WHITNEY’S MOVIE GETS MORE RESPECT THAN ARETHA’S

Naomi Ackie as Whitney Houston in the re-creation of her Super Bowl anthem in 
"I Wanna Dance With Somebody."

By Dominique Paul Noth

The musical biography has been a reliable if often corny sub-genre for Hollywood.  The techniques don’t vary too much.  You string together the hits. You fabricate the artist’s life.  Or you can partially fabricate around known events. 

That’s worked for  Cary Grant as Cole Porter, Robert Walker as Jerome Kern, Larry Parks in occasional blackface as Al Jolson, Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn, Angela Bassett at Tina Turner, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, even Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash.

You can even dig into their lives a bit to look for something more lasting -- as Respect maybe intended to do in 2021.  I reviewed it then but didn’t publish till now because it offers a contrast with the  better Whitney Houston bio film intended for the recent Oscars 2022 , I Wanna Dance With Somebody.  Both films wanted to be considered after the 2019 success at the ceremony of musical bio “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Yet both failed even to be nominated, though the Houston film is far better because it didn’t duck as many life realities.

In almost all musical bio films,  you invent scenes of the subject creating a riff or a tune on the fly as if they didn’t know the melody before entering the recording studio. This is always the amusing part, trying to force moments when your designated genius actually became a  genius.

These manufactured moments  certainly undo “Respect,” but in fairness the contrasting Whitney Houston film focuses more on the people who helped her gain fame. Her own participation in her choices for success may be exaggerated but they are limited to her listening to a song and preferring it.  With eminent music producer Clive Davis as executive producer (also played sympathetically in the movie by Stanley Tucci) you accept that it tied closer to the truth. 

There were abnormal hopes that true insights would emerge from “Respect,”  a look inside the private, landmark, troubled and musically inventive life of Aretha Franklin, the daughter of a Baptist pastor who was already great as a child singer, went on the gospel road with Martin Luther King Jr., then invaded New York for many albums, then went to Muscle Shoals in Alabama to coax some honky-tonk white musicians to follow her lead and then never looked back as the Queen of Soul.

“Respect” is a movie stuffed to the gills with great singers who do little acting.  Except for Jennifer Hudson both emoting and singing as Aretha, and Jennifer never met an Aretha wail she couldn’t master.  

But first there is Aretha at age 10, dragged out onto the church circuit by her pastor father and (look out, world) sung by a  true young talent, Skye Dakota Turner, playing Aretha at age 10.

A powerful number of Broadway divas play her mother, sisters and mentors (Audra McDonald, Heather Headley, Hailey Kilgore, Saycon Segbloh and Mary J. Bilge as Dinah Washington) usually singing as a bridge to other events or playing backup singers.  

Director Liesl Tommy and playwright/screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson may have had a more probing idea on their minds for “Respect.” Maybe pressures from the family and the studio interfered, since both groups had influence on the project.

Their film begins with Aretha as a child but strangely ignores how Aretha became pregnant at ages 12 and 14. It lets the big-voice child singer Skye show her appeal as Aretha at age 10 and then, when a male friend invites himself into the child’s room, we fade to black, and then all we know when the lights come on is that Aretha has become a surly withdrawn girl who has to be coaxed into singing.

Jennifer Hudson
 and  Marlon Waylan 

Flash forward. We meet Hudson as Aretha at age 19, casually introducing her children from a few years earlier but now flirting with men, confident of singing, occasionally breaking out in what the family terms “demons” of behavior.

It struck me that the creators were setting up a specific pattern of child sex abuse that would linger into grownup life, perhaps exploring whether it was related to Aretha’s secrecy, militant attitudes and brand of feminism. That would have been a much needed probing script. But we are only allowed to review the movie in front of us.

The film subsides into more familiar patterns – bad choices in men.  Her domineering pastor father (solid work by Forest Whitaker) wants to manage her career and control her life. Her abusive husband (Marlon Wayans) then wants to manage her career and control her life.  Hudson is not asked to do much as an actress, except suggest a strong will and musical intelligence inside her that the men in her life refuse to recognize. 

Hits  dominate any personal story. Comedian Marc Maron gets to employ his dry wit as producer Jerry Wexler, but the film winds up flipping from “and then I wrote” to “and then I noodled on the piano like a genius” to “and then I talked the label into letting me do gospel.”  It’s a parade of musical challenges, the real internal dilemmas of Aretha left behind, with Hudson doing the singing.

