“PLEASURE” My rating: B (Rent on Apple TV, Vudu, and Redbox)
109 minutes | MPAA rating: R
What they say about laws and sausages applies as well to pornography: If you want to keep enjoying it, best not learn about how it’s made.
In broad outline the ironically-titled “Pleasure” follows the familiar inside-showbiz template explored in films ranging from “All About Eve” to “Showgirls.” Innocent (or not-so-innocent) young thing is corrupted on her climb to fame and power.
Ninja Thyberg’s film, though, unfolds in the world of L.A. porn, a landscape rarely explored dramatically (although one could argue that “Pleasure” is practically a documentary dive into the dirty world of cheap thrills).
Our protagonist is Bella Cherry (not her real name), a Swede barely out of her teens who has flown halfway around the world to become an adult film star. She is played by Sofia Kappel, who benefits hugely from her chameleonic ability to look either ravishing (when fully made up) or girl-next-door unremarkable.
The screenplay (by Thyberg and Peter Modestij) isn’t much interested in plumbing Bella’s personality or her history. Just how sexually experienced is she? Was she abused? Where did she get the idea that porn might be a viable career?
The film is interested mostly in throwing this young woman into an environment where acts which most of us regard as supremely private are matter-of-factly dissected.
On one level Bella is brutally mercenary. She wants to be a porn star and is willing to burn bridges to get there.
On another, she’s painfully naive. Like many of us she has bought into the erotic allure of porn, not understanding that the onscreen magic is the product of a highly unromantic and cynical process.
Before it’s all over she (and we) will get a crash course in the nuts and bolts of porn production.
Basically Bella will bit-by-bit loosen her standards to become the object of lust the industry is looking for. The degradation is both physical and emotional.
“Pleasure” falls short of being porn itself. While there is considerable nudity, the sexual acts depicted appear to be simulated.
That said, Thyberg has hired real porn professionals to more or less play themselves, There is no shortage of penises in various stages of arousal. After a while the shock value wears off. (Still, this is the hardest R rating I’ve ever seen.)
The pall of nauseous discomfort that hovers over the whole enterprise, though, sticks. Want to convince someone they shouldn’t watch porn? “Pleasure” is Exhibit No. 1.
Thanks to streaming, we live in a paradise of great acting.
Oh, there’s always been great acting, it’s just in the pre-streaming era it was a huge pain to schlep from theater to theater to catch the strongest stuff.
Now you just sit down and turn on the tube.
We’ve known for some time that Steve Carell is more than just a comic actor. But he blows the doors off with his nuanced, heartfelt performance in the 10-episode ”The Patient,” a creepy thriller with an unexpected moral center.
Carell plays Alan Strauss, a psychotherapist, widower and father of a couple of grown kids who haven’t much use for him. His latest patient (Donhnall Gleeson) is a troubled young man desperate for mental and emotional healing but stubbornly resistant to revealing the personal secrets that would allow the Dr. Strauss to help him.
And then one morning the good doc wakes up in a basement rec room with a chain around his ankle and a bucket for a bathroom. His patient, Sam, apologizes but says this is the only way he can reveal the truth about himself and get the help he needs.
The truth? That Sam is a serial killer, looking to change but compelled to murder those whom he feels have disrespected him.
Created by Joel Fields and Joseph Weisberg, “The Patient” is part escape drama but mostly an insightful look into a healer who over time has become numb to both his profession and his family. Initially the shrink will do anything to effect his own release, but over time he develops something like selfless compassion for his tormented (but still very scary) patient.
Carell brilliantly hits the expected emotional buttons (and a few we didn’t know existed), while Gleeson delivers a chilling portrait of an emotionally constipated killer who nonetheless possesses a tantalizing notion of what normalcy might feel like.
Very dark, but worth it.
“THE CROWN” (Netflix)
Elizabeth Dibecki as Princess Di
The fifth season of this hit dissection of the British royal family has gotten mixed reviews…possibly because as the latest Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) gets to exhibit mostly stiffness and steely resolve.
But I like the way the season has been fashioned to highlight peripheral characters in the grand saga.
One episode begins in the post-war Mideast…it takes a while before we realize this is the backstory of Mohammed Al-Fayed, the wealthy businessman (he bought Harrod’s) whose son would die with Princess Diana. In fact, the elder Al-Fayed is so obsessed with being accepted but the Brits that he hires the valet of the late Duke of Windsor to give him a crash course in aristocratic do’s and don’t’s.
Another episode unfolds during the Russian Revolution and examines why the British monarchy deliberately chose not to come to the rescue of Tsar Alexander and his doomed family (their cousins, no less) when they were being held by the Bolsheviks.
And then there’s the backstory of Princess Di’s notorious 1995 BBC interview in which she described her marriage as a three-way (her, Prince Charles, and Camilla). The series picks apart how journalist (now disgraced) Martin Bashir fabricated bank records to suggest to the Princess that the Royals were paying her servants to spy on her.
The series even returns to the nixed love affair between Princess Margaret and the King’s equerry Peter Townsend. Now, 40 years later, Margaret (played this season by Lesley Manville and Townsend (former 007 Timothy Dalton) have a bittersweet late-in-life reunion.
Lots of familiar faces taking up major roles: Dominic West as Prince Charles (don’t care what you say…Dominic West is cool even when he’s trying to play the terminally uncool), Elizabeth Debicki as Diana, Johnathan Pryce as Prince Philip.
Is “The Crown” as good as ever? Perhaps not, but you don’t think I’m gonna stop watching now, do you?
“INSIDE MAN” (Netflix)
Here’s an absolutely bonkers premise — not to mention a world-class case of subversive misanthropy —somehow redeemed )or maybe almost redeemed) by solid performances.
In an American prison, death row inmate Jefferson Grieff (Stanley Tucci) awaits his execution by helping the authorities solve outstanding crimes. An acclaimed criminologist who murdered his wife, Grieff holds court in a prison interview room, weighing the evidence brought to him and invariably coming up with a solution.
For added weirdness, this jailhouse Sherlock has his own Watson, a cynically erudite but physically imposing serial killer (Atkins Estimond) who provides comic relief through his cheerful amorality.
Meanwhile, in Britain, an upstanding suburban vicar (David Tennant) finds himself caught up in a child pornography case and, to protect his teenage son, imprisons the boy’s math tutor (Dolly Wells) in the cellar. The only way out, it seems, is for the good Rev to murder the teacher before she goes to the cops.
The two plots come improbably together when a Brit reporter (Lydia West) presents the case of the missing tutor to Grieff.
Written by Steven Moffat and directed by Paul McGuigan, “Inside Man” is possibly the most cynical show now streaming, With a tone ranging (not always comfortably) from fierce black comedy to pseudo-tragic drama, the series delights in presenting characters who seem virtuous (or at least likeable) but who invariably reveal a staggering level of corruption.
The supporting cast kills, especially Dylan Baker as a prison warden and Lyndsey Marshal as the vicar’s atheistic spouse.
“Inside Man” is only four episodes long, but that is almost too much. With race-against-time tension fueling the final hour and characters inducing off-the-charts discomfort, not every viewer will be able to go the course.
There’s something about the autobiographical film that brings out the best in directors.
Fellini’s “Amarcord.” John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory.” Not to mention last year’s Oscar contender from Kenneth Branagh, “Belfast.”
To that honorable list we now add Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” an episodic epic that dissects his own boyhood fascination with the act of moviemaking against the background of a loving but dysfunctional family.
We first meet little Sammy Fableman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) in a queue outside a movie theater. The year is 1952 and six-year-old Sammy is about to see his first film, Cecil B. DeMille’s circus melodrama “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
Except that Sammy isn’t so sure he wants to get involved. Movies, he has heard, are big and noisy. They’re emotional and visual roller coasters. Sounds scary.
In a good-cop-another-good-cop routine that will be repeated for the next 20 years, his parents encourage him.
Mitzi (Michelle Williams) — a feelings-on-her-sleeve artistic type who gave up a career as a concert pianist to be an Eisenhower-era mom — chatters on about the fun and beauty of the movies. The magic.
Dad Burt (Paul Dano) — an engineer rising through the ranks of the new world of computers — takes a more rational approach, analyzing the science of motion pictures. Sammy won’t be frightened once he understands how individual still photographs can, through the phenomenon of persistence of vision, become lifelike movement on the big screen.
Once in the theater Sammy is predictably blown away, especially by the massive derailment of a circus train that is the movie’s action centerpiece. In the following weeks he will beg his parents for a model train set and, once that’s in place, plead to use his dad’s movie camera. He is compelled to recreate that scene from the movie, to pick it apart frame by frame, to understand how it was done and how it could affect him so.
“The Fabelmans”could have been a perfect 30-minute short examining a boy’s introduction to and fascination with movies, But of course it is much, much more than that.
Over 2 1/2 hours we follow Sammy into his late teens (he’s portrayed for most of the film by Gabriel LaBelle), moving with the clan as Burt’s career takes them first to Arizona and later to California.
Paul Dano, Michelle Williams, Seth Rogan
Throughout, Sammy’s devotion to movies grows ever more intense. His equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated; his efforts evolve from home movies to mini-Westerns and, with the help of his entire Boy Scout troop, a bloody World War II combat film.
We are introduced to Burt’s best friend and protege, Ben (Seth Rogen, excellent in non-comedic mode), who spends so much time hanging around the Fabelmans that Sammy and his siblings think he’s an uncle. Much later Sammy will discover that Ben is key to the breakup of Burt and Mitzi’s marriage.
And then there are the tormented teen years in which Sammy finds himself coping with antisemitism as one of the few Jewish students at a WASPish high school. The unexpected upside is that as even an indifferent Jew he’s an object of romantic curiosity, with one lovely shiksa (Chloe East) attempting to win him over to Jesus through a bonkers regimen of prayer and petting. (The scene borders on comedic caricature…it’s one of the few times “The Fabelmans” misses the mark.)
In a very real sense”The Fabelmans” is only peripherally about Sammy. As played by LaBelle and written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, Sammy is often the least interesting character on screen, a guy who does most of his expressing through a camera lens. His art is intriguing; he’s much less so.
No, the film is basically a love letter to Mitzi, Burt and, to a lesser extent, Ben. All are strong personalities who mold Sammy’s character, whether the effect was encouraging (Mitzi) or cautionary (Burt, who sees a movie career as an unrealistic pipe dream).
Audiences will be particularly taken with Williams’ Mitzi, a frustrated pixie-cut ecdentric who struggles to be a conventional wife (she insists that the family dine on paper plates with plastic cutlery, so that the whole mess can be quickly wrapped up in a disposable table cloth) and battles depression.
It doesn’t help that Mitzi loves her husband but isn’t actually in love with him. For his part, Burt will remain faithful to her long after the marriage has ended.
Spielberg has rarely been more real-world sensitive than he is in the depiction of his parents…it’s a a quietly spectacular achievement.
BTW: Look for a late-in-the film appearance by David Lynch as veteran director John Ford, who gives Sammy a bit of crusty but concise cinematic advice that provides “The Fabelmans” with its wonderful final image.
Watching “The Causeway” I was reminded of “Winter’s Bone” and why we all fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence in the first place.
Lawrence, of course, is a decade, many movies, a couple of Oscars and a motherhood away from that superb indie effort in which she played a child of the Ozarks. But in “Causeway” she exhibits the same emotional honesty, lack of affectation and wise-beyond-her-years intelligence.
