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| Marcus Carl Franklin, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere in I’m Not There |
Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson (voice), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Bob Dylan.
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| Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in "Wuthering Heights" |
Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell, Amy Morgan, Jessica Knappett, Charlotte Mellington, Owen Cooper, Vy Nguyen. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell, based on a novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis.
I am not a teenage girl, which means that my particular sensibility may hinder me from fully appreciating what Emerald Fennell has done with Emily Brontë's great mad novel, Wuthering Heights. Fennell said that she approached making a film of the novel as if it were being imagined by a teenage girl who had just read the book. She also did something of which I wholeheartedly approve: She put the title in quotation marks because movies and literature are distinctly different media -- no film, however closely it sticks to the source, is the equivalent of a written work. And on those terms, I have to applaud Fennell's movie: It does what it sets out to do. Sometimes at the expense of taste, to be sure: Any movie that starts with an ejaculating corpse is going to have to justify itself, and "Wuthering Heights" never quite recovers from that scene. The scene in which Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) finds Cathy (Margot Robbie) masturbating on the moors, her flesh-colored room at Thrushcross Granger, and her strapless mourning dress continue to push the boundaries of audacity. But the movie benefits from Fennell's decision to go all the way and from its cast's willingness to follow her. This is, in short, one of those movies that are better appreciated if you haven't read the book on which it's based: Brontë's novel is not a paperback bodice-ripper (the covers of which Fennell copies to the point of parody). The film is a sometimes campy but occasionally tedious exercise in excess.
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| Bella Heathcote and John Magaro in Not Fade Away |
Cast: John Magaro, Jack Huston, Will Brill, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini, Brad Garrett, Christopher McDonald, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Dominique McElligott, Molly Price, Meg Guzulescu, Gerard Canonico. Screenplay: David Chase. Cinematography: Eigil Bryld. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Film editing: Sidney Wolinsky.
David Chase created The Sopranos, one of the greatest dramatic TV series of all time, rich in character and incident, with a superb evocation of a particular milieu. But what makes a series work doesn't necessarily make for a successful movie. Not Fade Away gives us a portrait of a corner of suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, with a youth culture at odds with the older generation and the Vietnam War seething in the background. The central story is that of Doug Damiano (John Magaro), who begins the film as a high school kid intoxicated with rock 'n' roll, especially after the emergence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He and his friends Gene (Jack Huston) and Wells (Will Brill) start a band, and he gets a girlfriend, Grace (Bella Heathcote). Doug is at odds with his father, Pat (James Gandolfini) over his hair and his music, especially after Doug drops out of college to try to make it in the record business. It might have made a good TV series, but Chase fails to give it shape and coherence as a film, tossing in scenes that don't work with the main story, such as a needlessly included encounter of the young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train at the start of the film. He occasionally inserts a narrative voiceover by a secondary character whose identity isn't revealed until the very end, and then to no great point. There are some good performances by Magaro, Huston, and Gandolfini, but the movie's lack of focus and narrative drive undermines them.
Jane Russell in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)
Cast: Jane Russell, Richard Egan, Joan Leslie, Agnes Moorehead, Jorja Curtright, Michael Pate, Richard Coogan, Alan Reed. Screenplay: Sydney Boehm, based on a novel by William Bradford Huie. Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Mark-Lee Kirk, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Hugo Friedhofer.
Loosely based on a novel that was loosely based on the memoirs of the sex worker Jean O'Hara, Raoul Walsh's The Revolt of Mamie Stover is one of those dodges around the Production Code that kept cropping up in the 1950s. Set mostly in Honolulu before and after the Pearl Harbor attack, it's the story of a woman who parlayed her earnings as a "dance-hall hostess" into a fortune by buying up real estate when people fled the island at the start of the war and leasing it to the military. Jane Russell got the role of Mamie Stover -- which was one of O'Hara's actual pseudonyms after Marilyn Monroe, originally cast in the part, rebelled against her 20th Century Fox contract, and Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward, and Lana Turner were considered. It's a perfect fit for Russell. The movie is nothing special, but it's directed efficiently by Walsh, and has solid action scenes during the Pearl Harbor bombing, and colorful views of Hawaiian scenery.
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| Mary Bronstein in Yeast |
Cast: Mary Bronstein, Greta Gerwig, Amy Judd, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Sean Price Williams, Ignacio Carballo, David Sandholm. Screenplay: Mary Bronstein. Cinematography: Michael Tully, Sean Price Williams. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein.
Rachel (Mary Bronstein) is wound a little too tight, but her friends Alice (Amy Judd) and Gen (Greta Gerwig) are barely wound up at all: They are the very definition of "slackers." And that's the relationship that plays out through Bronstein's itchy movie Yeast. The more Rachel tries to get Alice and Gen to straighten up their lives, the more passively aggressive they become. Yeast runs for a mercifully brief 78 minutes -- I say "mercifully" because I don't know how much longer I could take having my nose rubbed, via hand-held camerawork and extreme closeups, in the lives of these dysfunctional young women. Which is not to say that Bronstein didn't succeed, maybe just short of brilliantly, at giving a portrait of millennials uncertain where they fit in the scheme of things they were thrust into. It's easy to dismiss Yeast as just another "mumblecore" movie, proudly low-budget, improvised, and unstructured, and the presence of Gerwig and the Safdie brothers (in a loopy cameo) reinforces that. But there's a real poignancy at the film's end, when Rachel, irritating as she can be, finds herself alone.
