August (Agosto)

First Hit: A beautiful intimate story about a young man coming into his own during the 1994 crisis in Cuba.

Here Cuba is going through an economic crisis because the Cold War between the United States and Russia has ended. Russia, being Cuba’s benefactor, is in its own turmoil and this satellite country of theirs, just 90 miles from the United States, is now caught without a support system.

The country is in deep poverty, the government supplied electricity is sporadic, and food is difficult to find. People are fleeing the island in unsafe boats and other homemade floatation devices and attempting to make their way to the US.

It’s August of 1994 and Carlos (Damian Gonzalez Guerrero), and Carlos is out of school for their recess. He’s in love with Elena, as is his best friend, Mandy. The talk on the radio is how people are fleeing Cuba.

His grandmother is old, lives with him, and is in constant need. She lives with him and his mother and father. She has bouts of daydreams and fantasies. He takes care of her by feeding her, talking with her, and giving her water when she cries out.

In one poignant scene, his grandmother seems to intuitively know that sex is on Carlos’ mind, so she tells him that his deceased grandfather was an outstanding lover. Her graphic details were hilarious to me in the audience but very confusing and educational to Carlos.

The beautiful photography of a decaying Cuba highlighted by spots of fresh paint on a few walls exemplified the economic struggles and hopeful outlook of this prideful nation in crisis.

What makes this film stand out was the non-verbal power of Guerrero to share Carlos’ struggle to become a man. His sweet way of holding Elena’s hand, and their first sweet kiss was exquisite. When he thinks Elena wants more in their subsequent kiss, he’s shocked and hurt in Elena’s rebuffing him.

When he sees Elena sitting on a wall holding hands with Mandy, the audience can feel his hurt. Then to add to his quiet ways, the reluctance to share his sadness with his mother when she asks him about what is wrong exemplifies many young boys' unwillingness to share these types of troubles with their mothers.

After he learns that Elena’s family has left on a boat to the US, he decides to take matters into his own hands and find a way to escape the island. His hubris and inexperience show up on the beach at night.

Guerrero was sublime, and I felt like I knew him because I was him during different moments of this story. The rest of the actors Alejandro Guerrero Machado, Glenda Delgado Dominguez, Luis Ernesto Barcenas, Rafael Lahera Suárez, Lola Amores Rodríguez, Verónica Lynn López, and Tatiana Monge Herrera were excellent in their respective roles. As writer and director, Armando Capo put together a beautiful piece of art while sharing a very personal story.

Overall: This gorgeous film marinates within you long after you leave the theater.

Joker

First Hit: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is powerfully twisted in overt and subtle ways.

Arthur Fleck (Phoenix, aka Joker) works as a clown. Living with his mom Penny (Frances Conroy) in a dark Gotham low rent slum apartment, he’s very thoughtful of his mother’s inability to take care of herself. He has a semi-secret wish to become a standup comedian and bring smiles and joy to everyone.

While watching his favorite program, The Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) Show, he fantasizes about appearing on the show and becoming famous.

In an opening scene, Fleck standing and dancing in front of a going out of business shoe store twirling a sign to entice people to visit the store. He’s got his clown outfit on, face painted, and seems to enjoy what he’s doing. This is the first sign of the subtle way Phoenix shares the depth of his character. There is a glint in the facial expressions that give the audience a notion that all is not right with him. He gets mugged by some kids who take his sign and, in the chase, ends up being beaten.

He gets reprimanded by the company (HaHa) he works for because the sign was broken, and the shoe company wants it back.

Beaten by the young thugs, a fellow clown employee, Randall (Glenn Fleshler), gives Fleck a gun for protection.

We learn that Fleck has an inappropriate behavior of laughing at the wrong times when he’s feeling tense. He carries a card that he hands people stating his illness.

The film digs a little into his mental state with scheduled visits to a city-run social worker who can and does, prescribe a litany of drugs. The social worker, at one of their meetings, tells him the city is stopping this program, and he won’t be able to get his drugs through them any longer. He plows into a dialogue about how the social worker never listens to him, askes him the same questions each and every meeting. Here again, the audience knows he’s right, but we also are seeing ways that he’s slipping through the cracks.