If the film had only stuck with exploring some of the deeper domestic hints, maybe it would have snuck in to the Oscars. It was a missed opportunity. The best thing about it if you stream – about the only way left to find it since it was out of theaters in minutes --  is the conclusion under credits, borrowing footage of  the real Aretha at her memorable Kennedy Center performance in 2015 shortly before her death, shedding her expensive furs singing “Natural Woman” for composer Carole King.

Turning to “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” it is blunter about Whitney’s private life, even concentrating on an aspect that many of her fans didn’t see – her lesbian roots in choice of companion.   (Apparently lesbianism is more palatable to movie audiences than a 12-year-old getting pregnant.) It turns out that the lesbian friend lingers on and emerges better for her than such men as Bobby Brown, who took her to the drugs and is taken to the cleaners in the film. 

I suspect this touch of honesty comes from screenwriter Anthony McCarten, who also penned “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), but it is a relationship augmented by director Kasi Lemmons (who moviegoers may best remember from her acting days, as FBI training cohort of Jodie Foster in “Silence of the Lambs”).  She does well with modern film techniques, borrowing the computer graphics interface (cgi) techniques smoothly for the concert scenes,  using file after file strips much as “Bohemian Rhapsody” did to create the  mammoth Super Bowl crowd when Whitney sang the National Anthem.

Tucci as Clive establishes early that he may have set some great talents in motion over the decades but generally stays out of their personal lives.  The film suggests he broke his own tradition a bit in Houston’s later years when her drug use was clearly limiting her soprano ability to provide those anthem slides from soft to belting on songs.

The Houston film isn’t a parade of great singers in the background, but it surprises us with the singing talent of Tamara Tunie, best known from “Law and Order SVU,” here playing Cissy Houston (Whitney’s influential singing  mother).

“I Wanna Dance” is overall better acted. British actress Naomi Ackie is a strong emoter as Whitney, doing her own gospel singing but leaving the main tracks to Whitney, whom she lip-syncs perfectly.  She does look a lot like her thanks to prosthetics and talent.

Tucci is sympathetic as Davis, Tunie is likeable as Cissy, Ashton Sanders is growingly hateful as Bobby Brown and veteran actor Clarke Peters perfectly conveys the one thing all these black female celebrities seem to have in common – a domineering father figure.

The Whitney film doesn’t completely solve the “then I wrote” problem with such bios, even though turning it more into “and then I sang.” It doesn’t investigate Whitney’s personal limitations deeply enough, just showing her falling into drugs to sustain her  intense performing schedule. It prefers to leave us with the better image of her, but it doesn’t hide domestic entanglements as “Respect” did.

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 still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain.

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

 

“TAR” VS ‘EVERYTHING’ IS OSCAR DEBATE

 

Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in "Tar"

By Dominique Paul Noth

The Oscars (March 12)  are actually putting up front a ferocious debate about what the public wants in a motion picture.

Part of the debate is about selectability – audiences choosing a streaming service in the comfort of their own homes rather than going out to a theater to watch movies with total strangers, bigger screens and better sound. Streaming is winning based on the box office results, providing overwhelming financial proof  despite excuses such as the hangover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the more important debate is between “Tar” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” both movies I enjoyed on both emotional and intellectual levels, yet each addressing different aspects within the larger movie envelope. They are test opposites in the schools of moviemaking.

“Everything” a few days ahead of the Oscars, was climbing in the guessing poll as the likely Oscar winner for best picture and best actress against the long assumed best actress, Cate Blanchett, for “Tar.” Her director, Todd Fields, sees hopes  diminishing for what would be my choice as  best director as well as runaway the best film of the year. But  “Tar” clearly lit all my fires while the professional technical skills that rule  Oscar have reason to applaud “Everything.”

Given the makeup of the Oscar voting industry, there are good reasons why they will vote “Everything” as best picture and openly value the technical skill sets of the industry members.  It is a delight, attuned to what has changed in movieland and requiring new definitions of what screen acting is in the current environment.

It is a science fiction tale that explodes across the multiple universes in a way the Internet can only envy, but probably the Internet has helped lead  both younger audiences and older ones to think about life in this manner. So have years of comic book fantasies, now translated into runaway box office success, given some 30 Marvel features plus resurgence of the D.C brand and such triple threats as “Hunger Games.”

What keeps “Everything”  afloat is how the Daniels (as co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are called) have inexpensively but cunningly by Hollywood terms roamed free and fast across artificial intelligence, rapid mind-bending editing, multiple universes (to which we apply the term multiverse these days), dimensions in which characters change personality and costumes whipping into different environments and ages while ultimately returning home for some basic lessons about family and domestic worth.

Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh in 
"Everything Everywhere All at Once"

While retiring from acting for  decades after being the cute kid in an Indiana Jones adventure, Ke Huy Quan is likely to win the Oscars best supporting actor honor, but even he would admit that his vocal tone is not the reason.  It is how he used movement, animalistic instincts and the Alexander Technique on posture and placement to physically change as the multiverse changes, from the wimpy husband to the martial arts expert with backpack and on and on as the needs and script require.

 The directors are expert at pulling him back and pushing him forward, as they do with much of the cast. Jamie Lee Curtis as the creepy IRS agent lurching toward the camera like the Terminator  (and I suspect that was the vision the Daniels were after with her threatening herky-jerky advances) may also win best supporting actress though there is strong competition.

There is one universe motif composed of  rocks talking to each other,  another where fingers turn into floppy hot dogs (reviewers tend to describe these sequences as  a  fight among dildos). There are dynamic kung fu passages. The movie is almost a travelog of movie memories and modern international film techniques and tech training (some viewers will need a Google search engine to keep track of what’s going on).

It  reminds us that so much movie acting these days requires body shaping, green screen and physical payoffs, far more than believing in the moment to moment acting sequence we have learned from the stage. This is not Bette Davis movie territory.

Michelle Yeoh is a wonderful center for these shenanigans (touted to win best actress Oscar since it would be a way for Hollywood to apologize for neglecting or isolating Asian characters).  Here she can use her dignity, manner and martial arts training with what seems like abandon. 

Acting  in such a free-wheeling environment, with the Daniels willing to try anything and yet have the savvy to return the story to a simple middle – well, it’s quite different than what Blanchett achieves in “Tar,” though there is a different kind of shape shifting by the actress who moves from CEO power to personable interview to loving husband to arrogant enforcer.

Some critics have wrongly criticized “Tar” as being high-brow (set in the Leonard Bernstein heights of classical music) or, worse, putting the liberal MeToo movement in its place.  Which it does, brilliantly, if you isolated from the whole film  how her Julliard masterclass elevates Tar’s putdown of a black modernist’s distaste for old white guys only to see social media excerpt her comments to make her look like an ugly arrogant racist. 

Wall Street Journal actually ran an opinion piece that accurately describes the scene but draws the wrong conclusion. It in effect damns the film with false praise, which “Tar” is suffering a lot from.

“Tar” is an example of how a fine director, Fields, can seem to be playing fair while selecting only those aspects of a character vital to his story.

For instance, Lydia Tar makes a big deal about having been mugged to explain facial bruises.  But in a fascinating sequence, the camera sees Tar invade the space of a female cellist she is sexually pursuing, get disoriented and, maybe, face-splat herself in a panic to escape.  We don’t see the face-splat but we hear her version at length – and we  have learned enough about Lydia to suspect that her power dominance and mental agitation are beginning to undo her.

I don’t want to give away too much of the movie – but let's emphasize that the invisible third person narrator we assume in "Everything" takes us where we  want to go in -- though it is really where the Daniels want us to go. Yet we accept the Daniels as truthful in a sci-fi world.

But Fields in “Tar” is actually directing our eyes to what he wants us to see about Lydia Tar and her world. “Anyone who watches this film is the final film-maker,”  Fields has said in an interview, but that is a facile comment for the press though it contains truth. It is another way of pretending he is not shaping our vision of Lydia Tar, who is a total fabrication that fits recognizably into our modern world.

He dares to trust our powers of observation in a fable about  CEO power, mob “virality,” self-deception and  a both admirable and manipulative protagonist who is undone in the end, without losing her artistic center.

Blanchett is not the only excellence in the acting realm. As one example, in a quiet observational way, Nina Hoss is fascinating as  Tar’s wife and mother of their adoptive daughter, also the Berlin Philharmonic's concertmaster – another example of how Tar is lovingly protective and an absolute tyrant in  scaring a school-chum who has been bullying her child.

Sophie Kauer, an excellent cellist plucked out of obscurity (and attractive in looks), plays the new object of Tar’s affection – but totally indifferent to the seductive suggestions of her would-be captivator.  In fact, it is Tar’s obvious plunge for the cellist’s affections that gives root to the explosion and disgrace that pursue her.  

Blanchett keep us watching from moment to moment – one reason why the film seems slower, because it is psychologically deeper and rewards careful attention. “Tar” represents the sort of excellence within one world, while suggesting many worlds to careful observers, that to my mind requires the top awards. But I don’t expect it to win.

A previous review contrasted “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Argentina, 1985.”

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 still active 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 Doms Domain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

WAR WILL BEAT ARGENTINE JUSTICE IN INTERNATIONAL OSCAR RACE

 By Dominique Paul Noth

Felix Kammerer as Paul in "All
Quiet on the Western Front"

As the Oscars approach March 12, the only confident prediction I will make is that the best international film prize will go to Germany’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” – also nominated for best picture Oscar, which it won’t win.

