A Western with practical, lactose considerations at its heart.
John Magaro and Orion Lee star in this “opening of the West Western, with Toby Jones, Alia Shawkat. And this March 20 release, “First Cow,”from A24 has the last big screen performance of Rene Auberjonois.
Looks magical.
Well, nice use of Pink Floyd in this trailer to the April 13 release I suppose SOMEbody is actually looking forward to.
Disney has said it is shutting down the whole X-Men “mutants” thing, now that it runs Fox. But we’ll see.
Netflix’s best bet for a Best Documentary Academy Award is almost certainly “American Factory,” a good film and a candid look at Chinese investment in the American workforce. It was produced under the Netflix banner of Barack and Michelle Obama, and you know how Hollywood loves the Obamas.
But the streaming service has another “short listed” contender (the 15 films they’ve narrowed their nominees list to). What about “The Great Hack?”
I’ve put off seeing this one because the subject is almost too dispiriting to wrestle with, and seeing this movie about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, data-mining and voter manipulation (for starters) that Big Tech and our addiction to it is doing to democracy, didn’t exactly lift my spirit.
After all, it’s not like the criminal behavior of the Steve Bannon-founded Cambridge and many lies that company’s CEO, Alexander Nix, and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg were caught in led to punishment of any real consequence. So yeah, it’s 2020 and it’ll probably happen again.
The “data scraping,” the “thousands of data points” Facebook and others have mined with all our “likes,” searches, map points, “fun online quizzes,” purchases and the like are being used against us every day, why not Election Day?
But filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim lay out a version of the history of Britain’s decision to Brexit the European Union and America’s turn to Trumpism in digital terms, and in journalistic ones.
There’s the New York digital media professor, David Carroll, the film’s hero and narrator, a man very much savvy to the personal information that’s been harvested from him, a fellow resourceful enough to sue Cambridge Analytica to see just what his “5,000” (and counting) data points “profile” has in it.
British reporter Carole Cadwalladr, doggedly breaking and pursuing the story of Cambridge Analytica’s decades of electoral manipulation (Thailand to Trinidad, to Britain and America), has been sounding the warning about the “high tech gangsters” and the “grossly unethical experiment” that this “criminal enterprise” has been carrying out all over the world.
And then there’s heroic villain or villainously heroic Brittany Kaiser, a one-time Obama campaign intern who sold her social media marketing skills to the highest bidder — Cambridge — helped strategize the company’s efforts for clients from Ted Cruz to Donald Trump, “Leave.eu” and Nigel Farage. She was one of the public faces for Cambridge Analytica, and once the heat turned on her, turned whistle-blower on the her deceptive, law-breaking employers.
And Kaiser kept campaign pitches, her calendar of meetings, lots and lots of things that pointed directly to the lies Nix and Zuckerberg were telling in front of elected officials in the UK and the US.
The timeline, the testimony, the atomization of voter pools into “the persuadables” who could be bombarded with negative ads that pull them into backing Brexit or pushed into voting “against” Hillary Clinton, it’s all informative and damning as hell.
But aside from your “full service propaganda machine” with Cambridge in its name being broken up, nothing else has changed. We haven’t all abandoned Facebook, and the Russians are still able to slip divisive ads onto Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.
We still haven’t defined this sort of data-mining, profiling — “psycho-graphics” — as “a weapon.” And with authoritarian conservative regimes in power in much of the world, the idea that “data rights are human rights” isn’t going anywhere. For now.
Have we learned anything? Have the “Bond villains” at the heart of this story been discouraged from repeating their actions? Do we have any idea what can be done, and is anything at all BEING done?
Aside from all those “Election Security” bills gathering dust on the desk of #MoscowMitch?
Nope.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, some profanity
Cast: David Carroll, Carole Cadwalladr, Christopher Wiley, Brittany Kaiser
Credits: Directed by Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:54
You’ve heard or figured out on your own that January is one of those “dead zones” on the movie release calendar where studios have traditionally dumped films they have limited expectations for.
