Spoiler alerts have become to movies what the Surgeon General’s warning became to smoking: a perfunctory caution before ill-advised behavior.
Remember plot twists in movies? The stunning revelations in films such as Psycho, The Crying Game and TheSixthSense? Good times.
And getting rarer. When was the last time you were surprised by a movie’s plot?
Studios are trying to maintain the mystery: In the ad frenzy promoting Daniel Craig’s final film as James Bond, No Time To Die, trailers exclaimed (and still do) “You won’t believe the ending!”
Perhaps. Unless you read the Wikipedia entry for the movie. It spelled out the ending in detail — on the movie’s opening weekend.
This is the new rule, not the exception, in Hollywood’s click-bait reality. Movie reviews and plot secrets air on social media the day a movie opens, if not before. Some YouTube movie critiques are ad-libbed on cell phones outside the theater that just aired the film.
And it’s not only the ending. The Eternals, Disney’s latest comic-book entry, led all moves this weekend with a respectable $70 million in the U.S. — only in theaters.
But for those who enjoy Marvel’s trademark end-credits for their cameos and plot clues, bad news: Wikipedia listed that as well. Twice, actually: Eternals had a mid-end-credit scene, too. Both were duly described.
This poses a conundrum for an industry that must tease a film without giving away away too much. Studios are already laboring to sell kids on the theatrical experience itself, no small task in a pandemic. That job becomes tougher without intrigue.
So what fate, the movie twist? Already, fans are calling on fellow cinephiles to be more discreet.
Studios are asking reviewers sign agreements that they will not write on social media about a movie before their reviews. And more film reviews and analyses can be found on YouTube with a “NO SPOILERS” guarantee.
But for now, it’s up to the viewer to provide the suspension of disbelief. And surprise
First it was TV. His visual opuses — Hemingway, Vietnam, The Civil War — put other television shows to shame, including my favorites: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, The Simpsons.
NOW he’s ruined storytelling for me. His latest non-fiction tale, Ali, ranks among my favorites. I was already a sports nut, so there was no chance I would not like the PBS series.
But what caught me flush on the jaw was his undercutting of my assumptions about not only the man, but what I believed to be true about Malcolm X, my career of choice and, more importantly, my father’s.
Ali is Burns at his poetic peak. Throughout his career, Burns has managed to affect the cadence and mannerisms of every American milieu he’s portrayed. Hemingway had the sparseness of the author; The Civil War seemed to live on sepia parchment, like the letters of long-gone soldiers; you could almost taste the horse nipple of a stadium hot dog in Baseball.
In Ali, we are ringside and blood-spattered at Muhammad Ali’s greatest bouts. Set to a pulsating house beat, Ali sets up the Kentucky boxer’s most important battles, in and out of the ring. And because Burns is, at heart, a gumshoe reporter, he invariably finds details overlooked or ignored by history. Ali even makes the outcome of fights decided decades ago feel uncertain, a masterstroke of any sports documentarian.
But Burns goes deeper, sparring with the subject matter. Like Ali the fighter, Burns the storyteller rope-a-dopes viewers, luring them into looking at one thing while — Pow! — stinging with a jab that clears whatever preconceived notions were in your head.
In this case, that would include haymaker epiphanies about Malcolm X, The Nation of Islam, and the media of my father’s era, all of which combined to turn Ali into a social pariah. Burns exposes not only the Sweet Science, but the mad scientists who were determined to turn a flawed man into flawless hero — or fatally flawed villain.
Among the mini-documentaries to emerge from Ali, no subject stands as tall as Malcolm X. Burns reveals that Malcolm X was such good friends with Ali that after the boxer claimed his first heavyweight title, he changed his name to Cassius X, enraging Elijah Muhammad, the leader of The Nation of Islam. Malcolm’s newsreel interviews reveal a principled, thoughtful soldier of faith troubled by his brothers’ descent into greed and ego. Malcolm would be exiled from the Nation of Islam by Elijah, who “granted” Cassius Clay the name Muhammad Ali, and be gunned down in an assassination he foretold.
I always thought Ali was a shameless braggart who chose his own name. The reason I thought that was because my father thought that.
Burns makes quick work of Elijah Muhammad, a spiritual leader with a Koresh-ian fondness for power and adoration. His rise to power in The Nation of Islam — fueled by Elijah’s publishing prowess — is a Shakespearean fall that the director illuminates effortlessly.
