Movie Nation

Many of my favorite documentaries over the years have been works of cultural historiography — films that literally “write the book” on some corner of pop culture that’s outside of my experience or general interest.

My first serious education in hip hop was “Rhyme & Reason.” “Paris is Burning” introduced us all to drag queen subculture’s embrace and impersonation of high fashion. “The King of Kong” packaged video gaming’s prehistory into a tale of hated champion vs. upstart challenger, and “Rize” set the table for how dance culture got from hip hop to krumping and clowning, to twerking.

“When the Beat Drops” peels back the layers of recent dance history, the line dancing “dance battles” first mainstreamed in “Stomp the Yard” and “Step Up” and “You Got Served,” and traces it to the ascendant Capital of African America — Atlanta — and the black gay subculture that created it.

Jamal Sims’ film breaks into chapters focusing on this or that figure in Atlanta line-dancing’s past and present.

It all began, the various practitioners of the back-arching, leg-kicking “buck” dancing say, with the majorette/dance squads of “HBCUs” — Historically Black Colleges and Universities — with Atlanta’s Clark, Spellman, Morehouse, Morris Brown and Spelman at their epicenter.

Football and basketball games brought in not just the athletes of Jackson State, from Jackson, Mississippi. It was the dance squad, the Prancing J-Settes that won the attention, admiration and imitation of young Anthony Davis and his friends.

A plus-size kid who had grown up with little interest in “doing what boys should do,” who knew he was different when he realized Lynda Carter’s “Wonder Woman” was his role model, Davis would watch the “graceful…sassy and sexy” J-Settes, and he and friends would try out what they saw that night, after the game, in Atlanta’s African American dance clubs like Club Traxx.

“Bucking…like a stallion,” was all the rage, and the dance floor and even the parking lot would be the scene of dance battles as young men would throw down, match each other’s moves and try to better them.

Davis founded his own dance team, Phi Phi, which has ruled the roost in Atlanta, hosting and sponsoring competitions, demonstrations and the like, gay teams putting themselves out there in increasingly feminine attire in a conservative, church-based bastion of African American conservatism. “The city too busy to hate” would slowly come to accept its black gay subculture.

Made-up and dressed in matching halter-tops, leggings and boy shorts, groups like Team Mystique and Banji and 3D would dance-off in assorted styles of music — House and Hip Hop.

Official competitions, which Davis and Phi Phi often organize (as they moved away from competing) would feature a category called “Stands” — dance moves a college dance squad like the J-Settes could perform in the limited space, on steps, aisles or in between seats, in the stands of a football stadium or basketball arena.

“Dance in YOUR SPACE,” Anthony, aka “Big Tony,” bellows to his team as they practice choreography, barking out the count as they rehearse their steps.

Dancers talk about the grounding they need in modern dance, jazz dance and ballet and use the nomenclature of those disciplines, even if they never formally studied them.

As “bucking” came to be known as “J-Setting,” named for Jackson State’s dancers and their role in inventing and popularizing it, a new generation of dancers like Lavor and Napoleon (Team 3D) got involved and all of this moved even more out into the open.

As “Napoleon” (Lynel Goodwin) may declare, “When the beat drops, my mission is to take over the world.” When he’s not in dance mode, he’s a school band teacher and non-profit director (Band Room Nation), popularizing marching/dancing bands at high schools across America.

Those profiled talk about getting mugged, harassed and discriminated against, and debate how “out there” they should be when, for instance, they participate in a small town Christmas parade.

Sims has gone for an action-oriented (lots of dancing) and yet intimate, in-their-own-words story which hamstrings his film somewhat. That myopic approach means there’s no outside voice connecting this trend or fad to the larger dance world. It’s just gay black dancers in Atlanta chronicling dance inside their bubble, with no Voice of Cultural Authority saying, “It spread from here to the horizons” or “This will be as forgotten as krumping in a few year’s time.”

Still, “When the Beat Drops” makes for a fascinating dissection of “how these things get their start,” even as the jury’s still out on their larger impact.

fascinating  I did not know that

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexuality

Cast: Anthony Davis, Lynell Goodwin, Johnny Waters III

Credits:Directed by Jamal Sims. A World of Wonder/LOGO release.

