Wonder Wheel

WONDER WHEEL               D                           
USA  (101 mi)  2017 d:  Woody Allen                 Wonderwheelmovie - Official site

Wow!  What an epic misfire.  Most have probably never seen a Woody Allen film that falls this far off the rails, unfunny and unchallenging, on the wrong footing from the very start, as it feels completely miscast, where viewers recognize the neurotic voice of Woody Allen in the narration, but don’t associate those words and thoughts with any of these actors, as the dialogue is simply not interchangeable.  Allen speaks with a pronounced ethnic Jewishness, which has always been a reference point in his films, but here the constant nagging tone is all wrong, as its Borscht Belt humor is carried out by Gentile actors, where the result is simply not the same, as the actors go through the motions but lack any hint of comedy or vaudeville humor, turning this into an agonizing dramatic misadventure with pretensions to Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill, the great American playwrights, but without the depth and complexity, falling enormously short.  Framed as a Eugene O’Neill dysfunctional family set in the 50’s, where everything that can go wrong does, set entirely within the raucous confines of an overcrowded Coney Island amusement park, even the living quarters, intermixed with elements of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a spinoff apparently from 2013 Top Ten List #7 Blue Jasmine, it features an ongoing narration by a family outsider, Justin Timberlake as Mickey (normally a decent actor, but he’s all wrong as the voice of Woody Allen), an aspiring playwright who also works as a Coney Island lifeguard, who never once is seen rescuing a swimmer in distress.  Instead he intervenes in places where he shouldn’t, basically playing the field, fostering the hopes and dreams of two very different women.  First is Ginny (Kate Winslet), an emotionally-charged older waitess in an oyster bar who finds herself lost in a Blanche Dubois delirium, continually going on emotionally distraught monologues complaining of migraines and overwork, where her every last nerve is being tested.  She is a former actress whose career was derailed by a momentary lapse of judgement when she cheated on her husband, an anonymous jazz drummer who consequently left her, forever blaming herself for that mistake, sending her on an alcohol-fueled bender, leaving her with an emotionally damaged son (Jack Gore as Richie) who is clearly affected by his father’s absence, turning into a serial pyromaniac, lighting fires whenever the feeling hits him, which happens to be several times a day.  Finding a fellow alcoholic on the rebound, Ginny re-marries her current husband, a blue-collar carousel operator named Humpty, Jim Belushi, who spends the entire film doing his best Stanley Kowalski impression.  Into their lives walks Carolina (Juno Temple), the second woman, Humpty’s long-lost daughter who got herself involved with a dreamy young mob gangster with pockets full of cash, actually spilling the beans to the feds, where she’s now on the run with the mob looking for her, with shades of Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose (1984).  This is a film where the sins of the parents are handed down to their own children, each an emotional basket case of frazzled nerve endings.

There isn’t a single likable character in this film, much of which is ugly and overwrought, delving into the ongoing personal insecurities and fears of people with barely enough money to scrape by, who constantly harp at one another for the choices they make, as they’re stuck in a rut that they can’t get out of, mostly feeling like caged animals.  Ginny is a whirlwind of fluctuating moods, much of it delusional, where she constantly thinks of no one but herself, growing hysterical when she thinks it’s all too much, with a claustrophobic world closing in on her, giving her no room to breathe, where she hasn’t an ounce of so-called freedom, literally suffocating before our eyes.  Humpty is a loud and blustery character who’s little more than a blowhard, all bark and no bite, that is since Ginny has removed alcohol from his daily regimen, keeping him off the sauce, as he grows brutally violent when drunk, though when times get rough, she takes a swig from a bottle she keeps hidden underneath the sink.  Timberlake’s confessional, on-going narration couldn’t be more off-putting, as it’s completely out of synch with the rest of the picture, where he’s more of a con man than he lets on, always shrouded in innocence, yet he’s a snake in the grass, never being honest with the audience, where the entire film feels like a rationalization for womanizing, yet he’s constantly being judgmental towards others without ever pointing the finger at himself.  At the center of the film is Ginny’s guilt, as she’s forever blaming herself for the pit she’s fallen into, stuck like a trapped insect, unable to pull her way out, as her husband has no ambition, leaving her having to pull the entire weight.  That heavy burden is constantly hovering over her, like a dark cloud, relentless and debilitating, as she’s been sucked into a life she hates, where everyone in it literally disgusts her, including herself, where her son’s constant obsession with setting fires is actually more of an irritation, as she never comes to grips with it, but simply blames him each and every time, having yet another panic attack.  For his part, Richie is cool with all the attention it provides, never fearing the consequences of getting caught, thinking so what, as it doesn’t hinder his actions, simply doing what he wants whenever he wants, with no interference.  From Ginny’s point of view, this is total bliss, as it’s unlimited freedom, exactly what’s missing in her overly constricted life, where she’s suffocating and can’t breathe, drowning in a life of squalor with a man she probably doesn’t even like, much less respect, but she sticks around as he rescued her from her prior emotional downfall.   

