Wilmington On Movies - November 12, 2009

Precious (Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire)
Pirate Radio and For the Love of Movies

Precious (Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire) (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Lee Daniels, 2009

Yes, it should get an Oscar nomination. Not just because of its unusual ambition and breakthrough achievement, but because it’s so patently an Oscar-style movie ripe and ready for its nod. That doesn’t mean Precious (Based on the Novel ‘Push” by Sapphire) is as good as, say, A Serious Man, which is patently not an Oscar-type film (too weird, too downbeat), and also labors under the handicap of coming so soon after the Coen Brothers got their Best Picture Oscar.

No, Precious also should get its shot because it succeeds so well at being the ideal anti-Hollywood (yet not alarmingly so) movie, a movie set in ‘80s Harlem with an outsider, abused, overweight heroine Claireece, a.k.a. Precious, played luminously by Gabourey Sidibe. And because it’s exactly the kind of film the smarter Hollywood types are probably embarrassed that they don’t make more often, because it’s daring but not too daring, because newcomer director Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer) and writer Geoffrey Fletcher (a.k.a. Damien Paul) show such impressive confidence and skill, and because Precious really does have some of the best naturalistic dialogue and performances of any American film this year.

That includes Sidibe, of course, who moves us as the seemingly stolid impassive but churning-inside Claireece, and moves us more with her eloquent dreamy voice-over narration. And it includes as well,  Paula Patton as her believably dedicated teacher, pop artists Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz as a very convincing social worker and male nurse (more drama from these two), and most of all, in the performance that absolutely deserves an Oscar nomination (and maybe even the Oscar): Mo’Nique as Claireece’s horrible, destructive, gluttonously mean yet vulnerable mother Mary.

A small point, though. I haven’t read Sapphire’s novel. But this is the kind of story that would have been even more powerful if we’d seen Claireece without the amazing support group she has here, if instead she’d have to suffer in relative silence, sadness and isolation, the way many girls and women like this really do in life. It could have been better if we’d realized that help doesn’t always come, that there are still Claireeces all around us, Preciouses we don’t help, lives that are blighted, victims who are ignored. There are. Such stories exist. Yet, thanks partly to Precious, Daniels, Fletcher and company, maybe more of them will be told.

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Pirate Radio (The Boat that Rocked) (Three Stars)
U.S.; Richard Curtis, 2009

Some movies, whatever their obvious flaws, hit you where you live. I promise I'll get throught this review without saying "groovy.“ But Pirate Radio is one rock-the-house Golden Oldie-lovin’ spoonful of Brit pop glory that reawakened fond youthful memories, got my mojo up, got past most of my defenses. Too fast? Too scattershot? Too clichéd? Too cutesy-lewd? Too action-movie extreme at the end? Too unfair to stuffy cultural gate-keepers and rock ‘n roll-haters? Too full of poop to really pop? Maybe. But who cares when the rock 'n roll starts blasting on this particular nostalgic sea of love?

The movie, scripted and directed by Richard Curtis (writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, which I liked, and Notting Hill, which I didn‘t) is an ode to ‘60s rock, primarily British - and to the heyday of the young Beatles, the young Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Kinks, The Who and scads of others. It’s set on a scrappy looking old industrial ship that prowls past the outer British limits of the North Atlantic in the mid ‘60s, serving as floating home and 24/7 “all rock all the time” outlaw radio transmitter for Radio Rock: a community of eight DJ’s, and their fellow workers and carousers, led by cheerfully dissolute-looking station manager Quentin (Bill Nighy) -- all of them dedicated to breaking the BBC radio strictures on pop (just a smidgen per day).

Our witness for all this is a rather mild and definitely too-typical “coming-of-age” young guy named Carl (Tom Sturridge). Carl, godson of Quentin and son of tolerant mom Charlotte (played by the still sparkling Emma Thompson), comes aboard to get a job, get laid and learn about life -- and he’s immediately plunged into the pop swim with a raffish crew that includes the current Radio Rock cock-of-the-walk, The Count (Philip Seymour Hoffman), The Count’s soon-arriving rival and London‘s ex-deejay monarch Gavin (Rhys Ifans), girl-shy Simon (Chris O’Dowd), out-of-sight morning man Bob (Ralph Brown), fat seducer Dave (Nick Frost), and other lovable misfits, who make up in instant color and zap what they lack in, uh, depth.

