“People’s Republic of Desire” is a cinema verite documentary about online streaming stars in China, people who “perform” on demand and are rewarded directly by patrons — viewers with money.
It’s narrow-cast capitalism at its most ruthless.
“People’s Republic”“People’s Republic” opens in New York and other cities in early Dec.
The problems started pretty much the moment the Pell Grant, named for a U.S. Senator who wanted to move college aid from colleges which dispensed it to students, to the students themselves, was invented.
The idea, as recounted in the documentary “Fail State,” was to give students “choice,” to spend aid money at state schools and community colleges, or private — typically non-profit ones.
But that act opened the Pandora’s box of “for profit” education, “schools” built on “the market model,” which found they made more money by not actually providing an education, by spending their Federal student loan guarantees obtained from students on obtaining more students — advertising, recruiting and rounding up warm bodies that qualified for loans — and paying for lobbyists and making campaign donations to ensure Congress would never ever derail their fraudulent gravy train.
Jennifer Wilson, an alumnus of Everest University pictured above, holds up her degree, which no prospective employer would recognize, and states a cold, hard personal truth — “This $50,000 piece of paper is completely worthless.”
The film’s title — a play on college names like “Boise State/Albany State/Ohio State” — isn’t the cleverest. And the film is something of an overreach, offloading far too much information to easily process. That’s because the movie has a lot of ground to cover, with a lot of policy turning points, too many villains to track and too much money spread around to trace.
Still, Alexander Shebanow’s film shines a damning spotlight on these “degree mills,” which many represent as simple “frauds.”
We see how The University of Phoenix sponsors concerts at military bases because they need veterans to sign up for their courses. Not shown, Full Sail University buys billboards all around their city block-sized Orlando, Florida campus (re-purposed shopping malls along with a few purpose built structures) touting how many “Oscar nominated films” or “Grammy winning albums” their alumni worked on. What they did on those projects, or even if the figures themselves are accurate, isn’t disclosed.
And your TV is filled with ads for schools that sound prestigious, but are often just money-transfer operations making their investors and founders rich.
“Fail State” focuses on academics, journalists and legislators fighting to expose, regulate or close such schools. And it zeroes in on their victims — low income people of every race, recruited, pressured, hustled and conned into signing up for “educations” that are in most cases, lacking, and for loans that millions of such students will never be able to repay.
Shebanow sums up decades of reporting on this, another solvable problem made unsolvable by politics. The first story we see identifying this then-new ripoff was introduced by Walter Cronkite on “The CBS Evening News” back when he anchored it. The latest, by John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight.”
Members (Maxine Waters) and former members of Congress (Senator Tom Harkin) detail how attempts made, over the decades, to regulate, police and if necessary close such businesses, which are responsible for billions in un-repaid student loans every year.
Former President Bill Clinton is given millions to sit on the board for Walden University. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner rode to the speakership on the millions donated by parent companies of such schools, the sainted John McCain defended them and George W. Bush started the gutting of rules his father’s administration pushed through years earlier.
And Trump University? Never let it be said that a grifter doesn’t know a good grift when he sees one.
Schools such as Kaplan’s ICM School of Business, Westwood College, Rasmussen, Columbia School of Broadcasting, DeVry, Everest, ITT Tech, Strayer, University of Phoenix and hundreds of others focus their pitch on the disadvantaged, offering a fast-track (months instead of years) program that won’t cost you anything up front.
But even as a narrator notes the shifting nature of work in America, where “college is the only route to the middle class,” “it’s increasingly out of reach.”
The many academics interviewed point out how “poor students have just a one in ten chance of graduating,” how “higher education is functioning as a caste system.”
F. King Alexander, president of LSU, details the history of collapsing state support for colleges that began under Reagan and continues today
One film chapter explains “The Pain Funnel” approach to recruiting — a step-by-step plan recruiters use to break down recruits, embarrass, frighten and goad them into signing up.One Miami “campus” even hired strippers as on-street recruiters.
