Movie Reviews - 2018 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS

The light bulb went off for me when I saw “Road to Perdition” starring Tom Hanks in 2002. At one point, Hanks’ character, a Chicago mobster, drives through downtown Chicago circa 1931, and it’s not a backdrop, and they’re not filming in neighborhoods that evoke the era. Through computer technology, they resurrected the past. “Oh,” I thought, “CGI isn’t limited to sci-fi futuristic stuff. It can restore history.”

In a more immediate way, director Peter Jackson has done that here.

In 2014, Imperial War Museums, a British institution, asked Jackson if he could create a documentary for the centenary of the end of World War I, Nov. 11, 1918. The museum had 100 hours of footage from the 1910s and 600 hours of interviews with surviving war vets from the ’60s and ’70s. To hear him tell it—in a half-hour “making of” doc that follows this 99-minute doc—he mulled it over for a while. He didn’t want to do it unless he could do something new.

The footage was silent, of course. It was old, scratched, and some of it was just copies of copies. Like most films of the era, it also looked comically sped-up. Our current standard is 24 frames per second. The standard back then was 16 frames a second, but Jackson soon discovered it wasn’t even that simple. Many film cameras were hand-cranked, so the speed depended upon how fast the cameraman twirled the lever. In order to bring them up to the current standard and look natural, each film had to be adjusted individually.

Ultimately, he and his team at Wingnut Studios tried an experiment: How good could they make a segment of film if they cleaned it up and adjusted the speed? And how about if they colorized it? Jackson is against colorizing movies generally, but that’s an artistic integrity argument; here, he wanted to see the men as they saw themselves.

The result is astonishing. It's the past restored. 

Not in Kansas anymore
The title of the documentary comes from the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen,” about the men who died during World War I:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 
At the going down of the sun and in the morning 
We will remember them.

According to IMDb, Jackson switched up the “grow not old” line to avoid a Yoda-ish cadence, but it also makes it more of a declaration, doesn’t it? It makes it more of a crime. Political leaders and emperors ensured that millions would not grow old; Jackson and his team brought them back to life.

Immediate thought as I was watching: Can we do this with other footage of the era? Baseball movies? Chaplin films? I assume we can. It’s just a matter of time and money and will. Mostly money. It just depends how much we care about the past. (Answer: not much, sadly.)

Some of the shots are truly astonishing: horses killed; men dying in trenches, covered in insects. Also the ordinary: the look upon soldiers as they realize they’re being filmed. As Jackson says in the post-doc, film was such a new medium, and the act of filming so rarely seen, that they didn’t know what to do. The tendency was to do what one did with photography: stand still. Waving at the camera wasn’t a thing yet. “Hi, mom,” was half a century away.

One young man—you can see him in the trailer—turns to his comrades and says with a smile, “Hey boys, here it comes. We’re in the pictures,” then laughs, and the work that went into that little bit, and all the audio in the doc, is equally astonishing. First, Jackson hired lip readers to figure out what was being said; then he and his team researched which outfit was what, and where its men were from; then he hired voice actors from that region.

As in the trailer, the movie begins with a small black-and-white box that expands until it fills the entire screen. But the footage is still a bit choppy, and it’s still in black and white. it’s only when we arrive at the battlefield that the full effect takes place—that we enter into their world. It’s like “The Wizard of Oz” in this way, but an Oz of blunt reality rather than fantasy.

With such a technological feat as this, so beautifully realized, and done pro bono, it would take a real asshole to quibble with it.

Here I go.

Again, from IMDb:

It was a deliberate choice not to identify the soldiers or battlegrounds as that would ground the film in too many facts and slow it down. Instead, the desire was to make this about the experience of being a soldier.

I think this was a mistake. Individuals, and individual stories, are lost. Everything becomes part of the mass. It’s like reading an oral history that’s been stripped of who stays what, and when, and with no overarching narrative. I’m a detail man; I wanted the details rather than the generalities. The details that Jackson worked on technologically should‘ve been worked on narratively. 

I get, too, that Jackson had 600 hours of commentary to choose from, and he wanted to fit in what he could; he wanted us to hear their voices. But the narration winds up feeling somewhat relentless. I wanted a little more silence. I wanted to absorb more of what I was seeing. Ironic, given these are silent films. 

A long way to Tukwila
Even so, if you have the opportunity to see “They Shall Not Grow Old,” don’t hesitate. It’s being parceled out in movie theaters—a week’s showing here, a day’s showing there, so blink and you miss it. Next show in Seattle is apparently January 21. No, not starting January 21. Just January 21. In December, Patricia and I drove all the way to Tukwila to see it; Seattle theaters were already booked.

I’m glad there’s such interest. Most of us forget the past too quickly; Americans are particularly bad at this. Jackson and his team have put it right in front of us. They’ve made ghosts of long ago seem you like or me. We’re in the pictures. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Hey, it’s not awful! Why isn’t it?

The first and biggest reason is Jason Momoa. He’s handsome, built like a rock (or The Rock), and he’s got a fun recklessness in his eyes. You imagine him as someone who most comes alive when doing dangerous things.

The second reason is the hero’s journey. OK, so it’s a stupid hero’s journey. Arthur Curry/Aquaman begins it a hero (single-handedly rescuing Russian sailors from a hijacked submarine), and ends it with a dull job (King of Atlantis), and the only reason he succeeds is because of weaponry. In the 1981 bomb, “The Legend of the Lone Ranger,” the title character, recovering from an attack, is shooting his pistol but keeps missing the target; so Tonto suggests using silver for his bullets since silver is pure. My father back then: “Who knew the Lone Ranger used silver bullets because he was such a lousy shot?” You can ask a similar rhetorical question here: Who knew Aquaman needed his gold trident because he couldn’t win a fair fight with his half-brother?

Overall, too, Aquaman’s heroic journey is less journey than treasure hunt. Go here, do this, which will tell you to go there and do that, which will tell you ... etc. Arthur Curry’s journey takes him from the Sahara Desert to Sicily to the middle of the Atlantic and then through a wormhole to a pristine beach at the center of the Earth. What, you thought the center of the earth was fire and lava? Nah. More like Maui.

Cue Cher
Something else that makes “Aquaman” not horrible? The villain isn’t exactly wrong. (Cf., “Black Panther,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Incredibles 2.”) Yes, Orm (Patrick Wilson), the next would-be ruler of Atlantis, makes it seem surface dwellers are attacking Atlantis in order to justify a war. But his first act is to create tidal waves all over the world that wash up all the garbage we dumped in the ocean. We get our trash back. Not a bad move. The movie should’ve lingered more on this garbage. It should’ve been food for thought as we shoveled popcorn into our pieholes, then dropped the buckets onto the sticky theater floor.

To the story. In 1985, Atlanna (Nicole Kidman, CGIed well), queen of Atlantis, washes up on the rocks of a Maine lighthouse and is rescued by its lighthouse keeper, Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison of “Once Were Warriors,” CGIed creepily), who nurses her back to health. Love and a child follow. But then soldiers of Atlantis find her, and she returns to the sea in order to keep secret her half-human kid. She's killed anyway for the transgression. The boy grows up motherless.

He also grows up to be Jason Momoa, all buff and tatted and half-fish. He can communicate with underwater creatures—demonstrated in a great scene at an aquarium when two boys try to pick on him and a giant shark almost breaks through the glass to take them on. An even better scene? He and his dad at a bar, and four or five toughs gather around asking if he’s “Aqua boy.” He stands and confronts them: “Aquaman,” he corrects. An ass-whupping seems imminent. Instead, the lead tough asks, “Can we get a selfie?” Then we see a series of selfies from the evening as men and Aquaman get deeper and deeper into their cups.

After that, the tidal wave, and the appearance of Princess Mera (Amber Heard), who wants AM to return Atlantis to reclaim his birthright and end the war. Doesn’t go as planned. He’s seen as an interloper, a bastard, and a mongrel. Orm challenges him to a duel, defeats him, and only doesn’t kill him because Mera springs into action and the two escape and begin their treasure hunt to get the original trident of Atlantis. So Aquaman can win the fight.

A few questions at this point:

• Why Maine? Momoa is from Hawaii, Morrison from an island in New Zealand. Why not one of those? Because the filmmakers needed cold and gray? Because cold and gray is cooler? Dudes, I live in Seattle. That shit ain't cool. 
• What’s with all these kingdoms in comics? Why no democracies? Asgard, Themyscira, Wakanda, Atlantis. If they’re all so advanced, how come they're relying on kings and queens? Or are we wrong?  
• And who’d want to rule Atlantis? Those dudes are assholes. I haven’t heard “half-breed” shouted so much since Cher sang it.
• And what’s with the hair? Millennia ago, Atlanteans were surface dwellers; then a power surge sank their kingdom and gave them the power to adapt. Yet everyone kept hair? Underwater? Is no one evolving? Is that why no democracy, either?

Another question: Shouldn’t they get weaker away from water? Like when walking in the desert? That’s part of the heroic journey but neither Aquaman nor Mera seem to suffer at all.

Just before the war with the crustaceans
In the center of the earth, Aquaman is reunited with Moms, who, sure, was destined for execution; but she survived. AM then gets the trident, and they all return for a giant battle Orm has started with ... no, not us. Not yet. It’s with the crustaceans. Yeah, doesn’t make sense in the movie, either. In the midst, Aquaman and Orm fight again, this time Aquaman wins (natch), but he shows mercy and spares Orm’s life (natch). And Arthur Curry is crowned the new King of Atlantis.

