My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Sunday, September 25, 2016

The real Friday Night Lights: Last Chance U documentary

Thumbs up for the Netflix documentary series Last Chance U., about the premier junior-colloge (Juco) football program in the U.S., at Eastern Mississppi Junior College, where they essentially take kids who washed out of a D-1 school because of grades or arrests or bad attitude and kids from high schools with the talent but not the grades to even start D-! - so it's a team w/ a lot of ability and where each kid carries a huge burden. The series clearly shows the incredible poverty in which these kids lived, and for almost all football is the ladder up and out, if possible - but it's also clear to us that very few of these kids will be able to go pro, and those who don't will have few or no prospects. The school itself is really strange with a lot of resources pouring in because of the success of the football team, but the team itself is a world apart. The players for the most part completely blow off their academics' they're poorly prepared, barely literate, and uninterested. Perhaps the most appealing person in the show is the stalwart young woman called the Athletic Academic Adviser, who works really hard to make sure the guys show up for class, hand in assignments, and show at least a vestige of understanding - she's truly devoted to a very difficult cause. The coach is an ambiguous figure - really tough and brutal to the players, but that's also obviously what they need if they have any hope of moving on in their athletic careers. We also see how football dominates the whole culture of the school and the region - the way pro sports do in many regions. As I'm sure many have commented, this is the real Friday Night Lights, or at least the other side of FNL - much more poverty, despair, and even callousness toward the players and exploitation of them: they're worth only what they can bring to the school, and you get the sense that everything else in the life of the school, for the players and for the students, is ancillary.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

So many great things about The People v OJ Simpson

Now halfway through the great Fx series The People V OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, and no matter what you know or think you know about the OJ case this series will bring the case and those relatively innocent days alive - and perhaps its greatest strength is its head-on approach to the many issues that rattled and captivated Americans over the course of that trial: race, celebrity, police brutality (this was in the wake of the Rodney King arrest, the first of now thousands the exposed police brutality against blacks - a case that now seems almost quaint and innocent - at least he lived), sexism (some of the best material is in episode six as Marcia Clark is purloined in the tabloids that focus on her hair and clothing style - she's just devastated and we really feel for her - quite an accomplishment of writing and directing, as she's such a tough and sharp-edged character but now we see her vulnerability), politics (why didn't the LA DA take this trial on himself? Obviously, because he didn't want to alienate black voters), and the legal system (the so-called dream team of lawyers defending OJ do a great job, or course, and Johnny Cochran is always great to watch in action - but it all feels unfair, like the Red Sox playing against a high-school team). Though the case comes alive to us 20 years down the road and it's a harbinger of many future police on black conflicts even more in the news today, the case also seems so long ago - yes, it was the first celebrity event to go 24/7 on the news channels and to become unending tabloid fodder, and the OJ chase (episode 1) was probably the first crime scene watched live on national TV - but we've moved far beyond that today, as we're no longer depending on news media to present the news, we get it instant and unfiltered and all the time from social media: the news media has been the victim of its own success and has been pushed to the margins of the picture

Monday, September 19, 2016

Where's Woody Allen when you need him?

Where's Woody Allen when you need him? The characters and social setting that he depicted so well, with wit and sympathy and imagination and credibility, in so many of his movies have been usurped in Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan and to ill effect. Here again we have young professionals and intellectuals in Manhattan and environs wrestling with issues of love and commitment, forming good friendships and enduring lousy relationships - but such a differences here in tone. These characters, led by the talented but getting-too-predictable (must she always portray an awkward, strangely costumed, single woman on the edge of worry about commitment?) Greta Gerwig, just never feel real or believable, not for a second: we always sense that they're actors playing their lines, and, as in too many movies, they are characters, not people - from the "cute meet" to the preposterous skewering of an academic debate to the bratty bright kids to the clumsy gags about artificial insemination to the cheesy Gerwig-Hawke falling-in-love, just nothing, nothing worked for me. Has Ethan Hawke ever played a less likable character? And what's Julianne Moore doing with that Russo-Franco accent? Honestly, I had to bail out after Act One but have it on good authority that it was downhill from there. (Gerwig was far better in Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, which treated similar moods and anxieties, albeit at a slightly younger stage in life, with sensitivity and brio.)

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Surprisingly great series that gets to the heart of the OJ case

Like many others, we have been blown away by the quality and drama of American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson; who would have thought Fx could rise to such quality (it definitely helps to be watching this on DVD rather than w/ commercial interruptions, of which there would be many) or that we could re-engage with this dramatic case. I thought I pretty much knew the whole story  - it wasn't all that long ago that the case dominated news for weeks - but to see it play out from the inside, with all of the conflicting forces and psychological complexity - race, money, big-time sports, politics, legal wrangling - just translates so well to the form of an episodic drama: we see the troubled mind of OJS up close, the conflict brewing between the DA's office (Marcia Clark) and the ridiculously high-priced defense team. Great use of occasional documentary footage, and some really fine acting, Cuba Gooding Jr obviously as a tormented (and deranged) OJ, David Schwimmer as his sycophant best friend Kardashian, and in particular Jon Travolta as OJ's first lawyer, the suave insider, Robert Shapiro. Will keep watching this series for sure.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Talking heads (of the CIA): The Spymasters

