On THE WEDDING RINGER

"They put stitches in your penis head."  That's a line comedian Kevin Hart has in his new comedy, THE WEDDING RINGER.  That's one of his more tasteful lines in it.

If you did a shot of Schnapps every time Hart drops the F-bomb in this movie, you'd be tipsy after seeing just the first 20 minutes.  A buddy movie, it's the kind of buddy theme that's been done before...and way better...by such comic talents like comedy great, Mel Brooks.  He did this kind of story better when he wrote and directed 1967's The Producers.  Hardcore Kevin Hart fans may give The Wedding Ringer big box office love over the weekend.  He is popular but, in this project, he doesn't have a good screen comedy script.  Marriage-wise, it lacks the bawdy and fresh wit of Bridesmaids.

Fast-talking hipster Jimmy, played by Kevin Hart, is the big city huckster who will become the best friend to the nebbishy guy who has a life as dull as C-Span.  Here, the nebbishy guy needs a best man to appear at his wedding.  He's engaged to a hot blonde whom, we know, doesn't really love him.  Doug has a good job, money and a babe of a fiancee.  However he doesn't have male friends because he so uncool.  He decides to rent-a-best man.  Jimmy heads an agency that fills that need.  He'll be your best friend for a fee at a Jewish wedding.  He'll dress up like a Catholic priest.  He'll supply your groomsmen.  His staff is a team of misfits -- like a dorky Asian guy, a really fat guy, a muscle hunk who stutters, an ex-con in a wheelchair and a flaming gay Mexican wedding planner.  They will be the groom's team.  These are the hired best friends to accompany the hired best man.                                                                                                                            

This odd squad drags Doug into some risky business that shakes the dullness out of his life.  He'll drink.  He'll get a lap dance.  And a dog will lick peanut butter off his balls.  Of course, something will go horribly wrong.  But Doug and Jimmy are bonding.  Doug is having naughty adventures.  Jimmy has been so busy hustling money that he's never had a close buddy himself. Again, Mel Brooks did this kind of thing better in 1967.  Also, you feel like you saw all these sight gags before in 1980s comedies.

Doing a good job as the dork is Josh Gad.  Millions of kids love this actor's work.  He's the speaking and singing voice of Olaf the Snowman in Frozen.  He's got Broadway skills.  Gad was in the Book of Mormon Broadway musical cast.  The Wedding Ringer burdens Gad with a juvenile script.  But his dance number with Hart was pretty cool.

The Wedding Ringer is not quite as sophisticated as 1984's Revenge of the Nerds.  The cast includes Kaley Cuoco from TV's The  Big Bang Theory, veteran actor Ken Howard and NFL great Joe Namath.

Actress/Director Ida Lupino

All entertainment journalism is abuzz with the news of who got invited to Hollywood Prom Night.  Yes, the Oscar nominations were announced.  Once again, a woman directed a film to an Oscar nomination for Best Picture -- but she did not get an Oscar nomination for Best Director.  Barbra Streisand, director of The Prince of Tides (7 nominations including Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress), Debra Granik, director of Winter's Bone (nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor) and Lisa Cholodenko, director of The Kids Are All Right (nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor) know how Ava feels.

Ava DuVernay got sensational reviews for Selma but she did not make this list this of nominees for Best Director.  However, she did make Oscar history as the first African American woman to direct a film nominated for Best Picture.

Personally, I think the Academy needs to change and update a rule.  If a movie is nominated for Best Picture, that film also receives an Oscar nomination for Best Director.  Because that film did not get in the Best Picture Oscar race by directing itself.  Period.  David Oyelowo, who amazingly played Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma and also got sensational reviews, did not get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.  Don't get me started.

In over 80 years of the Academy Awards, less than 10 women have been recognized in the category of Best Director.  It's been predominantly a White Boys Club.

Let's talk Hollywood history and another trailblazing woman.  She directed films and TV shows after establishing herself as one of Hollywood's best actresses.

Back in the late 1920s and the 1930s, there was one female director in Hollywood.  She was Dorothy Arzner.  She was the first woman to direct a performer to an Oscar nomination.  Actress Ruth Chatterton, known to many classic film fans as the actress who played the vain, exasperating wife in William Wyler's Dodsworth (1936) was a Best Actress nominee for 1930's Sarah and Son, directed by Ms. Arzner and co-starring Fredric March.