“Causeway” is the feature directing debut of Lila Neugebauer, whose credits to date have centered on episodic TV (“Room 104,” “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” “Maid”). It’s a stripped-down, humanistic paen to everyday lives, the sort of story Ken Loach might tell if he were a young American rather than an old Brit.
It’s not showy, but it’s substantial, setting an emotional hook that is not easily shaken.
Lawrence plays Lynsey, who in the film’s first 20 minutes is fighting back from some sort of traumatic experience. She’s living temporarily with Sharon (Jayne Houdyshell), an older woman who offers her home as a sort of halfway house for veterans recovering from life-changing injuries.
Lynsey suffered traumatic brain damage in an IED explosion in Iraq. She’s not scarred on the outside, but her head is all messed up. She has to relearn walking and controlling her hands. Moreover, her emotions have been scrambled. She’s living in a cocoon of numbness, barely able to express a normal range of feelings .
The screenplay (by Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Gobble and Elizabeth Sanders) follows Lynsey to her hometown of New Orleans where she moves in with her not-unkind-but-definitely-remote mother (Linda Emond) and begins seeing a VA neurologist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) whose OK she needs if she is ever to return to active service.
The yarn’s center is Lynsey’s growing relationship with James (Brian Tyree Henry), an auto mechanic who fixes her broken truck, offers her a ride home and ends up becoming her best — hell, her only — friend.
Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Lawrence
James is just as damaged in his own way as Lynsey. His big bad moment came in an auto accident on a nearby causeway, a horror that claimed the life of his nephew and resulted in the destruction of his marriage. Now he relies on weed and beer to numb all the raw edges of his bruised psyche.
In a weird way, Lynsey and James were made for one another.
But not in the movie-romance manner you might expect. Fro one thing, Lynsey is gay (a revelation the film drops matter of factly…it’s no big deal). Plus, these two are far more important to one another as emotional/intellectual sounding boards than as lovers. Getting their rocks off is pretty far down their list of essential needs.
“Causeway” explores these two with unhurried calm and a minimum of fuss. The film is in many ways anti-dramatic. No big Oscar-bait scenes. Instead it offers a steady drip of insight into its characters’ lives,
The results feel absolutely, inarguably real. Lawrence and Henry (he plays the rapper Paper Boi on TV’s “Atlanta”) imbue their roles with aching loss and a quiet dignity. They give two of the year’s most effective (if understated) performances.
For three decades the “Star Wars” franchise has been getting progressively dumber, bottoming out with the so-bad-I-couldn’t watch them “The Book of Boba Fett” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Which makes the stunning adultness of “Andor” all the more miraculous.
We were introduced to Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He was one of the commandoes who die transmitting the schematics of the first Death Star to their rebel brethren. “Rogue One” had a few narrative blips but it at least stood on its own in the “Star Wars” universe as a dead serious, camp-free espionage thriller.
Disney’s “Andor” is a prequel depicting Cassian Andor’s early years, and it pushes the solemnity and darkness of “Rogue One” to the very edge. Showrunner and frequent screenwriter Tony Gilroy makes few concessions for the family audience. This series takes as its models police procedurals, film noir, prison pictures and political dramas, and the results are gritty, grim and glorious.
The show covers much territory, opening on a dank corporate-run planet where Cassian kills a couple of thuggish security officers and taking side trips to the Empire’s capital city of Coruscant, a watery prison planet and, in flashbacks, the primitive tribal world where our hero was born.
This early episodes depict Andor’s life as a criminal fugitive and his run-ins with the Empire…presumably this self-serving mercenary will be thoroughly radicalized in the second season.
The series resurrects from the original “Star Wars” film the character of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), a member of the Imperial Senate working secretly for the rerbellion, and delivers a whole slew of new faces, among them Stellan Skarsgard as a Machiavellian rebel spymaster and Denise Gough as a dangerously effective Imperial security specialist.
