The Assistant

 

In writer / director Kitty Green's The Assistant (2019), Julia Garner (Ozark's Ruth Langmore) plays Jane, a fairly new executive's assistant in the New York office of a movie production company run by a tyrannical lothario who never appears on camera but is voiced by Tony Torn. (Yes, it is clearly supposed to feel like Miramax.)

The film's story is set during one very long day for Jane. We watch as she is belittled, patronized and threatened by nearly every one in the office. She meets a young woman hired by the studio boss to be yet another production assistant, despite having no experience, few qualifications but a pretty face.

Jane takes her concerns that the woman is being expoited to the director of human resources, Wilcock (Matthew Macfayden), who recasts Jane's concerns as jealousy and warns her that pursuing the complaint would end badly for her. Jane, a smoldering ember of fear and contempt, retreats and resigns herself to the harshness of the world she says she wants to be a part of.

Green's slow burn of a script and Garner's methodical, understated performance give searing voice to the topic of sexual exploitation in the worplace and leaves unanswered, intentionally, the picture's central question, expressed by Jane to Wilcock -- "What can we do?"

The Assistant is too subdued to be accurately characterized as a rallying call for #MeToo advocates, but its washed-out starkness lends the issue the weariness of common practice. And that will surely anger and activate many viewers.

Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres

 

Director Suzanne Kai loves and respects the subject of her bio-doc Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres (2021) now streaming on Netflix.

Having been a reader of Rolling Stone since it's early days as a newsprint quarter-fold, I was familiar wth Fong-Torres' probing stories about popular music celebrities and their often inscrutable worlds.

His was a distinctive style, both removed and intimate, disciplined, trustworthy, not at all like the verbal pyrotechnics of Hunter S. Thompson, who often became the central point of his stories, or the epic abrasiveness of music critic Lester Bangs, probably both adored and despised by his subjects and readers.

Though he has written many probing portraits of recording artists, Fong-Torres, who grew up in the Bay Area of California, is more circumspect about himself, a quality he came to in childhood when he often found himself isolated as the only Chinese student in his school and social circles. He tells the viewer he learned to recede and listen.

According to the film, Fong-Torres, who attended San Francisco State, was universally loved by the musicians coming into their own in the '60s and '70s in his native Bay Area (The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane) and beyond (The Doors, The Rolling Stones).

Fong-Torres, principal music writer and editor, diversified the magazine with long-form features on towering Black artists like Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles, who talked candidly not only about their music but their relationships to audiences and industries that often showed little understanding about them. In the film, Quincy Jones says Fong-Torres had an endearing chameleonic quality, adapting his manner and speech to fit any situation.

Writer / director Cameron Crowe was hired by Fong-Torres when he, Crowe, was only 16 years old. That event was the basis for Crowe's celebrated film Almost Famous (2000), his affectionate description of the world Fong-Torres explored for America's premiere music magazine. In the documentary, Crowe gushes unapologetically when meeting with Fong-Torres, still that fanboy from his youth. It's an utterly charming moment in a film that is loaded with warmth.

At 77, Fong-Torres, the son of Chinese immigrants by-way-of the Philippines (thus the Torres add-on to his surname), proves a fascinating subject for a documentary about the man himself, music journalism as craft and enterprise, youth culture and America's racial history. Though he left Rolling Stone many years ago for other ventures, Fong-Torres is still a major presence in the San Francisco / Oakland area as writer / broadcaster / fundraiser.

Trouble No More

More than occasionally, I imagine what the world would be like if more of us embraced the original Allman Brothers Band's ethos of creative amalgamation, friends of all stripes working together and becoming family.

Not that the Brothers didn't have their challenges -- drugs, disaster and death seemed to stalk them -- but they appeared to me to be more or less imperturbable in their commitment to spirited inclusion and to whatever it was they were building -- whether it be a jam or a brand, if such crass commercial language can be applied to a group that to many seemed transcendent. (Have you HEARD "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed"?)

A diverse ensemble of young musicians, some with direct ties to the Brothers, are touring in tribute to the iconic band. They call themselves Trouble No More, after the Muddy Waters song the Brothers recorded and performed live early on. (Another group of older musicians in Oregon is also performing under that name.)

Trouble No More is led by 19-year-old guitar prodigy Brandon Niederauer. His brother, bassist Dylan, is also in the band. (Here is a story of the group's formation and evolution -- https://lnkd.in/gv2vSJxt)

The Allman Brothers' staple Whipping Post was recorded during the Trouble No More show at the Beacon Theater in New York a couple of weeks back. It is an energetic and dexterous performance that is also inspirational for what it signals about our potential for creating beauty when we put our minds -- and souls -- into it.

https://lnkd.in/gaAUp7mU

Ted Lasso

Season 2 of Ted Lasso concluded with Nate Shelley lashing out at Ted during half-time of the final match with vile accusations of wrongs committed by the coach against his young protege.

