‘BLACKKKLANSMAN’ SPIKED WITH LEE’S SAVVY FURY

John David Washington as a most unlikely KKKlansman

By Dominique Paul Noth

A full useful grab bag of cinema is at Spike Lee’s beck and call after decades of occasionally marvelous films (“Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X,” “4 Little Girls”) – and he unloads that expertise in righteous anger, righteous finesse and righteous overreach in an Oscar nominated best film (with Spike nominated as best director). It’s titled, alphabet tongue-in-cheek, “Blackkklansman.”

It begins brilliantly with a long tracking shot from “Gone With the Wind” and an extensive Alec Baldwin imitation, quite frighteningly funny of a racist spokesman from maybe the McCarthy era.  Then we get Spike’s take on a real 1979 story, a slightly unbelievable tale of a black police officer who joins the KKK over the phone while a fellow officer, white, continues the masquerade in person.  Tensions and guessing games ensue.

The director has running cinematic  threads throughout, including whether the screen splits horizontal or diagonal during conversations;  how in the real Black Panther era every black person sported the same Afro; and  how the faces become zombie-like threatening when the film sweeps into the black exploitation “wave your gun SuperFly” style.

Running jokes, too.  How both the police bosses and the KKK can’t believe the black officer, played with a smidge of Richard Pryor impishness by John David Washington, speaks perfect King’s English.  How the white officer who imitates him with the Klan, Adam Driver (nominated for a supporting actor Oscar), is actually Jewish.  How a noted group of actors grimace and holler as a bumbling white supremacist cell.  Among them are Jasper Paakkonen and Ashlie Atkinson as the Jack Sprat comedic opposites (he thin, she not) eager to dynamite blacks while cuddling. 

There is a winning cameo from Harry Belafonte as an old man recalling the horrors of watching the Klan kill blacks in his youth.  The film’s structure is a mocking internal reminder that subterfuge is not just a plotting device but reflects the entire double-dealing of America’s race relations.  Walking the line in the racial divide is another of Lee’s many subtexts. 

Along with the plot twists, there is a lot of ribaldry.  It becomes hard by the end to know whether Spike Lee is trying to get us involved or has tongue firmly in cheek as he wraps up the story in neat Hollywood bows -- cop falls for the revolutionary black chick, officers race to break up a bomb threat, David Duke (played like a young Bill Macy by Topher Grace) as the ultimate stooge in the plotting. It’s so over the top we get the messages clearly.

After some police jesting over how they made the Klan look dumb, and some billing and cooing by the lead couple, the film turns deadly serious at the end.  It links the KKK to Trump and the Charlottesville marches, a reminder that the story may mock and defeat the Klan but white supremacy rolls on in America’s highest echelons. 

The film’s enjoyable showing off of Lee’s filmic mastery and social conscience winds up too elfin for its own good. It’s a reminder in a way Lee may not have intended -- that a film can throw off so much heat that it gets in the way of the sunlight.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Roma

Vice

The Favourite

The Wife and Oscar’s best actress race

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 and Internet and consumer news. 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.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

‘THE WIFE’ HAS FEW SHOTS AT AN OSCAR AND IT LOOKS TO BE CLOSE

Glenn Close as "The Wife"

By Dominique Paul Noth

Perhaps deliberately, the Oscars best actress category is set up as a clear division between first timers remarkably good in roles created around them and veteran actresses who have displayed artistic longevity.

And standing out among the veterans is Glenn Close, six previous times an Oscar bridesmaid seeing others win the top award. She and the Academy voters well know, at a remarkably young looking 71,  this may be her last go-round at the prize, and that reality will work positively for Close, who is highly regarded by her peers.

A good thing, too.  While her work in “The Wife” is powerful, a mixture of the restraint and sudden human fury that Close brings to the screen, she would be the first to suggest it was not her most difficult role, though clearly required acting of her caliber to keep us so engaged in a domestic drama about the interactions of a couple whose husband in the 1990s wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.  A film that elevates the importance of the traditional forgotten woman is also in tune with the times.

Swedish director Björn Runge relishes the trappings and intrigue of the real Nobel ceremony and quietly amuses us with the sort of intrusions that slowly make privacy impossible for  the Castlemans, he the prize winner.  Christian Slater does believably charming but creepy work as a biographer trying to dig out the family secrets.

