More stars than there are in heaven! That catchphrase was the byword for Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the granddaddy of the big Hollywood studios, originally founded 17th April 1924 by Marcus Loew who joined forces with Louis B. Mayer Pictures together combining with Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures to establish the most prestigious studio around. Here’s a reminder of some of their greatest productions from their first two decades when the talent roster included Garbo, Gable, Harlow, Crawford and The Marx Bros!
You’ve never seen her, man. She’s in another league. 2019: married tennis power couple former player Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and currently injured star Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have a young daughter Lily (AJ Lister) who likes to stay in hotels. Under Tashi’s coaching, Art has become a top pro. He is one US Open title away from a Career Grand Slam but he is struggling to regain his form after an injury. Hoping to return him to form, Tashi enters Art as a wild card in a Challenger event in New Rochelle, New York to boost his confidence by beating lower-level opponents. His former best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend is now an unknown player living out of his car, scraping by on the winnings from the lower circuit and also enters the New Rochelle event. 2006: high schoolers and childhood best friends Patrick and Art win the junior doubles title at the US Open. Afterwards, they watch Tashi a highly lauded young tennis prospect make mince meat of the opposition on court. Then they meet her at a party later that night. Usually their attractions are separate but Tashi is the first person to whom Patrick and Art are both attracted. The three make out in a motel room but stop short of having sex. With the two boys playing each other the next day, Tashi says she will give her phone number to whichever of them wins. Patrick wins the match and later signals to Art that he had sex with Tashi by placing the ball in the neck of the racket prior to serving – a tic of Art’s. Tashi and Art go on to play college tennis at Stanford University, while Patrick turns professional and begins a long distance relationship with Tashi. A jealous Art questions Tashi about whether Patrick loves her, and Patrick, recognising Art’s jealously, playfully reassures him of his and Tashi’s connection. Patrick and Tashi fight when she gives him unsolicited tennis advice and he says he views her as a peer, not his coach. In the next match which Art watches without Patrick, Tashi suffers a severe knee injury. Patrick returns to comfort Tashi but she demands he leave, with Art taking her side. Art aids Tashi in her recovery but she is unsuccessful in resuming her tennis career. I want you to join my team because I want to win. A few years later Tashi reconnects with Art and becomes his coach and the two begin a romantic relationship. He reveals that he and Patrick have not talked since Tashi’s injury. In 2011, Tashi and Art are now engaged and Art’s career is on the up. Tashi and Patrick run into each other at the Atlanta Open and have a one night stand, which Art secretly notices. 2019: Starting at opposite ends of the seeding, Art and Patrick advance through the brackets at New Rochelle until they find themselves facing each other in the tournament’s final match. In a sauna the day before the match, Patrick attempts to reconnect with Art but Art rejects Patrick by saying his career is over and he, Art, will be remembered. Patrick secretly asks Tashi to be his coach and lead him to one last winning season, sensing she is unhappy with Art and that Art is tired of playing but she rejects him … Which one is which? Take three highly charismatic young actors, place them in competition with each other sexually and professionally, complicate things with a love triangle and the monotony and sacrifice of life as sportsmen and women and you have the ingredients for a cracking drama. Director Luca Guadagnino returns with a tennis story – a surprising fact particularly given that there haven’t been any good ones but the screenplay from Justin Kuritzkes is multi-faceted. Not just a sports film but a romance, a thriller and a portrait of generalised anxiety erupting from having to sustain a career, creating monetising opportunities from every win, enduring pain, dealing with catastrophic injury, burnout, a friendship contained within the rise and fall narrative that all sportspeople experience over time and driven characters playing at marriage. Using the New Rochelle Challenger event as a framing device intensifies the pressures of the relationship past and present – we see where they are now and how they got there with the catalysing event an almost-threesome that prefigures everything else in their destiny. And as Tashi explains, Tennis is a relationship. What an impressive cast. Faist is the dazzling actor who was by far the best thing about Spielberg’s West Side Story remake – awards should have come his way but the film fell foul of COVID lockdown release schedules just as this one was delayed from Fall 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Here he’s the walking wounded and he plays tender and vulnerable