Nate's tortured irrationality had been building over the season, and he would not be mollified by Lasso. Even a team-win using Nate's defensive strategy was not enough to cool his resentment.

He reserved his most hurtful gesture for Lasso's hand-drawn "Believe" sign introduced earlier in the season. It had been posted in the lockerroom and used by the team as a totem.

Though viewers did not see him do it, it was suggested that Nate tore the sign in two and left it on Lasso's desk, a contemptible act, intended to demoralize and, perhaps more importantly, to humilate a man who seemed to be roundly loved and admired for his humanity if not his coaching savvy. Nate both loved and hated Ted Lasso.

Many of us are familiar with how spiteful jealousy fuels irrational acts -- some of us more than others. What the show did so well was contextualize Nate's anger, the pain behind the attack. We understood the young man's misery and how pettiness grew out of it. It was a hurtful and weirdly human act; it made sense to me. To paraphrase the great Chris Rock, "I'm not saying Nate should have done it, but I understand."

And that's why this show was so brilliant.

The Hummingbird Project

 

Celebrated Canadian director Kim Nguyen's 2018 film The Hummingbird Project (now on Showtime) is an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful picture about an ambitious venture to run fiber-optic cable in a straight line the thousand miles from Kansas to New Jersey, reducing processing time by a millisecond (the single beat of a hummingbird's wing), which, according to the narrative, would translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in a Wall Street minute. The picture is ambitious because it proposes to "sexify" code-writing and industrial and civil engineering and it is unsuccessful for pretty much the same reason. But it does deliver several solid thoughts.

Nguyen, who directed the Oscar-nominated War Witch (2012), could have used some of 2010's The Social Network's brisk pacing and narrative clarity -- after all, he also had that picture's Jesse Eisenberg as his lead, Vincent Zaleski -- or 2015's The Big Short's cockeyed textual notes and celebrity explainers. Still, the film does say some interesting things about (1) competition in the world of information technology in the person of Salma Hayek's menacing tech mogul Eva Torres, (2) human and machine interface through Alexander Skarsgård's performance as the brilliant but fragile programmer Anton Zaleski, and (3) the cost of all of this.

In that regard, there are two important take aways: (1) time, information and timely information are all "money," and (2) sometimes a triple-scoop ice cream cone is worth more.

Jimmie Spheeris

Folks I know who are fans of Jimmie Spheeris stumbled upon his music while flipping through record bins or listening to college radio.

Spheeris recorded fewer than a half-dozen albums, toured a good bit, but hit a creative slump for nearly a decade before recording new material and dying in a motorcycle accident, killed by a drunken driver in Santa Monica on the Fourth of July, 1984, the night he finished the record. He was 34 years old.

Safe to say, many (most?) people have come to Spheeris posthumously. And discovering his story might be as fascinating as listening to his music.

Spheeris was born in Alabama, into a family that ran a carnival. He was a brother of the celebrated filmmaker Penelope Spheeris. Friends have written that Spheeris was gay and a Scientologist, which caused him great distress.

Spheeris' more cherished songs are melodically rich, contemplative and ruminative, impressionistic scenes more than stories. Blue Streets closes out his third album, The Dragon is Dancing (1975), and is one of his prettiest compositions wrapped around images of hiddenness and detachment. So powerful.

Streets of scarlet, streets of blue

Child from the wishing well's bound to you

Moons of madness, moons in you

Pull you like the ocean to the blue streets

And sunlight thru the lace

Is throwing shadows on some stranger's face

So you get up and pull the shades

Blind the black eyes of the blue streets

Dreams of scarlet, dreams of blue

Fade in the alleyways you walk thru

Eyes of fire, eyes so sweet

Beg you, resurrect you on the blue streets

And sunlight thru the lace

Nothing seems to see you in this stranger's face

So you get up and pull the shades

Like lids for the eyes of the blue streets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slYS7FL4XgQ

The Bible: ... In the Beginning (1966)

 

Movies have always been there for me.

In January 1968, my family buried a revered matriarch. The service was in a funeral home on a busy street in downtown Washington, D.C.

I was not quite 10, but I remember seeing through the window of the limousine that a neighboring movie house was screening The Bible: In the Beginning. Being a good Catholic school boy, I pointed to the marquee and said to a family member that that was a good sign (unaware of the double meaning of what I had said).

It would be 20 years before I actually saw, albeit on video, the picture that I long associated with that solemn occasion. For all of that time, I had assumed John Huston's weirdly uneven but still spectacular epic retelling of the first chapters of Genesis was a '67-'68 release. The picture had actually been in theaters since September 1966.

