Shogun

 

A friend and I have been exchanging thoughts about FX's Shōgun streaming on Hulu. He tells me he is fascinated by the symbolism of the various tokens passed among the main characters -- samurai swords and game birds, among them -- and what the program creators are saying with such cryptic markers. I agreed and told him I find especially intriguing how opaque the characters are -- their motives hidden behind clouds of deception, ego or tradition. With so many years -- more than 40 -- having passed since the original television adaptation of Clavell's 1975 novel, it is quite likely the story will be unexplored territory for many viewers ... which serves this latest elaborate entry quite well. Shōgun is best enjoyed, I believe, when the full intentions of the story's many characters are as murky as Japan's foggy coastline. Yes, the "mission" of the Jesuits and their Portuguese musclemen seems clear, if not entirely godly, but is it? And survival seems to be the prime motivation of the sea wise British navigator who is fiercely loyal to his aging Protestant monarch but might be moved even more by greed. And the motives among the Council of Regents seems pretty apparent, but might be revealed more by what is not said than what is. And the subservience of the trussed and obi-ed courtesans might come across a tad cagey considering many are more ingenious than the men they are bound to, but I suspect there is a great deal more underfoot, like the shifting tectonic plates that threaten to lay waste to all life. Wonderful stuff!

3 Body Problem

 

The Netflix series 3 Body Problem uniquely introduces the battle between truth and falsehood.

The very literal-minded alien colonists in a 400-year-long journey do not understand the human penchant for deception and fiction. Their introduction to these ideas is Little Red Riding, a story rooted in the dangers of falseness.

Because humans appear to revel in misleading and deceiving one another, the aliens decide humans can not be trusted. "We are afraid of you," they declare before ceasing communication with their Earthling contacts.

The moment is chilling for the perspective being offered about our culture and practices, how routine dissembling and pretense are for us. How much we get out of lying to one another -- and ourselves.

Ironic that a work of fantasy would place so much emphasis on the dangers of make-believe.

Monkey Man

Dev Patel's terrific directorial debut, Monkey Man, is set in a teeming Indian city where the wealthy castes live and party in high-rise splendor and the low-born, outcasts and untouchables swelter in congested outskirts where they compete for scraps and opportunities to be exploited by their betters.

Patel is the nameless monkey-masked combatant in nightly underground matches where he takes dives after being pummeled by opponents. His punishing existence hides a consuming desire to avenge his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), who was murdered during a purge by government agents looking to expand the city's holdings.

After a failed attempt to assassinate the chief of police (Sikandar Kher), which leaves him nearly dead, the fighter is rescued by a community of transgender monastics, patched up, and in the style of many films of righteous underdogs, rebounds with new battle skills and vision. His guide through this recovery is the wise priestess of the temple, played by Vipin Sharma, who challenges the fighter to "get up" and meet his fate, leading a revolt against corruption and exploitation.

Patel's highly impressive film borrows more than a little from the John Wick playbook in its kinetic energy and enormous body count -- its fight sequences are astounding -- but it also has a unique distinction and cultural significance that nonetheless resonates in the U.S., where the poor and marginalized also must contend with one another and their oppressors.

Hero (2024)

 

Dustin Whitehead's Hero, screening now at the Nickelodeon, is an energetic film with a committed cast of local actors in the story of a young man, Tre, who is on a meandering lifepath that ultimately brings him around to self-realization and fulfillment. A production of Columbia-based Local Cinema Studios, Hero stars Anthony Currie as Tre; Columbia theater veteran Darion McCloud as his doting father, Wayne; and Carly Siegel as Jess, Tre's ex-girlfriend who is facing her own challenges. The screenplay by Myles Isreal, who appears as Tre's best friend and fellow cosplay competitor Damon, covers a lot of emotional territory -- exploring tough terrain of interpersonal relations, missed opportunities and recovery with insight and spirited good humor. A tender and promising labor of love, Hero was shot all around Columbia, so spotting familiar landscapes is an added bonus.

Shirley (2024)

 

John Ridley's Netflix biopic on Black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's groundbreaking run for president in 1972 is a tender treatment of its human subject and a sensible -- though not riveting -- dissertation on American politics -- as it was 50 years and may be more so today.

As written by Ridley and portrayed by the ever-reliable Regina King, Chisholm, a schoolteacher who represented a district in Brooklyn, is a sharp woman with one-too-many blind spots regarding political gamesmanship. 

The congresswoman often presents as too self-assured for one so new to politics. But her determination wins followers; they like her boldness and the possibilities her candidacy promises.

