Series Review: Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full” becomes an Oversexed Cracker Cartoon for Netflix

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Roger Moore

Tom Wolfe’s darkly comic 1998 novel “A Man in Full” comes to the screen, courtesy of another king of ’80s and ’90s entertainment, TV writer/producer David E. Kelley.

The book, uneven but page-turning trash encompassing Wolfe’s favorite themes — class, race, wealth and how sex and media and myth weave through them — becomes an R-rated spectacle of exaggerated characters, egos and situations in the hands of the prolific creator of TV’s “L.A. Law,” “Ally McBeal,” “Big Little Lies” and the TV versions of “Presumed Innocent,” “The Lincoln Lawyer” and “Mr. Mercedes.”

Kelley updates the book, trying to give it present-day currency as we see a blustery big talker facing the consequences of being a showboating braggart and perpetually over-extended builder and businessman.

Jeff Daniels gives full value, as always, playing a larger-than-life Atlanta developer whose reputation, career and business of juggled excesses is about to crash to the ground. As it is a handful of vindictive, resentful bankers who bring him down, the story enters the realm of fantasy, as America knows how compliant bankers enable bungling gamblers just like this. They’re not in the business of punishing them. Those guys don’t face consequences, even in Tom Wolfe’s “Vanity Fair” era America.

Charlie Croker was a Georgia Tech football star back in the last millennium, the “Sixty Minute Man” in the backfield of a national championship team. He’s parlayed that fame into a “Man Who Built Atlanta” empire.

Now in his 60s, with an ex-wife (Diane Lane) and a “trophy wife” (Sarah Jones of TV’s “For All Mankind”) half his height and half his age, drawlin’ Charlie Croker has his name on the biggest building in the Capital of the South, his crown jewel, Atlanta’s Concourse. He’s got a 29,000 acre ranch/plantation/game preserve he’s named TurpMtine and a portfolio that dominates Atlanta’s skyline.

And when we meet him, an overmatched, foul-mouthed and furiously jealous younger banker (Tom Pelphrey of “Ozark” and “Iron Fist”) and his blunt, hardass superior (the estimable Bill Camp) have him in a big bank boardroom where they’re going for a full-fledged emasculation.

Testicles are the big talk in this big talking man’s world, and Charlie’s aren’t just in a vice. He’s in the hole for over $800 million to just this one bank. Others are also holding hundreds of millions in bad paper over Charlie’s toppling businesses and Gulfstream Jet over-extended lifestyle.

This “Man in Full” has his manhood on the line as he schemes to fend off the wolves and keep up appearances in “his” town.

The city’s Black mayor (William Jackson Harper of “Midsommer” and TV’s “The Good Place”) is facing electoral defeat at the hands of a MAGA conservative with a shady past, a man who happens to be a former teammate of Charlie’s.

Charlie’s lawyer (Aml Ameen, who played Martin Luther King, Jr. in “Rustin”) was a Morehouse classmate of the mayor, and finds himself tested by both men’s crises, and in over his head in court defending the husband (Jon Michael Hill) of Charlie’s secretary (ChantĂ© Adams), who gets in trouble for resisting an unjust arrest.

The divorced, late model BMW-driving banker Raymond Peepgrass (Pelphrey) has his own legal and financial issues, a patrimony suit by a Finnish sex worker. He’d like nothing more than sticking it to Charlie, and Charlie’s ex-wife (Lane), just not in the same way.

And that ex-wife’s beauty-icon pal (Lucy Liu) has her own testy relationship with Charlie and past connections that tie her to his difficulties, and the mayor’s.

I listened to the book on tape (read by a drawling David Ogden Stiers) on a cross country road trip when “A Man in Full” came out, and all that stands out in the memory is of the novel’s lurid thoroughbred “siring” scene, something delivered in all its sordid glory here.

Kelley does entirely too much to emasculate what was admittedly an inferior book to Wolfe’s “A Bonfire of the Vanities,” thinning out the manly outdoorsman/horseman/sportsman activities from our “full” man. But Daniels gives us the essence of the character, a poseur who would hate to be thought of as the embodiment of the put-down, “All hat and no cattle” he credits Georgia for coining about showboats like himself.

Lane gives the series a touch of heart and a few moments of fire.

But as Kelley plays up the court case, with its smirking biased judge (Anthony Heald) and the life threatening Fulton County Jail consequences that the stoic victim of an unjust system, Conrad (Hill), faces, it’s easy to see why Kelley focused on what he knows best — legal proceedurals. He’s out of his depth with most everything else.

Wolfe got “the South,” even if he wasn’t able to wrestle all the issues and threads of the culture into his bulky, researched but cartoonishly broad novel.

The performances — Camp is at his most venomous here — are what we cling to, as the narrative isn’t coherent and believable enough to cliff-hanger us through all six episodes.

But if this hits enough eyeballs, maybe Netflix will take a stab at turning Wolfe’s greatest novel — “Bonfire” — into a series. God knows that deserved better than the miscast, botched “blockbuster” that Brian De Palma, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith gave us in 1990.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Jeff Daniels, Diane Lane, Aml Ameen, Tom Pelphrey, Chanté Adams, Jon Michael Hill, William Jackson Harper, Lucy Liu and Bill Camp.

Credits: Created and scripted by David E. Kelley, directed by Regina King and Thomas Schlamme, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe. A Netflix release.

Running time: 6 episodes @45-50 minutes each

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Movie Review: Millennials try to buy-in or opt-out of the “American Meltdown”

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Roger Moore

“American Meltdown” is a comic buddy picture that taps into the deep well of Millennial angst and grievance about a “system” that is finally so broken it doesn’t work for them. At all.

