Who knew Adam Sandler could act?

The Josh and Benny Safdie crime/thriller Uncut Gems (2019) is really Adam Sandler’s picture, as he energetically portrays a maniacal, scheming, borderline criminal dealer in jewelry and watches, sports memorabilia, and most notably precious minerals (the eponymous gem is a 1,000 carat opal; the movie opens w/ a scene of some Ethiopian miners discovering the gem,which they sneak from the mine owners – good – and sell for about $1,000 – about 1 percent of its street value). But the movie really begins with Sandler, as Howard Ratner, in his tight-security office showcasing the gem to Kevin Garnett, playing himself; he gives the gem to KG (as he, w/ false bonhomie, calls Garnett) on loan, which sets off a string of reactions, deals, and double-crosses, as Ratner/Sandler places some ridiculous bets, pawns a Celtics ring Garnett gave him for security, and deals w/ the many entanglements of his family life, such as it is, and his affair w/ one of his salesclerks – and why would she put up w/ him anyway? Anyway, who knew he could act? Sandler is great in this role – though admittedly it’s a one-note portrayal, two hours of pure mania and deception. You can’t help but watch him as he self-destructs, but the movie never builds any sympathy for him, either. The pace is frantic and relentless, though I felt the energy flagged near the grand finale as we watch a Celtics game on which Ratner has placed a ridiculously risky wager. At the end – spoiler here – can anyone really feel sad that Ratner’s shot to death? It was a relief to have him just shut up.

A most unusual stand-up show in which the comic examines her darkest moments and deepest beliefs

Hannah Gadsby’s hour-long live-from-Sydney comic stand-up show, Nanettte (2018), on Netflix, is, at the end, a knockout: A must unusual comic gig that mixes humor – much of it about Gadsby’s coming out and life as a Lesbian in her mid-30s or so – with some unusual comic riffs – who’d have thought you could work into a standup show a long and very funny series of riffs on art history (her college major, as she notes). But at the center of the program are HG’s heartfelt and powerful thoughts about differences, oppression, repression, suppression, male-white-privilege, and the need and urge to “fit in.” Recounting what’s in this show, however, inevitably gives the wrong impression: It’s not a harangue or a guilt trip, through there are many pointed remarks about male cruelty and violence. Rather, the program does what much great literature does or tries to do: Gives us access to the consciousness or the consciousness or another. HG’s holds nothing back –and at its most poignant, and original, moments, the show becomes her public struggle to ascertain he value of her work: She says several times that she has to give up stand-up comedy, as it’s not the right or the best vehicle for her to communicate her ideas and beliefs. The show examines its own premises and its own worth: She notes, correctly, that comedy is a two-stroke engine (my metaphor), set-up and punchline – and that doesn’t give her sufficient space to tell her story and express her deepest beliefs. So we see on stage an artist wrestling with, struggling with, the adequacy of her material and with her very being. (Evidently, HG has not given up yet on her milieu, as she has another hour-long special due this week on Netflix.)

It requires suspension of disbelief, but many reasons to watch Giri/Haji

You really have to just give yourself up to the flow of the story to enjoy the powerful and unusual multicultural gangland/crime drama/melodrama 2019 British-Japanese co-production, Giri/Haji (Dury/Shame). Is the story credible? No, not at all – but you don’t want to watch this and expect it to be an account of how police (or gangs for that matter) actually operate; it’s not the Sopranos, not the Wire, nor is it mean to be. It’s tempting to say it’s like a Japanese action comic or manga, but none of the characters has superpowers and there’s no element of surreal fantasy (though there are some well-crafted dreamlike sequences). What we do have this: a Japanese police officer (Kenzo, played vby Takehiro Hira) is ordered to go to London to bring home for justice his long-disappeared brother (Yuto, Yosuke Kubozuka) who’s now wanted on a charge of killing a leader of one of the two powerful, warring Japanese crime syndicates. There’s a long and complicated history between these two brothers (cf the Providence-set American series Brotherhood) – and in fact the story line was, for me at least, sometimes difficult to follow, involving multiple shifts in time and cross cuts between a story line in London and one in Tokyo. That said, it’s enough to just follow the development of the relationships among the leads and the secondary characters, esp London police officer Sarah (Kelly Macdonald) and troubled rent-boy Rodney (Will  Sharpe). There are some eye-closing scenes of violence and many shootouts – plus some surprisingly tender and thoughtful scenes as the brothers come to terms w/ one another and as Kenzo struggles with his foundering marriage and w/ his headstrong 16-year-olod daughter (her relationship w/ a much-older woman is surprisingly unexamined in this drama). The final episode includes one of the most unusual and moving surreal sequences I’ve ever seen in a crime show – a total surprise and worth the admission price. And of  course the doors are left open for an inevitable 2^nd season. All told, it’s a powerful production, worth watching and not examining all too closely for its sometimes wavering credibility.

