North Dallas Forty (1979, directed by Ted Kotcheff)

Posted on February 2, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Pete Gent was a college basketball star at Michigan State University who, in 1964, received a tryout with the Dallas Cowboys. Intrigued by the $500 that the team was offering to any player who attended training camp that summer, Gent accepted. Despite the fact that Gent had never before played football, the Cowboys were impressed with his athleticism and they signed him to the team.

For five seasons, Gent played wide receiver. During that time, he caught a lot of balls, became close friends (or so he claimed) with quarterback Don Meredith, and got under the skin of Coach Tom Landry with his nonconformist attitude. After several injuries kept him off the field during the 1968 season, Gent was traded to the Giants who waived him before the next regular season began.

Out of work and with no other team wanting to sign him, Gent wrote a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about his time with the Cowboys. North Dallas Forty was published in 1973 and it immediately shot up the best seller charts. When the book was published, football players were still regularly portrayed as being wholesome, all-American athletes and the Dallas Cowboys were still known as America’s Team. North Dallas Forty shocked readers with its details about groupies, drugs, racism, and gruesome injuries. The NFL, of course, claimed that Gent was just a disgruntled former player who was looking to get back at the league. When asked about the book (which portrayed him as being a marijuana-loving good old boy), Don Meredith was reported to have said, “If I’d known Gent was as good as he says he was, I would have thrown to him more.”

Meredith had a point, of course. In the book, Pete Gent portrays himself as not only being the smartest man in football but also as having the best hands in the league. Men want to be him. Women want to be with him. And the North Dallas Bulls (which is the book’s version of the Dallas Cowboys) don’t know what they’re losing when they release him for violating the league’s drug policy. Today, when you read it and you’re no longer shocked by all of the drugs and the sex, North Dallas Forty comes across as mostly being a case of very sour grapes.

Luckily, the film version is better.

Nick Notle plays Phil Elliott, a broken-down receiver who wakes up most mornings with a bloody nose and who can barely walk without first popping a hundred pills. Phil is a nonconformist and a rebel. He loves to play the game but he hates how it’s become a business. Mac Davis plays Seth Maxwell, the team’s quarterback and Phil’s best friend. Seth is just as cynical as Phil but he’s better at playing politics. G.D. Spradlin is B.A. Strother, the cold head coach who is a thinly disguised version of the legendary Tom Landry. In the novel, B.A. Strother was portrayed as being a hypocritical dictator. The film’s version is more sympathetic with Strother being portrayed as stern but not cruel. Strother even tells Phil that he “can catch anything.”

Both the film and the book take place over the course of one week leading to a big game against Chicago. In the book, Phil says that he and Seth don’t care about whether or not they win. In the movie, they much do care but, at the same time, they know that they’re being held back by a system that cares more about whether or not they follow the rules than if they win the game. While Phil’s teammates (including Bo Svenson as Joe Bob Priddy and John Mantuszak as O.W. Shaddock) behave like animals, Phil falls in love with Charlotte Caulder (Dayle Haddon), who doesn’t care about football.

Pete Gent was originally hired to write the film’s screenplay but left after several disagreements with producer Frank Yablans. (The screenplay was completed by Yablans, directed Ted Kotcheff, and an uncredited Nancy Dowd.) The movie loosely follows the novel while dropping some of its weaker plot points. As a result, the film version has everything that made the novel memorable but without any of Gent’s lingering bitterness over how his career ended. The novel used football as a metaphor for everything that was going wrong in America in the 60s and 70s but the movie is more of a dark comedy about one man rebelling against the system.

There’s only a few minutes of game footage but North Dallas Forty is still one of the best football movies ever made, mostly because Nick Nolte is absolutely believable as an aging wide receiver. He’s convincing as someone who can still make all the plays even though he’s usually in so much pain that it’s a struggle for him to get out of bed every morning. He’s also convincing as someone who loves the game but who won’t give up his freedom just to play it. This is a definite improvement on the novel, in which Phil seemed to hate football so much that it was hard not to wonder why he was even wasting his time with it. Country-and-western signer Mac Davis is also convincing as Seth Maxwell and fans of great character actors will be happy to see both Charles Durning and Dabney Coleman in small roles.