And though it is a good film, I don’t think it deserves the international film prize, though it will get it,  given the astounding publicity for it, the credentials – Erich Maria Remarque’s famous 1920s novel that also was a phenomenally successful 1930 American film – the importance of the antiwar message down through the ages  and the lack of any equally strong campaign for the other four nominations.

But there I have a favorite – “Argentina 1985” – that I think should win and is now getting some buzz.  In some ways it might be dismissed as a courtroom drama, but it is faithful to an actual lesser-known court drama, exposing a once-powerful right-wing junta,  that may be more immediately resonant in our current political age.

For anyone paying remote attention to Argentinian history, the film is also a reminder of a  country caught in the ceaseless back and forth of military dictatorship, democratic rule, then military again, then democratic -- and throughout, thankfully, a mordant sense of humor. (The same prosecutor who  is a stickler for court proceedings can hurl a vulgar gesture at his opponents.)

The film chronicles a reluctant federal prosecutor who had learned to subdue his judicial ethics under military rulers but  now has a more liberal government in Argentina. Yet he still  has healthy suspicions about the powers that be, fearing this new wave of democracy won’t last (in that regard he was right).

Nevertheless,  he tries to fight for justice,  and his shrewd moves make a good movie, recounting the miraculous ways he worked with a ragtag group of supporters to speak out in public and punish the nine junta leaders responsible for thousands of “disappearances” and brutal killings of ordinary citizens.

Actor Ricardo Darin

It’s almost imperceptible how smoothly the film has been dubbed into English and it is intriguing how good the cast is, led by Ricardo Darín, a highly rated stage and film actor who, even in dubbed dialog, makes us feel for this methodical, put-upon and slowly demonstrative prosecutor. I wound up preferring this slower, more intellectually demanding film.  Director Santiago Mitre may not plow new ground but he effectively uses the full range of semi-documentary storytelling techniques.

Not to say “All Quiet” isn’t  powerful. But it struck me as over-used film making, hardly ground-breaking in an arena where it could be breaking ground. That is the problem with war movies that make the same devices tell the same story, unlike how “Argentina 1985” truly introduces a new set of characters and complications.

“All Quiet” is  exposing a horror we all know called World War I in which soldiers in separate bunkers feet apart lost lives by the millions  barely gaining a foot of ground in the process. 

Down through the decades of war films, though all wars are hell, WWI may well be the easiest one to make look foul on all fronts. There is no national pride left in anyone about its craziness.  This film echoes the  waste of soldiers on all sides, making the novel’s focus on the German side speak volumes to all sides, from the way the students were encouraged to join the military by gung-ho schoolteachers (they would feel at home in Florida under DeSantis) to the savage lessons its story elements constantly reveal.

The main lesson has some fresh insights in how commerce is secretly fed by the  carnage. The film extends the novel’s insights here, striking us in the guts about  money-making merchandising dominating every conflict. Doesn’t matter if labeled capitalism or communism – the soldiers are unwitting cogs in a bloody machine.

“All Quiet” opens – much like other war films – in absolute brutality with cameras flying all over the mud, spikes and  facing bunkers.  Individual soldiers are dying brutally, but they are not the soldiers the plot will follow. These bodies and possessions are scavenged by the survivors (their fellow troops), their bloody rat-infested uniforms salvaged, cleaned, the bullet holes sewed shut, the fabric then pressed and neatly folded – and then given to the new soldiers who are becoming fodder by the millions.  “Whose Heinrich?” wonders Paul, our main protagonist, as he receives the garments of a soldier who died reels ago. Paul’s physical presence is hauntingly embodied by gaunt Austrian actor Felix Kammerer.

Visually  these are powerful social images, barely touched in the novel, as is the brutal manipulation of the ruling class of generals (a topic most brilliantly covered back in 1957  in Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory”).  Here we get to see the armistice negotiations as the combatants locked in trench warfare are dismissed as pawns in the egos of the leaders --  the absolute indifference on both sides to the consequences for the soldiers.

There is a moment from the novel but more powerfully rendered by 1927’s unrelated “The Big Parade” directed by King Vidor, where a soldier is stuck all night in a trench with the slowly dying foe he stabbed.  These almost endless painful moments become the most haunting intimacy in the new film.  They reminded me how the colorized actual marching, bathing and latrine footage of WWI doughboys exposed the harsh indifference of actual  war, without the flash of fire and charging bodies,  in New Zealand director Peter Jackson’s largely forgotten 1918 short documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old.”

