Marty Supreme (3/5 Stars)

When the Coen Brothers split up in 2019 and made separate movies, it was illuminating what projects each of them chose. Joel Coen, the elder brother, made a black and white adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Ethan Coen, the younger brother, made two screwball dark comedies featuring lesbians and starring Margaret Qualley, Drive Away Dolls and Honey Don’t. One could discern if one chose what part of their shared canon came from the more serious dramatic brother and what part came from the more quirky comedic brother. Not surprisingly, you need them both to have that signature Coen Brothers dramatic quirkiness. Hopefully their split is temporary.

The split up of the Safdie Brothers, writer/directors of Good Time and Uncut Gems, is equally as revealing. In the fall of last year, Benny Safdie, the younger, made his directorial debut with The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. A few months later, Josh Safdie, the elder, made his directorial debut with Marty Supreme starring Timothee Chalamet. Both are ostensibly sports movies in that they are about athletes. Beyond that they couldn’t be more different and reveal that in the brother’s previous partnership, it was most likely Josh Safdie who was the dominant creative force. Mary Supreme is far more like Good Time and Uncut Gems in writing, direction, and style than The Smashing Machine is. The most interesting thing though is that The Smashing Machine is a better movie and contains what Good Time and Uncut Gems had but Marty Supreme does not: an emotional core and a general point. Or to put it another way, what Good Time, Uncut Gems, and The Smashing Machine have in common is that they ultimately have something to say. Good Time, Uncut Gems, and Marty Supreme are alike in that the stories have the same subject matter and style, they all energetically swirl around morally dubious hustlers in New York City.

What is Marty Supreme about? It stars Timothee Chalamet as Marty Mauser, as an aspiring athlete in 1950s New York City (I think I recognize these streets from where Marlon Brando was shot in the first Godfather movie). Since Marty Mauser looks like Timothee Chalamet, his choices of sports are limited. Here, he plays table tennis, an otherwise obscure sport that is just being organized into international competitions.

Marty needs money for the airfare to get to certain competitions. Unfortunately, for reasons unexplained, his mother wants him to be a shoe salesman (or something) and keeps stealing his money. Also, when he does get to the first competition in London, he does not win and thus does not win the prize money and fame he was counting on. That competition involves a surprise entry by a Japanese player who is his opposite in personality. He is stoic where Marty is epicurean, calm where Marty is frenetic, humble where Marty is egotistical. The movie is at its most interesting when they spar off for the first time. This occurs in the movie’s first hour and Marty loses. True to form, Marty is a sore loser and accuses the other player of cheating.

We think there will soon be some sort of rematch. But this does not happen for a long time. Instead, Marty’s mom steals his airfare money again and Marty spends the next hour and a half on various side hustles trying to get to the next tournament in Tokyo. These schemes all work until they don’t and by the two-hour mark he is no closer than he was at the hour mark. Marty is also a giant asshole (not unlike Robert Pattinson in Good Time and Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems) that pisses off everyone he meets, thereby burning every bridge and effectively ending his dreams by the time his rematch with the Japanese player starts. He wins that rematch, but by then it doesn’t matter whether he wins or loses.

The best thing that can be said about this movie is the characterizations. Any given scene is well-written and well-acted. In particular, Timothee Chalament’s verbal spats with the financier Milton Rockwell (played by Kevin O’Leary), Owner of Rockwell Ink, who may or may not want to be his corporate sponsor, are especially memorable. Marty Mauser also has an affair with Kay Stone (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), wife of Milton Rockwell, and they too have verbal spats. You think at some point Milton Rockwell will find out about the affair but the movie is too busy for that. I hear the Oscars have created a new category for Best Casting. I’m not sure what that really amounts to, but I would think this movie has some sort of edge given all the especially non-movie-star-looking Jewish actors in supporting roles.

The movie is too long to end up where it ends up. If I had to choose the removal of one of the sideplots, I would omit the one about the guy with a lot of cash who gets injured when a bathtub falls on his arm and he sends Marty on a mission to bring his dog to a veterinarian but the dog gets lost when Marty hustles a bowling alley with a black cabbie and there is a conflagration at a gas station, but then they find the dog at a farmhouse across the street the next day but the owner is violently opposed to giving the dog back and so various people die of gunshot wounds in a shocking and gratuitous fashion. This movie would have been better without all that if only because it would have been shorter.

I haven’t even gotten to the subplot about Marty knocking up another man’s wife, Rachel Mizler (played by Odessa A’Zion) and her being like eight months pregnant during some of the more violent scenes about the dog. But what does it matter? What was the point of this movie?

It is not that I am discouraging the subject matter. Good Time was about a petty criminal, but then he met someone even stupider than he was and by the end of the movie, it felt like he had turned a corner. Uncut Gems, though the main character was reckless and adulterous, had an ingenious scheme to turn himself and his gambling debts around. It was exciting to see him try to pull off. What is the redeeming value of Marty’s story? Josh Safdie misses his brother. Benny may have been able to come up with something.

Review: Brokeback Mountain (2005)

“I can tell you this, I probably won’t see Brokeback Mountain again. It’s too long and moves too slow and once you’ve seen a great landscape do you really get the same thrill watching it again.”

Max Travis, Brokeback Mountain 2005 Review

I was dismissive of Brokeback Mountain in early 2026. I saw it, not necessarily because it piqued my interest, but because it had been nominated for Best Picture. As an aspiring cineaste, I thought I should see all the movies nominated for Best Picture. My review lasted a few sentences, mentioned that the movie “got the details right” (it beats 39-year-old Max how 19-year-old Max could have known that), and then went on to say I would have rather they nominated “King Kong” or “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” for Best Picture.

I still think “King Kong” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” got snubbed, but my opinion of “Brokeback Mountain” has risen dramatically upon the second viewing, now twenty years later. It is in fact a very good movie, whose main themes become more recognizable and more appreciable the more life experience the viewer has.

