The Holdovers (2023)

The world doesn’t make sense anymore. I mean, it’s on fire. The rich don’t give a shit. Poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punch line. Trust is just a name on a bank. December 1970 in New England. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a classics teacher at Barton Academy, a boarding school he once attended on scholarship. His students and fellow teachers despise him for his strict grading and stubborn personality. Dr. Hardy Woodrup (Andrew Garman) Barton’s headmaster and Hunham’s former student, scolds Hunham for costing the academy money by flunking the son of an important donor (a senator), causing Princeton University to withdraw his offer of a place. As punishment, Hunham is forced to supervise five students left on campus during the holiday break, including troublemaker Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) whose mother cancelled a family trip to St Kitts to honeymoon with her new husband. Also staying behind is cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) whose son Curtis attended Barton and joined the military to pay for college but has been killed in the Vietnam. To the students’ chagrin, Hunham forces them to study and exercise on their break. After six days, the wealthy father of one of the students arrives by helicopter and agrees to take all five students on the family’s ski trip with their parents’ permission. Angus, who is unable to reach his parents for permission, is left alone at Barton with Hunham and Mary. When Hunham catches Angus trying to book a hotel room, the two argue about Hunham’s disciplinarian policies. Angus impulsively runs through the school halls and defiantly leaps into a pile of gym equipment, dislocating his shoulder. Hunham takes Angus to the hospital; to protect Hunham from blame, Angus lies to the doctors about the circumstances of his injury. At a restaurant, Hunham and Angus encounter Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston), Woodrup’s assistant. Hunham flirts with Lydia, who invites the pair to her Christmas party. Angus, Hunham, Mary and Barton’s janitor Danny (Naheem Garcia) attend Lydia’s party. Angus successfully flirts with Lydia’s niece Elise (Darby Lily Lee-Stack). Hunham is disappointed to discover that Lydia has a boyfriend and Mary gets drunk and has an emotional breakdown over Curtis’s death. Hunham insists on leaving early. Hunham and Angus argue; when Hunham references Angus’s father, Angus says his father is dead. Mary scolds Hunham for his unsympathetic attitude. Feeling remorseful for his actions, Hunham arranges his own small Christmas celebration … There’s nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man’s every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present. Director Alexander Payne’s campus dramedy is set in the early 1970s so the mind turns to those wintry Love Story moments and the political satires of the era and even casts itself as a gnarly riposte to Dead Poets Society: this boasts none of those tropes or inclinations. Instead it’s about the accidental forming of an alternative family with Giamatti in the best performance he’s created since the last time he worked with Payne in the estimable and beloved Sideways. Their collaborations create nuanced portraits of masculinity in a continuum observed in Payne’s other work but somehow come off best when they’re together. At least pretend to be a human being. Please. It’s Christmas! Here he’s essentially Scrooge on the path to redemption as the seasonal setting and quasi paternal function require. I have known you since you were a boy, so I think I have the requisite experience and insight to aver that you are and always have been penis cancer in human form. Newcomers Randolph and Sessa are impressive indeed in their debut film roles. The backdrop of course is Vietnam and it’s foregrounded with the loss of Randolph’s son reminding us that it’s offscreen drama which informs a lot of on the nose exchanges in an often cliched character study that paradoxically ignores the contemporary politics in the main, lending its focus instead to the politics of the school. Twisted fucker orphaned that glove on purpose. Left you with one so the loss would sting that much more. If there’s a flaw in construction it’s in the absurd overlength at 133 minutes – something that definitely could not be thrown at the films it wants to retrospectively join in the pantheon. Those chilly scenes of Winter 1970 are authentically captured by cinematographer Eigil Bryld who perhaps surprisingly was shooting digitally. Written by David Hemingson, very loosely adapting Marcel Pagnol’s Merlusse to create a quasi-autobiographical tale, this is bracingly performed. Not for ourselves alone are we born

Reuniting the Rubins (2010)

