The Weekly Gravy #70

Licorice Pizza (2021) – ****

In a way, this film is a cousin of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, a portrait of the lives and follies of show people, a series of mostly comic episodes set in a nostalgic vision of the semi-recent past (in this case, 1973), populated by a mix of real people, thinly disguised riffs on them, and our wholly invented protagonists. This is by far the lighter, gentler film, with almost none of the violence and none of the death of Tarantino’s own sprawling vision. And for me, it might be the more satisfying, more cohesive film, because it’s held together by a relationship of abiding sweetness and humanity.

That relationship is between 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman). Alana is an aspiring actress trapped in a cycle of unrewarding jobs, while Gary is winding down his career as a child actor in favor of entrepreneurship – he manages a PR firm, later sells waterbeds, and still later opens a pinball arcade. Gary is besotted by Alana within seconds of meeting her, and despite her own doubts, she’s soon drawn into his world – but even though they aren’t officially a couple (for obvious reasons), they can’t help feeling incredibly jealous of each other’s hook-ups, and fate keeps drawing them back together. It ends happily, though whether that happiness can last is anyone’s guess.

On one level, Licorice Pizza is a rather fascinating study of values. Nowadays, the age gap between Alana and Gary would be a deal-breaker, but in the 70s…well, this was the decade that gave us Manhattan, after all. On the other hand, nowadays, Joel Wachs (a real person, here played by Benny Safdie) can be open about his gayness, but at the time, he had to keep it strictly under wraps, despite the pain it causes his lover (Joseph Cross). And then there’s the absurdly offensive behavior of restaurateur Jerry Frick (John Michael Higgins), speaking broken English to his Japanese wives because he doesn’t really know Japanese. You can simply laugh at what a horrible blowhard he’s being. Or you can take note of how Mioko’s (Yumi Mizui) face falls when she hears the phrase “doll waitresses.”

On another level, it’s a delightful portrait of a time and place and the characters who populate it. Bradley Cooper nearly steals the film with a few scenes as Jon Peters, the infamously temperamental hairdresser-turned-producer, splitting hairs over the pronunciation of “Streisand,” threatening to set a gas station on fire, and hitting on every woman in sight. Tom Waits has a hilarious bit as a drunken director who drags a restaurant full of people to watch him stage-manage a ridiculous stunt on a nearby golf course. Harriet Sansom Harris, who had a brilliant small role in Phantom Thread, has a memorable cameo as an over-the-top talent agent. And so on.

But the heart of the film is Alana and Gary, and despite their very human shortcomings – their jealousies, their mercenary streaks, Alana’s temper, Gary’s arrogance – we want them to be happy. Especially Alana, struggling to find her path in life, bristling at the expectations and judgment of her family (played by Haim’s real family – her father Moti is especially funny), finding disappointment in the human frailties of her idols and, we hope, finding happiness in the person she’s never put upon a pedestal.

As you would expect from Anderson, the acting is top-notch across the board. Haim is especially wonderful, convincing both as the relatively young woman, still with stars in her eyes, still looking for something to believe in, and as the mature, self-possessed young woman who can drive a moving truck using only gravity (one of the film’s very best scenes) and understand who she should run to once her illusions are dashed. She can’t help but overshadow Hoffman, but he’s also quite good, showing us how Gary is at once a precocious businessman and very much a teenage boy.

As is also the case with a lot of Anderson’s work, he stuffs so much into the story that some of it can’t pay off properly, and one may be frustrated, for example, with how we never really understand why Gary was arrested and promptly released, or how Gary’s mother (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) appears only sporadically, seeming to have little actual role in her son’s life. And while Sean Penn gives an effective turn as an aging star who seems unable to separate his persona and his self, the decision to name him “Jack Holden” (instead of just making him William Holden) is more distracting than giving him a wholly invented name would’ve been,

But these are forgivable quibbles in a film that provides so much enjoyment, that gives us characters we can care about, situations to make us laugh and move us, not to tears, but to smiles. Anderson’s last few films have been moving gradually in the direction of happy endings for their protagonists, with The Master giving us poignant loneliness, Inherent Vice giving us pure ambiguity, and Phantom Thread giving us a couple happily united in a profoundly twisted way. We don’t know what the future holds for Alana and Gary. We only know how happy they are in those final moments. And in the movies, that’s all we need.

