Tag Archives: Netflix

Mank’s the Name, Self-Sabotage the Game

Mank (credit: AP)

In one history of the movies, Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz might look like a footnote. The former playwright had a hand in many famous pictures, including The Wizard of Oz, but most went uncredited. He was the smartest guy in the room, a drunk and a gambler who was dead at 55. And his kid brother, Joe, who directed and wrote All About Eve, would go on to be the better-known Mankiewicz. 

But in another version of Hollywood history, the one David Fincher tells in the glorious new film Mank, Herman Mankiewicz as portrayed by Gary Oldman was early Hollywood in all its greatness and tragedy. Working off a crackling screenplay by his late father Jack Fincher, David Fincher has made Mank into an incisive look at a complex man who was once William Randolph Hearst’s favorite dinner companion but by 43 was a Hollywood has-been — washed up and laid up while writing what would become Citizen Kane in a bungalow in Victorville in 1940. 

Even though it’s filmed in black and white with a big band score (from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) and made to look and sound like a film of the time, this isn’t some dreamy, nostalgic writer-as-hero tale. It doesn’t take a writer to know that there’s nothing more deathly boring and uncinematic as the writing process. Nor is it a referendum on the old “who really deserves credit for Citizen Kane” debate. 

Instead, Mank is about the context around Citizen Kane, the tarnished realities of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the seductive power of filmed imagery and how a man who was once a friend not just to Hearst, but to Marion Davies, too, would decide to write about them against the advice of everyone in his life. 

In order to do this, Fincher flashes back to 1934, when Mank is riding high in the studio system, getting invited to all the parties, helping his little brother Joe (Tom Pelphrey) get a foot in the door and hanging around Hearst (an intimidating but warm Charles Dance) and Davies (an outstanding Amanda Seyfried). But outside of the opulence of the movie business there is the Depression going on and worldwide unrest that will soon lead to another war.

In one scene Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) walks Mank and Joe through the studio lot while giving a lively speech about the “dream factory,” only to end up on a big soundstage where he tells everyone from movie stars to grips that they’ll have to take a 50% pay cut so the “family” can survive the Depression. The hypocrisy of it all is getting too much for Mank to handle with his usual sarcasm. He already believes he’s slumming it in his mercenary procession and is unafraid to speak his mind to the suits around him, who tolerate him until they don’t. 

By 1940, Mank is a Hollywood exile who agrees to write a script for the 24-year-old radio wunderkind Orson Welles (Tom Burke). Bedridden from a car accident, he dictates dialogue and scribbles notes that his prim British assistant Rita (Lily Collins) puts through a typewriter. 

There are more questions than answers when it comes to Mank, including why he seemed so intent on self-sabotage and why his wife Sarah (Tuppence Middleton) stayed around. Although pushing the limits of what a 43-year-old man looked like in 1940, Oldman is naturally terrific at playing the guy who refuses to suffer fools and is always ready with a comeback, but who takes it too far too often (the tragedy of the arrogant drunk). 

The film is wry and observant about the movie business and all the things that haven’t changed, as well as those that have. That it’s a Netflix production is a deafening statement of its own. But it also has a beating heart thanks in large part to Seyfried’s Davies, who beautifully reclaims the life and agency of a woman who history and Citizen Kane reduced to Hearst’s showgirl mistress. Mank and Davies are kindred spirits and she is the moral compass of the ridiculous world they inhabit. When Mank is eviscerating everyone in a drunken rant, you’re looking for her reaction. 

It makes the question of why he ended up writing what he did ever more vexing toward the end. Was it a paycheck? A bout of moral conscience? An attempt to burn bridges? A combination of all? Or something else altogether? 

Mank isn’t interested in providing the answers, which is just as well. It’s simply telling a story about a man behind so many of our movie memories and making a new one in the process. And it is one of the year’s best.

Tiger King’s Court of Jesters

Joe Exotic in 'Tiger King'

Here, in the stark luminescence of a worldwide pandemic, we can be honest with each other, human to human. And here’s the truth: Cat people are weird.

You know it. I know it. And Netflix sure as hell knows it: Over winter, the streamer had the documentary of the season with Don’t F*** with Cats, a terrific true-crime tale. Now, they have the series of spring with Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

The series kicks off with the crazy-cat-lady premise, and then which proceeds to prove it — and then some — over seven jaw-dropping episodes. Netflix has made a lot of noise with unscripted programming, but it’s going to roar with this beyond-bizarre docu-series distraction, which demonstrates that outlandish people who love filming themselves are a formula for TV that’s grrrr-reat.

It’s hard to know, frankly, where to begin with all the strange twists and turns, but directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin rightly assume that it’s easiest to work backward from the (almost) end: Joseph Maldonado-Passage, an eccentric keeper of tigers, lions and other big cats in Oklahoma who goes by the name “Joe Exotic,” allegedly having orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against Carole Baskin, a woman who runs a facility called Big Cat Rescue, who had lobbied to shut down operations like his.Image result for joe exotic
After that, though, there’s a whole lot to chew on. Big cats, it turns out, are a kind of aphrodisiac, inspiring what can only be described as cultish devotion — including Joe’s marriage to not one but two men; another big-cat owner, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who is basically a polygamist; and Jeff Lowe, who comes into Joe’s orbit later and brags about using exotic pets as a come-on to find partners for threesomes.
But wait, there’s more: The colorful characters that Joe attracts to work for him (including one who loses a limb to a tiger attack); Joe’s desire to create his own media kingdom, enlisting a former Inside Edition correspondent, Rick Kirkham, to oversee his TV efforts; and finally, Joe’s forays into politics, running for president before mounting a libertarian bid for governor of Oklahoma, despite being a little unclear on what a libertarian actually is.
Finally, there’s Baskin, who would seemingly be the voice of reason in all this, objecting, as she does, to people housing and trading in dangerous cats. Still, she finances those efforts largely through the fortune she inherited from her late husband, who disappeared under the kind of mysterious circumstances that even a Dateline NBC producer might consider too good to be true.
Because the big-cat owners are showmen (beyond the zoo, Joe fancies himself a country-and-western singer), there’s a whole lot of vamping for the cameras. They also tend to document their actions extensively, which makes the occasional use of reenactments here feel especially gratuitous.
Still, even by the standards of reality TV — a genre populated by exhibitionists and those seeking their 15 minutes of fame — Tiger King is so awash in hard-to-believe oddballs that lean into their image it genuinely feels like a Coen brothers movie come to life, the kind of thing any studio would return to the writer saying the screenplay was too over the top.
During the final chapter, one of Joe’s employees says there’s “a lot of drama in the zoo world.” That’s about the only thing that’s understated in Tiger King, which — even amid the current glut of true crime — is the kind of binge-worthy game that’s almost impossible to resist.

Call ‘The Pharmacist’ for Refills

Image result for netflix the pharmacist

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’.”