Jonathan Pryce makes sure we understand Castleman’s randy yet romantic literary nature from the get-go while Close is clearly the mature one keeping the novelist’s worst tendencies in check -- until she blossoms forth in her own right, desperate to maintain her own terms.

These are the domestic firecrackers that break through the film’s stiller surfaces to keep us absorbed without thinking we are watching a masterwork – except in Close’s brilliant dissection of Jane Anderson’s script. There is a plot revelation that the audience may well guess early but the unfolding is quite startling and somewhat surprising.

In other words, it’s good enough to win an Oscar, especially when rated, as the voters will, with Close’s superior presence in movies since 1975 (“The World According to Garp,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “Albert Nobbs”) not to mention stellar Broadway and TV work. (With those past experiences, her surprise this year at winning both the Golden Globes and SAG do not fall into that typical apple-polishing moment of  “Oh gosh! Little old me?”  I suspect she was genuinely surprised given the field of contenders.)

Lady Gaga in "A Star Is Born"

In that new girl in town contrast comes a terrifically enjoyable Lady Gaga in “A Star Is Born,” a movie about an unknown singer whose frank unassuming personality elevates her to fame, even as the boy friend who started the journey succumbs to drink and deafness. 

It is a role from Bradley Cooper (co-star and director) that gives us the most human likable side of la Gaga we have ever seen and there is a lot of creativity not only in the songs she sings but the scenes she nails.  But again, this was her maiden voyage for all cinematic intents and purposes, and it was shaped to bring out and challenge her best.

The most radiant and touching performance of the year probably belongs to indigenous Mexican native Yalitza Aparicio whose humanity invests nearly every frame of “Roma.”  Director Alfonso Cuarón has challenged her through a range of naturalistic and extraordinarily painful moments, writing and directing her each step of the way.

If we judge only what comes back to us on the screen and not weigh who was responsible, her performance is stunning.  Whether she can stun again in a different role is something we may never know since she is unsure about continuing to act.

That is why the Oscars are set up as a rather stringent test of what it means to be a film actress and it will be hard to not consider endurance.

All this to and fro may actually benefit the other two candidates in the race.

British veteran Olivia Colman plays gout-ridden imperious Queen Anne, the half-crazed and supremely powerful – and the supremely manipulated focus of “The Favourite,” as two women compete with ferociously different skills for her favor.  Actually I think the performances of Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as the competitors will be a more demanding dilemma for Oscar voters since both are up for supporting actress and may cancel each other out, which could be a shame.  

Melissa McCarthy in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"

The last nominee is Melissa McCarthy, who does what I would call a nice job of sticking to naturalism in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” based on the real story of what drove a hard-drinking, down on her luck writer to turn to forging literary letters to keep herself fed.

Anyone who understands what goes into comedy should not be surprised at how well McCarthy pulls off turning serious, almost too serious in that she has to hold back on the snappy comebacks and resentments within the character.

But proving she is not a one-trick pony in a film that flows with nice performances (Richard Grant, Jane Curtin, Anna Deavere Smith) should not be enough to land this prize.  I’m looking for a Close encounter.

Other current film reviews:

Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Roma

Vice

The Favourite

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 and Internet and consumer news. 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.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

CHOOSING A ‘FAVOURITE’ AMONG ROYAL COSTUME DRAMAS

Emma Stone and Olivia Colman in "The Favourite"

By Dominique Paul Noth

Two lavish bewigged and begowned costume dramas, both steeped in British royal history, vied for movie eyeballs as 2018 closed out and their takes may be similar in their ominous foreboding but quite different in up close versus long distance conflict. 

The costumes and settings are feasts for the eyes.  Yet as cinema I much prefer the macabre and comedic yet deadly court intrigue of “The Favourite” to the somewhat heavy breathing feminist overwriting of “Mary Queen of Scots.”

“Mary” is blessed in the costumes of Alexandra Byrne and strong leading actors in Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth I, actors forced to pontificate too much on their plight, which includes being pawns in the machinations of men (which they were) and fabricating queenly philosophy at a manufactured meeting (which they didn’t). 