Score: 90

Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story/Rex: Kyoryu Monogatari/REX 恐竜 物語 (1993) – ***

It takes just three minutes for Rex to bring the lost continent of Mu into the story, and not much longer to bring in Ainu folk magic, a crystal skull, an absentee mother, a snarky grandmother, and a viable dinosaur egg, which of course hatches to give us Rex, the adorably mischievous little dinosaur who’s forced into doing commercials to pay for his upkeep before you can say “Carlo Rambaldi.” Rambaldi, of course, was the animatronics maestro who created E.T. and created Rex, who’s hardly as impressive (you can tell Rex was made on a limited budget), but convincing enough for the sweet little movie he’s in.

Chie (Yumi Adachi) is the young girl who becomes Rex’s adoptive mother, partly to give him the attention her own mother, Naomi (Shinobu Ôtake) never has; Naomi is a paleontologist, like Chie’s father Akira (Tsunehiko Watase), and she re-enters the picture to study Rex, but struggles to connect to her own daughter. It’s hard not to see this is a criticism of working mothers, not helped by the comments made by Naomi’s mother Sanae (Mitsuko Kusabue), or an odd scene, oddly placed after the end credits, in which Naomi tries to fulfill Chie’s vision of her return, right down to a lavender outfit which suits her ill.

The target audience (children) may or may not pick up on this, not when they’re busy watching a girl their age playing with a dinosaur, a golden retriever, and a horse, or outsmarting (with the help of a friend) a bunch of absurdly obvious villains, dressed in matching black coats, with black hats and sunglasses to match. They also may or may not pick up on the absurd amount of product placement, including but not limited to Coke and KFC.

Oh, and did I mention this is a Christmas movie? Well, the climax of the film takes place at Christmas, and we get plenty of holiday-related antics and music before Rex must, with the help of the Ainu shaman Mr. Shinoda (Fujio Toneda), return to the lost world where his biological mother may yet live, even though the theory has been put forth that the extinction of the dinosaurs was rooted in bad parenting, about as reasonable a theory as you could expect from such a film.

If this seems like a bit of a rambling review, it is, but it’s the kind of film where it’s easier to list all the wacky elements than try to review it as a serious work of art. That said, it’s really quite enjoyable, especially if you grew up with kids’ movies of the late 80s and 90s, as I did; it fits very much into their style, which may seem flat to some (the cinematography is nothing special), but oddly comforting to others – like me. And it has a very solid young lead in Adachi, who’s remained a prolific actress to this day.

It’s not a great movie by any means. The story is pretty predictable, the acting is mostly unremarkable, the overt comic relief isn’t very funny, and the pace can be poky. But as a light-hearted fantasy for children, or as a nostalgia trip for 90s kids (I’d have loved this if I had grown up with it), it’s more than satisfactory.

Score: 74

Robot Monster (1953) – Dreck

For so pathetically bad a film, Robot Monster comes surprisingly close to being passable. If that seems a tangled-up sentence, it’s a fitting way to describe a film with the immortal line:

I cannot – yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do “must” and “cannot” meet? Yet I must – but I cannot!

Oh, and this is all a dream, emanating from the subconscious of concussion-stricken Johnny (Gregory Moffett), Alice’s younger brother, a boy with comic books on the brain…at least until the final shot of the film suggests that the Great One may, in fact, be coming for humanity yet. The image of him menacingly approaching the camera is repeated three times, presumably for reasons beyond the comprehension of my hu-man brain.

I would say the rampant silliness of the film was intentional, given that it’s explicitly a dream, but unlike The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, released the same year, there’s little to differentiate the dream from reality. After all, you’ve got the Professor (John Mylong) and his assistant Roy (George Nader) examining cave paintings in Bronson Canyon, that locale so beloved of low-budget filmmakers, who seem totally unfazed when Johnny and his younger sister Carla (Pamela Paulson) wander into the picture whilst playing. And at the end, after Johnny is found with a rather bad bruise on his head and no one suggests he go to the hospital – and moreover, his mother (Selena Royale) invites the Professor and Roy, two complete strangers, to dinner – it’s hard to say we’re in anything like the real world, Ro-Men or not.

It’s worth establishing the context for this impassioned declamation. A Ro-Man, played by George Barrows in a (very husky) gorilla suit topped with a Halloween-store space helmet and a set of antennae, has been ordered by his boss, the Great One (also Barrows, also in this outfit) to kill Alice (Claudia Barrett), the hu-man woman for whom the Ro-Man has developed…feelings.

And yet, for all the bad choices on display, the inept costuming, the baffling use of stock footage (mostly from One Million B.C.), and the glut of technobabble, there’s a shred of promise here. I like a good story of post-apocalyptic survival, and the bulk of the film ostensibly takes place in a world where only our six human protagonists survive after the Ro-Men wipe out our species with a death ray. Scenes like the impromptu wedding between Roy and Alice, or their love scene played out in silent gestures (if they speak, the Ro-Men will be able to find them), hint at what might have been an effectively poignant story of, as Rihanna would put it, love in a hopeless place.

The acting isn’t bad for a film that cost so little and is so absurd, and Brown’s voicing of the Ro-Men has some decent verve; you can almost believe in his dilemma, ridiculous though it may be that he would feel lust for a hu-man. The score, by Elmer Bernstein (just two years away from his first Oscar nomination, for The Man with the Golden Arm), isn’t his best work by any means, but for a film of the budget and genre, it’s more than adequate.

But then the Ro-Man lumbers across the screen in his ridiculous costume, fiddles with his “Billion Bubble Machine” (courtesy of N.A. Fisher Chemical Products Inc.!), and yammers about the “calcinator death ray.” Or we’re treated to lines like “You look like a pooped-out pinwheel,” courtesy of screenwriter Wyott Ordung. Or we’re treated to the flat staging of director Phil Tucker and the confounding attempts to compensate for the non-existent budget by using stock footage that hardly seems to fit. (Even Ed Wood realized his vision more completely.) And we’re reminded as to why this is a long-established member of the bad-movie canon.

Score: 11

Light Sleeper (1992) – ****

No doubt but that Paul Schrader has his preferred themes and motifs. A man, a loner to a greater or lesser degree, who lives an ascetic lifestyle and keeps a diary. An employer who more or less represents “normality,” who acts as a counterbalance to the protagonist. A tragic death the protagonist seeks to avenge by holding a powerful man, whom the law cannot or will not touch, accountable. First Reformed and The Card Counter make ample use of these. So, many years earlier, does Light Sleeper, providing its own variations on these themes, and if it’s less daring and timely than the former, it’s more cohesive and ultimately more satisfying than the latter.

Here, the protagonist is John LeTour (Willem Dafoe), a New York City drug dealer who’s worked for Ann (Susan Sarandon) for many years. Ann has decided to shut down her operation and turn her attention to cosmetics, which leaves John in considerable doubt as to his future. A chance sighting of his ex-lover Marianne Jost (Dana Delany) sparks a desire in John to recapture what they once had, or at least what he believes they had amidst the chaos of their mutual addiction (they’re both clean and sober when the film begins). Marianne, who’s dealing with the impending death of her mother, is extremely reluctant to let him back into her life.

The death of a young woman, found with a large amount of cocaine on her, has the police breathing down dealers’ necks, as Guidone (Robert Cicchini) starts breathing down John’s, and between troublesome clients like Eddie (Paul Jabara) and untouchably connected clients like Tis Brüg (Victor Garber), it’s obvious that trouble is coming. But in what form, and how John responds to it, you’ll just have to find out. That’s the real meat of the film anyway – not what happens, but how it happens.

