Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice

Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman offer fans a musical treat in their bio documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. Epstein and Friedman (The Celluloid Closet) are masters of the narrative arc and smartly recount Ronstadt's discovery and rise, her musical experimentation and embrace of her Mexican roots and these later years that have been quieted by Parkinson's disease. The joy of the film is not just in the soundtrack, which is irresistible, but in hearing Ronstadt tell her own story throughout. She reveals herself to be not a detached superstar but insightful and reflective about herself and the world. She's had one hell of a career, inspired numerous other female artists in popular music and been a cherished friend. Hearing Emmylou Harris's story of Ronstadt's generosity will fill your heart and hearing Ronstadt join her cousin and nephew in a lovely Spanish love song will break it.

Dark Ages

 

 

If you ask me, black folks have been catching hell ever since the church made up white Jesus and the black devil. Since then darkness has been the code for badness. It's a deep, deep stain in Western culture. So deep we've laughed at it and cheered it on. Now that's powerful.

Marguerite (film short)

Canadian director Marianne Farley's beatific short film Marguerite (2017) is a two-character portrait of an aged woman in her last days and the young home-health nurse who makes daily visits. The film has barely a page of dialogue but the women are involved in an intimate exchange of care and trust. So much is said with their smiles and eyes. When Marguerite learns nurse Rachel has a girlfriend, at first her face shows surprise but then she seems to wander off into memory. We learn of Marguerite's lingering regret and are nearly broken when she asks Rachel, haltingly, what it is like to make love to a woman. "C'est beau," the nurse says, tenderly. "C'est beau," the older woman repeats. This exquisitely humane story is wrapped in fallen snow and downy comforters and warm light: it speaks to our need for love and our capacity for loving.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

Vince Gilligan's El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is smartly crafted but cruises rather than races. Compared to the original series, the film feels lethargic in spots, but that's purposeful. Gilligan has crafted an epilogue for fan reflection and contemplation. There's gun play and explosion, but this picture, this chapter closes the book softly. Quietly.
Aaron Paul's performance is wonderful. His Jesse Pinkman does the heavy lifting for the story about the meth-chef's next steps after escaping from brutal bondage with a vital assist from his mentor Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in the series' final episode.

The unfamiliar might assume El Camino is a wanderer's tale, in which the hero encounters various characters, some familiar and some new, each holding a valuable piece of his fate. It is that tale, for sure, but it is also something more existential. It's about a human's transformation.
Pinkman -- once high wattage and "bitch" obsessed -- is now a low drone. His speech is laconic, his eyes are steely. His PTSD is authentic, his scars are quite visible and his future is an open question.
The film's close is satisfying, if not certain. And such is life.

Judy

British director Rupert Goold's Judy depicts an iconic figure, Judy Garland, near the end of a life that's been addled by a drug addiction spawned by a merciless motion picture studio system when she was a teenager. Renee Zellwegger, stripped of her cherubic girlishness, is a gaunt and enervated Garland, kept alive by booze and pills and love for her children, performing a series of concerts in London just months before her death at 47. Though the script by Tom Edge has moments of near campy hysterics, it also has some lovely, quieter moments that resonate. Judy's evening with a gay couple (Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira) is respite from the grind of performance, isolation and insomnia. She enjoys a meal and a moment of genuine connectedness. It's a passage of warmth in the film to counterbalance the alienation the character has felt most of her life. The film's unevenness in tone will keep it out of the running for Best Picture but Zellwegger's total encasement in the body of an abundantly talented and tremendously tragic woman will most assuredly get a nod.

Joker

That Joaquin Phoenix’s physical form appears to have been broken and improperly mended adds levels of credibility to his performance as Arthur Fleck a/k/a Joker in Todd Phillip’s brutal character study. The picture, an origins film of sorts for the Batman saga, depicts a grim and violent Gotham City, the filthy home to teeming masses of the discarded and forgotten and a few wealthy princes of the city. Phoenix’s Joker is a distressing, sunken presence who dreams of making it big as a stand-up comedian but lacks the imagination to pull that off. Instead he works as a clown-for-hire, tends to his feeble mother (Frances Conroy) and fixates on a local late-night talk show host (Robert DeNiro). After a punishing beatdown by teenaged thugs and a series of other indignities, Arthur decides to fight back against a world that threatens to devour him. His actions inspire imitation and insurrection. Phoenix gives his usual masterful performance in a movie that taps contemporary societal stressors to leave viewers shaken and disoriented.

Joker / reflection

A critical and unsettling moment in the film Joker showed the slowly crazing clown-for-hire Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), who had just discovered a connection between his family and Gotham City's most powerful industrialist, reaching through the gates at stately Wayne Manor and using his thumbs to push a smile into young Bruce Wayne's face. It's sad and creepy and for this viewer a foreshadowing of the masked misery that lay ahead for both characters in the universe of Batman lore. But it also struck me as a larger statement from director / writer Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver about the lack of authenticity in human interactions. We smile but aren't happy. Ask "how are you" but don't actually care. We clap, stand, kneel, march, weep as the crowd dictates and attack those who don't do as directed. Fleck / Joker laughed when he was nervous or upset because of faulty wiring and his condition brought on several beat downs because he was off-script and the world could not handle it. The madness that eventually led to societal chaos was not of Joker's making. It and he were products of society's relentless despair. The last scene of a "city on fire" was a metaphor for our current condition of deepening dysphoria.