Whether you’re a football fan or not, North Dallas Forty is a great film. Coming at the tail end of the 70s, it’s a character study as much as its a sports film. It’s also one of the few cinematic adaptations to improve on its source material. As a book, North Dallas Forty may no longer be shocking but the movie will be scoring touchdowns forever.

Any Given Sunday (1999, directed by Oliver Stone)

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

With Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone set out to make the ultimate football movie and he succeeded.

Any Given Sunday is not just the story of aging coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino). It’s also the story of how third-string quarterback Willie Beamon (Jamie Foxx) allows celebrity to go to his head while the injured starter, Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid), deals with his own mortality and how, at 38, he is now over-the-hill. It’s also about how the team doctors (represented by James Woods and Matthew Modine) are complicit in pushing the players beyond their limits and how the owners (Cameron Diaz) view those players as a commodity to be traded and toyed with. It’s about how the Sharks represent their home city of Miami and how cynical columnists (John C. McGinley plays a character that is obviously meant to be Jim Rome) deliberately set out to inflame the anger of the team’s fans. It’s about how politicians (Clifton Davis plays Miami’s mayor and asks everyone to “give me some love”) use professional sports to further their own corrupt careers while the often immature men who play the game are elevated into role models by the press. It’s a film that compares football players to ancient gladiators while also showing how the game has become big business. In typical Oliver Stone fashion, it tries to take on every aspect of football while also saying something about America as well.

In the role on Tony D, Pacino famously describes football as being “a game of inches” but you wouldn’t always know it from the way that Oliver Stone directs Any Given Sunday. As a director, Stone has never been one to only gain an inch when he could instead grab an entire mile. (Stone is probably the type of Madden player who attempts to have his quarterback go back and throw a hail mary on every single play.) Tony tells his players to be methodical but Stone directs in a fashion that is sloppy, self-indulgent, and always entertaining to watch. One minute, Al Pacino and Jim Brown are talking about how much the game has changed and the next minute, LL Cool J is doing cocaine off of a groupie’s breast while images of turn-of-the-century football players flash on the screen. No sooner has Jamie Foxx delivered an impassioned speech about the lack of black coaches in the league then he’s suddenly starring in his own music video and singing about how “Steamin’ Willie Beamon” leaves all the ladies “creamin’.” (It rhymes, that’s the important thing.) When Tony invites Willie over to his house, scenes of Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur are on TV. Later in the movie, Heston shows up as the Commissioner and says, about Cameron Diaz, “she would eat her young.”

Any Given Sunday is Oliver Stone at both his best and his worst. The script is overwritten and overstuffed with every possible sports cliché but the football scenes are some of the most exciting that have ever been filmed. Only Oliver Stone could get away with both opening the film with a quote from Vince Lombardi and then having a player literally lose an eye during the big game. Stone himself appears in the commentator’s both, saying, “I think he may have hurt his eye,” while the doctor’s in the end zone scoop up the the torn out eyeball and put it into a plastic bag. Only Stone could get away with Jamie Foxx vomiting on the field during every game and then making amazing plays while a combination of rap, heavy metal, and techno roars in the background. Stone regulars like James Woods and John C. McGinely make valuable appearances and while Woods may be playing a villain, he’s the only person in the film willing to call out the coaches, the players, the owners, and the fans at home as being a bunch of hypocrites. Stone’s direction is as hyper-kinetic as always but he still has no fear of stopping the action so that Foxx can see sepia-toned images of football’s past staring at him from the stands. Stone directs like defensive lineman on steroids, barreling his way through every obstacle to take down his target. No matter what, the game goes on.

Any Given Sunday is the ultimate football movie and more fun than the last ten super bowls combined.

Ghosts of Sundance Past #5: Marjorie Prime (dir by Michael Almereyda)

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the year 2050, a woman (Lois Smith) sits in the living room of her beautiful house. Through the windows, we can see that she has a view of an even more beautiful beach. In fact, the beach is nearly too pristine. So is the house. Somehow, everything about the location feels both inviting and fake at the same time. We find ourselves wondering what could possibly be lurking underneath the surface.

The woman is 85 years old. Her name is Marjorie. She’s talking to a very handsome and charming man named Walter (Jon Hamm). As they talk, it becomes obvious that Walter and Marjorie are married. Walter mentions that he proposed to her after they saw the movie My Best Friend’s Wedding. Marjorie doesn’t remember ever seeing a movie by that name and when Walter explains the plot to her, Marjorie simply smiles and nods along. Afterwards, she says that she wishes they had gotten married after seeing Casablanca. She wants a better memory than the one they have.

