The time frame of Paul McGuigan’s slice-of-life biopic of actress Gloria Grahame isn’t specifically stated, though the first scene takes place in a rundown dressing room in Liverpool in 1981 as Grahame (Annette Bening), long washed-up as a film actress, prepares to take the stage for yet another performance of The Glass Menagerie. She has already met and fallen in love with a local aspiring actor, Peter Turner (Jamie Bell), who is much younger than she is, and McGuigan hints throughout the movie that Grahame had a penchant for much younger men, even for boys. However, the film focuses on her relationship with Turner, which is limiting in terms of what it tells us of Grahame’s life as an artist and a human being. It’s also dramatically lazy, since the plot is a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards that seem to cover a long period of time but actually only cover a few years, and the development is just one drunken fight after another, many in Liverpool, where Turner was raised, but also in New York and Los Angeles, all followed by desperate reconciliations and punctuated by the recurrence of the breast cancer that eventually killed her at the age of 57.
McGuigan’s problem is that he seems to be saddled with Turner’s memoir of the affair as his source material, and once he’s into it there seems to be no escape. Consequently, he over-relies on whatever chemistry Bening and Bell can conjure up, and while the former displays her peculiar empathy for older women with emotional problems, Bell’s acting is all reactionary. This tendency is especially annoying in scenes involving his family, who are bizarrely OK with Peter having sex with a much older, unstable woman, simply because they are starstruck. That said, Julie Walters, who plays Turner’s mother, is much more believable in her role as a supportive parent than is Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Grahame’s imperious mother as if she were trying out for Lady Macbeth. Since I don’t take Redgrave lightly in any role, I have to imagine the problem is in the part as it’s been written.
Invariably, the viewer is driven to Wikipedia to fill in the holes in Grahame’s life left gaping by the movie, and what you learn makes you desperate to see Bening play her in something with more breadth. After all, she was admired by her peers, especially Bogart, and earned an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952. In the mid-50s she was considered one of Hollywood’s few actresses with the chops to play pretty much anything with class and rigor. Then she was quickly tossed aside, reduced to the kind of stage tours that kept sending her back to places like Liverpool. Some of these points are touched on, but for the most part Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool takes its title was too literally. Though much of it is set in the storied port city, and Grahame almost did die there, she, in fact, passed away in New York.
Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).
Film Starts Don’t Die in Liverpool home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2017 Danjaq LLC
Here’s 
At this writing, the new CGI live-action Dumbo is being slated as a likely box office smash, thus justifying Disney’s faith in director Tim Burton as the kind of edgy filmmaker they can trust with their family fare. Inherent in this proposition is the idea that, of course, there is no intention of supplanting the original animated version of the story, but rather to simply give it more relevance for an audience whose tastes in technology are presumably more sophisticated than they were in 1941, but that’s a load of bull. Disney owns the story and the images and thus controls how those elements are reconfigured for a new generation. The real idea is to exploit a property, and nobody expects Burton, regardless of his reputation for the weird and the wondrous, to make anything other than what Disney approves of. And if you hold Alice in Wonderland up as an example of what Burton can do in the face of corporate control, remember that it was probably the worst reviewed film of his career. Neither Burton nor Disney seems willing to test each other in the same way this time.
The big reveal at the end of the first LEGO Movie was one of the most brilliant in the history of animated films, since it capped a fairly hilarious mock-dystopian story with a credibly affecting framing device that not only put the mock-dystopian story into proper perspective, but gave it an emotional force that you couldn’t have expected given the overall comic thrust of the movie. Obviously, the sequel isn’t going to be able to deliver the same kind of thrill. As they used to joke in the old Looney Tunes shorts when the guy blows himself up to impress a vaudeville talent agent, yeah, it’s great, but you can only do it once.