This is one of the points of the film. Society in this story is one of the struggles between the haves and have-nots. Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), father of the young Bruce Wayne, and a wealthy man believes that people that don’t have anything need to pull themselves up from their bootstraps. He’s also running for mayor. It is here and in other places this film touches on today and our current societal state of affairs where the top 1% of the people own 90% of the wealth.

This point runs through this film. The story is filled with moments that reflect how society has become lawless, and there is an uncaring towards our fellow man.

A turning point in the film is when Fleck, after being fired for bringing a gun to a clown gig in a children’s ward of a hospital, he starts laughing while watching a tense encounter between three young drunk well-to-do businessmen who are harassing a young woman on a subway train.

His inappropriate laughing causes the men to start picking on him, and during the resulting fight, he shoots and kills all three. Poignantly this attack becomes a rallying cry for the poor and disenfranchised in Gotham. All they see are the headlines that a man with a clown face (mask or makeup) stood up to three of the “haves” and now there is a slow movement of people having protest marches and rioting with many of the participants wearing clown masks.

This story is complicated, just like Fleck is complex. Being hunted by the police for the killings, learning about his past through his mother, then through records at a mental hospital, and being off his medication creates a man who is acting out of anger, loss, and desperation.

When Murray shows and then posts on social media, a hilarious video of him attempting to do a standup routine, he becomes a laughingstock across the country. However, the viralness of the post, Murray decides to have Fleck on his program.

The depth and complexity of the film, the character, and the way it puts a realness to the “Joker” (DC Comics’ character) was profound. It’s almost a perfect layup to Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” with Christian Bale being Bruce Wayne. The scenes and sets in this film are wonderfully shot. The mental hospital, the social worker’s office, Flecks apartment, and the street scenes all carried the sense of a troubled world.

Phoenix absolutely became this character. The overt and subtle shifts in his eyes and mouth said so much throughout the film. As someone who was disregarded by society, he ended up being the man of the moment. He kept me on the edge of wondering what he will in each scene. De Niro was oddly a curious character and excellent as an aging talk show host. He, partially, reminded me of his role as Rupert Pupkin, a wanna be talk show host, in “The King of Comedy.” Zazie Beetz, as Sophie Dumond, Fleck’s neighbor, and short-term lover was outstanding. The way she saw Fleck as someone who could relate to her was powerfully displayed when they went out, and she saw his comedy routine. Conroy, as Arthur’s mother, was good in this subtle, yet pivotal role. Cullen as Wayne was a perfect reflection of a have’s arrogance. Fleshler, as a manipulative friend and co-worker of Fleck, was excellent in this protective backstabbing role. Todd Phillips and Scott Silver wrote a power-packed script and screenplay. Phillips directed this story with absolute clarity of delivering the story he wanted to make.

Overall: I fell into this story from the very beginning, and it worked.

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

First Hit: Brings to life some of the mystery surrounding a deeply complex man who expressed himself best through the music he created.

Miles Davis created a unique, inventive, and improvisational form of jazz. In doing so he emotionally moved people in ways they never knew before. As Miles’ pushed his soul to create his live music, the audience was discovering new feelings in their soul while listening to him play.

This movie is narrated by Carl Lumbly, whose raspy voice was equivalent to Davis’ voice post-surgery. This throat surgery did not affect his playing, only his voice.

We are presented with a quick overview of Davis’ upbringing and I was surprised to learn that his family, specifically his father, was a self-made wealthy man, the film states. He was one of the wealthiest black men in all of the United States. His father was a dentist but also ran an income producing farm outside St. Louis. The film also points out that being a child of a wealthy man didn’t stop him from racial injustice both as young boy and as a grown man.

One nugget from his youth is that his mother wanted him to play the violin but Miles wanted to play the trumpet and as with most things in life, he got his way.