Shirely gathers together a cadre of advisers, fundraisers and organizers (played with assurance by Lance Reddick, Terrence Howard, Lucas Hedges and Brian Stokes Mitchell), and with the support of her devoted husband, Conrad, (an endearing Michael Cherrie), launches into a campaign that is underfunded and understaffed, lacks competitive infrastructure and a message that will resonate beyond Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Ridley tracks the months leading up the Democratic Convention in Miami and Chisholm's efforts to work around the skepticism and push through the resentment of political veterans and her myopic view of the power of her image. She underperforms in every primary and finds herself with few delegates going into the convention when she joins a group of other Democratic contenders in challenging California's winner-take-all delegate rules.

If the winner-take-all rule is disallowed by the National Committee, the other candidates on the ballot stand a chance of stalling frontrunner George McGovern's ascendance on a first vote and forcing him to commit to their agenda items. In return they would pledge their delegates to him. 

The outcomes, of course, is history; Shirley Chisholm did not become president but she inspired the careers of many other women and people of color to "bring a chair" to the table if none had been provided for them.

Shirley is a solid piece of filmmaking that would have benefitted, I think, from less political intrigue and more spirited interaction between the players working against impossible odds to make change.

The Zone of Interest

 

A short answer to the question "what makes director Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest such an extraordinary film experience" is the manner in which he has taken familiar horrors and made them new.

Zone is the startling and chilling account of a commandant of the Nazi's Auschwitz concentration camp and his family living next to the razor wire and billowing chimneys, clearly at peace with what was happening just over the wall.

Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller play the highly efficient and ambitious Nazi officer and his vain and equally officious wife. They sleep separately, exhibit little caring or affection for one another and see to their duties in keeping with the Fuhrer's orders.

Glazer keeps the human suffering and extermination off-screen but manages to make what is presented -- the soulless, spiritual and emotional hollowness of this family -- as repellant as scenes of lines of men, women and children being marched into gas chambers. The couple's four children play in the family courtyard and pool as shots ring out in the distance, signalling the pistol deaths of prisoners, paying no more attention to it than they would to birdsong -- maybe less.

Meetings of camp commanders and annihilation engineers are clinically strategic and include talk of transport, forced labor, cremation of hundreds of thousands of prisoners a week. These passages, while ghastly, are not as disturbing as the depiction of the family's housekeepers dividing up clothing stripped from camp women or a teenaged boy admiring this collection of harvested teeth.

The Zone of Interest is an artistic work, methodical in its pacing that asks do horrible people commit horrors or does the imposition of horrifying visions and beliefs create horrible people.

I suspect both are true.

The Saint (redux)

've been revisiting episodes of the classy British (redundant?) detective series The Saint from the '60s. Roger Moore was the star and played a world-renowned detective and bon vivant who traveled the globe doing good by helping to solve crimes.

One of last night's episodes -- The Pearls of Peace (1962) -- was set in a fictitious fishing village in Mexico where an idealistic young friend of Moore's Simon Templar named Brad (Bob Kanter) finds himself stranded after being swindled and blinded during a fight with an unscrupulous comrade (Robin Hughes). The two men went to Mexico to dive for pearls of great price, with the younger leaving his beautiful but vain girlfriend (Erica Rogers) back in New York with a promise to return a wealthy man and worthy of marriage.

When Templar finds young Brad, he meets the older woman who has been caring for him for the past three years, Consuelo (Dina Paisner), who has been helping the young man hunt for valuable pearls with no luck. She has been tucking away money from her job as a waitress to help pay for Brad's operation that might restore his vision.

She tells Templar she is distressed because if his eyesight is indeed restored he won't think she is beautiful and will leave her, presumably because she has tawny skin and dark hair.

Quite a dilemma and for the times quite an interesting statement about race. Though Templar was supportive of the angelic Consuelo and brutally frank with the gold digging girlfriend, his final word was inner beauty was more important and enduring.

While certainly true, the statement falls short of challenging the beauty standards of the day -- no doubt to keep advertiser dollars flowing in -- and declaring Consuelo possessed both outer AND inner beauty. That would have been quite the saintly move.

Brewster McCloud

 

Director Robert Altman's outrageous 1970 gem Brewster McCloud introduced cinephiles to Altman's muse, wackadoodle Shelley Duvall (Nashville, Three Women, Popeye), and to title star Bud Cort's signature pre-pubescent understatedness, which would be on full display the following year in the alt-cinema classic Harold and Maude.

The picture is the biting tale of a manchild living in the basement of the Houston Astrodome, where he is building a set of mechanical wings so that he might one day take flight.

It's not clear from Doran William Cannon's screenplay why Brewster is doing this or what sort of being is his mentor and protector Louise (Sally Kellerman), who from the markings on her shoulderblades may be a fallen angel, but it all seems to relate to the general crappiness of humankind and the need to escape from hatefulness and greed.

