Jay Kelly: A sublime character study

Jay Kelly (2025) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.14.25

The opening Sylvia Plath quote says it all:

 

“It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else, or nobody at all.”

 

Flanked by publicist Liz (Laura Dern, center left) and best friend/handler Ron (Adam
Sandler, center right), Jay Kelly (George Clooney) cheerful interrupts his morning to
sign autographs for adoring fans.

Jay Kelly (George Clooney) has it all: a long and successful film career; a devoted entourage, including best friend and handler Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler); and the admiration and respect of fans, friends and professional colleagues.

 

He is one with Gary Cooper, Cary Grant and Robert De Niro: shapeshifters and chameleons of identity, with faces that represent something personal to millions.

 

But.

 

Jay’s nature, even when the cameras are off, remains a pose; he has no sense of self. His relationship with daughters Jessica (Riley Keough) and Daisy (Grace Edwards) is strained at best, estranged at worst. They’ve grown up seeing him repeatedly forsake them for the work: another movie, another months-long absence. Their mother and Jay’s other exes are distant memories.

 

He takes Ron for granted, failing to recognize the strain this keeps putting on his family.

 

Jay is selfish … and he’s so far gone, he’s incapable of recognizing this.

 

To be sure, he’s affable, suave and generous with the public; he’s also wheedling and persuasive, and knows how to get his way. After all, he has been doing it for decades. (This is George Clooney, after all; the man exudes charm and savoir faire the way the rest of us breathe.)

 

And yet …

 

Of late, Jay has begun to relive past choices: confronted by ghosts from his past, awakened to the shallowness of his present. And with this rising awareness comes a feeling he can’t quite identify:

 

Regret.

 

This plays out in director Noah Baumbach’s masterfully composed film, which enchants from its initial scene: cinematographer Linus Sandgren’s stunning, single-take tracking shot that follows the set-up and shooting of Jay’s final scene in his new movie, Eight Men from Now. Baumbach’s script, co-written with Emily Mortimer, is a masterful blend of drama, gentle humor, angst and character dynamics, brought to life by richly nuanced performances from Clooney and Sandler. Both are sure bets for Academy Award nominations.

 

(I understand the eyebrow lift. Adam Sandler, in a subtly shaded straight role? Hey, watch this film, then get back to me.)

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (And can you stay there?)

Where'd You Go Bernadette (2019) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for profanity and fleeting drug content
By Derrick Bang

Cate Blanchett’s starring performance in this film is breathtaking: a constantly mesmerizing display of nuance and manic emotional swings, which rise to mischievous playfulness and fall to shattered despair, frequently fueled by a stream-of-consciousness volley of half-finished thoughts and hopes.

Bernadette (Cate Blanchett, left) feigns delight when her daughter Bee (Emma Nelson)
gets accepted to the college-prep boarding school Choate ... but actually is dismayed that
her only child — and best friend — is about to move all the way to Connecticut.

Spending two hours with her character, however, is torture on par with root canal surgery.

Ten minute into this sorta-kinda dramedy, we’re ready to strangle her. Ten more minutes, and we’re eyeing the exits.

Television screenwriter-turned-novelist Maria Semple’s 2012 best-seller is an epistolary novel told mostly via emails, memos, letters and other documents, with occasional first-person commentary by 15-year-old Bee, as she attempts to unravel the “mystery” of her mother. Given that format, our sense of Bernadette develops second-hand, at something of a remove; her bitchy, scattered, nasty, socially unacceptable and self-destructive antics are filtered through the lens of a loving daughter.

Director/co-scripter Richard Linklater, in great contrast, thrusts Bernadette into our faces in real time. Watching her interact with other people — doing and saying the things that took place off-camera (so to speak) in the book — will tax the patience of even Blanchett’s most devoted fans.

The point of the story is that there’s a reason for Bernadette’s narcissistic and frankly intolerable behavior; that’s the “enigma” to be sussed by anybody masochistic enough to endure these personality flaws en route to the film’s (admittedly more satisfying) third act. But boy, getting there is a struggle.

Bernadette Fox is a boldly inventive architect whose imaginative creations once garnered a MacArthur Genius Grant. But that was 20 years ago, before she fled Los Angeles for a reclusive life in Seattle, where she and husband Elgie (Billy Crudup) settled in the shambling wreck of Straight Gate, a “house” that looks like it began life as a sanatorium. Any thoughts of renovating the place apparently vanished when only child Bee (Emma Nelson) arrived, and became the sole focus of Bernadette’s more lucid moments.