so well. O’Connor is the talented Brit who has created so many great performances and powers his way through this with a life in freefall and a smirking swagger, never fully out of love with Tashi. Zendaya is finally being allowed to act nearer her age (27 at time of release) and is so famous she’s currently on the covers of both UK and US Vogue, such is her pull for advertisers and the youth audience, a combination of Euphoria and Spider-Man fans with a monster sci-fi epic under her belt following Dune2. Watching the guys watch her on court at the 2006 US Open and later at a party, open-mouthed and lustful like heat-seeking missiles, is highly amusing and sets up the relationship’s eventual complexities with her at the fulcrum, literally calling the shots. Aren’t you everybody’s type? It also sets in motion the director’s familiar focus – young people and their romantic travails – although we know the starting point is the end point, or thereabouts, which is a little like watching Titanic and knowing the outcome but now we get to invest in the characters as they encounter each other 13 years later with everything that has gone on since that first fateful encounter. You typically fall apart in the second round. As the guys get reacquainted with their game and Tashi is turned off Art because his game is off and she lives through him, Patrick sees his chance to upset the applecart, pointing up the performative aspect of all their public lives. Thus the scene is set for Round Two in their lives, rivalries intact. It’s about winning. And I do. A lot. For a sports movie love triangle this fun and sexy we have to go back in time to 1977 and Semi-Tough with Burt and Kris and Jill. That was smart and screwball-y too but set in the world of football. How are you going to look at me if I still can’t beat Patrick Zweig? This is tense and exhilarating and wonderfully played by a cast that is exceptionally well matched and hot for each other. Love all? Not quite. But this is a smash, with a zippy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Who wouldn’t love you?MM#4545
From her debut as a pulpy teenage temptress in Jamon Jamon (where she met future husband Javier Bardem), Penelope Cruz has delivered eye-popping performances of increasing dramatic control and excellence. The only Spanish actress to be rewarded with an Oscar – for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona – as well as being given a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she has worked consistently between Spanish and English-language cinema, becoming a muse for auteur Pedro Almodovar and lately lending her sparkle to Ferrari but also bringing poignancy to the wonderful 70s-set melodrama L’Immensita. She won at Cannes for Volver and at Venice for Parallel Mothers. She has been nominated for 14 Goyas and won for The Girl of Your Dreams, Volver and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Her qualities of emotional intelligence, a strikingly starry presence and a lively commitment to roles whether high comedy or intense psychological drama make her an international star whose every performance is an event. Happy 50th Birthday Penelope Cruz!
Good writers have the sense to borrow from their elders. Great writers steal! Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) is an aspiring ambitious young writer and Oxford English grad whiling away his twenties tutoring potential Oxbridge entrants for their exams. He eagerly accepts a position at the family estate of his idol, renowned author JM Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) who hasn’t published since the tragic death of his older son. Liam is tutoring his seventeen-year old son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) under the watchful eye of his French mother, sculptress and art curator Helene (Julie Delpy). JM is cold to Liam whereas Helene checks up on her son each day. Liam manages to help JM with a computer problem when the novelist can’t print something out. Liam wonders about a second server in another location in the house. Helene asks Liam about his writing – and reminds him he included his dissertation subject on his CV – JM Sinclair. His technological nous is such that Sinclair eventually offers him to swap novels. Liam compliments his idol’s work but says the ending feels like a different writer whereas JM destroys Liam’s efforts with cutting comments. Then Liam finds a file that illustrates that he is ensnared in a web of family secrets, resentment, and retribution … We don’t talk of his work, we don’t talk of Felix. Follow those rules and you should be fine. A working class wannabe is invited into a wealthy household and eventually his presence apparently destroys the power base and he is handed the keys of the kingdom. The head of household is played by Richard E. Grant. Sounds like Saltburn? Yes, and any or all iterations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. In this case Grant is a revered novelist and the tutor for his truculent son has written his dissertation on him and has ambitions to write novels himself. And it appears that Delpy’s Helene is a real femme fatale as the story unravels. So we might call this Slowburn. In fact, it is a very clever wonderfully constructed mystery thriller