Both films may send patrons scurrying to the  history books to see how much of the happenings are invented or historically acceptable, and the simple answer is, in both,  basically dialog and events are developed around real characters in eras when court intrigue was the name of the game.  The history is not accurate, the outcomes are at the service of the screenwriters,  but passing attention is paid to the times.

“Mary” is freer with the facts since the basic conflict between two queens separated by space vying for power has long been the stuff of historical speculation and literature.  Did one really try to kill the other? Or did they respect each other’s situation?

Director Josie Rourke handles excellently the production elements but feels freer to suggest the emotional conflict over the factual one, silly dialog like “Only one Queen can understand another.” Her movie succumbs to overwriting and over-explanation, forcing the actors into extended screen time when they should just hit their points and move on.

“The Favourite” in contrast relishes the clumping around of a pudgy Queen Anne with agonizing gout and flighty moods – and sudden bursts of the sad girl lost in duties beyond her abilities yet with absolute power that makes her dangerous.  Olivia Colman plays her full theatrical tilt, like Miss Piggy at the height of anger. But she makes it clear that the queen’s bursts of outrage are related to how over her head she is in the complicated Tory vs. Whigs affairs of state.  The rest of the court has become expert and vindictive in playing on her uncertainties.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos recognizes the real audience grabber in his 18th century romp is the ruthless quest for power over Anne between her ladies in waiting. Rachel Weisz is the high-born established power behind the throne.  Her role is really Sarah Churchill (to be historically accurate) whose affectionate nickname for the queen was Mrs. Morley.

Emma Stone is Abigail, the comely poor relation Sarah takes in to her everlasting regret.  The fight of these two for the queen’s favor – a sexual fight as well as social fight – takes over the film, with little surreal splashes whether gathering home remedies in the forest or splattering blood while shooting not so clay pigeons.

Rachel Weisz turns on the charm during a mud bath
in 'The Favourite'

Stone is constantly intriguing, as nasty and untrustworthy as she has ever been on screen and clearly delighted by the demands.  But the real powerhouse performance is Weisz as the striding snippy Sarah in mannish clothes and overbearing manner, yet capable of pretending sweetness when the circumstances warrant. The details of their battles – who is up, who is down and when – are something audiences should discover for themselves. The director leaves the outcome up to the uncertain manic eyes of Queen Anne herself, overrun by her pet bunnies.

There are powerful music cues as well from composer Max Richter, though he is not nominated.  He adds to traditional lilting English madrigals and chamber music sequences with repetition of a long cello note and a quick percussive tap. It’s a device that builds our tension much like that shrieking violin note in “Psycho.”

The texture of the film and its almost surreal sections -- plus some elaborate character-related dances that push the edge of courtier abilities -- provide an observant eye from the outside on all the double-dealings that pile up inside.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Roma

Vice 

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 and Internet and consumer news. 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.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

REMARKABLE MAKEUP CAMOUFLAGES DISAPPOINTING FILM

Christian Bales as Dick Cheney in 'Vice'.

By Dominique Paul Noth

“Vice” admits openly and actually makes a joke about being a liberal’s viewpoint on the life of Dick Cheney.  But even its moments of levity and flippancy – Cheney’s rise to power as a board game, the theory of the unitary executive’s right to torture explained as a restaurant menu, Lynne and Dick Cheney breaking out in a Shakespearean bed scene in case we didn’t catch their similarity to the Macbeths, how his new heart plays a role in the script – don’t make this a comedy.

It lives instead  in-between – an ineffective domestic drama and a not quite social comedy, perhaps to make palatable a swift thumbnail rush through some four decades of American politics. 

Director Adam McKay has created an interesting but hardly great movie with some very good side-role acting – Steven Carell as self-mocking Donald Rumsfeld – and some great makeup artistry, led by Christian Bales’ transformation into Cheney. 

The actor scores with a pinpoint accurate monotone delivery, a sly sideways look and a portly imposing walk through 40 years of changing situations. But Bales is right – if he wins acting awards for his fine work, half should go to the squad of makeup specialists helping the actor find a way into the unassuming, unyielding bureaucrat’s rise to supreme power.

