The Many Masks of Anora

 When first seen, Anora (who likes to be called Ani) is plying her wares at a tawdry “gentlemen’s club” in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Sidling up to potential customers, she comes off as cute, friendly, and ready for anything. A lap dance? An upside-down whirl on the stripper pole? A cozy visit to a private room? Sure! It’s all part of her repertoire.

 Sean Baker, the American indie director who won this year’s prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Anora, has profound love for those on the underside of society.  In the case of Anora, what’s not to love?  Especially when we learn that her dream is to go on a honeymoon trip to Walt Disney World. Her Cinderella fantasies almost come true when an adorably curly-headed young Russian (drawn to her first because she can understand—if not really speak—his language) falls for her in a big way. After a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas,  they return home as man and wife. The pampered son of a Russian oligarch, one who’s enjoying living alone in a fabulous seaside mansion, Ivan can give her everything—love, fun, drugs, a three-carat diamond ring. Not bad for a young woman who up to this point has had to scrupulously keep an eye on her finances.

 But like all good things, the honeymoon quickly comes to an end.  When his parents’ local fixer—who doubles as an Armenian priest—discovers the marriage, all hell breaks loose. The parents are quickly on a plane from Mosco, determined to scuttle the marriage and pursue a quick annulment. In their eyes, Anora is a gold-digger preying on their innocent boy. The situation develops into a riotous brouhaha, in which Ivan flees into the night and Anora is kept at bay by two rather inept thugs who’ll do just about anything to calm her down.

 This is the point at which Ani’s combative spirit really comes into focus. She wants what she sees as hers, and nothing—not violence, not bribes, not sweet talk—is going to stop her. Her  transformation from sexy wench to woman in love to warrior princess is both startling and fascinating. This is someone who is fearless, both with her hands and with her mouth, in demanding what she deserves. And, especially when she’s faced with Ivan’s obnoxious mother, we see what drives her: a desperate need to stick up for herself in a world where she has no other champion. Which leads, finally, to an at-first-perplexing moment in which we come to understand how hard she’s struggled to build a life for herself, and how much she’s lost along the way.

 Mikey Madison, who plays Anora, has a short Hollywood resumé (she played one of the Manson girls in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)  but I agree with all the pundits who insist this film will launch a major career. A SoCal girl who grew up (she insists) quite shy, she has adopted for Anora a bold, exuberant personality that doesn’t quit. What’s special about her is that she isn’t simply loud and sexy: there are layers in her portrayal that hint at the complexity of her life. Credit Sean Baker with bringing out the various facets of Anora’s approach to living: as his work in indie flicks like Tangerine shows, he loves actors who are fearless.

 This evening, while tooling down the Sunset Strip, I saw a huge billboard for Anora: Madison looks totally seductive, with a bare shoulder peeking out from a fur coat. No question: a star is born. 

Surviving a Velvet Morning

In playwright Neil LaBute’s film, Some Velvet Morning, Stanley Tucci is hardly thinking about becoming the next pope. Instead, in this chamber piece from 2013, Tucci’s hot on the trail of an enigmatic young woman who may or may not be named Velvet. LaBute himself personally suggested that I watch this flick, based on my appreciation for an earlier LaBute cinematic work, The Shape of Things. Now that I’ve seen Some Velvet Morning, I can understand why it has divided critics and audiences, even those of the film-festival-going variety. Yes, the writer/director displays in this film his usual mastery of dialogue and his gift for ambiguous characterizations, but I can understand how some moviegoers have come away from it annoyed and even offended. Still, I found it, when all was said and done, genuinely bracing.

 Part of the challenge of Some Velvet Morning comes from the audience’s need to figure out just what is going on. We start with a languid young woman in a bright red minidress stretched out on a sofa in an oh-so-pristine townhouse. Then a well-dressed older gentleman carrying quite a lot of luggage rings her doorbell, and the film kicks into action. These two apparently know each other, though there’s been a long absence, and the viewer is tasked with figuring out exactly what exists between them.