Then came actress Ida Lupino.  She started making Hollywood movies in the 1930s.

Lovely and talented, some critics in the 1940s felt she should've had her pick of the same A-quality scripts that went to the Queen of the Warner Bros. lot -- Bette Davis.  Nonetheless, Ida made a name for herself.

In the 1950s and 60s, she continued to act while also taking her place behind the camera.  She broke ground for women as a film director who also accumulated a lengthy list of credits as a female director in episodic television.  If a woman directed an episode of a network medical drama, western, thriller, detective series or a sitcom in the 1950s and '60s, you knew that woman was Ida Lupino.

Although she slammed across some solid screen performances, she was never nominated for an Oscar.  Although she was a pioneer for women in the field of television as a director, she never received a Lifetime Emmy.

Ida would've loved to see the accomplishments of women directors today.  She'd have been thrilled at the achievements in my previous post, Women in Film: Brava, Ava DuVernay!

From 2011,  I did a short podcast on the extraordinary and unjustly overlooked groundbreaker, Ida Lupino.  I loved the heart and spirit of her 1966 Catholic school comedy, The Trouble With Angels.

  

Rosalind Russell played the strict but sweet Mother Superior.  Hayley Mills starred as the mischievous teen who works the nun's last good nerve.

Celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee makes a guest appearance.

Here's my podcast from 2011:
bobbyrivers.podomatic.com/entry/2011-02-04T07_54_13-08_00.

If you're familiar with IMDb.com, go there sometime and check out Ida Lupino's credits as a TV director when no other woman was directing episodic TV.  She opened the door for future actresses who also became directors.  Women such as Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster and Penny Marshall.

Ida should've been given a Lifetime Emmy.  She was an actress, scriptwriter, director and a producer.  I still feel a film/TV scholarship award for women should be named in Ida Lupino honor.

"I'd love to see more women working as directors and producers."  ~Ida Lupino

Ms. Lupino died in 1995 at age 77, a much-respected talent with a most remarkable resumé.  Check out her performances in classic films such as They Drive By Night, High Sierra, The Hard Way, Devotion, Deep Valley, The Man I Love, Moontide, Lust For Gold and The Big Knife.

Check out films she directed such as The Bigamist, The Hitch-Hiker and Hard, Fast and Beautiful.

Women in Film: Brava, Ava DuVernay!

The following actors are members of a small, exclusive and very special club.  The club has its place in Hollywood history.  What do they have in common?  These gentlemen all got Oscar nominations for performances in films that were directed by women:  Giancarlo Giannini in Seven Beauties, Tom Hanks in Big, Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides, Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker and Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right.

Giancarlo Giannini was directed by Italy's Lina Wertmüller.  She also became the first woman to get an Oscar nomination for Best Director for that same 1975 film.  Tom Hanks was directed by Penny Marshall, Nick Nolte by Barbra Streisand, Bill Murray by Sofia Coppola, Jeremy Renner by Kathryn Bigelow, the first and only woman to win the Oscar for Best Director, and Mark Ruffalo was directed by Lisa Cholodenko.

Thursday morning, actor David Oyelowo could become a member of that exclusive, small yet very special club thanks to the director of Ava DuVernay.  She guided him through his outstanding performance as civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Dr. Martin Luther King in SELMA.

Ms. DuVernay could make Hollywood history herself as the first African American woman to be an Oscar nominee for Best Director.

2014 was a year of home runs for the team of Women In Film.  In addition to Selma, two of my other favorite films of last year were also directed by women -- the hugely imaginative modern-day vampire story about a ruthless female vampire in Iran who finds romance in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.   That low-budget, black and white thriller came from Ana Lily Amirpour and took us to the Middle East known for disrespect of women and for not treating them as equals.  The Babadook is an Australian modern-day horror story written and directed by Jennifer Kent.  The tale of a single mother, her young child and a demonic presence in their home got high praise from William Friedkin, the man who directed The Exorcist.  I second his emotion.  The Bababook is a scary winner.

