Films with (very) limited release

I haven’t seen a whole heck of a lot of films lately but here’s what I have seen, and they’ve been a little special....At the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, as part of the museum’s Liberation Film Series, the 1970 documentary Finally Got the News (left). This is a film I’ve always wanted to see. Growing up in the Windsor-Detroit area in the early 1970s was a very formative time. Detroit in those days was a cauldron of racial and radical politics and this film exemplifies both in the context of the era’s labor movement. It’s about what was then the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which organized within the auto plants and took confrontational stands to both management and the traditional UAW over the treatment of black workers. Says General Gordon Baker, one of the key labor organizers of the era, the movement "pretty much brought Chrysler to its knees." The soundtrack features Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. The film also focussses on a very young lawyer but soon to be Detroit radical icon, Ken Cockrel, father of current Detroit councilman Ken Cockrel Jr. For more about the film go to http://icarusfilms.com/new2003/fin.html. For more about the – free – Liberation Film Series go to http://thewright.org/liberation-film-series. Each screening features a panel discussion.....

 

I’ve always loved short films and can’t understand why they don’t get more screen time, even ones starring famous actors. Like those I saw last weekend and which continue this weekend at the Detroit Film Theatre. The DFT of course always shows its Oscar nominated shorts during Academy Awards season. But this series, called Stars in Shorts, features seven films starring Keira Knightley, Lily Tomlin, Colin Firth, Judi Dench, Julia Stiles and Jason Alexander. I like short films because they force directors to pack a lot into a small segment of time, and usually deliver punchy or unexpected endings. But I was little disappointed in this collection. Sexting with Julia Stiles (above left) was the best - a sort of embrrassing run off at the mouth - followed by Neil Labute’s After-School Special. It's another in Labute's look at the scary edges of human relationships. And Judi Dench in Friend Request Pending is abou online dating for the old (okay, well-preserved septuagenarians). I missed the first film The Procession starring Lily Tomlin but hear it’s hilarious. For more go to http://www.dia.org/auxiliaries/event.aspx?id=3382&iid=&aux_id=14&cid=100.



Was Seven Psychopaths written by a schizophrenic?

Seven Psychopaths grabbed $4.3 million at the box office this weekend after opening Friday. Probably it’s because the word “psychopaths” is in the title. Okay, Colin Farrell is also in the movie and we know that name will draw fans aplenty (even maybe women who don’t like violence). Not to mention our old friend Christopher Walken, almost playing a parody of himself. (Actually he’s the best thing in this.) And, hell, there are people like Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson. So you’ve got all these big name alpha male actors and a movie with a spin like it’s something out of Quentin Tarantino. Few people, however, probably know that it’s some foreign – Irish by way of England – playwright, Marty McDonagh, who wrote and directed the whole thing. Apparently, as screenwriter and director (he also did 2008’s In Bruges also starring Farrell) McDonagh’s the best thing that hit Ireland since the offshore oil boom, and we know what happened to that. But that’s my point. I really disliked In Bruges – well, more like it seemed extraordinarily boring and pointless with bad attempts at humour – and you can triple my feelings (foregoing “how do I really feel”) about this mess..... It’s been awhile since I’ve actually felt ripped off by a movie. Maybe In Bruges was like that. Like In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths is an attempt to be a comedy with a bunch of harebrained bad guys mixing it up. The National Post last week said this was better than Tarantino. Yeah, that’s because they’ve probably got a bias towards supposedly literate people “who write for the stage” (said in an English accent). Seven Psychopaths would have been great if it actually was a send up of Tarantino, not that Tarantino needs to be sent up. And it’s not even that this movie’s gratuitous violence is offensive. It’s just that there’s no point to the violence (is that redundant?). Farrell as Marty plays an LA screenwriter whose next film is called Seven Psychopaths, only he can’t come up with descriptions of the psychopaths let alone a plot. (He does want them to be kinder and gentler, however – ha ha.) His very real psychopathic friends, it turns out, help him. The film is a mishmash of presumably real or imagined crime scenes, all fitting grist for the screenwriter’s mill. But the movie jumps all over the place with an extraordinarily disjointed plot. Ah, the schizoid bit. And the jokes – or entire joke of a film, if that’s what their meant to be – are lame. Not only should audiences get back their time and money (I’d take a triple refund, with which another audience member heartily agreed) over this schlock. But good 'ol – and very esteemed (use English accent again) – director McDonagh should be relegated to writing (with English accent) for the stage. In any case he seems to have wasted a couple years of his life with this. But box office receipts are good, no?