Some fine moments in Truffaut's late [not Last, see correction below] film

Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) is far from his best film but it was his last film (he died, too young, in 1984) [Correction, 5/22: it was not his last film, it was his third-from last] and it holds up well over the years and is still worth watching. In brief it’s about a small theater company (the Montmartre) in Paris in the early 1940s under Nazi occupation; the Nazis, using obsequious French so-called journalists and drama critics, have purged all theater companies of  Jewish actors/producers/owners and evaluate each script and performance to exhume Jewish elements and traits, whatever that’s supposed to mean. A horrible and frightful time – and this theater company pulls together to launch its new show, a plaintive melodrama, it seems. The head of the company is played by Catherine Deneuve, beautiful as always; her Jewish husband has supposedly left the country but actually lives in the cellar of the theater, from where he listens to all the rehearsals and provides his notes and comments – a nice conceit, but pretty much impossible. Gerard Depardieux plays the male lead in the show-within-the-show, an ambiguous character at first but who ultimately rises up against the Nazi censorship and leaves the company to serve in the Resistance. The film reminds me of 2 I’ve seen recently. The obvious comparison is w/ Truffaut’s Day for Night; that one gave us an inside look at the process of making a film – this one gives an inside look at producing a play, though it’s in no way as complete and surprising and bold as D4N. The film also calls to mind the screwball comedy To Be or not To Be, about a theater company under the Nazi occupation of Poland – a much more uproarious film and produced during the uncertainty and terror of the war. Last Metro has its heart in the right place, of course, though the Nazis [and collaborators, I should add - 5/22] are a pretty easy target by 1980; this film was not in and of itself about the resistance – it’s nothing compared w/, say, Army of Shadows – but Truffaut does a great job managing a large cast of eccentric characters, and the film has some fine sequences, including a bit of a surprise at the ending (no spoilers here), even though Truffaut had to cheat a little bit to bring the ending to life – we’ll excise that; I was his last film [see correction above], and it was Truffaut.

An intriguing film from Iran that makes us ponder the nature of film narrative -- documentary v scripted

Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 film from Iran, Close-up, is a complex and thoroughly intriguing combination of feature film and documentary, telling a simple and strange story in a new and surprising way that makes us ponder the very nature of film narrative itself. In essence, the film is based on a true crime (if it is actually a crime at all) in which a young (30-something maybe?) man is on a bus, reading a novel or screenplay by a well-known Iranian film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf; when the woman sitting next to him notes what he’s reading, the man pretends to be MM himself, and he insinuates his way into the woman’s life – offering to come to her house to help her younger son into a career in film. He then proceeds to visit the family over time, telling them he would like to do a movie about the family and set it in their house. They gradually become suspicious about his behavior and have him arrested; he is charged and his case goes to court. At some point AK became interested in this strange story and stepped in: AK films much of the court hearing on the charges, and then – quite amazingly – gets the man’s permission, and family’s to tell act out the whole backstory for this film. So some of the footage is documentary (the court scenes, primarily) and some scripted and acted – but with the actual family and the man (Ali Sabzian) re-creating their roles and interactions. All told it’s a strange and sometimes moving story, and we’re never quite sure of the status of Ali: Is he a criminal and imposter? A sweet man hoping to live out his dreams of artistic success? A disturbed young man who cannot recognize the ramificaitons of his odd and aberrant behavior?

