (Matthew Heineman)

     2. First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

     3. A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper)

     4. Vice (Adam McKay)

     5. First Man (Damien Chazelle)

     6. The Rider (Chloé Zhao)

     7. At Eternity’s Gate (Julian Schnabel)

     8. The Wife (Björn Runge)

     9. Tully (Jason Reitman)

   10. Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke)

    I usually list another handful of films that I liked but, believe me, finding 10 was hard enough. When I gather my second 10, it will mostly consist of films I didn’t completely hate—it was that kind of year.

A PRIVATE WAR (2018)

      Too often, even when filmmakers craft an anti-war picture, the focus remains on the soldier-heroes who live or die in the service of decision makers in some far away capital. Inevitably, if only because of the star's performance, the philosophical idea of warfare comes off as a heroic endeavor.

     But this movie, a war film through and through, directed by acclaimed documentarian Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”), keeps the camera trained on the victims; the women and children and men not on the front lines whose lives and homes and cities have been destroyed in the name of political or religious disputes.

      The central character of the film is real-life newspaper reporter Marie Colvin, through whose eyes and experiences we see these wars----Iran, Sri Lanka, Libya, Syrian. She ventures where few foreign correspondences will tread, with an obsessive need to show the world, through her stories, the victims of the hundreds of bombs being dropped indiscriminately on towns and villages, often by their own governments. 

       The American-born and Yale-educated Colvin worked for more than 20 years for the Sunday Times of London, going from one hot-spot to another, ignoring the warnings of loved ones and editors. While she’s tough as they come, she’s not immune to the effects of the horrors she regularly experiences; at one point, she enters a sanitorium to recovery from both PTSD and alcoholism.

       Bringing this amazing woman to life is Rosamund Pike, best known for “Gone Girl.”  Pike is almost unrecognizable as she makes this legendary, eye-patch-wearing reporter (she lost sight in one eye while on assignment in Sri Lanka) come alive on the screen. Nothing seems to be held back—the drinking, the recklessness, the indiscretions, her boundless empathy, the journalistic passion—none of it can be separated from the others. The excellent script was written by Arash Amel, based on Marie Brennan’s Vanity Fair article.

      The episodical film shows her in war zones through the Middle East, occasionally back in the newsroom in London, enjoying time with friends or getting involved with a well-to-do businessman (Stanley Tucci). There isn’t a moment in this film that seems artificial or worshipping. Her interactions with Sunday Times foreign editor (the fine British character actor Tom Hollander), one of the few constants in her life, captures the classic love-hate relationship between reporter and editor.

       During a stop in the Green Zone in Iraq before heading to Fallujah, she enlists the services of a freelance photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan, the star of “Fifty Shade of Grey”), who becomes her sidekick as she goes from one humanity crisis to the next.

      While Pike’s performance is unforgettable, the scenes of the dying and suffering is what is most memorable about this film, especially when she arrives in bombed-out Homs, Syria, for what would be her final assignment. Countries, leaders and politics are rarely touched on (though there is a contentious, but amusing interview with Muammar Gaddafi right before his death), as director Heineman, like Colvin, clearly sees his mission as spotlighting those left to die amid the rubble.

THE RIDER (2018)

    Is a film in which the cast is essentially playing themselves, reenacting events in their lives, a fiction feature or a documentary? That’s the line that “The Rider,” a beautifully made film about a young rodeo rider, straddles. The movie plays out like a typical feature, only lacking the polished acting of professionals, with a script and editing and atmospheric cinematography.

     It’s only when you see the credits and read about the making of the film that you discover that Brady Jandreau is playing a version of himself as Brady Blackburn, along with his real-life father Wayne, his autistic sister Lilly and even his buddy and severely injured rider Lane Scott. The result is a moving portrayal of a struggling Lakota family and Brady’s attempts to recover from a rodeo head injury that required a plate be inserted in his head (all real).

     Chinese-American director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards bring a rural romanticism to the film—almost every scene seems to play out at sunset, against the poetic vision of the South Dakota horizon. This could come off as pretentious, but the characters and their plight are so powerfully told that the heavy symbolism feels earned.

    Brady, who is warned not to get on a horse, works at the local grocery story for a bit and then finds his calling in training wild horses. The way he deals with the animals is something to be seen.

    Jandreau gives a believable performance (it’s easier said than done to play yourself—remember Howard Stern in “Private Parts”?)  as the young “rider,” who, lacking much education, must face the world after his rodeo days are over. He has the making of a real actor, coming off as the only polished performer while interacting with the supporting “players”—non-actors reading lines.

     But the real star of “The Rider,” is Zhao, whose only previous feature was “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” (2016), another story set among Native Americans, where she met Brady. This 36-year-old, who studied filmmaking at NYU, displays a keen understanding of the connection between cinematic visuals and storytelling along with getting more out of nonprofessional actors than many directors achieve with professionals.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018)

     The big controversy about this flimsy bio of the popular British rock band “Queen” is that director Bryan Singer was fired during the production and has been accused by multiple men of sexual impropriety.