But there have been many exceptions to this in recent years — a horror breakout, clever counter-programming against the flood of Oscar contenders that many people have seen or are tired of hearing about since Thanksgiving — or an action picture, usually starring Mark Wahlberg.
The Wahlberg years are gone — he was to January what Will Smith once was to July 4 weekend — but here’s a Kristen Stewart/T.J. Miller “Alien” in the Deep thriller.
Could be fun. It opens Friday.
Ten nominated feature films made the Producers Guild Awards cut, including the usual suspects, from “Little Women” and “1917” to “Ford v Ferrari,” “Joker,” “Jo Jo Rabbit,” “Once Upon a Time,” “Irishman,” “Parasite,” “Knives Out” and “Marriage Story.”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/pga-awards-nominees-2020-list-full-1267527
“1917” has quite a bit of momentum, now, I’d say.
The Directors Guild gave Sam Mendes a Best Director boost, along with the directors of “Parasite,” “Jo Jo Rabbit,” “Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”
An embarrassment of riches in this category, as Todd Phillips, Almodovar (not his best movie) and Marielle Helle of “Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” could have been nominated, but were passed over.
But women such as Ava DuVernay (TV film), and first time directors Alma Har’el (“Honey Boy”) and Melina Matskukas (“Queen & Skim”) were nominees in other categories.
https://www.goldderby.com/article/2020/2020-dga-awards-nominations-directors-guild/
Not the most beloved University of Florida alumna, just another Urban Meyer recruit made…bad.
Premieres on Netflix Jan. 15.
In their documentary short “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert captured the failure and closing of a Dayton, Ohio General Motors plant that closed in 2008.
Some ten thousand longtime GM employees lost their jobs and a big chunk of their future when the plant closed at the beginning of the Great Recession. That’s how Reichert and Bognar begin their new film, as well — the aftermath and aftershocks of that closure.
Jill confesses she “struggled to get back to the middle class,” living in her sister’s basement. Others speak of months and years of job hunting, skilled factory workers in a part of the world where such skills are unneeded in an American workforce whose needs and requirements are changing.
But “American Factory” (now on Netflix) is about a glimmer of hope, the Chinese firm that figures an empty factory, a desperate workforce and a whole lot of state incentive money adds up to a profitable investment in Dayton. We see Fuyao Automotive Glass move in, with hopeful workers listening to a pitch at a job fair, the plant’s opening and the pitfalls and the trials and tribulations that follow.
There’s a hint of the culture clash comedy “Gung Ho” to this, with hundreds of Chinese employees and supervisors brought in to help start the place up, and a couple of thousand new American jobs for workers willing to retrain in a different corner of the auto industry, learn a few words in Chinese, each side trying to “read” and get along with the other.
See the Americans embrace the “culture” of the company, with some visiting the corporate HQ back in China, learning to sing (or at least listening to) the “transparent” company anthem, absorbing the many slogans the Communist/Capitalists serve up to the workforce. One even weeps at the globalism “We are One” message of a parade of singers, dancers and sketch-performers at a big company banquet.
And we also see Americans bridling at the various safety and health shortcuts their new bosses want to impose, the “Be alert, be earnest, be lively” and “Accept Good Glass, Create Good Glass, Transfer Good Glass” indoctrination emblazoned on every wall. The two thousand are so jobs pay less than half what GM did.
And the boss? He’s more out of “The Simpsons” than “Gung Ho.” Smiling Chairman Cho Tak Wong declares, “If a union comes in, I’m shutting down.”
“American Factory” follows this culture clash through the first five years of Fuyao Glass America’s existence. And although we’re not told the incentive money put in by government, and the time parameters of it, these years are fraught enough that we fret for the long-term prospects of this enterprise through what might be, as the presidential candidate Andrew Yang has been warning, the last generation of a manufacturing labor force that is being automated into oblivion.
The candor here can be amusing — the burly Americans criticized for their “fat fingers” by the lean, younger Chinese (behind their backs), an American inviting Chinese colleagues over for Thanksgiving on his farm — turkey, ham and a little shooting time on the DIY firing range he’s set up behind the house.
