EASTWOOD’S LATEST LARGELY IGNORED IN OSCAR CONTEST

By Dominique Paul Noth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A BEAUTFUL DAY IN AN ACTOR’S NEIGHBORHOOD

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

By Dominique Paul Noth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOT THE BEST SCORSESE BUT 'IRISHMAN' ENJOYS LIMELIGHT

By Dominique Paul Noth

Robert De Niro (left) and Joe Pesci in midlife at a bowling alley
in 'The Irishman.'

It’s almost an afterthought to see an actual Martin Scorsese film nominated for an Oscar – so many other movies have borrowed from him.

Scorsese is one of our prime movie makers, rescuer of cinematic history and influential in using old and new techniques: Tracking, long shots, following footsteps on the road to death, criticizing TV interior panning, humanizing close-ups and casual violent encounters – never take your eyes off the screen when one character meets another in a Scorsese film -- always relating our times to our gangster attitudes. He has also eloquently attacked the Marvel Comics world of film making as a new form of amusement park.

No wonder Quentin Tarantino, despite his own traits that dominate “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” routinely “quotes” elements of Scorsese in the way stories are told – and what side stories he wants to tell.  No wonder “Joker” relies on Scorsese techniques and commentaries for its more cinematic moments.  Even “Little Women” and “Marriage Story” – two other films nominated by Oscar -- owe something to Scorsese in how they break the wall to invite the audience in. 

Indeed in their award-winning tributes to their own films, directors Sam Mendes of “1917” and South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho whose “Parasite” is my favorite Oscar film, singled out Scorsese as a vital influence.

In a young man’s industry, Scorsese is the same age as some leading presidential candidates (77) and about the same age as his famous stars of The Irishman – Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel, several of whom started their climb to film fame under his tutelage.  This alone is one of the curious things about The Irishman – which flashes back into World War II where Frank Sheeran learned his trade of calmly killing people and then spends a lot of time in the 1950s and 1960s, locked down by the hit sounds of “In the Still of the Night.”

The characters in the underworld and corrupt union tale of Frank Sheeran would have been in their early thirties.  All gone now, they succumbed at about the same age as the living stars who enact them.  There is a slight youth aging back in time but we can’t escape noticing despite suddenly black hair, trimmer physique and groomed appearance that the actors are carrying a pronounced middle age and older physiognomy during their supposedly formative doings.

Yet we and Scorsese can’t quit them. We know he has been toying with telling this story for years and probably started at a time when the actors would have been closer to the ages he wanted.  Scorsese has often been willing to work with younger actors, yet for this underworld tale he is relying on the “Good Fellas” aura he created in 1990 and even the aura Coppola created in “The Godfather” saga – so powerful was the impact of these actors in shaping our awareness of gangster mentality and murder for hire.

It’s an engrossing three and a half hours on Netflix rather than local theater screens, but it is not the best of Scorsese. It is much more an  engaging revisit to the techniques and attitudes his team made famous.  It is a gripping story in  how  good friend Frank in the Teamsters killed Jimmy Hoffa, the popular boss of the Teamsters, but it relies on the personas the stars have established in many films.

It’s not just that it doesn’t fully qualify as best film of the year to me but it is always working on a couple of levels.  This is Pesci, after all, moving from De Niro as Frank’s casual rabbi to close friend.  So when he stares meaningfully at his buddy across the banquet room, we know not just from this story but from past experience that somebody has been ordered to die.  We almost don’t need the silent accusatory stare of Frank’s daughter Peggy (played as an adult by Anna Paquin) of how evil her father is.  De Niro is one of the few actors who can carry meaning in the same  grimace --  both a sense of remorselessness and dismissive sorrow --  as he goes about his job of “painting houses” (for the blood he spatters on the journey).

The best performance because of the energy of its range is Pacino as the volatile unrelenting Hoffa, but even this is well within the confines of previous Pacino outings.

In fact, Oscar nominating both Pesci and Pacino as best supporting actor seemed calculated to keep each other out of the running.  The Irishman has legit chances in film editing and production design.

 The film is like a long visit with old friends, marveling at times at the technique employed but longing to see new wrinkles in time.

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

NATIONAL CAR FETISH KICKS UP FETISH MOVIE BOX OFFICE

Christian Bale (left) and Matt Damon in typical buddy conflict in 'Ford v Ferrari'

By Dominique Paul Noth

America’s love for speedy cars and Detroit brand dominance have made a cinematic box office victor out of Ford v Ferrari, which takes Hollywood liberties with a famous 1960s rivalry but also has  some legitimate Oscar nominations (not for best picture which is a joke but  for editing and sound categories).

