Yesterday

First Hit: Thoroughly enjoyable film and story, especially if you like “The Beatles” music.

In my sophomore and junior years of high school, Jim Golden and I sat in his or my bedroom playing Beatles songs over and over again. Jim was one year younger than me and much better on guitar and singing. However, I knew how to harmonize, and together, we sang the shit out of those songs.

In my junior year (1967), Jim and I joined a band and one week after the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band album came out, the group sang three songs from this album in the second of our band’s total of three public performances. My contribution was singing lead on “A Day in the Life,” and I’ll never forget it. The proof is that today, I can still play and sing this song.

In this film, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) wanted to play his music in front of people. His manager Ellie Appleton (Lily James), met him and fell in love with him at age 17 when he performed Oasis’ Wonderwall song during a high school performance. From that time, she worked tirelessly to get him gigs in local bars and establishments near their small English town of Lowestoft. When he’s not performing his songs at these joints, he’s working in a food warehouse.

When he plays, most people in the audience talk or just go about their business, and no one really listens except Ellie and a small group of friends that request their favorite Jack Malik songs.

One day Ellie brings him good news and bad news. The good news is that she got him a gig at a big-time music festival. However, the bad news is that it’s in a remote music tent. When we see Jack perform in the tent, his most attentive audience appears to be four children, Ellie, and a couple of other friends. It’s at this moment he decides to give up on his music career.

While riding his bike on the way home, there is a worldwide blackout, and during the outage, he gets hit by a bus. Waking up in a hospital with two missing front teeth, Ellie is there by his side. Getting out of the hospital, she gives him a new guitar because the old one got run over by the bus. While testing out the guitar, he sings, The Beatles “Yesterday.”

The three friends sitting with him ask him when did he write that song? And he says, he “didn’t, The Beatles did,” and they say who? This is a hilarious scene, especially when they bring up Coldplay. But the fantastic thing about this scene is that the audience, at least I did, hears this song as if it were really a new song. The focus is on the words, and they reflect Jack’s current situation, just as they reflect the circumstances in our own lives.

This then becomes the setup of the film. Did The Beatles exist? Did they ever exist? Jack goes home and searches the internet for The Beatles and finds nothing, except beetles.

Thinking that no one knows The Beatles songs, he begins to recall them and begins to write them down. When he performs them, the audiences love the songs and believe that these songs are Jack’s songs. Through the greatness of the songs, he becomes the new world singing and songwriting sensation.

He records the songs and with the help of Ed Sheeran and a new obnoxious agent who is appropriately named, Debra Hammer (Kate McKinnon). She gets him all caught up in the demands of the music business, including how he looks. The scenes of the marketing team coming up with album titles and imaging are hilarious.

Meanwhile, Ellie tries to tell Jack that she’s more than someone who used to manage him, she’s in love with him and has so since she was seventeen. She asks him to make a choice.

This story is about making choices about the love of a person or a career. It is about honesty through the songwriting. It is about fame, money, and the downsides of all of it. However, for me, it was mostly about the songs I grew up playing with Jim Golden. I loved singing The Beatles songs then, and I loved lip-syncing the songs while watching the film. “I Saw Her Standing There” (She Was Just Seventeen) had extra meaning because of Ellie. The background music as Jack was hit was the music crescendo from “A Day in the Life.” Watching Jack work on remembering the words to “Eleanor Rigby” along with the remembering of the other songs shared in this film was exquisite.

The film had so many out-loud funny bits. Including that “Coke,” Oasis (the band), and cigarettes didn’t exist, were both entertaining and amusing each time they came up. I thought the pacing and sequencing of the scenes were divine, and when Jack drives out to a lonely beach house and meets an artist who tells him what is important in life, I wept silently.

Patel was fantastic in this role. I felt him in his character through my own experience as a young boy in a band wanting to sing songs. James was beyond wonderful. I loved her attempts to share her feelings with Jack, but it’s her looks when she just watching him that made her perfect. Joel Fry as Rocky, Jack’s old friend, and roadie after he gets discovered was hilarious. McKinnon slightly overacted her role at times, but overall was good. Sheeran as himself did an excellent job of acting in a role he would know. Richard Curtis wrote a fantastic screenplay from a story co-authored with Jack Barth. Danny Boyle did a superb job of creating a thoroughly enjoyable version and filled my heart with memories and joy.