The four-part series is rife with revelations: Malcolm was a man of peace; Eliah a man of corrupted ego. That sportswriters, not the athlete, dictated Ali’s narrative (a narrative personally handed down by my father, a news reporter as snookered as I by hometown sports writers beguiled by the reputation of the sport, not the realities).
The series, like the man, sputters in the second half. We are familiar enough with Ali’s fall from grace that the series would have better fit a three-act Greek tragedy, which Ali ultimately was. The boxer was just Hamlet in boxing gloves: To be or not to be the greatest. Both caution the danger of myth meeting humanity.
Burns, of course, doesn’t give a damn about myths, reputations and legends. That makes him the king of storytellers, including those in film, music, TV and art.
In fact, an enterprising college should offer an American history course, as seen through the eyes of Ken Burns. Can you imagine a college class with educational TV as homework? Can you imagine the wait list? Just sayin.’
I had a problem with Val, and I have a problem with Val, the Amazon film that’s dazzling critics and has set social media a’swoon.
Complete with yearbook videos of Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon and others from the dimpled heyday of a Dirty Dancing generation, Val charts the Shakespearean fall of a man who never lived a life more than an arm’s length from a videocamera. And that’s how Val feels: like a sad video with heart that can’t quite connect because the lens gets in the way.
Make no mistake: Val is courageous filmmaking. Any Hollywood project that underscores the humanity of an inhumane industry is worth noting. And seeing Kilmer squeeze synthesized words through a dime-size hole left gaping in his throat because of cancer is agonizing. Combine that with the actor’s admission that he’s been reduced to autograph-signing for a living, and his film is a bonafide heartbreaker.
But having an Incurable doesn’t make you a hero, or even brave. And Val seems too content to conflate illness with fortitude, disease with determination. In that sense, Val is guilty of a cardinal-sin-trope.
That is a common mistake in film, however, and I have learned to forgive it. My real problem with Val is my problem with Val. He is one of two actors in my career who I considered insufferably aloof.
The first was America Ferrara, the Disney star who has become the poster child of princesshood. I was interviewing her for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and she was backstage for some made-up award. While she fielded my questions, she never took her face off a mirror. She would play with a lock of hair, gazing adoringly while she gave pat answers. And I thought: She will not remember a moment of this.
America Ferrera
A similar realization struck when I interviewed Kilmer for the film Alexander. We met at a diner on Wilshire, just down from the Academy. I arrived early and took a booth by the window to see him arrive. He must have taken a back or side entrance, though, because he seemed to just appear — and walk past the booth. He did not look around; Kilmer was used to being recognized, not recognizing. I called him back to the booth, and tried to interview him.
I say try because it wasn’t really an interview. Like America, Kilmer spent the entire lunch gazing away. Unlike America, Kilmer wasn’t looking at his reflection. He was looking at a bus stop on the corner, as if he were watching a dog read a newspaper there; transfixed, bewildered, but not enough to warrant mentioning. I assumed he was high, drunk, or both. Either way, he was rote, automatic, and checked out for the interview.
Which is the failing of his autobiographical film. Kilmer has clearly gone through intense personal drama, from cancer to the jacuzzi drowning death of his 15-year-old other brother. Yet none of that grief and recovery seems to inform a film that is, ultimately, about loss. Val’s moral seems to be ‘Shit happens, so look good when it hits.’
And Val looks good. The movie makes clear: Kilmer went nowhere without a videocamera and an Action! worldview. An early adopter before that was even a term, Kilmer used a camera as electronic journal, taping actor buddies, ambushing directors with 60 Minutes-style confrontations and lamenting their shortcomings in video confessionals.
But his famous feuds with Cruise and Marlon Brando were unfilmed and almost unmentioned here, instead glossed in the movie with press junket pleasantries. There is no reflection on whether a James Dean lifestyle led to a James Dean darkness. No pondering whether smoking led to cancer. Not much pondering, period. Just ‘Love is the answer.’ And ‘Jesus saves.’
That’s a form of filmmaking honesty, I guess. But it’s a subjective, selective honesty.
Hollywood honesty.
Speaking of which, I wasn’t going to review Val because of the above personal interaction with him. And I acknowledge that feeling brushed off by him — and from anything real and personal — likely colored my impression of the man.
I just can’t get over feeling the same way about the film.
Hollywood has always had a lucrative but loveless marriage to the nation’s movie theaters.
