A CARNIVAL SIDESHOW PLUGGED TOO HARD FOR THE OSCARS

Publicity still for Bradley Cooper in 'Nightmare Alley'

By Dominique Paul Noth

Within the movie industry and even on cable networks there’s an Oscar publicity push for Mexican director  Guillermo del Toro’s latest, Nightmare Alley. And given its acting lineup and movie lineage, no wonder.

Del Toro is the director of films I have admired  such as “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006 combining fantasy and fascist horror) and “The Shape of Water” (elements of fantasy, romance and a creature from the black lagoon that cleaned up in 2018 at the Oscars).

A prolific producer and user of the latest cinematic techniques, he recently turned to co-host duties on Turner Classic Movies pumping how his “Nightmare Alley” corrected a major studio’s wild stab at film noir in 1947 when 20th Century Fox didn’t dare turn its biggest heart-throb Tyrone Power into the chicken-ripping carny disaster suggested in the original novel of the same name.

Given his  delight in the human underbelly and technical mastery of gloomy alley visuals, constant traveling camera and shocking intercuts of humanity’s darkest sides, del Toro had no hesitation in exploring a third-rate carnival and its denizens – in fact, adding to the macabre. The film tries but lacks his usual collision of grim tale with historic resonance, but he has called in some notable acting names to roam this 1940s underworld: 

Bradley Cooper as the central hustler, believing he can outguess everyone, Rooney Mara as his disquieted love interest, Toni Collette as his fortune-telling plaything, Ron Perlman as the menacing carny strongman, Willem Dafoe in a black wig and mustache as the ultimate nasty know-it-all, David Strathairn as the drunken pseudo-psychic who teaches him the ropes, Richard Jenkins as the savage rich guy he wants to fool, and Cate Blanchett as the cool psychiatrist who may outwit him. What a cast! And what a strangely slow and unconvincing movie as we wearily trudge this masterfully-shot endless tunnel of 1940s environments.

The film is interesting, though, in how language and meanings have changed.  Today a “geek” may actually be an affectionate term for a computer nerd.  In the 1940s a geek was the absolute dregs of show biz, a doped up drunk in the carny’s worst act,  hired from town to town to bite the heads off chickens – an almost inhuman being who has driven himself to the bottom.

That’s where Cooper is heading and the story’s ending is telegraphed (which is one reason the 1947 movie was and is so disappointing – the studio couldn’t imagine going this dirty with Tyrone and the audience knows where it is supposed to be going).  Well, 20th Century Fox  has evolved into Searchlight, with the same famous theme song.  The dirtier the stars get, the better.

The suspense in the story has always been is seeing how the Cooper character gets there, from a drifter with a checkered past but tons of good looks and immoral ideas to a smooth nightclub mentalist to an overly confident dapper-dressed trickster who unglues himself.

Del Toro is having a lot of fun foreshadowing and after-shadowing how the Cooper character has a lot of creepiness in his past and built-in weaknesses stemming from his self-confidence. Cooper is unusually metronomic in how he handles character development, almost as if he is peeking at the next page of the script.  

As the overly cool blonde manipulator, Blanchett is a strong but extreme version of herself – likely to be nominated on reputation because she is never bad. Of the other supporting cast, I thought only Dafoe and Jenkins showed anything special.

Now while  I long to see del Toro’s future projects, including a grown-up version of “Pinocchio,” this one is a mere sideshow and not worth the hullabaloo.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

KING RICHARD

DON’T LOOK UP

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

‘DON’T LOOK UP’ IS EASY TO AGREE WITH AND HARD TO JUSTIFY

 By Dominique Paul Noth

Sickened by our politics? By our cavalier attitude toward climate change? By selfishness during an epidemic? The vapid chatter on TV news and social media?  For those reasons and more you want to applaud director-writer Adam McKay for his angry three-endings take in Don’t Look Up, a title that invites pundit variations such as Don’t Look It Up or Just Don’t Look. It is exclusively on Netflix for now, and that is also a commentary on this star-studded film.

We the American public are the main target as we refuse to believe in the planet-killing comet speeding toward Earth (how the film opens).  We are  the complacent society of couch potatoes reluctant to even look up at the meteor filled sky. We let rich technology gurus, slimy politicians and those TV talking heads reduce major ideas into gotcha balloons or seek a way to make money off disaster.  These privileged movers and shakers  even think they can escape the Earth’s impending atmosphere of climate destruction.

After a promising opening premise, the film demonstrates that gathering a stellar cast for a needed assault doesn’t mount to diddly without tight writing, true humor and a good instinct of how to poke fun again and again without becoming boring.  Something McKay was supposed to learn from his past at SNL, but then again today’s SNL is also hit and miss.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence

As the scientists alarmed at how society refuses to accept their  facts about the killer comet, the movie relies on Leonardo DiCaprio (for too many panicked reaction takes) and Jennifer Lawrence (tricked up with nose earring and burnt red hair to look as ugly   as possible for one of the most attractive  creatures on screen). They become the anxious ragers against Establishment indifference and self-serving schemes. 

