A boxer's search for redemption

 

At times while watching director Jack Huston's Day of the Fight, I felt as though I were watching an advanced acting class. You can almost feel actors digging to wring every bit of flavor out of every scene. Shot in black-and-white, Day of the Fight tells the story of a one-time middleweight champion trying to pull his life together after being released from prison. Michael C. Pitt plays Michael Flannigan, a boxer we follow on the day of his comeback fight at Madison Square Garden. Mike spends the day trying to mend fences with some of the major people in his life, notably his former wife (Nicolette Robinson) and teenage daughter. He also meets with his trainer Ron Perlman, an uncle (Steve Buscemi) who has been a major influence in his life, and a friend (John Magaro) from the old neighborhood who has become a priest.  Mike also visits the father (Joe Pesci) who tormented him as a kid but now is a demented old man staring out the window of the nursing home where he lives. Flannigan also makes a major bet on himself to win his bout. Huston's gritty New York story aims at the heart, but its beat is slowed by the extra weight of genre familiarity.

A haunting look at roads not taken

 There are moments in many lives that can, in retrospect, be viewed as pivotal: relationships that didn’t blossom, loves that went unexpressed, and connections severed by geographical separations. 

 Such moments can prompt "what-if" thinking, the act of trying to imagine the nature of a life that didn’t happen from the perspective of one that did. 

  Nora (Greta Lee)  and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the two main  characters in director Celine Song’s Past Lives, put their toes in "what-if" waters. They try to find each other after years of separation. That may sound like a romcom formula but life seldom evolves in formulaic ways and neither does Past Lives.

   Nora left Korea at the age of eight and moved to Toronto with her family. She grew up and relocated to New York City to pursue her ambitions as a playwright.

    Hae Sung remained in Korea, where he became an engineer. He didn’t marry but never abandoned the idea that he might reunite with the girl whose departure left him saddened and lonely.

    As Nora and Hae Sung approach adulthood, they make an on-line connection and begin regular conversations via the internet. Nora breaks off the talks when she's about to embark on a writer's residency in Montauk, Long Island. 

    Perhaps she doesn't want anything to interfere with her work or maybe she realizes that time and distance have created an unbridgeable gulf between herself and Hae Sung.

     During her residency, Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro), the writer who will become her husband. He'll become worried -- not in a crazy way -- that if Nora reconnects with Hae Sung, their marriage will dissolve.

    It takes 24 years for Hae Sung to visit New York in hopes of reuniting with Nora. Together, they ponder their lives and the meaning of lost connections. When they meet, you can see them searching each other's faces for traces of their younger selves.

    Nothing happens on the sly. There are no secrets here. Nora's husband understands that his wife needs to meet with an old friend.

    In the movie's best scene, Nora, Arthur, and Hae Sung are seated at a bar on Manhattan's lower Eastside. Initially, Nora translates for her husband but soon winds up having a revealing conversation with Hae Sung, which her husband can't understand. Arthur knows only rudimentary Korean -- and not much of that. Hae Sung's English is spotty at best.

    Song introduces speculation by the characters about the way connections are formed: Is it fate or perhaps encounters in previous lives that are recurring in the present? But Song isn't pushing an explanation. She's acknowledging the mystery of ties that are difficult to relinquish.

      Song has a delicate touch, so don't be surprised not to find volcanic emotional explosions or tidal waves of passion that conquer calm consideration. That doesn't mean the movie stirs no emotions.

    Grief, albeit perhaps gentle, inevitably accompanies the sadness of unsatisfied yearnings and roads not taken. Even if past and future lives are possible, we still must live them one at a time.  

Art, yes, but what about the hot water?

 

  Director Kelly Reichardt specializes in slow-moving movies that encourage viewers to linger. Put another way, you don't just watch Reichardt's movies (First Cow, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff), you live in and with them. 

  Employing minimal editing, no manipulative music, or startling plot twists, Reichardt allows viewers to inhabit the worlds she creates.

  In Showing up, Reichardt introduces us to a ceramicist (Michelle Williams) who makes miniature female figures, often in contorted poses that invite interpretation. 

  Williams's Lizzy might be the mopiest figure to appear in a movie this year. She’s alternately depressed or annoyed about being part of a dysfunctional artistic family while dealing with the pressures of preparing for a show.

