YESTERDAY (2019)
Considering that the premise of this
film is so utterly ridiculous—a worldwide blackout erases the existence of the
Beatles—it is pretty amusing and entertaining for about 30 minutes.
Only Jack Malik
(Himesh Patel), a struggling English singer-songwriter, who is rendered
unconscious in a bike collision at the exact moment of the blackout, can
remember the Fab Four and their catalog.
The movie is
clever and witty as Jack weighs his options and then starts playing Beatle
songs in public, getting little reaction. But then Ed Sheeran (playing himself
with great aplomb) recognizes the brilliance of the music.
Through Sheeran
and his take-no-prisoners manager Debra Hammer (SNL veteran Kate McKinnon), Jack
becomes an over-night sensation, just like John, Paul, George and Ringo, while
the film turns into a series of well-worn tropes.
Patel, who
starred in the long-running British series “EastEnders,” makes his film debut
and it shows. He’s a pretty good singer, but not much of an actor, so when the
script goes soft so does his performance.
The second half
of the film focuses on Jack’s frustration with his relationship with hometown
gal and one-time manager Ellie (Lily James, the go-to Brit for these roles) and
his childish inability to spit out his feelings. At the same time, he’s being
transformed into a “star” by Debra, who is given no human attributes, becoming
a collection of stereotypes about music industry execs.
Director Danny
Boyle, who won an Oscar for the equally shallow “Slumdog Millionaire,” and
Richard Curtis (“Love Actually,” War Horse”) fall back on the lazy portrayal of
the music business as some kind of soul-sucking, heartless machine (not unlike
last year’s “A Star Is Born”) that makes the “reality” part of the film hard to
buy into.
Yet the real flaw
of the film is the failure by Boyle and Curtis to even attempt to explain this
bizarre idea of cultural erasure (it’s not only the Beatles) and the
ramifications involved. And their one acknowledgment to this alternate history is
cringe-worthy, an obvious attempt to elicit tears.
But, clearly, I
am thinking too much about this light-weight amusement that is not much more
than a jukebox musical.
NON-FICTION (2019)
Though I had
issues with Olivier Assayas’ last two films (“The Clouds of Sils Maria” and
“Personal Shopper”), I admire his focus on ideas, giving characters room to
delineate opinions and debate with others, or themselves, about the nature of
society and art and what it means to be alive in the Twenty-first Century.
His latest is
his most straightforward and successful, tackling the ways the Internet has
impacted the publishing industry and, the essential human endeavor, reading.
Like a news report from the front lines of real life, Assayas also tackles the
ethical question of co-opting details of someone else’s life in a work of
fiction. (Referred to as autofiction, a controversy of sorts in the literary
world, though it’s been essential to literature since the 1950s.)
Juliette
Binoche, an actress of seemingly unlimited range who has all-but defined French
film since the 1980s, plays Selena, an actress starring in a popular TV cop
show who is married to a book editor (Guillaume Canet). He’s just rejected the
latest “autofiction” work of Leonard (the charming Vincent Macaigne), a
longtime friend of the couple.
Leonard’s novel
is about his fictional stand-in’s relationships with his ex-wife and his
married lover, who we soon learn is Selena. Does her husband actually dislike
the book or suspect the truth? Meanwhile, Leonard is baffled, as, it seems, is
the filmmaker, that anyone would object to writing about one’s own experiences.
It’s all very
French, as Selena’s husband is also cheating, sleeping with a much-younger
editor (Christa Theret), in charge of web publishing, who sees printed books as
pointless relics. The pair never stop debating the worth of the printed word,
before and after hotel sex.
Conflicting
stats and reader surveys offer little guidance as to whether printed books are
in their final days, but the idea that it would serve as a central theme of a
film certainly gives comfort to those who love words.
The long-running
debate on the use of real people’s lives in fiction apparently has gained
renewed traction in recent years, with many feeling used when they become
recognizable fictional characters in a novel by something they once were close
to. In a world where people seem so open to reveal their most personal stories,
who has the right to profit from the use of them? It’s just one of the
fascinating questions addressed in this cinematic cocktail party.
As usual, Binoche
is flawless as this image-conscious actress whose opinions seems to shift
depending on who she wants to please. Assayas, at first, presents her as the
story’s moral compass, but it eventually becomes clear that she is as
compromised and self-serving as everyone else. Though I did find it unrealistic
that her and her husband had a grade-school age child—she’s 55—Binoche doesn’t
look much different than she did at 35. Though she’s one of the most
recognizable movie stars in the world, she remains a master at submerging
herself in a role, always finding the humanity in her characters.
No one comes off
as right or wrong in “Non-Fiction,” which is one of its strengths; though it
makes a strong case that discussions—sometimes friendly, sometimes heated—about
big issues are an essential part of human relations. It made me think about how
few films—American, at least—have even attempted to address the way recent
technology, especially the Internet, have impacted society. The devaluation of
knowledge, truth and human interaction might actually add up to a good
film—probably a comedy.