For decades, studios and exhibitors have maintained a tense but workable relationship. Sure there have been some knockdown-dragouts, and lamps have been thrown in arguments over things like the cost of a ticket and how long someone should wait before they can see a movie from home.
But things got serious over the weekend. And while mom and dad haven’t filed for divorce yet, it looks like they are getting separated. And the custody battle could change life as you knew it as a moviegoer.
Theater owners on Sunday blasted The Walt Disney Co. for making Marvel’s Black Widow available simultaneously in the home and on the big screen, saying the decision undercut the movie’s box office potential and promoted piracy. It marked rare public in-fighting for an industry that prides itself on private unity.
In a blistering press release from the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), the trade organization accused Disney of handcuffing its own film by simultaneous streaming the film and releasing it in theaters, causing the movie to suffer a “stunning collapse in its second weekend in theatrical revenues.” NATO also noted that Widow dropped an unprecedented 41 percent from Friday to Saturday during its opening over the July 9-11 frame.
This is Hollywood eating its own. For years, studios and theater owners had a rough peace accord: a three-month delay between big-screen release and video availability.
But COVID destroyed that treaty. The pandemic forced industries to accomodate a populace sequestered at home, a disaster for companies in the spectating business like movies, theater and sports.
Disney and Warner Bros. have revamped their film slates to accommodate streaming releases, and studios such as Netflix and Amazon Video had already dampened box office revenue, which has remained relatively flat for 25 years.
In a sweeping indictment of all streaming studios, NATO accused Disney of using the virus as a ruse. “Despite assertions that this pandemic-era improvised release strategy was a success for Disney and the simultaneous release model, it demonstrates that an exclusive theatrical release means more revenue for all stakeholders in every cycle of the movie’s life,” NATO said.
This is one parent blaming the other for a child’s fatal disease, when in truth their union had been on the rocks for years.
Since 1995, Americans have bought 1.2 to 1.4 billion movie tickets a year. That’s roughly four movies a year, per American.
Whether that’s a healthy business model is up for debate. Whether it’s a stagnant one is not.
Widow‘s subdued ticket sales, coupled with steep second-weekend declines, suggest that moviegoing is far from returning to normal. And while Disney has not commented on NATO’s accusation, it did note that Widow’s box office has passed $324 million, including revenue from Disney+ Premier Access.
But even that is debatable, NATO claims. It argued that Widow‘s stand-alone box office debut was actually $92-$100 million, a rare swipe at studio veracity.
“One can assume the family-oriented Disney+ household is larger,” the release said. “How much? How much password sharing is there among Disney+ subscribers?”
Ouch.
The way back is unclear. The professional sports world seems to have brokered a rough balance between at-home and in-person spectating, though not without significant casualties (The 2021 Tokyo Olympics, for instance, will be fan-less.) There is money to be made.
So these are not necessarily irreconcilable differences. But, given the stark contrasts over what constitutes a true moviegoing experience, they are irrefutable.
When Arclight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters announced this week that they were shuttering 16 locations and more than 300 screens — including the venerable Cinerama Dome in Hollywood — you could nearly hear the city deflate like a punctured balloon.
The news was met with a collective gasp and sob that Los Angeles hasn’t felt since Kobe’s death, and filmmakers and fans alike took to social media to pay respects, swap memories and brainstorm ideas to rescue the 1963 treasure, the world’s first all-concrete geodesic dome.
The L.A. Times fretted the movie house’s fate. “Could some craven developer turn it into an upscale steakhouse?” the paper asked. Its answer: probably not. The Cinerama Dome’s designation as L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument No. 659 likely would make turning the theater into a strip mall a litigious mess.
But the Times missed the bigger story. Namely, that it’s a small miracle the Dome could stay in business as long as it did. Because for a quarter-century, the Cinerama Dome and 40,000 theaters across the country were peddling a product that garnered middling American interest at best.
An exhaustive analysis by the box office website the-numbers.com paints the haunting portrait. When adjusted for inflations, the movie industry has been swimming in stagnant waters.
Starting in 1995, the analysis found Americans bought 1.22 billion movie tickets. In 2019 — the last full Hollywood season before the pandemic — that number was 1.23 billion. The heyday came in 2002, when Americans bought 1.58 billion tickets, according to the site.
