Yet another high-school misfit movie - but this one has some original angles

Is there room for yet another movie about a high-school misfit, loner, weirdo, friendless victim of bullying? Yes, of course, the supply of such movies will apparently never end, the latest being On the Edge of Seventeen, which features a protagonist, Nadine, who is all of the above and, like many such protagonists (see Juno) speaks more like a Hollywood screenwriter than like any teenager, much less a loser-misfit. This film also suffers from the flaw that besets many teenage-loser movies: almost without exception, the lead characters are never convincing as the misfit victim; as in this movie, they are almost always cute, attractive, intelligent, most likely to be widely popular or, at the least, far from friendless. So, OK, with all these flaws acknowledged, let it also be noted that this is a pretty good and entertaining film about Nadine's struggle to find her place. The writing is intelligent, sometimes witty, and the writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig finds a few new angles to explore on this familiar turf: Nadine has had a life-long jealousy of her handsome and popular brother (Darian), and when he starts a relationship with her one and only friend that upsets everything in Nadine's life and in their family of 3. Craig also goes against convention by having Nadine confide regularly in her history teacher (Woody Harrelson) who, against expectation, is acerbic and cynical - the development of his character and his relationship with Nadine is the highlight of this movie. As in all comedies, Nadine grows over the course of the film, learns about the high-school pecking order and learns to live outside of same, and earns her way to social inclusion and a happy ending - orchestrated, yes; believable, not quite; but a feel-good movie that takes some original pathways on this very well-trodden ground.

Is American Crime the best series on network TV?

Through the first 3 episodes of John Ridley's American Crime (Season 3) I'm once again impressed by everything about this series. I'm no expert on this, but it seems to me the best serious crime drama on network TV - on a scale with the smartest HBO, SHO, Amazon, and Netflix dramas. Each of the three seasons is a completely stand-alone miniseries, but many members of the cast appear in two or even all 3 of the seasons, in entirely different roles. So watching characters, notably Felicity Huffman, play 3 different parts to perfection is one of the incidental pleasures of this series. But even more so, the whole crew does a fine job with an intelligent and complex drama about a crime and its rippling and lingering effect on so many people - victims, families, entire communities. Season 3 is about the treatment of migrant laborers on a NC family-owned farm; the crew that subcontracts and manages the labor is corrupt and vicious, and because of neglect 15 laborers die in a fire in a one of the trailers into which they're crammed. (One serious quibble: This would have been a major news story, not something that would slide under the radar.) The owners of the farm wash their hands of responsibility - they're not the ones running the labor operation, they say - but Huffman, the wife of one of the 3 siblings who own the farm, begins to question this hands-off attitude and to push her very reluctant husband to look further into the cause of the fire. A hallmark of this series through all 3 seasons is the intelligent and daring use of close-ups; many of the finest dramatic moments focus full-screen on the fact of one of the characters, in either monologue or dialogue, which really shows the expressive characters of the actors and showcases some truly fine screenwriting as well. Another great strength of each of the seasons is the honest and sometimes daring portrayal of important and complex social issues. In episode 3, Huffman and spouse go to a community meeting on migrant labor, and the words of the speaker hit them, and us, pretty hard: there's a price to pay for the food we eat and the clothes we wear, and most of us are unwilling to take a close look at that price. American Crime is taking that close look, and it's pretty harrowing.

Some reasons to watch Nobel and how it can improve

The Norwegian series Nobel does some things exceptionally well, in particular the action scenes - the attack in the parking garage in Oslo, the military operations in Afghanistan, and, in the final episode, the tense, secret negotiations in Afghanistan among Norwegian, Afghan, and Taliban officials - negotiations that, no surprise here, come to a dreadful end (and leave a Season 2 as a strong possibility). What keeps this series from being great, however, is its extremely complex network of competing forces and interests that are hard, especially for English-language viewers working with subtitles, to keep straight not only from one episode to the next but even within episodes. The personal story, which involves marital strife in the Riiser family, with the husband, Erling, a special forces operative who gets duped into an unauthorized killing, and wife a top official in the Norwegian state dept (it's a small country), never really develops: We don't see or know enough about the personal lives of most of the characters - again, because the series is so plot-heavy that we are overwhelmed with characters and plot strands. Worse, a key element driving the plot, the forces competing for the Nobel Peace Prize, never really gels and feels just tacked on in the final episode. Those are my quibbles, yet there was enough going on here to hold our interest through the whole 8-episode series - a lot of action, smart writing, tense pacing, overall a highly professional show that I hope will continue and will improve, through great plot focus, in future seasons.

Why it's worth seeing Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures, a late 2016 release that got lost in the shuffle of so many fine movies on themes of racism, black lives, and black history, tells the important and little known history of black women working on the NASA space-launch initiatives in the Virginia facility in the 1950s and 60s; the movie is "based on true events" and also adapted from a nonfiction book of the same title - props to the author of the book [Morgot Lee Shetterly] for truly uncovering this great story. By "based on" I take it to mean that, though the three central women characters are all based on real people who broke through many barriers of law and of hatred to contribute to the space program, the narrative brings the women together as three buddies and orchestrates their domestic lives in ways that are probably no historically accurate - though that doesn't matter. We see in the working conditions at NASA the horrible racism and sexism that these women had to encounter just to do their jobs - and these women were among the smartest and most talented and bravest, and by the way NASA was probably among the best employers in the South: NASA needed talent and was willing to hire black women if they could do the job. Over the course of the movie, we see the women gradually win respect, recognition, and, to a degree, equal treatment. This is all to the good, but I have to say that the screenplay itself and even the art direction and costuming were so programmatic, so predictable, so devoid of surprise or genuine emotion (with perhaps the exception of one scene, when the supervisor, Kevin Costner, takes a sledgehammer to the "colored rest room" sign) that movie feels as if it could have been written by the IBM computer that's at the center of the plot. The movie is so obvious and at times heavy handed - this will be good for you to see and to know, and we're all so much better and more enlightened today! - it's like the greens one of the dads insists that the little kids eat with their cookout dinner.

