News You Can Bruise for 2016 August 2 (entry 0)

Tue Aug 02 2016 19:07 July Film Roundup: Rising global temperatures, political documentary series, and blockbusters in franchises I care about ensure that I spend a lot of time in air-conditioned theaters this summer. The result is a Film Roundup for the ages! Specifically, ages 13 and up. (Sorry—COPPA demands it!)

• Armageddon (1998): The film so bad it got its own Film Roundup Special.
• Blood Simple (1984): Looking back this movie feels like a dry run for Fargo, but on its own terms it's really good, sort of a twisted version of "Gift of the Magi". Saw it with Sarah and we both enjoyed it a lot. Keeps the tension going to the penultimate shot! Then you get one shot of resolution and leave the theater a broken mess.
• Kung Fu Hustle (2004): Fun action film that keeps the violence cartoonish to the point of showing people with Road Runner-type rotating legs. It sure beats The Mermaid, although no one thing was as funny as the police station scene in The Mermaid.

  That said, I'm not really clear on who hustled whom or what the hustle was. Perhaps I, the audience member, have been hustled?

• The Sound of a Flower (2015): Inspiring Korean drama of a woman pansori performer who just wants to portray a Ghostbuster on stage, but the rules of nineteenth-century Korean opera require that Ghostbuster roles (plus all other roles) go to men. Will her high-pitched singing break the glass [ceiling]? It's basically a sports movie, so yes.

  This was the consensus Asian Film Festival choice between me, Sumana, and one of her friends; and as often happens with consensus picks we were all kind of let down. Pansori is a genre that's not that interesting to me, and although I'm not qualified to judge, according to the programmer of the film festival, star Suzy Bae's pansori singing isn't great.

• Antigone (2016): We made an unprecedented third excursion to a live theater event. This was a local theater production and it wasn't great. I'm interested in seeing other things in the same space, because it's relatively convenient and incredibly cheap compared to other theater options in New York.
• Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (2016): I liked this documentary a lot because I came into the movie knowing absolutely nothing about Norman Lear, and learning about him from a short documentary was a lot more entertaining than learning the same facts from Wikipedia.

  Like, just as an example, Norman Lear wasn't just a successful TV guy. At one point he was the producer of five of the top ten network shows. He plowed his millions right back into television, producing a special called "I Love Freedom" to push back against the religious right, a special which featured Robin Williams playing the American flag. He bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence and sent it on a road trip in an attempt to inoculate people against anti-American authoritarianism. And in the interviews he really opens up and talks candidly about the darkest parts of himself. Compare someone like Mel Brooks, who shows up in this movie and spends most of his scene telling one really long joke. Really interesting show.

• Bob Roberts (1992): Tim Robbins film suffers from all the problems you'd imagine from a political mockumentary made by a stereotypical Hollywood liberal who writes, directs, stars and performs the folk song parodies. Seriously, watch Tanner '88 (below) instead. Giancarlo Esposito does a good job with what he's given. Sumana and I agree there there are several minutes of footage after what really should be the last, creepy shot of the movie.
• Ghostbusters (2016): Really solid. I prefer the worldbuilding in the original, but I find 2016's escalating gags funnier than 1984's more situational humor. No reason you can't have both. In fact, have them all!

  Unlike a lot of modern action movies (see Star Trek: Beyond: below), I could follow the action scenes even when they got complicated. And looking forward, the end of this film gives me confidence the sequel will avoid the worst problem with Ghostbusters II (1989).

• Caucus (2013): This documentary about the 2012 Iowa caucuses does what Bob Roberts was too self-righteous to do: present a complex portrait of a man whose politics are awful (here, Rick Santorum). This film is full of people you will hopefully never have to care about, humiliating themselves to no purpose, but Santorum is the standout.

  He's got a couple great scenes, but the one that sticks out in my mind has a frustrated Iowan throwing a big blob of generalized resentment at Santorum, and he listens and sympathizes and probes around the conspiracy theory for some normal conservative sentiments he can agree with. It's a sign of how low the bar has been moved since 2012, but I found that really touching. Rick Santorum does the basic job of a politician.

