There’s a tradeoff made when producing an authorized work of art examining the life and career of a famous person. The documentary Zappa, which focuses on the life and times of musician, filmmaker, and iconoclast Frank Zappa, makes that tradeoff with mostly successful results. Director Alex Winter – an actor who moonlights as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill and Ted movies – had full access to Zappa’s extensive personal archives for his film. The extensive amount of concert video, behind-the-scenes home-movie footage, and interview archives allow Winter to paint a portrait of Zappa – who died from prostate cancer in 1993 – that feels exhaustive and intimate.
The danger with authorized biographies is the risk for them to slip into hagiography. The biographer might smooth over some of the rough edges of a subject in an effort to keep in the good graces of those offering the unfettered access. Zappa doesn’t shy away from some of its subject’s negative qualities. We learn about Zappa’s serial philandering and his tendency to treat his musical collaborators like props who only existed to fulfil his vision. There are darker strains to Zappa’s work, though, that Winter fails to explore. The enfant terrible creative genius, who used satire and comedy in his music to great effect, often incorporated sexist-bordering-on-misogynistic lyrics and racist cultural appropriation into his art. Winter looks the other way from all this, and his film suffers for it.
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“You cannot capture a man’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression.”
So says Herman J. Mankiewicz early in the biopic about his greatest professional achievement, writing the screenplay for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. In Mank, that’s precisely what director David Fincher does with Mankiewicz. Here was a man of principle, Fincher shows us. Here was a man of character. Here was a drunk, an inveterate gambler, but above all, here was a man with an absolute conviction in what he believed.
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There are two bravura sequences in director Brandon Cronenberg’s waking nightmare of a film, Possessor. Brandon, the son of legendary horror director David Cronenberg, proves with Possessor, his second feature after 2012’s Antiviral, that he’s up to taking on the family business: creating mind-bending cinema centered around queasy body-horror special effects.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos, a contract killer who works for a company with a revolutionary process for carrying out its assignments. Vos is a possessor; using the company’s technology, her consciousness is implanted in a host body to do the killing. After each hit, Vos is pulled out of the host body, leaving that poor soul to deal with the consequences of a murder that he or she had no choice in committing.
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The uninspired comedy Buffaloed takes a handful of gags and uses them over and over again to fill its feature length. The way the locals of Buffalo, NY speak is one of those gags. They way they look is another. And that’s really about it. The classic film Fargo also pokes fun at the way its characters speak. But there’s so much more under the surface of that film. Buffaloed is a one-note comedy that ends up feeling disposable.
Set in Buffalo, NY, the debt-collection capital of the world, Peggy Dahl is determined to be successful and break out of the chain of poverty in which she was raised. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother pays the bills (just barely) by running an unlicensed beauty salon out of her house. (Ten cent wing night at the local bar – this is Buffalo, remember – helped keep Peg and her brother fed on their mother’s tight budget when they were growing up.)
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Even if Sound of Metal weren’t one of the best, most emotionally pulverizing cinema experiences of the year, the outstanding lead performance from Riz Ahmed would be reason enough to praise the film. The English actor/rapper/activist’s incredibly rich performance comes down to the level of interiority that Ahmed is able to convey to us. Through nuanced looks and gestures, most often conveyed with no words at all, Ahmed accomplishes with his character, Ruben, one of the most noble goals of the arts: the ability of the audience to truly see the world through someone else’s eyes.
Ruben Stone is a drummer in the two-piece metal band Blackgammon. His romantic and artistic partner, Lou (short for Louise), plays guitar and sings. A recovering heroin addict, Ruben is faced with a life-upending situation when he suddenly and almost completely loses his hearing due to the nightly abuse of Blackgammon’s metal shows.
It’s a simple setup – almost high-concept: the elevator pitch might be, “Metal drummer loses his hearing overnight and must face radically changing his life in order to adjust.”
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There’s a risk in adapting a play for the screen. The typically confined nature of the source material can lead to a stage bound feel in the movie. That locked, static aesthetic is anathema to an art form that’s known, after all, as motion pictures. (Take a look at many movies made in the wake of noisy, bulky sound equipment being introduced to the process in the early 1930s if you don’t believe me. The worst of them look like filmed plays.) One of the best examples of a director and movie that thrillingly breaks free of the source material’s stage roots is Miloš Forman’s dazzling Amadeus. Chicago, too, adds a cinematic spectacle feel to its musical number sequences.
Joe Mantello’s adaptation of playwright Mart Crowley’s seminal LGBTQ melodrama The Boys in the Band only breaks free of the source material’s stagy feel in a few key sequences. Each time it happens is thrilling; it injects the wider world into the hermetically sealed one of the story. While the rest of the movie could have easily taken place on a stage, Boys has plenty more going for it to make it an electric experience.
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I had my first colonoscopy this year at age forty. Most people don’t start getting this preventative care procedure until they turn fifty. I won’t bore you with the particulars of why I started early, but rest assured that everything is fine. Just before I was wheeled from the prep area back to the O.R., I had my first truly profound existential epiphany. The I.V. drip that the anesthesiologist hooked me up to started to take effect, and I began feeling a little drowsy. I had the comforting realization that death was like going to sleep. I thought about how I would be unconscious, knowing nothing, as the doctor performed this procedure, and how death, too, would be identical to unconsciousness; death is the act of never knowing anything again. In that moment, as the twilight of artificial sleep was coming on, I was fine with that realization.
