PUBLIC NEEDS TO GANG UP FOR SPIELBERG’S ‘WEST SIDE STORY’

Ariana DeBose (center) as Anita in 'West Side Story'

By Dominique Paul Noth

Six decades of children turning into teenagers turning into parents turning into grandparents.

From family movie night at the local palatial palace for the Natalie Wood version of “West Side Story” (1961) then after a decade a TV perennial, then forgotten by movie palaces turning into multiplexes, then COVID comes along confusing movies with home streaming services, then teens preferring the video joys on their smart phones to ever going out to a movie with mom and dad -- what changes in the entertainment habit!  These shifts now greet the most successful moviemaker in history, director Steven Spielberg, for his re-thought remake of  West Side Story (2021)

Spielberg makes more money signing a deal than I could imagine in a lifetime, so he can afford to outwait an uncertain public as his $100 million outing has brought in to date only $37 million at the box office. Those figures will jump around March 2 when the movie-house-only decision gives way to Disney Plus and HBO Max.

But frankly I think it will be 20 years before Spielberg’s much better version matches the original box office or reputation. It is bothersome that the public is not rushing to the moviehouse. Maybe an Oscar win out of seven nominations will start the ball rolling.   But Oscar and Hollywood have got to stop counting box office as some sign of quality or even proof of commercial longevity for a work like this.  I think the 2021 version is deservedly here for the long haul.

One reason is respect for the original.  You’ll find visual echoes of director Robert Wise such as the colors coming through windows panes.  Choreographer Justin Peck pays constant homage to the other original director Jerome Robbins (yes, there were two) for the dance numbers – less finger snapping and fewer scoops to the ground but the same syncopated action, more synchronized ballet twirls, more lunging forward in groups, the same Robbins power and virile strength, even extended street dances with more people involved, including kids. 

Where Wise started with high aerial views,   Spielberg brings the story closer to the ground as wrecking balls skim the dilapidated turf where the Lincoln Center is going up in the 1950s. Oscar nominated cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a Spielberg veteran, provides exceptional images without calling attention to how shrewdly his cameras have been placed, particularly noteworthy in the   intimate singing scenes. 

Spielberg has daringly changed “Cool” into a “keep-away” fight for a gun with extraordinary leaps.  He has moved “I Feel Pretty” to provide irony after the rumble – it is performed by an unknowingly happy Maria and minimum wage Puerto Ricans (no subtitles needed) cleaning up Gimbel’s.  The rumble draws Tony in with more brutality and psychological whiplash.

Ansel Elgort as Tony

Screenwriter Tony Kushner has moments of brilliance. He has not thrown away Arthur Laurents’ Broadway book with its invented slang but he has augmented with powerful back-stories, clever changes in sequence, and extended dialog face-offs that explain more deeply the friendship of Tony and Riff and clearly make Maria the aggressive one in her romance with Tony. Even Chino, Maria’s hulky boy friend who intends to shoot Tony, is fleshed out into a believable character by Josh Andrés Rivera

Tony as actually sung and acted by Ansel Elgort is a remarkable improvement on the original. With a fine voice and smoldering Marlon Brando looks as he swings among the fire escapes, he approaches the role as a tall star-struck kid with a vicious past and the naïve belief he can charm anyone to like him – and then learns savagely that he can’t. 

The Riff of Mike Faist looks like an emaciated John Cassavetes but is frighteningly intense in his acting and dancing, while David Alvarez’s Bernardo is a snarling boxer eager to mix it up. The storyline now makes more of the main characters believable.

It  will take several viewings for the other members of the  Jets and the Sharks to take on the individuality the public bestowed on the originals, but Spielberg is making sure that each will have that sort of moment.  The fight over turf and racism is more cutting in language with neighborhood adults added for humor and street shock (we no longer feel the youth gangs are aliens dropped from space). 

Virtually all the Jets and Sharks have Broadway experience, and the combination of choreography and singing demands those skills. Leonard Bernstein’s music has never sounded better and Spielberg marries the music to the settings as intended in special ways I had not thought about when seeing the 1961 version.

The Anita of Ariana DeBose is Oscar nominated, delightfully smiling and swirling her skirt but also grimly dark and mature in the tragic scenes. She is being allowed to suffer and strike back in manners different than Rita Moreno as the first Anita, and that brings up an interesting Oscar exclusion.

Rita Moreno as Valentina

I had speculated the Oscars would not resist nominating both DeBose and Moreno, but they did. Moreno at 90 hardly needs any more honors but her natural depth should have been recognized. As Doc’s widow, Valentina, she plays a more central role in the story.   A scene that could have been gimmicky – when Valentina teaches Tony Spanish – is not the overused movie device it sounds like.  Quite touching as well is  Moreno soloing on  “Somewhere” after a sip of Puerto Rican rum. 

