One mini-series, three seasons, ten movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Hulu, Max, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

The Bear (created by Chris Storer, 2022–2024). The premise: Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a chef from the world of Michelin-starred restaurants, comes back to Chicago to run an Italian-beef restaurant, The Beef, after his brother’s suicide. This series grew on me: though there’s lots of glorious food, The Bear really isn’t about food; it’s about relationships, mostly familial and work-related, among people with backstories, interior struggles, and the determination to do well in a group effort. Along with White, the standouts here are Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ayo Edebiri, Lionel Boyce, and Liza Colón-Zayas. And Colón-Zayas’s episode, “Napkins” (dir. Edebiri), is one of the most poignant things I’ve ever seen on a screen. ★★★★ (H)

*

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (dir. Matt Tyrnauer, 2016). Our household was more than two-thirds through Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, when we thought it time to watch this documentary again. It’s inspiring to see a “housewife” (Moses’s dismissive epithet for Jane Jacobs, an accomplished journalist) challenge and defeat the plan of the master builder — or, rather, master destroyer — to create an expressway through lower Manhattan. The documentary considers urban planning more broadly, taking in the the dystopian design of superblocks, the destructive impact of the Cross Bronx Expressway, and the plight of those affected by so-called “urban renewal,” which, as James Baldwin points out, meant “Negro removal.” Jacobs and Moses are both well-represented in film clips, and it’s easy for viewers to make up their minds about the two. ★★★★ (YT)

[Though The Death and Life of Great American Cities is listed in the bibliography of The Power Broker, Jane Jacobs herself is missing. Her story was part of the 300,000 words cut to make the book a manageable single volume.]

*

Prisoner of the Prophet (dir. Pat McGee, 2023). A well-made documentary mini-series telling the story of Briell Decker (as she is now known), at one time the sixty-fifth wife of Warren Jeffs, the self-proclaimed, now-imprisoned prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Here is patriarchal religious authority in its most toxic form, as a cover for psychopathic cruelty and pedophilia. It’s particularly interesting in 2024 to ponder how not even Jeffs’s criminal convictions can move ardent followers to abandon their leader. This documentary is a necessary counter to the bizarre Keep Sweet (dir. Don Argott, 2021), which avers that no one has told the story of the FLDS from “both sides” — as if there were two sides worth considering. ★★★★ (M)

[Briell Decker has founded the Short Creek Dream Center to aid others leaving abusive, oppressive living situations.]

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Noirvember Essentials

They Drive by Night (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1940). It begins as a movie about work, as wildcat truckers Joe and Paul Fabrini (George Raft and Humphrey Bogart) dodge repo men, confront cheating contractors, and steer around the dangers of the road. Then we have tense melodrama, with Lana Carlsen (Ida Lupino) renewing her pursuit of Joe after he takes a job with her husband Ed’s (Alan Hale) trucking company. And then everything goes off the rails after a drunken night on the town, and that’s where the noir comes in. Raft is fine; Bogart, okay; but Lupino as a woman scorned and Ann Sheridan as a smart, self-reliant waitress are the real stars of the movie. ★★★★

*

Election (dir. Alexander Payne, 1999). I loved this movie when it appeared, and I’m happy to find that it holds up. A high-school social-studies teacher, Jim McAllister, Mr. M. (Matthew Broderick), maneuvers to defeat a candidate for president of the student body, Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the insufferable model student to whom the position really seems to mean something. Sharp satire from beginning to end. It occurs to me that a question Mr. M. asks his class, “What’s the difference between ethics and morals, anyway?” is a question that hangs over teacher and student in Payne’s The Holdovers as well. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Stones and Brian Jones (dir. Nick Broomfield, 2023). As a fourteen-year-old, the director had a chance meeting with Brian Jones on a train, who proved to be a kind and generous conversationalist, so one might think of this documentary as a belated note of thanks. With lots of archival footage but little music, it traces a sad life: a father who disapproved of his son’s career in music, numerous fleeting relationships with women, children everywhere (seven, I think), Jones’s increasingly peripheral role in the band he founded, and a decline aided by alcohol and drugs, which finally led to his being fired from the Stones. It’s telling that Bill Wyman is the only Stone who sat for an on-camera interview: no Mick, no Keith. I wish there were more emphasis on Brian Jones’s musical contributions: there’s no mention, for instance, of his recording the Master Musicians of Joujouka. ★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Queer Noir