But the numbers never dramatically spiked or plummeted. Here are the five-year totals:
1995: 1.22 billion
2000: 1.38 billion
2005: 1.37 billion
2010: 1.32 billion
2015: 1.32 billion
2020: 223.86 million (pandemic ravaged)
Meanwhile, the study found ticket prices climbed from $4.35 a ticket in 1995 to $9.16 in 2019. That’s still wildly affordable for out-of-the-home entertainment. And it propelled box office totals from $5.31 billion in 1995 to $11.25 billion in 2019, according to the data.
But inflation is not a business strategy. And the pandemic has left theater chains reeling. AMC, the nations largest, asked shareholders this week to authorize another 500 million shares for issue, but promises it won’t take them up on those sales until next year at the earliest. Analysts say that’s promising news for the company, but hardly a cure-all.
AMC recently reopened in key markets Los Angeles and New York after local officials lifted public health restrictions, “but it still has a long way to go to make up for the losses it and other theater operators endured in the last year,” Barron’s said in an article Friday.
So what’s the larger fix? A summer box-office resurgence notwithstanding, Hollywood may have to either increase prices for a ticket dramatically, make fewer films, or both.
Would a Broadway approach to business make movies a must-see event again? Of course, the pandemic has the stage in a standing eight-count as well: Fine and performing arts industries lost almost 1.4 million jobs and $42.5 billion in sales from just April 1 through July 31, according to NBC News.
Or do sporting events hold the key? Professional athletics have managed to stay afloat through COVID-19. But they rely heavily on television revenues, a taproot the movie business is loathe to mine.
Regardless, Tinseltown needs a hero like the ones it loves to splash on celluloid.
Otherwise there may really be no business like show business.
The pandemic put the movie industry on ice. But it has set TV on fire.
From Tiger King to The Queen’s Gambit, COVID has treated the small screen like royalty. Television viewing nationwide increased for the first time in nine years in 2020. Warner Bros. announced it was turning its 2021 film slate into TV moves of the week airing on HBO Max (though Warners will still toss flicks to the few theater chains still dog paddling).
That doesn’t mean all was right on the boob tube last year. Sports have lost their competitive zeal, and some game shows simply don’t translate without a live audience.
Here, then, are the TV lab reports from from some iconic shows facing pandemic programming.
Sports Athletics saw some truly dramatic storylines in 2020, including LeBron James becoming the first NBA player to win championships with three teams and the Cleveland Browns winning their first football playoff game since, well, maybe leather.
But there’s no getting around it: Pro sports are just glamorous scrimmages without crowds. Part of every athletes’ measure is the ability to perform the craft in public. Otherwise, you’re just a musician with agoraphobia; the talent may be there, but you gotta show the guts.
Scripted television Screenplays — particularly dramatic ones — felt as rare as toilet paper last year. Most series simply weren’t (aren’t) ready to reflect a society forced to wear a mask (after all, COVID hides your dimples). The upside is that those who did venture out, like Fargo and Better Call Saul, felt like oases ash.
Better Call Saul
Game shows Here’s where TV went manic.
For the sake of reporting I swear! I looked up the opening minuts of The Bachelor on Comcast’s On-Demaan. I know it’s been ABC’s (thus Disney’s) shinier mantle pieces for a quarter-century, where it has hovered about the top 10.
I don’t know who the bachelor is, I don’t know who Miss Etiquette is, but the series begins with Sweet Polly Purebread announcing to the bachelor, with her hand behind her back: “The pandemic was really hard on me, but I got through the tough times with this,” producing a dildo.
Where to begin? Howbout: Was? Is the pandemic over if you find true love? And what did you want him to do with that?Wouldn’t you have been concerned if, instead of laughing, he’d said, “Oh, thanks! Mine broke!”
Clearly, some shows need to be put into a medically-induced coma until the storm passes.
Miss Etiquette and The Bachelor
You have to feel for The Price is Right. Sure, Drew Carey looks like he’s about to mail bombs from a woodshed, but they’re trying. But it doesn’t feel the same without your second-cousin Terry shouting at you that you’re paying too much for sandwich bags.
Drew Carey
Some TV hosts seem utterly unfazed by a worldwide plague. Judge Judy may be better in a pandemic. She looks a lot like the New York city judge featured on 60 Minutes because of her straight talk to lawyers and laymen alike. And the show benefits without a courtroom to ooh and ahh at courtroom antics, which Judith Sheindlin always detested, anyway.
