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Archive for April, 2017

“DONALD CRIED”: Arrested development

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 6, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Kris Avedisian

“DONALD CRIED” My rating: B  

85 minutes | NoMPAA rating

Kris Avedisian’s “Donald Cried” is a comedy of discomfort.

The premise finds a reasonably normal individual being held a virtual captive by a socially inept, borderline delusional idiot whose behavior is alternately needy, manic and childlike.

But beneath the film’s high squirm factor some interesting cross currents are at work.  Avedisian’s screenplay is sneakily good at misdirection, and before it’s over our views of these characters will undergo a significant metamorphosis.

NYC investment banker Peter (Jesse Wakeman) has returned to his wintry New England home town to settle the estate of the grandma who raised him. He’s not happy to be back…in fact, he’s not set foot in the place since his high school graduation 20 years earler.

To make things worse, he lost his wallet — cash, credit cards, i.d. — on the bus ride from the city.  Desperate, he reluctantly turns to his neighbor and boyhood friend Donald (director Avedisian), a gawky manchild with a terminal case of arrested development.

Donald is a total geek who apparently cuts his own hair with manicure scissors. He still lives in his mother’s house and works a part time in a bowling alley. He does a lot of pot and blow. His hobby is attending adult entertainment conventions. (“Do you still masturbate?” is one of his first questions to his long-lost friend.)

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“QUEEN OF THE DESERT”: Nicole of Arabia

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Nicole Kidman

“QUEEN OF THE DESERT”  My rating: C+

129 minutes | MPAA rating PG-13

“Queen of the Desert” is quite possibly the oddest film of director Warner Herzog’s wildly idiosyncratic  career.

A mash-up of woman’s picture, real-life biography and sweeping  “Lawrence of Arabia” images, it stars Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell, a British adventuress, diplomat, archaeologist and feminist who became an expert on the Middle East in the years before World War I.

We first encounter our heroine in 1888. The daughter of a steel magnate, she’s being groomed for a fitting marriage.

“You will not scare the young men with your intelligence,” her mother warns, but Gertrude is having none of it. She’s too independent, too strong willed to endure simpering aristocratic society.

(Kidman, now 49, plays Bell from age 21 to 40. Remarkably, she pulls off the youthful Gertrude, thanks to great makeup and God-given bone structure.)

Her exasperated father finally agrees to let her join the British embassy in Teheran where she soon finds herself falling for Henry  Cadogan (James Franco, struggling to maintain a Brit accent), a low-ranking staff member assigned as her escort. Henry’s prospects aren’t promising, but like Gertrude he loves the desert. And he’s not afraid of her independent streak.

Daddy, however, nixes this liaison, and a heartbroken Gertrude turns her back on romance, devoting herself to travels in the Middle East, crossing vast deserts with a handful of faithful local guides.

During her travels she runs across a young T.E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson), working on an archaeological dig at Petra in Jordan. Years away from his exploits among the Arab tribes in the Great War, Lawrence already wears the native costume that will become his trademark.  He and Gertrude flirt innocently, but neither is looking for a relationship.

Over years Gertrude is befriended by the Bedouin. She also finds a lover — platonic — in married British statesman Charles Doughty-Wylie (Damien Lewis).

Eventually Gertrude is recognized by her government and with Lawrence is part of the commission that divides up the Middle East in the wake of the war.

 

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“BETTING ON ZERO”: Taking on Herbalife

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 6, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Bill Ackman

“BETTING ON ZERO” My rating: B

99 minutes | No MPAA rating

Capitalism is a system designed to produce a few big winners and many more losers. Hopefully the majority will find themselves holding their own somewhere in the middle.

As an illustration of that principle in action, we have “Betting on Zero,” Ted Braun’s documentary about Herbalife, the international health food/vitamin supplement company.

The real business of Herbalife, the doc makes clear, is less selling goods and services — which are not available through conventional retail outlets –than recruiting new participants who pony up thousands of dollars to start their own Herbalite distribution operations. That money, and any they earn from selling products, flows upward to the person who recruited them, and then to that person’s recruiter, and so on.

The only way for a late arrival to the system to flourish is to recruit dozens more participants from a shrinking pool of possibilities.

It is, one economist says in the film, a textbook definition of a pyramid scheme.

Several years ago hedge fund whiz Bill Ackman concluded that the Herbalite system was due to collapse as fewer and fewer people were recruited into its ranks. So he took a short position on Herbalite stock, making a billion-dollar bet that the company’s stock would go belly up.

If that happened, Ackman would make a huge killing.  At the same time he attempted to seize the high moral ground, saying that only a couple of times has he come across a company doing so much harm that taking it down is a public service.

He will learn that the high moral ground and high finance operate in mutually independent worlds.

Braun’s film alternates between Ackman’s high-profile campaign and the stories of individuals who lost nearly everything by getting involved with Herbalife. Many of them are recent immigrants who saw the company’s slick sales approach as a gateway to riches in America.  Even after concluding they were being ripped off, most declined to take their case to court — many were in the country illegally and weren’t about to draw unwanted attention by turning to the courts for redress.

 

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