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The Boys in the Band

1 Oct

‘The Boys in the Band’: Having a gay old time, from the stage to Netflix in over a half-century

By Tom Meek

It seems that 1968 is all the rage in 2020. Last week we had Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” about those held responsible for the 1968 Democratic Convention riots; over at the Roxbury International Film Festival there’s “The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show,” a documentary about NBC’s socially minded response to race riots in the late 1960s. Now there’s this cinematic adaptation of Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” a play weaving in and out of a gay birthday party in a New York City flat that’s thrown into chaos when a straight man shows up. The revisit is not so much fond nostalgia, but a dialogue about where we are now: divided, having seemingly made little progress.

Learning of the Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”) produced project, I wasn’t quite sure another film version of Crowley’s honest and open look at gay culture pressure-cooked by social judgment was necessary. The 1970 adaptation directed by Willam Friedkin (who would go on to do “The French Connection,” “The Exorcist” and “Cruising”) was a tight, clustered affair driven by anger and revelation. That’s somewhat less true here. There’s more bounce and ebullition before the sour turn of confronting one’s past and hard truths. The play was resurrected on Broadway in 2018 for its 50th anniversary, and the stage director there (Joe Mantello) and entire cast boot up for this Netflix production – with better sets, multiple takes and a bigger platform.

The cast is excellent, especially Jim Parsons as party host Michael, who inadvertently invites an old college friend, Alan (Brian Hutchison), who’s straight (is he?). Michael’s got a lot of catty sass – “Just because I wear expensive clothes doesn’t mean they’re paid for” – which peels away when Alan shows up and strikes another party member in the face for using female pronouns for men and being a “pansy.” And the guest of honor hasn’t arrived. From there the boozy evening spirals inward and downward, not so much because of Alan, but because of global self-hating that’s in frame from scene one. These are deeply carved characters that have been known and lived in. The masks get pulled off and you’re in, in deep.

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Kajillionaire

27 Sep

‘Kajillionaire’: Arrested-development daughter gets glimpse of growth from a family of grifters

By Tom Meek

I’ve always been piqued by Miranda July, a Renaissance human blessed with a cool name and an idiosyncratic presence who, it seems, effortlessly churns out witty short stories (“Roy Spivey”) and quirky but not quite nervy films (“Me and You and Everyone We Know,” “The Future”). Her works always bump up against mainstream sensibilities and veer toward the dark, like a Harmony Korine movie (“Trash Humpers,” “Spring Breakers,” “The Beach Bum”) without the extreme depravity. Her latest, “Kajillionaire” is more of the same, but also perhaps, the most accessible of her brief portfolio (in “The Future” an ill cat named Paw Paw narrates, the moon talks and a T-shirt drags its mangled form along a sidewalk). It’s a double clutch of sorts that centers on the Dyne family, a trio of lo-fi grifters in Los Angeles who run rickety “skimming” schemes – pilfering mail, and insurance and store-return scams. What’s clear is that the oddly named daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), is a poster child of arrested development. At the age of 26, she has the sensibilities of a 14-year-old boy, wears a bright aqua blue jogging jacket that rivals that of Seth Rogen’s journo nerd in “Long Shot” (2019) and is possessor of bad dance moves reminiscent of Ben Affleck’s smooth wannabe in “Good Will Hunting” (1998). What Old Dolio is in need of is a mall run with some female besties, but mom and dad (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) have isolated her with their over-engineered ploys and meager living conditions; they squat in a warehouse next to a bubble factory where occasionally globular mounds of pink ooze cascade down the wall or hang from the ceiling like The Blob.

Old Dolio’s parents are caring enough. Even as they surreptitiously meander the seedy back alleyways looking for their next mark/opportunity, you can feel a solid family vibe, the same way you could in Hirokazu Koreeda’s “Shoplifters” (2018). Then the family runs into a perky opticians assistant named Melanie (Gina Rodriguez, so good in a small role in Alex Garland’s “Annihilation”) while in the midst of a ruse and she wants in on the action, even pitching a scam or two herself – grifters gotta be grifting. To tell much more how the film evolves would be to do July and company a disservice. The film does change gears, and Melanie becomes a vehicle for Old Dolio to step outside the box of a world her parents have kept her in. Melanie, in short, becomes Old Dolio’s guide to adult womanhood, and perhaps independence. The cast all around delivers nuanced performances, but Wood, so electric and edgy in Catherine Hardwicke’s “Thirteen” (2003) and the star of the hit series “Westworld,” finds a whole other thespian gear here. As Old Dolio she simultaneously conveys street wisdom and naïveté with a fluidity that’s nothing short of masterful. You can really feel the collaboration between the actress and July, something of a performance artist and a personality chameleon herself, to bring Old Dolio to life. For all its quirks and kookiness, I must say, “Kajillionaire” does, to a degree, feel like it should have colored outside the lines a tad bit more, but I’m enjoying July’s career arc. If I have anything to say about it, I’d love to see her make a film about “Roy Spivey.”