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| John Abbey in Mr. Freedom |
Cast: John Abbey, Delphine Seyrig, Donald Pleasence, Jean-Claude Drouot, Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Lefebvre, Sabine Sun, Rita Maiden, Colin Drake, Pierre Baillot, Raoul Billerey, Philippe Noiret, Sami Frey, Catherine Rouvel, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret. Screenplay: William Klein. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Production design: William Klein. Film editing: Anne-Marie Cotret, Valérie Mayoux, Monique Teisseire. Music: Serge Gainsbourg.
William Klein's sledgehammer satire Mr. Freedom was made at a time when revolutionary posturing was all the rage in France and things seemed to be coming apart in the United States. It stars John Abbey, an expatriate in France like his director, as a cop turned superpatriotic superhero. Donning the guise of Mr. Freedom, which involves a lot of padded musculature and a costume made out of sports gear, he descends on France to save it from the commies and ends up nuking much of it. For a contemporary equivalent to the character, think of Homelander from The Boys. The movie is a gleefully unsubtle mess, filled with cameos by French actors and a larger role by Delphine Seyrig as Marie-Madeleine, a French collaborator with Mr. Freedom. (Or is she?) The movie's lampoon of American political and cultural imperialism (the American embassy is a shopping mall) is almost too broad to cause offense. It's about half an hour too long, like an SNL skit run amok, but there are laughs to be had.
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| Isabel Sandoval and Eamon Farren in Lingua Franca |
Cast: Isabel Sandoval, Eamon Farren, Lynn Cohen, Ivory Aquino, Megan Channel, Lev Gorn. Screenplay: Isabel Sandoval. Cinematography: Isaac Banks. Production design: Maxwell Nalevansky, Clint Ramos. Film editing: Isabel Sandoval. Music: Teresa Barrozo.
The problems facing the protagonist of Isabel Sandoval's Lingua Franca are even more urgent today than they were when the film was made. Sandoval herself plays Olivia, a transgender Filipina who works as a live-in caregiver for Olga (Lynn Cohen), an elderly woman on the verge of dementia. An undocumented immigrant, Olivia sends some of what she earns to her mother in the Philippines and pays much of the rest of it to a man who promises to marry her, which would allow her to get a green card. But when he announces that he's met someone he really wants to marry, she's left on her own, just as ICE is stepping up a crackdown in the Brighton Beach area where she lives. Then Olga's grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), who has just been released from prison, moves in with his grandmother. After initial wariness, Alex and Olivia develop a relationship. As writer and director, Sandoval handles the nuances of the situation well, giving us enough of Alex's own difficulties to understand why he may not be the ideal solution to Olivia's problems. As actress, she is also up to the task of portraying Olivia's mixture of hope and fear as a resolution to those problems presents itself. Except for a few scenes where the revelation of Olivia's sexual identity and the threat of deportation feel contrived, Sandoval mostly resists conventional plotting, and the bittersweet conclusion of the film is deftly achieved. Lingua Franca is one of those movies that need to be better known.
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| Madonna in Body of Evidence |
Cast: Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Jürgen Prochnow, Lillian Lehman, Frank Langella. Screenplay: Brad Mirman. Cinematography: Douglas Milsome. Production design: Victoria Paul. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Graeme Revell.
Perhaps the only effective performance and convincing characterization in Uli Edel's Body of Evidence is that of Lillian Lehman as the judge presiding over a tawdry trial, who is rightly pissed off at the nonsense taking place in her courtroom. The film was a vanity project, designed to make Madonna into a major movie star. She plays Rebecca Carlson, a gallery owner in Portland, Oregon, who indulges in BDSM but winds up on trial for murder when one of her partners, a wealthy older man, dies after having sex with her after, leaving her $8 million in his will. Rebecca's sexual tastes are "explained" by a passing reference to childhood abuse, but her anything-goes approach to sex seems to stop short at bisexuality: She broke off with another partner when she found him in bed with a man. It would take an actress more adept at nuance than Madonna to make sense of such an ill-conceived role. There are some fine actors in the movie, including Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Frank Langella, and Julianne Moore (who has expressed regret at taking her role in the film), but the screenplay, filled with "surprise twists" that land with a thud, does them no good. Body of Evidence bombed with critics and audiences, and it holds favor today only with die-hard Madonna fans.
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The Hunted (William Friedkin, 2003)
King of the Night (Hector Babenco, 1975)
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| William Petersen in To Live and Die in L.A. |
Cast: William Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow, Debra Feuer, John Turturro, Darlanne Fluegel, Dean Stockwell, Steve James, Robert Downey Sr., Michael Greene, Christopher Allport. Screenplay: William Friedkin, Gerald Petievich, based on a novel by Petievich. Cinematography: Robbie Müller. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: M. Scott Smith. Music: Wang Chung.
William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. is a darkly cynical thriller in the mode of Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and Friedkin's own The French Connection (1971), though instead of the tough cops played by Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman, we get the solid but miscast William Petersen as Richard Chance, a Secret Service agent grimly determined to catch the counterfeiter Eric Masters (Willem Dafoe), who murdered his partner. It all leads up to a celebrated car chase going the wrong way on an L.A. freeway, but then fizzles into a downer anticlimax. There's too much lame dialogue, some of it apparently ad libbed under Friedkin's instructions. At one point, a snitch asks Chance to be reimbursed for her expenses, to which he retorts, "Uncle Sam don't give a shit about your expenses. If you want bread, fuck a baker." Chance seems to have been instructed in this kind of reply by a stoolie he tried to employ earlier, who told him "If you want a pigeon, go to the park." Undeniably kinetic, To Live and Die in L.A. is riddled with too many improbabilities and plot holes to be fully satisfying. The car chase is the best thing about the movie, along with Robbie Müller's cinematography.