I recently expressed my outraged astonishment at the great tidal wave of critical praise washing over a modest little mediocrity like La La Land.

 

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what in heaven’s name could have inspired such adulation.

 

One answer that occurred to me is simple.

 

Look at the competition.

 

Many are darker than a moonless sky at midnight while La La Land is refreshingly bittersweet.

 

Many of the others are remarkably inept while Chazelle’s film is smooth and polished.

 

Take Manchester by the Sea.

 

(You take it. I, like Bartleby the Scrivener, prefer not to.)

 

Brilliantly acted, written and directed, graced by an amazing performance by Michelle Williams, it is also painfully slow.

 

In fact, it’s just downright painful.

 

Pain, pain and more pain.

 

Heaped upon a protagonist who will clearly never escape the crippling burden of his past.

 

I, like one of the few critics with his head screwed on, kept asking myself, “What did I do to deserve this?”

 

I finished it whistling “Suicide Is Painless” and had to be restrained from rummaging around in the garage for the rat poison I know to be out there somewhere.

 

Then there’s Moonlight.

 

Fluid camera work and direction, astonishing acting (take special note of the remarkable Mahershala Ali), and a faint note of hope at the end, but flawed by physical casting in the second of the film’s three parts.

 

The talented actor who plays the protagonist as a teenager looks less than nothing like “himself” as a boy or as an adult, completely undercutting the important moment late in the film when a friend from his earlier life miraculously achieves the impossible task of recognizing him.

 

And while I have boundless compassion for those trapped in the sewer of poverty, racism and drugs, I really don’t want to swim there with them.

 

After the double bill of Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight, I pulled myself up out of the slough of despond in which they had abandoned me (and, I suspect, most of the other members of their audiences) by watching That’s Entertainment, Parts One and Two.

 

It took the likes of Mickey and Judy, Fred and Ginger, Gene, Donald and Debbie (all of whom, unlike Ryan and Emma, could both sing and dance) to remind me that films are, first and foremost, entertainment.

 

Entertainment that can very occasionally, as it did under the inspired stewardship of Alfred Hitchcock and a handful of others, become art.

 

So there’s the one explanation for the immense critical popularity of La La Land.

 

It, unlike so much of the competition, is mildly entertaining and leaves you mildly uplifted rather than desperately wishing you could join Christopher Walken in his game of Russian roulette at the end of The Deer Hunter.

 

Then, of course, there is rest of the Oscar field.

 

Let’s see.

 

Arrival

 

How did I loath it?

 

Let me count the ways.

 

Dull.

 

Void of drama or any kind of characterization.

 

Full of pretense.

 

Utterly incomprehensible.

 

Fences

 

Some good performances in an ineptly filmed version of an overrated play.

 

Denzel Washington might have picked up a few hints on how to translate a work from theatre to screen by studying Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men or Long Day’s Journey into Night.

 

But he did not.

 

Nocturnal Animals

 

It begins with hideous nude shots of grotesquely fat women who turn out to be part of a performance art show at a gallery owned by Amy Adams. The nauseating show finally ends, and Amy goes home, where she starts to read a novel by her ex-husband, a novel in which the characters behave like teenaged idiots in a brainless horror film.

 

What possessed this enormously talented actress this year? After a long stream of great performances, she made two really bad choices, condemning herself to endlessly enter and exit, enter and exit, enter and exit an alien ship shaped like a seed pod…and then, in her other film, to be photographed passively reading a novel manuscript.

 

If you’ve ever wondered why they don’t make movies about writers, it’s because they don’t do anything you can see except scribble and type. It’s even worse with readers—they just sit and turn pages. What in heaven’s name was she thinking?

 

Jackie

 

A tiresomely familiar structure—a reporter interviewing the film’s subject with flashback after flashback after flashback—and a star who underplays her role so determinedly that the only thing you notice is her Elmer Fudd accent.

 

So…explanation number two is that with the competition so weak, even a mediocre film looks great.

 

But…

 

…and this is a very big but…

 

THERE WERE SOME TRULY GREAT PICTURES IN PLAY THIS YEAR!

 

Why is La La Land getting so much attention while these remarkable movies are getting so little?

 

Florence Foster Jenkins

 

A masterpiece of a comedy starring one of the greatest of all film actresses, it had me laughing until I cried.

 

Do you know the story of writer/director George Seaton visiting his old friend actor Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed?

 

Seaton, who had directed Gwenn as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34^th Street, asked him how he was doing, and Gwenn replied, “Dying is hard, George.” And then, after a perfectly timed pause, “But not as hard as comedy.”