 Perhaps the most instructive moment occurs at the end of the credit sequence, when five words appear on the screen: For August Strindberg, with Love. LaBute, a serious student of classic drama, was clearly influenced on this project by the 19^th century Swedish author of intimate plays like Miss Julie, in which the battle of the sexes plays out with dramatic ferocity. As always, LaBute’s screenwork here feels much like a stage play, with sharply articulated dialogue briskly moving the action forward. But there’s also the vividly cinematic use of the full townhouse set, including steep staircases and well-decorated nooks and crannies to add some visual reality to the story’s twists and turns. 

 Watching the plot unfold, I was struck anew by Tucci’s talent for naturalistic performance. Whatever his mood at any given moment, he’s totally credible, even when lashing out with lightning speed. In both his character’s neediness and his anger, he seems completely real. His opposite number, Alice Eve, was unknown to me. As she changed moods and approaches to the man at the door, I sensed there was something histrionic about her, in contrast to Tucci’s more internalized performance. In time, though, I questioned my own earlier judgment. That’s what this film does to you.

 I won’t go into where it all leads. But at the end of this relatively short film (all of 82 minutes), the viewer should acknowledge having been on quite a journey, one whose conclusion he or she had not quite anticipated. (It’s hardly surprising to me that not everyone is pleased with this outcome.)

 I should add that the film’s curious title was apparently borrowed from a Lee Hazlewood song from 1967, best known from a recording in which he duets with Nancy Sinatra on her “Movin’ with Nancy” album. One critic said at the time, “’Some Velvet Morning’ sounds like two songs spliced together by a madman, or an avant-garde short film in song form.” Its lyrics are famously enigmatic, having puzzled critics and fans for generations. Hazelwood has confirmed that in writing the song he was thinking about classical Greek mythology, and particularly with the beautiful but dangerous Phaedra, whose love life was certainly complicated. Does the song help explain LaBute’s story? Well, maybe, or maybe not.

 

 

Capitalist Pigs: “Okja “

When I sat down to watch Okja, I knew only that this was a recent Korean film, highlighting the warm relationship between a young girl and a supersized CGI pig. My guess was that the film would have something of an ET vibe, featuring tenderness, innocence, and a certain amount of whimsy. And, to be honest, these elements can all be found in Okja. But it didn’t at first occur to me that any film written and directed by Bong Joon-ho—who followed up Okja with 2019’s lacerating Oscar-winner, Parasite—would doubtless be well laced with black humor.

 I also didn’t realize at first that Okja is a true East-meets-West collaboration between Bong and Hollywood, with Netflix and Brad Pitt’s adventuresome Plan B Entertainment much involved. A good part of the story takes place in New York City, and key roles are played by box-office favorites Tilda Swinton, Paul Dano, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal’s role as the sell-out host of a TV animal show is hilarious, though I found him absolutely unrecognizable, even after I saw his name in the end-credits. As for Swinton, she takes her usual perverse delight in playing a character who’s obnoxious in the extreme. Her role is that of a corporation head who has nothing good to say about her father (an investor in Napalm) and her sister (under whose company leadership a lake exploded). She coos to her team about her own development of adorable super-pigs, whose meat will be (among other good things) inexpensive and environmentally friendly. Of course she’s lying through her teeth, and Giancarlo Esposito (of Breaking Bad fame) is on hand to help take things from bad to worse.

 But these aren’t the only questionable characters in Okja. When the super-pig she’s helped to raise in the mountains of Korea is summoned to New York (supposedly to be crowned as top pig in a competition arranged by Swinton’s company), young Mija can’t prevent her beloved pet from being taken from her. But she finds she has some unlikely allies, members of the Animal Liberation Front, who’ll do just about anything to protect animals from human exploitation. Led by the (usually) soft-spoken Paul Dano, they at first come across as earnest and reasonable, but their passion for their cause leads them, at times, into outrageous acts. Their intentions may be good, but often they seem as crazy as the greedy capitalists they oppose with single-minded zeal.

 So what becomes of the young girl and the giant pig?  I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that in this film everyone ultimately gets what he or she deserves. Though there are some stomach-churning moments that spell out the ultimate fate of most of those giant pigs, our two favorite characters live to enjoy another, brighter day.   

