Magic Mike's Last Dance (Warner Bros., 2.10.23) will hopefully be the last installment. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Reid Carolin, produced by Channing Tatum and costarring Tatum and Salma Hayek (who replaced Thandiwe Newton when Tatum canned her). Tatum is 42 -- too old for this racket.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Last Thursday (11.3) an official trailer for Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre's Lady Chatterly's Lover (Netflix, 12.2) appeared. The trailer is decently cut but it obscures a basic problem that I had with the film, which I caught a couple of months ago in Telluride.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Witty, personable, endearingly urbane Douglas McGrath -- playwright (the Tony-nominated Beautiful: The Carole King Musical), screenwriter (Woody Allen's co-author on the Oscar-nominated Bullets Over Broadway), actor and columnist -- suddenly died today, and he was only 64.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Ironic or crude as this may sound, the only thing that’s really missing from Maria Schrader‘s ultra-scrupulous She Said is that it doesn’t fake it enough. Or at all.
It doesn’t throw in those extra elements of intrigue and flash and flavor that entertaining films sometimes do. It adheres to the facts so closely (and to its immense credit, I should add) that it’s more of a muted, highly studious docudrama than a film that’s out to grab you or make you chuckle or give you that deep-down satisfied feeling.
Just about every scene in She Said is gripping or absorbing in some modest way, but unlike All The President’s Men, it doesn’t have an abundance of scenes that tickle or surprise or get you high.
And while ATPM had a pair of glamorous movie stars in the two lead roles (Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman) and otherwise cast several seasoned actors in supporting parts (Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Jane Alexander, Martin Balsam, Lindsay Crouse, Ned Beatty), She Said goes with a cast of respected, first-rate actors (Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan in the lead roles) who, Kazan and Mulligan aside, aren’t highly recognizable, much less marquee names.
When you think of the scenes or bits that really work and get your blood rushing in All The President’s Men, the list boils down to 15:
(1) The extreme closeup of typewriter keys loudly slamming into white paper, followed by the shot of President Nixon’s helicopter arriving at the U.S, Capitol;
(2) The Watergate break-in and subsequent arrest;
(3) The amusing court arraignment coonversation between Robert Redford‘s Bob Woodward and Nicolas Coster‘s “Markham”, and particularly Markham telling Woodward “I’m not here”;
(4) Woodward’s oil-and-water relationship with Dustin Hoffman‘s Carl Bernstein, illustrated by this and that bit (such as Bernstein surreptitiously rewriting Woodward’s copy).
(5) Woodward’s three or four parking-garage meetings with Hal Holbrook‘s “Deep Throat”;
(6) Jason Robards‘ Ben Bradlee giving Bernstein a look when Bernstein insists that the White House investigating Teddy Kennedy thing is a “goddam important story,” and later telling Woodstein to “get some” luck;
(7) Bernstein tricking his way into the office of Miami district attorney Martin Dardis (Ned Beatty) and obtaining incriminating info about CREEP Midwest finance chairman Kenneth Dahlberg;
(8) That long scene in which Woodward reaches Dahlberg on the phone (“My neighbor’s wife has just been kidnapped!”) and discovers that Dahlberg passed along a $25K check to CREEP finance chairman Maurice Stans;
For a gripping account of the ghastly 1955 murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the despicable perversion of justice that followed, Stanley Nelson and Marcia A. Smith‘s The Murder of Emmett Till, a 2003 American Experience doc, is your best bet.
Having just seen and been moved by Chinonye Chukwu‘s Till (UA Releasing, 10.14), I’m actually planning to rewatch the PBS doc.
Partly (and I don’t mean this in a naysaying sense) because Till is not a tightly focused, chapter-and-verse procedural about the tragic facts, and that’s what I, a shameless just-the-facts type, more or less wanted the whole time.
Which is not to say Till is a problem film — it’s not. It’s just that it’s strictly focused on the agonizing ordeal of Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler), and about the dignity and resolve that this half-broken woman summoned in order to bring about a form of justice for her son.
Not legal justice, of course — not in the Jim Crow south of the mid ’50s. But the justice of history and all the facts being known.
Co-written by Michael Reilly, Keith Beauchamp and Chukwu, Till recounts the basics of Emmett’s Chicago life (sharing a home with Mamie, his colorful personality and natty clothing) before his visit to Money in late August of ’55, and how his expression of hormonal arousal (a wolf whistle) directed at Carolyn Bryant, a married 21 year-old storekeep, led to his killing by her husband and half-brother because he’d violated a sexual racial barrier.
The heart of the film is how Mamie dealt with this horrible occurence, and particularly her decision to reveal her son’s mutilated, bloated, bashed-in head to the world by opening the casket lid during his Chicago funeral. This was followed by her Mississippi testimony at the trial of his killers.
Till’s murder is aurally suggested but mercifully not shown.
Till is sad and penetrating and well acted up and down, but award-season-wise it’s mainly an acting showcase vehicle for the gifted Deadwyler, who will obviously be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She channels three simultaneous currents — devotion, devastation, steel.
Till is deeply appalling and sadly factual. But it’s not a satisfying story because the actual story itself was unsatisfying. Not only were the bad guys not convicted but they even pocketed a fat fee when they admitted to killing Emmett in a Look magazine article.
If you want the kind of emotional satisfaction that results when the bad guys pay for their foul deeds, re-watch the fictional Mississippi Burning. But if you want to submit to a wowser, soul-deep lead performance, see Till.
It took me over four months to finally watch Emma Cooper‘s The The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes (Netflix). It’s basically a montage of digitally enhanced (and quite beautified) clips of Monroe’s life and times along with an assembly of corresponding audio excerpts from 29 interviews conducted by British author Anthony Summers. And what the doc conveys feels entirely frank and honest and sobering.
