Hello, Bookstore: An excellent read

Hello, Bookstore (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Not rated, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Amazon Prime and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang

Bibliophiles will adore this little film.

 

I’d like to believe that it also will appeal to a broader audience.

 

How much nicer it was, back in the day: Bookstore owner Matthew Tannenbaum enjoys
chatting with his customers, just as much as making a sale.

A.B. Zax’s charming documentary is a profile of Matthew Tannenbaum, who since 1976 has run an independent bookstore — cheekily called The Bookstore — in Lenox, Massachusetts. He purchased it on April Fool’s Day that year — an intriguing date on which to close a business deal — from David Silverstein, who had opened it a decade earlier after encouragement from a friend, Alice Brock.

(Who, just in passing, is the title character in Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.”)

 

It quickly becomes clear that this establishment isn’t merely a bookstore; it’s a community gathering place, where folks come, yes, to buy books, but also to chat with Tannenbaum — mildly disheveled, invariably dressed casually — and delight in the stream-of-consciousness anecdotes, memories and convivial conversation that mark A True Raconteur.

 

When he insists that “There’s a book for everyone,” we know he’s serious … and that he’ll scour the shelves to find the perfect title for a given customer.

 

The bookstore also is home to the “legendary Shade Gallery” and the “Get Lit” wine bar. (“Our motto,” Tannenbaum explains, “is that you can’t drink all day, unless you start in the morning.”)

 

A custom-designed alphabet block sits on the counter, the letters on its six sides spelling W-R-I-T-E-R. (A writer’s block, of course.)

 

Zax knew The Bookstore well, having spent many happy hours, weeks and years browsing its stacks, smelling that rarified and distinctive “book scent,” and — by his own words — “watching Matt hold court” with customers. Zax undoubtedly conceived this project as a means of celebrating the ongoing, four-decades-plus success of an independent bookstore: not an easy thing, in this era of online shopping.

 

He began filming in the autumn and winter of 2019 … and then Covid hit, at which point Zax was forced to pivot. Suddenly a film intended to honor Tannenbaum and his bookstore became an as-it-happens study of grim survival in the pandemic era. And as this 86-minute film proceeds, we begin to wonder if the shop will endure.

 

The narrative cuts back and forth between late 2019 and the spring and summer of 2020, although it opens during the latter. Tannenbaum — wearing a cranberry-colored mask — refuses to allow anybody into the store, and conducts transactions by speaking loudly through the closed door. Patrons then are asked to step back, while he places the purchased item(s) on a stool in front of the store.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — Sophomore slump

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, strong violence and occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.11.22

If this new entry falls short of its predecessor, it’s mostly because the 2018 film set the bar so impressively high.

 

Okoye (Danai Gurira, left) and Shuri (Letitia Wright) adopt disguises in an effort to
infiltrate MIT, where they hope to locate — and rescue — the scientist who has
developed a controversial vibranium detector.

That said, director Ryan Coogler’s second entry in the Black Panther series has a massive hole in its center: the tragic absence of star Chadwick Boseman. Try as they might, Coogler and co-scripter Joe Robert Cole — both of whom brought us the first film — can’t quite fill that gap.

And, in an effort to compensate — while also honoring the series’ ongoing heritage — they spend too much time on grief, lamentation and bleak dialogue exchanges between the story’s primary characters. You’ll find very few smiles in this long-winded saga, which at a ridiculously self-indulgent 161 minutes, overstays its welcome by at least one massive melee too many.

 

On top of which, this story’s central character — the science-minded prodigy, Shuri (Letitia Wright) — is burdened by an unnecessary amount of heartbreak.

 

A year has passed since the untimely death of Shuri’s older brother, King T’Challa, from circumstances left vague. Wakanda’s Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) struggles to protect their nation from intervening world powers, some of whom — notably France and the United States — wish to get their hands on the African realm’s fabled vibranium metal, with its extraordinary abilities to absorb, store and release large amounts of kinetic energy.

 

This meteoric substance also remains invisible to conventional scanners, making it a potential game-changer in global rivalries … which Queen Ramonda knows only too well. She has no intention of sharing vibranium with anybody.

 

Ah, but elsewhere at sea, a U.S. research facility is monitoring the progress of a deep-water machine that CAN detect — and has found — an undersea vibranium deposit. But before this discovery can be celebrated, everybody at the facility is slaughtered by an ocean-going platoon of blue-skinned underwater denizens, led by the remorselessly vicious Namor (Tenoch Huerta), lord of the hidden undersea civilization of Talokan.