Director Kirsten Johnson’s heartfelt, moving new documentary, Dick Johnson Is Dead, takes ninety minutes – culled from years of shooting for the picture – to make an uneasy, gallows humor sort of peace with the finality of death. It is a love letter from a daughter to a father, and vice versa. My only reservation with the film is how Johnson, right up until the final cut to black, prioritizes the main conceit of the film. She gleefully pulls the rug out from under us in the very last frame. I appreciated the playfulness of it, but not as much as was probably intended.
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I’m imagining the year 2060, when I’ll be 80 years old. In my mind’s eye, I see someone who’s my age now. Like me, this fictional person is a history buff – and a cinephile, too, of course – and she watches old movies and reads books about (mostly pop-culture) history. (What will this time period’s version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls be called, anyway? Stan’s World: When Marvel Ate the Entertainment Industry?)
This person, who was born in 2020, reads part of the Wikipedia entry for “COVID-19 pandemic in the United States” and becomes fascinated. After watching a few YouTube videos of archival news footage about the pandemic, she stumbles across the trailer for Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary Totally Under Control. She watches the whole movie with an unbelieving half-grin on her face.
It’s a disturbing watch, but for her it’s a little like when I watched Triumph of the Will. It all happened so long ago, it’s hard to imagine actually living through it. This invented person – like the actual people who might one day watch Totally Under Control four decades from now – will never know the rage, frustration, and sense of hopelessness that watching Gibney, et al.’s film engenders in someone living through this moment.
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Aaron Sorkin’s sophomore effort in the director’s chair – after 2017’s Molly’s Game – is just as compelling, erudite, and masterful as his first. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is one of the best movies of the year so far. All of Sorkin’s strengths are on display here. His screenplay is brimming with his signature style of crackling dialog. He examines with nuance and complexity mature themes like patriotic dissent, justice, and what makes American democracy function. His characters are all fully fleshed out people, not merely two-dimensional dialog delivery devices.
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The Julie Taymor who directed the electric films Titus, Frida, and, yes, even Across the Universe – a movie which wasn’t well received by most critics, but which really worked for me – shows up a little over an hour into her latest effort, The Glorias, the biopic about journalist and activist Gloria Steinem.
There are Taymor flourishes in the meandering first 70 minutes of the picture, to be sure. The film opens with a sequence in which an older version of Steinem – four actresses play the iconic feminist throughout The Glorias – looks out the window of a Greyhound bus as it rolls along the highway. Steinem and everything inside the bus are in black and white, everything outside the bus is in full color. It sets an interesting aesthetic that doesn’t pay off until Steinem finds her fiery passion for the Women’s Liberation movement. That’s when the movie really starts to rip.
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Within the first ten minutes or so of Jeff Orlowski’s new docudrama The Social Dilemma, the director poses a (seemingly) simple question to his interview subjects. Most of them held, at one time, a top position at one or more tech giant companies: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. He asks, why is social media – and the internet more broadly – responsible for so many of our current society’s ills? Every single person hesitates before coming up with a response. No one provides the simple, one-word answer: Money. To be more accurate, no one says it that bluntly. In truth, almost the whole of The Social Dilemma is structured around exploring how the ruthless ways these companies monetize people’s attention has caused immeasurable harm to civil society and our mental health.
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Gather round for the latter-day tales of the Two Great Ones, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, aka Wyld Stallyns. As we all know, these prophets saved our society from being totally bogus and instead insured our most excellent future.
Ok, we probably don’t all know that.
In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that if you’re under the age of about thirty, you had never heard of these two sweet-natured lunkheads and the perplexing cult status of the late 80s/early 90s movies that featured them: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.
As someone on the margins of Bill and Ted fandom – I watched both the earlier films around the time of their original release (when I was twelve or so) and liked them, but I didn’t think about them much after that – I was more bemused than anything else when I heard about this newest sequel, Bill and Ted Face the Music.
After revisiting the first two entries in preparation for the new Bill and Ted, I found them both as affable and goofy as I had remembered. They’re the movie equivalent of junk food, to be sure, but guileless and silly enough to be harmless – except for those few dated homophobic slurs that are played for laughs.
I can happily report that Bill and Ted Face the Music is in the exact same vein as its predecessors.
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Christopher Nolan has made an absolutely thrilling James Bond-style spy movie filled with breathtaking action set pieces. Too bad it’s in the middle of a mind-bending sci-fi plot that’s ludicrous and nearly incomprehensible. Tenet frustrates the mind as much as it dazzles the eye. It reportedly took Nolan five years to write the screenplay for Tenet, after puzzling over the movie’s main ideas for a decade. I don’t know if he spent too long on the project or not long enough, but either way, Tenet presents audacious ideas with unforgettable imagery, but the nuts-and-bolts of the plot make zero sense after any amount of scrutiny. The antagonist’s motivation is banal; his ultimate plan is laughably grandiose. And of course, as with most Christopher Nolan movies, the sole purpose of the main female character is to give the male characters their motivation.
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Not since Darren Aronofsky’s mother! in 2017 has a movie so successfully and hauntingly evoked an oneiric state as Charlie Kaufman’s fever dream vision I’m Thinking of Ending Things. If I were a more clever writer, I might invent a Kaufmanesque conversation between the two filmmakers, in which Aronofsky calls to praise Kaufman’s idiosyncratic and disturbing new work of art. Since I’m not that clever, you’ll have to settle for a more standard review in which I praise Kaufman’s unique vision while also wrestling with a few of the picture’s shortcomings.
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Ellis Martin hates his job. He hates his roommate’s girlfriend. He hates almost everything about his life. Sunday afternoons for Ellis are spent getting wasted as a way to cushion the blow of another work-week on the horizon. His dull 9-to-5 consists of dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing toilets for a cleaning service. Ellis applies for other jobs in the hopes of finding something better – something he can live with – but even this seems futile.
That might be a good opening act for a story, but the description above is essentially the whole of independent filmmaker Shaun Rose’s hour-long film Upstate Story. There are no subplots, beyond a flashback sequence about one of Ellis’s ex-girlfriends. The movie suffers from solipsism, with no meaningful dialog coming from any character other than Ellis. Defying a cardinal rule of cinema – show, don’t tell – the entirety of Ellis’s dialog is delivered in voice over, making Upstate Story a kind of visual novel.
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It’s the ultimate hopelessness of the situation that made it hard for me to buy into the uplifting ending of the new political documentary Feels Good Man. There are a lot of emotional and intellectual nooks and crannies in the picture, and what resonated with me was the aforementioned hopelessness and an impotent rage at the callousness of other human beings. First time director Arthur Jones covers a lot of ground in Feels Good Man. He paints a personal portrait of an artist who has lost control of what his art means; he captures the zeitgeist of a singularly odious time at the intersection of American politics and culture; he provides a cogent exegesis for one small part of the 2016 presidential election. Jones’s film is an engrossing look at the power of the internet to shape the world that lies beyond the screen.
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Think of Kelly Reichardt’s new film First Cow as a spiritual cousin and companion piece to P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The films are about the American dream on the western frontier in the early 1800s (Cow) and the early 1900s (Blood). There Will Be Blood is about the American dream run amok on greed and unchecked success; it’s the story of an oil tycoon told on an epic scale. First Cow focuses on, essentially, a small business owner who goes out of business before ever striking it rich – if you’ve seen the film, you’ll get the irony of my putting it that way. It’s a tale of American entrepreneurial spirit on the smallest, most personal scale.
That’s not to suggest there are no dramatic stakes (pun intended) in First Cow. The contemplative pace of Reichardt’s film and the languorous nature of her camerawork both belie the story’s dramatic tension.
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Filmmaker Jesse Moss considers Harlan County, USA to be the high-water mark of documentary filmmaking. You can see that influence all over Boys State, the new documentary that Moss directed with his wife and frequent collaborator, Amanda McBaine. The film is a masterful piece of observational, verité cinema. It’s every bit as engrossing as Harlan County – although the stakes of that film, about striking coal miners in Kentucky, are literally life-and-death – and carries on the grand tradition of the direct cinema approach of the Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman. Moss and McBaine’s largely fly-on-the-wall approach exposes the deepest flaws in our democracy – and the flaws of how we teach it to our children – while offering a fascinating inside look at a society with a one-week lifespan.
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In the glut of remakes Disney has released in which they make a cash grab by simply reshooting their animated classics as live-action versions, their 2019 retelling of The Lion King is one I missed. (To be honest, I think 2019’s Aladdin is the only one of these that I’ve seen. To me, they seem like cynical bits of content trading on raw nostalgia. I found Aladdin superfluous at best.) The general impression I got of director Jon Favreau’s remake of The Lion King is that it was a CGI – so, basically animated – shot-for-shot remake of the original; a project lacking in purpose outside of making a huge sum of money.
Inspiration for something truly original can come from anywhere, though, and singer/songwriter/megastar Beyoncé – who played Nala in the Lion King remake – used the Disney property as a jumping-off point for something fresh, stunning, exciting, and unapologetically in praise of blackness. Black is King is a visual companion art piece to Beyoncé’s tie-in album The Lion King: The Gift, in which the artist “reimagines the lessons of The Lion King for today’s young kings and queens in search of their own crowns.”
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Charlize Theron continues her ascent to the throne of Ultimate Action-Movie Hero Badass in The Old Guard, following her star turns in powerhouse action films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde. This time out finds Theron sharing her stunt-heavy, fight scene bravura with an ensemble of lesser known, but equally entertaining, actors. The Old Guard is a graphic novel adaptation that overcomes a familiar setup to deliver an energetic, exciting story that finds a way to make its seemingly invincible characters vulnerable. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood packs her movie with several competing aesthetics, and she’s mostly successful in getting them all to work in harmony.
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