A companion plot involves the investigation of the murder-by-strangulation of some of Houston's most prominent misanthropes, with each victim being defiled by bird poop.

In the movie's especially rich title opening, aging socialite Daphne Heap (Margaret Hamilton of Wizard of Oz fame) is shown dressed in red, white and blue and bedecked with bunting while rehearsing the Star Spangled Banner in the Astrodome backed by an all-black marching band.

Heap, who appears to be tone deaf, scolds the band harshly for playing in the wrong key. In retaliation, they launch into Lift Every Voice and Sing, often referred to as the Black National Anthem, as the opening credits roll.

Altman, famous for his sardonic wit, understood the tension created by the juxtapositioning of these two works -- tension that has not abated in the 50-plus years since McCloud took flight.

I think it is important to note that in the movie's final reel police chase after Brewster-on-the-wing around the stadium. Though he has created a marvelous flying contraption, he is still trapped inside a cage. A fitting metaphor, I think, for those of us tired of putting up with the world's shit but realize this is the only world we've got.

The Strawberry Statement

 

In director Stuart Hagmann's 1970 student protest flick The Strawberry Statement, Bruce Davison plays a crew rower at a Bay Area university who gets swept up in a campus strike, meets a pretty young feminist (Kim Darby) and joins a group of anti-war / anti-racism activists who have taken over the university, demanding it give back land taken from a neighboring Black community. The land has been dedicated to the expansion of the school's ROTC program.

The story is based on James Kunen's experiences during a demonstration at Columbia University in 1968, and the film is an interesting artifact from a time of social disruption and unease that doesn't peddle pat answers or pablum.

Davison's Simon is a footloose gadabout who wanders into the activism sphere solely looking for a hookup. Soon the protest rhetoric, animosity of the university establishment, hostility of the police and the indifference of the greater community are too much for the 20-year-old to ignore. He turns a fight with a conservative oarsman into a red badge of courage and gets elevated as a martyr to the cause of pushing back against the "bullshit."

For her part, Darby's Linda is as confused by the protesters' agenda as she is about her own need for liberation and Simon's intentions. She is drawn to his energy, if not his dedication, and becomes his companion, which, of coures, does not comport with the Women's Lib agenda.

Though the film is an interesting "statement" in its own right, Hagmann's tone (and camera) swings madly between whimsical and didactical. The familiar California folk rock musical score is of the moment but the closing scenes of the gassing and beating of students by the police are shocking and seemingly endless and feel disassociated from what had come before.

I suspect that was purposeful, suggesting demands to "give peace a chance" are often answered by truncheons and boots.

Sound familiar?

Carnivale (redux)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwtMpL-zxEY

During its short run (2003-2005), I was completely hooked on Daniel Knauf's Carnivale, despite its end-of-days hokum and endlessly evolving mythology.

Set during the Great Depression, the story told of a ragtag roving circus traveling through the dusty Southwest, unwittingly on its way to a showdown between agents of goodness and wickedness.

Sweat, dust and dirt, sweltering heat and blinding wind storms filled the screen weekly. I loved the feel of the show. Carnivale won Emmys for its production values but was overlooked for performance awards. Maybe the size of the cast worked against them.

Michael J. Anderson played the diminutive leader of the band, Samson, a former weightlifting dwarf who answered to the mysterious (hell, everything about this show was mysterious) Management, who sat shrouded in a trailer, visited only by Samson and one or two others.

Nick Stahl as escaped prisoner Ben Hawkins and Clancy Brown as evangelist Brother Justin were the incarnations of light and darkness, although it was never clear who was which. That question and a host of other puzzlers made the show intriguing but also frustrating to those who really like narratives to have definitive meaning.

Though it lasted only two seasons -- to the great disappointment of its fans -- it was a bit of a game changer, at least to me, in how it handled themes of faith and morality. (See especially the season 1 episode titled Babylon) Criminality and lasciviousness were written on every page, judgment meted out with relish, but Knauf and company seemed interested in the grayness of human existence not dogma. This notion is present in the series' opening monologue, delivered by Anderson.

The series is grim and because it was cancelled prematurely leaves many loose threads dangling but it is a fascinating treatment of the duality of human beings, as we struggle with right and wrong along unfamiliar paths, into uncertain futures.

Live Fast, Die Young

 

Saturday Night Drive-in ~ Live Fast, Die Young

Back in '58, California high-schooler Jill gets lousy grades, picked on by her teachers and the other school kids, talks trash with her out-of-work-bum-of-a-washed-up-jock of a father, and runs away because her life is "for the birds."