The actual Dick Cheney 

The film never answers key questions about Cheney, except to give wife Lynne extraordinary power over shaping him. And here there is some fierce acting by Amy Adams, who cajoles and controls her husband until she realizes he is underneath the controlling force.  Sam Rockwell never sees deeper than a surface George Bush (should that mean there was nothing deeper?).  And Tyler Perry wastes some scenes that could flesh out the tragedy of Colin Powell.

But for audiences it becomes a patronizing film, reinforcing horrors about Cheney that should be commonly known.  Sure it is basically factual and its side journeys and quick flashes about torture, lives casually taken or destroyed, legislation manipulated through test groups, are revealing reminders of the consequences of our not paying attention. The film does make us all feel even more stupid that we routinely elect such people to run and ruin our lives.  But don’t look here for an explanation of why we succumb.

There is a lot of evidence that Cheney saw early on how a simpleton president could be manipulated, but inventing dialog where that happened is not satisfying.  The dialog becomes more a shallow screenwriter’s view of drama than reality as Cheney moves from a hard-drinking dropout to the D.C. power player who rose through Nixon, Ford, Congress, Reagan and the two Bushes to in effect seize control of the country by the height of 9/11.  But quick looks behind the scenes of such power are neatly done, though (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Cheney’s actual motivations aside from power-grabbing are given short shrift.

Indeed, what Cheney did to the nation, the film argues with many facts on its side, is worse than Trump today but somewhat ominous as a direction Trump could readily move in.  The parallels in manipulation of intelligence data, of belief in the superiority of the president over all the other branches of government, the obfuscating of what is going on through the White House levers may continue today but “Vice” is different in one sense.

It suggests that the most likely way to emerge as the most powerful man in the country is to move invisibly and in secret, which is not what goes on today.

All the flash of makeup wizardry and rapid cutting can’t solve what “Vice” dances around.  No one even after this film has a clear grasp on who or what Dick Cheney is.  It doesn’t help to inspect his fall without exploring why we fell for it.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Roma

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 and Internet and consumer news. 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.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

WITH MOVING 'ROMA' NETFLIX DEFIES THE OSCAR ODDS

Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo, the centerpiece of 'Roma'

By Dominique Paul Noth

Describing the methods of “Roma” -- its black and white panoramic vision of Mexican upper middle class living in the 1970s -- could make the film sound artsy and hard to grasp. If so, I have done disservice to Mexican director and likely Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón. (He has also directed “A Little Princess,” “Children of God” and “Gravity.”)

His frozen lush landscapes and architectural framing, his gentle humor through observation,  his planes flying to some distant place, his scenes through or within window panes, his lapping water, his tracking shots and elaborate panning sometimes stitched together seamlessly as if one elegant camera shot;  then the one single long intense camera shot that captures the forensic brutality of a hospital birth – all are totally on behalf of humanity and memory and leave us in awe. 

This film is basically only available on Netflix (there is a huge story in the refusal of most movie houses to let it be part of their Oscar marathons). Watching it at home gave me the sensation the computer screen had expanded to 40 feet in width to capture the vision. There are a few  mystical sidetrips to argue about, but what is cinematically extraordinary is how much of Cuarón’s artistry is at the service of his story and his determination to make us see.  

Cuarón offers society in nonjudgmental relief, but we also are witnessing emotional poetry in such devotion to what happens to house servant Cleo, played by a non-actor who is now up for every acting award in sight.

In his memory fictionalization, Cuarón explores the strange but typical world she inhabits between hired hand and beloved family member.  He makes us rethink our usually politically ingrained view of social classes, since the upper middle class is clearly privileged and complacent yet shares a genuine affection for its Cleo, who by the end is revealed as victim, true hero and essential life force. 

Cleo is played by an ordinary-looking indigenous Mexican native with a radiant expressive face named Yalitza Aparicio.  While I prefer to see a variety of work honored at awards time (lots of people can hit it out of the park at first try on film), this was perfect casting in so personal and challenging an epic. Aparicio is vividly and naturalistically used by Cuarón, who also wrote this memory play about his own upbringing.

The immature lover who impregnates her is more into his martial arts skills than into Cleo, painfully clear as he parades nude around the bedroom before abandoning her.  But Cleo is never berated except by herself for her unwed pregnancy.  The family she serves and whose house she cleans – a controlling wife, an unfaithful physician husband, an ever present grandmother, and four children who dote on Cleo --  assumes full responsibility for her care, though the father’s sympathetic brevity is mere professionalism.