Wait, since Atlanna is alive, shouldn’t she be the ruler? Or is Atlantis a patriarchy on top of all its other problems? 

“Aquaman,” directed by James Wan (“Saw,” “The Conjuring”), is monumentally stupid, but it has something. I guess it’s personality, which, as Jules said, goes a long way. The one thing the DC universe has done well—really the only thing it’s done well—is casting: Cavill as Superman, Gadot as Wonder Woman, Momoa here. Now if they can just work on literally everything else.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Oh well.

I had high hopes for “Vice” after seeing the trailer a few months ago. Hopes were dimmed after certain reviewers slammed the movie for not being critical enough of the Bush/Cheney era; then they were buoyed again when author Rick Perlstein and former terrorism czar Richard Clarke weighed in positively via social media:

Just watched VICE, the Cheney movie. I thought it really was Cheney and not Christian Bale. And I used to work with Cheney. An amazing job. Sam Rockwell as W was also spot on. Only a great script and acting could tell this story. #VICEmovie

— Richard A Clarke (@richardclarke) December 27, 2018

High praise.

Sadly, I’m with the critics. “VICE” feels disjoined from the start and never quite finds its stride. It keeps lurching. It begins in 1963, catapults us to the White House Situation Room on 9/11, then back to Cheney’s drunken, ne’er-do-well days in ’63. From there, it mostly stays chronological but with a few, odd jumps back into the Bush White House. Like the scene where’s he’s eating a Danish and jokes about eating healthy? And then it’s back to whatever it was—the ’70s or’80s? What the fuck?

The narrative innovations that felt effortless, charming and clarifying in writer-director Adam McKay’s previous film, “The Big Short,” feel forced here—like Naomi Watts showing up as a faux Fox News broadcaster. The worst may be the narration that frames the movie. The narrator is Kurt from Pennsylvania (Jesse Plemons), who says he’s close to Cheney. Almost related, he says. The big reveal is that Kurt (RIP) is Cheney’s 2012 heart donor. That’s the connection. It adds nothing.

12 years a turnaround
What did I learn about Dick Cheney watching this? That he was a Yale dropout with a drinking problem who had his share of bar fights and DWIs. The impetus for straightening up and flying right was his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), who lays down the law to her deadbeat husband: Make something of yourself because, as a woman in 1963, I’m not allowed; make something of yourself or I’m gone. So he does. Boom. In fiction, this kind of turnaround would make me roll my eyes, but it works here because: 1) we know where he’s heading, and 2) Amy Adams just nails the scene.

Twelve years later, Cheney is White House Chief of Staff. Wow. How the fuck did that happen?

It’s kind of a blur, but basically Cheney (Christian Bale, outstanding) becomes a congressional aide and then rides the coattails of Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carrell), portrayed here as outgoing, jovial, ribald—and at odds with Nixon’s men. This turns out to be a boon. Since he’s not an inside man, since he’s physically relegated to Belgium, he’s untainted by Watergate. As a result, after Nixon resigns and Nixon’s men go to prison, there’s not many top GOP guys left, and Ford taps him as chief of staff. When Rummy becomes Secretary of Defense, it’s Cheney’s turn. He’s only 34. 

Looking at pictures from the period, they probably make Cheney too fat too fast, but maybe they had to; maybe he was still too handsome otherwise. It really is astonishing that the man who played Batman so well could play Dick Cheney even better.

Is height a problem? Bale is listed as 6’ while Cheney is 5’ 8”. Meanwhile, George W. is 6’ but the man who plays him, Sam Rockwell, is 5’ 8”. It’s all reversed. Combine it with Bale’s bulk and Rockwell’s wispiness and Cheney seems to dominate Bush all the more. It works metaphorically but probably too much. I imagine W. stood his ground now and again.

The movie implies the Cheneys expected Ford to win in ’76, which is odd, since he was polling behind from the get-go. It suggests Cheney was a dull candidate for U.S. rep who probably would’ve lost if he hadn’t had a heart attack, which allowed Lynne to campaign dynamically in his stead. As Wyoming’s sole U.S. rep from 1979 to 1989, it shows us various nefarious votes he cast—such as against making Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday. That’s true; he voted against in 1979. It’s also misleading since he voted in favor of it in 1983 when it passed. To use the Rovian nomenclature, he flip flopped.

I like the false end-credits sequence in the middle of the movie, in which Cheney and wife live out the rest of their days in Virginia, raising golden retrievers. But then the phone call. There’s a lot of these “If not for this, history would’ve been different” moments, but the movie ignores the biggest. Why did Bush 41 tap Cheney, the House Minority Whip, for defense secretary? In the movie, it just happens. But Cheney wasn’t Bush’s first choice—former U.S. Sen. John Tower (R-TX) was, but he got shot down by his Senate colleagues because of allegations of drunkenness and adultery, and the Bush team needed a clean candidate. Despite the DWIs, that was Cheney. More irony: I remember Dems back then crowing about defeating Tower, but two things happened as a result: 

• Dick Cheney was catapulted to national prominence
• Newt Gingrich became House Minority Whip

Oops.

Thank you, sir, may I have another?
Much of the movie feels like a primer on the era and may be necessary for people who didn't live through it or weren't paying attention: Bush v. Gore, Cheney’s power grab, 9/11, run-up to Iraq, the Iraq war, the torture of Iraqis, Fox-News, etc. chest beating. The movie crystalizes a lot of what went wrong in this country: right-wing money leading to right-wing think tanks leading to right-wing policies which are trumpeted by right-wing propaganda machines—creating a world in which the rich get richer and most of us got screwed. And most of the screwed keep voting for the screwers. 

I like that McKay shows us the consequences of our actions. Nixon decides to bomb Cambodia and we see shots of a Cambodian village—before and after. A similar instance with Iraq is overdone—Bush’s twitching leg beneath the Oval Office desk tied to the twitching leg of the terrified Iraqi father under the table—but cutaways to scenes of torture of Iraqi prisoners are truly powerful.

The Valerie Plame affair is a blip: referenced, gone, along with Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk). Rumsfeld’s firing, too, seems to take place in a vacuum, but it was a direct consequence of the GOP losing the midterms in 2006. Would the movie have been better to have focused on one or two of Cheney’s relationships? Maybe just Rumsfeld? The student becoming the master and betraying his former master? As is, it’s scattershot. It’s warm family man vs. cold, calculating pol. The more he moves into history, the more unknowable he becomes.

Bale, at least, is monumental; I can’t recall an actor nailing such a well-known figure. That said, his decision to improvise Cheney breaking the fourth wall and giving us, in essence, Jack Nicholson’s “You want me on that wall” speech from “A Few Good Men,” feels like a mistake. Particularly where it was placed—near the end of the movie. We wind up lurching from the left-wing POV to the right with no intervening clarity. We long for a signal but “VICE” simply descends into noise. It ends with a focus group yelling at each other about, and then physically fighting over, Trump. Adam, I could get that on Twitter for free.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The girl in the poster looks trapped and she is. She’s Shen Man, a live-streaming star on YY.com, a Chinese social network that launched in 2005 mostly for gamers, then relaunched in the 2010s for a wider audience. I still don’t quite get it, to be honest. It has something called “hosts,” and fans follow these hosts. Some give them virtual gifts, which are somehow translated into real money, and in this way the hosts can make a living and even become rich. Sometimes the hosts have huge financial backers and if they’re popular enough (or financially backed enough?) they can enter an annual 15-day contest to determine who’s “best.”

How is best determined? By wittiest? Funniest? Sexiest?

By votes. Except you can also buy votes. And the richer you are the more votes you can buy. Think of it as American democracy after Citizens United, with Chinese versions of the Koch brothers solely interested in promoting this or that YY.com host rather than directing governmental policy. Why do they do it? Because they’re bored? Because it brings them status? Who knows? Director Wu Hao only talks to a few financial backers. 

That’s my main complaint. I wanted a wider vision. I wanted more explanations as to the absurdities going on in front of me.

At the least, YY.com is aptly named. Watching, I kept going “Why? Why?”

First
Start with the two hosts who make up the brunt of the doc. 

Shen Man is a former nurse who’s had cosmetic surgery to look prettier, but she’s still no Zhao Xun. She flirts with and whines to her fans, and has tens of thousands of followers, some of whom are encouraging, some of whom are just assholes (“Show us your tits,” etc.). Big Li, meanwhile, is always referred to as “a comic” but in the many times we hear him hosting his live-streaming show, I think I laughed maybe once. Mostly he cajoles and complains and cheerleads. For what exactly? For him—and his audience. They’re a kind of a team—the downtrodden and ignored. The way I root for the Seattle Mariners, Chinese provincials root for Big Li. Similarly, he disappoints.

How did they get to this position in the first place? I’m not sure. I don’t think they’re sure. A wider vision, maybe showing us marginal hosts with only a handful of fans, would at least give us something to compare to. But I get the feeling Shen Man and Big Li are where they are because they were first. The first ones through the wall may get bloody, per “Moneyball,” but the first ones through the technological door don’t have to be particularly talented. See early movie, radio and TV stars. See the early stars of YouTube and Instagram.

Fame and fortune don’t exactly make them happy, either. Shen Man winds up supporting her father, who comes to live with her. Big Li visits his relatives in the provinces and promises to make them all proud. It’s like he’s talking to his fanbase rather than his family.