• Chicago (2016): A fourth live theater production! We saw the all-female Takurazuka production. Sumana likes Chicago and she also likes it when women play roles that are the eternal birthright of men, so we dressed up (slightly) and headed to Lincoln Center, where we we ran into our friends Mirabai and Kate, also there to see Chicago! A pleasant surprise.

  I'd never seen Chicago before, so seeing it in Japanese was a nice stretch. Overall I would rate the musical as "okay". After the show Takurazuka did a medley of their greatest hits, with elaborate costumes and cross-dressing galore. As usual when we go out to a live theater event, I'm unhappy with the cost, but Takurazuka did give me the feeling of seeing something that I'd never be able to experience any other way, so I'm glad we went.

  Mirabai, a big Chicago fan, was not impressed by my trivia tidbit: that according to IMDB ratings Chicago was the 155th-best movie of 2002, the worst performance of any Best Picture winner. Maybe you'll be impressed! Who knows? Actually I'm a little suspicious of this number; I did some spot checks on some well-known 2002 movies and the only one I saw with a higher rating than Chicago was The Hours.

• Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004): Super enjoyable documentary of the Shirley Chisholm campaign. Unlike most long-shot presidential candidates, Chisholm had a good plan: to get some delegates and use them as leverage to affect the party platform. It's the plan Bernie Sanders started out and ended up with.

  This is a fascinating film, partly due to the inclusion of tons of candid footage from two contemporaneous films where people heard about the Chisholm campaign and thought "I must follow them around!" but never actually released a film. Caucus gives you the 'real' candidates by showing the abrasive effect on their emotional defenses of a grueling sequence of public events. These unfinished films achieve 'reality' by going right into Chisholm's Congressional office and convention hotel room. It helps that she's the same person in private as in public. The scene where Chisholm is watching the convention on TV, she picks up the phone and tells her delegates to vote how they want—it's the kind of moment that's often dramatized but that documentaries rarely have the camera running to show you for real.

  Director Shola Lynch showed up for a Q&A afterwards and mentioned some fun trivia about Shirley Chisholm's initial congressional run, plus what happened in 2004 when she took the film to Chisholm's Florida home to screen it for her. Chisholm originally hadn't wanted to watch the movie, didn't even have a VCR, but now she was sitting, watching, not saying anything, and Lynch was getting really nervous, until a friend called Chisholm's phone and she went off to answer it. Lynch overheard (paraphrase of a paraphrase): "No, I'm busy! We're going to be late! We're going to be late to the Early Bird Special! I'm watching the most incredible film!"

• Star Trek: Beyond (2016): I'm not going to say "Trek is back!" but... people who understand Trek are in charge again. There's a decent story here, and I respect the fake-out where the villain from a bad Trek movie (Ru'afo) turned out to be the villain from a good Trek movie (Colonel West).

  The Simon Pegg script does a lot to save this movie, at the cost of making Scotty's relationship with Keenser ever weirder. Lots of cool spaceship grunge—Star Trek finally stealing the best thing about Star Wars. Nice character moments between Spock and McCoy, some cleverness during the impossible-to-follow action scenes. We old-school fans have to take our enjoyment where we can, you know?

  Oh yeah, I saw this movie in 3D (not my choice) and I totally forgot about it the whole time I was writing this review, until just now. It felt like a normal 2D movie. Don't know what that says about me or the movie.

• And finally, it's time to shine the Television Spotlight on the most authentic political mockumentary, Tanner '88 (1988). What better way to introduce me to Robert Altman's work than to watch this Garry Trudeau collaboration? It occupies the place where you'll find a lot of middle-highbrow cinema, a space that used to baffle me, where the attitude is humorous but there's not a lot of jokes per se. Overall recommended, partly for entertainment value, partly for its influence, partly for sheer cleverness.

  Behind-the-scenes interview says that Altman had such a great time doing Tanner '88 that he wanted to keep it going after Tanner's inevitable loss. This is an attitude shared by many real presidential candidates, but the amazing DNC episode is the highlight of the series and it's good that HBO pulled the plug afterwards because you can already feel it start to go downhill.