Man-Hating Big Sister Kim joins her on the run, and they become thieves, seducing and hitting up drunks in bars -- all because their trashy mother ran off with a lousy salesman and they ain't got no education.

Two real choice dames in this Eisenhower-era cautionary tale about the dangers of being an independent woman!

Starring a pre-Mannix Mike Connors and dreamy Troy Donahue.

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

I'm sauntering through Jon Robin Baitz's Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, a Hulu series that I'm finding fascinating and exhausting.

Tom Hollander's Capote is a scarved, behatted masochist who has revealed the unseemly underbelly of New York high society in an Esquire article that leads to the end of his relationship with a quintet of women, The Swans, and banishment from their inner circle. Naomi Watts (Thanks for the catch, Peach!) is wonderful as chief Swan Babe Paley, socialite and wife of media executive Bill Paley (a fine Treat Williams), with whom Capote was especially close and whose friendship the writer missed the most.

I found particularly intriguing episode 5, an imaginary day-long meeting between Capote and Black ex-pat author James Baldwin during the dark days of Capote's alcoholism. Baitz admits the day never happened, and is an encounter between two highly influential gay men of letters, contemporaries but not friends, who responded to alienation and truth in very different ways. Baldwin left America for France many years before Capote's crisis.

Baldwin, played convincingly by Chris Chalk, is Capote's counselor and comforter, pushing the acerbic writer -- who is struggling to finish an imposing new work titled Answered Prayers -- to finish what he has begun, revealing America's falseness and social disparities.

The conversations between the two men are some of the most insightful in the series, with Capote sharing startling awareness of racial dynamics not explored in previous episodes. Capote, famously biting, is likely not to have ever uttered these words or had these thoughts, is just Baitz's tool to air them, but that is fine by me.

Baldwin's part in the epiphany may strike some as a little regressive, magical Negro intervention, but Chalk's portrayal is so self-possessed and clear-eyed I never felt Baldwin was any more than a man shaking some sense into a friend who was wasting his gifts and time.

Were we all to be so lucky to have someone who cared that much to tell us to cut the crap and get back to work!

American Society of Magical Negroes

 

Kobi Libii's debut feature, American Society of Magical Negroes, is tanking in its theatrical release, but I trust it will find a more appreciative audience when it arrives on streaming, which will quite likely be soon.

I enjoyed the picture and appreciate what Libii tries to do in blending the cinematic trope of deferential Black secondary characters with the reality of African American endangerment because of the itchy discomfort of some white folks.

The fine young actor Justice Smith (The Get Down) plays Libii's alter ego in a story I take is rooted not only in the filmmaker's study of motion picture history regarding depictions of race but in his own lived experience. Smith plays Aren, a struggling textile artist (I can't imagine any other kind) who has been navigating L.A. with a quick smile and a quicker apology.

One evening, after an especially disheartening art show, he finds himself accused of taking a young woman's purse at an ATM. The situation is "miraculously" de-escalated by David Alan Grier's mystical Roger, who invites Aren to a recruitment meeting. At the meeting, Aren is introduced to the eponymous group whose role is to help ease the anxiety of white folks for the safety of Black folks because dis-ease equals death.

Yes, that premise is a lot to swallow, but it didn't strike me as being that much more challenging -- considering current events -- than Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) or Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle (1987), both of which wrestled with race and racism to wildly divergent audience response.

Aren earns his "Magical Negro" wings and is assigned a client, Jason, a vacuous and self-involved co-worker at a social media platform. Aren is first assigned to helping Jason (Drew Tarver) earn a promotion but shortly also to woo a bright young designer (An-Li Bogan), to whom Aren himself is attracted.

Aren has been warned, however, that he must never act in his own behalf or all of the Magical Negroes will be powerless to help anxious white folks. This, in turn, would endanger Black folks everywhere. Things go awry, as one might expect, which leads to a final act that is both clunky and inspired (that tonal unevenness, again).

Smith, a skilled stage actor, is bright and engaging and is the reason the picture works as well as it does, I think. A less likable protagonist would have made it much easier to dismiss the whole thing as a sad misfire.

I understand why many audiences might be frustrated by the film's uneven tone and its under-developed narrative structure, but I still think it introduces intriguing ideas that are worth exploring in more depth.

Poor Things

 

One measure of the relevance of director / philosopher Yorgos Lanthimos' fantastic "immorality" tale Poor Things might be the number of viewers taken back by the sight of Emma Stone's untrimmed pubic hair and not by the bloody evisceration of corpses -- both make frequent appearances in this striking and hilarious film. These responses would suggest that people have less tolerance for graphic presentations of women's sexuality than they do for butchering the human corpus. 