Their isolation increases. We see them in their apartments and live-streaming from their apartments, and that’s about it. As the movie progresses, each  gets more sallow and unhealthy. We long for them to get outside. We long for us to get outside.

The doc is bookended by two “best of” competitions. In the first, Shen Man wins without much effort but Big Li is blindsided by a new competitor, Picasso, with a wealthy patron. The loss doesn’t bring out the best in him. He spends months licking his wounds, then plans a comeback with his own wealthy benefactor. Doesn’t help. In the second 15-day competition, not only does Picasso swamp him but he falls into massive debt— something like a million dollars—because he owes his benefactor some percentage of the votes bought for him ... or something. Either way, he's ruined. We flash back to the beginning of the doc, with Li, a former migrant worker, riding through Beijing in the backseat of a town car, smoking a cigar and wearing shades, and feeling full of himself. We expected comeuppance but not a million dollars worth.

Thirst
In her match, Shen Man loses, too, but she’s smarter, or more risk-averse, and drops out sooner. But she’s still distraught; her self-worth is gone. At the end of the doc, talking to her fans, those men who often encourage her to take off her clothes, she finally reveals herself—not without clothes but without makeup. It’s the movie’s one healthy act.

“People’s Republic of Desire” does what documentaries are supposed to do: It gave me a glimpse into a world I know nothing about. It's also a world I know everything about. It’s about the desire for wealth and fame, yes, but at bottom it’s about loneliness and isolation. It’s about the urge to connect, and how social media taps into this urge and never assuages it. Social media is to connection like salt water is to thirst. We drink and we drink, and we wonder why we keep getting thirstier.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Writer-director Lee Chang-dong’s last film, “Poetry,” was about the horrific death of a girl that happens off-stage. We never see the girl but we hear about her rape and death, and we see the blasé and calculating reactions of the people responsible. We also watch the old woman who tries to make it matter; who tries to truly see the girl even though she’s never met her. 

“Burning” is also about the death of a girl that happens off-stage. And not only do we not see it happen, we really don’t even know if it happens.  

Consider it an arthouse version of a revenge thriller. The revenge happens clumsily—not to mention less-than-heroically—at the 11th hour, and we’re not sure if it’s necessary. Traditional revenge movies are all about certitude and satisfaction. This leaves us with nothing but questions.

We three
We first see her outside a department store, dressed in a cute, midriff-baring outfit, with another cute girl, involved in a kind of raffle. They’re drumming up business; that’s why they’re out there. It’s about a minute into the movie, and we’ve followed Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), smoking a cigarette in an alley and onto this delivery. He’s thick-lipped, with an expression halfway between numb and stunned. He wants to be a writer but doesn’t know how to start. “To me, the world is a mystery,” he says later. It doesn't get clearer.

Initially, Haemi (newcomer Jeon Jong-seo) is a pleasant mystery. She eyes him, flirts with him. Hey, he wins the raffle! It’s a pink woman’s wristwatch. In an alleyway, smoking cigarettes, he gives it to her.

Turns out they know each other from their small village, and soon she’s taking him back to her tiny apartment. Does he sense something off about her? We do. Like an increasing number of young Korean girls, she’s had plastic surgery, and in her apartment she talks about that time in eighth grade when he crossed the street to tell her she was ugly. You think it’s a comeuppance moment: You thought I was ugly, now I’m pretty and flirting with you but you can’t have any of this. Bye. Instead she kisses him, sleeps with him. In their relationship, he’s quiet and passive; she does all the heavy lifting.

Then she’s off for a trek to Africa and he’s left to care for a cat he never sees. He arrives, fills the now-empty dish, then masturbates standing up. He’s biding time until she returns. 

When she does, she does so with another boy, Ben (Steven Yuen), who is cordial enough but mostly smug, superior, amused. On the phone, he mentions something about his superior genes. In the audience, we do a double take. Did he really say that? It’s either a bad joke or a worse reality. We quickly suspect the latter.

All definitions are lost, and Jong-su doesn’t know how to ask the right questions to bring them back. Are he and Haemi a couple? Are Haemi and Ben? What’s his role? Even so, he keeps hanging out with them—he never sees her alone again—and the places they’re hanging out get ritzier, with more and more of Ben’s high-end friends. You know that scene in “High Fidelity” when Charlie Nicholson (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has John Cusack over, and there’s a dinner party in progress? “Everybody, this is Rob,” she says. “Rob, this is everybody.” This is like that. Our protagonists aren’t part of the crowd.

The key moment occurs at Jong-su’s father’s ranch. When he first goes there, we hear some awful, tinny noise in the background, and I’m thinking “Is that North Korean propaganda?” It is. The ranch is right on the Demilitarized Zone. Jong-su is looking after the rundown ranch because his father is in prison for attacking another man. His father, it seems, has a tendency to explode. We wonder if it runs in the family.

On the porch, the three smoke pot and Haemi takes off her top and twirls and dances; then she passes out on the couch. To Jong-su, Ben confesses a pastime: he likes to burn greenhouses. He’ll find an abandoned greenhouse nobody wants and torch it. “You can make it disappear as if it never existed,” he says. He says he has his eye on a greenhouse near Jong-su’s place. Jong-su looks around. Near? Very near, Ben says.

For a while, we see Jong-su running up and down the dirt roads near his father’s place, checking on all the greenhouses. Is he trying to protect them? Is he waiting until one burns up so he can alert the cops and get Ben out of the way? What he’s doing isn’t exactly proactive.

At what point do we suspect he's already lost? When he can’t get in touch with Haemi? As she was leaving his father’s place, he chastised her for dancing in front of them topless, saying only whores do that, and we suspect her absence is related to that. But then he can’t find her at her apartment, either. She's disappeared. Plus the landlord says she never had a cat and he can’t find evidence of the one he fed all those weeks. Did he merely dream the cat? The whole thing becomes dreamy, or nightmarish, with Ben is at the center of it. But Ben never reveals himself as such. He stays cordial, distant, supercilious. He’s always seems amused by Jong-su’s efforts.

And he has a new cat.

You can make it disappear as if it never existed.

Revenge is a dish
Any thoughts on the false ending? Jong-su does his amateur investigations and doesn’t get far, but far enough to strongly suspect Ben killed Haemi. Then he settles behind his computer screen and types. We see him from outside his window, and the camera pans back, and we get the building, and more and more of the city. It’s a classic ending shot, but it would leave most everything unresolved. Was Jong-su writing about Haemi? Ben? Was it fiction? Is this the way he finally becomes a writer—via this horrible mystery?

But the movie keeps going, and the son becomes the father. Jong-su explodes. He and Ben meet on a lonely wintry road, and as Ben is about to take control of the conversation again, Jong-su knifes him in the gut. Initially I was so confused that I thought it was the other way, that Ben had knifed Jong-su, but no. It’s our guy doing the deed. Then he stuffs Ben in his sports car and sets the thing on fire. He makes a thing disappear as if it never existed.

Shivering, naked for having disrobed and burned his bloody clothes, he drives away in his beat-up truck. And that’s the end.

Steven Yuen as Ben is getting acclaim from American critics groups, deservedly, but Jeon Jong-seo really anchored the movie for me. She anchored it with how off she was—in a breezy, believable way. It’s her first role.

“Burning” was a little too long for me, a little too dreamy. My mind began to drift. Was that Lee’s intention? It actually makes you want to watch the film a second time. To see what you’ve missed. I like thinking about it, though. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

A middle-aged couple who committed murder hole up in the tiny, shack-like home of an elderly Japanese woman, who lives there with her granddaughter—a sex parlor worker. The couple is also raising a young boy whom they kidnapped from a pachinko parlor and taught how to shoplift. Returning from a shoplifting escapade, they spy a four-year-old girl on a balcony and take her home as well. When the old woman dies, the couple buries her body inside the home and take all of her money. 

They’re the good guys.

Most of the above is learned at the 11th hour, or by and by. We begin thinking the couple is the parents of the boy, and one of them is the child of the matriarch. We begin thinking they’re a family. Which they are. That’s writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s point. At least that’s how he began the movie—with the question, “What makes a family?” He decided it wasn’t blood.

Question: Does he rig the game?

Chosen
The couple is big-hearted in a cold-hearted world. They keep the girl because she was being abused. They found the boy abandoned in a car. The “father,” Osamu Shibata (Lily Frank), taught him shoplifting, he later tells the cops, because it’s the only thing he knew how to teach him. He says this haplessly, but without pity or ego. There’s a recognition in his eyes that it all went wrong, that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, but what are you going to do?

There’s nothing venal about them is my point, and they have an upfront honesty that most families don’t have. The boy, Shota (Kairi Jo), is acting distant, and Osamu surmises why. At the ocean, in the waves, he talks to him about boobs and morning boners and desires. He tells him he’s not abnormal for these urges but at one with the world. “Everybody likes boobs,” he says. The “mother,” Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), compares the girl’s scar, where her biological mother burned her with an iron, to her own near identical scar from a work accident. “We’ve been chosen, haven’t we?” she says. It’s a bonding moment.

Kore-eda keeps giving us these moments. They’re precious without being precious. Shota, upset about the addition of the girl, Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), or maybe because he’s asked to think of her as a sister, and to train her in shoplifting techniques, doesn’t come home. Osamu surmises he’s in a nearby abandoned car. He goes there, sits in the car with Shota, talks to him, talks him into going back home. There’s nothing haranguing about it. It’s gentle. It reminded me of a moment, when I was a child and threw a temper tantrum at my grandparent’s house and locked myself in the car outside. Eventually my grandfather came and got me. By then I was depleted. I went willingly, happily. I was so happy to see him.