Schrader is more concerned with character and atmosphere, anyway, and infuses the film with his brand of cynical humanism. There’s no question John lives in a difficult and dangerous world, one in which a sanitation workers’ strike causes trash to pile up on the streets, a metaphor for the stresses and anxieties mounting upon John’s psyche. And there’s no question that in dealing drugs, he’s helping some of his clients ruin their lives – the film doesn’t glamorize or sugarcoat the business. But it also shows how John, Ann, and Robert (David Clennon) are, for all practical purposes, family, as concerned with what to order for dinner as with dealing drugs.

And the relationship between John and Marianne offers a poignant balance between his rose-tinted memories, her well-founded hesitations, and the attraction which still exists between them. One of the key scenes in the film has them embracing, on the verge of making love, and observing how doing so completely sober is an unusual experience for them. It’s funny, erotic, and tender all at once, undermined only slightly by some dialogue which reminds you that a man wrote the script. If, as with The Card Counter, the resolution to the story is less satisfying than the build-up, it still works reasonably well, while the final scene offers poignancy and hopefulness in its own right.

The acting is unsurprisingly strong, with Dafoe doing fine work in his vulnerable vein (with a few key fiery moments), Sarandon having a great deal of fun running her enterprise like an MLM (she has a great moment where she reminisces about the good old days before crack), and Delany being suitably tragic and enigmatic in a faintly underwritten role. Clennon and Garber give effective turns as the snarky Robert and sleazy Tis respectively, and there are notable early roles for Sam Rockwell as an associate and David Spade as the “Theological Cokehead” (a touch of pure Schrader).

And it’s quite well made, with solid direction by Schrader, handsome, moody cinematography by Edward Lachman, and especially good art direction which captures the seaminess touching every level of early 90s NYC, from the dive bars where you can buy black-market guns to the penthouses where connections protect you from the consequences of your crimes. But best of all is the score by Michael Been, especially the original song “World on Fire,” which captures our attention during the opening credits and is effectively reprised near the end. The song, like the film as a whole, is all too little appreciated, then and now.

Score: 89

The Thin Man (1934) – ****

On the other hand, The Thin Man has been quite properly appreciated since it first appeared, being a big hit that led to five sequels and earning four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Actor for William Powell – though Myrna Loy was passed over for Best Actress, a definite oversight. It ended up losing them all to It Happened One Night, and I actually agree with the Academy; I certainly think Frank Capra’s direction is more dynamic than W.S. Van Dyke’s and I think the overall film holds together just a bit better. But that’s not to take away from the incredible charm and wit of The Thin Man, which might actually be the better-written film. It’s certainly as quotable as all get out.

The plot has to do with a missing inventor, Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis), the actual “thin man” of the title. Wynant is planning to leave New York for a few weeks – and refuses to tell anyone where he’s going – and before he leaves, he argues with his secretary, Julia Wolf (Natalie Moorhead) over bonds she stole from his office safe, which he intended to give to his daughter Dorothy (Maureen O’Sullivan) on the occasion of her wedding to Tommy (Henry Wadsworth). After confronting Julia, Wynant walks off into the night…and is never seen again.

A concerned Dorothy encounters an old friend, Nick Charles (Powell), once a renowned sleuth, now a cheerful lush enjoying marriage to wealthy Nora (Loy), who’d really like to see her husband trot out his old detecting skills. Likewise, Dorothy wants his help finding her father, and a growing number of people, from the NYPD’s Lt. Guild (Nat Pendleton) to Julia’s associate Joe Morelli (Edward Brophy) assume that Nick is on the case. He tries to dissuade them all, but ends up running circles around Guild and solving the case at a dinner party where all the suspects – the living ones, at least – are gathered.

