The Muppets Christmas Carol

Ebenezer Scrooge does not care for the so-called "surplus population". He's actually quite clear about it. In Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge is petitioned by two do-gooders trying to help the poor, he barks at them that "if [the poor] would rather die [than go to poor houses] they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population!" That famous line is uttered verbatim by this version of Scrooge played by Michael Caine in the 1992 musical, The Muppets Christmas Carol. It shouldn't be that surprising; the same line is often kept in high school productions of the famous story, as well, like the school play featured in a fascinating episode of Planet Money two years ago that details Dickens using his cruel character to represent the views of economist Thomas Robert Malthus, whom Dickens found to promote inhumane, misanthropic economic ideas at a time when so many were suffering. But it surprised and impressed the adult me that The Jim Henson Productions decided to keep such a line in their adaption.

The kid version of me always liked The Muppets Christmas Carol, the first Muppets movie without founder Jim Henson (whom, along with puppeteer Richard Hunt, the film is dedicated to) and the first to be distributed by Disney. Despite its use of the famous line described above, this is a non-restrictive adaption of this famous story because, well, most of the characters are played by Muppets. Kermit the Frog (Steve Whitmire) is Bob Cratchit, and predictably his wife is played by Miss Piggy (Frank Oz, who also served as executive producer of this film and directed Caine four years prior in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). Other than that, this adaption largely follows Dickens' story, which is important. Children, the target audience of the film (and perhaps one day the novella), may grow up to be considerably less mean than Scrooge, but that may be because famous, universal stories like these are so didactic. Toning down everything by having Scrooge be a little nicer and having everything be perfectly cheery would have been a mistake.

It seems unnecessary to detail the story and plot of this movie. Practically everybody knows about Dickens' famous tale, how a miserly grinch named Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three spirits (the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Future) to warn him that his cruel ways shall have consequences. Surely, every viewer can envy Scrooge for such a gift to see not only the past and future but also what people are truly saying behind their backs in the present. Such tactics are necessary, for Scrooge, a ruthless banker who underpays his workers, has such a negative effect on everything. Things seem to get quite dark and cold as soon as Scrooge, or "Mr. Humbug", as the Muppets sing, walks hurriedly to his office. 

Scenes can get pretty spooky at times in Scrooge's journey to understand his terrible ways, especially when the fire extinguishes and the ghosts appear and haunt Scrooge in his own home. In The Muppets Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Jacob Marley is now the ghosts of Jacob and Robert Marley, played by Statler and Waldorf (performed by Jerry Nelson and Dave Goelz, respectively). The creepy tone doesn't stop when they exit, however. The Ghost of Christmas Past (a ghastly animated doll voiced by Jessica Fox) and the reaper-like Ghost of Christmas Future (puppeteered by Robert Tygner and performed in-suit by Don Austen) are also unearthly.  

The film, though, is definitely a comedy, one that's as humorous as the Muppets can make it. The gags and pratfalls (things like Rizzo the Rat falling into a bucket of frozen water or a Muppet cat crashing into a suddenly closed door) will likely still get quite a few laughs from children, but adults will at least appreciate the spoken humor. Screenwriter and longtime Muppets collaborator Jerry Juhl's script employs that famous Muppets wit. For example, when Scrooge is asked for money to help the poor, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew (Goelz, who also is Gonzo the Great, our narrator) asks how much they can put Scrooge down for. "Nothing," says Scrooge, to which Dr. Honeydew immediately asks, "You wish to remain anonymous?" 

Additionally, the production design by Val Strazovec and art decoration by Dennis Bosher and Alan Cassie are exemplary. (It's also clever. Look closely as Caine sings "Thankful Heart" in town and you'll see a store called Micklewhite's. Michael Caine's real name is Maurice Micklewhite.) Other production elements that deserve praise are Miles Goodman's score and the songs by Paul Williams, especially "Scrooge", "Thankful Heart", "When Loves is Found", and "It Feels Like Christmas", sung wonderfully by Nelson as the Ghost of Christmas Present. One song that was controversially omitted from the theatrical version was "When Love Is Gone", sung by Scrooge and his fiancé, Belle (Meredith Braun) in the scene from his past. Disney is the one who has been blamed for that, apparently believing that the song wouldn't appeal to young children. However, the lost piece of film was finally found earlier this month.   

Caine's singing is so-so; he's able to carry a tune but sometimes is a bit flat. It doesn't matter. This isn't Abba or Les Misérables. He's singing with Muppets, so he's allowed to have imperfect pitch and range. Besides his singing, his acting is terrific. Caine is completely believable as Scrooge before and after his transformation and enlightenment, able to depict Scrooge's cruelty, curiosity, and compassion with ease. The sharpness in which he delivers the lines is also that of a master in his field. When Kermit diplomatically reminds Scrooge that the latter wants eviction notices to be sent out on Christmas, Scrooge replies, "Very well. You may gift-wrap them." The acidity in his delivery is remarkable. Caine, delightfully, likes the movie as much as you do, telling interviewer Lauren Larson that he still watches it all the time with his younger family members. He took the work seriously, too, claiming at the time that he approached the project as if he were working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It doesn't matter if he's with Kermit and Miss Piggy; he appears as if he's very devoted to his craft while also having a ball.   

As will most people watching this film. It may not be the most rambunctious Muppets production, but it works. For many, it's actually the best adaption of the famous story. Children should see it (preferably with the recently found footage). They'll laugh, they'll be frightened from time to time, and they'll at least learn that people are people; sometimes they struggle, but they should never be written off as "surplus". 

Dedicated to Mary, my mother, a fan of this movie.

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The Prom

The new musical The Prom is kind of like the Pete Buttigieg of musicals, which is too harsh to Buttigieg, whom I generally like (and preferred over the eventual nominee), but I get why a lot of people don't care for him. I'm not the first one who has thought of similarities between Buttigeg and The Prom; Zachary Stewart wrote about the resemblance of the two last year, but Stewart and I seem to have come to different conclusions. At first I thought Stewart's article was meant to be an insult—both Buttigieg and The Prom are hardworking yet bland and try to be really appreciated. Ultimately, however, they're gay stories presented mainly for straight, centrist audiences.

In fact, centrism is one of the major flaws of this film. The Prom, directed by Ryan Murphy and written for the screen by Chad Beguelin and Bob Martin (who wrote the show with Matthew Sklar), is a movie that likes to think of itself as being self-aware—it is, after all, a show that pokes fun at celebrities embracing activism to help a lesbian student in order to improve their image and brand—and yet it's not as self-aware as it would like to be. Its satire falls flat, and its message of love and acceptance comes across as smug, superior, and outdated. The clearest example of this is undoubtedly the big solo by Trent, the actor in between gigs whose over-beaten joke is that he went to Julliard. In the song, Trent (pretty creepily) stalks a bunch of the conservative teenagers at the mall to sing a song called "Love Thy Neighbor", where he points out all the hypocrisy and absurdity of religious people cherrypicking Bible verses to boost their political agenda. In the long history of arguing over this issue, pointing out the parts in the Bible that would send most of us to Hell has never worked to convince anyone to support queer people. The song, with on-the-nose lyrics including lines like "love trumps all," comes across as if Aaron Sorkin in the late 90s had written it.

The character at the center of this story is Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), a gay teenager in Edgewater, Indiana, who, like most teenagers, wants to go to her high school's prom. However, the PTA, led by Mrs. Green (Kerry Washington), eventually cancels the prom to prevent Emma and her girlfriend (who happens to be the closeted Alyssa Greene, Mrs. Greene's daughter, and is played by Ariana DeBose) from attending. Emma, though, has powerful allies in her corner, one of whom is the principal (Keegan-Michael Key, whose singing is quite good), and the other four (with more questionable motives) are washed-up Broadway actors.