I don’t think it occurred to me when watching this movie in early 2026, but the movie spans twenty years of time, I believe from 1963 to 1983. In 1963, two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), are hired to watch over a herd of sheep on Brokeback Mountain over the summer. By fits and starts and despite a heavy dose of denial, they become lovers. Then the summer ends too soon, and it seems that the romance ends there as well. Ennis Del Mar, already engaged to Alma (played by Michelle Williams), keeps the marriage date and soon thereafter sires two girls. These girls grow up. In the last scene, one of them, Alma Jr., (played by Kate Mara, about six years before I learned her name via House of Cards), is aged 19 and invites her estranged father to her wedding. He inquires as to whether her betrothed loves her, leaving unsaid his concern that her husband-to-be may be just like him, a closeted gay man who married and cheated on a woman he didn’t love.

The story of Brokeback Mountain is about what didn’t happen during those twenty years. These two men fell in love in 1963 and then spent twenty years not acting on it, or acting on it, but only halfway. They both get married and both commit adultery, heading off into the Wyoming wilderness a few times a year on “fishing trips”. There seem to be several opportunities to end the charade. Jack Twist, perhaps too reckless, brings up the possibility several times, and at one point, after Del Mar’s well-earned divorce, certainly believes that this time they will be together for real. Jack Twist is ready to divorce his wife as soon as Del Mar approves of the plan. But Del Mar doesn’t have it in him. He is too much of an ordinary man in the times he was living in.

Heath Ledger’s performance of Ennis Del Mar is very much a revelation. I didn’t quite get why it was so good until the second viewing. The character is very introverted, the little that he speaks seems to escape out of the side of his mouth. And then this character that changes very little, goes through twenty years of not changing enough. Ultimately he is a coward. Not an exceptional coward, mind you, just an ordinary one, up against societal forces that a normal person understandably cower from. A veritable parade of people try to get to him and it seems he would rather be alone than have to deal with the consequences of meeting them as himself.

I use the judgmental label of “coward” purposefully because I think the only way to understand this movie is to see it as a tragedy, one in which there are unfair societal forces sure, but also one in which the characters make bad decisions that detrimentally affect themselves and those around them. Because what Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are doing is wrong. I’m not talking about the homosexuality. I’m talking about the adultery. This is more pronounced in one marriage than the other. Alma, a woman who loves her husband, is very much wronged by the actions of Del Mar. The other marriage, and this went way over my head on the first viewing, might be a marriage of convenience initiated by the other wife, Lureen Newsome (played by Anne Hathaway) who may have chosen Jack Twist because he was gay (the homosexuality is a lot more obvious with Twist then it is with Del Mar). That is, she may have chosen Jack Twist because she is a lesbian and intended to be through with the romance part of the marriage just as soon as she gave her parents a grandchild. Again, I didn’t pick up on this possibility at all during the first viewing. I half-expect that the first gay person I try out this theory will shake their head as if it was so painfully obvious.

I have notoriously bad gay-dar. This likely comes from being raised in a socially conservative area (Orange County, California) combined with a complete lack of bisexuality. I’ve heard homesexuality is not necessarily black and white, but a spectrum, and it would seem to me that I’m on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from homosexuality. I recall being weirded out by the brief love scenes in this movie twenty years ago. I was still uncomfortable watching them after twenty years, though I understand why the scene is important to the movie. But even a person devoid of homosexuality, and one who finds the physical idea of it frankly repulsive, will understand the historical prejudice against it has no place in our day and age. (The taboo is historically universal which infers, to me at least, a utility beyond mere prejudice. I think it is about public health. You prevent the spread of STDs by having marriage only between male and female virgins.) Modern medicine however obviates that concern, rendering the taboo pointless and ultimately harmful not only to the homosexuals but everyone around them. This movie makes plain the collateral damage, which is mainly borne by the spouses of closeted men. Here, we may consider Alma. She only has one life and Del Mar wasted a good decade of it.

There are very few movies in which the plot revolves around characters that are wasting everybody’s time. These are not exciting movies to watch. We want to see people take action in their lives. We want them to succeed, yes, but if that is not possible, we at least want to see them try. When a movie comes along in which even “trying” does not happen, it screws with the intuitive expectations of the audience. There is this kind of notorious story, first a novel, and then a movie, entitled “Remains of the Day.” The story, by a Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro, was written to deliberately convey the most wasted life possible. He chose to tell a story about an English Butler before and during World War II who runs the manor of an aristocratic with Nazi sympathies. This Japanese author felt that a life dedicated blindly to service was a waste both personally, and in this case, politically.  (It is a very Japanese detail that the author was interested in this theme but couldn’t look inward enough to actually make the story take place in Japan. The ability to do this, is one of reasons why Godzilla Minus One is such an extraordinary film.) One of the plot points is that this butler (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) has the opportunity to hire two Jewish refugees but chooses not to out of deference to his Lord's politics. About a decade later, he expresses relief when he learns that the two girls weren’t murdered. You just want to shake this guy. The movie is splendidly acted and expertly does what it sets out to do. But given that the goal is to tell a story of missed chances and frustration, I can’t say I can recommend it.

If movies about people who make the wrong choices are not exactly easy to watch, they can however be instructive. For a movie like “Brokeback Mountain”, it may serve as a cultural impetus to change. Or it can spur a change in one’s personal life. I once saw a movie called “Broadcast News”, which is a 1987 movie written and directed by James L. Brooks. It is ostensibly a love triangle romance between a television newscast producer (Holly Hunter at her most attractive), a smart, funny and serious reporter (Albert Brooks), and a charming but vapid news anchor (William Hurt). Albert Brooks should have the upper hand in this romantic tug-of-war except he isn’t really trying. Or at least not trying in good faith. He uses his intelligence and sarcasm to belittle his opposition but not get ahead himself. He criticises Holly Hunter for not choosing him, but doesn’t actually put himself out there to be chosen. There is a particular moment in the movie where Holly Hunter essentially gives him the go ahead to win her over and he responds with a fantastically cruel remark. In the end, he doesn’t get the girl not because he can’t (or as he thinks, she doesn’t understand how much better he is then the other guy) but because he wasn’t playing to win. He was playing as if he already lost and, I don’t know, trying to improve his standing in the eyes of history. You know, you only have one life, and it throws enough at you to make things hard enough. What these types of movies do is show you that you don’t have to make it harder on yourself.