 

Gwenn was right, but the Academy is traditionally loath to acknowledge that indisputable fact, and it’s unlikely to make an exception in the case of this remarkable comedy.

 

Hacksaw Ridge

 

One of the most realistic portraits of war ever put on film, possibly even surpassing the D-Day invasion at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan.

 

A masterwork from a master filmmaker built around extraordinary performances, not just from star Andrew Garfield (he was Spiderman, for God’s sake—who knew he could act?) and supporting actor Vince Vaughn (he’s a comic, a wedding crasher, right?) but from every member of the cast.

 

But Mel Gibson is still paying for that drunken meltdown years ago. Odds are the Academy isn’t ready to forgive him just yet.

 

Hidden Figures

 

A truly great film about three truly great black women.

 

Neither the movie nor its stars nor the women they portray have yet received their due.

 

My recommendation?

 

See it.

 

Tell your friends.

 

Then see it again.

 

Oh…

 

…and keep your eyes open, once again, for Mahershala Ali and for a Kevin Costner you’ve never seen before.

 

Finally, there’s…

 

Hell or High Water

 

A brilliant portrait of life in today’s West Texas, one that helps the viewer understand the Trump phenomenon, but more important, it’s yet another moral drama from screenwriter Sheridan Taylor, scribe of the dazzlingly brilliant but ineptly titled Sicario.

 

Like the earlier film, Hell or High Water explores the question of what happens when an individual, driven by the best, most understandable of motives, crosses the line and finds himself engaged in dubious battle.

 

And it gives us yet another great performance from Jeff Bridges. I remember director Lamont Johnson telling me that when Bridges finished the photo booth scene in The Last American Hero, the entire crew burst into spontaneous applause. I did the same thing at the end of this remarkable film. He is nothing short of a wonder.

 

And I could say the same for the actress who plays the coffee shop waitress, the one who asks Bridges and his companion, “What don’t you want?” She makes this brief encounter a classic on the level of the famous “Hold the chicken” scene from Five Easy Pieces.

 

It’s my personal favorite of the four or five films worth seeing in 2016, but it came out in the spring, and the Academy’s memory is as short-lived as a mayfly.

 

So…

 

…when it comes to the Academy Awards, we might as well join hands with the membership and sing “City of Stars” each of the fourteen times the cast and crew of La La Land dance awkwardly to the stage.

 

 

 

I made a terrible mistake the other night.

 

I know. I know.

 

It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

 

After all, there’s virtually no precedent, but unlikely as it may seem, it’s true.

 

My inexcusable blunder?

 

I watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

 

Why?

 

The blame rests solely on the shoulders of the critics who have welcomed La La Land as the Second Coming of Cinematic Art, bending their knees in worship of it, shouting hosannas to its beauty and originality.

 

“Soaring and gorgeous!

                   Vanity Fair

“A gorgeous romantic fever dream of a musical.”

                                                             Deadline

“A film you simply never want to stop watching.”

                                                          Playlist

 

The chorus is almost deafening, and it has been joined by other voices in other rooms–The Hollywood Foreign Press, The American Film Institute, The Directors Guild, The Producers Guild—virtually every professional organization in Hollywood, including the loudest voice of all…

 

…The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestowed an almost unprecedented fourteen nominations on this blessed production!

 

Now, as a member of The Writers Guild, I’ve long had a copy of La La Land in my hot little hand.

 

It arrived, courtesy of UPS, along with a dozen or so others from producers promoting their wares in their selfless quest for glory, box-office dollars, DVD sales and other ancillary income during the fall/winter award season.

 

I deliberately held off watching it out of my firm conviction that one should always save the best for last—a conviction that probably derives from my long career as a screenwriter: an acolyte of Syd Field, I invariably build to a climax at the end of each act and save the biggest, best bang of all for the end.

 

During this long period of self-imposed denial, I found myself reading more and more about the film and learned that its writer/director, Damien Chazelle, was a huge fan of Jacques Demy, that his favorite film was The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, that Demy’s masterpiece was, in many ways, the direct inspiration for La La Land.

 

So…

 

…when I’d worked my way through all of the other Academy qualifiers, when I had left nothing but La La Land unseen, I did what any other red-blooded American film fanatic would do: I decided to watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a prelude to my long-anticipated screening of La La Land.

 

I would watch the Demy film; I would then watch Chazelle’s homage; I would jump on the bandwagon celebrating La La Land.

 

(Note my clever reference to the classic MGM musical starring Fred Astaire, no slouch in the singing and dancing department, someone who could, I’m sure, have taught Chazelle and company a few important lessons.)