Rallied against them are Meryl Streep as a female presidential version of Trump, Jonah Hill as her obnoxious son elevated to chief of staff, Cate Blanchett as a  man-eating TV host devoted to making the important look trivial,  and Tyler Perry as her co-host echo chamber. There are also in various stages of opposition Timothee Chalamet as the unpretentious but empty-headed love interest and an extra talented actor, Mark Rylance, who almost escapes criticism as the creepy technological guru (think Steve Jobs crossed with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos). 

Look around if you don’t think this story has truths. The movie insists that we like sheep  will heed the bigwigs’ commands to just step aside, keep our heads down and let the money boys operate. The film is a scream of anguish and a parable for our time – but it is a comedy? Or is comedy passé in our current gridlock?

McKay feels righteous outrage – so several of his films testify  (“Vice,” “The Big Short”). But clever humor is still expected from him, and is sadly thin in a movie where bile rules and an understandable negative view of mankind wins. 

Mark Rylance in 'Don't Look Up'

In a better film Rylance would receive accolades for his constant smile and spooky mannerisms, as would Streep for her ferocious portrayal of a soulless politician. In this film, people I never thought would be boring are.

It’s a strange thing to say about such collected first-rate talents.  You can easily be misled into thinking it all can’t be a waste – the cast alone should put it at No. 1 on Netflix.  Well it isn’t all a waste, not at first, but it comes damn close in two and a half hours. It’s understandable that many of the participants say in interviews that it was more like making  a documentary  than a satire.  That may well be part of the problem.  

We keep agreeing with McKay’s points and long for a reason to like this parade of very expensive special effects and useless diatribes, with constant intercuts to scenes of destroyed or threatened nature. He is trying to make the modern complicated  equivalent of 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” But director Stanley Kubrick and writer Terry Southern had a spine – a serious fiction novel “Red Alert” that struck them as hysterical to spin off, breaking themselves up with laughter.  McKay has no such anchor, nor the talent to wing his way through this.

Hiring like-minded seriously talented people is desperation, not a substitute for wit and genuine ideas.  That’s why the movie scrambles for finales – not just a stolen kiss between unlikely partners, not a meeting of the good folks for a final dinner, not just a surprise space ship voyaging into disaster.

A word about Netflix and this ever more common way of watching movies. The service signed some pretty big names for this movie to add to its seemingly bottomless mixed bag of exclusive offerings.   I’m finding value in my Netflix subscription by ignoring the entry screens and daily emails  where they push the products they think I would be interested in.  I just push deeper to find my gems – like “Voir” (a collection of movie essays) or movies that will never strike it big but are worth a look like “Proof,” “Passing” and “Tick Tick Boom.” 

The online services are doing with volume what the movie theaters have given up for now (though they may surge into variety again if COVID fears die off).  The online services  welcome blockbuster possibilities while also embracing  slivers of audiences. This broad choice of venues has turned film critics into openly being what they secretly always were – consumer advisers showing you where and when.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

KING RICHARD

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

CIRCUMSTANCES SHORTENED REIGN OF ‘KING RICHARD’

From left: Demi Singleton as Serena, Will Smith as 'King Richard' and Saniyya Sidney as Venus

By Dominique Paul Noth

Released to film festivals in October and to the general public in November,  King Richard should still be playing at movie theaters but has moved rather formidably to a variety of streaming services (usually for $19.99 rental), confounding expectations given its budget, its star draw in Will Smith  and its bigtime investors.

It should on reputation still  be doing blockbuster business  because of both respectable reviews and a real-life  storyline  many of us remember, perhaps negatively though the results were positive.  It is  how one gruff African American father, Richard Williams – bossy, driven,   endlessly talkative and protective of his children --  confounded expectations in the lily-white world of professional tennis.

Many of us knew the outlines from the 1980s – a determined hustling black father imposing strict regimens on all five daughters (three from his wife’s previous marriage, with suggestions that he had  other families along the way), writing a detailed 85-page  plan for  his two daughter’s  future when they were four and a half and cajoling and wheedling the tennis world into giving his glibness and young’uns  center stage as an opportunity for Venus and Serena Williams – then pulling them from the heady world of juniors as too destructive of their characters. 

Lo and behold he was right in his expectations, homegrown training and against-all-odds beliefs. They would become the best in the tennis  world.

The movie focuses mainly on teenage Venus and it embellishes several lessons, such as how the father came close to losing his own cool over boys pursuing his teens and only by the grace of a drive-by shooting  escaping the ghetto life he feared.