Overall: This is a feel-good film.

Anna

First Hit: I was surprised that I liked and enjoyed this film as much as I did.

The film starts with a bunch of assassinations by the KGB of what appears to be CIA agents, all at the same time, in Russia. We’re given little context to these opening scenes, and have to trust that the story will make sense in the end.

Then, we are introduced to Anna (Sasha Luss), a mistreated Russian young woman, who is abused at the hands of her live-in boyfriend Vlad (Nikita Pavlenko). Vlad is a scamming bum who spends his time drinking, thieving and blaming Anna for their miserable life. Walking home one evening Vlad, driving a Mercedes, picks Anna up and drives to an ATM. Vlad opens the trunk, yanks out an old man, and uses his AMEX card and pin to try and extract money from the prisoner’s bank account. Just as they are doing this the police drive by and soon there is a shootout and a car chase.

Lucky to escape the chase, Anna and Vlad arrive home to be greeted by an agent of the KGB. The agent, Alex Tchenkov (Luke Evans), is not interested in discussing anything with Vlad, shoots him as a matter of fact, and begins speaking with Anna. He knows a lot about her; that her parents died when she was young and that she’s smart and appears to have a real will to survive. Alex offers her an opportunity to be free of all this, become a KGB agent, and in five years be free of everything, even the agency.

This is the setup.

However, when Anna' meets his boss, Olga (Helen Mirren), it’s clear that Anna must impress Olga because Olga is not impressed with her background. Quick thinking and acting under pressure are critical in the agency, and in this brief interview, Anna does this by reciting quotes by famous Russian authors.

Before you know it, Anna, Olga, and Alex are in front of the head of the KGB Vassiliev (Eric Gordon) who makes it quite clear that being part of the KGB is for life. And this hits a negative tone for Anna’s primary goal in life — freedom.

She’s been controlled and managed her whole life by her parents, the state, her boyfriend, and now the KGB. As an audience member, I hoped that her freedom was where the film would lead.

How the story is told to the moviegoer, is through numerous flashbacks and flashforwards. The audience has to soon learn that each scene may not be as it appears at first, that a flashback may subsequently give more information. An example was the scene when Anna is recruited as a model.

This form of filmmaking sometimes works, and other times becomes a distraction. Here director Luc Besson almost misses the mark as it is a slight distraction early on, but then becomes the primary vehicle for understanding the choices Anna is making along the way.

These choices include being a model, KGB agent, being a lesbian, and being recruited as a CIA agent by Lenny Miller (Cillian Murphy). Miller explains, at one point, that the loss of the agents at the beginning of the film was his responsibility and he wants to right this wrong, and she can help him. Does she become a CIA agent, a double agent, where is Anna’s allegiance, or does she just disappear?

The jobs Anna is sent on by Olga are numerous and horrifying. The first assassination job teaches her to check her equipment and be ready for anything – it’s quite a battle, one single woman agent against 15 – 20 thugs. The choreography of this scene was excellent as it was easy to follow and worked.

Anyway, the film was filled with action, risks, and questions about who is Anna, and what does she want?

Luss is excellent as Anna. Her look and physical movement work for this role as a model and also being entirely in control of her body. Murphy was strong as the CIA agent wanting to make amends for losing a bunch of agents. Mirren was exquisite as Anna’s boss at the KGB. Her disapproving looks and vocal tone exemplified what we might picture as a high-level woman KGB agent. Evans was equally strong as Anna’s recruiting agent. Gordon was perfect as the head of the KGB, cold and calculating. Lera Abova, as Anna’s roommate Maud, was very good as a model, friend and Anna’s lesbian lover. Besson wrote an engaging script which, at times, bordered on losing control and engagingly entertaining. As a director, it was obvious what he wanted in the end, and I think he got it.

Overall: I was glad I saw this film because each flashback gave new context to the story.

Men in Black: International

First Hit: Certainly not as good as the original, but at least we’ve got “women” involved.

I never thought of the “Men in Black” as a domestic only group, but I guess I was wrong. I mean, how could aliens be on earth and only lived in the United States? So for me, the premise in the title was weak.

We begin with young Molly (Mandeiya Flory) looking out her window witnessing her parents being neuralysed by Men in Black (MiB) agents because of a commotion in the house. The uproar came from a young alien the agents were tracking, and Molly thinks it’s cute, so she helps the alien escape, but not before learning a word from the alien. You know that this will mean something later in the film.

