Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Martin Scorsese's engrossing masterwork Killers of the Flower Moon takes the true story of the murder of members of the wealthy Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s and turns it into a study of corruption, greed and white supremacy.

The picture's 206-minute running time covers about a dozen bloody years, when white settlers on Osage land overflowing with oil find ways to insinuate themselves into tribal affairs in hopes of eventually making themselves rich. Standing between the schemers and the tribe's money are laws prohibiting non-tribal members from inheriting oil rights ... except through marriage.

Robert De Niro, Scorsese's longtime collaborator, is William "King" Hale, the prime schemer and uncle to returning doughboy Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a slow-witted young man with no demonstrable talent who goes to work as a cab driver.

Through this job, he meets an unattached Osage woman named Mollie, played by the remarkable Lily Gladstone, whom he is encouraged by his uncle to woo, as Mollie's mother is sickly, her older sister a destructive alcoholic, and her other sisters already married. Mollie herself is suffering from diabetes. King tells Ernest if he marries Mollie and lets "nature" take its course her family's great wealth will one day be his, or rather theirs.

The plan progresses. Members of Mollie's family are slowly killed off by ghostly figures, leaving her only support Ernest, who claims to love her more than he does money, and King.

More than 20 Osage members are murdered, and the federal government dispatches investigators led by Tom White (the ever-reliable Jesse Plemons) to ferret out the killers.

Scorsese weaves into the tapestry of this "gangland" tale much historical and cultural context about the Osage people, and it is in those passages -- some staged as newsreel footage and others as dreams and fantasy -- that the director offers his most elegiac imagery.

Most notably for me was a field-burning scene late in the picture that depicts the event giving the picture and its source material its meaning. It is chillingly emblematic of the destruction of not only Osage people but all Native American tribes.

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

 

Directors Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle and Karen O'Connor's touching and illuminating documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is only secondarily a musical retrospective. 

It is primarily an exploration of the spirit of an 82-year-old woman who has been both gifted with a heavenly voice and social consciousness and tortured by demons she's never fully understood.

The film is bookended by Baez's preparation for a final tour after many years of absence from the stage and includes family footage mostly shot by her father, a Mexican immigrant who was an accomplished physics professor. Baez recounts being plagued by depression and anxiety as a child, conditions she would struggle with for the rest of her life and the cause of which is suggested but not firmly established.

Her public story is familiar to many -- her relationships with Bob Dylan, whom she introduced to public audiences in the early '60s, and anti-war activist David Harris, whom she would marry and with whom she had a son, Gabriel. Many already know of her participation in Civil Rights protests in the South and world peace campaigns all over the country.

Less familiar would be the parts of her story that involved her sisters -- Pauline and Mimi -- and their varying degrees of closeness and distance, support and resentment, and the impact her parents would have on both her success and her despondency.  

Themes of personal and familial unhappiness course through this riveting picture, which incorporates live and recorded performances by Baez and footage of her social justice work. 

Though she no longer has the clarion soprano of her youth, her voice is still lovely and her convictions have not waned, despite the fierce battles she has waged to maintain her sanity and emotional wholeness. 

A scene of Baez dancing barefoot to a drum squad in a Paris street is so joyful we forget for a minute her struggles with stifling sadness, most achingly portrayed in passages and drawings from her childhood journals. 

Hers has been both an incredibly public and private existence that has enriched the world in incalculable ways. The picture is a loving and vital tribute to a remarkable woman.

Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal

 

Season 1of Netflix's Murdaugh documentary featured no people of color in any substantial way in running down the events of the murders and the earlier boat crash.

Season 2 prominently features a Hispanic woman who worked as the Murdaugh's housekeeper and an African American woman who was caretaker to Alex Murdaugh's parents.

These are longstanding roles in the South, especially where there were strict divisions between the white, wealthy propertied class and those who worked for them -- poor whites and people of color -- with the latter often being exploited and manipulated by the former.

The Creator

 

Gareth Edwards' The Creator presents two minds to audiences.
One is concerned with the threat of unbound technological advancement, and the other the benign hybridization of humans and machines.

Both of these themes have been explored numerous times in film and television and, I feel, with more impact (Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence [2001] and Alex Garland Ex Machina [2014]).

The apocalyptic world that Edwards has created with co-writer Chris Weitz is set decades in the future with humans and machines on two different continents. The machines inhabit "New Asia" and the humans, a militarized America, where the president is a uniformed officer. Yes, the socio-political messaging here is pretty heavy.

John David Washington plays Joshua, an Army sergeant on undercover assignment in New Asia, married to Maya (Gemma Chan), a human raised by A.I., who is pregnant with the couple's first child.

