Improv on film - it doesn't quite work

The recent Don't Think Twice gets off to a fine start as we meet the 6 members of a Improv theater troupe, The Commune, whose name, bearing, and even the Dylan reference in the movie title invoke the spirit of the 1960s, and the movie will inevitably remind you of some classics of and about that era, particularly "reunion" pix such as Return of the Secaucus 7 and the Big Chill (as well as the Swedish movie about life in a commune), but the problem is this isn't really a commune, it's a troupe of actors who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time together - the movie is unclear and uncertain on this point: at one time I thought they all lived together in a loft space, but then it seems several of them have their own NYC/Brooklyn digs - apartments that are far too clean and lavish for anyone in a hand-to-mouth theater group. What started as a good, almost documentary film about Improv theater becomes a romance drama as one member of the troupe gets picked for the cast of a show modeled on SNL, spurring jealousy, suspicion, etc. among the other members. There's potential here, as each of the characters wrestles with his or her future - at what point in your life do you realize you're not going to fulfill your early dreams and move on? Never? - but I have to say the movie didn't exactly grow on me - in fact it grew off me, as the characters seemed less (not more) real over the course of the movie. I never quite got or bought into the interactions among the members of troupe - except when they're on stage: the film did give me a great sense of the difficult of managing an Improv performance. Otherwise, this film seemed to me like actors in their 40s playing characters in their 30s who act like kids in their 20s.

Fine and fun Follies performances at the Venus

Great time last night at the Venus for the 43rd (?!) Providence Newspaper Guild Follies; once again, the gods have been kind to the Follies crew, providing plenty of material from 2016, and the crew capitalized on the bounty. Have to say that the UHIP number, a take on the Adele smash Hello, with Alisha Pena as a woman deprived of benefits and Cheena D'Arauja - Desir as a hapless benefits officer, was not only the highlight of the show but probably, pace Michael Evora, the best vocal # in Follies history - they just killed it, with beautiful, simple staging and scoring as well. Other great moments included Tracy McGraw, Gina Raimondo's double, as the ice queen from Frozen, all the women in the cast in a great Yoga Pants Parade # to the tune of "You Don't Own Me," a funny skit on the Russian sub sighted off the R.I. coast, and a hilarious Cooler-Warmer # at the top of the show w/ half the cast in beach attire and the rest in ski jackets and wool caps. Over the years, the backstage crew has gotten better and better, and this year the costumes were outstanding - anyone who's seen the backstage space at this show will be even more amazed at how they can execute all the costume and props transitions in a (mostly) seamless process. The "Smith Brothers," Andy and Steve did a great job directing and more than held their own on stage as well. Mystery guests? Less said the better - but at least they didn't eclipse the fine and fun performances from the Follies crew.

If you buy the premise, The Fall is an intelligent, engaging series

Props to Allan Cubbitt, writer and director of the Netflix series The Fall, which had us captivated throughout Season 2 - this one of the rare series that improves as it moves along. There are a lot of plot developments along the way, but, unlike so many police procedurals, most of them do make sense and they're not dependent on fortuitous events or odd coincidences to move the narrative along. Gillian Anderson is fine in the lead as a British detective sent to Belfast to lead the search for a serial killer, and the supporting cast carries its weight as well. My quibbles from the outset still do hold, however: It's really not possible for me to believe that the serial killer (we know his ID from the first episode - this isn't a traditional "whodunit") - could pass as a good citizen, husband, dad, family man, that he could lead a double-life for years, almost a decade, without his wife having even a hint that he is deeply disturbed. If you can put that aside, however, and just go with the premise, and if you have the stomach to watch some of the killer's brutal attacks on women (and one man), it's an engaging series through Season 2 - honestly not sure where it's headed in Season 3, as it seems most of the plot lines are tied up pretty tightly at the end of Season 2.

Reasons to watch The Fall

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself (Whitman). Despite most recent post on several TV episodics that I've abandoned, for various reasons, we have decided to continue watching the Netflix series The Fall, at least through season 1. In this Belfast-set series a dour and determined Gillian Anderson gets assigned to the Belfast PD to lead the hunt for a serial killer who preys on professional women. Some aspects of the series are ridiculous, and I from the start just couldn't buy into a serial killer with such a Jekyll-Hyde personality: a good dad and socially committed worker (a grief or bereavement counselor, no less) by day and a deranged psychopath murderer at night; a really smart and devious criminal who, by the way, keeps souvenirs of each killing and stashes them in his young daughter's bedroom. Say, what? But over time this series did grow on me; I never believed it, but wanted to see how it would all turn out. The series breaks with convention in that we know from the outset who did it; like Crime and Punishment, it's about the how rather than the who or the what: how does Anderson and the PD track down the killer, and what effect does the tightening noose have on this deranged man? There are a number of subplots involving police corruption (and ties to one of the victims, which I still don't understand), and far too much dizzying cross-cutting between scenes taking place simultaneously, but a strong, strongly feminist Anderson carries the show and other time we learn more about the killer. The show carries on for at least 2 more seasons, so you can surmise that we won't or don't have all the answers at the conclusion of Season 1. All told, it's worth staying with the series, although it's not a portrait of cultures and communities in conflict, as in The Wire.