As a mystery, it’s slight, but as a showcase for banter, from the playful banter of Nick and Nora to the acrid back-and-forth of the seedier characters, it’s a delight. Dashiell Hammett’s source novel was already quite humorous, but the adaptation by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich packs it to the gills with memorable lines:

• “You asleep?” “Yes.” “Good. I want to talk to you.”
• “Hey, would you mind putting that gun away? My wife doesn’t care, but I’m a very timid fellow.”
• “Well, I do believe the little woman cares.” “I don’t care! It’s just that I’m used to you, is all.”
• “Well, can’t you tell us anything about the case?” “Yes. It’s putting me way behind in my drinking.”
• “You see, my father was a sexagenarian.” “He was?” “Yes, he admitted it.”
• “Ever heard of the Sullivan Act?” “Oh, that’s all right. We’re married.”
• And of course: “I’m a hero. I was shot twice in the Tribune.” “I read where you were shot five times in the tabloids.” “It’s not true. He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”

As good as the script, it’s the cast that makes it sing. It’s hard to say what Powell does better; deliver his one-liners or react to Loy’s one-liners. Whatever the case, he’s having a ball and we join right in the fun every step of the way. And Loy, with her blasé snark, garnished with moments of naive sweetness, matches him beautifully. There’s a reason they’re one of the most beloved married couples in American cinema.

But they’re well supported by Pendelton as the oafish Guild, O’Sullivan as poor, sweet Dorothy, Minna Gombell as her scheming mother Mimi, William Henry as her blithely ghoulish brother Gilbert (“I have a mother fixation, but it’s slight”), Cesar Romero as her sleazy lay-about of a stepfather, Harold Huber (who was probably the best part of The Gay Desperado) as Nunheim, and that legendary canine Skippy as the adorably timid Asta, to whom the film gives the last word.

As a piece of filmmaking, it’s crisply edited and nicely shot, but it’s not greatly above average for a studio film of the era. It’s the writing and the acting that make it a classic, and they most assuredly do. If you want to introduce someone to the delights of Old Hollywood, you could hardly do better than put this on and let the good times roll. You may serve the fish.

Score: 90

Wife of a Spy/Supai no tsuma/スパイの妻 (2020) – ***½

What commands our conscience? Where do our true loyalties lie? With the people we love? With the values we hold dear? Or with our country? Such are the questions posed by Wife of a Spy, though Yūsaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi) insists that he isn’t a spy, but a man acting according to his values. Those values certainly won’t let him turn a blind eye to the Japanese military’s experiments on human beings in Manchuria (Unit 731 is never named, but students of history will know it at once), but what about his wife Satoko (Yū Aoi)? When she first realizes he means to expose their country’s crimes in the hope of starting a war that will end these crimes decisively, she can’t bear the thought. But in time, she has a change of heart, and there’s an element of mystery as to what prompts it: her horror at Japan’s actions, or her love for Yūsaku.

That sense of mystery extends throughout the entire film, from the arrest of a British silk trader on the vague suspicions of the military police to the final moments, when what seems like a melancholy ending might be a happy one, carefully concealed. But the mysteries created by the script are supplemented by the mysteries created by the characters; Yūsaku and his nephew Fumio (Ryōta Bandō) are involved in the mysterious affair of a woman who turns up dead, and are extremely reluctant to tell Satoko anything, to her distress. And the tense atmosphere of 1940 Japan only adds to the sense of paranoia, as Satoko’s old friend Taiji Tsumori (Masahiro Higashide) becomes a zealous member of the military police. Who can be trusted, if anyone?

Knowing that the film was originally made for Japanese television, and certain gaps in the story, make me wonder if the two-hour version of Wife that was released internationally wasn’t cut down from a longer original. To be sure, that story is full of uncertainty and ambiguity – a key theme is how much Satoko has been kept in the dark about what’s really going on – but there are plot elements (the film Satoko and Fumio make, for example) that could’ve been better explained.

