Movie Reviews - 2024 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

People don’t understand what Christopher Reeve meant to comic-book-collecting nerds like me in the 1970s. We had nobody. I mean, nobody. For the first half of the decade, the greatest live-action superheroes were Evel Knievel and the Fonz. I watched “The Electric Company” for 1-2 minute installments of “Spidey Super Stories,” in which the webslinger didn’t do anything super, he wasn’t even vocal, he just spoke in word balloons and tripped through comic panels. I stayed up late one Friday to watch “It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman!” a TV rendering of a 10-year-old Broadway musical that attempted to do with Supes what William Dozier and company had done with Batman in the 1960s—make him relevant through satire—and, well, didn’t.

A Doc Savage movie with Ron Ely? That might be interesting! No? Then I’ll just read the book. They’re doing a “Spider-Man” TV show starring one of the Von Trapp kids? I’m there. Wait, and a live-action “Hulk”? How is that even possible?

The point is we barely got anything, and if we did they botched it, and when they cast it they tended to cast it wrong.

And then along comes “Superman: The Movie” with an unknown in the lead, and he … was … perfect. You couldn’t have drawn a better Superman. Plus he was able to act as both Superman and Clark? Make the world’s worst superhero subterfuge vaguely credible? Wow. In the middle of that blow-dried decade, they even got the spitcurl right.

Meaning I was the perfect audience for a documentary about Christopher Reeve. So why did it take me so long to watch it?

We know why. 

The super part
In my defense, last year was a busy year, and a crappy year, which is why I missed the doc during its theatrical run last fall. And once it made it onto HBO, I couldn’t get anyone to watch it with me: wife, fellow nerds, no one. Eventually a friend signed on. We watched it in the wake of its BAFTA win for best documentary feature.

For a decade Christopher Reeve played the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy figure and everyone wanted to see him; and then his life became the opposite of that and no one wanted to see him. They averted their eyes. We averted our eyes. “Super/Man” encompasses both halves of that life, with an emphasis on the latter. Which, in its way, is the super part.

I didn’t know his father was a scholar. I vaguely remember the “Man and Superman” story—how Dad was impressed that his son got the part until he found out it was Jerry Siegel rather than George Bernard Shaw. Dad was handsome, too. That’s where Chris got his looks, which he then passed onto his handsome children. Everyone’s handsome in this thing. It’s also where he got his drive. His father was a driven man who remained unimpressed with the son’s accomplishments, which made the son even more driven. “He was an intense guy, he didn’t do anything half-assed,” says Chris’ son Matt. “You could not fail and quit. It was like, ‘You try, you fail, you try harder.’”

I knew about the weight training for “Superman”—at a time when weight training wasn’t a thing—but I didn’t know, for example, that he learned to horseback ride while playing Count Vronsky in a TV movie, “Anna Karenina,” in 1985. Did he go Tolstoy to impress his father, a Russian scholar who accompanied Robert Frost to the Soviet Union in 1962? Either way, it got Reeve into horseback riding; and it was a horseback riding accident, being thrown and landing on his head, that led to the spinal chord injury that left him paralyzed below the neck. It was May 1995. He was only 42.

He flatlined twice. The doc includes voiceovers from Reeve’s memoir, “Still Me,” and there’s a poignant one with his wife Dana in the immediate aftermath of the accident:

Dana came into the room, she knelt down next to me and we made eye contact. And then I mouthed my first lucid words to her: “Maybe we should let me go.” Dana started crying. She said, “I’m only going to say this once: I will support whatever you want to do, because this is your life and your decision. But I want you to know that I’ll be with you for the long haul, no matter what.”

And then she added the words that saved my life: “You’re still you, and I love you.”

I came away with huge respect for Christopher Reeve and his kids, and for many of their friends—particularly Robin Williams, his roommate at Julliard, who was always there for him, always fighting for him, always using his superpower, laughter, to make things better—but Dana Reeve is truly Superwoman. What positive energy she exudes under impossible circumstances. What a bright light.

The doc keeps cutting back from Reeve’s final years to his rise in the 1970s—a good way to handle it. Jeff Daniels recalls being in an off-off-Broadway play with Reeve and William Hurt when Reeve casually mentioned he had to go to London for a screen test. When he said it was for “Superman” Hurt tried to talk him out of it. He wouldn’t be doing the culture a favor, was the gist. Others brought up Brando and Hackman—already cast—but Hurt was adament. We can laugh now, particularly since Hurt played Gen. “Thunderbolt” Ross in the Marvel movies, but he wasn’t exactly wrong: “Superman” by itself was no problem but we’ve overindulged. Hurt also wound up with the ’80s career Reeve wanted: leading man in prestigious films. In the late ’80s, both men starred in indictments of the news business. “Broadcast News” was acclaimed and nominated for seven Oscars, including lead actor for Hurt; “Switching Channels” was panned and nominated for two Razzies, including supporting for Reeve.