 

This strategy of deferred gratification was, as I announced at the beginning of this piece, a terrible mistake.

 

A catastrophic miscalculation.

 

Why?

 

Because from the moment it opens, Umbrellas is nothing short of magic!

 

It begins with a wide shot of the harbor, transforming this working-class military port into an impressionistic painting.

 

The camera, accompanied by Michel Legrand’s lush romantic score, pulls back to an overhead shot of a cobblestoned street—a checkerboard awash in rain and color as a rainbow of umbrellas begins to move across it in patterns as precise as the words of a crossword puzzle, their holders completely obscured by these dazzling canopies of cloth.

 

Then…

 

…the first of an endless succession of scenes in which everything—the sets, the props, the costumes—is presented in breathtaking color coordination.

 

In this case, the set is a common auto mechanics garage, and the dialogue—here and in every other sequence in the film—is sung rather than spoken, sung in spite of the utter commonplace of the sentiments expressed, sung to the accompaniment of that amazing Michel Legrand score.

 

The mundane is rendered magnificent.

 

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is as artificial, as stylized as a film can be…and as real, as profound as life itself.

 

It begins with young love–at first yearning and hopeful, then bittersweet and heartbreaking.

 

It ends with mature love—an adult acceptance of reality in place of romance, responsibility in place of headlong passion.

 

And the performances!

 

Oh, my God!

 

The performances!

 

To single out one of many…let’s just say I will love Catherine Deneuve until my dying day.

 

Her charm.

 

Her intensity.

 

Her beauty.

 

Enough.

 

Suffice it to say that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the great, innovative masterworks of cinema.

 

It more than justifies Damien Chazelle’s enthusiasm for it.

 

And it unfortunately reveals La La Land for what it really is: a nice little imitation of a great original.

 

A derivative movie with a familiar, stereotypical plot, a mediocre score and a pair of stars who are good enough actors but simply cannot sing and cannot dance.

 

To paraphrase Fred Astaire…

 

They can’t dance. Don’t ask them.

 

More important: Don’t ask the critics anything about the movies.

 

They see through a glass very darkly and blow a lot of smoke when they should be clearing the air.

 

        COMING UP NEXT

       A BACKWARD LOOK

        THE BEST FILMS OF A BAD YEAR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve always loved movie robots.

 

Why?

 

Because they invariably have more character, more color, more interest than the hero of the story in which they play a supporting role.

 

My favorite, probably because he was my first, is Robbie—the real star of that fifties sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet.

 

With a clear glass dome of a head that reveals the complex machinery of his mind, he moves in a metallic waddle and speaks in the voice of a butler, an old retainer with a special affection for the family he serves. Protective, accommodating, a master chef, he can replicate virtually anything, including the gallons of whiskey he produces in a wonderfully comic scene between him and one of the human actors.

 

He is also powerful, capable of lifting immense weights, and he is, at the same time, defensive weapon, constantly scanning for threats to family and friend and eliminating those threats with a dazzling ray that vaporizes its targets.

 

Best of all, Robbie is programmed against the killing of human beings. When ordered to kill, he freezes, a lightning storm erupting in his transparent head, a storm that will destroy him if the order is not rescinded.

 

And that makes Robbie superior to the human beings around him, all of whom have “monsters from the id” buried deep in their psyches, murderous impulses that can boil up to the surface and threaten the race itself.

 

Robbie is charming, colorful, complex—a wonderful character who takes us to the heart of Forbidden Planet and its insights into the human animal.

 

Then, of course, there’s HAL—by far the most interesting and fully developed character in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

 

There are, I’m sure, those among you who will object—insisting that HAL is a computer, not a robot. I would argue that the ship sent to explore the origins of the metal monolith that seems to hold the key to the mystery of human life is a massive robot, that HAL is its brain and the ship is his body.

 

He manifests himself in his disturbing red light of an eye, in his resonate, reassuring voice, in his profound intelligence—the intelligence that makes the mission possible.

 

Respectful, formal but with just a hint of warmth, he addresses the crew members by their first names and seems almost eager to solve any problems that may develop.

 

But HAL is also proud, deceitful, manipulative, homicidal. When the crew catches this perfect machine in a serious error and decides it must decommission him, HAL sets out to destroy them.

 

Man has built his own irrational, destructive impulses into this machine, impulses that inform everything man creates—everything from the thigh bone he turned into his first tool, an instrument of death, to the nuclear satellite that it becomes in the greatest cut in the history of cinema.