     Yet the film scored five Oscar nominations, including best picture and best actor for Rami Malek, who portrays Freddie Mercury, the band’s colorful lead singer.

     What also should be controversial are the script’s invented dramatics and reliance on the oldest cliché in the rock ‘n’ roll story: a tempestuous singer’s estrangement from his bandmates.

    Despite a script credited to Oscar nominees Anthony McCarten (“The Theory of Everything,” “The Darkest Hour”) and Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon,” “The Queen”), the story never explores Mercury beyond the usual pop music tropes. Born Farrokh Bulsara in Tanzania and raised mostly in India, Freddie joins the band Smile as a teenager after showing off his impressive vocal range.

    The film skips over the hard work and struggle of the band, jumping right to a record contract and, before you really grasp if they’ve made it, a U.S. tour. And then, the script invents a band breakup and estrangement between Mercury and band founder Brian May (Gwilym Lee).

    While Queen was known as one of the top live acts of the 1970s and ‘80s, the film doesn’t do a very good job of re-enacting that, apart from the band’s famous 1985 Live Aid performance.

     The second half of the film focuses almost exclusively on Mercury’s sexuality and lifestyle as he ends his romantic relationship with Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) after a series of homosexual pick-ups. But the script again relies on clichés as it presents the singer as sad and lonely when he’s in a permanent relationship with his overly protective manager (Allen Leach of “Downton Abbey” fame). 

     Malek, best known as the star of the USA series “Mr. Robot,” certainly captures the outrageous bravado of Mercury, but I was always aware that he was doing an imitation; the actor never became the singer. 

      I’m not sure how fans of Queen, of which I never was, are reacting to the flaws of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but it clearly has impressed Academy voters (and the Golden Globe critics who chose it as best picture). Though I think most of its end-of-the-year success—it was panned by most critics when it was released in November—reflects admiration for Malek’s over-the-top portrayal of this legendary singer, who died of complications related to AIDS in 1991. 

WIDOWS (2018)

    Maybe I’m being sexist, but I have no doubt that this film about four strangers pulling a heist would have been dismissed as a poorly executed and ridiculously potted mess if it had starred men. Critics can’t resist the idea of a crime film featuring women who are working through personal problems.

    The overly positive reviews can also be explained by the critical acclaim of limited-run TV shows that have become the rage on cable TV. “Widows” plays out like a television series in which many stories are going on simultaneously, eventually culminating—though not always adding up—in a climatic action sequence. (Turns out, the story was originally a miniseries back in 1983, featuring a cast of unknowns.)

    Maybe, expanded by a few more hours, “Widows” could have worked on HBO or Netflix, but as a feature film it falls flat.

      Viola Davis plays Veronica Rawlings, the widow of a professional thief (Liam Neeson), who apparently dies along with his crew, after their latest job. But the money goes missing and the Chicago crime bosses want their cut, one way or another. So she brings together the women left behind to take over the plan her husband was working on, to rob the prominent Mulligan political family (scene chewing Robert Duvall and Colin Farrell).

      The film spends so much time on the political rivalries, including a black candidate for city council, that I started to wonder what the film was about. It has the usual surprises, which might have worked at the end of each episode, but only ensure the pointlessness of the much discussed but rather boring heist.

     Along with Rawlings, the heist team includes widows Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) and Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and another woman, Belle (Cynthia Erivo), whose story seems extraneous to the film.

    In fact, almost every sequence plays out like its own mini-movie, without adequate transitions or attempts to tie them together. Director Steve McQueen, whose “12 Years a Slave” won the 2013 best picture Oscar, needed to excise some of these auxiliary plots if he had any hope of creating a coherent picture. What ends up on the screen is baffling and a waste of time.  

THE CATCHER WAS A SPY (2018)

     Mo Berg, a backup catcher in the 1920s and ‘30s for teams in Chicago, Washington and Boston, had one of the most interesting lives in baseball history.

    While little known to the general public, his story has been well chronicled in baseball books for years, including the 1994 biography by Nicholas Dawidoff that the film is based on. Paul Rudd, who should never be allowed anywhere near a drama, plays the Yale-educated, multi-lingual athlete who became a military spy during World War II at the end, and right after, his major league baseball career.

    Beyond Rudd’s facile performance, the structure of the script by Dawidoff and Robert Rodat and Ben Lewin’s direction of it fails on every level.

   An underlying theme of the film, for reasons I never grasped, is whether Berg is gay. It is almost as if his sexuality somehow taints his bravery during the war—as it would have in the 1940s—but, looking back, it shouldn’t be a major issue.