Like a lot of fiction and op ed essays about the large and maligned generation, it’s very much in the eye of the viewer — this perception that these mid-20s to late30somethings are either the first to figure out American capitalism, culture and politics is “rigged,” or simply the first to considering giving up trying to fix it.

It’s an indie film that reminds us there’s talent out there that mainstream distributors haven’t embraced — in front of and behind the camera. And fittingly enough for the subject generation, “Meltdown” feels self-satisfied but incomplete, with a finale that plays like a pulled-punch.

Jacki Von Preysing makes her feature film debut as Olivia, an interior designer who learns she needs to take “90 days off” so that her scummy “blame the unions” (there are none) employer (Bella Shaw) can avoid paying her “full time” wages, with benefits, and on the same day comes home to see that her SoCal rental house has just been ransacked.

Broke, blamed for the break-in by the lazy, dismissive Millennial cop (Shaun Boylan) and her creeper corporate landlord (Clayton Farris), in a house she can’t afford since her inheritance baby beau (Christopher Mychael Watson) ditched her for “an influencer,” on a “background check” waitlist for a job driving for one of those predatory rideshare services, Olivia’s delusions of The American Dream are tattered.

She stumbles into this photographer under a pier on the beach, who snaps a picture that makes her look like someone’s who’s died, or just given up. Then shutterbug MarĂ­ (Nicolette Sweeney) chases Olivia down and returns the wallet “you dropped.” As it’s not the right wallet, and the right one and the wrong one, both in MarĂ­’s possession, are empty of cash, Olivia needs to look past “super sketchy” apologies and see the pickpocket for who she really is.

Unlike Olivia, MarĂ­ has dropped off the capitalism hamster-wheel, living hand-to-mouth, off-the-grid and in a van in the desert. When she’s in town, prowling this or that beach or street scene, she “only” steals “from those who deserve it.”

As the cop IDs Olivia as “Bougie,” we understand MarĂ­’s mistake. She thought Olivia had money and takes pity on her when she realizes otherwise. And “sketchy” or not, Olivia could use a little company right now — for binge drinking, and for companionship in the tony and now scary house Olivia is afraid to sleep in alone.

An unlikely friendship drifts towards “partnership” as the movie hints at a big crime to come. Olivia is interviewed by a detective (DeMorge Brown) in the aftermath of that event, viewed in flashbacks as the script reconstructs the nature of Olivia and MarĂ­’s relationship.

Olivia is passive. MarĂ­ seeks revenge or some form of rough justice. Olivia despairs at her plight — calmly.

“What’s the use of being calm,” MarĂ­’ wants to know” “ANGRY people get s–t done!”

The leads and supporting players are make believable characters out of one and all. But writer-director Andrew Adams leaves out connecting scenes that would make the abrupt shifts of setting and attitude less jarring.

Expressions of generational angst and rage register. But while some seem rational and justified, others come off as “Ok Boomer” cant from folks who deserve at least some of the “entitled,” impatient and (intellectually and physically) “lazy” labeling and abuse tossed at them by their elders.

No matter where your birthday falls on the generational dividing line, “American Meltdown” never quite shakes the “letdown” it seems destined to become.

Sharper contrasts in the character’s arcs were called for, maybe a few pickpocket and anarchist politics lessons from the van-dweller jarring Ms. Buys-in into questioning her faith in a system that either denies her dreams, or is to blame for her having those dreams in the first place.

Whatever its failings, “American Meltdown” should inspire others to tackle this subject at this point in time. Because as bad as things might seem to Millennials and those coming up after them, something tells the rest of us that these will soon be the “good old days” for those who don’t consciously work, shop, vote and fight to change the future they so despair of facing.

Rating: TV-16+ (profanity)

Cast: Jacki Von Preysing, Nicolette Sweeney, Shaun Boylan, Clayton Farris, DeMorge Brown and Bella Shaw.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew Adams. An MPX release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:22

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Damn. Snowed/Iced-in and no wifi — Let’s rewatch “The Duke”

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Winter Storm Blair,” the drama queens at The Weather Channel call it — Looking at you, Meryl Cantore.

Bad weather means no internet.  No screener links, no Netflix or Prime or 🍏 work.

And the Biden Administration’s “Build Back Better” bring rural America fibre optic cable/high speed internet initiative is just a mile or so from us as the snow falls. Maybe next week.

Dish TV it is, maybe a TCM classic later. But FXX just dropped “The French Dispatch” followed by Broadbent, Mirren and Goode in”The Duke.” An aging gadfly steals a painting in the classist ’60s UK. Liked it then, perfect day to watch it again.

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Classic Film Review: Hopkins is “The Efficiency Expert,” but are Crowe, Collette and Mendelsohn getting the ax? (1991)

Posted on January 4, 2025 by Roger Moore

Three future stars from Down Under pop off the screen in “The Efficiency Expert,” a delicate, dated and yet timeless fish-out-of-water period piece set in Australia at the birth of the job-cutting “consultant” boom.

Toni Collette, impressive and emotional in a romantic supporting role here, would break out in “Muriel’s Wedding” three years later, and have the most impressive career of the three.

Russell Crowe shows off the blustery tough guy he’d become as a thin, dashing and vain villain in this wistful, sentimental comedy about a workforce that’s a “family.”

And Ben Mendelsohn, top billed among the three back then, would age and smoke his way out of the higher-voiced baby-faced youth he appears as here to play grand villains as a late bloomer, cranking up the evil in everything from the “Star Wars” universe to the “Marvel” one.