When the family is finally caught, and wind up before the authorities and the press, everything gets twisted.

Another question: Why does Shota do it? They get caught because Shota gets caught for shoplifting, and at the end of the movie he tells Osamu he got caught on purpose. Which we know. We see it happening. He abandons the technique he’d been taught, and which didn’t work as well as Osamu thought. (The local grocer, for example, knows the kid is shoplifting—another poignant, charming scene.) But why does Shota do it? To momentarily protect Yuri, who is trying to shoplift too? Or to protect her on a larger scale? To get her away from Osamu and Nobuyo and the cramped, big-hearted life they live with its petty crimes?

Also, why tell Osamu at the end? What is he telling him? That he did it on purpose to end a lifestyle that wasn’t sustainable? Or is he saying: I didn’t really fail. Your techniques are still good. I’m still a good shoplifter.

Triumphant
The kids are beyond cute. Is that rigging the game, too? Shota is so pretty he looks like a girl—the way that a teenage Joaquin Phoenix looked like a girl in “Parenthood,” or the middle Hanson brother in the “MMMBop” video. Yuri, meanwhile, is so quiet and vulnerable that when she finally smiles it lights up the world. Just the way she moves, my wife said, broke her heart. 

The standout for me is Ando as the mother, Nobuyo, who is tougher than her husband. She’s the one who takes the rap for the crime of kidnapping Yuri away from abusive parents. Ando reveals complicated depths with a glance, an intonation, a shrug. She deals with the pettiness of humanity—as at work, with bosses or colleagues—with a knowing, amused smile. It’s not saddened or bowed; it’s almost triumphant. It’s like she’s thinking, “I knew you were going to be that small.” She knows how the game is really rigged.

When the cops accuse her of simply “throwing away” the matriarch by burying her, she looks them in the eye, directly, but without heat. “I found her,” she says, matter-of-factly. “It was someone else who threw her away.”

I could watch this movie again just for Ando; just for moments like that.

WARNING: SPOILERS

About five minutes in, I went “Oh, right. Yorgos Lanthimos.” 

The trailer makes it look more fun than a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. It lies. Trailers do that. In fact, as I was watching this, I began to think maybe trailers should only be made by the directors of the movies they promote. That way, we’d get their sensibility—the movie’s sensibility—rather than the marketing department’s. We’d get more original trailers and fewer lies.

So what’s a Yorgos Lanthimos movie like? Disturbing. Discordant. Often unnecessarily so. In an early scene in “The Favourite,” we slowly become aware that there’s a steady thrumming, thumping noise on the soundtrack. Occasionally there’s an urgency to it, as if it were warning us of some upcoming shock, but mostly it’s just there: constant and annoying and taking us out of the movie. To me, it sounds like a headache. It’s classic Yorgos.

That said, I mostly liked “The Favourite.” And I liked it more when I found out its characters were historical.

Stripped and whipped
Watching, I’d assumed this British queen, at war with France, with a powerful, Machiavellian Duchess whispering in one ear, and an equally Machiavellian servant girl whispering in the other, was a kind of fiction. It was England but not England—like Central Europe in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” It was Evergreen England.

But it’s the story of Queen Anne, the last ruler of the House of Stuart (Olivia Colman, brilliant), and her close friendship with Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), who is, in the end, usurped as “power behind the throne” by her cousin Abigail (Emma Stone). The whole story is right there on Wikipedia:

Flattering, subtle and retiring, Abigail was the complete opposite of Sarah, who was dominating, blunt and scathing. During Sarah’s frequent absences from court, Abigail and Anne grew close; Abigail was not only happy to give the queen the kindness and compassion that Anne had longed for from Sarah, but she also never pressured the queen about politics...

In real life, the Duchess lost the battle but won the war. Queen Anne died in 1714, Abigail retired to a private life, and the Duchess lived another 30 years. In her memoirs, she writes dismissively of the Queen, which, some say, is why Anne has generally been discounted by historians:

She certainly meant well and was not a fool, but nobody can maintain that she was wise, nor entertaining in conversation. She was ignorant in everything but what the parsons had taught her when a child.

There's a bit of irony here. The bad words written by the Duchess are actually kind compared to what “The Favourite” does. In “The Favourite,” Anne is most definitely a fool: easily manipulated, whining, crying, caring nothing for the people around her. She’s concerned she’s fat but overeats and throws it up. She’s the original binge-and-purge girl. You know “The Godfather” edict—it’s not personal, it’s just business? Lanthimos’ Queen Anne is always personal. She's so uninterested in business she doesn’t even know her country is still at war.

Our lens through all this is Abigail, who arrives in court in a crowded carriage in which a man is masturbating in his trousers; then she’s literally pushed out of the carriage and into the mud. At the palace, she’s dressed down by the Duchess, who, enjoying her power, lingers over such moments like a cat with a mouse. Abigail is put to work as a scullery maid—assistant to the kitchen maid, the lowest possible position—where the other servants cackle when her hand is burned by lye. Several times, she’s literally kicked by men, who are more dangerous—or at least more comic—when they start acting lascivious. “I should have you stripped and whipped,” she’s told several times. How horrible the world is. How nice she is. Or seems.

For her burned hand, she makes a balm from plants she finds in the woods, and this turns out to be her in. The Queen suffers from gout, and the raw meat slapped on her swollen red joints does nothing, so Abigail arrives surreptitiously and applies the balm. It helps enough, and she insinuates herself enough into the conversation, to get herself noticed—less by the Queen and more by the Duchess, who senses that Abigail is more calculating than she seems. She's sees her as a lieutenant. But that's not how Abigail sees herself.

The movie then is about Abigail’s rise and Sarah’s fall. In her memoirs, or maybe just via her wicked tongue, the real Duchess implied Abigail was also the Queen’s lover. The movie does more than imply and tosses in the Duchess for good measure. Their wicked tongues are used for more than spreading gossip.

Typo                                                                                                                                       graphy
Much of the movie is funny, and most of the funny stuff—chiefly with the foolish Queen—wound up in the trailer. Colman is a treasure: the whole “look at me/don’t look at me/look at me” exchange. There’s even a moment when we feel for her—when, early on, Anne tells Abigail how she gave birth to 17 children and lost them all. Most were stillborn or died in infancy. One, Prince William, lived to age 11 before succumbing. It’s tough to imagine giving birth to 17 kids, let alone losing them all. For a moment, she seems like a human being. The moment passes.

I would’ve liked “The Favourite” more, I think, without Lanthimos’ singular, distracting discordancy and general showiness. Patricia, a graphic designer, a former art director, hated the typography that accompanied the film. She found it pointless, hard to read, and smug. She loved the women in all their awfulness.

WARNING: SPOILERS

There’s a moment about 45 minutes into “The Spy Who Dumped Me” that made me laugh.

Our main characters, Audrey and Morgan (Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon), two American girls caught up in international spy intrigue, are on the run for their lives in Europe. Unbeknownst to them, Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno), an international model/gymnast/assassin (you know the type), has been sent to Prague to kill them, and, I assume, retrieve the maguffin in Audrey’s possession. She’s getting in position over Prague’s Old Town Square and asks her superior, via earpiece, who she’s looking for. Response: “Targets are two dumb American women.” She raises her rifle, looks through the scope, sees:

• two girls posing for a picture, one flipping the bird, the other doing the flicking-tongue-under-v-sign gesture
• a hung-over girl on a bridge throwing up into the water below while her friend holds her hair back
• two girls doing a bump-and-grind against a shrouded medieval statue, and, per subtitles, “both whooping”

At which point, realizing the impossibility of her task, she lowers her rifle.

That’s a good bit.

The rest of the movie is simply empowerment of those same dumb American women.

Us/them
Our heroes are amateurs who bungle their way into international espionage and thrive there. The outlandishness that makes Morgan “a bit much” in the real world is perfect for distraction, while Audrey, 30 and going nowhere with her life, has real talent for the spy game. Before, she couldn’t lie. Now she’s adept at it. She’s good at the bait-and-switch, at killing (via all those Friday-night video arcade shooting games), and at hiding the maguffin where the sun don’t shine. Sure, innocent people die (Uber driver), but our girls wind up feeling good about themselves, and isn’t that what’s important?

Audrey also gets to kill the duplicitous spy who dumped her (Justin Theroux) and win the spy who’s loyal (Sam Heugan). Both women get new, sexy careers. They start out the movie as us (stunted, marginal) and wind up the movie as them (heroic, central). The thing they were brought in to mock is what they become. 

Sound familiar? It should. Think: “The Other Guys,” “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” “The LEGO Movie,” and “21/22 Jump Street.”

Here’s an excerpt from my 2015 review of “Spy” starring Melissa McCarthy:

Most genre spoofs occur when Hollywood takes someone who looks and acts like us (a schlub) and places them in an exciting genre movie (western, action-adventure, spy thriller). The laughs come when the schlub tries to live up to the genre and falls flat, while the catharsis comes when the schlub becomes the wish-fulfillment fantasy figure in the end. The genre may be mocked but it ultimately wins. Wish-fulfillment fantasy wins. We want us on the screen but no we don’t; we’d rather see them.