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The Trial of the Chicago 7

27 Sep

‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’: They’re on the stand for taking a stand, and ’68 isn’t so far from 2020

By Tom Meek

Aaron Sorkin knows his way around a courtroom, as evidenced by his play “A Few Good Men” and its 1992 cinematic adaptation starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. The tightly controlled dialogue between the two A-listers bristled with personality and ideology, and that’s even more true in “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” a dramatization of the trial of a diverse lot of famed counterculture leaders – student movement activists Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, Black Panther Bobbie Seale and hippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin among them – charged under Nixon AG John Mitchell for inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. At the epicenter of the riots and trial are issues of inequality, racism and police brutality; what’s old is new again, and timely in its arrival (now at the Landmark Theatre Kendall Square, and coming to Netflix in mid-October).

Sorkin, nominated for an Academy Award for “Moneyball” (2011) and “Molly’s Game” (2017), winner for his script on the biting take on Facebook’s ignominious Harvard origins (“The Social Network,” 2010) and the creative force behind “The West Wing,” takes on double duty here as director as he did on “Molly’s Game,” in which Jessica Chastain was a high-stakes poker host. He’s blessed with an impressive cast here, with Eddie Redmayne as the all-American Hayden, Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat,” 2006) as the punchily comedic Hoffman, Mark Rylance (“Bridge of Spies,” 2015) as defense attorney William Kunstler and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen”), commanding and powerful as Seale, who was implicated in a murder in New Haven, Connecticut, around the same time. On the other side of the courtroom, Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a deeply nuanced performance as conflicted chief prosecutor Richard Schultz, and Frank Langella is the specter of everything wrong with our justice system as control-minded Judge Hoffman. He and Baron Cohen’s crack-firing prankster own the screen while in frame – one makes you smile and raise your fist in the air, while the other makes you fume.

How the trial all works out is a matter of record. The contemporary relevance is haunting – leading to the bigger question of why we haven’t learned from the past. The film, with most of the drama unfolding in court (the riots is in flashbacks), is a lean, mean sizzler, taut at every turn. Given this spare, strange year, there’s a lot of Oscar timber here all around: Gordon-Levitt for one, the film and Sorkin on both ends, and three, if not four, supporting nods.

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Tenet

14 Sep

‘Tenet’: Time travel caper by Christopher Nolan chooses its moment, masked against apocalypse

By Tom Meek

Well, I did it: I went to a theater and saw “Tenet.” Would I recommend you to? That’s a personal call. For me it didn’t feel too risky, but read on. I attended a 4 p.m. show at Landmark’s Kendall Square Cinema. I bought my ticket online, but still had to wait in line to show the usher behind a plexiglass shield my emailed barcode and get a printed ticket. I saw only three other people at the theater, all folks asking for senior discounts – in short, those in high-risk categories but clearly desperate for an in-theater experience, as was I. Landmark offered no snacks, and masks had to be worn 100 percent of the time. Every two seats in the theaters are blocked off, and management asks you to sit in alternating rows – something, I did not need to worry about. I was the only person at my screening. (Apple Cinemas near Fresh Pond and Alewife is showing it too, since reopening Friday.)

This being a Christopher Nolan film, seeing it on a big screen is kind of a must – in the very least for the imposing, driving score (by Ludwig Göransson, though it feels and sounds a lot like Hans Zimmer’s work on Nolan’s 2010 “Inception”) and the impressive camera work by Hoyte Van Hoytema, Oscar-nominated for Nolan’s WWII time scramble, “Dunkirk” (2017). Playing with time and space is Nolan’s thing; he did it with “Memento” (2000) to tell a murder mystery in reverse, and “Interstellar” (2012) as space travelers who go through a black hole where decades of Earth time pass in minute. Here time is imbued into objects sent back from the future. Sounds zany, right? It’s one of the things you just let wash over you, because no matter how hard Nolan and his characters try to explain, you feel like you’re just not getting it. The best I can do is that you can rewind history and insert yourself into the action – in essence, altering the future – but the catch is everyone else is moving in reverse while you’re going forward. People walk backward, cars go in reverse, and bullets get sucked back into their gun. 

