Movie Nation

VERDICT, Charlotte Rampling, Paul Newman, Sidney Lumet, 1982, directing the actors

“Network” is one of those movies that I cannot channel surf past without stopping. If I’m lucky, I catch it from the very beginning because like all movies, it casts its spell in the opening moments, this one more than most.

I stumbled across it again the other night just as I was finishing the chapter on filming it in “Sidney Lumet: A Life,” Maura Spiegel’s new biography of this almost peerless “actor’s director,” one of the biggest names behind the camera in the ’60s on into the ’80s.

There aren’t a lot of filmmakers in the know who wouldn’t give their eye teeth to call Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” his last film, made when he was 83, their own. Going out on a high note. Not many get to pull that off.

He was a child actor on Broadway, making one film appearance in the 1930s, a struggling young stage director lured by Yul Brynner to dive into the then-budding medium of television, where he quickly made his mark.

Smart, a WWII vet whose assignment was teaching others how to use and field-repair the most complicated technology of its day — radar — and organized — he became famous for making live TV complicated and cinematically artful during the first “Golden Age of Television.”

He dropped into film with the minimalist classic “Twelve Angry Men” where those organizational skills and that acting background made him famous for generating Oscar-nominated performances and movies that always came in under budget — “The Pawnbroker,” The Anderson Tapes,” “Serpico,” “Prince of the City,” “The Hill.”

Spiegel had access to two invaluable resources when putting together “A Life” — Lumet’s definitive (for its day) “how to make a movie” manual, “Making Movies” (1995), Lumet’s unfinished and abandoned autobiography, and the memoirs of his womanizing father, Baruch, a Polish emigre and mainstay of New York’s Yiddish theater after coming to America.

Spiegel, a New York film academic, gets a little carried away with the post-mortem psychoanalysis of her subject, gets WAY off topic here and there, and seems a tad out of her comfort zone talking about early TV and how it worked.

But she never goes far wrong when leaning on Lumet’s own memories, the sometimes revealing interviews he gave over the decades and the “opening up” he almost did in the book he never finished.

And there are just enough anecdotes from the movies he made, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s empassioned pursuit of him to direct “Network,” and Lumet’s care in grooming Beatrice Strait’s one big scene in that movie — nine takes (Lumet rarely did more than a couple) that enshrined her supporting actress performance as the shortest (on screen) Oscar winning performance in Oscar history.

His own acting history is little-known except by film buffs, and his various marriages (once, to Anderson Cooper’s mama, Gloria Vanderbilt) were not something I’d ever heard much about. His child-actor childhood wasn’t idyllic, his war experiences traumatic (even though he never saw combat) and his reputation as a New York Filmmaker never as great as Scorsese’s or Woody Allen’s.

Blame Pauline Kael for that. A major New York critic who guts your every movie with a review could ding a reputation, back in the day.

But the movies, with their spare artistry, intricate but never flashy compositions and career-defining performances, speak for themselves.

And Spiegel, breaking the highlights down, does a pretty good job of speaking up for them as well.

Sidney Lumet: A Life. St. Martin’s Press, 401 pages. $29.99.

When “street fashion” photographer Bill Cunningham died in 2016, he was New York Famous for being the photographer who documented what the stylish wore on the city’s streets, for decades, for The New York Times.

He’d been honored in Paris for his contributions to fashion photography (he also shot runway shows) and celebrated in a lovely and popular documentary, “Bill Cunningham: New York,” in 2011.

People in the wider world knew who he was thanks to many TV profiles that spun out of that film, and the legions of fans and peers from his “world” that sang his praises in the movie.

“We all got dressed for Bill,” Vogue editor and fashion influencer Anna Wintour famously intoned.

But filmmaker Mark Bozek was sitting on a long filmed interview he had with Cunningham before that “fame” came his way, before he’d been profiled and interviewed to death, before AIDS retreated from the obituary pages, where it had decimated Cunningham’s world and taken so many he knew and worked with.

And that 1994 interview paints an even more revealing, more intimate portrait in “The Times of Cunningham” than the more authoritative earlier documentary. This is the famed street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham at his lightly-guarded, offhand, charming and modest best, telling his life story, having the various now-obscure figures who made him who he was today defined and described by a narrator — Sarah Jessica Parker.

Here is Cunningham, at 65, sitting with Bozek, cinematographer Jeff Hodges and sound recordist Bob Rodriguez, open and smiling and charming, still a wide-eyed enthusiast, a man at the peak of our current expression — “Living his best life.”