Running time: 1:27

Somebody figured out that what fans of witch and wizard stories revel in is the cornucopia of critters, gadgets, spells and talismans.

Somebody figured out that witches, warlocks and wizards learn their trade somewhere — probably an enchanted, inaccessible school.

And that somebody discovered this long before J.K. Rowling came along.

Mary Stewart’s “The Littlest Broom,” the basis for the Japanime “Mary and  the Witch’s Flower,” was published in 1971. And watching this new-to-Netflix (it had a short Fathom Events theatrical release) film is like taking a peek into the many influences Rowling synthesized into her Potter world.

It’s a lovely looking anime outing — not from Studio Ghibli — that, like Potter, hurls exposition and fresh “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” at us, from opening scene to last.

The set-up, a girl “mistaken” for a witch, a never-ending string of introductions to the elements of this world, a rescue quest, is straight up “Hero’s Journey” of Joseph Campbell, and absurdly unsurprising. But for any Potter fan longing for a little taste of that sort of thing, it probably fills the bill.

A girl escapes from a mansion, fleeing by broom. But it’s a harried flight, her bag of magic beans spill out and…we cut to years later.

Young Mary (voiced by Ruby Barnhill) is staying with her great aunt in a great house in the English countryside. She’s a tween, a bit of a klutz and lonely. If only school would start!

“Nothing good ever seems to happen in my life!”

But a chance trek into the woods following some cats lets her find bright blue flowers. They are “Fly by Night”flowers, the gardener tells her. They bloom every seven years and the locals also call them “The Witch’s Flower.”

Mary has plucked one. The cats freak out, and fog and lightning and whatnot dust up in the woods. Before you know it, Mary’s discovered a kid-sized broom and the darned thing has whisked her to Steampunk U in the clouds.

Actually, it’s Endor College. Being a redhead, naturally they take her for a witch, a first-year kid. Characters like the Scots-accented broom-handler/wolfman Flanagan (Ewen Bremner), the heavyweight Headmistress Madame Mumblechoo (Kate Winslet) and bigheaded mad scientist Doctor Dee (Jim Broadbent) are sure she’s “a prodigy,” and give her the grand tour — a feast of classes, magical activities and weird things that make magical life easier. They also give her the run of the place.

Only Mary isn’t…a prodigy. It’s just that talismans — the flowers, the broom, a book of spells — keeping dropping her in lap.

When Madame M. finds out, there’ll be heck to pay. That means she’s going after the only boy Mary’s met in Redmanor village, Peter (Louis Ashbourne Serkis, you know who’s kid?). And Mary’s fate is sealed.

“All trespassers will be TRANSFORMED!” That’s the big thing at Endor, Dr. Dee’s transformation experiments. Mary and/or Peter could end up as some caged critter of the Mad Doc’s design.

I love the color palette of anime films, the impressionistic backgrounds, with characters, structures, trees etc. in the foreground drawn in sharp, realistic images. The animation is still, after the advent of computer assistant, jerky — almost by design these days.

“Mary and the Witch’s Flower” isn’t particularly Japanese (a real appeal of these films) and isn’t built out of the most engrossing or exciting script. Studio Ghibli’s “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “Spirited Away” covered similar ground in a much more interesting way.

Director Hirosama Yonebayashi is best known for animating Western kid lit (His “Secret World of Arrietty” is adapted from “The Borrowers”). He doesn’t have the Hiyao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away”) touch. The screenplays he directs need juicing — more jokes, better sight gags.

But the creatures, settings and gadgets are real eye candy and hold our attention. It’s more for kids than adult anime fans, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Who knows what child watching today will be the next J.K. Rowling, inspired by all the witchery/wizardry jiggery pokery this world introduces?

MPAA Rating: PG for some action and thematic elements

Cast: The voices of  Ruby Barnhill, Kate Winslet Jim Broadbent and Ewen Bremner

Credits:Directed by  Hiromasa Yonebayashi, script by Riko Sakaguchi and David and Lynda Freedman (English), based on the Mary Stewart novel “The Littlest Broomstick. A Studio Ponoc/GKids/Universal  release.