 

(A brief sidebar, for those unfamiliar with Marvel Comics history: Namor, most famously known as the Sub-Mariner, dates all the way back to 1939. Since then, he has become both hero and villain, generally in service of trying to prevent his undersea kingdom of Atlantis from being discovered and/or destroyed by “surface dwellers.” 

 

(More recently in the Marvel Comics universe — given that both are hidden civilizations with advanced tech and militaristic tendencies — Wakanda and Atlantis have been embroiled in a punishing, long-term war that has wreaked havoc on both sides: hence, this film’s core plotline.)

 

(But I’ve no idea while Coogler and Cole made up “Talokan,” when they could — should — simply have used Atlantis.)

The Banshees of Inisherin: Wails of discontent

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R for violence, brief graphic nudity and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.4.22

Back in 2008, writer/director Martin McDonagh teamed with actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for In Bruges, a darkly meditative — and frequently funny — study of loyalty and death between two contract killers (likely enjoyed only by viewers with broad-minded sensibilities).

 

Pádraic (Colin Farrell, right) makes another effort to determine precisely why he's being
shunned by former best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson), but the latter refuses to engage.

I’d love to say that McDonagh’s reunion with Farrell and Gleeson is equally appealing … but that’s far from the truth.

The time is 1923, the setting the harsh, rocky (and fictitious) island of Inisherin, off the west coast of Ireland. Pádraic Súilleabháin (Farrell), a hard-working milk farmer, lives with his sister Siobhán in a simple rustic house they often share with their pet miniature donkey, Jenny. Eight years have passed since their parents died; the sibling bond is tight and loving.

 

Every day at 2 p.m., presumably going back years, Pádraic has walked over to the house belonging to his best friend, Colm Doherty (Gleeson); the two then head over to the local pub: the island’s sole form of entertainment.

 

Except this time, as the story begins, Colm refuses to answer the door. Pádraic peers through a window, and sees Colm inside, silently brooding at a table. Pádraic knocks again; Colm doesn’t move.

 

Bewildered, Pádraic heads to the pub by himself; the publican, Jonjo (Pat Shortt), can’t believe his eyes. You’ve had a row, he suggests; Pádraic insists not.

 

“A’ least, I don’t tink so,” he admits.

 

Farrell’s expression, thus far, is puzzled and mildly hurt. Assuming that he somehow must be at fault, when Pádraic later corners Colm at a table — the latter also wants his daily pint — Pádraic does what all good friends do, and apologizes for whatever unintended slight may have occurred.

 

It’s a sincere apology. Farrell’s expression is earnest, his gaze both curious and worried.

 

Colm’s response is breathtakingly callous: “I just don’ like you any more.”

 

Blunt as that statement is, Colm’s subsequent explanation is even worse. Being older, he has begun to brood about his mortality, and the fact that — unless things change — he’ll leave nothing behind. He thus refuses to spend another minute with Pádraic — whose simple kindness is “too dull,” and who can spend hours ruminating about what emerges from Jenny’s rear end — in favor of focusing on his fiddle, and composing music that will outlive him. Like Mozart.

 

Farrell’s wide-eyed reaction prompts laughs, because — at first blush — this seems so ridiculous. To Pádraic, it’s like a parent suddenly disowning a child, for no reason. But when it becomes clear that Colm is serious, Pádraic begins a slow slide into deep sorrow. Farrell’s richly nuanced performance is heartbreaking: the palpable embodiment of unrelenting grief.

Wendell & Wild: A fractured Halloween fable

Wendell & Wild (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13 for dramatic intensity, violence, brief strong language, and an overall ookie-spooky atmosphere

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

The Brothers Grimm would have loved this film.

 

Director Henry Selick’s newest stop-motion fantasy is gleefully, grotesquely ghoulish: full-tilt macabre and disturbing at a level that absolutely warrants its PG-13 rating. (Parents, take note.)

 

While her sorta-kinda friend Raúl watches nervously, Kat prepares to have a close
encounter with something rather unpleasant.

But while the film looks fantastic, it’s somewhat over-written, with at least one sub-plot too many, and a tendency to short-change supporting characters who deserve more exposure. The clumsy script is by Selick and Jordan Peele, based on an unpublished book by Selick and Clay McLeod Chapman.

 

A fleeting prologue lasts just long enough to introduce 8-year-old Kat Elliot, who immediately loses her parents in a tragic car accident, for which she blames herself. (Bad enough that so many Disney films, animated or otherwise, feature characters who lose one parent; this poor girl loses both?)

 

Before we can wonder about Kat’s subsequent fate, we’re whisked to a cacophonous underworld setting, where an immense demon named Buffalo Belzer (voiced by Ving Rhames) has built a crazy-quilt amusement park for despondent lost souls on his massive chest. His two much smaller sons, Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele), spend eternity by applying dollops of rejuvenating hair cream on Belzer’s balding pate … all the while dreaming of building their own, vastly superior amusement park for the dear departed.