“I just go out and enjoy myself with the camera,” he gushes. “I don’t think of it as work!”

“I’m not a real photographer,” he corrects his off-camera interviewer (Bozek). “I’m a fashion historian.”

He grew up a Boston postal worker’s son who always had an eye for fashion and a thing for hats. His early years had him working as a milliner —  a hat maker — selling his wares as “William J.” while supposedly working in the advertising department of Bonwit Teller.

He made hats in his spare time in the Army — “I kept that quiet, you bet!” — and took weekend passes to dash off to Paris to see fashion shows. His long journey towards his eventual life’s work let him see that “I wasn’t getting the answers from the fashion shows…I wanted to see the way women dress in their own lives…how people dress every day,” what they put on and accessorize with before hitting the streets of New York or Paris.

He’d ride his bike, dismounting to snap a shot or two, marveling at so much he saw.

He had jobs with Women’s Wear Daily and later freelanced for The New York Times, always living simply in a small apartment (eventually in the Carnegie Hall Towers), wearing a French laborer’s blue coveralls as a uniform, never getting health insurance, quietly earning, saving and giving away MILLIONS as he did.

The first camera Cunningham was given — an Olympus Pen half-frame (half a full frame of film exposed for each photo — came with an edict. “Use it as a notebook.” And that’s what he did.

He gets emotional in the interview about his “charmed life,” the sadness of AIDS devastating the communities he held dear. And he kept working. The night “Bill Cunningham: New York” premiered, he hung out outside, snapping the fashionable folks going in to see it. He never saw the film himself.

But as the “Nostradamus of fashion” (from Bozek’s written narration performed by “Sex and the City” star Parker), he had a higher calling.

“He helped people ‘see’ in a new way.”

Indeed he did. And “The Times of Bill Cunningham” helps us see him in a new way.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bill Cunningham, narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker

Credits: Written and directed by Mark Bozek.  A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:14

The horror of a boat trip to Hell. Oh yes.

“Dead Sound”comes to theaters/streaming March 3.

I interviewed Benh Z. when his Oscar-nominated indie marvel, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” came out. That was eight years ago.

He obviously has a knack for working with kids, and an interest in telling stories with a child’s eye view, looking at even a decayed, impoverished landscape with wonder.

Aside from “What about ‘Wendy,'” his “Southern Wild” take on “Peter Pan,” took seven years (he announced it in 2013), what other questions can you think to ask him?

Comment below and thanks, as always, for the help.

What to make of this burlesque in blood, “Birds of Prey?” All these fights, all that fight choreography, all that bloody violence and mildly-amusing mayhem should ensure another hit, cementing Warners’ command of their R-rated comic book adaptation niche.

But where does it does it sit on the sliding Warners/DC Comics adaptation scale? It’s not remotely as good as “Joker,” positively inconsequential when you hold it up against the best “serious” comic book adaptation ever and a legitimate Best Picture contender. Maybe that comparison’s not fair.

It’s an improvement on “Suicide Squad,” a tad better than “Aquaman,” not quite up to “Wonder Woman.”

There’s no sense comparing it to any Marvel Studios product, as apparently all the “funny” dialogue writers for comic book movies migrate there. The laughs in “Prey” come from Margot Robbie’s Betty Boop/Marilyn Monroe vamps as Harley Quinn.

“I have all my best ideas drunk!”

Ewan McGregor is aptly cast as Roman Sionis, a murderous mob boss with just a hint of whimsy about him. I laughed at one or two things he did, but at nothing he said.

The funniest line comes from Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), the under-age pickpocket whom the Birds of Prey defend.

“You’re not the ONLY one who makes money off dumb, rich white people!”

That was generous, because Basco is the weakest link in an uneven cast.

Judging from the audience reaction at the showing I attended, the killer moments here are the killer moments here — applause and laughter at this leg snapping, that body exploding.

And whenever a new character to this big screen DC Universe demonstrates her superpower, the fanbase is thrilled.

But I’m on the fence about this somewhat heartless exercise in ultraviolence. There are interesting bits and cute riffs, some actresses I generally enjoy lending their presence to a superhero movie that dabbles in trying to be about “empowerment.” The look is that eternal DC-post-“Batman” gloom, so a tip of the hat to Art Director Kasra Farahani (“Black Panther,” “Captain Marvel”) and production designer K.K. Barrett (“Where the Wild Things Are”).

And those stunts (Jonathan Eusebio stunt coordinator) and fights (Jon Valera, fight coordinator) are impressive. You will believe these willowy ladies can outbrawl the biggest heavies in the business. Kind of. Some of the action was acted at half speed and sped up for projection.

But “Birds of Prey” relies on incessant voice-over narration from the psychiatrist turned Joker moll turned jilted lover out for attention, Harley Q.

“Nothing gets a guy’s attention like violence!”

And as any casual movie fan knows, voice-over is the laziest crutch in movie narrative.

The story is a shrug and the action arc ends where too many movies of this genre seem fated to end — in an epic fight in a derelict amusement park.

Again, there are more broken bones than laughs. An oversized CGI hyena for a pet? Right.

And it’s a little too close to “Suicide Squad” in one all-important regard. Take away Harley Quinn, and you’ve got no movie.

Harley has just been dumped by “Mister J,” the villainous patient she fell for who twisted up her mind and amped up her appetite for violence. Her days of breaking up bars and robbing supermarkets at will are numbered without her “master’s” protection.

“A harlequin’s NOTHING without a master!”

As she tries to adjust, a club owner/mob boss (McGregor) makes his play for Big Boss by getting his hands on a big diamond that has a code on it. The pickpocket (Basco) nabs it, a henchmen (Chris Messina, abandoning “nebbish” roles for once) and the club chanteuse Dinah Lance, aka “Black Canary” (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) are sent to fetch her, and it.

A veteran cop (Rosie Perez), who always has some guy stealing credit stolen for her big busts, is on the case. And this mysterious, skinny crossbow-wielding murderess (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) keeps popping up and killing people.

“They call me…” The only running gag in the movie? Woman can’t figure out her masked vigilante name, even if  “Crossbow Killer” is how everybody knows her.

Perez’s Detective Montoya keeps muttering cheesy “lines from every bad ’80s cop movie,” McGregor’s psychotic boss, aka “Black Mask,” keeps skinning faces off victims — or threatening it.

But “Birds of Prey” is never airborne when Robbie’s Harley is off the screen. Fantasizing a Marilyn-ish “Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend” production number in mid-torture, gleefully dispatching hired guns with sticks of dynamite, a baseball bat or a carnival “strong man” mallet, she’s the lifeblood of the movie.

Director Cathy Yan (“Dead Pigs,” “According to My Mother”) has a career-making blockbuster on her resume. But her big break is an empty whirlwind of mayhem, with a sloppily inconsistent narrative not entirely due to Christina Hodson’s (“Bumblebee”) script.

If it weren’t for all the fights, there’d be no forward motion to this movie at all. Very “Transformers” that way.

“Empowered” these women may be, but Perez should have been given funnier, cooler things to say and do, Winstead’s turn flattens out and Basco is just green.

Smollett-Bell is the only sidekick to pull her weight, and Robbie’s one-note take on Harley isn’t enough, by itself.

Fans will eat this up and probably forget it — save for the odd body blowing up — before the next comic book movie comes along.  But “Birds of Prey” is all empowered with no idea what to do with that power, nothing of consequence, anyway.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout, and some sexual and drug material

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ewan McGregor, Rosie Perez, Ali Wong, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Messina and Ella Jay Basco .

Credits: Directed by Cathy Yan, script by Christina Hodson A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:49

Elijah Wood plays a DJ, music producer and pop impresario WAY out of his depth in “Come to Daddy,” a gonzo, gory and goofball B-movie about fathers, sons and killing or being killed.

It doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny — nonsensical coincidences abound. But a couple of pulse-pounding fights-to-the-death, several great big twists in the plot and a befuddled “Everything is Illuminated” turn by Wood make the best “midnight movie” option for fans looking to stay out late and howl at the screen.

Wood is Norval, an LA hipster — you can tell by the mustache, the Hitler haircut and the gold plated cell-phone “designed by Lorde” — who deposits himself on the stoop of his father’s remote, cliffside “like a UFO from the ’60s” bungalow on the Oregon shore.

“I got your letter.”

Dad (Stephen McHattie) seems nonplussed. Long-estranged from his ex-wife and his son, he’s a bluff and blustering ex-limo driver who doesn’t want to hear the kid’s stories about the music biz, about being “discovered” by Elton John.

“I like fight stories,” the old man growls. No intimate father-son chats here, oh no.

“I don’t want to discuss it.”

That is, of course, before the meat cleaver comes out, before the old man charges him, before the cop (Garfield Wilson) grills the kid and notes that “bad guys have eyes that look like raisins,” and that his old man had “raisin eyes.”

And then there’s the coroner (Madeleine Sami) who suggests — as his father is now a corpse and Norval has to “store him” due to a backlog at the morgue — that “You should talk to him,” dead “him.” “It helps.”

Producer (“ABCs of Death II”) turned-director Ant Timpson makes sure to take a “story by” credit here, because that first “twist” is just the first of many. The whole damned movie, from here on out, is twists.

We’re led in one direction, only to have events turn on a dime in another direction.

And at every turn, Norval takes another step in his journey from vulnerable and fragile enough to have attempted suicide to wounded and bludgeoned and toughened up by the experience to not be as hapless as he is when we first meet him.

The deadpan locals get all the funny lines and few actors working in the movies are better “reactors” than Wood.

Graphic, stomach-churning violence, grotesque nudity and the occasional witty line don’t add up to much of a movie. But they do add up to just barely enough to make this one fumbling, fearful and fun.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout, sexual content and graphic nudity

Cast: Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Martin Donovan, Michael Smiley, Ona Grauer, Garfield Wilson and Madeleine Sami.

Credits: Directed by Ant Timpson, script by Toby Harvard. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

Big slam-bang action beats dominate the first half of this trailer. Then the Minions take over, and things get cute.

“The Rise of Gru” is a summer release. As of now, they haven’t announced the other villain voices, so we will hear about that when Universal is good and ready, I fear.

A common gripe about faith-based movies is how they’re so far sanitized that they’re removed from reality — real people in real situations having real conversations.

A romantic comedy about two people thrown together for a dance competition isn’t going to remedy that. But the song under the opening credits of “Faith, Hope & Love,” one repeated in the movie, jokes about “gin fizzes” and “booty-shaking.” So we’ll call that “progress.”

It’s a fizzy little comedy with a dollop of sadness and entirely too much “fizz” fizzed out.

It’s about a Christian widower (Robert Krantz) raising two girls and clinging to his advertising job by a thread. His littlest girl (Aria Walters) figures that setting him up with her ballet teacher for a “pros and schmoes” dance competition is just what he needs.

“They’re going to be dance partners and fall in love!”

The divorced dancer instructor, Faith (Peta Murgatroyd), is about to lose her studio and needs to win this competition, for the publicity and for the cash prize. She auditions male partners who fit the “schmo” (not a pro) definition, and in desperation settles on jokey, loosy-goosey Jimmy (Krantz).

Before you know it, they’re rehearsing and they’re sharing. He’s quick on the “Do you believe in God?” question, but he drinks a bit to drown his sorrow over losing his wife. She’s a tad bitter about her breakup and can’t figure out why she rarely gets past the first date — despite being a gorgeous blonde dancer with a Kiwi accent (Faith is an Australian emigre, Peta who plays her is from New Zealand).

Faith sizes Jimmy up like the outsider she is. “Shouldn’t you be saying something religious here? ‘What would Jesus do?'” She’s not being snippy. She’s just bought into the stereotype.

Jimmy tries to help her with her dating life, she has ideas for the career-saving pitch he has to make to a dating website, and they country dance, tango, hip hop (not really) and ballroom — rehearsing their way from her high school reunion to “the big contest.”

Krantz, trying WAY too hard playing a guy who tries WAY too hard to wring a laugh via slang and colloquialism, isn’t awful, although the script he wrote for this gives him and pretty much everybody else in the picture limited opportunities to shine or land a joke.

It’s a “formula” movie, start to finish. But the germ of a few good ideas are hiding out in that screenplay. Jimmy’s Greek (and Greek dancing) heritage makes its way into the picture well after the halfway mark. The actor-screenwriter was born Haralambos Karountzos and has been  in films, bit parts mostly, since the ’80s — for 35 years.

The Greek dancing scene is cute, the name he uses on the phone because nobody can spell “Elpidas,” his last name, is “Jimmy Hope.”

“Jimmy Hope — that’s what ‘Elpidas” means in Greek.

The kids are pretty much non-starters as characters, blandly-played to boot. Some dance numbers are cute (ish). And Krantz and Murgatroyd — yes, that’s a real name — have a little faith-based romance chemistry. He comes off as charming, which explains the picture’s healthy supply of star cameos.

M. Emmet Walsh plays his priest, Corbin Bernsen is Jimmy’s indulgently forgiving boss, Ed Asner is the oldest guy in Jimmy’s Bible study class and Michael Richards is the father of a dork (J. Chris Newberg) competing against our increasingly-close couple.

Not one of them have anything funny (enough) to do, although Richards does seem to relish wearing a cowboy hat.

With faith-based films, message often trumps other considerations, not a happy situation in most movie genres. “Faith, Hope & Love” gets the “faith” in, and the “hope” and even a hint of “love.” It’s the comedy that lets this romantic comedy down.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: Peta Murgatroyd, Robert Krantz, Corbin Bernsen, Michael Richards, Ed Asner, M. Emmet Walsh, Karen Y. McClain, Natasha Bure and Aria Walters

Credits: Directed by Robert Krantz, J.J. Englert, script by Robert Krantz. An ArtEffects/Netflix again.

Running time: 1:46

SOMEbody is targeting cops. SOMEbody (Chris Rock) is a veteran detective, rolling up on crime scenes in a vintage Camaro. SOMEbody is his new partner (Max Minghella).

And somebody is a little foul-mouthed and a little murderous.

A little “Saw?”

“Spiral” comes out in May.

In “Wendy,” the writer-director of the Oscar-nominated “Beasts of the Southern Wild”  transports the Peter Pan story from London and “Never Never Land” to the Louisiana bayou and the Caribbean island of Monserrat.

And he tinkers with the fantasy about “never growing up” and adulthood, adding an environmental allegory to its message in this latest richly-detailed fantasia on the imagination of children and the wonders they stumble into when left to figure the world out for themselves.

It is a movie of magic and (sometimes) messy messaging, of carefree play with never a worry about meals or tetanus shots — a lot like “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Wendy Darling (Devin France) grew up in the family diner, a whistle-stop so close to the tracks it’s but a short hop from rooftop to boxcar-top, for would-be daredevils.

As a toddler, Wendy crawled along the counters and learned to drop eggs on the griddle. Her future is set. Until her twin brothers (Gage and Gavin Naquin) come along, and one has the temerity to question the narrow confines of the life awaiting them all.

“I COULD be a pirate!” one brother declares, chastened when reminded of his outlook by elderly waitresses. “I don’t WANNA be no mop and broom man!”

Mother (Shay Walker) was once a hitchhiking hippy, and that makes the older sibling Wendy wonder just what’s out there. The twins interrupt netting turtles and taking turns at the swimming hole to share a vision she sees — a dreadlocked boy (Yashua Mack) cackling and leaping from boxcar to boxcar on a passing train.

That fires her storytelling imagination, and gets her brothers all worked up.

One day, the kids make the leap and they’re off, riding the rails with Peter Pan, who declares “This is an ADVENTURE! There are no stops” on this train.

He says this just before he shoves them off into the river as they cross a trestle (Don’t try this at home, kids.). And that’s how they board the rickety rowboat and set off for the mostly-abandoned, half-devastated volcanic island (Montserrat) where kids can be free and “never grow up.”

The others in their band are “lost boys.” Wendy? “She don’t stand a chance.”

A still from Wendy by Benh Zeitlin, an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

Zeitlin leans heavily on his starlet, her co-stars and the arresting milieu that he drops them into for frolicking.And when that’s not enough, a little James M. Barry “Peter Pan” magic is in order.

Peter’s “never grow up” ethos is achievable, the lad insists.

“You have to believe” for starters, and as there’s no Tinkerbell, that’s within the realm of the possible. “Never slow down. Never think twice.”

There are stunning caverns to dive into, a wrecked fishing boat as playground, homesickness for Mother and awe at the wonders of Mother Earth. And there’s a lot of fretting about “never growing up,” and the perils that come with that, perils that might require “REAL help, from grownups!”

I love what Zeitlin is trying here, and one can understand, thanks to the fact that he announced this as his follow-up to “Beasts” way back in 2013, why he was reluctant to trim it to a breezier, brisker length.

“Wendy” drags through the middle acts, and the finale is something of a struggle.

But young Miss France is a beatific wonder — curly hair and earrings and what The Rolling Stones were singing about when they described “the girl with the faraway eyes.” Yashua Mack, another discovery, has the impish bravado to pull off Peter, although one wishes he’d had some funny lines to go along with his many elegies to “never growing up.”

That would have made “Wendy” a little more small-child friend and a little less of a slog.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief violent/bloody images

Cast: Devin France, Yashua Mack, Gage Naquin, Gavin Naquin, Shay Walker

Credits: Directed by Benh Zeitlin, script by Benh Zeitlin and Eliza Zeitlin. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:52