With a constantly repetitive jazz retro soundtrack that continuously plays the same song on repeat, feeling like a recurring headache after a while, the film is shot by veteran cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who creates a mosaic of constantly shifting light and color, especially faces, where a palette of artificiality bathes the screen throughout.  Enter Mickey, who offers Ginny a doorway out, having an affair that couldn’t come at a better time, where she goes all in, like water gushing out of a broken dam, becoming an unstoppable force.  While liking the attention of an older woman and all the associating drama, which he thinks will be excellent material for his plays, Mickey remains more coy about his motives, taking it slower, enjoying the ride, not turning it into such a big deal, which is what she does at every opportunity, constantly reminding him, where he’s her lifeline to a way out.  But Carolina’s youth and good looks complicate the status quo, perking up his antennae, as she’s not like other girls in the neighborhood, having traveled around the world in luxury and style, literally blowing him away, falling for her in spite of himself.  Knowing how this would crush Jenny, he does it anyway, even if it goes against all rationale of good sense, as Carolina is the forbidden fruit.  Of course he does this behind Ginny’s back, never letting on, pretending like nothing’s happening when he knows full well there’s a spark, which changes the dynamic with Ginny, who knows something’s up, but Mickey turns into another good-for-nothing man who deceives her, unable to trust the whole lot of them, turning against all men in the process, spiraling even more out of control, taking refuge in the bottle, with Humpty eventually joining in, becoming the picture of a pathetic drama without an ounce of humanity on display, where instead it’s all bluster.  The male characters are deplorable, every one a sleaze, while the women at least fare better in their scenes together, but in the end Allen’s grim and overly fatalistic view taints all.  With mob heavies Tony Sirico and Steven Schirripa from The Sopranos on Carolina’s tail, she is dangerous merchandise, making her all the more enticing to a young unattached male like Mickey, who seems to have his own issues with illusions, where he’s like a deer in the headlights, hypnotized by her allure, unable to help himself, striking while the iron is hot.  The stage is set for a final showdown with Ginny, but like Blanche, she’s already lost in the cobwebs of her own delusions, barely recognizable as a person, losing every last trace of her dignity, where it all derails into a tailspin of unfiltered torment, each little bit only adding to the collective hell of having to endure more, wiping out any hint of reality, where all that’s left is a waking nightmare that never ends, where she can’t ever wake up, stuck in an endless Sisyphean death spiral of human misery and suffocation, becoming all-consuming, like a fever dream.  Lost in the haze, the film is back where it starts, mired in that sinking feeling of utter futility.  Spare us the drama, Woody, as behind the curtain, nothing is real.  