Indie cliché but Lynskey shines

 

I obtained a screener of this because it was supposed to have come to the Main Art Theatre. But its appearance was cancelled. Still, I had the DVD in my hands and was eager to review it. So here goes....Hello I Must Be Going appears the first major full length effort from director Todd Louiso. It’s competently done and the acting – starring Blythe Danner, Melanie Lynskey and Christopher Abbott – is quite good. Lynskey (Amy) is a 30-something divorcee who has moved back with her parents in affluent Westport, Ct., a commuter ride from the Big Apple, where she had been married to a high-flying entertainment lawyer. Dumped from that marriage she is depressed and can hardly get out of bed. Her parents (Danner as Ruth & John Rubinstein as Stan) keep coaxing her to get back into life - or get a life - and especially dress better,  because there's an important dinner party coming up with potential for Stan, a lawyer, to snag a major client and retire prosperously.....When Amy meets Jeremy (Abbott), a young actor, at said party, they fall in love, or kinda. Jeremy hits on Amy but, as the older woman, she’s reluctant to get involved. Still, they develop a romantic relationship as the summer in the ocean side community winds down.....There are problems with this movie. Like oh-so-many independents its plot is a bit tired. How many films have there been about a maturing adult returning home after a crisis, sleeping in her old bedroom, hooking up with old high school friends? The characters are also par – the quiet, dreamy but intelligent Amy and the moody artsy Jeremy. Then there’s the score, with beautiful mainly female folkie alt-rock lyrics. But, again, even this is symptomatic of the omniprescent trying-to-find-oneself indie film theme......It’s also a bit of a mystery why so many of these films are set in wealthy communities where the middle class is afflicted by boredom and angst, as is mom Ruth and one other character, a therapist (natch!). No, I don’t think the film was making any political statement.....The best thing about Hello surely is Lynskey, a New Zealand native who’s got an arm’s length of film and TV credits and is currently in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. She’s a scene stealer, no doubt, and her moods and looks are ones you keep thinking about after the movie is over.   

Russian noir, and classic Hollywood

I made it to two films in theatres over the past couple of weeks and caught a couple on DVD. The best of the bunch was Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, Russia 2011) shown last weekend at the Detroit Film Theatre. It won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Its score is by none other than New Age/Classical composer Philip Glass. And it has a noirish plot. So I bit. And wasn’t disappointed. The film opens with long, studied shots on particular scenes – the balcony of a luxury high rise condo, the interior rooms of the ultra modern apartment. Gradually we see the denizens of the household wake up – a retired couple – Elena and Vladimir – who sleep in different bedrooms and who seem to have two very different lives. Vladimir was some type of successful businessman and investor, obviously well to do. Elena is a retired nurse. On the surface they seem mismatched. Elena spends her days commuting to a poor suburb where her deadbeat son and his family live. Vladimir happens to be supporting this extended family but to his increasing disgust. Elena indulges and is in fact an enabler or her son’s sloth. He doesn’t work, he and his wife forget to use birth control and as a result keep having more children. This is a very simple story but also very moralistic. It’s also about still waters running deep. The studied shots make the film, along with Glass's score, suspenseful and menacing.....I also caught Trouble with the Curve (Robert Lorenz), Clint Eastwood’s latest role as a crotchety old man who’s about to be put out to pasture as a once great major league scout. Eastwood as Gus Lobel is losing his sight and Atlanta Braves’ management thinks he’s losing judgment when it comes to recruiting players. There’s talk of retirement. For anyone who doubts classic schmaltzy Hollywood movies are dead you can take comfort in this film. There’s our hero - Gus, and the folks who are about to do him in – management. Throw in a side story about Gus's daughter (Amy Adams) joining him for a last recruiting run, a love interest between her and another scout (Justin Timberlake), and you have a neat Hollywood package of old. Nothing wrong with that. But the clichés are a little much.  Like when Gus slams into his garage because his eyesight is failing. Or when he checks into a fleabag motel. Don’t think an organization like the Braves would put him up in that kind of accommodation.