    The plot focuses on one mission Berg is given—in fact, it implies that this was his only mission—to assassinate a German nuclear scientist who the U.S. fears is near to creating “the bomb” for the Nazis. Despite the obvious intense nature of the mission, Rudd and director Lewin manage to drain any intrigue out of the action; at best, it plays like a made-for-TV thriller.

    The film does boast an impressive supporting cast, including Paul Giamatti as an American scientist, Jeff Daniels as OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) chief Bill Donovan, Guy Pierce as Berg’s handler and Sienna Miller as the girlfriend, who is confused as the audience by Berg’s feelings.

    

TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949)

    I continue to religiously watch “Noir Alley” every Saturday night on TCM (repeated early Sunday morning) and I’ve learned that not all the film noirs that Eddie Mueller rapturously extols live up to his praise.

    A recent screening of an odd, very B 1952 picture “Talk About a Stranger,” starring Billy Gray (later the son on TV’s “Father Knows Best”) as a youngster who blames a stranger in town for the death of his dog. His parents are played by future California political stalwarts George Murphy and Nancy Davis Reagan. Despite Mueller’s talk, the film plays like a very forgettable episode of “Lassie.”

    But another Mueller favorite, which I had never heard of, more than lived up to his hype: “Too Late for Tears.”

    Lizabeth Scott, who, if Hollywood was fair, would have had many more high-profile roles, plays Jane Palmer, a money-hungry femme fatale and a master at using her sexuality to get what she wants.

    A case of mistaken identify results in her and her husband (Arthur Kennedy, in the midst of his run as Biff in the original Broadway production of “Death of a Salesman”) gaining possession of a bundle of stolen money. She persuades her less criminally inclined husband to keep the money, temporarily she says, but it soon attracts the shady Danny Fuller, perfectly played by Dan Duryea, who is the “rightful” owner.

    The tough guy can’t help but fall for Jane, who uses him like she did her husband to get a slice of the money any way she can. The story becomes even more interesting when a man (Don DeFore) shows up claiming to be an Army buddy of her husband, who has conveniently gone missing.

        The interplay between Scott and Duryea is priceless, enhanced by the taunt, claustrophobic direction of Byron Haskin (an acclaimed special effects guy who later helmed “The War of the Worlds”). The hard-boiled, witty script comes from Roy Huggins, based on his magazine story. Huggins went on to a celebrated career in television, creating such landmark shows as “The Fugitive,” “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers” and “The Rockford Files.”

     Scott had quite a run of noirish films in the 1940s, starting with “The Strange Love of Martha Ives,” followed by “Dead Reckoning” with Humphrey Bogart, “I Walk Alone” with Burt Lancaster and “Pitfall,” starring Dick Powell. She was also memorable in “The Racket” (1951) with Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan and in the underrated “Silver Lode” (1954) as the bride-to-be of John Payne.

    She should have scored an Oscar nomination for this film (along with Duryea), but this kind of genre picture was decades away from earning the respected it deserved.

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (2018)

    Like he did in the Oscar-winning script for his breakthrough film “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins takes the screenwriting mantra of less is more to extremes in his follow-up to that surprise best picture.

      In adapting James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, the writer-director offers his actors huge leeway in shaping their characters as his sparse script leaves out more than it includes, creating a movie filled with awkward silences and under-developed ideas. Call me old fashioned, but I expect screen dialogue that goes beyond the pedestrian exchanges of real life and expresses insights that usual exist after many, many rewrites.

      As Baldwin was one of the most thoughtful writers of the 20^th Century, whose elegant prose regularly plunged the depth of the human psyche, I assume that the “Beale Street” script reflects the sensibilities and style of Jenkins. But if you responded positively to the tone and pacing of “Moonlight,” you’ll like his new film.

    The classically simple story of a young couple falling in love is interrupted when a racist, neighborhood cop pins a rape on Fonny (Stephan James), leaving Tish (KiKi Layne) with a young child to care for and a husband in jail. The only effective scene in the picture is when Tish tells Fonny’s parents and sisters that she’s pregnant, turning the gathering from a celebration to family fight.

    The scene brings some needed energy to this static picture and, best of all, puts the spotlight on Regina King, playing Tish’s mother, who is the only reason to see the film. Unlike the rather dull young couple and cliché-loaded supporting roles, King’s Sharon captures the protective, unconditional love of a mother.    

     In a strange plot turn, the young woman who was raped leaves the country after identifying Fonny. Obviously, in the real world, unless she testified in court he would not be convicted, but those details—along with the scene of him being arrested—are never depicted. Instead, Sharon makes a trip to Puerto Rico to convince the woman to return to the U.S.; the oddly scripted scenes give King more screen time but make little sense and add nothing to the central story.

     At points in “Beale Street,” Jenkins, utilizing a music score that overpowers the actors, seems to be illustrating Baldwin’s novel rather than adapting it. To my eyes and ears, it was a missed opportunity.