Movie Reviews - 2024 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

I wish it were less relevant.

Not that I think America 2025 is in the same situation as Brazil 1970. We’re not. But they didn’t think they were in the same situation, either. After Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) is taken away, friends assure his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres, Oscar-nominated), that he won’t be harmed. He’s a congressman, after all. Well, former congressman, since his tenure was revoked when the military junta took power in April 1964. With U.S. support, I should add.*

* Is our current situation another case of the chickens coming home to roost?

You’d think more bells would be going off for them. The country was just heaving: new Constitution in 1967, different leader in ‘68, who, in December, per Wikipedia, “gave the president dictatorial powers, dissolved Congress and state legislatures, suspended the constitution, and imposed censorship.” Then that president had a stroke. Then Gen. Emilio Garrastazu Medici took over. He did most of the damage. Damage means: incarcerating people, torturing people, killing people.

So no, the U.S. isn’t there yet. We, like Eunice, are merely surrounded by people who, in Bob Dylan’s words, philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears.

Just there
For a time, I watched “I’m Still Here” as a kind of primer. As homework. And for a time I took solace. Look, even under authoritarianism, life continues. People go to the beach, girls talk boys and play volleyball, friends come over for parties and dancing; couples play backgammon and fathers and sons play loud games of Foosball late at night.

Until they don’t.

Initially, it’s very slice-of-life. What’s the drama? Not much. Other than the impending one, it’s just life. The Paivas have five kids, all girls except for the youngest, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira), who, as the movie opens, finds a dog on the beach and works both sides of his parents to keep him. Yes, the eldest, Veroca (Valentina Herszage), and her left-wing friends are pulled over and harassed by the Army after the Swiss ambassador is kidnapped; but she’s going away to London to study, and be safe, and maybe become Mrs. John Lennon. Meanwhile, soufflés are made, and parties hosted, and every once in a while Rubens takes a cryptic phone call or passes something to a late-night door-knocker, but then he resumes being his charming self.

And then there’s a different knock on the door and he’s asked to come along with the men there. He does. “I’ll be back soon, sweetie,” he tells his wife. We never see him again. And the plainclothes men don’t leave. They stay behind and close the curtains. Who are they? Why are they there? That’s the menace of it. Nothing is known and all is accepted. Two of the men are vaguely hippyish, one more militaristic, but they all have a blankness in the eyes. What politeness they have makes them more menacing. They don’t trash the place, they don’t threaten anyone. They’re just there.

At one point, she offers them food, and they eat, and there’s something about the way the men, sitting on a couch or in a chair, set aside their plates with the crumbs on them—not dismissively but also dismissively—that felt so gross to me. Like such a violation. Director Walter Salles (“Central Station,” “Motorcycle Diaries”) filmed the movie in sequence, which Fernanda Torres said helped all the actors get a better sense of the escalating fear and oppression. All of that is translated to us. I think of the Robert Frost line about holding something back for pressure; in these scenes almost everything is held back and the pressure is overwhelming.

And then the mother and eldest remaining daughter are taken into custody. On the way, they’re asked to put a bag over their heads. They do. When it’s removed, half-blind and disheveled, Eunice is immediately photographed. Pop! She’s questioned. A mugshot book is brought out and she’s asked to point out people she knows. She doesn’t know many. Her interrogator is disappointed, disbelieving, angry. She wants to see her daughter. Where is her daughter? Instead she’s put in a small, grimy cell. She’s returned for more questioning and more mugshot pointing. Her husband’s face appears in the book, and then her daughter’s, and then hers. How much time has passed? How many days? She begins marking time on the wall. On the 12th day, she’s released. A guard walks her out, saying he doesn’t agree with what’s going on. But he’s still helping it go on.

The daughter is home—she was released after the first day. It’s late and the kids are asleep, and the mother doesn’t wake them. Instead, she takes a shower and tries to wash it all off, scrubbing until she’s pink.

The family is still watched—a Volkswagen with two men on the other side of the street—and Eunice can’t access money because it’s in the husband’s name. But she still has means. She has a lawyer, connections. They’re an upper-class family with books on the shelves and tons of friends. Some rally, some are distant. She’s looking for evidence that her husband was actually taken because the authorities deny it. That’s how they disappear you. They take you and then say they didn’t take you. A schoolteacher friend can help but won’t. “My husband is in danger,” Eunice tells her. “Everyone is in danger,” the teacher responds.

Solace
When did I realize the family wasn’t fictional? Probably when they skip to 1995 and the boy, Marcelo, is now a well-known author in a wheelchair. The movie is adapted from his memoir of the same name.

By 1995, Eunice is a civil rights lawyer—she got her J.D. at age 48—and that’s the year the government, now civilian, lets her know her husband is dead. She holds up the death certificate before the press and smiles. A different kind of director would underline the moment—maybe give us the smile but the doubt in the eyes, like the final shot of Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill—but Salles doesn’t play that. He knows the Paiva family personally, so I assume he knows. Throughout, Eunice has held that aristocratic stoicism of putting best faces forward. When they leave Rio de Janeiro, she tells her children to smile for the press. She smiles here. The final shot is the family smiling in 2014. Plus I assume Eunice is genuinely happy to get the certificate. She’s happy for the closure. That’s the sadness of it. They leave you in such a state of unknowing that in the end you’re happy just to find out that they killed your loved one in cold blood.

Did we need the 2014 scenes? I might’ve ended with the death certificate. That said, I like the touch of having the elderly Eunice, wheelchair-bound and suffering Alzheimer’s, played by Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro. Some part of her awakens when she sees a news report of the disappeared, including Rubens.

“I’m Still Here” is powerful, particularly the incarceration scenes, but it’s a bit too slice-of-life. It’s a family going through authoritarianism and coming out the other side, damaged but resilient. I guess I take some solace in that. If the Portuguese have a word for soupçon, that’s how much solace I take.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Holy crap, what crap. I’m glad Patricia and I watched it at home where we could talk back at the screen now and again and relieve some of the pressure. And it’s 71% on Rotten Tomatoes? Rotten Tomatoes is rotten. Corruption flourishes. Their ruthless aggression spreads like a plague throughout the empire.

Those last sentences are from the movie’s ponderous opening titles:

“16 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius, his ‘dream of Rome’ has been forgotten. Under the tyranny of twin emperors, Geta and Caracalla, corruption flourishes. Their ruthless aggression spreads like a plague throughout the empire. The fall of the great city is imminent. Only the hopes of those who still dare to dream remain…”

I knew we were in trouble then. Particularly since we cut from the declaration of Rome’s imminent fall to Roman soldiers, led by heavy-hearted General Acacius (Pedro Pascal, everywhere), conquering the last unconquered city in Northern Africa. Plus if it’s Caracalla, the Roman Empire has centuries to go before it sleeps. So much for imminent.

Wait, I actually knew we were in trouble when I saw the trailer and a pretty lady hangs laundry only to be surprised and wrapped up by Paul Mescal. I wanted her to go, “Hey, I just cleaned that!” Last movie, director Ridley Scott kept giving us fingers grazing stalks of wheat; now it’s billowing laundry. What Terrence Malick trope will he cadge next?

I take it all back. I knew we were in trouble when I heard Paul Mescal, whom I knew as the suicidal dad from “Aftersun,” was cast. And yes, he’s an actor, and can play many parts; but when “Gladiator” won best picture at the 2000 Oscars, its producer thanked Russell Crowe for “filling a whole arena with the force of your face,” and man did he ever, and no, Mescal doesn’t. Sorry, Paul. You’re cute, and you got those slow thighs, but every time someone says you’re filled with rage I’m like, “That guy?”

And if we’re going to get the fall of Rome would it kill you have some decadence? The only decadence here is a gloriously ribald gesture Denzel Washington as Macrinus makes behind a slavegirl, while the only suggestion of sexuality is a powdered feyness among Roman leaders. Don’t know if that was the intention of Ridley and screenwriter David Scarpa (“Napoleon”), but it’s there for any MAGA dipshit to grab onto.

The kid from the first movie
Mescal plays Hanno, a leader in that African city, who gives a rousing speech before battle:

“Where we are, death is not! Where death is, we are not!”

Right, not rousing. It takes a minute to be proven false. But someone loved those lines enough to have poor Hanno repeat them before the movie’s final battle. Because if it didn’t work once…

Widowered and captured, Hanno is bought by Macrinus, who sees something in him, then he moves up the ladder of gladiatorial escapades. Each fight has to be bigger than the last, and the spectacle has to be bigger than the spectacle in the previous movie, so we enter truly absurd territory. These are his opponents:

• A big dude
• A gibbon
• A gladiator atop what the studio terms a “BADASS WAR RHINO!!”
• A ship of soldiers, as he pilots a ship of slaves, in an arena filled with water and sharks

Meanwhile, everyone wonders about his origins. How did someone with his skills, who can quote Virgil verbatim, wind up where he wound up?

“He’s probably the kid from the first movie,” I told Patricia.

He’s the kid from the first movie. It’s not revealed until an hour or so in, but it’s so not-a-secret that he’s called by the kid’s name, Lucius, in all the official literature of the film—from press releases to IMDb.

Meanwhile, Mom, AKA Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, doomed to be in these types of movies forever) is now married to the heavy-hearted General Acacius, whom Hanno/Lucius blames for the death of wifey. So, conflict. Meanwhile, Acacius is plotting a coup, the good kind—toward benevolent manliness and away from fey corruption—with his 5,000-man army only 10 days away. Ah, but then he gets ineffectual senators involved, one of whom is in debt to Macrinus and spills beans. Macrinus, in a power move, tells the twins, and then in another power move (all his moves are power moves) convinces the twins to send the very popular general/now traitor into the arena to battle Hanno/Lucius. There, Acacius professes his love for Lucius’ ‘rents, including Maximus, and Lucius refuses to kill him. Instead, the Praetorian Guard does—sticking more arrows into poor Pedro Pascal than in any star since Toshiro Mifune in “Throne of Blood”—and the citizenry is outraged and riot.

I couldn’t help but root for Denzel in the film—he’s Denzel, and plays the only intriguing character. You keep wondering what his game is. Turns out he's a former slave who has designs on the throne and revenge. With the city rioting, he convinces one twin to kill the other, and when the traitors are sent to the arena, and Lucius protects moms, Macrinus kills her with a distant arrow. For good measure, he kills the other emperor. Why not? Now it’s just him. Well, him and Lucius, and Lucius has armies behind him. Or maybe the armies are just standing around to see who wins that final battle? Never were armies so useless.