Two of these stars are Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep) and Barry Glickman (James Corden), who have just closed a show on Broadway in which they played Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. The biting reviews of their performances finish them. Lacking the will to crawl out of such disappointment, Dee and Barry, while washing away their sorrows in alcohol with chorus girl Angie Dickson (Nicole Kidman) and Trent Oliver (the actor in between gigs played by Andrew Rannells), they stumble upon the anti-lesbian controversy in Indiana on Twitter. Now they have a publicity stunt to save them! So the four of them decide to make their way west to Indiana to demand that this small, backward town change its ways, whether Emma wants their help or not. This cynical, haughty, misguided, fake-woke behavior of the foursome is a major driving point of the story, and in better hands, it could have gone somewhere. Instead, we get unbelievable character arches, boring songs, and fanciful embroidery pretending to be critical art. 

Like Love, Simon two years before it, the place and time of this story is peculiar. GenZ is the most progressive generation alive, and yet this movie would have us believe that the entire student body is united in intolerance toward Emma. Don't get me wrong: It's no question that young queer people still face terrible challenges (like homelessness, for example, in which LGBTQ youth are 120% more likely than non-LGBTQ youth to suffer from; Emma is one of them after she is disowned by her parents), and not being allowed to attend prom with their dates is certainly one such challenge. There is a long history of students fighting for this right, dating back to 1980 in a court case called Fricke v. Lynch in which the court ruled that school bans on same-sex couples attending prom is a violation of students' freedom of speech. Nine years before The Prom debuted on Broadway, a school in Mississippi cancelled its prom instead of allowing a lesbian couple to attend. In a situation similar to what happens in The Prom, a secret dance was planned by the parents instead, and the two gay students were not invited. A similar controversy happened last year in the exact same school district. 

So, why not have the film take place either several decades ago or in present-day Mississippi? It seems like a trivial thing to criticize the movie for, but it's also something I kept thinking about. Putting this story in a modern-day, middle-class Indiana suburb makes what happens in The Prom feel hyperbolic. Believe it or not, Mississippi isn't Indiana (support for same-sex marriage in Indiana was sixteen points higher than in Mississippi, according to polling conducted three years ago). There are so many troubling stories of queer students being discriminated against at schools and proms across the entire country in cases that could have served as the civil rights issue for the film, but an entire school board and student body working to unleash, with surgical precision, gratuitous amounts of humiliation on a school's apparently only out lesbian student in present-day Indiana was not believable to me. 

Even if the above points didn't bother me, there's not a whole lot to praise in The Prom, with its acting in particular being a disappointment. It wouldn't be fair to say that Pellman, who makes her debut here, provides a one-dimensional performance in her role as the kind, persevering Emma, but for a character who is meant to be going through a variety of different emotions and turmoils, Pellman puts forward more or the less the same expression and note in every scene she's in. It could be that this was done deliberately to be Emma's mask in the face of such hatred, but I didn't get that impression. 

Much of the other discussion about the acting has centered on Corden's performance, with articles in IndieWire, Yahoo News, and Buzzfeed all devoting ink to what many viewers will likely take away from his acting: a straight actor leaning heavily into stereotypes, resulting in an unseemly display of gay-face. I agree with these critiques, and I wish that Corden had known better. (I do think he can sing, though.) The controversy aside, his chemistry with Streep mostly works, and she's essentially as good as she's ever been, but she's never really given a bad performance, has she? I just wish she had found a better movie to be in this winter than a feel-good yet phony musical in which the songs all sound the same.

The Prom is the type of movie that feels two decades too late. I had low expectations for The Prom, and they were met. 

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Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

"Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer."

Francis Ford Coppola always considered The Godfather Part III, the third feature in his trilogy based on Mario Puzo's famous novel, now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, to be an epilogue. Hence the "coda", which is apparently what Coppola and Puzo wanted to name the film. Despite Paramount Studios rejecting their idea and ordering the film to (logically) be called The Godfather Part III (after The Godfather and The Godfather Part II), Coppola has now revisited this famously mediocre conclusion in a director's cut titled Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. 

That title is important, or so we're told. Coda, according to the dictionary, means the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure. Craig Elvy at Screenrant argues that in one simple name change, Coppola has fixed the biggest problem with his 1990 film. According to Elvy, "When audiences hear 'The Godfather Part III,' they expect a cinematic epic on par with the 1970s classics, but the third effort was never intended or written to deliver the same experience. By billing itself as 'The Godfather Part III,' viewers are destined for disappointment even before the opening credits." In other words, naming the film "Coda" (which translates to "tail", or the ending of a song, in Italian) as Coppola and Puzo intended allows audiences to understand what kind of final film they were attempting to present. 

I disagree. Audiences are smart, far smarter than Hollywood usually gives them credit for, and yet it's doubtful that audiences would have understood the difference between the final film as an epilogue and the final film as a piece of cinematic artwork with intended equal footing as the previous two films. Those who saw it were disappointed in 1990, and its title had nothing to do with it. Thus, what worked in Part III also works in Coda, but what didn't work in Part III still doesn't work in Coda. The elements that don't work are well-known by now: the absence of Robert Duvall (due to salary disagreements with the studio) as Tom Hagan, the adopted son of Vito Corleone and family consigliere; a convoluted plot involving a conspiracy regarding the death of the Pope and a papal banking scandal; and the perhaps nepotistic casting of Sophia Coppola as Michael's daughter.

While the consensus over the years is that the reaction to the film itself may have been a little too unfair, Sophia Coppola's performance still divides viewers. Julia Roberts had been cast in the role but then dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. Winona Ryder took over but then dropped out due to nervous exhaustion (though she would be directed by Coppola two years later in Bram Stoker's Dracula). Running out of options, Coppola cast his daughter. It's true that she was a little out of her league with giants in the scenes, but in this new director's cut, I wouldn't call the performance bad. It's probably the most naturalistic performance in the film, which can come as a relief given that many of the older, experienced stars overdo it from time to time. Sophia Coppola has recently said that while the reactions had embarrassed her, it didn't destroy her. This is our gain, for she won an Academy Award fourteen years later for the screenplay for Lost in Translation, joining her father, grandfather (Godfather composer Carmine Coppola) and cousin Nicolas Coppola (better known as Nicolas Cage) as Oscar winners.

Like the two films before it, this one starts with a party in which every problem the Godfather will need to deal with is essentially laid before him. Al Pacino returns as Michael Corleone, the Godfather, who now attempts to be the man he promised Kay he would become all those years ago: legitimate. The casinos have been sold, and there is nothing illicit about his empire, or so he tells the archbishop (played by Donal Donnelly). Michael knows that the archbishop, as head of the Vatican bank, has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. Michael's offer is to purchase $600 million worth of shares in Immobiliare, making him the largest shareholder. But the primary mess beyond these financial situations Michael has to deal with involves his nephew, Vincent Mancini (the son of Michael's brother Sonny, played here by Andy Garcia). Like his father before him, Vincent is a boyishly charming yet unpredictably violent hothead. He feuds with Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna), who has taken control of the Corleone family business in New York City. Despite Michael's distrust of Zasa, he scolds Vincent for not seeking peace. Peace with Zasa is not something Vincent wants, so Vincent takes a big bite into Zasa's ear. 

That still is not the end of Michael's problems. His son, Anthony (Franc D'Ambrosio) wants not to pursue a career in law, but in music. He's supported by his mother, Kay (Diane Keaton), who has long since separated from Michael. Kay fears that now that Michael is so respectable, he's even more dangerous than he has ever been. Even though she hasn't seen him in eight years, when she meets him again at the opening party scene, it's easy to see how much she despises him. She looks wonderful, though, he tells her as he quickly eats cake and doesn't make much eye contact. 

While it may not be as unforgettable as the two films that preceded it, The Godfather Part III is not without its distinctive features, namely the thrilling helicopter attack scene, the ambush during a street parade, and Michael's famous line: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." However, that iconic line would be so much better if we had more of the calm acting Pacino became famous for in the 1970s. While his work in Part III is more subdued than his acting in Scarface, it still is the Pacino of the 80s, 90s, and beyond. In other words, he screams a lot, and the film suffers when he does.

