"High Flying Bird" and "Triple Frontier"

What have we been watching on Netflix lately?  Well, let's see…

"High Flying Bird" is Stephen Soderbergh's latest, about a sports agent named Ray Burke (André Holland) trying to steer his latest client, Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), through an NBA lockdown.  Other figures in Ray's orbit include his clueless boss (Zachary Quinto), a labor negotiator, Myra (Sonja Sohn), Ray's ambitious assistant, Sam (Zazie Beetz), Erick's rival, Jamero Umber (Justin Hurtt-Dunkley), Jamero's intimidating mother/manager, Emera (Jeryl Prescott), and Bill Duke as Spencer, the elderly coach who serves as a pillar of the local basketball community.  

With a predominantly African-American cast and a sensational script by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, "High Flying Bird" offers a rare, insightful critique of the way professional basketball operates and the cut-throat culture that it encourages.  Though billed in some quarters as a sports movie, there's hardly any basketball played onscreen. Rather, this is a sports economics movie, keen to dig into all the politics and pitfalls around professional basketball, criticizing the way the system has been set up to the disadvantage of the players.  The movie is built around these wonderful conversations and negotiations between different characters, as they struggle to come out ahead. Soderbergh includes Interviews with real professional players interspersed throughout the film, little reminders that the issues being discussed in the story are all very real.

Soderbergh shot the film largely with an iPhone, the same way he shot "Unsane."  He follows Ray and Erick around New York, meeting with all these different people and trying to get on top of a bad situation.  I didn't find the end results all that interesting visually, but it does add a certain verisimilitude to the interactions, and immediately imbues the characters with a sense of place and culture.  Holland is especially entertaining to watch as this epitome of the smooth operator, who may seem to be in over his head at times, but always has another trump card in reserve to play at a crucial moment.  The entire ensemble is excellent, including an ornery Bill Dukes still holding his own effortlessly in every scene.

Now on to "Triple Frontier," the long-simmering action thriller scripted by Mark Boal that went through countless cast and creative changes before finally landing J.C. Chandor as director and an all-star cast lead by Ben Affleck and Oscar Isaac.  I'd assumed this was a war film based on some of the earlier reporting, but it turns out that "Triple Frontier" is a heist movie of sorts, but one with a much closer resemblance to "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" than "Ocean's 11." Isaac takes point as "Pope" Garcia, battling Colombia's drug cartels as a military consultant.  One day he receives a tip from an informant, Yovanna (Adria Arjona), about an infamous drug lord's jungle safehouse full of ill-gotten funds. Garcia recruits his old Special Forces pals to help him pull off a heist, including Tom "Redfly" Davis (Ben Affleck), now a realtor, Ben and William Miller (Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam), and pilot Catfish Morales (Pedro Pascal).    

The "triple frontier" of the title refers to the area where the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil converge in the Amazon rainforest.  This is where the heist goes down, and is the source of some of the film's best visuals. There's also a lengthy section of the story that takes place in the stark Andes mountains, where surviving the wilderness becomes a major concern.  However, the scenery can only contribute so much, and this is sadly one of those cases where the story could have used more help. Now as an action film, there's little to complain about. The set-pieces are well staged and the tension is terrific.  Chandor makes good use of the South American settings, and the various twists and turns of the heist and its aftermath are deployed well.

The trouble comes when the film tries to incorporate anything more substantive.  And I don't mean anything related to the region's drug wars and culture of corruption and exploitation, but just the basic character interactions whenever the pace slows down.  It's all very generic and surface level. Despite the stacked cast, there's no getting away from how thin these characters are. The script does a decent job of setting them up as a troupe of ex-military badasses who didn't transition well to civilian life, but on an individual level, there is very little to work with.  Ben Affleck's character is the only one who seems to come to the situation with any stakes, and the others are barely distinguished from each other. This drastically undercuts the impact of the later parts of the film.

So, as an action film this is a decent film.  But as drama, especially one that flirts with the same themes of greed and desperation that have featured in some of the greatest films of all time, it's a miss.  I don't expect this to be "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" or Kubrick's "The Killing," but it's very disheartening to see such a talented group of filmmakers deliver such glib treatment of similar subject matter.