Angelina Jolie directed by big World War II biopic, Unbroken.  We follow the young life of Olympics track star-turned-survivor of a brutal WWII Japanese prisoner of war camp, Louis Zamperini.  He was an Italian-American guy from Southern California who endured sheer horror in the war on land, in the air and at sea.  Those other three films directed by women had more soul to them.  They felt more realized.  Jolie did some impressive work but the last act of the film needed more of a payoff.  Her biopic is relentlessly inspirational with motivational phrases like "If I can take it, I can make it."  I agree with the comment on Unbroken from novelist/screenwriter Susan Isaacs (Compromising Positions, Shining Through).  She wrote that the last act felt incomplete, as if it was the story of Jesus and ended with the Crucifixion without a scene that lets you know the Resurrection occurred.

As a biopic, Selma is way more satisfying and it got more critical acclaim than Unbroken.  But then there was some controversy about DuVernay's portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the film when he argued civil rights policies with Dr. King.  President Johnson was played by the excellent Tom Wilkinson opposite fellow Brit, David Oyelowo.                                                                              

Some complained passionately about a historical inaccuracy regarding LBJ.  Those same people did not complain that Dr. King's speeches in the film were also historically inaccurate.  DuVernay could not get the rights to use his famous speeches.  The rights are owned, reportedly, by Steven Spielberg.  So, she co-write "new" speeches for Dr. King (although she did not receive on-screen writing credit).  As film critic David Edelstein said on CBS' Sunday Morning last Sunday, DuVernay "got 90%" of the LBJ section correct --- and Edelstein called the film "magnificent."

Selma is a feature film.  It's based on historical events and real people.  It's not a 2-hour documentary nor should it be taken as two hours of journalism.  Director/writer Oliver Stone has given us several biopics such as Born on the Fourth of July, the rock music biopic, The Doors, and his presidential biopics, Nixon and W. (about George W. Bush).  Were they all historically accurate?

Stone wrote the screenplay adaptation of the Billy Hayes memoir, Midnight Express.  I've known Billy since the 1970s when his book came out.  He and I attended the same Milwaukee university.  His best-selling memoir detailed his years in and his amazing escape from a dismal Turkish prison when he was in his 20s.  He was jailed for smuggling hash an unjustly decades-long sentence.  The movie was a big box office success.  In it, the very blond Billy was played by dark-featured actor Brad Davis.  Also, Stone took major liberties with Billy's life story.  Billy did not cuss out Turkish officials in court during a heated outburst like he did in the movie.  However, that scene tainted the image of Turkey so severely that it crippled tourism for over 20 years and Turkey blamed Billy personally for it.  Last year, I saw him tell that story and other revelations in his well-reviewed one-man stage show, Riding The Midnight Express with Billy Hayes.  It played New York City and London.

The film Midnight Express was nominated for Best Picture of 1978.  Oliver Stone won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Let's see how Ava DuVernay's Selma fares when the Oscar nominations are announced Thursday morning, January 15th. In the meantime, I say "Brava, Ava!"

I Loved SELMA

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was our leader as we marched.  Why did black Americans risk their lives and march across that bridge in Selma, Alabama?  For the right to vote.  Black Americans.  In the 1960s.  Not the 1860s. The 1960s.

January will be a major month for Women In Film.  SELMA, directed by Ava DuVernay, opens nationwide this weekend.  She has already won rave reviews from several top film critics in the country.  She deserves that high praise.  I've seen Selma and I want to see it again.  This Sunday at the Golden Globes ceremony,  Ava DuVernay will hear her name read as nominee for Best Director.  A first for a black female filmmaker.  Brava, Ava!

The subject of her film, the late Dr. Martin Luther King, made history with his legendary Civil Rights activism in the racially turbulent 1960s.  Ms. DuVernay is making Hollywood history as a female director -- and as a minority female director.  I believe that Ava DuVernay could make history on January 15th as the first African American woman to hear her name announced as an Oscar nominee for Best Director.

