Category: Film and Video

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Pick! ASR Film ~~ “The Crime Is Mine”—French Screwball Satire Carves Up Justice, Feminism

By Woody Weingarten

Screwball comedies satirizing traditional love stories peaked in the early 1940s — after having begun to gain popularity during the Great Depression.

New examples of that romantic comedy sub-genre would manage to pop up every few years thereafter, but they’d usually fail to be as funny or polished as those of yesteryear.

But now comes The Crime Is Mine, a French-language satire (with subtitles, of course) that stands up with the best of them. The one-hour, 42-minute film time-warps back to 1930s Paris and provides a Duisenberg-speed storyline that repeatedly twists and turns as it focuses on a sexy, penniless actress who figures she can become famous by confessing to a murder she didn’t commit.

 … “The Crime Is Mine” ain’t subtle, but delightfully tasty it is …

Scheduled for release on Christmas Day by Music Box Films, the flick lays onto the marvelous comedy, an equally marvelous carving up of feminism, the class system, show biz antics, and courtroom machinations.

In the final analysis, though, within weeks after watching the movie, you’re likely not only to have forgotten slices of the plotline but exactly who is who, especially when it comes to lesser characters such as the judge, the prosecutor, the police inspector, and a boyfriend (even though all are amusing) and exactly what who said to whom.

Madeleine, played by Nadia Tereskiewicz, is tried for murder in “The Crime Is Mine, a screwball comedy.

Nadia Tereskiewicz merrily plays blonde bombshell Madeleine Verdier, a talent-less wannabe who desperately craves stardom and her close-up. She’s aided in her quest for fame by her brunette BFF and starving garret roomie, Pauline Mauléon (played by Rebecca Marder), a young lawyer with no other clients who launches a campaign based on the notion of self-defense against sexual assault.

Supporting their skillful acting chops is Isabelle Huppert, a French icon who, while chomping on the scenery, portrays silent film star Odette Chaumette, the real killer turned blackmailer.

All the main characters, each of whom is self-serving, mug a lot (except the murdered producer) — and every now and then, Madeleine’s combined flightiness and earthiness may remind a filmgoer of Renee Zellweger playing Roxie Hart in Chicago.

 … Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 100% rating …

François Ozon’s direction of this adaptation of a 1934 stage play is almost as perfect. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 100% rating with 22 credits so far.

Best buddies and roomies — Madeleine (Nadia Tereskiewicz) and Pauline (Rebecca Marder) — hatch a scheme to beat the system in “The Crime Is Mine.”

With humor ranging from dry to frivolously farce-like, it’s virtually impossible not to like the film—whether or not you can relate to kooky but intelligent women who easily outmaneuver the men in their lives.

The Crime Is Mine ain’t subtle, but delightfully tasty it is — a cinematic soufflé that never falls.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, he is the author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionThe Crime is Mine
Directed byFrançois Ozon
Run DatesOpens December 25, 2023
VenuesTBA
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5//5
Overall4.25/5
Performance4.25/5
Script4/5
Pick?YES!
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PICK! ASR FILM ~~ ASR Film: Hite Documentary Details Woman Sexologist’s Rapid Rise and Exile

By Woody Weingarten

Cancel culture wasn’t a concept in the 1980s, but slinky sexologist Shere Hite became victimized by something exactly like it.

The feminist author of a 600-page 1976 blockbuster, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, was not only lambasted as a man-hater because of her writings but partially because, being broke, she’d posed nude for Playboy and modeled for paperback covers and ads that objectified women. She was slut-shamed even though that phrase hadn’t been coined either.

Hite became so distraught at her treatment, mostly at the hands of male critics who felt threatened, she ultimately fled from the states to Europe, mainly Britain and Germany, and relinquished her American citizenship.

… “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” is fascinating throughout …

Now, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, an R-rated biopic by Nicole Newnham, resurrects the researcher’s life by cobbling together frequent rolling texts of her basic material (and a voice-over by actor Dakota Johnson) with sometimes fuzzy newscasts and archival footage, next to interviews with the Missouri-born writer, her ex-lovers, her detractors, and her friends and supporters, including Kate Millett, author of the groundbreaking Sexual Politics, who bemoans Hite’s public erasure and self-exile and points out that the academic social scientist could no longer earn a living in the United States.

Shere Hite as she appears in new documentary. Courtesy of Mike Wilson. An IFC Films release.