Much of what's disappointing about the film is not so much Sophia Coppola's acting but the film's script. Despite some memorable dialogue, there are problems with how it presents these characters we've known for so long and the situations they're in. It's right to focus on Michael's obsession with redemption, but the film tries too hard to come full circle with everything. Coppola and Puzo also try to give Connie (Michael's sister, played in all three films by Coppola's sister, Talia Shire) something more to do than in the first film (in which she is only there to be a victim of domestic violence) and the second film (in which she's only there to...not really do anything). But changing her from passive to active, as she backs Vincent's moves to be more aggressive when dealing with the family's enemies, has mixed results. So, too, do many of the scenes in which Michael and Kay try to bury the hatchet and move on; they often come across as delightful yet dull. And the Vatican plot the family finds themselves in is interesting, but Coppola and Puzo do not tie the two together in a convincing way.

Despite the disappointment that the film is famous for, it wasn't the disaster some think it is. The film earned $137 million worldwide, finishing second in its opening weekend behind only Home Alone. It wasn't much of a critical failure, either. While Coda has an impressive 91 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Godfather Part III still received a rating of 68 percent and seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, making the trilogy one of only two to have all three of its films nominated for Best Picture (the other being the Lord of the Rings trilogy). One of those nominations went to Garcia, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. One of his competitors for that award was Pacino, who was nominated for his role as Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, a performance that is superior to his work in The Godfather Part III. They both lost to Joe Pesci for Goodfellas. 

I didn't revisit the theatrical release version of The Godfather Part III before watching Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Why would I? One negative consequence of that, though, is that because I hadn't seen Part III in more than fifteen years, it was remarkably difficult to figure out what has been changed by Coppola. The very final scene is definitely different, and most people who see both, even if there has been a big gap between the viewings, will probably notice. The opening is quite different, too; part of that I knew immediately, and part of that I learned later. 

But ultimately, even though a few minutes have been shaved off, some scenes have been rearranged, and the opening and ending are different, it still feels the same. Or, as Owen Gleiberman terrifically put it: "It's the same damn movie." That's a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. I fell in the "it's-not-great-but-it's-not-awful" camp who modestly defended The Godfather Part III, but Coda largely left me unable or unwilling to enthusiastically champion it as a shining masterpiece, as I think some had expected it would become after this director's cut. In essence, it's still the least memorable of the three films. 

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Mank

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
-Upton Sinclair

Mank, the first film directed by David Fincher since Gone Girl six years ago, is, as you may suspect, a Hollywood film dripping with Hollywood nostalgia for the 1930s and 1940s. That makes it a peculiar topic given that we're in an era where the nostalgia audiences seem to desire is about the 1980s. Box office tickets, however, in this pandemic are largely irrelevant, especially as the film is available to viewers on Netflix. Fincher, whose works often feature persona non grata, takes a different track this time. In Mank, the audience is told the tale of Herman Mankiewicz, the legendary and amiable Hollywood screenwriter most famous for writing (or co-writing, depending on who you talk to) Citizen Kane. 

Mankiewicz in the film, called Mank by his friends (and foes), is often demarcated in some way. In flashbacks, he is frequently drunk and obsessed with gambling, but generally likable in ways his enemies never are. In the present-day scenes (that is, in 1940), he's desperately yet reluctantly working away on a screenplay he doesn't seem to think will go far for "radio's golden boy" Orson Welles (played here by Tom Burke). Mank even agrees to write the film for $10,000 (about $180,000 in today's money, which must have been quite something in the midst of the Great Depression) but receive no credit. He's bound here, too, not only because his director, who has been given creative freedom by RKO, is demanding a script in no time, but also because he's bedridden thanks to a giant cast on his leg. 

Like Citizen Kane before it, Mank features a screenplay, written by Fincher's father, Jack (who died in 2003), that is non-linear. The film switches between Mank writing the script for Citizen Kane in 1940 and flashbacks from the 1930s detailing his relationship with different Hollywood figures, some of whom will serve as inspiration for characters in the famous 1941 film. Mank is recovering from a car accident, and to keep him away from alcohol, he works in a remote house in California to create a script in ninety—scratch that, sixty—days. Assisting him are his English secretary, Rita Alexander (Lilly Collins), and German housekeeper named Frieda (Monika Gossman), who feels she owes Mank her allegiance due to help he has given her in the past. The flashback scenes are the ones in which we see Mank interact with most of the Hollywood figures who helped shape the narrative of Citizen Kane. Aside from businessman, publisher, and politician William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), who served as the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane (the main character Welles plays in Citizen Kane), Hearst's mistress Marion Davies is a key part of this story. Davies may or may not have served as the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane's wife, Susan. (Welles later felt regret that Davies had become associated with the film.) Davies is played by Amanda Seyfried in one of the most talked-about performances of the year.

For students of Hollywood history, there are a variety of other names thrown at you in these flashbacks: Ben Hecht, Joseph von Sternberg, David O. Selznick, Irving Thalberg, to name a few. The two who get the most screen time are Joseph Mankiewicz (Mank's brother who won four Oscars, including two for All About Eve, and who is played here by Tom Pelphrey) and MGM head Louis B. Mayer, depicted here in a terrific performance by Arliss Howard. If there is a chief malefactor in this story, it's Mayer, Mank's conservative employer who comes across as an unethical cheapskate who can't quite understand why Mank is always antagonizing him. Mayer as a character, however, gets gentle treatment from the film. None of the more nefarious behavior of Mayer's is shown, like his sexual abuse, which was depicted in last year's Judy. Nevertheless, Mank's contrarian behavior toward Mayer will help serve as the inspiration for his famous screenplay.  

This rivalry is where the film dabbles in politics, and this is also where the Finchers theorize were motivations for Mank basing characters from Citizen Kane off of real people, sort of as an act of revenge. (Such an act can provide such catharsis for writers.) Part of the film's second act focuses on the 1934 California gubernatorial race between Republican Frank Merriam, centrist Progressive Raymond Haight, and socialist Upton Sinclair running as a Democrat. Surprisingly or not, this is where the film becomes most interesting, and Fincher has chosen a surprising figure to appear in a cameo as Sinclair. (He does kind of look like him, to be honest.) You may not know who Merriam or Haight were, but you've possibly heard of Sinclair, at least if you had to read The Jungle in university. The Jungle, Sinclair's exposé of the harsh conditions in which immigrants worked in meat-packaging plants, is Sinclair's most famous and influential novel, resulting in acts of Congress to reform the food industry.

Mayer and Hearst are naturally opposed to Sinclair's nomination. (The flashback scenes take place just around the time Hearst broke away from supporting FDR and went from being on the left to the right.) To fight his candidacy, Hearst funds xenophobic newsreels to instill the fear of communism in Californian voters. One of Mank's friends, a test shot director named Shelly Metcalf (Toby Leonard Moore), is recruited to direct these newsreels to help get him to the big leagues. (It's worth noting, however, that much of this, as Matthew Dessem has written in his fascinating fact-or-fiction article at Slate, is the work of Jack Fincher's invention. For example, there was no Shelly Metcalf.) Overcome with his guilt for making propaganda to harm a candidate working for working people, Shelly immediately falls into a serious depression, and Mank tries to save him. All of these events help fuel Mank's hatred for Hearst and his lackey, Mayer.

Mank is a film that certainly channels its inner-Citizen Kane from the get-go. In addition to its dialogue-rich screenplay (that was polished by David Fincher and Eric Roth, the younger Fincher's frequent collaborator who co-produced Mank), its gorgeous cinematography by Erik Messerschmidt essentially shares the same DNA as Kane, even featuring a few old-fashioned cue marks (those dark circles that suddenly appear in the upper-right corner of the frame) that look like the old days (in a gimmick that comes across as, well, gimmicky). The film's score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won Best Original Score for the Fincher-directed The Social Network, is exceptional. 