Running time: 1:43

When you’re charging members $9.95 a month to see a movie a day (average price, $10 matinee, $14 and up in the evenings), the word “unsustainable” comes up.

Whatever data mining value there is in seeing what you buy tickets for, it’s not worth dollars per day, scores of dollars a month to any buyer of Movie Pass’s customer info.

Thursday night, “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” fans using MoviePass were screwed.

Out of money. Emergency loan got them back up…but tick tick tick.

Congrats on those who bought in and took them for a ride. But this was never going to work. The jig is up.

The theater chains aren’t going to eat that shortfall. The studios aren’t either. Failing that, how was this ever going to get in the black?

At least they proved that if you make the tickets cheap enough, people of a movie-going age or of a movie-loving disposition (tech/app savvy older film fans) will see EVERYthing out there.

What I’m holding out for is a Regal Beer Pass — your favorite pour at any Regal location (my favorite chain) for a fixed amount. Per month. Stella gets expensive when you see 30 movies a month.

An epic about the Irish Potato Famine of 1847, and the British role in causing it.

A cast that features Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, LOTR and “Matrix” legend Hugo Weaving, Barry Keoghan and Stephen Rea and Sarah Greene in what has the feel for one of those troubling movies that reminds us it wasn’t so much a religious civil war that tore at Ireland for centuries, it was a class war.

“Black 47” has an Irish opening date (Sept. 18), but somebody will surely pick it up for US distribution — Sony Classics, Samuel Goldwyn, Bleecker Street — one of’em.

It’s such an obvious concept that you feel you’ve seen an “SNL” sketch or two on the subject. Maybe a Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson comedy about it.

Professionals who consult with you about a relationship you want to end, and then play-act the perfect way for you to get out of it, no muss, no fuss — disrupting weddings, helping fake your death, “going missing,” at least four black-out gags here gave me a laugh in this trailer.

As it played SXSW and opened in New Zealand, let’s hope Sony Classics or Samuel Goldwyn got hold of “The Breaker Upperers,” from the country that gave us “Flight of the Conchords” so we can see it and laugh at the gags and the funniest version of the Down Under Accent.

Soft as a plush toy and as edgy as the advertorial for “Highlights for Children” magazine it for all intents and purposes is, “44 Pages” captures the venerable children’s magazine as it prepares to put out its 70th anniversary issue back in the summer of 2016.

Tony Shaff’s dull, conflict-free behind-the-scenes look at the family-owned magazine still found in doctors and dentists’ offices across America, is seen through the lens of the magazine’s own motto — “Fun With Purpose.”

Colorful, with sparkling illustrations and artwork, puzzles, regular features such as the good choice-teaching “Goofus and Gallant” cartoon, features on crafts such as art and cooking, poetry by famous adults and kids who have submitted their work, fiction, a little science — “Highlights” is aimed at creating kids who are “kind” and “curious.

A parade of Honesdale, Pennsylvania editorial staff talk about the history of the magazine, which debuted in 1946,  and its ongoing mission — showing kids “how the world could be and should be.”

They are, editor Judy Burke smiles, “People who love kids, people who love to read.”

They spend a lot of time vetting the pieces for accuracy and “sensitivity,” publisher and heir Christine French Cully smiles.

Everybody smiles at “Highlights,” in the quaint, old small-town mansion that houses editorial, at the vast Columbus, Ohio business offices, where marketing and accounting and the new online version of the venerable publication is housed.

They smile as they speak, very quietly, of the “wholesomeness” and “goody-goody” labels they try to avoid, and the “bubble” they acknowledge they all live in. Redesigns and a new “Highlights” app to reach kids online don’t obscure the words the many employees avoid most assiduously — “conservative, old-fashioned, dated, fusty.”

Headquartered in tiny, rural Honesdale (population under 5,000), it’s a magazine setting the agenda for childhood in America and what kids should be, seemingly trapped in an America that hasn’t existed for 50 years.