Rachel Zegler was plucked not from Broadway but from 30,000 audition tapes to be Maria.  Of course her face and eyes are luminous. More important her soprano is lovely especially in the higher range and her acting grows in firmness, capturing the innocence as well as the determination in important dialog additions.

Rachel Zegler as Maria

The surprise to me about the remake is that the power of the music is improved. It is not just better sound technology (also nominated for an Oscar)  but the major difference in people actually singing the parts they are playing.  There are no big celebrity names that  require dubbing as was standard in 1961. 

I know all about   pre-recording and the like, and the studio has gone out of its way to describe how much was captured live.  But either way  it is amazingly more human and freeing for this A-list of Spielberg collaborators when  Tony and Maria are actually singing and looking at each other, as opposed to imported voices like Jimmy Bryant and Marni Nixon in the original. 

Nor is the movie a new plaything for people seeking those “easter eggs,” the  Spielberg touches in how the story is told, like the color red in “Schindler’s List” or the John Ford scene in “E.T.”  The actual touches are in the craftsmen he hired and the way he keeps the camera moving among the players – and the way the story adds believability.

This is a fine film and the audiences will discover it at their own pace.  Of all the film makers today, Spielberg is the one of such high regard that he can wait patiently for that fickle audience to find him.

ALSO COVERED: 

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

KING RICHARD

DON'T LOOK UP 

THE LOST DAUGHTER

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

SUPPORTING ACTRESS CHOICES

SPENCER

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.
 

THE TRAGEDY OF BEST ACTOR NOT BEING IN BEST FILM LIST

Kathleen Hunter in 'The Tragedy of Macbeth'

By Dominique Paul Noth

In the stark black-and-white almost landscape of The Tragedy of Macbeth -- “almost landscape” in how it takes shape only to transport us --  director and shrewd editor of Shakespeare’s original, Joel Coen, does not waste any time to address the hot social media controversy that surrounds the casting of his wife, Frances McDormand, and Denzel Washington, 67,  as the Macbeths.

The social media talk is all about how they are too old for the roles.  The parts have been played as young rebels or sensual lovers or middle aged overachievers, but here there is no effort by Coen to justify their long-term relationship nor  hide the grizzled lines and non-Botoxed necks. They just ARE and believable as practiced lieges who have risen to the heights of a Scottish court where they can scheme in isolation and embrace their darkest ambitions. Works just fine.

Coen simply lets us realize that these established veteran members of the court will be abnormally trusted by Duncan the king  and other nobles, letting us focus not on how they avoid the law but become the hated law itself as they wade deeper into the lies and the blood. 

McDormand was not even nominated for an Oscar – was it because she won last year? Or is this   a mild ageism snub – that famous  “unsex me here” dialog? Either way it is a horrid oversight.  She is a concentrated, convincing,  earthy, understandable Lady Macbeth who becomes numbed  by the blood hunger she has unleashed within her  husband and can no longer control. The calibrations are well done without cheating in terms of dramatic acting. The film cuts the emotional conflicts to the bone, every courtier there for a reason.

Coen’s style in the telling is minimalist, tight-fisted and only exploding in cinematic punctuations for good reason. Perhaps this was why it wasn’t nominated as best picture.  It seems to take place in fog or abstract space which suddenly has landscapes that echo each other,  with sudden stark outlines of castles and roads, and places murderers can hide or victims can delay the inevitable. We move through this space with quickness and fear, never knowing what lies around the next invented turn. Shakespeare’s words have a human bite to them.

With Coen there is a subtlety as well as cleverness in how the settings melt into each other, how mere passageways, endless steps and chambers sublimate into the next scene, how floods of birds and leaves are suddenly unleashed to paint the way to doom. The sets are built for cinema, not for the stage.

In this of all years,  Coen’s power of limited palette should be recognized.  The Oscars have gone overboard in the  best director category to praise those whose general artistry is loved even if this wasn’t their best year.  There are no other honors, for example, for  Licorice Pizza. Even those who admire "best" director Paul Thomas Anderson have to admit that he is there just because he embodies how giddily palettes, editing and running techniques  can be employed to entertain us – indeed some nominations are really about the way the film pyrotechnics have been used or even overused, maybe because Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences technical experts are voting for each other.

Denzel Washington as Macbeth

The hands down best lead actor at the Oscars is Denzel Washington, who could clearly play Macbeth onstage but here makes human the conversational elements of some of Shakespeare’s most famous poetry.  He muses in bitter solitude, he dreams in active voice, he bellows with menacing authority and questions Banquo in hidden gentle threat (“goes Fleance with you?”).