Studios made many fewer pictures back then, and movie canisters were first released to the major metros' big palatial theaters with names like Orpheum, Loew's and Fox. Features were screened in those houses for months before making their way to smaller cities and towns and eventually the hinterlands and to drive-ins. Small town audiences often saw the blotched and scratched prints that had been pristine in Chicago and New York months before.

Occasionally, fresh prints were released and the cycle begun again years after the initial screening.

Some reels that went to Dixie were edited to remove "objectionable" content -- like Black folks that WERE NOT portraying minstrels. Southern audiences were spared seeing Sidney Poitier kissing Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue. (Cancel culture?)

Today, some motion pictures are edited to suit the sensibilities of international audiences. (https://lnkd.in/g9K9mVmV)

The movie business may have been different in the years before multiplexes, HBO and video streaming but the one enduring aspect is making money.

FWIW, according to IMDB, Huston's movie, which was not particularly religious or inspirational, cost about $18 million to make. It did not recover the cost in ticket sales but movie rentals have helped.

The Bad Guys

 

Animator Pierre Perifel's feature-length directorial debut, The Bad Guys, borrows from live-action caper films like the Ocean series starring George Clooney, who is actually referenced in this gem of a film.

Sam Rockwell's Wolf (as in Big Bad) and his motley crew of stereotypically miscreant critters (Snake [Marc Maron], Shark [Craig Robinson], Tarantula [Awkwafina], and Piranha [Anthony Ramos]) have been living lives of crime because the world doesn't expect anything better of them. They're marginalized hard cases.

When Wolf gets a pleasant tingle from doing a good dead in the midst of a heist, the team's efficiency and esprit de corps becomes threatened and they end up as experiments for a Professor Henry Higgins-type guinea pig (voiced by British actor Richard Ayoade) who promises to try to turn the bad into good over the skeptical objections of Gov. Diane Foxington (voiced by Zazie Beetz).

As has been true for the best animated work from the DreamWorks studios, The Bad Guys has an engaging maturity in its humor that will miss young children in the audience. However, adults might actually reflect on its mesages about fear and assumptions in a world where half the people are scary and the other half are scared.

The Unbearable Weight of Mass Talent

 

How much one loves Nicolas Cage's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, directed by Tom Gormican, will be proportionate to how much one loves Cage, motion pictures and/or Cage's motion pictures.

Cage, as many know, is a member of the Coppola family of moviemakers -- Francis Ford, Sophia, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, etc. etc. Though an Oscar winner for Leaving Las Vegas, Cage is not known for being understated on the screen, and, as his latest film notes, albeit ironically, he seems to be constantly working.

Unbearable Weight (note the title's spoof on "The Unbearable Lightness of Being") finds Cage hoping to score a solid dramatic part in a film that will stretch him, all the while winking at audience members who, no doubt, are aware of Cage's habit of playing (or overplaying) every role he gets. He doesn't do subtle or nuance -- there is no lightness to his being.

Cage's life is a bit of a wreck -- divorcing his wife and estranged from his daughter -- when he gets an offer through his agent, played by Neil Patrick Harris, for a party appearance on Mallorca, hosted by a wealthy fan, Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), who has a screenplay to peddle.

Sharp viewers will find homages to Cage's movies throughout the picture, which finds him drafted to help CIA agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) who have targeted Gutierrez as an arms dealer responsible for kidnapping the daughter of a Spanish politician running for president.

It's all bona fide nonsense except for Cage's chemistry with Pascal, which is the real deal; they really put the "bro" in "bromance."

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness trades the Marvel Studios' usual deft mix of blistering action and cockeyed humor for a daft mix of baffling abstraction and coked-up horror.

Sam Raimi, who directed the comparatively pedestrian Tobey Maguire universe of Spider-Man films, takes his new picture's title seriously and punches through nearly every wall of conventional narrative to turn viewers' minds every which way but loose.

A young dimension jumper named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) is running from creatures that do the bidding of an evil version of second-string Avenger, The Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen).

America lands in the universe occupied by the Doctor Strange we all know and, maybe, love (Benedict Cumberbatch) with a story that if she's captured the witch will be able to take control of all of the occupants of the multiverse.

It's not explained how Wanda Maximoff got to be the baddest hexer in existence but neither Strange nor his cohort Wong (Benedict Wong) seem able to match her witchery. America tells them a mythical book of spells might do the trick but getting to it will be tough.

All of the hoodoo is bewildering and quickly becomes tedious because the audience can't invest in what they don't understand. And the creeper gore that Raimi throws into the mix just makes the picture messier.