A new film from Russia (!) that is sure to be considered a classic

 Who would expect a great film to be coming to us from  Russia of all places, not known for the excellence of its contemporary cinema, but here comes the (poorly titled) historical drama Beranpole (2019) and by any measure its a rare film that we can immediately call a classic. Set in Leningrad at the end of WWII (1945), it's at least in part a look at the complete disruption of Soviet society after the brutality and the losses of the war; people are pouring back into the city, but so many are wounded, physically and psychologically (or both), and the poverty and bleak conditions of a Russian winter permeate over moment of the film. Within this bleakness there are glimpses of beauty - notably the terrific designs of the crowded apartments with their colorful wall hangings and carpeting - yet everyone is bearing a terrible burden. The central (eponymous) character, played by the striking Viktoria Miroschnichenko (!), is caring for a young child entrusted to her by a woman she says was a comrade in arms during the war; the child suffers a bad fate, and when the child's mother - Vasilisa Perelygina - turns up there are many complications, none of which I will reveal - but will note a # of fantastic scenes: the clinic, the baths, Beanpole's first fit, sex in the car, fighting around a table (incredible camera work), the twirl scene, meet the parents - probably others as well: this film moves from one great, indelible moment to the next. Strangely, I heard that a reviewer compared this film w/ War and Peace, which I think is totally off the mark: Nothing about military strategy, not a glorification in any way of the military, no families of nobility, lots of disturbing moral dilemmas, and strangest of all, nothing that reflects well on the current state of affairs in Russia unless the message is "that was then, this is now." I don't know for sure how factual Beanpole is re post-war Russia and military life, but I read that it was based on reporting by Svetlana Alexievich, who won a Nobel Prize in literature for her nonfiction writing - the veracity only adds to the excellence of this film (Kanitemir Balagov, 29 years old, directed!). 

A movie worth missing: Midnight Sky

 Here's a movie that's worth missing: The overly familiar and pointedly ridiculous space odyssey (did we need another) the Midnight Sky, starring and directed by George Clooney, who ought to know better (stars directing themselves rarely works btw). GC plays the role of what appears to be the last man on earth: Some kind of unexplained radioactive disaster has killed most of the world's population and some survivors to try to endure in underground outposts (never explained nor depicted); GC is one of the few left behind, manning a radio outpost in the Arctic and dying of cancer (thus, expendable?). A space ship with an all-star crew is headed home after an unsuccessful attempt to explore a previously undiscovered moon of Jupiter that they thought could be a refuge for earthlings (you figure the chances!). Anyway, from that premise onward we endure a couple of ridiculous and improbable romances, rescue scenes, and space accidents, all of which look to be crabbed from previous space movies (e.g., Mars, Arrival for 2 recent much more engaging films) as Clooney gives us his best impersonation of Mandy Patinkin mumbling into his beard. I don't know what else to say about this movie except that it's not credible even for a moment and the central mystery of the plot - who is the 7-year-old girl left behind w/ Clooney? - should be clear to anyone who's actually trying to follow the plot of this film. 

A most promising film debut for director Talbot: The Last Black Man in SF

 The Joe Talbot debut feature, The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), has many great elements and moments, a film that's hard not to like even if many of the plot elements clearly preposterous and sometimes hard to follow. But no matter - you could say the film was worth watching for one of its laugh-out-loud moments alone (the bus stop scene in the Castro neighborhood; I'll give away no more). The plot involves two black men, best buddies, one of whom, Jimmie, has taken it on as his life's mission to buy and restore the beautiful Queen Anne-style mansion in which his family had lived for generations,  in the Fillmore district, once a black neighborhood now becoming gentrified. The efforts of the two men to take over possession of the house - getting rid of current tenants, entering as squatters, going through hoops to get ownership in their name - while highly unlikely do give us a picture of the pangs of gentrification, the struggle for good housing in a ridiculously over-priced environment - and along the way we see many SF neighborhoods seldom seen by visitors or even denizens, we see the struggles of the families of these two young men (Jimmie's family difficult and estranged; his friend (Mont)'s family loving and attentive (especially nice are the scenes w/ Mont's father who is blind) and we get a bit of social commentary on real-estate and banking scams and the housing market that makes some rich and others homeless. Jimmie and Mont also have some run-ins w/ a small group of neighborhood toughs - and much of the plot involves the efforts of Mont, an aspiring playwright, to create and stage a pop-up production centered on the history of the house that the two guys are rehabbing. In short, the film have a lot going for it, and you have to love it for its earnestness - a most-promising debut for co-writer and director Talbot. 