Song Sung Blue (5/5 Stars)

“I’m not a songwriter. I’m not a sex symbol. I just want to entertain people.”

Mike Sardina (played by Hugh Jackman)

“I want to sing and be happy and feel loved. And I don’t want everything to be such a big deal.”

Claire Sardina (played by Kate Hudson)

There is something special about this movie in its unabashed earnestness. The main characters, a married couple named Mike and Claire Sardina, have been through troubles in their respective lives before they meet each other. Mike was in the Vietnam War, utilized as a tunnel rat, crawling over dead bodies. He spent his early adulthood as an alcoholic, ultimately undermining his first marriage. Claire is also divorced, middle-aged, also with kids left over from her previous marriage.

But the movie does not find these people in the depths of depression. Mike is celebrating his 20th Sober Anniversary at Alcoholics Anonymous. He sings to his group Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue, a song about how having the blues, putting them into a song, and singing them out again makes you feel a whole lot better. Mike moonlights as a singer named “Lighting” and a guitar player in a local Mo-Town band “The Esquires”. Claire moonlights as a Patsy Cline impersonator. They meet at the local state fair and become attached both romantically and professionally. They have lived long enough to know what is important to their lives and recognize that the other is on the exact same page.

What Mike and Claire Sardina decide to do is form a band and get married. The band will mainly rely on cover songs of Neil Diamond. As Mike is already “Lightning”, Claire will be “Thunder” and they will be known as “Lightning and Thunder.” This is a real band and it was apparently beloved in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin region, enough so that it became the subject of a 2008 documentary of “Song Sung Blue”. Hugh Jackman, as good of a song-and-dance-man as he is an action star, is great as Mike in both acting and performances. Kate Hudson, recently nominated for an Oscar for this role, is in her best role and movie since her first nomination in Almost Famous (2000), 26 years ago.

The musical biopic is a relatively stable and conservative sub-genre of movie. Take an up-and-coming actor and marry them with a musician that they kinda look like (say Timothee Chalamet and Bob Dylan, Jeremy Allan White and Bruce Springsteen). Drawing on the star power of both, you can then sleep-walk yourself through the screenplay of the artist’s life punctuating it every 10-15 minutes with well known songs. “Song Sung Blue” is unique in that it is a musical biopic with Neil Diamond songs, but is not about Neil Diamond. (It is also not entirely fictional like ABBA’s Mamma Mia) Instead, it is about some real people that were deeply touched by Neil Diamond’s work, then went out into the world to spread the joy like evangelists. Imagine being Neil Diamond and waking up one day to realize that you had a part in this story without ever meeting the people in it. What better tribute could there be to an artist’s music than this?

“Song Sung Blue” is directed and written for the screen by Craig Brewer who has had an interesting career. He started with two very good movies, “Hustle and Flow” (2005) and “Black Snake Moan” (2006), the former of which is one of the better movies ever made about making music from scratch. Although these two movies achieved some critical acclaim, Craig Brewer didn’t become one of those directors that gets to choose his next projects. Instead, he became a television episode director (most notably Empire) and made some movies for other people (a 2011 remake of Footloose, Eddie Murphy’s My Name is Dolemite and Coming 2 America). In a way, “Song Sung Blue” after a period of almost twenty years, is his next movie. Craig Brewer saw the documentary in 2008 and has been wanting to make this movie ever since.

Song Sung Blue is an exceptionally well directed and edited movie with a deep technical knowledge of how to utilize music in a narrative framework. Take for example the song “Play Me”, which starts as a rehearsal between Mike and Claire Sardina in Claire’s home with the two characters providing voices and instrumentation for the song in the scene. The movie then cuts to a scene at the state fair (earlier in the day, I think) where Mike and Claire are walking along and talking about their past marriages. While they are doing this, the song (their voices and instrumentation) continues to play in the background of the scene. And then the movie goes back to the rehearsal even though this technically does not make temporal sense. But because it works so well emotionally, it does not seem obvious the leaps in movie logic that the director is making. Music is very much like that. Another example is the montage that accompanies the song “Sweet Caroline”, which covers at least a year of narrative development. (Mike and Claire are the type of couple who get married and then provide the entertainment at the reception. Hundreds of people attend their wedding, which is one of many events that takes place during that song.) Other songs like “Forever in Blue Jeans” and “Soolaiman” are straight up stage musical numbers. The latter is not a well known Neil Diamond song, but Criag Brewer uses it as the big musical finale. He does a good job of setting it up throughout the movie with Mike Sardina consistently referring to it as a great Neil Diamond song that is not “Sweet Caroline.” By the time it starts, you genuinely want to hear what it sounds like. All of this work. And the music. Listen, I knew about half the songs. The others I heard for the first time and they were all great and seamlessly worked within the narrative framework of the movie. I’ve been listening to the movie’s soundtrack on repeat for the past two weeks.

Because of the real life contours and detours in the lives of Mike and Claire Sardina, including employment gaps, unpaid bills, and a bizarre car accident that claims the leg of Claire Sardina, the movie does not need any human antagonists. Everyone in this movie is on the same team. Fisher Stevens plays Mike Sardina’s dentist/manager. Jim Belushi provides logistics. Even Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam comes in and lends a hand. The result is one of those movies where the drama is all the characters against the world as opposed to the characters against each other. This makes for several beautiful moments. I especially liked the scene where Mike Sardina puts on a one-man performance for the owner of a Thai restaurant that employs him three times a week utilizing the karaoke machine. The night happens to be the birthday of the owner’s recently deceased wife. So Mike trades singing sad songs with him (Neil Diamond’s “I Am…I Said”) while the owner gets drunk. This reminded me of the one-man performance Llewyn Davis gives to his father.

I looked into the real life story of Mike and Claire Sardina after watching this movie. The documentarian of the 2008 documentary, Greg Kohs is credited as a co-writer here. Like many movies based on real events, there are certain changes made to achieve a more cohesive storyline. For instance, instead of opening for Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder invited Lighting and Thunder onstage for an encore performance at Milwaukee’s Summer Fest. Then they sang “Forever in Blue Jeans” together. It makes sense for them to present that differently in the movie. I am very happy to report one of the main differences between this movie and real life. In the movie, it appears that the events take place within the space of a few years. Notice the lack of age progression in the children. In real life, Mike and Claire Sardina started singing together in 1989, married each other in 1994, the car accident occurred in 1999, and Mike died in 2006. That means the good times encompassed a much longer period in real life, which is a great thing to know.

The Smashing Machine (5/5 Stars)

The Smashing Machine takes its name from an early 2000s HBO documentary about the Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter Mark Kerr. I found it in an odd place, Facebook, which makes me think like it won’t be there for very long. Having glanced at the documentary, I noticed several scenes that find themselves in the movie, so many that it is probably accurate to describe this movie as a dramatic adaptation of the documentary. The movie uses the scenes in the documentary as set pieces and then fills in the gaps where a documentary crew can’t go.

In a lot of ways, Mark Kerr is a man ahead of his time. He was one of the best mixed martial arts fighters at a time when the sport was very much in the shadow of boxing. There was a lot of potential in the sport, for instance it better answered the question of which man was the better fighter because it allowed so many fighting styles and relaxed so many rules. In boxing, all you can do is box. With mixed martial arts, you can be fighting karate, or boxing, or ju-jujitsu or something else. Mark Kerr, from Toledo, Ohio had a background as a free-style wrestler. And upon that basis he added a bunch of other things you can’t do in wrestling, like head-butting, and eye-gouging, and kneeing someone in the face. MMA would soon ban some of the more extreme moves, but while they are allowed, in the early days when it was a bloody free-for-all, apparently Mark Kerr was very good at it.

Mark Kerr also developed an addiction to pain-killers about twenty years before the opioid epidemic. So he was ahead of that trend too. When the documentary came out, it included scenes of Mark shooting up and also scenes of him in the hospital after an overdose knocked him unconscious. These scenes were apparently shown to Mark before the documentary was finalized and Mark was given the choice as to whether they would be included (I know this from Mark's recent interview with Joe Rogan). He okayed the inclusion of all the embarrassing stuff thinking that if people saw it they may not make the same mistakes that he did. He was a brave guy.

The movie was written and directed by Benny Safdie and stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Mark Kerr. This is Benny Safdie first feature film directing alone. He previously directed movies with his brother Josh Safdie. I've seen two very good movies from them, Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019). Interestingly, Josh Safdie has his first feature film without Benny coming out at the same time, Marty Supreme starring Timothee Chalamet. I have not seen that one, but I will soon and I expect to write a review about it. 

The Smashing Machine feels like it was made by people who admire Mark Kerr and want you to know more about him. Certainly, someone like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the highest paid action stars in the world, does not need to take part in a small movie like this. He is doing it because he believes in the story. I’ve said this before about Dwayne Johnson: that he probably is a good actor, but it is hard to tell since his physical nature makes him hard to write a good role for. He is too physically imposing to be your stereotypical leading man but too nice looking to be a villain. Mark Kerr is one of those rare roles that are tailor made. Mark Kerr was a smashing machine but also, apparently, a soft-spoken nice guy outside the ring. There is a very good scene here where Dwayne Johnson strikes up a nice conversation with an elderly woman in a doctor’s office. I think there is credit to be given to certain actors that can pull off roles that very few other actors can even attempt (I’ve argued for more recognition for Jim Carrey in the past with this logic). Who other than Dwayne Johnson could have played this part? And not only that, keep in mind that Dwayne Johnson and Mark Kerr are about the same age so when Dwayne plays Mark, there is a quarter-century age difference. What over fifty-something actor can plausibly take on a twenty-something role, without a shirt and in tight pants. I’m not saying give him an award but let’s not dismiss this very exceptional thing we are witnessing here.

If Dwayne is playing well within type, albeit in a dramatic and not action-oriented role, his romantic counterpart, Emily Blunt, is playing decidedly against type. Here is an actress that has played Queen Victoria and Mary Poppins, who is now playing Dawn Staples, the girlfriend of Mark Kerr, a well- meaning but immature American. We have to give her a break because she is also twenty-something and doesn’t quite understand what Mark Kerr is going through, mostly because Mark is not the type of person who can really articulate why all of this is so important to him. They have the type of conversations that unnecessarily turn into fights because they aren’t successfully communicating with one another. It is a testament to the writing, yes, but especially the acting, because although the characters aren’t connecting, the audience at the same time understands that they are not and why they are not.

Shakespeare is great not simply because he used fancy words better than anybody else, but because he so successfully communicated what his characters were feeling. For the same reason, these scenes between Dwayne and Emily are great because the audience understands so much of what is going on. That the characters themselves can’t quite see it lends the scenes a certain tragic quality to it.

For those like me who did not know anything about Mark Kerr before watching this movie, the ending was a surprise. I didn’t know whether or not he won the big fight or how the result may have happened. The best sports movies do not rely on the outcome of the big contest. After all, movies simply cannot compete with real live sporting events in this regard, (Why watch something contrived to turn out a certain way, when you can watch real sports and actually feel the suspense) so great sports movies use contests to get at something deeper than the result of the same. And The Smashing Machine is no exception. This entire movie is a relentless pursuit of competition at the highest levels and all the trials and tribulations that come with it. And the ending here, well, it is a sigh of relief, a relaxation. All your love and all your hate and all your memories and all your pain. You tried your best. It's time to let go.

The movie ends with a scene of the real Mark Kerr shopping for groceries on a bright sunny day in Arizona. He looks healthy. He looks happy.

If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You (4/5 Stars)

Per the audio commentary of Requiem for a Dream (2000), when Darren Aronofsky was adapting the novel into a screenplay, he made a realization about the fundamental nature of the plot. Requiem for a Dream was ostensibly a drama about four characters, each dealing with substance abuse, but the arc of the story more resembled a horror movie. That is, like a horror movie, at various twists and turns in the normal course of a plot, things kept on getting worse for the characters, like consistently getting worse. In realization of this, Darren Aronofsky leant into it and turned out a rather atypical movie. The lives of the characters unravelled in the manner of a horror plot, but without a stereotypical horror villain or even a monster (unless, of course, you count the refrigerator).

As a prime example of this, Aronofsky told a story about an actor who later said that the direction he had received from Aronofsky was the hardest direction he had ever received in his career. The scene is quick, and the actor plays one of the main character's doctor.  She is at the doctor's office for a check-up and she is presently suffering from her medication. The doctor comes in speaking and moving fast. He prescribes more pills and leaves. What was difficult about the direction is that Aronofsky told the actor to never look at his patient during the scene. This was difficult because it flies in face of every natural human instinct, especially those of a doctor. But the horror plot required it because if the doctor had noticed that his patient was experiencing terrible side effects from the medication, things wouldn’t have gotten even worse.

I was reminded of Requiem for a Dream when I watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and also various other movies in the limited universe of movies that look like dramas but work like horror movies (Safe 1995, The Father 2020) and also that one horror movie that is really just about sleep deprivation (The Badadook 2014). A woman named Linda (played by Rose Byrne) in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You with a daughter that is suffering from a mysterious illness that takes up all the time she has in which she isn’t already working as a professional therapist. Her husband is in the navy and available only by phone. She does not appear to have any other family or friends. Then she comes home one day to find that a giant leak has busted through the ceiling of her bedroom necessitating the evacuation of rented apartment to a nearby motel.

The writer and director of this movie is Mary Bronstein who also plays a role as the passive-aggressive Dr. Spring. She makes a very interesting choice in framing as most of the movie heavily relies on close-ups of Rose Byrne even in scenes which include her daughter (played by Delaney Quinn). Her daughter is not named, is never seen, and only makes her presence known by audibly complaining. This directorial choice greatly helps the build-up of tension in the plot. Speaking as a parent, I think one of the ways one’s child reduces the amount of annoyance/stress taking care of them entails, is by looking generally adorable. The nature of the mysterious illness also builds the tension. There isn’t much known about it other than Dr. Spring's diagnosis that the child needs to gain lots of weight quickly. This makes feeding the picky eater that much more of an ordeal.

Then there is all the therapy that takes place in this movie. But as amply demonstrated in this movie, therapy has its limits, and in certain circumstances is pointless. Therapy helps people who have enough time and money to meaningfully engage in it. To give an extreme example, if your country is experiencing a famine, it isn’t going to help to be able to talk to a therapist about how hungry you are. Therapy is something that balances an over-active mind in times of quiet. I am reminded of a great scene in As Good As it Gets (1997) when the mother (Helen Hunt) has an intense conversation about all sorts of fresh anxieties popping up in her mind because her continually sick child is no longer continually sick and thus is no longer monopolizing her attention span. Linda does not have mental issues. The terrible things that are happening in this movie are logistical and would burn out any normal person. What she needs is help, and she is not receiving it.

The therapy sessions are particularly interesting though because Linda is a therapist. In between her own work, she seeks therapy from a colleague, played by the late night talk show host Conan O’Brien in an inspired bit of casting. What she needs, her therapist cannot provide. (She primarily needs someone to take on a permanent shift in looking after her kid and to fix her ceiling so she can go home). He can’t give her what she needs and she gets increasingly distraught. But there is nothing that this therapist can say to her. She asks him to tell her what to do. He replies (correctly) that she should get some sleep. In one trying scene, I thought it might be a good idea if he gave her a hug, but that didn’t happen either.

This is a movie that relies on performances. Rose Byrne does a very good job and I expect she will receive awards recognition. It is one of those roles that is tough to go head-to-head with when comparing performances because this one requires more acting. Almost every scene is a difficult one. I think under the radar perhaps is the performance of Conan O’Brien who is an unlikely model of restraint in his scenes. Once more a comedian turns in a fine dramatic performance which could mean one of two things: 1) We should not underestimate comedians, or 2) dramatic performances aren’t so hard. This is writer/director Mary Bronstein’s first movie in fifteen years (she made a movie called Yeast in 2008 that I have never heard of). She should make more of them.

Death by Lightning (5/5 Stars)

“Death By Lighting” is a miniseries, streaming on Netflix, about the unlikely election and unfortunate assassination of James A. Garfield. Whenever anyone decries the state of movies and bemoans that great movies of the past couldn’t possibly be made in the present, it is perhaps helpful to point out a mini-series such as this, which is an example of a very good cinema that would have been impossible to produce as recently as fifteen years ago.

This miniseries is four episodes of approximately 50 minutes each, so around 3 hours and 20 minutes long. It consists mainly of talking (so a focus on writing and acting), there being only one real action scene, which takes place in the last thirty minutes. Before digital and streaming, a running of 3 hours 20 minutes needed to be an epic movie. There needs to be a great deal of spectacle in order to keep an audience in the seats for that amount of time. We can bemoan the decline of movie theaters, but at the same time, this is something that wouldn’t fit in a movie theater. For the first 100 years of movie history, there wasn’t any long form drama outside of television, which was generally an inferior product, interspersed as it is with commercials and prone to inefficient storytelling due to the perverse incentive to maximise the amount/length of episodes and thus the amount of advertisements shown.

The advent of digital/streaming makes a miniseries like “Death by Lightning” possible. It is longer than most movies, but it is also much cheaper than most epics. (Indeed, because of digital movie-making, it is a bit cheaper than a two hour movie would have been in the 1990s). The exception that was HBO has become the rule. You can watch the whole thing at once (if you wanted to), but the product is best consumed over the course of 2-4 nights. And it is as long as it needs to be, no longer because there isn’t a commercial incentive (i.e. the product is paid for by advertisers) to draw it out unnecessarily.

Because it is cheap to film drama (just writing and acting) and cheap to stream it outside of theaters, Netflix is allowed to take chances on a not-so-obvious subject matter. President Garfield was assassinated within three months of the start of his presidency. So, unlike other murdered Presidents (Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy) there was hardly any accomplishments to remember him by. You likely do not know anything about him. But that is fine, because the audience’s lack of familiarity with the subject matter only lends to the dramatic unfolding of the narrative. The less you know about a historical event, the less spoilers are involved.

There are two main storylines. The first is Garfield’s (played here by Michael Shannon) unlikely nomination as the Republican candidate in 1880. We are introduced to the party’s main players that form the supporting cast. Roscoe Conkling (played by Shea Whigham) and Chester A. Arthur (played by Nick Offerman) represents the influential and well-funded New York faction. James A. Blaine (played by Bradley Whitford) represents the less influential and less well-funded New England faction. Then there is the second storyline which only has one character, the would be assassin Charles Guiteau (played by Matthew McFayden) who is a delusional nobody who has the tendency to show up uninvited in scenes from the first storyline.

As coincidence would have it (and it is a coincidence because Guiteau is a crazy person), Guiteau’s motivations line up with and seemingly comment on the main controversies of this historical era. The Gilded Age (say post-Civil War and before World War I) is a time of weak federal government, mass industrialization, and the formation of unfettered big business. One thing the TV series could have explained better is why the New York faction has the power that it wields. It is mentioned that three quarters of the economic trade of the country goes through the port of New York City, but what is not mentioned is how exactly that results in most of the federal revenue coming from New York City. The reason is because the federal revenue at the time was based not on income taxes but on tariffs upon international goods. I’m not sure why, but the word tariff isn’t even mentioned.

This situation along with traditional wheeling and dealing amongst politicians induced much bribery for the sale of federal offices and federal land out west. Guiteau believes he is entitled to his fair share of corruption. He is a pathological liar and suffers from delusions of grandeur. McFayden is miscast simply because of his good looks, but apart from that, he does a very good job of portraying a person that at first glance may seem sane enough, but upon further reflection is straight up crazy. It’s all in the eyes.

Normally, I would bristle at the idea of giving a real-life assassin such a prominent role in a story, and I especially liked Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” for its example of not taking that route. But here it works, because, well, the character of Guiteau, all nerves and bristle, is a foil to Garfield, who lets face it, is kind of boring. In fact, if the miniseries was mainly Garfield, it would be a boring miniseries. But instead, Garfield is just one character among many men who are either crazy, cynical, or just kind of weak. This has the effect of making Garfield’s presence, when he appears, a pleasant one. Indeed, out of all these flawed men, you would very much want the stoic and serious Garfield to be the President of the United States. When he is picked out of the crowd for an unlikely dark horse nomination at the Chicago convention, you feel, as a citizen, to be tremendously lucky. And when he becomes the victim of a freak assassination, you feel, as a citizen, to be tremendously unlucky. The miniseries makes a strong argument that Garfield could have been a remarkable President.

What is interesting about this story is that its historical constraints inhibit standard character development. Guiteau, because he is crazy, cannot really change as a person. Garfield, because he is assassinated before he can accomplish much, cannot really change either. This leaves a supporting character, Chester A. Arthur, who was nominated as a Vice President because he was part of the New York machine but not the head of it (that would be Roscoe Conkling). Chester A. Arthur is a corrupt soul, beholden to machine politics and grieving the recent death of his wife with more drinking and partying than usual. He is outright disloyal to President Garfield and sees his ascent to the Vice Presidency as a bit of a joke. He is gobsmacked when he is not asked to immediately resign by President Garfield and horrified by the prospect of actually becoming President.

But, and there is historical evidence to this, the good nature of President Garfield apparently induced a moral change in Arthur and when Guiteau kills Garfield under a deluded belief that Arthur, upon ascending the Presidency, would grant him a federal appointment out of gratitude, it deeply affects Arthur. Arthur breaks off his ties with the corrupt New York machine and helps pass civil service reform out of a duty felt to the now deceased President Garfield. So, in a way, Chester A. Arthur is the main character of this miniseries because he is the one that changes. Nick Offerman (typecast as a cynical politician) gives one of his best of many performances as a cynical politician. (A sequel anyone?)

Assassinations are senseless and it is sometimes foolhardy to insist that we can learn anything from them. The motivations of the perpetrators are almost so depressingly irrelevant. Still, “Death by Lightning” perhaps succeeds more than usual, even if in a contrived but forgivable fashion. As Guiteau is awaiting his execution, he is visited by the widow of Garfield, Crete Garfield (played by Betty Gilpin), who gives a great if kind of unbelievable speech about how nobody will remember the assassin because she has exercised her influence to exact her own form of revenge, buying up the manuscript of his autobiography for the purpose of burying it. And we in the audience are also given one last moment of comfort during the execution of Guiteau via McFayden’s performance. The historical reality of Guiteau is that he wouldn’t have come to any late realization of his errors, and the miniseries mainly hews to this reality, except for that one last moment, when we see it in his eyes and we hear it in his last word, “oh”.

This is contrived, but then again, when someone does something terrible because they want to be remembered, sometimes the best revenge, if it is impossible to forget them completely, is to remember them in the exact opposite way they intended. “Death by Lightning” is a great mini-series and the best anything to be made about our interrupted leader, James A. Garfield.

This miniseries was created/written by Mike Makowsky and directed by Matt Ross, who is best known for playing tech mogul Gavin Belson in the HBO TV series “Silicon Valley.”

A House of Dynamite (4/5 Stars)

This tense thriller takes place in less than twenty minutes and is told three times, from different viewpoints.

In the first act, the action takes place in the White House Situation room, Captain Olivia Walker (played by Rebecca Ferguson) presiding, and an army base in Alaska, Major Daniel Gonzalez (played by Anthony Ramos), presiding. A missile launch somewhere in the Far East is picked up by a satellite. Within a few minutes it is ascertained that the missile has gone suborbital and is heading toward the United States. Within a few more minutes, it is ascertained that the missile is going to hit Chicago. The operators in the first act are the first and only line of defense in what appears to be a preemptive nuclear strike. Although they have trained for their task many times, they fail to stop the missile.

