Movie Nation

As a non-fiction fan as a reader, a lifelong history buff and somebody who considers period pieces my favorite film genre, I rarely read a show biz history book without my mind wandering to the question, “Is there a movie in this?”

Years and years before Tim Robbins got “Cradle Will Rock” on the screen, I knew somebody would eventually try to capture the heady energy and political fireworks of Orson Welles, at his theatrical peak, getting Marc Blitzstein’s 1930s labor opera “The Cradle Will Rock” in a movie.

It’s a piece of theater legend any Welles fan knows -thrillingly recounted in every Welles biography –9 a WPA show that the government lost its nerve about in mid-Depression, cast and crew scrambling to find a theater to stage it on opening night, doing so in an act of artistic defiance for the ages.

I see something with even greater artistic and mass audience appeal in one slice of George Gershwin’s life, the creation, casting and production of “The Negro Opera” “Porgy & Bess.”

There was an earlier Gershwin biopic that starred Alan Alda’s dad, Robert. And apparently, there’s another in pre-production.

Gershwin cut a wide swath through the culture in his too-short life. And the temptation to try and tell all of it (learning his craft as a “song plugger” on Tin Pan Alley, rubbing shoulders with the other inventors of “The Broadway Musical” in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Hollywood) is certainly there.

I’d guess you’d be better off with a film more circumscribed in time, something more like “Me and Orson Welles,” (THAT man again.), Richard Linklater’s charming outsider-looking-in-at-the-tyro-artist comedy with Zac Efron. That was confined to Welles’ Broadway-changing production of “Julius Caesar” from roughly the same era.

Gershwin was the composer who blended jazz and Tin Pan Alley pop into Broadway show tunes, elevating that art form in the ’20s and ’30s. Gershwin’s most famous piece, beaten to death by Woody Allen in film scores, was a signal moment in “legitimizing” jazz in “serious music” (classical) circles when it premiered, as performed by the composer himself (at the piano) and Paul Whiteman’s jazz orchestra in the mid-1920s –“Rhapsody in Blue.”

But the creation of “Porgy,” perhaps THE great American opera, is the surest bet, the best place to confine your movie to.

As musicologist and biographer Richard Crawford’s music-centric biography points out, Gershwin’s teaming with (white) South Carolinian Dubose Heyward was the stuff of magic. Gershwin, already schooled in jazz, mentored by African Americans and admiring others who proceded him in Tin Pan Alley, was ready to take on a project just like this. Gershwin and Heyward’s research visits to African American churches, soaking up the music and the world Heyward turned into “Catfish Row” and Gershwin animated with song, is fascinating enough. Crawford devotes much of this biography to this act of creation.

Heyward’s poem that Gershwin put to music as “Summertime,” and the casting that altered the tunes and bent the show closer to documentary reality and thrilling musicality are just a couple of the dramatic highpoints that seem most cinematic.

Yes, Gershwin hit on his young Juilliard-trained choice for Bess (Anne Brown). No “Not happening,” she said. He still crafted the role for her and put her in the history books.

Yes, the choir they hired, the other players they settled on, changed the opera, giving it musical authenticity and adding to the musical audacity. That process transformed “Porgy & Bess” into the enduring classic it became.

It’s a warm “creation myth,” one with qualities that embrace the liberalism of the time (New York theater was alive with door-opening African American efforts by white playwrights and composers, from Virgil Thomson’s “Green Pastures” to Welles’ celebrated “Voodoo” Caribbean setting of “Macbeth”). Careers were launched, and great black playwrights would soon follow.

As any number of Golden Age of Hollywood studio moguls were prone to say, knowing their word was law, “Let’s get SOMEbody on that.”

Yeah, I went for an Elvis “Kissing cousins” joke there.

But this coming out/coming of age Nov. 1 release could be funny, and should be an eye-opening state-of-gay rights/acceptance in Brazil foreign language farce.

In the documentary “#Female Pleasure,” five women from different cultures discuss the ways “the universal religion, patriarchy” has circumscribed and even traumatized their lives.

A Japanese artist is persecuted for her vagina imagery, a Hasidic woman hounded for breaking with the faith, an Indian woman starts a website to try to drag her country into a century where groping, rape and “honor killing” are ended via her website, a German nun struggles to get the attention of Pope Francis with her story of rape by a priest within Vatican city.

But the money moment, the scene that will stick with your from this Barbara Miller documentary, is provided by psychotherapist and women’s right’s activist Leyla Hussein. Her cause begins with using the proper terms for child marriage and female genital mutilation.

“Child abuse.”

And the fact that this practice, most common in Third World and Islamic countries in Africa, the Middle East and Polynesia, spreads to the First World when refugees — she is a Somali native — bring the barbaric custom with them sets up her indelible scene in “#Female Pleasure.”

So Hussein rounds up young Somali men from the diaspora that she lives among, in Britain, and uses a large-scale clay model to demonstrate the stages or degrees of “FGM.”

We watch the kids cringe, and cringe along with them, as she takes a putty knife to the parts of a vagina that are carved up or removed to “deny female pleasure” in sexual intercourse. The kids realize, as anybody watching this will, that writing off this graphic, gruesome and lifelong trauma as a mere “cultural practice” that we in the West shouldn’t comment on, is a grotesque misuse of custom and religion, horrifically primitive in origin, sexist, cruel and repressive in its continued use.

Hussein, who had this done to her as a child, remembers the aunts and neighborladies who came to carry the “rite of passage” out on her, and notes — “It’s not your body that you lose. You lose trust.”

“#Female Pleasure” roinds up these dispirate assaults on women’s most basic freedom — control of their own body and romantic destiny — to create a sweeping condemnation of millenia of patriarchical thinking.

Vithka Yadav, who set up the Love Matters website in India, recalls the waking nightmare of “growing up a girl-child in India, daily gropings and assaults,” spiraling towards an arranged marriage that too-often is another form of slavery.

“I started to hate myself for being a girl,” she remembers, stopping to debate a sexist monk in the city square (she has to hold back from telling him off) on her way to editing pieces on sexuality written by the coed staff of her website. The country that created the Kama Sutra has taken hundreds of years of backward steps in regards to equality of the sexes, she says.

Deborah Feldman‘s New York Hasidic trials and tests are more familiar and have been documented in books, articles, documentaries and feature films — another arranged marriage, another culture condemning women to lives without choice, without education (and books), without pleasure. That this is allowed to happen in New York, with fathers too often winning custody of children when the rare wife makes her legal escape, is apalling.

Catholic nun Doris Wagner’s story may be the saddest, signing into a patriarchy where nuns are mixed in with sometimes predatory Vatican City priests, “but it is the nun’s responsibility to make sure nothing happens.”

There is one lighter thread in Miller’s film, the story of Japanese artist Rokudensashiko. She draws manga, Japanese comics, and incorporates female and feminist issues into her stories. She also makes dioramas out of scenes from the comics.

Where she runs afoul of tradition, patriarchy and the law is when she starts making plaster casts and then 3D models of her vagina. She makes her vagina a character in her work. She commissions a plastic kayak shaped like her vagina. She and we giggle as she does.

“OBSCENE” say the menfolk, and we snicker along with her at the flaming hypocrisy of this as she walks through Tokyo’s sex shops, sampling the wares — where inflatable sex dolls and all manner of kinky “real woman substitutes” were invented for a culture that is shrinking in population because real sex is apparently too frightening…for some (men).

As I say, much of what is reported here has turned up in TV news magazine segments, articles and other films. But Miller has pulled some far-flung threads together to create a fascinating “state of the struggle” report, one that women like Hussein are fighting, one speech, one interview, one graphic demonstration of FGM at a time.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, frank discussion of sexuality and sexual violence

Cast: Leyla Hussein, Rokudenashiko, Vithika Yadav, Deborah Feldman, and Doris Wagner

Credits: Written and directed by Barbara Miller. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:37

Vivienne Westwood is a founding mother of British punk, an artist turned fashion designer who shaped, more than anybody else, the “look” of punk during the Sex Pistols’ heyday.

