Greedy People: Crime really doesn't pay!

Greedy People (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for violence, sexual content and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters and video-on-demand

By Derrick Bang

They don’t come much darker than this one.

 

At first blush, this modern crime noir from director Potsy Ponciroli and writer Mike Vukadinovich looks like it’ll occupy the darkly humorous neighborhood populated by sardonic classics such as Fargo and In Bruges. The occasional dollops of humor are twisted: driven both by a bevy of burlesque characters and a plot that is far more comically convoluted than it initially appears.

 

The story cooked up by Will (Hamish Patel, left) and Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), in an
effort to explain a woman's grisly death, doesn't withstand the smell test ... but they
nonetheless stick to it.

Midway through the second act, though, Vukadinovich delivers an unexpected wallop that destroys what’s left of a humorous tone.

People who make films of this nature understand that some boundaries shouldn’t be crossed; call them Thou Shalt Nots. Savvy writers and directors recognize that, no matter how twisted or deplorably their characters behave, it’s wise to avoid Thou Shalt Nots, lest viewers be outraged and alienated past the point of forgiveness.

 

Occasionally, though, really savvy directors and/or writers sometimes take that risk, assuming that their filmmaking chops are solid enough to hold the audience. John Carpenter (in)famously violated a Thou Shalt Not at the beginning of 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, gambling that he’d maintain a level of suspense that would make the move worthwhile. He won that gamble.

 

And goodness; the entire John Wick film series owes its longevity to a Thou Shalt Not broken in the initial 2014 entry.

 

I’m less persuaded that Ponciroli and Vukadinovich are similarly successful here, although the aforementioned wallop definitely plunges their film into much deeper waters.

 

The time is the present, in the sleepy Northeastern coastal island community of Providence (not to be confused with Rhode Island’s capital city). Rookie policeman Will (Himesh Patel) and his very pregnant wife Paige (Lily James) moved into town just three days earlier; they’re still waist-high in unpacked boxes.

 

Will dutifully reports for work on this, his first day; he’s given a brief rundown by Captain Murphy (Uzo Aduba). We’ve already seen her earlier this same morning, at home, still mourning the loss of a young child. Murphy assigns Will to a week of training with veteran cop Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), after which the newcomer will get his own vehicle and beat.

 

Will is an inherently honest family guy who believes in the social stabilization of moral law enforcement. Terry is an opportunistic, foul-mouthed horse’s ass who views police work as an easy path to free coffee and donuts, while rousting and threatening folks for the sheer joy of it. They have nothing in common.

 

Terry acts according to three personal rules, the first of which is, Try Not To Kill Anybody. “It gets messy,” he tells a bewildered Will. 

 

Because, really, who would need killing in a place like Providence?

Being the Ricardos: We still love Lucy

Being the Ricardos (2021) • View trailer

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

Available via: Movie theaters and (beginning December 21) Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Writer/director Aaron Sorkin loves the crackling intensity of rapid-fire dialogue amid interpersonal conflict, as we’ve seen in earlier projects from TV’s The West Wing and The Newsroom, to big-screen efforts such as The Social Network and The Trial of the Chicago 7.

 

The stars of I Love Lucy — from left, Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), William Frawley
(J.K. Simmons), Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) and Lucile Ball (Nicole Kidman) — rehearse
a scene wherein Ricky and Lucy Ricardo attempt to "re-unite" the bickering Fred and
Ethel Mertz.

When Sorkin is at the top of his game, the result is exhilarating: absolutely the word to describe this new film.

Being the Ricardos is set primarily during a tumultuous single week in late 1952, as the stars, writers and sponsors of I Love Lucy shape the second season’s next episode, prior to it being performed and filmed before a live studio audience. That said, frequent flashbacks reveal the early careers of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), and how they met and married.

 

Those elements are fascinating, as Sorkin deftly sketches the ambition, shrewd intelligence and business savvy that — once they got together — transformed two B-movie contract players into industry visionaries: They co-created one of television’s all-time most successful shows (No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings for four of its six seasons) and then founded Desilu, one of the world’s top TV production companies at the time (and later the home of Star Trek, among many other hits).