LATE NIGHT (2019)
I might have been
the last person in America to know who Mindy Kaling is, only investigating
after seeing the trailers for this film that she wrote and co-stars in with the
impeccable Emma Thompson.
Using her stint as
a writer (and actor) on “The Office” and as creator of the critically acclaimed
series, “The Mindy Project,” this Indian-American woman shows off her insight
into the all-boys world of TV writing staffs that live in fear of displeasing
“the star.”
In “Late Night,” her
Molly lands a job, as a diversity hire (she has zero experience), on the
all-white, all-male staff of fading talk show host Katherine Newbury
(Thompson). Just showing up for work causes disruption among the staff, but
soon her fresh ideas (she’s a longtime fan of the show) earns her praise from
Katherine, who has been told by the network boss that she will soon be
replaced.
As much as this is
a vehicle for Thompson—her “Devil Wears Prada”—probably her most interesting
role since “Love Actually” (2003), Kaling is the focus, playing the young
everywoman who, given the chance, shows that hard work and dedication go a long
way toward success.
There’s a plot
turn in the final act that seems unnecessarily dramatic, as it tries too hard
to be of the moment and sets up an overly tidy conclusion that undercuts the
satirical tone of the film’s first half. But as current Hollywood comedies go,
“Late Night” delivers laughs, a seemingly honest look at backstage TV and two
characters you can’t help but like.
FLAP (1970)
Anyone who doubts
that the cinema has come a long way in how it treats people of color needs to
sit through this excruciatingly offensive movie about a group of Native
Americans standing up to developers encroaching on reservation land.
The trio of
Native Americans are played by Anthony Quinn, Claude Akins and future
producer-director Tony Bill. That’d be who I would have cast as American
Indians, though I might have checked to see if Ronald Reagan was available.
Quinn as Flapping
Eagle, the renegades’ leader, acts as if he has the mental capacity of a 10 year
old. But he does stand up for the right of his brethren, even when the biggest
store owner on the reservation (film noir veteran Anthony Caruso)—in cahoots
with local police—shows a willingness to kill to make certain the road project gets
built. Akins is Flap’s tough-guy running mate, while Bill’s Eleven Snowflake
(you can’t make this stuff up) is all moon-eyed over Ann Looking Deer (Susana
Miranda).
There aren’t many
Western movie clichés this film doesn’t cover, including a couple of
amateurishly staged rumbles at the local whorehouse, run, of course, by Shelly
Winters. I refuse to believe that she played the role sober—she’s so
off-the-rails it’s jaw-dropping.
Casting
aside—well, it’s hard to really put it aside—the script by veteran TV writer
Clair Huffaker, from his novel “Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian” (giving you a
good idea of where this is coming from), desperately needs a script doctor. The
dialogue sounds as if it was written by someone who never heard humans speak
English. The central “joke” of the film is that it’s about American Indians.
What could be more hilarious?
Astonishingly, the
director of this travesty is Carol Reed, the man responsible for “The Third
Man,” “The Fallen Idol” and many other fine British pictures. “Flap” was
released just two years after Reed’s musical “Oliver” won the 1968 Academy
Award for best picture and Reed took home the Oscar for best director. Talk
about the Oscar jinx.
He made one more
film, the rarely shown “The Public Eye” (1972), from a Peter Shaffer play that
starred Mia Farrow and Topol. No matter how bad that film might be, it can’t
top “Flap,” maybe the worst film ever made by a great director.
KING OF JAZZ (1930)
One of the most
fascinating early sound productions, this vaudevillian-like collection of
musical performances features a very unlikely star, the affable, rotund big
band leader Paul Whiteman.
Whiteman was
among those responsible for bringing African American jazz into the homes of
white America; an attenuated version, but what proved to be the beginning of
jazz becoming the popular music of the country.
Like an early
version of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the movie, with Whiteman serving as host, stars
all-but forgotten singer-actor John Boles, who was a leading man throughout the
1930s, and the Rhythm Boys featuring a very young Bing Crosby. With massive
sets, inventive animation and groan-worthy skits, the picture serves as both an
artifact of a long-gone showbiz world and a reminder that the good old days had
just as many bad acts as today.
The musical and
visual highlight is the Whiteman orchestra’s performance of George Gershwin’s
masterpiece, “Rhapsody in Blue,” a brilliant meshing of jazz, pop and classical
styles that stands as one of the great works of the 20th Century. As
the TCM host remarked before the screening, it’s really “Rhapsody in Green” as
the early Technicolor process used just red and green, before the invention of
three-strip full color. Even mis-colored, the sequence is spectacular.