However, I found Oldman's performance to be increasingly distracting. He certainly makes choices, but often those choices seem to result in what looks like a bad Jack Nicholson imitation. In the history of drunk men, there has never been a drunk man who acted as drunkenly as Oldman does here. And while some of the thought behind his approach makes sense (namely his effortful breathing, which is understandable given that Mank was a smoker and alcoholic who would die a decade later due to alcoholism), it cannot be doubted that the way in which he mumbles through this performance is a hindrance. Oldman is at his best when he tones it down (as he did in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the Dark Knight trilogy), and he's at his worst when he hams it up (like he does in virtually everything else). In Mank, he gives his most over-the-top performance in years. 

Aside from that, Mank is certainly compelling, and if you can keep up with its rapid dialogue, there's a lot viewers will like about it. I can't say it's unwatchable, yet it's not without numerous problems in addition to Oldman's acting. Mank is another mostly white movie directed by Fincher (there is literally only one Black actor who shows up for a few seconds), and there isn't much female representation here, either, which is unsurprising. The women in the film (Marion, Rita, Frieda, and Mank's wife, Sara, played by Tuppence Middleton) are not allowed to be nearly as interesting or complex as the men. In the all-male writers room, the only woman who appears is a typist who sits topless with pasties on her nipples without explanation. I suspect Fincher and his team are trying to make a statement condemning Old (and current) Hollywood of sexism, and yet it just feels like he doesn't quite understand the problem and instead fuels it. 

Mank is often quite dressed up and may or may not have a place to go, but it doesn't provide much of a reason for caring. Those who dig these kinds of behind-the-scenes biographical films will surely eat it up. Those who don't might find it to be a chore to make it through to the end. Still, Hollywood's love letters to itself often are rewarded come rewards season, and I suspect Mank will be as well. Yet my unfiltered opinion must be stated: I find most, if not all, of Fincher's work (including Menk) to be mediocre at best. (I said it. Sue me.) And I firmly comprehend that I exist in the minority when I say The King's Speech was better than The Social Network. (Sue me again.) But I do think the Academy should have split the difference a decade ago, awarding The King's Speech with its top prize and giving Fincher Best Director. While Fincher likely will be nominated, who knows if he will win. But he has waited his turn. I'm not his biggest fan, but everyone else is. Just give the man his Oscar already.

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The Witches

"Witches are women who have subsumed their anger, right?" That's a question Angelica Huston asked her interviewer a few years ago to promote a new film she was starring in. Much of the conversation, it seems, centered on Huston's thoughts on micro-aggressions toward women and the anger that such acts can produce. "Everything about [witches] hurts," she continued, "and every time they look in the mirror they hate what they see. They're so great to play because they're just furious—and everything dreadful happens to them."

That's a nice quote to keep in mind when watching The Witches, the 1990 adaption of Roald Dahl's novel (which was also adapted on HBO this year starring Anne Hatheway and Octavia Spencer) released during a Hollywood crave for such comedy horror. (It was released three years after The Witches of Eastwood and three years before Hocus Pocus.) The witches in this film are indeed angry, but the story doesn't much want us to sympathize with them. They are, after all, out to destroy every child in the world. Huston plays the leader of the witches, and she's disappointed that there are still so many young kids running about in England. (From her name and accent, it sounds like Huston's witch is from Germany.) She devises a plan that gets rid of the children once and for all. It's not clear why they hate kids so much, but they are indeed furious.

Taking place in idyllic locations in Europe (and yet everything is drab at best and hellish at worst), Grandma Helga (played by Swedish actress Mai Zetterling in her final acting role) chomps on cigars as she tells her sweet grandson, Luke (Jasen Fisher), tales of witches. Witches, she tells him, are actually very ordinary, or at least they appear ordinary to everyone else. These are not the witches of the Harry Potter franchise or of The Blair Witch Project, but sort of a hybrid, simultaneously normal and monstrous. They present themselves as regular people, though they all wear wigs; only the pink hue in their pupils can give them away. To add some details to her stories, Helga includes a horrifying anecdote from her youth in Norway in which a witch hunted down a young girl and kidnapped her. What became of the girl is uncertain, even to the audience, but Helga does tell us that her friend started appearing in paintings, getting older as the years went on, until one day she just disappeared. As for the witch, well, "witches never get caught." Despite all the terror Grandma Helga speaks of, Luke seems genuinely entertained by the tales, unfazed as he is inquisitive.  

After a domestic tragedy, Helga decides to move Luke back to the United States. But before they do that, they take a short trip to England, where they'll stay in a hotel on the coast and relax before continuing their journey. The hotel looks straight out of "Mr. Bean in Room 426" from Mr. Bean. Speaking of Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson himself plays the manager of the hotel. He's fairly competent at his job, though he doesn't like children, either, scolding Luke for bringing two mice into the hotel and threatening Helga before she outwits him and turns the tables on him. At any rate, Luke and Helga have far bigger problems that an unsympathetic hotel manager, for a large convention is using the hotel for their conference. And this isn't just any ordinary group; they're actual witches instead, secretly meeting to discuss their plan to eliminate every child from England. 

Their leader is the Grand High Witch, who uses the name Eva Ernst. She's the one played by Huston, not long after winning an Oscar and then appearing as Morticia Addams in two Addams Family films. For her really iconic scenes, in which she is covered in grotesque prosthetic makeup, she endured hours and hours worth of getting the makeup on and another five just to get it off; the prosthetics on her hands also made it problematic (her word) to use the restroom. Despite the misery of such filming conditions, she looks like she is having a blast.   

She's in good company, with Zetterling providing an effective performance and the two young boys, Fisher and Charlie Potter as Bruno, the hungry British boy who also finds himself mixed up in all this toil and trouble, doing as good a job as child actors generally did in the early 1990s. But the production elements of the movie are the most spectacular, with Jim Henson's Creature Shop creating a variety of different-sized puppet mice. They look far more interesting to watch than all the CGI mice in the new adaption, and they elevate the film's humor (like when Helga tries to convince Bruno's spoiled, uninterested parents that he's been turned into a mouse) as well as the adorableness quality. How can you not find it cute when Luke in mouse form says, "One of the cooks tried to cut off my tail with a carving knife"? The puppetry really works. This was the final film Henson supervised before his death the same year The Witches was released. Dahl also died in 1990. 

I don't seem to recall ever having watched The Witches as a child, although part of me wants to say that I vaguely remember the scene of Huston's character disturbingly pulling off her face to reveal her true self. It is a film, though, that apparently has haunted an entire generation of children. The director, Nicolas Roeg, wrote in his autobiography that he screened an early version of the film for his young son, who was so creeped out that he ran out of the room and hid, which convinced Roeg to further edit this children's film. What remains the spookiest moments besides the witches themselves are the scenes of the boys turning into rats (even scarier than when boys turn into donkeys in Pinocchio) and the real-life horror of adults harming children. 

For much of the roughly ninety minutes of the film, I couldn't quite decide if I liked it or not. What harms the film is its over-reliance on "...and then..." aspects to storytelling; that is, one thing constantly leads to another and that's it. It seems like something would cause and complicate another thing (it is a tale, after all, of witches turning children into mice), but it instead feels like the stakes aren't there, or at least the movie doesn't care if you care about such stakes. Another disappointing trait is its denouement, deviating strongly from the novel. I initially wrote in my notes that the film had a "peculiar but un-formulaic ending", and then moments later I crossed it out. "Guess not," I wrote. Apparently, they filmed and tested two versions, but the one they predictably went with deeply angered Dahl. 

This isn't to say that it's a bad film. While I would hesitate showing it to very young children, most kids (and adults) would probably like it, whether in 1990 or 2020. It's good, if perhaps overly creepy, fun. The witches might not gain our sympathy, but even in the most unsightly scenes, you can't look away. 

