Alejandro Iñárritu's "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"
If you’ve already seen Black Panther: Wakanda Forever three times, there are plenty of other sources for your movie fix this weekend.
Fresh off the success of his Cabinet of Curiosities, Guillermo Del Toro unveils more potentially holiday-related eye candy with his long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio. Del Toro says the $35 million stop motion film is the project he’s been wanting to do his entire life. Based on a version of the story by Nineteenth Century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi, it’s not the little wooden boy you remember from the Disney vaults. Voice actors include Ewen McGregor as Sebastian J. “Don’t Call Me Jiminy” Cricket, Tilda Swinton as a Wood Sprite who is totally not Tinkerbell, and Cate Blanchett as a monkey.
Ralph Finnes is serving the most dangerous dish in The Menu. Director Mark Mylod, late of HBO’s plute-shaming soap Succession, has gathered an all-star cast of Nicholas Hoult, Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, and Hong Chau, for dinner, and class war is what’s for dinner. Yum!
As a journalist, I know that the best films of all time are all about newspaper people. As a filmmaker, I know Harvey Weinstein is a depraved, power-mad rapist who hurt a lot of people and did irreparable damage to the independent film world. She Said is the story of Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Cantor (Zoe Kazan), two New York Times reporters who broke the story of Weinstein’s reign of terror by convincing his victims to go on the record. He’s currently in jail for 23 years in New York, and yesterday the prosecution rested in his California trial, where he is facing 60 more years in the hoosegow.
Alejandro Iñárritu is no stranger to Memphis. He shot 21 Grams, his second feature film here. Since then, he’s won nine Academy Awards. He’s back with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a satirical look at Iñárritu’s native Mexico through the magical realist filter of his mind.
The current “epidemic” of recreational opioid drug use just goes to show you that everything old is new again. The world runs in cycles. Once everyone forgets how awful/awesome something is, it comes back around. Fascists, I’m looking at you—particularly the fascists sprung on oxy.
Long before the American white working class lost hope and found pharma, the flower of Scotland’s youth did it. Dismal weather, lack of jobs, and a football-besotted culture of toxic masculinity put the Scots on the smack back in the gone-gone grunge era of the 1990s. Granted, it was the stepped-on brown stuff smuggled by haji through the Khyber Pass, not pure, white pills ganked from grandma’s Medicare-funded cancer meds, so score another for American exceptionalism, I guess. USA!
The last time the smack was flowing through our veins leading to centers in our heads, we were in the early states of an indie film revolution. In America, it was QT and RR. In England, it was Danny Boyle, a nerdy upstart who knocked one out of the park adapting literary bad boy Irvine Welsch’s cult novel Trainspotting. Perhaps inspired by his junkie characters’ fetishization of Brian Eno, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop, Boyle made the most of his modest budget by looking to 70s art cinema for visual inspiration. No dutch angle was too extreme, no composition too expressive. But it was his cutting that set him apart: fast for the pre-digital era, but not so fast as to lose visual coherence. In 1996, Trainspotting was madness, but there was clearly method.
The standout in the Trainspotting ensemble of dead ender Edinburgers was one Ewen McGregor, who subsequently hit the big time playing young Obi Wan Kenobi and singing opposite Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge. Boyle’s star continued to rise as well, culminating in eight Academy Awards for his 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire. But Trainspotting was lightning in a bottle, still studied for its hyper hip artistry, even as the players it elevated matured into mainstreamers. When Boyle got the band back together for a sequel, twenty years later, who knew if it could still work?
T2 Trainspotting is based on Welsch’s 2002 sequel Porno. The three mates from the projects, Mark (McGregor), Simon “Sick Boy” Wiliamson (Johnny Lee Miller), and Spud (Ewen Bremmer), have somehow lived into middle age, as has their frenemy Franco (Robert Carlyle). Simon and Spud are still in Edinbough. Simon is ostensibly running his family’s failing pub, while making his real living crafting blackmail schemes with his on and off Eastern European girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova). Spud’s back on the smack after a messy divorce and series of horrible misunderstandings brought on by the switch to Daylight Savings Time. Franco is, of course, in jail for robbery and assault, but he busts out just in time for the return of Mark from Amsterdam, where he fled with 16,000 pounds of the gang’s money at the end of the first film. Mark, too, had a bad divorce, and his well paying desk job is on the way out thanks to a corporate merger. So he decides to stay in Edinburgh for a while to put a business face on Simon’s idea for a high class brothel to be run by Madame Veronika. Needless to say, creative larceny, bad sex, and betrayal ensue.