With $100 billion in student loans going out today, there’s a lot of incentive to get that money, moving it from taxpayers to corporate chiefs, sticking the poor and when they default, the government with the debt.’
It’s no wonder one congressperson calls two of the instigators of this mid-2000s deregulation looting spree, Congressmen John Boehner and Howard McKeon, “bag men for the mob.”
The warnings about “creating a permanent underclass” are underscored with who is losing out on the money the for profit operators are grabbing — America’s community colleges, “the Dark Matter” holding the country together, providing cheap, practical and legitimately accredited educational training for millions hoping to better their financial situation.
We meet Marquette Bascom as she struggles to raise two sons and attend LaGuardia Community College. Her student loans are sizable, but not onerous.
And unlike the other students hoping for the same results she does, she will have a legitimate degree and a loan she will be able to pay off.
It’s a lot to take in, and “Fail State” doesn’t leave the viewer with a lot of hope. When the Obama Administration figured out how to grade such operations and shut down the ones plainly set up to fail their students, Corinthian, Everest, ITT Tech and DeVry went away.
And then Donald Trump got elected.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits:Directed by Alexander Shebanow, script by Alexander Shebanow, Regina Sobel, Nicolas Adams, narrated by Gibson Frazier. A Gravitas/Starz release.
Running time: 1:33
Yeah, this one’s set in Norway, where they allegedly listen to scientists.
Magnet has picked this one up for US distribution. No firm date for release for “The Quake” that I can see,
The reason it’s notable is its connection to the very fine Norske tsunami thriller, “The Wave,” same stars, same general idea of a natural disaster that has avoidable consquences.
There’s an embargo on this film, a review that won’t see the light of day until All Hallow’s Eve.
Disney landed Keira Knightley, and Keira 2.0, aka young Mackenzie Foy, along with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.
It opens Thursday night, and one wonders if Disney’s fondness for making the most of “brands” isn’t about to blow up on them.
I mean, “The Nutcracker” ballet is something a tiny percentage of kids find enchanting, and the rest of us were dragged to it, endured the evening of blatantly symbolic dance (You still have to tell tiny tots the story”) or saw a version on TV and didn’t warm to it.
No, it’s not the ballet, but the branding in this case could be a “Oh NO Mommy” turn off for a lot of viewers.
It could do well, but one has a nagging feeling the weekend belongs to Freddie Mercury and families may not be up to a true “holiday” kids’ fantasy quite just yet.
Long before the Coen Brothers saddled up with “True Grit,” they showed a penchant for florid, archaic English, the speech of the characters of Western writer Charles Portis.
Think of “Raising Arizona” — “Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”
“O Brother, Where Are Thou?” — “It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.
Not everybody prattles on through “The Ballad of Buster Suggs,” the Coens’ new film for Annapurna and Netflix. One chatterbox trapper (Chelcie Ross) gets labeled “tedious” for running on and on at the mouth because he so seldom has the pleasure of a human audience.
Then there’s the title character, played in the opening scenes by Tim Blake Nelson, showing off his crooning pipes in a way that “O Brother” only rarely allowed.
“I too have been known to violate the statutes,” his Buster offers a crusty barkeep who allows that whiskey is illegal in this corner of the desert Southwest. The shootout that follows, an under-estimated Chatty Cathy of a dandy, in cowboy clothes straight out of a Roy Rogers faux Western, dispatching several tough hombres and never losing his grin, can only be punctuated thusly.
“Puts me in mind of a sawwwwwng.”
And that opening — snippets of grandiloquent goofiness, graphic violence and the occasional song, is your test. No, it’s not a musical. But will you want to sit through two hours and twelve minutes of unconnected episodes, chapters from a (fake) titled “The Ballad of Buster Suggs,” or are you of a mind to spend your time more industriously, the importance of being earnest taken into account?
Because while every single chapter — “The Mortal Remains,” “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” etc. — has delights and reasons to enjoy it, they don’t tie together. It peaks early, and slogs a bit afterwards as we get the usual Coen grotesques, darker-than-dark humor, verbal dexterity that ventures into verbosity and their special brand of cruelty.