Filmmakers say that making biopics is difficult.  I'm sure it is.  Some critics and moviegoers may quibble about a biopic's accuracy.  That happened with the fine portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered by Tom Wilkinson in Selma.  Folks forget that the project is neither a documentary nor journalism.  It's a feature based on the life and/or a key time in the life of a publicly known person.  It's still a movie.  As a filmmaker, I'm sure you try your hardest to get at the essential truth of the person's life or message.  That said, you cannot deny that Hollywood just loves biopics come Oscar nomination time.  This love has been throbbing for well over half a century.  From the 1930s when Paul Muni, Spencer Tracy and the recently departed Luise Rainer won Oscars for playing true life characters to the modern-day Oscar victories of Susan Sarandon, Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Helen Mirren, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jamie Foxx and Matthew McConaughey (to name a few), the nearly 13 inch Golden Boy loves going home with performers who played real life people.

I will not be surprised to hear the name David Oyelowo announced on January 15th as a nominee for Best Actor and Selma should make the list of nominees for Best Picture.

I've written before that I was a boy when Dr. King made his historic 1963 March on Washington, his march on Selma, his appearance as a guest on NBC's Tonight Show and when he was tragically assassinated in 1968.  He changed the world and did monumental things when he was just in his 30s.  He never lived to see 40.  Think about that when you see Selma.  Dr. King was part of our weekly lives, it seemed, because he was constantly covered by the network evening news.  Our family in Los Angeles paid attention to the TV every time he was televised.  I remember his classic speeches ("I have a dream") and how his majestic preacher's voice was like a symphony orchestra unto itself.  We don't hear his classic speeches in Selma because another filmmaker owns the rights to them. Not the King Family.  Director Ava DuVernay mentioned that Thursday, January 8th, when she was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air by host, Terry Gross.  DuVernay did not mention who the other filmmaker is but, reportedly, Steven Spielberg owns the rights to the famed Dr. Martin Luther King speeches.

When the Oscars ceremony was annually held in early April, the one and only time the telecast was postponed was in 1968 out of respect for the untimely death of Dr. King.

Due to one screenwriter's strong clause in his Hollywood contract, DuVernay is not credited on film as a co-screenwriter.  But she did work on the Selma script and had the daunting task of writing "new" speeches for the late Civil Rights legend.  Her writing rocked.  She got the essential message and truth of Dr. King's words and of his message.  It would have been wonderful to hear his exact words but DuVernay couldn't get the rights.  She overcame that obstacle with some superb original writing.

Compare that, in a way, to another biopic of sorts that opened last year.  Jimi:  All Is By My Side could not get the rights to classic Jimi Hendrix music.  The film suffered from that.  It also suffered from a shabby structure.  The women in the life of the famous rock guitarist take more focus than he does.  Also, the storyline meanders.  It's as if Selma focused more on Coretta Scott King and made Martin a supporting player with the story ending before the march across the bridge in Selma.  André Benjamin was good as Jimi Hendrix.  But director/writer John Ridley couldn't overcome obstacles that arose when he couldn't get rights to significant material, specifically Hendrix's hit music.

Oprah Winfrey is one of the Selma producers.  She also delivers one of her best big screen performances in this film.  (She's in the pic above with star David Oyelowo and director DuVernay.)  Oprah knows Spielberg.  It would've been very generous if he'd granted Ava DuVernay permission to use some of Dr. King's speeches.  But maybe he's working on a King project himself.

With the events of Ferguson in the St. Louis area and the anger in New York over the grand jury decision relative to the death of unarmed Eric Garner at that hands of police, the strength and importance of peaceful protest has great relevance in Selma.  You'll think of the "I Can't Breathe" peaceful protest marches that arose from the Garner case.  In looking at the past, we see much of our modern times.  We see how far we've come.  We see the work that still needs to be done.  The release of Selma is perfectly timed due to occurrences in the news -- just as The China Syndrome was released about a week before the Three Mile Island nuclear plant emergency.  That 1979 drama starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon focused on safety hazards at a nuclear plant being covered up.  With the Three Mile Island national news story, life imitated Hollywood art.