It

IT                     A-            
USA  (72 mi)  1927  d:  Clarence Badger      co-director:  Josef von Sternberg (uncredited)

Sweet Santa, give me him.                 —Betty Lou Spence (Clara Bow) 

This is exactly the kind of Cinderella story that makes movie romance a myth, where a working class girl can grab a millionaire if she’s lucky enough, a prince in shining armor, just like in all the fairy tales.  This could easily be the Hollywood prototype for this kind of picture, and it’s one of the best of the genre featuring what is arguably the best female performance of the Silent era, none other than Clara Bow, where the film turned her into the biggest female movie star of the late 20’s.  And deservedly so, as she carries the entire picture on her shoulders, where her feminine guile and wit and sparkling personality with a multitude of sexual charm makes her one of the most appealing figures on film, where she is so continually mischievous and delightful that she renews the passion and inspiration for going to the movies.  Clara Bow grew up in a childhood of poverty, violence, and mental illness, living in a Brooklyn tenement with a schizophrenic mother and an alcoholic and sexually abusive father.  She became an actress at age 16, after winning Motion Picture Magazine’s “Fame and Fortune” contest in 1921.  Though delivered on a cheap, Coney Island tin-type, her image was enough to convince the magazine’s judges that she was special, so as the grand prize winner they awarded her a bit part in a small film BEYOND THE RAINBOW (1922), where her part was eventually cut.  Clara Bow loved the movies and loved acting, though she interestingly never had a chance to practice the craft except in front of her mirror.  Her mother compared actresses to whores and threatened to kill Clara in her sleep once she found out about the contest.  This meant the 16-year-old, singled out immediately for her innate talent, artistic maturity and range, never had a career on stage. And without substantial stage training, she brought none of the trappings of stage acting to the silver screen.  The results were stunning, Clara Bow - She's Got It YouTube (2:45). 

Bow eventually signed with B.P. Schulberg’s Preferred Pictures in 1923 churning out low-budget films, where the following year she was one of 13 women chosen as a Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS) Baby Star, chosen for their talent and promise as a potential motion picture star, which gained the attention of Schulberg's former partner Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount Pictures.  Largely due to Clara Bow pictures, Schulberg and Zukor merged to form one of the largest studios in Hollywood, but it was the smash hit movie IT (1927) that made her Paramount's number one star and the most famous name in Hollywood.  Described by critic David Thomson as “the first mass-market sex symbol,” it’s also important to point out that this is one of the most deliciously entertaining films of the Silent era, yet there’s no Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or any of the other great Silent comics, instead it’s a romantic comedy that still flourishes nearly ninety years later on the magnificence of its star performer, whose charismatic personality exudes a kind of contemporary allure that is nothing less than refreshing, as she’s completely in step with modern times.  What’s perhaps more ironic is the cheesy premise upon which this story rests, as the title comes from one of the characters thumbing through a 1927 Cosmopolitan magazine and coming across an article written by Elinor Glyn (who makes a cameo appearance) describing “It” as a kind of alluring sex appeal, described as “that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force,” or described earlier by Rudyard Kipling in his 1904 story Mrs. Bathurst, who may have introduced “It” by describing the sensation, “Some women will stay in a man’s memory if they once walk down the street.”  Unbelievably, this picture was considered lost for many years, but a nitrate copy was found in Prague in the 1960’s, and by 2001 it was selected into the Library of Congress National Film Registry.  

