Category Archives: Reviews

Hollywood’s Villainy Problem

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Hollywood has always struggled with diarrhea of the mouth. It can’t help but spew forth when it gets excited. Trailers give away the entire movie. Sequels dwarf originals. A comic-book film works? Clone away! A star is trending on social media? Put star in everything. Image result for adam driver

One of its golden rules, however, used to be: Never give away the ending. Remember when people were shocked that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense? Or that the heroine in The Crying Game was actually the hero? Oh yeah, spoiler warning. Secrets were easier to keep before the internet, but, even now, studios request that reviewers not post spoilers on social media outlets.

But leave it to Tinseltown to burn the tinsel down. Last week, Rian Johnson, the director of the whodunit  Knives Out, recently sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair to break down a scene from the film. During it, he revealed that Apple, a sponsor of the film, doesn’t allow “bad guys” to have an Iphone on screen. As part of Apple’s guidelines, the company confirmed, third parties can only show their products “in the best light” and “in a manner or context that reflects favorably” on the company.Image result for knives out

Well, there goes your whodunnit.

Corporations have always flexed Darwinian dominance on celluloid. Ever seen James Bond in a smashed-to-hell Aston Martin? Or Tom Cruise  in a dented BMW? Or a hero whose Ferrari isn’t spit-polish clean? Exclusive car manufacturers have their own usage guideline, the underpinning one being: “Don’t make our cars look like shit.”Image result for james bond in car

But that didn’t affect a movie’s plot.  We already know James Bond isn’t going to die in any spy installment. That the man’s wheels are as polished as the man is no great stretch.

But Apple’s villainy clause underscores Hollywood’s villainy problem. The Usual Suspects, for instance, would not exist, or require Keiser Soze to use a Tracfone or some other cheap 7-Eleven burner. And you know Kaiser don’t Android. Cell phones played a key role in The Departed. Would  the studio have insisted on those old brick handsets?Image result for keiser soze

While the Apple disclosure isn’t going to send shock waves through the industry (Netflix and Amazon do that), it does underscore a larger problem the film industry faces in portraying bad guys.

Time was, studios would appoint villains the nationalities of any countries we saw on the battlefield. Native Americans. Asians. Germans.

In the 70’s, Hollywood took a bad-guy-bead on nationalities. Black and Hispanic actors, in particular, were easy, disenfranchised foible fodder. Clint Eastwood built his legend on challenging minorities to bullet counts.Image result for dirty harry and criminal

In today’s online, social justice frontier, however, there are fewer choices of folks to vilify. The Hunt, a violent human prey film from Blumhouse pictures, was delayed for months because protesters saw it as a political screed against political correctness. It was quietly re-edited and will be released next week.Image result for the hunt

So who’s left? Pederasts and serial killers are usually a safe bet — just be careful the color and gender you choose for the antagonist. Aliens are a pretty safe bet, as long as you make it clear we’re talking about http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/kathryn-cobb-stoner/kathy_stoner-600/ space aliens.

I’m sure Hollywood will think of something. Who knows? Sometimes, they’re even in your own backyard. Image result for harvey weinstein

 

‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ Will Become Yours, Too

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(AP)

Not too deep into the Netflix film The Last Thing He Wanted, the spunky heroine is given a warning: “Buckle up. It’s gonna be bananas!”

It’s advice that checks out. It’s definitely bananas, but not those fancy, ripe, yellow ones Cheetah gets at Tarzan & Jane’s jungle soirees. These are more the splotchy, half-decomposed bananas with those  cancerous brown chunks throughout of the fruit.

Director Dee Rees has stumbled badly with her adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel of the same name, creating a messy, disorientating and meandering film. It’s the last thing we wanted.

Rees, who helmed Mudbound to acclaim, directs and co-writes the screenplay with Marco Villalobos and they clearly admire the novel. That leads to pointless scenes, too many minor characters and a lack of precision. For a thriller, there’s also an alarming lack of thrills. So often this films feels like a balloon repeatedly blown up and then just as soon deflated.Image result for mudbound

(Mudbound)

Viewers might need to do some homework beforehand and get familiar with Nicaragua in the 1980s. Knowing who the Sandinistas and Contras are is crucial. Being patient with lots of cryptic geopolitical conversations is also a plus. This isn’t based on a true story, but then we oddly get a portrayal of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. (Look away, Shultz fans. It isn’t pretty.)Image result for george p shultz

The movie stars Anne Hathaway as the middle-aged woman at the heart of the book. Hathaway’s Elena McMahon has walked out of her life. Actually she does it twice. We meet her as a hard-nosed journalist who has already fled a cossetted existence and wealthy husband. Then we see her flee that high-flying career in order to aid her ailing dad.