Its big name lead actors, Matt Damon and Christian Bale, were ignored by Oscar but not by moviegoers who have made the film a big draw since November.

Slickly directed by James Mangold, it forces an immediate confession from me.  I am familiar with but  not a fan of sportscar racing movies, which makes me un-American in some circles.  I think our fetish with automobile speed – and even with the interstate highway system, for which I was grateful on a recent trip to Florida and is responsible for a legion of truck and car improvements that have enhanced my living standards and certainly my diet -- is now standing in the way of limiting fossil fuels.

Maybe over decades electric cars will take over these expansive highways and steel and concrete trade routes that have knit the country together. But our continued fascination with the automobile, its oily smells, roars and shifting gears pumping up fueling technology, have pushed the average Joe behind the wheel to try and break the sound barrier and have made potshots on Ford, Chevy and import brands commonplace. You could also argue that all this car mechanics focus is getting in the way of where progress should be taking us.

That said, race car movies have been a Hollywood staple since James Cagney and Clark Gable and was certainly formidable for James Garner and Steve McQueen in the same 1960s decade where this film takes place.

For those who don’t think like me and even for those who do, the movie is a technological Le Mans triumph, a buddy story of how racing car designer Carroll Shelby and beatnik British driver Ken Miles – Damon and Bale respectively, the first with a heavy Southern actor, the second mastering the brash Brummie intonations and sardonic wry smile of a  Birmingham rascal – joined together in individuality to force Henry Ford II off his placid rump (a glaringly pompous performance by Tracy Letts) and think outside his Brooks Brothers corporate juggernaut devoted to mass production.

Stung by a Ferrari trade deal that ran rings around him, Ford vows to beat the Italian engineering monarch on the international racetrack, which in the film requires undoing the entire CEO executive structure Ford has built and accept the scruffy mavericks and their team of builders. 

The film makes a big deal about how different the assembly line  car industry is from what is needed on the race circuit. In fact, the Ford corporate structure is the big villain in the story.  In my mind, Bale’s jaunty attitude as the much hated Detroit  intruder raises the film out of the B movie class.

The movie shows all sides playing gamesmanship diving in and out of the racing pits.  It makes a too big deal about the poetry and independence of high speed racing, but drives the point home when Letts if forced to endure a high speed ride in his own creation (another fictional concoction).

In race after race leading to crash after crash, it also plays with reality as drivers seem to have time at outrageous speeds to  glare at each other and yell insults in between gear shifts. Even racing novices will know how the film is playing stop and go games with the realities of the track,  whipping up our involvement with invented moments of conflict and trickery.

Off-centering the driving excess are the intervals of Bale as a warm and impish parent and spouse, blessed by the loving and defiant looks and style of Caitriona Balfe as his wife. Many of the events, such as a comic knockdown fight between Damon and Bale, are totally fabricated, just as the movie makes mythic the final events, wrapping a neat emotional bow around the proceedings.

In those moments the film is pure Hollywood and mawkish, but Bale’s performance and its technical atmosphere  surpass the race car movies of the past. 

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

OSCARS AT CRAZIEST = 11 ‘JOKER’ NOMINATIONS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Joaquin Phoenix in 'Joker'

I have never confused the Oscars with precise artistic ranking of the year’s best films, though artistry and importance are certainly mixed into the perceptions.  For that reason alone, my heart sank with shame and embarrassment for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and our society when Joker led all films with 11 nominations.

It is the triumph of the worst instincts of  macabre over humanity.  Of the nihilistic alienation extremes of society over the actual tension. It is the dumb and dumber pretense that creating a dominating ugly world is more important to win accolades while the history of cinema stands as an effort to demonstrate how art and even graphic novels can range across categories, not indulge in one at the hideous dismissal of the other.

But Joker  has been great at the box office as a dark red fantasy and insider joke -- linking a DC Comics legend with a Gotham City gone mad in gangs, beatings and killings all accompanied by magnified manic laughter in a tour de force “anything goes” performance by Joaquin Phoenix. I have to believe that its box office has a lot do with the nomination fever and that its success is in how the Joker pretends to be launched from real life pain into flagrant madness, rather than launched from one comic book form to another. Anyone who thinks it is relative to the burst of young madmen shooting up our schools is deeply deluded.

But it is basically unfair to set Phoenix loose against the modulated moment by logical moment performances required of an Adam Driver in “Marriage Story”  or Jonathan Pryce in “The Two Popes” (same category) – a distinction already ignored by the Golden Globes that fell all over Phoenix.