We jump some twenty years into the future and Molly (Tessa Thompson) is still focused on becoming a MiB agent to work with aliens because she likes the alien she met and saw what happened to her parents after they were neuralysed. We are meant to believe that the single early childhood event has become her singular whole life focus.

Attempting to find where MiB headquarters is located in NYC, Molly sets up computers to track incoming aliens. Finding a MiB encounter, she follows the agents back to their offices. Slipping into the building, she gets caught and quickly tells them, she wants to become an agent carrying a neuralyser. After extensive interviews, she’s given a chance to prove herself as a probationary Agent M.

Her assignment takes her to London (hence the International in the title), where she meets High T (Liam Neeson) who assigns her to work with Agent H (Chris Hemsworth).

Agent H is shown in several scenes to be a play-boyish rogue of sorts, loving to gamble, and drink taboo elixirs. Agents H and M are assigned to meet Vungus, the Ugly of royal alien family heritage. But during this meeting, Vungus is killed by evil twins who can manifest themselves as pure energy.

Because Vungus gives M a secret weapon before he dies, she and H are being tracked by the twins who want this weapon to destroy Earth. Will M and H save the world?

This is the short version of the plot. There are other aliens in the mix as well as a storyline that High T has been protecting H since their encounter with the Hive who tried to destroy Earth many years earlier.

What didn’t work for me was that the plot felt too manufactured to be engaging. It lacked a flow to it, and therefore, it pulled me out of engaging with the story. I’m not sure why the writers needed the character of Riza as the recipient of the weapon. Yes, she was an arms agent, but it seemed like it was created as yet another plot device and character. Additionally, some of the acting (Neeson in particular) felt stiff and done for the money and not for the story. Many of the visuals were fun, like when M and H test the weapon Vungus gave M. The twins when they changed to pure energy was fun to watch.

Tessa Thompson was engaging and fun to watch. Her character made the story work. Hemsworth was a bit too silly and laissez-faire for the critical role as protector of the Earth from aliens. The part was built this way, and I thought he could have toned down some of the silliness. Neeson appeared too disengaged from the story and role. The heavy makeup and powder, as seen in the closeups, didn’t help. Rafe Spall as Agent C was very good as the one who wanted to be seen as having more power and engagement in the London MiB office. Emma Thompson as Agent O was good as the authoritarian in-charge person. Rebecca Ferguson (as Riza) was attractive in a role I didn’t think was needed. Matt Holloway and Art Marcum wrote the screenplay that seemed too manufactured as a way to use the MiB name. F. Gary Gray directed this film.

Overall: Not sure this film added any greatness or enhancement to the MiB franchise.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

First Hit: I was both enthralled and, at times, perplexed by this quirky powerfully acted story.

The opening set of scenes; a neighborhood preacher/orator is standing on a box talking about cleaning up the neighborhood near the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard. There’s a local group of young men hanging out talking smack to each other south of Hunter’s Point. Also, there are men in hazmat suits cleaning up the hillside near the shipyard. A fantastic looking house in the Fillmore district on “Golden Gate near Fillmore” (House is really on S. Van Ness), and other great shots in the city, were all mesmerizing. These opening scenes and more were amazingly shot, giving a languid sense of life in a subsection of San Francisco.

But all is not so languid on the inside and neighborhood as Jimmie Fails (plays himself) rides a skateboard everywhere around the area, stopping, looking at “his grandfather’s house.” We find him sitting in front of the house on S. Van Ness Avenue. His close friend Montgomery Allen (“Mont” Jonathan Majors) is often with him. In fact, Jimmie sleeps at Mont’s home where Mont takes care of his Grandpa Allen (Danny Glover). And there is a tension that rises from all the players, except Mont.

In an early scene, Jimmie is climbing up on the house on S. Van Ness and is painting the windowsill. The owners of the home come back and start throwing fruit at him, telling him he must leave, and he must quit coming by the house and painting it.

He claims that his grandfather built the house in the early 1940s, although the style and construction type is clearly from a time 100 years earlier. In one scene, he shares this information to a crowd led by a tour guide (Jello Biafra) on Segways in front of the house – it is both funny and telling of Jimmie’s deeper self.