There is a tendency (probably strengthened here by Serena and Venus as co-producers)  to add too much sugar into these truly moving minority tales of how a strong-willed family insisting on basic values can survive prejudice and privileged expectations to flip the world on its ear.  These  movies, factual and not,  have found an audience – “Hidden Figures,” “The Blind Side” and “The Help” spring to mind. There is a tendency to simplify the lessons, the cheeriness of such families, the villainy of those standing against them.  Here there is at least some effort to  counter the sweetness. .

Smith plays the dad with careful physical restraint but dominance, a quite suitable naturalism, and an appealing but  unshakable insistence on Richard’s way no matter how big the bucks are offered by Nike and the so-called tennis experts.  It’s nice to see Smith, whose main box office oomph has been escapist films, prove his acting ability is not a fluke of personality.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green keeps the movie well paced, the young cast as likable as kittens, the tennis action revealing in rapid cuts from closeups to bird’s eye as Richard prowls around the edges.

Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene

King Richard spends much of its time partly correcting the historical image the country had that this was the ultimate in controlling dads, suggesting that as crazy as his rules and manner seemed they worked – and largely because of the prejudice he had to constantly fight against.

But while Smith will get all the huzzahs, the best acting in the film belongs to Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene (Brandy) his wife – feisty, supportive and insisting on equality – a performance that deserves to be considered at awards time. It is her honesty as an angry truth-telling wife that keeps the film from slipping irretrievably into the sugary side.

Also impressive and constantly expressive  as the young Venus is Saniyya Sidney, who can no longer be regarded as  teenage flash in the pan.  The rest of the supporting cast is both a physical match and quite capable. It’s a fine movie.  Not a great movie.  But a good story.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

‘THE LOST DAUGHTER’ WINDS UP AS LOST OPPORTUNITY

By Dominique Paul Noth

Dakota Johnson and Olivia Coleman
in 'The Lost Daughter'

The Lost Daughter revels in a slowly unfolding character study, pursuing an interior understanding of how motherhood embodies mental danger and why interaction with young daughters can be particularly brutalizing and guilt-ridden.

The film meanders so much trying to make important points through naturalistic behavior that finally audiences have to wonder what the hell is the point? You start out not quite knowing where director Maggie Gylennhaal is going in her debut behind the lens after countless films in front of it. We recognize it is well crafted and thoughtfully naturalistic, but our efforts are not rewarded.

It’s a bit like The Power of  the Dog also on Netflix and previously and favorably reviewed, but “Power” starts out with an interesting milieu of characters and tells its story step by clear step,  rather than obfuscating the opening as the Gylennhaal film does.

“Daughter” focuses on a middle aged professor, Leda, played by Olivia Coleman, enjoying a working vacation on a Greek island, both drawn to and disturbed by a rowdy family of American tourists invading her space.  Almost all is revealed or hidden by the looks among the participants.  

Film patrons may feel misled early when a daughter of the tourists go missing, though we soon learn that it is her missing doll that holds the key to the plot.

Since “Daughter” features Coleman, an excellent actress frolicking with the likes of another excellent actor, Ed Harris, we remain a bit tolerant at the miniature pace of revelations.  The more hypnotic and active understanding comes with a young version of the married Leda in flashbacks. An actress and singer worth remembering, Jackie Buckley, the best thing in the movie,  emerges to fall into the tribulations, erotica and intellectual frustration that the middle-aged Coleman embodies. 

As director, Gyllenhaal does nothing outrageous -- we almost wish she would.  She relies so heavily on naturalistic behaviorism -- at which Coleman and Harris excel – that the viewer feels thwarted in getting under the skin of these characters.  As an aside, we admire Dakota Jackson for proving she can take on a real acting role, again in the behaviorist mold. 

I don’t want to discount the revelations about the self-destruction of intellectual and sensual control that motherhood entails.  But though the film has changed the characters from Italians and devotees of Italian literature (substituting a world of tourism and comparative literature while staying faithful to the pseudonym-named popular author Elena Ferrante), it has kept a lot of the author’s asides and supposedly revelatory ramblings.

Only when the film explores in Buckley the younger behavior that has created such a mentally agitated but cryptic Coleman does the film and the editing provide some cinematic power.  It’s a long wait for limited satisfaction,  followed by a deliberately did-she or didn’t-she ending.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

 

‘POWER OF DOG’ – THE OTHER KIND OF MOVIE TO PAY ATTENTION TO

By Dominique Paul Noth

There are distinctly different kinds of movies competing for the top prizes like the Oscars.