The director Clarence Badger was famous for making over a dozen films with Will Rogers from 1919 to 1922, but nothing that reached the success of this picture, becoming ill during filming where Josef von Sternberg directed some scenes during his absence.  Though expressed through title cards, much of the witty dialogue in the picture predates what would eventually lead to the screwball comedy of the 30’s, where it’s the irrepressible spirit of the women that tends to catch the more reserved upper class gents off guard, where Bow as Betty Lou is not so much a sex kitten as an adorably sweet working class girl with spunk, the kind of woman audiences can identify with as she’s just one of the girls, but her cutie-pie beauty and down to earth manner are a remarkable combination, where her aggressively flirtatious style “is” part of what’s so funny, seen early on as she’s working behind the counter at Waltham’s department store and sees the dashing young store owner’s son, Cyrus Waltham Jr. (Antonio Moreno) and exclaims humorously “Sweet Santa, give me him.”  From that moment on she devises a plan to make that man her husband, just to prove a point to the other working girls that it can be done.  While the odds are against her, she gets a lucky break when Monty (William Austin), a kind of frat brother best friend of Cyrus (where they often meet “at the club”), is the one thumbing through Cosmopolitan magazine and starts searching the store for “It” girls, believing he’s finally found her with Betty Lou, offering her a ride home in his car.  She graciously accepts, but not in his car, preferring her own, and hops onto a heavily packed commuter bus, eventually agreeing to a dinner date, but only if it’s at the elegant Ritz, as she overhears that’s where Cyrus and his pampered socialite girlfiend Adela (Jacqueline Gadsden) are dining.  While the film is a choreography of misdirection and funny sight gags, it’s all led by Betty Lou’s tenacious drive to capture her boss’s interest, failing miserably at first, but not to be deterred, by continually placing herself in his path, she eventually catches his eye. 

Starting with the right dress to wear, with the help of her cash-strapped girlfriend Molly (Priscilla Bonner) who’s out of work and raising a baby alone, they literally cut into her work dress a plunging neckline while she’s still wearing it, Clara Bow Dresses for Dinner YouTube (6:07), converting it into an elegant look by evening, though by the time they reach the Ritz, the head waiter notices her work shoes, showing the various class layers she has to overcome just to be presentable.  And while she’s obviously using Monty to get to Cyrus, the portrayal of Monty is interesting, as while he’s charmingly polite, he’s more than likely gay, calling himself “Old fruit” in the mirror at one point, where his sexual neutrality allows the audience to accept this little opportunist game Betty is playing.  Monty is a good sport, often used to comic effect, and eventually aids Betty in her romantic ambitions.  By the time she finally gets her boss’s attention, Cyrus doesn’t seem to mind when he finds out she works for him, as what she offers is pure, unadulterated fun, an obvious class contrast and a poke at the idyll pleasures of the rich as being boring and pretentious.  When they finally go out on a date, she wants to go to Coney Island, filling up on hot dogs, laughing at the rides and funny mirrors, and literally having a ball at the good times to be had in an amusement park.  Happiness takes Cyrus by storm, clearly an unexpected pleasure, but when he tries to kiss her good night, she gives him a slap to protect her moral virtue and hurries out of the car, but is seen looking at him longingly out the window of her room afterwards.  While there’s an interesting diversion when the morally self-righteous welfare women, taking a zealously high-minded approach, come to take Molly’s baby away, creating quite a scene on the street below, where they send in a reporter to get the story, who is none other than Gary Cooper in one of his earliest (and last uncredited) roles.  Betty is able to make them go away only by claiming the baby as her own, which creates headlines, but also causes the morally principled Cyrus to have second thoughts, as he can’t be seen with a “fallen woman.”  This all sets up the free-wheeling finale on Cyrus’s yacht, where Monty helps stow Betty aboard as his supposed date, where after becoming the life of the party by playing her ukulele and clearing up a string of misunderstandings, the two literally take the plunge, lovers at last.  While Bow was only 21 when this movie was filmed, the advent of talking pictures all but ended her career, and while she made a few unsuccessful talking pictures, her stardom came to an abrupt end at the tender age of 25.     

He Got Game

HE GOT GAME          B+  
USA  (136 mi)  1998  d:  Spike Lee

It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that - for many young men it represents their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. In The Last Shot, Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four of the neighborhood's most promising players. What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication. But working against them are woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the slick, often brutal world of college athletic recruitment. Incisively and compassionately written, The Last Shot introduces us to unforgettable characters and takes us into their world with an intimacy seldom seen in contemporary journalism. The result is a startling and poignant expose of inner-city life and the big business of college basketball. 