focused on writerliness and authorship with death as its beating heart. Quite who might be teaching whom, and what the lesson is, changes with each of the three acts and there’s a great payoff (in fact, there’s more than one). Everyone’s intentions are concealed, nature and water are utilised symbolically to plunder the psychological text and the central motif – the rhododendron – is key to the family secret which spills out to engulf Liam, the visitor with ulterior motives. He is played by Irish actor McCormack, whose subtle ingratiating into this warped family picture is not necessary because for quite some time he’s the only person here who has no idea why he’s really been hired. As he adds to the Post-Its for his next novel trusted butler Ellis (Crispin Letts) takes note because the references are entirely parasitic, reminding us that this plot has been used before with Jean-Paul Belmondo in The Spider’s Web and Terence Stamp in Theorem, throroughoing murderous black comedies about the bourgeoisie eating itself. However, integrating the writing experience into this social analysis, the suicide of an older son and a wife’s intricate plan to get revenge while saving her younger son from the same fate, add an entirely new dimension to the premise by debut screenwriter Adam MacKeith. The scheme is brilliantly exposed, with even clever clogs Liam not anticipating the conclusion. You’re not the first. Grant is scarily good as the dinner table bully mercilessly exploiting his older son’s death in private while a chilly Delpy’s character has secrets in abundance. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Anna Patarakina at Haddon House in Derbyshire with a sharp score by Isobel Waller-Bridge to match the shrewd and finely etched performances, this is a marvellous watch, a modern British noir, with an appropriate reminder of an old school screen villainess in the film Grant’s vicious Sinclair watches in his cinema, another element of planting that pays off properly in a knowing thriller. Directed by first-timer Alice Troughton. What makes an ending?
We are now closer than we have ever been to victory. The near future. A civil war has broken out between an authoritarian US Government and various regional factions. The dictatorial President (Nick Offerman) who is serving a third term, claims that victory is close at hand. Renowned war photojournalist, Colorado-born Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) saves aspiring photojournalist Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny) from a suicide bombing in Brooklyn. Lee and her colleague, Florida-born Reuters journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) intend travelling to Washington DC to interview and photograph the president before the city falls. Lee’s mentor New York Times veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson)asks to accompany them as far as Charlottesville where the Western Forces (‘WF’) of Texas and California are presently assembling. Despite Lee’s hesitance she and Joel agree. Unbeknownst to Lee, Jessie persuades Joel to take her with them as well. After leaving NYC, the group stops at a rural gas station protected by armed men where Lee negotiates the purchase of fuel in Canadian dollars. Jessie wanders off to a nearby car wash, which she saw from the road. There, she finds two men being tortured by the owners, who claim that the men are looters. One owner follows Jessie but Lee defuses the situation by taking a photo of the man posing with his victims. After leaving, Jessie berates herself for being too scared to take photos. Following an overnight stop close to ongoing fighting, the group documents the combat the next day as militiamen assault a building held by loyalists. Lee sees Jessie’s potential as a war photographer, while Jessie photographs the militia executing captured loyalist soldiers. Continuing on, the group spends the night at a refugee camp  before passing through a small town where, under watchful guard, residents attempt to live in blissful ignorance. Look at the tops of the buildings. Be subtle. Lee and Jessie grow closer, trying on clothes at a local shop. Later, they are pinned down in a sniper battle amid the remains of a Winter Wonderland theme park. No one’s giving us orders, man. Someone’s trying to kill us and we’re trying to kill them. The snipers they are with mock Joel’s attempts to ascertain which party they are fighting for or against, telling Joel that they and the sniper in a nearby house are simply engaged in a struggle for survival. Jessie’s nerve builds and her photography skills improve as she witnesses several deaths and she develops a mentorship under Lee … They shoot journalists on sight in the capital. Writer/director Alex Garland’s latest film plugs into the inflammatory State of the Union as it currently pertains, figuring a fissure that is as much physical as ideological with the Western secessionist states of California and Texas pitched against the federal forces that protect a President hiding out in the White House. Garland’s work from The Beach onwards has focused on trouble in paradise and lately on dystopia. Lee and Joel are both camouflaging psychological disturbance from previous war zones – she has PTSD, he has modern-day shellshock and Lee especially exhibits something world weary cynicism to control symptoms that threaten to erupt into something worse. It’s gonna make a good image. How that dissonance within Lee translates into a kind of mentoring relationship with Jessie reflecting Sammy’s relationship with her provides much of the tension as the action and violence spiral the further into the US they travel. I remember you at her age. The juxtaposing of beautiful landscapes with jarring imagery of shock and awe combat provides much of the troubling visual texture. The sense of reality, the minutiae of a road trip under fire and the urgency of the storytelling has the quality of reportage from the front line. The fact that Lee wants to photograph the President to prove he is still alive speaks volumes. What happens ultimately is straight out of the Romanian playbook. The ones who get taken are always lesser men than you think. With no enemies identified, the viewer is asked to come to their own conclusions, a motley crew of varying protagonist-journalists providing a kind of collegiate and immersive focus group of the population, a prism for coming to terms with radical change and war as Americans fight Americans. Every instinct in me tells me this is death. Whether the presence and role of good old-fashioned photojournalists recording events makes a difference is not really questioned here – it’s presumed necessary for history: proof that things are happening because seeing is believing. Hence the acknowledged reference to Lee Miller in Dunst’s character’s name. What kind of American are you? A powerful state of the nation portrait that feels immediate and true. What happened back there is nothing in comparison with what we’re heading into
Is there a name yet for this disease? 1976: by the Ebola River in Zaire. American epidemiologist Don Francis (Matthew Modine) of the World Health Organisation arrives in a village where he finds many of the residents and the doctor working with them have died from a mysterious illness later identified as the Ebola haemorrhagic fever. It’s his first exposure to this kind of epidemic and the images of the dead he helps to cremate haunt him when he later becomes involved with HIV/AIDS research at the CDE (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta. 1981: Francis becomes aware of a growing number of deaths among gay men in Los Angeles, New York city and San Francisco from a rare lung condition – pneumocystis pneumonia. It only afflicts people with weakened immune systems. He moves to Atlanta, Georgia where CDC Administrator Dr. James Curran (Saul Rubinek) asks him to begin an in-depth investigation into this new immune disorder. Due to the Reagan Administration’s clampdown on public spending, Francis is forced to work with little money, limited space and outdated equipment including microscopes. He clashes with members of the medical community, many of whom resent his involvement because of their personal agendas. Francis comes into contact with the gay community after he and his colleagues find strong evidence that the disease is spread through sex. Some gay men support him, such as San Francisco activist and congressional aide Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen) but others such as Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) express anger at what they see as unwanted interference in their lives, especially in his attempts to close the local bath houses, read as homophobia. Kraus works with the doctors treating gay patients to try to save the gay community from the virus, to the point that it costs his own relationship with boyfriend Kico Govantes (BD Wong) who moves on with an architect. Francis and other CDC staff are shocked that representatives of the blood industry are unwilling to do anything to try to curb the epidemic because of potential financial losses. While Francis pursues his theory that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus (based on his own interest in feline leukaemia and Hepatitis B) his efforts are stymied because of competition between French scientists from Paris’ Pasteur Institute led by virologist Luc Montagnier (Patrick Bauchau) and American scientists, particularly Robert Gallo (Alan Alda) of the National Institutes of Health who is enraged when he finds out that Francis collaborated in typically collegiate fashion with the French scientists. The researchers squabble over who should receive credit for discovering the virus and for development of a blood test. Meanwhile the death toll climbs among many different types of people including children who receive infected blood. One day in 1984, while exercising at a local gym, Kraus notices a spot on his ankle and worries that it might be Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-defining illness … The party’s over. One of the two most essential publications of the 1990s (the other being Crisis in the Hot Zone) was Randy Shilts’ 1987 non-fiction book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Excellently adapted by the venerable screenwriter Arnold Schulman (who died February 2023 aged 97) and premiered at the Montreal Film Festival before being screened on TV first by HBO and later by NBC, it knits several strands of storytelling together. It