A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: A bold, but failed experiment

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

This is so not the movie most folks likely are expecting.

Not even 10 minutes in, it feels like we’ve stumbled into the Twilight Zone.

When cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys, right) arrives at the Pittsburgh studio
where Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood is filmed, he's surprised to be greeted effusively by
Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks), as if they were longtime friends.

A couple of clues signal this not-quite-rightness. The film’s aspect ratio is 4:3, as with old television set images (as opposed to any sort of wide-screen format). The visuals appear slightly out of focus, as if we’re watching a VHS tape; director of photography Jody Lee Lipes has re-created 20-year-old television-style cinematography. The result seems “blurry” because we’ve become so accustomed to pristine HD camerawork.

Lipes pans slowly over the familiar, scale-model neighborhood set, complete with toy vehicles — notably the Neighborhood Trolley — moving jerkily among the rows of houses, in the low-budget, pre-CGI fashion. The gentle, equally memorable piano melody rises — Nate Heller’s soundtrack sublimely mimicking the iconic Johnny Costa, whose improvised keyboard work was such an integral part of the show — and Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks) enters in ritual fashion.

The jacket comes off, replaced by a red cardigan: zipped all the way up — and then halfway down — with a snap. He sits; the formal shoes yield to canvas boat sneakers. All the while, he softly croons the iconic opening song — “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” — without ever losing that gentle, inviting smile.

The replication is almost spooky: the stance, the voice, the welcoming expression. More than that, the aura that always radiated from Fred Rogers. The latter must’ve been a challenge: Either that, or Hanks has discovered a way to channel the dear departed.

Right about now, we wonder: Where the heck are we going?

At which point, the merely puzzling sails into the positively weird.

Mr. Rogers shares a picture-board, opening each of the little doors to reveal a photograph beneath. Some are familiar, as with the puppet King Friday the 13th. But the next door conceals a head shot — practically a police booking photo — of Mr. Rogers’ “good friend,” Lloyd Vogel. He looks quite worse for wear, with a black eye and bloodied nose.

Mr. Rogers softly laments the plight of those consumed by anger, unable to forgive the trespasses of others. Whereupon we slide into Lloyd’s life, to witness the events that brought him to this sorry state.

The Post: Fast-breaking drama

The Post (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for profanity and brief war violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.19.18

Although Steven Spielberg’s riveting new film gets most of its dramatic heft from the democracy-threatening events that swirled around the release of the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971, we’re most emotionally involved with the plight of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham: at the time, the only woman in a position of power at a major national newspaper.

The entire Washington Post editorial staff — including executive editor Ben Bradlee and
publisher Katharine Graham (Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, third and fourth from left) —
reacts with stunned silence after learning that The New York Times has been forced, by
a federal injunction, to cease reporting on the Pentagon Papers.

As the film begins, and as we’re introduced to Graham via Meryl Streep’s thoroughly engaging performance, the poor woman is hopelessly — helplessly — out of her depth.

We spend almost the entire film waiting for her epiphany, and for the “Meryl Streep moment” when the actress — Graham finally having found her spine — verbally eviscerates one of her patronizing male colleagues.

It’s a long wait ... and well worth the anticipation.

The Post isn’t opportune merely as a reminder — at a time when the White House is occupied by an infantile gadfly who defends his lies by screaming “Fake news!” — of the crucial role played by our Fourth Estate. Scripters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer couldn’t have known, as their film was being shaped, that its parallel focus on Graham would resonate so well at a moment when American women have risen en masse to challenge male hegemony.

The resulting drama serves both mindsets, while also taking its place alongside top-drawer journalism dramas such as All the President’s Men and Spotlight (the latter having brought Singer — also a veteran of TV’s West Wing — an Academy Award).

The sequence of events taking place during just a few days in the early summer of 1971 almost defy credibility. The film opens on a sidebar issue, as Graham prepares for a presentation to The Washington Post Company board of directors, in anticipation of raising badly needed capital via a stock offering when the paper goes public, on June 15.

Streep’s Graham is nervous and flustered, despite having solid notes prepared with the assistance of longtime friend and confidant Fritz Beebe (Tracy Letts, nicely understated), a former Wall Street lawyer and chairman of the board. Even before knowing anything about this woman, we feel for her; Streep makes her anxiety palpable.

We therefore groan inwardly, when — her moment having come — she’s too tongue-tied even to speak, and her carefully prepared details are introduced by Fritz.

This is before Graham learns, a few days later, that the stock offering could be scuttled by her paper’s growing involvement in the nation-shattering spat between Richard Nixon and The New York Times: the first time, in the history of the republic, that a U.S. president has attempted to silence a national newspaper.

Burnt: Overly scorched

Burnt (2015) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang

We’re supposed to root for this guy — and it shouldn’t be difficult; we are, after all, talking about Bradley Cooper — but his character is too damn mean.

Dragged against her will into joining Adam (Bradley Cooper) in the kitchen of his
restaurant-to-be, Helene (Sienna Miller) almost immediately is the target of a belittling
tirade by her new boss. Which she tolerates, thereby losing all of our respect for her.

Redemption stories get their juice from the intensity of atonement: The deeper the downward spiral, the more we cheer the dogged climb back to salvation and forgiveness.

That said, this story’s protagonist is such a temper tantrum-throwing bully — such a relentless prick — that viewers likely will write him off as unworthy, long before he tries to get his act together. Scripters Steven Knight and Michael Kalesniko give him too many unpalatable virtues, and — as directed by John Wells — Cooper obligingly delivers too many thoroughly persuasive rages.

Matters probably aren’t helped by the fact that this story takes place in the world of London and Paris’ haute cuisine restaurants, where screaming enfant terrible chefs browbeat their staffs into delivering the perfect artistic touch to dishes with portions so small they wouldn’t satisfy a mouse, which then are served to über-rich snots who smack their lips and roll their eyes over imagined sensory marvels.

We live in a post-Gordon Ramsey world, where — rather weirdly — boorish behavior by celebrity chefs has come to be synonymous with gastronomic perfection. I ain’t buyin’ it. Frankly, this film’s most interesting moments come during the occasional montages that find our hero (?) exploring food carts, back-alley stalls, bodegas, street markets and even fast-food restaurants, while searching for intriguing spices, sauces or seasonings.

Once back in his high-end kitchen, applying said discoveries to laughably over-decorated menu items ... not so much.

But maybe I’m just not enough of a foodie.

All that said...

We meet Adam Jones (Cooper) at an oyster shack in New Orleans, where he has spent the past few years doing self-prescribed penance for previous bad behavior. His path to spiritual salvation: the shucking of one million oysters, a task he has recorded meticulously in a pocket notebook. He reaches this goal as the story begins, and then he’s off to Paris, scene of his previous extremely bad behavior.