Alternative monitoring of popular culture ~ broadly defined ~ in the pursuit of deeper understanding
Monday, September 13, 2021
The Card Counter
Malignant
James Wan's movies (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) are not known for subtlety. In his horror-hackemup pictures, actors are walking, muttering bags of viscera, lurching from frame to frame, waiting to be gutted or bludgeoned. Everyone is fair game and the endless bloodletting is all in good fun.
Saturday, September 4, 2021
The Sparks Brothers
For the familiar, "idiosyncratic" does not begin to describe Ron and Russell Mael, better known as Sparks. Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver), a smart and crafty Brit who is also a huge fan, uses the venerable band (50 years old and counting) to explore the nature of creativity and orthodoxy in a most engaging way in the loving documentary The Sparks Brothers.
I was introduced to the group's recordings while on staff at my college radio station. Sparks had released two albums --Kimono My House (a punning recast of the title of Eartha Kitt's Come On a My House) and Propaganda the year before -- that garnered much attention by the alternative music crowd for the cleverness and complexity of the songwriting. Ron Mael has been the principal songwriter of the group's enormous catalog (close to 1,000 songs) and Russell has been the indefatigably nimble singer (some of the vocalizations are herculean feats).
Wright interviews the Maels, former band members, and other fans (many of them musicians with more prominent profiles, who were inspired by the group) to carry viewers through what is ostensibly the group's impressive discography of 25 studio albums. In so doing, Wright delves into the brothers' intuitive creative process, their hits (there have been several) and misses (more than a few), their need to push themselves and their vision, and, yes, Ron's mysterious moustache. (Hitler or Chaplin?)
It will be apparent from the film that Sparks has remained overwhelmingly the darlings of white audiences, despite their ventures into techno and dance music in the late '70s. Their image as a cult band for Euro posers may not have been helped by the tongue-in-cheek "White Women" on Big Beat (1976), whose chorus intoned
"White women everyday
To me it doesn't matter that their
skin's passe
As long as they're white
As long as they're white
As long as they're white from head to toe
As long as they're white
As long as they're white
As long as they're white I'll have a go"
Full disclosure, I mistook the song's meaning when I first heard it, failing to consider the entire album's edgy facetiousness and mockery of cultural standards. Wright argues that this and similar sharpness, which eluded many a record company, has endeared the "Sparks Brothers" to a core fan base that has aged and grown over the past two generations. In this way, the film is an affectionate biography of a group too outré for true commercial success and a statement on the nature of celebrity and compromise.
Friday, September 3, 2021
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Director Dustin Daniel Cretton's athletic, nimble and robust Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings amazes with cinematic acrobatics and warm family tension but doesn't quite stick the landing in an overlong climactic cacophony of dragon magic and blurry martial arts.
Saturday, August 28, 2021
Reminiscence
The exactitude that Lisa Joy commits to the creation of Westworld is largely missing from her first feature film, Reminiscence. Joy's stringy sci-fi rumination on love and lawlessness and memory is set in a time when the oceans have risen, flooding coastal cities, and the heat of the day drives human activity to after sundown. That is a rich concept and the production elements are highly effective but aren't enough to sustain interest in the doings of the humans in this world.
Hugh Jackman plays a former soldier / now memory guide named Nick, who helps people mine better times by connecting them to a device that is not fully explained and immersing them in a tank of water, pulling their remembrances from the recessed soup of their consciousness. Helping him is Thandiwe Newton (one of the stars of Westworld) as an alcoholic fellow vet, Watts, who is actually the most interesting character in Joy's drippy story. Into their bleak world comes the mysterious Mae, an oddly tuneless nightclub chanteuse played by Rebecca Ferguson, whom Nick falls for and when she disappears obsesses over. Little time is devoted to Nick and Mae's romance and even less time to building the underworld that Mae and a gallery of rogues inhabit. Much is left to supposition, which isn't sufficient when trying to sell characters as worthy of empathy or enmity.
Candyman (2021)
Monday, August 23, 2021
The Protégé
Saturday, August 21, 2021
Move Captions
In two prominent instances when the N-word was used in the film, the captioner spelled the first one ending with an -a and the second ending with -er. In the first instance, Rev. Franklin was referring to daughter Aretha’s shifty beau, Ted. In the second instance, shifty Ted was challenging a white Alabama studio producer, saying the producer was itching to use the word. This was an interesting example of code switching by the captioner, that is, apparently -a was the form used intra-racially and -er was the interracial form of the epithet, even though both instances were hostile.
The other observation was the mislabeling of Aretha’s considerate second beau Ken Cunningham as Ted White, her malicious first husband. Such a rank amateur mistake, even
though both men sported a short Afro and mustache. They represented two very different periods in Aretha’s life.