As I wrote in earlier blog posts, DuVernay made Dr. King a real kitchen sink, working class person.  A man who laughed, argued, ate, had sex, doubted himself, made mistakes, gathered his courage and helped others.  He was not born a saint or a legend.  He was an ordinary man, a family man, who did extraordinary things with his life.  What he did was not easy.  Utilizing Gandhi's principles of non-violence and non-resistance, principles introduced to him by his brilliant openly gay and Quaker key advisor Bayard Rustin (played by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) took extreme steeliness and guts.

Who knew back in those hard days of the 1960s that, in time, he would be honored with a January federal holiday in his name?  Who knew that a black woman from Compton, California would direct his story on a big screen?  Wow.

If you can, go see Selma.  You'll be moved.  It shows us a life.  It shows us a struggle.  It shows people brave enough to oppose bigotry.  It shows us the possibilities we all have.

It's THE BABADOOK

Can you blame this lonely, stressed out, single mother for owning a vibrator?  (I knew that would get your attention.)  Another home run has been hit by the team of Women in Film.  One of my favorite films of last year is the modern-day vampire story, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.  Ana Lily Amirpour wrote and directed that imaginative, tense and witty thriller about a ruthless Middle Eastern female vampire in a bleak Iranian city who winds up finding romance with a kind human male.  Now out is another thriller that opened last year.  Jennifer Kent wrote and directed the scary Australian import, THE BABADOOK.  Mister Babadook is a boogie man character in a children's tale.  He may be that spooky make-believe character kids think could hide under their beds at night.  In this movie which focuses on a suburban widowed mother and her only child, we start to feel that The Babadook is not so make-believe after all.  There's something very creepy here.

This is a mighty fine psychological fright movie -- like those three excellent features The Haunting (1963),  The Innocents (1961) starring Deborah Kerr and the Spanish film, The Orphanage (2007).  It has your mind racing.

This feature, like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is an economic and very effective film.  A small, tightly-made, low-budget feature, Ms. Kent's film produces big thrills.  Amelia, the mother, and her sensitive little boy, Samuel, live in a big neighborhood house.  The colors are muted, like Amelia's life.  We see no bright, fun colors in the decor.  You do see red.  That's the red of the pop-up storybook Amelia reads to Samuel.

The story scares him.  He's lost his father.  He doesn't want to lose his mother to a monster.  She reassures Samuel that it's just a storybook character.  There are problems with him.  He's a loving kid, but he appears to be sickly.  Maybe in need of medication.  He's picked on by other kids.  He deeply misses having a dad.

Amelia is lonely and still in a state of grief depression, seven years after the untimely death of her handsome husband.  Her snobby girlfriends are tired of her.  Notice their muted colors, too, at a children's birthday party.  They're dressed like they're at a company board meeting.

Strange things begin to happen at Amelia's home.  Things go bump in the night.  Amelia proves to her son and the dog that there's no boogie man under the bed.

But strange things happen in daylight hours too.  Strange phone calls.  Her driving gets erratic.

We start to wonder if Samuel is gradually being possessed by The Babadook.

Then we start to wonder if he's okay but his mother has gone crazy from a mental breakdown.  The sleep-deprived, buttoned-up suburban mom turns into a wild woman.  What's as horrible to a little kid as a monster under the bed?  A beloved parent fracturing into a dark personality who scares you.

Then we wonder if they're both okay and the house is possessed by The Babadook.

This is the kind of movie you want to see with black folks in the audience because we will be shouting, "GIRL, you need to run and get the hell out that house now and move to an apartment building!  And take the vibrator with you!"

In the storybook, Mister Babadook looks as though he was inspired by the character Lon Chaney created for his 1927 silent film thriller, London After Midnight (seen below).

I could tell you more but that would dilute the experience of seeing it for yourself.  You know the basic story and its qualities.  I want you to gasp at scenes like I did.

Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman  are terrific as the tormented mother and son.   The Babadook got high praise and recommendations from William Friedkin on Twitter.  He directed a horror classic that also had a single mother, her young child and a malevolent presence possessing their home.  That movie was 1973's The Exorcist. Writer/director Jennifer Kent must be very proud of that praise.  As well she should be.