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things

4 Sep

‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’: Breaking up – hard to do even without a blinding storm of meta

By Tom Meek

The latest from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, the man who penned “Being John Malkovich” (1999) and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), making his third directorial effort feels something of a follow-up to his trippy yet meandering 2008 debut, “Synecdoche, New York” if co-written by David Foster Wallace. Interestingly enough, Wallace is one of the many solemn topics discussed in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” by Jake (Jesse Plemons) and his girlfriend (Jessie Buckley, whose character is never given a name and is referred to in the credits only as “the young woman”) on an arduous road trip. Other pleasant and not so pleasant subjects arise as the two sail through a brimming snowstorm: Mussolini, Wordsworth, the musical “Oklahoma!” and suicide bombers – routine stuff, in Kaufman’s universe.

Tellingly, as the sojourners dig intellectually deep into anything grim or arty, their seeming road to nowhere takes on an existential quality, an apt reflection of where the couple’s relationship is likely heading on their way to meet Jake’s parents. They’ve been dating for a few weeks and already the pairing seems doomed, if not done. The title, taken from Ian Reid’s novel (that the film is based on) is not about suicide, as one might think, but the refrain in voiceover asides by Buckley’s passenger about how she needs to end things with Jake each time he responds to her vibrant snark with glum counter offerings.

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Mulan

4 Sep

‘Mulan’: The story’s familiar, but now live action in big screen spectacle relegated to small screen

By Tom Meek

I feel like part of the onus of this review is to answer: Is the film worth the $30 it costs to stream on Disney+? I promise I’ll get to that. First let me just say that this live-action version of the 1998 hand-animated feature (both based on an ancient Chinese ballad and historical events) is stunning to take in, most notably the set design and stunts, though the leap to a more epic and spectacular format has nipped some of the wonderment and depth of character – similar to what befell the near real-life animation redux of “The Lion King” last year. Clearly there’s something inherent in the simple classic animation construct, be it the childlike innocence or abstraction of reality, that makes theses fable-esque tales come to life more viscerally.

The narrative here is the pretty much the same as before. Mulan (Liu Yifei) doesn’t want her aging and war-scarred father Hua Zhou (Tzi Ma) to be enlisted into the emperor’s army (martial artist Jet Li, hard to recognize) after a mandate issued for one man from every household to battle the marauding hordes from the north (led by Jason Scott Lee, who played Bruce Lee in “Dragon”), so she dresses up as a boy and assumes the family post. As a soldier, Mulan proves fierce and effective, as well as being a natural leader and the butt of fellow warriors’ jokes about her Pigpen-esque odor because she refuses to partake in group bathing. The nice addition here is Li Gong (“Raise the Red Lantern,” “Miami Vice”) as a witch – something of a Morgan le Fay – in the service of Lee’s raider. Always captivating in posture, poise and projection, she’s the one who takes over every scene she’s in. Gone is Eddie Murphy’s wiseass dragon, though it’s replaced with a nonsensical phoenix that crops up to let you know a major transition has just taken place. (Geez, thanks, I didn’t know.) The other reason to see the film is the stunt work, with warriors leaping up inverted walls as if they were in an “Inception” maze and some nifty horseback gymnastics by Mulan and enemy archers; still, it doesn’t near apex wire work such as in Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000) and Zhang Yimou’s “Shadow” from just last year.

Intriguingly, the film’s directed by Niki Caro, who’s made a series of impressively intimate and internal feminist-themed films including “Whale Rider” (2002), “North Country” (2005) and “The Zookeeper’s Wife” (2017) but gets a bigger palette here – and likely more studio supervision. As a result, the New Zealand-born director’s normal inward-looking lens feels obscured in the vastness.

Now back to that question: Is “Mulan” worth $30 to stream? Keep in mind you need to be a Disney+ subscriber, and if you’re not you have to lay out another $7 per month. The film, once you unlock it, is yours to watch as long as you keep paying those $7 bills, vs. let’s say “Bill & Ted Face the Music” which costs $25 to own on Amazon Prime and $20 to rent, giving you 30 days to watch it and 48 hours to finish after starting it. If you have kids who love the movie and will watch it over and over, it makes solid financial sense. If you’re a curious cinephile holed up on your own, probably not so much. The film for my money would have been more enjoyable on the big screen where the wire stunts, rich colors and meticulous sets would have stood out even more; given the safety factor, Disney’s done the responsible thing. That still doesn’t atone for what’s lost in translation, but for these times it’s a viable event for a family to enjoy safely together.