It’s going to be the best Seder ever! When sixty-something London-based widower and lawyer Lenny Rubins’ (Timothy Spall) plan for a relaxing round-the-world retirement cruise is disrupted by his elderly mother’s (Honor Blackman) hospitalisationg for a heart attack he is then further disturbed by her request from her hospital bed that he reunite with his estranged adult children so they can all celebrate Pesach (Passover) together. And it turns out she’s bought back the old family home in order to hold it there. Eldest son Danny (James Callis) is an obsessive and highly strung businessman constantly on the phone bullying his minions including new recruit Nick (Blake Harrison) whom he wants to go to Central Africa for a mining deal with a foreign company. He ignores his young son Jake (Theo Stevenson) in pursuit of his latest financial move for which he’s even learned to speak Japanese. Lenny’s daughter Andi (Rhona Mitra) is coincidentally in the same part of Africa as part of her political activism. Lenny almost moves mountains to find her and discovers she regards Danny as the enemy. Lenny locates his son Clarity (Asier Newman) in a Buddhist temple, silent, but ultimately willing to reunite with his grandmother. Then when all seems lost his last son Yona (Hugh O’Conor) shows up completely Orthodox – a new Rabbi – complete with heavily pregnant wife Miri (Loo Brealey) and three kids and he sets out to make the family kitchen completely kosher for the much-anticipated meal. Then there’s a tragic event and everything changes … It could be worse – he might have been a Scientologist. Yoav Factor’s family comedy drama could be damned with faint praise were it not for the fact that there’s a set of terrific performances at its core not least that of Spall with his frustrations writ large. After years of inexplicable behaviour from his warring offspring he’s fed up but his heart expands to deal with all of their problems as they arise, all the while trying to figure out how to take his long deserved holiday, get his money back because his mother’s prior heart condition wasn’t disclosed, and stop his offspring from killing each other. The throughline of identity, Jewishness, communication, language and misunderstandings keeps the family squabbles afloat with more meaning than they have on the surface. The running joke is pronunciation because Lenny is hardly observant yet two of his sons are deeply religious, one not even in the faith into which he was born. It’s a nice attempt to bring British Jewishness to the screen but probably doesn’t hit as many targets as it thinks, particularly since Grandma’s House and Friday Night Dinner on TV set such a high bar and the screenplay is rather clunky and isn’t sure where to lay the emphasis allowing the tone to drift. Nonetheless kudos to the debutant writer/director for dramatising the traditional meal and all that precedes it in a convincingly dysfunctional North London Jewish household where emotional blackmail is the raison d’etre. Tonight we’re all kings

Miss Juneteenth (2020)

A crown don’t make some magical life where all your dreams come true. Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) former beauty queen and single mom prepares her rebellious fourteen-year old daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) for the Miss Juneteenth pageant a scholarship programme for black girls in Fort Worth, Texas to commemorate the day in 1865 when slaves found out they had actually been freed two years earlier. She has an on-off relationship with her mechanic husband Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson) who lives apart from the family but occasionally hooks up with Turq despite the efforts of local funeral director Bacon (Akron Watson) to woo her as he’s been attempting since their teens; her pastor mother (Lori Hayes) is an alcoholic from whom she’s mostly estranged; and her life serving rowdy locals in a bar-restaurant seems hopeless. She is pinning everything on Kai making it through the pageant process to ensure her future – the future she herself messed up. Kai however is only interested in dancing and wants to do it competitively and take the alternate route through life and her mother’s destiny is one she wants to avoid then Ronnie gets put in jail after a fishing expedition goes wrong, money is short and Turq has to dream differently … Not only will you represent your beautiful selves but our history as well. Written and directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples, this takes a cliched setting – single mother, deadbeat dad, endless money troubles – and upends all expectations by subtle writing and performing, especially by Beharie. This isn’t just about a stage mother – it’s about race and society and changing your destiny. It also has an historical basis which is easily threaded through the story in which disappointments seem interminable and family seem to permanently let you down. The upbeat twist ending suggests that sometimes daughters know best, the very antithesis of Mildred Pierce in this uplifting tale of empowerment and sisterhood. Executive produced by David Lowery. Was I a good mother?