There are the films fashioned along blockbuster lines in which even good actors are given dialog that announces their intentions (often already revealed by their costumes). The directors use reams of audio sound effects and rapid cinematic cutting to signal the emotions the audience is supposed to feel. Sophisticated computer graphics interface (cgi) speaks volumes to the viewer. Promotional campaigns emphasize the visceral oomph behind the logos. This is not necessarily Marvel films but any mammothly orchestrated enterprise.  

The second category is the subtler movies in which every framing of the content and the landscape reflect a purpose, in which the psychology of the characters and their almost-interaction can be so subtle that we have to pay attention to every line reading and every look, in which the tonal quality of the behavior and the nuances require us to expect meaning in every moment – in which, frankly, the director relies on our input.

(Some of today’s movies, such as "The Last Duel," try to dance between the blockbuster style and the subtler one.)

Strangely many of the second category films are only available through streaming, and hence not just in competition with the best of HBO but in competition with sitcoms, reality shows, serial dramas, and Madison Avenue methods that do not require careful attention and even are programmed so we can visit the refrigerator for refreshments while they unfold.  In home viewership, with many people spread around the couch after a hard day’s work, moviegoers have to give over special attention to compensate.

Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst in
'The Power of the Dog'.

An example of the subtler kind of movie is Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, now mainly available on Netflix. The New Zealand (now Australian) director brings a special sort of attention to her psychological tales and some viewers will assume automatically in the first minutes just who the top dog of the title is at this remote and lucrative Montana cattle ranch in 1925 run by two vastly different brothers.

The obvious alpha dog is Phil Burbank, played by Benedict Cumberbatch as a muscular sarcastic hard-nose cowboy totally at home with boots, castration knives and banjo, literally wallowing in mud and bossing everyone around him with stern looks and harsh words. After 25 years he still calls  his older brother George “fatso” though this fatso, as quietly and thoughtfully played by Jesse Plemons, stolidly walks through the punches unperturbed, sticking to his softer mannerisms and social concerns, willing to court despite his brother’s scorn a neighboring widowed innkeeper, Rose. She is played in engaging suffering by Kirsten Dunst as so meek and fearful of Phil’s barbs that she takes to drink.

Rose has a college age son, Peter, so thin, awkward and effeminate that Phil immediately sees an easy target in Peter’s playing with paper flowers and dissecting animals as, he says,  a preliminary to studying medicine.  As naturalistically played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, there may be more will and determination within Peter than the dominating Phil realizes.

The evolving relationships among these corners unfold so slowly and deliberately that I suspect some viewers may not realize how much is being revealed, so conditioned have they become to movies that tell them how to think rather than trapping them into awareness.

Cumberbatch, already a star player in everything from Sherlock to Hamlet, commands a great deal of pleasure in watching him bend his highly trained British voice and talents to an American taciturn prototype, a deliberately nasty man who hides his intellect within a rustic legend of his own creation, modeled after his late hero, Bronco Henry, the ultimate perfect cowboy in the Tom Mix vein who shaped him -- in some strange shapes, as we slowly learn.

Cumberbatch submerges and refines his skills to totally capture Phil – making him a fierce physical presence as well as a Freudian puzzle, but expert students of his methods will note how exactly he has turned his vocal and sarcastic talents to fit a different mold.  I for one could not subdue knowledge of Cumberbatch’s techniques though I had a lot of fun watching how he did it.

I was more impressed – Oscar level impressed, in fact – by Plemons' unpretentious but touching work as the brother, of Dunst’s skill at making us grip Rose’s fear as well as her clinging niceness and particularly by how well Smit-McPhee lets Peter’s personality creep up on us, and I do mean creep.

All of this is made possible by director Campion’s care and trust in her actors and in letting the subtleties unfold at what many may see as a stately pace as she commits to the place and the tempo of the story.

This is billed in some quarters as a western, but only if films like “Hud” are westerns, only if we recognize that Campion is saying something different about the milieu of the Old West and our attitudes about those times. Something else is going on as the cowboys skin hides and bathe in the creek with Stetsons strategically placed over their X-rated parts.  There are power plays underway, but don’t presume to know who the top dog is in a movie too easy to overlook at awards time. Just don’t overlook it now.

ALSO COVERED: BEING THE RICARDOS

 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.
 

 

I LOVE . . . SORKIN? HIS TECHNIQUES SURE DOMINATE ‘RICARDOS’

By Dominique Paul Noth

Though Aaron Sorkin has enjoyed success on stage and in film, he remains best known for TV series such as “The West Wing” that made his gifts as a writer part of the American landscape, so prolific that many of his devices have become staples of parody. 

Javier Bardem and Nicole
Kidman in "Being the
Ricardos."

His extraordinary talents as a writing craftsman surpass his capable and  competent abilities as a director in Being the Ricardos, which plays with the lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz by compressing and inventing moments from their private lives sliding into table readings and concocted backstage juggling during the making of “I Love Lucy” (1951-1957).

