Love Me Like A Rock: "Phantom Thread"

Phantom Thread
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville

What to say about Phantom Thread. Hmmmm...

Well, it seems that I have a thing for director Paul Thomas Anderson, because in his films you are not going to get a standard narrative, and I do like being surprised. With his films you are going to get a thought-provoking, confronting, unusual film experience that makes you examine in depth the often-illogical and sometime unpleasant ways that being human asserts itself. Consider The Master, Inherent Vice, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood. These films offer unique narratives about the fraught relationships between some extremely complicated -- OK, weird -- people.

On its surface, Phantom Thread is about a successful, meticulous, and insular man and the way in which love disrupts his very ordered life.

Looked at from another angle, the film is about a war of wills between an older man and a very determined young woman who will not be discarded or dismissed. (I was reminded of Glenn Close's plaintive statement from Fatal Attraction some 30 years ago: "I'm not going to be ignored, Dan.")

This is about a grown man with severe, unacknowledged Mommy issues, who strikes an unusual psychological bargain that allows him to crawl, helpless, into the nurturing arms of a strong female from time to time.

At its heart, the film is about what truly shapes a relationship, about the totally unseen and unsuspected reality of reciprocal need and desire that draws two people into a partnership, i.e. the phantom thread sewn through the fabric of two people's lives that stitches them irrevocably together. When this thread is revealed toward the end of the film, we the viewers are aghast. Particularly because the film itself is so mannered, so elegant, so well composed and measured, so politely English, and the bargain struck between the couple at the center of the story seems almost macabre.

The main character, Reynolds Woodcock (played by the marvelous Daniel Day-Lewis), is a highly regarded British couturier who designs and constructs dresses for a fashionable 1950s clientele that includes countesses, princesses, society dames, and the like. Fussy, eccentric, demanding, rich, and wholly self-involved, Reynolds trusts only his sister and business partner, the equally dour and demanding Cyril (a perfect Lesley Manville), whose every move caters to the personal whims and professional needs of her brother. Their business occupies an impeccable and fashionable London townhouse, staffed by a bevy of loyal seamstresses and patternmakers and, on occasion, by Reynolds' lover of the moment, a young woman who is usually fired and ushered out by Cyril.

At an English seaside hotel restaurant, Reynolds acquires a lovely young waitress, Alma (a Mona Lisa-like Vicky Krieps), who becomes new lover and muse. He flatters her, measures her for new gowns, shares his memories of his late mother, who inspired him to sew, and ultimately brings her to the townhouse and installs her as part of the household. Except that Alma, who is feisty, opinionated, and in love, doesn't quite fit into the be-seen-but-not-heard role Reynolds demands. Though he shares with her the secrets of his craft, and the fact that messages or coins can be sewn into the lining of a garment, and learns that Alma truly recognizes the creative sanctity of his work, Reynolds is mostly a cold customer.

After some unpleasant confrontations between the patronizing and wholly selfish Reynolds and a hurt Alma, the young woman decides to take drastic action to get Reynolds to "settle down" and return to a state of vulnerability and tenderness she knows he is capable of, a state in which Reynolds recognizes and affirms his love of Alma. Soon Reynolds becomes ill, and Alma locks everyone else out, including Cyril, to nurse him back to health. After this episode, Reynolds asks Alma to marry him, and Alma accepts.

But within months, Reynolds regrets the marriage, becomes annoyed with everything Alma does, cannot concentrate on work, becomes verbally abusive to Alma, and begs Cyril to help him correct the enormous "mistake" that he's made. Alma, overhearing Reynolds' fitful complaints to his sister, again takes matters into her own hands to get Reynolds to "settle down." It is in the final moments of the film when we learn that Reynolds is not only aware of Alma's plans, but condones them.

The film's story is framed by Alma explaining to a young doctor how and why her relationship with Reynolds continues to work. But the nature of this bargain is beyond the doctor's -- and our -- ability to comprehend.

Should you see it? Sure. If you're a fan of Day-Lewis, great filmmaking, and scratch-your-head endings. But the truth is, more than one relationship has a funky phantom thread running through it. And it should by all means remain hidden from view.

Random Notes:

* The impeccable cinematography and attention to sartorial splendor reminded me in some ways of fashion designer/film director Tom Ford's directorial debut, 2009's A Single Man.

* The film's score -- combining lush composed music by Jonny Greenwood with a mix of classical pieces and period big band melodies -- enhances the overall mood of the piece as something elevated and atmospheric, but also tense and timeless.