 

(Amusement parks for the dead? On a demon’s chest? Seriously? No wonder Selick and Chapman haven’t been able to sell their book.)

 

Time leaps ahead in the surface world. Kat (Lyric Ross), now a defiant, punk rock-loving 13-year-old, has endured the worst of the foster care system; she’s brought back to her home town — in shackles — for her “last-chance placement” at the local all-girls Catholic school. She’s shocked to see that her beloved community of Rust Bank is a sorry shadow of itself; her parents’ brewery burned to the ground shortly after their demise, and most homes and storefronts are barricaded, with ugly “Klax Korp” posters warning people not to trespass.

 

Kat’s sullen attitude doesn’t dent the chirpy greeting from the school’s preppy “RBC Girls”: Siobhan (Tamara Smart), Sweetie (Ramona Young) and Sloane (Seema Virdi), accompanied by their adorable pet goat. They want to become instant BFFs; Kat wants no part of them. She’s a bit more tolerant of Raúl (Sam Zelaya), a quiet, artistic trans lad who has turned the school attic into a well-appointed studio workshop.

 

The school is run by Father Bests (James Hong) and Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), with assistance from a couple of squat, forever scowling nuns dubbed Penguins (old joke, right?).

The Good Nurse: An unsettling diagnosis

The Good Nurse (2022) • View trailer

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

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

If the American health care system doesn’t already make you nervous, watching this film will leave you hiding in a closet, whimpering like a child.

 

After Amy (Jessica Chastain) suffers a minor cardiomyopathy attack, Charlie
(Eddie Redmayne) talks her down from panic.

Because Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ screenplay — based on Charles Graeber’s meticulously researched 2013 true crime book of the same title — makes it abundantly clear that lawsuit-adverse corporate ownership of hospitals allowed perhaps the worst serial killer in history to continue unchecked for 16 years.

It can be argued — and this clearly is the point of director Tobias Lindholm’s slow-burn film — that this system is the bigger villain.

 

But such awareness arrives later. Our attention is drawn initially to Jessica Chastain’s richly nuanced, quietly compelling performance as Amy Loughren, a dedicated nurse in a large East Coast hospital. She’s the single mother of two young daughters — Maya (Devyn McDowell) and Alex (Alix West Lefler) — and works long hours during demanding ICU night shifts.

 

Amy also suffers from cardiomyopathy, a potentially fatal heart condition that manifests when her pulse rate spirals out of control. It requires surgical intervention, which she cannot yet afford; because she’s relatively new to this hospital placement, she’s still months away from the one-year vesting that’ll allow health insurance to kick in.

 

(The irony is not lost on us: a nurse, working at a hospital, who remain uninsured.)

 

Chastain’s slumped posture and frequently weary expression suggest a woman constantly battling total exhaustion. And yet Amy also radiates dignity and responsibility; she always lights up when with a patient, or comforting a family member; her ministrations are gentle, her compassion palpable. 

 

She isn’t merely a “good” nurse; she’s a great nurse. Chastain delivers one of those “all in” performances that makes her every move and spoken word compelling, and authentic. She feels like somebody living next door.

 

We meet Amy as she tends to an elderly woman with a serious skin condition: uncomfortable and debilitating, but not life-threatening. Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns take their time in establishing Amy’s routine: both during her overworked and understaffed hospital shifts, and at home, where Maya has become frustrated by her mother’s prolonged daily absences.

 

Relief finally arrives when Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) joins her unit. Amy shows him the ropes; he adapts quickly to this late-night shift’s demands. Redmayne makes him affable, observant and — most particularly — empathetic. Amy and Charlie bond during these long nights; she trusts him with her heart issues, and he becomes something of a cheerleader.

 

And also a friend, spending daytime hours with Amy and her daughters, who adore him.

 

Then the elderly woman dies, quite unexpectedly.

Confess, Fletch: Hamm on wry

Confess, Fletch (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R for profanity, sexual content and drug use

Available via: Amazon Prime and other streaming services

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.28.22

Well, this is a nice surprise.

 

Beloved literary characters rarely get a second chance, if their debut leap to the big screen is sabotaged by arrogant studio execs catering to the whims of a Hot Star Of The Moment.

 

Fletch (Jon Hamm) isn't quite sure what to make of the larger-than-life Countess
Sylvia de Grassi (Marcia Gay Harden), particularly since she's apt to become his
future mother-in-law.