As he keeps telling the story about how his grandfather built the home, and as an audience member, I am becoming convinced that he is right.

There are scenes of the Greek chorus (the gang) in which they challenge each other on some set of facts or of their manliness, and most of the time, through the biting comments, all is made well enough.

The couple living in the home leaves, so Jimmie and Mont move in. There are exploratory sections where Jimmie tries to get a loan from a bank, and Mont talks with the listing Real Estate Agent named Clayton (Finn Wittrock) who shows the property deed to Mont. The exploration here shows just how difficult it is to find a path to their want - the house and the truth.

Mont writes and draws in a notebook he’s always carrying around, and one evening he writes a play, which they put on at the house. It is a great scene.

The film was touching in many ways because Jimmie is attempting to live in an idealized world and believe the story he tells himself. Mont is wonderfully supportive and faithful and Jimmie’s friend. The intense scenes of the group challenging each other, the play, and when Jimmie is pleading for money from the bank’s loan manager are powerful. The poignant, convincing acting is telling a story of wants, desires, wishes, family, pain, and truth.

Fails is great as himself in a role he envisioned as a very young boy. His remembrances of being in the house as a young boy are particularly vivid. Majors, as Jimmie’s friend Montgomery, is elegant in this role. His ability to live in a present moment and not become too swayed by emotions, especially when the gang attack him verbally was stunning. Glover was fun as the grandfather who couldn’t see and needed television programs explained to him. Willie Hen as the corner preacher who stands on boxes and shares his word was amazingly strong. He captures so much of what is going on in SF and life in his sharing of his truth. Wittrock was excellent as the real estate agent who grew up in the neighborhood. The Greek Chorus (the gang that hangs out) were all great, each exemplifying an attitude and stake in the ground of the city. Joe Talbot and Rob Richert wrote a wonderfully dynamic screenplay that was based on a story by Jimmy Fails. Talbot shows us in the first 5 minutes that he’s an influential director with a clear vision.

Overall: When Jimmie says; “You can’t hate this city unless you love it,” a sentiment that, based on this film, it says it all.

Rolling Thunder: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

First Hit: Little insight into Dylan, a lot of insight to the surrounding people and how they made music together.

Bob Dylan has always been an enigma to most of his audience. His music does his talking for him.

Watching this film about the 1975 tour, I was hoping to learn more about Bob, having grown up with much of his music being available to me. I was never a big Dylan fan, but there were songs I’d listened to that I loved and spoke to me, those were my Dylan songs. For many people, all of Bob’s songs were their songs. For others, when Bob went electric, they shuttered and thought him a traitor to the folk movement of the early 1960s.

What I admired most about Dylan was that he sang his own tunes his way, and for that, he deserves all the respect in the world.

This film talks with James Gianopulos the concert promoter of this concert tour, a number of the musicians including Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Ronnie Hawkins, and Scarlet Rivera. Additionally, there was a dialogue with others including Allen Ginsberg, filmmaker Martin von Haselberg, reporter Larry “Ratso” Sloman, Patti Smith, and Sam Shepard.

Many of the interviews were with this group of people in current time and back then, while other discussions were just from the 1975 tour.

Haselberg’s footage is used for the historical sequences, including the performances. While Scorsese shot additional interview footage, including with Bob. Haselberg did an excellent job of getting shots of the band before, after, and during the performances.

What this film did point out was that Bob Dylan does what he wants. Watching his critical eye while on stage, looking at his band, guiding them with slight gestures from his eyes or a head nod was mesmerizing. The tangent discussions that resulted in how people were added and removed from performances were interesting. “How do we fit Ginsberg in?” Will Joni get enough stage time? What about Joan?

The performances were held in small venues which allowed the film to reflect the closeness Dylan had with his audience. I was enchanted by the stage presence and violin playing of Scarlet Rivera, a highlight as was watching McGuinn playing the twelve string.

However, what was truly amazing was the during the credits, Scorsese listed all of Dylan’s concerts from 1976 on by year through 2018. This man never stops working.

Scorsese did a fantastic job of creating a drop-in, slice-of-life feeling, of what it was to be on this tour. An amusing touch was seeing Bob behind the steering wheel multiple times, driving the motor home to each of the locations – he was an engaged man.

Overall: Although I didn’t learn much about Dylan, I learned how he liked to make music.