A terrific adaption of the August Wilson play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

 The George C. Wolfe (dir.)/Ruben Santiago-Hudson (screenplay) streaming v. of the August Wilson play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1982) is a terrifically engaging and highly dramatic show; I never saw the original play so I'm not sure how much this adaptation amended the original - aside from the obvious "opening up" by having the show open w/ Ma (Viola Davis) performing before an all-black audience in the deep South (1927) before the shift to Chicago where Ma is set for a recording session that will, all hope, introduce her work a more profitable, i.e., a white audience. Many things go wrong during this recording session, most of the because of Ma's irascible and irrational diva-behavior (she's a proud woman and steps warily into this new phase, but in the process she's nasty to just about everyone, often w/ good reason, as it's clear the two white characters - her agent and the recording-studio honcho - will exploit her work in any way that they can). Davis is great in the part, but the show-stealer is Chadwick Boseman, who died of cancer at 43 shortly after completing this project. Boseman, as a (relatively) young sideman in the band has some of the most powerful scenes you'll ever see in a stage (or film for that matter) production, providing throughout the humor, the drama, and the danger, as he goes through a range of emotions in second, from flippant to furious to maniacal in a moment. The film itself is a sad but all so true expose of the racism and exploitation in the early recording industry; it's scary at times - but not without its self-deprecatory humor, as the characters interact and develop over the course of one day's action. 

Steve McQueen's great anthology series on the West Indian community in London in the '80s

 High praise for Steve McQeen's groundbreaking series on Prime, Small Axe, a collection of 5 films (one true movie-length, 90 or so minutes, the other 4 clocking at about an hour, sort of a mini-movie or an episode), all of which depict the West Indies community in London in the 1980s, w/ an obvious emphasis on the injustices inflicted and the challenge of assimilation into or accommodation of the dominant white English political and cultural climate. Three of the 4 episodes (it's not an episodic series in any conventional sense as each episode stands on its own and there is no particular continuity of character or setting other than the overall principles) depict struggles w/ authority. The first episode, closest to a standalone movie, depicts the police harassment of a man who opens a restaurant in the community and whom the police suspect of harboring criminal and dealing in Rx; this episode, based on true events, led to a criminal indictment of about 10 people and long and controversial trial in a high-level and highly unsympathetic court (Americans will be reminded of the Chicago 7 trial). the 2nd episode is unique in the series, a simple story of a group of West Indians who turn their house into what today we'd call a popup nightclub - serving food and drinks, providing the music and the venue, and people show up for a long night of dancing and love; there's no real plot to this episode, and I have to say for me it was my least fave of the 5, though some reviewers have felt just the opposite. The 3rd episode was about a man who, as a child, saw his father wrongfully arrested and harassed, which led him to try to break the color barrier and join the London police force, to his father's dismay - again, based on actual people and events. The 4th is another that depicted in illegal arrest and harassment of a young man, an aspiring reggae singer, who was present at a riotous demonstration - a man who was about to turn his back on society but was persuaded by a cellmate to pursue his education, and he (Wheatle) has got on to a career and a prolific novelist (also based on real people and events!). The 5th and final episode, like its predecessor, puts for the message of the importance of education - in this case looking at the separate and unequal schools provided for students with learning disabilities, including many black students (and focused on 1) sent to one of these so-called schools because he was disruptive; a movement arose to get rid of these schools and provide real education and services for students with disabilities - based on a true issue and struggle (true in many locations and persistent today). All told this series is a great social documentary about a changing, evolving, struggling immigrant culture as seen through the daily lives and actions of a wide range of characters. It would be great to see other directors take on this anthology format, but I'm not holding my break on that. 

Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law starts off rough but improves as it moves along and has some surprisingly funny sequences

 Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film, Down by Law, at first looks as if it's going to be just a dark and unpleasant study of the lives of a few down and out people on the margins of the law in then-present-day New Orleans, but the film seems to grow and improve over its course and become not a dreary bit of nostalgia for the mud but, incredibly, a unique take on the genre of buddy/prison escape films (one of the characters even comments on the over-exposed genre). The principals are 3 guy - Zack, Jack, and Roberto (Bob), played by Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni, on the heels of his international comedic success and the bringer of light and humor into this potentially nihilistic narrative. The 3 guys end up as prison cellmates and they plot an escape that they, against all odds and all probability but who cares, manage to accomplish. The look of the film, all shot on location in Louisiana, is an uncontested strength, but the developing relationship among the cellmates - as well as a glimpse at the underlife in the city and in the holding cells of the county prison - are what really drives the film. JJ is one of the true filmmakers working outside of the Hollywood system, and a film like this, low-budget and Spartan in design, shows how much can be accomplished outside of clutches of box-office gross and instant success. 

An excellent documentary on police corruption in Boston and the unjust imprisonment by an innocent man

 Remy Berkel's 2020 8-episode series, Trial 4, is a truly excellent documentary about the corruption of the Boston Police Department in the 1990s and how an innocent man, Sean Ellis, a 19-year-old black man w/ no arrest record, was charged with and convicted of the murder of a Boston drug detective, John J. Mulligan, who by all accounts abused the system and had many enemies. Despite the evident cronyism and outright illegality throughout the arrest, trial, and incarceration of Ellis - who spent 20 years in prison before his release and the opportunity to face a 4th trial for the shooting - the corrupt cops and the Suffolk County DA stood together (well documented at the time by the Globe) and persisted in hanging the collar on Ellis, whose crime was to be present at the wrong place at the wrong time (a 3 a.m. murder scene in Roslindale. Given his sentence of life without parole, he was headed toward dying in prison and would have were it not for the smart, selfless, and persistent efforts or his defense attorney, Rosemary Scappichio. Imprisonment of the innocent has become an all-too-familiar story, which has been treated well in other episodic and shows, such as Just Mercy and Rectified, but this series stands out for its scope (the case resonates across the political and journalistic landscape of Boston for 20 years), its focus on the central character, and most of all for the clear storytelling of Berkel and team who unravel the threads slowly and carefully and keep us well-informed throughout the 8 episodes despite the many jumps back and forth in time. To their credit, those who commented on the case for this documentary were by no means all sympathetic to Ellis and his plight. The Berkel team, however, included in each episode a list of the (many) whom they approached who declined to take part in the project. It's definitely a film worth viewing, in particular for those in the Boston area. 

The Top Ten Classic Films I Watched in 2020

 

The Top Ten (OK, it's 11) classic films I watched in 2020:

Day for Night

Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) film is probably the best of all movies about the making of a movie; no other film gives as great a sense of what it’s like to direct a film and of the complex internal dramas that take place throughout the process of a shoot. 

Faces Places

The penultimate Agnes Varda film (2017) is a totally enjoyable and surprising documentary about her public-art project, in which she joins forces with a 33-year-old French graffiti artist who goes by JR. 

Fireman’s Ball 

These hapless, sexist firefighters can’t seem to get anything right, including fighting a fire, which I think was a brave thing for Milos Forman to dramatize in 1967, when any critique of uniformed officers came as close as possible to a critique of the Soviet control of the government; I believe most Czech viewers, though maybe not the Soviet censors, got the point.

Fox and His Friends

This 1976 film stands as probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first great work, groundbreaking in many ways and a film that established RWF as a master at staging and composition and as a multiple threat, director, writer, lead actor; in particular, the film was one of the first honest and non-exploitative films about gay culture.

Harakiri

Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 film is truly one of the great Samurai films of all time though it's not as well known or recognized, perhaps because overshadowed by Kurosawa’s work in the same genre; the film engages viewers right from the start as the first half hour or so is among the most powerful sequences in Japanese film.

In the Mood for Love

Writer-director Wong Kar-Wai's film from 2000 is a sad and strange tale of a man and a woman, each in an unhappy and faithless marriage, who meet and fall in love but find it impossible to leave their marriages begin a new life with each other, which may remind viewers of the great British film Brief Encounter.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

The man above suspicion in Elio Petri’s from from 1970, a police chief who commits a murder and flaunts authority is played by Gian Maria Volonte, who he gives a great performance: cruel, brutal, and scary, especially in his rants against “political” prisoners (i.e., anarchists, Marxists, et al.), an outburst that seems eerily contemporary. 