Now 79, Summers actually conducted 650 Monroe-related interviews, and they consumed about three years of his life. The ultimate result was Sumnmers’ “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe” (’85).
I wanted to absorb Cooper’s excellent doc, which conveys a sense of documented, matter-of-fact, take-it-or-leave-it truth, before seeing Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, 9.23), which is allegedly quite the stacked deck with one odious predator after another. The Summers doc, on the other hand, tells us repeatedly that Monroe had a fair number of friends and allies and considerate acquaintances in her life…people who cared for her or at least tried to care for her, and that her existence wasn’t entirely about being victimized.
I suspect that Blonde will be less balanced and ultimately less forthcoming because of the Joyce Carol Oates narrative, which is that despite having became a flush and famous movie star, poor, brutalized Marilyn never caught an emotional break, and was rarely blessed in the way of good fortune or serendipity or the simple luck of the draw, and that her last two or three years on the planet were especially arduous.
I was looking yesterday for an enthusiasm trigger as I read several Venice Film Festival reviews of Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, 9.28). Alas, I found myself in a depression pit after hearing from a critic friend that the only encounter between Ana de Armas‘s Marilyn Monroe and Caspar Phillipson‘s John F. Kennedy is a blowjob scene. Just that, nothing more.
I understand that the basic Blonde game is about conveying how much of Monroe’s life was shaped by cruel and callous sexism, but my heart sank when I heard this all the same.
The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, a Netflix doc that relies on investigative reporting by Anthony Summers, claims that Monroe’s relationship with JFK dates back to the early ’50s, and repeats the legend that in 1961 and ’62 Monroe was on intimate terms with both Kennedy brothers. Not to mention the May 1962 “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” showstopper in Madison Square Garden plus the after-party encounter at Arthur Schlesinger‘s Manhattan apartment. A whole lot of swirling subcurrents, and all of it reduced to a single act of servitude. That hurts, man.
This strongly suggests that Dominik’s film, closely adhering to the extremely somber slant of Joyce Carol Oates’ 22-year-old same-titled novel, is a series of ugly encounters with cruel, compassion-less men who used and abused Monroe willy nilly.
We’ve all understood for decades that the life of poor Marilyn (aka Norma Jean Baker) was too often defined by bruisings and anguish and emotional starvation at the hands of heartless scumbags, but I was hoping against hope that Blonde might spare us to some extent, perhaps by injecting or even inventing some unusual or unexpected emotional grace notes from time to time. The reviews indicate otherwise.
Of all the Monroe biographers, Donald Spoto is probably the most scrupulous. Consider this excerpt from a Popsugar article, written by by Bret Stephens and posted on 8.29.18:
“Multiple Marilyn historians, including respected biographer Donald Spoto, who wrote the 1993 book ‘Marilyn Monroe: The Biography’, allege that the most plausible time that Marilyn and JFK could have had a sexual encounter was during a party at Bing Crosby‘s home in Palm Springs, CA, on March 24, 1962.
“Marilyn’s masseur and close friend Ralph Roberts told Spoto that he received a call from the actress asking him for massage techniques for muscles of the back, and that he ‘heard a distinctive Boston accent in the background’ before Marilyn handed the phone to President Kennedy.
“Roberts added, ‘Marilyn told me that this night in March was the only time of her ‘affair’ with JFK. A great many people thought, after that weekend, that there was more to it. But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that.”
HE insert: What about investigator Paul Otash’s claim that he overheard a sexual encounter between JFK and Monroe at Peter Lawford’s beach home?
Back to Stephens: “It was reportedly that night at Crosby’s home that John asked Marilyn to perform at his upcoming birthday party at Madison Square Garden.
“Despite the fact that JFK’s philandering ways were well known, it’s most likely that his connection with Marilyn was just a dalliance and nothing more than a one-night stand. Was it salacious? Yes. But was it the torrid, persisting affair that we’ve been told it was? All signs point to ‘nah.'”
HE feels that it’s morally and artistically wrong to confine the JFK-MM thing to a single oral episode. Talk about cutting the heart out of things. Talk about harshly dismissive.
Actors should be allowed to play whomever or whatever. In a perfect world none of us would or should have a problem with a straight actor playing gay or vice versa, or a non-Latino playing Fidel Castro or you-name-it.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Login with Patreon to view this post
Daily Mail investigative reporter Laura Collins has visited the Kentucky backwater apartment of Carolyn Bryant Donham, 88 — the one-time Mississippi storekeep who accused 14 year-old Emmett Till of wolf-whistling her in the summer of 1955, and in so doing incited her deranged redneck husband, Roy Bryant, and his brother, John Milan, into killing Till. The brothers were found not guilty by a local jury. A long-buried unserved warrant for Donham’s arrest (dated 8.29.55) was recently discovered. Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (UA Releasing) will premiere at the ‘22 New York Film Festival.
Roughly ten months after the airing of Women of the Movement, a six-part ABC miniseries about the horrific 1955 murder of Emmett Till and the relentless pursuit of justice by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (Orion, 10.7), a theatrical feature that apparently tells a similar story, will debut at the 60th New York Film Festival.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Login with Patreon to view this post
Will Joyce Carol Oates follow the example of James Patterson in the end? Will she humbly apologize for calling out woke terror in the publishing world?
Login with Patreon to view this post
Login with Patreon to view this post
"It’s Hard to Overstate the Danger of the Voting Case the Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear," posted on 6.30.22 by Slate's Richard Hasen: "The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, an independent state legislature (ISL) theory case from North Carolina. This case has the potential to fundamentally rework the relationship between state legislatures and state courts in protecting voting rights in federal elections. It also could provide the path for election subversion in congressional and presidential elections."
Login with Patreon to view this post
Login with Patreon to view this post
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »