Do you want to take a break? Do you want music that lifts you up, talent that brings tears, and comfort all around.
Go see the movie of Aretha Franklin: Amazing Grace, made in 1972 when she was already a massive star. I fell in love with her brilliant, warm mentor James Cleveland and was moved by his Southern California Community Choir. Most of all, I was transfixed by Aretha Franklin's transcendent voice, which is a crucial part of the soundtrack of my life – and that of several generations.
The film was shot during the making of "Amazing Grace, which was both Aretha’s biggest selling album and – to this day – the best-selling live gospel album ever. Sydney Pollack, who was directing for Warner Brothers, made a terrible technical error, which left the audio out of sync. Producer Alan Elliott devoted decades to saving the film, but faced a lot of resistance, including from Aretha herself. A new technical fix and Aretha’s death allowed him to bring it to us now.
It is raw and real and sweaty and full of bloopers, such as the film crew stepping in front of the camera by accident or turning up behind Aretha messing with wires. Interesting guests dot the audience – from her father (oddly invited last minute) to Mick Jagger, hanging out in the back of the room. The vast majority of the audience is members of a Los Angeles Baptist church where they filmed over two nights.
It's simply wonderful. “Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel,” said The New York Times.
Well god-damn: Melissa McCarthy’s acting chops are something to behold in Can You Ever Forgive Me? For writers and readers, this film will charm the pants off of you. Based on the memoir of Lee Israel, a biographer of celebrities, we meet the exasperated agent (played by Jane Curtin, once of SNL fame), the publishing world that thrives on showy white men, and Lee’s one human friend, Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant at his best), an aging gay man who joins her in her desperation. Add two facts: one, she is a lesbian whose ex (played by Anna Deavere Smith of West Wing, The Practice, and Nurse Jackie fame) is sick and tired of her bullshit, and two, her best friend is the obligatory ill cat. Lee turns to crime and booze when her literary career is as moribund as the job she is fired from when she tells her boss to fuck off. Follow her life of forgery and fall in love.
A parody period piece in which two women court attendants (Emma Stone & Rachel Weisz) vie for the sexual and political favor of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Lots of giggles. Lots of girl-on-girl rumpy pumpy, but a very bewildering ending.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Those who didn’t know Freddy Mercury and the music of Queen may find this illuminating. I totally “get” the criticisms of the gay press on how nastily the gay male party days are portrayed. I couldn’t stand the teeth prosthesis they used; Rami Malek seemed so slight, unlike Freddy. The only part that moved me was the Live Aid concert at the end – very powerful.
Roma
A slow-moving, intriguing film that gives insight –on the visual and narrative levels – into Mexican life of both the bourgeois and the poor. The lives of women of different classes intersect in this Black & White nominee for Best Foreign Film. Gorgeous cinematography and strong acting.
When I saw charming, smart Amandla Stenberg interviewed on a talk show, I knew I wanted to see her moving, powerful film, The Hate U Give. Stenberg plays Starr Carter, a teenager who lives a life of code-switching. Home is an impoverished Black community suffering the violence of the police and the violence of the drug dealers. School is in a posh white neighborhood where, to counteract her isolation, she must adapt her speech, behavior, and most of all her reactions.
Her lifelong friend Khalil (Algee Smith) is murdered by a white cop for no reason at all during a traffic stop, and she is the only witness. One male authority figure after another – her powerful, devoted, ex-prisoner father (Russell Hornsby); her loving uncle, a cop (Common); the local drug lord – tells her what to do about testifying or not at the upcoming grand jury. The advice from the two adult women – her mother (Regina Hall) and the community organizer (Issa Rae) – is given less emotional weight, although in the end, it is the community activist who most impacts Starr’s direction.
The cast is simply sterling – one fabulous performance after another. The action and the emotional punches are non-stop. I cried many times. Apparently meant as a Young Adult film, I recommend it to everyone.
I pretty much hated “A Star is Born,” although I agree that the acting was strong, not the least Lady Gaga. I could not stand the privileged, condescending, petulant dickhead that Bradley Cooper played. His surprise introduction of her to his audience was aggressive if not abusive. His role in life was to disrupt her upward career trajectory (as his fell) with drunken sloppiness, public scenes, and excessive pouting. Kinda reminded me of Kavanaugh. Meanwhile, she enabled, excused, and absorbed his bad behavior. Mostly I wanted him to take a shower, scrub his sweaty face, and wash his slimy hair.