In the wake of the recent Mueller report and the disappointment felt by those who hoped it would hasten the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, Rob Reiner’s earnest paean to the old-fashioned virtues of hard-hitting newspaper journalism may, in fact, only serve to rub salt in those wounds being nursed by liberals like Reiner himself. Shock and Awe chronicles the painstaking research that the Knight Ridder newspaper group carried out to prove that the weapons of mass destruction Bush II posited as the reason for invadeing Iraq in 2003 were essentially made up. Almost every other media outlet in America bought the administration story, so Knight Ridder should have come to represent what’s left of responsible journalism, but for the most part journalism didn’t survive the Bush years, as we can easily tell by the shrill tone used to cover both the Obama and Trump administrations. The lesson the Trump folks want us to take away from Mueller is that the mainstream press can’t be trusted, which is also what Shock and Awe tries to tell us.
Given her current role in keeping the U.S. Constitution on an even keel during these politically stormy times, it’s not surprising that there are two feature-length films about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and by most lights the Oscar-nominated RBG is the more rigorous of the two simply because it’s a documentary. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better movie. RBG is mostly a tribute to Ginsburg as a guiding personality for the 21st century, and while it explains her accomplishments and their effect on not only the legal landscape of America but the status of women, it does so in a manner that highlights her qualities as a woman rather than her mind. On the Basis of Sex is a dramatic recounting of Ginsburg’s early career centered on the case that brought her attention as the leading gender rights advocate of the 20th century, and while it tends toward easily processed characterizations in the mode of Hollywood biopics, it gets into the nitty-gritty of legal procedures more deeply than RBG does. When the phrase “radical social change” comes up—more than once—it has genuine meaning.
Spike Lee’s most obvious touchpoint as a major film director is his obsession with the African-American experience, which he translates to the screen in the most uncompromising terms. For that reason, he often oversteps his subjects when it comes to form and style. The manic qualities that made critics notice him early on have never receded, and are often at odds with what seems to be his purpose in making a particular film. Certainly, Do the Right Thing is the clearest example of this mode of presentation when it works sucessfully. Malcolm X proves that he can also pretty much address his obsession in more conventional ways and produce something worthwhile, but it feels more like an exception rather than the rule.
The rapid rise and fall of Mary Stuart has been filmed a number of times before, so director Josie Rourke needs a damn good reason to stick our noses in the tragedy once again. Her revisionist take, turning the rivalry between Mary (Saoirse Ronan), who, when her husband, the king of France, dies, returns to reclaim her throne in Scotland at the age of 18, and her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie), into a cautionary feminist tale about two strong-willed women struggling to navigate a world of men who don’t trust them, is interesting up to a point, but it still has to contend with certain inalienable facts that have to be explained if anything is to make any sense, and, as a result, Mary Queen of Scots comes across as schematic and dramatically anemic.
It’s interesting that Jodie Foster is thinking about doing a Hollywood remake of this extraordinary Icelandic fantasy, because it seems so resistant to the kind of pat familiarities that Hollywood trades in these days. The hook is understandably appealing: Unassuming single middle-aged woman looking for purpose in her life becomes an underground eco-terrorist who garners headlines and stirs controversy aboveground. And while director Benedikt Erlingsson handles the action portions of the tale with flair and humor, he’s more interested in the philosophical ramifications of our hero’s quest. Altruism is many-sided and complicated to a fault. Sometimes you have to give up one good thing in order to get another.
As we prepare ourselves for another spring-summer of superhero schlock, it’s best not to make too much of a distinction between Marvel and DC. Obviously, the former trumps the latter in most departments, but the late Stan Lee’s runaway train of pop culture signifiers has become so obsessed with outdoing itself movie after movie that the effort becomes a slog for everyone involved, including the viewer. The Spider-Man franchise has always managed to set itself slightly apart from the crowd, and I have no idea if it’s because the brand is handled by Sony rather than Disney, but reportedly the makers of this ambitious animated take on the series had problems selling the studio on their concept, and it’s easy to see why: It’s a genuine kids’ movie, but for kids who are brainier than your average superhero fan, since it deals with multiple dimensions that incorporate parallel plots requiring the viewer to process characters on-the-go. Eventually it was greenlighted, and Sony/Marvel got more than they expected: a huge box office hit and the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
philipbrasor.com 