The lover’s gang, captured on an open field exercising martial arts, is terrorizing in its metronomic obedience.  Yet in the watching crowd, only Cleo can do the acrobatic move they stumble over.  Later it is her lover who inadvertently causes the stillborn birth of their daughter.

Images linger. Parakeets and dogs cavort inside the house.  A lone TV antenna is fixated on the roof. Water gently flows over tiles revealing a daily mopping chore for Cleo even as a plane in flight appears in the sudsy water.   A shopping trip for a baby crib occurs in the middle of a homicidal street riot. A car maneuvering an interior driveway reveals volumes about the grandiose wife and the straying husband, while solid, always present Cleo represents emotional continuity for the children.

This unhurried yet captivating journey – a diorama of society within a simple year in the life of Cleo -- adds layer upon layer:  a forest fire, a riot, murders and a near drowning. Yet Cleo’s life unfolds almost passively as if these are natural moments for people we normally treat as invisible. Cuarón’s subtexts haunt us – flight and space travel, windows and floors, unnoticed beauty in routine vistas, a fire bursting upon an upper class garden party. 

I don’t know if by February 24, the studio industry that dominates the Oscars will overcome its animosity to television streaming services to applaud Netflix for a film of such quality.  “Roma” did provide 10 nominations. But the final decision is a political reality surrounding a film that eschews politics to open our eyes.

Other current film reviews:
Mary Poppins Returns

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

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 and Internet and consumer news. 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.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

THE LONELY WONDERFUL “BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS”

Saul Rubinek, Tyne Daly, and Chelcie Ross (left to right) share an unnatural stagecoach ride
in 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs'

By Dominique Paul Noth

Often the Coen brothers create stunning hard-to-categorize movies (where would you put Fargo and The Big Lebowski?).  Sometimes they even stay within a genre, which they love to pretend to do, but provide the Coen twists (No Country for Old Men, True Grit).  Sometimes they come a cropper (that for me was O Brother Where Art Thou? and Hail Caesar).  

But often a Coen film is a gigantic uncategorizable pleasure. The brothers are, despite their growing fame, eccentric (or maybe that’s part of the fame).  Some of their films escape reviewer notice and audience attention because they are so difficult to explain and so hard to build word of mouth around -- until the film reaches cult status.

Such I think is The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an exceptional film, both creepy and sad, that should be on most best of 2018 lists. Yet most people have not heard of it unless they are devoted to Netflix and the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, sometimes regarded as the two-headed director. 

“Ballad” collects in six different styles  six Western tales that hint weirdly of many standard Western genres, from the singing cowboy to the wagon train romance to the lonely prospector to the medicine show to the stagecoach ride toward doom, each weirdly unfolding as either a surreal adventure or what we expect to resolve as a  profoundly natural excursion.  The cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel is extraordinary, warm, luxurious and dark when needed. Other production values are exemplary. The pacing and even the cutting are of a piece but shift style and intention in each tale. Some are very short, some are extensive in either dialog or events.

This sort of omnibus film, a collection of stories connected as if from a book, was commonplace in the 1950s and ‘60s with O. Henry short stories and the like, but it has almost disappeared today, replaced by four to six episode TV shows.  In the Coen hands, it is definitely a movie in breadth and it requires an impish knowledge of a range of movie westerns, once America’s most popular movie form.  This encompasses not only the classic ones but the B movie ones that filled the bottom of the bill in the 1940s or dominated television in 1950s series, winding through the modern variations. 

The Old West, this film reminds us, was a minefield playfield of the battle between good and evil, mortality and morality, desert and sky, of shadings in between with different directors bringing different energies and purposes.  There are historic lessons from such classicists as John Ford and Anthony Mann and modernist tics from Sam Raimi – and a squad of clichés from all the horse operas of the past.  Many are borrowed from but the Coens have overlayed the genre with cruel and sad laughter – a style of attack uniquely theirs.

There are many noted actors in the cast, most bathing in invisibility behind costumes, makeup or manners different than the ones they are known for.  Others, such as Tyne Daly, are used for the power they give to conversations.  Some of the more notable are Tom Waits (yes also a song legend), Liam Neeson, Harry Melling as a Shakespearean actor you will never forget and Zoe Kazan as a touching mail order bride on the trail. 