“Spy” did the genre spoof better because McCarthy’s character wasn’t a schlub; she was assistant to a superspy (Jude Law) but actually competent. I.e., more competent than the men. She’d just never been given the chance. But when Jude appears to die in the first reel, she gets it. The comedy comes in how less-than-glamorous her version of the spy game is. It’s really a feminist/lookist take within the genre spoof. 

This isn’t that. “Dumped Me” reverts us back to the stupid norm. It pretends that you can join late with zero experience and still master the game. 

Funny/not funny
That’s not what dooms it, though. It's just not funny. I think I laughed fewer than 10 times. I liked the bit about driving the manual-transmission car into the kiosk at 2 mph. I liked Cheesecake Factory menus compared to the novels of Dostoevsky. I liked Paul Reiser and Jane Curtain as the parents, and Reiser’s line reading on Woody Harrelson. And not much else. 

Some of the action sequences are surprisingly good but has McKinnon ever been less funny? Has Kunis made a smart decision since “Black Swan”?

“Targets are two dumb American women.” The movie’s targets are many dumb American women. Based on its pallid box office, it didn’t hit them, either.

WARNING: SPOILERS

2018 is the year the dastardly plots of supervillains in movies began to make sense to me. Either our superhero movies are becoming more complex or I’m becoming more diabolical. Or both.

Start with “Black Panther.” The hero, T’Challa, is part of a long line of Wakandan leaders who not only hide their superior tech but their entire nation. They’re less Invisible Man than Invisible Country. They even let the slave trade continue unabated for centuries despite the tech to stop it. Killmonger, the villain, wants to share this wealth; he wants to help oppressed peoples rise. The only reason we really root against him is because he’s an asshole. But in the long view he makes more sense than T’Challa—who, by the end, actually adopts part of Killmonger’s platform. That was in February.

In “Avengers: Infinity War,” we don’t exactly root for Thanos but at least we recognize some cold Malthusian logic to his actions. He doesn’t want to rule the universe, as so many supervillains before him, he wants to save it. By killing half, sure, but his heart is vaguely in the right place. He just wants to do his job, then retire and sit on his porch and watch the sunset. Who can’t relate?

But the 2018 supervillain who makes the most sense is Screenslaver.

Director as smuggler
First, can I get a shout-out for Pixar supervillain names? In “2,” our heroes first encounter “The Underminer” (Pixar perennial John Ratzenberger), who emerges from below in a giant digging machine spouting the catchphrase, “I’m always beneath you ... but nothing is beneath me!” Love that. (By the way, is he still at large? I don’t think they ever caught him.)

He’s just the warm-up. “Incredibles 2”’s main supervillain is Screenslaver, who is able to hack into almost any system and hypnotize the people watching the screen. It’s basically all about the dangers of screens. Can there be a better message for kids in 2018? I mean, are parents now able to tell their kids, rather than the ineffectual “No more screens,” something like: “You don’t want to be hypnotized by Screenslaver, do you?"

But that’s not what I meant about Screenslaver making sense. Screenslaver’s true purpose is to get rid of superheroes—or, as they’re called here, supers. Initially a hypnotized pizza delivery guy, Screenslaver is in actuality Evelyn Deavor (Catherine Keener), sister to Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk), who is trying to help legalize supers via the most modern means possible: public relations.

Evelyn—who looks astonishingly like some actress I can’t quite place, but I’m thinking some ‘90s sitcom I never watched—initially seems the cynical counterpoint to Winston’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. At one point, she and Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) have the following conversation over glasses of wine:

Evelyn: I invent, he sells. I ask you: Which of us has the greater influence?
Elastigirl: Which side of me are you asking: the believer or the cynic?
Eveyln: The cynic—
Elastigirl: —would say selling is more important because the best sellers have the most buyers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, it only matters what people buy.

Up to this point, I’d been flagging, slightly bored by Winston’s reclamation project, via Elastigirl, and Mr. Incredible’s relegation to the role of Mr. Mom and the inevitable gags that resulted. But this conversation perked me up. I’ve long argued that the one thing we should teach in public schools is how to sell. We all have to do it at some point—even if it’s just ourselves at a job interview—and some of us are naturally gifted at this, others not, and a little help for the latter group wouldn't be bad. (Full disclosure: I’m in the latter group. Virtually its president.)

Yes, this is Elastigirl’s comments, not Evelyn’s, but Evelyn is guiding the conversation. She’s the creator, and yet her brother, the seller, has all the power. Pull back, and it’s Hollywood’s artistic side (writers, directors) complaining about the power of its commercial side—the producers and studio heads demanding sequels and superhero movies; demanding, from Pixar, “Finding Dory” and “Incredibles 2” and “Toy Story 4.” Amazing that this conversation is even in here—in a superhero sequel that grossed $1.2 billion worldwide. But I guess the producers and studio heads know that it doesn’t matter what’s being sold; it only matters that people buy.

But—again—that not what I meant by Screenslaver making the most sense. Here’s what I meant. At one point, as Elastigirl pursues Screenslaver, he (really she) announces his/her doctrine to the world. Please read it all:

Superheroes are part of a brainless desire to replace true experience with simulation. You don’t talk, you watch talk shows. You don’t play games, you watch game shows. Travel, relationships, risk—every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance so that you can remain ever-sheltered, ever-passive, ever-ravenous consumers who can’t bring themselves to rise from their couches, break a sweat and participate in life. You want superheroes to protect you, and make yourselves ever more powerless in the process, while you tell yourselves you’re being “looked after,” that your interests are being served and your rights are being upheld—so that the system can keep stealing from you, smiling at you all the while. Go ahead, send your Supers to stop me. Grab your snacks, watch your screens, and see what happens. You are no longer in control. I am.

On the one hand, it’s simply a villain attacking the superhero-reliant people in this animated world. Except since supers are already outlawed, that doesn’t make sense. Nobody’s relying on anything. So what’s really going on? C'mon, you know what it is: It’s a superhero movie railing against superhero movies. And insulting its viewers in the process.

That’s amazing. It’s basically the movies owning up to the threat that the movies themselves pose to the moviegoing public:

Grab your snacks
Watch your screens
You’re not in control
We are 

They’re not hiding any of it. It’s all right there.

In “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” the famous director divides movies into four overlapping categories: director as storyteller, illusionist, iconoclast and smuggler. The “smuggler” is a director such as Andre De Toth or Douglas Sirk who includes “different sensibilities, off-beat themes, even radical political views” in otherwise conventional genres and stories.

Do we add “Incredibles 2” writer-director Brad Bird to the list? Maybe at the top of it?

Screenslaver ’20
As for the rest of the movie? Shrug.

The animation is fantastic. The characters are either so prototypical or so personal that I was constantly reminded of people I know: the hapless Mr. Incredible as my brother-in-law; the testosterone-filled Dash as my 3-year-old nephew. I was happy when Winston, the man helping the Incredibles, didn’t turn out to have ulterior motives. That would have been a dull move.

The movie was fun but not funny enough. I don’t think I laughed until Jack-Jack began to do his thing in the backyard with the raccoon. I mean, “New math”? Some chestnut to roast again.

But at least “Incredibles 2” gives us Screenslaver’s doctrine. Sure, she’s the supervillain, but she’s not wrong. She may be more right than anyone in any movie you see this year.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Green Book” could’ve used more of its title character: The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual pamphlet that helped guide African-Americans toward friendly accommodations and services while traveling around the U.S. in the Jim Crow era.

In the movie, which is based on a true story, it winds up in the hands of Tony Vallelonga, a.k.a. Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), an Italian-American bouncer and bullshitter from the Bronx. He’s been hired to drive Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a classical pianist who lives in an artist’s residence above Carnegie Hall, as he and his band, the Don Shirley trio, tour Midwest and Southern states, playing before white, ritzy crowds in the fall of 1962.

It’s an opposites-attract road movie. Tony is uneducated, earthy, powerful. He’s a nonstop talker with a big heart and a voluminous appetite. You know how certain movies like “Big Night” leave you hungry? I saw Tony shoveling so much food into his yap I never wanted to eat again. I left the theater bloated.

Dr. Shirley is educated, distant, pinched. He’s distant not only from other people but his own people. In high-end white hotels, he drinks his bottle of Cutty Sark on the balcony while the rest of the trio chat up girls in the courtyard. In black-only hotels, he’s drinking Cutty Sark on the ground-level, but uncomfortably. He begs off a game of horseshoes; he doesn’t want to mix. It’s up to Tony to introduce him to popular black music of the day, like Little Richard, Chubby Checker and Aretha Franklin. He introduces him to fried chicken.

Oh, Dr. Shirley is also gay. Oh, and Tony starts out the movie racist.

You know, for something this country can never shake, Tony’s racism sure seems to fade fast. 

Schmasist
We first get wind of it after Tony pulls an all-nighter as a bouncer at the Copa—featuring Bobby Rydell singing “Black Magic” (nice touch). The next afternoon he wakes to find two black plumbers working in the kitchen, and friends and relatives grumbling about same in the cramped living room as they watch Roger Maris hit a homerun in Game 6 of the 1962 World Series. After the plumbers leave, Tony takes the two glasses they drank from and deposits them in the garbage. That’s what he thinks of that.

Then he’s offered the above gig. During his interview, Dr. Shirley wears a dashiki and basically sits upon a throne—an elevated bejeweled chair. For the tour he wants Tony to press his pants and shine his shoes. Tony begs off those tasks, but Dr. Shirley remains authoritative. He tells Tony to stop smoking. He tells Tony both hands on the wheel. He tells him he shouldn’t shoot craps with the other (black) drivers outside the private concert hall, that he should have more dignity than that.