Abandonment: 3 episodics we're no longer following

Generally I post only on TV series when I’ve committed to watching at least a whole season, but there are quite a few episodics that I start and know, sometimes by the first episode, that I’m not interested, for one reason or another, we abandon ship. There are so many great TV episodics out there, why not move on when a series is boring, disheartening, or just plain dumb? (Same principle holds for reading novels.) Here are quick notes on 3 that I’ve abandoned. First, Bosch, despite strong recommendation from friend AW w/ whom I almost always agree. Series creator Michael Connelly is well-known as the crime-novelist who pretty much owns LA, but from this series it seems to me that what works in a novel doesn’t translate directly to screen. Despite a pretty good opening chase scene, the series quickly declines into a very ordinary police procedural, with all the too-frequent flaws of the genre: highly improbable clues that turn up in just the right places, completely absurd depction of media coverage, and no capacity whatsoever to develop a romantic relationship: the dialogue between Bosch and the female cop he hooks up with is practically comic in its ineptitude. Add to that the failure to devel B’s personality as a cop who plays by his own rules etc. (compare this w/ McNulty in the Wire and you’ll see the difference between cliché and character), and after 2 episodes I’m out. Then there’s the Netflix Jillian Anderson as Belfast detective series, The Fall, which revolves around a deranged serial killer his stalks women, kills them, paints their nails, and goes home and hides locks of hair and other mementos an an alcove in his daughter’s bedroom. Nice family guy – and a therapist to boot! Happens all the time. Sure. Next? Finally, a special case, the Broitish series Peaky Blinders about a gang that controlled crime in Birmingham in the year after the First World War, and that touches on the conflicts among various groups, including the British and Irish police, the IRA, the radical workers groups, and various ethnic communities. I found this one pretty gripping and satisfyingly complex, much like Boardwalk Empire, but my viewing partner found it too graphically violent, so we’re out on this one, too. Would add that the title – the name of the street gang – is the stupidest ever, sounds like a kids’ cartoon hero, and may be part of the reason nobody watches this series.

Sing Street is likable but falls far short of the standard Carney set w/ Once

John Carney's 2016 Dublin-set film, Sing Street, is a reprise, of sorts, of his success with the amazing and enthralling Once from about a decade ago. Like Once, SS is about aspiring musicians in Dublin, but in this case they're not near-pro buskers but high-school kids in a tough Xtian Bros academy; as in so many such movies the band members are social misfits and outcasts who come together over their music. The strength of the movie is the charm of the young musicians, watching them change and evolve, watching them take on the school bully and the tyrannic school principal, watching the lead singer pursue the unattainable beauty, and watching him find his separate piece and navigate the shoals of family tension, divorce, and the failure of his once-promising older brother, now lost to the fog of hashish. That's all to the good, but what doesn't work so well is: the amazing transformation of the eponymous band into a really fine David Bowie/punk Anglo-Irish rock group ca 1985 (the time period of the film), watching the bully w/out much pushback give up his ways and sign on as the band's roadie, and mostly watching the lead singer actually get the unattainable girl, who is much too old and sophisticated for him, and watching them head off together for a new life in London - at all of 16 years old - a completely absurd and unneeded ending. Any comparison w/ Once may be unfair, as that film's ending was bittersweet and fully credible rather than contrived; another more fair comparison may be with the fine Swedish film We are the Best, in which a (girl) rock band found some success, even though their performances are pretty awful, but at a high-school gym level - it's much more true to life about their relationships and their talent levels. Sing Street, for all its flaws, is still very likable and watchable, but it could have been so much better if Carney had thought about how to make this story seem at least a tad realistic.

A rare psychodrama with a plot that keeps us thinking and guessing: The Handmaiden

Park Chan-Wook's 2016 Korean film, The Handmaiden, centers on a country estate in which the manor is built half in traditional Japanese style and the other half an English manor house with Victorian era furnishings and decor, and this bifurcated architecture is a metaphor for the theme of this film: a young Korean woman arrives at the house where she is to serve as the handmaiden for the young woman who will inherit the vast wealth of the estate, and we think we're embarked on one of the many servant-governess stories so common in English literature (and film) - Jane Eyre, Turn of the Screw, Rebecca, et al. - but then the movie takes a dramatic shift and we're in a completely different film, in which the characters are underworld figures plotting and scheming, with and against one another, in various interlocked and conflicted attempts to steal the (ill-gotten) fortune of this household. I won't give any plot elements away except to say that there are several complete turnarounds in the plot, various surprises, and a lot of complex scheming that at times is hard to follow, though you don't necessarily need to track every nuance. There are some intense scenes of torture and abuse (not watchable) and some intense sex scenes (watchable), and even some moments of dark humor. It's a long film, but engaging throughout - like a long and complex novel, with strong lead characters who go after one another with murderous intensity. Chan-Wook, part of a great new wave of Korean directors, also directed that dark drama Oldboy. Like that one, this film is not for everyone nor for every mood; it's unsettling, demands a lot of attention, a rare psychodrama that keeps us guessing and thinking from start to end.

Victoria suffers by comparison with The Crown

Been watching the BBC series Victoria primarily to get a brush-up, however superficial, about British history. Essentially, it's a True Romance version of the Victorian era, or at least of Victoria's ascent to the throne and her marriage to Albert. Unfortunately for this series, it will inevitably be compared w/ the great Netflix series from last year, The Crown, which brilliantly dramatized the early years of the reign of QE2. Whereas The Crown was thought-provoking and dramatically tense, showed real character development of the course of the season (as well as character un-development, as we watch the marginalization and decline of King Phillip), and sumptuous presentation of period detail, Victoria strives for effect in each realm and comes up far short. In precisely the same mode, we have a woman unexpectedly become Queen of England, faces the judgments of all those around her and the stifling expectations of family, confides in the PM but gradually has to move out of his shadow, marries for love but inevitably puts her husband into an awkward, subsidiary position - but every one of these points is developed and presented w/ much greater subtlety and with in The Crown. Victoria is hindered by stolid writing (there are a few good laugh lines, particularly those taking pokes as the aristocracy, but far too many points when I could hear a line of dialogue coming minutes before the words are spoken), needlessly long takes, repetition of key points in case we missed the point, dull and drab interiors and a limited palate of exteriors, and an extremely tired upstairs-downstairs dramatic structure that does little to illuminate Victoria's character. On the plus side, my quick checks show that the series has so far been pretty accurate on historical detail and Jenna Coleman is winning in the title role. Worth watching to a degree, and I'll probably stay w/ it out of curiosity about the era, but not a great dramatic statement.

The OA: = Over And out.

A few words about the Netflix series The OA, which I've watched for 2 episodes and that's most likely going to be it. Clearly, this series is a Netflix attempt to double down on the surprise success of Stranger Things: once again a female protagonist appears out nowhere in a comfortable suburban community, carrying with her some complex and secret history of abuse, unable to communicate her experience directly, bearer of mysterious powers, assembles around her a cadre of supporters, most of them outsiders or misfits, and, despite dire warnings from authority figures, embarks on a rescue mission of sorts. Specifically in The OA, a young woman, who had been missing for 7 years, suddenly reappears and is reunited with her (adoptive) parents; when she had disappeared, she was blind - now she can see. OK, so here's why The OA fails whereas Stranger Things held our interest and attention. First of all, we accept that in a scifi, horror, or supernatural story such as Stranger Things, there will be forces at work beyond rational explanation - mind-reading, disappearance into another dimension, ability to control animals, and so forth. That's the premise we must suspend disbelief and buy into. But when we buy into that bargain, we expect the rest of the narrative to be clear and pure: In Stranger Things, the lost character had been held captive in some kind of mysterious government science experiment, which we are gradually learning about. The back story in The OA is so ridiculously complicated and convoluted, involving a childhood in Russia, a drowning and near-death experience, an abduction, and on and on, that we lose the thread and lose interest. Writing a narrative is not the same thing as creating a series of incidents, sorry. Second, in scifi etc., accepting the one fantastic premise works only if everything else in the narrative is acceptable as realistic or naturalistic narrative. I'm willing to believe at least part of the back story the The OA (Russian birth, blindness, super powers, etc.) if her (her name is Prairie, but she calls herself The OA, still not explained - stupid title, anyway) behavior is in any way normal and credible. So if you can believe that a 21-year-old blind woman who's led a completely sheltered life in a loving home would suddenly head, alone, to NYC w/ no money and just a small backpack & a violin (because he has a vision of the statue of liberty, no less), could figure out how to live on the streets as a subway busker (still looking clean and healthy), and why she would head off in a private plane with a man who approaches her in the subway and says he'd like make her part of his study on near-death experiences - well, please, I can't buy this behavior for one second (ditto for the kids and, believe it or not, the high-school teacher who agree to be part of her rescue team and stay up all night by candlelight to hear her story - completely unrealistic characters, absurd behavior).