Sorkin starts with what he knows best, the intricacies of writing and show-running, casting older actors against their younger selves to enact as well as reflect on what is happening  (including an excellent Tony Hale as the uneasy  show runner and ostensible boss, as if anyone could control Lucy and Desi).

It’s an intriguing sign of respect or love of good dialog that Sorkin uses de-aging cinematic trickery to help Javier Bardem become the younger Babalu Desi Arnaz as a bandleader and Latin hunk who eloped with Lucy in 1940. But when it comes to backstage remembrances, he uses noted older actors (John Rubenstein, Linda Lavin, Ronny Cox) against their younger backstage selves (Hale, Alia Shawkat and Jake Lacy)

For TV sidekicks Ethel and Fred Mertz, he uses a decidedly more attractive Nina Arianda to remind us that Vivian Vance had to play dumpy though she had considerable Broadway credits and glamor appeal well before Lucy.  He also uses J.K. Simmons, a fine actor forced to find a way to start grumpy and wind up as lovable confidante William Frawley, while also interpreting how Fred and Ethel never got along.

Sorkin’s technique of revealing alliances and unease through shifting relationships onstage and off is actually quite adept at providing a through-line for a good movie actress, Nicole Kidman, to keep us watching a mercurial Lucy, whom she doesn’t look like except suddenly in some silhouettes, eye rolls and facial expressions – this is not the real Lucy.  It is not mimicry and that will get Kidman criticized but also maybe gets her an Oscar nod.

It is a remarkably watchable creation suggesting an intellect at work within the pratfalls -- if you can put your actual memories of Lucy to one side and just forget the older Ball who became a tiresome bore in such films as “Mame.”

Similarly,  Bardem doesn’t really look like Desi, but it is a strong performance by an actor who understands the chauvinism of the times, the volatility and sarcasm Sorkin relishes and the tendency of TV executives to underrate the temperament  and brain behind the Cuban accent. 

The whole story revolves around Lucy’s suspicions about Desi’s roaming ways, which frankly doesn’t fit either’s history. Their passion, mutual regard and roaming was part of their relationship.

Sorkin has taken a number of events in the lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and jumbled them together to create his own mythology.

It is true the magazines were quick to report Desi catting around, but it’s doubtful his infidelities were so new to her to become Sorkin’s central plot point.  It is also true that family loyalty led her to join the Communist Party in the 1930s when so many Americans did -- and that CBS didn’t want a pregnant Lucy to invade its biggest hit show, fodder for Sorkin as he mashes it all  together to fit his bouncing one-week timeline.

Less comprehensible to me was Sorkin’s deliberate fudging of a movie history he should know  well.  It jumped out at me, perhaps because I may be one of the few people in the audience who has actually seen Lucy and Desi’s early Hollywood work, particularly Lucy’s serious movie role in “The Big Street” as a hatefully self-centered beauty that Henry Fonda worships. 

As good as she was, it did lead RKO to drop her contract (ironically the studio she and Desi owned 15 years later), but Sorkin spends a lot of screen time insulting Judy Holliday as one of her rivals for the role, while Judy had not even had her first Broadway hit in 1942 when “Big Street” was released.  He mentions Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford as Lucy’s rivals for the role, but in truth it was more likely Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck in a film that has the Frank Capra aura around it but failed to excite the box office.

These constant Sorkin digs at Holliday made me wonder if Lucy really hated the comedienne – and then I remembered both in the 1950s  had been called before the blacklist committee (HUAC, a key plot element) that Lucy got a clear stamp of approval from --  as did Holliday, who later admitted she just pretended to be the dumb blond of “Born Yesterday” to escape.  But that is a heck of thin stick for Sorkin to waste so much screen time on. The Holliday references seem dragged in and make you wonder what else was fabricated, including Desi's escape from Cuba.

Like most Sorkin creations, this is eminently watchable yet frustrating in how many conversations are just showing off the writer’s ability to keep our attention without advancing anything. Some of the performances as worth noting, but a central theme – suggesting Lucy ought to be holding master classes in comedic analysis – becomes a stretch in believability that Kidman neatly dances her way through. Sorkin’s camera also dances with black and white evocations of the original sitcom.

Being the Ricardos is at movie theaters or available with membership in Amazon Prime.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

AMERICAN FACTORY AND FINAL OSCAR REFLECTIONS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Cultures bond as well as clash in American Factory

For the past month or so Urban Milwaukee readers have been able to dip into my reviews of films that are up for Oscars on February 9.  The advantage of these  Oscar films reviews is readers have a chance to get a critic’s inside reaction to the incredibly diverse field of offers.  The other advantage is seeing how often I’m wrong, because I don’t expect Oscars to go along with me.