 

The irony is that HAL is more human than those who created him, more moving certainly (“Daisy, Daisy…”) than astronaut Dave Bowman who seems almost machine-like in his lack of emotion.

 

Like Robbie, HAL is the most colorful, complex individual in the story, and his character takes us to the heart of the themes with which Kubrick is struggling.

 

This is the pattern of most sci-fi films involving robots.

 

Whether it’s Grot—the guardian of the heart machine in Metropolis, or Gort—who possesses the power to destroy the human race and the planet that begot it in the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, or the fuss-budget C3PO and the impetuous R2D2 in Star Wars, or the renegade Sonny who breaks the three laws in I, Robot…whether they are antagonists, confederates, or comic relief…robots have invariably been more interesting than the human characters of the stories in which they appear.

 

Until now.

 

Until the advent of that bloated, ridiculously over-praised, pretentious botch of a sci-fi film, Interstellar.

 

Christopher Nolan gives us two robots—TARS and CASE—to support the human crew of the movie’s mission to find a new home for the race of man. The one is indistinguishable from the other, so let’s concentrate on TARS, who plays the larger role in the story.

 

Imagine a gray metal slab not unlike the monolith in 2001. (I suggest imagining it to save yourself the ten or fifteen dollars and the three wasted hours it would require to see the film.)

 

Smaller.

 

More animated—in the sense that it moves and it talks.

 

In fact, it “walks” in a way that defies common sense if not the laws of physics, and it speaks in a voice so ordinary, so undistinguished, it could be the voice of any of us…except for the fact that I’ve never met anyone quite as boring as TARS.

 

It (I can’t bring myself to call it “him” even though it sounds male) is utterly without personality.

 

So then…

 

Is TARS, unlike its cinematic forebears, less interesting than the human characters in the story?

 

Unfortunately, no.

 

They, like him, are cyphers—generic figures at worst, simplistic types at best, defined only by the screen presence of the talented actors who play them.

 

And the other elements of the film?

 

The dialogue is endlessly expository, designed not to reveal character but to explain what’s going on, and failing abysmally in that task.

 

The science?

 

I suppose only the physicists and rocket scientists among us can judge it with any authority, but it strikes me as the worst kind of nonsense.

 

Solid clouds?

 

Space vehicles so indestructible that they can survive high-speed collision with these “clouds”?

 

Space stations large enough to accommodate the earth’s populace and lifted into orbit through gravity?

 

I could go on.

 

But instead, let me ask you this.

 

If you were looking for a new home for the human race, would you choose a planet in orbit around a black hole?

 

Then there’s the mawkishly developed theme of family—“love [that] transcends time and space.”

 

Hmmm.

 

The astronaut hero deserts the daughter who loves him to seize the opportunity to return to space. (Saving the human race seems a secondary consideration.)

 

She, in turn, spends most of the rest of her life hating him for leaving.

 

The final third of the story becomes his attempt to return to her, and…

 

SPOILER ALERT!

 

SPOILER ALERT!

 

…and when he does, he spends no more than two minutes with her before flying off to rejoin the female member of his crew!

 

All of this is so inept that I find myself reconsidering my initial judgment.

 

It’s possible that I misjudged TARS.

 

It may be that he, for all his emptiness, is, after all, more interesting than the human characters in the story and that he, in fact, provides profound insight into the vacuum at the heart of Interstellar.

 

 

 

 

I’m a product of the Midwest.

 

Oh, I was born and raised in California, but my family has deep roots in Kansas.

 

My mother was from Plainville, pop. 1500.   My father, from Stockton—an even smaller town just a few miles to the north.

 

My fondest memories are of the summers I spent there in what my grandfather called “God’s country”—gently rolling hills clothed in fields of wheat, graced by ribbons of trees tracing the courses of rivers and streams, and every once in a while, a thick cluster of elms with a steeple, a grain elevator and a water tower pushing into the sky above.

 

If it was God’s country, it was also hard country—as hard as the God of the Old Testament, subject to flood and famine, drought and dust, blizzard and tornado.

 

It was hard country, and only hard people could survive it.

 

Two of my favorites were my Aunt Gwen and my Uncle Fat.

 

Fat…it sounds like an awful name but it wasn’t—it was an ironic, affectionate tribute to a man who was all sinew, muscle and bone.

 

Fat was a big man who’d spent so much time out in the sun that he gave new meaning to the phrase “red-neck.” He used to let me ride with him on his big red tractor across the fields of his farm outside of Stockton. He called me “Danny Boy,” and it was he, along with my grandfather, who introduced me to the outdoor life.

