Netflix has a real prestige picture or three this holiday season. This adaptation of the room reflective, reactionary and some say self righteous redneck memoir by J. Vance has a Glenn Close Oscar nomination in its DNA.
The father wants to get his kid into the exclusive Catholic school that will give his little boy the best chance at a brighter future. And it’s not going well. The admissions officer asks him a question in code.
“What kind of people are Mani?” he wants to know, referring to the dad’s surname.
“Good people!”
But that’s not what he’s asking, and Dad (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) cuts to the chase.
“We’re shudras, lower caste,” he blurts, and the whole office of this Mumbai institution flips out.
“We’re not ALLOWED to use that phrase,” even though that’s precisely what the classist creep wanted to know.
Mani is personal assistant to a scientist (Nassar) who heads an institute dedicated to getting government grants to search for signs of alien microbes in the upper atmosphere. The scientist is arrogant and insulting, calling Mani “Moron!” “Imbecile!” “Knobhead!” He can be that way because he’s upper caste. He can even get away with being a stubborn dope. Mani gets it.
The caste system still exists, Indian semantics be damned. A Tamil, he’s lived his whole life in a kind of comical defiance of the stacked-deck of India’s democratic meritocracy. And he’s hell-bent on getting his kid into that school, having the boy — mostly deaf in one ear — recognized as a genius, and putting it to India’s version of “The Man” as he does, as his son mingles with and joins the ranks of “Serious Men.”
Sudhir Mishra’s dramedy, based on a novel by Manu Joseph, is playful and profound, a commentary on India and its version of “privilege.” It’s also quite touching, a cautionary tale of “How far we’ve come” India, a sentimental father-and-son saga with a bitter metallic aftertaste.
The prologue shows Manu chewed out for speaking Tamil, when Hindi and English are all the upper classes will tolerate in upper class jobs. He jokes (in Tamil and Hindi, with English subtitles) with his pregnant wife (Indira Tiwari), sneaking her into an exclusive hotel’s pool, explaining the torrent of Tamil profanity she shrieks when she goes into labor as “It’s the Lord’s name…in Tamil.”
But once the child is born he’s all business. He will use what he’s learned to get little Adi into that school. He will teach the boy the science he overhears each day, and more importantly, the arrogant way the blowhards he works for carry themselves.
“I don’t have TIME for this” is a classic brushoff of annoying questions. “I can’t DEAL with primitive minds,” Adi fumes. “If you understood, you would be ME,” a brilliant person’s most effective put-down.
Adi (Aakshath Das) is distracted in class, pedantic when pressed on it. And by age nine, he has become a celebrity, the “little Einstein” of the BDD (slum) complex.
We have just enough time to ponder what Adi’s deal is — A genius learning to throw his weight around? A fraud? Dad’s trained, taught and doted-on revenge on India’s rigged society? — when a father-daughter PR firm and its idealistic, politically wired younger partner starts wondering how Adi can be of use to them.
“Aunty Anuja” (Shweta Basu Prasad) wants to lobby for money to improve the BDD slum, and a smart, articulate little boy with his eye on the skies just might be the face of that effort.
Like “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Serious Men” is a satire of Old India colliding with the new. But our hero this time always seems to have the upper hand against the Forces of Class and Caste. He and his wife may be “2G,” a generation removed from the filthiest, menial work of their caste. The top tier of India are 4G or higher. It’s just that Manu has been watching, listening and learning, and plotting his revenge.
Siddiqui, a wonderful actor who starred in “Photograph” and had a supporting role in “The Lunchbox,” beautifully embodies the resentment and hurt Manu lives his life by. He is the classic office underling rolling his eyes and cracking wise at the over-promoted cranks he works for.
“Alien microbes in the stratosphere?” It is to laugh.
Tiwari plays the wife and mother Oja as passive and provincial, exactly as Manu sees her — until he and we realize she isn’t.
Veteran character actor Nassar — he was in Hollywood’s “Fair Game” — has the bluff and bluster to pull off the imperious Dr. Acharya, and the range to show us the real man whose bluff has been called.
Young Aakshath Das sounds like a child speaking by rote, which is exactly right in this part. And Prasad, a beautiful actress given a facial scar and limp as Anuja, gets across a nice blend of ruthlessness and disability-driven empathy for the poor she might actually want to help.
Of all the countries where Netflix has planted its flag and financed home grown cinema, India is where their cash is producing the most impressive films. “Serious Men” is a serio-comic satire well worth the subtitles, and a sentimental drama worth the tears.
Credits: Directed by Sudhir Mishra, script by Bhavesh Mandalia, Abhijeet Khuman, Nikhil Nair and Niren Bhatt, based on the novel by Manu Joseph. A Netflix release.
Screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick mainlined something universal with his script, “Final Destination.” A film that launched a franchise, it tapped into that teen tendency to feel immortal and the conspiracy buff in us all that likes to see “coincidences” as part of “death’s grand design.”
Good movie.
Reddick must see something similar in the hook to “Don’t Look Back,” which he wrote and directed, basing it on a short film he made some years back. “Survivor’s remorse” or guilt is a well-documented psychological trauma, and Reddick’s spin on that is a commentary on the culture we’ve become.
These days, you can’t escape assaults and other crimes that fill the evening news, or Youtube — incidents which bystanders, instead of trying to intervene, instead of calling the police, record the assault on their cell phones.
With thuggish goons running rampant this election cycle, it’s become an American epidemic. Reddick is onto something. But applying Reddick’s “Final Destination” “coincidences” and “death’s grand design” supernatural formula to survivor’s guilt doesn’t quite come off.
Kourtney Bell is good if not dazzling in this, her debut as a lead, playing Caitlin, a young woman who survives a brutal home invasion that ends with her badly injured and her father dead.
Months later, still traumatized, she sees a murderous beating in a nearby park (this was filmed in Baton Rouge). Her shocked eyes scan every other face that witnesses this before she grabs a phone from some gutless man taping it and calls the police.
The victim was a local altruist and a righteous dude. Caitlin is appalled at what she didn’t do, mortified that nobody else even managed to call the cops. As she exits the police station, she glimpses the other witnesses, rationalizing away or stricken by their lack of action.
It won’t be long before Caitlin starts seeing the dead man everywhere. She’ll notice the crow hanging around her and others who witnessed the murder. And once she’s spotted the number “27” — a Bible verse from Luke, birthdates, etc. — she can’t stop seeing it.
As the public turns against her and the other eyewitnesses, thanks to a TV talk show host (Rainn Wilson, excellent), Caitlin reaches out to the others just at the moment the crow (harbinger of death) starts making house calls.
Who or what is doing this, and why?
The acting isn’t bad, or particularly emotional and compelling. But the bigger problem is that Reddick’s script lets down this promising “survivor’s guilt/revenge” premise in several ways. It throws a too-obvious suspect at us, and gives no one a single memorable line.
The “supernatural” deaths aren’t horror-movie creative in the least, a big part of “Final Destination’s” success (and to be fair, budget).
The angry public is happy to spit on these eyewitnesses and ghoulishly celebrate the “karma” that their deaths represents to them. But that’s a seriously twisted misinterpretation of karma, for starters.
And the universe as a judge and jury executing people for cowardice or callousness isn’t remotely as gripping as the idea that young “nothing can hurt me” people escape their fate, only to have “death” stalk them and take them out, as “death’s grand design” intended.
That’s why “Final Destination” worked, and a big reason that “Don’t Look Back” doesn’t.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Kourtney Bell, Will Stout, Skyler Hart, Jeremy Holm and Rainn Wilson.
Credits: Written and directed by Jeffrey Reddick. A Gravitas Ventures release.
What overwhelms you about David Lean’s second most famous Dickens adaptation is the sense of hunger that washes off the screen and erases any sense of “period piece” about it.
“Oliver Twist” makes hunger so timeless that the 19th century poverty it is part and parcel of becomes secondary. The stunning production design, the peerless cinematography of Guy Green, the poignancy of the story and the tragedy at the heart of it recede every moment a hungry child devours whatever crumbs a cruel society cares to give it.
It’s a 72 year-old black and white film of a novel by literature’s great sentimentalist, with accents so thick you wish it had subtitles at times. And it will break your heart.
I can’t remember catching this back when I first dove into David Lean via my grad school advisor, a Lean scholar who parked the master’s “Great Expectations” adaptation and other Lean films in the college’s film society every chance he got.
“Great Expectations” (1946) is the more celebrated film. And many Dickens titles have been filmed repeatedly, adapted into modern settings even, so none of his stories are capable of surprising the viewer, although Armando Ianucci’s “David Copperfield” and the giddy big screen “Nicholas Nickleby” of some years back came close.
But “Oliver Twist” is the first classic I’ve dipped into in ages that had my jaw agape and “Wow” coming out of my mouth more times than I can count.
There was a David Lean documentary some years back in which the veteran editor scoffed at the average moviegoer’s (and critic’s) oohing and ahhing over “that lovely shot.” “It’s the cutting,” he’d insist, the editing people like he did that made that masterful camel rider approaching out of a mirage in “Lawrence of Arabia” glorious.
Perhaps. But the crowded, dark and dingy London set designer John Bryan puts us in is total immersion, a Charles Dickens theme park of want, cruelty and shadows. I can’t imagine producers of the 1960s stage and screen musical “Oliver!” ever bothered to read the book. This “Oliver Twist” was all the research they needed.
A very pregnant woman (Josephine Stuart) staggers and groans her way through a dark night to a town workhouse, where she gives birth, comforts her infant for a moment, and dies.
The boy (John Howard Davies) may seem quiet and compliant as he passes through his early years at this orphanage/slave labor institution. But when The Beadle (Francis L. Sullivan) places him at an undertaker’s establishment, the kid shows his mettle. He won’t be bullied, won’t hear ill of his late mother.
And when he gets his chance, he flees to London. That’s where The Artful Dodger (future Brit crooner Anthony Newley) marks him, and that’s how he’s brought into the pickpocket mob run by Fagin.
Alec Guinness is almost unrecognizable in the makeup and hatchet-sized beak of this Victorian caricature. His Fagin was why the film was kept from release in the U.S., Jewish groups regarding the hideous stereotype that portrayal represents. He was edited almost entirely out of the picture when it opened here in 1951.
You can say the anti-Semitism is Dickens’ own, a British failing that was still on public display during Monty Python’s glory years. But Fagin is a wholly realized villain, memorable with or without historically slanderous Jewish associations.
“You’d like to make pocket handkerchiefs as easily as the Artful Dodger, wouldn’t you my dear?” Guinness purrs, turning Fagin’s catch-phrase, “My dear,” menacing when cajoling won’t do.
Robert Newton’s Bill Sikes is less horrific than later Sikes, perhaps because productions like Roman Polanski’s wanted to play up Bill and soften Fagin.
Through it all, young Master Davies (only nine when the film premiered), and underplays the hero in keeping with the spirit of the novel. Oliver is a reflection of the times, an underclass deserving better. Surrounding him with colorful character actors with those funny lines and outlandish Dickensian aptronym-names all but puts him in the background.
Grumpy cynic Mr. Grimwig (Frederick Lloyd) is just one minor character who has punchier lines than young Oliver.
“You old women never believe anything but quack doctors and lying story books.”
But what we remember from this tale, filmed refilmed and turned into a musical, beautifully rendered in one of the loveliest black and white films ever here, is a hungry child and the shame of those callous enough to let that happen, a little boy asking the one unforgivable request during one malnourished meal.
“Please sir, can I have some more?”
MPAA Rating: “approved”
Cast: John Howard Davies, Robert Newton, Alec Guinness, Kat Walsh, Francis L. Sullivan and Anthony Newley
Credits: Written and directed by David Lean adapted from the novel by Charles Dickens.
Gina Gershon, as the empress of MMA fight promoters, and Elijah Baker as a desperate personal manager to a fighter needing a comeback are the two performers who merit the label “actors” in “Cagefighter: Worlds Collide,” a stupidly-plotted collection of gimmicks from several lesser “Rocky” movies reset in the Octagon.
I point these two out because the other “performances” have a hint of boxing/wrestling/MMA “hype” authenticity, even if we never believe the brawlers playing the parts are thinking of these lines, or delivering them with spontaneity.
It’s all about the fights, of course, so quibbling about stiff line-readings, starchy staging and stale leave-the-awkward-pauses-in direction and editing is just an invitation to assault.
But these mugs can’t act. Even the ring announcers need coaching. Not that the script helps.
“I don’t think a single person in this arena saw that coming!”
The three-act structure writer-director and MMA movie specialist Jesse Quinones came up with? Three. Fights. Plus a snippet of one in the opening credits.
I don’t think a single person watching this movie saw that coming.
The hero, Brit light middleweight Reiss Gibbons (Alex Montagnani) is a five-time champ who has “cleaned out his division,” causing promoter Max (veteran character vixen Gershon) to talk him into a title defense with a psycho, trash-talking wrestler, Randy Stone (Jon Moxley).
I don’t follow the sport closely, but it does have a hint of “We’re making up this showbiz s— as we go along” in its reputation.
Reiss hears the pay per view numbers, and takes the bait.
“What’s Reiss got to lose?” “His DIGNITY!”
Stone? Don’t mention “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. It’s on the list of things that will set him off.
“These are BRICKS,” he yells, holding up his fists. “These are MACK trucks!”
He’s just getting started. “I’m stronger than him, I’m bigger than him, I’m QUICKER than him, Hell, I’m better LOOKING than him!”
We’ve heard that before, variations on a boxing/wrestling/MMA theme, quoting from the Tao of Muhammad Ali.
The build up — exchanging blows when they first meet, another near-brawl at a press conference, delivers the inevitable. The “champ” is humiliated.
It’s the beginning of a downward spiral the screenplay just prances through with no more thought than “I’m afraid.”
There’s nothing for it but to go back to the “basics,” and as Burgess Meredith is long dead and gone, so MMA big name Chuck Liddell plays Marcus, the trainer and nobody’s idea of a thespian, will have to do.
Moxley is the better actor of the ring performers, to be fair. Not that there’s much more that really brutal fight choreography to master.
And even if the acting was better, it’s hard to see this script as anything more than perfunctory scenes in between the fights.
“Wait, I’m BROKE? ‘Ow can that BE, mate?”
It’s a movie, so it’s more violent than any MMA fight you’ve ever seen. So maybe fans will get something out of it. But I don’t see Scorsese or any of his proteges lining to tell a story in the octagon any time soon.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, blood and profanity
Cast: Alex Montagnani, Jon Moxley (Jonathan Good), Chuck Liddell, Elijah Baker, Georgia Bradner and Gina Gershon.
Credits: Written and directed by Jesse Quinones. A Screen Media release.
It’s not utter madness to reset American novelist Jack London’s overtly political novel “Martin Eden” in the Red Epoch Italy of the 1960s.
The title character (Luca Marinelli of TV’s “Trust”) rants about “individualism” and “socialism” and “capitalism” as a young man teaching himself literature, politics and how to write. He adds fame to his rage repertoire in his later years, a famous poet, novelist and essayist who no longer speaks at union rallies and fumes guiltily about that.
The ferment of the time, with liberal capitalists kidding themselves about how much they hate the very idea of socialism, gives the adaptation an appropriate backdrop, if nothing else.
But this meandering Pietro Marcello (“Lost and Beautiful”) film seems to exist out of time, a fictional “struggling artist” biography as rife with cliches as it is obtuse in story and message.
Martin is a merchant sailor when we meet him, young and curious about the world beyond his reach. He’s head-turning handsome, hotheaded and two-fisted. But he recognizes the dead-end that being stuck in his circumstances promises him. And he resolves to change that by becoming an autodidact. He will teach himself.
Martin’s first break comes when he intervenes in a beating a rich kid is taking. That introduces him into the world of the cultured and well-off Orsinis, and fair Elena (Jessica Cressy) becomes his Unattainable. She speaks French, plays the piano and is as well-read and cultured as any college student he’ll ever meet.
“Mr. Eden,” she says, keeping him at a formal remove for the longest time, “what you need is an education. I can see you’ve got intelligence.”
Martin strives to educate himself, and writes her letters from his various gigs on “my incessant march through knowledge (in Italian with English subtitles).” One more menial job and he vows to make a living by writing, turning out short stories and essays which every newspaper and magazine in Italy turns down. “Return to sender” packages are even more brutal than rejection notes.
He gives himself “two years to prove my talent” can support them, but gets sidetracked in his readings. He takes to the long-abandoned philosopher and social theorist Herbert Spencer, the man who read Darwin and coined the phrase “Survival of the fittest,” which he applied to every sort of transaction and interaction.
Martin throws Spencer into every argument, which makes him no friends even as his writing finally gains notice.
The cliches raining all over this lengthy and often tediously-talky affair include choosing the aspirational mate over the beauty of his own class, the mentor (Carlo Cecchi) who challenges him not to sell out and the tubercular hanky that mentor is sure to cough into at some point.