Not that there isn’t  a certain crescendo built into his presence.  But it is clearly about the wide-open possibilities he brought to the part rather than what was there to begin with. It’s more about his willingness to injure himself.  He is given all the time in the world to indulge his victimization as a beaten, deranged and confused former mental patient and professional clown who becomes a subway killer and social icon, a  psychological explorer of his own family roots and the comic book Joker himself, dressed and sounding much like Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger. And does the movie really think dwarf jokes are funny?

The actor is allowed to indulge the view that standup comedy clubs and television  talk shows are just  the place to park social misfits. This Gotham City’s descent into hell  is essential to turning loose a maniacal Arthur who easily eludes legal consequence. 

The progression is much controlled by director Todd Phillips, something of a cinematic jokester himself, judging his history. He uses editing and long takes examining Phoenix manipulating his face into smiley-gloomy rigor mortis, dwelling on his emaciated body, on his gasping fits of laughter and spit-ups and almost balletic arms akimbo dancing and twirling, the elements supposed to uplift the performance into esthetic consequence. 

Each occasion – and there are dozens -- takes as much time as the actor needs (or I suspect improvised) with editing and mixing add-ons so we can never be sure what is in Arthur-later-Joker’s head and what has actually occurred.  We get pretty strong clues that there is no loving girl friend in his life though she flits in and out, but does he really kill his mother and then his best friend? 

The film relishes all possibilities, with subtle clues that often relate to how people react to him more than what actually happens onscreen, which is bloody.  Even at the end, when the lunatic is walking down a hospital corridor leaving bloody footprints or chased by a guard in and out of sunlight, we are not quite sure if the Joker and his bloodbath are really over. Not in this surreal Gotham City that looks like Manhattan demented, overrun with garbage, rats and killers in clown masks.

There are also homages or borrowings throughout from everything from Charles Chaplin and Fred Astaire to co-star Robert De Niro’s own filmic past in “Taxi Driver” and “King of Comedy,” this time with De Niro playing a variation on TV host Johnny Carson, to which he brings naught but anticipated victimhood.  

The mood  is much dependent on a score by Icelandic composer Hildur Gudnadóttir, who here is channeling  Hitchcock’s Bernard Herrmann to reverberating impact.  Though Frank Sinatra also figures into the crazy man’s psycho.

There is no question the film is an appropriate cinematic nominee in such areas as sound mixing, makeup and music. My problems stem from such categories as best picture, director, actor, adapted screenplay, cinematography and costume design where the other candidates had to work within limits rather than being hired to wallow past the limits of realism and construction.  If it wins any of the bigger awards, the Joker is on us.

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

MERCY! ‘TWO POPES’ A MISCHIEVIOUS SALUTE TO TALENTED CINEMA

By Dominique Paul Noth

Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce in 'The Two Popes'

There is a completely concocted moment at the papal conclave in 2005 that wound up choosing Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger as pope when he is in lunch line with then the second most popular candidate, Argentinean Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio who is absently-mindedly whistling “Dancing Queen.” 

Who is that by? asks German musical expert Ratzinger.  “Abba” says Bergoglio, which is also the Aramaic name for Father not just the Swedish pop group, which clearly confuses the future pope.

It is an amusing setup for The Two Popes, an invented look at emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned in 2013 and had a pretty good idea who would succeed him, and the current Pope Francis.  

The first question that needs to be answered is if there is any stinting or shortcoming by Netflix in concocting the sumptuous Vatican settings and international flavors of the story.  Absolutely not.  We can argue forever whether such movies are better seen with a crowd in theaters or absorbed alone at home, as is often case with Netflix.  But the streaming service is making waves for the quality it brings to offerings, nowhere clearer than here with both Anthony Hopkins as Benedict nominated for Oscar best supporting actor and Jonathan Pryce, my personal choice for best actor for the dry honesty, smallest hints of humor and immediacy in his portrayal of Francis.

(If anyone thinks the decisions of the Vatican can be mysterious and manipulative, consider the Oscar best supporting actor category and how it is trying to maneuver the voters.  There they are parking big names like Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Tom Hanks along with Hopkins!)

The second question: Is this just a dry theological debate for Catholics?  Not at all. It may be invented, except for moments when actual statements or encyclicals are paraphrased as if emerging in dialog, and it certainly assumes a relationship that current events may not support, such as Benedict now,  when some interpret the retired pope as  attacking Francis for his views on priestly celibacy. 

But in the heartfelt challenges, when (in the film) Benedict brings Francis back to Rome to explore stepping aside, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles raises noticeable issues of the roads to God and to power. Plus he allows moments back in time to reveal Francis’ conflicts with celibate life (perhaps making a dry point by not doing so much background for Ratzinger).