There were some films I’ve seen I had not previewed with  full reviews, including the likely winner of the best documentary Oscar since I felt constrained without the opportunity to see the full field.  Now I have so I’ll catch up here with my pick for best feature length documentary, American Factory.

The smart money Sunday night is on this particularly strong entry that mixes old-fashioned narrative documentary devices with advances in technology. Such as mikes inside households to give the illusion than interior monologs of participants are being captured.  Such as intimate  scanning cameras allowed during manufacturing or lavish office celebrations to tell the story. Such as seamless moves from the home plant in China to the new venture.

This is the former Dayton (Ohio) GM plant taken over by giant Chinese glass company Fuyao (glass windshields for Ford, GM, Bentley, Honda and more).  The problems faced in Ohio are hauntingly familiar to what Foxconn and its differently aimed glass, using much the same management techniques,  is trying to set up in Wisconsin.  The parallels are amazing.

All the attendant clashes of separate cultures are there as the Chinese strain to seem to let Americans run the show, while they quietly do.  The mikes and cameras capture the Chinese supervisors attitudes  – the Americans all have fat fingers as the Chinese masters quietly sneer, they have been taught disrespect and too much freedom from childhood.  There’s  anger among the Chinese when US Sen. Sherrod Brown pushed unionization in his welcoming speech though the company wanted its own “money talks”  work ethic  to catch fire.

Yet ironically, the documentary plays fair with both sides (some friendships are formed) and with the threat of automation to all sides.  What makes the film likely to win is that Oscar voters know that two names nowhere on the screen have helped fund the movie through Netflix as their initial filmland effort – Barack and Michelle Obama – and the film plays honestly with themes they have also urged discussion of during their White House tenure and are currently all over the presidential debates if your name is not Trump.

Both it and another moving documentary, The Edge of Democracy, are available on Netflix. The second is a fascinating if a bit complicated look inside the unraveling of two Brazilian presidents who had notable personality cults and economic visions, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

There is also one review on my own site which still has me ticked off since none of the three films discussed received any Oscar nominations, though the names in those films are deeply involved in Oscar selection.  The problem in my view is those films dealt seriously with how unexpected heroes took on corporate or government corruption – and society needs more of that, and I wish the Oscars were saying so.

Looking back over the reviews that appeared on Urban Milwaukee, I am struck by how many of my choices will probably be avoided by Oscar.  My choice for best movie is South Korea’s phenomenal Parasite, which works on so many levels of comedy and social commentary (saw it months ago during a film festival).  I suspect Oscars will be carried off by a solidly serious film that pushes the envelope of pretending to be one long continuous shot – 1917,  which did not get a good review from me.

I also fear that a film I deeply criticized, Joker, may run off with the best actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix, though the truly triumph acting job belongs to Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis in The Two Popes.  I also wouldn’t mind a best Oscar for Adam Driver in Marriage Story, one of three films he’s made quite an impact in this year. Not reviewed, alas, but I saw it early.

The best actress Oscar seems destined for Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in Judy, a film I did not review, though I admire her work even more than the likely runner-up, Scarlett Johansson.  Now Johansson is an interesting case, also up for supporting actress in JoJoRabbit, which might give her a boost in the best actress race for Marriage Story.  She started life as a fine child actress, is now lost between her Internet fame as a sex image and her constant effort to return to serious consideration while also playing fast and loose with Marvel Comics blockbusters.  It’s going to take her fan base some time to adjust to the real Scarlet and I don’t think this Oscar is yet the time.

Speaking of Marriage Story, Laura Dern as the divorce lawyer with an amazing monolog probably has supporting actress sewn up because she had fine roles on the TV screen this year and in one blockbuster movie, Star Wars: The Rise of Starwalker, and a film reviewed for Urban Milwaukee, Little Women. There will be some pressure for it to win even more Oscars, including best actress for the coltish Saoirse Ronan, though I wouldn’t mind seeing Florence Pugh as Amy knocking fellow Little Women star Dern off her supporting perch.

Nor would I mind the best supporting actor winner to wind up being Tom Hanks for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood over the likely embodiment of Tarantino cool Brad Pitt in a fun romp Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, also heavily nominated and likely to be otherwise aced out.

It did review The Irishman directed by another nominee Martin Scorsese, yet strongly suspect he will not win a single Oscar for the film though every other person on the stage will acknowledge stealing from him!

To refresh you, here are the reviews and categories Urban Milwaukee has run, plus a few others not yet repositioned from my own domain:

JoJo Rabbit 
Oscar nominated as best picture, supporting actress (Scarlet Johansson), adapted screenplay, production design, film editing and costume design.