The TB and incredibly tin-eared Spencer obsession are among the dated elements of this good-looking, artfully-made drama. Marcello inserts early 20th century silent film footage clips to make the connection between the ferment London (and Martin Eden) write in, and the script takes pains to include a loud, pontificating debate between smug members of the Orsini circle and Martin, whose tolerance of socialism (if not his embrace of it) they dismiss as “one of the maladies of youth.”
Marinelli is never less than committed to this “primitive” artist character, a guy not shy about throwing a punch and treating women as prizes, setting his jaw at being reminded of how poorly-educated he is and how his success may be the ultimate revenge, even if the end, that’s not enough.
Nor is “Martin Eden.” This high-minded London story is far closer to the leftist/workers-unite allegories of the German socialist/novelist B. Traven. But even Traven took care to wrap his politics and striving/struggling characters in entertaining adventure parables like “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
London, already famous and well-off thanks to his early 1900s hits “Call of the Wild,” “White Fang” and “The Sea Wolf,” worked out his dissatisfaction with himself and his relationship with the world with “Martin Eden.” But in English or in Italian, that was never going to be particularly cinematic, something the filmmakers here must have realized when they gave up on editing this into something more coherent and entertaining.
Cast: Luca Marinelli, Jessica Cressy, Carlo Cecchi and Denise Sardisco
Credits: Pietro Marcello script by Pietro Marcello and Maurizio Braucci , based on a novel by Jack London. A Kino Lorber release.
What a bizarre, loopy and over-the-top environmental justice drama “The Devil has a Name” is.
It’s pitched like a fable, with vampy, larger-than-life villainy, outragous, out-in-the-open crimes and intimidation, a plucky “little man” hero and a crusading lawyer who has reached the bladder control years of his practice.
“Inspired by a true story,” it’s as much a cause as a movie, which drew Edward James Olmos to it. He directs and co-stars in this story of a Bakersfield area almond grower at war with the Big Oil company that poisoned his groves and his life.
Olmos is on safe ground — well, safer ground — when he confines his story to the widowed grower (David Strathairn), his farm manager/pal (Olmos) and their rising alarm at what’s happening to their trees. Even the time we spend with the hard-drinking oil woman (Kate Bosworth) who sips from her flask’s cup (ladylike) while exchanging testy epithets with her board (Alfred Molina is the venomous chair) is at least entertaining.
“Houston city is WIN city,” Molina’s chairman rages, in between tasteless JFK-killed-in-Texas threats. “MAMA didn’t bring home the W!”
But Shore Oil heiress Gigi (Bosworth) has a good excuse, setting up the tale to be told in flashback.
“There are 53 different kinds of nuts in the world. (Strathairn’s farmer) was one of them.”
That tone is what Olmos tries to sustain throughout the film. But the director/co-star’s attempts at wizened Hispanic whimsy clashes with Strathairn’s widowed dirt-farmer reality. And then this violent, menacing “heavy” from the company (Pablo Schreiber, cartoonishly evil) shows up, and the formerly-famous crusading lawyer (Martin Sheen) who takes on the case.
“The Devil Has a Name” stops staggering down that fine line between thriller and spoof and takes a header straight into the ditch.
The long flashback here is about how that farmer, Fred Stern (Strathairn), a grieving widower who never got to buy a boat and sail the world with his late wife, decides to take on Shore Oil, which uses a local “farmboy turned advertising hack” (Haley Joel Osment, over-acting as if there was a gun to his head) to lowball him into selling his land.
We follow two points of view. Fred an his friend and farm manager Santiago’s comically quarrelsome (wrestling, even) relationship and Fred’s decision to go to court, and the glowering drunk Gigi staring down her board and Molina.
Fred’s annoyance turns into storm-out-of-the-shower outrage in a flash. Big Oil escalates matters into intimidation and threats in a bigger flash.
The elderly lawyer asks for a bathroom break.
“I will NOT have grandstanding in my courtroom,” the judge bellows. The trial is nothing but grandstanding and eye-rolling double-crosses.
And none of it adds up to anything with urgency about it, a sense of triumph or defeat or a story coherent enough to engage the viewer.
“Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation,” Dr. Albert Schweitzer said. He wasn’t a critic complaining about a movie. But he could have been.
MPAA Rating: R (Some Sexual Material|Brief Violence|Language|Drug Use)
Cast: David Strathairn, Kate Bosworth, Edward James Olmos, Pablo Schreiber, Haley Joel Osment, Katie Aselton and Alfred Molina.
Credits: Edward James Olmos, script by Robert McEveety. An eOne/Momentum release.
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