For Reeve, these were the diminishing returns, evidenced by how well the Superman movies did. The box office kept dropping as the quality kept dropping:

• Superman (1978): $134 million
• Superman II (1981): $108 million
• Superman III (1983): $60 million
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987): $15 million

He tried comedy with “Noises Off,” and played the American in “Remains of the Day,” but by the ’90s he was mostly doing TV movies. Superman is a tough role to shake.

After the accident he became another kind of symbol, another kind of inspiration. The doctor who treated him, Steven Kirshblum, recalls a boy with a spinal cord injury who had tried to wean off the ventilator, failed, and didn’t try again because he didn’t want to fail again. “Chris went and spoke to him,” Kirshblum recalls. “And the boy simply said, ‘Christopher Reeve spoke to me, I’m going to wean.’”

The drive that he got from his father (and his father’s disinterest), Reeve now brought to his impossible situation. He directed movies. He acted in a TV version of “Rear Window” (shown here) and in episodes of “Smallville” (not shown). His first big public appearance after the accident was at the 1996 Academy Awards, where he got a standing ovation and made a case for greater funding and visibility for spinal cord injuries. “I think the fact that Superman was in a wheelchair, and was willing to go public with it, was huge,” says Glenn Close. Whoopi Goldberg, who hosted that night, gets right at the issue. She talks about the strength Reeve had dealing with “lots and lots of people trying not to look you with pity.” And that wasn’t just there; that was everyday.

The biggest sin
“Man/Superman: The Christopher Reeve Story,” written and directed by Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui, makes you cognizant of everything you take for granted: standing, walking, breathing. But it’s not just eat-your-vegetables. There’s joy in it. How can there not be? It’s Superman. I remember in college watching the movie on TV with my friend Todd, and during the helicopter rescue scene I could feel this huge grin spreading on my face. And I looked over at Todd and he had the same. And we just sat there, two cynical college kids, with these stupid grins on our faces.

Perfect

I wish they’d included the clip of Tom Mankiewicz, creative consultant on the first movie, talking about what happened when Reeve finally got his screen test. The doc gives us the prelude: the people the Salkinds covetted didn’t want the role (Robert Redford), and the people who covetted the role the Salkinds didn’t want (Neil Diamond, Arnold Schwarzenegger). And all the people they screen-tested, the semi-knowns and unknowns, were all wrong. Nothing fit. Until Reeve. Here’s Mankiewicz.

He hopped off the balcony and said, “Good evening, Miss Lane.” And [cinematographer] Geoffrey Unsworth looked over at me and went [makes impressed face]. Because the tone was just right. He went through the test and we just knew we had him.

Reeve made progress against impossible odds. At one point, he was actually able to move parts of his extremities. The doc doesn’t mention his hair falling out but his Wiki page says he suffered from alopecia from an early age, and some post-accident meds exacerbated it. Life gives and then takes and keeps taking. In October 2004, he went into cardiac arrest, fell into a coma, and died 18 hours later. Within a year, Dana Reeve was diagnosed with cancer and died. “Unfair” doesn’t begin to cover it. I think of a word “Superman” director Richard Donner used in a DVD commentary from 2006. Reeve shows up onscreen and Donner says, “This is the biggest sin. This is the best kid that ever lived.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

If you’re sick of human voices—and who isn’t these days?—watch “Flow.” There’s no human voice in it. There’s no human in it. We gone. Mr. Kurtz, we dead. I assume.

There's no explanation for our absence other than the thousand ways we’re currently blowing it. But we have left behind a few things: drawings and statues of cats; buildings; towering statues of humans. Think “Ozymandias” but with water rather than lone and level sands.

The most monumental thing we leave behind—again, I assume—is the volatility of the world.

“Flow” is written and directed by Gints Zilbalodis of Latvia, and beautifully animated. It’s cinematic in its photography. It flows, and it’s thrilling, and it’s probably my favorite film of 2024. I have no notes, I just loved it. It doesn’t hurt that I’m a cat person. And it really doesn’t hurt that the lead reminded me of our cat Maisie: big intense eyes, sleek black coat, light on her feet, insistent, with a tendency to chirp rather than meow.