They are living peacefully in an A.I. enclave when a gigantic, floating American vessel drops bombs on the village just as Maya, who did not know Joshua was a spy, tries to join the A.I. forces in fighting back. Joshua and Maya are separated, and Maya presumed dead.

Five years later, Joshua is part of a mission led by Colonel Howell (Allison Janney) to locate and capture a device that could neutralize all American weaponry. Joshua discovers the device is actually a simulant child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). After the rest of the mission team is killed, Joshua takes charge of the child / weapon.

Predictably, Joshua and the child, whom he names Alphie, develop a bond as they try to elude Howell's forces who are determined to destroy her. During their flight, Joshua learns from a simulant fighter (Ken Watanabe) that Maya may be alive, and Joshua sets out to find her.

Edwards' visual effects artistry is on display in nearly every frame of this picture, particularly in the robots and simulants. But the movie's reliance on familiar narrative tropes and some anachronistic dialogue (Get in! This will be hellafun!) kept it from becoming a fully immersive experience.

Jesse Plemons

 

Jesse Plemons does not have a Hollywood-handsome face and is paunchy. I don't think I've ever heard him in a role where his Texas accent was not present. He will likely never play Hamlet -- though I think that could be quite a performance. He's not a method actor but appears to invest himself fully into his characters -- men who would quite likely -- were they real -- look like him. He's done comedy, family drama, period pieces, psychological thrillers -- film and television. He's won awards and will surely win more. He's as solid and appealing an actor as any I can think of and if film distributors DO NOT include him in the trailer for a picture -- no matter how small his part -- they're absolutely crazy. Plemons is in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon as FBI agent Tom White. He is one of the few younger members of the Friday Night Lights television series cast to go on to build a substantial career.

Dumb Money

 Film and television director Craig Gillespie's Dumb Money is a spirited companion to Adam McKay's The Big Short (2015) as it recounts the phenomenal climb of the price of stock for video game and accessories retailer Game Stop and the response of Wall Street insiders to the threat the stock's success posed to their lucrative short positions, that is, they were betting on Game Stop's failure as more video gaming moved online.

Leading the charge for Game Stop stock was Massachusetts financial analyst and amateur trader Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who through his YouTube channel Roaring Kitty inspired the unprecedented bull run by others fired up by Gill's unvarnished deliver and transparency.

The screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, based on the book by Ben Mezrich, covers a lot of ground as it tracks Gill's journey with Game Stop, a handful of inexperienced traders from all walks (America Ferrera, Myha'la Herrold, Anthony Ramos, Talia Ryder) and the hedge-fund brokers (Seth Rogen, Vincent D'Onofrio, Nick Offerman) who were betting on Game Stop's financial collapse.

"Dumb Money," a disparaging term that refers to the capital managed by amateurs, does not have The Big Short's cheekiness but it does have the earlier film's anti-greed ethos and the added kick of a fully extended middle finger to billionaire schemers who shut out the common person and those who allow them to do so.

It Lives Inside

 

Director Bishal Dutta's It Lives Inside has been positioned in the horror genre market by the same folks who greenlighted Jordan Peele's game-changer Get Out (2017).

Dutta's nifty little assimilationist's nightmare is not as polished as Peele's stellar pictures are but it is a cultural curio that is well worth a look by fans of scare fests that also serve as social commentary. (The aforementioned Get Out.)

Megan Suri stars as Samidha (Sam), an Indian-American high schooler who is alienated from her Asian heritage, much to the disappointment of her mother, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), a cultural purist who refuses to speak English, prepares only tradition desi dishes and hosts holiday celebrations. Sam's father, Inesh (Vik Sahay) is more tolerant of their daughter's explorations and is a buffer between Sam and Poorna.

When Sam's friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), who has turned into a bit of a walking zombie, starts carting about a jar with dark markings on it, Sam works even harder to put distance between them. One afternoon, Tamira asks Sam for help with the entity she says is trapped in the jar, something she retrieved from the home of another Indian-American student who was killed along with his family in their home. Sam sends Tamira away.

Sam's kind teacher Joyce (Betty Gabriel of Get Out) urges Sam not to turn her back on her friend because the children of immigrants should stick together.

This is not a persuasive argument for Sam, who does reject her friend and accidently breaks the jar. The entity is released, and, as is the way with such stories, all hell breaks loose in the form of an ancient soul-eater, the Pishach. Tamira disappears and people start dying.

Dutta and co-writer Ashish Mehta fold much cultural significance into Sam's battle with her own identity and the demonic presence that seems to feed on the fear and uncertainty of its host.

The spirit might be read as the struggle many children of immigrants face while trying to find their place in a country that is not always accommodating or welcoming, that often demands conformity and threatens rejection.