* The scenes of industry within Woodcock's townhouse reminded me of a more personal memory, of what it's like to go to work daily in a historic home. The soundscape is very different from working in an office environment, where you often have carpeting, glass, and other expanses of man-made and modern materials, including elevators. I was reminded that as a teenager, in the late 1970s, I worked as a program assistant at New York's International Center of Photography, which was then housed in New York City's historic Willard D. Straight House, a four-story Georgian-style mansion on Fifth Avenue and 94th Street (the museum and school have since moved and expanded to several locations). I was captured by the sounds of the door hinges creaking, the glass door knobs, the ringing of footsteps along the parquet floors, the climbing to various high-ceilinged offices along the grand wooden staircases in a building that had been constructed as the home of a rich New Yorker some 70 years earlier.

* Love and politics make for strange bedfellows.

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*all photos screenshots

Guest Review: "The Post"

“THE POST”
directed by Steven Spielberg
starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks

By Leslie Hunter-Gadsden

This review was written by my longtime friend and high school classmate. She raved about the film, and since I hadn't seen it, I said "have at it!"

It is amazing how timely “The Post” feels when you consider that The Washington Post and The New York Times were pushing to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971 – 47 years ago. The antagonism between members of the media and representatives of the U.S. government strikes a chord with viewers in light of the current administration’s sparring with the media and labeling most unfavorable reports as “fake news.”

Steven Spielberg’s take on the working relationship between Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee is an excellent bird’s eye view of an era when men were grudgingly forced to accept that women could be not only their co-workers but – gasp – even their bosses. In one scene, Graham (portrayed by Meryl Streep) tells a room filled with male board members, legal counsel, and editors including Ben Bradlee (portrayed by Tom Hanks): “This is not my father’s paper. This is not my husband’s paper. It is MY PAPER!” I felt like shouting “Time’s Up!”

The film shows Katharine Graham as a privileged, well-educated, white socialite who was described by a male Washington Post board member as “giving great parties” attended by a who’s who list of D.C. government movers and shakers. But Graham assumed the publisher post after the 1963 suicide of her husband, Philip Graham, the paper’s former publisher who succeeded her father, Eugene Meyer, after he stepped down as publisher. By the time U.S. military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, first to The New York Times and next to The Washington Post in 1971, Graham had been publisher for eight years.

Splicing in scenes of street protests with the action in boardrooms, newsrooms and the New York Stock Exchange, Spielberg does a great job of communicating the growing frustration of the American public after Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers revealed that American involvement in the Vietnam War was the result of three decades of government lies which impacted the success of U.S. troops.

Not only did I enjoy watching the power plays between prospective newspaper investors, editors, government representatives and the publisher that the film portrays, but I loved the attention paid to how women were treated by men inside and outside the newsroom in 1971. Spielberg doesn’t hold back as he shows how Graham has to battle the condescending way she is treated and spoken to by Bradlee and others as she fights to be taken seriously by the men she encounters and finds the courage to make a tough decision for The Washington Post on whether to publish the Pentagon Papers or not. While Graham is the central female character, the film also includes scenes showing how women with less power and money than her are evolving in the 1970s.

On a personal note, this film reminded me of why I decided to become a journalist and what it was like when I interned at two newspapers in 1981. The newsroom scenes were authentic, from the overall chaos of ringing telephones to the pneumatic tubes used to file completed stories and send them to the copy desk. For anyone working in a newsroom or just living life before smart phones, seeking a private phone conversation during work hours meant leaving your desk and going outside of the office to find a phone booth – and using coins to make the call! Spielberg adds this reality to his newsroom tableau as a seasoned reporter reaches out to Ellsberg via a pay phone outside the Washington Post, nervously dropping lots of coins on the ground mid-call.

No matter the age of the viewer, this film does a good job of translating the fact that news organizations have the ability to shine a light on all aspects of our government, even if it requires a Supreme Court decision. It also highlights the power struggles within news organizations themselves and the continuous journey women are on as they fight to be respected and listened to in a still patriarchal society.

I highly recommend seeing this film. Sure, Spielberg could have taken the time to include a bit of dialogue on why there were only a few faces of color in the newsroom scenes, i.e. the ever-present lack of diversity in major media, then and now. But overall, the film was accurate with stellar acting and great pacing. I felt suspense at several points, even though the outcome is already a part of recorded history.


Leslie Hunter-Gadsden is a journalist and educator with over 30 years of experience writing for print and online publications. A life-long resident of New York City, her current passions include writing personal essays, dancing, enjoying her husband and grown son and daughter, and researching her ancestors.