Judge Judy and Officer Byrd
Some shows are not only pandemic-proof; they’re people-proof. Battlebots may be a peek into an AI future. If anything, the show drags to a near-standstill when the humans cackle about what’s at stake in the pursuit of the show’s “Giant Nut” championship.
The Giant Nut
So what does that mean for viewing in ’21? At least on the news front, things are going to get pretty boring. Already, the 24/7s are replaying footage from the Capitol insurrection as if it were a viral YouTube cat video. As much as they bitch about inciting unrest, CNN and MSNBC needs to examine its insistence on highlighting lowlifes. Saul is entering its final season, and Fargo has no plans in place for a fifth season.
But COVID, which has proved to be a pandemic that teaches us what we can live without, has also improved some of the things we hold dear. Phone calls now really are a way to reach out and touch someone. Zoom has strengthened enumerable family relationships. Drive-ins are back. Dog shelters aren’t teeming with the abandoned and abused. Imagine what a hug is going to feel like again.
From surface to soul, COVID has been a human cleansing. If TV is a reflection of — or reaction to — that profound metamorphosis, it will see a new heyday. Just pass on the dildos.
Maybe it’s the sun, but California is a magnet for serial killers. The Zodiac Killer, The Hillside Strangler, The Manson Family; all called the Golden State home.
But non were as chilling as The Night Stalker.
The Night Stalker is one of the most terrifying serial killers in American history. Typically, psychopathic killers follow a pattern that can make them relatively predictable.
But Richard Ramirez, who would become dubbed the Night Stalker in the press, was a tornado of random violence. Murders, assaults, rapes, kidnappings—he terrorized the West Coast in 1984 and 1985, and was ultimately convicted of 13 counts of murder, 5 counts of attempted murder, 11 counts of sexual assault, and 14 counts of burglary, although those are probably only a fraction of his actual crimes.
His rampage became known around the world but, the new Netflix series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer re-frames the Ramirez story through the prism of those who chased and ran from him. And while Stalker can feel a bit like a Lifetime TV movie, it aptly documents a crime spree that would not only freeze the state; it transfixed a nation.
Stalker starts with a montage that sets the tone for Los Angeles in the 1980s, painting it as one of the most vibrant communities in the world, but possessing a criminal underbelly that emerged after dark.
The star of the docu=series is Detective Gil Carrillo, who was an inexperienced kid cop when he led the investigation into the Night Stalker crimes with legendary detective Frank Salerno, who broke the Hillside Strangler case and is an eloquent interview here. Their recollections of tips, leads and almost-hads give the film its police-procedural edge.
Too bad director Tiller Russell didn’t use their narrative to lead into an examination of the killer himself. Ramirez, who granted a handful of prison interview before his death from cancer in 2013, is given little attention in the film — just the final chapter in a four-piece series. It’s not enough, and the film would have been better served if Ramirez, a professed Satanist and fan of AC/DC, had been the center of at least the last two chapter.
It doesn’t completely derail Stalker, which has some binge-worthy moments, including the cliffhanger end of every episode.
Perhaps, though, this is the fitting film for the Ramirez case, which ended in a death sentence that was never carried out.
The movie feels similar: A relief that it wasn’t worse, but a shame it didn’t go farther.
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.
It comes 14 years after the surprise original — a lifetime and a half in movie metrics. Borat’s fish-out-of-water schtick should be a one-trick pony, just as SNL films are glorified sketch jokes. And everybody should know Sacha Baron Cohen’s chameleon mug by now; he’s already punked Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney and a raft of unwitting stars, TV reporters and dim bulb politicians. His goose should be cooked by now.
And yet, Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm is a small wonder. While not the seismic discovery of the 2006 original — and what could be? — the follow-up is laugh-out-loud funny, surprisingly touching and still remarkable in its ability to get citizens, particularly elected ones, to act like asses for the camera.
Or, in Rudy Giuliani’s case, like a child molester.
Like the first film, the sublime Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the sequel has a knock-knock joke simplicity. Cohen plays a correspondent and unofficial statesman from Kazakhstan, and he uses the ruse to get America to drop its guard and describe itself, assworts and all.
Cohen takes a bead on some of his favorite targets: gun rights advocates, evangelicals, and just about any country bumpkin willing to sign a rights waiver. And there are a lot.