It’s the dream of pop bliss for a young ’60s male virgin (which Carl, to his mortification, is). Rock all day and night with your buddies and workmates (with your mom‘s permission), thumb your noses at the BBC and wait for the birds and the sex to come gliding in every two weeks on a hooker boat, along with occasional hotcha tours by the likes of smashers like Elenore (January Jones). Even though it‘s a predictable dream, it still has its hooks.

But wait! Bummer! A stuffy devil-cabinet minister is prowling around the edges of this ship of rockers, with their clarion call to fab times, fuzz-tones and hedonism: Sir Alistair Dormandy, a total twit and a beyond-John Cleese nasty ass, a cultural czar who looks as if he stepped out of an old Boulting Brothers satire (He’s not All Right, Jack), and who is played, surprisingly by that one-time Hamlet and Prince Hal, and Emma’s ex-honey/hubby, Kenneth Branagh. Aided by his nefarious straight-arrow underling Twatt (Charley Dickens, eat your heart out), scowling Sir Al is determined to clean up the airwaves and rid the high seas of Radio Rock and all that it stands for, even if he has to drown half the cast doing it.

If Pirate Radio tends to remind you a bit of the Boulting Bros, and, in a less classy and understated way, even a wee twee bit of Ealing oddball-Brit-community comedies like Tight Little Island and Passport to Pimlico -- and if, at the end, it turns into a low-rent Titanic -- the show has one big advantage: a great play list.   As Gavin, The Count and the whole sick crew spin their platters and spew their patter, and as Sir Alistair and his Twatt scheme and lurk, the movie keeps rocking and the hits keep coming. You’d expect the Stones and even Jimi, the Kinks and the Who. But this sound track also boasts Smokey Robinson, Otis Redding, Procol Harum, The Hollies and Cream -- and many others.

Were there any more records on the scads of footage (reportedly an hour or so) that they cut out of this movie before release and then also before changing the name (from The Boat that Rocked) and shipping it stateside? Bring ‘em back! In fact, bring ‘em back anyway. (Right now, the movie feels way too rushed.) If any picture cried out for a director‘s cut and lots of deleted scenes on the DVD, it’s this one. And if you want even more swinging /60s nostalgia, there’s a great groovey (There, I said it! Damn!) gallery of old album covers -- from “Sgt. Pepper” on down, alongside the end-title credits.

The acting is almost all amusingly over the pop-top, even if the actors often seem better than their roles. It’s a zingy cast. The almost-always-excellent Hoffman starts out in his scathing, deep-voiced hipster Lester Bangs mode (from Almost Famous), becoming supposedly the first man to say “fuck” on British radio, and, then, when Gavin jars The Count’s confidence, Hoffman does some fine frayed-nerve, falling-apart, self-sabotage, before grabbing at the redemption Curtis offers.

Ifans demonstrates both charisma and versatility. Is this really the same guy who played a gentle-seeming psycho in Enduring Love, a primitive cherub in Human Nature, an urban slob in Notting Hill, and, reportedly, a convincingly beyond-the-fringe Peter Cook in Not Only But Always? Of course, no one can play a scrappy dissipated type like Nighy, and, as for Branagh and Thompson, never on screen together here, this show made me wish they’d reunite for some more Shakespeare. Or even another Carry On movie. (“Carry On, Macbeth?“) Branagh may be no Terry-Thomas, but he’s as good a stuffy, mean twit as Richard Attenborough was, in one of Sir Richard’s old Boulting slumming expeditions.
As a writer, Curtis keeps all the balls spinning in air -- quite a lot of them -- and, as a director, he keeps the camera spinning around as well, sometimes excitingly. I have no idea why this movie was (reportedly) slammed in England, unless it was by some relatives of Sir Al. Yet, ‘arf a mo…Now that we really do have all rock all the time, everywhere you spin the dial, some of us may have a few qualms about the “victory” the movie proclaims at the end. After all, rock would have thrived without the Radio Rocks and even without Radio Caroline, one of the real-life pirate stations that inspired it.

More carps, maybe solved if you put the movie back together: I didn’t care where or when or even if Carl lost his cherry. And I had my doubts about the movie‘s “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” climax. Something more Ealingish or even Boultingesque, might have worked better. But I liked watching it. And especially, listening to it.