Where the 1930 “All Quiet” – deservedly award-winning for director Lewis Milestone – gave time for camaraderie in the trenches, in the 2022 film most of the soldiers Paul has come to know just die suddenly alongside him – except for his best friend Kat, who helps him steal food to survive. The most famous 1930 final image (often parodied) was of Paul reaching for a butterfly --  his flopping hand tells us he also died.  Death is never so clean in the 2022 film.

Indeed, WWI is again a set piece for film makers to send battalions of extras into the carnage and the futility of battle. The new one adds the arrival of armored tanks and flame throwers, which these bunker-entrenched opponents had never seen and flee in panic.  A 2019 Oscar contender, “1917,” in which director Sam Mendes became too enamored of pretending WWI  was all done in one flowing camera shot, nevertheless matches German director (actually Swiss) Edward Berger in epic size and fierce fire scenes. 

Both films are trying and failing to come up to the D-Day horror standard of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” But all are  playing on the same battlefield, making us sometimes feel that war is a test of moviemakers rather than humanity.

We always feel the humanity in “Argentina 1985.” While satisfaction  seems elusive at first given the setbacks as the prosecution plods along, suddenly satisfaction soars out in a trial speech that compares with the great humanizing speeches of past courtroom films like 1961’s  “Judgment at Nuremberg.” 

Pretty sure “Argentina 1985” won’t win at the Oscars but suspect it will hang around our minds for years longer than the competition.

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 still active 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 Doms Domain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

A MILWAUKEE BOOK THAT REVEALS SONDHEIM TO THE WORLD

By Dominique Paul Noth

I first met Paul Salsini in the 1960s when I started working at The Milwaukee Journal. We both left for very different reasons in 1995 when it was the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In all that time he had profound impact on his colleagues as the quiet excellent reporter and copy editor who became staff development director, then writing coach and in effect ombudsman explaining what journalism should be to readers, as he was also doing for journalism students at his alma mater (and mine), Marquette University.

Knowing him as a journalist to emulate (though I never succeeded) and the cleanest of writers, I fully expected that his new memoir on a topic we both loved, “Sondheim & Me: Revealing a Musical Genius,” would simply speed along at 205 pages. As a reviewer I found it actually is a quick and absorbing read. As a Sondheim student, I kept pausing and savoring every chapter because I was learning so much, getting inside a mind that I had admired for decades.

The first surprise in “Sondheim & Me” is that Stephen Sondheim, the most prolific and influential creator in American musical theater, would give equal intellectual weight and commentary to a Milwaukee writer, Salsini, who in 1994 started a quarterly magazine known as The Sondheim Review. He edited it for 10 years. 

It was hardly a fan magazine but chockful of journalistic inquiry, special interviews, probing and skeptical reviews of his output from around the world, impressive timelines, dating back to his birth in 1930 and how he burst on the musical world in his teens, historic photos and interweaving Sondheim’s own views with those of many notable sources.

Mainly there were “dear Paul” letters (excerpts) to the editor about the Sondheim Review magazine, which Sondheim seemed to read fastidiously four times a year.  The book reprints key phrases in streams of letters to Salsini, often raising what Sondheim called “emendations” (letter to the editor corrections). In one case he showed his outraged testy side over a London review of his stage opus “Passion.” 

Sondheim, through Salsini’s choices, was revealing himself and his work methods. Somehow, Sondheim saw in Salsini what his newspaper colleagues had seen over the years – a passion for the topic, a clearness of intent and a quiet dignity. In every chapter, without intruding his own opinions, Salsini shows a side of Sondheim reacting to how others saw his work or adding his own comments.

Sondheim has seldom been this easy to understand, since his intellect was formidable. (I recalled how in the 1960s as a young theater critic I was fascinated by his word games and crossword puzzles in New York magazine and later struck with how little notice he got as an active movie buff and screen composer.)

He was generous in his advice to established famous performers and fledgling talents (who later became the heart of the new Broadway). He even analyzed “Hamilton” better than many critics did. But he was also notorious for knowing his own worth and showing a grumpy prickly side.

Let’s put this in historic perspective. Sondheim died at age 91 in November of 2021, just after he advised, saw and praised Steven Spielberg’s movie remake of “West Side Story” and while he was still actively contributing to a gender changing revival of “Company” and a star-studded revival of “Into the Woods,” which continues its Broadway run even as Salsini’s book comes out in October of 2022.

