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.