Long-in-the-tooth copyeditors shouldn’t watch captioned movies. *Sigh*
Friday, August 20, 2021
The Night House
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
Don't Breathe 2
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Respect
Saturday, August 14, 2021
Free Guy
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Nine Days
In his first feature film, Nine Days, writer/director Edson Oda reframes ancient questions about life and conscience into an original meditation. Set in a lonesome house in the middle of what appears to be desert salt flats, the story (an extended allegory) depicts the work of a solemn, humorless man named Will (Black Panther and Us's Winston Duke in an award-caliber performance) who must choose which of five unborn souls (played by Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård, David Rysdahl, Arianna Ortiz) will get a chance at life.
In retro form befitting his character's personality and previous existence, Will has his subjects watch television screens that are windows into the worlds of previously selected souls. The unborn must take notes on what they see. Will reviews the notes, looking for evidence not that the unborn souls are spiritually worthy, as one might expect, but that they will survive the harshness of human existence, which Will himself was unable to do.
Will's companion in the selection is Kyo (Benedict Wong of Doctor Strange), who is sunny counterpoint to his friend's darkness. Kyo is also concerned about Will's peculiar obsession with one long-ago selected soul who seemed to have everything but committed suicide. This seems to be making Will even more tentative and guarded in his selection process.
Yes, much of the film is brooding but there are also moments of joyfulness, channeled mainly through Zazie Beetz's (Atlanta) wonderful character Emma. The final three minutes of the film -- an extended monologue by Will -- is the most remarkable exhibition of pure acting craftsmanship I've seen so far this year. The script is a melding of Whitman and Shakespeare; and Duke is exuberant and thrilling.
Highly recommended.
Friday, August 6, 2021
The Green Knight
Old
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
Stillwater
Saturday, July 31, 2021
Pig
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Noah Reid of Schitt's Creek
When Noah Reid's character Patrick Brewer was introduced in the third season of the highly celebrated Canadian comedy Schitt's Creek (nine Emmy wins last year), viewers no doubt wondered if the kind, understated and disarming business consultant, who was also closeted, could survive the lunacy that is life in the Creek, much less stoke a romantic spark he felt for the cluelessly affected and self-absorbed budding entrepreneur David Rose (series co-creator Dan Levy).
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Black Widow
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Roadrunner
Morgan Neville's Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain -- despite its questionable but generally undetectable AI enhancements -- offers a thoughtful reassessment of the public and private life of the eponymous media icon, celebrity chef, gourmand and world traveler. The audience will undoubtedly know that the charismatic Bourdain committed suicide in 2018, after a period of international celebrity as the author of Kitchen Confidential and host of CNN's culinary travelogue Parts Unknown. That knowledge does not dull the edge of the film's point that his death was painful to many, made more so because Bourdain lived with gusto and daring.
Neville pairs archival footage of Bourdain with accounts from friends and family, all of which depict a man with an unquenchable thirst for exploration and, perhaps, distraction. A recovered drug addict, Bourdain discovered new obsessions in his work, exploring and writing about the folkways of people around the globe, particularly in unfamiliar corners and quarters.
Failed romances, late fatherhood and a grueling travel schedule took a toll, unnoticed at that time, on Bourdain's mental and emotional health. His fall, in the last year of his life, was precipitous and puzzling, involving the idolization of a new muse, actress and women's rights activist Asia Argento, and the rejection of old friends, who, the film suggests, feel not only loss but betrayed by a man they loved dearly but who didn't love himself enough.
Respect trailer
Saturday, July 10, 2021
Zola
Tuesday, July 6, 2021
F9: The Fast Saga
Justin Lin's F9: The Fast Saga is an unbelievably expensive and shameless exhibition of all that has made this fearless fast-car franchise so bankable -- a negligible storyline (which I won't bother to recount here), neo-family values sanctimony, multi-culti casting and preposterous vehicle chases that defy the laws of physics. It's gotten so bad (or good, depending on your POV) that characters are now commenting on their own indestructibility. All of the bruising insanity is held together by Vin Diesel's inscrutable visage and his ability to maintain his composure (and facial expression) from the first implausible racing set piece to the big family dinner that has become the epilogue for the series. Wonderfully explosive stuff.
Friday, July 2, 2021
Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It
Mariem Pérez Riera's loving documentary on the life and career of actress / activist Rita Moreno is an often-revealing tribute that occasionally wanders into cringe as Moreno, a self-described "attention seeker," hams and mugs for the audience between the tears. The stronger elements of the film are the stories of Moreno's nearly exclusive early casting as "island girls" and "dusky beauties" and her victimization by Hollywood's studio machinery. The maltreatment included a sexual assault by her agent (whom she does not name) and publicity pairings with movie actors, one of whom she disastrously married -- Marlon Brando.
Monday, June 14, 2021
In the Heights
The Naked Gun (2025)
Those familiar with SNL alum/writer/actor/director Akiva Schaffer's humor will be better prepared than the uninitiated for his revival...

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As you closely read the two photographs above -- Sally Mann's "Candy Cigarette"(top) and Diane Arbus's ...
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The rootlessness that comes from pride and calamity threading through Bob Dylan's 1965 hit single "Like a Rolling Stone" als...
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Like the architectural style at the center of its story, writer / director Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is about unadorned truth, stri...