Of Time and the City 

Terence Davies's documentary from 2008 is a personal recollection and evocation of his childhood in Liverpool (in the postwar years, the 50s and 60s), a moving and sometimes frightening testament to the hardships of poverty then and now and a testament to what Davies calls the English propensity for the dismal. 

Shame 

Ingmar Bergman's great film from 1968 responded to the critiques of his beautiful chamber drama for being remote from the issues that were rocking the world; in this film Bergman takes on some of his typical material, the strains and break-up of a marriage, and plays out the drama in the context of war and revolution. 

World of Apu

Satyajit Rays the conclusion of his Apu trilogy not only lives up to its reputation as a classic in world cinema — it may even go beyond its reputation, as it looks better, more original, more mysterious today than it would have in 1959, with so many beautiful and strange settings in Calcutta and in rural India that now feel like messages from time capsule. 

Young Torless

Volker Schlondorff's debut film, from 1966, about hazing and abuse in a boarding school, is of course painful to watch, but it's not unrelieved or gratuitous pain and its message, articulated by Torless in a passionate speech in which he attacks those who are indifferent and feckless or cowardly in the face of abuse and exploitation, resonates today, perhaps even more than it would have 50 years ago.

The Top Ten returning or classic miniseries I watched in 2020

 The Top Ten returning or classic miniseries I watched in 2020 

Babylon Berlin 

This series emulates The Crown, as we can only wonder at the amount of money and the creative energy to replicate Berlin in 1929 down to the smallest detail, but in other ways this is its own series entirely, particularly in Season 3, as the Communists face off against the National Socialist Party.

Berlin Alexanderplatz 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 13-part series was ground-breaking in 1980 and has been hugely influential in charting the course for long-form, character-driven dramas such as The Sopranos, The Wire, House of Cards - the list could go on. 

The Crown

I will join in the universal praise for Season 4 of Peter Morgan’s monumental series, which deserves commendation on every level and aspect, starting perhaps with the spare-no-expense sets and settings for the royal family, all reconstructed and resurrected it seems in perfect period detail.

Fauda 

Like its predecessors, Season 3 of this Israeli series about team of agents assigned to undercover, anti-terrorism work against radical Islamists and Palestinian activists is as tense and gripping as anything on TV or streaming, start to finish - and of course it leaves the door open to a 4th season. 

Last Chance U 

Football is the vehicle but the show itself, which concluded this year with Season 5, is about so much more than football; it’s about communities, leadership, poverty, inequity, and the “collision of forces” inevitable in any high-pressure sports enterprise that is part of an academic setting. 

Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Season 3 of this series was a definite step up from Season 2, which seemed to drift away from what gives the series its strength and its life: Rachel Brosnahan’s portrayal of the eponymous rising-star standup comedian.

Ozark 

The 3rd season continues with the great storytelling, writing, and ensemble acting (Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Julia Garner) of the first 2 seasons, as we watch the Byrde family sink ever deeper into world of money laundering, corrupt gambling, the heroin trade, and an outright war between two Mexican cartels. 

Rectify 

This highly intelligent and moving socio-drama about a man released from prison after 20 years on death row, which never really found its audience, was not only a personal drama focusing on the now severely traumatized man but it was also a family drama, a legal thriller, and, to a lesser extent, an issue film about the rights of prisoners and of ex-prisoners trying to make the best of what's left of their lives post-incarceration.

Schitt’s Creek 

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 ended, this year with Season 6, on the right note at the right time.

Succession

As we continue to watch the members of the Roy family engage in a dynastic fight to control their corporate enterprise and in Oedipal struggles to unseat or deracinate the family patriarch, the strengths remain the great ensemble performances, with every cast member in and out of the family holding up the standard set by the occasionally hilarious and demanding script.

The Top Ten (new) streaming miniseries I watched in 2020

 The Top Ten (new) streaming miniseries I watched in 2020:

Derry Girls 

This series for Ireland series stands simply as one of the funniest and most endearing comedies streaming today.

The Eddy

This series about a jazz nightclub club is a study in character and in group interaction, the development over time of life/work/family relationships that bind the lead characters to one another, and an homage to the ex-pat jazz scene still alive in Paris.

