The Weekly Gravy #119

Mistletoe & Menorahs/A Merry Holiday (2019) – **

Since I’ve given up trying to watch my Hanukkah-request movies in the originally planned order, I’ve made a point of watching this particular pile of cinema in time for Christmas and the end of Hanukkah! I’ve done this because this film, as the title suggests, appeals to those who celebrate both holidays, though in practice, I think it only appeals to connoisseurs of Lifetime cheese, and a ripe wedge this silly little film is.

Christy Dickinson (Kelly Jakle) is a perky young woman who works at a toy company and loves Christmas. Absolutely loves it. When she’s invited to a client’s holiday party to pitch a new toy line to him, she’s delighted – until she learns it’s a Hanukkah party, and she doesn’t know squat about Hanukkah! But wait – her best friend at work, Samantha (Cory Lee) knows a guy, who happens to be her son’s history teacher, and Jewish! Enter Jonathan Silver (Jake Epstein), who’s got a problem of his own: he’s going to be hosting his girlfriend Heather (Kathryn Kohut) and her dad for Christmas, and he doesn’t know a thing about Christmas!

Obviously, Christy and Jonathan have a lot to teach one another, and they become good friends as she learns to make latkes and light the menorah while he learns how to decorate trees and enjoy fruitcake. And would you believe that her boyfriend Peter (Jon McLaren) cares more about making money and watching basketball than her family’s holiday plans? And that Heather doesn’t care about having kids when Jonathan really wants to be a dad? And that Christy and Jonathan will find themselves in need of each other in time for a happy ending?

So yes, it’s a formula plot, complete with a meet-cute, an all-knowing older relative in Jonathan’s grandmother Tovah (Theresa Tova), and a full complement of shenanigans and warm fuzzies. I’m not opposed to the formula, even if it’s not my cup of cider. But how the film uses it, and how it relates to my own experience as a Jew growing up in a heavily Christian culture, is where it really falls on its tuchus.

Having not grown up in a large city, I don’t know how easy it would be to live outside of the sphere of Christian influence, but I couldn’t buy for a second that Jonathan wouldn’t have picked up the basics of Christmas, simply by osmosis. If he was Hasidic, I could see it, but he’s very much living in mainstream society – just hearing the right Christmas songs (which are fucking everywhere) and seeing the right iconography around (like, say, a nativity scene) would at least give you the premise of the holiday, and you’d have to try not to pick up more than that along the way.

They even make a point of saying he’s never tried eggnog! How does that happen, unless you’re specifically avoiding it?

I can at least understand why Christy might not know much about Hanukkah, but she gets all flustered over trying to become an expert in it, and – it ain’t that complicated. The miracle of the lights, the process of lighting the menorah (or hanukiyah, if you want to be precise), the dreidel game, latkes and chocolate coins…that’s all you need to know to get through one party. Which she does, of course. Even recites the prayer for lighting the candles with the musical cadence I remember from services.

She becomes a big fan of latkes and sufganiyot (jelly donuts), and in one especially silly moment, Peter comes over and she offers him latkes. He gets all weirded out and suggests ordering Chinese food instead. They’re just potato pancakes! Do you like hash browns? Then you’ll like latkes! But she doesn’t even try to convince him, because that would mean acting like a human being rather than a romantic-comedy lead.

Which Jakle does play with the proper bubbly spirit, but she doesn’t have a great deal of chemistry with Epstein, who looks and acts a bit like Peter Sarsgaard, which is to say a bit too weary-souled for this trite picture. Lee does offer a little more life to her role, and Tova has a touch of that old-world charm, but the limitations of the material don’t allow them to do much more than keep things from going hopelessly flat. Max McGuire’s bland direction and Guy Yosub’s vapid script certainly don’t help much.

On a more personal note, the film irked me constantly by alternating B-roll of Chicago with scenes obviously shot elsewhere (a little research suggests most of the film was shot in Ottawa, Ontario). Now, growing up, I spent Thanksgivings in Chicago. I know what the city looks like in winter. I’ve been to the Christkindlmarket in Daley Plaza and the Bean in Millennium Park. I had a relative who lived at Water Tower Place. I’ve crossed the Chicago River plenty of times. Don’t try and convince me your silly little movie is set in Chicago when you shot it in friggin’ Canada.

And those latkes looked like shit. Fight me.