Stone plays Bella Baxter, a Victorian-era revivified victim of suicide, a Frankensteinian experiment into which the ghastly Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has implanted a baby's brain. Baxter is raising the full-grown Bella as his daughter with the help of a young medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who falls for Bella's beauty and innocence.

Bella is intellectually and emotionally arrested, at first, but then her brain begins to grow rapidly, along with her raven hair. The doctor fears Bella, who has been sheltered from the world, won't survive outside of his London estate. He intends for Max to marry Bella, and the couple would then never leave. 

Baxter's plan is disrupted when the wolfish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) takes Bella, who has developed an insatiable sexual appetite, on a tour of foreign cities. Once away from "God" and Max, Bella starts to learn about the ways of the world, that is, the ways of men. And, because Bella has not been conditioned by social conventions, she responds in ways that seem both "radical" and "rational," traits not commonly demonstrated by "decent" women of the period. 

Stone, an Oscar winner for La La Land, is wonderful as the science experiment who grew into a fully actualized woman, taking full ownership of her mind and body in a world that despite Lanthimos's visually stunning production elements -- eye-popping sets and costumes -- is not far removed from the real.

Oscars 2024

 

I've seen nine of the 10 Oscar nominees for Best Picture and they're all so different that it doesn't really make sense to compare them. Maybe it never has made sense. Dunno.

Many industry observers are saying it's Oppenheimer's to lose. Probably so. Having 10 pictures, though, could split the vote and a dark horse darling like Barbie or The Holdovers might sneak in. 

I suspect awards will be spread out among the pictures and American Fiction might win for screen adaptation. I don't see Jeffrey Wright, as wonderful as he always is, will win Best Actor against Paul Giamatti in Holdovers or Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Lily Gladstone will get Best Actress as many are predicting but Carey Mulligan was terrific in Maestro and Emma Stone unbelievably good (and committed) in Poor Things. 

I would love to see Best Supporting Actress go to Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer but think Da'Vine Joy Randolph from Holdovers is favored and that's OK with me.

I thought Robert Downey Jr. was actually more compelling in Oppenheimer than the lead so I'm fine with him getting Best Supporting Actor. 

Christopher Nolan has never won an Oscar for directing. I think he will this year. 

 

“American Fiction”

“Anatomy of a Fall”

“Barbie”

“The Holdovers”

“Killers of the Flower Moon”

“Maestro”

“Oppenheimer”

“Past Lives”

“Poor Things”

“The Zone of Interest”

All Of Us Strangers

 

The less one knows about Andrew Haigh's beautiful and quietly devastating film All of Us Strangers the better. It's a small, intimate picture about loss and recovery that must be heard as much as seen with one's guard down. 

Adam (Andrew Scott) lives in near isolation in a London high-rise, trying to write a screenplay about his parents, who died in an accident when he was a boy. Andrew gets the notion to visit his childhood home and while there encounters his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy), living in a world suspended between the past and present. He begins regular visits. 

Around the same time, a friendly neighbor (Paul Mescal) comes to Adam's flat one night with a bottle of whiskey and a sexual proposition. Adam declines at first but then ventures out and they begin an affair.

These events are linked, and the beauty of Haigh's film is the way it reveals how and what they tell us about Adam. The answers are unexpected.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Taichi Yamada, is exquisite in its intelligence and honesty. Each performance by the small cast of principals is deeply moving, with Scott's slow burn as an isolated man learning, perhaps for the first time, the power of love the most gripping.

Origin

 

Ava DuVernay's Origin takes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's personal journey of discovery, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent -- which sought to reframe public conversations and explorations around race and inequality -- and transforms it into a motion picture of singular beauty and brilliance. 

The film, which features a tremendous cast led by the amazing Aunjunue Ellis-Taylor, is poetic and painful -- so painful -- fiercely intelligent, compassionate and analytical, factual and metaphorical, intimate and global, historical and pressingly relevant. 

It's a sermon, a dissertation, an indictment, and a love story. It is so many things, but perhaps foremost, it is a cinematic triumph. DuVernay's best work yet.

I'll leave it at that and urge everyone to see and don't resist its message -- even if that were possible. Let it move you and bruise you and, finally, give you hope.

American Symphony

 

Documentarian Matthew Heineman's Oscar-nominated film American Symphony generates warmth and a tinge of claustrophobia with its intimacy and closeness, but not at all negatively. 

Heineman's subject is multiple Grammy-winning musician and composer Jon Batiste, a native New Orleanian performer with a personality and smile as big and broad as the Mississippi River. His radiance is nearly shamanistic; he communicates in languages that are both mystical and grounded. It's wonderful to watch him at work as he navigates the many waterways and eddies of his very full and complicated life.

