Summer doldrums

Wow, this has been a bad summer for movies. And I’m not even talking about blockbusters, which have also gone missing in action. Art house theatre releases have been flat. What to do? Go to see what the most interesting flicks on the big screen might be, and otherwise sit at home and turn on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). And, yeah, there’s Netflix…. So, here’s what I’ve been watching over the past month:

Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley), in theatres: This is the edgiest film I’ve seen all summer, but its edge carves into a familiar script. And if you can stand the cacophonous sound track you’re a better person than me. The plot revolves around Cassius "Cash" Green (Lakeith Stanfield, Get Out, Selma), a naïve recruit to an Oakland call centre. He’s tipped by Langston (Danny Glover) that if he wants to make sales he has to use a “white voice.” He proceeds and graduates to the elite ranks of selling. But when fellow employees go on strike he, now in suit and tie, blithely crosses the picket line. To his ultimate peril. He’s humiliated to the nth degree, including doused in excrement on a TV game show. Yes, Riley, a communist activist, really wants to ram the point home. The movie’s one truth is the capitulating to another identity, forced by racism. Technically, it has as much visual dissonance as audio, with sets having an artificial claustrophobic feel. The movie zings but it doesn’t quite sing. 

The Constant Gardiner (2005, Fernando Meirelles) on Netflix. Is this film now 13 years old? And who could have thought that the early 2000s would start to have a dated look? The clunkier laptop computers and almost comical computer screen dialogue boxes are dead giveaways. And so too is the fact a British diplomat in sweltering Kenya wears suit and tie. (Maybe they still do.) Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, accosted in the post 9/11 world by a social activist, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), who accuses Her Majesty’s government of Iraq War complicity. They of course fall in love. In Africa, her Amnesty prowess conflicts with his High Commission work. It’s then that the real story unwinds. The plot seems slightly over the top – murders to keep a drug company’s immoral protocols under wraps - but maybe I’m just naïve. The story is apparently based on a true incident, recounted in John le Carré’s novel of the same name, though it may have gilded the lily. (The author says it’s “lame” compared to the real thing). Meirelles’ direction is good, and the plot is marked by appropriate le Carré international jet set intrigue. The scenes of Kenya’s vast poverty are eye-opening.

A couple of weekends ago I spent a whole day watching Gary Cooper films on TCM: The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Love in the Afternoon (1957), The Fountainhead (1949), The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and Sergeant York (1941). Cooper’s versatility as a more serious “ah shucks” version of Jimmy Stewart’s everyman, in the heroic mode, comes in a variety of disguises. Like as Longfellow Deeds, the naïve but morally upright inheritor who uncannily exposes corruption all around him. (Photo left) Or as Lou Gehrig as an everyman who just happens to be 1930s baseball superstar. Or as a hillbilly pacifist who nonetheless takes up arms as the lesser of two evils. In Love in the Afternoon, though, he has a Cary Grant persona as the urbane older gentleman to Audrey Hepburn’s sassy ingenue. And in The Fountainhead, how can he be anything other than a larger-than-life straight shooter in the Ayn Rand story of an uncompromising architect?