—Darcy Frey, book jacket from the uncredited The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, 1994

Spike Lee’s take on HOOP DREAMS (1994), an often amusing yet also dead serious message about how basketball is the new drug in the urban black community, as it can take you places you never dreamed or imagined.  The amount of attention young black basketball players receive often begins in middle school, becoming an all-out war in high school of competing college interests, each one absurdly creating what they think is the right fantasy to feed into a young man’s imagination, including fast cars, women, and money, where legal and illegal incentives all weigh into the picture.  A mix of gritty realism with fantasia and flashback, what truly sets it apart is the chosen use of music by Aaron Copland, which just feels like the heartland of America, traces of which could be heard in the orchestral music written by his father Bill Lee’s original soundtrack from Do the Right Thing (1989).  In an extended opening credit sequence, Copland is heard over the opening montage that starts off as a reference to Hoosiers (1986), with white kids shooting baskets out in the middle of cornfields, but it slowly gravitates towards the more upscale suburbs and inner city playgrounds, where both Brooklyn and Chicago are duly noted, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Michael Jordan statue outside the United Center, extending to the outer reaches of the country as well before a masterful crane shot takes us from the Atlantic Ocean to the housing projects in Coney Island to the concrete outdoor yards of the Attica Correctional Facilities that houses inmate Denzel Washington (sporting an Afro) as Jake Shuttlesworth.  The music seems to have turned off many viewers, who prefer their basketball movies fast and freewheeling, more compatible with black music, but Aaron Copland, who happens to be white, Jewish, and gay, was born in Brooklyn where Spike Lee grew up, whose classical sound is expansive, grand, and eloquent, and may be the most American orchestral music ever written, incorporating jazz and folk into his music, literally liberating it from European influence, while also writing music for the film version of Thornton Wilder’s OUR TOWN (1940), a fictionalized portrait of small-town America.  These references are not lost on Lee, who makes proudly American movies, suggesting basketball is as quintessentially American as cowboys or Abraham Lincoln.

Sports culture, if one follows the money, is a dominantly male discussion in America, both at the collegiate and professional levels, where a sports movie is also a reflection of masculinity.  As Spike Lee shows his flamboyant support for the New York Knicks through his courtside tickets for games in Madison Square Garden, often engaging in trash talking with many of the opposing players during the game (where Michael Jordan and Reggie Miller in legendary playoff games come to mind when they literally torched the Knicks), he also has many pro basketball friends and acquaintances, and most prominently made a series of black and white Nike commercials in the 90’s with Michael Jordan 1991 - Nike - Michael Jordan, Spike Lee - Is it the shoes? 1 - YouTube (30 seconds).  Suffice it to say, with this basketball pedigree, he would be subject to humiliating ridicule by current NBA players if he made a bad basketball movie, so he avoids dunkfests or the underdog sports cliché, like ROCKY (1976) or Hoosiers (1986), and puts himself at the center of the controversy.  In Lee’s film, Academy Award winning Denzel Washington is not the basketball star, as he’s serving 15 years in prison, but the Governor is a big basketball fan and has taken a particular interest in his son Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by NBA guard Ray Allen at age 22, at the time a member of the Milwaukee Bucks), who is ranked the #1 high school player of the nation, courted by every school in the country, all offering scholarships and other assorted goodies.  The warden has a plan to release Jake for a week, on an electronic monitoring device, guaranteeing a quicker release from prison if he can get his son to commit to Big State University, the Governor’s alma mater. 

