I Care a Lot: Deviously nasty fun

I Care a Lot (2020) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and violence

By Derrick Bang

In this Netflix original’s initial 20 minutes, writer/director J Blakeson and star Rosamund Pike craft one of cinema’s all-time, audaciously evil characters.

 

Dragged from her home by the force of a court order, Jennifer (Dianne Wiest, center)
becomes increasingly suspicious of the "benevolent" attitude displayed by Fran
(Eiza González, left) and Marla (Rosamund Pike).

Pike’s Marla Grayson isn’t merely malevolent; she’s smug, self-satisfied, shark-like and insufferably condescending. Think Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched, from 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but with naked avarice and ambition added to the mix.

 

Marla’s plastic smile is so insincere, so unbearably patronizing, that you want to reach into the screen and throttle her.

 

She’s one of the best-scripted villains ever concocted, and Pike brings her to terrifying life. Every little detail — every nuanced bit of dialogue, every self-righteous smirk — is exquisitely calculated.

 

Marla’s behavior — her very existence — is nightmarish. We pray never to encounter her like, in real life.

 

She unapologetically reveals her moral bankruptcy early on, via voice-over. “There are two kinds of people in this world,” she insists, matter-of-factly, “those who take … and those who get took.”

 

Marla has built an appallingly successful career as a professional, court-appointed guardian for dozens of elderly wards deemed “incapable of caring for themselves,” and therefore railroaded into managed-care facilities. Once barricaded and helpless behind locked glass doors, Marla and her business partner/lover Fran (Eiza González) seize, strip and sell each victim’s assets via dubious but wholly legal means.

 

As the film begins, the son of one such casualty — Macon Blair, as the hapless and frustrated Feldstrom — understandably goes berserk when he’s refused access to his elderly mother. It’s a disastrous move, which the oh-so-cool-and-collected Marla later references before court Judge Lomax (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), since it proves that Feldstrom poses a “clear and present danger” to his mother.

 

It only gets worse.

 

Marla has two additional key players on her corrupt payroll: smarmy Sam Rice (Damian Young), director of her favorite managed-care prison, who’ll adjust meds and treatment to her desires; and chirpy Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt), who proposes likely candidates from her patient roster.

 

Her newest suggestion is Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a wealthy retiree who lives alone and is without family: therefore a “cherry,” in Marla’s cold analysis.

Da 5 Bloods: A powerful statement

Da 5 Bloods (2020) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, grisly images and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.26.20

Movie serendipity can be spooky at times.

Back in the spring of 1979, The China Syndrome hit theaters just 12 days prior to Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island almost-a-catastrophe.

Sheer chance has brought them to the right spot: As David (Jonathan Majors, far right)
watches quietly, his companions — from left, Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie
(Norm Lewis), Paul (Delroy Lindo) and Otis (Clarke Peters) — find evidence of their
long-ago fallen comrade.

And now, director Spike Lee’s savagely compelling new drama, Da 5 Bloods, debuted on Netflix June 12, not quite three weeks after the callous murder of George Floyd ignited a justifiably enraged movement that shows no sign of slowing. Lee’s message couldn’t be more timely.

His film warrants such enhanced attention. And then some.

Da 5 Bloods — co-scripted by Lee, Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott — finds the reliably passionate filmmaker once again in the infuriated mode that characterized his early career. This isn’t a slyly sarcastic (and fact-based) jab at racist buffoons akin to 2018’s BlacKkKlansman; Da 5 Bloods is a bleak, intensely angry rage-against-the-man diatribe, with a slice of magic realism.

And, yes, a few winks and nods to classic Hollywood. Let’s call it a Vietnam parable by way of 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

The setting and character dynamics may be different, but the message is identical: Greed destroys.

African-American Vietnam veterans Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) haven’t been too successful, since returning to the world. They’re broken men, beaten down by grief, illness, addiction, financial ruin and divorce. And by regret and shame, knowing that — decades earlier — they were forced to abandon their fallen squad leader, known as Stormin’ Norman.

Haunted ever since by this failure (“Leave no man behind!”), they’ve returned to Vietnam, determined to find, and bring home, their former comrade’s remains.

As it happens, though, their motives aren’t entirely pure. Back in the day — shortly before Norman’s death — the squad was tasked by the CIA to deliver a chest of gold bars to the indigenous Vietnamese who were helping the American war effort. But Norman — passionate about his own people, back home — proposed they bury the gold until they could later reclaim it for the benefit of their own communities.