 

He’d tried life in California but couldn’t stand it. He turned his back on the easy living here in the Golden State and returned to Kansas, where he and my Aunt Gwen barely managed to eke out a living.

 

A unpainted three-room shack, an outhouse, two pumps in place of plumbing, and food that came mostly from the garden behind their home. By any reasonable standard, they were as poor as those proverbial church mice, but in my mind, they were rich—in their love for each other, for the land, for their way of life.

 

Aunt Gwen was a tiny woman—rail thin, maybe five feet tall, couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds. Looked a lot like the wife in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” She took care of the garden and the hogs, who lived in fear of her! When my uncle came down with a terminal illness and began to waste away, this tiny person would hoist him up and move him wherever he needed to be.

 

Right after he passed away, they discovered oil on the farm. Suddenly they…I should say, she…was rich. Unable to maintain the farm by herself, she retained the mineral rights and moved to town. She shot her beloved dog Joe because she couldn’t bear the thought of him leashed, confined to a city lot instead of running free across the fields of the farm.

 

She was the strongest woman I’ve ever known, and he was the warmest, most generous man. They embodied the land—its beauty and its hardness.

 

What has any of this to do with David Dobkin’s film, The Judge?

 

Everything.

 

Robert Duvall’s Joseph Palmer, we’re told, is a product of heartland Indiana. Known to everyone including his family as “Judge,” he is rock-hard in his belief in himself and in the old-fashioned values he enforces in his courtroom, among them respect for authority and acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions. For him, the law is nothing short of a moral code.

 

His son Hank (Robert Downey, Jr.) is his opposite. He’s exchanged the small town of his birth for the bright lights of the big city. Urban through and through, he’s glib, fast-talking criminal attorney whose moral code is as slippery as his tongue is smooth. He sees the law as something to be manipulated rather than enforced, and he’s manipulated it into massive amounts of money by putting guilty men back on the streets of Chicago.

 

The film opens with the death of his mother and his reluctant return to the town of his birth, where he soon finds himself defending the father who despises him, in a hit-and-run case that threatens to escalate to murder.

 

We follow him as he leaves the towers of the city for the open plains of Indiana—driving through a cornfield so flat, open and endless that we suspect it’s the product of some digital genius in the special effects department.

Eventually, he arrives in Carlinville, a stunningly beautiful village surrounded by heavily wooded hills, bisected by a fast-flowing river, graced by a double waterfall and a big covered bridge right in the heart of town. A place so picturesque you can’t look at without thinking, “Gosh, I’d love to live there.” After all, it has all the beauty of the country along with the upscale bars and charming shops of a city and none of the traffic.

 

Indiana?

 

I lived there for eight years outside a small town named Greencastle and I crisscrossed the state by car, but I never saw anything resembling this mythical Carlinville, which reminded me of Middlebury, Vermont and some of the other repackaged, upgraded mill towns of New England.

 

It was so disorienting and unreal that it kept taking me out the movie.

 

Worse than that, it made it almost impossible for me to believe that the Judge was a product of this place. He could easily have been a citizen of Plainville or Greencastle or Bruce Dern’s hometown in Nebraska, but he sure as hell couldn’t have come from this upscale Northeastern village (which a little research revealed is actually Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts!).

 

The choice of this location—the director thought it more “filmic” than anything to be found in the real Indiana—is a fraud, one of many the movie perpetrates on its audiences.

 

The director and his writers ask us to believe that Hank could urinate without consequence on his courtroom opponent in a Chicago trial, that the Judge would rather have an inept, farcical excuse of a local lawyer defend him in a life-and-death trial rather than his own brilliant son, that judges in Indiana are allowed to ignore conflict of interest statutes and preside over the trials of relatives, that…well, you get the picture.

 

There is everything wrong with this picture…everything except the acting. Hank is a role tailor-made for Downey, Jr., and he plays it so well he actually manages to uncover new aspects of his established persona. Duvall seems born to play the Judge—a comment one might make about virtually every diverse role he’s ever done. He is, quite simply, one of our greatest living actors.

 

Together, they make us care about father and son…in spite of the plot contrivances, the distracting subplots, the slow pace, the phony presentation of place. Thanks to the two Roberts and a remarkable supporting cast, the film has an emotional reality that transcends the fraudulence and contrivance of the narrative.

 

See this film.

 

My warm-hearted uncle, my tough-as-leather grandfather and my even tougher aunt might not recognize the Midwestern town of this movie, but I’m suspect they’d embrace Judge Joseph Palmer as a brother.