Oddly enough, the plot bears a resemblance to John Carpenter’s electrifying thriller Escape from New York (1981), where Kurt Russell as prison convict Snake Plissken is released from prison to perform a morally questionable, near suicidal mission in exchange for the dubious government promise of his release should he succeed, where the suspense is enhanced throughout by a diminishing time limit that could produce fatal effects.  Here Jake is the convict, and his mission is to go into the projects of Coney Island and get his son to sign a letter of intent to enroll in Big State University, where the kid is under siege from every college in the country.  Since so many of the other offers are morally questionable, why not from the Governor?  Lee proceeds to use recruitment offers like Busby Berkeley dance spectacles in 1930’s musicals, each one more outrageous than the last, using quarter of a million dollar automobiles, free access 24-hours a day to willing and available white girls in college dorms, who in addition to sexual favors will also cook and clean for him, or a cool $10,000 in cash as suggestive inducements.  This plays out like utter fantasy, an exaggerated invention of an artificialized paradise, where what’s most distressing is just how real these offers actually are.  College athletics is a huge business, where money is flowing at all levels, where sports agents routinely sign their players to multi-million dollar deals, exactly the opposite world than the often desolate, gang-infested, economically deprived urban ghettoes where these inner city kids come from, as the recruitment process for the best high school players in the country is open season for the highest bidder and amounts to little more than camouflaged bribery. 

The idea of pairing up Denzel Washington with a real NBA basketball player parallels a theme of social reality, which works brilliantly in the film, especially Allen whose shooting skills and talent on the court are indisputable, where Lee capitalizes on his natural grace and timing, turning it into cinematic poetry in motion.  Real life coaches John Thompson (Georgetown), Dean Smith (North Carolina), John Chaney (Temple), Roy Williams (Kansas), Nolan Richardson (Arkansas) and Lute Olson (Arizona) appear on video to remind Jesus, “This will be the most important decision in your life,” which he hears a zillion times.  While Lee is the credited screenwriter, his first since JUNGLE FEVER (1991), using actress Lonette McKee in both, he’s lifted more than a few pages from Darcy Frey’s book The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, as both are set in and around Brooklyn’s Lincoln High School, each grounded in the game’s meaning and potential monetary significance to those living in the Coney Island projects, where basketball is both a trap to those who get injured or fail, and a ticket out to those few who succeed.  The book follows three seniors and freshman Stephon Marbury, an eventual NBA all-star, where the others aren’t so lucky, as Darryl Flicking couldn’t pass the 700 SAT score needed to be NCAA eligible, becoming homeless afterwards where in five years he was eventually hit and killed by an Amtrak train.  One of the other players currently works manual labor, where both the film and book expose the demeaning recruitment process, where teenage kids are tempted by the million dollar lifestyle of NBA stars (see a pulled from the headlines 2013 story where hotel, meals, and travel expenses, along with $20,000 were issued to former coach to lure a college freshman player to an NBA sports agent:  Kansas reviews McLemore coach allegations), where friends and family already have their futures lined up, completely dependent upon this kid’s potential future earnings, convinced he will make it, usually at the expense of his education. 

Much of the movie’s tender and often heartwarming storyline is the friction that exists between father and son, the root of which is not initially known and slowly unravels through the use of flashbacks, but also the pressure that exists from being the best in the country, where so much is expected from you.  Even if you keep your head and avoid the lure of temptation, those around you are more susceptible, where recruiters end up going after aunts and uncles or high school coaches, even girl friends, played here by a young Rosario Dawson.  Everybody wants a piece of the gravy train, and no one wants to be left out, so they get their hands in early.  But clearly, the film’s definitive mano a mano struggle is between Jake and Jesus (interestingly not named after the Biblical figure), both struggling with their own masculinity, where Jake’s dreams to succeed may have pushed Jesus too far in what amounts to bullying tactics, literally forcing him to succeed for the supposed benefit of the family, while Jesus completely rejects anything from his still incarcerated father, thinking of him as a stranger that no longer exists.  Both are connected to a wounded past from which they haven’t recovered and both need to redefine themselves for the future if they ever expect to heal from past mistakes.  Easier said than done, as this film suggests there are no easy answers, that the line between multi-millionaire and prison for a black man is a thin one, where a few split seconds in one’s life may make all the difference—but what a difference.