*screenshot of Twentieth-Century Fox trailer

Mother Mary Comes To Me, Armed: "Proud Mary"

Proud Mary
Directed by Babak Najafi

Trotted myself off to the local AMC cineplex to catch Taraji P. Henson as star and producer of Proud Mary this past weekend. Gotta say, I enjoyed myself. Now, I have to say that my enjoyment is predicated on a couple of things: I'm female, I'm relatively middle-aged, and I'm a TPH fan. So this makes me the perfect audience. Still, it's a fine film and I'm perplexed by reports that Screen Gems hasn't put the full weight of their promotion machine behind it, considering that African Americans and people of color generally make up the majority of the viewing audience. I'm also perplexed by many folks publically declaring that they plan to miss it until it shows up on cable or streaming services because it doesn't appeal to them. Certainly it's anyone's prerogative to see a film where and when they like, or even not to see it all, and I understand that some may be put off by a narrative about an African American gang moll, but the negativity, people! Give it a chance!

Here are some of my notes:

1. TPH gives a strong performance. The script allows us to see her as a hardboiled operative, but also as a conflicted woman who regrets some of her choices and wants to change her life. There is a softer side to Mary. But in order to get to that peace in the valley, she has to climb a mountain of ... dead bodies.

2. The flick may remind many of the John Cassavetes' 1980 film Gloria, starring his wife Gena Rowlands (it was remade, unnecessarily and unfortunately, by Sidney Lumet in 1999 with Sharon Stone in the title role). In it, a tough ex-gangster's moll tries to prevent the Mob from offing the sole young survivor of a gangland killing. Movies can't resist telling us that the maternal instinct will turn any woman into a supernatural Lioness. (Remember, it was thwarted motherhood that sent Beatrix Kiddo on her intercontinental killing spree in Kill Bill.)

3. I enjoyed the performance given by Jahi Di'Allo Winston as the boy Mary takes under her wing. He's engaging, handsome, and he can play both toughness and vulnerability, which was perfect for the part. (He also charmed as young Ralph Tresvant in last year's TV hit The New Edition Story.) He and Taraji had some great scenes together.

4. It could be said that the film feels a bit slow and leisurely in places. That there are holes and lapses in logic in the plot (as in telling a child not to do something is a bottom-line guarantee that he will do it, for starters). That Mary's backstory could have been pumped up a bit more to increase the pace and make us appreciate her skills and history in the underworld crew. But I was OK with the slower scenes. I find it wearisome when every single film is throwing action, info, and images off the screen at breakneck speed. Sometimes fast and furious does not equal smart and clever, but we've been conditioned by a spate of whiz-bang thrillers and superhero flicks to be bombarded. It's nice to be able to just savor a narrative. (Perhaps that's a function of my age; I grew up watching films where character, plot, and tension were allowed to build over the course of the film's running time.) Still, some of the scenes in her apartment dragged down the film's momentum.

5. The perception of drag in the movie could well be influenced by Danny Glover's labored line readings. On a recent social media thread about the flick, someone commented that this is his worst performance yet. I don't know; he isn't given much to do here. I'm a Glover fan, and I still harbor fond recollections of him as a Pomeranian-stroking underworld boss in 1991's A Rage In Harlem. But I have to acknowledge that Glover has always had a mucklemouthed delivery, like his tongue is too fat for his mouth, and his striated voice is only getting more and more rusty as he ages. I described his voice in 2014's Beyond The Lights as "incomprehensible fog." Now his vocal performance has become so distressed and hoarse that in his every scene, I wondered if his audio track was out of sync, since his words seemed to arrive at our ears several seconds after he'd wheezed them out.

6. There is plenty of action and gunfire here. Does it seem over the top? Yes. While the plot explains that underworld boss Luka and Mary's boss Benny (Glover) are rivals, the scope of their operations is never made plain. But it is serious enough for many Bostonians to die in their service.

7. I have to give props to the film's music. The score (by Fil Eisler?) is dynamic, atmospheric, taut and sensitive. While I certainly enjoyed the soundtrack of existing tracks -- including Ike & Tina Turner's version of "Proud Mary," Anthony Hamilton's "Coming From Where I'm From," and more -- the choices in some places seemed too obvious and over the top, particularly in the use of "Proud Mary" as the musical theme. The song is rousing, certainly, but didn't seem to match with Mary's motivations.

But overall, Proud Mary is about redemption. And as a theme for any screen entertainment, it still works. And it adds significantly to Taraji's expansive portfolio as a multi-talented force in films. Of this Mary, we can be proud.

(Proud Mary photo courtesy Screen Gems)

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Prepping for "Proud Mary" with Tales of Hitmen Past

I'm preparing for Taraji P. Henson's new flick Proud Mary. I don't have especially high expectations for the movie in terms of it being Oscar-worthy or anything, but as a fan of a good actioner, I'm looking forward to seeing my girl flex her guns (and her weapons, too). Why shouldn't she get to show how slick, fit, cold-blooded and butt-kicking a character she can be? We are already acquainted with Taraji's incredible capacity for fierceness, thanks to her smoking chops in Empire. Now it's her turn to get physical.