Happy Halloween  

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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Fourteen years after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Sacha Baron Cohen as the Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev is back in a surprise film made in secret over the year. There had been hints that Cohen was up to something throughout the past few months, but now we have our answer in this biting satire. For the past decade-plus, Cohen has mostly shifted away from this sort of thing that made him famous and instead focused on mainstream films, some of which he's good in (Hugo), some of which he's not so good in (Les Misérables), and some of which you probably forgot he was in (Sweeney Todd). (He also appears in this year's The Trial of the Chicago 7, though his performance is less interesting than the others in the ensemble cast.)   

Why is Borat back in the spotlight? He is tasked by the Kazakh government with repairing the damage he did with his previous film by offering a bribe to the leaders of the U.S. government (yes, those ones). (Though I've never been to Kazakhstan, I doubt it's anything like the Kazakhstan depicted in this film. The scenes taking place in Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania, and Cohen's "Kazakh", for example, is actually Hebrew.) Once reaching American shores, he is disturbed to discover that his teenage daughter, Tatur (played by Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova), has snuck into a crate and now must join him in his mission. Their journey puts them on a path across the U.S., predictably meeting a large span of people, including an Instagram influencer, anti-maskers, and a QAnon dummy duo.   

After making Bruno in 2009, I recall hearing Cohen mention in interviews that his days of doing these kinds of mockumentaries were over because people would recognize him and nobody would fall for his pranks. The latter is definitely not true, as Cohen has continued releasing such works as recently as a few years ago with the Showtime series Who Is America? For this story, however, Borat knows that people will recognize him on the street, so he often disguises himself, often in beards and cowboy hats. Once in the U.S., Borat enthusiastically wants to meet the "magnificent new premier" of the United States. When this doesn't work, he compromises and settles for the "vice premier", "Mikhael Pence". That brings Borat and his daughter to an annual conservative meeting where Pence is giving a speech (about how prepared the government is for the coronavirus, which is such a devastating remark that no further comment is needed). Dressed in a Trump fatsuit and somehow sneaking past security, he interrupts Pence's speech to try and give him his daughter. Alas, Borat is unable to present his daughter as a bribe to the vice premier. Borat feels he is out of options until Tutar comes up with the idea that they should go for the next big thing: "America's Mayor", Rudy Giuliani. The scenes with Giuliani are the ones that have created the highest amount of attention and controversy, especially in recent days. 

Giuliani has defiantly said he didn't fall for Cohen's trick. From the looks of it in every possible way, this appears to be a bizarre claim to make. Incidentally, Giuliani's client, Mr. Trump, similarly boasted that he didn't fall for Cohen's prank when he was interviewed by the comedian in 2003 (with Cohen playing another one of his characters, Ali G), though Cohen pointed out that it took Trump a lot longer than most to figure out what was going on. Giuliani has also argued he did nothing wrong. Aside from the ethics of trying to sleep with a journalist who just interviewed you and cheating on your girlfriend, this is technically true. Giuliani, for the record, has been married thrice before, including, as Cohen reminds us and Giuliani (possibly to his face), once to his second cousin. 

What works in Borat 2 is essentially what has always worked in these kind of prankumentaries by Cohen: exploiting a toxic and peculiar combination of American politeness, ignorance, and racism to expose a dark side of society many would rather not discuss. I did not rewatch the first film in preparation for this one, but it seems that the "subsequent moviefilm" focuses not simply on anti-Semitism, but also combating sexism, racism, and authoritarianism. Anti-Semitism does show up, though. Tutar tells her father that she has used Facebook to discover the "truth" about the Holocaust, essentially that it did not happen. (Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have been frequent targets of Cohen's in recent years.) 

What doesn't work in Borat 2 is that there's dual discomfort in the awkwardness he presents. For one, my tolerance for cringe humor is much lower in 2020 than it was in 2006. Additionally, these days viewers are far more cognizant of how a character like Borat plays to our xenophobia; the character is like a leftwing version of South Park. Additionally, there's nothing Cohen can do to shock us anymore. On an episode of Da Ali G Show in 2004, Borat went to a bar in Arizona and sang a song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" to a supportive audience that merrily joined in. Here, as Borat in disguise, he crashes a right-wing "March for Our Lives" rally in Olympia, Washington and sings a song about chopping up journalists "like the Saudis do." There's nothing surprising if the audience hoots and hollers to that, given the present political climate. 

I feel a bit of guilt in admitting that I still found myself laughing (a lot) at a character and idea I just called xenophobic, or at least borderline xenophobic. I don't know how to reconcile the fact that a character I find, regardless of its good intentions, to be problematic is still one who makes me laugh. It's something the left is often unwilling to talk about. I find Larry David funny, but his show Curb Your Enthusiasm contains every kind of offensive -ism you can name, and yet because he is who he is, liberals won't call him out for it. If it were Larry the Cable guy and not Larry David telling those jokes, there would be an uproar. 

But David and Cohen still make me laugh. The laughter I get from Borat is similar to seeing an old friend for the first time in a decade; there will likely be lots of laughter, even though it will be less frequent after about forty-five minutes, but eventually you might have to reconsider your friendship if he's not willing to evaluate his offensiveness. In essence, times have changed since I saw that friend fourteen years ago; I have changed. What do I do if my friend hasn't? At any rate, as problematic as it is, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is probably the funniest film of the year, a year in which there was little humor, in films or elsewhere.

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A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote

In my mind, A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote (aka the West Wing Reunion) is not the West Wing reunion we wanted or needed. Why? Because everything is so different now that the universe of The West Wing seems way too fantastical. So much time has passed since the show went off the air in May of 2006 that such a reunion seems misguided. I once mentioned the show when writing about House of Cards and the shows' differences in 2014. (How simpler a time 2014 was, even before we knew about Kevin Spacey.) "The West Wing might be what we want our political system to be," I wrote. "House of Cards might simply be what it is." The reality, though, is that Frank Underwood was nothing compared to the current mess we've been in for some time now. 

The West Wing was a series that served as a civics lesson, reminding viewers that we're all on the same team and we want the same things. How naive that all feels now. The past few years have shown that we are, in fact, not on the same team. If the Obama years showed us that so many people in the United States are still quite racist, the Trump years have showed us just how authoritarian many Americans are. Thus, in the midst of a pandemic that has left more than 200,000 Americans dead and an economy in the tank, with almost daily reminders of injustice against so many people, who would possibly be in the mood for another glib center-left lecture from West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin and company? 

It might have worked had Sorkin, writer Eli Attie, and the cast reunited for an update on where these characters are these days fourteen years after their fictional administration ended. Instead, the cast has reunited to recreate on stage (COVID precautions and all) an episode from season 3 in 2002 called "Hartsfield's Landing." The episode is named after the small town in New Hampshire called Hart's Location, one of the three small towns in New Hampshire that are the first to declare their results of the election around midnight. In the episode, the main drama is that China is threatening to act aggressively if Taiwan tests its Patriot missiles it purchased from the U.S. The subplot is a feuding press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) and aide Charlie Young (Dulé Hill) going at it with pranks. President Jed Bartlett (Martin Sheen) is feeling the weight of all this pressure from China's saber-rattling, with two different games of chess with his speechwriters, Sam Seaborne (Rob Lowe) and Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) serving as some stress relief. 

It's a bit challenging to critique their acting because these are all performances we've seen before. Needless to say, it's a joy to see them again. These are some of the finest actors recreating some of their finest work. Sheen, in particular, is fantastic in one of his best roles of his legendary career. Sterling K. Brown is the newbie in the cast. He plays Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, who was played on the show by John Spencer until his death during the final season. Brown is a renowned actor, winning Emmy Awards for his work on The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story and This Is Us. But his performance as Leo is much less inspired than Spencer's, coming across as flat and unnatural. That never happened with Spencer.