How does Tony, the nose-breaker who can’t abide black lips touching glasses in his home, deal with all of this? Shockingly well. His racism? Gone. Poof. He takes pride in Dr. Shirley’s talents (quite endearingly, actually), and never treats him as anything less than a boss, a man, and—ultimately—a friend. The gay thing in the YMCA with the white guy? Whatevs. Onto the next gig.

In fact, of the two, Dr. Shirley has the greater distance to travel. He has to loosen up. He has to eat fried chicken and play boogie woogie. He has to look black sharecroppers in the eyes and own up to who he is. He has to come off his high balcony and pitch horseshoes with the rest of us.

Think about that for a second. What does it say that in a road-trip movie through the Jim Crow South, the black guy has more to learn? It says, among other things, that the filmmakers are probably white. And they are: director Peter Farrelly, who also helped with the screenplay, and screenwriters Bryan Hayes Currie and Nick Vallelonga.

Wait, Vallelonga? Yeah, that’s Tony’s son. He’s a longtime B-movie producer, director, actor. In “Green Book,” he’s screenwriter, actor (playing a bit part) and character (played by Hudson Galloway). How often does that happen? The fact that he's involved may help explain why Tony is so ahead of his time. 

Mississippi so-so
Gotta say: I enjoyed the chemistry between the two leads; and much of the superficial period detail feels accurate.

But throughout I kept thinking the filmmakers were making the characters extreme versions of themselves in order to give us our accommodating happy ending. I mean: a dashiki in 1962? I’ll take the artistic license of Tony schooling Dr. Shirley on Little Richard; but assuming everyone knew Aretha in 1962 doesn't make sense. She didn’t break big until 1966-67. Which is around the time dashikis became a thing.

As for that small-town Mississippi jail cell? It’s supposed to be horrifying. But after reading books such as Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters,” it feels like the nicest Mississippi jail cell these two particular northerners could’ve encountered.

Oh, and apparently Don Shirley’s family has complained about the inaccuracies.

In trying to break past racial stereotypes, “Green Book” slides into one of Hollywood’s favorite tropes: educated people are snooty and working class people have hearts of gold. Elitist Hollywood just can’t tell this story often enough.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Last Letter” (Chinese title: “你好 之华” or “Hello, Zhihua”) is a quiet, contemplative, post-longing movie that nevertheless relies upon one gigantic suspension of disbelief. Maybe two.

The movie begins in stoic sadness, with the funeral of Zhilan, a suicide, whose distraught teenaged daughter, Mumu (Deng Enxi), asks to take her mother’s ashes home. Aunt Zhihua (Zhou Xun, our star), nods. But where’s home? Since the father is out of the picture, Mumu and her younger brother, Chenchen (Hu Changlin), now live at Grandma’s. Except Chenchen wants to go to the city with his aunt and uncle, where the wi-fi is better. So a temporary swap is made: Zhihua’s daughter, Saran (Zhang Zifeng of “Aftershock” and “Detective Chinatown”), keeps Mumu company at Grandma’s, while Chenchen goes where the wi-fi is better. As they’re out the door, in the mailbox, Mumu finds an invitation for her mother to attend her 30th high school reunion. Zhihua smiles and promises to take care of it.

That’s the seeming nothing comment that will propel the rest of the movie.

没有手机
At the reunion, everyone mistakes Zhihua for her sister, and she doesn’t correct them. Later, she’ll tell her husband there wasn’t time. He: “It’s just one sentence.” Initially we think Zhihua is just too polite, but there’s more at work.

She leaves the reunion early but is followed out by Yin Chuan (Qin Hao), a struggling novelist scraping by in Shanghai. He talks to her, asks her out for tea, she begs off saying she’s got a long busride home. There, both Chenchen and her husband, Wentou (Du Jiang), are sitting in the living room looking at their cell phones. (I like that bit.) She goes to shower, her phone remains behind, and she soon receives a text from Yin Chuan proclaiming his love. Wentou sees it and he’s not happy. Even after Zhihua explains about the mistaken identity, he’s not happy. He winds up breaking her cell phone in anger.

In the days that follow, he continues to take it out on her in a passive-aggressive manner. He presents her with a new cell: a string phone with an Apple logo on the cups. (Chenchen, with all the tech in the world at his fingertips, is genuinely amazed at how it works—another good bit.) Wentou also brings home two big dogs; then he lets his mother stay with them. Zhihua feels like she’s being tortured. She says so much in letters she writes to Yin Chuan. Physical letters. She no longer has a phone, she’s worried about Wentou snooping on her computer, so she resorts to this pre-internet way of communication. It’s charming and fits the movie’s pace, which is leisurely and contemplative.

But there’s more to Zhihua's letter-writing than merely avoiding a digital footprint; there’s a backstory.

Back in middle school, the young Zhihua (also played by Zhang Zifeng of “Aftershock,” etc.) had a crush on Yin Chuan, who had a crush on her older sister, Zhilan (also played by Deng Enxi). Classic love triangle. Yin Chuan even writes letters to Zhilan but Zhihua doesn’t pass them on. She’s trying to win him for herself. Eventually she does pass them on, even as she declares her love for Yin Chuan; but it's not reciprocated. In not correcting the mistaken impression at the high school reunion, she was, in effect, doing what she always wanted to do: replace her more beautiful older sister.

But there’s backstory even Zhihua doesn’t know. Yin Chuan wound up helping Zhilan with her commencement speech (she was class valedictorian), and at university they became friends and possibly lovers. He lost her to—or she left him for—Zhang Chao (Hu Ge), with whom she started a family. But he was a bad drunk, a bad husband, a bad man. He beat her. Eventually he left. Meanwhile Yin Chuan wrote a novel about and named after the love of his life: “Zhilan.” He didn’t have her but he had that. And eventually she had that. We find out that later in life she clung to it, and to the old letters he wrote her, and the love he had for her. Mumu is the one who tells the adult Yin Chuan all of this. She also tells him her mother would’ve been better off with him.

All of which provides a kind of closure for Yin Chuan (who feels he’ll be able to write again), for Zhihua (who still has a muted crush on Yin Chuan), not to mention Mumu (whose mother, after all, chose death over her). Meanwhile, the wi-fi-loving Chenchen is not as shallow as we think. He winds up involved in desperate acts of escape: for a pet bird and for himself.

The last letter of the (English) title is the letter Zhilan wrote to her children, which we see in a drawer in the first act, and which is read in the third—to not much effect. On purpose? Maybe that’s the idea. There are no answers.

你脏鼠
As for the suspensions of disbelief I mentioned in the lede?

The lesser is one of casting. You know the “Public Enemy” casting story? Initially Edward Woods was going to play the lead (Tom Powers), but they decided the second-billed James Cagney (as Matt) had more pizzazz, so they had them switch roles. But the childhood scenes had already been filmed, so the kid who’s a dead ringer for Cagney (Frankie Darro) grows up to be Edward Woods, while the tall slim boy (Frank Coghlan, Jr.) grows up to be the short, squat, pugnacious Cagney. So wrong. 

We get a bit of that here. Zhang Zifeng, who plays both the younger Zhihua and Zhihua’s daughter, is fine but she’s no great beauty. She's the first face in the poster above. But the movie would have us believe she becomes Zhou Xun, one of the most beautiful women in the world. (The third face in the poster.) Indeed, when I first saw Mumu (second-to-last face in the poster), I assumed she was playing Zhou Xun’s daughter since they looked alike. Instead, she’s the niece, as well as a younger version of the older sister. All of which at least makes the mistaken identity at the high school reunion more plausible; but it's still so wrong it takes us out of the picture.

What else takes us out of the picture? This long-standing problem: The movie industry attracts beautiful people who then often want to play ordinary people living ordinary lives. It's the “Michelle Pfeiffer can't get a date” syndrome. Here, too. In “Last Letter,” we have to believe that Zhou Xun—again, one of the most beautiful women in the world—plays second fiddle to her more beautiful older sister. 真的吗？

After the reveals, a few questions remain. Yin Chuan claims he knew it was Zhihua at the reunion. If so, why the text message proclaiming his love? Was he teasing her? Testing her? And if Zhihua went to the reunion to see Yin Chuan, why turn down his offer of tea and conversation?

Another puzzle: “Last Letter” is Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai’s first Chinese-language film, but he’s already filming a Japanese version, also called “Last Letter,” which will be out next year. I’ve never seen that before. Is it simply a remake? An improvement? Are the two versions a comment on the cultural differences between China and Japan? Or did he just want to take it home? 

I might have to see it. I like the feeling this one left with me. I felt opened slightly, wiser slightly. I carried the movie’s delicate humanity with me as I left the theater.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Queen’s performance at Live Aid, July 13, 1985, before 100,000 people at Wembley Stadium and millions watching worldwide, is often called one of the great live performances in rock history. And not just by its fans. Backstage, Elton John supposedly told the band, “You bastards, you just stole the show.” Dave Grohl, who’s played his share of stadium concerts, and knows a thing or two about how that can distance you from your audience, has said this:

Every band should study Queen at Live Aid. If you really feel like that barrier is gone, you become Freddie Mercury. I consider him the greatest frontman of all time.