Two decades on, the house is an unkempt monstrosity, its haphazard artistic touches overwhelmed by a leaking roof, peeling wallpaper, chunks of fallen plaster and blackberry runners growing up through the carpet. Bee finds this magical, thanks to the forbearance of a worshipful teenage daughter who delights in adult eccentricity. 

But the notion that Elgie puts up with it — has put up with it for years — is beyond comprehension. We’re led to believe that his work as a brilliant Microsoft innovator has made him an often preoccupied, frequently absent husband and father … but still.

Alien: Covenant — Rather disappointing

Alien: Covenant (2017) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for violence, gore, profanity, nudity and sexuality
By Derrick Bang

In space, no one can escape being surrounded by idiots.

The Alien franchise, just shy of four decades old, continues to crank merrily along, of late shepherded by founding director Ridley Scott. To some degree that’s a good thing, because his films always are handsomely mounted, crisply paced and graced with compelling ensemble casts.

Once it becomes obvious that something nasty is prowling on board their massive
colony ship, Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and her synthetic companion Walter
(Michael Fassbender) consider their options.

They’re also usually a great deal smarter than this newest installment.

Alien: Covenant suffers from the same bone-stupid plotting that made the recently released Life — a rather blatant Alien rip-off in its own right — such an infuriating experience. Nobody has a lick of sense, the various characters utterly ignoring chain of command and basic safety protocols, while bickering and squabbling like school kids. As I’ve noted in the past, if these numbskulls represent Humanity’s Finest, then we deserve to be massacred by outer space nasties.

This aggravating film’s script comes courtesy of Jack Paglen, Michael Green, John Logan and Dante Harper, who sacrifice plot logic on the altar of routine gore effects. You’ll find little genuine suspense here; all the alien attacks — whether by the now-familiar ovomorphs, facehuggers, chestbursters or adult xenomorphs — are telegraphed by maddeningly unhurried reveal shots.

Most of these encounters are by-the-book horror flick stuff: Somebody hears something, s-l-o-w-l-y turns around — or peers at something — and whammo! More blood on the screen.

This film offers neither the shock of the opening installment, nor the full-throttle energy of James Cameron’s immediate follow-up, 1986’s Aliens.

Most subsequent films were disappointments of one sort or another, until Scott re-ignited the franchise with 2012’s Prometheus. As a prequel to everything that had come before, the Jon Spaihts/Damon Lindelof script established an intriguing back story that explored the creation of the xenomorphs, the origins of mankind, and the space-faring race of giant “Engineers” who apparently seeded life throughout galaxies. Very high-falutin’ God stuff.

This new film takes place 10 years later — still roughly 20 years prior to the events in Alien (for those who pay attention to such things) — as the deep-space Earth colony ship Covenant makes its way to the distant planet Origae-6. The crew and 2,000 colonists are deep in hyper-sleep, the ship monitored solely by a synthetic android named Walter (Michael Fassbender) and an onboard computer dubbed Mother (voiced by Lorelei King, sounding very much like Sigourney Weaver). Once the journey is complete, the settlers hope to establish a new human outpost.

Jackie: A fascinating character portrait undone by directorial excess

Jackie (2016) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and brief strong violence
By Derrick Bang

A few iconic women have become popular staples in Hollywood dramas; consider the number of actresses, over the years, who’ve portrayed Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth I and Marilyn Monroe.

Having decided upon a lavish funeral procession that she feels will suitably honor her
late husband, Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) suddenly has last-minute doubts,
which she shares with brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard).

And, more recently, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Previous Jackies have been played by Blair Brown, Jacqueline Bisset and Katie Holmes, none of whom comes close to the ferocious intensity and shattered vulnerability depicted here by Natalie Portman. Her performance is so painfully raw that, more than once, we feel like uncomfortable voyeurs, intruding on a grief-stricken woman’s privacy during the worst few days of her life.

Portman’s starring role is by far the best part of Jackie, which marks the mainstream American debut of famed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. His approach is known to be uncompromising, with a grim, take-no-prisoners approach certain to raise eyebrows ... or, in some cases, unapologetically offend.

Many viewers will feel that he has done the latter here.