The nearly two-hour documentary strikingly shows Hite being ambushed by tabloid-type television journalist Maury Povich, causing her to leave the interview almost as soon as it started (with the interviewer’s aide forcibly trying to stop her), as well as her haughtily blowing smoke in talk show host Mike Douglas’s face, and trying to cope with a rude, all-male Oprah audience that couldn’t wait to take pot-shots at her research.

It further connects disparate items such as Anita Bryant attacking gay rights, a conference of the National Organization of Women (NOW), Anita Hill testifying at a Supreme Court confirmation hearing that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, Hite’s neighbor and KISS co-lead singer Gene Simmons reflecting on her New York parties that collected endless celebrities, and a James Bond poster for the movie Diamonds Are Forever with two sexy women flanking Sean Connery (Hite had posed for both, one featuring her signature strawberry blonde hair, the other with tousling pure blonde tresses).

Disappearance, which is being distributed by IFC Films, also builds a sense of a whole woman by stitching scenes of raw but lovely sexuality with staged images of women with tots, women cooking dinner, women strolling.

The film was written by director Nicole Newnham, who’d co-directed the Oscar-nominated Crip Camp, an amazing, feel-good 2020 doc that had a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating after 99 reviews. That flick managed to link a summer camp for the crippled to both the American disability rights and civil rights movements, making sure to note along the way that the disabled are also sexual beings.

The Hite Report on Female Sexuality — which had started as a post-grad thesis at Columbia University — was based on questionnaires filled out anonymously by 3,000 women. Hite, an admitted bisexual, defended the anonymity of her interviewees by insisting the women wouldn’t have been honest had they been required to list their names because they feared negative reactions from their male mates and other men.

That approach, however, gave major ammunition to vilifiers who claimed her methodology was flawed.

The tome drew as much public attention as those by Kinsey and Masters & Johnson and earned a ranking as the 30th best-selling book of all time. It became a key element of feminist history by stressing that most women felt unsatisfied sexually with their male partners, that women achieved orgasm through clitoral stimulation and masturbated often, that rampant infidelity existed, that 95% of women faked orgasm, that sexual equality was possible, and that few people (men and women) knew much about the female genitalia.

Despite her instant best-seller and subsequent titles (including her first follow-up, The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality) that were believed to have advanced the so-called Second Wave of feminism, Hite, because of the extended backlash, never reached her goal of overcoming both gender and class bias — even after having sold 20 million books overall.

Shere Hite. Courtesy of Mike Wilson. An IFC Films release.

The sex educator was criticized heavily for virtually everything she peddled, especially such statistics as 84% of women being unsatisfied emotionally and only 13% of women still loving their husbands after two years of marriage.

Whether you think Hite an innovator or fraud, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is fascinating throughout — and offers viewers an opportunity to see how she flaunted her body and flamboyant costumes at the same time as it provides dramatic insight into her original, creative mind.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, he is the author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

ProductionThe Disappearance of Shere Hite
Written byNicole Newnham
Directed byNicole Newnham
Production DatesOpens Dec. 1st
Production AddressLandmark Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness Ave.
SF, CA
Websitehttps://www.landmarktheatres.com
Telephone(415) 771-0183
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review Pick?YES!

 

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ASR Film ~~ New Documentary On Joan Baez Shows Three Lives: Public, Private…and Secret

By Woody Weingarten

The documentary film Joan Baez: I Am a Noise appears to check all the right boxes, revealing three lives of the iconic singer/protester and civil rights activist.

The Public:

• Becoming world-famous overnight as a barefoot thrush at age 18 and having Time magazine plaster her face on its cover.

• Being immersed in a relationship with then unknown songwriter/singer Bob Dylan and helping catapult his career, only to have him break her heart (“It was horrible.”)

• Being married for five years to David Harris — an icon in the anti-Vietnam War movement whose outcries led him to be jailed for more than a year — and having a son with him.

• Relishing the marches where she accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. (“Nonviolent action is what I was born for”).

The Private:

• Having at least two mental breakdowns and dealing with decades of almost constant sensations of panic, depression, inadequacy, insecurity, and loneliness (she describes herself as “a personalized time bomb” and her inner life as “dark, dark, dark”).

• Experiencing midlife torment when her “career plunged into the abyss.”

• Agonizing because her two sisters, Mimi (Farina) and Pauline, distanced themselves from her, unable to live in the shadow of a star.

• Enduring racial slurs as a child because her physicist/inventor dad was Mexican and she, therefore, was “half-Mexican” and “thought I was inferior to the white kids, the rich kids.”

