What makes a good life? Health, love, money, career success? Turns out it’s happiness, which encapsulates elements of those others, and the balance of which that equates to equanimity – or so that’s the basis for Pamela Tanner Boll’s documentary “A Small Good Thing,” which gets a screening Monday at the Cambridge Friends School.
Boll, who lived in Winchester for most of her adult life and collected an Academy Award as executive producer on the 2004 documentary “Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids,” came up with the concept to explore the meaning of a life well lived after looking inward at her own existence. “I felt like I had so many great things in my life,” she said in interview. “I had a good family, great sons, a nice home and I had been able to find work that was meaningful, but I also felt I was, however, getting too stressed out and busy. I felt like I was becoming one of those people who says, ‘I’m so busy with work, I don’t have time’” to socialize.
Surely championing documentary voices for more than a decade has contributed. “I come across so many amazing stories and I help them get to the screen,” she says. But it’s a tough business to make a go at. “Born into Brothels” cost less than $500,000 to make and made $8 million at the box office – most eaten up in distribution and marketing. Her own film cost a bit more than “Brothel” to make and is clearly a labor of passion, as is true with most documentaries. Continue reading
Zack Snyder, the hyperkinetic visual stylist who’s crafted such over-the-top spectacles as “300” and “Sucker Punch” but also demonstrated nuanced restraint with the highly underappreciated “Watchmen,” winds up in no man’s land with epic aspirations as he grandiloquently pits the two classic comic book giants against each other.
Somber and serious like “X-Men” this is not, and that’s where “Deadpool” draws its energy, with high quirk and black comedy as endless graphic dismemberings and gorings fill the screen. It’s what another Marvel offering, “Guardians of the Galaxy,” did so effortlessly throughout, but this is to such a gonzo degree that it has Deadpool in mid-sword fight talking casually to the audience to elaborate on his social views and past, even while taking a bullet or two for his trouble. But don’t worry; he regenerates like Wolverine, though not quite as fast. The wicked wit, so good and so rich early on, also happens to be the Achilles heel of “Deadpool,” as such a nosebleed level of hyperbole and genre-skewering becomes impossible to sustain.
The title refers to one who returns from the dead or a long absence. Some definitions have it as a ghost or specter, and all are apt in Iñárritu’s ordeal of great suffering. Right from the start, blood gets spilled as a party of American fur trappers in the early 1800s is beset by Arikara warriors. Viewers, like the furriers, don’t see the Native American detachment coming until the visceral twang of a well-guided arrow sails across the screen and pierces the throat of an unwary skinner. Being at the mercy of a largely unseen assailant registers eerily like the band of mercenaries in “Predator” being picked off one by one by a near-invisible alien force.
“Joy” marks more of the same – not a bad thing, as it features the ever determined yet effervescent Jennifer Lawrence, back under Russell’s instruct for the third time. But even given Lawrence’s vast talents, is the invention of the Miracle Mop as worthy a fact-based feature as “The Fighter” and “American Hustle”? It’s all about scale. “The Fighter” was rooted in the hardscrabble world of boxing, opioid addiction and the tawdry cauldron of the struggling working class, while “Hustle” reveled in the cheesy polyester fashion and over-the-top personas of the late ’70s. Here, Lawrence is on her own to pull the yoke as the titular inventor of the now-famous mop, but oddly enough (copyright issues?) the name “Miracle Mop” never gets mentioned, though the real-life Joy Mangano does serve as an executive producer. One can only assume her endorsement.
Back in 2010, Charles Ferguson’s documentary “Inside Job” made a point of big money’s deep connections to the White House, regulatory agencies and academia. Who ran Capital Hill didn’t matter; red and blue allegiances were irrelevant as long as the talk on the table was about more green. McKay’s “Short” homes in on the gamblers who profited from that giant economic sucking sound, those who were alert to the rigging of the system and rampant neglect and, in the end, opted to hedge it. You could call them visionaries or vultures and both would be true; the film, however, paints them as more accidental heroes, opportunists and scientists who saw the sky falling and, when no one took them too seriously, put their money where their mouth was.
Like the first theatrically released chapter back in 1977, we begin on a dusty, barren planet – this one called Jakku, and more junkyard than outpost. Time-wise we’re about 30 years out from “Return of the Jedi,” and a Resistance fighter (Oscar Isaac, showing some comic flair) and his beeping beach ball of a droid (the adorable BB-8, who’s been getting all the prerelease press) possess a secret hologram map to deliver to Resistance HQ. The info will allegedly guide the holder to Skywalker so the object of the title can be achieved and the Evil Empire – now known as the First Order – can be weakened and its tyrannical chains cast off. But before any of that happens Jakku is assailed by Imperial Stormtroopers, and BB-8 and the map fall in with a scrappy scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley, showing the resolve of Katniss Everdeen) who’s pretty good at hand-to-hand and has a mysterious childhood that spills back to her in ghostly shards. 
That’s not to say “Macbeth” is all a mess. It offers a rapturous staging of the battle of Ellon, righteous in its fury, and boasts two of the best and most interesting actors working in film today, Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. But Fassbender, so alive with spit and rage in “12 Years a Slave,” feels muted here, lacking the enunciating articulation that Kenneth Branagh rebranded as the standard when as a young man he ingeniously resurrected “Henry V” in 1989. There’s a dull detachment that one could attribute to the amount of blood spilled at Ellon. The three scribes (a scribe for every witch) who adapt Shakespeare’s timeless tale of tragedy, avarice and madness (Todd Louiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie) imbue Macbeth with a son, who is gone before he even speaks during the opening carnage.
“Trumbo,” based on the book by Bruce Cook, shows the screenwriter’s triumphs and tribulations while on the “list.” It’s a snarky look at a period when right-wing fear mongering – akin to today’s strong immigration/terrorism rhetoric – reigned supreme and liberalism was equated with Communism and anti-American sentiment. The film, directed by Jay Roach of “Meet the Parents” and “Austin Powers” fame, plays light and fast, a benefit to something that could have been a somber slog, but it also lacks breadth. The focus of the film centers on the newly blacklisted Trumbo, his outlandish shenanigans (he wrote “Exodus,” “Roman Holiday” and “Spartacus” behind the scenes, using pen names) and the state of paranoia and complacency sweeping the country.
For What it's Worth 