With and without subtitles, the movie drives seamlessly through multiple languages, with time to make a joke about Benedict being most comfortable in Latin. It’s an ideological representation, far from history, but aside from the buddy movie criticism from critics, it does delve deep and honestly into many issues we wish the two men would discuss!

Based on his own play (nominated for Oscar adapted screenplay), Anthony McCarten has provided amusingly intellectual dialog and the genuine emotions as well as issues the two men faced. Pedophilia and bank finances are indeed explored. He does not hide how Ratzinger was accused of being a Nazi, much to the distress of Francis’ search for pastoral humility, not does he dodge (in fact makes a centerpiece) the guilt Francis felt as leader of the Jesuits playing footsie with an Argentine strongman regime. 

In fact, these conflicts strengthen the sense of humility among pomp that two popes had to debate (though probably not so openly) in what remains a remarkable dual argument about the church’s future. In real life, it does seem that Benedict has grown healthier and more open since stepping aside and that Francis has found a more formidable voice of leadership --- both realities that fit this manufactured exchange.

The movie more weakly suggests that soccer brings the men together, but “The Two Popes” lives and breathes on the moments of humanity the actors find under the robes and formal prayers, with Pryce particularly natural in how he achieves that outcome. A meander in the garden speaks volumes.

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added:

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

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

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

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

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.

AN EXCELLENT OUTING FOR THE OLD-FASHIONED WHODUNIT

By Dominique Paul Noth

Daniel Craig and Ana de Aramis in 'Knives Out'

Here again is that creepy remote mansion stuffed with scary bric-a-brac. Hidden entryways, dangerous staircases,  convenient trellises. Dogs that bark in the night or don’t. The lordly patriarch who ends up with a cut throat after controlling an immense fortune. Squabbling relatives who clearly have their Knives Out.

A sweet immigrant companion who cannot lie without throwing up and is convinced of her own guilt while the audience prays she has misread the events. The mysterious sleuth with a funny name (Benoit Blanc) and an exaggerated Kentucky fried accent but the same word salad as Hercule Poirot about his own remarkable mind (“these little brain cells”).

No, Agatha Christie is not alive, nor is “Murder She Wrote” still filming though we get a brief reminder of its methods on a living room TV.  This is a constant sub-genre of Hollywood films that can be played straight but with laughs or spoofed to death in parodies like Neil Simon’s “Murder by Death.”  It is walloping fun without a single serious thought except trickery in its melodramatic flourishes, with welling music and tableaus of scary family vultures circling in.  It still makes audiences jump all together.

Writer-director Rian Johnson, enjoying a vacation from the “Star Wars” franchise, clearly loves the category and has concocted a delightful frolic of whodunit misdirection.  He plays the constantly suspicious faces of spoiled relations (Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon and Don Johnson among them) against the guileless ingénue appeal and lustrous eyes of Ana de Aramis as the young nurse we pray will escape from the suspicious circumstances of mixed up medical bottles and night-time creeping around.

Christopher Plummer is delightfully demanding as the soon to depart patriarch and Daniel Craig, broad Southern drawl and silent observation, is having a feast as an actor  showing a different sort of authority than he does as James Bond, to which he will finally return in April with Aramis as a Bond girl.

The plot – nominated for an Oscar as best original screenplay but placed in particularly fast company -- is too convoluted to explain but falls into Agatha Christie aha!! by the conclusion.  The actors relish every opportunity to blow smoke or behave conspiratorially, with Evans relishing being the most hateful. Director Johnson, through rapid cuts and bizarre car chases, keeps the viewers off balance in headlong ways, mainly so we don’t re-examine the premises that got us here.

He is so enamored of this style that he has contemplated more adventures for his Kentucky thoroughbred Benoit Blanc (which literally means Blessed White), but I hope not. This is the sort of film that benefits from one and done though Hollywood will be tempted by the money in sequels.

Other recent film reviews with Oscar nominations added here:

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

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

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

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

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.

THREE STRONG LATE ENTRIES BRING MOVIES BACK TO HUMANITY

By Dominique Paul Noth

Mark Ruffalo in "Dark Waters"

Three films late in 2019 or early in 2020  seemed to proudly return American film-making to the gripping investigative storytelling that television had pretty much taken over in longer forms than two-hour stories. These are topnotch cinema drawn from real life where dogged Americans are demonstrating again and again how the arc of the universe “slowly bends toward justice.”