Her then lover and collaborator was punk impressario Malcolm McClaren, and in the new documentary “Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist,” she recalls how she and McClaren “cast” the band, and she dressed them.

Every time you see a torn t-shirt, a safety pin or swastika misused in “fashion,” thank Vivienne.

Defiantly independent, even as she hits 80, she and McClaren opened such iconic shops as Let It Rock, Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die and World’s End. She set the tone for this DIY look, and maintained it “even after they (the media) moved on to the next new thing.”

Lorna Tucker’s film captures Westwood as she finally absorbs the recognition British fashion long withheld from her and tracks her as she evolved her cluttered, DIY-looking weird-wear into runway-ready showstoppers, her brand spreading worldwide during the course of the film.

We see her hands-on piecing together of “looks” on her models, with her husband, the Austrian Andreas Kronthaler, fussing over every layer, accessory, ungainly shoe or legging.

They’re just “a drunken auntie and the gay uncle” to her “family” of designers and employees coos Andreas, who will never be butch enough for “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” But they make this work, doting over each other and the work (he was a former student and model) as her independent empire reaches the far corners of the globe.

Naomi Campbell giggles about her famous runway tumble in whatever absurdly impractical heels they whipped up, and Kate Moss jokes about their years of association.

Tucker lets Westwood (her first husband’s name) grouse about old ground she doesn’t want to cover again, about McLaren, chapters she’d just as soon forget.

She was openly mocked on British chat shows, and seeing some of what she puts out there, that’s easy to understand. And yet, she persisted.

And the filmmaker lets Westwood trumpet her environmentalism, which works itself into her “No fracking” etc. designs. Left unchallenged is fashion’s role, in the very vanguard of industries ruining the planet on so many levels that there have been documentaries about it.

Still, she chose not to open a planned shop in Beijing for all the right reasons.

“Westwood” doesn’t rank with the great and revealing fashion docs of the past decade — “The September Issue,” “Valentino: The Last Emperor,” “Iris” or “The Gospel According to Andre.” But Tucker has documented cultural proof that an artist who sticks with it long enough and takes care of herself can live long enough to see everybody else come around to her way of viewing the world of what we wear.

It’s an amusing gloss on a punk icon who never gave up the rebellion and never let go of the safety pins.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: Vivienne Westwood, Pamela Anderson, Christina Hendricks, Andre Leon Talley, Andreas Kronthaler and Kate Moss

Credits: Directed by Lorna Tucker.  A Greenwich Entertainment/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:23

Like millions of Netflixers, I was watching Robert Forster Friday night in what turns out to be his last “movie” role — as the “El Camino” vacuum cleaner salesman whose side hustle is what Jesse Pinkman is more interested in.

Forster played heavies and heroes and romantic leads, mostly on TV, until Quentin Tarantino rescued him from obscurity for “Jackie Brown.”

That’s the one I plan to re-watch today. Forster got decades or work out of that sparkling appearance, a bail bondsman who finds love in a stewardess doing bad (Pam Greer), a damned George Jones “He Stopped Loving Her Today” level performance. Pathos, understanding, humility and wit, that became his showpiece role. World weary, that was Max Cherry.

I interviewed him for his work in Mamet’s “Lakeboat,” a working class Joe playing a working class Joe — Joe Pitka, crewman on a Great Lakes freighter.

Classy guy, modest, everything you want in a movie star.

Deadpan or understated and earnest, malevolent or romantic, he made it look effortless, from “The Descendants” to the “Olympus has Fallen” franchise.

Classed up “El Camino,” and how.

“The African Queen” anyone?

Their audiences don’t necessarily overlap, but anybody seeing “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie” on Netflix after catching “Downton Abbey” on the big screen should pick up on the similarities.

They both exist as fan service, movies that give devotees what they want. “Character  moments” abound. Scenes, here and there, have a random “Well, let’s give him/her another bow” feeling. Both films lope along, stuffed with scenes that don’t do much of anything to drive the narrative forward. The lack of “urgency” — a characteristic of long-form/short-season television — weighs on them both. The story doesn’t race forward so much as drip drip drip along.