• Savoring a two-year lesbian relationship (“She was more feral than I”).

• Accepting the fact that her son, Gabe, still bemoans her frequent absences because she was “too busy saving the world.”

The Secret:

• Finding her father’s alleged sexual abuse (which she unearthed during hypnotherapy) “bone-shattering.”

The film stitches all that together, nearly seamlessly, yet might still leave a viewer with the sense that something’s missing, that some of the in-depth excursions into her psyche dig down only about 85 percent and that the most difficult truths are still covered. It’s not unlike checking out the headlines of a story rather than reading it all the way through.

Truly vulnerable moments are few in Joan Baez: I Am a Noise — the title, not incidentally, stems from a journal entry from her 13-year-old incarnation in reaction to being likened to the Virgin Mary, “I am not a saint, I am a noise.” Two stand out. Most moving is when she lovingly caresses her mother’s face on her death bed. Another is when she’s photographed taking off all her makeup.

But oddly absent from the film — which is distributed by Magnolia Pictures and deftly inserts Baez’s home movies, artwork (her originals as well as someone else’s animations), journal entries, and, surprisingly, therapy tapes — are:

• Her multi-tune appearance at Woodstock.

• Her two-year relationship with Steve Jobs.

• Full-song performances (the doc does contain many, many fragments).

• Humor (one rare inclusion is her imitating Dylan imitating her).

Baez, who’s followed around — almost reality TV-like — during her final tour at age 79 (she’s now 82), admits she likes being the center of attention. Even now, although she says her once pure voice has turned “raggedy.” That craving, the doc demonstrates, is evident when she dances to street drummers when no one else is dancing.

As to fame, she says, “I was the right voice at the right time.”

The singer, who attended Palo Alto High School and now lives in Woodside in San Mateo County, also enjoyed making tons of money when she was young, despite her father dissing her because he’d always had to work harder for it. She particularly enjoyed literally tossing $100 bills at him and the rest of her family.

Regarding her dad, who denied inflicting any abuse, she tells the filmmakers — Miri Navasky, Karen O’Connor, and Maeve O’Boyle (who also deserves major accolades for her editing skills) — that if only 20% of what she remembers about the abuse is true, that’s damning enough.

Baez doesn’t only point fingers at her father. She, who says she’s been diagnosed as having multiple personalities, confesses that she’s simply “not great at the one-on-one relationships — I’m great at one-on-2,000.”

When all’s said and done, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is a fascinating portrait of somebody we thought we knew but didn’t. Though it’s possibly 20 minutes too long, it’s definitely like having a backstage pass into all three of her lives.

The film’s ending is clearly intended to show her finally at peace, but it feels too posed, too contrived, as she dances — eyes closed — with her dog as she recites lines from a Robert Frost poem that indicates she’s not done yet (“…miles to go before I sleep”).

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ASR Senior Writer Woody Weingarten is a voting member of the S.F. Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net

 

 

Joan Baez: I am a Noise

  • Opens October 13
    Landmark Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco
    AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco
    AMC Bay Street 16 in Emeryville
    Landmark Piedmont Theatre in Oakland
    Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley
    Summerfield Cinemas in Santa Rosa
    Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol in Sabastopol
    3Below Theaters in San Jose
    Landmark Del Mar Theater in Santa Cruz
  • Opens October 16
    Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael
    ***** Q&A with Joan Baez following the November 3rd, 7:00pm screening!

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PICK! ASR Film & Cinema ~~ New Film About Surrealist Salvador Dalí Depicts Artist’s Craziness, Torment, and Genius

By Woody Weingarten

Sir Ben Kingsley, as Salvador Dalí, portrays crazy rather well.

Kingsley also alternates Dalí’s comic and tormented turns rather well. In fact, the actor plays all the famed Spanish surrealist artist’s extreme aspects rather well in the new movie Dalíland. Without making a caricature of him.

Ben Kingsley, as Salvador Dali, is clearly ready for his close-up. Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

Yet, arguably, a smidgeon over the top.

The film’s focus is on Dalí’s final years, when his octogenarian relationship with his older, tyrannical wife and muse, Gala, is disintegrating because, as one character contends, they no longer like being with one another since it reminds them “that they’re old.”

Gala, in fact, is constantly chasing her youth by bedding down with one of her boy toys, the latest being the actor then starring in the lead role of Broadway’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

Dalí, meanwhile, is relegated to voyeurism, which he apparently prefers anyway.