Aside from the acting, this version of the episode just feels...awkward. The opening preamble by Bradley Whitford (who plays White House aide Josh Lyman) describing the project's inception and aims is surpassed in weirdness only by similar monologues from the other cast members. The gist of their speeches can probably be summarized as "if we can get just get one more new voter...", which (spoiler alert), they probably won't. As a friend pointed out, the people who watched The West Wing are not the people who aren't going to vote in elections. Fans of the show, though, are certainly going to have a reaction to this reunion, most of which will be positive. Some have called it a "home run". 

I am not one of them. This was not a home run, but a missed opportunity, dripping with Sorkin's misunderstanding of reality. I was a fan of the show as much as anyone, but we are lightyears away from how the world worked back then. Sorkin, Attie, and the others could have addressed this. The West Wing often worked as a reaction to the real world, with the show starting in the late 90s as Hollywood's wishful thinking of what a more ambitiously and proudly liberal Bill Clinton could have been. (Clinton, whose presidency doesn't exist in the West Wing universe, for some reason shows up here, as does Michelle Obama, Samuel L. Jackson, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.) Most of the show's run existed during the horrible years of George W. Bush, and while the show didn't spend every episode providing hypothetical alternative universes to how a Democrat might have handled some of the events of the time, it did take that route occasionally. And while the show ended before Barack Obama became president, many noted at the time how similar the fictional presidential race between Democrat Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) and Republican Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) mirrored the race between Obama and John McCain.  

It would have been captivating to have seen Sorking get Bartlet, Lyman, Cregg et al post-presidency reacting to whatever similar event might be going on in their universe. Instead, this reunion is a painful remind that we're a long way from 1999-2006, and, in some ways good and in some ways bad, we're never going back.

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Mulan

"But when the two rabbits run side by side, 
How can you tell the female from the male?"

-"Ballad of Mulan"

"The emperor walked into the most obvious trap in fake chinese history and then started doing bed sheet kung fu (sic)." That is how Chinese writer Xiran Jay Zhao, the author of an upcoming book about Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in Chinese history, nearly concluded her multiple-tweet disappointment in the new Disney live-action remake of their 1998 animated hit Mulan. Her frustration is understandable. In countless tweets and re-tweets, she joined numerous others in expressing predictable frustration at this Disney remake. Surrounded by controversy and delayed due to the pandemic (although now available for $29.99 on Disney+), this new Mulan, which waited on the shelves of development hell before finally being directed by Whale Rider director Niki Caro, is finally here, and it's...not that bad, I guess? But alas, it definitely has loads of issues.

This Mulan is a motion picture riddled with contradictions. The costume design is beautiful, yet it's designed by Bina Daigeler, not an Asian designer. The film has exciting fight scenes, but they're also kind of ridiculous and they don't present anything we haven't seen before. Mulan makes for an effective action hero, but any character arc or development is absent. Instead, her comrades cheer "I believe Mulan!", and the filmmakers hope we don't groan in disbelief too loudly. Despite these problems, I couldn't help but at least be moved by some scenes, even as I rolled my eyes at others.

Mulan (Liu Yifei) is someone who has always required patience as she learns "how to control herself". Despite her natural tendencies as a leader, she is told by her parents that she needs to hide her gift away, and that her main job is to bring honor to her family through marriage. A matchmaker (Cheng Pei-pei) instructs Mulan that a good wife is to be quiet, composed, and polite, yet Mulan does not believe these are characteristics for her. She believes she is loyal, brave, and true (although the two groups of adjectives aren't necessarily contradictory to each other). Truthfulness is the quality that she struggles with the most throughout the film, mainly because she disguises herself as a man.

Due to invading armies, the emperor (Jet Li) decrees that every family must send one man to join the defending army. But Mulan's family has no son. There is only her, her sister (Xana Tang), her mother (Rosalind Chao), and her father (Tzi Ma), who requires a cain for walking and is not in fighting condition. Declaring that he has been blessed with two daughters, Mulan's father chooses to fight and represent his family. For Mulan, this is not an option. Late in the night, she steals her father's armor, sword, and horse and rides off to join the army. Effectively disguising herself as a man and avoiding showering with her fellow soldiers, she perseveres and trains under the leadership of Commander Tung, played by Donnie Yen, who fought with her father in a previous war. Tung and the character Chen Honghui, played by Yoson An, are both based on the character Li Shang from the animated film. Splitting Li Shang into two characters, while well-intentioned, has sparked controversy.

There has been lots of other controversy regarding this film over the past year or so. The one that has gotten the most attention is Liu's comments on Twitter supporting the police brutality against pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. (The calls for a boycott of the film also helped coin a new nickname for Agnes Chow, a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong, as "the real Mulan".) Liu is a human being, and she is entitled to her opinions, regardless of how abhorrent they may be. But another controversy of the film had little to do with Liu and could entirely be blamed on Disney: its non-Asian crew. None of the principal crew members (its director, four screenwriters, costume designer, etc.) are Asian, with some describing the attitudes of the screenwriters as "orientalist". Amanda Silver, one of the screenwriters, recently told an interviewer that their "research" brought them to the epiphany that the Eastern hero embraces "filial piety". I don't even truly know how to respond to that. Perhaps if Disney had invested in having actual Chinese screenwriters, this updated Mulan wouldn't have been so cringeworthy. Beyond that, I thought we were past the point of actors speaking English in a movie that is meant to be throughly Chinese, but at least they got the "filial piety" in there.

In fairness to Silver, the film's focus on family is its strongest moments. They are the scenes that work the best. The family dynamics are also what made The Farewell last year such a compelling film, and we were given plenty of it. In Mulan, it shows up in the beginning and the end and that's it. (Incidentally, Ma played the father in both films.) But the screenplay and its dialogue are really the weakest part of the film, often devoid of humor and essentially stripped of any queer subtext that the first film had.

Much of Mulan requires a heavy amount of suspension of disbelief (see bedsheet kung-fu), especially when it comes to the action scenes. Last year, there was a teenager in China named Wang Weitian whose walking-on-air exercises went viral, but even he could not do what Bori Khan (the villain played by Jason Scott Lee) and the Rourans do in this film, like run up walls. In a Disney animated film, no suspension of disbelief is required. Audiences buy the fantasy the minute they agree to watch a cartoon in which people sing. Nobody points out the ridiculousness of there being a red dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy, but a witch in a live-action historical film invites copious amounts of justifiable repudiation. At least Gong Li, the Meryl Streep of China who plays this character, assisting Bori Khan and his army, provides one of the more interesting performances in the film. She and Mulan are the only ones given any ounce of complexity. Again, in the 1998 animated film, Mulan has much more depth; that's what happens when you allow characters to sing their hearts out to communicate their inner turmoil.

At least Mulan tries to do different things. With last year's The Lion King, audiences were given a banal shot-by-shot remake, and any new element only harmed the film further. Here, enough of what made the 1998 film work is back; Christina Aguilera even returns to sing "Reflection", one of Disney's best songs, and composer Harry Gregson-Williams' incorporation of the theme into his score might give you goosebumps. But unlike The Lion King, perhaps including more of the original would have helped this new Mulan. To not hear "Honor to Us All" and "I'll Make a Man Out of You" is a reminder that the original animated musical is superior to this update. Thus, as is the case with just about every one of these money-grabbing remakes, the originals should have been left alone. There already has been a live-action version of this famous story, the 2009 film from China. Though I haven't seen it, it sounds more interesting than this Mulan, which is about as mediocre of a live-action film as any Disney movie has made.

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Miss Juneteenth

In the opening moments of Miss Juneteenth, the debut feature film of writer and director Channing Godfrey Peoples, a woman is looking through her old dress from a pageant. Accompanying this scene is "Lift Every Voice and Sing", the song often referred to as the "Black national anthem" and written by writer and activist James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in the early 1900s. This is an obviously very deliberate choice on the part of Peoples and her team, not simply because of its historical importance, but also because of its usage in other forms of art, like the 1989 film Do the Right Thing and Maya Angelou's 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou looms large in Miss Juneteenth. It is the poem that helped the film's main character, Turquoise Jones (played by Nicole Beharie), win the Miss Juneteenth Pageant in 2004. It seemed her victory would help lead her on to better things, like becoming a doctor or a lawyer, as other winners have. This is not the case for Turquoise, who now is a single mother, working late-night shifts at a bar.

