Archive | June, 2020

The King of Staten Island

12 Jun

‘King of Staten Island’: It goes on a bit too long, like this needle artist’s stay at home with mom

By Tom Meek

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Funny guy filmmaker Judd Apatow directs funny guy Pete Davidson is “The King of Staten Island,” a semi-autobiographical account of arrested development on the urban isle of the film’s title. Apatow, known for punchy comedic hits such as “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” (2005) and “Knocked Up” (2007), and Davidson, whose wide-eyed edginess shines on “Saturday Night Live,” dial up one long “finding yourself” dramedy (almost two and a half hours) that’s unfortunately a tad slight on the laughs and way too long on the melodrama.

Davidson plays a version of himself as Scott, a 24-year-old tattoo artist living with mom (Marisa Tomei) and in a friends-with-benefits relationship with his sister’s best friend, Claire (Bel Powley). He won’t be seen in public with her and she wants something more – but slack, stunted dudes always think they have more in their hands than they do. Mostly Scott hangs out with a posse of the similarly rudderless (Ricky Velez, Lou Wilson and Moises Arias) who get high, complain about their stagnant situations with passive zeal and occasionally crack a funny joke. Then one day Scott offers to give a 9-year-old kid named Harold (Luke David Blumm) a tat. The kid taps out at the first squiggle of ink and later that day shows up with his dad (Bill Burr), who wants Scott or his mom to pay for the removal or he’ll call the cops.

Turns out Burr’s Ray is a firefighter (with a “big thick [fill in the blank]” as we’re told by his ex) who knew Scott’s father – a firefighter who died in the line of duty on 911 – and starts to date Scott’s mom. There’s a lot of relationship turns in “The King of Staten Island,” which becomes tedious after the umpteenth miscommunication and overreaction. Davidson’s not as razor like or effective as he is in his short jabs on SNL. Tomei and Burr, however, are quite excellent. Tomei, vulnerable and warm while digging in her heels, and Burr, casting shadows of John Voigt’s macho prison escapee in “Runaway Train,” is affable and complex beyond the script. Powley, so amazing in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” also doesn’t get a lot to work with, but you notice her when she’s onscreen. Apatow’s daughter Maude plays Scott’s antagonistic sister, and real-life firefighter turned “Reservoir Dogs” actor Steve Buscemi plays one of the hose draggers down at Ray’s station.

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Da 5 Bloods

12 Jun

‘Da 5 Bloods’: The treasure’s back in Vietnam, but it’s a recurrent political moment we dig up

By Tom Meek
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Spike Lee’s latest, “Da 5 Bloods,” was supposed to get a theatrical release, but Covid-19 has changed the rulebook. Lee was also supposed to be a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival last month, but that’s postponed to 2021.

The gorgeously composed film, something of a Vietnam War reconciliation project, is a hot hodgepodge of socially conscious branding wrapped around a treasure quest thriller adorned with reappropriated cultural icons – namely Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” which crops up from time to time, most obviously in the form of a disco four of the five titular “bloods” visit upon their return to the country where they fought some 40 years earlier. “Da 5 Bloods” starts out with some archival imagery of the poetically loquacious Muhammad Ali, politically active blacks taking to the street and iconic clips of savagery from the Vietnam War with voiceover telling us that African Americans make up 11 percent of the population but made up 33 percent of the fighting force, posing the question: “Will history stop repeating itself?”

The “bloods” in question were part of an Army squad, and have reunited to return to ’Nam to gather the remains of a fifth blood (Chadwick Boseman, “Black Panther”) who was killed in action. They know loosely where his body is, as well as a hefty stash of gold bricks. Of the returning four, Delroy Lindo’s Paul stands out the most: He’s a Trump supporter (Lee and Lindo vociferously oppose Trump and his policies, but that’s kind of the point), wears a red MAGA cap throughout and has a prickly relationship with his son David (Jonathan Majors), who’s in tow. What ensues is a strange olio of “Grumpy Old Men” gone up river “Apocalypse Now” style before straying into “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” territory as the loot is also sought by a French opportunist (Jean Reno, “Le Femme Nikita” and “The Professional”) and a faction of Vietnamese nationalists who want to settle an old score with the “bloods.” It’s a lot to unpack as Lee continues to stir in revisionist history and social barbs. It’s a compelling mess that’s almost too rich for its own good, and a better war film (postwar film?) than Lee’s 2008 “Miracle at St. Anna.” Somehow too, Paul Walter Hauser (Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and “Richard Jewell”) makes his way on scene and that MAGA hat, for better or worse, takes on its own persona.

It’s amazing to realize that Lee won his first Oscar only last year, for the “BlacKkKlansman” screenplay. He’s made a lot of films in his time, and not all have stuck their landing; but as a filmmaker, Lee’s always been a risk taker, and one with something to say. At the end of “BlacKkKlansman” Lee stitched in footage of the violent Proud Boy tiki march in Charlottesville; here there’s a “Black Lives Matter” chant with a hopeful flourish. (Lee also just completed the short “3 Brothers: Radio Raheem, Eric Garner and George Floyd,” which should require no explanation.) “Da 5 Bloods” may not be Lee’s finest film, but it comes at the right time.