 

Captivating as all this is — and the power couple’s many innovations almost are too numerous to take in, so quickly (a Sorkin trademark) — the film primarily focuses on three crises that erupt during this one week:

 

• A newspaper photo that leads Ball to believe that Arnaz is having an affair;

 

• Muckraking gossip columnist Walter Winchell’s bombshell announcement that Ball is a communist (!); and

 

• The revelation that Ball is pregnant with their second child, and her determination — with Arnaz’s support — to break television’s then-cultural taboo against showing pregnant women on screen.

 

While all these events are factual, Sorkin has “massaged” history — and heightened the intensity of his film — by having them occur simultaneously. (They didn’t. Most notably, Winchell’s radio bombshell wasn’t made until a few days after Ball’s second meeting with the House Un-American Activities Committee, in September 1953.)

 

Ergo, the cacophony of calamity is artistic conceit, but it’s a forgivable sin.

 

Verbal jousting is ubiquitous throughout, in the audacious manner of a 1930s screwball comedy: between Ball and Arnaz; between both of them and their three favorite writers, Madelyn Pugh (Alia Shawkat), Bob Carroll Jr. (Jake Lacy) and Jess Oppenheimer (Tony Hale); and between all five of them and the CBS suits (Clark Gregg, Nelson Franklin and Dan Sachoff) and Phillip Morris representative (Jeff Holman) who question, nitpick, challenge and argue over any line or act that might be considered controversial, risqué or offensive to American TV viewers.

 

It’s a revelation, to be reminded of the jaw-droppingly insane restrictions placed on TV shows, back in the day … and the long-suffering patience required of the stars, writers and directors who had to put up with such nonsense.

 

Alan Baumgarten’s editing, throughout, is as tight and quick as the rat-a-tat dialogue.

Richard Jewell: Grim slaughter of innocents

Richard Jewell (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Perhaps the most reprehensible lingering disgrace in the ordeal suffered by Richard Jewell — during a lengthy nightmare laden with hourly indignities — is the fact that, to this day, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution maintains that it behaved responsibly.

Centennial Park security officer Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser, center) points law
enforcement officers to a suspicious-looking backpack that has been abandoned
beneath a bench near the sound-and-light tower adjacent to the performance stage,
where Jack Mack and the Heart Attack are entertaining thousands of fans.

To borrow a phrase from the younger generation, I call BS.

Jewell deserves to be remembered solely as the hero who, while working as a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, discovered a bomb-laden backpack and helped evacuate the crowded area before it exploded. He undoubtedly saved many, many lives.

Instead, he’s more likely remembered as the hapless individual who, three days later, was identified as the probable suspect who planted the bomb, thanks to an overzealous FBI investigation, inflammatory “reporting” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the hundreds of media outlets that subsequently fanned the flames. 

Despite being cleared after an 88-day siege by media and all manner of law enforcement, Jewell undoubtedly remained a question mark in the minds of many, particularly since nobody initially was arrested for the heinous crime. It’s easy to imagine the rumor-mongering: “Maybe he did do it, but the FBI just didn’t have enough evidence…”

Even when Eric Rudolph confessed to being the bomber after being arrested in 2003, there was no way to wholly eradicate the avalanche of accusatory publicity that had buried Jewell and his equally hapless mother for 88 days. Retractions and “fresh truth” rarely have the impact of three months’ worth of screaming headlines.

Director Clint Eastwood and scripter Billy Ray — adapting Marie Brenner’s mesmerizing profile of Jewell, in the February 1997 Vanity Fair — have done their best to restore his honor, in a compelling drama fueled by powerhouse performances from Paul Walter Hauser and Kathy Bates, as Richard and his mother, Bobi. The result is a terrifying cautionary tale about the fragility of one’s place in society, and the ease with which an ordinary life can be ruined by authority and bad publicity.

Jewell’s ordeal truly is straight out of Kafka.

Stan & Ollie: A warm, heartfelt tribute

Stan & Ollie (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were enormously popular film stars for roughly a decade starting in 1927, in great part because they were among the very few comedy actors who successfully navigated the transition from silent films to talkies.

Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan, left) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly, right) are dismayed
when their British manager/handler, Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones), explains that
they'll be stuck playing small, run-down theaters ... at least, for awhile.

(Indeed, some of their later one-liners remain gems to this day. “You can lead a horse to water,” Stanley observes, in the 1930 short Brats, “but a pencil must be led.”)