Little Women 
Oscar nominated as best picture, best actress (Saoirse Ronan), best supporting actress (Florence Pugh), adapted screenplay, costume design, music.

Joker 
Oscar nominated best picture, actor, director, adapted screenplay, film editing, sound mixing, sound editing, makeup, music, cinematography, costume design.

The Two Popes 
Oscar nominated as best actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay.

1917 
Oscar nominated as best picture, director, original screenplay, production design, sound mixing, sound editing, cinematography, music.

Ford v Ferrari
Oscar nominated best picture, film editing, sound editing.

The Irishman
Oscar nominated for best picture, best supporting actors, film editing, production design.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood 
Oscar nominated for best supporting actor (Tom Hanks).

Richard Jewell
Oscar nominated for best supporting actress (Kathy Bates)

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

EASTWOOD’S LATEST LARGELY IGNORED IN OSCAR CONTEST

By Dominique Paul Noth

From left: Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates and Paul Walter Hauser in
'Richard Jewell.'

Ever since 1992’s The Unforgiven won every award in sight, serious and casual filmgoers have accepted Clint Eastwood as a legitimate, crisp and meaningful movie director.   While sometimes his persona of talking to chairs and arguing right wing stances have led to a weird public image, his best movies have often explored the misguided attitudes that establishment society has visited on the individual, in ways that reinforce the centrality of the American experience.  That’s aside from just being a good storyteller in films like Mystic River.

Sometimes his own feelings and his subject’s history bring out a confusing film – American Sniper, torn between bloodbaths and interior strife, springs to mind – but sometimes his sense of society’s tendency to pigeonhole people who stand up for justice touches the audience.  This was true of Changeling, Gran Torino, Sully and should have been true about his current Richard Jewell, which explores the fate of an ATT security guard whose discovery and positive actions on finding a backpack in an Atlanta concert stadium during the 1996 Olympics may have saved lives but instead with no evidence saw him vilified for months  by the media and the FBI as the terrorist who planted the bomb.

It was false. The porky unaware Jewell who so identified with law and order (a believably dense performance by Paul Walter Hauser) was easily painted as excessive wannabe. He and his family suffered months of abuse and hatred.  The story has even deeper resonance today, whether Eastwood intended the political wrinkles, when money, the media and the confused government can so readily accuse people by sheer volume of attack about being corrupt when they’re not or terrorist linked when they’re not.

But whether it’s because Eastwood’s attitude toward media and his experience with the media have been permanently or temporarily over-simplified, the film blows its possibilities.  It suggests that a horny FBI agent (Jon Hamm) and a promiscuous reporter (Olivia Wilde) from the Atlanta Journal Constitution did Jewell in as opposed to exploring what is built into  – and redoubled into today’s Internet world – that so easily makes society run off the rails of common sense. 

In reducing the story to some offbeat humor and some pointed barbs at media methods, Eastwood limited its attention by Oscar to one good but typical performance in the supporting actress category by Kathy Bates. It’s nice but nothing a solid actress hasn’t proven before.  I don’t think it will dislodge the likely winner, Laura Dern (for Marriage Story),  who has had a shining year on big and small screens. Though I wouldn’t mind seeing her dislodged by Florence Pugh’s fine performance as Amy in Little Women.

 Not nominated for Richard Jewell, though in pure watchability they could have been as much as Bates,  were supporting work by Sam Rockwell as the personable and constantly angry composite of the lawyers who went to work for Jewell, and Nina Arianda, a fine US  stage actress using the Ukraine accent of her  parents as his pushy Nadya who keeps warning the lawyer about what police powers can do.

Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray keep relying on actors deepening the cardboard cutouts rather than probing the complicated roots of attitudes our culture was embracing in the 1990s and is further embracing today. 

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

JoJo Rabbit 
Oscar nominated as best picture, supporting actress (Scarlet Johansson), adapted screenplay, production design, film editing and costume design.

Little Women 
Oscar nominated as best picture, best actress (Saoirse Ronan), best supporting actress (Florence Pugh), adapted screenplay, costume design, music.

1917 
Oscar nominated as best picture, director, original screenplay, production design, sound mixing, sound editing, cinematography, music.

Dark Waters, The Report and Just Mercy.  (The last treated as a 2020 release.)

The Two Popes
Oscar nominated as best actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay.

Joker
Oscar nominated best picture, actor, director, adapted screenplay, film editing, sound mixing, sound editing, makeup, music, cinematography, costume design.

Ford v Ferrari
Oscar nominated best picture, film editing, sound editing.