What’s remarkable here is that none of these are throwaway roles. The villains, usually only paper thin in the “Star Wars” universe, are here given substance and backgrounds.
The dialogue is smart and the production values off the charts. Every episode, it seems, has at least one tour de force action sequence.
And so far there’s not a Jedi in sight.
“REBOOT” (Hulu)
It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud at my TV set…but “Reboot” had me howling.
This wickedly clever comedy from Steven Levitan (“The Larry Sanders Show,” “Modern Family”) is an orgy of inside-show-biz rim shots. The premise finds the cast of a cheesy ‘90s TV family sitcom being reunited 20 years later for an updated version (yeah, just like “Roseanne” and “The Connors”).
The years have not been good to the actors, who are thrilled to be back in the spotlight…and immediately pick up the bad habits they indulged in back in the day.
Keegan-Michael Key is an insecure leading man who overthinks everything; Judy Greer is perfect as his on-screen wife and off-screen ex-squeeze. Johnny Knoxville of “Jackass” fame is jaw-droppingly good as the substance-abusing co-star trying to stay straight, while Paul Reiser and Rachel Bloom (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) are sublime as the father-and-daughter producing team working out the kinks in their troubled relationship.
Along the way “Reboot” is practically a comic tutorial in how TV gets made. The scenes in the writers’ room are among the funniest TV I’ve seen in years…think “The Dick Van Dyke” show with an unstoppable potty mouth.
“THE ENGLISH”(Amazon Prime)
This six-part Western from writer/director Hugo Blick often bites off more than it can swallow, and its narrative frequently becomes stranded in dead-end alleys.
Yet there’s something about it that kept me coming back for more.
For starters, the ever-watchable Emily Blunt. Here she plays Lady Cornelia Locke, a Brit aristocrat who comes to the 1890s Wild West on a mission of vengeance. She’s looking to kill the man she blames for the death of her son. The details of the boy’s demise are not revealed until late in the series, and when they finally hit home “The English” comes on with the power of an Ibsen tragedy.
Cornelia shares her gruesome and dangerous quest with Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Cherokee scout who has only recently resigned after years with the U.S. Army. That government gig that has left Eli seriously conflicted, given that his job was tracking down and killing other Native Americans. Now he must come to terms with his new life as a second-class citizen and his forbidden (for more than one reason) intimacy with Cornelia.
Their journey plays out against an exquisitely photographed landscape (d.p. Arnau Valius Colonel takes full advance of the series’ Spanish locations) populated by characters who at best are wildly eccentric and at worst sadistically venal.
But all of them speak in a florid style that reminds of “Deadwood’s” Al Swearengen. Black is a first-class wordsmith who can pack tons of meaning in brief exchanges; the dialogue is so spectacular that it helps gloss over the show’s meandering narrative.
“WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY” My rating: B-(Roku)
108 minutes | No MPAA rating
For two thirds of its running time Roku’s “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” is an amusing hoot, a parody of rock screen biographies that just happens to be about a guy who became famous by parodying famous rock songs.
If the movie limps to the finish line with an uninspired final 20 minutes … well, what comes before will leave most viewers in a charitable mood.
Penned by the real Al Yankovic and director Eric Appel, this elaborate spoof stars Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al…or at least Weird Al as run through the filter of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Rocket Man” and other tuneful biopics.
So in this version the accordion-pumping parodist dates a man-eating Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood, obviously having a ball), develops a drinking problem, alienates his few friends and struggles to gain the acceptance of his squeezebox-hating father (Toby Huss) and Betty Crockerish mother (Julianne Nicholson).
The film also introduces a deliriously lunatic alternative history in which Weird Al writes the music and lyrics to “Eat It,” only to have the song stolen and parodied by Michael Jackson as “Beat It.”