Our Girl Friday (1953)

Aka The Adventures of Sadie. She is entitled to benefits commensurate to her sex. After a collision at sea, a haughty, wealthy young woman, Miss Sadie Patch (Joan Collins) is stranded in a lifeboat with three men: Carroll (George Cole) a journalist, Professor Gibble (Robertson Hare) an expert in civilisation, and Pat Plunkett (Kenneth More) an Irish ship’s stoker. They wash up on a desert island, where they build huts and catch fish and amorous rivalries soon spring up, with Carroll and Gibble making fools of themselves in a bid to win Sophie’s affections while she secretly hankers after Pat, who has a bit of a problem with drink and a devil may care attitude that makes him hard to approach… Where do you go when you can’t stand the sight of yourself? This mild comedy isn’t especially well directed by Noel Langley (who also wrote the screenplay, adapting Norman Lindsay’s 1931 novel The Cautious Amorist) but it’s certainly something to see all these men fall for young Joan Collins who busies herself making a fetching bikini from Kenneth More’s shirt. More probably fares best as the Oirish joker stoker who just waits to be caught. There is great battle of the sexes banter between Collins and Cole but it’s not well staged. A pleasant breeze of exotic colour in British cinema with a nice opportunity to see expert farceur Hare and how amazing to see Hattie Jacques playing Joan’s mother! Filmed in Mallorca, Spain. We must throw off our shackles. We must go back to the simple life. We must return to Mother Nature!

Come Back, Little Sheba (1952)

You and Marie are nothing but a couple of sluts. Twenty years after their shotgun marriage, their child dead and their little dog lost for months, dowdy Lola Delaney (Shirley Booth) rents out a room in the house she shares with her recovering alcoholic husband, chiropractor Doc (Burt Lancaster). The pretty college student Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore) does life drawings in the living room of track star jock Turk Fisher (Richard Jaeckel) and Lola enjoys watching them fall in love. Their carry on aggravates Doc who infers that they are engaged in sexual shenanigans despite being told that Marie is engaged to someone else. He compares Lola to Marie and his obsession ultimately drives him back to the bottle despite his two year membership of Alcoholics Anonymous which had got him back on track … I can’t spend my time kissing all the girls. Booth was recreating her acclaimed stage role (and it won her an Academy Award in her screen debut at 54) and Lancaster gives a great, mature performance in a William Inge play that reads like a suburban take on A Streetcar Named Desire: just how big is this house and how long is this woman going to stay in the spare room? Adapted by Ketti Frings, Lola is slatternly and useless but enormously endearing, Doc is remote and difficult but somehow admirable. His paranoia is not far from the surface and peppy Marie gets under his skin. His concealed passion destroys his resolve but Lola treats Marie like a daughter, unaware of his conflict until she opens the cupboard to make cocktails. He has never forgiven her for the forced marriage that stopped him training as a proper doctor and then Lola lost the baby. When his pent-up violent anger finally erupts it’s shocking. It’s a persuasive picture of long-festering marital resentments, fixation on the brevity of youthful beauty and loss and a signature film of kitchen sink realism. Directed by Delbert Mann. Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men

Portrait of a Lady On Fire (2019)