We can’t help but notice that Walter appears to be quite a bit younger than Marjorie, despite Marjorie saying that Walter was considerably older than her when they first got married. This is because the Walter to whom she is speaking is not the real Walter. The real Walter died years ago. Walter Prime is a hologram, a computer program designed to give Marjorie someone to speak to. Marjorie is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. When she first got Walter Prime, she specifically decided that she wanted to spend her days with the young Walter, as opposed to the old man that he became. Sometimes, she knows that Walter is just a program and other times, she thinks that he’s real.

Living with Marjorie is her daughter, Tess (Geena Davis) and Tess’s husband, Jon (Tim Robbins). Tess finds the hologram of her father to be somewhat creepy and she wonders why her mother treats the hologram better than she treats her own daughter. Jon, on the other hand, feels that the hologram is just what Marjorie needs.

Time passes. Marjorie grows closer to the hologram while Tess grows angrier and angrier over her mother’s condition. When Tess discovers that Marjorie has been reading a bible, she has a meltdown because her mother has apparently forgotten that she was always a militant atheist. Jon tries to keep everyone calm. Is Jon trying to the inevitable better for everyone or is he just trying to distract himself from the pain that’s all around him?

The hologram and Jon have a meeting. The hologram says that, even though Jon and Tess have programmed him to act, think, and talk just like the original Walter, there are still things that he hasn’t been properly programmed for. While filling Walter Prime in on some more of Marjorie and Walter’s past, Jon reveals the family tragedy that has haunted the family for years….

Marjorie Prime is not a particularly happy movie. It takes place over the course of several decades and we follow Marjorie, Jon, Tess, and Walter through a great deal of changes. The only thing the remains consistent is that everyone is eventually left with only half-remembered fragments of their past. Some of those fragments are happy and others are full of regret. Everyone ages except for the holograms but, as becomes apparent in one particularly heart-breaking scene, a hologram is only as good as the person programming it. A hologram can be programmed to superficially act like someone but it can never actually be that person. As much as Jon, Tess, and Marjorie attempt to recreate the past, it can’t be done because the past can never truly be relived.

Marjorie Prime is science fiction without CGI. It’s a film that’s designed to make you think and it succeeds. It would also probably be unbearably depressing if not for the skills of the cast. Lois Smith is heart-breaking and sympathetic as Marjorie while Jon Hamm does a good job of showing why Walter Prime would be so attractive in theory and so frustrating in reality. (Walter Prime can be programmed to act like he cares but he can’t truly do it.) Geena Davis gives an intelligent and thoughtful performance as Tess, capturing both her anger and regret and the film even makes good use of Tim Robbins’s tendency towards to smarminess.

Marjorie Prime, which was acclaimed when it premiered at Sundance in 2017, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Great Expectations (dir by David Lean)

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“My Christian name was Philip Pirrip, which I pronounced Pip….”

SHUT UP, PIP!

Seriously, there’s a lot of good things that can be said about Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations but most readers simply can’t get past the fact that the narrator insists on being called Pip. I don’t necessarily blame them, as Pip might be a good nickname for a child but, by the time you’re 16, you should be demanding that everyone call you Phil. That said, I’ve always liked Great Expectations. Despite the fact that Charles Dickens could be a terribly pedantic writer, the plot of Great Expectations is genuinely interesting and the book is full of interesting characters, the majority of whom don’t demand to be known by their childhood nicknames. Plus, I’ve always related to Estella.

The 1946 film adaptation of Great Expectations was at least the third movie to be made from the novel and it would be followed by many more. (In 1998, there was a modernized version where Pip was wisely renamed Finn.) Still, the 1946 adaptation is the best. As directed by David Lean (and based on a stage version that was put together by none other than Alec Guinness), Great Expectations remains true to the source material while, at the same time, cutting away a lot of extraneous material. As a result, Lean’s film version of the story maintains a clear narrative momentum, which is something that eluded Dickens in his sprawling original.