Giri/Haji

This British-Japanese co-production has some eye-closing scenes of violence and many shootouts – plus some surprisingly tender and thoughtful scenes, including a final episode with one of the most unusual surreal sequences I’ve ever seen in a crime show.

The Last Dance

This isn’t a series for basketball fans only; all viewers can watch with amazement and wonder at Michael Jordan’s dominant skills in every facet of the game, physical and mental. 

Lenox Hill

This series should be on everyone's list, a terrific documentary that follows over the course of a year or so the professional (and personal) lives of four doctors (2 brain surgeons, 1 ER doc, 1 (pregnant) OB-GYN doc) in the Manhattan hospital.

The Queen’s Gambit 

This highly acclaimed series is well worth watching regardless of your knowledge of or even interest in chess, in particular for Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance in the lead role as a chess prodigy with many troubles in her life. 

The Spy 

This British series is another in the long run of high-quality suspenseful espionage shows, though this one has a particular plaudit: The often hard-to-believe series of events is in fact based closely on an actual case of Israeli espionage.

Unorthodox 

This popular series depicts the bravery and the struggle of the 19-year-old Etsy Shapiro (Shira Haas), who flees from her ultra-orthodox community in Brooklyn to seek freedom and a new life in, of all places, Berlin. 

Waco

This series provides a surprisingly thoughtful and multifaceted re-creation of the horrendous 1993 ATF/FBI raid on the Branch Davidian complex - as seen from perspectives both inside and outside of the complex under siege. 

Who Killed Malcolm X?

This under-the-radar series presents a taut account of the 1965 assassination of the  black leader, the shoddy if not corrupt NY police investigation of the killings, the imprisonment for 20 years of 2 men who had nothing to do with the killings, and the suspicious indifference of the police and the FBI regarding the most likely assassin.

Note: And I will add one more that I watched after compiling this list: Trial 4, about the unjust imprisonment of a Boston man convicted of the murder of a Boston police detective. 

The Top Ten (new) movies I saw in 2020

 In a year of much screen time, here are the Top Ten (new) movies I saw in 2020:

1917 

Sam Mendes's WWI movie came out of nowhere - had he ever in his long career done a movie so daring and innovative? - and will astonish and engage any viewer, no matter how many war movies you've seen, or missed. 

23 hours to Kill 

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, but his hour-long comedy special on Netflix shows that he continue to work miracles. 

The 40-Year-Old Version

When I'd first heard about this Netflix film (written, directed, starring playwright Radha Blank) I thought, despite strong reviews, that this would be a film for which lI would not be the ideal audience; all the more props to the amazing R Blank in that I was totally captivated, entertained, and moved by her really intelligent and imaginative film.

 Ali Wong: Hard-Knock Wife 

This spirited comedy special is terrific and memorable not only for Wong’s fantastically energetic performance and her terrific comic timing but also for the range of her materials, which includes marriage equality, breast-feeding, c-sections, universal paid maternity leave and, on the lower end of the spectrum, fart jokes.

Dick Johnson is Dead

Kristen Johnson's funny, original, and moving documentary about the last years of her father's life has many surprises and somehow manages to avoid the lachrymose sensibility that pervades many such projects. 

The Farewell 

Lulu Wang's film, with a great lead performance by rising star Awkwafina as a 20-something Chinese-American would-be writer in NYC, is a movie full of multiple culture-clashes and generational clashes, family dramas and mini-dramas, and some hilarious and riotous segments.

Mank

This David Fincher (dir.) & his (late) father Jack Fincher (screenplay) tells of Herbert Mankiewicz, a troubled, alcoholic, charming roundtable drinking buddy and Hollywood wash-up until he got tabbed by the 24-year-old Orson Welles to write the screenplay that would become Citizen Kane.

Nanette

Hannah Gadsby’s hour-long live-from-Sydney comic stand-up show is, at the end, a knockout —  a most unusual comic gig that mixes humor – (much of it about Gadsby’s coming out as a Lesbian in her mid-30s) – with some unusual comic riffs; who’d have thought you could work into a standup show a long and hilarious series of riffs on art history?