Disney's Blonde Obession

Have ethnic females been FROZEN out by Disney?  Lord knows I have grown up loving Disney theatrical features and TV shows.  When I was a kid, Walt Disney hosted Wonderful World of Color Sunday nights on NBC.  That was "Must-See TV" for youngsters.  Today, Disney is the parent company of ABC.  Last year, with the phenomenal box office success of Frozen, Elsa was such a hot new character that she seemed to eclipse Mickey Mouse, the character who put Disney on the global map.

The Oscar-winning song from Frozen, "Let It Go," seemed to replace the Oscar-winning song "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" (from 1946's Song of the South) as Disney's Magic Kingdom theme.  And ABC's.  In the last couple of months, I started to wonder if you watch an entire broadcast of Good Morning America or get through one solid hour of ABC prime time programming starting at 8pm without hearing a bit of "Let It Go."  I liked the motivational, girl power song at first -- but every single day and night, ABC?

Elsa from Frozen is Disney's new "It" girl.  Hundreds and hundreds of little females dressed as Elsa for Halloween.  On Good Morning America, Robin Roberts dressed as Elsa for Halloween.  Robin Roberts interviewed an "Elsa" at DisneyWorld for a nationally televised holiday parade special.  In the weeks leading up to Christmas, it was nice to see ABC bring back Mickey Mouse for product placement appearances.  After all, he has been the corporate logo for decades.  The Frozen ice queen got her own storyline added to ABC's Once Upon a Time.  Long blonde hair, blue dress and all.

Disney's Cinderella is one of my favorite full-length animated features from the studio's 1950s period.  The company has been retooling characters it made famous in its Golden Years.  Come March, Disney gives us CINDERELLA again.  This time, in live action form with top actresses such as Cate Blanchett and Helena Bonham Carter.

I admit that the trailer makes me want to see it.  However, something makes me curious.  I'm writing as a grown male who's not seen all the Disney animated releases of the last few years.  But I'm a grown male who's concerned about big screen images.  Two years before Frozen, Disney Studios released the Oscar-winning drama, The Help.  In that, we saw the extraordinary Viola Davis as a black maid in the 1960s tenderly saying to a privileged little blonde Southern girl, "You is kind.  You is smart.  You is important."

With the popularity of Frozen, we saw white and black females, girls and women, dressed up like blonde Elsa for Halloween.  Now we're getting a new version of Cinderella.  Just like Elsa, this Cinderella will be a young, slim, pretty blonde with a petite nose who wears a pretty blue dress.

Is there a subliminal message Disney is trying to send to our minority girls?  First of all, how come we're not seeing big screen retoolings of 1998's Asian heroine, MULAN...

....or sweet Tiana, the African American lead in 2009's THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG?

I love Helena Bonham Carter.  But let's think about this:  Viola Davis now stars as a brilliant law school professor on a hit ABC series called How To Get Away With Murder.  Disney is ABC's parent company, as I mentioned earlier.  Did anyone think to ask Viola to go fantasy glam and give her the festive -- and important -- role of the Fairy Godmother?  If not Viola, you know who I would've offered the Fairy Godmother role to?  Oprah!  For years on daytime television with her annual "Oprah's Favorite Things" edition of her talk show or the day she gave everybody in the audience a car, she really was the Fairy Godmother of daytime talk shows.  Also, it would've been fabulous to see her in a fun role and making dreams come true instead of playing another woman who gets knocked to the ground by a bigot down South -- specifically The Color Purple and now Selma.

Oprah as the Fairy Godmother would have been fabulous casting.

I grew up on a cul-de-sac block in South Central Los Angeles.  My working class family's friends and neighbors were black, Mexican and Asian.  When I was a boy, I looked for images of my world on the big screen and on TV.  Ethnic images.  My drive to be a celebrity talk show host, film reviewer and game show host on TV was fueled by the fact I didn't see us minorities do that kind of work on local and network TV when I was a kid.

Back in 1990, I met with Disney execs in L.A. about possibly hosting my own celebrity talk show for Disney's Buena Vista syndication.  I was honored to have the meetings, as I've been a longtime Disney fan.  I'm still a Disney fan.  I'm also a black male concerned about film images for minority little girls and teens.  I just want to make sure that Disney today will embrace them too and give them the feeling that they are kind, they are smart and they are important.  They don't secretly have to wish that they were slim and pretty Caucasian blondes in order to have special powers or to make their dreams come true.