Director Mark Joffe’s movie — scripted by Max Dann and Andrew Knight — came out the same year as the all-star film adaptation of the downsizing dramedy play “Other People’s Money,” and reaches for some of the same emotional notes. Long before “Up in the Air,” the “Greed is Good” ’80s sent venerable and vulnerable companies around the world into cut-cutting/stock-price-boosting layoffs, which eventually launched a whole new industry — layoff “management.”

But before that, consultants were hired to show up at companies, look at the books and carry out “time and motion” studies of the workforce to bring “efficiency” to (mostly) manufacturing concerns.

That’s what Errol Wallace (Anthony Hopkins) and his partner Jerry (John Walton) do. They’re wrapping up such a consultancy with an Australian auto parts manufacturer, where big layoffs would make a union company more attractive to American buyers in the mid-60s.

Jerry’s an amoral “Someone’s always going to lose out” rationalizer. “The trick is to make sure it’s not us.”

But Errol, as brittle and blunt as he can be, is hitting the midlife pangs of guilt stage over what he does in his career. That next consultancy, at the Balls moccasin manufacturing concern in Spotswood, a working class suburb of Melbourne, just might put our cutthroat cost-cutter over the edge.

Sure, there’s “ineffeciency” everywhere. The women doing the shoe-stitching chat all day, even during their long group lunches in the cafeteria. The shipping department is a bunch of old-timers and trainees wasting time on personal calls and plotting their strategy for the big state slot-car racing grand prix they hope to win.

Old Man Ball (Alwyn Kurts, just twinkly enough) has relatives all over the payroll, and is bringing in his daughter (Rebecca Rigg) “for a while,” just until she can get her modeling career going.

That makes young inter-department runner Carey (Mendelsohn) and everry other male his age on the workforce breathless with lust. Does he stand a chance against the young sales exec Kim (Crowe)? And does that mean he’s no longer besties with his young stitcher-neighbor Wendy (Collette)?

But they all have something bigger to worry about when Errol Wallace rolls up. The smart ones are either alarmed, or conniving (Kim) to survive this doomed factory’s fate. But most of these lifers are happily oblivious.

“Crikey,” Wallace mutters (a Hopkins first). It’s “like visiting my grandather’s house, and finding it full of people!”

He enlists Carey as a stop-watch clicking “time and motion” measurer. And as the “other” deal Wallace’s consultancy has turns into protests and near-riots at the auto parts supplier, he finds himself at a crossroad. Can he do anything to “save” this company and the people in it from obsolescence?

A telling scene has another kid there get a co-worker to splash eye drops in his eyes, as another worker tells Wallace “He’s allergic to sheep skin,” the material they make their moccasins from.

“Why does he WORK here?”

Why, “It’s where his future is!”

It was wistful and melancholy to look back on the ’60s and the death of manufacturing from the early ’90s, when this film was released. “Efficiency Expert” can seem downright quaint today, with its dusty, anitquated factory, slacking-off workforce and the idea that “the future” could be a job for life that somebody might be guaranteed, or that anybody would want to stay with such a gig for more than a short stretch.

But Hopkins, on the cusp of his greatest decades as a star, gives us a hint of humanity peeking out from the callous “cost cutter.” Mendelsohn is adorable as a kid too naive to gracefully manage asking the owner’s daughter out, too dim to see what she’s really like and slow to catch on to the new “promotion” that has him in a coat and tie every day, and makes all his friends turn on him for turning them in as “inefficient.”

Crowe sets off sparks as the office bully. But Collette lets us see the great character actress she would become in a couple of simple moments of romantic heartbreak.

Among the several comedies of this subgenre from that era, “The Efficiency Expert” plays as the lightest, if not the most lightly delusional in a wish-fulfillment fantasy light. As Springsteen sang in the middle of the Reaganomics/”Wall Street” ’80s, “foreman says ‘These jobs are goin’, boys, and they ain’t comin’ back.”

The storytelling is, pardon the word, “efficient,” with just enough heart and “cute” to get by. The characters are archetypes, but realistic and functional ones. And how can we tell the difference between Errol and his partner Jerry? One drives a practical (if anachronistic) ’72 Rover. The other’s in a flashy Volvo P1800.

Tthe cute setting, quirky characters and a very good cast putting their best foot forward, young and old, to keep up with Hopkins make “The Efficiency Expert” a worthy outing in the “fish out of water” and “obsolete industry/workforce” genres.

It’s worth tracking down just for the chance to catch Crowe before his Oscar, Mendelsohn before he aged into the villains he’s grand at playing or Collette at her most winsome.

Rating: PG

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Ben Mendelsohn, Toni Collette, Rebecca Rigg, Alwyn Kurts, John Walton, Bruno Lawrence and Russell Crowe

Credits: Directed by Mark Joffe, scripted Max Dann and Andrew Knight. A Miramax release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 1:28

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Movie Review: A Locksmith lives to Regret Taking that One “Night Call”

Posted on January 4, 2025 by Roger Moore

I’m of two minds about that subgenre we call the hero/heroine with “particular skills” thriller.

The parade of Liam Neeson/Jason Statham/John Cena et al action pictures where this mobster, that rogue government or rogue government agency or creepy neighbor crosses this or that mild-mannered man or woman who turns out to be ex-CIA, a retired Marine, a former assassin or Navy SEAL has worn out its welcome.

Somebody effs around, somebody finds out they’ve “Taken” the wrong relative, crossed the wrong professional mayhem-maker. Yawn.