Angelina Jolie had her outings hefting guns bigger than her in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Salt, and the forgotten 2008 thriller Wanted. Charlize Theron has been a badass in last year's Atomic Blonde, Mad Max: Fury Road, the Aeon Flux series, and even 1996's 2 Days in the Valley, where she had an epic girlfight with Teri Hatcher. Uma Thurman was not only The Bride in Kill Bill, but Emma Peel in the New Avengers, a superhero in the comedy My Super Ex Girlfriend, and Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin.

Taraji's entry no doubt follows in the mold of numerous blaxploitation sheroes of the 70s, like Pam Grier, Teresa Graves, Gloria Hendry, Vonetta McGee, Tamara Dobson and the like. But unlike many of these ladies, whose characters were usually motivated by revenge or justice, the Proud Mary character appears to do what she does for money alone. Will have to actually watch the movie to understand her motivations and payoffs. After all, the movie is called "Proud Mary." What makes her proud?

Proud Mary looks to be part of a long list of movies about what filmmakers imagine to be the fast-paced, high stakes, high-paying, and stylish yet lonely, complicated, desensitizing world of professional killers who must face life-and-death decisions every single day. The risks and morality of their profession make them the perfect character studies.

Aside from the more recent The Hitman's Bodyguard, which I didn't see (should I?), here are a handful of relatively recent yarns about tortured hit men that I found interesting:

1. Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
A hilarious and simultaneously violent movie that manages to skewer politics, corporate career advancement, the American dream, and suburban values while asking questions about life, love, and one's taste in music. Grosse Pointe Blank follows Martin Blank (fast-talking John Cusack), a 30something hitman undergoing a mid-career crisis. On what he plans as his last assignment, he travels back home to the Michigan city of the title where he must execute a target (only identified in a sealed dossier he delays opening) before a pair of Federal agents stops him or a team of freelance assassins led by Grocer (Dan Aykroyd) kills Blank and hits the target themselves. In the meantime, Blank decides to attend his ten-year high school reunion and resume courtship of the sweetheart (Minnie Driver) he abandoned just before prom. Throughout the film Blank has a back and forth with himself and those around him about doing what he does. "If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there," he explains to his terrified therapist (Alan Arkin). "It's not me! Why does everybody think it's me?" he grouses for the millionth time about the impersonal nature of his job, while violence and mayhem rain down around him. "No, no, no, psychopaths kill for no reason, I kill for money, it's a job!" he tries explain to his horrified girl. The jokes, jibes, and spot-on notes about modern life fly as fast as the bullets, all powered by an amiable New Wave soundtrack. One of my favorite flicks.

2. Killing Them Softly (2009)
Few people saw this elegiac crime noir starring Brad Pitt as Jackie Cogan, a Boston-based fixer charged with taking down the palookas who foolishly robbed a Mob-connected poker game. Jackie prefers to take out his victims from a distance with no warning, thus "killing them softly." He dispatches one of the robbers himself, but since he's personally acquainted with the other marks, he decides to sub-contract the gig to Mickey Fallon, an old-school hitman played by the late, great James Gandolfini in an incredible performance that nearly derails the whole film. Unfortunately Mickey is a wreck: A drunken, overweight parole violator just out of stir who precedes the job with drugs, alcohol and hookers and ultimately can't perform, leaving Jackie to do what must be done. It's a slow, atmospheric film with a lingering sense of dread enhanced by constant peeks at televised news bulletins and 2008's presidential debates showing the grim realities of economics in America. The story has the same leisurely pace, affection for its characters, and Boston Irish accent as the much earlier The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and indeed, both films were adapted from novels by George V. Higgins (1974's "Cogan's Trade" in this instance). The story ends with Jackie in a bar haggling over what he's been paid for the three hits. "F--k you, pay me!" he demands, echoing what he feels America is really all about.

3. The Professional (aka Léon) (1995)
Jean Reno plays Léon, a taciturn, illiterate and lonely hitman living in a tiny apartment in Harlem. His daily routine consists of drinking milk, exercising, cleaning his guns, and waiting for his next assignment in between executing hits around the city, while his fees are pocketed by his Little Italy-based boss "for safekeeping." But when the family of Matilda, the precocious 12-year-old girl next door (Natalie Portman) is wiped out by a crooked, sadistic DEA lieutenant (Gary Oldman) over stolen drug money, Léon finds himself the reluctant guardian and mentor for this orphaned Lolita. As their relationship unfolds, Matilda teaches him more about life and familial love and he teaches her the tricks of his trade as a "cleaner." Intent on avenging the deaths of her family, specifically her innocent young brother, Matilda is no match for Oldman until Léon lends a hand, dispatching bad guys in spectacular fashion.