In the second act, the action takes place mainly in STRATCOM, General Anthony Brady (played by Tracy Letts) presiding, and the White House’s Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Bearington’s (played by Gabriel Basso) breathless race to get to work on time and engage foreign leaders to find out what is happening abroad. STRATCOM is located in the Rocky Mountains and commands the nuclear arsenal of the United States. General Anthony Brady acts like he has been preparing for this moment for his entire life. Jake Baerington scrambles around to consult an expert on the North Koreans and the diplomat from Russia, but ultimately cannot provide the President with advice that is conclusive.

In the third act, the action follows the President of the United States (played by Idris Elba) and his belated interactions with Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves (played by Jonah Hauer-King), the man in charge of the “football”, that briefcase which contains the nuclear codes and follows the President around everywhere he goes just for this kind of scenario. The President’s schedule has him attending a fundraiser with a WNBA star for girls’ sports. Then he is whisked away to make a decision as to whether to commit to an all-out nuclear counterstrike on the USA’s enemies. Each act ends with the President about to decide what to do.

This movie is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, a very capable director who excels at relatively realistic war movies (2008’s The Hurt Locker, 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty) and who, inexplicably, hasn’t made a movie since 2017. Somehow, she hasn’t lost her step. “A House of Dynamite” is a taut thriller that moves along briskly, introduces mainly characters and locations, and explains various procedures. Still, it keeps a clear focus and is, more or less, understandable. Above all, it is an interesting (and maybe plausible) take on a somewhat realistic scenario, which more than anything else, impresses upon the viewer not just the outward stakes in terms of human lives at issue but also the lack of time involved in the decisions that need to be made. Apparently, it would take an intercontinental nuclear strike only twenty minutes to get from somewhere near North Korea to Chicago. And apparently, the United States is so ready and prepared for that scenario, that it could initiate a world-wide counterstrike of apocalyptic proportions on all of our enemies at the same time before the first missile actually landed.

That is kind of amazing when you think about it. I vaguely knew that a man with the Football briefcase followed the President around everywhere just for that eventuality, but I never saw a movie in which that guy opens the briefcase, pulls out the armageddon menu, and ask the President whether he wants to initiate the “rare”, “medium”, or “well-done” plan. This is the type of movie where the subject matter elevates the material. The details in the plot are inherently dramatic. And the more the movie understates its delivery, the more it makes the movie feel real, which underlines that you are seeing a relatively realistic end-of-the-world scenario.

The point of this movie is to impress upon the viewer the importance of nuclear arms proliferation and an urgency for world leaders to once again enter treaties limiting their arsenals. As of next year, I believe there won’t be any of those treaties left. I believe another point the movie is trying to make is that this particular decision is in the hands of one man, the President, who may not be as prepared for this sort of thing as we may all like. In this movie, Idris Elba remarks that he received “one briefing” on this subject. This contrasts with the thousands of rehearsals that the Alaska army base and STRATCOM mention that they have had. Why is the least prepared character person in this movie in charge of the most important decision?

Counterintuitively, I think the people who should really be frightened after seeing this movie are all our would-be nuclear enemies. Although the Americans are shown to be realistically emotional about the situation, they are very competent and have plans in place to deal with it, not only in their attempts to thwart the strike before it happens, but also how to deal with the aftermath locally, and how to seek revenge immediately and on an apocalyptic scale. Consider this movie from the viewpoint of our enemies: one rogue missile is launched and before that missile even touches down 20 minutes later, it shows the American President in the process of confirming launch codes for an immediate and massive counterstrike. Meanwhile, a general impending nuclear armageddon playbook is automatically being implemented with all the functions of government being presently and immediately shuttled to a secure underground bunker in Raven Rock, Pennsylvania.

People are focused on the “House of Dynamite” quote. I think the better quote is the one preceding it, in which the President posits: “I always thought having you follow me around with that book of plans for weapons like that, just being ready is the point, right? Keeps people in check. Keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war, right?” Hopefully, our enemies see this movie and are reminded of what the United States is capable of.

Current geopolitics affects the screenplay of this movie and also the plausibility of the United States response to the threat. Perhaps because it would be too provocative to actually name the source of the ICBM, the movie provides an excuse for the characters to not know. So there are three possibilities: North Korea, Russia, or China. Out of those three, Russia is the least likely and that is the only country the United States is able to get on the phone to talk about the threat. Not surprisingly, the Russians don’t know or won’t admit to anything. But really, if this was either Russia or China, there wouldn’t only be one missile, there would be at least fifty. It doesn’t really make sense for Russia or China to send over one nuke to wipe out Chicago just to test how the United States would react.

But really, regardless of who has lobbed this missile (and especially if it was North Korea), it doesn’t make sense to present the President with the options that he is presented with. All three options “rare”, “medium” and “well done” are for scenarios in which many nuclear warheads are moving our way, not just one, and certainly not just one from an isolated pariah state. If it is just one, then the most obvious response would be to lob one-and-only-one missile back at a similar target. Tit-for-tat. This shows that the United States will respond, but not in such a way that will necessarily provoke everyone else in shooting off all of their missiles at the same time. It might provoke that response, but not necessarily. If you ever watched “Dr. Strangelove”, you will notice a similar dynamic to “House of Dynamite”. In that movie, a rogue American military officer goes on the loose with the effect of only one nuclear missile being dropped on Russia. The obvious Russian “Tit-for-Tat” response is neutered by its new technology, the “Doomsday Device” which automatically triggers an all out nuclear response regardless of how many missiles have been sent first. Both of these movies present a worst case scenario by involving plot points that prevent the obvious game theory strategy from being implemented. I’m fairly certain our generals at STRATCOM have a basic understanding of game theory.

Finally, this decision is probably best in the hands of the President. The alternative would be to put it in the hands of Congress, which will not have the ability to act with deterrent speed, or the generals, who, let’s face it, have been training their whole lives for this moment. You want Idris Elba, who would rather be at a WNBA fundraiser, making this call, not Tracy Letts, who is unelected and sees every problem as a nail to hit with his nuclear hammer. At the end of the day, the President is a people person and cares about his legacy. He is the one going to try to avoid a nuclear war.