During the time of Heineman's filming, Batiste is working on an ambitious venture that would combine all of America's musical traditions into a single symphony, pulling from the traditions of African Americans, native peoples and other resident cultures and folkways. It's an enormous undertaking that Batiste seems called to produce but also unsure if he can make it happen.

At the same time, Batiste's wife, writer Souleika Jaouad, is battling leukemia, which has returned after years of remission. The tender exchanges between the couple, filmed in their most private places and at their most vulnerable times, gives the film a near voyeuristic quality, but doesn't cross the line into prurience or misery porn. Rather, these scenes rise to a spiritual level, and not just because of Batiste's very open devoutness. We can see and hear every breath, hope and despair, resignation and resolution. 

The combination of a truly unique human subject and phenomenal access to the ebbs and flows of the subject's life gives the film American Symphony itself a kind of classical structure -- many, many melodic passages followed by tension and counterpoint, the repeating of earlier themes and motives and a rousing closing section that fills the heart.

Mean Girls and The Book of Clarence

The latest version of Tina Fey's Mean Girls juggernaut has arrived in theaters carrying the same Hi-NRG inclusiveness that has made earlier iterations enormous hits (and big paydays for the Queen Bee of SNL alums).

Directed by the duo of Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr., Mean Girls is a now familiar tale of high school cliques and trauma, so familiar that since the original film in 2004 "mean girls" has become a separate class of teen-ager for many.

New arrival to North Shore High School Cady Heron (Angourie Rice of The Nice Guys) is befriended by queer outcasts Janice and Damian (Auli'i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey, a hilarious pair) who then encourage the newbie to infiltrate the camp of the Plastics (the eponymous Mean Girls) which is led by Campus Queen Regina George (Reneé Rapp). Cady is to report back what Regina and her wannabees (Avantika and Bebe Wood) are up to. The Plastics keep the scorching judgments about their schoolmates in a "bedazzled" (thank you, Moira Rose) portfolio, the Burn Book, a central plot device.

A math whiz, Cady falls for a handsome Regina-reject in calculus (Christopher Briney), which, predictably, complicates the mission and Cady's life as it evokes the Queen's wrath. All of this is observed with varying degrees of remove by Mr. Duvall (Tim Meadows) and Ms. Norbury (Ms. Fey) and told through energetic pop-y tunes and nimble ensemble choreography.

Mean Girls is free of moralistic bromides, especially as articulated by the few "grumps" in the picture, but it is not without healthy messaging about self-identity and the power of transformation, even for people who aren't quite done with growing.

British director Jeymes Samuel's The Book of Clarence is an interesting idea in need of a more cohesive presentation. LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah, Atlanta) stars as the title character, who is the twin brother of one of Jesus's 12 disciples. Yes, nearly everyone in the picture -- including Jesus and his Apostles, is Black. The exceptions are, of course, the Romans, who here are standing in for oppressive laws and enforcement.

Clarence is a first-century atheistic rogue and drug dealer, who with his partner Elijah (R.J. Cyler) are indebted to crime lord Jedediah (Eric Kofi-Abrefa), whose sister Varinia (Anna Diop), Clarence fancies.

Samuel matches the story's mix of religion, crime and romance with widely varying tones -- from the reverential to the fanciful and a thumbing hip-hop musical bed -- which is the picture's strength and weakness, to my mind. Was all of this intended and strategic or is Samuel exploring the more free-wheeling, expressive side found in his music?

After seeing throngs drawn to Jesus (Nicholas Pinnock), Clarence gets the notion to try his hand at being a messiah, using stunts involving fake miracles and mud-hut wisdom to raise enough money to settle his debts.

It wouldn't be a movie if the scheme went as planned, of course, and the dismantling of this one is swift and multilayered, ultimately wrestles with matters of faith and redemption, not altogether convincingly.

Samuel's The Harder They Fall (2021) was a fresh take on the American Western that benefited from his outsider perspective. I'm not sure from The Book of Clarence where Samuel, who also wrote the screenplay, is on the religious continuum. I don't think there's any question he's a believer, who embraces forgiveness and sacrifice as eternal truths but his faith lacks the rigidity of more orthodox traditions.

Maybe it doesn't matter, ultimately. Clarence will not be added to the burgeoning canon of contemporary Christian films, but it might best be viewed as an interesting though flawed attempt to make the gospel relevant, regardless of authorship.

American Fiction

 

Cord Jefferson's American Fiction takes questions of authorial authenticity and develops a fascinating study of the meaning of identity, asking what is it that makes each of us who or what we are and what do we do once we find out.