4. Kill Bill, Vols. 1 & 2 (2003-2004)
Quentin Tarantino's epic tale of revenge undertaken by Uma Thurman's unwavering Bride (aka Beatrix Kiddo), these films give us a lot to chew on about the imagined lives of a crew of professional assassins. How all of these vindictive killers manage to stay aligned under the rule of Bill, aka The Snake Charmer, is a mystery since they all seem to be a pretty bad-tempered lot. Their Deadly Assassination Viper Squad requires them to adopt the codenames of troublesome snakes, not all of them venomous; their names seem to reflect their personalities more than their killing abilities, as the Bride becomes Black Mamba, Elle Driver is California Mountain Snake, O-Ren Ishii is Cottonmouth, Vernita Green is Copperhead, and Bill's brother Budd is Sidewinder. We learn quite a bit about the physical training in martial arts (Camp Pai Mei, anyone?), tools of the trade (swords in this day and age!), and nerves-of-steel techniques used by these killers and their adversaries. They know martial arts, knives, guns, swords, darts, spears, poisons, languages, survival techniques, espionage and more. Who can forget Vol. 2's pregnancy scene, with Karen Kim wielding that giant shotgun in an attempt to take out The Bride at the hotel? She was no joke, either. The thing is, when you hang with killers, you usually get killed. And in a revenge tale about a trained killer versus a bunch of trained killers, things are bound to get intense.

5. ShadowBoxer (2005)
The lives of contract killers don't get anymore complicated than they do in this flick. Mikey (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and his cancer-stricken stepmother Rose (Helen Mirren) are professional assassins and also lovers. Called in by a contact to kill his pregnant wife, who he suspects of cheating, the duo instead find the wife ready to give birth. They decide to help their target through labor and delivery, then spirit mother and child away to another city for safekeeping. Mikey continues to dodge the woman's husband and carry out hits as Rose gets sicker and sicker. Then comes the scene most remember. At Rose's request, Mikey takes his beloved on a picnic deep in the woods, makes love to her, and shoots her in the head. The film continues to show the unraveling consequences Mikey faces for harboring the wife and her son, but who cares. He killed Helen Mirren in an act of love! It's the hit man's way of pulling the plug. Mikey ultimately prevails to survive another day.

6. Looper (2012)
In another twisted take on the genre, this film poses the question: What is a hitman to do when the target is ... himself? In this dystopian future, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt plays Joe, a member of an elite crew of live-for-today 2044 hooligans called Loopers. This assassin ring kills crime world targets from 2074, delivered back over the years via an outlawed time machine. Unfortunately being a “looper” comes with the proviso that they only get 30 years to serve until they too get looped back for execution. All hell breaks loose when Joe from 2074 (Bruce Willis) loops himself back to kill a murdering mob boss as a baby, while young Joe tries to stop him. Complicated plot, interesting premise.

So, what will Taraji bring to the genre? Can't wait to see. (PS -- I did see it; check out my thoughts here.)

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Frosty The Snow Flick: Thinking of Some Cold Weather Films

A couple of days ago, we got hit with close to a foot of snow. While I've survived many a cold, snowy winter, it is not my favorite climate. If I get too cold, I cease to function. I've been this way for a while; as soon as I start to feel a chill I start to shut down. The worst episode was when I was a teenager. It was February with snow on the ground and my dad and I were driving back down the I-95 to the Bronx from Boston, where I'd visited some college campuses. The station wagon malfunctioned somehow, and in the days before cellphones, my dad left me in the vehicle on the side of the road while he went for help. Waiting for his return, I developed my first case of frostbite. Seeing my fingers turn from white to purple to black, then feeling the burning, searing pain when the blood finally returned to my extremities is something I have never forgotten.

So when I see films where extreme cold and snow are a factor, I physically recoil. No matter how great the storyline, no matter how temperate my surroundings while watching, I often find myself growing uncomfortable, viewing with my shoulders raised to my ears, arms crossed, hands tucked under, teeth gritted.