Noah Oppenheim’s script is unusual, even challenging, in its depiction of Jackie Kennedy during the turbulent few days immediately following her husband’s death: specifically, from the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, to the massive funeral and procession that took place the following Monday morning. The details in between unfold in a blur of flashbacks and cross-cutting, Larraín and Oppenheim deftly conveying the confusion and shock that followed this national tragedy.

Jackie essentially tells her own story via a series of narrative devices: during a lengthy — and at times quite brittle — interview with a never-named journalist (Billy Crudup), who does his best to suss out the “real” Jackie; during a confessional conversation with a priest (John Hurt) just prior to the state funeral; and during anguished conversations with the only two people she trusts, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) and White House social secretary Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig).

These revelatory exchanges are blended further with re-created clips from the TV special A Tour of the White House, with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, hosted by CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood, and broadcast on Feb. 14, 1962: the first-ever First Lady-led, televised tour of the White House — Jackie recently having renovated and restored the mansion — which was seen by 80 million viewers in 50 countries.

The latter sequences — given fuzzy, black-and-white authenticity by cinematographer Stépane Fontaine — show an entirely different Jackie: nervous, stiff, camera shy but determined to share (and justify) the $2 million spent to bring this presidential palace back to its original luster.

It’s also the narrative touch that establishes the film’s theme. Jackie clearly viewed that TV special as emblematic of her legacy as First Lady, just as she obsesses over details — immediately following the President’s assassination — in order to  properly preserve his legacy.

Spotlight: The Fourth Estate Rules!

Spotlight (2015) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.20.15

Crusading newspaper journalists have been a cinema staple ever since the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur stage play The Front Page first hit the big screen in 1931, but true classics are rare.

The Devil is in the details: Michael (Mark Ruffalo, center) and Sacha (Rachel McAdams)
grow increasingly excited — and horrified — as a fairly simple computer search by Matt
(Brian d'Arcy) reveals that they're likely dealing with far more than just five or six
pedophile priests.

Meet John Doe, The Big Carnival, Deadline USA and Absence of Malice come to mind, and they all have one thing in common: They’re fictitious stories.

Memorable films based on actual reporters who pursued real-world scoops are more scarce, in part because few screenwriters can spin compelling drama from the day-after-grinding-day research slog that precedes a “breaking” news story, which (to the outside world) seems to come out of nowhere. The gold standard in this category remains All the President’s Men, in great part due to screenwriter William Goldman’s superb, Oscar-winning adaptation of the Bob Woodward/Carl Bernstein book.

Goldman now has equally talented company: Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer, who’ve done a masterful job with Spotlight — McCarthy also serving as director — and its depiction of the four Boston Globe reporters who won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their astonishing series of stories exposing the long-term cover-up of child abuse by members of the Boston Catholic Church clergy.

As was the case with All the President’s Men, Spotlight isn’t merely an engaging — even suspenseful — drama, fueled by excellent performances from a well-selected ensemble cast; it’s a valuable historical document that details a frankly heinous abuse of trust and power. It’s simultaneously cathartic and horrific: a crisply condensed depiction of an extremely complicated story that expands so far beyond initial expectations, that — were it fiction — it likely wouldn’t be believed.

But it’s not fiction; it’s grim, infuriating and relentlessly heartbreaking fact.

Not to mention another reminder of the significant service performed by newspapers and their dedicated staffs, and the frankly alarming hole we’ll be in, as a country, if the Fourth Estate is allowed to be replaced by the frivolous, empty-calorie content of “web journalism” (an oxymoron if ever one existed).

McCarthy is an actor who burst on the filmmaking scene when he wrote and directed 2003’s The Station Agent, one of the finest, quirkiest dramedies of the new century. Singer has a wealth of TV scripting credits in his still-brief career, notably The West Wing and Fringe, and he made the jump to movies with the 2013 Julian Assange dramatization, The Fifth Estate.

Both McCarthy and Singer have an ear for realistic dialog, and particularly the careful “dance” that takes place during painfully raw and intimate conversations. This film is laden with such scenes — some quite difficult to watch — and all handled masterfully both by the film’s stars, and by lesser cast members appearing perhaps only briefly.

The Watch: You definitely don't want to

The Watch (2012) • View trailer
One star. Rating: R, for pervasive profanity, vulgar sexual content, violence and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

This misbegotten train wreck represents the triumph of a pithy high-concept pitch over common sense, plot logic and artistic integrity.