John Mills plays Pip, an orphan who is being raised by his wicked aunt and her husband, the simple but kind-hearted blacksmith, Joe Gargery (Bernard Miles). One night, Pip helps out an escaped convict named Magwitch (Finlay Currie) and, though Magwitch is eventually recaptured, that one act of kindness will determine the rest of Pip’s life.

Pip is invited to visit the mansion of a recluse named Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) and it’s there that he first meets and falls in love with the beautiful but rather cold-hearted Estella (Jean Simmons and then, after Estella grows up, Valerie Hobson). Of course, what Pip doesn’t realize is that Miss Havisham has specifically raised Estella to destroy the hopes and dreams of every man that she meets.

Eventually, Pip grows up and discovers that he has a mysterious benefactor who feels that Pip should be transformed into a gentlemen so that he might be able to meet the “great expectations” that the benefactor has for him. Pip, of course, assumes that it’s Miss Havisham but even those who haven’t read the book will probably suspect that there’s more to it than just that. Pip moves to London, where he stays with Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness), a pale young man (for that’s how Dickens described him) who teaches Pip that a gentleman does not use his knife as a fork. Herbert was always my favorite character in the book and he’s my favorite character in the film, largely because he’s played by the totally charming Alec Guinness.

Anyway, Pip becomes a bit of a snob but eventually, he discovers the truth about his benefactor and the last few years of his life. It causes him to not only rip down a lot of curtains but also to reconsider what it truly means to be a a gentleman.

It’s all very well-done, largely because David Lean doesn’t allow the fact that he’s making a film out of a great novel get in the way of telling a good story. The film is well-acted by a wonderful cast of British thespians, all of whom manage to make even the most artificial of scenes and lines seem naturalistic and believable. Even though Pip is a bit of a jerk, John Mills manage to turn him into a sympathetic character. (Mills plays Pip as if he himself cannot stand the fact that he’s turned into such a snob.) Both Jean Simmons and Valerie Hobson do a wonderful job of bringing the potentially problematic character of Estella to life and Bernard Miles is wonderfully empathetic in the role of the Joe Gargery. The scene where a nervous Gargery first meets Pip after Pip has become a gentleman is a true example of great acting.

Not surprisingly, Lean also does a great job of bringing 19th century England to life. Watching this film is a bit like stepping into a time machine and going back to the Dickensian era. As filmed by Lean, London is as bright and vibrant as Pip’s childhood home is dark and constraining. When Pip finds Magwitch on the beach, Lean directs the scene as if it were from a film noir. When Pip enters the darkened home of Miss Havisham and meets the beautiful but destructive Estella, the film flirts with becoming a Rebecca-style gothic romance. And when it’s just Pip and Herbert Pocket talking, it becomes a comedy of manners. Not surprisingly, Great Expectations won Oscars for both its art design and its gorgeous black-and-white cinematography.

Great Expectations was also nominated for Best Picture. However, it lost to Gentleman’s Agreement.

A Blast From The Past: Combat America (narrated by Clark Gable)

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today is the birthday of one of America’s greatest screen legends, the one and only Clark Gable!

Clark Gable was born 119 years ago today and, in honor of the birthday of this cinematic icon, we’re sharing a little blast from the past. When in the past? 1945, to be exact. In Combat America, Gable takes you on a tour through the world of aerial combat during World War II. Gable joined the U.S. Army in 1943, shortly after the death of his wife, Carole Lombard. (Lombard died in a plane crash. She had been traveling across the country, working to build up support for the war effort. Shortly after Lombard’s death, Gable’s co-star from Gone With The Wind, Leslie Howard, was also killed when the Germans shot down a plane in which he was traveling.) Gable trained as an aerial gunner and flew five combat missions in 1943. Reportedly, Gable was ordered to stop flying because it was feared that the American morale at home would never recover if he was shot down.

Combat America was one of Gable’s contributions to the war effort, as well as a tribute to all the men who sacrificed their lives to defeat the Nazis. Gable both narrates and appears on camera.

Incidentally, I know that Clark Gable will always be Rhett Butler to most people but my favorite Gable performance is his Oscar-winning work in It Happened One Night. If I had been Claudette Colbert in that film, the Walls of Jericho would have come down very quickly. Just saying.

Ghosts of Sundance Past #4: Frozen River (dir by Courtney Hunt)

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2008 film, Frozen River, tells the story of two desperate mothers.

Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) has spent two years working as a clerk in a discount store and still cannot convince her boss to promote her to full time because, in his opinion, she’s just not “long-term employee” material. Ray’s husband, a compulsive gambler, has vanished and taken the majority of their money with him. Ray and her two sons live in a mobile home, where they subsist on a diet of popcorn and tang. Every few days, a man comes by and threatens to repossess the home and leave Ray and her children homeless. Ray always manages to talk him out of it. If there’s anything that Ray can do, it’s talk her way out of trouble.

Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham) is a Native American who lives on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation and who works at a bingo parlor. Because Lila is struggling financially and often resorts to illegal means to make ends meet, Lila’s mother-in-law has taken away her infant son. If Ray’s defining characteristic seems to be her ability to talk her way out of trouble, Lila is quiet and often seems to be hiding from the world.

One day, while Ray is out looking for her husband, she spots Lila driving his car. Lila claims that she found the car, sitting deserted at a gas station. (It’s never established whether Lila is telling the truth or if she actually stole the car.) Ray discovers that Lila makes her money by smuggling undocumented immigrants over the Canadian border and Ray soon joins her.

Frozen River takes place a few days before Christmas in Upstate New York. There’s snow on the ground and a Christmas tree in the mobile home but there’s little holiday cheer to be found in the film. In order to smuggle people across the border, Ray and Lila take them across the frozen St. Lawrence River and, just like the ice on the river, Ray’s occasional moments of happiness seem to be destined to only be temporary. Just as the ice is eventually going to break, so is Ray and Lila’s operation. One gets the feeling that it’s only a matter of time. Ray and Lila almost immediately attract the attention of the stern State Trooper Finnerty (Michael O’Keefe). Significantly , Finnerty’s suspicions are initially limited to only Lila and he even tries to warn Ray that she’s hanging out with a known smuggler.

Frozen River is dominated by two strong lead performances. Melissa Leo is the one who was nominated for best actress but I actually think that Misty Upham (who tragically died a few years after this film was released) is even better. Leo is the one who gets the big scenes and who gets to deliver all of the best lines and she does a great job with a richly written character. Upham, meanwhile, has to largely create her character in silence. She rarely speaks but, when she does, she makes it count. When Ray and Lila get pulled over by Finnerty and Lila snaps that Ray will be okay because she’s white, the way Upham delivers that one line tells you so much about what has led her to be in her current situation. When you see Upham in the background, watching Ray or Finnerty or anyone else who is standing in the way of her seeing her baby, her glare is worth a thousand monologues. Both Leo and Upham are so good that they hold your interest even when the film’s script and direction veers towards the heavy-handed. (Director Courtney Hunt, for the most part, does a good job of keeping things credible but it’s hard not to roll your eyes a bit when a duffel bag being carried by two refugees turns out to not contain, as Ray originally suspects, explosives but a baby instead.)

Frozen River was a hit at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize. Leo went on to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, though she lost to Kate Winslet in The Reader.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: East Lynne (dir by Frank Lloyd)

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the history of the Academy Awards, East Lynne is a curiosity.

Released in 1931, East Lynne was one of the five films to be nominated for Best Picture at the fourth annual Academy Awards. Best Picture was the only nomination that East Lynne received, which of course leaves you to wonder just what exactly was so good about it. Why was it nominated as opposed to something like A Free Soul, which received nominations for Best Actress and Director and which won the Best Actor Oscar for Lionel Barrymore? East Lynne was a success at the box office but so were The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface. None of those classic gangster films made much of an impression with the Academy but all of them are better remembered today than East Lynne.

One reason why East Lynne has fallen into obscurity is because it’s not an easy film to see. There is only one complete print of East Lynne still in existence. It’s housed at the UCLA’s Instructional Media Lab but it can only be viewed by appointment. There are, however, a few bootleg copies on DVD. The picture is grainy. The sound is inconsistent. Even worse, the bootleg is missing the last 12 minutes of the film. Still, for those of us who don’t live near UCLA, that bootleg copy is the only convenient way to watch East Lynne.

That’s how I watched it. (I also looked up how the film ended so I know where the story eventually led, despite those missing 12 minutes.) Having now seen the film, I can now say that it makes even less sense that the film was nominated because it’s pretty bad. I can only imagine that it received its nomination as a result of Fox Film Corporation (which would later merge with 20th Century Pictures to be come 20th Century Fox) demanding that its employees vote for it.

Based on a Victorian novel that had already been filmed several times during the silent era, East Lynne tells the story of Lady Isabella (Ann Harding), a British noblewoman who marries a stuffy attorney named Robert Carlyle (Conrad Nagel). From the beginning it’s an awkward marriage. Isabella is sociable and popular and wants to enjoy life. Carlyle is a humorless jerk. Not even the fact that they live in a nice mansion called East Lynne provides much comfort.

When Isabella accepts a kiss from a cad named Captain William Levinson (Clive Brook), Isabella’s sister-in-law uses it to drive a wedge between Isabella and Carlyle. Carlyle, being a jerk, kicks Isabella out of the house and takes custody of their child. Now viewed as being a figure of scandal, Isabella goes abroad with Levinson. (Since this is a pre-code film, going abroad amounts to going to a then-racy show in Vienna.) However, through a series of improbable events, Levinson ends up dead and Isabella ends up very slowly going blind. However, Isabella is determined to see her child just once more before losing her sight so it’s up to her to convince a maid to sneak her back into East Lynne late at night….

And then the bootleg version of the film ends! Now, I did my research and I discovered — here’s your SPOILER ALERT — that the film apparently ends with a blind Isabella stumbling over a cliff and her husband realizing too late that maybe he was kind of a jerk. I’m kind of sorry that I didn’t get to see that. I may have to book a flight to UCLA.

Anyway, from what I did see, East Lynne is a creaky old film. This is one of those films where you can tell that the cast was still adjusting to the new sound era. Ann Harding’s screen presence is a bit too insubstantial to keep the film’s melodramatic story grounded and neither Conrad Nagel nor Clive Brook seem to be worth all of the trouble that Isabella goes through. Frank Lloyd’s direction is painfully slow and stagy, though things do pick up briefly when the action moves to Vienna. Worst of all, the film is pretty much on Carlyle’s side. He’s a jerk, the movie says, but Isabella should have made more of an effort to keep him happy. Welcome to 1931!

East Lynne lost the best picture race to Cimarron, which was another fairly forgettable film. Though there were plenty of good films to choose from in 1931, it doesn’t appear that the Academy nominated any of them. Of course, that wouldn’t be the last time that would happen.

Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019, directed by Toby Haynes)

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

It’s finally happening.

Nearly four years after a narrow majority voted in favor of leaving the European Union, the UK is finally doing so. The success of Brexit not only took the world by surprise but it shocked much of the UK as well. I didn’t expect the Leave Campaign to win. My relatives in the UK, all of whom voted to leave, never expected to win. The British media establishment certainly didn’t expect Leave to win and their anguished reaction largely mirrored the reaction of their American counterparts when, a few months later, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

One person who was probably not, in any way, shocked by Leave’s victory was Dominic Cummings, who was the lead political strategist for the Vote Leave campaign. At least that’s the impression that one gets from watching Benedict Cumberbatch play Cummings in Brexit: The Uncivil War.

This television film originally aired on Channel 4 and subsequently, it made its American premiere on HBO. Featuring sharp direction from Toby Hayes and an even sharper script by playwright James Graham, Brexit presents fictionalized accounts of both the Vote Leave Campaign and the Britain Stronger In Europe Campaign, which is led by Craig Oliver (Rory Kinnear). As the film shows, while the conventional wisdom was that Leave didn’t have a chance, Cummings instinctively grasped what others were missing. Cummings understood that people across the UK were angry because they felt that they had lost control of their own lives. They were sick of being told that a bureaucrat in Belgium knew what was better for the UK than the people who actually lived there and who took more pride in being British than in being European. While Oliver and the Remain campaign relied on the traditional politics that had always worked in the past, Cummings used new techniques (like social media databases) to reach out to people who might not have always voted but whose posts and tweets indicated that they might be open to Leave’s message.

Towards the end of the film, one of Oliver’s focus groups descends into chaos and a woman memorably cries, “I’m sick of feeling like nothing, like I have nothing! Like I know nothing. Like I am nothing. I’m sick of it!” and, for the first time, Oliver realizes that Leave could win. By that point, it’s too late. With Leave’s strength growing every day, the British political establishment has descended into chaos. Boris Johnson (Richard Goulding) and Michael Grove (Oliver Maltman) both throw their support behind Leave. After the assassination of Jo Cox, Cummings and Oliver meet for a drink and, in a scene that ranks up there with the famous De Niro/Pacino meeting in Heat, they discuss what will happen if Leave wins.

The meeting between Oliver and Cummings never happened but the accuracy of the majority of the film has been verified by those who were involved in both campaigns. (Oliver himself served as a consultant to the filmmakers.) This is the film to see if you want to understand not only why Leave won but also why so many commentators were caught by surprise. Though it was written by a Remainer and, in one of the film’s few missteps, Nigel Farage is portrayed as being a cartoonishly vapid twit, Brexit is one of the few examinations of the vote to understand why Leave’s “Take Back Control” slogan resonated with so many voters. Though Brexit may be ultimately sympathetic to the Remain position, it refuses to dismiss the concerns of those who voted for Leave or to commit the sin of painting those voters as merely being uneducated or afraid of progress. If the Remain campaign had made as much of an effort to understand those voters as the film about the campaign does, the vote may have gone a different way.

(Instead, much of Remain’s supporters reacted to defeat by 1) demonizing the voters and 2) demanding a second referendum so that the same voters could presumably get it right the second time around. For four years, they said that the UK leaving the EU would be the end of western civilization and that the sky would fall. As of right now, the sky is exactly where it has always been.)

When this film was produced, Theresa May was still in Number 10 Downing Street and there were real doubts as to whether Brexit would ever happen. The film is book-ended by fictional scenes in which Cummings is interviewed during a public inquiry. In these scenes, which were meant to be taking place in what was then the near future of 2020, Cummings insinuates that Brexit is still on hold. In the real world, though, Brexit is finally happening and Dominic Cummings is currently the Chief Special Adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Ghosts of Sundance Past #3: Crown Heights (dir by Matt Ruskin)

Posted on January 29, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2017 film, Crown Heights, tells the story of two friends and a miscarriage of justice.

In 1980, a 19 year-old Trinidadian named Colin Warner (Lakeith Stanfield) is arrested in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Taken down to the police station, Colin is told that he has been arrested for the murder of Marvin Grant, a man who he has never heard of. When Colin says that he is innocencent, he’s informed that eyewitnesses saw him at the scene of the crime. Though he continues to protest his innocence, Colin is transferred to a jail where he is to await his trial.

From the start, it’s obvious that Colin didn’t have anything to do with the shooting of Marvin Grant. What’s messed up is that the people prosecuting him know it as well. When another prisoner tell the detectives the name of the man who actually committed the murder, his statement is ignored because he refuses to name his source. When one of the prosecution’s witnesses testifies that he saw someone other than Colin fire the gun, the prosecutor “corrects” his witnesses’s testimony in open court. After the jury returns a guilty of verdict for Colin and another man, the judge says that he can’t be sure whether or not Colin is guilty but that he can only follow the law. And the law says that, as an adult convicted of a crime, Colin is going to spend the rest of his life in prison. No one in the legal establishment cares that Colin is obviously not guilty. He’s a young black man with a minor criminal history and, by convicting him, the police can close one homicide investigation and move on to the next one.

In prison, Colin finds himself isolated, both literally and figuratively. When he refuses to get involved with any of the prison gangs, the other prisoners shun him and he finds himself being targeted. When a prison guard pushes Colin until Colin finally snaps and throws a punch, Colin ends up spending two years in solitary confinement.

Meanwhile, on the outside, Colin’s best friend, Carl King (Nnamdi Asomugha), attempts to prove that his friend is innocent. That proves to be even more difficult than Carl initially expects. No one is interested in reopening a closed case and Carl can’t even afford a good attorney to help him pursue Colin’s appeal. Still, Carl never gives up. He even trains to become a process server so that he can have an excuse to hang out at the court house and hopefully meet a lawyer who will be willing to take on Colin’s case. Amazingly, that’s exactly what happens.

Of course, by this point, Colin Warner has been in prison for 20 years….