Actors and directors expand the best elements of Law and Order and Frontline into important stories that reassure us of the difference dogged persistence can make – and entertain us with potent moments in the bargain.

In order of success as film-making, they are Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters, in which a plodding unexpectedly heroic corporate lawyer for elitist companies, played with pudgy stubbornness by Mark Ruffalo, took on DuPont in a continuing 20-year battle to own up to its chemical Teflon’s  destruction of the world environment.

The movie could have relied on deformed carcasses and angry farmers to tell the tale, but it delves grippingly into the world of chemical formulas and courtroom delays and strategy to keep us on the edge of our hope of success against the odds. There are even moments of paranoia that we understand plus surprisingly effective use of visual effects to capture the polluted water supplies creeping into our farms and homes. Not surprisingly but certainly with nastiness, the power of money and corporate influence forces every step forward to cope with two steps back.

Annette Benning and Adam Driver in "The Report"

This is closely followed in quality (and similar power struggle) by writer-director Scott Z. Burns’ The Report (with a blocked out middle word in the title that in reality spells Torture) streaming through Amazon.  It is focused on a real-life Senate report on the CIA that is still hidden from public view. 

But it took a seven year pursuit by an idealistic and growingly angrier investigator at a Senate computer deep in the bowels of the CIA to just give the public the 500-page executive summary outlining how US agents used “waterboarding” and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques (think torture, such as electrodes on genitals, sleep deprivation, screaming noises and other niceties that left scores of captured combatants unable to be processed in US courts and also handed Isis a major propaganda victory called Guantanamo).

The real-life investigator is played by Adam Driver whose coiled intensity keeps us alert to the smallest advances toward sunlight of the summary, which was successfully blocked by the Obama administration though that president instantly halted the torture.  The decision was made not to prosecute the CIA agents who were following orders from the Bush administration, a human rights decision that angered such senators as Diane Feinstein and Sheldon Whitehouse (played straight ahead and quietly by Annette Benning and John Rothman, with other realistic portraits and dead ringers in looks as Jon Hamm as Obama’s chief of staff and Ted Levine as CIA boss John Brennan). 

Who finally got to unfold what makes for quite a study and may anger audiences since too few Americans have absorbed the lingering consequences of all this – or realize who the real heroes were and what fallout remains. 

Driver is all over the 2019 screens and probably makes his biggest box office impression in “Star Wars: The Return of Skywalker” and his likely award winning presence in “Marriage Story,” but this entry is not chopped liver. Presented as imaginative relentless pursuit behind computer screens and into the workings of dark sites, psychological hokum and coverups (the inescapable conclusion is that torture never worked as expected) the story is fascinatingly important in penetrating one of the US’ darkest chapters.

Michael B. Jordan in "Just Mercy"

The third movie is the most like a TV movie but with big-screen moments – emotionally simple and straight ahead with a screenplay full of amazingly articulate participants in the Alabama death row system.  But this is Alabama, where racism and fear still seem revealed in outlandishly brutal moments.

Just Mercy is based on the tireless work to help prisoners, mainly black, denied criminal justice since the 1980s and the creation of the continuing Equal Justice Initiative with Michael B. Jordan playing its founder and author Bryan Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as the cynical death row prisoner Walter McMillian whose story became famous through “60 Minutes.” (The judge who doesn’t listen is a remarkable physical ringer for Jeff Sessions.)

A relatively new director  Destin Daniel Cretton trusts his actors in a straight at the heart portrayal of the events, particularly blessed in Rob Morgan as a doomed Vietnam veteran and the always amazing Tim Blake Nelson as the twisted and scarred white honkie who recants.  The lead actors are okay but it is these supporting actors who score the biggest input.

Perhaps partly because of sympathy to the criminal justice work underlying “Just Mercy,” I was caught up in how crisply even though sometimes lacking in nuance was this investigation of minds changing and redemption.  But all three films reminded me again of the power that good empathetic acting can bring to all manner of roles.

“The Report” shines in its casting, which allows the script to fly through scenes knowing the actors will land the goodies with a look or a reaction.

“Dark Waters” not only reminds viewers that star actresses like Anne Hathaway and chameleon actors like Ruffalo and Tim Robbins can surprise us by naturalistic underplaying.  It is also a pleasure to see established film actors prove their range.  I was particularly struck by how Victor Garber and Bill Pullman, comic staples in “Sleepless in Seattle,” here can pull up quite startling and different emotions from the world of corporate lawyering.

All three films do justice to their stories.  But “Dark Waters” also has illuminating layers of social commentary that patrons will respond to.

Other recent film reviews:

JoJo Rabbit 

Little Women 

1917 

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.