Aka Portrait de la jenue fille en feu. Will you be able to paint her? Painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is instructing a class of art students in Paris. They ask her about the origins of a painting and she reminisces: France, 1770. Marianne is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) a young woman who has just left the convent and is at home on a remote island off the coast of Brittany. She is a reluctant bride to be and her mother the countess (Valeria Golino) wants Marianne to paint her portrait in secret for an arranged marriage to a nobleman suitor in Milan whose visual approval is required. The last male artist failed in his mission and Marianne must study Héloïse without her knowing. Marianne accompanies her on her daily walk under the pretence of being her companion but observes her carefully and paints her secretly. Is that how you see me? When she reveals her identity and Héloïse dislikes the portrait Marianne destroys it, to the rage of the countess who goes away for a while as long as Marianne agrees to do another portrait, this time with her subject’s full co-operation. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s. The women fall in love and Héloïse reads Orpheus and Eurydice by firelight to Marianne and Héloïse’s servant, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) whose pregnancy the women help to end. As Marianne finishes the portrait and the countess is returning they must accept what happens next … Your presence is made up of fleeting moments that may lack truth. French writer/director Céline Sciamma’s historical romance is stately, elegant and well framed:  this is a picture of female solidarity and love, grounded in the most obvious of ideas – the female gaze in a patriarchal world – in a film about looking and perception. We are going to paint. This is about turning around and acknowledging and engaging with what you see – and making a choice. The performers look and watch and are passive aggressive as society dictates they must be with their taboo affair, illuminating each other’s lives in secret. How people see each other has rarely been so truthfully portrayed. A profound, at times magical, meditation on what it means to be a woman, this is beautifully and carefully staged, with nothing excessive or ornamental and driven by stunning performances. The digital cinematography by Claire Mathon is so exquisite there are candlelit scenes you will want to reach out and touch and hang on your wall. This show and tell is far from still life. If you look at me, who do I look at?

Palm Beach (2019)

It’s what they’ve dreamed of for themselves is not what they’ve turned out to be. Frank (Bryan Brown) is flying in his lifelong friends for his big birthday at his beautiful home overlooking the bay at Palm Beach, north of Sydney. Now retired from his tee-shirt business which made him very wealthy, he and his wife Charlotte (Greta Scacchi), feckless son Dan (Charlie Vickers) and medical student daughter Ella (Matilda Brown), are hosting the remaining members of The Pacific Sideburns, the band he managed in the Seventies who made the cover of Rolling Stone back in 1977 when they had their one big hit song. Now Leo (Sam Neill) is a journalist based in New Zealand, married to teacher Bridget (Jacqueline MacKenzie) and stepfather to her teenage daughter Caitlyn (Frances Berry). Billy (Richard E. Grant) is an ad man married to actress Eva (Heather Mitchell) who thinks at 60 she’s too young to be cast as Nicole Kidman’s mother. Holly (Claire van der Boom) is the daughter of their late lead singer Roxy and she arrives with her lover, an older man called Doug (Aaron Jeffery) in tow. Tensions erupt over money, career, cars and homes and then there’s a secret which has been niggling at someone’s conscience … The Pacific Sideburns go down as the voice of adult incontinence. Directed by that lovely actress Rachel Ward (who is of course married to leading man Brown), who co-wrote the screenplay with Joanna Murray-Smith, in her second theatrical outing behind the camera, this is a kind of Big Chill for a different generation and at a different stage of their lives. Fans of Australian cinema will be thrilled with the cast (which also includes blow-ins Grant and Scacchi), with Neill and Brown co-starring for the fifth time. This time out they’re in a production about rites of passage among friends (and frenemies) which isn’t afraid to be tough on its characters, none of whom is without baggage or post-60 year old issues. There are all kinds of relatable tensions over ageing, health and money with the added frisson of questionable DNA. The issue of whether Dan might be fathered by Leo becomes the main plank of the narrative particularly since Frank and Dan are permanently at daggers drawn. But Billy – who has made an ad for adult diapers in France using the band’s big hit – is envious of Frank’s money and taunts him about the chimneys on a neighbouring property blocking the view so often that Frank does something about it, leading to the film’s comic high point:  retirement is not for chickens, as his anti-depressants prove. Bonding over building a pizza oven is no picnic. It’s pretty hard to bond with the Gestapo, growls Sam Neill. The women have their own problems but try to get them out of their system with some therapeutic white wine-assisted yoga by the pool and tough conversations with their terminally self-obsessed men. The father-son relationship between Frank and Dan results in a terrible accident and it finally brings them all to their senses in a well managed conclusion to the comedy drama. This family affair also involves Brown and Ward’s real-life daughter as Frank’s daughter; while the film within a film is Ward’s 2001 short, The Big House. The songs are by the band The Teskey Brothers in a soundtrack peppered with great tunes. An extremely winning production with fantastic performances and smart writing, this is an amazing showcase for New South Wales in a location familiar to viewers of TV’s Home and Away. Very easy watching indeed. I’m on my way ASAP, especially if I can stay in that magnificent beach house. I call it uninvited clarity