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Bill & Ted Face the Music

2 Sep

‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’: Passage of real time adds wives and daughters to dudes’ partying on

By Tom Meek

As AMC and other theaters begin to slowly reopen (none in Camberville except for Landmark’s Kendall Square Cinemas, which opened stealthily Friday) studios are hedging their bets by releasing in theaters and on streaming platforms. “Mulan” is coming to you next week from Disney for nearly $30 plus the cost of a Disney+ subscription, and if that feels eye-popping, consider that you can show it to the whole family. In this racket we normally have press screenings in a theater or the studio sends us a screening link, but for “Bill & Ted Face the Music” I missed the boat and so went the path we all must go, shelling out $20 to rent the third installment of this dude-ly trilogy.

Written by the original’s screenwriters, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and directed by Dean Parisot (“Galaxy Quest’’), time has not been all that kind to Bill Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore’’ Logan (Keanu Reeves). They married and have daughters, but their dreams of being big-time rock stars have fallen by the wayside. Something of an abandoned strip mall overgrown with weeds, is how one might describe it after drinking in their performance at a wedding party. So how do the lads – er, dads – get back into the time-hopping phone booth? Someone called The Great Leader (Holland Taylor) in the future sends back her daughter (Kristen Schaal) to give them a wakeup call, and for good measure, there’s a freaky ’bot (Anthony Carrigan) who’s something of a cross between the Terminator and Tin Man. The quest this time around is to come up with the one song that can unite the planet – a quest that would seem like a platitude if it were not for the time – and ultimately save the universe. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still) and Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft) work their way into the plot, but the best is when Bill and Ted run into past and future versions of themselves, with the best being the version of themselves inside a prison yard. The wives (Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays) are off in their own phone booth on their own adventure (the couples therapy scene is droll and hilarious) as are the daughters, Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving). George Carlin makes a digital appearance and the ageless William Sadler is back as the Grim Reaper. Yes, a trip to Hell is mandatory.

Is seeing the first two chapters – “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991) – a requirement? No, “Face the Music” works on its own well enough, with just a few references and gags that may be lost without the homework. Reeves and Winters do an effective job of remaining excitably dude-ish while being dad-ly. The nice revelation here are Lundy-Paine and Weaving as the dudes’ daughters; in mannerism and inflection, even style and attire, they’re chips off the old block. You can tell they’ve watched the two prior episodes forward and back ad infinitum. If this is the end of the dudes’ run, you can see them picking up the reins and having their own dudette adventures. As for paying $20 (you can own it for $25) it’s a coin toss for me as a solo watcher. Now, if I was doing a series watchathon with family or friends, and enjoying a beer or two? Most Excellent!

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Desert One

23 Aug

‘Desert One’: Rescue attempt in Iran was daring, but risk and repercussion dig in with Eagle Claw

By Tom Meek

Barbara Kopple’s meticulous dissection of the failed Operation Eagle Claw mission, launched in 1980 to rescue Iranian hostages, serves as a gripping connect-the-dots weave of history, harrowing personal testimony and world-shaping events. Without much judgment the film dials back to the 1950s when Iran was the hot, oil-rich country Western powers jockeyed to get in on. Later the CIA helped topple a brief nationalist government in a coup d’état and reinstall a shah, and Kopple’s doc delivering a montage of him in chummy photo ops with every president from Truman onward. The doc also subtly metes out snippets of the shah’s abysmal, brutal human rights record. Then comes the defining moment of the overthrow, the extreme hatred for America and the takeover of the U.S. embassy – that final event told by several staffers and military personnel who would become hostages, recalling the chaotic mayhem of angry Iranians scaling the gates and storming the building.