It’s always more interesting when somebody a lot more ordinary is tested by an extraordinary situation, and by people ostensibly a lot more capable of what Mr. or Ms. In Over Their Heads is attempting. “Three Days of the Condor” is the template for this sort of film. A more recent example is the snowplow operator tracking down and avenging himself on his son’s mob killers — “In Order of Disappearance.”

Throwing somebody with one “particular skill” that doesn’t include violence, criminal or espionage subterfuge or the like? As an exercise in screenwriting problem-solving that’s almost always a fun film to watch. That’s why I have high hopes for Rami Malek’s upcoming spring fling, “The Amateur.”

Let’s hope that’s as good as the lurid, violent and tight-as-a-drum Belgian thriller, “Night Call.” A young man (Jonathan Feltre) is tricked, trapped and life-or-death tested by one long night at work.

Mady is a student, we gather, and a native-born Belgian with a thing for Petula Clark ’60s pop — in French. His night gig is as a locksmith. On this one night, that job will get him into trouble despite his best efforts to avoid it. And his “particular skills” and the tools of his trade will come in handy just enough to make you mutter, “clever, clever boy” at the screen and what writer-diector Michiel Blanchart has cooked-up for his feature filmmaking debut.

Mady’s the guy you summon when you’ve locked yourself out of your car, business or flat in the wee hours. He’s professional, courteous and honest. No, the quoted price — 250 Euros — is all you owe.

He’s also careful. The young woman named Claire (Natacha Krief) summons him to a Brussels flat she’s locked out of. She doesn’t have the €250. It’s in her purse, in her flat. With her keys. No, that’s where her ID is, too. As she’s flirted, just a bit, and the streets all around them are consumed by Black Lives Matter protests because Black people die at the hands of white cops in Belgium, too, he takes her word for it.

Mady might be the last to figure out that her last lie, about “taking out the trash” (in French with English subtitles) and hitting the ATM downstairs, is her get-away. When she rings him up and warns him to “Get OUT of there” (in French with subtitles) he’s still slow on the uptake.

That’s when the apartment’s real resident, a musclehead with a punching bag and lots of Nazi paraphrenalia on the walls, shows up and tries to beat Mady to death. He fails.

But can a young Black man call the possibly racist cops about what’s happened and have them believe him? Maybe not. It’s when he’s trying to “clean” the scene of the “crime” that he’s nabbed, and his night of hell escalates into torture, threats and attempts to escape from the mobster (Romain Duris at his most sadistic) in pursuit of stolen loot and the “real” thief, the elusive but somehow conscience-stricken “Claire.”

As Hitchcock always said, “Good villains make good thrillers.” Duris, recently seen in the French “The Three Musketeers” and “The Animal Kingdom,” famous for “The Spanish Apartment” and “Chinese Puzzle,”, is the classic thriller “reasonable man” heavy.

“Either you become a friend, or a problem,” his Yannick purrs, in between pulling the garbage bag off the suffocating kids’ head, only to wrap Mady’s face in duct tape, a more creative bit of asphyxiation.

The spice that Blanchart seasons his thriller with is the backdrop — street protests, with Black protesters furious that Mady isn’t joining them and riot police pummeling and arresting every Black face in sight. That’s jarringly contrasted by the oasis-of-calm subway and unconcerned discos where Mady chases clues and Claire.

A getaway on a stolen bicycle, dashing through streets and down into a subway station, suspense via frantic escapes, frantic bits of outwitting or outfighting crooks and cops, a decent confrontation with the not-cute-enough-to-excuse-all-this Claire and a satisfying “ticking clock” finale?

That’s what makes a good thriller. And if those “particular skills” show up here and there, at least we know Mady’s learned something on a job that if he lives to finish school, won’t be his career.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex scenes in a brothel

Cast: Jonathan Feltre, Natacha Krief, Jonas Bloquet, Thomas Mustin and Romain Duris.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michiel Blanchart. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:37

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Netflixable? A cuppa “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” if you please

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Roger Moore

Well cor blimey and “butter me crumpets,” Wallace & Gromit are back.

Britain’s most adorable exports since the Minis — the Cooper and the Skirt — are back for another twee stop-motion animated farce that reminds us of how much we’ve missed them.

“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” sees our keep-calm-and-keep-inventing duo still snug and comfy in their Wallace & Gromit “Escape to the Country” small town living. But doggoned if the Foe that Made Them Famous — the disguised pengiun known as Feathers McGraw — isn’t ready to escape prison and finish the heist that began back in “The Wrong Trousers,” nearly 30 years ago.

And this time, he’ll pin his “blue diamond” theft on hapless Wallace and his always-underestimated “best pal,” Gromit.

Wallace’s latest invention is a help-around-the-home digital garden gnome, a “smart gnome” who can “tidy up” your garden, clean your house, make your tea and do your knitting, all chores those pottering Brits are famous for loving to do the old fashioned way.

“Norbot” (voiced by Reese Shearsmith) is a persistent, quick-learning bot who just might be Wallace’s first lucrative invention ever. He’ll program the robot to make more Norbots and hire them out as handy-gnomes.

“The more Norbots, the merrier,” the broke Wallace crows. “What could possibly go wrong?”

The dog knows. The dog always knows.

Feathers McGraw, doing hard time (for an Adelie penguin) in a local zoo, silently and expressionlessly cooks up a scheme to hijack the gnomes, bust out of “prison” and pin all sorts of crimes on Wallace, and by extension Gromit.

The late voice actor Peter Sallis died in 2017, and there really is no replacement for that daft, befuddled and ever-cheerful “blokety bloke” North Country accent he summoned for the screwball inventor who always has his biscuits saved by his clever boy dog. So longtime Wallace & Gromit filmmaker Nick Park got actor Ben Whitehead to come in and do his best Peter Sallis. It works.