Still, it’s quite a solid story of conscience, paranoia, and devotion; the comparisons to Hitchcock seem odd, because director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) is less interested in tightening the screws of the plot than in depicting the effect of the story’s various turns on the characters. As such, much of the weight of the film rests on the performances, especially Aoi, who does an excellent job tracing Satoko’s journey from privileged naivete to sober awareness, and Takahishi, who balances a sense of ambiguity about his true motives with the painful knowledge that this ambiguity is necessary to protect the woman he loves.

It’s solidly crafted all around, though it wasn’t until the final act that I was truly impressed by Kurosawa’s direction, especially in a beautifully ironic scene where it’s clear what’s about to happen, but it’s still deeply satisfying to watch it play out. And a couple of scenes later, the themes of the film really hit us like a ton of bricks as we see the devastation of the war, the war Yūsaku needed to happen, and are reminded of how the country as a whole paid the price for the actions of the military and government. It’s a lesson worth remembering.

Score: 83

Red Rocket (2021) – ****

Throughout Red Rocket, you may wonder why it was decided to set the film in 2016, with that year’s infamous election in the background. And you may also wonder whether Mikey Davies, aka Mike Saber (Simon Rex) would be better off achieving his goals or losing everything – let alone whether everyone around him would be better off for it. But by the time the film reached its admittedly ambiguous end, I couldn’t help but think of how the 2016 election turned out. I couldn’t help but think that men like Mikey tend to land on their feet. And even if he’s down and out in the short term…well, he was pretty down and out when the film began, wasn’t he?

As the film begins, he’s returning to his hometown of Texas City, Texas, after many years working in the porn industry in Los Angeles. He talks his way back into the life of his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod), herself a former porn star, now living with her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss), and back into selling weed for Leondria (Judy Hill). He slowly rekindles his relationship with Lexi and starts hanging out with neighbor Lonnie (Ethan Darbone), but the biggest change in his life comes when he meets Raylee (Suzanna Son), a teenage employee at a local donut shop. He sees all kinds of potential in her – including a possible way back into his old industry.

As is typical for director/co-writer Sean Baker, the emphasis here is on the rhythms of daily life, with narrative progression being secondary to character and atmosphere, but despite the 130-minute running time, it hews closer to the sense of purpose which marked 2015′ Tangerine than the low-key ambling of 2017’s The Florida Project. Mikey’s constant scheming, motor-mouthed chatter, and nerve-wracking insistence on pushing his luck – he’s not as bad as Howard in Uncut Gems, but he’s close – keep the film moving briskly, helped by Baker’s graceful editing.

The film still makes ample time to take in the atmosphere of Texas City, from Lil’s rundown home to the looming refineries to the seedy strip club to the dying mall to the characterless donut shop (Drew Daniels’ cinematography is excellent), and all the characters therein. Baker prefers to use non-professionals, and gets convincing turns out of Elrod as the worn-down, desperate Lexi, Deiss as the feisty but comparably exhausted Lil, Darbone as the pathetic Lonnie (he has a bad habit of stealing valor), and Brittney Rodriguez as Leondria’s daughter June, who is profoundly unimpressed by Mikey’s swaggering.

But the film really belongs to Rex and Son, Rex for how well he conveys the sleazy charm, the pathological boasting, the endless figuring of angles, and the devastating self-absorption that make it so hard to believe any setback save death is permanent for Mikey, and Son for how she shows how simultaneously aware and naive Raylee – or Strawberry, as she’s nicknamed – really is, how much she knows about the miseries and hypocrisies of those around her, yet falls totally under Mikey’s spell. His triumph might mean her tragedy, and we’re left disturbingly uncertain of what the future will hold for them.

But we know what the future held for us, and we can just imagine what trouble Mikey might have gotten himself into in the interim. It’s a credit to Baker’s direction, the script he co-wrote with Chris Bergoch, and the performances that, rather than being repelled by all of this, it grips our attention all the way through, and makes us laugh a great deal along the way (it’s most definitely a comedy). If you know someone like Mikey, and there’s a decent chance you do, it’ll ring very true. If you don’t, well, you’d better hope seeing this film is the closest you ever come.

Score: 88