This variety show
also includes a cartoon, created by Walter Lantz (“Woody Woodpecker”) that
features an animated Whiteman leading a collection of wild animals dancing to
jazz.
Making an
appearance in a handful of the “comedy” skits is an almost unrecognizable
Walter Brennan, who went on to win three supporting actor Oscars.
“King of Jazz,”
the only film directed by John Murray Anderson, a successful Broadway musical
director for 30 years, is a priceless remnant of the early days of cinema that
should be seen by anyone who treasures that forgotten era of entertainment
MOVE OVER, DARLING (1963)
I know that good
manners dictate that we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but the writers of
tributes and obituaries after Doris Day’s death in May were just as egregious
in their praise.
They re-evaluated
her as one of the 20th Century’s greatest performers. Yes, she was a
strong-voiced pop singer in the 1940s and ‘50s, but she never evolved (or tried
to) into a vocalist whose artistry rose above the material or era. Her finest
recording was among her first, “Sentimental Journey.”
As an actress,
she was refreshingly unpretentious in her early musicals, but was nothing but a
walking, talking cartoon in her popular romantic comedies of the late ‘50s and
early ‘60s. Plenty of actresses from that era—Audrey Hepburn, Joanne Woodward,
Natalie Wood, Lee Remick—found roles that showed women as more than just love
interests, yet Day inevitably played the feisty, somewhat shrill
wife/girlfriend looking to hold on to her man.
Not that there is
anything wrong with those roles or movies—she proved to be one of the most
popular movie stars of the 1950s and ‘60s—but there’s no basis for rewriting
her legacy as a proto-feminist.
I recently
watched “Move Over, Darling,” one of the few of her 1960s films that I hadn’t
seen. This remake of the amusing Cary Grant-Irene Dunne 1940 screwball comedy
“My Favorite Wife,” co-stars James Garner as the just remarried husband of Day,
who is presumed dead in a plane crash after missing for seven years. She
returns home—she was stranded on an island with another passenger (hunky
playboy Chuck Conner)—and then chases down Garner on his honeymoon.
While the
script’s “comedy” relies on keeping the new wife (Polly Bergen) in the dark as
long as possible, the machinations Garner and Day are put through is pure
idiocy. I didn’t laugh, but I felt sorry for these stars having to perform in
such a foolish manner.
Day starred in a few
first-rate films, all in a three-year stretch, as singer Ruth Etting in “Love
Me or Leave Me” (1955), as James Stewart’s wife in Hitchcock’s “The Man Who
Knew Too Much” (1956) and in the Gwen Verdon role in “The Pajama Game” (1957).
She retired from
film 20 years after her debut, after yet another unwatchable, badly dated
comedy, “With Six You Get Eggroll” (1968).
THE HATE U GIVE (2018)
Not to pile on
the “Green Book” bashing, both critics and Academy voters overlooked the year’s
most insightful and wrenchingly realistic film about race relations. Without
the high-powered PR machines behind “Black Panther,” “BlackKklansman” and the
ill-chosen best picture, “The Hate U Give,” from Angie Thomas’ best-selling YA
novel, fell through the cracks. Tellingly, it doesn’t have to go back in time
to soften the blow or lessen the guilt; nor does it invent new worlds to
explain what being black in contemporary America means.
Starr Carter,
wonderfully played by Amandla Stenberg (Rue in “The Hunger Games”), is an
African American teen living in the “bad” side of town while attending a ritzy
white-dominated private school across town.
She thinks she’s
successfully balancing both sides of her life until she rides home from a party
with a childhood friend (Algee Smith, who was so good in “Detroit”) she’s lost
touch with.
They get pulled
over, an incident which escalates when a young white cop overreacts, killing
the young man when he mistakes a hairbrush for a gun.
The rest of the
film deals with Starr facing her role in the black community, something she had
tried to put in her rear-view mirror. Complicating her decision to testify
against the cop is that her murdered friend was involved in the local drug
trade, run by the very intimidating King (Anthony Mackie).
The one aspect
of the film that seemed to strain credibility is the attitude of Starr’s white
schoolfriends when they learn she knew the dead teen and isn’t supportive of
the cop. To make a point, I think the filmmakers give too little credit to the
thoughtfulness and sense of justice among students at an elite high school.
More balanced
are her parents, memorably played by Regina Hall (who was also outstanding in
“Support the Girls” last year) and Russell Hornsby (the older son in “Fences”),
who want her to follow her conscience but also can’t forget that they have to
live in the neighborhood.
George Tillman,
Jr, who directed the well-acted “Men of Honor” with Robert DeNiro and Cuba
Gooding, Jr. in 2000 but has mostly done B-movie action flicks since, takes a
step up with “The Hate U Give,” showing himself to be a first-rate director.
The movie’s
screenwriter, Hollywood veteran Audrey Wells (“Under the Tuscan Sun”), died of
cancer the day before the film’s release.