A few notes on the final season and the conclusion of Schitt's Creek, and no spoilers!

Just a few notes on the final season, Season 6, of the Eugene and Daniel Levy series Schitt’s Creek, with no spoilers: There’s no doubt that this excellent series, which is both hilarious and completely engaging, is one of the few comedy-miniseries of our time in which the show gets better with each passing season and ends on the right note at the right time, going out on a high rather than stretching out the plot till it’s hanging by a string. It’s also one of the few shows in which the characters evolve over the course of the production – they all are (six years) older, tougher, wisely, and more worldly at the end than at the outset. There’s universal agreement that not only did the characters become better people over the course of the six sesons but also that the show itself became better – sharper, funnier, more endearing. At the first episode, we saw a family, the Rose family (Eugene and Daniel Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Annie Murphy) suddenly bankrupt and forced to sell off the baronial estate and move into a rundown motel in the eponymous village. The humor, such as it was, involved their discomfort and the crude and bumptious behavior of the town residents. Over time, the beauty of this series is that the Rose family gradually becomes part of the community, changing their lives and the lives of their neighbors. Two aspects deserve special mention: First, though the homosexual love between and, in the last season, marriage of David Rose (Daniel Levy) and his partner Patrick (Noah Reid) is a key plot element but it is never treated as an “issue,” never opposed or questioned or confronted to make plot points – it’s just part of life in our time. Second, there are so many ways in which the final season could have gotten cheesy or fallen back on the cliches of a “Hollywood Ending,” with love and happiness for all, but the show never veers off course and builds to a completely moving, credible, and somewhat open ending that seems and feels just right. The series, after its rocky start, seems right all around and is one of the best family-drama miniseries, along with the in many ways quite different series, Friday Night Lights.

An excellent espionage series about an Israeli spy undercover in Syria

The Gideon Raff-created British series The Spy (2019), starring Sascha Baron Cohen as the Israeli spy Eli Cohen (no relation, apparently), is another in the long run of high-quality suspenseful espionage miniseries, though this one with a particular plaudit: The often hard-to-believe story is in fact based, somewhat closely I think, on true events (we see actual footage of Eli Cohen in the final episode). The essence of the story is that Eli, an Egyptian-born Muslim now married to an Israeli jew (ca 1962) is recruited by Mossad to leave his wife and daughter and go undercover as a spy in Syria, an assignment that he, a true Israeli patriot and an extremely brave and wily man, takes on willingly – even though he can tell noone, not even his wife, what he’s up to; he tells her and others that he has a new job in procurement that requires extensive travel (hard to believe that his wife can’t see through this, but even so he did have to live apart from her for months at a time). He goes first to Argentina, then on to Damascus, where he becomes something like a Jeffrey Epstein figure, insinuating his way into top ranks of government/military and winning favor through lavish entertainments and sex orgies (in which he pointedly does not participate). There are many close calls and escapes – no way to tell how many of these are based on fact; most I think are invented or posited for the series, as EC never wrote a memoir – but we see up close the tension and the challenges of this kind of undercover work, far from the glamour of a James Bond or the quite competence of a Smiley. At times the series is a little heavy-handed, in particular that we never understand how much his wife knows or doesn’t know, but overall it’s a fine and exceedingly tense spy drama and a look at the heart of Israeli espionage in the 1960s (though note that, unlike the Israeli series Fauda, The Spy makes no attempt at a positive or sympathetic portrayal of life in the Muslim families in the Arab world).

Seinfeld still develops plenty of great material from "nothing"