Re-View: Capote (2005)

Twenty years ago, in my one-paragraph review of “Capote”, I summarized the conflict of this story in this one sentence: “[Capote] needs two men to die, so he can finish a book about their death.”

Looking back, I think my summary of the movie is also a window into the dubious nature of Truman Capote’s mission in writing his non-fiction bestseller “In Cold Blood.” After all, the movie is about Capote’s struggle in writing and finishing a book. The book itself is about two men who committed an awful quadruple murder and were tried and executed for it. Neither the book nor this movie is about the family that was murdered or the community they were a part of, the town of Holcomb, Kansas. And that reality, I now have realized after twenty years, is an awful thing. The family and community experienced a horrible crime and this dilettante from New York breezed into town to write a scandalous book about it as if the topic was fit for his urbane cocktail parties. I read that book and was struck how after the first few chapters that led up to the murder, the vast majority of it was about the criminals, and in particular Perry Smith, a man that seems to have captivated Capote (played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) for various reasons.

Capote’s first remarks to the lead detective Alvin Dewey (played here by Chris Cooper) include the unnecessary revelation that he doesn’t care if the perpetrators are ever caught. Alvin Dewey makes a point to inform Truman that he along with the general community care quite a lot about whether the perpetrators are caught. Truman has a generally hard time with getting people in the neighborhood to talk to him. He needs to use his research assistant Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener and soon to be of To Kill a Mockingbird fame) to break the ice with people. It isn’t just that Truman has the affectation of a carefree homosexual that puts people off. In general, he doesn’t seem to understand that people may not be as interested in him as he is in himself. There is a good quote that is in every trailer to this movie in which Truman says “Ever since I was a child, folks have had me pegged because of how the way I talk, and they are always wrong.” Put in context of the scene in which is uttered though, this is a faux pas because he happens to be talking to the friend of the murdered teenage girl when he says it and the subject of the conversation was the murdered teenage girl. It simply was not the time to start talking about himself. The friend and Harper Lee look uncomfortable but politely refrain from commenting on his behavior.

There is a lot of disturbing subtext in this movie that I did not quite catch the first time around. There is far more nuance in the performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman then I remember. It really is a great performance. First, it is so against type for Phillip Seymour Hoffman who had made his name before and after playing either far looser or far more authoritative characters. If this was the only movie you had seen of this actor, you would have a dramatically wrong idea of his normal range. Second, the way he plays Truman fits into the ambiguous way the movie itself shows his actions. The movie is directed by Bennett Miller who appears to take stances on Capote’s behavior in dribs and drabs, never really playing his hand as to whether he is sympathetic to him or not. It isn’t all that clear whether or not Capote should be helping the criminals. Or whether or not he is helping the criminals sincerely or to just help the dramatic unfolding of his book. Did he fall in love with Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), or simply identify with him as someone from a similar background, or is he simply using him. He is never directly confronted about his motivations. Ultimately, the men are scheduled for execution and the end (their lives, his book) is finally in sight. There is this extraordinary scene where Truman Capote visits the men immediately before they are hanged and experiences a very tightly wound emotional breakdown. The situation at that point is so complicated that it is impossible to unwind all of the contradictory elements of it. And yet it is emotionally real. All explanations can be found in the choices of the actor. Phillip Seymour Hoffman would go on to win the Oscar for this movie, and as I recall, it wasn’t really a contest. This is arguably the best performance of Hoffman who was arguably the best actor of his time (say 1995-2015). I still miss him.

The Director Bennett Miller is himself a bit of a cypher. Capote was his first feature film and he would go on to direct two others, 2011’s Moneyball and 2014’s Foxcatcher. Then apparently he decided he didn’t want to make movies anymore. It is rare that a person makes three feature films, all of which garner multiple Oscar nominations, and then doesn’t work again. His style doesn’t draw attention to the man behind the camera, instead it focuses on the acting which is allowed to breathe and develop. His movies are notable in that they feature some of the best acting in the careers of the actors in them, Hoffman in Capote, Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt in Moneyball, and Steve Carell and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher.

When I first saw this movie in 2005, I didn’t quite get the scene near the mid-part of the movie where Alvin Dewey sits across from Truman and takes an understated midwestern umbrage to Truman’s efforts to help the criminals appeal their sentence on the grounds of inadequate counsel. If these men are freed because of his meddling, the Dewey informs Capote, “I’m going to go to Brooklyn and hunt you down.” I think I get it now. 

The utility of the death penalty does not lie in deterrence. Counterintuitively, people do not fear death. Instead they fear suffering. (This is what was learned by the many policy attempts to stop people from smoking. By far, it was more effective to show an alive person dealing with a hole in their throat than showing statistics about deaths from lung cancer.) And suffering, at least the cruel and unusual kind, is unconstitutional. No, the utility of the death penalty lies in its finality. It allows the community to move on and assuages the very natural impulse of human beings towards retribution and revenge. The state takes on that responsibility so the individual does not have to. Here we see Truman Capote suffer because it takes years for the two men's appeals to be exhausted before their execution. Imagine for a moment, how that same stay of execution affected the people who knew the murdered family and mourned their deaths. For that reason, it should remain, but used sparingly only for the commission of shocking crimes and only if there is no doubt at all as to guilt of the perpetrators.

Unfortunately this is not how the death penalty is used. Instead, it is used as leverage for negotiation (i.e. a criminal will escape the penalty if they plead guilty) making its general application only in those cases where the facts are hotly contested (i.e. the suspects plead innocent) and which require a trial. I say, if you need a trial to figure out what happened and who was responsible, then you shouldn’t apply the death penalty regardless of the outcome. And if there is no doubt that these two particular men decided to break into a house and murder a family of four for no particular reason, then they shouldn’t be allowed to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. Any argument that we shouldn’t have a death penalty because we are too civilized for it seems to me to be an argument from vanity which doesn’t take into account the details of the crime in question nor its effects on the larger community. But I digress. This movie isn’t about the victims.

Here is link to my original review:

https://maxsminimoviemagazine.blogspot.com/2010/10/capote-112005.html