The now infamous Iranian hostage crisis would become a 444-day ordeal. That extraction mission – the first Delta Force operation – was green-lit by then President Jimmy Carter, and its failure, as the film has it, was the key to him being swept out of office by Ronald Reagan. Carter and his VP, Walter Mondale, appear in the film, as do several of the commandos who recall the surreal scene in the desert outside of Tehran where several Sikorsky Sea Stallions that couldn’t handle the sandstorms failed, leading to the ultimate decision to abort. The evacuation, for those who don’t recall, would go horribly awry, and eight military personnel would wind up burnt alive. Before that, when the Delta Forces arrived at the remote location, a busload of civilians happened bizarrely upon them in the middle of the night and had to be taken hostage by the commandos. Then several other vehicles arrived; there was confusion, a skirmish and a massive explosion. I don’t want to give aways all the details, but Kopple does a great job of stitching together a thrilling narrative with archival footage, personal accounts from those who were there in the desert (one marine, tough and on point, breaks down on camera; one of those Iranian citizens from the bus recalls his own experience of being held without knowing why) and to re-create the drama in the desert, Kopple smartly opts to use animation much as Ari Folman did with “Waltz with Bashir” (2008) and Randall Christopher did with “The Driver is Red” (2017) – the former about an Israeli incursion into Lebanon and the latter about the hunt for Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. In all three cases, animation creates a provocative abstraction to put you on the scene more viscerally than a dramatic recreation might. It’s a brilliant mix of media forms that seamlessly deepens the global and human context of what transpired. Kopple won Oscars for her first two documentaries, “Harlan County U. S. A.” (1976) and “American Dream” (1990), both depicting labor disputes in middle America. Since then Kopple’s lens has been trained on such diverse and unique topics as Woody Allen and his union with Soon-Yi Previn in “Wild Man Blues” (1997) and the Dixie Chicks’ media battle over statements opposing then President George W. Bush in “Shut Up & Sing” (2006). Kopple’s latest is something new and powerful, not just because of the implied what-ifs, but because of the heroism, sacrifice and personal tales of survival.

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Represent

14 Aug

‘Represent’: Embedded with three campaigns, women from all over the hard-to-navigate map

By Tom Meek


Another politically themed doc this week (along with “Boys State”), “Represent” looks at women running for political office in the Midwest. Under the observance of Hillary Bachelder’s lens, Myya Jones, a 22-year-old, tries to spark a youth movement by running for mayor of Detroit; Bryn Bird, a farmer and working mother in small town Ohio, seeks a township trustee post; while Julie Cho, a Korean immigrant, runs as a Republican candidate for state representative in a liberal Chicago suburb. The timelines aren’t all that linear, but most interesting is Cho, who, ostensibly because she is not a typical GOP candidate (“rich, white male”) is abandoned by the party during her campaign but also takes veiled racial pokes (she’s in an interracial marriage) from the liberal opposition – “Why don’t you go run in the Korean neighborhood?” To which she notes to the camera that only the left gets away with that kind of racism these days. Her idealism to embed and change the party feels like the right quest, but lack of support and the attacks she faces on the trail take their toll. Her frustration and weariness are palpable, and yet she remarkably soldiers on. We catch up with Bird already in office and making policy, some of which is not popular, and in one telling scene she remarks on how one of her jobs affects the other when formerly loyal customers, rankled by her policies and communal decisions, walk by her stand at a farmers market without a hello. What’s remarkable about Bachelder’s doc is the degree of access and trust she gains from her subjects. You could call it “Girls State: The Real World Edition.”

“Represent” shows as part of the the Brattle Theatre’s Virtual Screening Room.

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Boys State

14 Aug

‘Boys State’: Re-creating America in miniature, dominated by right whites (then comes a twist)

By Tom Meek

Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ immersion into the Girls and Boys State mock political programs, which have for decades turned out leaders of tomorrow such as Bill Clinton, Ann Richards and Dick Cheney, is both an eye-opener and a reason for pause. For “Boys State” the documentarians embedded in 2017 with the Texas chapter, where 1,100 17-year-olds assemble for a fortnight in the capital, divide into two parties (Nationalist and Federalists), develop platforms and elect a governor – the highest official rank to be reached, and the final act of the educational event sponsored by the American Legion.

Sounds pretty wholesome and promising, right? And it is, on one hand (the passion for politics and democracy, a clear win), but at times the hooting, testosterone-amped crowd of mostly white lads (“I’ve never seen so many white people ever,” one African American attendee reflects) eerily calls to mind the tiki torch marchers in Charlottesville. The agendas too feel skewed to the right – pro-gun, pro-life (“if there’s a rape, we don’t punish the child, we find the rapist and castrate him!”) and “back the blue.” Given the lack of color, it’s refreshing to see a son of undocumented parents rise to run for governor, bolstered by a somber, reflective approach rather than shouted platitudes such as “freedom!” and “a vote for me is a vote for all!” The use of Instagram and other social media is impressive, though it’s often mean, personal and racist. Drinking in “Boys State” instills a sense of hope, and dread. It’s a slice of America if lived on a landlocked “Lord of the Flies” isle, where you know boys will be boys.

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