The movie’s more unsettling side is the ugly stereotyping the Chinese, young and old, carry around about Americans, who are “lazy” and “love to be flattered to death…Donkeys like being touched in the direction their hair grows” one higher-up counsels.
Xenophobia is a two-way street, with red-blooded Buckeyes bridling at video screens filled with Chinese child singers warbling songs of efficiency, profitability and peace.
There are Chinese staff meetings, and American staff meetings. In the Chinese ones, ethnic identity and cohesion is stressed among the expats, who will “always be Chinese,” even though they’re living and working in the flatlands of Ohio.
Sure, speech is free here, and virtually every American worker lives in better conditions than the lower-level managers imported to “supervise” do. But the Chinese cannot fathom why they can’t impose “efficiencies” that endanger employees (“OSHA?”), why they can’t dump toxic byproducts down the drain (“EPA?”) and why the Americans won’t work 12 hours a day, with just two days off a month.
“American Factory,” made under the aegis of Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company, is no celebration of the politics of “bringing back jobs and saving a community.” It’s about a fight to unionize, a struggle for common ground and a totalitarian management/ownership style that’s not the least bit alien to American workers these days, unfortunately.
Speaking of “aliens,” there’s a hint of science fiction in the eager way certain higher-paid American management types buy in to the ethos of their new masters. When Senator Sherrod Brown mentions unions in his speech at the grand opening, one grousing minion jokes “I’m gonna have to kill me a senator.”
It’s hard to see this and not think of “1984,” of a workforce of “proles” powerless to resist the depressed wages and thankless work offered by People’s Republicans, who have a lot in common with America’s robber barons, and with those who enslave in the bastardized interpretation of Marx or Lenin.
“American Factory” is too dispassionate to be a rallying cry, too sobering to be a “wake-up call,” but still a terrific fly-on-the-wall look at the struggles of America’s working class.
And it’s a reminder that politicians might want to be wary of Chinese bearing gifts — if you provide plenty of incentives for them to do it.
MPAA Rating: TV-14, profanity
Credits: Directed by Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:50
The Monroeville, Alabama of “Just Mercy” is a barely-repentant racist town coasting on the righteousness of its most famous resident, Harper Lee — who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Hav’ya BEEN to the Harper Lee Museum?” every white person in the legal system asks Bryan Stevenson, an African American “lawyer from up North,” upon his arrival. It’s the late 1980s, and he has brought his Harvard Law degree to the Deep South to work for death row inmates, to provide “legal assistance for people who can’t afford it.”
But the comfy white folks of Monroeville are bound to be puzzled, if not enraged, by that. “To Kill a Mockingbird!” they say, as if that makes them safe and secure from present day scrutiny and condemnation. The book was set in the 1930s, came out in 1960, and heck, Gregory Peck was in the movie! All that lynching, racism, racial profiling and unequal justice? Ancient history!
“Just Mercy” is a movie about a touchstone case that proved that to be a lie, a righteous, well-intentioned but uneven emotional roller coaster of a film that plays it safe a little too often itself.
Michael B. Jordan plays Stevenson, an idealist fresh out of law school with a government grant to start a legal aid service for inmates in the heart of the former Jim Crow South. He has been chastened by his internship, helping the same sorts of clients he will be dealing with in his new job. But he’s raring to go. Back home in Delaware, his mother is less optimistic, blunt about her concern that he might “get killed down there.”
Stevenson’s ardor is cooled when he finds his new office manager (Brie Larson), a white local, can’t even rent office space for such a “business.” His first visit to prison includes a protocol-breaking strip search, meant to simply humiliate him.
Jordan lets us read that it in Stevenson’s eyes, the struggle to stay poker-faced at the insults, threats and violent police harassment that follow. It takes a special kind of commitment to endure that, Jackie Robinson stoicism and self-control coupled with calming righteousness.
Meeting his first clients, he is steeled for the task ahead. He needs to be. Because while he can assure a condemned man (Rob Morgan, superb) whose Viet Nam War-related post traumatic stress syndrome means “there’s always something we can do” to build an appeal, while the holes in another convicted murderer’s case make a retrial an obvious path, Stevenson is about to figure out how little has changed in the Alabama legal system since Lee’s Atticus Finch stood before the court.