The stories are such that a reviewer shouldn’t give away the endings, but each one lands a different kind of punch, some leaving us staring at the darkest side of life, others offering a comic outreach to heaven.

The only downside of watching this on Netflix (only place it is available) rather than in theaters is I wanted to see if others were racked by the same reactions, carried away in the same places I was. Sometimes that’s the price of solo viewing and sometimes it’s the joy of solitary freedom. 

But I wonder if that is also a price the film is paying this awards season. It’s not even a favorite in the two Oscar categories where it got nominated for the Feb. 24 ceremony, best song and the Coens for best 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 and Internet and consumer news. 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.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

AWARDS ARE NOT AS FRIENDLY AS AUDIENCES FOR ‘MARY POPPINS RETURNS’

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Emily Blunt and animated friends in 'Mary Poppins Returns'

Oscar News update Feb. 17: 
By announcing Bette Midler as a special Oscar guest, and revealing she will be singing the nominated song for "Mary Poppins Returns," the Oscars have found a backdoor way to correct a clumsy error. The Academy had  earlier announced that none of the nominated songs from "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," "Mary Poppins Returns" and the documentary "RBG" would be performed during the live telecast Feb. 24, in order to shorten the broadcast's time. (Curiously, the film's star, Emily Blunt, had agree to perform if asked, but Oscars decided she wasn't a big enough name.)

The screams from the Disney Studio and Lin-Manuel Miranda, among others,were clearly heard. Making Midler perform “The Place Where Lost Things Go” forcefully corrects the problem and the quiet word is that now the other skipped-over best songs will be performed, "I'll Fly"  by the documentary's actual end-credits performer, Jennifer Hudson.

By Dominique Paul Noth

The box office grows but “Mary Poppins Returns” is barely mentioned on the current awards lists (but heavily featured in the TV broadcasts).  There is no award specifically for what Disney and director Rob Marshall have succeeded in doing: “Best Hitting of the Hot Spots of Nostalgia and Freshness of Beloved Material for the Flying Nanny.”

But those elements deserve some recognition from reviews, down to the return of the old Disney look of hand-drawn animation for the mix with “real people”; the clever trickery of the bathtub into ocean; the finding of something useful beyond celebrity billing for the guest stars, and the smart way Emily Blunt doesn’t pretend to be Julie Andrews but it is made to do all the things the original “Mary Poppins” did 54 years ago. 

This Poppins, less sugary but mischievously flinty as was the original, sings a lullaby and catchy instructional songs to two resistant but slowly enchanted children.  With perfect posture, she pirouettes in space and then dances as lustily as music hall conventions allow with her admiring lamplighter Jack, played with broad charm and gusto by Lin-Manuel Miranda in his own bizarre Cockney accent that seems a backhand tribute to Dick Van Dyke’s admittedly horrible Cockney in the original.

For this version, there are no dancing chimney sweeps but there is made-up slang jargon specifically for the street-lamp-lighters in a huge production number (one of several places the movie almost stops to admire its own gymnastic invention, though the same could also be said about the original).

Blunt has moments to prove she can do anything Andrews could (and Julie refused to do a cameo, the story goes, because she wanted this to be Emily’s night on the town).  But Emily will probably be washed out of the awards (she actually proves a more versatile actress in the current horror film “A Quiet Place”) because doing everything well may be what audiences expect but it is not a comfortable character thread for acting awards.

There is one such performance, though – Ben Wishaw as the now grown Michael Banks, a young father having the same adjustment problems as his dad in the original.  Director Marshall, Wisconsin born by the way and a former choreographer now the go-to director for splashy movie musicals, not only has a deft way with countless little callbacks to the original. He also gives full weight to the modern widower musing in song over his lost wife, allowing adults in the audience to grab hold of a reason for Poppins to return to help out and for the outlandish comedy in the story. 

Wishaw just won a Golden Globe for his saucy but demanding gay lover in “A Very British Scandal” TV short series, and well deserved.  His quiet anchoring of attention in “Mary Poppins Returns,” against all the special and magical effects, confirms his talent.