It wasn’t just the vocals and the strut, it was the interaction with the crowd: the whole DAY-oh! thing. He got them going and moving and a part of it. It’s become legend. 

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the new biopic of Freddie Mercury, smartly ends with that concert.

Not so smartly? They try to tie up all the loose ends and anticipate the next six years of Freddie’s life before his death of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 45. 

I’m not talking about telling the other members of the band he has AIDS in 1985 rather than 1989. I’m not even talking about the rationale for Queen’s late entry into Live Aid. For the movie, Freddie’s nefarious assistant, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech of “Dowtown Abbey”), wasn’t relaying messages to Freddie, keeping him in a bubble, and away from friends and family. This included tearing up a desperate message that Queen was wanted at Live Aid. Except it wasn’t. In truth, the concert’s organizer, Bob Geldof of Boomtown Rats fame (“I Don’t Like Mondays”), didn’t even want them. Queen kept playing venues that were being boycotted by everyone else: Argentina in 1981; Sun City, South Africa in 1984. They were politically toxic. That’s why the late entry. Little Paulie’s machinations had nothing to do with it.

But—again—I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how the movie presents Freddie’s day, July 13, 1985.

He gets up, feeds his cats, goes out. To Wembley? For the afternoon concert? No. According to the movie, this is the day Freddie finally tracks down Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker), with whom he would spend the rest of his life. In the movie they meet at a raucous party in ... 1980? Freddie’s naughty, Jim gives him a dressing down, Freddie acts the chastened schoolboy and is intrigued. Then he spends five years or whatever tracking Jim down. And he finally does it on this day: July 13, 1985.

And then Freddie goes on to Wembley to make rock history.

Actually, no. Though Freddie and Jim haven’t seen each other in however many years, they’re immediately a couple. Like that. So much so, that Freddie picks this day of all days to then visit his parents, stalwart immigrants, and to introduce Jim as his partner. And he’s not just introducing Jim; he’s coming out to his family. And guess what? They’re immediately accepting of him! Because of course they are. Father hugs son, mother is teary-eyed, son promises mom he’ll blow here a kiss during his performance, and everything is made right on this day, July 13, 1985, just before Freddie heads to Wembley for an afternoon concert to make rock ‘n’ roll history.

In the audience, I kept shaking my head.

Oh, and then the movie implies that no one gave a shit about starving kids in Africa until Queen started playing. Not sure who’s more insulted by that: the other bands at Live Aid, or all of us.

Is this the real life
The tagline for “Bohemian Rhapsody” is: 

FEARLESS
LIVES
FOREVER

Which I misread at first. I read “lives” as a noun rather than a verb—as in “He led a fearless life.” Either way, it doesn’t quite fit. Freddie was fearless in being flamboyant and original. But he was still a gay Parsi kid named Farrokh Bulsara who spent most of his life hiding his heritage and his homosexuality. Apparently he wanted to both stand out and fit in. That’s the wish of most of us, really. That’s where the dilemma is, but the movie makes a muddle of it.

The movie’s a muddle generally. You wait for the great songs (“Killer Queen,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Somebody to Love,” “Crazy Little Thing”), and you thrill at Rami Malek’s dead-on impersonation of Freddie’s unique, strutting stage presence. But in between these moments, we get conflicts that are either cliché or contradictory.

So there’s the fictional record exec (Mike Myers, in a nod to “Wayne’s World”’s Queen scene) who can’t see the point of a six-minute single 10 years after “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Hey Jude” broke the barrier. He gets his. So there’s the nefarious underling who pulls Freddie away from family and friends and toward decadence. (Pull Freddie toward decadence? From what I’ve heard, he leapt.) And they can’t even do this right. When the schemer, Paul, assistant to manager John Reid (Aidan Gillen of “Game of Thrones”/”The Wire”), tells Reid that maybe Freddie should break from the band for a solo career, and then Reid suggests this to Freddie in the back of a limo, Freddie is so incensed by the suggestion that he fires Reid on the spot. So Paul becomes the manager. Then Freddie agrees to do the very thing he fired Reid for even suggesting. Why? How did Paul change his mind?

I don’t know how many times Freddie talks up the fans in the back row, the ones who don’t fit in, the freaks who are different—as he was, called “Paki” (for his heritage) and “Bucky” (for his teeth). And yet what are some of their biggest songs? Jock anthems: “We Will Rock You,” “We are the Champions,” “Another One Bites the Dust.” Each has been adopted by some sports team or another. The World Series-winning 1981 LA Dodgers even performed a horrible rendition of “We are the Champions” for posterity. I would’ve loved 10 seconds on that incongruity. Seeing jocks singing it at a futbol match: “These arsholes would’ve beaten me up at St. Pete’s.” Something.

Here’s the biggest question: Where did it all come from? The singing, the talent, the strutting? To the movie, it’s just suddenly there. He’s a shy kid working baggage at Heathrow and admiring a band, Smile, who’ve just lost their lead singer, Tim Staffel; and then he’s onstage and he’s Freddie. In real life, according to Slate, they all knew each other much earlier:

Mercury, who had drifted through other groups as a keyboard player, always wanted to be the band’s lead singer, sometimes shouting, “If I was your singer, I’d show you how it was done,” from the audience and already offering unsolicited advice on image and performance, telling them, according to May, “You’re not dressing right, you’re not addressing the audience properly. There’s always opportunity to connect.” In fact, by the time Staffell quit, May, Taylor, and Mercury (then still Bulsara) were sharing an apartment, so when the vacancy arose, Mercury was the natural person to fill it. 

I love the thought of Freddie shouting from the audience. Would that we could’ve seen it.

Is this just fantasy
Great casting. I’ll give it that. Dead on. Everyone looks the part. 

But “Bohemian Rhapsody” doesn’t live up to its tagline. It’s not fearless. It’s a typical rock biopic. It’s ordinary. It’s what Freddie wasn’t.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Shouldn’t it have been more fun?

I love that they make space travel seem hard, and foreign, and existential. It was and is. There’s a moment when they’re closing the metal door on the Apollo 11 capsule, with its metal handle, and I thought, “Someone made that metal handle on that metal door to lock into place, and seal in these men on a four-day flight through space, to the moon, and then back again. Human beings did that. And they did that only 60+ years after we first figured out how to fly in airplanes. My god, what a leap. What a gigantic undertaking. How monumental.”

So shouldn’t the movie have been more monumental?  

The eight years “First Man” encompasses, from 1961 to 1969, are serious, driven and haunted. Also ultimately triumphant—but triumph in the minor key. Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) does it, NASA does it, but to what end? A few dead friends, a troubled marriage, a month of quarantine, and many people arguing whether we should’ve gone in the first place. We get Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey’s on the Moon” before whitey was even on the moon. Seeing the plethora of American flags, and the idiot left arguing against going (because we have so many problems here on earth), made me flash on today’s idiot right protesting the movie because it wasn’t patriotic enough. They wanted the money shot, the planting of the American flag on the moon’s soil. Without it, apparently, they couldn’t get off.

Both Ryan Gosling and Neil Armstrong have been criticized for being too emotionless, so the part seemed well-cast. Plus Gosling has worked with director Damien Chazelle before—in 2016’s award-winning “La La Land.” That movie was like the arthouse version of the musical. This is like the arthouse version of an adventure story. And I guess I wanted more adventure. Or a better story. 

Perspective
As is, the story is a subtle refrain on dealing with grief.

In 1962, Armstrong’s daughter, Karen, dies at the age of 2 from a malignant tumor in her brain stem. Armstrong is clearly devastated but he throws himself into his work. He’s an engineer and a pilot. For NASA? I think so but it’s hard to tell. The movie opens with him test-piloting a plane past the reaches of our atmosphere but having difficulty with re-entry and rocketing up past 140,000 feet before regaining control and landing at Edwards Air Force base. Supposedly this was legendary but it’s not clear why we see it—other than for the perspective it offers: the blue warmth of earth, the cold blackness of space.

He talks about perspective when he interviews for NASA’s Gemini program:

I don't know what space exploration will uncover, but I don't think it‘ll be exploration just for the sake of exploration. I think it’ll be more the fact that it allows us to see things—that maybe we should have seen a long time ago—but just haven't been able to until now.

To me, that perspective is: It’s just us. Whatever “us vs. them” we have going on down here, in the big picture it’s earth vs. a vast nothing. So don’t fuck it up.

In that interview, Armstrong also talks briefly about grief:

NASA official: I was sorry to hear about your daughter.
Armstrong: I'm sorry, is it a question?
NASA official: What I mean is... Do you think it‘ll have an effect?
Armstrong: I think it would be unreasonable to assume that it wouldn’t have some effect.

That’s good. The interview is good. It’s one of my favorite parts of the movie. Which is a little sad when you think about it. A movie shouldn’t hit its high point with a job interview.

During the decade, grief grows. Friends are made, friends die—including Elliot See (Patrick Fugit), Ed White (Jason Clarke) and Gus Grissom (Shea Whigham). With each death, Armstrong seemed more enclosed, more driven, until he’s chosen as commander of Apollo 11, the flight that will send a man to the moon and safely back to earth before the end of the decade, fulfilling JFK’s 1961 promise. Did that promise piss off anyone at NASA? Did anyone go, “Wait, what? We have to do what by when? Are you shitting me?” That would be funny if true. But every movie treats the promise with reverence.