Jefferson's protagonist in this highly entertaining and provocative tale is one Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (the always wonderful Jeffrey Wright). Ellison is an L.A.-based writer of modest renown, laboring in the fields of academia, where he appears to have stagnated. Ellison appears distanced from his craft, from his family and from himself. The film is about how all of these estrangements converge.

Assembled around Monk are his agent Arthur (John Ortiz), who is trying to keep a talented man invested in his career; his sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), who is Monk's truthteller trying to pull him back into the family; and his brother (Sterling K. Brown), who is on his own quest for authenticity.

At a book festival in his hometown of Boston, Monk hears bestselling urban writer Sintara Golden (a terrific Issa Rae) read from her blockbuster "We's Live in Da Ghetto," (yes, the satire is that broad), a book celebrated by the publishing world as the needed voice of Black America.

Monk is repulsed by what he considers pandering prose, but personal circumstances soon persuade him to give the genre a shot. The shot turns into a goldmine, which fuels Monk's deep crisis of conscience.

Jefferson's film is an adaptation of Percival Everett's "Erasure," which I have not read, but, knowing some of Everett's other works, I expect the source material is even more incendiary in its depiction of the publishing industry's relationship with Black writers -- a topic that Everett, who was reared in Columbia, no doubt knows well.

Fans of Wright who like me welcome anything the man decides to do will undoubtedly love the complexity of the character he portrays with the easy grace that typifies his work. But the film's ensemble is also strong, especially the lovely and understated supporting appearance by Erika Alexander (Living Single) as Coraline, Monk's love interest who gets as close as anyone might to understanding the enigma that is the man.

I hope American Fiction, a wonderful picture, will inspire much post-screening conversation and productive navel-gazing among literary agents and writer's struggling to find their voices amidst the cacophony of modern publishing.

Anatomy of a Fall

 

Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall is a riveting suspicious-death procedural that's wrapped around a domestic drama of incompatibility and "blinding" self-regard. 

I use the term "blinding" deliberately and ironically because the prime witness to the suspicious death is the son of the couple living in a chalet in Grenoble (Sandra Hüller and Samuel Theis), who lost his vision in an accident.

The boy, played by the impressive child actor Milo Machado Graner, has been a silent witness to his parents' acrimonious relationship, which has worsened since the family moved from London to the Alps. Daniel's mother, Sandra, is charged with the murder of his father, Samuel, whose body the boy found in the snow, a fatal wound to his head.

Triet exposes through the investigation and the court trial competing scenarios to explain Samuel's death, with the chief prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) describing jealousy and resentment between the couple, a successful writer, Sandra, married to a struggling writer / college professor. Sandra's attorney is a former love interest named Vincent (Swann Arlaud) who acknowledges that the circumstances point to Sandra as the culprit but promotes another cause of Samuel's death.

Anatomy's structure is pretty standard for whodunits but departs from it when piecing together the competing views -- reality and illusion -- about the couple's relationship and the role Daniel's blinding accident played in the dissolution of what may or may not have been true love. So much weight is put on the boy's presence in the lives of these two egoists and the changes to the family's dynamic after he was blinded that one wonders how (or even if) he's remained sane. 

And therein lies the biggest mystery of Anatomy of a Fall, and one the film does not answer readily. And that makes the fascinating picture all the more so.

The Retirement Plan

 

Director Tim Brown's The Retirement Plan is a breezy, outlandish mob comedy / thriller starring Nicolas Cage as a former government asset named Matt, living a drunken existence in the Caymans when his 'tweeny granddaughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell) arrives at his beachside bungalow, deposited there by his estranged daughter Ashley (Ashley Greene Khoury) after her husband (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) runs afoul of the gangster he drives for (Jackie Earle Haley).

Brown's picture is a convoluted mess of crosses and double-crosses with layers of nonsensical political intrigue on top of dense strata of murky backstory. It's all more impressions than information. The closest the picture gets to understanding Matt's motives is when an old friend (Ernie Hudson) shares a bit with Sarah and Ashley about Matt's deadly exploits, foreshadowing for them and the audience what the last reel would deliver.

The Retirement Plan shares more than a passing resemblance to featured player Ron Perlman's The Baker (2022), another lazy story of an aging cantankerous grandfather with a smoky past on a mission of vengeance and redemption.

The Origins of Evil

 

French director Sébastien Marnier's The Origin of Evil (L'origine du mal) takes the nastiness of patriarchal legacy film and television (Knives Out, Secession, etc.) and distills it into a concentrated intoxicating potion. Superbly composed and hypnotic.