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The "Dumbo" Edit

The News: According to The Hollywood Reporter a few days ago, the new Disney+ service will not be offering the controversial "Song of the South."  Worse, however, is that while the 1940 animated "Dumbo" will be available, the crows and their song number will be cut.

First thought: This is a travesty.  "Dumbo" is a classic of animation and one of my favorite films.  Boo. Hiss.

Second thought: Clearly the crows are a touchy topic and there are some legitimate worries about continuing to keep a film with this kind of content in circulation.  Just because I have no issue with the crows doesn't mean its not right to be sensitive to the concerns of others. The Tim Burton live action remake left them out. This is a socially responsible decision, even if it's an artistically compromised one.

Third: It sets a horrid precedent though. Does this mean we're losing the ""What Made the Red Man Red?" number from "Peter Pan"?  The Siamese cats from "Lady and the Tramp"? Heck, "Dumbo" itself has the arguably more problematic "Roustabout Song" and Dumbo's drunken escapades leading into "Pink Elephants."  The feature is barely an hour to begin with. How much will be left if all the mildly objectionable content is eventually tossed?

Fourth: This edited version of the film is specifically for the new Disney+ service.  So this is essentially like"Dumbo" being edited for television, not a full excision of the material from Disney history like Sunflower being removed from "Fantasia."  I expect you should still be able to buy the full version on official home media.

Fifth: This is also a business decision.  Disney+ is being billed as family friendly, which none of the other streaming services has really pulled off yet.  Sure, Netflix and Amazon and the rest have kids' programming, but a whole service dedicated to family entertainment is fairly novel.  The curation will allow parents to set their kids free on the service the way they can't on something like Youtube. That's going to be a selling point.  

Sixth: This introduction of more stringent content standards on a major streaming service feels like another step in online streaming's gradual replacement of broadcast and cable television.  Other services are sure to follow suit, as streaming services keep looking more and more like cable channels. Apple's streaming service, if it ever gets off the ground, is also looking to be family oriented.  

Seventh: However, the dynamic is going to be different from television, where the carefully curated, mainstream-oriented broadcast networks have largely been the default option.  With the all-inclusive Netflix having so much market share, it's the default in the streaming world. I expect that family friendly options like Disney+ will be treated as more specialized since it's aimed at a narrower segment of the audience.  I don't think this bodes well for Disney+ being a real Netflix challenger.

Eighth: This also tempers my expectations a bit for Disney+ content.  While we'll be getting a lot of content from the hallowed Disney vault, it's not likely to be nearly as much as I was hoping for, and it's going to be limited to family friendly material.  Disney means kid-safe. That means we're not likely to see all those Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures movies, or similar content from the Fox library. Ralph Bakshi will be spared the indignity of seeing his films put under the Disney banner in any context.  But where will this content end up online, if at all? Hulu?

Ninth: I expect that we'll come across more examples of content restrictions on Disney+ when it launches in November - broadcast friendly versions of movies, missing episodes of certain series that have problematic content, and so on.  This was standard operating procedure for Disney cable channels like the Disney Channel and Toon Disney for ages. Just because Disney is trying to compete with Netflix doesn't mean it's going to behave like Netflix.

Tenth: Since I own "Dumbo" in multiple formats, I'll be showing my kids the original version anyway.  And I'll be holding on to my collection of physical media a little tighter.

Eleventh: I'll also still be subscribing to Disney+ in November just to get a look what they're doing with it.  Whether I'll keep it around is another matter.

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The Startling "Shirkers"

It's very rare that a movie feels like it's speaking directly to me, that really hits me on a fundamental level.  "Shirkers," however, fits the bill. It's a documentary made in extraordinary circumstances about a lost film, also titled "Shirkers."  Netflix released it with little fanfare last year, about a week before they released Orson Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind." Unlike that film, alas, the original "Shirkers" is doomed to remain unfinished.