About the songs. Almost every one of the originals has become famous – “Spoonful of Sugar,” “Feed the Birds,” “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” among them. Each has something of a counterpart in this film, so it may be years to see which if any survive.  Disney is putting its money and awards attention behind “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” but songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman had the double duty of coming up with winning inserts of their own and capturing the personality of the original.

Van Dyke, at 93, having to wear old-age makeup to look like his original character’s older self, nails the nifty dance steps, but there are only subtle reminders that his character was meaner in the original. That first world of banking at the turn of the century (this tale is moved into the 1930s) deliberately looked a bit crueler and more in need of magic.  The new movie has to work harder to justify the need for magical intervention.

In an elaborate cameo as cousin Topsy, Meryl Streep resurrects her “Sophie’s Choice” Polish accent but this time for roundly comic effect, and Angela Lansbury, an old Disney favorite, re-imagines under Marshall’s gaze the bird woman of the original. 

The movie constantly turns back in on the original (the background music includes snatches of the original songs) even as it pumps to create its own identity.  After a while it is not so much a movie as an intent to not leave any nostalgic yearning untouched, while still trying to carve its own central people and emotions.  It is a clever entertaining cinematic manipulation, but there is no category for that at awards time.

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 and Internet and consumer news. 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.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

‘WONDER’ DOESN’T FACE UP TO ITS PROMISE

By Dominique Paul Noth

Julia Roberts and (behind the prosthetics) Jacob Tremblay in 'Wonder'

The most wondrous thing about “Wonder” is the level of teacher skills and classroom expectations in the sixth grade in what must be one of the finest schools film-makers could find in California.

The second most wondrous thing is how dutifully and simplistically the well dressed kids in the school reflect a stereotype adult concept of good kids, bullies, intervening kids, bullying situations, on-the-spot rethinking  and redemption when confronted by a kid whose face is like a slimmed down version of “The Elephant Man,” technically the incurable Treacher Collins syndrome

The movie is not meant to be a tale of absolute generalities, like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” which posited a perfect liberal household against the issue of interracial marriage.  Underneath it really means to be a sweet uplifting story pretending to real life about how the world should respond to a child whose face was messed up at birth and has evolved into a boy who only finds love within his family and hurtful stares everywhere else. 

Some noted actors are wasted in the effort to reassure him – Mandy Patinkin as a sympathetic principal, Owen Wilson as the hippest loving dad in captivity, Julia Roberts, aging openly into roles of maternal dimension, and newcomer Izabela Vidovic who has the difficult task of making at least one teenager seem normal and nice. 

In what this year seems a Hollywood trend, the good kids in schools are associated with the drama clubs that largely produced the current young writers of these movies. Personally, as a drama club enthusiast, I would like to believe that’s true. But like many things in the movie I feel the vision is from Hollywood on high.

The makeup artists for Jacob Tremblay – a normal looking youngster who is quite effective as the object of so much hate – merit a special award for his looks. They are totally in keeping with what the syndrome can do to a face, justifying why Auggie is so dismayingly stared at (and who among us wouldn’t), realistic enough to fool the audience and help the actor inside, and yet not so frightening that we don’t grow to like and even want to hug the son having so much trouble making connections.

It’s sort of a shame that director Stephen Chboskly (also co-screenwriter) went for students who melt so obviously in sympathy or behave so objectionably even when events and peer pressure are against them. There are also cardboard efforts to make unthinking parents at the school the real villains.

The need for the world to open up to kids like Auggie, who are just kids underneath though Auggie is also shown as a scientific genius, is a good message communicated in extreme examples, tear-inducing moments  and even an extended concluding hallelujah that puts this film on a curious list of 2017 wonders – Wonder Woman, Wonderstruck, Wonder Wheel and Wonder. 

Wonder what word will dominate Hollywood titles this  year?

OTHER RECENT FILM REVIEWS WITH OSCAR CONNECTIONS:
GET OUT

DUNKIRK and DARKEST HOUR

LADY BIRD

THE SHAPE OF WATER

THREE BILLBOARDS

THE POST

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

PHANTOM THREAD

MOLLY’S GAME

Or scroll all Noth's recent film reviews at domsdomain.blogspot.com

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, and a founding figure of the American Theatre Critics Association.  After stints as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, he was also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic on his way to becoming 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 and Internet consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with active historic 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 culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

THE WESTERN THAT WANTED TO BE PART OF OSCARS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Christian Bale in 'Hostiles'

If you were near a TV screen in December and then again January, you saw it hailed in its own ads as “the best western since Unforgiven” and star Christian Bale touted as “the new Marlon Brando.”