The Big Clock (dir. John Farrow, 1948). From Kenneth Fearing’s novel. The setting: the offices of a magazine empire run by time-obsessed Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), where overworked editor George Stroud (Ray Milland) finds himself the ultimate wrong man, a witness to a murder in which all clues are pointing to him. With Rita Johnson as a scheming mistress, Elsa Lanchester as an eccentric painter, and George Macready as Janoth’s right-hand man. The queer element, though never explicit, is so unmistakable that I wonder how it got by the censors. ★★★★

*

The Teachers’ Lounge (dir. İlker Çatak, 2023). It’s common in workplaces: an employee who exposes wrongdoing becomes the target of everyone’s wrath. Here, Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a seventh-grade teacher at a German gymnasium, exposes the culprit responsible for a series of thefts, and all sorts of repercussions follow. Surveillance, xenophobia, cancel culture: all play a part here. And there’s extraordinary tension, with the unavoidable possibility of sudden violence, particularly when a student enters a classroom late with an enormous satchel. ★★★★ (N)

*

Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders, 2023). Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) cleans Tokyo toilets for a living. His days are made of meticulous work (he uses his own tools), canned coffee drinks from the machine outside his apartment, cassette tapes (mostly ’60s pop and rock), sandwiches, photographs (mostly of trees and sky, one a day, with the keepers stored in metal boxes), visits to a familiar restaurant and bar, and a book before sleep (William Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith, Aya Kōda). And there are unexpected surprises here and there. Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson seems a strong influence on this beautiful, luminous, enigmatic story. ★★★★ (H)

*

Decade of Fire (dir. Gretchen Hildebran and Vivian Vazquez, 2019). South Bronx resident Vivian Vazquez explores her community’s past, present, and possible futures in photographs, home movies, archival footage, and interviews, tracking a long history of willful neglect and outright discrimination (e.g., redlining) by city, state, and federal authorities. The story begins with a thriving world of multicultural residents in tidy old apartment buildings; then life devolves through years of neglect by landlords who failed to make repairs, turned off electricity and gas, and finally, when there was no more money to be made, paid neighborhood kids a pittance to torch buildings so as to collect insurance. And as fires multiplied, the city shut down fire houses in the South Bronx while adding them elsewhere. Block improvement groups, tenant associations, and residents who refused to give up and leave finally brought change to the South Bronx — and that’s the inspiring part of the story. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Sorry, Wrong Number (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1948). From Lucille Fletcher’s radio play of the same name. When the telephone wires get crossed, the invalid daughter of a pharmaceutical manufacturer overhears two men plotting a murder, and a complicated story of martial discord and criminality unfolds in flashbacks. As Leona Stevenson, Barbara Stanwyck is terrific: her character is haughty and manipulative, but she still inspires sympathy. Also present: Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards, Wendell Corey, who seems to be prepping for his role in Vertigo, and Sol Polito’s cinematography, with the camera, like a detective, roaming about interiors. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Christmas in Connecticut (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1945). Lovely nonsense, with Barbara Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, a magazine columnist whose stories of her farm, her family, and her cooking are wholly fictitious, and who must make them appear real when her publisher (Sydney Greenstreet) calls upon her to host a survivor of a downed battleship (Dennis Morgan) for Christmas. Fortunately Elizabeth’s long-time suitor (Reginald Gardiner) has a farm he can lend. With S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall and Una O’Connor. I wonder how this idea of “Connecticut” got started: a world of horses and sleighs that the twentieth century forget (see also I Love Lucy). ★★★★ (TCM)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Raindrop.io)