Are we not entertained?
And that’s our big finale. At a gate outside Rome, Lucius announces he’s Lucius, Macrinus says bloodlines don’t matter, force is how one becomes emperor, and is he ready to fight for it? Yes, Macrinus challenges Lucious to a fight, this man he’s seen defeat everybody. It’s his first not-smart move. And last.

So was a Lucius ever emperor of Rome? Yes! He ruled alongside his adopted brother Marcus Aurelius. Apparently they were a popular duo. There was a bit of free speech and a bit of caring for the sick and vulnerable. Sounds nice.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s called “A Complete Unknown,” as Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary was called “No Direction Home,” leaving “How Does It Feel,” “To Be On Your Own,” and “Like a Rolling Stone” for anyone who wants to complete the chorus.

I’ve watched the Scorsese doc a half a dozen times and recommend it about as highly as I recommend anything, but this one ain’t bad. Timothee Chalamet rocks. Edward Norton completely embodies the good-hearted Pete Seeger. All the actors sing as the performers they play and do a great job. Chalamet and Monica Barbaro sound better together than Dylan and Joan Baez did. They blend.

Yes, it’s not historically accurate but then neither was Dylan. He kept making up a mythos about himself: one moment he was raised in a carnival, another he was pop singer Bobby Vee. Plus the movie gets the basics right. Pete Seeger was the benevolent patriarch of an ever-burgeoning folk scene in the early 1960s, Dylan showed up and became its voice, writing songs about contemporary matters that felt timeless and filled with a wisdom far beyond his years. He was the future—a glorious future. And then he went electric and people freaked.

You could say Seeger was the “we” of that folk scene, but it was a restrictive “we.” There was an ethos; you were supposed to be a certain kind of person. Dylan was an “I,” a loose, all-encompassing “I.” It could go anywhere. Like the motorcycle he rides. And crashes.

Worried in the wings
I saw “Unknown” with my family in a near-sold-out theater in Minneapolis at Christmastime, sitting way down in the third row, and liked it well enough. After reading the book on which it’s based, “Dylan Goes Electric” by Elijah Wald, I saw it again, by myself, in the last row of a sparsely crowded theater in Seattle the other weekend. I still liked it. The moment at Newport ’65 when Dylan and his backing band launch into “Like a Rolling Stone” is thrilling.

This time I caught the comedic bits better—the little mumbled asides Dylan says in conversation that are funny cuz they’re true. Like when he says Joan Baez’s songwriting is all sunsets and seagulls, “like an oil painting at the dentist’s office.” Or how anyone on stage is a freak, and Sylvie (Elle Fanning) responds “Frank Sinatra’s not a freak,” to which Dylan says, “That voice ain’t human.” That’s so good. There’s a dozen of these. I wish I could remember them all.

So I wasn’t going to complain about the historical accuracy, but man I wish they’d given us Dylan’s grassroots rise—scrounging around Café Wha? and the Gaslight and a million other places, cadging off Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack, borrowing this book of poetry and that biography and these albums and that couch to sleep on. Feels like there’s drama there. Being rootless and absorbing it all and figuring it all out. In his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” he writes about going to the New York Public Library and reading newspapers from 1855-65 on microfiche—just to get the vernacular and the rhythm of speech and the concerns people had. Want to sound timeless? Going back in time ain’t a bad start.

None of that’s here. Mangold’s Dylan arrives in New York almost fully formed. On his first night he takes a taxi to visit Woody Guthrie in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, finds him with Pete Seeger, and plays “Song to Woody” for the both of them. The next morning, staying at Pete’s place, he plays him “Girl from the North Country,“ and Pete thinks we got something here. Fact-check: It was a bus, during the day, Pete wasn't there, and Dylan didn't write ”Song to Woody“ until months or maybe a year later—after he'd gone through the Woody repertoire but didn't like feeling he'd gone through him. He wanted to show his gratitude. ”I didn't not consider myself a songwriter at all,“ he says in the Scorsese doc. ”But I needed to write that, and I need to sing it, so that's why I need to write it."

Scorsese’s doc was wholly invested in the how of it: How did the wisdom of the ages emerge from this kid from Hibbing, Minnesota? Is he a shapeshifter? Did he tap into the collective unconscious? Mangold begins and ends the conversation with this lament from Dylan: 

Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they're not asking where the songs come from. They're asking why the songs didn't come to them.

Dylan here seem positively privileged—a top-down phenomenon, like he just knew the right people. He lucks into Pete Seeger, then Pete gets him a gig on the same stage Joan Baez plays, and then he’s getting representation. This early fictional help from Seeger makes the later Dylan look like an ungrateful shit.

The girlfriend stuff doesn’t play for me, either. At a church gig, Dylan meets Sylvie Russo, AKA Suze Rotolo, who tells him about CORE and the Civil Rights Movement and suggests he record more of his own songs. He responds that Columbia Records and his manager, Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler), want him to go traditional, when (again) the real Grossman was one of the ones pushing him toward songwriting—and for a very specific reason: that’s where the money was. Dylan wrote songs, Grossman’s clients/creation band Peter, Paul and Mary went up the charts with them, and everyone made a mint. But the movie bypasses Peter, Paul and Mary; it’s just Baez recording his stuff. And why did he let her do that, Sylvie asks, wringing her hands. Poor Elle Fanning. She’s given the thankless task of spending half the movie looking worried in the wings.

Does the movie imply Baez slept with Dylan because of the Cuban Missile Crisis? And where exactly was she going with her suitcase? Out od Dodge? Aren't we all Dodge? Overall, Fanning’s Russo feels too gossamer and Barbaro’s Baez too blunt—flipping off Dylan at Newport ’64 and getting angry that he’s writing music in the middle of the night. In later interviews, Baez always seems to love those moments when the wisdom of the world was flowing out of his fingertips: “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word.” She knew she was in the presence of genius. The movie makes her a bit of a diva: I need my rest, Bob!

Along with “Why him?” a good Dylan question is “Why Newport ’65?” Why did that performance freak everybody out? “Bringing It All Back Home” came out earlier in the year and it’s half-electric. Acts had already gone electric at Newport. Why the freakout?

I think it was partly the attitude. Dylan wasn’t talking or joking with his audience; he had his back to them. He was too cool for school, wearing leather and boots and shades. He just didn’t seem them anymore. The guy who wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” had changed. And yes, you could say it’s the nature of the left to not cohere, to break apart, and yes, that kept happening in the mid-’60s. The difference is when Black Power split off from the Civil Rights Movement, it wasn’t MLK leading the charge. Imagine King raising his fist and shouting “Hey ho, whitey’s gotta go!” and you get a sense of the betrayal some felt from Dylan ’65.

The movie’s kinder to Pete Seeger than it is to Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz), who’s another blunt force. He’s the one who flies off the handle with Dylan, Seeger, and Peter Yarrow (Nick Pupo), and gets into a fistfight with Grossman—which did happen. In comparison, Seeger comes across as a calm voice of reason: “Here’s a cup of coffee, Bob, let’s sit and talk about this” kind of thing. During the panic during Dylan’s electric set, they do have him look at 1) the cables and 2) a row of axes, before coming across 3) the stern face of his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune), warning him away. The legend is that Seeger got an axe and had to be held back from cutting the cables, but that's probably just a legend. Wald doubts it. He blames Yarrow—or people misinterpreting Yarrow. After Dylan and his backing band exited to boos (along with applause and cries for more), Yarrow tried to reassure the crowd that Dylan would return with his acoustic guitar. “He’s going to get his axe,” Yarrow told them. Anyway, I’m glad Mangold didn’t go there.

Again, I like Pete Seeger in this, and Norton plays him as such a beautiful man. The morning after Newport, while Dylan’s ready to ride out of town, helmetless, Pete’s out there folding up the folding chairs, doing the work. He always did the work. Before the electric show, Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) tells Dylan to track mud on their carpet, which, sure, great image, but someone has to clean that up, Johnny. Someone has to load the folding chairs into the truck. Seeger was the everyday “us” who did that, Dylan the genius “I” who didn’t, and the startling thing isn't that they broke apart but that the twain ever met. 

Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
In Wald’s book, there’s a great, prescient quote from Seeger that I wish Mangold had included somehow. After Dylan’s British tour, getting booed everywhere even as he rose up the charts, and after the motorcycle accident, Dylan released “John Wesley Harding,” a throwback outlaw album, the beginning of everybody’s throwback albums, and Pete sent a copy of the album to his father with this thought:

Maybe Bob Dylan will be like Picasso, surprising us every few years with a new period. I hope he lives as long. I don’t think there’s another songwriter around who can touch him for a certain independent originality...

Damn, that’s spot on.

The movie’s fun, I enjoyed it, I saw it twice. But it’s not the Bob Dylan of biopics. It’s not even the Pete Seeger of biopics. It’s Peter, Paul and Mary. It sings a pretty tune I don’t quite believe.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Twenty years ago, in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” Adrien Brody played an uncompromising Jewish artist struggling to survive in Nazi-occupied Europe; it led to a Golden Globe nomination and an Oscar for lead actor. In Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” Adrien Brody plays an uncompromising Jewish artist struggling to survive in America after the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe; it led to a Golden Globe for lead actor and an Oscar nomination (so far). 

You could say Brody has a niche.

Watching “The Brutalist” at SIFF Downtown last month was an event. It’s three and a half hours with intermission, and there’s a clear demarcation between the two halves. In the first (“The Enigma of Arrival”), Brody’s character, László Toth of Budapest, is a post-World War II refugee in America who maintains his dignity under rough circumstances, and whose talent and artistry are eventually recognized and rewarded. In the second half (“The Hard Core of Beauty”), let’s just say things go awry. The center doesn’t hold. For him and the film. 

I still recommend it. It unfolds in a way most movies don’t these days. It takes its time. It’s literary—right down to the naming of the chapters. 

Upside-down
At the open, we see Toth and a friend arrive in America, celebrating as the ship passes the Statue of Liberty—which, from their point of view, appears upside-down. Yes, hold that thought.

After an unsuccessful hookup at a brothel—“We have boys, too,” he’s told as he leaves—Toth takes the train to Philadelphia, where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), with pretty Catholic wife Audrey (Emma Laird), runs a small furniture shop called Miller & Sons. Who’s Miller? He is. Are there sons? No, but it has a sound people like. As for the furniture? It’s not beautiful, Toth admits. That’s why you’re here, Attila tells him. Toth smiles wearily at all this—this brave new world where people pretend to be what they aren’t in order to sell the second-rate.