And fans will not care.

But in the case of “Breaking Bad,” the victory lap series creator and writer/director Vince Gilligan was going for seems off.

It picks up the story right after the bloody but sentimental mayhem of the “Breaking Bad” series finale, which happened six years ago. Everybody who was there, who lived through it or who returns in fresh flashbacks here, is older, heavier, plainly not the scrawny cancerous high school chemistry teacher (Bryan Cranston) or his former student Jesse is played by a 40 YEAR OLD (Aaron Paul). And Jesse Plemons, Jesse Pinkman’s captor and a somewhat simple drug mob killer, has become a star character actor and put on age and weight in the ensuing six years.

Pretending years and years haven’t passed between then and the present day is a mistake. Underlining that is the genre of story Gilligan tells. “El Camino,” named for the classic truck-bodied Chevy, is a GET AWAY tale. Jesse Pinkman survived a slaughter that is still all over the news. His parents are being interviewed on TV. There’s a manhunt on. And this languid “memory play” of a movie is about how seemingly unconcerned Jesse is about self-preservation, you know escaping.

Cops and bad guys are looking for him and this rare, collectible car he’s driving. And dude, beaten and tortured and on the lam — doesn’t get out of town as fast as his legs or El Camino can take him. Scene after scene, long flashbacks about that captivity with his murderous jailor (Plemons) simple-mindedly using him as slave labor — installing a camper cover on the El Camino, disposing of a body in Todd’s oddly retro-mod Albuquerque apartment  — poke along, with no sense of the ticking clock that should be/HAS to be running out on old Jesse, who needs to hightail it to wherever he can to “start over.”

Are we being asked to forget the 40 year old playing him? Jesse is still supposed to be young and naive enough to maybe not grasp the urgency of his situation, the time-sensitive peril he faces.

The choppy, episodic-TV vignettes-“story” never works in a feature film. But there is a “Breaking Bad” logic to the narrative. Jesse reasons he needs money to start over. He mulls over his just-past-his-teens flashback with meth-man Mike (Jonathan Banks) about what he could do, where he could go, having made bank at such a young age (cough cough).

The long flashbacks covering his captivity do more than just turn Plemons into the film’s co-star. They reveal the cash that Jesse knows is out there, and the other bad men who contributed to his captivity, although that seems alternately too humane to be as sadistic as it was.

Robert Forster was in a single episode of the TV series, but has a lovely, sharp and amusing stand-alone scene here.

And Cranston’s return as Walter White may be a selling point, but serves no purpose other than to show how different Walter and Jesse look from their “Breaking Bad” years.

None of which should chase fans away from this feature length coda. But don’t kid yourself. As a stand-alone movie, this isn’t all that.

The grace notes, final bows (Skinny Pete and Badger), classic cars that would be the easiest vehicles in New Mexico to track down — a Fiero, the El Camino, a damned AMC Matador turns up in one random scene — are embellishmets on the bigger journey, Jesse’s hardening, his final metamorphisis as a character.

The stand-offs here play as contrived.

If you missed the series, or have forgotten much of it, there’s a refresher summary that plays as prelude here.  But whatever “closure” fans want beyond that final “Baby Blue” send-off, “El Camino” still doesn’t add up to anything a non-fan should bother with.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug use, profanity

Cast: Aaron Paul, Jesse Plemons, Robert Forster, Krysten Ritter, Jonathan Banks and Bryan Cranston

Credits: Written and directed by Vince Gilligan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:02

Swapping notes with a reviewer friend from the Midwest this week, we ticked off the credits on “Gemini Man” that should have signaled a much better movie than we saw on the screen.

Ang Lee behind the camera, Billy Ray and one of those “Game of Thrones” blokes among the credited screenwriters.

But the premise seems anchored in an earlier era, the trailer gave much of the movie away and there isn’t much of the “charming” Will Smith here, and let’s face it — him playing all hard and humorless? He can’t manage it. I dare say the fact that his “72 confirmed kills” government assassin who hugs each almost everybody wasn’t exactly the way the dude was scripted.