 Okja had its world premiere in 2017 at the Cannes Film Festival. Despite some technical difficulties during the screening, it was rewarded with a four-minute standing ovation, and was nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or. Filmed in Korean and English, the film makes a deliberate mistranslation (by Korean-American actor Steven Yeun, playing one of the ALF activists) an essential part of its plot.

 By the way, anyone checking out the recent DVD (which boasts a separate disc full of extras about the film’s technical challenges) should be sure to keep watching until the very end. Following a long set of end-credits, there’s a sardonic coda featuring the re-united ALF team. It’s as though Bong can’t bear to end his film on a note of Happily Ever After. 

 

Say It Ain’t So, Joe! John Sayles’ “Eight Men Out”

Baseball is America’s game. That’s its reputation, anyway—as a wholesome family entertainment in which athletes face off against one another at a sporting event that’s easy to watch and enjoy.

 The fact that the players’ faces aren’t covered is one reason that baseball seems to be the favorite team sport of moviemakers. So’s the basic set-up of the game. There’s no scrum of heavily padded guys smashing into another clump of players, similarly outfitted, with the spectator desperately trying to locate the pigskin and figure out who is who. Instead, in baseball, one solitary soul on the pitcher’s mound rhythmically faces down one batsman at a time. A man with a ball versus a man with a bat: what could simpler or more dramatic? 

 That’s got to be at least part of the reason why there are so many baseball movies. Some are lively and pure fun, like 1949’s Take Me Out to the Ballgame and 1958’s Damn Yankees, both of them star-studded musicals. Some are heartwarming biopics about baseball greats, like The Pride of the Yankees (1942, about Lou Gehrig) and several films focusing on major league baseball’s first Black player, Jackie Robinson. (See 1950’s The Jackie Robinson Story, in which Robinson played himself, and 2013’s 42, starring Chadwick Boseman.) Baseball takes on an almost mythic significance in The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), and Field of Dreams (1985). In the last of these, a young farmer in search of a father figure builds his own ballfield and greets the ghostly Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with the other disgraced members of the Chicago White Sox, who were banished from the sport forever for their part in fixing the 1919 World Series.

 Writer/director John Sayles has never much gone in for simple projects. Though his films over the years can be sorted into many genres, he seems to particularly appreciate American history, as seen on a broad canvas. In 1987, he won wide critical acclaim for Matewan, the often-brutal story of West Virginia coal miners overcoming obstacles to form a union. One year later, he directed an ensemble of major Hollywood actors (including John Cusack, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, and Charlie Sheen) in the story of what is often called the Black Sox Scandal. Eight Men Out details how, in an era when betting on baseball games was rampant, members of the pennant-winning Chicago White Sox were approached by mobster types to throw the series, in exchange for promises of hefty payments. What made Sayles’ screenwriting complicated is that, no one, including baseball historians, has the whole story. We don’t exactly know who-all was in on the fix, nor who agreed, and then eventually changed his mind. What we DO know is that there were many bad guys around, including mobsters, greedy players, and a team owner (Charles Comiskey) so cheap that some players apparently agreed to throw World Series games as a way of getting back at a boss-man who promised them bonuses but never paid up.  And we know that eight players were eventually prosecuted, including at least one (Buck Weaver, played by Cusack) who deplored the idea of playing to lose, but never squealed on his teammates.

 Sayles takes it all on: the players, the crooks, the management, the sportswriters who smelled a rat. (He himself appears as journalist Damon Runyon, and the great Studs Terkel plays another sportswriter of the day.) Sayles has also got the little urchin who looks up at his former hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and cries out, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Very mythic; very moving. 

 

The Gregarious, Gorgeous Teri Garr

I once had the good fortune of seeing Teri Garr up close and personal. It was decades ago, long before the brilliant comic actress was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the cruel disease that recently ended her life at age 79. The place: the tiny, cramped locker room at Jane Fonda’s then-famous West Hollywood exercise studio. Both of us were changing out of exercise gear. She was among friends, clearly—and I saw her as a true life force, lively and exuberant.