His death led to major tributes and fresh evaluations -- performances on Zoom, TV and in concerts -- but those were mainly expanded tributes and accolades that had started more than three decades ago and grew into an avalanche on his 70th and 80th birthdays as American culture caught up with his impact. (How prescient was Salsini to start his magazine when Sondheim was a mere 64!)

Sondheim’s early almost boyhood fame was as a lyricist (“West Side Story” and “Gypsy”) and even his words rather than his composing remained the draw in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962). “Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone” could almost be the motto of his life.

But then the dam broke, and he insisted on both words and music in all his works. His output became the most influential presence in the progress of musical theater. It is not, as some famous colleagues griped, that he did away with the boffo song so many musical comedies relied on. It was that his melodies were intricately about characters, moment and dialog, lending themselves to theatrical showstoppers but hardly attuned to the Top 40 world of Tin Pan Alley. His dramatic themes were all grown up compared to the wave of musicals before him.

Yet in fairness his mentors and early collaborators (Oscar Hammerstein, Jule Styne, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, writer Arthur Laurents) are equally difficult to pigeonhole as people have attempted to do with Sondheim for decades. 

Paul Salsini

 I’m a huge fan. But I have actually seen less full Sondheim than I would like – though I caught “Company” and “Sweeney Todd” in their initial Broadway runs. But the need for incredible performers both musically and theatrically and the difficulty of themes have prevented many of his shows from enjoying national tours (though London and Australia have always been welcoming).

In fact, it took revues built out of his compositions – such as “Side by Side by Sondheim” or the HBO 2013 documentary “Six by Sondheim” -- to help audiences everywhere understand the rigorous details of his theatrical work.

And yet there are still hits everyone knows. “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music” dominated the pop charts. “Being Alive” from “Company” and “I’m Still Here” from “Follies” have become cabaret anthems and some of Sondheim’s most haunting love songs stem from some of his darkest musicals. 

The most famous work may well be “Into the Woods,” which mashes favorite fairytales together and then shifts the mood to a darker and then perhaps more illuminating place. But it became accessible because of a much-performed high school version that emphasized its first act and not its more provocative whole. Even a movie musical that tried to do justice to the full worth of “Into the Woods” was ensnared in the Disney family fare vision on its 2014 release, to the detriment of its artistic endurance.

 

 Absorbing the depth and breadth of Sondheim has become difficult when you consider how many only know his output in bits and pieces, or through those revues. Works like “Passion,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Assassins” (thematically still too gloomy for many in our gun-crazy culture) resist staging without fully rounded production, though personally I will point out that some experimental versions of “Sweeney Todd” and “A Little Night Music” have proven quite attractive.

The difficulty is emphasized when you look at the full 2022-2023 schedules of major Milwaukee theater companies. Musicals abound, including several by composers and lyricists who regard him as their inspiration. But none by Sondheim. 

The chance to understand and appreciate Sondheim should send sales for this book far higher than small independent Bancroft Press expects. (Salsini will host a talk-back at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., October 18 with a publication date of Oct. 7.) 

 I think celebrities who have worked with him, performers who want to work with his material and theatergoers who, like Salsini, grew to be fascinated will flock to this book, its historic photos, its fascinating timeline and storytelling prose, always moving Sondheim forward in time and space. 

 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, still archived 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 SURPRISE CAR IN THE OSCAR SWEEPSTAKES

Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tôko Miura in "Drive My Car"

By Dominique Paul Noth

For decades I served as movie critic for The Milwaukee Journal, rubbing shoulders with national film critics and understanding that the movie industry was interested in us only if a review could help their box office.  We were free to speculate about insider behavior, such as the Oscars, where it was mutually beneficial. But what critics actually thought about movies – didn’t matter unless we put “fannies in the seats” as one industry spokesman subtly told me -- had little influence compared to the members of the Motion Picture Academy who actually did the work.

This may have changed in 2021 when the choice of 10 films for best picture Oscar was clearly schizophrenic and desperate.  Think it was 2013 when Oscar decided to double to 10  the number of best pictures and that seemed to make sense back then.  In 2021, however, several films were delayed a year by COVID, some were caught up in controversies such as the continuing #MeToo that snared Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin, both successful producers who ran intensive Oscar promotional campaigns for their films.  No more, thank heaven, but Oscar still isn’t sure how to police itself from all the vagaries of social comment and split viewership between home screens and movie theaters, which may have lent more weight to the critics’ blather than in earlier years.

The impact of social comment was clear when two films by veteran director Ridley Scott, who has enjoyed Oscar nominations since the 1970s, failed dismally in Oscar voting – The Last Duel (nada) and House of Gucci (one nomination for makeup) despite favorable reviews and an A cast list including Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Mark Damon, Ben Affleck and Al Pacino.  There’s a lot of feeling that Scott did it to himself in an interview when he blamed millennials and their “f*ing cell phone” fetish for skipping out on traditional films.