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The trailer:
The fundamental flaw in “Tea with the Dames” was that it was directed by a man, Roger Michell. He raised the (wrong) questions and topics. This documentary shows four of Britain’s most delectable old actors – Dames Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Maggie Smith – in conversation over cups of tea, apparently shot in a single exhausting day. Michell never asked what it was like to try to find meaty roles for women over the decades, nor did he ask about harassment or pay discrimination. Rather, he was most interested in their relationships with their (often famous) husbands. Missed opportunity.
Short summary: “Gilda” is strangely lacking any emotional impact – I got neither big laughs nor tears. So much was missing (some important voices, an engaging narrative arc) – but most of all her work was missing (except very short snippets out of context.)
I remember the first year of Saturday Night Live. Endearing Gilda Radner had been the very first staff member hired for the show – and for me and many other fans she was at the heart of show, even as she was fighting writer-room sexism to get herself into the skits. She was a total riot!
I remember watching as she got thinner and thinner, although we didn’t know the words for bulimia and anorexia at the time.
I remember when she got cancer, when she came back in remission, and when she got ill again.
I remember when she died. It was shocking. It was painful.
You’ll find very little of the magic of Gilda in this documentary. It’s stitched together in jerky bits and pieces, with many of the talking heads being current SNL comedians who never worked with her or even knew her. I appreciated the childhood photos and commentary – that part of her life was new to me. Unfortunately the tone of the film is distant, dispassionate, more like a resume than the gushy love letter Gilda deserves.
With just three days left on a year’s probation, after serving time for a felony, Collin (Daveed Diggs) is doing everything he can to follow the rules and make it out of these last days without trouble. However, his best buddy since they were 11, Miles (Rafael Casal), is pretty cavalier about the situation and is raising all sorts of hell. Collin is black; Miles is white. They are both in turmoil over the gentrification of their city Oakland, California.
Trigger alert: There is male-on-male violence, fueled by fear, anger, injustice, and testosterone – although no woman is a target in this film. Made by these two real-life friends and strongly directed by first time director Carlos Lopez Estrada, this film examines with brutal honesty the volatility of the intersection of race and class and masculinity.
The oppressive ever-hovering threat of the police is palpable. The desperation of the women trying to protect their sons is tangible. Patter, slang, and the spoken word weave a verbal tapestry of their pain. And nothing is simple or straight-forward – just like our real lives. The acting is superb. Blindspotting is funny, scary, and humane. It will leave you with a lot to talk about. I very highly recommend it.
This review is a total collaboration between Stephanie Schroeder and Sue Katz.
Pretty blond Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) is caught on prom night with her panties down in the back seat of a car with her girlfriend. Her parents are dead and her guardians are convinced that the best thing they can do for her is to ship her to a super-Christian center (“God’s Promise”) that purports to “convert” young people (“disciples”) afflicted with the sin of SSA (that is, same-sex attraction, in the lingo of the converters).
Their methods are strict, ridiculous, and dubious, led by two experts. The slimebaggy, Disney-villianesque, Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle) moves easily between manipulation and vicious cruelty. Rev. Rick (John Gallagher Jr.) claims to be a successfully converted ex-gay and, employing his dimpled smile, he pushes the whole narrative of Christian sin.
Their center is no place for youngsters. But when Cameron spies two other residents sneaking a joint, she makes friends with them. Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck) is a captivating character who identifies as Two-Spirit. Jane (Sasha Lane) is a witty and irreverent rebel whose role in the film could have been much more developed. The three of them form a dissident posse, and face daunting developments together.
With the constant drum beat of a nebulous religiosity pounding, the disciples are led through such earnest activities as Christian karaoke, jazzer-size for God, and drawings to diagram past trauma leading to SSA (too much competitive athleticism for girls, over-identification with female family members for boys, smothering parental love or, conversely, not enough parental affection for everyone).
With these young people in uniforms (girls in skirts; boys in pants) as pawns, the adults at “God’s Promise” play out every fascist’s and closet homo’s fantasy. By creating a dictatorship in a real-life setting (a religious compound far from civilization, cut off from reality and communication with the outside world, and without any oversight) these adult despots are free to enact whatever sick program they want with impunity. Even when an outside authority gets involved, he caveats his investigation with "despite the mission of this place," meaning there is no hope, there is no help to stop the abuse of these teens.