Masterful acting but so-so story

While critics are stumbling all over themselves praising Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which just opened in Detroit (at the Main Art and other Detroit theatres, and opening Friday at Devonshire Windsor), my comments are not quite as over the top. Sure, it’s a good enough film. It’s well directed, has a decent script, and has some great 1940s and 50s period scenes, the best being the vintage department store near the beginning of the movie. And, no question, Joaquin Phoenix is great. From start to finish, his performance as the character Freddie Quell, a World War II navy veteran suffering from what today we’d call post-traumatic stress disorder, is fully engaged and in many ways searing. It’s got Oscar Best Actor written all over it.....Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, a kind of religious cult guru (though Anderson says there’s no relation to Scientology founder Ron L. Hubbard – no, not much!) is also very good, as he is in every film. Amy Adams, as his wife Peggy, is fine. And Laura Dern as cult adherent Helen Sullivan, is, as well, etc. etc.....But critics are raving about this movie, thinking it’s the best thing since sliced bread, at least in terms of what’s come out in the past several months. The story’s okay. But what’s the point of it? Why should the movie going audience be interested in this – i.e., the founding of some cult? Why couldn’t the movie have been about a subject that had more appeal? One woman in the audience scowled afterwards at friends, “I’m choosing the movie next time!” and I heard other grumblings.....You know, sometimes you wish for an old fashioned plot so that good actors’ acting wouldn’t be so obscured. And that’s the way I feel about this film. Hell, even a basic war story, or detective plot, would have been more interesting.....In The Master, what we have is a film that shows off one – and possibly two – great acting talents. But we could have got that by, I suppose, watching them sit on chairs and emote their lines on an empty stage.  

The top grossing doc you've never heard of

Sometimes you have to think that what conservatives say about the media is correct. This would certainly seem to be the case with the movie Obama’s America 2016. Have you heard it’s been playing in selected theatres around Detroit? Did you know it’s now screening in almost 2000 theatres across the United States? And did you know that it has made more than $30 million at the box office since opening in mid-July and is the second top grossing political documentary of all time after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11?.....Yet compare these two movies in terms of press coverage. Fahrenheit 9/11 was front and centre in the media when it opened in 2004 and has resonated long since. Frankly, I don’t mind saying I think the mass media has blacklisted this film. After all, even if you don’t like the movie’s conservative slant why not give it the credit it’s due? Media people don’t like numerous other films for various reasons yet have no trouble publicizing them. Absolutely amazing!.....In any case, I caught the flick last weekend at the Uptown Birmingham 8. The film is made by conservative intellectual Dinesh D’Souza and basically follows the outline of his book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage.....The film’s central thesis is that Obama is a man from the American hard left despite a manufactured persona that makes him seem centrist and reasonable. Yet everything in his background suggests he’s of the Marxist left and has been able to cover this up through media collaboration and exploiting the tremendous goodwill of the American people who broke the colour barrier in 2008 by electing him America’s first black president.....In the film, D’Souza makes constant references to Obama’s book Dreams from My Father, which is about Obama’s Kenyan-born dad, a died in the wool Third World intellectual straight out of the Marxist anti-colonialist school. “Only from the dreams of the father can we understand” the beliefs of the son, the filmmaker, who stars in the movie and travels to Kenya, says. D’Souza also points to other major influences on the president such as former SDS Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, radical Palestinian writer Edward Said – who was his professor - and radical liberation theology ideologue Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of 20 years.....D’Souza’s theory is that you have to look at Obama’s actions in office through this prism. For example, everything from Obama’s returning the Oval Office bust of British “colonialist” Winston Churchill, to his speeches equating America with any other country “to reduce” America’s stature in the world, to running mammoth deficits and killing the Keystone pipeline. They’re all apiece of someone of the far left who wants to cripple America, the worst of all nations, D’Souza says.....D’Souza’s arguments about Obama’s influences make some sense although counter arguments can be made that people have all kinds of influences and grow up rather independently of them. After all, Obama hasn’t confiscated the major means of production or instituted wholesale collectivism, as tyrants like Lenin and Mao did. Obamacare as socialized medicine? That's laughable compared to Canada's medicare. And what if America was pushing its weight a little too much in the world? Shouldn’t that need a correction?.....Concludes D’Souza: if you thought Obama’s first term was over the top you haven’t seen anything if he’s re-elected this November. Hence, the movie's title.