 

Bugsy (1991)

I don’t go by what other men have done. Gangster Ben ‘Bugsy’ Siegel (Warren Beatty), who works for Meyer Lansky (Ben Kingsley) and Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano (Bill Graham), goes west to Los Angeles and falls in love with Virginia Hill (Annette Bening) a tough-talking Hollywood starlet who has slept around with several men, as he is regularly reminded by his pals, who he meets on a film set where his friend George Raft (Joe Mantegna) is the lead.  He buys a house in Beverly Hills and shops at all the best tailors and furnishes his house beautifully while his wife Esta (Wendy Phillips) and young daughters remain in Scarsdale, New York. His job is to wrest control back of betting parlours currently run by Jack Dragna (Richard Sarafian) but life is complicated when Mickey Cohen (Harvey Keitel) robs one of his places – Bugsy decides to go into business with him instead of punishing him and puts him in charge of casinos, while Dragna is forced to admit to a raging Bugsy that he stole $14,000, and is told he now answers to Cohen. On a trip to a deadbeat casino in the desert Bugsy dreams up an idea for a casino to end all casinos, named after Virginia (Flamingo), bringing the stars to Nevada but the costs overrun dramatically and his childhood friend Lansky is not happy particularly when it seems Bugsy might be aware that Virginia has cooked the books … Looks matter if it matters how you look. Warren Beatty’s long-cherished project was written by James Toback and Beatty micro-managed the writing and production and the result is one of the most powerful and beautiful films of the Nineties:  a picture of America talking to itself, with a gangster for a visionary at its fulcrum, building a kingdom in the desert as though through damascene conversion while being seduced by Hollywood and its luminaries, watching his own screen test the most entertaining way to spend an evening other than having sex. It sows the seeds of his destruction because his inspiration is his thrilling and volatile lover and making her happy and making a name for himself but it’s also a profoundly political film for all that, as with most of Beatty’s work. It’s undoubtedly personal on many levels too not least because the legendarily promiscuous man known as The Pro in movie circles impregnated his co-star Bening who was already showing before production ended. They married after she had his baby and have remained together since. His avocation of the institution is an important part of the narrative and gangsterism is a version of family here too but he chases tail, right into an elevator and straight to his penthouse too. Perhaps he wants to show us how it’s done by the nattiest dresser in town. It’s a statement about how a nation came to be but unlike The Godfather films it’s one that demonstrates how the idea literally reflects the image of the man who dreams it up in all his vainglory:  he enjoys nothing more than checking his hair in the glass when he’s kicking someone half to death (perhaps a metaphor too far). He is a narcissist to the very end, charming and totally ruthless while Ennio Morricone gives him a tragic signature tune. Impeccably made and kind of great with outstanding performances by Beatty, Bening and Kingsley. Directed by Barry Levinson. I have found the answer to the dream of America