A few words on the Showtime documentary The Spymasters - have to give the filmmakers credit for the amazing of getting all living ex-directors of the CIA (including former Prez Bush 41) to speak on camera and on the record, some in more detail than others. That said, the movie does feel like a lot of talking heads with spliced in video clips of news footage, primarily from 9/11 and from several attacks on U.S. embassies, some of it pretty dramatic and disturbing but none we hadn't seen before. I don't think there were any great revelations or turning points in the interviews (I didn't make it quite to the end) but we do get a sense of how these guys have to deal with life and death decisions all the time and that a few of them - Panetta in particular - struggle w/ guilt and anxiety about decisions they made that cost lives. Others are on camera more to burnish their reputations: there's a lot of talk about 9/11 obviously, with some of the CIA people (some lower ranks spoke as well; we wondered if one of them was the inspiration for Homeland) emphasizing how they tried to warn the Bush (43) White House about 9/11 but unsuccessfully - I'm no fan of Bush-Cheney yet it seems to me the CIA kept saying there was an imminent threat but without knowledge of the specific plot what could the admin  have done to prevent the strike? One thing that was obvious - there was no communication between the CIA and the FBI, and probably not a lot between the CIA and the White House, either. It's a lonely job, and I'm amazed this film team got such access, including footage of CIA hq that I'd thought was always way off the record.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Niether enough comedy nor enough drama, just TMI

Really wanted to like Tig Notaro's series One Mississippi but found it pretty thin gruel - not funny enough as a comedy (Tig playing herself has a wry, or maybe dry, sense of humor and her two radio bits - her character apparently has a talk and music show on an indie station - telling winsome stories largely about her cancer and her mother's untimely early death are a highlight - but not enough of a highlight) nor engaging enough as a drama. Tig goes home to her stepfather's house (I guess it's in Miss but all the references are to N.O. - which maybe is just the nearest airport or major city?) in time to be w/ her mother in her last moments. The stepfather (oddly, we learn from snatches of home movies that he seems to have been w/ the family from T's childhood, though she treats him as a stepfather from a much later re-marriage) is cold and controlling, but begins, by episode 2, to show some flashes of feeling and caring. I guess, over time, we will see Tig grow to love or at least like him - but how much time do we have? There's no drama or crisis or mystery built into this family or this narrative and tho Tig is an appealing character and presence her struggle through her illness - cancer, seemingly now in remission, but leaving her debilitated and suffering from continued diarrhea - is not all that pleasant, nor all that interesting - just TMI. Sorry, but I found the series flat, dull, though maybe not unprofitable.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

The crrepy use of puppets and stop-action in Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa is a disturbing but for me hugely disappointing film - a 90-minute drama told entirely through the use of felt puppets and stop-action animation. The story such as it is tells of a motivational speaker traveling to Cincinnati for one night to give an address and who's going through a crisis in his life - marriage falling apart, he seeks solace first from an old beloved in Cincinnati and then from a woman he meets in the hotel hallway. What if this movie were made w/ actors and not puppets? We wouldn't watch it - it wouldn't even have been made. There is nothing special, unusual, engaging, or except in extremis even credible in Kaufman's story. But does the stop-action make it worth watching? It of course makes the characters less human and recognizable, as if these events could not take place in our world but only in a world of disassociated voices, strange and awkward physical movements, an alternate world that I found creepy and monstrous right from the start. I guess that's the effect K wanted, but for me - it pushed me away from the movie rather than drew me into it. Technique needs to serve a purpose; in this movie, it just fills a vacuum, but fills it with mud.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

The surprising success of Stranger Things

Obviously the Duffer Brothers were not going to tie up all the loose ends and the conclusion of season 1 of Stranger Things, but it's a pretty solid ending to this surprisingly good 8-part series. I kept wondering why I was so interested in this story, as it is on one level just a pastiche of about a hundred sci-fi, fantasy, monster, government conspiracy movies and you can't really buy into the facts of the story - a secret government agency has been kidnapping children and using them as subjects for mind-control experiments but something went wrong and they ended up creating a carnivorous, grotesque monster that is haunting this small Indiana town, whew - but what you can buy into is the relationships among the kids: the 3 pre-teen boys who set out to find their friend who disappeared and step into the middle of this government conspiracy, the high-school kids who take on the monster and who grow and mature over the course of the series, most of all the young girl who was the mind-control subject who escapes from the Energy Dept facility and who yearns for a normal life. The D Brothers to a fine job re-creating the look and mood of the 1980s; one of the sad things about the series, for me, is to watch the boys play gathered in the basement for hours and days playing their fantasy game (seems to be Dungeons and Dragons, or something like it) and to think that, today, they would each be at home online playing the game alone or perhaps in consort with other players around the world. That human bonding of kids at play seems something we may be losing or have lost.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Two versions of a Hemingway story