Salvatore Dali in his studio is portrayed by Ben Kingsley. Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

The movie’s point of view stems from neither Dalí nor Gala, though — we see the one-of-a-kind genius through the eyes of James, a Dalí acolyte-sycophant then fighting to un-immerse himself from the artist’s destructive lifestyle filled with ostentatious fame, bizarre parties, and erotica.

Canadian director Mary Harron starts Dalíland with an astute bit of character self-assassination, a clip of Dalí’s hysterically funny appearance on the TV game show What’s My Line? in which he answers every question with a “yes” even if it’s totally inappropriate and must be corrected by emcee John Daly. When Dalí answers affirmatively about being a leading man, panelist-columnist Dorothy Kilgallen smoothly chastises him with the comment, “He’s a misleading man.”

That stands as a touch of foreshadowing to a deep dive into the artist’s darker aspects — to wit, the scene quickly shifts to a party in which Dalí focuses on Amanda Lear, a trans, and Alice Cooper, a friend.

Harron may have been a superb choice for the biopic. Her work-life began as a punk music journalist, immediately integrating oddball characters into her sphere of influence. In 1996, her first feature film, I Shot Andy Warhol, depicted a wannabe assassin as a feminist hero. She also directed The Notorious Bettie Page, about the famous nude pinup subject.

Kingsley, of course, won a best actor Oscar for his title role in 1982’s Gandhi.

In Dalíland, the artist doesn’t come off as the least bit likeable. Rather, he’s annoyingly egocentric (“I do not compare myself to God,” he pontificates. “Dalí is almost God”) and self-indulgent (he rents space at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City at $20,000 a month).

And he doesn’t blink at the knowledge that endless prints of his works are criminally being peddled at extraordinary prices as lithographs.

The main weakness of the low-budget, 1 hour, 43-minute film is the absence of the artist’s paintings (the producers clearly couldn’t afford reproduction rights). A second flaw is an overall lack of tension. And although the costumes are effective (especially Dali’s long, ornate dressing gowns and vests that look as if they’d been replicated from an 18th century operetta), and despite a hand-held camera frantically scooting here and there during frenzied party scenes, Kingsley’s man-of-many-faces performance is so melodramatic everything else fades into near-nothingness.

Still, considering the impossibility of accurately depicting a mad, alluring, repulsive womanizer in a story that’s not unlike watching a train about to derail, screenplay writer John C. Walsh, director Harron, and Kingsley do admirably well.

A pair of flashbacks, intended to lay the groundwork for the artist’s later behavior patterns, ironically feature Ezra Miller, who identifies as non-binary and who’s faced a series of disorderly conduct and assault charges and been treated for “complex mental health issues.”

Chris Briney as James, a gallery assistant, dresses Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dali in the film “Daliland.” Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

But perhaps the strongest image in the Magnolia Pictures-distributed film — which is set in Spain and New York during the mid-1970s — is when Dalí talks of a mountain peak that “appears in my painting The Great Masturbator” and remembers that “this is where [Gala] asked me to kill her, you know.”

A second memorable cinematic moment shows the artist asking James to bring him “many beautiful asses,” followed by his having the girls dip their rumps into paint and press them onto paper so he can instantly convert the images into saleable “art.”

Everything in Dali’s mind, in fact, becomes art — even his dyed, waxed handlebar mustache, which is treated as if it’s a priceless sculpture.

My own favorite moment is the chunk of a flashback where Dali wildly waves his cane as if conducting a distorted symphony of life, seemingly a summation of what his essence really is.

A personal note: Because I greatly admired Dali’s imagination and groundbreaking work when I was young, I paid $1,200 for an early lithograph — despite my being unsure at the time that lithos were truly art, and despite my being only 93.7 percent certain that the “certificate of authenticity” was actually authentic. Dalíland not only brought back a vision of that transaction but of the artist’s most famous work, The Persistence of Memory, and my own memory-regret that my ex-wife ended up with the extremely valuable litho.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

TitleDaliland
Directed byMary Harron
Screenplay byJohn Walsh
Distributing CompanyMagnolia
Production DateOpens June 9th
Runtime1 hr 56 min
ShowingLandmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco;
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College Ave, Berkeley;
Century Regency, 280 Smith Ranch Road, San Rafael.
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4/5
Performance4.5/5
Script3.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!

 

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PICK! ASR Film & Video ~~ Documentary About Primo Writer & Editor Toiling in Tandem is Powerful

By Woody Weingarten

Robert Caro is a powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. He’s 87.

Robert Gottlieb is a powerful book editor. He’s 91.