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

I’m sorry I was late but I was busy making a living. Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) is a workaholic ad man who returns home late on the biggest night of his career to find his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) packing her suitcase claiming she needs to find herself. She deserts him and their young son Billy (Justin Henry) and he has to find a way of taking care of the boy while juggling a busy career. He initially blames their divorced neighbour Margaret (Jane Alexander) for putting Joanna up to it but they become friends as he muddles through cooking, school appointments, playing in the park and working at home late at night while managing life alone with Billy. Then 15 months later Joanna shows up looking for custody and Ted loses his job because he can’t balance his work and life commitments. A court battle looms with the courts already tilted in favour of the mother … I have worked very hard to become a whole human being and I don’t think I should be punished for that.  For film scholar Hannah Hamad this is the Ur-film of Hollywood post-feminist paternal dramas, a mode that has dominated the industry ever since (just watch every movie out of America since 1980, more or less!). It’s also the film that put domestic melodrama back at the forefront of American cinema, garnering most of the principal Academy Awards in its year for something that had it been made in France would have been just another humdrum if moving drama. But it has stars – and is simply brilliantly performed with a naturalism that is breathtaking. Hoffman is great as the guy who has to get to know how to live as a working and caretaking parent. The kitchen scenes between him and Henry doing father-son bonding are fantastic. It’s smart too about the working environment and the boys’ club it engenders; and tough on the idea that any woman would want more from life than catering to the needs of a small child:  when Ted sleeps with office lawyer Phyllis (JoBeth Williams) she leaves early not to go home and give a kid breakfast but to go downtown for a meeting. Writer/director Robert Benton adapted Avery Corman’s novel and exhibits none of the quaint, quirky humour that distinguishes his other films. Slickly done, touching and hot-button on all the social issues of the day:  not just a film, a cultural event. I didn’t know it would happen to me. MM #2800

The Magnificent Seven (1960)

You must fight. Fight! A poor Mexican village is regularly raid by a gang of bandits led by Calvera (Eli Wallach). When Calvera kills a villager, the leaders decide they have had enough and one of the elders (Vladimir Sokoloff) advises them to fight back. Taking their few objects of value, three of them ride to a town just inside the US hoping to barter for weapons. Instead they they are impressed by Cajun gunslighter Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) who suggests they instead hiregunfighters to defend the village, and he eventually decides to lead the group. Despite the meager pay offered, he finds five willing gunmen:  gunfighter Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) broke after a round from gambling;  Harry Luck (Brad Dexter) who thinks his old friend Chris is hiding a much bigger reward for the work; half Irish, half Mexican Bernardo O’Reilly (Charles Bronson) who has fallen on hard times; knife and gun expert Britt (James Coburn) who relishes the challenge; and Lee (Robert Vaughn) the well-attired gunman on the run who is burdened by nightmares about the men he has killed. On their way to the village they are followed by aspiring gunfighter, hotheaded Chico (Horst Buchholz) whose previous attempts to join the group were spurned by Chris but he impresses the villagers with his passion and Chris asks him to be part of what is now a group of seven.  Chico then encounters Petra (Rosenda Materos) and the men realise the farmers had hidden their women to protect them from being raped by the bandits. Three of Calvera’s men are dispatched to recce the village; the seven kill all three. Calvera and his bandits arrive in force and another eight of them are killed. The villagers celebrate, thinking Calvera won’t return and ask the men to leave. But Chico infiltrates Calvera’s camp and learns that Calvera must return, as his men are short of food and the seven have to prepare for a final encounter … I’ve been offered a lot of money – but never everything. A film so perfectly archetypal it feels like it’s been inscribed in our collective consciousness since the dawn of time. Screenwriter Walter Newman said that the success of a film always commences with the premise and everyone concerned knew they had a good one because Akira Kurosawa had already made it in Japan. Newman and the blacklisted Walter Bernstein did an uncredited rewrite of the screenplay The Seven Samurai which had been adapted by William Roberts from the work by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni. Each character has his own arc, with his flaws, luck and skills underwriting his destiny. The story of the youngster Chico earning his stripes and finding love with Petra (Rosenda Monteros) gives the story a bedrock as a rites of passage experience but it’s the camaraderie, solidarity and the good intentions that make this a human interest story – the willingness to fight for a cause, putting the good of the group over selfish needs. The cast? How can you even begin to describe the charisma pouring off the screen? Inimitable. The set pieces by director John Sturges are matched by the more intimate episodes and the dialogue is never less than whip smart. Elmer Bernstein’s score is another essential part of the film’s rich mythology – an unforgettable, urgent, rousing call to action that heralds bravery, sacrifice and tragedy. Simply great. I have never had this kind of courage