Here are three of the frostiest films that I can think of off the top of my head:

The Revenant (2015)
This is an Oscar-winning tale of adventure and revenge in a bitter cold West of 1823, directed by Alejandro G. Iñáritu. Leonardo diCaprio stars as Hugh Glass, a reluctant guide for a ragtag fur-trapping party, whose half Pawnee teen son comes along. The group is attacked by another tribe, and to avoid being ambushed by more natives along their journey, Glass leads them overland to Fort Kiowa. Except on the way he is horribly mauled by a bear. The group's now self-appointed leader, John Reynolds (a weaselly Tom Hardy), attempts to smother him but is caught in the act by Glass' son. Hardy stabs the son to death before Glass' helpless eyes, convinces the rest of the party that Glass is dead, and abandons him to the elements, intent on cashing in the pelts for himself. The film now becomes a grueling survival story, as Glass must endure bitter cold, dense snowfall, bone-chilling rains, ice-laden rivers, further Indian attacks, and hunger, not to mention being debilitated by his wounds, as he attempts to get to Fort Kiowa, then revenge himself on Reynolds. Their final showdown takes place in a vast snowy landscape by a frozen creek. Photographed in grim grays and dim blues, the film' cinematography is awe-inspiring as it depicts the vast and lonely vistas of snow-covered mountains, frosty meadows, and ice-covered waterways. But the film literally left me cold. While DiCaprio's endurance in portraying this long-suffering character is notable, I couldn't wait for The Revenant to be over.

Dr. Zhivago (1965)
This David Lean-directed classic tells the story of the Russian Revolution, as seen through the eyes of an idealistic, aristocratic poet and doctor, and the troubled seamstress' daughter turned nurse with whom he has an affair. It's a long, melodramatic film on a scale as vast as Russia itself, with numerous twists and turns, a score of dynamic characters, incredible setpieces, and a soaring musical score. If you pay attention it offers new and interesting details with every successive viewing. What I most remember is Zhivago fleeing Moscow to a country estate with his wife, son, and in-laws, traveling by train through a barren landscape of endless sacked villages covered in snow, then arriving at the manse in the dead of winter by horse-drawn sleigh. Later in the film, he will take refuge here again with his lover, Lara, after the estate's lower floors have become an ice palace due to destruction by rebel forces and the elements. The cinematography and set designs are amazing and who can forget the Russian style sable and fox furs donned by the romantic pair as they survey the scene? The two almost make the snow seem cozy.

Fargo (1996)
Named for the North Dakota city where some of the film's "malfeasance" takes place, Fargo is the Coen Brothers' tragicomic story about a hapless car salesman so desperate to make a name for himself as the sole owner of a parking lot that he sells his soul -- and that of his unsuspecting wife, the daughter of a rich and controlling local tycoon -- to a pair of violent, ignorant louts. Nothing good can come from a scheme in which Jerry Lundegaard (the incredible William H. Macy) pays to have his own wife kidnaped so he can pocket the ransom and launch his business; everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and hot on his trail is a good-natured, persistent, and very pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson (a crack turn by Frances McDormand) from Minnesota's Twin Cities. Snow and cold figure prominently in the film, as characters must suit up to head out into the elements in snowboots and hats, the long featureless highway between towns is a bleak frozen tundra, a police informant so bundled up as he leans on a snow shovel that he can barely be seen, Steve Buscemi's bad guy packs snow onto his bloody jaw after being shot, then later cluelessly buries an attache case full of cash at an indistinguishable fence post among many along the snow-swept road. At the conclusion Marge chases down acerbic bad guy Peter Stormare across a frozen lake. Cold and snow are an unremarkable part of life in this part of the country. Marge lectures her quarry as she takes him to jail in a squad car traversing the snowdrifts: "There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day." (Emphasis mine.)

What are your standout snowy flicks? Feel free to follow this blog and post your comments below.
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P.T. & The Flash: "The Greatest Showman"

The Greatest Showman
directed by Michael Gracey
starring Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Zendaya

I'll say it again: I love musicals. I like watching talented people cobble together a full performance of story, song, and dance, using all of their narrative, vocal, and physical skills. I love being transported into a fully fleshed-out fantasy world. I want to be able to examine the performance, watch it from all angles, get an immersive experience.

Unfortunately many of today's musicals are so determined to break away from the older, classic Hollywood movie musicals and serve an apparently attention-deficit-disordered audience that they now offer style over substance, speed over accuracy, flash over form. I feel cheated out of a full experience by a number of now-common devices: slap dash, amateurish, or rushed storytelling; lightning-fast editing and multiple cross cuts that don't allow me to savor the fine points of choreography or even the actors' faces; simple songs voiced by unremarkable singers with insistent, multi-voiced choruses not sung with artistic intent but flung through the speakers like so many handfuls of pop-music confetti. Maybe this is because today's movie musicals seem to be targeted primarily at 14-year-old girls with the attention spans of butterfly moths and artistic discernment honed by years of playing videogames, watching animated cartoons, and wearing sequinned princess costumes.

Even the choreography now is moving away from the rigors and finesse of trailblazers like Bob Fosse, Michael Kidd, and Hermes Pan to a style that's a cross between high school cheerleading, square-dance hootenannies, and the most elementary B-boying. You should know that there is quite a bit of stomping and pointing in this film. So much stomping, in fact, that I came to see it as the characters' insistence that they have a right to exist, a right to pursue whatever goals they set for themselves, and a right to present this modest entertainment as the height of artistic excellence.