But they catch a break. A rich son, Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), wants his father’s study redone while he’s away. What I like? Attila is supposedly the deal-maker but he agrees too quickly to a $1,000 pricetag. It’s László, the artist, who looks at what needs to be done, and the timeframe with which to do it, and says no, not for that, and doubles the price. He does it not because he’s a businessman but because he’s an artist. Attila is willing to cut corners, László isn’t. So he makes the better deal.

A problem I had with the film, particularly its second half, is I’m not a fan of brutalist architecture. Too blocky. But the study László designs is beautiful: simple, clean, allowing for light while ensuring the sun doesn’t fade books. Who wouldn’t love it? 

Well, the father, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce), when he arrives home early with his dying mother and finds a Negro worker on his front lawn. He yells at the cousins and threatens them with lawsuits. Then the son doesn’t pay his bill. So Attila cuts László loose. He wakes him up to kick him out, tossing in an additional accusation of making a pass at the wife, when it was Attila, drunk and happy after the $2,000 contract, who creepily pushed László toward her. I like the way László looks here: slightly stunned, slightly fearful, but with a kind of acceptance:  “Oh, this is who you are. I thought as much.” We never see Attila again.

Because Van Buren Sr. does a 180. The study László designed is such a hit, so visionary, that it winds up in a photo spread in Look magazine. Then Harrison researches him and discovers that, before the war, László was a Bauhaus-trained architect who designed massive public buildings in Budapest. He finds László doing manual labor at a construction site (and, unbeknownst, using heroin for war-related pain), and invites him to the Van Buren mansion, where he is feted at a fancy dinner party. Afterwards Harrison leads the guests outside on a frigid night, to a hill overlooking the town and his property, and says he wants to build a vast community center there, named after his late mother, which will include a chapel, gym, theater and library. And he wants László to design it. Oh, and Harrison’s personal attorney (Peter Polycarpou) will work to expedite the immigration of László’s wife and niece, hung up in channels in Europe.

That’s the first part of the film, and its lines are clear: arrival and rise. In the second half, László becomes a martinet while overseeing the construction of the center, increasingly at odds with cost-cutting and any deviation from his artistic vision. He’s joined by his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), who arrives in a wheelchair accompanied by their near-mute teenaged niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy). The addition of women, damaged by war, creates awkwardness and friction. Is Harrison trying to cuckold László? Does the son sexually assault the niece? “We tolerate you,” the son tells the artist. The pressures of all of this seem to be building toward … something … when it’s derailed by a literal derailment. One of the millionaire’s trains goes off the track, he’s being sued, he shuts down the project. He does another 180.

Now László is working as a cog at a big architecture firm in New York. Now he's called back by Harrison. Now the two go to Italy to look at marble for the center. Now Harrison rapes a drunk László. Now they’re working on the center again as if nothing happened. Now László gives his wife a dose of heroin for her pain but she O.D.s. and nearly dies.

So much for clear lines. The second half is all over the place.

At this point, László and Erzsebet are disillusioned with America (join the club), and discuss moving to Israel as Zsofia and her husband had done. Then we see Erzsebet, suddenly using a walker, and heading up to the Van Buren mansion. How much time has passed? The family is in the midst of dinner but she refuses to sit with them. Instead she accuses Harrison of raping László. The family is shocked, particularly the son, who, to the horror of everyone, physically attacks Erzsebet; and then the father, after a full-throated denial, goes missing. They spend the night searching for him. Is he found at the center? In the chapel? Is he dead? And where is László? And how was Erzsebet able to walk again?

Instead of answers, we fast-forward 20 years, to our epilogue, “The First Architecture Biennale,” where Zsofia, middle-aged and thin, and in clear command of her voice, gives a speech for the now-celebrated László, a wheelchair-bound widower, during a retrospective of his work. We see all the great things we didn’t see him design and build. We hear her say that the Van Buren Center was created with concentration camps in mind. She ends her encomium with a line László often told her when she was a young mother in Israel: “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination not the journey.”

And that's the end of our journey.

American Salieri
What to make of it? Was the rape a metaphor for what businessmen do to the artist? And is that too on-the-nose? It’s like the project being derailed by a derailment—all of Corbet’s metaphors are literal. They’re brutalist metaphors. And is that ending quote supposed to preempt the 3.5-hour journey we just watched? Or is the center not holding the point? It can’t all be clean lines, Gracie. Life gets messy and diffuse. We think it makes sense until it doesn’t.

Again, I still recommend it. I loved the scene where a patient László and a furiously impatient Harrison sit in the sun at an outdoor café in Carrara, Italy, sipping espressos and smoking while awaiting the arrival of László’s typically late friend Orazio (Salvatore Sansone). I loved the subsequent hike to the marble mines and the silent way Orazio pours the water over the marble to bring out its highlights, and how Harrison puts his face against the marble.

Despite his name, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. is not old money. He’s a bootstraps guy, built his empire, and runs hot and cold throughout the film. At the initial dinner party for László, there’s that slightly terrifying way he shuts down a friend who intrudes upon his long, pointless storytelling. Best of all? He’s so fucking dull. His voice is flat, his thoughts unimaginative, but he’s what grows in the American landscape.

Wait, is it jealousy? He wants to be an artist but isn’t, wants artistic vision but doesn’t have it; so he buys it and wrecks it. He rapes it. He’s Salieri as American businessman.

Is this the first movie I’ve seen Adrien Brody star in since “The Pianist”? That Oscar didn’t open many doors, did it? He’s done his share of Wes Andersons, and I loved his two-episode turn in “Succession.” There’s a depth to him, a humanity in his eyes.

Watching this, I assumed “The Brutalist” was based upon a novel—epic nature, tattered second half—and looked forward to reading it. Nope. Director Brady Corbet wrote it with Mona Fastvold. Who’s Fastvold? Norwegian actor-producer-director-writer once married to Sondre Lerche. Who’s Corbet? Similar but American, and no Lerche. He’s had a lot of small roles with European directors over the years: Michael Haneke (a psychopath in “Funny Games”), Ruben Ostlund (a post-avalanche dinner companion in “Force Majeure”), Lars von Trier (Tim in “Melancholia”), Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria”). Maybe something rubbed off. He directed two films in the 2010s: “The Childhood of a Leader” with Berenice Bejo, and “Vox Lux” with Natalie Portman. Haven’t seen either.

Well, he’s got our attention. The irony of this one, juxtaposed against its closing quote, is that I didn’t think much of the destination; but the journey was great.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Once I began watching it, I remembered why I’d avoided it for so long. An American exotic dancer hooks up with the son of a Russian oligarch, and they get married. There’s not much about that sentence that intrigues me.

• Exotic dancer: OK, maybe?
• Son of a Russian oligarch: No, not at all.
• Get married: What is this, arthouse “Pretty Woman”?

I didn’t buy the premise and doubted I’d like the characters. The second part proved true. For the first 45 minutes, I didn’t like any of the characters because they’re awful and love doing worthless things. But the premise works. And the premise works because the characters are awful and worthless.

Hapless
The movie opens with a black-and-red shimmering effect before we get our first concrete image: an ass in our face. Hello! It’s a high-end strip bar, and director Sean Baker (“The Florida Project”) pans down the line, as hot young women dance before and on top of slouched men, until we get to our title girl and the title credit. 

The first five minutes is a day, or a week, or at least a montage, in the life of Anora, AKA, Ani (the now Oscar-nominated Mikey Madison, late of the Manson clan in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”), and it should be required viewing for anyone who goes to one of these clubs and thinks the stripper is into you. Looks soul-draining. Then she’s tapped to take care of this rich Russian kid because she speaks, or at least understands, Russian.

The next half hour should be required viewing for anyone who thinks capitalism isn’t dangerously fucked up.

Ivan, AKA Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), is a thin kid with a crazy mass of hair—think Russian douchebag Timothee Chalamet—who gets his lap dance, gets her phone number, invites her to his place. It’s a mansion, and she’s stunned by the opulence. Bargains are made, the ante continually upped. He pays for a night, he pays for a week, they decide to take a plane to Vegas with friends. It’s all drinking and vaping and drugs, video games and paid sex and dance clubs and shitty music, all on the back of whatever awfulness the Russian oligarch does to make his billions. So this half hour was a slog.

When does she fall for him? It’s less him than the swank. It’s the economy, stupid. When does he fall for her? He digs her, certainly, but why would a monumentally privileged 21-year-old agree to marry an exotic dancer? Because, in his post-partying stupor, lamenting the fact that his father is forcing him to return to Russia to learn the family business, he says aloud, “If I were to marry an American, I wouldn’t have to go back to Russia.” And there we go. It’s a business proposition. The last thing to be negotiated is the size of the carat.

Any thinking person would realize it doesn’t solve his problem—it just creates a worse one—but these aren’t thinking people. And this is when the movie gets interesting.

Word of the marriage reaches Russia. Vanya’s godfather, Toros (Karren Karagulian), a kind of community rep for Russian and Armenian emigrees in New York, and who was supposed to be watching over him, is then harangued by Vanya’s unseen mother to find out what the fuck is going on and make it go away. Oh, and they’re on their way to America now. Panicked, Toros sends two men, Garnick and Igor (Armenian Vache Tovmasyan and Russian Yura Borisov), to go to the mansion and lay down the law.

At this point I was worried about our title character, particularly when Garnick reminds the bald-headed Igor not to hurt Vanya but doesn’t mention Ani. I flashed on the “Pine Barrens” episode of “The Sopranos,” and that Russian mobster on “The Wire” talking about a corpse: “Did it have face? Hands? Yes? Then it wasn’t us.” You don't mess with these people.

Instead, when they get there, Vanya argues and runs away, while Ani, enraged at being called a hooker and having her new life upended, attacks the men. Furniture is destroyed, she breaks Garnick’s nose, Igor holds onto her for dear life, and the thing becomes a comedy. Toros arrives but he’s hapless, too, and they spend the night searching for a rich skinny Russian kid who could be anywhere: at this arcade, at this Coney Island candy shoppe where his friend works (a friend stupid enough to confront Igor); at this restaurant, where Toros passes around his photo. Toros is basically an unstoppable force—but, again, hapless. It’s one long crazy night.

I assumed Vanya was hiding, and plotting, rather than hanging in one of his usual haunts, but of course not. He’s a spoiled idiot. He dealt with the crisis by getting drunk in all the familiar places and then returning to Headquarters, Ani’s old place, for more drinks and lapdances—this time with Ani’s bete noire, Diamond (real-life exotic dancer Lindsey Normington). That’s where they finally corral him.