The picture opens with film star Laure Calamy getting ready for a shift in a fish-packaging plant. She's an assembly-line worker in a company that seems to employ only women. One night after work, she gathers the courage to dial a number and make contact with a local business magnate (Jacques Weber), identifying herself to him as his daughter Stéphane.

Next we see, she is taking the ferry to the island of Porquerolles to meet Serge; his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc); and other members of his household.

"Unsettling" does not adequately describe the unfiltered animosity at the gathering but Stéphane doesn't appear deterred by the cold, rudeness of daughter George (Doria Tillier) or the off-putting officiousness of housekeeper Agnes (Véronique Ruggia). In fact, Stéphane's lack of discomfiture is an early indication that all is not as it seems in this wickedly sly movie.

Serge has recently suffered a stroke and is prone to fainting spells. He's secretive and suspicious and is looking for an ally. Louise is a Baby Jane-grotesque, whose sole aim appears to be spending Serge's money. She cares little about her husband's welfare or much of anything else, apparently.

George, who seems to care even less for her father than her mother, manages Serge's many enterprises, and housekeeper Agnes keeps George informed of household intrigues. The only family member who seems to be above the toxicity is college-aged Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell), whose counting the days before she'll be free of her family.

Sébastien Marnier, who also wrote the screenplay, has crafted for his cast -- especially Calamy -- a maddening tour de force of greed and misery, slowly revealing the dimensions and depths of the family's morbidity as the picture slowly burns.

Bad Seeds?

 

In Mervyn LeRoy's 1956 child-killer thriller The Bad Seed, sprightly, pig-tailed, 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) kills a classmate and later a handyman who suspects her of doing it.

Her mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), suspects Rhoda inherited evil genes from Christine's birth father, who she had discovered was a serial killer. Christine tries to dispose of evidence of Rhoda's crimes and then do away with herself and her daughter.

Her plan doesn't work but Rhoda gets her just deserts. I won't say how.

Kelly and McCormack were nominated for Oscars, deservedly so, because the picture (based on a stage play by Maxwell Anderson) explores in more surreal terms, at least to my mind, the complex dynamic between parents and their errant children.

The film's plot centers on the killing of one child by another but is actually about the nature of criminality and culpability. Christine's distress and confusion are highly relatable, while Rhoda's sociopathy would likely be alien to most people.

Even though film standards and audience tolerance for violence have evolved since the '50s, the picture still packs a wallop and not just because of McCormack's creepy performance. The troubling questions the movie provokes resonate.

Who is ultimately to blame when our children go "bad"? Is it an easy dodge to saddle parents with the responsibility for their children's behavior? Genetics? Media? Society? Satan?

These questions came to mind when I read this morning of three teenagers being charged with the shooting deaths of three others and injuring a fourth. A family court judge will decide if the 14-year-old accused shooter will stand trial as an adult, a determination that will suggest the teen acted with full knowledge and responsibility.

Can this ever really be the case for someone so young?

Beyonce's Renaissance

 

Beyonce's invigorating cinematic testament to personal empowerment, Renaissance, builds on the narrative model she used in 2019's Homecoming, which was released on Netflix, to create not only a record of her latest tour but a thundering challenge to MAGA nation's stagnating worldview. As with Homecoming, Renaissance combines concert footage with that of production preparation during which Beyonce, 41, displays the control over all aspects of the tour that has made her legendary. Her drive is phenomenal, and the quality of her products -- the visually and aurally dazzling shows AND her personal brand -- are indeed remarkable. She's been described as a "force of nature" and everything in the nearly 3-hour film supports that description. Early in the film, Beyonce announces from the stage that her shows, booked in sold-out stadia, are "safe spaces" for those who have been marginalized or rejected. And they flock to her shows, costumed in silver and popping fans marked "Heated," after one of the numbers from the Renaissance album. Her highly diverse crew includes non-gender conforming dancers, several from New York's ball culture. And in voice-over, Beyonce says she was excited by the number of women working on the tech side of the enormous enterprise, building the gigantic sets. Those familiar with Beyonce's catalog know that her songs celebrate, sometimes in the coarsest of terms, women's ownership of their lives and bodies, of their destinies. She talks in the picture about balancing her public and private obligations, her devotion to her craft and to her family, the long hours, the injuries, the need for calm between the storms of her exhausting routines. And the enormous gratification she gets from being able to play at the top of her game and succeed. In so many ways, Beyonce Knowles-Carter represents what America should be -- a place that encourages and supports all of us, where we can realize our dreams no matter how grand or modest, unimpeded, giving us space to grow, free of others' limiting perspectives and prejudices. And, of course, plenty of room to dance.