This is a major reason why The Greatest Showman was such a disappointment. There is a whole lot of style over substance in this film, perhaps the fault of first-time director Gracey, who comes to the project after directing commercials in Australia. The sets and the costumes, the makeup and the visual effects are absolutely stunning. But like a newborn who fails to adapt to breastfeeding, I never properly latched on to this glittering tale of the rags to riches story of Phineas T. Barnum. Viewers are rushed and bullied into accepting its parameters and premise with little time to orient themselves within the story.

What's more, while I find Hugh Jackman an attractive and able performer, in all honesty, his voice is not that special. It's not transporting, sonorous, inspiring, or even imbued with personality. His singing voice is simply serviceable. Perhaps this is a function of the songs, which are robust and cleverly composed and produced to the outer limits of modern studio technocraft, but, being entirely contemporary and anachronistic to the time period in which the story takes place, are bombastic and forgettable. The most unique and interesting voice in the entire film belongs to a woman with a full beard and mustache (Keala Settle in full makeup), but her quivering earnestness and bouncing bosoms almost turn her into a cartoon laughing stock (indeed, it's hard not to think that she is mere seconds from an explosive costume malfunction during her energetic dance routines).

So let's talk about the cast of characters. PT Barnum's wife (Michelle Williams with her usual Mona Lisa smile) and daughters are as cute as cute can be. We get to see them, get to know them as adorable, unendingly supportive, and humanizing elements for the character of Barnum himself, whose motivations (get even with his rich father in law, exploit the downtrodden both inside and outside his tent) are entirely suspect. The cast of misfits, oddities, and physically challenged performers Barnum drafts into his service get embarrassingly short shrift. For most, other than Tom Thumb, we barely even learn their names, histories or the true nature of their gifts or get to enjoy their acts. Former Disney star Zendaya is cast as a beautiful young aerialist, and she gets to emote and sing, but her character is only barely sketched out. In her star-crossed romance with Barnum partner Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron), I wasn't sure if the impediment to their happy future was her perceived undesirable status as a circus freak or a person of color or both. And the whole Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) storyline, though historically apt, failed in one respect: Lind was the Swedish Nightingale of that era, but the songs she was given to sing in the movie did little -- in my estimation -- to earn her that title. Further, for a film mostly set in New York City -- Barnum's American Museum was located in the Wall Street area -- the exterior sets seem to resemble some fantasy metropolis in a foreign land.

I'm not even going to get into the discussion of the real P.T. Barnum's exploitation and abuse of people of color, the physically and mentally challenged, and even the wildlife he retained in his museum and live shows. You can read about that here. Only rarely do film entertainments, least of all musicals, adhere to the facts of their subjects.

This is one of the very few instances in a film where I feel that a character needed to be designated as a narrator -- and I'm not really a big fan of narrators. Think of The Age of Innocence, how the unseen narrator was able to put a lot of the story, and the feelings of the characters, into context. Granted, the narration was adapted straight from Edith Wharton's novel. But if Tom Thumb, or even Zendaya's aerialist partner, had told the story of Barnum through their eyes, explaining his rise and fall and why the performers came to feel like family (at least in this telling), it would have enhanced the story significantly, as would a static camera during the large production numbers.

I actually enjoyed the music of The Greatest Showman, and I appreciate the effort and talent it took to produce this film. But as a whole, it left me unmoved. And that's OK. It seems entirely fitting that a big screen musical about a razzle-dazzle showman who said "There's a sucker born every minute" should be at the center of this piece of cotton candy fluff.

Femme Fatales, Dizzy Dames & the Sad '70s Saps Who Rescue Them: "The Nice Guys" & "Inherent Vice"

The Nice Guys (2016)
Inherent Vice (2014)

The Nice Guys came on cable again recently. It reminded me anew of how the time-worn themes of the femme fatale and the damsel in distress are played out, again and again, even in contemporary cinema.

Mysterious, unknowable, sexually enticing, and often speaking in riddles, the femme fatale traditionally uses her allure -- knowingly or unknowingly -- to draw the male lead into a mystery, trap, or caper of some kind. As moviemaking has evolved with the culture over the decades, a twist on the femme fatale trope has emerged: That of the ditzy female, usually blonde, whose blithe ignorance gets her into hot water that she must be rescued from, usually by a man who appoints himself her savior. For both the Dizzy Dames and the Femme Fatales, the man endures all manner of humiliation, deprivation, danger and bodily harm to safeguard the clueless woman. The dizzy dame plot and its variations have most often fueled any number of screen comedies (Who’s That Girl, Desperately Seeking Susan, Butterflies Are Free, Something Wild, The Seven-Year Itch, Splash, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Born Yesterday, etc.), but they can be the centerpiece of dramas as well.