Put ‘em together and they’ll fight with fervor over semi-colons (and, of course, much larger issues.)

Put ‘em together and they’ll work in tandem for half a century and produce Caro’s multi-book bio about Lyndon B. Johnson’s power (and desperation.)

Biographer Robert Caro (left) and editor Robert Gottlieb have become friends after squabbling over Caro’s books for 50 years. Photo by Claudia Raschke, courtesy Wild Surmise Productions, LLC, and Sony Pictures

Now the two bespectacled Bobs are featured in a new Sony Pictures documentary, Turn Every Page, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie. It, too, is powerful. The film starts with a close-up of the dual titans of literature poring over a manuscript; it ends with them walking down hallways in search of “real” pencils, the yellow kind with erasers at their ends.

…if you’re…interested in literature, books, writing, or editing, this doc must be on your “must see” list…

In between, Gottlieb says he knew after reading merely 15 pages of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, the first Caro book he edited, that the bio was “going to be a masterpiece.” He notes, too, that Caro “is now working on Volume 5 of the three-volume biography” of Johnson. Caro, who takes about seven years to research and write a book, says he doesn’t “think anything was harder” than his first LBJ volume, and recalls the original million words of the Moses bio and the 350,000-word cuts necessary for the spine to carry the book’s weight.

Both admit to long-standing difficulty with the other. Says Gottlieb, “It’s not that I was trying to tear his bleeding heart out of his chest.”

The years have softened them, though. And although they don’t hang like buddies, the documentary tells of multiple Caro and Gottlieb intersections: Both are New York City Jews. Both had troubled childhoods. Both are workaholics.

And both clearly want to get everything right (and complete.)

Both are also quirky.

Caro, who was an investigative reporter for Newsweek before he turned to writing books, takes the carbon copies from his Smith Corona electric typewriter and squeezes them into a small space over his refrigerator; Gottlieb, who was editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker, collects what he calls “love objects,” hundreds of plastic women’s pocketbooks.

Caro (left) and Gottlieb promote Caro’s first book. Photo by Martha Kaplan, courtesy Wild Surmise Productions, LLC, and Sony Pictures

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb isn’t, however, just talking heads of the two. It features, in addition to several clips of LBJ (emphasizing civil rights and “equal opportunity”), a slightly bedraggled Colin Farrell reading from a Caro book; an interview with Bill Clinton; and lots of flashing covers of books Gottlieb edited (Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 as well as volumes by Clinton, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Nora Ephron, and John le Carré.)

Though she emphasizes the literary collaboration, Lizzie also focuses on the personal. Her father, for example, talks about his mom making him “stand outside for an hour every day” just to get some air, because he preferred staying inside buried in books; Caro opens up about walking along the street, finding every other person holding some sort of device, and feeling “out of touch” with modern life.

Caro’s series portrays LBJ’s duality — the visionary reformer and the conniving opportunist (who was elected to the U.S. Senate by fewer than 90 votes “cast a week after the election”.) Using the technique of a novelist, he humanized him. And showed how power affects the powerless.

Absent from the documentary are the pair’s working conversations; Caro insisted the sound be turned off because “it’s kind of a private thing.”

Lizzie Gottlieb and Robert Caro enjoy the outdoors together. Photo by Mott Hupfel, courtesy Wild Surmise Productions, LLC, and Sony Pictures

Lizzie says the two are “in a tortoise-like race against time to finish their life’s work.” Gottlieb says he feels bad about being old because it means you’re heading “faster and faster toward not being at all.”

Before the doc ends, Gottlieb praises his friend for being “a word painter — he paints with words.”

There are numerous take-aways from Turn Every Page, many more than Caro likes semi-colons, Gottlieb doesn’t. So, if you’re the least bit interested in literature, books, writing, or editing, this doc must be on your “must see” list.

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ASR Senior Contributor Woody Weingarten has decades of experience writing arts and entertainment reviews and features. A member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle,  he is the  author of three books, The Roving I; Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates; and Rollercoaster: How a Man Can Survive His Partner’s Breast Cancer. Contact: voodee@sbcglobal.net or https://woodyweingarten.com or http://www.vitalitypress.com/

 

TitleTurn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed byLizzie Gottlieb
Producing CompanySony Pictures Classics
Release DateDec 2022
Runtime1 hr 50 min
ShowingLark Theater in Larkspur
Reviewer ScoreMax in each category is 5/5
Overall4.5/5
Production Vakues4.5/5
Aisle Seat Review PICK?YES!