 She brought that same exuberance to her acting career, which included the wife role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the adorable mädchen who loved a roll in the hay in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Her biggest screen success came in 1982, with the release of Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman stars as an out-of-work actor who disguises himself as a woman to win a soap opera role. The gender confusion that arises in this Sydney Pollack film is hilarious. But it also seems quite modern, given that there’s a move afoot to deny a newly-elected transgender U.S. congresswoman the right to use the women’s restroom in the Capitol. (So what, pray tell, is she supposed to do when the need arises?) 

 When Tootsie was being cast, Garr apparently hankered for the role of the female lead. Julie is depicted as a slightly damaged but sturdy soul who interacts with Hoffman’s Dorothy Michaels in a popular hospital-based soap opera. (She introduces herself to the new cast member as the “hospital slut.”) Julie treasures Dorothy’s friendship and is guided by her relationship wisdom, but has no inkling that this sassy older woman is actually a man—and that he’s in love with her. After losing the role of Julie to Jessica Lange, Garr was reluctant to take the smaller part of Sandy, the neurotic would-be actress who’s Michael’s protégée and at one point his accidental lover. (Don’t ask!) Luckily for us, Garr ultimately changed her mind about the role. Sandy’s uproarious neediness is a highlight of the film, and resulted in an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Ironically, Jessica Lange was also nominated in this category, and took home the gold statuette: it was the only win for Tootsie that evening despite a whooping nine nominations. (This was the year of Gandhi—and the gender-bending Victor/Victoria). But if Lange won the Oscar, Teri Garr completely won my heart.

 Like all the greatest comedies, Tootsie has something to say, about the human condition. Its particular focus is on how women are treated in what often continues to feel like a man’s world. What Dustin Hoffman’s character discovers—in this beautifully directed, beautifully written, beautifully edited film—is that women benefit from being able to stand up for themselves. And, as a man, he comes to acknowledge that women need, and deserve, basic respect. Two prominent characters who have not learned this lesson are Dabney Coleman as an outrageously sexist TV director and George Gaynes as a preening actor who makes it his business to tongue-kiss every actress on camera. (By contrast, Julie’s father, as played by Charles Durning, is a manly but gentle widower who is smitten by “Dorothy” and complicates things by proposing marriage.)  Big kudos to screenwriter Larry Gelbart for finding the funny in the battle of the sexes while acknowledging that his characters all have something to learn. One of those characters of course is Garr’s Sandy. But she fights to hold onto her sense of humor. That of course also describes Garr, who considered titling her memoir, Does This Wheelchair Make Me Look Fat?  

 

Quincy Jones: Remembering a Thriller

I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to write a tribute to the late Quincy Jones, music man extraordinaire. Now I think the time has come. On Sunday, daughter Rashida Jones accepted the honorary Oscar that was supposed to be handed to her dad at this year’s Governors Awards ceremony. She was even able to deliver the speech he’d penned for the occasion: the man was prepared! Always an optimist, Jones celebrated music and film as having the power to make “the world a more understanding and embracing place for us all to exist.”  (Other honorees included writer/director Richard Curtis—who was warmly roasted by Hugh Grant—as well as veteran casting director Juliet Taylor, and the longtime producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael J. Wilson.)   

 It’s hard to write about Quincy Jones because, in his 91 years of life, he found success as a record producer, composer, arranger, conductor, trumpeter, and bandleader. He also functioned from time to time as a movie producer (the 1985 Spielberg screen adaptation of The Color Purple was one of his projects) and occasional actor. As an arranger and conductor, he worked closely with greats like Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. Hit tunes with which he was involved ranged all the way from Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” to the wacky Austin Powers theme music (originally called “Soul Bossa Nova”) to Michael Jackson’s bestselling Thriller album, on which he worked as a record producer.