Once upon time in the summer of 1992, a trio of college-aged Singaporean film-lovers, Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng, and Sophia Siddique, decided to follow their dreams and make an indie road movie together.  At the end of the film shoot, their unstable teacher and mentor George Cardona, made off with all the footage and was never to be heard from again. Roughly twenty years later, the materials were recovered after Cardona died.  Sandi Tan, who scripted and starred in the film, decided to resurrect "Shirkers" as a documentary about what happened in 1992, and the impact it had on her life and the lives of her friends.

Could there be anything more emblematic of the struggles of female filmmakers and minority filmmakers, than a film where a white male con-artist literally steals the work and money of the Asian female creative team, sabotaging what could have been several very promising filmmaking careers?  Hollywood loves films about scrappy young filmmakers, and we've seen several of them over the years. There have also been the stories of filmmaking attempts gone wrong, or gone sideways, like 2017's "The Disaster Artist." However, I've rarely seen one like this, a painful example of a film project destroyed through an act of unimaginable malice.

However, the film isn't really about the crime.  While Tan does spend some time picking apart Georges Cardona's psyche and his sad little history of grifts and betrayals, I'm glad that for the most part "Shirkers" is about Sandi Tan.  She uses most of the film to tell her own story of being a film enthusiast and burgeoning filmmaker in a country that barely had a filmmaking community to speak of in the 1990s. And then, twenty-odd years later, about her journey to reclaim her work and finally put the old ghosts to rest.  I identified with her passion something fierce. And it's so satisfying to see Tan cement her status as a filmmaker in the end, even if it's not with the film she started out making in 1992.

Most of the documentary's effectiveness comes from the way it's been pieced together, using nostalgic archival materials, interviews, and copious amounts of the unfinished "Shirkers."  The more I saw of the colorful, absurdist film that Tan and her friends were trying to make, the more I wanted to see the finished product. Sadly, it's eventually revealed that too many elements are missing, including the entire original audio track, for this to be possible.  Still, Tan's use of various clips creates this wonderfully appealing mirage of the film that could have been.

Ultimately, "Shirkers" is celebratory of creativity and perseverance and the joys of moviemaking in a way that I found tremendously appealing.  Even though the film wasn't finished, the experience of making it touched the lives of everyone involved, and Tan's repurposing of the surviving footage ensures that their efforts are finally being seen and appreciated.  I love that the final moments of the documentary are turned over to the man who composed the music for "Shirkers," which was never recovered. He gets to recreate a few minutes of it for audiences to hear at last, as the credits roll by.        

Finally, on a personal note, I remarked a few months ago that in 2018 I felt like I was finally the target audience, thanks to multiple films and shows suddenly coming out lead by Asian women over thirty.  We can add "Shirkers" to the list, one that may be the most relevant to me of all, because it features Asian women who love film as much as I do, who share the same kind of creative impulses and geeky worldview.  It's a comforting feeling to know that I'm not as rare a bird as I thought I was.

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Rank 'Em: The Muppet Movies

Despite the recent revival, I think the age of the theatrical Muppet movie is behind us for the time being.  However, eight installments over thirty-five years is nothing to sneeze at. Kermit and friends have given me a lot of laughs and a lot of good times over the years, and I think they're due for a little more attention on this blog.  So below, are the Muppet movies ranked from greatest to not-so great.

The Muppet Movie (1979) - The Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher songs are magic, the cameos are priceless, and the whole sunny, positive philosophy of the Muppets couldn't have been better presented.  There are a lot of fun bits of technical wizardry, like Kermit on a bicycle and the giant Animal, but I always loved the film for being so unabashedly heartfelt and sentimental. Kermit with his banjo, Gonzo with his balloons, and everyone at the grand finale with the rainbow - it's pure movie magic.  

The Great Muppet Caper (1981) - The sequel did what most sequels do, which was to become more conventional and formulaic.  However, there's a lot of good material here, with some of the Muppets' best running gags and jokes. Miss Piggy gets more of the spotlight, giving Esther Williams a run for her money and riding that motorcycle to glory in the big action climax.  The human actors are especially well used here, with Diana Rigg and Charles Grodin turning in a pair of very memorable performances.