The illustrations show black and brown faces, the published poems are always five by girls, five by boys and no picture of a child on a bike is without her wearing a helmet, no image of a family in a car fails to show the proper use of seat belts.

It has the feeling of CYA political correctness, tokenism and a fear of doing anything that will challenge anyone in the towns most like Honesdale, ages 6-12, or more exactly, the parents of their target audience.

The milieu, even editorial meetings, is “Mister Rogers” quiet and soft-spoken. No voice is raised, the endless tinkering and editing away the rough edges raises no ire — even with the contract workers doing a lot of the writing and rewriting, photographing and illustrating.

But avoiding issues of race, religion, environment, “evolution” and “controversy” in general cannot be easy. The occasional staff member glances over her shoulder and almost whispers when talking about everything they and their freelance writers, illustrators and others must dodge — violence, sex, guns, etc.

And looking at all these faces, you understand that they’re not just proving that publishing doesn’t have to be an urban phenomenon, with city sophistication. You see the good-faith effort made to make the magazine look like its readers.

It’s all the more amazing when you notice — as you must — that the entire enterprise is staffed by a sea of white, suburban women, hired from all over America — ages early 30s to late 60s. It’s a self-sustaining monochromatic matriarchy where, seemingly, If you’re not white and not a woman, you need not apply.

They pay all this lip service to children growing up in a very different world from the physical and metaphorical Mayberry this 44 pages-plus-cover/no advertising is still created in, while working in one of the most jarringly racially pure echo chambers in American media.

A trio of white men — art people and the science editor — have small roles and keep their voices down in what is otherwise a high-functioning matriarchy. The magazine, its earnest effort to promote sweetness and light and avoid ruffling any feathers — ANYwhere — reflects that — nothing to offend the sensibilities of little old ladies.

“44 Pages” shows its a jungle in there, a fallopian jungle.

The fact that it’s enduring in print in an era when dead tree publications are withering and dying underscores that they’re doing something right, or that doctors and dentists are slow to abandon subscriptions of a magazine that they believe keeps little kids occupied while waiting for their appointment.

In an age when men keeping women down is a running theme of the zeitgeist, especially in the media, here’s an exception that proves the rule. The descendants of educators turned publishers Garry and Caroline Myers are running  a civil, genteel and most feminine workplace trapped in 1955.

It doesn’t help to think too much about how they maintain this, the “psychological profiles” the staff alludes to having to pass before they join the whitest, most feminine institution this side of the Salt Lake City Garden Club, circa 1939.

There’s a reason media companies — save for Fox News — pursue “diversity” in editorial hiring. You’re limiting your connection to many of the people you’d like to reach when you all look alike, think alike and sound alike.

Filmmaker Schaff, whose documentary “Hotline” was about suicide phone banks, psychic call centers and the like, didn’t create “The September Issue” (about Vogue) here.

There’s zero conflict and zero effort by the filmmaker, off-camera, asking questions and prodding his interview subjects into interesting lines of questioning, to challenge the slow-to-change nature of “Highlights” and the culture that created it, depicting the world kids grow up in, their growing sophistication and Highlights as a bulwark against the real world.

There’s implied back-pattiing all around when “Highlights,” in the closing credits, is revealed to have shown an LGBQ family in its pages — in 2017 — decades after say, PBS Kids touched on it.

Shaff’s movie seems to be doing the loudest back-slapping of all.

There’s no addressing the monoculture this mag is created in or how that limits its scope. They bring in focus groups of kids to market research each issue before it hits the stands — little white kids from this not-that-diverse town that they publish it in.

I’d have appreciated even the (film’s) editorial suggestion of  how surprising it is that “Highlights” seems to cover itself in political correctness despite its reluctance to embrace the real world it now exists in. That would have been more interesting than this celluloid press release from “Highlights” corporate.

Whatever the stated higher purpose , however earnest the  apparent good intentions by all involved, Shaff was obligated — on behalf of the film audience — to question the official line pitched here. He just cheerleads, or more to the point, lets the staff cheerlead.