The film’s prologue shows us Walter “Johnny D.” McMillan’s arrest. Driving home from his wood pulp business, Johnny D. (Jamie Foxx) smiles through the “sharp looking truck you got there” cracks, the implied threat and then summary arrest for a teenage white girl’s murder. Now, he sits on death row, broken and furious, not really wanting to put his family through the false hopes this Harvard lawyer with “white boy status” is promising.
“I look like a man who could kill somebody,” he says. Down here, “you guilty from the moment you born.”
The ups and downs of McMillan’s case, the smiling dismissals of the green, don’t-rock-the-boat district attorney (Rafe Spall), the intimidating scowls, manipulations and unspoken menace of the sheriff (Michael Harding), an entire system that circles the wagons to defend itself from outside scrutiny, second guessing and reform, are the meat of “Just Mercy.”
As such, it’s a generally unsurprising film, given the years of high-profile police and prosecutorial misconduct cases that have played out in the news, the trigger-happy, racial profiling local police who inspired #blacklivesmatter. In 1988 Errol Morris released “The Thin Blue Line,” a classic documentary about a Texas case not unlike this one, but lacking the racist undertones here. This is nothing new, and yes, too little has changed.
Director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton (“The Glass Castle,” “Short Term 12”) never lets the picture turn preachy and didactic. But he’s hard-pressed to escape the tropes of the genre, seen in movies from “Dead Man Walking” to “Clemency,” both better films — the death row shouts of support and rattling of cups against the bars whenever one of their number is in the death chamber, the “traffic stop” by police and anonymous threats by phone meant to scare off those who question “the way things have always been.”
Characters are thinly-developed and some — Johnny D’s wife (played by Karan Kendrick) among them — are mere archetypes.
The performances are generally solid, with Foxx reminding us his Oscar was no fluke, although fellow Oscar-winner Larson appears to be picking up a cigarette for the first time. Tim Blake Nelson, playing an inmate and key prosecution witness, gives a dazzling character turn.
Jordan, in the sort of role usually offered to Chadwick Boseman, gets across the earnestness and dignity of the character without letting us forget he’s human and a bit alarmed at all this Jim Crow Era behavior coming from The System and those amoral enough to defend it.
My favorite moment in the movie is the one that gives it purpose. We’ve seen judges simply refuse to consider that they and their system have made a mistake, but it takes the venal sheriff to suggest why no “lawyer from up North” is worth hearing out. To guys like Stevenson, “we’re just’a bunch’a corrupt, Southern racists,” as if declaring that out loud makes it untrue.
But that “racists” and “bigots” and “bigotry” exist isn’t really the message of “Just Mercy.” And that’s not because the words don’t pop up, here and there, and aren’t apt and deserved. It’s just that there’s nothing teachable in such labels.
“Prejudiced,” as evidenced by the behavior — personal, official and legal — in this case and many others like it, is what “Just Mercy” sees as instructive. Break down the word. “Prejudiced” implies “pre-judged,” which is the curse of our legal system — under partisan assault, courts stuffed with judged deemed “unqualified” but fitting the racial and political agenda of those doing the appointing.
Under such conditions, there will never be a day when an Atticus Finch or Bryan Stevenson isn’t a lonely voice in the wilderness, crying out for justice for those railroaded, ineptly-defended, bankrupted, broken and imprisoned by a system set up to do just that, from Jim Crow onward.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content including some racial epithets.
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Brie Larson, Rafe Spall, Tim Blake Nelson, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Karan Kendrick, Michael Harding and Rob Morgan
Credits: Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, script by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Lanham, based on the book by Bryan Stevenson. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:16
The first R-rated comedy of the new year could pay off handsomely for this trio — no fresh comic competition, a rare bird in terms of January subject matter. People need a laugh. January isn’t always a dumping ground for dogs the studios are scared to drop anywhere else. This is the raunchy NSFW trailer for this one, kids. Headphones only.
Movie Nation 