Every so often with this film, premiering Nov. 16, makes one wonder “OK, when do they end this? And how?” It doesn’t so much run its course as stroll it, petering out along the way.
We meet a solitary prospector (Tom Waits) looking for gold in pristine (until he shows up) wilderness, an armless/legless traveling orator, “The Wingless Thrush” (Harry Melling) performing at the behest of a hustler/manager/barker played by Liam Neeson.
A bank robber (James Franco) has a knack for dodging nooses, once when an Indian war party crashes his necktie party.
An unworldly young woman (Zoe Kazan) is tested by a wagon train West, not least by her affection for her brother’s dangerously/irksomely noisy Jack Russell terrier.
And a couple of swells from the British Isles (Brendan Gleeson and Jonjo O’Neill) regale and are regaled by their fellow stagecoach passengers (Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek and that tedious trapper) as they transport a body overland to Fort Morgan.
It’s not a musical, in spite of that adorably bubbly and then bullet-strewn opening, but no less than Neeson and Gleason add tunes to the proceedings. Waits? Of course.
The songs are variations of the saloon tunes of a hundred Westerns, most amusingly Nelson’s Buster re-wording the classic “Little Joe” from “Destry Rides Again” to suit the situation.
Nelson is the stand-out performer here, with players like Neeson and Gleason and Franco feeling a tad wasted in parts this small. Waits sparkles, and the Coens make great use of Rubinek, who slings a French accent as he pontificates on the nature of love and what’s deep within the human heart and such.
“Buster Scruggs” is as rich in detail as any of the better Westerns we’ve seen in recent years, from “Unforgiven” and “Deadwood” to “Open Range” and “The Homesman.”
The wagon that transports trapped Professor Harrison, “the Wingless Thrush,” is a classic theater on wheels, and his repertoire, ranging from Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to Lincoln’s “Gettsyburg Address,” Shakespeare to the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, is exactly what traveling “orators” who weren’t Mark Twain would recite to the miners and cattle town provincials such performers regaled.
Indian warpaint is vivid and Remington painting real, prospecting is laid out in all its labor intensive tedium and peremptory hangings weren’t foolproof when all they had to work with was a horse, a tree, a rope and a prisoner.
The Coens manage a few Cinemascope-worthy Western vistas; Buster singing through buttes and canyons, an Indian attack that begins on the cusp of the horizon and a genuine wagon train — all images with beauty and scale that “True Grit” lacked.
Whatever working for Netflix did for their budgeting, not having to edit “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” into anything tighter or more thematically coherent allowed them these little grace notes.
But I found “Buster” to be a film that danced out of the starting gate and trotted or gamboled along, pleasantly and/or grimly ever after — perfectly watchable, probably more watchable in segments in the “Let’s put this on pause” comfort of your own home.
MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence
Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek
Credits:Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. A Netflix/Annapurna release.
Running time: 2:12
The casual fan probably doesn’t notice that roughly the output of the Joel and Ethan Coen Filmworks ltd. is either a misfire or utterly unwatchable.
Great films, Oscar winners, mixed in with “A Serious Man” and “Hudsucker Proxy” and “Burn After Reading” and a pleasantly inferior remake of “True Grit.”
They spent Netflix cash on going back to the Old West, filming a movie that will go a long way toward deciding if James Franco earns a “Get out of #MeToo” card, or faces years in the movie wilderness and movies with the likes of Mel Gibson and Louis CK.
Netflix is starting to screen their movies for critics in theaters, which is a good thing, although trying to get a publicist there to get you access to a specific release (Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind,” finally) is a lost cause. There’s little rhyme or reason to what they promote. “Awards contenders?” Maybe.
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” premieres on Netflix Nov. 16.
It’s a January release, so expectations are low.
The money in this trailer seems to have gone for music clearances and a digital mountain lion.