But as amusing as Wallace’s sputtered reactions to their predicaments always are, as cute as the work song the singing gnomes compose might be — “We break our little backs, and never stop to have a brew ’cause we’ve got battery packs!” — it’s the parade of sight gags that sell these clay-animated comic jewels.

Gnome puns abound. Gromit’s mastered using his retractable leash as a grappling hook. Gadgets like Wallace’s ever-evolving “wake me up/bathe me/dress me/jelly me toast” conveyor belt/amusement park ride tickle.

To break Feathers out of the zoo, the gnomes DIY an escape submarine out of the sheds and contents of sheds from assorted English gardens. Naturally, they don’t forget to include a pipe organ. Every Brit villain should know how to play Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor, even the penguins.

And what penguin escape would be complete without a nun’s habit as a disguise?

Chief Inspector MacIntosh (Peter Kay) now has a new trainee, Police Constable Mukhergee (Lauren Patel), one way these films have “evolved” over the decades. Aardman Animation has taken DEI lessons to heart, as this film looks like the clay-animated diverse Britain of today.

Granted, both MacIntosh and Mukherjee leap to the wrong conclusions about who the “bad’un” is here. MacIntosh is long enough in the tooth to still refer to the police as “Old Bill.” He’s distracted by dreams of a puttering retirement on his canal boat (“narrowboat”), which he’s named “Dun Nickin’.”

There are more grins than laughs in this outing, but Aardman addicts (myself included) will get a kick out of “The Night of the Hunter” and other film references, at the sight gags that land hard and the ones that just tickle.

It’s comforting to think there’ll always be an England, and even more comforting to hope that there’ll always be a Wallace and his Gromit “over there” to amuse us.

Rating: PG, kiddie slapstick, one very funny man-on-a-toilet gag

Cast: The voices of Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Reese Sheersmith, Lenny Henry, many others

Credits: Directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, scripted by Mark Burton and Nick Park. An Aardman Film for Netflix.

Running time: 1:22

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Classic Film Review: Baby Brian (De Palma) and Baby Bobby (DeNiro) — “Hi, Mom!” (1970)

Posted on January 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

Brian DePalma’s fourth “experimental” indie feature is a time capsule of New York in decay and political disarray. It’s the movie in which his no budget guerilla filmmaking connected with the zeitgeist, and an audience of the young and the hip, which “launched” him and his first muse, Robert De Niro and put both on the path to bigger and better things.

“Hi, Mom!” (1970) is Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” in cinematic form, a smart yet seemingly slapdash pastiche that’s part parody — in the “Hellzapoppin’,” “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” “The Groove Tube” and more recently “more recently Movie 43” tradition.

We see New York racism and slimy slumlords at their worst. De Palma sends up TV and public radio news, socially conscious documentaries and revolutionary, race-baiting theater. A porn industry on the cusp of “Deep Throat” respectability is ridiculed by the notion that “art” is what these sleazeballs are making and selling.

Uneven, amusingly organized and painfully dated, one can see flashes of De Palma’s bracing, under-your-skin technique and De Niro’s “Taxi Driver” Travis Bickle in between the dark and even disturbing laughs served-up.

De Niro plays Jon Rubin, a Vietnam Vet and aspiring movie maker who figures he’ll break into “the business” by shooting a peeping tom “Rear Window” for motor-mouthed producer Joe Banner (Allen Garfield, hilarious).

“It that art?” Banner wants to know as Rubin tags along with him as he’s watching dailies from others’ peep show pictures. Rubin follows Banner into a porn house cinema, where both men are groped by other men. Banner sees this as a moment where the kid learns respect for his audience — within reason.

“A pervert,” he says of one groper. “Leave him alone. Who knows where he’s been?”

Rubin needs $2000 and a zoom lens to shoot an 8mm silent (sound to be added later) movie. He’ll film from a rented slum, peeking through the windows of an artist putting a model through her poses, a radical (early De Palma collaborater Gerrit Graham) dabbling in activst art and Black theatre and the frolics of a group of single girl roommates who dress and undress and date in front of Rubin’s unblinking lens.

Actually, he does blink…and doze off during his vigil. It’s when he hits upon a way to get his producer the sort of sexual content he craves that we see the DIY nature of indie cinema in an era when cameras, film and everything else was beyond the reach of most and only the most creative, persistent and often ethically flexible could get their movie made.

Rubin will lie and trick his way into that girl group apartment, date and seduce the wallflower of the lot (Jennifer Salt). And he’ll contrive an filming elaborate set-up that entails using a clock radio, a camera, a red light wired to let him know he’s out of footage and two watches to time that footage as he launches into that seduction.

Little does Rubin know that young New York women of the era are a lot more sexually sophisticated and “open” than they might have been before he went off to Vietnam.

Later, we’ll see this “couple” progress into a marriage where he’s still dabbling with revolutionary politics — bombing their high rise’s laundromat as a “statement.” And “Hi, Mom!” will transition into its most riveting segment, a black and white documentary about a movement turned radicalizing theatre production.

“Be Black Baby” begins with man and woman on the street interviews with white New Yorkers who are questioned about if they know what it’s like to be “Black” or “a Black woman in New York City?” It’s for a TV documentary.

That documentary breaks format as Rubin auditions for the role of a New York cop — racist, violent and unaccountable — in a production of an evening of interactive theatre. “Be Black Baby,” for which the radical artist (Graham) has painted a nude model black as an advertising come-on, will put “liberal” white New Yorkers on the ground floor of a radically hip new theatrical experience.