I call her my movie-star cat now.

Boat of misfit toys
Does anyone know why it’s called “Flow”? Is it the obvious water metaphor or the fact that these animals have to flow/move to survive? Everything is in flux and so they’re in flux. I believe the cat is unnamed, so I’m just going to call him Flow. Kiss my grits.

The movie begins with Flow looking at his reflection in a puddle. He’s living in an otherwise abandoned house that’s a shrine to cats—cat statues of all sizes are everywhere—and sleeps in a room upstairs that he accesses via a broken window. Outside, the world is wide and dangerous. A pack of dogs fight over a fish, Flow gets it, the dogs chase him. Then he sees them running the other way. Then Flow is nearly crushed by a herd of deer. What is everyone running away from? A tsunami.

Flow is swept up in it, makes it back to the house, but waters continue to rise. From atop the ears of the tallest of the cat statues, he spies a passing small rowboat and swims for it and claws his way aboard—and there comes face-to-face with another animal.

“Looks like a capybara,” my wife whispered to me.

It’s a capybara. He starts out curious, sniffing. He’s both officious and comic relief. When he goes to sleep, he just conks out.

The boat becomes a bit like the Island of Misfit Toys from the animated “Rudolph” TV special. It’s a place for loners, and the misplaced, and those separated or banished from their group. Our group encounters a Gollum-like lemur who is too concerned with his “precious,” a basket of trinkets, to realize the water is rising and will soon sweep him away; so the capybara drags his basket to the boat and the lemur follows. A golden lab, separated from his pack, also joins.

The apex predator in this world is a white bird with long legs and a huge wingspan, and for a time I wondered if it was an alien; but no, it’s a known quantity. They’re secretarybirds, native to Africa, who, per Wikipedia, “hunt and catch prey on the ground, often stomping on victims to kill them. Insects and small vertebrates make up its diet.” Is that what Flow is to them? A snack? At one point, Flow nearly drowns avoiding them but is saved by a deus ex machina whale, who surfaces with Flow atop. Feels Biblical. Later, a secretarybird defends Flow against the others and has its wing wounded in battle. It, too, joins the boat.

None of these animals are anthropomorphized. They remain themselves. They learn to steer the boat via rudder but that’s as close as we get to a Disney version.

Amid the turmoil, we get small moments. The capybara brings aboard plantains. The lemur, taking inventory of its stuff, places a shell on a shelf, which Flow knocks off in the manner of cats. The dog wants to play with a blue glass float in the manner of dogs. The bird kicks it once, the dog returns it, waits expectantly, and the bird kicks it into water. Now the lemur wants the boat to turn around. When the bird refuses, the lemur attacks, and both Flow and the capybara are knocked into the water.

Mostly there’s mystery. They drift through vast stone cities, all but submerged, and pass a giant statue, its human head and hand barely poking out of the water. It’s our lone representation, drowning. There’s no greater mystery, for me, than when the secretarybird heals enough to leave, and both he and Flow wind up atop a stone pillar with intricate markings. The bird is looking up toward a light. Then water droplets begin to levitate. Then Flow and the bird do. They’re being pulled toward the light, but the secretarybird nudges Flow back to earth before disappearing, as if to say, “No, you belong back there.” Is this death? Something else?

At this point, Flow sees the boat on the horizon, mews, tries to swim toward it, but it’s too far gone. Flow winds up atop a blue glass float—the same float the bird knocked into the water?—and that’s where he’s laying when the waters recede. These moments are as terrifying as when the floods came. Trees rise up, seemingly out of nowhere, like monsters, crackling and snapping into place. Rather than signaling safety, it’s yet another danger to navigate.

Us, going under

Rainbow sign
Is the whole thing Biblical? A flood in which we the wicked are drown? A boat where the animals line up 1x1 rather than 2x2? And where are the rest of the cats? We see packs of dogs, herds of deer, but Flow is the only felis catus we encounter.

Back on land, the lemur winds up with a group of lemurs, the dog with his pack of dogs, and Flow finds the deus ex machina whale beached and dying. He rubs up against it. It blinks. In a post-credits sequence we see it resurface. A flashback? Or did the waters return and it lived? And is that good?

I hope there are no answers to these questions. I like the mystery of it.

Though dog and lemur have their groups, they still rejoin Flow and capybara. In the beginning of the film, Flow looked at his reflection in a puddle, and now he does the same but with three companions. We end as we began but with community. Not necessarily the one you wanted but the one you got. And isn’t that enough?

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.