Those of us who grew up or came of age ourselves in the ‘60s, have one treasure we carry with us always: the way the American-born, British-fueled pop revolution -- melding big beats and catchy hooks with lyrics that had literacy, smarts and irreverence, that were for smart kids along with everyone else -- produced hit after hit in those days. (Those were the days). The way they made juke boxes a joy and Top 40 lists a zone of excitement.

The previous generation‘s Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald may have been better singers. But where do you find better singer-songwriters, better groups? Glad it was to be alive --glad all over, in fact -- when we skipped the light fantastic with a little help from our friends in those Golden Days of “Revolvers” and “Rubber Souls” and “Highways 61 Revisited” and “Beggar’s Banquets.” Hey, “Pirate Radio” guys, run those end-titles one more time. Groovy!

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For the Love of Movies (Three Stars)
U. S.; Gerald Peary, 2009

Who are America’s movie critics and why are they being picked on and kicked out all over the country, from one failing newspaper after another?

First, a confession. I’ve known Gerry Peary, Boston Phoenix critic and the director of this extremely instructive, engaging and absorbing history of American film criticism, for forty years -- ever since we were both English and film students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Gerry walked up to me on Langdon Street one day and asked me to play Captain Hook in his production of “Peter Pan.” (I turned him down -- but that wasn‘t the famous Madison ‘Peter Pan” production later directed by Stuart Gordon, which I did have a part in.)

I also sponsored Gerry as a member of the National Society of Film Critics, to which we now both belong. And I’m one of the many critics interviewed or seen (or simply heard) in archive footage for this long gestating documentary -- along with Pauline Kael, Andy Sarris, Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Stanley Kaufmann, Dick Schickel, Manny Farber, Richard Corliss, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Stuart Klawans, Molly Haskell, A. O. (Tony) Scott, Elvis Mitchell, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Owen Glieberman, Kenny Turan, and many others -- including, in some Internet gab, my Chicago Tribune successor, Mike Phillips.

So, by some standards, I shouldn’t even be reviewing this movie. But the old rules no longer apply, as Gerry’s film convincingly shows. So, I can say baldly that I think this as good a documentary on it’s subject as you can imagine, and say it without looking over my shoulder, waiting for the harsh words of an editor or critic-hater waiting to pounce.

Gerry does his job here with all the tools of a scholar, plus an instinct for story-telling and entertaining. His Love argues that there was a great period of American movie criticism, one that followed the pioneering analysis of reviews of Vachel Lindsay and Robert Sherwood, and that spanned the decades between the early gems of Farber, Otis Ferguson and (my own personal writer-favorite) James Agee, that this tradition married the sinful pleasures of movie going and movie reviewing with the high literacy and deep analysis of the better literary or art criticism, and that it all reached a kind of peak with the vast celebrity and respect won by modern movie critics like Kael, Sarris, Ebert, Siskel, and some of the others above, many of whom are still active and around.

In the greatest movie critics -- especially, I would argue, Agee -- the literary, analytic and cinematic traditions all fused together so gracefully and complemented each other so well, that they both pleased us in themselves and also managed to heighten and enrich the film going experience. One of the most famous compliments ever paid a movie critic (too famous, and too over-copied by other letter-writers, in my opinion) was W. H. Auden’s letter to the Nation, extravagantly praising Agee’s movie reviews, and saying how much he often preferred them to the movies themselves (“to me, rather unimportant subjects”).

In any case, through the ’60s, ’70s and up to the new millennium, movie criticism was a job readers respected and sometimes envied. Now it’s a job that inspires a kind of dread and sadness among many of those who have it. Because, Gerry also argues at the end, that great tradition is dying, along with the very newspapers and magazines that nurtured it.

Increasingly, as more and more writers and editors of every kind are being laid off, or their jobs eliminated, from those print journals, the old world has been irrecoverably changed. The very appearance and missions of the papers have been altered, and more power and readership has shifted to the websites and the writers of the Internet, which you’re reading now.

How did it happen? What will happen next? I’ll get into that next week. But, first I should perform a different kind of critical function and mention that I didn’t like my own first big appearance. I had good things to say, but I twitched and moved around too much. And a critic, even when the world is alling and whatever the medium -- whether contemplating the American cinema or losing it at the movies -- has to be mindful of both the film and the audience. (At the Gene Siskel Center, Chicago.)

(To Be Continued.)