In his late teens, he signed himself up to Julliard to learn about music and music theory while also spending his nights sitting in on the jazz bands lining each side of 52nd Street. Sitting in with some of the greats, he quickly found his stride and was able to contribute to the band’s sound.

Starting his own band, he quickly became an audience draw through his extemporaneous innovations and arrangements. He loved experimenting and learning more about music and his soul through the music he created.

I was drawn to the section in the film when he made his first trip to Paris. He was shocked to be in a culture that lacked the kind of racism he found in his own country. For the first time he felt free of his color. Coming back to the United States was such a racial shock that he started to spiral down. All this lead to the part of the story where he ended up on heroin.

His life became all about finding the next score. Broke and nearly living on the streets, his father came to New York and dragged him back to St. Louis where he got clean. The film also chronicles his later issues with cocaine and alcohol.

The film documents the development of his sound through the 60’s and 70’s with the various bands he fronted, the albums he made, and how he made them. He wanted the musicians he gathered to play deeper from their soul than each of the band members ever played before and he pushed each one to stand out to make their sound. He wanted collaboration.

There is a fair amount of homemade film footage of Miles as well as photos and the montage of putting this all together worked really well. Additionally, Director Stanley Nelson used interviews with fellow musicians that ended up being enlightening about Miles and heartwarming to the film watcher. We see old film footage of these musicians as young men, then on the screen being interviewed, older, wiser, and still in awe of what happened when they played with Miles.

The film also chronicles his various marriages and girlfriends while including interviews with three of his former wives.

The film does an excellent job of letting some of the various types of music Miles created to flow in and out of the scenes. Some of the music we hear live, as they were creating it in the studio or on stage, and other times, the music is from what he recorded.

Miles comes across as a troubled man who was steeped in finding ways to express himself in the only medium in which he felt safe, music. And in this realm, he was a genius.

Nelson did a great job of putting this story together. Lumbly did a wonderful job of speaking for Davis

Overall: Although I’m not a jazz aficionado, in a quiet dark room, hearing Davis’ music takes me to places I’ve never been before.

Judy

First Hit: This film opened the door to possibly seeing a more in-depth and human Judy through her last year of life.

I loved and was deeply touched by this story.

After seeing this film, and then reading some of the reviews, I found that the reviews saying that they should have dubbed Judy’s voice on the songs that Renee Zellweger sang as Judy, missed the point of the story that was presented.

This story is about Judy’s final year of life, her voice worn out from surgery, drinking, smoking, and her soul ripped out by enablers and poor decisions. Have a dubbed voice of a Judy in her prime would have been both dishonest and not real.

Judy died at age 47, six months after she was removed from the set of London concerts which are the focal point of this story. Judy was strung out on pills and booze most all of her adult life. It felt as though Judy was simply a commodity that people used to make money, and in this way, Zellweger nailed what it must felt like.

As this movie pointedly shows in scenes sprinkled throughout, as a child, Judy was fed drugs by the head of motion picture companies to keep her alert and awake when they wanted her to work, to keep her thin, and then to have her sleep when they didn’t need her. The story shows that people had only one focus, use her voice, to make others, including her parents, husbands, and movie studios money.

With little real support from husbands (she married five times) or someone who had her best interests at heart, Judy ended up broke, strung out, and desperate to find inner peace.

This story begins with Judy and her young children Lorena and Joey Luft being shuttled on staged and in front of a live audience to do a quick song with a silly dance. They were handed an envelope with $150. Heading back to the hotel, where they’ve been saying, they find out that because Judy was in arrears to the hotel, their room was repurposed.

Getting into a taxi, Judy, with kids in tow, ends up at Sidney Luft’s (Rufus Sewell) home. The scene that shortly follows sets up their antagonistic relationship. Leaving the kids with Sid, and nowhere to go, she heads to a party where her older daughter Liza Minnelli (Gemma-Leah Devereux) is located.

Meeting Mickey Deens (Finn Wittrock) at this party, Judy decides to stay at the party instead of leaving with Liza because Mickey is charming and flirtatious with Judy. It’s here we see out easily she’s influenced and charmed.