It's A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

With a title like that, I expected a lot of graphic bloodshed and sizzling sex.  Not so.  In fact,  there was more violence and gunfire in Iron Man.  This new film has more emotional tension than physical violence.  I tell you that so you won't expect blood and guts and blow-ups and bare bodies if you see it.

The tone of A Most Violent Year reminded me Sidney Lumet films made in the 1970s and '80s in New York.  Films that dealt with values, corruption and forces that one tries to control but the forces wind up controlling you.  Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and the under-appreciated cop drama Prince of the City (1981) are examples.  Lumet made films that were heavy on dialogue.  I think director/writer J.C. Chandor was heavily influenced by the kind of good, gritty films we got in the 1970s and '80s.

The story takes us to New York City in 1981.  An immigrant, who seems to have done pretty well for himself, seeks to protect his business and his family.  He's handsome, dapper, persuasive, ambitious.  He has a gun but he doesn't want to use it.  The moviegoer sits there and tries to figure out if this guy is mobbed up or what.  Some shady financial dealings occur and his wife is involved.  She looks like a blonde bimbo but she's got terrific math skills. He's more concerned with doing the right thing than she is.

                                                                       

She may be cooking the books in her office job and that possibly helped them purchase a huge house out in the woods.  Personally, I wondered how they got together.  They're an odd couple.  He's like a Tony Award-winning Broadway drama.  She's like a Real Housewives reality show celebrity.  The characters seemed oddly matched.

Politically, we're in the President Reagan era.  Businessman Abel Morales, played with a cool and focused smoothness by Oscar Isaac, wants oil.  This causes drama.

If you're up for a lot of action, this movie is not for you.  It's almost like a special 2-hour episode of The Sopranos written by National Public Radio writers.  What hooked me was the acting.  It gives juice to a movie in which there really isn't much happening.  I'm sure some critics will snark that Oscar Isaac does an Al Pacino imitation in this film.  When you see his demeanor and his close-ups, it's hard not to think that, if The Godfather was made today, he'd be Michael Corleone.  His look resembles Pacino's a bit.  But he's not Pacino.  He's got his own talents.  He does make you wonder why Abel is so obsessed with oil.  Doesn't he realize what the obsession is doing to co-workers he cares about and to his reputation?  Just like today, the rich are getting richer -- and the poor seem to get the possibility of jail time.  Jessica Chastain plays Abel's tough wife, Anna.

Chastain is the real deal.  She's like a chameleon.  This is the same actress who was the lovably bubble-headed blonde Southern outsider, Celia Foote, in The Help.

The other performance I loved comes from Albert Brooks, the comedian/actor who has some solid dramatic acting chops.  He's the lawyer who can handle the several dealings with the formidable Orthodox Jewish group.  He's the guy who knows what's tainted and what's not.  I wish his role had been bigger.  Another stand-out performance comes from actor David Oyelowo, currently getting high praise for his portrayal of Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma.  Here, he's an official who could put Abel in jail or keep him out of it.

I saw A Most Violent Year at a screening in midtown Manhattan for critics.  A buddy of mine, an African American female critic, came up to me and whispered "What the heck was that movie about?"

I'll tell you what I told her.  This is my take on A Most Violent Year.

I lived in New York City for 20 years.  I lived below 23rd Street and had a daily view of the World Trade Center.  I was there on September 11th.  A couple of weeks after our national tragedy, New Yorkers in my neighborhood gathered for a downtown candlelight march for peace.  In the crowd, I heard people say over and over "This attack was all about oil."  Over and over again, as we marched, I heard "...all about oil."

Does Abel Morales really know how reliable or reputable the sources of his oil are?  Will he be controlled by corrupt forces he thinks he can control?  Will blood be spilled because of his oil obsession?  Is he willing to put people at risk to pursue the American Dream?

In a way, A Most Violent Year felt like a look at the kind of actions that made some folks richer, but tragically may have made us victims on September 11th.  There's blood and oil in A Most Violent Year.  And some good acting.  But not a lot of action considering its title.