There can’t be another Trainspotting, of course, but upon exiting the theater, my first words were “Where has THIS Danny Boyle been for the last decade?” His Aaron Sorkin-penned Steve Jobs biopic was formally inventive, as always, but T2 is the uncut Boyle funk—restless, visually witty, evocative, and cool. The Boyle I like is not the sentimentalist of Slumdog Millionaire, it’s the guy who says “Projection mapping looks like fun. Let’s try some of that!” The story is episodic and character driven, as was the original, but it lacks a certain sense of urgency and danger. Maybe that’s because the cast is clearly having so much fun, they can barely contain themselves. Nineties niihlism has worn thin for everybody—turns out dysphemism is less fun when there’s actual apocalypse in the air—which reduces the proceedings to a lighter, cops-and-robbers exercise.
Making Trainspotting into a psychedelic Ocean’s 11 is completely forgivable when the riffs are this sharp. The soundtrack is all aces, with Prodigy remixing “Lust For Life”, and punk classics like “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” rubbing shoulders with Fat White Family. The updated “Choose Life!” speech, which Mark delivers to Veronika in an upscale bar while trying to get in her pants, falls flat, but when Simon gets up in Mark’s face and accuses him of being “a tourist in your own youth”, the punch lands both on McGregor and the audience. Maybe Gen X has a little snarl left after all.
Don Cheadle’s performance in 2004’s Hotel Rwanda is one of my all-time favorites — and by “favorite,” I mean “he reduced me to a shivering mess stewing in a puddle of my own tears.”
Cheadle’s been working regularly the last few years as War Machine in the Marvel Universe — you’ll see him taking sides in Captain America: Civil War this summer. He does a fine job, but let’s face it, an actor of his skill is meant for better things than the Marvel C-list. Now, 12 years after Hotel Rwanda, he has another iconic performance in a role he created for himself.
Miles Davis, the architect of bebop, towers large in the history of 20th century music. His cultural influence is so deep, it’s sometimes hard to perceive. After all, his 1949 album Birth of the Cool is one of the reasons we still use “cool” as a positive adjective. He has never had a biopic, because his mercurial personality and extreme appetites made him a hard figure to get a handle on. How can you sum up such a huge personality in a two-hour movie?
Cheadle’s been trying for a decade to bring Davis’ story to the screen, ambitiously, not only taking on the role of the legendary musician, but also making his directorial debut at the same time. The struggle and time invested has paid off big time with Miles Ahead.
Wisely, the film does not try to outline Davis’ entire, eventful life, nor does it, like Walk the Line, focus on the artist’s most productive creative period. Instead, we meet Davis around 1980 in the middle of one of his famously contentious interviews. The intro, while visually interesting, is my only real quibble with the film. The rest of the movie flashes back and forth between an eventful couple of days in 1978 when Davis ran around New York with Rolling Stone journalist Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), and the decade-long story of Davis’ relationship with his one true love, his first wife Frances Davis (Emayatzy Corinealdi). These parallel story lines create a perfect couplet of cause and effect, deftly drawing us inside Davis’ point of view. Late ’70s Davis is a self-pitying, cokehead burnout who hasn’t recorded music in years. ’50s Davis is a self-possessed man of fierce talent and laser focus whose self-destructive tendencies are baked into his creative personality. But the intro and outro framing disrupts that symmetry and threatens to derail the blue train before it leaves the station.
Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead
Once over that minor bump, the film opens up into a rich, deep portrait of a genius worn down by time and trouble. Cheadle doesn’t shy away from the central contradictions of the man. After he is beaten by racist cops on the street outside the Harlem nightclub where he’s headlining, he immediately turns around and demands that Frances give up her promising career as a dancer because she is a woman and it offends his sense of proper gender roles for a wife to work outside the home. This is devastating to Frances and has the effect of poisoning their marriage from there on out, but Davis is as blind to his own sexism as the white cop is to his racism.
Cheadle is an empathetic director of actors, drawing out Corinealdi’s love for Miles and the pain it causes her. At the same time, he and McGregor are in some kind of demented buddy cop movie as they float from a coke dealer’s dorm room at NYU to a back alley shootout with record label heavies. Cheadle’s heretofore unseen directorial skills extend into the visual and conceptual, as he proves in a hallucinogenic climax at a boxing match that recalls Scorsese’s fight scenes in Raging Bull. But the most important element is Cheadle’s titanic acting performance as Davis, which transcends mere imitation to give us a glance of a tortured genius’ inner life. When next we see Cheadle, he’ll be spouting a couple of cheeky lines as part of a too-large ensemble cast of costumed crusaders. With Miles Ahead under his belt, he can cash that paycheck knowing he’s got nothing left to prove.