Based on a true story, Crown Heights was a hit at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Audience Award for the U.S. Dramatic Film competition. Watching the film, you can easily see why it was such a crowd pleaser. Not only does the film deal with serious issues of race and economic disparity but, when watching the film, it’s impossible not to be moved by the strength of Carl and Colin’s friendship. Despite all of the difficulties that are placed in front of him, Carl never gives up in his quest to prove Colin’s innocence and get him out of prison. The film works as both a cry for freedom and a celebration of friendship.

The film’s execution is not quite as strong as its message. Matt Ruskin’s direction occasionally veer towards made-for-TV (or, at the very least, made-for-HBO) territory and the film’s constant switching back and forth between Colin in prison and Carl searching for witnesses sometimes seems to prevent either storyline for really maintaining a consistent momentum. 20 years is a long time to cover in just 90 minutes and sometimes, it’s hard not to feel as if important parts of the story have been left out or, at the very least, glossed over. That said, it’s a heartfelt film and it’s blessed with two wonderful lead performances from Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha.

Crown Heights is not a perfect film but the story and the performances are powerful enough to make you think and to leave you moved.

Club Paradise (1986, directed by Harold Ramis)

Posted on January 29, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

I think I was nine or ten years old when I first saw Club Paradise on HBO. I remember thinking it was pretty funny.

I recently rewatched Club Paradise and I discovered that ten year old me had terrible taste in movies.

Robin Williams plays Jack Moniker, a Chicago fireman who gets blown out of a building while rescuing a dog. Living off of his disability payments, he retires to the island of St. Nicholas, which is basically Jamaica but with less weed. Jack and reggae musician Ernest Reed (Jimmy Cliff) open up their own Club Med-style resort, Club Paradise. Jack doesn’t know much about the resort business but he does know how to put together a good brochure. Almost the entire cast of SCTV shows up at Club Paradise, looking for a tropical vacation. Things quickly go wrong because Jack doesn’t know how to run a resort and there’s also an evil developer (played by Brian Doyle-Murray) who wants Club Paradise to fail so that he can get the land.

Club Paradise has got a huge and impressive cast, the majority of whom probably signed on because they were looking forward to a paid Caribbean vacation. Peter O’Toole plays the British-appointed governor of St. Nicholas. Twiggy plays Jack’s girlfriend. Joanna Cassidy plays a reporter and Adolph Caesar is cast in the role of St. Nicolas’s corrupt prime minister. Because the film was directed by Harold Ramis, it is full of Ramis’s co-stars from SCTV. Andrea Martin tries to get her husband to enjoy the islands as much as she’s enjoying them. Joe Flaherty is the crazed pilot who flies people to the resort. Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy play two nerdy friends who are both named Barry and who are only interested in scoring weed, getting laid, and working on their tan. Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy playing nerds? It’s a shock, I know.

There’s enough funny people in Club Paradise to ensure that there are a few isolated laughs. Not surprisingly, the movie comes to life whenever Moranis and Levy are onscreen. (If I had to guess, I imagine they were the reason why ten year-old me liked this movie so much.) Needless to say, Jimmy Cliff also provides a killer soundtrack. But Club Paradise ultimately doesn’t work because the script is too disjointed and it feels more like an uneven collection of skits than an actual film. It’s impossible to tell whether we’re supposed to think of Club Paradise as being the worst resort ever or if we’re supposed to be worried that the bad guys will shut it down. For a movie like this, you need a strong central presence to hold things together. Unfortunately, Robin Williams’s style of comedy is too aggressive for the role of Jack. The role was originally written for Bill Murray and it shows. Most of Jack’s lines sound like things you would expect Bill Murray to say in his trademark laid back fashion and it is easy to imagine Murray redeeming some of Club Paradise‘s weaker scenes simply by attitude alone. Instead, Robin Williams is so frantic that you never buy he could be happy living a laid back life on a Caribbean island. As played by Williams, Jack often comes across as being unreasonably angry at everyone staying at Club Paradise and it’s hard to care whether or not he manages to save his resort or not.

Club Paradise was a bomb at the box office. Harry Shearer, who was originally credited with working on the screenplay, hated the movie so much that he requested his name be removed from the credits. (Instead, credit is given to Edward Roboto.) As a result of the film’s failure, it would be 7 years before Harold Ramis would get to direct another movie. Fortunately, that movie was Groundhog Day and this time, Ramis was able to get Bill Murray.