At a press conference before the Apollo 11 flight, Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) is joking around, talking about bringing his wife’s jewelry on the flight. Is the conversation a riff on Gus Grissom’s fuck-up during the Mercury program? Loading himself down with coins, etc.? Anyway, Armstrong is asked, in the same jokey manner, what he’d like to bring, and, in that blank-faced sotto-voce way, replies, “More fuel.” Party pooper.

Even so, at that moment, I flashed on his daughter’s bracelet. After her funeral in 1962, Armstrong puts her bracelet into a desk drawer, which he closes with authority, as if to blot it all out. But it's like Chekhov's gun: a bracelet shoved into a drawer in the first act will reappear in the third. As it does. Armstrong has it on the moon. And as Aldrin is bouncing around with joy, Armstrong, forever serious, glances down at the bracelet, and, as if with a sigh, lets it drop into a nearby crater. And we get closure.

And bullshit.

Apparently it’s educated conjecture but it still felt like bullshit to me. Everything else in the movie is so grounded—ironically so, given the topic. It’s the dreary day-to-day. Then this moment. Would Armstrong really do that? On the first flight? When we didn’t really know how much of it was even possible? When all of it was still educated conjecture?

Vinny’s lament
My wife loved “First Man.” My friend Vinny—a fan of the 2007 documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon”—didn’t, and for many of the same reasons I had a problem with it. On Twitter:

• How did they take an event oriented so strongly around risk, optimism, technology, discovery and imagination, and turn it into a moody grouchfest?
• Why did they need to turn Aldrin into a bad guy?
• Why is 30% of the movie about Armstrong’s wife and kids?

Answers in reverse order:

• Because that’s what Hollywood does. (Cf., the wives and kids in “Apollo 13” and “The Right Stuff”)
• I don’t know. (Although I liked this exchange, as the astronauts stare up at one of Apollo’s rockets. Aldrin: “I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking.” [Long pause] Armstrong (quietly): “Maybe you shouldn’t.”)
• Because that’s what Hollywood does. 

I don't mean Hollywood does “grouchfest.” I’m thinking of the daughter. I’m comparing it to “Contact,” the 1997 film starring Jodie Foster. A monumental, fictitious event—first contact with ETs—is reduced, emotionally, to Foster’s character’s closure with the premature death of her father. Hollywood seems to think we can only understand or root for the monumental by reducing it to the personal.

Even so, I did want more fun. At one point, in the mid-60s, Ed White stops by Neil’s home as he’s doggedly going over all the engineering calculations he needs to know for the next phase, and asks him down to his house for a beer. Neil begs off; then he seems to study himself. Or maybe he studies others’ perceptions of him? But he relents. “I could use a beer,” he says.

That's the movie. The movie could’ve used a beer. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

As the movie opens, Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is sitting at her desk at 3 a.m., editing copy (magazine copy, I guess?), with an adult beverage nearby, when several co-workers complain: “You’re not supposed to eat or drink here.” Her response? “Fuck off.” Unfortunately she says this to her boss, and out she goes. She’s walking home in the early morning light, when, in the background, high atop one of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, we see these words lit up in red: NEW YORKER. 

Yeah, that’s about the size of it, I thought. You’re struggling, you’ve just got knocked down a rung or two on the ladder, and there it is, in the distance, visible but impossibly out of reach. Winking at you.

Or maybe I was reading myself into this too much?

Bottle in front of me
What surprised me is that Israel wasn’t some struggling writer; she was actually successful. She interviewed Katherine Hepburn in 1967 for Esquire (“Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies”). She wrote three biographies. The movie mentions she’d once been on the New York Times bestseller list but not with what. It was her bio of Broadway columnist and ’50s game show regular Dorothy Kilgallen. That seems fun. She seemed drawn to witty women: Kilgallen, Tallulah Bankhead, Fanny Brice. Her downfall, which the movie obscures, was the next book. Her publisher, Macmillan, tapped her for a warts-and-all bio of cosmetics queen Estee Lauder. Lauder supposedly tried to bribe her to drop the project, or at least the warts, but Israel didn’t. So Lauder came out with her own autobiography first. There went the sales. And Israel’s bio was reamed in the press.

The movie, as I said, obscures this. It implies that she’s just generally awful and no one wants to be around her. In this way, it's trying to be like “Tootsie," but without the joy. She’s Michael Dorsey, her agent, Marjorie (Jane Curtain), is George Fields, who has to tell her, “No one will hire you.” Michael’s reaction was to become another person: a woman. Lee’s is to become several of them: dead, hard drinking, literary heavyweights such as Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. What she’d done with her biographies—hiding herself behind her subjects—she does even more expertly here.

It’s 1991 and she lives in a walkup on the upper west side of Manhattan. Her main companion is her cat—and drink. She owes back rent and money to the vet. She doesn’t even realize how much she’s let herself go.

Despite a resounding lack of interest, she’s still researching her bio on Fanny Brice when, in the library, tucked into the pages of a book, she finds a letter written by Brice. She steals it, tries to sell it, but is only offered $75. It’s just not witty enough. So Israel adds a P.S. that is. The price skyrockets to $400 and she’s off and running—creating such letters out of whole cloth. 

Her confidante is all this, and eventually her partner in crime after the feds begin to close in, is Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant). The scenes between the two of them, laughing at the squares at a mid-day dive bar, are fun. My wife has always wanted to have drinks with Richard Grant, so this movie is almost her wish-fulfillment fantasy. 

For me, it just wasn't witty enough. Something was missing. Something specific. 

You know who was originally tapped for the role? Julianne Moore. You know what both Moore and McCarthy have in common? They’re not Jewish. You look at a photo of the real Lee Israel, who published her memoir about all this in 2008, and died in 2014, and it’s like looking at Golda Meir. Taking away the Jewish thing is just taking away too much. Not that I can figure out who to cast in McCarthy’s place. Natalie Portman? Gal Gadot? Is Jenny Slate too young? Michaela Watkins too obscure? You need a character actress for the role and no one in Hollywood, apparently not even indie Hollywood, is going to bankroll a movie about literary fraud starring a character actress who’s Jewish.

Yet that’s exactly the movie I want to see. That's my wish-fulfillment fantasy. 

Frontal lobotomy
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” written by both Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, and directed by Marielle Heller, isn’t bad. It’s just ... too much the dead end. It’s too drab. It should’ve been livelier. More pretensions should’ve been popped. The dead end, by the way, isn’t just Israel’s world but what the literary world had become by then: overwhelmed by other media; relegated to the margins, and to airless bookshops. Israel’s a woman out of time but doesn’t seem to realize it. Or the movie doesn’t.

I did like her swipes at Nora Ephron, with whom she shared an agent. The movie seems to join in on the tweaking by presenting us with Ephronesque images of Manhattan, and Ephronesque standards on the soundtrack, to accompany this very unromantic story.

Israel’s crimes are mostly victimless. Or the victims are snooty, tight-assed book dealers, so we don’t care. But the victims are also literary heavyweights and history. So we should.

There’s a good scene near the end when Israel sees one of her faux Dorothy Parker letters being sold in the window of a bookshop. It’s now up to $1900. She asks the bookseller how they know the letter is authentic, and he says it comes with a letter of authenticity. She asks if this letter of authenticity has a letter of authenticity, then drops a few hints indicating that the letter is indeed a fraud—hers. The bookseller is scandalized. He goes to the window, looks at the letter, is about to walk away with it. But nah. It’s $1900. Back it goes. Back into history.

Act III, scene ii

Last week, Patricia and I watched the HBO doc, “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” by Susan Lacy (recommended). The five acts are based upon the men in her life—the men who seem to dictate who she is or what she‘ll become:

• Act I: Henry Fonda
• Act II: Roger Vadim
• Act III: Tom Hayden
• Act IV: Ted Turner

Act V is the happy ending. She becomes herself. That’s the narrative, the journey of discovery—the late-in-life realization that she doesn't need a man, or need to please a man, and that she's most herself when she's with other women. This narrative isn't without validity. It's just a little neat.

What goes unmentioned? Each man isn't just new: He upends the previous man. He's the opposite of the previous man. Henry Fonda, her father, is the all-American with staunch values and probriety, so, in the ‘60s,  she winds up with Roger Vadim, a licentious Frenchman who isn’t particularly interested in politics, after whom, in the ‘70s, she marries Tom Hayden, wholly interested in politics and in fighting the worst aspects of capitalism, so, of course, in the ’90s, she is wooed and won by super-capitalist Ted Turner.

She doesn't have a “type,” does she? Or her type is the opposite of the previous type.   

In the doc, she makes herself seem like the acted upon in all of this, the controlled, but some part of me wonders if she didn't do some controlling. She got to choose, after all. For all her insecurities, she was Jane Fonda. That counted for something. That always counted for something. 

It's a shame she gave up on Hollywood around the time Hollywood was giving up on her for leading roles. In 1990, she co-starred with Robert De Niro in “Stanley & Iris” then didn't make another movie for 15 years: “Monster in Law” with Jennifer Lopez, when she was 68. One wonders what she might‘ve done if Ted Turner hadn’t come along. The roles she missed out on. What we missed out on.   

It's a shame, too, that the doc was made before #MeToo broke. That would‘ve been an interesting conversation. 

As for Henry? I still remember the GAF commercial he made in the early 1970s. He was doing his usual schpiel, and at the the end, a little girl goes up to him and reverses the definitions. “Aren’t you Jane Fonda's father?” she asks. And he gives the camera a kind of hapless shrug. I always found it charming. I wonder if Jane ever saw it?