Bryce Dallas Howard voices Bella, the lost dog, with Ashley Judd, Wes Studi and Edward JAmes Olmos the only real “names” in the cast.
But the author of “A Dog’s Purpose” strikes again with “A Dog’s Way Home.”
To Nic Cage fans — and we know who we are even if we’re proud of it — every movie is worth a “Nic Cage is BACK” headline. You know, like 50 years of Rolling Stone/Dylan covers.
Like a lot of Cage C-movies these past few years, this one has him looking scruffy, burnt out and wearing cowboy boots and a drawl.
Franka Potente is the other pretty face you recognize in “Between Worlds,”
which played Fantastic Fest and doesn’t have a firm release date yet.
Melissa McCarthy unleashes her inner misanthrope in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and we may never look at her the same way again.
Sure, the sad, lonely and foul-mouthed persona she’s cultivated in a few too many films is a big part of her version of the forger, thief and writer Lee Israel. But anger at her world, the limits put on it by Israel’s disdain for the human race, career misdirection, alcohol consumption, limited talent and frumpy appearance carries McCarthy through this performance, justifiably earning her Oscar buzz.
Israel was a biographer-for-hire in the ’70s and 80s, a freelance writer who got a book on reporter and game show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen on the best seller lists, but whose Estee Lauder bio was abandoned by book sellers practically before publication.
In 1991, when we meet her, she’s drinking at work, copy-editing with kids half her age and cursing too freely to keep the job. Her cat is old and sick, she’s behind on the rent. Her agent (Jane Curtin, prim and perfect) rarely returns her calls and nobody but nobody is interested in her writing about the nearly-forgotten vaudevillian Fanny Brice, already the subject of “Funny Girl” and “Funny Lady” movies by Barbra Streisand.
She can’t make nice, flatter, kiss up or “play the author’s game” to reach success. All she can do is remind us all of how there is nothing more distressing than the impatient hum of an electric typewriter when you’re at your written wit’s end.
“I’m a 51 year-old woman who likes cats better than people,” she grouses. She’s living in near squalor in one of the most expensive cities on Earth with no ready means of support.
Meeting a fellow barfly (Richard E. Grant, the life of the party), a gay ne’er-do-well who has crossed paths with her at this or that publishing party, doesn’t help. Drunk or sober, she’s broke. She has to sell her personal letter from Katharine Hepburn (she profiled her for a magazine in the ’60s) just to get her cat cared for.
She knows letters from the rich and famous have value. Stumbling across a couple of Fanny Brice letters, typewritten and tucked into some Brice books she pores over in the New York Public Library, gives Israel the inspiration.
As we’ve seen her pilfer from her agent’s apartment at a party, the leap isn’t a great one. Lee Israel will turn her writing toward mimicking the letters of figures she can research, whose voices she can copy, selling witty, jokey and blushingly personal notes for hard cash.
Brice, Noel Coward or Dorothy Parker, no problem. And when she gets away with it once or twice, she invests in the process — tracing signatures, reproducing personalized stationery, buying every old typewriter she can find, matching each typewriter to the author she is impersonating.
You had to be clever like that in 1991, even if you didn’t yet have the Internet around to unmask your crimes.
Israel could be funny and biting, so she made bon mot queen Dorothy Parker (“What fresh hell is this?”) a specialty.
“I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker!”
If there’s guilt, maybe it’s because she took advantage of book-seller/letter buyer who is also a fan (Dolly Wells) and kind of cute. Rooking Stephen Spinella and Ben Falcone, playing other dealers, is guilt-free.
There’s a touch of McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation in Israel — perpetually irked at the world when really, she’s the one with the big problem. It’s an understated performance flatteringly framed in close-ups by director Marielle Heller. Co-writer Nicole Holofcener (“Friends With Money,” “Lovely and Amazing”) specializes in layered, empathetic roles for women, which had to help.
Grant is the cinema’s favorite gay British best friend, and he makes a wonderfully louche lush as Jack Hock, Israel’s only friend. But being a homeless, aged coke-dealing Lothario doesn’t bode well for how dependable he’s going to be when the going gets tough.