One of my favorite moments? The next morning, the oligarch's attorney has gotten early on a judge’s docket to annul the marriage, but even here Toros tries to manipulate things. Bad move. The judge (Michael Sergio, who played a judge in Baker’s “Prince of Broadway” in 2008) ain’t having it. I’m like: Buddy, no, you’re in a court of law now. STFU.

Moot anyway: What gets married in Vegas gets annulled in Vegas.

All through the long evening, within the confines of his job, Igor has seemed quietly enamored of, or at least empathetic with, Ani. He seems to think she’s getting a raw deal. Is she? Vanya is worthless but Ani isn’t thinking things through, either. She wants to stay married, but if they do, one assumes, he’s disinherited. Could she love a Vanya who has no mansion and no money? Who has to somehow get a job? That’s the question she should’ve been asking herself.

Meanwhile, we await the parents. What are they like—these rich oligarchs that have had everyone terrified? Turns out Dad (Aleksei Serebryakov) seems mostly businessman. It’s the haute couture mother, Galina (Darya Ekamasova), who has everyone terrified. Including Dad.

There’s a moment where Ani almost figures a way out. Vanya sobers up and accepts his fate with tailed tucked, yelling at Ani over his own ineptitude. So Ani decides yes, they’ll get divorced, but on her terms—with a divorce lawyer. And she’ll get half. She says this outside the private jet. Somehow Galina wills her back inside. I was disappointed—but relieved. I didn’t want her to lose her face and hands.

Fresh
The movie could’ve used a tighter edit (Oscar nommed, so what do I know) but it does have one of the best endings of the year—even if it recalls 1994’s “Fresh.”

Igor is left in charge of Ani. She keeps insulting him but he accepts it all with a kind of muted fascination. I like what a slow processor he is. He doesn’t have many lines but he makes them work. He’s also shown himself to be a standup guy. He gives the concussive Garnick drugs for his pain and Ani thinks he’s a dealer. No, they’re his grandmother’s, with whom he lives. He’s also the only one to stand up to the oligarchs, telling them they owe Ani an apology. They don't, of course. It's the gesture. It's the balls.

The next day, amid the silence of a January snowstorm, he takes her to the bank to collect her “alimony,” and then home. And it’s there that she makes her move. Why does she do it? To feel something other than the pain she’s feeling? To feel in control again—the old familiar control? Probably. She gets on top and starts humping him in this idling car covered in snow. It’s when he tries to pull her face down for a kiss that things go awry—or toward the truth. She resists, then slaps him, then cries and whimpers. And they stare at each other. And he figures out what she needs. He pulls her toward him again, but this time toward his chest, where she crumples and breaks down crying. That’s our ending. 

“Fresh” did that, too—oh right, this kid who’s seemed so tough for so long is just a kid—but it’s still powerful.

“Anora” has been nominated for six Oscars, including picture, director, Madison as lead actress, and—surprise!—Borisov for supporting. Good for him. I think Baker helped. He lets us come to him. We think he’s an extra, a Russian henchman, before he develops into the only character in the movie worth a damn.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“I want to be him.” That’s the line that got to me.

Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote and directed, and Kieran Culkin, late of “Succession,” play cousins, David and Benji Kaplan, who, in the wake of their grandmother’s death, visit her native Poland on a Holocaust tour. They are a mismatched pair. One is uptight and anal, the other a sometimes thoughtless free spirit. Guess who plays who? Exactly. Guess with whom I identified? Right again.

I’m someone who has to be at the airport two hours early, but I was with Eisenberg’s David when he said of Benji: “I love him, and I hate him, and I want to kill him, and I want to be him.”

I think we all do. Most of us are too polite, in a way that pushes away the world—that makes us feel less. Benji’s not that. Benji wants to feel more even though he already feels too much. He’s the double meaning of the title: a real pain who feels a real pain.

Not wrong
Culkin isn’t Jewish, is he? No, of course he isn’t. I don’t know why that didn’t register before.

I like the open: As he heads to the airport, David nervously phones Benji every two seconds to let him know where he is, and how far off, and warning about traffic congestion, but then canceling that warning because it’s all good and he’s nearly there, and he hopes Benji is on his way. He’s not. He’s there. He showed up way earlier than even the anal guy. Why? Because, dude, you meet the craziest people at the airport! That’s what he says. And because he has nowhere else to go. That’s what he doesn’t say.

We quickly see the pattern. Benji’s charming—even charming a TSA agent!—but he’s thoughtless. He takes the snack David’s wife made for him, and he takes David’s window seat, leaving David the middle one, and in Warsaw he showers first, borrowing David’s phone to listen to music and draining the battery.

David is the one politely hanging back, which means he’s the one often left behind. When Benji suggests the two of them pose with monumental statues of Polish resistance fighters, David begs off, feeling it wouldn’t be respectful (he’s not wrong), so Benji rolls his eyes, goes up alone, encourages the others on the tour and everyone has a good time (he’s not wrong, either). David is the one who takes all their pictures. He’s the one not part of the picture. 

Who else is on the tour?

• James (Will Sharpe), a polite British tour guide from Oxford
• Marcia (Jennifer Grey!), a posh post-divorce socialite, whose mother survived the camps, and who finds herself becoming someone she doesn’t like—a lady who lunches
• Diane and Mark Binde (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), an older couple, Mark is the least amused by Benji’s shenanigans
• Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), African, survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who studied the Jewish people in its aftermath and converted

Benji leans into each of their stories. Sometimes what he says feels inappropriate (“Oh, snap!” to the Rwandan genocide), but at least he’s listening, and feeling, and reacting. He thinks Marcia has a deep sadness behind her eyes and tells David he’s going to go talk to her:

David: Maybe she wants to be alone.
Benji: Nobody wants to be alone.

Well, some people want to be alone. It’s less messy. But Benji thrives on mess. He gets angry that they’re Jews riding first-class on a train in Poland, and his subsequent actions (retreating to second-class with David, and then missing their stop) makes everyone wait for them. He chastises the truly lovely tour guide for regurgitating facts, for not engaging enough with locals, and it hurts the guide—you can tell—but when they visit Majdanek, one of the extermination camps, he’s taken the criticism to heart, and the quiet visit resonates. Plus, in the end, James is grateful. It was a huge moment for him. The kicker? Benji doesn’t even remember it.

James: I always say, “Please, just let me know if I can do anything better.” And you’re the first person ever to give me actionable feedback. So thank you so much for that.
Benji (pleased): Get the fuck out of here. What did I say?
James (confused): What are you talking about? You know the stuff about engaging Polish people and the Polish culture…?
Benji: Oh man, that sounds great, you should fucking do that, man.

A number of years ago I interviewed Gerry Spence, the great trial lawyer, who began a trial lawyer’s college that has improved the work of even top-tier attorneys. It starts with three days of “psychodrama,” a kind of role-reversal with important people in your life, and the pain of it, as a way to better discover ourselves, and he engaged me in it. I talked about things I normally hold in. And afterwards I felt so grateful. To not have to hold these things in even for a few moments. To not have to carry them. For an hour to be free of that burden.

What is the thing not being said? That’s the thing Benji says. Even if he forgets he said it.

David, not part of the picture.

A fucked-up system
“A Real Pain” isn’t a great film but it is a good film. I didn’t want Kieran Culkin’s character to be less Kieran Culkin, but I did want Jesse Eisenberg’s to be less Jess Eisenberg. His anxiety gave me anxiety. “Did you not see how nervous I was?” “Yeah, I just thought that was you. 

Benji is the one they remember, while David, poor bastard, is an afterthought. Except David is the one who’s made his way in the world. He’s got a wife and a child, and meds to get through the day, and a steady job creating ad banners on the internet. Benji disparages this last. “It’s not your fault you’re part of a fucked-up system,” he says.

Benji never found his place in the world because it’s a fucked-up system. He’s not wrong. We’ve all felt it. Really, these are the options? Why are these the options?

We hear Chopin throughout, and that’s the pace and the tone of the film. Watch the movie with your polar opposite. My next trip, I'm hoping to be a little less David, a little more Benji. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Early on, I went “Oh, this is the Marc Maron movie!” It isn’t, but I first heard about it via Marc on his podcast—two years ago maybe?—when he talked about playing Alan Berg, the Jewish DJ gunned down by neo-Nazis in Colorado in 1984. I vaguely remembered the historical incident, hoped the movie would be good, and promptly forgot about it … until “The Order” started showing up on top 10 lists. But what really made me want to watch it was when someone said Jude Law channels 1970s-era Gene Hackman. God yeah, sign me up for that.

And ... it’s not bad. It’s just not “The French Connection.” It’s a bit disconnected. Pieces don’t quite fit together.

It probably didn’t help that we watched it on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration.

Cohen Act
A playwright friend once told me he likes to begin plays with characters coming from offstage and basically saying, “Whew, glad that’s over.” This movie kind of does that. 

Agent Terry Husk (Law) has spent several decades battling the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia, and it’s estranged him from his wife and daughter, and so when he shows up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to reopen its long-dormant field office, he’s looking for some quiet final years with weekend hunting in the mountains before retirement. Instead, the first bar he goes into, he sees a WHITE POWER flyer. The local sheriff doesn’t seem too concerned about it—doesn’t want to poke the bear, he says with a chuckle—and we don’t know if he’s affable, incompetent, or maybe a closet supremacist himself. It’s a deputy, Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), who speaks up, telling Husk not only where Richard Butler’s Aryan Nation compound is (Hayden Lake, 15-20 minutes ride), but that they’re printing more than flyers. They’re printing money.

Meanwhile, we see various crimes committed. The movie opens with a couple of good ol' boys out hunting but they’re really murdering one of their own—someone who talks too much. Then we see the murderers team up with Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) to rob a bank—rather terrifyingly—in Spokane, Wash. Powerful scene. Mathews gives a bag of cash to his wife, another to his mistress. Later, the mistress gets pregnant. Stay classy, Coeur d’Alene.

It takes a while for Husk to figure out what he’s up against. Indeed, on a hunting trip, he’s confronted by a stranger, who turns out to be Mathews, and Mathews knows who he is. But at this point, Husk is clueless on Mathews.

Who is Mathews? He’s the leader of an Aryan Nation splinter group called “The Order.” Apparently they’re following the precepts of a 1978 novel called “The Turner Diaries,” set in a dystopian future in which it’s illegal for white people to defend themselves against non-white criminals. Yeah, that. Everything is run by Jews, and the “Cohen Act” has taken away everyone's guns, so a militia goes underground to fight back. That’s from my own research. I didn’t get a sense of the weirdness of the novel—or even that it was a novel—from the movie.