Peoples is not concerned about providing her audience every detail about Turquoise and her past. We know that her mother was tough, perhaps abusive. We know that Turquoise gave birth out of wedlock, and it's hinted that she was very young when she became pregnant. We don't exactly know what derailed her plans, other than the pregnancy. But as much as Peoples does not concern herself with giving us all the explanations, Turquoise herself is very much concerned with what happened and how to avoid the mistakes of the past. The opening shots of her, the ones set to "Lift Every Voice and Sing", convey to the audience that nostalgia will be an important element of this story. But it is not simply nostalgia in a good way. We often feel nostalgic when things are not going well; it feels like a necessary part of our ability to persevere. If this nostalgia helps Turquoise keep going, then more power to her. The problem is that we sometimes we become more stressed or depressed when we feel nostalgic. Thus, she strives to have her daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze), follow in her footsteps, but only partly so she doesn't find herself in similar circumstances later in life. Kai, however, is not interested in the pageant. She would prefer to try out for the dance team, but Turquoise doesn't approve. She doesn't even want Kai to do a dance for the competition, but instead recite Angelou's poem "Phenomenal Woman", as she did.

It seems that one thing after another goes wrong for Turquoise. She has to choose between paying for electricity and paying for the entrance fee for the pageant (which, again, Kai doesn't want to take part in). Turquoise's evangelical mother is disappointed in her, as is (implicitly) most other people, even the ones who are kind to her. "I had high hopes for you, Turquoise," seems to be a reoccuring sentiment. From Kai's perspective, it's one humiliation after another, from celebrating her fifteenth birthday in the dark to wearing casual clothes instead of a fancy dress because her father (Kendrick Sampson) didn't give them the money he had promised.

Both Beharie and Chikaeze are exceptional in Miss Juneteenth. Their acting is marvellous, as are the characters they're playing. Turquoise is an authoritative but caring mother, and both Turquoise and Kai find ways to compromise. That relationship, between mother and daughter, is the heart of the film. And while the film opines from time to time, its opinions are not front and center either. At first it may seem that Peoples is criticizing the Miss Juneteenth Pageant. This is not the case. She has said in interviews that while she was never a Miss Juneteenth herself, she feels nostalgic for the pageant in Texas. Juneteenth was sometimes in the news this year for controversial reasons, and it seemed like this year was the first time many white folks had heard of the holiday. The film is slightly didactic in that a bit of history of the event (celebrating the emancipation of enslaved people) is provided. But it's the characters that the film is most concerned about. The mother and daughter can't always understand each other, but they try, and they look out for one another. Indeed, this is the best mother-daughter film since Wadjda. Like Wadjda,
Miss Juneteenth is directed by a woman and stars women, much like the other best movies of the year, like Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, Saint Frances, and others. I greatly look forward to seeing more work by Peoples, Beharie, and Chikaeze.

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Get Me Roger Stone

As expected, Donald Trump has just commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, his longtime friend and political advisor. Apparently, according to the White House, children and teachers can risk their lives going to school during a pandemic, but prison is too medically risky for Mr. Stone, who was convicted on seven counts this year, including witness tampering and lying to investigators. He was sentenced this February to over three years in prison. This episode was yet another reminder of a seriously flawed justice system, one in which Trump seeks to throw those toppling statues of slavers in jail for ten years but will bail out his buddies. Stone certainly has company. He is one of seven Trump associates who have been found guilty of criminal acts since 2016; the others include Trump's former lawyer (Michael Cohen), former campaign advisor (George Papadopoulos), and Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman. Manafort is a longtime partner and friend of Stone's and is interviewed in the Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone about this infamous politico.

Written and directed by Dylan Bank, Daniel DiMauro, and Morgan Pehme, Get Me Roger Stone does not offer an attempt at repackaging and redeeming a rightwing figure like another Netflix documentary called Mitt did only a few years before it. If you hate Roger Stone, your hatred of him will only be fanned. If you don't like the guy but find yourself frequently defending him to your progressive friends, seeing a documentary like this might only make you more uncomfortable. Nobody likes Roger Stone, so I don't need to go any further with a third category.

In the documentary, Stone describes himself as an "agent provocateur". Trump describes him as a "dirty trickster". Stone happily wears that badge, as he frequently does the Nixon pose, embracing this image of a counterpuncher who doesn't always follow the rules with tremendous glee. He dresses the part as well. Everyone has seen pictures of him in those ridiculous suits and a bowler hat and glasses that make him seem as if he's begging to be punched. The schmuck even drinks a martini while being interviewed here. All rightwing provocateurs like to think of themselves as Bond villains, but Stone doesn't make the grade. He's not a Bond villain, but more like a 1960s Batman villain, an agent of chaos more in the mold of Caesar Romero than Heath Ledger.

Two years ago, Trump went to Twitter to hilariously cry that because he "won" on his first try (what adult talks like that?), he was not just smart, but a genius. But that's not true. I mean, obviously he's neither smart nor a genius. But aside from the fact that he lost the election by nearly three million votes, his first political adventure was in 2000, during Trump's efforts to be the nominee for President of the United States of the Reform Party (which surprisingly still exists). Trump sought the Reform nomination, and ironically argued the nominee shouldn't be Pat Buchanan because Buchanan was too racist. Who served as one of Trump's advisors? Roger F-ing Stone. Trump lost the race for the nomination, which Buchanan won. Stone then returned to Trump's inner political circle in the early days of his next campaign before he was fired (or before he quit, as he says). Stone is assumed to have recommended Manafort to be Trump's campaign advisor before he, too, quit (and now sits in prison, unable to get Trump's sympathy in a way Stone has).

Get Me Roger Stone progresses in a similar way to the renowned 2003 documentary The Fog of War, directed by Errol Morris. Like Morris, Bank, DiMauro, and Pehme get Stone to discuss his "rules" or lessons. There are so many rules he likes to dish out, but the only one you really need to understand is the first one he tells us: It is better to be infamous than not famous at all. He has an almost humorous way of finding himself in every sort of major U.S. political event, including both stolen elections of 2000 and 2016. He was a Nixon aid and was even discussed during the Watergate hearings. Regarding his Nixon fetish, he's a contrarian to be sure; no one likes Nixon, and nobody talks about him in positive ways. But Stone does, and the affection seems genuine. Stone has a tattoo on his back of Nixon's face, and his mother, according to the documentary, once told him that his religion is politics and his god is Richard Nixon. After Watergate, he became close with McCarthy's guy Roy Cohn (that Roy Cohn), who likely also served as a mentor to Stone in the dark arts of political fighting. (It was Cohn who introduced Stone to Donald Trump.) Along with Manafort, their partner Charlie Black, Lee Atwater, and later Trump, Stone championed the fight-dirty-but-win attitudes the Baby Boomer New Right has cursed us with.

Despite how rat-like he is, Stone comes across sometimes in a remarkably charming (yet insufferable) way. Among others interviewed in Get Me Roger Stone are Jeffrey Toobin, Tucker Carlson, and of course, Donald Trump. But they're all boring to listen to compared to Stone. He also makes surprisingly compelling arguments. "Hate," he tells the interviewer, "is a stronger motivation than love." Democrats learned that the hard way after their silliness about "when they go low, we go high" got them nowhere. Charismatic and knowledgable were not two adjectives I associated Roger Stone with before watching Get Me Roger Stone.

However, since the documentary was released, Stone has been different. The man is certainly not well. In his disposition from earlier this year, he sat like a rabid dog, aching to bite his peculiar teeth into the flesh of an opponent. By that I mean he literally chomped his teeth, as if they had a mind of their own and were willing to screw up his life even more than he already had. Any normal person who has had to witness an unhinged rightwing uncle ruin everyone's Thanksgiving with a rant about the so-called Deep State will surely recognize this when watching the clip. For a man who seems to revel in making everyone else angry, it is utter bliss to watch him so easily lose his shit.