A movie so bad it's almost (but not quite) worth watching

The biopic Jackie is so bad on so many levels that it's almost worth watching just to see how a movie can so completely misfire - almost, that is, except that one of the ways in which it's bad is that it's boring: has no idea how to stage a scene (time after time the hapless Natalie Portman badly miscast as "Jackie" Kennedy stares into space as if she's in some long-lost 60s European experimental drama or stands so close to another character - such as her father confessor - that it looks as if they're about to embrace), no idea how to build dramatic tension (obviously the assassination is the key moment, but with the film wandering about through various flashbacks and limply hanging on to its tired framing narrative, a reporter comes to Hyannisport to interview the widowed Jackie, that the narrative never has clear direction or purpose), and only a loose grasp on the politics of the transition for JFK to LBJ (much better dramatized in the many Johnson and Kennedy bios or in the recent All the Way.) The drama such as it is involves the back and forth about the funeral arrangements: open casket or not, procession in DC or not, Jackie and others on foot or in cars, etc. - when the procession finally takes place the film doesn't come close to capturing that actual sorrow and horror of that day - as all who were alive then will remember. Among the many flaws, let's put the relentless and monotonous score at the top - pounding through every scene, every moment, even the funeral march, when the sound of muffled drums from the actual event would have said it all - I can still remember that drumbeat +50 years later. May I also note that, if you're going to build your entire film within a frame story of a reporter interviewing the main character - a pretty shopworn device but let that go - you might at least have a sense of how this kind of interview would actually take place: there would certainly be aides around, and most likely a photographer, and the reporter would almost definitely record the interview - and did this take place in one sitting? Over several days? And what do we gain from this interview - it should be something we now know but never appeared in the story, for example: at least some new insight into this much publicized world-famous figure. But no, there's nothing we know at the end that most viewers wouldn't know at the outset. I could go on, but enough flogging. This one's DOA.

Outsider artists, and the strange and disturbing life story of Daniel Johnston

Jeff Feuerzeig's 2005 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, is another documentary about an outsider artist - an ever-intriguing little subgenre of 21st-century American film - in this case a man from West Virginia who spent his time in high school making frenetic and whimsical Super8 films, engaging in comic-book art, and composing antic songs influenced to a degree by the greats of his (and our) time, notably Dylan and the Beatles. Throughout h.s. his behavior became increasingly erratic and eccentric, passing from creative and witty to strange and obsessed. He passed through a few colleges, eventually left school, drifted to Austin, Texas, which adopted him as part of its punk music scene. He was at the right place, right time - his work was punk in its nascent days and punk to the extreme. He can't sing at all, his guitar playing is primitive, his musical compositions are OK but definitely garage-band and not complex or terribly original, his lyrics are strange and full of his odd obsessions (some comic-book based - he was drawn to Casper the Friendly Ghost - some religious, with rants about Satan). On stage he was so bad yet so earnest that he seemed a perfect emblem for the amateur and rough nature of punk; audiences, at least in Austin, went wild for him, and he drew attention from MTV, and then agents, etc. - but his behavior became increasingly erratic, leading to hospitalizations, several arrests, lots of medication. At the time of the film, he is heavily medicated, not writing music any longer, in horrible physical condition, but focusing on his comic-cartoon-influenced artwork, which sells for substantial sums. In most ways it's a very sad movie, as this Johnston is seriously mentally ill and harms many people, including himself. We never, or at least I never, sensed that he was or could have been a great artist; a # of his songs have been covered by other artists - notably Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Flaming Lips (you can see how these guys would be drawn to this kind of outsider music art) - but there is no way his opus can compare w/ the great songwriters of our time (despite efforts in the film to compare him w/ the similarly afflicted Brian Wilson). More closely, he's something like the William Hung phenomenon of some years back - so bad he's almost good, along with the sense that the audience is uneasily aware of his naivete and fragile mental state. The film may remind some of the excellent Marwencol, about an outsider artist w/ a similar fascination, or obsession, with an impossible love.