of course has the flavour of public service broadcasting as well as that benighted niche, Movie Illness of the Week. But with this cast and talent never mind the source material it still possesses a unique urgency. This could be the first deadly epidemic in history in which nobody officially died. The intricate scaffolding of the screenplay is constructed to bring together the various aspects of the teams working in silos who unwittingly find commonalities but take their time to work out their findings collectively through accident and coincidence until finally they discover the starting point. Almost everyone I know has or wants to. An internationally starry cast including Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Nathalie Baye, Glenne Headly, Anjelica Huston and Tcheky Karyo – with Richard Gere’s cameo as a version of (unnamed) acclaimed choreographer Michael Bennett – finds itself linked to the impossibly handsome Gaetan Dugas aka Patient Zero (Jeffrey Nordlin) that French-Canadian air steward the carrier who is symptom-free until he gets Kaposi’s. It’s like all the plagues in the history of the world got squeezed into one. When it’s not just gay men but African women in Paris and Haitian people in the US and babies in NYC dying from what Prince called the big disease with a little name, the strands of the narrative are united just as the personal issues are pushed to the forefront with a race to find a vaccine. The sparing use of archive, timed to punctuate developments and place them in an historical context, assists the affect of the performances. I want to stop you from turning this holocaust into an international pissing contest. On the political front there are a number of interests – the Reagan administration, the CDC, the doctors whose big pharma investments are at risk, the blood banks, the gay activists resistant to the bath house closures and then there’s the rivalry between Gallo and the Pasteur Institute which the American narcissist insists is a competition between countries. When doctors start acting like businessmen, who do people turn to for doctors? The irony that the man preaching safe sex finds himself infected is wonderfully exposed in McKellen’s subtle performance. Ultimately progress comes down to the same sample leading the competitors to discover the first new human retrovirus. This is where the diseases are. In an impressive ensemble, which doesn’t extol one individual over any other, Modine as Francis is the motor and the conscience, the protagonist whose original findings in Africa trigger his understanding of the spread of the disease creating empathy for a difficult front line that involves the everyday problems besetting the medical profession. The credits rollcall of the dead – from Arthur Ashe to Ryan White – and the movement’s activists, over Elton John’s The Last Song, is sobering indeed. Elegantly directed by Roger Spottiswoode who delivers a coherent, moving and emotive docudrama with a powerful political punch about stigma, prejudice, ignorance and self-interest that still has the capacity to make jaws drop in chronicling an epidemic with lessons for everyone. Will we ever learn? And will anyone ever commit to the fact that the origin of the protein that evolved alternately into HIV/AIDS or Ebola in humans came from Africans eating monkeys? This was known in 1993, when this film was produced, six years after Randy Shilts’ book was published but presumably nobody dared bring it up. We still fear a little reality about the transmission of disease in a world where borders no longer exist in the rush for globalised profit and concomitant unstoppable uncontrolled migration. This didn’t have to happen. We could have stopped it
Hollywood legend, Academy Award winner, gifted actress, brilliant comedienne, dancer, singer and all-round star, the irrepressible Shirley MacLaine is a magnificent 90 years old today. What a career she has had, from her debut with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, through an astonishing collaboration with Billy Wilder with The Apartment – one of the all-time great films – and the perversely charming Irma la Douce, a chance to return to her musical theatre roots in Sweet Charity and more than one alleged comeback in the 1970s with The Turning Point (another dance film) and later with Terms of Endearment and much more besides. That auburn pixie cut, those elfin features and the cunning impishness have always belied astonishing dramatic depths. Never mind those legs!! She was quite brilliant in Some Came Running and ran with the Sinatra crew for a spell. As well as being an author and spiritual seeker she and her younger brother Warren Beatty have always been immersed in Democrat politics, somewhere her commitment found a ready home. She has written autobiographies and directed too, a documentary and a feature, and has remained a vital part of the culture from her TV appearances in drama – her Downton Abbey role was an international incident – and in interviews: she made memorable appearances in the UK with Michael Parkinson on his chat show. Passionate, wickedly funny, smart and sensitive, she has crafted some of the most immaculate performances on screen. We salute you, Shirley! Many happy returns!
mondomovies 