If you know the play intimately, you may sense some disappointments (the night porter tries too hard to be funny) but you won’t miss the cuts, such as the unneeded scene in England where Malcolm tries to test Macduff’s commitment to the cause.

Joel Coen (operating here without younger brother Ethan) confesses in interviews that he is a novice scholar – like hell. He has made the mysterious Third Murderer (whose purpose has confounded many directors before him) a clever plot device. He creates a Macbeth so consumed by overreach that his ending is in keeping with his disease.

He has edited the sleepwalking scene with great skill and belief in the original and he has been remarkably inventive and terrifying in the Witches -- using a shape-shifting stage legend, Kathleen Hunter, to twist her limbs and guttural her voice into the master puppeteer of all three weird ones. Though there are some special effects involved, how Hunter is not nominated as best supporting actress is beyond me, except that category already had too many options.

If Denzel wins in a walk, I will forgive a strange Oscar year, clearly affected by COVID delays and vagaries of online vs. movie house receipts, which apparently influence voters.  But it is passing strange that a powerful Shakespeare adaptation that will stand the test of time better than Olivier’s “Hamlet” (which did win best picture) has gotten so little attention as this Tragedy of Macbeth.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

KING RICHARD

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

DON'T LOOK UP

SUPPORTING ACTRESS CHOICE? TOO MANY RICHES

FASCINATION WITH PRINCESS DI THE ONLY REASON KRISTEN STEWART HAS OSCAR SHOT

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.

 

FASCINATION WITH PRINCESS DI THE ONLY REASON KRISTEN STEWART HAS OSCAR SHOT

By Dominique Paul Noth

Kristen Stewart in 'Spencer'

The film opens with a vista of perfectly aligned trees and passing trucks, then slightly eerie sound effects as sentries guard a huge empty royal kitchen -- then a blond actress with a familiar haircut  speeds by on the country road, weirdly alone for a royal princess, seeking the way to her grandmother’s estate and Christmas dinner with the family.

I had sensed this styling before, the indirect entry into the land of the opulent rich, back in 2016 or actually the 2017 Oscars when Chilean film-maker Pablo Larrain broke  into consideration with “Jackie,” a vision of Jackie Kennedy (Onassis) struggling with neurosis set against lavish backgrounds. Larrain imagined much of that struggle with the kind of sympathetic invention Hollywood loves and we do, too, our feelings for a lost princess struggling against relentless fame and media. That film  gained a best actress nomination for Natalie Portman and furthered Larrain’s reputation for elaborate camera techniques and psychological journeys.

 Here  we are again at Oscar time. Same director, similar style, similarly based on a real life, another actress carrying the load,  but even deeper phantasmagoria, even a horror story,  about the late and beloved Princess Diana,  actually justified on screen as a “fable from true  tragedy.” 

Spencer   (her family name) is about Diana speeding to her royal prison, muttering to herself and hallucinating as she faces up to divorcing Prince Charles.

It is a fable but is it also a  true tragedy? Maybe, if we are always on Diana’s side, viewing her husband as a stuffed shirt ordering her not to throw up at the family dinner, seeing the  queen as an always smirking cold fish.

Diana is constantly running away from and into a regimented prison of luxury corridors, fancy curtains and prying eyes, every maid and butler a spy.  She imagines slurping a green  vichyssoise full of the string of  pearls Charles has given her,  which are like the pearls he gave Camilla (she already knows).  She envies the local field’s scarecrow,  feeling like a pheasant being shot by royal hunters. Moments with her children return her partly to normal, at least in this concoction.

Going mad before our eyes (despite a last minute mental rescue out of nowhere) is the style of Lorrain, who expertly arranges the details and gets us squirming at a world lined up as her enemy. His skill at composition is unassailable.  But beautiful to watch is not the same as beautiful to think about.

In 2017, Portman was a mere placeholder in the best actress category, and the same is expected for Stewart. Only because of that likelihood is the film in Oscar discussion – along with seeking to elevate Stewart’s reputation after the “Twilight” films.

We can distinguish film acting from genuine acting (and love the bodies that can do both). Maybe Stewart can, but as used here, loping across fields and flashing eyes in close-ups, then cut-in fragments of conversation, the main Di details are only in the way she gasps for breath and gulps as she talks. She represents the film acting side only, a performance that could easily be  pieced together from small takes.

For an established actress, look to Sally Hawkins as her loving dresser. Now that’s  a good performance.  Stewart’s Diana is more like impaling a butterfly on a pin and seeing how neurotically it can quiver.

The film is hanging around a few theaters hoping for Oscar nods, but mainly available for rent at streaming services.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

KING RICHARD

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

DON'T LOOK UP

SUPPORTING ACTRESS CHOICE? TOO MANY RICHES

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.