Score: 50

Rocktober: The Rundown (2003) – ***

On Christmas Eve, Nate and I opted to continue our trek through Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s filmography (with the aid of a drink or two), taking in this film which, despite genuinely solid reviews, managed to flop rather badly, not even clearing $50 million at the domestic box-office. To be sure, it suffered from a generic title and advertising campaign, had no brand recognition to build on, and was a blend of influences and styles that would’ve made it tricky to sell to unconvinced audiences. And, while it is enjoyable, it’s not really memorable enough that word-of-mouth would’ve overcome the other hurdles. It’s just a fun B-movie, made for A-movie money.

Beck (Johnson) is the henchman of gangster Billy Walker (William Lucking), and his skill at keeping a level head while facing numerous, frequently obnoxious opponents makes him perfect for his latest assignment: go to Brazil and retrieve Walker’s ne’er-do-well son Travis (Seann William Scott), who’s been hunting a solid gold artifact called O Gato do Diabo. Arriving in the town of El Dorado, Beck meets Cornelius Bernard Hatcher (Christopher Walken), who runs the local mine and effectively runs El Dorado itself, and Mariana (Rosario Dawson), a bartender who’s also involved in the local resistance movement against Hatcher’s exploitation.

Travis, who’s trying to woo Mariana (and get her uncle’s boat) claims to have found O Gato; Hatcher wants it because he believes anything found on “his” land belongs to him, and Mariana wants it because it could enrich her people and thus rid them of Hatcher. Beck just wants to get Travis on a plane to Los Angeles, but gets drawn into the quest for O Gato, the struggle to evade Hatcher and his men, and finally the struggle to save Mariana, who’s been captured; this last struggle will result in an explosive showdown, complete with one-liners and bagpipes.

A bit like if Guy Ritchie made an Indiana Jones film (the appearance of Ewen Bremner as an eccentric pilot reinforces the Ritchie connection), The Rundown is definitely a comedy thriller, starting with Beck’s face-off with a bunch of football players over Knappmiller’s (Stephen Bishop) gambling debts. He’s able to rattle off the dossiers of the various players, and we get ESPN-style rundowns of their stats, complete with game clips. But more relevant is his ultimatum to Knappmiller:

BECK: Knappmiller, you have two choices. Option A, you give me the ring. Option B, I make you give me the ring.

KNAPPMILLER: I’ll take B.

BECK: Wrong answer.

This little exchange is Beck’s trademark, and it’ll be repeated at least twice; each time, his opponents will underestimate him, and each time he’ll make them eat their words. Beck isn’t invincible – he takes a few blows fighting with Mariana’s comrades, most notably Manito (Ernie Reyes Jr.), and Mariana tricks him and Travis into eating konlabos, a fruit which causes one to hallucinate before lapsing into a paralytic stupor. But, being played by Johnson, we can rest assured that he will kick every ass that needs kicking.

This includes Travis, whose heart is basically in the right place but who can’t help but run his mouth constantly. If there’s a major fault with the film, it’s that Scott is a bit too good at being an annoying little shit; I think we’re meant to find him likable, or at least engaging, in spite of his obnoxiousness, and I never quite got there. The problem might be more with the script than Scott’s performance, but whatever the case, I found him mostly tiresome.

Johnson does pretty well, however, balancing Beck’s generally deadpan affect with choice moments of exasperation and fury. Hollywood has never quite known what to do with Dawson, and while she plays Mariana with the right mixture of sexy snark and righteous determination (and as far as I can tell does an acceptable job with the accent), the role could’ve been played by any capable ingenue. Walken is slightly underused (the script keeps him offstage too much of the time), but he’s quite fun when he is on screen; the scene where he tries to express his frustration using a Tooth Fairy analogy, only to realize that the men he’s speaking to have never heard of the Tooth Fairy, is a gem.

Director Peter Berg can stage a solid action scene, and Beck’s various brawls (especially his fight with Manito, who practices capoeira), his and Travis’ endless tumble down a hillside, and the explosive finale all work pretty well; less successful is the convoluted sequence in which O Gato is retrieved from its hiding place (a trap-laden cave). It’s solidly crafted in that early-2000s studio-picture way; it’s over-edited at times, but not overwhelmingly so.

It’s the script, by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt, that helps get the film to *** but keeps it from rising higher. It just doesn’t have the level of wit, the depth of character, or the narrative richness to rank among the great entertainments. But it’s a good one, a good step on Johnson’s path to true stardom, and a reminder that Berg didn’t always make movies with Mark friggin’ Wahlberg. He should try it again sometime.