Detropia: a review

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Detropia, which opened Friday in Metro Detroit, is less politically confrontational than I was expecting and more a picture of sober second thought. It’s yet another film about Detroit’s massive fall from its status as arguably the world’s greatest industrial city of invention and mass production to its contemporary beleaguered, blighted, and bankrupt state, the poster child for the rusted post-industrial age. Those of us who live in and around Detroit are well familiar with the genre, having been brought up on Detroit “ruin porn” for almost a couple of decades now, originating in books like Camilo José Vergara’s 1999 American Ruins, to Florent Tillon’s 2010 film Detroit Wild City. In fact Detropia is remarkably like Detroit Wild City in its slow, meditative, images of the depths of the D’s urban wasteland. But whereas Tillon’s film is more poetry – with long studied shots sometimes accompanied by someone’s introspective thoughts about the city – “there’s lots of fascination with the apocalypse, if you want an example you can come here and really see it” – Ewing and Grady’s film is more sociologically or politically edged. Whereas Tillon’s film simply portrays Detroit’s bleakness as a canvas outside much context as to why it got that way, Detropia not only probes the reasons for the city’s astounding decay but takes us to recent current events, through which we’re still living: the 2009 recession and GM and Chrysler’s bankruptcy, the City of Detroit’s financial implosion and bankruptcy as Mayor Dave Bing tries to salvage what city services he can under a tidal wave of debt. In the film, Detropia follows several individuals including a video artist, a blues bar owner, and a UAW local union president, who are exposed to the declining fortunes of the city on a day-to-day basis, especially during the recent economic crisis. Meanwhile there are occasional stark screen texts about how many people and jobs the city has lost, or the very limited options the city council has for saving civic services. I thought I’d get tired of the Motor City’s blighted images because this kind of film or book has been done so often now. Even the name Detropia seems rather clichéd. Haven’t we been calling the city something like that for ages? Yet the film didn’t seem tiring to watch. Facts are facts and in Detroit the facts are pretty stark. Nor do I have a great many problems with the characters that the filmmakers follow around, though they’re rather predictable for this genre of film. Raven Lounge owner Tommy Stephens (above left) is the most interesting. He keeps his humour despite the mess he sees all around him. Stephens’ occasional critiques are not so much in anger as in resignation, such as when he says “we’re moving to a have and have not society, he who controls the gold runs the show” or “capitalism is a great system, I love it, but it exploits the weak, always does.” Like many films by liberal filmmakers the economic analysis tends to be one-sided. The movie hints at what caused Detroit’s decline – foreign competition and “greed.” But whose greed? One character says everyone is to blame, yet we’re still left feeling it’s capitalist bosses who are responsible for this mess by willy nilly moving production offshore. What about the decades of wealth these same firms gave the city? What about the historically high wages? What about the fact that it just might be possible that companies have no choice but to slash wages, move, or go belly up? It’s a lesson the liberal-left doesn’t like to learn. Images of a union hall meeting rejecting contract concessions, and a town hall where citizens attack Mayor Bing’s plan to ration services, reinforce this. But, says the mayor in what might be the film’s best line, “The city is broke, I don’t know how many times I have to say that.” Detropia also doesn’t give many solutions to how Detroit can nurture itself back to health. There are references to building new electric cars like the Chevy Volt, or young artists and creative class types moving into the city’s cheap lofts. But the Volt has had teething problems and the creative class hasn’t gained enough critical mass. For once, what about interviewing some businesspeople - yes, business people - like Quicken Loans’ founder Dan Gilbert, who is renovating numerous downtown properties and bringing thousands of workers to the city’s core? Another problem with the film is that it leaves out the wider context of life in Detroit. The city, despite much physical decay, culturally is hardly a wasteland. Just go downtown on a Saturday night when Comerica Park, the Fox Theatre and several other large entertainment venues, are in full swing. Moreover, at 5.2 million people, the larger metropolitan area with its myriad and much intact suburbs is still one of the most vibrant U. S. urban regions, and a far more interesting place than numerous other burgs with better press. To focus solely on Detroit’s inner city woes, while important, leaves out this huge overarching dimension.  Someone who has never set foot in Detroit, watching films like these, would only exude pity without knowing the larger story.