So, this year out of 10 films there are three with serious traditional Oscar sensibilities.  Belfast, which not only emotionally revives the family fleeing in military conflict, but also the tail end of its Oscar campaign dovetailing with similar emotions stirred by Ukraine – and there are similarities in how Putin tried to make this a conflict between Russians and Ukrainians while Belfast explored the effort in the 1960s to split Protestants and Catholics.

Then there is West Side Story, a remarkably fresh retooling of a 60-year-old musical favorite by the world’s most honored director, Steven Spielberg, leading a host of his acclaimed academy cohorts. And, to fulfill the offbeat creative director at full power slot, there is Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which has offended Old Western diehards and requires moviegoers to stick through a subtle opening psychological first half for a kicker of a payoff. Not a typical Oscar entry by any measure.

And then come two films that reflect appreciation of individual actors and family values (Coda, King Richard) and others that represent not the best work but at least solid work by admired directors (Dune, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza and Don’t Look Up).

And then there is the mystery entry with four Oscar nominations including best director and best movie, the nearly three hour Drive My Car, limited availability in movie theaters and online at HBO Max (just choose the right language).  Its young Japanese director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, does not have a strong American or Hollywood following.  There was no major promotional campaign to include it. But it won best picture from the New York, Los Angeles and National Society of film critics – and this year that seems to have been enough.

Now I like the film but think my fellow critics lost their sense of proportion and don’t recognize flaws in construction that the Oscar professionals will.  It’s not the year’s best. It is the year’s most difficult to explain intelligently since it marries Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya, a world weary theater director, his late and deeply loved though unfaithful wife, the hypnosis of the family car and conversations (an obsession which the Japanese apparently share with Americans) and how coincidences of auditions and conversations, plus the constantly playing Uncle Vanya on the car stereo in the dead wife's voice -- all  connect a wandering storyline.

American film makers often smirk about sex scenes, but the Japanese have a way of combining erotica with character development, and the film shines in this regard. Oto, played by Reika Kirishima, is mostly seen during lovemaking while spinning her poetic ghostlike tales, pretending to be a lamprey sucking the bottom.  She also dies early in the film yet remains its most important character. 

Her fanciful tales during lovemaking  do more than hypnotize her husband,  a modernistic theater director played by Hidetoshi Nishijima, who is off to direct a mixed language production of Uncle Vanya (Korean, Japanese, English and even Korean sign language for the deaf).

One of the auditioners is the TV actor he knows slept with his wife and whose memories of her, plus his blatant appeal to women, figure in the conclusion.  The director is forced by the Hiroshima theater company to turn over the driving of his car to a young woman of a different class and background. Their encounters also figure in the story.

Something unusual that I liked.: The film waits till some 41 minutes in to flash the opening credits in Japanese and English during one of the many driving moments that are key to its pace and appeal. Curiously, the psychological shards of all this – Uncle Vanya, erotic memories, deaf mute power, and the hours traveling in the red car – do mount up to an involving drama, though the film is a half hour too long and its levers of coincidence become mannered. But it proceeds with an assurance of purpose that does set it apart from other nominated films, and while I doubt that the professional members of the academy will be as taken in by its plot intricacies as the film critics were, it’s a demonstrable case of outside social factors forcing their way onto the Oscar slate.

ALSO COVERED: 

WEST SIDE STORY

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH 

THE SHAME OF OSCAR’S HATEFUL EIGHT

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.

 

OSCARS DECIDE TO ISOLATE THEIR HATEFUL EIGHT

By Dominique Paul Noth

Despite their lame explanation that there is no such thing as a lesser Oscar, the planners for the March 27  national TV  ceremony made a value judgment between eyeballs and awards – and their idea of eyeballs won.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in a letter that created great discomfort since its 10,000 plus members are divided up into the categories being invaded, announced it would relegate eight Oscars to a preliminary ceremony an hour before telecast. That is more than a third of the Oscar categories.

They will do this through careful editing into the three-hour (hoped for)  TV program the title of the movie that wins the category, the person who won and the acceptance speech – clearly hoping this would produce eight of the shortest acceptance speeches in Oscar memory, along with eliminating that walk to the podium and congratulations from peers and press, all to speed things up.

Irony of ironies. The academy is relying on careful editing to quickly bring those moments to the telecast – just as it removes editing from prime time hoopla.