It’s a movie that tried mightily to be part of the Oscars (ceremony March 4) and failed.

It played many prestigious film festivals last fall and kept delaying its national opening hoping for some deeper praise from the awards givers, while picking up its TV advertising pace.

Finally it went national January 26 of this year – a delay that is also part of the awards game but in this case weeks after first planned.   Several noted films delayed national openings – notably “The Post” and “Phantom Thread” – in hope of standing out from the Christmas crowd. This one was a delay in search of a spark.

Strangely there wasn’t a heavy hostile reaction to “Hostiles” among the reviewers, which ranged from good to tepid, but there sure has been indifference among the public despite the high regard Bale is held in.  As a connoisseur of westerns – which often serve as an open range war for film-makers exploring good and evil, violence and redemption -- I think it is the film’s fault not the genre’s.  I would like to see more good westerns but not so obviously trudging ponderously over established paths.

Also I have been fascinated by Bale’s career and growth since he was a child actor in Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” (1987) through Batman movies and into several recent standouts such as “The Big Short” and “American Hustle.”

But this is straight-on two hours of Bale as suffering stoic, the retiring, brutal but infinitely polite Army captain in the Old West forced to gather up an ever-growing and sometimes slaughtered caravan of soldiers, Indians, pioneer widow and random horseback enemies in 1892.

His special mission involves a hated member of this caravan, Chief Yellow Hawk,  whom he watched kill close friends even as he was equally vicious killing the chief’s clan – both sides adept at massacres. Now he must safely deliver the dying chief to holy ground in Montana. That actor, Wes Studi, a Cherokee Indian famous for playing all manner of Indians with chiseled face and honest simple delivery, is one of the few plusses of seeing the film.

Bale is certainly a convincing one-note conflicted soldier – I doubt there are many actors who could keep us watching every twitch to see if anything important will crop up.  It doesn’t.

Rosamund Pike in 'Hostiles'

The film also has a convincing hysterical extended fit by Rosamund Pike as a pioneer wife who has seen her husband and three children brutally murdered by wildly painted renegades and attempts to bury them with her own hands as she screams the theater into silence.  And after accomplishing those extremes, she subdues into typical western ingénue willing to grab a rifle to help her savior, in this case Bale of course.

Director and screenwriter Scott Cooper clearly wanted to grab the mantle of western as soul redemption – a theme that sticks its head up not just in “Unforgiven” but also “Stagecoach” and “The Searchers,” films this plot strangely emulates.

But those films had a lot more hooks, variety and human connections going for them despite their old-fashioned lack of blood and accurate wardrobe. Making up with blood and accurate hairbraids is not the road forward.  The redemption message, subdued or complicated in the others, juts out of every scene in “Hostiles.”   The values of tight editing seem lost on Cooper.  He relishes every diversion as if in love with the terrain.  

Interestingly there is a bit part as an unskilled trooper for Timothee Chalamet, who was also a passing love interest in “Lady Bird” but got an early dismissal in these films while being Oscar front and center in “Call Me By Your Name.” 

The film expects focusing on Bale will make meaningful a parade of extended farewell scenes. Even those who like westerns may find this parade stupefying. 

“Hostiles” received funding and publicity efforts from a variety of introductory logos (I counted six), so the film can never claim they didn’t try.  But they didn’t succeed, and in this field of competition they shouldn’t.

OTHER RECENT FILM REVIEWS WITH OSCAR CONNECTIONS:

GET OUT

DUNKIRK and DARKEST HOUR

LADY BIRD

THE SHAPE OF WATER

THREE BILLBOARDS

THE POST

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

PHANTOM THREAD

MOLLY’S GAME

Or scroll all Noth's recent film reviews at domsdomain.blogspot.com

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, and a founding figure of the American Theatre Critics Association.  After stints as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, he was also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic on his way to becoming 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 and Internet consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with active historic 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 culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.