Is there no skeptic — academic, publishing, educator — to question the “Highlights” way, their numbers, their editorial slant? Look at America today, and ask yourself if “Highlights” has succeeded in its 70+ year mission of creating “kind” and “curious” kids. Ask yourself how a lily white enterprise like this might deserve a little credit where it doesn’t it.

Shaff has made a movie that skims the surface, like a “How Magazines are Made” video for kids that no kid will want to sit through and will keep few adults awake.

MPAA Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: Judy Burke, Christine French Cully, Lisa Schnebly Heidinger

Credits:Directed by  Tony Shaff. A Gravitas/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

Watching the old “Papillon” as a way of prepping for the new “Papillon” — Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in a Franklin “Patton” Schaffner film then, an epic that has improved with age. Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malik in a Michael Noer (Danish native, relatively unknown) film now. All these cameos and actors later to become famous — the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo as a commandant, Vic Tayback (Mel on TV’s “Alice”) and Len Lesser (“Seinfeld’s” Uncle Leo) as guards, George Couloris of “Citizen Kane” as a prison doctor, Richard Farnsworth (“The Straight Story”) as a manhunter (no lines), Billy Mumy, and on and on. It was practically a make-work project for Hollywood character actors.

No way the new one will have the scale and scope of the original, but a leaner more brisk “Papillon” can’t be a bad thing. As dense with incident and characters as the narrative is, I could see this as an Amazon or HBO limited series — maybe five hours (Schaffner’s was over 2:45.

My favorite book in high school. Must’ve read it a dozen times. August 24, another take on one of the great adventure yarns (partly true, largely exaggerated) hits the screen.

Yay, another teen comedy about nerdy boys who try to find an angle to “get girls” in high school.

Because the Weinstein/Trump/Moonves/Franco model, get rich or be born rich and make yourself famous so that you have “power” over them is no longer an option. Yeah, better school yourself in high school son.

Couple of laughs in this trailer — from “girls.”

Yeah, she’s like the fifth most famous cover artist in the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame.

But she formed The Runaways, and when the Cherry Bomb went off and the smoke cleared, built a solid solo career on…covers.

Yeah, Joe Cocker isn’t in the HOF and I’m bitter. But all power to Joan J. Icon.

“BlackKklansman” is the funniest Spike Lee movie in decades, a film of such wit, tension, passion and relevance that it is his most important work since “Malcolm X.”

This mostly-true story of a grim but ironic undercover sting of the Ku Klux Klan allows a filmmaker infamous for getting in his own way, condemned to low budget filmed stage shows, documentaries and movies-nobody-saw, to return to relevance with a thriller that’s epic in scope and satirical in its bite.

All it took was hot producer Jordan Peele (“Get Out”) and three extra screenwriters to get it made and rein in just enough of Lee’s excesses to get him back to making the sorts of movies he used to toss off with ease.

Ron Stallworth, subtly-played by John David Washington of TV’s “Ballers (and a tween extra in “Malcolm X”) was a straight arrow son of a career military man who became “the Jackie Robinson” of the Colorado Springs Police Department in the 1970s.

He endured the racism of his own department, first in the records room where the rookie was repeatedly asked for files on this or that “toad.” Colorado racist cops had given up the N-word for the T-word. Progress.

But a smart guy like Ron, with his Natural hair style and the ability to switch from his usual “King’s English” to “jive,” figures undercover work is where it’s at. And after much grousing from the more racist colleagues, and his prickly chief (Robert John Burke), he gets his chance. He wears a wire into ex-Black Panther Stokely Carmichael’s speech, invited to address the black community by the local college’s student union.

Stallworth was to spy on this “radical” who was “stirring things up.” The police were looking for an excuse to arrest the FBI target then going by a newly-taken African name, Kwame Ture. No dice there, the rhetoric wasn’t that incendiary, Stallworth insists.

But he passes muster with the undercover guys (Adam Driver, Steve Buscemi’s brother Michael Buscemi). And he does meet a “fine as red wine” sister, Patrice (Laura Harrier), whom he has to lie to even as he resists her crowd’s insistence on calling police “pigs.”

They have their reasons.