Much of the movie is a little disconnected. The Alan Berg killing is over there in Colorado. Why did it happen? Who was listening to Berg? It’s not central to anything. You could remove it and the movie would be the same. At one point, Mathews brings some weapons expert into the fold, and I thought that was going to lead to something, but we hardly see him anymore.

Back in 1991, I remember seeing the documentary “Blood in the Face” about Pac-Northwest white supremacists, and being completely creeped out. It was like moving a boulder and seeing these weird bugs crawling beneath. I don't get enough of that sense here. Director Justin Kurzel, and writer Zach Baylin, working from a non-fiction book, “The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America's Violent, Anti-Government Militia Movement,” don't make it chilling enough. Maybe what was shocking to me then isn’t now. Back then, I thought we were past all that.

Elk hunting
The ending doesn’t work, either. Can no one do endings in prestige movies anymore?

After the death of Deputy Bowen, Husk and others track “The Order,” now just a handful of guys, to a safe house on Whidbey Island, Wash. Two try to escape, are caught, but Mathews refuses to surrender. So the FBI sets fire to the place. I don’t get why Husk went in to get him. Doesn’t work—both ways—and the last we see Mathews he’s in a gas mask getting into a bathtub with fire all around him. Can you survive a fire that way? You can’t. Then we cut to Husk hunting again, and coming across the elk he nearly killed mid-movie but for Mathews’ interruption. He takes aim. The camera closes in. That’s it.

OK?

Law is fine but maybe he was the wrong guy to channel 1970s Hackman. I don’t get enough weight from him. Hackman always let you know he was there. I do think Hoult does an amazing job. I never thought of him as charismatic but he is here—and as a fucking neo-Nazi.

Could you do the movie without the focus on the FBI? The movie opens with internecine strife—white supremacists killing one of their own—and the big divide in the film is between them: Mathews wants to go guerilla, Richard Butler wants to stay within the law. Mathews wins here, in that he splinters off, in that the movie is about him, but Butler turns out to be the prescient one. “In 10 years,” he tells Mathews, “we’ll have members in the Congress and the Senate.” He undersold. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The Beatles arrived in America in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. “Beatles ’64” arrived on Disney+ in the aftermath of Trump’s second presidential election. I’ll leave it to history to decide which was the greater tragedy.

Though “Beatles ’64” was produced by Martin Scorsese, and directed by longtime Scorsese editor David Tedeschi (“No Direction Home,” “George Harrison: Living in the Material World”), the brunt of the material was filmed by Albert and David Maysles back in February ’64. The two American brothers, who were the documentarians seen filming Truman Capote’s “Black & White Ball” in the Hulu series “Capote vs. the Swans,” had been commissioned by the BBC to document how the trip went. That’s why the incredible access. They’re in the Plaza Hotel with the Beatles as the streets outside are besieged by fans. They’re in Central Park as the Beatles (sans George) pose for the NY press. They’re at a nightclub after the first “Ed Sullivan” performance as the boys drink and Ringo dances and semi-canoodles with … is it one of the Ronettes?

Relying on the Maysles footage gives the documentary a cinéma vérité quality, but was it the right move? I for one wouldn’t have minded more context.

And now … Fred Kaps!
Example: Didn’t Ed Sullivan book them because he had been delayed coming through Heathrow in the fall of ’63 by throngs of Beatles fans? I seem to remember reading that. He booked them as a novelty act. These weird British boys with pudding-bowl haircuts who thought they could play rock ‘n’ roll. Then he got lucky. By Feb. 9, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was No. 1 on the Billboard charts, a position it would hold for seven weeks, followed by “She Loves You” for two more and “Can’t Buy Me Love” for five. That’s 14 straight weeks—more than a quarter of a year! As a result, when the Beatles showed up at JFK Airport, née Idlewild, and pandemonium ensued, it helped Sullivan’s show garner the highest ratings in TV history.

And the Beatles don’t seem nervous!That’s what struck me watching “Beatles ’64.” It’s 73 million viewers wondering if they’re worthy of the attention, George has the flu, and they seem breezily confident. And sure, they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing for 5+ years, getting on stage and rockin’ and rollin’. But this is America, man, rock’s birthplace, man, and up to this point, no British or European rock act, or anything rock act, had ever made it there.

In the doc, we see them perform two songs from the Feb. 9 “Sullivan,” but that night they played five, and it’s intriguing how Paul-heavy their playlist was:

Opening:

• “All My Loving”
• “Till There Was You”
• “She Loves You” 

Closing:

• “I Saw Her Standing There”
• “I Want to Hold Your Hand”

Was leaning on Paul a choice? Whose? Keeping “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the end makes some sense, particularly for Ed Sullivan, but if you’re the Beatles shouldn’t you lead with your strength? And they go “Till There was You” second? I guess to win over the oldsters. I guess the bows weren’t enough. 

In “Mr. Saturday Night,” an underrated 1992 mock biopic, Billy Crystal plays a Borscht Belt insult comic named Buddy Young Jr. for whom life keeps going awry, and one of the gags is he’s the guy who has to follow the Beatles on “Sullivan.” Here are the ones who actually did. This is the Feb. 9 show in full:

1. The Beatles (three songs)
2. Fred Kaps, Dutch magician
3. Cast of “Oliver!,” including Davy Jones, singing “I’d Do Anything”
4. Impressionist Frank Gorshin imagining Hollywood stars as political leaders; sadly, no Ronald Reagan
5. Welsh singer Tessie O’Shea, then on Broadway in “The Girl Who Came to Supper”
6. McCall and Brill, a B-grade Nichols and May
7. The Beatles (two songs)
8. Wells and the Four Fays, an Australian acrobat troupe 

It was basically Beatles, Broadway, and what was left of vaudeville. It demonstrates why the Beatles were needed. And maybe why they weren’t nervous.

They were here 2+ weeks so why did they only play two concerts? After “Sullivan” we see them take the train down to D.C. to play the boxing-ring concert on Feb. 11 (with a young David Lynch in attendance), and then they take the train back to NYC for two concerts at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 12. And that’s it. Plus the Sullivan shows. Could Brian not book them? Did he want to give them a vacation?

I could’ve used more of their press conferences. The American press, taking its cues from Elvis, assumed rock acts were raunchy onstage and politely dull off it, while the Beatles were polite onstage, bowing after each song, and cheeky off it. They made the press conference a show in itself:

Reporter: Would you please sing something?
All four: NO!
Reporter: There’s some doubt that you can sing.
John [adjusting cufflink]: No, we need money first.

An eye-opening line about all this comes from George later in life:

Everybody in Liverpool thinks they’re a comedian. … All you got to do is drive up there, and go through the Mersey Tunnel, and the guy on the toll booth is a comedian. You know, they all are. We had that kind of bred and born into us.

I’d always assumed it was just them. That’s a great addition in this doc.

In that initial press conference, by the way, George says a line that’s not just Liverpudlian but sweet and poignant:

Reporter: What’s your ambition?
George: To go to America.

I’d seen tons of clips and ripostes from this press conference but never that one. And George says it in such a disarmingly charming way. He knows it’s funny but he means it, too.

And now … the Way-Outs!
You know what else I wanted? (I know, I want a lot.) At one point, talking head Joe Queenan talks about how the boys could’ve been from Mars, and I expected the doc to cut to a clip of the Way-Outs, a mop-top foursome who appeared on “The Flintstones,” and who may or may not have been actual aliens. I wanted all those ’60s sitcom depictions of Beatles-ish bands—from The Mosquitos on “Gilligan’s Island” to The Ladybugs on “Petticoat Junction”—which indicates not only their impact but how strange they appeared to American eyes initially. I guess making us see with those eyes would be hard and/or impossible to do, since, 60 years later, it's the Beatles who seem the normal ones: down-to-earth, and, as the tour continues, increasingly wary of everything pressing in on them—particularly opportunists like Murray the K. “I think the craziness was going on in the world,” George says in a later interview. “I mean, you could do 30 minutes of film just showing how idiotic everybody else was whenever the Beatles came to town.”

Where did Tedeschi and Scorsese get their talking heads? Why these people? Because someone knew someone? I’m talking less Smokey Robinson than, say, Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard, or Danny Bennett, son of Tony, or Jack Douglas, who, as a young man, smuggled his way into Liverpool for the day and later as a record producer worked with John Lennon. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be in the doc, I’m just curious how they got tapped. Douglas seems lovely, and it’s surely a sign of the mania that Liverpool seemed the promised land to him, but is it a story for “Beatles ’64”?

Queenan has a great line about the impact of the music itself:

December of ’63 my sister had the radio on and I heard “She Loves You” … [breaks] … It’s like the light came on. … It’s like total darkness. And then the light comes on.

The doc opens with that total darkness, with the promise of JFK and the horror of his assassination, and so I assumed it would be bookended with John Lennon’s assassination 16 years later. It would certainly be easy to do. The Plaza Hotel, where they stayed, is on the southeast corner of Central Park, while the Dakota, outside of which John Lennon was standing on Dec. 8, 1980, is on the west side, a mile away. Wouldn’t take much to draw that line. But they don’t go there. Probably better.

“What's your ambition?” “To go to America.” 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Yeah, I don’t get the ending, either.

Someone online said it’s Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) loving and forgiving one another after all these years, which is all Tashi (Zendaya) ever wanted, and that makes as much sense as anything. Except it doesn’t make much sense. The Tashi who starts the threeway with the boys 13 years earlier, then pulls back so they kiss each other, and then smiles at the result, well, that’s no longer this Tashi. Her dreams died with her ACL injury, her competitive drive was sublimated through Art, who became her hubby and a Grand Slam champion, and she became a harridan who maybe ran him into the ground. Meanwhile, every half-dozen years, she’d sneak out for a quickie with Patrick. 

Seriously, are there no other men in the world?

When the movie began, among the warnings was the film’s “graphic nudity,” and I leaned over to Patricia and said, “That means male.” I was half joking but 100% right. The director of “Challengers” is Luca Guadagnino, who directed “Call Me By Your Name,” and he ain’t shy in the locker room scenes. It’s like a 1980s teen movie but with guys.

Homoerotic droplets of sweat
“Challengers” is good for a while, with rocketing editing and great CGI tennis, but do we get unstuck in time too much?

It begins at a “Challengers” match in New Rochelle, NY, in 2019, where Grand Slam champion Art Donaldson is making a surprise appearance because his wife feels he needs this confidence-booster before the U.S. Open. Feels like that’s just asking for trouble. If he wins it’s expected, and if he loses it’s shattering.

The trouble comes in the form of another entrant, the down-on-his-luck Patrick Zweig, who we first see flirting with an unattractive hotel clerk to get a room for the night. Meanwhile Art and Tashi are living in suites. Guess what? They all knew each other back in 2006.

And back we go. In 2006, Toshi is a rising star in the circuit, and Art and Patrick are the junior doubles champs who are given the McEnroe-Borg nicknames “Fire and Ice.” Patrick is the fire, who nails winning shots from between his legs like Roger Federer, but he doesn’t seem that fiery. He’s more sideways than straight on. Art, meanwhile, feels less ice and more lukewarm water.

Both boys are besotted with Tashi, who uses her status and looks to engineer the three-way in which the boys wind up smooching. But this isn’t revelatory to either one; they still want her. So she pits them against each other: whoever wins their match the next day gets her phone number. Kind of a dick move. Anyway, Patrick, the dick, wins and they hook up.

Except Patrick turns pro and tours, while Tashi and Art study at Stanford. Art subtly works to break up the couple but his machinations aren’t necessary. Patrick isn’t winning his tournaments, Tashi can’t stand hanging with such a loser, he storms out. That’s when she tears her ACL. I don’t know if she blames Patrick for not supporting her from his usual courtside seat, but it feels that way. She yells at him, Art yells at him, both are through with Patrick. The ACL never heals, she’s done, and there’s Art.

Seriously, are there no other men in the world?

That’s our divide. Art becomes a winner of Grand Slam tournaments (though never the U.S. Open), Tashi rides him hard (she’s the real fire), and they travel the world, hotel suite to hotel suite, with child and nanny/parent. Patrick scrapes together a life on the edge of the circuit. He’s considered one of the 100 or 200 best tennis players in the world, and in this world that means one thing: LOSER.

Though Art wins in New Rochelle in 2019, he keeps sighing, all ennui and defeat, so Tashi bribes Patrick into losing the final match; then they have sex. That final match is interspersed throughout the film. Patrick wins the first set, Art the second, and the rubber match, amid slow-mo, homoerotic droplets of sweat, goes down to the wire. Patrick seems ready to double-fault it away when, pre-serve, he places the ball in the neck of the racket, a signal, 13 years earlier, that he had slept with Tashi. Art, stunned, lets the serve go by. Now we’re at tie-breaker.

We wonder: Will Art get a little fire now? Will he care? Kinda sorta not much. In the final point of the movie, which isn’t the final point of the match—we’re early in the tie-breaker—amid more slow-mo sweat, both men creep closer to the net until Art goes for the overhead slam that actually brings him over the net and into the arms of Patrick; and the two men embrace and smile and laugh again. And from her courtside seat, Tashi rises in slow-mo and angrily screams “COME ON!!” Then she, too, succumbs to smiles and laughter.

And that’s our end.

Fire and nice
Some moviegoers had a problem with not finding out who won. My problem? I didn’t believe any of it. I didn’t believe Art would immediately forgive Patrick for sleeping with his wife—again—and I didn’t believe the ultra-competitive Tashi would laugh at this brotherly or otherwise gesture, and I didn’t believe a point in tennis would go the way this one went—where both players get a foot from the net and still volley. It all felt so stupid.

Does Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes give us any reason to care about these people? Whatever sympathy each might have is undercut: the underdog Patrick is too much a dog, the injured Tashi is too much a harridan, the cuckolded Art is too much a limp biscuit.

I liked the tennis. You felt like you were on a court with 140-mph shots whizzing past. Off the court, it was just three assholes.

The ending: fire and nice

The Battlin' Bogarts: Here's looking at not-quite-you, kid.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

About two-thirds of the way through “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes,” labeled the first “official feature documentary” of Humphrey Bogart (meaning, I guess, that it has estate/family approval), we get a voice-over from actress Cherie Lunghi, reading haughtily as silent-film star Louise Brooks, about how necessary each of Bogart’s wives was to his career—particularly one of them.

No, not that one. Here’s how it sounds in the doc:

When he began to act and had so much to learn about the theatre, he married Helen Menken. Mary Phillips was exactly right for him during the time he required comfort more than inspiration. But no one contributed so much to Humphrey’s success as his third wife, Mayo Methot. He found her at a time of lethargy and loneliness when he might have gone on playing secondary gangster parts at Warner Brothers. He met Mayo and she set fire to him … and blew the lid off all his inhibitions—forever.

The quote is from a 1966 article Brooks wrote about Bogie for Sight and Sound magazine, and it’s oddly placed in this storyline. We hear it not from the period when Bogart and Methot were married, 1938-45, but in 1951, after Methot’s death and with Bogart poised to win an Oscar for “African Queen.”

More to the point: it’s bullshit.

But no one
OK, so I don’t know Bogie like I know Cagney, but if I had to give anyone other than Bogart himself credit for his transformation into one of the greatest film stars in Hollywood history—the greatest per a 1999 American Film Institute poll—it would be these guys:

• Leslie Howard
• John Huston
• George Raft 

Howard because he refused to act in the movie version of “The Petrified Forest” unless Bogart also got to reprise his stage role as Duke Mantee; Huston because he knew there was more to Bogart than the second-tier gangsters Warner Bros. slotted him for, and fought to get him leads in “High Sierra” and “The Maltese Falcon”; and Raft because he turned down every good role that paved Bogart’s path to stardom.

That’s basically what we all need in life: a pal to give you a helping hand (Howard), a visionary to see what you might be (Huston), and a dope to get out of your way (Raft).

None of these thoughts are original to me, by the way. It’s the traditional Bogart narrative, and in that narrative Methot is a pain in the ass. They drank too much together, fought too much together, were “the Battlin’ Bogarts” per the gossip of the day. Did that light a fire under him or did it weary him? Both? I mean, he’d already played Duke Mantee. He obviously had something going for him.

So hearing the above in the doc, I don’t know, it felt like a woman giving another woman credit for the success of a man. That old gag.

The woman giving the credit, by the way, isn’t just Louise Brooks; it’s documentarian Kathryn Ferguson. Because Brooks doesn’t really say what Ferguson has her say. Again, here’s the voiceover in the doc:

But no one contributed so much to Humphrey’s success as his third wife, Mayo Methot.

And here’s the relevant portion in Brooks’1966 article:

Besides Leslie Howard, no other person contributed so much to Humphrey’s success as his third wife, Mayo Methot.

I don’t get why Ferguson does this. Particularly since the doc has already acknowledged Howard’s contribution to Bogart’s career. They’ve given Howard credit. Why skip it here? Why go out of your way to skip it?

They skip a lot. We get why he went to sea but not why he went into acting. They have him turn up in Hollywood but not why Hollywood called for him in the first place. I guess they say that with the advent of sound, Hollywood was looking for stage actors, and, as read by Enzo Squillino, Jr., Bogart tells us the following:

MGM had hit a goldmine with Clark Gable. 20th Century Fox needed a big rough answer to Gable. That was me.

Makes sense. Except it doesn't. When Bogart arrived in Hollywood in 1930, Gable wasn’t Gable, and wouldn’t be Gable for several years. He was a supporting player with big ears—usually a villain—he wasn't a goldmine. Hell, 20th Century Fox wasn’t 20th Century Fox; that name wasn’t born until a 1935 merger. And Bogart wasn’t the big rough answer to anybody. He was usually cast as the rich kid or the romantic lead. I think his first gangster role wasn’t until 1932: “Three on a Match.” Warner Bros.

The waters
It was like this throughout. I kept getting frustrated by the inaccuracies. The doc also relies too much on “recreation scenes,” with an actor, shot in shadows and/or from behind, playing Bogart at different stages of his life. Meh. Oh, and guess what goes shockingly unmentioned? A little film called “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

Much of the film is Bogart telling us about Bogart, and Squillino isn’t bad—merely suggesting Bogie rather than imitating him. I’m just curious where all the quotes come from. I don’t think Bogart ever published a memoir. Did he begin one that went unpublished? Are these from a diary? From letters to friends? If anyone knows, let me know.

The point of the doc is to give us Bogart from the perspective of the women in his life—four wives and a mother—and I guess that’s not a bad post-#MeToo thing to attempt. Fresh eyes are good. Fresh perspective is good. Too much of this, though, just feels misinformed. Like going to Casablanca for the waters.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Apparently Robert Eggers wanted to remake “Nosferatu” rather than “Dracula” because he thinks F. W. Murnau’s silent classic is the best distillation of the story. Sure. But why remake any of them? Aren’t they shambling 19th-century things?

This is the basics of anything culled from Bram Stoker's work. A solicitor travels to Transylvania to get Count Dracula/Orlock to sign papers for a property in England/Germany and enters a nightmarish landscape where he realizes his client is a vampire/nosferatu. Somehow Dracula/Orlock sets his sights on the solicitor’s wife/fiancée, with whom he develops a symbiotic relationship, leaves the solicitor behind to die, and travels by schooner to England/Germany. By the time it arrives it’s a ghost ship and a plague is visited upon the seaport town. As Dracula/Orlock pursues the wife/fiancée, forces are marshalled against him led by the solicitor (now returned) and an elderly scholar, and either they save the wife/fiancée or she saves them by sacrificing herself. The end.

Not exactly tight. Basically it's a real estate deal gone bad.

Moustaches
So what did Eggers add? Motivation!

About time, really. I’d never understood why Dracula/Orlock wanted to move to England/Germany in the first place, but in Eggers’ version the symbiotic relationship with Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) begins when she’s 9 years old. Yes, creepy. But it’s also why Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) buys the property in Wisborg, Germany: to claim her. And it’s why the enslaved Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) sends Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) for the paper-signing—to get hubby out of the way.

All of which raises more questions:

• Since Orlock seems able to control or at least influence Ellen’s thoughts/desires from afar, why didn’t he just order her to Transylvania?
• How did Knock—this universe’s Renfield—become enslaved? Did he meet Orlock or is that long-distance mind-control, too?
• Exactly what body of water is Orlock traversing to get from Romania to Germany?

Eggers, who directed “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse,” and “The Northman,” does the nightmarescape of Orlock/Nosferatu’s world well, that odd logic/illogic of dreams—how space is circumvented or drawn out. Is Ellen rising from the bed or levitating? He also shrouds Orlock in perpetual darkness. We never see him clearly until the very end when the sun rises on his post-coital bed and poof. I also like that he didn’t just rubber-stamp a Max Schreck look; this Orlock looks more like Vlad the Impaler, an apparent source for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, moustaches included.

But how did Eggers blow the plague? Murnau’s version was released four years after the 1918 influenza epidemic, while Eggers’ version comes to us four years after COVID, but he doesn’t seem to do much with it. It should’ve resonated more. 

Depp has been praised, and it’s a brave performance. She’s not just the victim. She’s the one, who, at age 9, summons the demon in the first place, and she often revisits her own nature/nurture question. “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” she asks. But she also flips on a dime too much—one minute mocking hubby as inferior to Orlock and the next standing up toOrlock for hubby. And no handwringing on being Patient Zero? She’s the reason the entire town is dying—including her great friends Anna and Friedrich Harding (Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and their children. Mea culpa? Nada.

You know what might be interesting? This story written and directed by a woman. Have we had that yet? In all the versions that have been made? Kind of cries out for it, doesn't it?

Taming succumbing
Hoult does a great job in a thankless role, while Skarsgård is again unrecognizable as evil personified. I liked McBurney as Knock, though could’ve done without the Ozzie Osborne stunt. I think I shielded my eyes about five times watching the movie. 

Willem Dafoe, who played Max Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire,” turns up as the Van Helsing of this universe, named Prof. Albin Everhart von Franz, but his acting felt a bit over the top. “I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!” he cries, a line which made me laugh out loud. He also says, “If we are to tame the darkness, we must first face that it exists!” Please send that quote to members of the Republican caucus, or to the legit media, as we tame or succumb to our own darkness.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In the early 2010s, Jacques Audiard made some of my favorite movies, particularly “Un Prophete” and “Rust and Bone,” but since then we’d lost touch, and I wanted to get reacquainted. As the man said, “We should talk, we should always have talked.” So I watched this.

I also watched it because Zoe Saldana won the Golden Globe—and because she’s Zoe Saldana. I guess the movie won awards, too? Wait, Zoe won for supporting? Isn’t she lead? She’s top-billed, and she seems to have the most screen time. On the other hand, she does feel supporting, since the story isn’t about her. She’s there as facilitator and observer. The story is someone else’s. The title character’s.

I get why Audiard went musical with it. There’s something operatic about the story: huge twists and turns.* If you did it straight, it would seem over-the-top. Or more over-the-top.

(* Per Wikipedia, yes, Audiard originally wrote it as an opera libretto.)

I just wish I liked it more.

The whole nine yards
Rita Castro (Saldana) is second-chair to a less-competent criminal defense attorney in Mexico City, and while helping acquit a drug-cartel figure she wonders (though song and dance) if this is the life she wants. Saldana has the moves and pipes, by the way. You can tell she’s trained. And her acting here is a revelation. For God’s sake, Hollywood, get this woman away from green screens and into better scripts!

After the acquittal, Rita gets a phone call from a mysterious, gravely voiced man, offering work. She’s told to go to a newsstand, does, and is promptly kidnapped: bag over the head, car ride to nowhere, the whole nine yards. Who’s responsible? Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the most powerful drug cartel leader in the country. What does he want? He wants to be a she. He wants gender-affirming surgery and he wants Rita to facilitate it so that it happens soon and nobody knows. Manitas will disappear and Emilia Perez will be born.

So it’s off to Bangkok and Tel Aviv. I don’t get why, when they need to cut through the red tape, they don’t go the Bangkok route—where the red tape is, I assume, almost nonexistent—but no, that’s when Rita goes to Israel. There she finds a sympathetic ear in Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), who is serious, quick and by the book. He actually flies to Mexico City and does the whole nine yards (bag over the head) to ensure the patient’s psychological profile is fine. Despite Manitas being who he is (a mass murderer, etc.), he passes, and the surgery goes forward.

Four years later, Rita is lawyering in London, or at least hobnobbing with the jet-set crowd, when, at a fancy dinner party, she’s introduced to another woman from Mexico City. It takes a minute for the other shoe to drop. “It’s you.” “Bingo.” What does Emilia want? She wants her wife and children, safely stored in Switzerland, to return to live with her, Manitas’ “sister,” in Mexico. 

Me: Wait, she’s not going to become a better person because she’s a woman, is she?

Bingo. During lunch at an outdoor café, Emilia is handed a missing persons notice by a distraught woman whose husband was disappeared by the cartels, and, with her inside info, Emilia gets the answer. Then she helps another and another. An NGO is created. Most of these men are dead but at least the women have answers and can move on with their lives. As a result, Emilia becomes a beloved national figure. She also begins a romantic relationship with one of the women, Epifania (Adriana Paz), who was terrified her abusive husband wasn’t dead but still alive.

So where’s the drama now? With Manitas’ wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), who seems less interested in rearing her children than partying with new BF Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez). The real problem occurs when Jessi announces she’s going to marry Gustavo. And the children? Well, they’ll come live with her, of course. 

That’s when we see the Manitas in Emilia. She erupts, rages at and physically attacks Jessi, calling Gustavo a pimp. She has her men beat up Gustavo and toss money at him to leave town. He doesn’t. He kidnaps Emilia, cut off three fingers, and hold her for ransom.

During a third-act firefight, Emilia finally confesses to Jessi who she is but by then it’s too late. She’s stuffed into the trunk of Gustavo’s car, and, when Jessi pulls a gun on Gustavo to get him to stop, they fight, go over an embankment and the car burst into flames. In the aftermath, songs are sung, and the image of Emilia as folk saint is paraded through the streets of Mexico.

Nice Jewish doctor
Some songs were catchy—the sweetest, I thought, was when one of the children sang how Aunt Emilia smelled like their father—but I never got into the characters. Rita is only briefly the main character, then her story is subsumed by Manitas’/Emilia’s, who is (for me) a little needy as a woman. Jessi is a shallow thing and Gustavo a nonentity. I actually liked Dr. Wasserman—who only has a bit part. When Rita was wondering why she couldn’t find a good man, I wondered about him. When it doubt, go nice Jewish doctor.

Has enough been written about the diversity in Audiard’s stories? This isn’t your father’s French cinema:

• A Muslim kid rises to power in prison
• A Sri Lankan Tamil warrior becomes a caretaker in Paris
• A Mexican cartel leader has gender-affirming surgery

The U.N. should be so diverse.

“Emilia Perez” isn’t a bad movie and I hope people see it and lessons are learned. My main takeaway? Get Zoe Saldana better scripts.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

I liked the Nebraska of it all. It was written and directed by Adam Rehmeier, who grew up in Nebraska City, Nebraska (current pop., 7,222), right next to the Iowa border, and the movie opens with the boys betting at a … is it horse track? No, off-track dog racing. In Iowa. Where it’s legal. We learn, by and by, that they’re on a field trip, and played hooky to gamble, but since we’re in media res, and the boys are too busy arguing with each other to explain anything to us, it takes a while to come up-to-speed. I liked that. I thought I was going to watch some dumb coming-of-age movie and I actually had trouble keeping up.

OK, it was a movie recommendation via The New York Times, so I figured it wouldn’t be “dumb.” But it’s still teenage boys. How hard is it to keep up with teenage boys? Turns out, a little hard. Because Rehmeier didn't put exposition ahead of realism. Good for him.

I also assumed the movie would be like “Adventureland”: a kid gets a shitty summer job with a shitty boss and falls for a pretty girl. Instead, two kids bankroll their gambling earnings to lease the titular shack at the local pool for the summer. They’re the shitty bosses. And then they fall for the same girl. 

Gone girls
The same-girl thing felt odd, to be honest. We spend a summer at the local pool, and there’s no other girls? It’s just the one girl and she’s kind of an asshole. In the 1980s, you couldn’t make a movie like this without showing tons of T&A, and now you can’t even show the girls? As if they’ve been #MeTooed from existence? Wrong lesson there, fellas.

Our two leads are Moose and A.J., 14 going on 15, and they’re played by actors who are 22 (Gabriel LaBelle) and 24 (Connor Sherry). I’m curious if Rehmeier wasn’t mocking the trope of older actors playing younger ones. Because it’s so fucking obvious.

The casting is interesting. The Persian Gulf vet/Fonzie protector, given the cinematic name of Shane, is played by Nick Robinson, who went through his own spate of coming-of-age movies 10 years ago (“The Kings of Summer,” “Love, Simon”). Sherry as A.J. bears a remarkable resemblance to Michael O’Keefe, who did this shit in the early 1980s (“Caddyshack,” “The Great Santini”), while LaBelle as Moose kept bugging me. Where do I know this guy from? Then the other shoe dropped. He played a young Spielberg in “The Fabelmans” and a young Lorne Michaels in “Saturday Night.” Helluva range. In one year, he played the 31-year-old producer of “Saturday Night Live” and a 14-year-old Nebraska kid. The latter, by the way, is way more interesting.

It's 1991, the school year is ending, and these two need summer jobs they can’t find. That’s when Shane mentions the Snack Shack. The two bullies of the high school plan on leasing it but A.J. and Moose outbid them by a dollar. Or they think. Turns out they outbid them by 10 times their bid plus the dollar, and everyone on the city council laughs. But the joke is on the council; the kids make a mint. They do even better when A.J. sees Moose flirting with lifeguard and literal girl next door, Brooke (Mika Abdalla) and writes “FUCK” with ketchup on the hot dog he’s serving, and it becomes a hit. Kids are willing to spend 75 cents over the hot dog price to get a “fuck dog.” Great bit.

Brooke’s dad is in the Air Force and they’re in town temporarily, but A.J. is quickly enamored, while she is teasingly upfront and insulting. She calls him “Shit Pig” and takes his photo at embarrassing moments—like when he’s suffering hay fever from mowing the lawn. Then she winds up snogging Moose because he makes the move? Even though she likes A.J.? I get the feeling the movie forgives her all this because she’s the girl. I didn't.

And that’s their summer: navigating parents and bullies and girls while running the titular Snack Shack. At one point I wondered if the movie would just be that, or would it turn serious. Like would Shane die?

Shane dies. Car accident. He survives the Persian Gulf War but not American roadways. It’s what reunites our boys after Brooke breaks them up.

Is enough of the movie felt? Skims the surface too much, doesn’t it? I wanted deeper. I wanted deeper Nebraska.

Nevermind
The soundtrack is just meh for me, even though they’re apparently songs from the summer of ’91—like EMF’s “Unbelievable.” Which is the problem. All of those songs are forgotten in a flash because in September Nirvana releases Nevermind. And that changes everything.

You know what’s truly odd? It’s set 33 years ago and yet the clothes and the fashions don’t feel that out of place with today. Either they didn’t nail 1991 (maybe) or it’s part of that cultural stagnation the world is seeing (more likely). Imagine a movie from 1991 set 33 years earlier. That would be 1958. Not only would everything look different, but you would’ve passed through four or five cultural upheavals before you got to that specific difference. It’s shocking how stagnant we’ve become.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Where are her friends? You know, the ones who support her through various crises and tell her she looks beautiful and that jerk Harvey (Dennis Quaid) is a jerk for firing her from her fitness show—that the audience wants someone her age, they don’t want a girl that’ll make them feel like something the cat dragged in. But not one phone call or text. And why does she have a giant poster of herself on the wall? Not even from an awards show or red carpet? It's from her fitness-shill stage. Nora Desmond seems stable in comparison. 

I lost interest in this movie fast. Wait, she does all this just to get her fitness show back and host a New Year’s Eve special? When I was growing up, New Year’s Eve was the province of the Guy Lombardos or Dick Clarks of the world; it was nothing you risked your life for. 

But sure, it’s the desire to be desired. She craves other people craving her. She had it all her life, it went away, she wants it back.

Watching this vain, shallow character, and the tons of full-frontal female nudity, I began thinking, “Whoever made this doesn’t like women much.” Surprise! It’s a woman, French filmmaker Carolia Fargeat. Mais bien sur. No male director could get away with it. But a woman? She’s giving us a female lens. She’s reminding us of the absurd standards for female beauty. It’s a lesson, people.

A very shallow lesson.

Two yous
The movie opens with a still shot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame star of actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), which, over the years, goes from being adored to ignored, spilled upon, cracked, forgotten. Not bad shorthand. 

Sparkle still has her fitness show, and looks in great shape, but the sagging is there, and then she’s fired by that jerk Harvey. Driving home, she’s distracted by a billboard of herself literally being ripped down and gets into a car accident. Two children in the other car are killed. Kidding. We never hear about anyone in the other car. Other people don’t exist.

At the hospital, a hot male nurse, sensing her need, gives Elisabeth a flash drive in which something called “The Substance” promises “a younger, more perfect” version of you. To get it, she has to go to a sketchy part of town, into an alleyway, and use a card key to enter a dingy joint, then use the same card key to open a mail box.

The instructions are vague in their simplicity: You inject yourself with the substance and you split in two—a younger more supple version of you emerges from your spine. (The instructions leave out the spine part.) Apparently they’re both you, but only one of you can exist at a time. While one roams around, the other is in stasis, and fed intravenously, but you have to change places every week.

I would’ve jumped off at this point. Another me? One is bad enough. But Elisabeth's need is great enough to go through with it.

The younger self, Sue (Margaret Qualley), is tapped to host the fitness show to replace her older self, and to take revenge upon all the small men who rejected her. Kidding. She just wants attention, and the desire of men, and doesn’t want to return to stasis. But then she nosebleeds and other things. The first delay results in Elisabeth’s finger turning crone-ish and witch-like, and the second does that to half her body. They battle each other. It’s less one consciousness than catfight.

I’ll cut to the chase—something Fargeat should try sometime. Sue keeps Elisabeth in statis for several weeks while she parties and is adored and gets the New Year’s Eve hosting gig, which the movie treats like it’s the Oscars. But the night of, she runs out of stabilizer, and the only way to replenish it, she’s told, is to return to stasis. Now Elisabeth is a monstrosity, a hairless, goopy hunchback, and determined to finally terminate her younger self. Except nah, even now she can’t inject Sue with the termination fluid, so somehow both become conscious. Seeing Elisabeth’s plan for her, Sue strikes first, killing Elisabeth, then preps for the New Year’s show.

Except without Elisabeth she begins losing teeth and fingernails, and injects the initial one-use serum into herself. What did she hope for? A younger version? Instead she becomes a shuffling monstrosity with Elisabeth’s silent shocked face attached to her back. Oddly, turning into a monster doesn’t curb her ambition. The show must go on, and she shuffles onstage wearing an Elisabeth mask. When it’s removed, the audience attacks her. Amid the carnage, she explodes, and, in a pool of blood, her Elisabeth face slithers over to the Walk-of-Fame star. There, for one last time, she hears the crowd roar before expiring.

It's feminist.

Final cut
After Fargeat’s previous film, “Revenge,” a feminist tale of gang rape, she was offered several mainstream movies, including Marvel’s “Black Widow,” but she wanted final cut. I guess she got it here: “The Substance” plops in at a hefty 2.5 hours. I watched it with my wife, via streaming, but with the last hour I did chores around the house, checking in at odd moments. “What is she now? A hunchback? Got it.”

Pedestrian question: Do we like anyone in this movie? Or is anyone interesting? The people around Elisabeth are grotesques before she becomes one. Dopey, unattractive men assume they can make it with movie stars, while young motorcycle guys refuse to even back up their bikes to drive around people. 

And did we ever find out the game of the people who provide the titular substance? Are they making any money? Or is it like Mr. Roarke from “Fantasy Island”: they just want to teach people a lesson.

A very shallow lesson.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

In an early scene, as Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is leading the conclave to find the next pope, he talks privately with one of the leading contenders, Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), about whether the previous pope dismissed him over dinner the night he died. Tremblay denies all, vehement and hurt (in that John Lithgow manner), and gives reasonable enough answers, and Lawrence seems placated. Then, at the door, Lawrence turns and asks “By the way, what did you talk about at dinner?”

It's Lt. Columbo at the Vatican. He does everything but say, “Just one more thing….”

Wouldn’t that be a helluva TV series—Cardinal Columbo? With reluctant witnesses, he can just tell them, as he does here, “Would you like me to hear your confession?”

I liked “Conclave” a lot. It’s gripping, and beautifully photographed, and Fiennes is wholly believable as a good, wise man in doubt about his own goodness and wisdom. It's a performance that seeps into you. 

Succession
Initially I thought it might be a murder investigation. But that’s not it—heart attack, old age. No, the movie is all about succession—to coin a phrase.

These are the early contenders for Pontiff:

• Cardinal Tremblay (Lithgow), an ambitious moderate
• Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), an unambitious liberal who is really an ambitious moderate
• Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a progressive in racial terms (he would be the first African pope) but regressive in other ways (he condemns homosexuality as an abomination)
• Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a reactionary, who wants to undo Vatican II reforms and wage a holy war against Islam

Not a stellar group.

And it gets worse. As votes are cast, and black smoke sent out from the Vatican, mud is slung and secrets revealed. When he was 30, Adeyemi had an affair with a 19-year-old girl, and there was a child. As recent Roman Catholic scandals go, that’s hardly a blip, but it torpedoes his chances. Tremblay’s too, since it’s revealed he was the one who brought the woman to Rome to besmirch Adeyemi.

Meanwhile, Bellini has never been a popular candidate—too Stanley Tucci. Which leaves Tedesco? Whose slogan seems to be Make the Vatican Latin Again?

Not if Lawrence has anything to say. And he does. Before the first vote, Lawrence gives a speech to the assembled that ends with a paean to doubt:

There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty … Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

My kinda guy.

Indeed, support for Lawrence has been growing, and one wonders if we’re going to get a Dick Cheney moment—the guy leading the committee to fill the slot fills the slot. Is Lawrence ambitious himself? Bellini thinks so, and I could foresee a moment when it’s all done, when, alone, Lawrence’s smile turns less benevolent. But no, his private face is his public one. If anything, there is more doubt and pain in his private face. I like a moment in conversation with Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who insists on voting for Lawrence even though Lawrence is telling him not to. Lawrence becomes enraged. That’s when I went, “Oh, he’s not fooling. He really doesn’t want it.”

Benitez is a last-minute addition to the conclave—the archbishop they didn’t know existed because his diocese is Kabul. I wish he hadn't gotten that one vote in the first round. It immediately made me think he'd be last man standing. Which is kind of what happens. Lawrence keeps voting for Bellini, until he doesn’t; until, reluctantly, he writes in his own name.

The movie is big on the rituals of the Church—it’s a procedural in the investigative sense and even more so in revealing the procedures of the Vatican—including the way the Cardinals slide their secret votes into a vase before they’re counted. As Lawrence is doing this with his own reluctant vote for himself, the upper stained-glass windows explode, knocking him to the ground and causing lacerations on his face. For a second, it feels like God’s judgment, and one wonders if Lawrence didn’t assumes the same; but no, it’s human beings: a suicide bomber—part of the holy war Tedesco wants to fight.

It's Benitez, whose jurisdictions have been in war-ravaged countries, who gives the big speech that saves the day. While nodding to tradition, he adds, “The church is not the past. It is what we do next.” Beautiful line. Next vote, he gets the 2/3 majority.

The 14th Innocent
Did we need the final reveal? Benitez has his own secrets. The Vatican sent him to a clinic in Switzerland for … well, initially I thought he was transgender, but no, he/they are intersex (the outdated term is hermaphrodite). Though raised as a boy, a recent operation revealed a uterus and ovaries. In Switzerland he’d contemplated having them removed but decided against it. “I am what God made me,” he tells Lawrence. The final question for us is what Lawrence will do with this information. For a time, he objects. He broods. Then he smiles his weary smile and lets it all go. Benitez is, after all (as Benitez tells him), the very embodiment of the uncertainty Lawrence counseled.

Benitez’s choice of a pontiff name is interesting for a forward thinker: Pope Innocent. He would be the 14th Innocent, and the first we’ve had since the 1720s. Most were in the Middle Ages. But it fits. There’s an innocence to Benitez, and in his new place in the very patriarchal Roman Catholic Church. He's the clean slate.

Did most people know Fiennes has never on an Oscar? He hasn't even been nominated since “The English Patient” more than a quarter-century ago, so I assume he’s a frontrunner this year. It’s a beautiful performance. He exudes a kind of holiness.

And now for a confession of my own. Forgive me, Edward Berger, for I have sinned. I didn’t watch your movie in a theater, as you and God intended. I watched it at a friend’s home on their big TV. And they had motion smoothing on. Last month, I tried to fix their motion-smoothing problem, but like the serpent in the Garden, tech bros are the most crafty and shrewd of all the wild animals and I couldn’t find the path. After I realized how good your film was, and how beautiful it would look on a big screen, I checked to see if I it was playing in a nearby theater. It wasn’t and I wept. I will now say 100 Hail Martys.