It’s only one step the Oscars are taking to boost viewership by giving the audience more of what the academy planners think they want. They’re bringing back hosts – three of them.  They are making moves toward fan favoritism and polling. There is even a new campaign to create an #OscarFanFavorite – a popular film to be selected via Twitter! Plus there are rumors of more entertainment numbers rather than peers imposing honor on other peers.

Age 71, Fred Astaire broke into an unannounced dance in 
1970 at the Oscars, a hard kind of audience thrill to create
by moving eight Oscar categories out of live TV.

Now some of this may not be bad. Supposedly impromptu sidelights were for years an Oscar staple.  I can recall in 1979, the Oscars give more than 10 minutes to Steve Lawrence and Sammy Davis Jr. for a specialty number, “Not Even Nominated,” which detailed dozens of famous songs created for film that Oscar totally ignored – a double whammy that chastised Oscars for short-sightedness while pointing out, in so many tunes from so many eras, how much the movies had given to American culture. (Oscar is keeping in prime time the original song category, which today can really test how well you listen to pop  music.)

Also, mainly because the public doesn’t get to see these so much, I don’t strongly object that the academy is throwing to the early dogs the documentary short, the animated short and the live action short, even if those were the categories where viewers were likely to spot important newcomers. In other words, the academy is showing less concern for its own future viability.

They are also moving off prime time the makeup and hairstyle category – in an era where prosthetics, wigs and other specialty body designs have grown in importance. In reality, this move eliminates from live interplay the only Oscar “House of Gucci” was in competition for. (If its star, Lady Gaga, still shows up March 27, expect an inserted musical number.)

In another nominated candidate, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” makeup and prosthetics are key to the appeal.  But at least Jessica Chastain still gets to compete for best actress in an HBO Max movie that few have seen.

But now come the categories relegated to earlier that most distress me, and make me wonder if the academy realizes the history and important artistic names it is losing.

Original music score has been sidelined to the earlier time -- and this one dumfounds me. Names like Bernard Herrmann, Dmitri Tiomkin, Alex North, Ennio Morricone, Max Steiner, Quincy Jones, Elmer Bernstein have long made me sit up and take notice at the film’s credits, signaling more to me than the producer names.  Wonder if the academy would have dared do this if John Williams was one of the nominees?  But another notable nominated name that springs to mind is Hans Zimmer who composed the music for “Dune” And among the team composing for ”Encanto,” given the edge for animated feature Oscar, is “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Production design.  Lost to live moments are many artistic names:  The detailed eye brought to “West Side Story” by Adam Stockhausen, who has also done many of Wes Anderson’s films; also Stefan Deshant who helped director Joel Coen reinterpret German Expressionism for “The Tragedy of Macbeth.”  Nor can anyone argue that the design wasn’t crucial to "Dune," "Nightmare Alley" and "The Power of the Dog."

“Dune” should be particularly grieved by the designation to earlier time since four of its potential Oscars have been moved out.  That leaves the prime time opportunities to none that  “Dune” is seen as a favorite in -- cinematography, one of 10 nominated best pictures, costume design, original screenplay and visual effects. It certainly weakens the “Dune” boasting rights for landing the most nominations.

Also discarded – sorry, that’s moved earlier – are the stalwart categories of sound and film editing. That may also indicate that the passage of time has affected the value of certain skills in a collaborative medium.  Sound and film editing today are built on past skills but they are not the same as in the old studio system.

But there have been film editors as well known to cinephiles as directors (if you doubt me, think Dede Allen). A number of directors either started or incorporated film editing into their methods – David Lean, Robert Wise, the Coen brothers and Akira Kurosawa.

And sound magic has never been more important and more complicated an enhancement to moviegoing.  In interviews several times, actors have mentioned how a fan has credited them for an emotional moment when it was really the music or the use of sound or a nifty bit of editing.

This academy decision is not quite putting music, sound, editing and production design to pasture. But it is sticking them in the backseat.

For many of us who enjoy thinking about films and what makes them good or bad, it is understandable that a trade group – which is what the academy is – wants to police itself (Can’t they just work on the internal hatred-love promotional campaigns the members still engage in?) and create a better TV product without diminishing the purpose of the celebration.  The trade group argues that there is no diminishment, but I doubt the nominees would agree.

The Oscars have also been a rich time for reviewers.  Urban Milwaukee has picked up several of mine and I’ll provide that site links here: West Side Story,  Tragedy of Macbeth, Being the Ricardos, Spencer, The Power of the Dog, King Richard, Nightmare Alley, plus a speculation on the richness of the supporting actress category.

Many other reviews timed to the Oscars are available by scrolling through domsdomain.blogspot.com

ALSO AT DOM’S DOMAIN: 

DON'T LOOK UP 

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.
 

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.