Score: 69

Rock Score:

Babylon (2022) – ****

I figured I might not like Babylon, what with the very mixed reviews, my reservations about the trailer, and my ambivalence about Damien Chazelle as a writer. But just as I’m always fascinated by huge novels, I tend to be fascinated by huge films, films of prodigious scale, scope, and length – and Babylon, clocking in at 189 minutes, costing $80 million, and following a large cast of characters over a period of years in and around Hollywood, most certainly fits the bill.

As high as I rate Babylon, I’ll readily admit it’s a flawed, uneven, sometimes maddening work, one that wears its influences too brazenly upon its sleeve and, despite its length, could’ve gone a good deal farther in exploring certain characters and themes. Scene by scene, it’s a hugely generous film, overflowing with technical skill, fine performances, and engaging scenarios, but taken as a whole, it doesn’t always hang together, and the much-debated ending doesn’t quite land for me personally – but let us set the stage for it.

In 1926, Manuel “Manny” Torres (Diego Calva) manages the delivery of an elephant to a decadent Hollywood party; the elephant voids its bowels all over him and the camera, arguably setting the tone. The elephant is forgotten as we explore the party, where sex is had, drugs are taken, alcohol is consumed, and our protagonists are introduced. In addition to Manny, there’s Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), an aspiring actress who has yet to make a film or sign a contract, but insists she’s a star, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a matinee idol and party animal who goes through wives like cocktails, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), an ambitious jazz trumpeter, Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), the industry’s leading gossip columnist, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), intertitle writer by day, openly lesbian cabaret singer by night.

By the time dawn breaks, Nellie has secured a bit part in a film (after the original actress overdosed) and Manny has a job as Jack’s gofer. Manny has also fallen in love with Nellie, but the following day’s shooting – which, as this is still the silent era, means several productions are shooting simultaneously in an open field – offers little time for romance; Nellie impresses her director (Olivia Hamilton) and upstages her co-star (Samara Weaving), while Manny tries to deal with a crowd of strikers and secure a camera for Jack’s latest costume epic after all of them get smashed shooting a massive battle scene. But he gets the camera, and they get the shot, right as the sun goes down.

Nellie quickly rises to stardom and Manny begins his ascent to studio executive. Jack believes film must grow and develop as an art form, but when talking pictures come in, he finds himself more and more a relic of the past. Nellie, with her heavy New Jersey accent, has her own difficulties with sound – and her off-screen behavior, including an affair with Lady Fay, causes headaches for the studio; the moral guardians are beginning to assert themselves. (The film doesn’t encompass the establishment of the Hays Office, but it’s on the horizon.)

In time, our protagonists’ dreams will crumble before our eyes, and Manny, the last one standing, will have to leave the industry behind. But years later, he’ll return to Hollywood, just for a visit, and he’ll end up seeing the greatest film ever made on the transition to sound, weeping at his memories of long ago being the subject of a musical comedy, then having a strange vision encompassing the whole span of cinema from Muybridge to Avatar, kind of like Paul Atreides’ vision of the Fremen Jihad, after which his tears of sorrow turn to tears of joy. Roll credits.

I get what it’s going for, but no, the ending doesn’t do much for me, other than featuring a split-second clip from Ivan the Terrible Part II. Drawing so brazenly upon an undisputed classic is never a great idea in my book, and it adds nothing to this film’s greatness, nor do the other obvious allusions to Singin’ or the obvious borrowings from Boogie Nights, to say nothing of what else you might be reminded of: Fellini Satyricon? The Day of the Locust? The Wolf of Wall Street? Take your pick.

You might wonder what makes it great in the first place. Chazelle’s direction, for one, and the sheer enthusiasm for cinema which has shone through in all his films. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography, full of swooping crane shots, graceful long takes, and rich colors. Florencia Martin and Anthony Carlino’s magnificent sets and Mary Zophres’ lavish costumes, encompassing the opulent, the decadent, and the derelict alike. Justin Hurwitz’ thrilling jazz score, often relayed through Sidney’s trumpet. Tom Cross’ crisp editing, which keeps the film from dragging despite its enormous length.

And there’s the acting, from Robbie’s explosive portrayal of Nellie and Pitt’s balance of Jack’s boisterous facade and increasingly haunted soul to Calva’s subtler portrayal of Manny’s complex moral journey, Adepo’s deft depiction of Sidney’s arc (an example of less-is-more minimalism in this maximalist film), Smart’s snarky sympathy and Li’s poignant depiction of a woman whose identity is more than Hollywood can really accept (making the most of an underexplored character). And that’s before mentioning all the fine actors who do good work in their smaller roles: Weaving and Hamilton, Tobey Maguire as a creepy gangster, Eric Roberts as Nellie’s ne’er-do-well father, Katherine Waterston as one of Jack’s wives, and Flea as Manny’s first boss.

With all that, the film’s faults – Chazelle’s uneven dialogue, the trite premises of certain scenes, the presence of Jeff Garlin (who left The Goldbergs after misconduct allegations) as a studio executive with a troubling resemblance to Harvey Weinstein – are not enough to outweigh its strengths, at least in my view. I fully understand the criticisms leveled against it, and I can’t easily recommend it to those who aren’t willing to meet it halfway. But it’s the kind of film I’m inclined to appreciate – and I do.

Score: 88

After watching such a long film, I do believe it’s time for some more shorts.

• Trade Tattoo (1937) – Len fucking Lye, baby. Here, making another promotional film for the General Post Office, he combines animation, live-action, and rhythmic music to show how the postal service helps maintain the pace of British industry. The magnificently vivid colors, the pulsating samba music by Jack Ellitt, and Lye’s stunning command of his imagery, blending his delightful drawn-on-film animation with scenes of industry and labor which suggest Dziga Vertov on acid, make for an eye-filling five minutes. Score: 89 – ****
• The Birth of the Robot (1936) – Lye, having mastered 2-D animation, applied his skills to stop-motion with this monumentally bizarre outing. “When the world was turned by hand, and Venus made her lonely music mid the stars,” a twit in a convertible goes tooling around Egypt, gets caught in a sandstorm and dies, and Venus, turning music into oil, turns his skeleton into a robot. It turns out to be a commercial for Shell Oil, because “Modern Worlds need Modern Lubrication.” It’s not quite as dazzling as his best work, but it’s still pretty damned fun and plenty audacious, with charming figures and designs (reflecting Lye’s career as a kinetic sculptor) and Holst’s great The Planets on the soundtrack. Score: 87 – ****
• Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967) – Possibly the strangest Oz film ever made – possibly the strangest piece of Oz media ever created, and I’ve seen some weird stuff in my time. The first four and a half minutes depict, in cut-out animation, the Tin Woodman as he chops a tree into a chair and table, frolics with a frog, rides a bubble with Toto, heads toward the Emerald City, then encounters a being described in synopses as an “Asian spirit,” which sends him flying off on a kite. This leads to 10 minutes of kaleidoscopic footage, some recognizable as a young woman in a miniskirt dancing and an arrangement of porcelain noh masks, some pure hypnotic abstraction. The two sections don’t really mesh, but given the legendarily unfocused career of director Harry Smith, it’s not surprising. I frankly prefer the first section and recommend that as an intriguing re-imagining of Oz iconography (iconOzgraphy?), but the rest has its own trippy charm. Score: 74 – ***
• Pixillation (1970) – A juxtaposition of the organic and the digital by Lillian Schwartz. Images of what seem to be paint dropping into water and being pressed between glass alternate with digital patterns created by Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs, which pulsate and flicker to Gershon Kingsley’s electronic score. It’s quite mesmerizing, a bit overbearing (it came with a warning for those with photosensitive epilepsy), and a decided milestone in digital animation. Score: 85 – ***½
• The Substitute/Surogat (1961) – Dušan Vukotić, after his wonderful Piccolo, actually won the Oscar for this delightful short about a polygonal little man’s day at the beach. Everything he needs, from his car to his tent to the fish he catches to the buxom young woman he tries and fails to impress, can be inflated or deflated as needed. Full of visual imagination, risqué humor, and bouncy music (I love the little man’s constant scatting), it’s a colorful little treat that holds up quite well, right through to his final comeuppance. Score: 88 – ****

The Whale (2022) – ***

I had a friend in college, a fellow member of the student improv-comedy troupe. A funny guy, with a great zeal for performing and a quick, brash wit. A few years after college, however, he began having health issues which led to several hospitalizations, and finally to his death at just 28. I was shocked and saddened; I had hoped, for all that he had gone through, that would be able to pull through.

Some years after his death, I learned about another facet of his post-college life. He had always been heavy-set, but at some point, he began to make a point of gaining as much weight as possible, eating huge amounts at every meal and setting goals of hundreds of pounds more than he already weighed. He made no great secret, when and where he wrote about it, that he did so for pleasure’s sake. He said as much to people who challenged him online, disputing his motives, those of his family, and the morality of what he did.

Perhaps he truly did enjoy it. I don’t dispute that it was his life and his body, and if gaining weight for its own sake was what he truly wanted, it was no one’s place to tell him not to. But the way he continued to engage with those people despite professing indifference to their often-cruel comments makes me wonder how he truly felt about his choices, or the price he paid for them even before his untimely death.

The Whale is about a man eating himself to death, and after cagily hinting at the tragedies of his past which help to explain why, finally starts to spell things out, but still falls short of making us really understand him or his choices. Yes, we’re shown how he eats, how he struggles to move, how he resists going to the hospital, how he tries not to be seen by anyone except a chosen few. But there’s something missing from Samuel D. Hunter’s script (based on his play), and it’s also missing from Darren Aronofsky’s direction, and to a lesser degree from Brendan Fraser’s performance. It’s that spark of real connection that would take us from simply beholding this man to actually knowing him.

Something isn’t quite right from the start. Charlie (Fraser) is discovered masturbating to gay pornography, which causes him to suffer chest pains and anxiety, which leads him to start reading an essay on Moby-Dick to calm himself down, at which point Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary, happens to knock at the door and is summoned in to read to Charlie until he can collect himself. It all reeks of contrivance, with a splash of shock value for good measure, and it doesn’t improve when Charlie’s friend and unofficial nurse Liz (Hong Chau) arrives and, while tending to him, tries to get Thomas to leave, but Thomas instead waffles indecisively. None of it feels quite like real human behavior.

Nor does it improve when Charlie, realizing his time is running out (and refusing Liz’ pleas to go to the hospital), reaches out to his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), a standoffish teenager whose interactions with him likewise play out like written exchanges. Charlie, an English teacher who’s currently teaching online courses (with his webcam off) tries to help Ellie with her homework and urges her to write something just for him. The essay on Moby-Dick was hers. He claims it’s the best he’s ever read. I don’t know if Hunter expects us to agree. I don’t.

Nor do the odd relationship between Ellie and Thomas, the revelations about his own past and motives, the contentious relations between Charlie, Ellie, and his ex-wife/her mother Mary (Samantha Morton), the whole matter of Charlie’s money which suggests he or Hunter has never heard of trust funds, or the revelation of what connected Charlie and Liz to begin with feel like anything other than a writer’s contrivances. Elmore Leonard said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it,” and by that logic, The Whale needed another draft.

The actors certainly hold up their end of the bargain. I do think a lot of the praise for Fraser’s performance should really go to Adrien Morot’s ambitious prosthetic makeup, which reputedly weighed as much as 300 pounds. That’s not to say Fraser doesn’t give a very good performance when the material actually gives him the opportunity – he conveys Charlie’s desperation and self-deprecation especially well – but like DiCaprio in The Revenant, for much of the film he’s simply on screen in physically demanding circumstances, more a camera subject than a real character. Compare what Daniel Day-Lewis achieved in My Left Foot with greater physical (and vocal) constraints – and without prosthetics.

Sink, despite having to play quite a few eyeroll-inducing beats (Hunter omits few troubled-teen tropes) finds real fire and humanity in Ellie’s rebellious resentments, just as Chau communicates Liz’ complex emotions toward Charlie – she loves him as much as she resents him – and her distaste for Thomas with total conviction. Speaking of which, Simpkins plays his own dubiously written character with sincerity, even as Hunter bungles what could’ve been a powerful interrogation of misguided piety, making him too easy a target for Charlie’s lack of belief. Morton has an even greater challenge to overcome (Mary is almost comically choleric) and less room to do it in, but she’s certainly forceful.

What isn’t is Aronofsky’s oddly muted direction, which never brings the material to actual life nor embraces the theatricality of Hunter’s script. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is solid and Rob Simonsen’s score, while somewhat overbearing in its gloom, is in of itself well written. But neither those aspects, nor the fine acting, can overcome the fundamental falsity of the writing. I may not fully understand what made my late friend tick, but he was a real and complex human being. Charlie, and moreover his creator, have no such excuse.

Score: 72