Daniel Radcliffe Evan Rachel Wood
Along the way viewers can play their own game of Where’s Waldo? with a dozen cameos (some lasting only seconds) by famous (and often heavily disguised) faces: Will Forte, Patton Oswalt, Michael McKean, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Conan O’Brien, Emo Philips, Jack Black, Quinta Brunson, Josh Groban, Seth Green.
Also, special kudos to Rainn Wilson, who in top hat and tux perfectly embodies Dr. Demento, the cult-rock deejay who becomes young Al’s mentor (kind of a benevolent Colonel Parker).
The real Weird Al even shows up to portray a clueless record label executive.
Holding it all together is Radlicliffe, who perfectly walks the tightrope between silly and sincere. Seems Harry Potter has become a first-class comic performer.
The movie is, I believe, 30 minutes too long. Maybe a last-act letdown was inevitable, since “Weird” shoots out of the starting gate and gallops madly throughout its first hour. That’s a hard act to keep going.
“ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT” My rating: B(Netflix)
148 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Netflix’s new German-language “All Quiet on the Western Front” is not so much an adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war novel as a riff on it.
Those familiar with the book or the 1933 and ’79 film versions will recognize a few scenes. But for the most part this effort from writer/director Edward Berger comes off as a big-budget art film that eschews niceties like character development and plotting for a near total immersion in the madness of war.
Our hero once again is 18-year-old Paul Baumer, a schoolboy who with his comrades is whipped into a patriotic enlistment frenzy by a jingoistic professor.
But as played by Felix Kammerer, Paul is less a personality than an all-purpose Everyman with no back story.
The earlier “All Quiet…” films starred Lew Ayres and Richard Thomas, both of whom possessed an on-screen charisma. Kammerer, on the other hand, seems to have been cast for the unremarkable presence he projects, for his ability to suggest quiet anguish or shell-shocked blankness.
This is story-telling stripped down. There’s no basic training montage, no getting to meet the other guys in Paul’s unit. One day they’re in their school uniforms and the next they’re on World War I’s Western Front where the fighting has boiled down back-and-forth assaults across a ravaged no-man’s land and hours of misery in water-filled trenches.
With one exception — an older fellow named Kaz played by the excellent Albrecht Schuch — we really don’t get to know these kids. They’re cannon fodder, doomed to die in all the ghastly ways modern warfare provides.
You might say Berger’s film is populated by zombies. He’s less interested in individuals than the totality of the war experience. By the time you’re done with this 2 1/2-hour effort, he wants you to be nearly as catatonic and crushed as Paul.
The attention to detail is overwhelming, and the battle scenes have been superbly choreographed to suggest the utter unpredictability of combat. They are on one level exciting, but ultimately dismaying as boys turn into wraiths before our eyes.
The script by Berger, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell focusses on Paul’s slow dehumanization, culminating in the famous scene in which he shares a shell crater with the dying Frenchman he has repeatedly stabbed with his dagger.
But it also takes new digressions. Late in the film a hungry Paul and Kaz wander a snowy French countryside…you can’t help thinking of the final scenes of Renoir’s “The Grand Illusion.”
There’s a subplot about a German diplomat (Daniel Bruhl) trying to achieve an armistice late in the war; and another about a Prussian officer who with just a few moments to go before the cease-fire sends his troops on a pointless suicide mission.
The film opens with a segment showing a military jacket being stripped off a dead German soldier; it is laundered with hundreds of other jackets, then tears and bullet holes are sewn up. After which it is recycled to a new enlistee, our hero Paul.
When Paul discovers the previous owner’s name tag still in the collar, a supply officer says that the jacket most likely was turned in because it was the wrong size.
Yeah, right.
Particularly effective is Volker Bertelsmann’s non-traditional musical score, heavy on ominously wheezing electronics and snare drum hits that ring out like gunshots.
Ultimately this “All Quiet…” presents the full horrors of war, but perhaps something is lost by downplaying our identification with the characters.
Butler's Cinema Scene 