Dad (Willem Dafoe, terrific) is a curmudgeonly arms dealer who has manged to arrange one last exchange which will net him $1 million, a lot in the mid-80s. But his memory is failing and he gets confused so he asks his daughter to fill in for him. So that’s how we get Elena in a cocktail dress standing on a remote airstrip in Nicaragua with cases of guns, bullets and land mines.Image result for the last thing he wanted willem dafoe

Somehow the irony of this situation isn’t fully explored. Here we have a righteous journalist who just a few minutes before was declaring “We can’t just look away!” about Central American atrocities who’s now smuggling in the exact weapons fueling the violence. But Elena is moving too quickly to think about it — she’s fallen deep into a twisty conspiracy wrapped in an enigma hidden in a lousy script.

Somewhere in the film is a lesson about corruption of the soul or the venality of nations. But “ The Last Thing He Wanted ” is both too small and too large, unable to tell the whole story of the U.S. meddling in Central America and yet unable to really tell the story of one woman, either.

There are moments when Hathaway really reveals a hurt deep inside — a scene in which she opens her dad’s empty fridge is deeply affecting — but the individual scenes don’t add up to a real portrait. The film also stars Ben Affleck as a shadowy figure and he has decided that being quiet and blank is the best option here, except for a scene in which he eats pie with Shultz, which is just bizarre. There is criminally too little Rosie Perez as well.Image result for the last thing he wanted hathaway affleck

The first half doesn’t fit with the second half, there are too many distractions and the filmmakers think it’s clever to leave clues but they do it clumsily and at the last minute and it’s really exhausting for the viewer. There’s a whiff of The Year of Living Dangerously, a little Air America and even some of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

But whiffs aren’t enough. Ultimately, Last Thing is a banana peel on which everyone has slipped.

Call ‘The Pharmacist’ for Refills

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Spend enough time as a reporter, and you’ll quickly learn: There comes a moment in any interview when you tell yourself, ‘This is the quote. This is the interview. This is the story.’

The same must happen with non-fiction movies.

Sometimes when you watch a documentary – particularly one of the new wave of true crime serial documentaries – you can’t help but imagine the moment when the producers first met their key interviewee and, within a couple of minutes, realized they were looking at factual-film-making gold.

Dan Schneider, the hero – and here, that’s not hyperbole – of Netflix’s rollicking new four-parter, The Pharmacist, is such an interviewee. An open-hearted, grey-haired bear of a man who is articulate and eager to tell his shattering tale, often through thick tears and repeatedly invoking God as a helper and witness, Schneider has an attribute even the best sources don’t usually offer: he has recorded, on film or audio cassette, everything he has been through, meaning The Pharmacist has a vivid immediacy most documentaries can’t achieve.

Appalled at the lack of police interest in the case and with acute grief occluding his instinct for self-preservation, Schneider launched his own investigation, hunting for and interviewing suspects and witnesses while ignoring strong advice not to proceed. In the hope of one day presenting his evidence at trial, Schneider taped all his phone calls and even spoke his private thoughts into his recorder, as if narrating his own story.

That story, of who killed Schneider’s son and how he found them, is a breathless thriller with a sensational twist in the middle. But, in episode two, The Pharmacist reveals that Danny’s murder is merely a horribly tragic prelude.Image result for netflix the pharmacist

Indeed, Schneider’s investigations did not end with the killing. He used his day job to look into an even bigger problem than crack: opioids. Oxycontin prescriptions are coming through his pharmacy’s door far too often, clutched by patients too young and not in enough pain to warrant taking the drug. When he recognizes a young user in a news report on her premature death, Schneider takes his audio equipment and his unstoppable curiosity and picks up the case: thanks to one rogue doctor, there are young people on their way to dying early just like Schneider’s son did. But unlike Danny, some of them can be saved.

What follows is a rapidly expanding narrative of medical, corporate and law-enforcement corruption, doggedly chipped away at by a lone individual who simply won’t shut up and be quiet. The you’re-kidding-me revelations that power any good true crime doc come regularly – the moment when a simple piece of investigative work by Schneider makes the DEA, FBI and local sheriff’s office all look stupid is a corker – as The Pharmacist scores interviews with all relevant parties, holding some of them back for maximum storytelling impact.Image result for netflix the pharmacist

The show is blessed with several compelling talking heads apart from Schneider himself, not least a reformed big-pharma drugs rep who announces yet another abrupt shift in the plot by dramatically barking, more than halfway through the series: “That wasn’t the end! That was … the beginning!”

In the last two episodes, we arrive at the real point of The Pharmacist, as it pulls back to look at the history of a national opioid crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives since Schneider correctly outlined its mechanics at a local level. It is a story of inhuman capitalist greed on a huge scale, described here as being on a par with the lies told about tobacco in a previous century. The final twist is that when the scandal goes national, the humble Louisiana pharmacist keeps up with it, scaling up the same fussy, stubborn common sense to help stem the tide.

The Pharmacist raises an impeccably important global issue, but its power as television all comes from one individual. Schneider, always dogged by sadness (the program never forgets young Danny’s loss) but resolute in his faith and his desire to right wrongs, also has the self-awareness necessary to be a truly great documentary protagonist:

“I was driven,” he says in one of many wry examinations of his own motives. “Other people would say ‘obsessed’.”