The one small sliver of solace one can find in the saga of Roger Stone is a simple fact: By now, other than fringe alt-right figures who pose an undeniable threat to the United States and to civilization, no one likes or admires a person like Roger Stone, and surely no one will mourn when he finally leaves us. Even most of the people interviewed in the documentary don't heap praise on him. His daughter admits he's a trickster, and his wife tells us that when she met him, she thought he looked like a member of the Hitler Youth.

All of this nonsense has been normalized these past few years. "Now the children's table is the adult table," someone says in the documentary. How true that is. In 2015, at the first GOP debate, Trump was asked about all the money he had given to politicians before he himself became one. (Trump's money giving is addressed in Get Me Roger Stone, as well.) "When they call, I give," he said. "And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me." For a man who is a serial liar, that is a profoundly honest and accurate statement, one that would have likely cost him a generation or even a decade or two before. But these are different times, partly because of guys like Roger Stone. The documentary is successful at drawing lines between Nixon to Stone to Trump. Stone complains in the documentary about it all being "a swamp", the term Trump often uses to shift blame for not solving problems. It may be a swamp, but it's a swamp that celebrates Roger Stone as a founding member.

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Hamilton

2020 has not been the kindest year to the United States of America. As everyone knows, the country leads in COVID-19 cases and deaths, which as of this writing are at 2.8 million and 132,000, respectively. The ensuing recession has been like none before it, with unemployment reaching at least fifteen percent and then eleven percent, where it currently is. Fierce outrage over the murders of George Floyd, Aumaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others have led to massive protests in all fifty states. These protests and conversations have also resulted in the removal (sometimes by force) of statues and paintings glorifying slavers, racists, and traitors from previous centuries.

During this pandemic, and one that takes place as the country's citizens grapple with its past, normal acts of patriotism and celebration during this holiday are misguided, at best. Perhaps Disney+, of all things, offers a slightly less problematic way of learning about U.S. history in the form of the most famous musical in recent times. Hamilton, the enormously successful musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, has made its way to the screen earlier than planned due to the pandemic. And instead of a new adaptation, which would have been the more predictable route, this is simply a filmed version of the Broadway production. 

Filmed in June of 2016 (which, in retrospect, was such an innocent time), Miranda's musical famously casts a diverse group of actors to tell a story of famous white men. It was inevitable that some form of the original cast's production would hit the screens, as the actors have since become quite busy. Some examples: Miranda has worked with Disney several times, writing Oscar-nominated music for Moana in 2016 and co-starring in Mary Poppins Returns in 2018. Leslie Odom, Jr. (who plays Aaron Burr, one of Hamilton's arch rivals) was in Harriet last year; Daveed Diggs (Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette) wrote, directed, and starred in the 2018 film Blindspotting. Jonathan Groff (King George III) has appeared in the Frozen movies and as the lead in the Netflix crime series Mindhunter. If an adaptation was to be made, it would be tricky getting the band back together. So perhaps it's for the best that the stage show is now streaming on Disney+, as (like Fiddler on the Roof decades before it), the music is starting to get a little overplayed and the cast has moved on.

Hamilton is a long show, but it moves quickly. (Apparently, it would last four to six hours if it went at the pace of most other Broadway shows.) So quickly, that when it finally takes a moment to slow down, it becomes a bore. The show starts with the amazing number "Alexander Hamilton", followed by "Aaron Burr, Sir" and then "My Shot", so within just a few moments we've been rapidly given much of his story. I don't blame Miranda for trying to cover so much ground in such little time; it takes biographer Ron Chernow, whose 2004 biography served as the inspiration for this musical, about a hundred pages to finally make his book at least somewhat interesting.

During the war, Hamilton (played by Miranda) becomes an assistant to George Washington (Christopher Jackson), despite a rocky relationship between the two due mainly to the fact that Washington won't (at first) allow Hamilton to command during battle. After the war, once Washington becomes the first President of the United States, Hamilton becomes the first Secretary of the Treasury. Cabinet battles between Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson over topics regarding the power of government and whether or not to aid France are depicted in rap battles. He also marries a woman named Eliza (Philippa Soo), but also gets himself involved in the country's first sex scandal, all while accumulating quite a few enemies, namely Aaron Burr (Odom, Jr.), who is engaged in increasing competition and rivalry with Hamilton.

I first saw the musical in London two years ago (though I probably wouldn't have if I had known it would be available on streaming at a much more affordable price a year and a half later), and I remember my stomach slightly clenching as King George III slowing walked onto stage wearing mockingly ostentatious attire, thinking to myself that there would be copious amounts of palpable tension and awkward silence from the crowd. This wasn't the case, fortunately. George III is played by Jonathan Groff, and it's his scenes that I like the best. He opens the show as the announcer asking attendees to turn off their phones. "Enjoy my show," he tells the audience. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not for him to be there. Hamilton never met George III. In the musical, he doesn't serve much of a purpose. But his three numbers, all following the same tune (that of a '60s Britbop, as the New York Times called it), are wonderful comic relief. King George is written and played kind of as a sophomoric and manipulative ex-boyfriend, warning the Americans that they'll soon come crawling back to him once they see how difficult it is on their own. Groff relishes every syllable as he sings "'Cause when push comes to shove, I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love" as he immediately shifts to a long da-da-da-da-da segment that brings the number to a close. There's a few chuckles throughout the rest of the musical, but nothing as funny as these scenes.

The Brits may have been okay with how one of their former leaders was depicted and lampooned, but I was surprised that a show described as "revolutionary" by the Wall Street Journal would treat Thomas Jefferson and George Washington with such kid gloves. They may have been Founders, but more importantly they were slavers, and it's odd to watch such generous treatment towards these figures in a time when the nation is grappling with how much praise (if any) should be given to them. This isn't a new thing; it would have been just as necessary five years ago to be critical towards these two.

Much of this show is about not simply one man but of the complicated and painful history regarding race in this land. So it is frustrating that since it became famous, Hamilton has sort of served as a litmus test for white liberals who want to prove how woke they aware. But there is an uncomfortable dichotomy that white liberals would rather not talk about: this is a brown show that plays for white audiences. Like, all white. (Apparently, Art Garfunkel was one of the rather disruptive ones.) Rian Johnson even poked fun at this last year when a white character in his comedy Knives Out quotes the musical and says, "Immigrants, we get the job done," before informing the other person (who has no idea what he's talking about) that he saw Hamilton on stage. Additionally, as many have pointed out, one of its numerous criticisms is the fact that gender parity is low here. There are only three female characters who have speaking lines, and all of them only exist in the narrative because they revolve around Hamilton, the great man of this show. There is only one scene in which the three have a conversation with each other about something other than Hamilton. If Miranda and his team were bold enough to cast people of color as the the founders of the U.S., why then couldn't they have cast women in these roles, as well? Miranda has since said he is okay with the idea, but it's perplexing that he didn't think of it then.

Of his music, though, there is nothing quite like it. Miranda has been deservingly showered with a variety of awards for Hamilton: the show won eight Drama Desk Awards, eleven Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Hell, he even rescued Alexander Hamilton from historical non-relevance, as Hamilton was saved from being removed from the $10 bill after the popularity of this musical became apparent. His singing may be a bit noticeably nasally, his storytelling might have an issue or two (if you require an engaging plot and character development, this musical might not be for you), and the story and how we view it, as Siddhant Adlakha has brilliantly described, has changed so much since 2016. As Adlakha put it, "It was made for a different America." But Miranda's music will live forever. Hamilton has changed how we think of musicals for the better, and if you can tolerate the problems with the show, it will be an enjoyable, less problematic, and safer way to enjoy the Fourth of July.

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