Exhibit A: Author Lawrence Block’s gentleman cat burglar/detective, Bernie Rhodenbarr, who became Bernice when Whoopi Goldberg wound up starring in 1987’s absolutely dreadful Burglar. No surprise, Bernie’s subsequent adventures have remained within the safe confines of two covers.

The late and greatly lamented Sue Grafton, author of the beloved Kinsey Milhone “alphabet mysteries,” famously refused to entertain any sort of screen adaptation. She knew full well, having worked in Hollywood earlier in her career, how often a property gets ruined by meddling hands determined to “improve” a writer’s work.

 

At first blush, Chevy Chase seemed an ideal choice as Gregory McDonald’s rogue investigative journalist, Irwin Maurice Fletcher, and 1985’s Fletch was tolerable. But the deplorable 1989 sequel succumbed to Chase’s disguise-overkill vanity, and the character subsequently languished in development hell.

 

Until now.

 

Jon Hamm is spot-on as Fletch, radiating grizzled charm and just enough snark; his comic timing is well-suited to this amusing script’s many cheeky, insubordinate and downright smart-assed one-liners. 

 

Director Greg Mottola, admired ever since 2009’s under-appreciated Adventureland, has just the right touch for this material. He and co-scripter Zev Borow simplified the book a bit, and introduced some different supporting characters, but all essential plot points are in place; in several cases, they even retained McDonald’s dialogue.

 

The story opens in Rome, where Fletch has become engaged to the voluptuous Angela de Grassi (Lorenza Izzo), whose father has been kidnapped; the ransom demand is a Picasso from the Count’s famed art collection. Unfortunately, other parties unknown have stolen the entire collection, which leaves Angela frantic. 

 

She asks Fletch to liaise with an art broker in Boston, where the Picasso is rumored to have surfaced. He duly flies to Boston, arriving late in the evening; he walks into the apartment Angela has arranged for his stay … and finds a dead woman in the living room.

 

Fletch duly calls the police — an amusing conversation that sets the tone for what will follow — and soon finds himself in the cynical cross-hairs of Inspector Morris Monroe (Roy Wood Jr.) and his recently minted partner, Griz (Ayden Mayeri).

 

(Morris is a replacement for the book’s Inspector Flynn, who is missed … but no matter.)

 

Till: Absolutely riveting

Till (2022) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, strong disturbing images and racial slurs

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.21.22

2017’s Academy Award-nominated live-action short subjects included filmmaker Kevin Wilson Jr.’s My Nephew Emmett, which dramatizes Moses Wright’s late-night dread, as he awaits the men who he knows will kill his nephew.

 

It’s a heart-stoppingly solemn, quietly powerful 20-minute experience.

 

Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall, center) pauses before entering the tiny grocery store, where
the next few minutes will forever change his life, and the lives of many, many others.

Director Chinonye Chukwu’s Till is far from quiet, and even more powerful. Thanks to her astute direction, along with a meticulously detailed and thoroughly absorbing script — co-written by Chukwu, Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp — this film is mesmerizing, appalling and unforgettable.

(Beauchamp spent 27 years researching Till’s heinous murder, and his research prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen the case in 2004.)

 

Chukwu draws an absolutely amazing performance from Danielle Deadwyler, cast as Emmett’s loving and protective mother, Mamie. When eventually confronted with what has happened to her 14-year-old son — what he looks like, when she sees his brutally maimed body — Deadwyler summons a degree of anguish, heartbreak and fury that I’d not have thought possible.

 

This goes far beyond acting; she becomes Mamie Till.

 

Few film performances achieve the impact of similar work in a live theatrical production, because the screen remains a barrier between us and the actors. But Deadwyler’s breathtaking work here is a rare exception; she unerringly navigates an astonishing range of richly nuanced emotions, as Mamie resolutely embarks on a path she never would have chosen for herself, and often dreads walking.

 

But that comes later.

 

Equally impressive is the degree of restraint and dignity with which Chukwu and her writers allow this story to unfold; this must’ve been quite difficult, considering the heinousness of what occurred.

 

Events begin in Chicago, in the summer of 1955. Mamie is a widowed single mother — her husband died in action, during World War II — who is the head of her household, and (tellingly) the sole Black woman working for the Air Force in this city. She dotes on Emmett (Jalyn Hall), nicknamed “Bobo,” her only child; he’s an irrepressibly cheerful bundle of energy.

 

Hall’s performance is equally engaging; his handling of Emmett is a blend of enthusiasm and joy, with subtle touches of youthful arrogance. He simply loves life, his gaze forever radiant. (It’s difficult to be certain, as a viewer, if we detect the boy’s somewhat reckless streak on its own, or because we already know that this side of Emmett will prove his undoing.)