We move forward a few weeks and, in need of money to buy a home, pay her debts, and become a full-time mother, Judy signs a 5-week agreement to do concerts in London. With Roslyn Wilder (Jessie Buckley) assigned to keep Judy in line and show up sober to the sold-out engagements, Judy does try her best, but her inner demons continue to gnaw at her, and soon she shows up on stage drunk and ends up walking out.

However, she does get a swan song helped by her true fans - this was a lovely scene.

Zellweger was absolutely fantastic as Judy. The, I don’t know what to do, and I’m a fish out of water, look Zellweger brought to the role absolutely fit with the story as told. Over the years, I’ve listened recordings of Judy and could easily imagine her voice losing its sublime tone after surgery, drugs, alcohol, and lots of cigarettes. That some think that Judy’s premiere voice should have been used in the singing scenes, would have been a false story. Buckley was excellent as Judy’s minder while in England. Slowly seeing the depth of Judy’s suffering was beautifully portrayed when she presented Judy with a birthday cake she could eat. Deans was good as Judy’s last savior husband. Royce Pierreson as Judy’s bandleader in London, was beautiful. I felt as though he knew the path Judy had taken and would do anything to make it work for her on stage. Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira play two London gay men who are full-fledged fans of Judy’s and the scenes with them and Judy in their apartment were incredibly sweet and heartfelt. Sewell as Sidney Luft was excellent but unexplored. Lastly, Darci Shaw as a young Judy was excellent. The scene of sitting with Mickey Rooney in a restaurant with Judy’s minder not letting Judy eat anything was incredibly telling of how her life was controlled. Tom Edge wrote an interesting script about the final months about Judy’s life. Rupert Goold did a fantastic job of creating pointed scenes and excellently staged sets. But ultimately his getting Zellweger to take on and embody Judy Garland was perfect.

Overall: I was deeply touched by this story.

Becoming Nobody

First Hit: Moments of delight with Ram Dass are mixed with Jamie Catto’s own agenda.

Instead of producer and director Jamie Catto eliciting information about Ram Dass and his life, we get him doing this and also spending time sharing his own spiritual journey and points of view. It isn’t that this is wrong; however, I had looked forward to seeing a film about Ram Dass, a man who has influenced so many of us baby boomers and others with his willingness to expand our understanding of life as it is.

Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert) found a yearning from within to better understand life as he and others were experiencing it. He had questions about why life, the way it was unfolding for him, was unsatisfactory. With these questions, he began a quest to better understand it all.

Meeting with Dr. Timothy Leary, he started taking various types of drugs, psilocybin and then LSD to expand his consciousness. But it wasn’t until he met Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu spiritual teacher in India that he called Maharaj-ji, did he find his guru and path. In Maharaj-ji he found loving acceptance and limitless love for who he was.

The film intersperses current time interview segments with Catto along with previously recorded film and video segments of Ram Dass teaching groups of people. These clips cover a broad spectrum of his life and help to make this story interesting.

TMoments, for example when Catto shares his understanding of Dass’s teachings and when he looks for approval and pats on the back from Dass, got tiring. At one point Jamie outright told Ram that he thought of Dass as his father figure and it came across, to me, as needy and approval seeking.

The film did not spend as much time on Ram’s hospice work, for which he’s very well known and respected. But Dass did talk a little about it by telling a couple of stories, in video clips, of patients he worked with. He also spoke about the importance of embracing both the concept and actuality of death as it arrives at each of us.

It was in these segments along with a couple of other discussions that I fell into enjoying this film wholeheartedly. I’ve come to understand many of the same things that Dass has learned through my own meditation practices and readings, and by reading his books “Being Here” and “Still Here.”

Because I had expected to see a film about Ram Dass, I felt that the film spent too much time on Catto’s teachings and what he’d learn from Dass or on his own.

Overall: Not quite the film it could have been, but there are genuinely laugh out-loud and enjoyable moments.