Set in 1977 Los Angeles, with all the attendant bellbottoms and disco beats, the story of Nice Guys follows the entangled paths of Jackson Healy, an enforcer for hire played by Russell Crowe, and failing private investigator Holland March, played by Ryan Gosling, who’s got a mortgage and a wanna-be-grown pre-teen daughter. The two men cross paths “cute” – Healy is hired to bang up March at his L.A. hilltop bungalow to warn him off a case – and they reluctantly join forces to locate a porn star who may or may not have died in a car crash, which leads them to the trail of the missing daughter of a local Justice Department official. In the process, the two heroes squabble like Felix and Oscar, ride around a sun-drenched Hollywood in a convertible Cadillac (I would swear that Gosling drives the same Caddy in La La Land), trade blows with bad guys, and stumble through a decadent Hollywood Hills party in search of film footage with the potential to bring down a struggling automaker.

The film, directed by Shane Black, is supposed to be a neo-noir thriller, but its overarching sunniness and toothless sense of danger play more like an original ‘70s episode of Starsky & Hutch than anything approaching Chinatown.

Gosling’s shambling loser character, Holland March, gets a veneer of sympathy for the “cute” relationship he has with his daughter, whom he’s raising alone. But with the two heroes already chest deep in doo-doo chasing after a nudie star and a hippy activist, he loses points in my eyes for cluing in his precocious 13-year-old daughter to all the details of the case as though she’s an adult, leading her to take an active role in their investigation with dire – and comic -- consequences. This is a movie that thinks everything little (white) girls do – no matter how clueless, ill-timed, illogical, or useless, whether they’re 12 or 22 – is somehow just adorable, even as it puts them and everyone around them in peril and requires incredible feats of human endurance to rescue them from.

The plot is overly complicated and somewhat silly, and somehow we the audience are supposed to take a liking to these two endearing, bumbling mercenaries—Nice Guys!-- who just want to do the right thing – for the right price. It’s a pleasant enough romp with some great nostalgic 70s music (the soundtrack boasts Kool & the Gang, EWF, the Bee Gees, America, Kiss, Al Green and more). But it’s hard to drum up enough sympathy for the two leading men or the fallen angels they’re trying to find. While Crowe and Gosling – who reportedly took the roles so that they could work together – seem to be having a rip-roaring good time, It’s no mystery why Nice Guys flopped at the box office.

Nice Guys reminded me of a movie I’d gone to the theater to see a couple of years ago, 2014’s Inherent Vice, adapted from a novel by Thomas Pynchon – an author whose work has previously been dubbed unfilmable. Director Paul Thomas Anderson, known for difficult, somewhat obtuse material such as There Will Be Blood and The Master, takes a stab at it.

Also set in the Southern California of the early ‘70s, and also about an addled private eye trying to track down a missing person, the flick stars Joaquin Phoenix as Doc, who spends most of his time getting stoned in the beachfront Malibu home he’s barely holding on to. When his beautifully mysterious hippy ex-girlfriend shows up asking for help locating her boyfriend, a wealthy married real estate developer, Doc decides to take the case out of nostalgia for their lost relationship. The result is a labyrinthine and damn near incomprehensible journey throughout the length and breadth of Los Angeles County, as Doc agrees to take on two more equally perplexing missing person cases that confuse and confound him – not to mention the viewing audience.

Along the way Doc encounters a brutal police captain (Josh Brolin), an eccentric attorney (Benicio del Toro), Chinese massage parlor hookers, a bizarre sanitarium, the misuse of laughing gas, fatal speedballs, an Asian ghost ship, and enough weed smoke for three Cheech & Chong movies. The plot is almost too internecine to be followed and begs multiple viewings. Indeed, the title should be "Incoherent Vice." Also billed as a neo-noir dramedy, Inherent Vice combines some kooky characters with a wacked-out atmosphere and a loose-limbed sense of the absurd.

Still, it’s kind of fun to see Joaquin Phoenix disappear completely into yet another oddball character in his filmography (as he did with Paul Anderson’s The Master), and the unique narrative is helped along by the brilliantly zany Josh Brolin and the ever-quirky Benicio del Toro, along with appearances by Reese Witherspoon, Maya Rudolph, Eric Roberts, Owen Wilson, and others.

His Doc is a Dude without much philosophy of his own and way more of a marijuana haze than a series of White Russians can impart. As a result, Inherent Vice can be viewed as a study in murky moods and how actors embody challenging roles. It’s the sort of film that will give you a hangover.