 The artistic period I know best is the 1960s, and I’d like to remember Jones in terms of that pivotal decade.  He attracted attention for his very first score, written for Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964), in which Rod Steiger played a Holocaust survivor haunted by his memories. He went on to score films that were both serious (The Slender Thread) and comic (Walk, Don’t Run). But his first of many banner years was 1967, when he was involved with scores for five films, including Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing, the thriller Banning, the very dark In Cold Blood, and the year’s top award-winner, In the Heat of the Night. The last of these featured a bluesy Jones-composed title song performed by his longtime idol, Ray Charles. Though In the Heat of the Night was nominated for seven Oscars and won five of them (including Best Picture), Jones’ contribution to that film was overlooked by the Academy. Still, in that same year he was honored with two of his seven competitive Oscar nominations, one for the jazzy score of In Cold Blood and one for “The Eyes of Love,” an original song featured in Banning. “The Eyes of Love” made hm the first-ever African American to be nominated by the Oscar voters for Best Original Song. His two Oscar nominations in a single year was also record-breaking for an African American composer.

 Ironically, Jones never won a competitive Oscar. He gained another Best Original Song nomination for a Sidney Poitier romantic comedy, For Love of Ivy, and a decade later his film score for The Wiz was also recognized. The Color Purple earned him three nominations, including Best Score, Best Song (with Lionel Ritchie also involved), and Best Picture (he was nominated along with fellow producers Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall). And the posthumous statuette he just won was not his first honorary Oscar. Back in 1995 he was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the first musician ever to be so honored by the Academy. (He eloquently called his time on stage to receive that golden trophy “the proudest moment of my life.”)

 

“Here” Today, Gone Tomorrow

I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to feel about Tom Hanks’ latest film, directed by Robert Zemeckis and also featuring Hanks’ Forrest Gump co-star, Robin Wright. Frankly, Here sounded corny, if not downright weird: an entire movie in which the camera never moves, and the story toggles between various occupants of the very same place, from dinosaurs and Native Americans to disparate 20^th century families living in a large old house. All I could think of, going in, was a stage oddity by Thornton Wilder called The Skin of Our Teeth. In it, people representing Adam, Eve, and their kin somehow live both in the Ice Age and in what was, in 1942, the present day. The central theme? Survival.

 Here is based not on The Skin of Our Teeth but on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, derived from his own comic strip. Clearly, its central topic is Time: how life evolves, personal values change and get overridden, individuals—no  matter how bright or how amiable—can’t stand up to time’s onslaught. It’s a motif that certainly has meaning for all of us. Poets have been writing about it for centuries. Here’s what  English poet Andrew Marvell published in 1681:  “At my back I always hear/ Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near.” (Marvell, it must be said, was trying to talk his coy mistress into bed by reminding her that youthful vigor doesn’t last forever. Yes, things change.)

 Zemeckis, who has never lacked for grand ambitions, seems determined to make a film for the whole human race. Certainly, while never moving from one fixed spot, he tries to cover a whole lot of ground. Along with the dinosaurs and Native Americans there are historical figures (Benjamin Franklin) and small children and decrepit oldsters and pioneer inventors and nice people who never quite amount to much of anything. The most recent owners of the house that becomes the film’s entire universe are African American. We learn frustratingly little about them, but I think they are popped into the story in an attempt to cover all (or, I guess, most) bases when it comes to American history.

 But most of the screen time belongs to the couple played by Hanks and Wright. Through the very latest in de-aging technology, we meet them as young high schoolers in love, with pretty blonde Margaret meeting her beau’s parents, a bitter World War II veteran (an impressive Paul Bettany) and his devoted wife. We watch over the years as Richard and Margaret come to share the house with his ageing father and mother. They celebrate a quickie wedding, then there’s the birth of a daughter; Richard’s frustration with his workaday job; Margaret’s chafing at the bonds of matrimony; illnesses and other setbacks, sometimes interrupted by the narrative’s bounce into the lives of other couples with other joys and challenges.

 At movie houses, all trailers are carefully selected to match the upcoming flick. It was obvious, when I saw Here that the multiplex honchos were unclear on what kind of audience would  be watching this film. So I saw a terrifying trailer about American neo-Nazis, and another about actual Nazis in World War II. Then there were spots for benign family flicks like Moana 2 and Wicked. Confusing? I, for one, think it’s my own age group that should respond most thoughtfully to Here. We remember Tom Hanks from movies like Splash and Big, when he was as youthful and lively as his de-aged self in early scenes from this film. And so were we.