You would think that, eventually Jerry Seinfeld would run out of material, as he’s made his long and brilliant career based on commentary about the minutia of daily life. How much is there left to say about the mundane and the trivial, about, as his eponymous show wryly noted, nothing? But his new (and last?, or so he’s hinted) hour-long comedy special on Netflix, 23 Hours to Kill, shows that he continue to work miracles. He doesn’t rely on shtick or insult or the day’s news, and he still finds plenty of great material in the mundane. Who would think he could have side-splitting routines about the U.S. Postal Service, about cell phones, about text messages, about cars w/ dual climate control? But there it is, terrific stuff coming from field that you’d think were dry as deserts. He also has plenty to say about marriage, and if at times he nears the brink of sexism in his stereotyping of irascible women, he more than makes up for that w/ his commentary on men in general and husbands in particular. And his routine opening about friendship, entertainment, dining out, and our cultural sense of time (nobody wants to be where they are, we always want to “get somewhere else,” home or to the office or to the show or off the airplane) – any way, he makes it work. The only down spot on this routine is through no fault of JS, but the segment on hospitals and dying, obviously developed some months ago, feels a little scary and in bad taste today – a shame and a caution, but it shouldn’t steer anyone away from this show.

Bergman's great political film, Shame

Ingmar Bergman's great film fro 1968, Shame, was, I would suspect, his attempt at a response to those, including many on the American left, who'd criticized him for the apolitical nature of his many great films from the 50s and 60s, beautiful chamber dramas sometimes set in the middle ages, in any event, largely remote from the issues that were ricking the world in Europe and America in the 1960s. So in this terrific film his takes on some of his typical material, the strains and break-up of a marriage, and puts it in the context of war and revolution. The married couple, Eva (Liv Ullman) and Jan (Max von Sydow) are living on an island (a large one it seems) in an unnamed country; they are living in near poverty on a small farm that they can barely manage; we learn that they are classical musicians cast aside as their orchestra was disbanded; Eva is much tougher than Jan, who suffers from some kind of depression and over-riding anxeity. We soon see why: there as an ongoing war, in which it seems that their "island" has been taken over by an occupying force - somewhat like the Germans in Norway in WWII - while a rebel force is attacking the island to "liberate" it, the the liberators seems to be roughly based on the Soviets or at least on some violent and dangerous army of occupation. Eva and Jan are, of course, caught in the middle - threatened and occupying army, accused by the rebels of being collaborators. There are some hugely powerful "intimate" scenes, too many to list, and some great moments of action and mayhem (the destruction of their small farm is particularly powerful) and of the flight across the island hoping to board a fishing boat that may take them to safety. Sven Nyquist's photography is great as always, including some powerful scenes shot w/ a handheld camera, unusual for Nyquist I think. Not sure if this film assuaged Bergman's critics, but it stands up well as a powerful film, just as scary today as it was 50 years ago.

The extremely tense Israeli series Fauda, Season 3

Like its predecessors, Season 3 of the Israeli series Fauda is as tense and gripping as anything on TV, start to finish - and of course it leaves the door open to a 4th season. The story continues with the adventures of a small team of Israeli agents assigned to undercover, anti-terrorism work against the radical Islamists and Palestinian activists at work on the West Bank, the Palestine-controlled segments of Jerusalem, and - in this season - on the extremely dangerous (to the Israelis) Gaza strip. The season begins as the central character, Doron, is undercover working as a boxing instructor in an Arab community (on the West Bank? - like most American viewers, I'm not familiar with all the geography and the names of the many competing armies and interest groups, making it a little hard to navigate some moments in this series) to gain intelligence about planned terrorist attacks; he's "outed" leading to a # of crises and culminating in a complex and daring series of episodes in which the Israeli team penetrates into Gaza in an attempt to free and rescue two young Israelis held captive as bait for a prisoner exchange. I think what really makes this series is the terrific editing and use of sound, which makes just about every moment a point of high tension and anxiety - but it does so w/ relatively limited violence, it's just anticipation - as, for example, the team works its way through an underground maze of tunnels leading into Gaza or as Doron shelters a wounded comrade as they hole up an a commandeered apartment as a manhunt takes place across the maze of Gaza neighborhoods. A # of story lines, some involving the often-strained relationships among the team members and the inevitable stress these paramilitary operations put on marriages and families - but that said the series is mostly about action and risk, though action presented in what feels like a realistic and credible - not a "superhero," comic-book - manner. The series has been criticized by many factions in and around Israel, with many Palestinians believing that the series always portrays them as perpetrators rather than victims of oppression and many Israelis believing that the series goes too far in portraying the Palestinians, particularly in their family life, as sympathetic characters. Fauda must be doing something right!