It cost a fortune to strip decades off his face, and the digitized version of him is less than human and obvioussly so. More convincing than you’d think, but not convincing enough. The action beats had a digitally jerky video game speed about them.

Is a $19 million opening a “bomb?” Not really. But watch that “Bad Boys” sequel trailer attached to this movie in the theaters and tell me that’s pre-sold, that it doesn’t look as mediocre as “Gemini Man” did in its trailers.

“Joker” is holding 50% of its opening weekend audience, which tells you this one is connecting with viewers, if not all critics. I expect it to find its way into the Oscar conversation, but we’ll see. $46 million.

“The Addams Family” has proven to be a kid-friendly brand through the ages, and a new animated one may be only about half as dizzy as you’d hope. But you and I are adults. The sight gags are here, and Oscar Isaac’s little vocal riff on Raoul Julia as Gomez is fun. It’s now looking at a $30 million+ opening.

I had to catch Lionsgate’s Adam Devine “in love with my cell phone” comedy “Jexi” at a suburban multiplex. There were two of us in the theater. The other guy laughed even less than I did. 

That one is now headed for a little over $3 million. Back to Netflix, Devine.

A stressful Minnesota family Thanksgiving, a harrowing drive on icy roads on the way home. Their child has a fall on a construction site next to a gas station they stop in, an anxious race to a nearby hospital.

But the worst is over, right? That’s what Joanne (Lily Rabe) and Ray (Sam Worthington) figure. Once they get past the intrusive admissions questioning, the maddening wait, “Everything’s going to be fine,” right?

Well, the ER doc on duty is played by Stephen Tobolowsky. So, maybe not.

“Fractured” is a rock solid, blood simple thriller from the director of “The Machinist.” If you haven’t seen that deeply disturbing Christian Bale tale, RENT IT.

This is about what happens when Ray lets wife and child (Lucy Capri) head “downstairs” for a CAT scan. He watches the elevator drop to “LL,” takes his seat and waits. And waits and waits and waits.

When he starts asking questions, he gets the brush off. “Shift change” and all of that.

When he remembers the shifty looks nurses, the admissions clerk and others gave him, the testing “Is this really relevant?” questions about “family history” and his first wife and his “recovering alcoholic” status, panic sets in.

When he learns that radiology and imaging is UPstairs, not in the basement, he freaks.

Where is his family? What’s going on here? What exactly is his mental state, aside from the manic man missing his wife and child that we can see?

Director Brad Anderson, working from a middling but covers-the-basics Alan B. McElroy script (he wrote a “Left Behind,” a few “Wrong Turns,” “The Perfect Guy,” etc.), concentrates on Worthington and visual and aural (muffled sound) ways to show Ray’s increasingly frayed state of mind.

The lead-up to the opening act accident is grey, chilly and fraught. We can feel something bad happening quite a bit before it actually does.

Worthington ably threads his way through Ray’s rising alarm, from “It’s been hours,” to “I signed her in myself! You threw out the SHEET?” to “You lost my FAMILY?”

The hospital responds the way “TV movie” hospitals do, nary a concern for liability when dealing with a distraught father. But when the cops arrive — in the script’s farthest reach — they treat every coherent or semi-coherent thing out of Ray’s mouth absolutely seriously. Hospital personnel are quick with the “You need to calm down,” but the cops? They ask questions.

That’s a twist — a situation where you’re suspicious and in fear of the medical profession and trust the cops to do the right thing.

Worthington’s had his share of tour de force opportunities, and this one pays off. He’s just crazy enough to plant doubt, just sane enough to make us think “He’s NOT paranoid. Are these people selling kids or harvesting organs?”

There’s little beyond the grey-and-grim production design here that one would venture so far as to call it “great.” But “Fractured” provides an interesting mystery, engrossing story and a couple of superb action beats, more than enough to make it “Netflixable.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Sam Worthington, Lily Rabe, Stephen Toboloswky, Adjoa Andoh and Lucy Capri

Credits: Directed by Brad Anderson, script by Alan B. McElroy. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40