Black activist/actors (Carole Leverett, Bubby Butler, Carolyn Craven, others) will bring the well-heeled in pursuit of a unique “experience” they’ll be the first to see. Theatergoers will be questioned, chastized, talked into surrendering their wallets and purses and dignity as they’re painted in blackface by Black actors in whiteface.

Confused, disoriented, not wanting to come off as racist or unhip, they endure this right through the racist taunting that begins when they’re in sloppy blackface, then assaulted and robbed. And when a cop (De Niro’s Rubin) shows up, he only listens to the folks in whiteface, doubling down on the abuse and dehumanization of the Upper East Side whites in blackface.

It’s far and away the cleverest thing in “Hi, Mom!” and a big reason this movie resonated with underground cinema fans who’d moved on from the amateurish “experiments” of Andy Warhol and others of the ’60s.

De Palma would soon transition to studio-backed horror (“Carrie,” “The Fury”) and thrillers (“Dressed to Kill,””Blow Out,” “The Untouchables”). Through blockbusters, acclaimed thrillers and bombs, he never quite hit “respectability” until people started looking back at his career.

De Niro was soon to break out of “The Godfather: Part 2” into stardom, with “Taxi Driver,” fame and Oscar glory.

Garfield and Charles Durning, playing the building super in a slum in the film’s opening recreation of a TV public service announcement, would go on to become two of the most recognizable character actors of their era.

And “experimental” cinema would recede into the same, out-of-the-public-eye niche that porn was destined to inhabit as Hollywood flirted with ’70s auteurs, blockbusters and mainstream cinema that pushed the boundaries of what was allowed or understood on screen far beyond what “Hi, Mom!” poked at.

Viewed today, this primitive, fitfully amusing “radical” comedy is most appreciated for the history lesson it provides, reminding us of how seedy New York was in its last truly gritty decade, and of how hard it used to be to get any movie made in that pre-film schools proliferation, pre cheap cell phone camera and streaming distribution era.

Rating: R, nudity, violence

Cast: Robert DeNiro, Jennifer Salt, Lara Parker, Carole Leverett, Bubby Butler, Carolyn Craven, Gerrit Graham, Charles Durning and Allen Garfield.

Credits: Directed by Brian DePalma, scripted by Brian DePalma and Charles Hirsch. A Sigma III release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:27

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Why Netflix is eating Amazon’s Lunch on Streaming

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

Netflix has 280 million subscribers, worldwide. People who pay for Netflix are paying for unlimited access to thousands of movies and series they watch.

Amazon Prime, the online retail giant’s answer to Netflix, has 200 million “members” worldwide, but only some of them use the video streaming Amazon platform as a part of that. We use it for goods from a wide variety of vendors, shipped free to the house.

Both produce series and original movies. But there’s a pretty big gap in video usage, and there are infuriatingly obvious reasons for this.

Netflix has their streaming tech down. You can watch Netflix movies or series etc. on your phone or a laptop at the airport, at home, at a fast food joint or waiting for your concert or sporting event to start. It’s a simple, smooth, rarely-buffered viewing experience.

Amazon? It works at home. Sometimes. Often. Depending on your wifi speed. I experience hangups — buffering crashes — that often seem tied to the “limited ads” they try to tailor (Hah!) to my “profile” with Amazon. Go to smaller devices or leave home and it can be even clunkier.

Amazon has its hit series, and every now and then, one becomes a phenomenon (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” “Clarkson’s Farm”). Their hits-to-misses track record seems on a par with Netflix’s (which produces far more series) but not with say Hulu or Apple TV, which focus heavily on series, don’t produce a lot of them, and have a better batting average in the hits-to-misses dept.

Then there’s the movie selection. Jeff Bezos and Amazon via Amazon/MGM are blowing money on the occasional film — “Red One,” “Air,” “The Big Sick,” “Manchester by the Sea,” etc. But new “originals” aren’t a weekly offering or feature of Amazon. And their acquisitions dept. doesn’t have the budget Netflix throws at even money-losers like short films.

Amazon buys a lot of bottom-shelf “entertainment,” self-financed or cheaply-made movies from assorted indie operators. If I want to review something “new” on Amazon, I am almost always disappointed in the quality. Well-intentioned piffle like “Chicken Coop” or “The Crossroads” or one I just got through, “The Window,” dominates their New on Prime” menu.

They get around this “We don’t have much, and much of it is s–t” shortcoming by mixing up menus, showing off a wide selection of “new releases” that are rentals because they’re still in theaters or just dropped off big screens, and an even wider selection of content they don’t advertise as “available for rent” by which should be more clearly marked as such.

There are other deceptions Team Bezos trots out. I started to watch “The River King,” a FilmRise title pitched by Amazon Prime as a “2024” release. It has some names in the cast — Edward Burns and Jennifer Ehle.

But I watch a few minutes of it, speculate on how much plastic surgery “work” Burns and Ehle might have had done, only to check and see that the damned movie was made in 2005. It’s “new to Amazon” content that Amazon labeled as “2024” “new.”

I think, well maybe they made a deal with Lionsgate’s limited-release/direct-to-video division. I posted the trailers to “The Thicket,” a bounty-hunter Western starring Peter Dinklage, and “Armor,” a Stallone quick-and-dirty heist picture “released” this year. Amazon has them. But it’s not until you click on the title that you see it’s only for sale or “rent.”

Kids, if nobody and I mean NOBODY bought a ticket to see these films, and legions of smaller distributors’ titles, in theaters, how do you figure it’s worth $6.99 now? It isn’t and they aren’t.

Amazon Prime’s slim pickings are most pronounced, to me, over the holidays at the end of the year, when new titles in theaters have all premiered, I run out of reviewable titles among the limited releases during the year and Amazon is where I go to catch up.