But it’s a glance at a brazenly-placed newspaper recruiting ad for the KKK that piques Ron’s interest and gets him on the phone. His “King’s English” convinces the voice on the other end of the line of his “white” legitimacy, his instincts tell him that these creeps are thinking big — and violent. All he’s got to do is convince his boss (Ken Garito), the chief and the rest of the “intelligence” squad to go along with it, and get a white cop to play the role he’s creating on the phone and infiltrate the KKK.

The skeptical, jaded Flip (Driver) reluctantly agrees.

“I’ve always wanted to be black.”

Lee, working from the real Ron Stallworth’s memoir, takes us into a world of virulent racists, paranoid gun nuts and delusional cranks, “The Invisible Empire,” whose members lay low, refer to the KKK as “The Organization,” The Cause.”

And they are planning “a big year,” something bigger than mountaintop cross burnings — “The highest hills get the most eyes.”

Ron, in the person of Flip, goes to redneck bar gatherings and backwoods shooting parties where the boys trot out their named firearms (“I call this one ‘Jew Killer'”) to riddle African American-shaped targets.

He faces the furious, ignorant suspicion of Felix, played in a fine, foaming-at-the-mouth fury by Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen.

And he debates Ron on the importance of what they’re doing.

“For you, this is a crusade. For me, it’s a job.”

Lee balances Ron’s work debates with his guarded arguments with the “Revolution is Now” Patrice. His patriotism has him ironically believing “America would never elect somebody like David Duke president of the United States.” He tests his own idealism with her, his belief  you can effect change “from the inside.”

Patrice, rousted and abused by the most racist local cops on the night of the Carmichael/Ture speech, doesn’t buy it. With her voluminous Afro and high profile in the community, she’s almost certainly on the KKK radar as well.

Lee steadily ratchets up the tension even as he’s never far removed from finding these dangerous men funny. Casting Topher Grace as the young Louisiana racist KKK Imperial Wizard Duke sets the tone, and works wonderfully. Black Ron has to call National KKK headquarters to see about his membership card, and shockingly, the Big D is who answers the phone and expedites the card.

“God Bless White America!”

The local group’s collection of secretive sympathizers in government and literal mouth-breathers warns White Ron that “a war’s coming.” Will Black Ron and White Ron be able to stop it?

Lee finds places to squeeze in his trademarks — his rolling reverse zoom, pointed political criticism and “Uplift the Race” sermons and lectures. They fit here. Alec Baldwin plays a man rehearsing a KKK film lecture in the movie’s heavy-handed and somewhat ill-fitting (but biting) opening scene. Lee gives actor Corey Hawkins, as Carmichael/Ture, minutes of mesmerizing screen time for his speech.

Ture’s speech doesn’t so much “turn” Ron as lay the out the distances between the races, and ways that gap has and hasn’t closed in 45 years. Harry Belafonte has a moving cameo, telling the story of a long-ago lynching his character witnessed to a rapt Black Student Union audience.

And Lee finishes with a flourish, hammering home the connections between the KKK then and now, racist leadership then and at the very highest levels now.

Those of us who have followed Lee’s work over the years embrace his strengths and his flaws. He shot “BlackKklansman” in a grainy, lurid blacksploitation style (period appropriate tunes) and texture and wonderfully balances the mockery of the racists with the grim realities of the true story.

But Spike never learned to drop the mike, leave the audience craving more. As with “Malcolm” and most of his signature films, he cannot bear to exit the stage, running “BlackKklansman” past its climax, sermonizing until the credits stop him.

At least he’s outgrown the tendency to have an actor turn to the camera and shout “WAKE UP!” at the faithful.

With “BlackKklansman,” the great touches overcome his two Achilles Heels. Let’s hope this reconnects the filmmaker with the wider big screen audience, because talent this mercurial has been a terrible thing to waste.

MPAA Rating: R, violence, profanity, racism

Cast: John David Washington,  Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Jasper Pääkönen, Alec Baldwin

Credits:Directed by Spike Lee, script by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, David Wilmott, and Spike Lee, based on the memoir by Ron Stallworth. A Focus release.

Running time: 2: