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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.