The Irishman
Oscar nominated for best picture, best supporting actors, film editing, production design.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Oscar nominated for best supporting actor

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

A BEAUTFUL DAY IN AN ACTOR’S NEIGHBORHOOD

Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

By Dominique Paul Noth

It always bothered me that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood gathered only one solitary Oscar nomination – what was that? A back of the hand recognition that Fred Rogers, the saintly, beloved and much parodied believer in children’s importance and TV’s importance to them, could not be completely dismissed as an American legend?  A tribute to a sincere fictional film building on the runaway success of a documentary devoted to Rogers’ life and influence on generations of children, my own included?

The category was itself suspicious since it is larded with celebrity names who often carry a picture and not one was doing a cameo appearance.  So what besides tokenism or afterthought was Tom Hanks as Rogers doing in that supporting actor category?  As a sop to make sure Brad Pitt won as the liveliest part of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?  To keep Anthony Hopkins at bay as the lesser role (mea culpa Benedict) in The Two Popes? To confirm that two powerhouse draws, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, are present for The Irishman to neuter each other?

And how in the name of King Friday XIII is Hanks even present in the supporting actor category!  Is he not the main reason anyone would go to A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood -- to see what the most popular nice guy in movie land brings to the nicest guy television ever experienced?

The last question always bothered me – until I saw the film.  And lo! Hanks ought to be in the lead actor category but if we can for manipulative purposes only get him here, he is delivering one of his best acting jobs, not only in perfect emulation of Rogers’ style and voice but in surprising us with how straight-ahead intelligent is his attempt to investigate the qualities behind the public personality.  Turns out the private matches the public and we are the ones ashamed of our cynicism.

Now this reaction is surprising because Hanks is easy to criticize as an actor who has let some of his natural gifts waste away in his  tendency to be Hollywood’s go-to guy for niceness. Road to Perdition reminded us he could be a mischievous villain and A League of Their Own how funny a clown drunk.  Be he was usually the nice comic leading man when you needed a comic but appealing young one, even the nice young widower that Meg Ryan dreamed of in Sleepless in Seattle, the touching homosexual lawyer dying of AIDs in Philadelphia, the goony determined Forrest Gump, the embodiment of Americana GI in Saving Private Ryan and various films where he shined as skipper in space, in the skies, on the ocean all based on real life American heroes. 

He even became a joke, asked to humanize Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks, one of the portraits when his efforts to create a grinning human front in all circumstances was cloying.  I admit I anticipated that cloying side from his Fred Rogers outing but Hanks the artist surpassed himself.  He pulled in the various colors his palette contains to play freely,  genuinely ahead with the Rogers persona, not trying to over-color his open reactions to others, his awareness of how he was mocked, not lost in being himself. If anything, Rogers’ reliance on his proven gifts, his sense of safety in who he was, stands out.

It is a real acting job in a film that can barely justify Hanks in the supporting category because there is an angry young father and his wife – fine work by Matthew Rhys and Susan Kelechi Watson. Rhys is the cynical magazine writer who can’t believe Mr. Rogers has anything substantive to add to his life and winds up angry to be caught out in his way of thinking.  But the film takes even more minutes interacting with Hanks as with the couple to tell its story.   If there is a real supporting actor to nominate in this film it is Chris Cooper nailing so perfectly as he so often does the dissolute father whose presence has so stirred the anger.  The story was inspired by a touching Esquire article more than two decades ago about Rogers, who died in 2003.

A young intelligent director, Marielle Heller, has seized on a nice framing device for the story as well as some solid work of storytelling.  The toy village and city that Rogers created for TV is expanded into real life, so that toy planes take off and toy traffic jams carry the characters around interchanged with real streets and cities.  The device works for a long time until the playfulness of Rogers’ world becoming the real world becomes weary after an hour and is further damaged when the film tries too hard to make us accept Rogers’ fancies as our own lives.  It’s like the film no longer trusts Hanks’ artistry or Rogers’ heart to lead us.

The smart money says Pitt.  Hopkins would be an acceptable choice.  But the best acting is a surprise. It belongs to Tom Hanks.

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

JoJo Rabbit 
Oscar nominated as best picture, supporting actress (Scarlet Johansson), adapted screenplay, production design, film editing and costume design.

Little Women 
Oscar nominated as best picture, best actress (Saoirse Ronan), best supporting actress (Florence Pugh), adapted screenplay, costume design, music.

1917 
Oscar nominated as best picture, director, original screenplay, production design, sound mixing, sound editing, cinematography, music.

Dark Waters, The Report and Just Mercy.  (The last treated as a 2020 release.)

The Two Popes
Oscar nominated as best actor, supporting actor, adapted screenplay.

Joker
Oscar nominated best picture, actor, director, adapted screenplay, film editing, sound mixing, sound editing, makeup, music, cinematography, costume design

Ford v Ferrari
Oscar nominated best picture, film editing, sound editing.

The Irishman
Oscar nominated for best picture, best supporting actors, film editing, production design.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.