The film, which won Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize, is based on a novel set in 1993 by Emily M. Danforth. The director Desiree Akhavan (“Appropriate Behavior”) does a pointed job of nailing the hypocrisy and dangers of these “conversion” therapies, which were debunked decades ago. The film has an unusual number of behind-the-camera women, from cinematography to music supervision.
The film is receiving only limited release in the U.S. despite the top prize at Sundance, and as has been written about elsewhere, may soon be overshadowed by another "conversion therapy" film by a male director, focused on a male protagonist, and with enormous star power. This is another example of the way films by and about women (especially queer women) are often diminished by the film establishment. See "The Miseducation of Cameron Post." See other movies by and about women. And, read more about the dismissal state of queer female sexuality in film in this interview with Akhavan.
Sorry. Don’t hate me, but I cringed a bit at this film, which Rotten Tomatoes gives a 99% rating. (You know me: always in tune with America.) I was looking forward to it because Fred Rogers was a Pittsburgh boy much of his life and the show aired in early 1968 on my childhood PBS station WQED.
And that’s my problem. In 1965 I left my youth behind in Pittsburgh and by 1968 I was ensconced behind the barricades of Boston radicalism. As I watched this film about sweet (saccharine?) white, calm, empathetic Mr. Rogers, I kept thinking about what was going on outside that studio.
Che Guevera had been executed in Bolivia just a few months earlier while they were shooting the show. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were murdered that year. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam was in 1968. President Lyndon Johnson’s mostly pale male Kerner Commission confirmed the existence of systematic and institutional racism across the country.
While I watched the film, I couldn’t help but think that although Mr. Rogers had a reputation of speaking truth to children – about disability, about death, about feelings – his calm patience and ability to remain entirely unruffled was in painful contrast to the screams and chants and protests of my world.
Many of those oppositional voices on the streets were addressing the real problems of real kids: from poverty to racism to segregated education to gender discrimination and so much more. Rogers’ “thing” was encouraging self-esteem and showering unconditional love – he was an intelligent Dr. Feel Good to the pre-adolescent set, replacing the drugs with thoughtfulness. But as my companion at the film said, “Many children need more than self-esteem to cope.” The world he created seemed to be entirely of kids and those who cared for them all, in a kind of anonymous group hug. I think about my own childhood – with its violence, men exposing themselves, anti-Semitism, limitations on me because I was a girl – and I just can’t relate.
Full disclosure, the show was too late for me as a kid and I didn’t have children of my own, so I never had an emotional attachment to this relaxed, frank easy-going dude with the Perry Como sweaters. Nor did I gain that attachment while watching the film.
One problem for me may be the director Morgan Neville. He made the Oscar winning documentary film “20 Feet from Stardom,” which I also thought was a missed opportunity and which I also criticized. I think his ideas for films are brilliant and his execution kinda meh.
Those who grew up on Mr. Rogers or raised their kids watching the show may feel more moved. This is supposed to be a tear-jerker, but I only sprouted a bit of moisture in the scene when Mr. Rogers is sincerely surprised to meet up with the adult who, years earlier, had been a kickass kid with disabilities on his show.
In this gripping and engaging bio-pic, an abusive waitress mother (brilliant work by Allison Janney) pushes her talented daughter Tonya Harding (played wonderfully by Margot Robbie) onto the ice and into the world of competitive skating. The father bails on the family – the first major betrayal by a man Tonya has been leaning on – and the mother’s violence becomes relentless. Tonya hooks up with the first guy at hand and uses him as an escape from the mother’s hairbrush beatings. He takes over the physical abuse where the mother left off.
All along, as her skills improve and her talents shine, the judges try to impose a very particular lady-like femininity on an athletic girl who gets little if any recognition for being the first American woman to nail two triple axels in a single competition.
The film provides a compelling representation of violent abuse. It highlights the oppressive imposition of a narrow notion of femininity by sports’ ruling bodies (which imposition I know only too well from the partner dance world) and the financial demands (like expensive costuming) these judges mandate for success in competition. It reveals how the combination of male stupidity and arrogance ruins women’s lives – in this case when her ex and his doofus sad sack friend decide to have Tonya’s rival attacked. And when the criminal justice system is anything but just.
But I have failed to mention Tonya’s quick wit and quicker tongue and the many funny bits in the film, not the least the tRump-like idiocy of the ex-husband’s buddy. Tough as all the physical blows are, the film itself speeds right along, bringing us a slice of white minimum-wage life where art struggles to survive.
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