On and on you scroll — or I do — looking for something Amazon Prime has that make Prime a viable alternative to Netflix. Some classic titles, sure. Not all. And many of those are “for rent” or purchase.

The latest releases for rent just as they’re leaving theaters is an understandable “upselling.” I’d expect to pay near cinema prices for “Gladiator II” or “Wicked.”

But as a “Let’s watch a movie as part of our ‘Prime’ membership” experience, Prime just sucks.

Netflix finances film production directly or via purchasing of screen rights all over the world. And there are plenty of examples of money wasted on these films from North America, Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East or Asia. But by and large, there’s professional content on offer, even from countries whose film industries aren’t well known or necessarily well-regarded in the West.

Hulu and Apple don’t pitch themselves as true Netflix alternatives. You expect fewer series and very few films from them, or Disney+ or Max or whoever.

Amazon Prime Video, a Netflix-competitor hyped and offered-up by the most valuable retail corporation on Earth, is a joke.

It’s no wonder they don’t publicize usage rates, etc. I review a title on Amazon, even a conceivably popular one that is getting a lot of viewers, and the review only generates a small fraction of what your average review of a Netflix title — even a Polish thriller or Italian comedy — rounds up.

I don’t have access to Amazon’s balance sheets, and their business plan may have wrinkles in it that are beyond the conventional streaming model. But what seems obvious as of now is that they’re blowing money on “Red One” that could very easily have been broken up and paid for scores of Lionsgate, A24, Neon, etc. releases and produced a steady stream of actual “offerings” that make Prime membership a home video boon.

There’s just not enough worth watching on Prime. And making your glitchy, data-mining/data-hungry video streaming platform just an excuse for upselling users to more expensive content is just another way greed gets in the way of providing true “fair value.”

And whoever is running your “anything and anyone who got a movie made” acquisitions needs to go back to Film Appreciation class. Is it a bot that’s making these bottom-dollar buys?

The amount of Daddy’s money-financed indulgences, with a script so weak the filmmakers weren’t able to attract a single “name” to act in it, cluttering your platform shows contempt for subscribers and a penny-pinching greed that makes one inclined to cling to that Costco membership for anything one wants shipped, and to tell Bezos bye-bye. Because Amazon Prime isn’t “prime” anything.

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Movie Review: A Woman is enslaved by a “Blood Money” debt in Pakistan — “The Window”

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

“The Window” is a brutal and pitiless Pakistani melodrama about primitive practices (mostly) in the provinces, the tradition of marrying women off to pay “blood money” debts.

It’s harsh and judgemental enough to be an Indian anti-Pakistani/anti-Muslim propoganda film, but the slow-to-die practices depicted here — chiefly treating women as property, property men can abuse as they see fit — is seen all over the Subcontinent.

We meet Mina (Suhaee Abro) on her wedding day, which is anything but a happy occasion. Her father (Hameed Sheikh) has sold her in marriage to a family whose youngest son died at the hands of his son, Babar (Sami Khan). The village elders will excuse that killing with this “blood money” debt.

And Farhad (Faran Tahir), the groom and monstrous older brother of the dead man, is determined to get his full, bloody value out of this blood money.

Mina is subjected to beatings and gang rapes, clocked in a single-window cell in their property on the edge of their village. As her own father has ordained “Do not bring her up again in this house” (in English and Urdu with English subtitles) to her mother, his wife, Mina’s doom seems sealed.

“You are to spend the rest of your days in this room,” Farhad spits (literally) at her. Even his sister, Deeba (Rubya Chaudhry) has limits to the pity she shows their prisoner, who is soon chained for having the temerity to try and flee this fate.

Co-writer/directors Ammar Lasani and Kanza Zia use flashbacks to tell us how it all came to this, the ill-fated lovers who tried to flee to Lahore, only to be chased down, setting up the confrontation where someone was going to die — either from “bringing shame to my family” or from trying to carry out the “traditional” rough justice sentence for such a crime.

Other flashbacks double down on the “forbidden love” causes of all this, and underscore just how poorly women are treated in the more primitive corners of this part of the world. Mina joins in on a soccer match, scores a goal, and is promptly pummeled for it by the manly men she scored on.

Mina’s pathetic plight is ham-fistedly underscored by the one creature she can speak to without judgement, “Mr. Ant,” crawling in and out of her cell.

The acting is wildly uneven here, with some players either amatuerish or uncomfortable enough acting in English as to stand apart from the rest. The explain-it-all flashbacks are paired with simplistic fantasy hallucinations, all that Mina has to cling to as her lot doesn’t improve and more and more time passes.

The graphic nature of the violence reinforces how pitiless and hopeless this situation is portrayed. Mina has no agency in any of this. Attempts to free her or remind the village of her plight are hapless and futile.

As decades of outrage, protests and international shaming do little to lessen this savagely repressive treatment, can a movie melodrama change anything? If not, one really does wonder what the point of “The Window” is.

Rating: 18+, rape, graphic violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Suhaee Abro, Faran Tahir, Rubya Chaudhry, Sami Khan, Hameed Sheikh and Angeline Malik

Credits: Directed by Ammar Lasani and Kanza Zia, scripted by Ammar Lasani, Kanza Zia and Randy Zuniga. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:22

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Classic Film Review: A Scottish Bay, a Burt and a Baby-Faced Peter Capaldi — “Local Hero” (1983)

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Roger Moore

Oh to make the pilgrimage to Pennan, flying in to Aberdeen, recreating the journey a “Local Hero” makes in perhaps the quaintest, cutest film of that golden age of excess, the ’80s.

Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth’s “Gregory’s Girl” announced to the world a great cinema talent with an eye and an ear for “adorable.” But “Local Hero,” a Hollywood studio film (Warner Bros.) with a Hollywood legend (Burt Lancaster) adorning the cast, is where Forsyth best-blended his twee Scots sensibility to a Major Motion Picture.

It’s a classic “fish out of water” comedy, one that flips the conventions of such films, suggesting the predictable, then veering away from it. The ’80s and early ’90s were a golden age for fish out of water comedies, with this film, “The Coca-Cola Kid,” “The Efficiency Expert” and “Crocodile Dundee” among those making their merry way into cinemas around the globe.

Peter Riegert of “Animal House” and later “A Shock to the System” plays a young “acquistitions” closer at Knox Oil & Industries, a Houston concern with an interest in buying “Scotland, or a piece of Scotland” for a North Sea oil storage and shipping terminal.

They’ve settled on tiny Ferness. The aged and eccentric CEO, Mr. Happer (Lancaster), a man working with a shrink who figures humiliating and abusing the born-filthy-rich is a way of “treating” him (Worth a try.), is a bit distracted by to be all-in on this project. But he summons MacIntyre (Riegert), an executive chosen for these “delicate” negotiations because of the surname his Hungarian family took at Ellis Island, and in between getting his name wrong, tells him to “watch the skies” over there.

Happer thinks he’ll make his true mark on the world by getting a comet named for him.

Mac flies over, meets the multi-lingual local Knox company man Oldsen (future Doctor Who Peter Capaldi, barely old enough to shave), sees the scale-model that shows his rapacious company’s plans for buying and destroying Ferness and its bay, and they’re off.

In the grand tradition of city-slicker-goes-rural fish out of water comedies, Mac and Oldsen arrive in the one-phone/one-telephone-box village and never know what hit them.

The hotelier, bartender, taxi driver and only-accountant-in-town Urquhart (Denis Lawson) can barely be bothered to interrupt his lusty attentions to his wife Stella (Jennifer Black) to wait on them. But he, like every other thrifty Scot within earshot, knows exactly why “the Yank” is here.

The only person who doesn’t “know” what Knox Oil has in mind for this town, this beach and this bay is the fetching marine biologist Marina, whose name is so on-the-nose that she simply had to be played by an actress named Jennifer Seagrove.

Oldsen is instantly smitten, and it will take all his professionalism to keep the “secret” to himself. Because the other locals, even the Afro-Scottish priest (Gyearbuor Asante) are already seeing dollar signs, or pound notes, which is one of the points Mac and Gordon Urquhart must haggle over before a price is asked and met.

Meanwhile, the beach that the two gents in three-piece suits keep walking, the cozy pub where the locals gather for sing-alongs and Cèilidh (debates), even the hotel which has no idea what to do with “an electric briefcase” (pre-computer era), but where the three-star chefs (Stella and Gordon) know exactly what to do with an “injured rabbit” Mac brings them (they cook it), start to work on the Yank and his Scots protege.

The clever touches start with the ways Mac’s “bringing the community together to make a collective deal” go wrong for both the Houston hustler and the Ferness finagler Gordon.

One soon-to-be-rich wag is repainting his sailboat and gives it a new name — “The Dollar Bill.”

“Are you sure there are two l’s in ‘dollar’, Gideon?”

“Aye, an’ are there two g’s in ‘bugger off!'”

Writer-director Forsyth sets up characters and love interests that seem destined to derail the deal, and then surprises us when they don’t. He introduces us to the “charms” of the village, while letting us see how “charm” has its limits, and how living in such a place can seem to those stuck there.

The spry-to-the-end Lancaster brings a grand twinkle to the mad Happer, a goof more interested in shooting stars and Northern Lights than in oil.

That reckless motorbiking kid that everybody in the village knows to look out for every time they step out is Ricky, drummer in a local band and played by the “Gregory” of “Gregory’s Girl,” John Gordon Sinclair.

Riegert’s role in all of this is that of the straight man — the reactor — and he handles that with a faintly smarmy ease. He’s enjoyed a long and never-idle career, but his great run was”Animal House” through “Local Hero,” to “Crossing Delancey” and “A Shock to the System,” always great in support, rarely the lead.

Capaldi’s career didn’t truly blow-up until he tore through his profane turn in the wickedly funny political comedy “In the Loop.”

With “Local Hero,” the Oscar-winning legend Lancaster started his career’s home stretch — lots of twinkling old man roles; “Rocket Gibraltar,” “Tough Guys” and “Field of Dreams.”

About the only thing that seems dated in Bill Forsyth’s early films is the juvenile leering and ogling evident in this movie and “Gregory’s Girl,” even hinted at in his male-dominated feature debut, “That Sinking Feeling.” It’s sexist and cringey, seen today.

Our writer-director all but ended his career with “Being Human,” an ambitious and twee Robin Williams misfire that took a lot out of both of them. But he added “Comfort and Joy,” “Housekeeping” and “Breaking In” to a list of movies that suggested producers should have been beating down his door all through the ’90s and beyond.

Scotland had Connery and Lulu and Annie Lennox, The Proclaimers, Billy Connolly, Kelly MacDonald and Craig Ferguson. But nobody in recent years has done “Scotland” better than the guy who put it on the screen at its most adorable, Bill Forsyth.

Rating: PG, innuendo

Cast: Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Christopher Rozycki and Burt Lancaster

Credits: Scripted by directed by Bill Forsyth. A Warner Bros. release on Tubi, Youtube, other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:52

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