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Shirley

7 Jun

‘Shirley’: Author has plenty of horror to handle, even some to deal out as couple comes to stay

By Tom Meek

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Josephine Decker’s screen adaptation of Susan Scarf Merrell’s “Shirley: A Novel,” is a haunting affair that, while steeped in reality, is highly fictionalized (that tag “A Novel” being a tell). The film catches up with author Shirley Jackson in Bennington, Vermont, in the 1950s, where she’s in a deep depression because her brutally alluring short classic “The Lottery” is found appalling by early readers. It doesn’t help that her husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg of “Call Me By Your Name,” and so good in the Coen brother’s “A Serious Man”), a literary critic and professor, is too interested in his own career to deal with his wife’s malaise – so what better way to pass the buck and get some me time? Rope in your starving writer teaching assistant and wife as emotional wet nurses by giving the them free room and board in your country manse.

“Shirley” plays fast and loose with dates and events (such as when works were published, and the timeframes of events leading up to them) but that’s okay – what Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins are after is a character study of Jackson, turning her mental anguish into something of a near gothic horror story that Jackson herself might have written (think Ken Russell’s 1986 spin about Lord Byron and Mary Shelly, “Gothic,” and you’d have the right idea). What wins the bold gamble is Elizabeth Moss nailing the author’s weepy depression, her simmering anger against her wayward husband and ultimately, her literary resolve. Moss, who rose from her wallflower persona on “Mad Men” to more full-bodied roles in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and as a punk diva in “Her Smell” (2018), has become something of an icon of Covid-19 streaming in the chasm created by studios holding back products for theatrical releases following the shutdown: This endeavor and Leigh Whannell’s radical reimagining of “The Invisible Man” both went from theater to smaller screens (along with “The Hunt”) without missing a beat. She notches a new level here, and you feel as if this isn’t her topper yet.

A key background element to “Shirley” is the real-life missing Bennington College student Paula Jean Welden and the powerful pull it had on Jackson – the case would became the basis for her novel “Hangsaman.” Then there are the attendants, the newlywed Nemsers, Fred (Logan Lerman, “End of Sentence”) and his pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young, “Assassination Nation”). Whiskey pours at night, as does sexual innuendo. As Rose and Shirley spin off into a strange codependent relationship punctuated by bouts of mania (from pregnancy and depression) and jealously, we also get a good lesson in the misogyny of the time as the two men stay out, carousing and pawing after other women indiscriminately. Overall, in the tightly clustered affair, we’re not too far from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” territory.

Decker’s plumped similar internal anxieties with her 2018 cornerstone, “Madeline’s Madeline” and digs in deeper here, but it’s Moss who carries the film with a moody soulfulness complemented by the ensemble around her. Stuhlbarg’s Stanley is as affable as he is contemptible, and Young holds her own in simmering tense scenes with Moss. It’s a dark, near-real work that bears both fangs and fruit.

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Peaceful Protests in Cambridge

7 Jun

Peaceful protest of 200 honors George Floyd; More actions planned amid renewed anguish

 

By Tom Meek

Protesters gather Sunday in Porter Square after a renewed spate of nationwide deaths of people of color at the hands of police. (Photo: Tom Meek)

Around 200 residents assembled along Massachusetts Avenue in Porter Square on Sunday to protest police brutality and ask for justice in the Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minneapolis – and in countless other blue-on-black incidents nationwide. The video of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of Floyd has sparked protests across the country, many turning violent as people join with uncertain motives and police respond.

Update from June 3, 2020: Police officers estimate that the protest “maxed out with about 100 participants,” according to Jeremy Warnick, director of communications and media relations for Cambridge police.

Curfews have been imposed in 40 cities; the National Guard has been called to 15. Social media is pulsing with videos of looting and police violence.

Not in Cambridge, though.

Chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, these racist cops have got to go,” and “No justice, no peace,” filled the area as cars drove by, honking in support. Signs demanding justice and the end of police brutality joined a sea of “Black Lives Matter” placards.

The protest, organized by North Cambridge attorney Gerry McDonough through social media, was peaceful and without incident. McDonough, launching an activist group Stand Out Against Racism, or Soar, said the day’s event was one of many to come. At the rally portion of the event, he announced a day of action slated for Saturday, when smaller groups in neighborhoods would stage similar protests.

Luis Cotto, Mercedes Soto and Ángel Cotto pause after creating a chalk memorial on the steps of City Hall. (Photo: Luis Cotto via Instagram)

Other signs of protest popped up around the city, from a “BLM” tag for the Black Lives Matter movement spray painted on a building at Kirkland and Beacon streets to the names of people of color slain by police chalked on the steps of City Hall. The names stretched back at least as far as Amadou Diallo, killed in New York in 1999.  

One of the concerns of protests and demonstrations in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic is public safety and social distancing. All demonstrators present wore masks, but a 6-foot rule was rarely achieved.

Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said Saturday that she was planning an online vigil. “Facilitating a community healing process will be one of our most important jobs as elected officials, so we can collectively address the pain of this pandemic, the pain of this moment and the generational pain many of us carry in our bodies every day,” she said via social media.

Plans for the vigil, made public over the weekend, have it taking place from 5 to 5:30 p.m. Monday on cable Channel 22 and via Facebook Live. Details are here.

“Like many of you, I am navigating waves of anger and sadness as I think about [Floyd’s] life, his family and community – and about this country’s history of criminalizing blackness. George Floyd’s death should not have happened. May he rest in power,” Siddiqui said.

Work with City Manager Louis A. DePasquale and police commissioner Branville G. Bard Jr. is ongoing on “how best to keep our community safe from violence,” she said. “We must also work to keep people safe from discrimination and safe from displacement.”

Bard commented briefly on Floyd’s death as well. “Make no mistake about it, George Floyd’s death was the result of depraved indifference.” Bard said online Wednesday before expanding on his thoughts after the protest. Speaking to fellow law enforcement officials via tweet, he said, “I hope we realize that it will take more than words to correct this! Action, and only action will help to reverse this.”

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