Pain and Glory 

Pedro Almodovar’s film is a rich and complex narrative of a type that we don’t see often today, at least in films from the U.S.: a story about a 60-something film director at a point of crisis in his life and his career

Young Ahmed

The Dardennes brothers’ latest film is a bit of a break for them: same territory and milieu (the industrial territories of Belgium and northern France) but focused on a teenager who has become absorbed in a conservative Muslim mosque whose young and charismatic leader has seemingly pushed this vulnerable young man to criminal extremes. 

And a special note to 3 excellent streaming versions of three plays: the impossible to overpraise Broadway musical Hamilton; the Bridge Theatre (London) production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the most exciting and imaginative Shakespeare productions I’ve ever seen; and the Met Opera live streaming broadcast of Porgy & Bess. 

The beautiful and mysterious story in Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love

Writer-director Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood For Love (2000) is a sad and strange tale of a man and a woman, each in an unhappy and faithless marriage, who meet and fall in love but find it impossible to leave their marriages begin a new life with each other. It's something of an Asian version of the British Brief Encounter (thus I was not surprised to see the Criterion linked these two films as one of their "double features"). It's a mysterious and moving film throughout: the man (Tony Leung) and the woman (Maggie Cheung) meet when they rent adjacent apartments (their apartments are essentially rooms within the same household - the film is set in the 1960s, when Honk Kong was obviously not prosperous and housing was a challenge). Both learn that their spouses in unfaithful, and the 2 (weirdly named Chow and Chan) begin what starts as a friendship but gradually builds into a love relationship - though it's not clear whether had sex (one would suppose so, but the film is oddly or perhaps intentionally discrete on that point). Eventually, their lives part and we see them in loneliness and sorrow, apart, in late life. There are many beautiful scenes and moments throughout the film, the mysterious ending in particular and also their break-up "rehearsals," which are quite a surprise (I won't give it away). The score is strange, including what seems to be a Latin samba selection and some classical motifs. The camerawork, with many slow panning shots, is great, especially the outdoor scenes in the rain and the crowded adjacent apartments, w/ all kinds of background noise and chaos as the 2 lovers try to find a bit of solitude and privacy - these scenes shot like a Wiseman documentary. All told, an intelligent, deeply sad story of two who meet at the wrong time, the wrong place. 

A terrific biopic about the making of Citizen Kane and Hollywood in the studio era

 The David Fincher (dir.) & Jack Fincher (screenplay) biopic, Mank, about the Herbert Mankiewicz, troubled, alcoholic, charming roundtable drinking buddy and Hollywood wash-up until he got tabbed by the 24-year-old Orson Welles to write a screenplay that would become Citizen Kane and which popular lore had attributed almost entirely to Welles until later scholars and critics (notably Pauline Kael I think) set the record straight at gave the late Mank his due. The film is a little hard to follow at first, as many characters are quickly introduced and the plot line, particularly as it involves a 1934 California gubernatorial election, is not widely known and seemed to me a little obscure and confusing. But the main outline of the story is quite well known, as least to those likely to watch this film: the creation of a film masterpiece about a titan of the publishing/newspaper industry who was brought down by his own folly, in particular by his using the newspaper resources to push the performing career of his much young paramour - and the two characters were to closely modeled on WR Hearst and Marion Davies that the Mank's career if not his life was on the line. Throughout, J Fincher's writing is sharp and witty - a real challenge for a screenwriter, to outdo the legendary screenwriter/wit who is us subject, and the film has a terrific look start to finish. Daringly, D Fincher made the film to look like a 1940s movie, in b/w, with scene intercuts using the hideous Courier typeface that amazingly is still in use for screenplays if nothing else and filming some of the outdoor sequences at the desert retreat - perhaps using infrared techniques? - so that the background looked like the painted backdrops used in a lot of low-budget films of the era. The team even used the sprocket marks in the upper right corners once used to alert projectionists about an impending reel change! There are some terrific scenes throughout: a great nightclub sequences on election night, a banquet in Hearst's San Simeon at which Man (Gary Oldman) embarks on a weird, drunken monologue, Welles throws a tantrum, and others. It helps to know Cit Kane if you're going to watch this film, but even w/out that as a backdrop this is smart and I think accurate re-creation of life in Hollywood in the days of the studio bosses and actors/writers/directors working under contract, swimming in dough, churning out ideas, and often drinking themselves to death.