Having learned that a newly discovered silver sphere is a powerful
alien weapon, our numbnuts heroes — from left, Jamarcus (Richard
Ayoade), Bob (Vince Vaughn), Evan (Ben Stiller) and Franklin (Jonah
Hill) — proceed to blow up all sorts of stuff, accompanied by much
raucous laughter. Sadly, they can't laugh hard enough to make us
viewers believe that any of this dreck is the slightest bit amusing.

The Watch may not wind up as the worst big-studio effort of 2012, but it’ll do until that one comes along.

Words simply fail me. I can’t believe this mess ever started as an actual script; it feels like so-called writers Jared Stern, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg got stoned one evening, jotted wild ’n’ crazy ideas onto pieces of paper, threw them in the air, assembled them randomly and then handed the stack to director Akiva Schaffer, who apparently saw no reason to argue.

Schaffer, it should be noted, was a longtime writer and director — of digital shorts — on TV’s Saturday Night Live. He paused long enough, during that tenure, to direct Andy Samberg in one of 2007’s limpest comedies, Hot Rod. Haven’t ever heard of it? That’s to your advantage; don’t go looking.

At the risk of repeating an old cliché, on the basis of that film and his “work” here on The Watch, Schaffer ain’t fit to direct traffic. Nor would I let him direct me to a market half a block away; he’d undoubtedly get it wrong.

Failed comedies can be egregiously awful, and this one certainly qualifies. The dialogue sounds under-rehearsed; the characters lack continuity or credibility; the plot sorta/kinda stumbles from one scene to the next. As is typical of too many numbnuts “doofus projects” these days, profanity and vulgarity are tossed about like spent condoms — actually one of the many running gags — in the vain hope that such elements can draw laughter. Not because any of the lines are actually funny, but ... just because.

Random dialogue exchanges are reflexively homophobic, racist, sexist and all other –ists that come to mind; about the best that can be said, is that these guys are equal-opportunity offenders.

And as bad as the limp-noodle efforts at slapstick humor are, things get even worse when Christophe Beck’s soundtrack swells with what’s intended to be feigned emotion, for a scene Schaffer apparently hopes will be heartwarming. Gaaahhh...

Watchmen: Tick-tock...

Watchmen (2009) • View trailer for Watchmen
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, and quite generously, for nudity, profanity, sexual content and urelenting graphic violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.6.09
Buy DVD: Watchmen • Buy Blu-Ray: Watchmen (Director's Cut + BD-Live) [Blu-ray]


Fans of Alan Moore's Watchmen are in for a ripping good time, because director Zack Snyder's big-screen adaptation of this seminal 1980s graphic novel is geek paradise.

The film is impressive faithful to its source material, and at just shy of three hours, Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse have plenty of time and a massive canvas on which to reproduce all the important details, large and small, that made Moore's ground-breaking deconstruction of superheroes so memorably engrossing.

Having decided to defy the government's ban on their activities, the costumed
heroes Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) derive
considerable pleasure from quelling a prison riot while searching for one of
their comrades.

You will not, however, find Moore's name anywhere on this project, which claims simply to have been adapted from the work by Dave Gibbons (the original 12-part comic serial's artist) and "DC Comics." The notoriously eccentric Moore, no fan of the film industry — despite what I'd argue are honorable big-screen renditions of his other works, From Hell and V for Vendetta — refused to allow his name to be used to help sell this film.

Hey, his loss.

Watchmen belongs to the recent trend that reasonably questions whether super-powered beings automatically would be virtuous beacons of integrity. Obviously, they wouldn't all be; a certain percentage of any subset of humanity would include those with opportunistic streaks and even criminal tendencies.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely ... or, to employ one of this story's catch-phrases, Who watches the Watchmen?

Moore's saga, obviously written in a white heat of rage prompted by his perception of where the world was going in the 1980s, takes place in a slightly altered universe where "Masks," as superheroes have been dubbed, began operating in public during the WWII years. Oddly, they're a mostly American phenomenon, which generates considerable nervous tension on the part of other world powers.

When President Nixon later calls on the Masks to help the United States win the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union's perception of American arrogance escalates a nuclear missile build-up that prompts worried scientists to set their "doomsday clock" to scant minutes before the midnight of annihilation.

(In a deliberate nod to Dr. Strangelove, a scene in Nixon's war cabinet shows various generals cheerfully acknowledging the necessity of insane levels of collateral American lives lost, when — not if — this war begins. One can hear the echo of the grinning George C. Scott, as he ruefully admits that we'd "get our hair mussed.")