Credit for teaming the slim Englishman (Laurel) with the corpulent American (Hardy) goes to early motion picture impresario Hal Roach, who made them an official double act with the 1927 silent short, Putting Pants on Philip. They became indefatigably busy thereafter, with a résumé that boasts 32 silent shorts, 40 sound shorts — including 1932’s Academy Award winner, The Music Box — and 23 features.

They never quite cracked the list of Top 10 American film stars — by box-office receipts — but they were among the Top 10 international film stars in 1936 and ’37. Their gentle brand of humor, and their films, were universal.

Director Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie is a warm and deeply poignant tribute to what would become their swan song: an ambitious UK tour in 1953 and ’54, undertaken despite their declining health. After that final curtain, they never again appeared together; Hardy died in 1957, and Laurel survived him by another eight years.

Screenwriter Jeff Pope plays fast and loose with a few historical details, but the core narrative is reasonably faithful: most notably the bond between two men who had worked together for so long, that their relationship was far more deep than that with respective wives over the years. Pope’s tone is heartfelt, and Baird’s direction is impressively delicate; at no time does this often melancholy story become mawkish, nor is there any sense that the duo’s memory is being exploited unduly.

Mostly, though, the film is driven by superlative performances from Steve Coogan (Stan) and John C. Reilly (Ollie, more affectionately known as “Babe”).

Coogan is particularly impressive, clearly having studied Laurel meticulously enough to perfectly mimic his impeccably timed pantomime. It’s not merely a matter of reproducing the stage bits performed before an adoring public, but also mastering the doe-eyed, less-is-more dancer’s grace with which Stan carries himself, behind closed doors.

One of the key points of Pope’s script, however — adapted from A.J. Marriot’s 1993 book, Laurel & Hardy: The British Tours — is that Stan’s outwardly mild manner conceals a creative talent chafing at the contractual restraints imposed by Roach (Danny Huston, suitably imperious). As depicted here, Ollie is content and complacent, cheerfully willing to do as he’s told; Stan is ambitious, desiring the greater freedom that he knows will make them even more successful.

This dichotomy will resurface later, under less than ideal circumstances.

Florence Foster Jenkins: Pitch (im)perfect

Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and needlessly, for fleeting suggestive content
By Derrick Bang

It may be Meryl Streep’s movie, but Simon Helberg very nearly steals the show.

Newly hired piano accompanist Cosmé McMoon (Simon Helberg, far left) is about to get a
shock, when Florence (Meryl Streep) — under the "guidance" of toadying vocal coach
Carlo Edwards (David Haig, far right) — begins to rehearse an operatic aria. Florence's
constant companion, St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), beams indulgently.

Streep delivers another bravura star turn as Florence Foster Jenkins, a truly American original who dominated a slice of New York’s aristocratic music scene from the early 1920s until just before the end of World War II. Had she been content to remain a mere patron of the arts, it’s entirely possible that performance venues — even to this day — would bear her name.

But Jenkins also fancied herself an operatic diva, despite having virtually no sense of rhythm or timing, and possessing a truly lamentable voice that was incapable of pitch or sustained notes. None of this bothered her — indeed, all indications suggest that she wasn’t aware (or simply refused to acknowledge) her deficiencies — and she took pains to ensure that her intimate recitals were attended solely by friends and hand-picked sycophants.

Occasional published “reviews,” appearing solely in small newspapers or obscure music publications, were no more than obsequious puff pieces (which, in at least some cases, she reportedly wrote herself).

But the charade — if that’s even the proper term — came to an abrupt end on Oct. 25, 1944, when Jenkins gave her one and only public performance at no less than Carnegie Hall. That event, along with a handful of 78-RPM records she made for the Melotone label, forever defined Jenkins’ life and career.

While the results could be labeled as tragic or just desserts for unmitigated hubris, director Stephen Frears and scripter Nicholas Martin obviously didn’t see it that way. Their buoyant study of Jenkins is giddy, hilarious and unexpectedly poignant: a deferential depiction of a free spirit who marched to the beat of her own drummer (if seldom in time).

Streep’s portrayal emphasizes vulnerability and fragility to a degree that seems at odds with established fact, but it does serve to make Jenkins more sympathetic. Mostly, though, Streep revels in this flamboyant, outsized role to a degree than Jenkins herself would have recognized and encouraged. Streep is loud, brash, stubbornly ambitious and utterly clueless ... the latter Jenkins’ defining characteristic.