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is based on Israel’s memoir, one of those reminders that in New York publishing, a name’s a name and when you’re in you’re in. Whatever price she paid for her crimes wasn’t high, and there were plenty of suckers who believed her later book and never bothered to fact-check her earlier works.
Short cutting cheats are repeat offenders, and I’d take anything she signed her name to with a bunch of grains of salt.
But “Forgive Me” makes for a fun yarn, one undercut with tinge of sadness. Perhaps only a comic as funny and salty as McCarthy could have made Israel funny, cunning, crooked and dysfunctionally depressed, so likably unlikable in the process.
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references, and brief drug use
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Dolly Wells
Credits:Directed by Marielle Heller, script by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:46
“Hunter Killer” arrives in theaters as a Cold War revival submarine thriller about commandos and a US sub sent to rescue an embattled, coup-imprisoned Russian president.
Tell me you think that’s wonderful geopolitical timing. Take off your MAGA hat when you do, pal.
It was scripted a long time ago and filmed some time before Michael Nyvist (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) died, in June of 2017. But this disjointed actioner feels like the most unfortunate piece of pop art timing since Charles Lindbergh tried to get “Save the Next Dance for Me, Adolf” on the 1941 “Hit Parade.”
It’s a Gerard Butler combat pic, and while it isn’t on the level of his worst B-pics — Gary Oldman has won an Oscar since this was put in the can, and the effects are decent — it’s still a clumsy thriller weighed down by cliches, gigantic leaps of logic and ham-fisted “The Russians are Just Like Us” politics that only a tiny minority of Americans won’t find grating.
Butler is Captain Glass of the U.S.S. Arkansas. He’s on a rescue mission for a missing U.S. sub in the waters north of the Once and Future Soviet Empire. But once he’s on station, there’s “a shoot out under the ice.” His “Hunter Killer” (non ballistic missile) sub has to fight its way out of a jam. The Russians want World War III?
So it almost seems. Because their president (Alexander Diachenko, handsome and bland) has been taken hostage, labeled “weak” by his bellicose defense minister (Michael Gor).
The Navy brass (Common) and intelligence expert (Linda Cardellini) see what’s happening. They’ve got to prevent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Oldman) from pressing Madame President (Talk about alternate reality.) from escalating things into a war.
And as they already have commandos on the ground and a sub within reach, why not rescue the Russian Not Named Putin?
“We’re goin’ in t’get four of our boys, and one Russian president,” Captain Glass growls.
Toby Stephens of Netflix’s “Lost in Space” is the tough-as-nails commando leader, Carter MacIntyre the sub’s highly-strung XO (executive officer), the one who shrieks at his commander every time Glass goes rogue, beyond orders, what have you.
And the late Nyqvist, who rarely had a Hollywood film worthy of his talent and stature in his native Sweden, is a Russian sub commander.
The digital sub-fights are quite good, with surface ships and some apparent Navy cooperation. The best moments in the movie are little slices of damage control response teams, stanching flooding, putting out fires, etc.
The commando scenes, which are like their own movie (with painfully under-developed characters, “types” really) are generic paint-by-number bits. Love the way they swim in fjords above the Arctic Circle as if it’s Fleet Week in Key West.
It’s entirely too dramatically thin and lacking in real suspense to stand among the great or even middling submarine movies. It’s “Red October Lite,” with lots of Tom Clancy gadgetry and Cold War politics that Clancy would recognize as well.
Even though Helsinki makes the idea of an American rescue of a Russian president more plausible than a say, having a woman in the White House, “Hunter Killer” isn’t remotely good enough to make you forget the America it’s being released in, which is the whole point of an action movie — escape.
MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language
Cast: Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman, Common, Linda Cardellini, Michael Nyqvist
Credits:Directed by Donovan Marsh, script by Arne Schmidt and Jamie Moss, based on a novel by Don Keith and George Wallace. A Summit release.
Running time: 2:02
Movie Nation 