A perverse male fantasy and a waste of a great performance by Huppert

I have seldom, maybe never, seen a movie with such a cast of totally unlikable characters as we see in the recent Elle. Yes, Isabel Huppert is terrific and deserved her Oscar nomination (and maybe she should have won the award), as she totally dominates the movie with the force of her character for the entire 2+ hours: Is she in every single scene? I think so. But that said, what a horrible movie this is: The characters are universally despicable: sexist, faithless, crude, mocking, foolish, feckless, narcissist - and that doesn't even cover the serial rapist and stalker, who is just plain sick. In fact, the only character don't despise is Huppert's father (he has no speaking role), a serial killer serving a life term for 27 murders. The movie opens with Huppert enduring brutal rape and attack. Afterwards, she cleans up the broken cutlery, takes a bath, goes to work. She never reports the rape, and mentions in passing to a group of her friends/co-workers. She continues her life, even though the rapist continues to stalk her and leave her threatening messages - she just doesn't seem to care. She and her best friend run a videogame company, and the game they're marketing is full of violent rape scenes - she prods her staff to make the scenes even more gruesome. When we're not w/ her we're with her super-botxed mother who's living w/ a gigolo about 1/3 her age, with her son who leeches money off her and can't even hold down a fast-food job, his fiancee who's a harridan of the worst order, her partner's husband who comes on to her right in her office in the middle of the work day - I can't go on with this list, it's so ridiculous. And - spoiler coming - once Huppert is aware of who her attacker is, she pursues him - not for vengeance but to continue the attacks. Despite whatever intentions the direct (Verhoeven, known for his action films) may have had, this is not a movie about a powerful, independent woman who is frank about her sexual desires; it's a perverse male fantasy that goes so far as to suggest that some women actually enjoy assault and rape and would come back for more if they could. This is move is wrong on so many counts - what a waste of a great acting performance.

Terrific new play at Ars Nova in NYC: Sundown, Yellow Moon

3 of us yesterday saw Rachel Bonds's new play Sundown, Yellow Moon at Ars Nova/WP Theater, Anne Kauffman directing, and we universally loved this one-act play: funny, moving, powerful, true to life. The story concerns twin sisters who return to their small Southern town to visit their father, a prep-school teacher, who is facing a crisis in his life (he's been suspended from his job because of a violent outburst at a school assembly, and he's been ordered into anger-management counseling). Over the course of the play, we recognize that each of the major characters is at a point of crisis in life, each is struggling with failure and disappointment and unfulfilled dreams and aspirations. Bonds's writing is sharp and beautiful and, especially in the night-time dialogue between dad and one of the daughters, Rae, as they wrestle w/ sleeplessness, it's moving and emotional. Those in the know will recognize the title as a Dylan lyric, which gives you a sense of Bonds's literary milieu. In fact, music is hugely important to this play, as two of the main characters are wrestling with frustrated yet unrelenting musical ambitions - and many of the scenes involve musical performance: it's by no means a "musical" play but Bonds incorporates music in a natural way (e.g., the characters get together w/ two neighbors for an evening of music, and the songs and performance anxieties tell us much about the characters and their relationships). Bonds also leaves some elements open at the end of the play, which actually gives it a feeling of great completion and realism - for ex., we never learn the outcome of the dad's suspension; the girls' difficult mom (at least from dad's POV) is mentioned but never seen or heard from. As a note: Rachel Bonds's dad was one of my very best friends in youth (college roommates) though we lost touch later in life; Rachel and I have communicated via email. In some ways this play is a tribute to her dad - and I saw some elements of him in this play's Ton - though I'm sure she would agree that it's by no means a direct portrayal of her wonderful father.

Promising Norwegian miniseries on a troop in Afghanistan and complications on the home front

Three episodes in and the Norwegian miniseries Nobel seems to be moving along very well; it's well-paced and complicated and engaging, with a focus on a political crisis, this one involving a Norwegian platoon on duty in Afghanistan that gets tangled up in a fight with a local strongman leading to repercussions back in the Norwegian central government. It's a tangled web and frnakly, and perhaps intentionally, it's a little difficult to follow in the first episodes, as the style of the series seems to be to present dramatic action - e.g., a fight and a stabbing in an Oslo parking garage - without a lot of clarity as to who's involved or why, and then jumping to a flashback to what took place in Afghanistan a few months back, which will fill in some but not all of the pieces. Three episodes in I'm still not sure why it's called Nobel, though there are suggestions that the fight between the state department and military will will involved a detente operation underway to smooth relationships w/ China -leading to major Chinese investments in Norway - all of which could be derailed if the Nobel committee tilts toward a visiting Chinese dissident. Wow, a lot of threads to tie together - but fortunately the writing is clear and straightforward (oh those taciturn Scandinavians) and the main characters - Erling, the acting platoon leader now home on leave, and his wife, who is like a Chief of Staff to the Foreign Minister - are strong, well-delineated characters - facing major issues as their two agencies come into direct conflict. Definitely worth following this Netflix offering, and you can't help but think that it may lead to an American rewrite, as with Homeland, as the same forces could well be in play in a U.S. drama. (Also reminded me of the excellent Danish film about a troop on the front lines in Afghanistan, with no clear mission in sight.)