Watched parts of 2 versions of The Killers, two movies, one from 1946 the others from 1964, both based to varying degrees on the excellent Hemingway story from, I think, the 1930s. The '46 version is considered a classic or at least an early instance of American film noir. In this version, the director and screenwriter stay very close to the text of the Hemingway story - which is the movie's strength and its downfall. For a while, I was completely engaged, thought this was an absolutely terrific noir movie: the first 10 minutes or so show the H story: to hired guns enter a small-town diner and make it clar they're waiting for the arrival of a regular patron and that they're going to kill him. He doesn't show, and a young man who was in the diner - Nick Adams, a frequent H alter ego - goes off to warn the man; the man is dull and listless and says he'll just wait for them to come and kill him, there's nothing he can do. All of this is handled beautifully - the dialog (all almost direct from H) is of course shart and perfect and scary, the lighting is gloomy and sinister, everything's good. The only thing they changed was not telling us the target was a prize fighter (presumably he threw a bout, or failed to do so). But once they're done with the Hemingway part the start to build what becomes pretty quickly a conventional police procedural, as an investigator sets off to figure out who got killed and why. Here the contrast with the Hemingway dialog and scripting does the movie in - what we'd probably tolerate if it were in and of itself, looks and sounds tepid and forced and strained compared with some of H's best writing. The 1964 v., directed by Don Siegel and starring a great Lee Marvin as one of the killers, changes the story radically: now the fighter is a race-car driver, and the killers gun him down in the first 5 minutes or so and spend the rest of the movie trying to track down a million $ that the race-car driver may have absconded with and stashed away. There's a lot of back story about the driver, and it's not all that interesting. The highlights, I hate to say, are the violent acts of the killers - esp the first sequence in which they corner the driver at a school for the blind where he's working as an instructor - so against convention to have these thugs push around a bunch of blind adults to get at their quarry. Another side highlight is R Reagan as the heavy. Hah! The love story is dull and distracting; the movie's OK but it's only very loosely based on the Hemingway original, and the original is much, much better.

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Very entertaining Stranger Things - as long as you can willingly suspend your disbelief

Half-way through the first season of The Duffer Brothers' Netflix drama, Stranger Things, and finding it surprisingly entertaining. Yes, it requires and enormous suspension of disbelief - as the story involves some kind of conspiracy centering on the U.S. Department of Energy facility in Indiana, with scientists using a young girl ( the daughter of the lead scientist) as a subject for mind-control experiments that someone get way out of control and produce a blob-alien all-devouring monster that is attacking children in the small Indiana town, got it? You really don't have to, as I find the sci-fi-conspiracy elements uninteresting in and of themselves - but they're a vehicle for the Duffers to get at the personalities of the town, in particular the children in the schools whose friends are abducted and who pledge to find them. Also, Winona Ryder is very good as the mom of the first abducted child and who believes he is communicating with her via electric currents. As in so many scifi movies, everyone thinks she is delusional, suffering from a serious breakdown, while of course her only problem is that she's in a movie about the paranormal - we get it, and we feel for her in her misery. The Duffers do a nice job w/ the 1980s period setting - the topical details and the style all seem right, and give the series a little bit of a creepy flavor - a la Blue Velvet, perhaps. The greatest influence, though, is the huge debt to ET (as M pointed out): the adult scientists cruel and lacking in understanding, the sensitive lost alien (in this case the girl who's been the subject of the experiments), the contrast between the dramatic and unusual plot and the mundane domestic life of the town and of the time - kids riding around on bikes in a seemingly safe community, w/ the unknown lurking around the bend.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

A great start to My Golden Days, and then what happened?

Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days got off to a great start - but then what happened?! A great beginning as Paul Dedalus (yes, we catch the allusion), a middle-aged anthropologist (as we later learn) leaves a central Asian republic heading home for France (where he had not lived for many years) and says farewell to a woman who works in the embassy and w/ whom he's been in love, or at least having an affair. All OK until he's stopped in a French (I think) airport and told there's a problem w/ his passport. That leads to an interrogation - French officials think he's been a Soviet spy - and flashback to his youth in southern (?) France and an adventure in Russia (I won't give it away), and a great story seems to be building: Apparently there's another Stephan Dedalus elsewhere in the world, same name, dob, place of birth. Now the spoilers: After the matter is explained, and we think we're building toward a crisis, the pin gets pulled and we learn the other Paul has been dead for 3 years, so what's the point? Then Paul has other youth memories, in particular, of his first huge college crush - and for the next hour we are faced with the tedious, predictable, terribly familiar romance story: his pursuit of "unobtainable" girl, he wins her heart, he goes off to college, they write to each other (dutifully captured in voice-over, a device that Truffaud used well and more or less retired). Completely uninteresting stuff, made worse by the fact that there are interesting characters on the periophery whom Desplechins (had to look up his name) leaves unexamined: the odd mother who dies when Paul is 11, the brute of a father who for no apparent reason later in life turns out to be a kind and friendly dad, the younger brother who's drawn to guns and violence, the attractive sister who believes she's "laide" ie ugly - why can't we learn more about these people? Why start a really good story and let it spin away into thin air? I couldn't finish watching - just didn't care after 1+ hour. Rather be reading.