But it’s the politicians who always make the best bait (Palin was skewered on Cohen’s Showtime series, Who Is America?) This time around, Giuliani is in the crosshairs. and Cohen nails him the way Bob Woodward nailed Donald Trump in Rage.
Actually, exactly like that. If you remember, this site criticized Woodward for saving a news story about the president’s COVID subterfuge to help sell his book. Here, the stakes aren’t nearly as high, and Cohen rightly used the scene for the, ahem, climax of the film. But Cohen could have made news with the footage alone — if it’s legit.
The scene begins with Giuliani seated on a couch, answering questions from Borat’s “daughter,” an adult actress playing a 15-year-old. When the actress asks the former mayor if they can continue their discussion in the bedroom. he agrees, and is then shown sitting on a bed, as she appears to take his microphone off and he appears to pat her. The segment then cuts to the image of Rudy, reclining on the bed, placing his hands down his pants. Borat then bursts into the scene, screaming “She’s 15-years-old! She’s too old for you!”
Giuliani has vociferously denied any wrongdoing, and accuses the filmmakers of doctoring the scene, which may be true. This is, after all, a feature film.
But Cohen strikes a documentary-like chord every time he turns on a camera, and Moviefilm is gloriously no exception. Perhaps the film’s biggest surprise is its tenderness. Namely, Jeanise Jones, an African-American babysitter who is stunned and offended when Borat instructs Jones to feed his daughter water from a dog bowl if she’s been a good girl. Jones ultimately gives the daughter a sincere, near-tearjerker about the girl standing up for — and finding pride in — her unpolished self.
There’s nothing new or earthshaking to Moviefilm. It is, after all, a direct-to-Amazon sequel, and you probably got it free with your order of bulk paper towels.
But given the year, the disappointment of $250 million movies like Tenet, and our junk food overload on crap like Tiger King, Borat couldn’t be more timely or welcome. He addresses everything from COVID to religion to gender roles in an hour and a half that seem to time warp by.
Like David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin is less a screenwriter than a songwriter. Sure, Goo goo j’goob doesn’t make a lick of sense, but its got a great beat.
So, too, does The Trial of the Chicago 7, Netflix’s latest pandemic entrée. Granted, our time in isolation has made us more welcoming than ever to visitors. And Sorkin, the mind behind The West Wing, has yet to see a trope he won’t hit on.
But the movie connects despite some sizable flaws, perhaps because of its underpinning message and unmistakable parallels between the politics of a half-century ago and today.
The film is based on the 1969 federal trial of seven men accused of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The film has taken its lumps for making the trial too theatrical. Rolling Stone railed, “The Trial of the Chicago 7 feels outright outlandish at times.”
Note to Rolling Stone: Look up the real trial. Defendant Bobby Seale really was bound and gagged at the trial. And unlike the film, which showed Seale as literal hostage once, the order stood for several days. A defense attorney stated, for the record, “This is no longer a court of order, Your Honor, this is a medieval torture chamber.”
The real Bobby Seale, left, in a courtroom sketch.
No, the flaws of Chicago 7 are about storytelling. The trial was such a circus, the film needs less dramatic flare, more documentarian finesse. In a throwaway scene apparently meant to peacock, one defendant asks another if he knows what’s going on as lawyers huddle. “I haven’t known what’s been going on for years,” the other replies with a poignant sigh.
In another, a defendant says he is keeping a list of soldiers who died in Vietnam during the case, noting that “with the trial starting, it might get easy to forget who this is about.” He later hands the list to Tom Hayden (a terrific Eddie Redmayne), whose final words to the court are to read the casualty list.
Too bad the speech — and list — are pure fiction.
And while chameleon star Sacha Baron Cohen bears a strong resemblance to Abbie Hoffman, the Brit simply can’t get beyond a “pahk the cah” Northeastern accent, and it weaves like a drunk driver on a two-lane highway.
Abbie Hoffman, left, and Sacha Baron Cohen
But it’s still worth the cost of admission, if only because it will nudge the occasional viewer to Wikipedia or YouTube for a remote-learning history lesson.
The film duly notes what became of the protesters, from Tom Hayden’s 5-term Senate run to Hoffman’s in 1989.
More importantly, Chicago 7 puts the upcoming presidential election into some much-needed context. As Sorkin does get spot on, the 60’s make these times look downright simple.
Back then, liberal voices got shot in the head for demanding to be heard.
The Hollywood Bowles 