 

SUPPORTING ACTRESS CHOICE? TOO MANY RICHES

Editor's Note Feb. 8: The Oscar nominations today make aspects of my story wrong, particularly that the Academy resisted what I thought it wouldn't -- nominating Rita Moreno alongside Ariana DeBose.  But rather than deal with the 'Belfast' conflict, they only nominated Judi Dench, plucked the new actress Jessie Buckley from 'The Lost Daughter' and, as I predicted, dropped the two leading ladies I mentioned to this category.

By Dominique Paul Noth

COVID could still change the timing, but the Oscar nominations are now set for February 8 and the ceremony itself for March 27. Various trades, guilds and other industry groups have met and produced their lists that will influence how the Oscar voters decide.

Ariana DeBose and Rita Moreno
at premiere of  'West Side Story'

To date the titles includes "Belfast," "House of Gucci,” "King Richard," "Licorice Pizza," “Don’t Look Up,” "The Power of the Dog," "West Side Story” and “The Tragedy of Macbeth” but other titles are hovering.

The nominations could also reflect movie theaters in one corner and streaming services in the other.  There are cross-overs but there are also stern one-siders.  Some categories in fact will be hard put to find five genuine prospects to nominate (much less 10 films for the top slot!). 

But the situation is the opposite in the supporting actress category.  There exist far more genuine hopefuls than there are slots, particularly when studios and agents play the game of forcing lead actresses into the supporting actress category.

That will smack viewers most forcibly with Belfast, a well acted movie that clearly confused some American viewers, who struggled with the Northern Ireland accents (I found them charming) and some uncertainty about who to root for in this boy’s life story of growing up in 1969.  The film opens subtly with color panoramas of Belfast today before moving into a black and white 1969.

Also confusing to some viewers is that the Protestant vs. Catholic enmity did not prevent both sides from declaring their Irishness and how in 1969, even as they were inflamed into choosing sides, Protestant and Catholic families co-existed. We all obviously need to learn more about this history, which was shut off US front pages by Vietnam.

Holding the Protestant family together in ways that Catholic families will  find recognizable is a fine Irish actress (and truth teller in director Kenneth Branagh’s film based on his own upbringing), Caitríona Balfe. Despite her central importance and screen time, academy voters are being pushed to consider her in the supporting actress category.

But there is a better known member of this cast also likely to be there. If so, it will be hard to dislodge Judi Dench.  The Dame, as she is titled, is best known to moviegoers as the perennial M in the James Bond films, where her dry wit and bemused looks don’t begin to tap her ability.  “Belfast” does.  She is the Granny being left behind, whose scenes with her husband (Ciarán Hinds, and look for him to be nominated in the supporting actor category) spark the humor and genuine sentiment of the story. She is even given the defining phrases  as the rest of the family leaves for America. Her final scene will be hard to overlook.

Two strong possibles from one film – and that isn’t even the strangest case.  How about two actresses associated with the same role – Anita in West Side Story?

Ariana DeBose has drawn raves for her acting, singing and  dancing in Steven Spielberg’s new version, only available in movie houses.  It is a role where those elements plus the ethical dilemma won Rita Moreno her Oscar 60 years ago  -- but look! Over there in the same film  IS Rita Moreno, a miracle at age 90.

She won the Oscar for Anita -- and is  given a new role, Doc’s widow Valentina,  now running the drugstore,  and she even nails  a famous song,  “Somewhere,” which she sang live on set, according to the studio.  It isn’t a cameo, as she insists, since screenwriter Tony Kushner wrote the part for her. 

Can you imagine the Oscar voters resisting coming full circle?  Can you imagine them nominating her and not nominating DeBose -- even though they may cancel each other out?

And can they also resist Cate Blanchett? A fine actress and former winner, she has two good ice-maiden supporting roles – Don’t Look Up and Nightmare Alley.  She never can be discounted.

Then there are two actresses who ought to be in the best actress category for the importance of their parts, but are only being talked about for supporting.  They are Kirsten Dunst, who quietly nails the dichotomies of her role in The Power of the Dog.

And there is the most cringe-worthy de-elevation being contemplated for King Richard, while Will Smith seems a lock for best actor nomination.  

As I wrote in a January review: “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.”

Yet the studio is pushing her – and not  very hard – only for the supporting category.

As of this writing, it is unclear which names the Oscars will jump for, and it might not include someone I should have listed as I see more of the films in contention.  I pretty much know who I like in the other races, but I wouldn’t want to be the voter who has to come down to five and then one in this category.

ALSO COVERED: 

BEING THE RICARDOS

THE POWER OF THE DOG

THE LOST DAUGHTER

KING RICHARD

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

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.

 

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.