The Muppet Treasure Island (1996) - I don't really know why this movie became one of my go-to guilty pleasures, but I've seen it at least twenty times and know all the songs by heart.  It's ridiculous on every level, many of the jokes are groan-worthy, and the plotting is kind of a mess. However, Tim Curry is perfectly cast as Long John Silver, and there's a subplot with Sam the Eagle that never fails to make me giggle.  If pressed, I would have to admit this is not a good movie, but for me it is an essential one.

The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) - The last of the original run of Muppet movies made when Jim Henson was still with us.  Frankly, I never much liked the storyline with Kermit getting amnesia, but Rizzo and the rats were a great addition to the Muppet universe, and who doesn't love a big wedding?  This was actually the first Muppet film I encountered as a kid, specifically in audiobook form. It wasn't a great one to start with, as all the references and Muppet history were completely lost on me.    

Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) - Michael Caine is a great Scrooge, but having already been exposed to so many other Scrooges in so many other versions of "A Christmas Carol," he was never going to be one of my favorites.  While there are some delightful moments here, what surprised me about the film was how faithful it was to the original Dickens story - to the point where it's really much longer than it should be. This was a good direction for the Muppets, but I found the results more mixed than merry.

Muppets Most Wanted (2014) - I wasn't a fan of Jason Segel and Walter taking up so much of the time and attention in "The Muppets" revival, so the sequel having less of them was a big plus for me.  So yes, there are way too many cameos and everything feels very slapdash, but the fundamentals are pretty solid here. I like Kermit's evil double Constantine, and a couple of the songs are catchy. This is a minor effort for the Muppets, but it's still diverting enough that I don't have bad feelings toward the movie.  

The Muppets (2011) - I know they tried.  I know everyone's intentions were good. Unfortunately, "The Muppets" rarely worked for me.  Bret McKenzie's songs are mostly good, and the sight of Chris Cooper as the evil rapping oilman is an image I will long cherish. However, there's so much of the movie that feels weirdly forced, and it completely failed to get me to care about the new characters.  It was nice to see Kermit and the gang again, but there wasn't enough of them onscreen.

Muppets from Space (1999) - I actually saw this in theaters, and knew there was something very wrong almost instantly.  Sure, the idea of Gonzo finally finding his place in the world was great, but the execution is a mess. There are no original songs, the cameos are terrible, and everything feels very compromised and derivative.  Seriously, how did they make "Muppets in Space" without even once referencing "Pigs in SPAAAAAACE"?

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The Amazing "Spider-verse"

Some minor spoilers ahead.

A few years ago, when Sony was making plans for a cinematic universe based on Spider-man characters, I was skeptical.  Was there really enough material to support films based around characters like Aunt May and the Sinister Six? However, my knowledge of Spider-lore was mostly limited to the 1990s and earlier.  I had no idea about the various new Spider-characters that had been created in the last decade, many of them in an effort to diversify the universe a bit. These are the heroes of the animated "Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse," and they may be the key to Sony finally getting what they want.

As we all know, Peter Parker (Chris Pine) is New York's friendly neighborhood superhero, Spider-man, who got his superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.  However, he's not the only one who got bitten. We're also introduced to teenager Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who lives in Brooklyn with his African-American father Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry), a cop, and his Puerto Rican mother Rio (Luna Lauren Velez), a nurse.  A gifted student, Miles is struggling to adapt to a new school, and lets off steam by sneaking off to visit his uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) and painting graffiti. This is how he encounters the fateful spider, and what leads him to stumble into the middle of a dangerous scheme by The Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) to access parallel dimensions.

One thing leads to another, and Miles meets other Spider-men and Spider-women characters while learning to master his own developing powers.  These include an older, down-on-his-luck version of Peter Parker (Jake Johnson), and a teenage Spider-woman version of Peter's gal-pal Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld).  So we have an origin story told alongside several other stories about very different kinds of Spider-folks. There are also several other familiar characters in the mix, both friends and foes, but discovering where and how they're used in "Spider-verse" is part of the fun.  The story continually drives the message home that anybody can be behind the Spider-man mask, and thus anyone can be a superhero.

"Into the Spider-verse" doesn't just diversify its heroes, but creates a wonderfully distinctive visual world for them that doesn't look quite like anything else we've seen in mainstream animation.  3D rendered characters and environments have 2D linework animated over them, giving them a look that evokes traditional comic books. Also, comic book visual language is used throughout, including speech bubbles, sound effects, and even the old halftone dot patterns on closeups of some of the characters.   Occasionally some of these visuals don't mesh right, especially when you've got photorealistic elements like cars and trains in the same frame with flatter, cartoony elements. Still, the overall the effect is wonderfully dynamic and fresh.

We've seen Spider-man and friends animated many times before, but this is the first animated Spidey film, and clearly there were significant efforts made to ensure that the "Spider-verse" characters offered something new. The characters designs feature exaggerated shapes and movements that could only work in animation.  Kingpin, for instance, has never looked so massive and impenetrable, sometimes filling the entire frame There are several sequences of Spider-man swinging through the city, but this time around it's a city that is abstracted or stylized in various ways, creating some fantastic, unique images. And supporting the visuals are a vibrant, hip-hop heavy soundtrack, strong vocal performances, and a gorgeous score.

Parents should be aware that this isn't a feature meant for the youngest Spider-man fans.  The content gets pretty dark at times, and there are some potentially upsetting deaths. Moreover, the plotting is complicated enough that kids under the age of eight or so likely aren't going to be able to follow what's going on. Many of the most clever gags and in-jokes are aimed at older fans, or are remixing elements that the creators expect viewers are already familiar with.  No one stops to explain who Aunt May and the Green Goblin are. At the same time, the humor and the energy of the film are so strong, newcomers won't be bored.

As for me, I've never been a big Spider-man booster, but these last couple of features aimed at a younger generation of fans have been wonderful to see.  If Sony and Marvel keep focusing on the more recent comics spinoffs, with their more eclectic sensibilities and inclusive worldview, then I'll happily look forward to more Spider-man (and Spider-woman) movies.  

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What is "Guava Island"?

I put "Guava Island" on my list of most anticipated 2019 movies a couple of months ago, on the strengths of its talent.  Donald Glover/Childish Gambino and Rihanna star in a film directed by Hiro Murai, Glover's longtime collaborator who helmed the "This is America" music video and every episode of "Atlanta" to date.  The news that they were making a feature together filled me with glee. The end result, however, is not what I expected.

For one thing, the movie is very short.  It's only 55 minutes with credits, and plays more like a super-long episode of "Atlanta" with musical numbers than anything else.  Glover starts as a musician named Deni, and Rihanna plays his lady love, Kofi. They live on the fictional Guava Island, a tropical paradise where Deni observes that none of the people have time to enjoy it.  Everyone is beholden to the Red Cargo (Nonso Anozie), the businessman who runs the factories and workshops where everyone labors. Deni intends to throw a music festival, but this goes against the interests of Red Cargo, who takes action to shut it down.

The best thing about "Guava island" is its setting.  The project was shot in Cuba and uses many Cuban locations and extras, also incorporating bits of the culture through a fictionalized lens.  The island is immediately an inviting, colorful, immersive place where everyone knows everyone else. We learn the ins and outs of how it operates just following Deni through his day, from doing announcements and commercials at the tiny radio station, to being held up by some kids for money he doesn't have, to being menaced by Red Cargo.  The cast uses a mishmash of different accents, and characters seem to come from a variety of different backgrounds, but there's a strong sense of community.

The story incorporates recent Childish Gambino songs like "This is America" and "Feels Like Summer" into the narrative, recontextualizing them from their previous appearances.  "This is America" is used by Deni to lightly chide a co-worker who dreams about leaving the island for a better life. "Feels Like Summer" has a more celebratory tone as it accompanies good news.  The performances of these songs are fine, but none of them really stand out, and few match up to the previous incarnations I've seen. However, there's an undeniable charm to seeing Glover perform them while in character as Deni, a good-natured, easy-going troubadour figure.     

I wish I could say the same about Rihanna's appearance, but she gets very little to do as Kofi.  Surprisingly, she doesn't sing in the film at all. However, she narrates the opening and closing sequences, including a colorful animated segment that sets the mood for the rest of the picture.  Letitia Wright is in the movie for about ten minutes as Kofi's co-worker, just long enough for me to wonder why she was being wasted in such a thankless bit part. This is where the short length of the feature hurts it, because these characters and their problems need much more fleshing out.  As is, the ending is moving but doesn't have nearly the amount of impact that it could have.

"Guava Island" left me with very mixed feelings.  I liked what I saw, but it feels very incomplete, like a proof of concept for a bigger, longer film that I don't think is coming.  I have some suspicions that the project was just thrown together as a lark by the creative team - maybe as an excuse to visit Cuba.  There's a wealth of ideas and impressions, but few feel like they're being used to their fullest. So while this was an interesting experiment, I hope the next Childish Gambino film and/or Hiro Murai film aims its sights a little higher.     

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On the "Star Wars IX" Trailer and Hype

The ninth American Star Wars Celebration event happened over the weekend, a fan convention devoted to all things "Star Wars," which Lucasfilm often uses to promote the franchise.  It usually comes around these days whenever Lucasfilm has new projects to hype, and boy did they have some doozies this year. In addition to the new video game "Jedi: Fallen Order," and the new Disney Plus series, "The Mandalorian," Friday's panel was the first place where you could see the teaser trailer for the latest "Star Wars" film, where the title was finally announced: "Rise of Skywalker."

I find it a little bewildering that we're at the point where simply announcing the title of an upcoming franchise film like "Avengers: Endgame" or "Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker" can be a hypable moment, and a dropping a teaser trailer can be an event on the same level as one of those Apple product launches that Steve Jobs was famous for.  Instead of Steve Jobs, however, Disney went and recruited Stephen Colbert to be their panel emcee, who happily worked up the crowd of convention-goers before bringing all the creative talent on stage to promote the new film. The public may have cooled on the "Star Wars" franchise over the last two years, but Disney certainly isn't treating it that way.

I have to marvel at the lengths Disney and Lucasfilm went to for this event, getting a room full of hardcore nerds together to watch the teaser premiere, flying out all the talent for appearances, and even putting Ian McDiarmid onstage afterwards to shout "Roll it again!" and push the reactions even further.  If you didn't have the $50-60 dollars for a convention ticket, you could watch the whole panel being streamed live if you wanted - I found a recording on Youtube over the weekend. It all paid off for Lucasfilm, though. The internet was buzzing madly about "Star Wars" all Friday afternoon, and there was a ton of speculation about what the title could mean and what we could expect from the new film in December.  

As for the trailer itself, well, personally I find it a little worrying.  The marketing is following the lead of "The Force Awakens," emphasizing the return of familiar faces from the first "Star Wars" trilogy again.  This time around Lando Calrissian and Emperor Palpatine are back. The ruins of the second Death Star show up. A new droid pal for BB-8 shows up.  There' s more heavy breathing. More running. More lightsabers. Frankly, the whole thing feels like it's backtracking what "The Last Jedi" did to break away from formula.  Sure, this is just marketing and Disney is just trying to put out images that are going to invite the most speculation, but it doesn't bode well. Personally, I am going to be very disappointed if Abrams walks back the revelation about Rey's parents in "The Last Jedi."

I'm actually more curious about "The Mandalorian," the Disney Plus series which is being handled by Jon Favreau and will star Pedro Pascal as the title character.  I like that it takes place in the gap between "Return of the Jedi" and "The Force Awakens," and features no familiar characters whatsoever. And speaking of Disney Plus, a similar splashy kickoff event was used to promote the service at Disney's Investor Day event, which happened to take place the day before Celebration.  This was a much more serious affair, however, presented by Disney CEO Bob Iger and attended mainly by Wall Street figures. However, its aim was also to drum up the hype, as Disney Plus will launch in November.

  

We can look forward to future events like this in the next few months - convention season is just around the corner.  Disney will probably use San Diego Comic-Con and its own D23 Expo in August to make some more big announcements. 2020's two new Marvel movies technically haven't been officially announced yet.  There are also two original PIXAR movies on next year's schedule, one of which we know absolutely nothing about. Now that the FOX merger has been completed, Disney can be a lot less hush-hush about its plans.  Or maybe the new status quo is turning any announcement into a big hypable moment.

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