  Separated from Mom, Dad (Judd Hirsch) makes functional pottery. Mom (Maryann Plunkett) runs the art school where Lizzy works, and Lizzy’s mentally ill brother (John Magaro) is tolerated by a family that considers him a genius.

   The family members all live in close proximity to one another.

   Reichardt effectively takes us inside this loose-knit community. But her approach raises an inevitable question: What’s to be gained from being there? 

  Sans emotional peaks, Showing Up can feel as mopey as Lizzy, a non-celebration of art-making in which a commendable lack of manipulation sometimes results in a kind of aesthetic inertia.

    While bringing Lizzy's family dynamics to light, the movie makes room for another artist, a sculptor played by Hong Chau, recently seen in The Menu and The Whale.

     Chau’s Jo also happens to be Lizzy’s landlord. Jo drags her feet about fixing Lizzy's broken hot-water heater, creating a source of constant aggravation for Lizzy. Jo’s also busy getting ready for her own art opening.

      As a retired potter, Hirsch's Bill can't resist ingratiating himself with a gallery owner who attends Lizzy’s opening at the behest of its reigning artist in residence (Heather Lawless).

     Amid the flow of daily life, a metaphor seems to arise. Early on, Lizzy’s cat maims a pigeon that has flown into Lizzy's home. Lizzy removes the bird from the house. It's later recovered by Jo, who assumes responsibility for the bird -- sort of.

    Jo often leaves the recuperating pigeon with Lizzy who carries it around in a cardboard box, another burden. The point? Artists suffer the same small torments as the rest of us while simultaneously trying to persevere in their work. 

    Wounds. Healing. Recovery. These, I suppose, are the metaphoric implications suggested by the bird.

      No one talks much about art or anything else for that matter. A sense of the ordinary pervades almost every scene and Reichardt dwells on Lizzy's statuettes as if they were creations of art historical importance. They were made for the film by ceramicist Cynthia Lahti. 

     We get to know Lizzy at a specific moment in her life, an achievement to be sure. But for me, Showing Up is hampered by an unrelenting insularity that can make its characters seem limited and even uninteresting.

    A narrow-gauge effort can be piercing. Sometimes, though, it's just narrow.

      

An unlikely pair of business partners

First Cow takes some patience but its rewards are worth it.

Cookie and King Lu are as unlikely a pair of felons as you'll find in movies.

Frontiersmen in the Oregon Territory during the 19th Century, Cookie and King Lu team up to bake biscuits which they sell to locals. Their business runs smoothly and the biscuits — Cookie’s recipe — are great. There’s a catch, though. To make the biscuits, Cookie and King Lu rely on the milk they steal nightly from the area’s only cow.

Working in a style defined by a leisurely, restrained naturalism, director Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy) establishes an environment in which bathing is infrequent and life can be brutal. I don't mean to deter anyone from seeing Reichardt's First Cow, but she creates a mud-caked world in which you practically can smell the characters.

When we meet Cookie, he's working as a cook for a group of trappers who berate him for not finding anything more than mushrooms to eat. On one of his food searches, Cookie encounters King Lu, who's hiding naked in the woods. Cookie helps King Lu, who says he's fleeing a vengeful group of Russians. King Lu later returns the favor, inviting Cookie to share his ramshackle cabin.

By the time, Cookie and King Lu start sharing digs, Reichardt has deposited them at Fort Tillicum, a settlement populated by Native Americans and grizzled-looking white men. The local boss (Toby Jones) owns the cow that tempts Cookie and King Lu into their life of crime.

Reichardt doesn't see this odd-ball duo as criminals and neither will audiences. Cookie and King Lu are budding entrepreneurs. Lacking capital, they must be extra-enterprising about how to begin collecting their share of the great American profit stream.

The movie deals with prejudice and class differences without italicizing a point of view. As a Chinese immigrant, King Lu (Orion Lee) isn’t exactly greeted with open arms. He dreams of owning a farm. Cookie (John Magaro) has his own cockeyed ambition: He’d like to own a hotel with an adjoining bakery.

In a land where fistfights are as common as handshakes, Cookie and King Lu form an alliance that blossoms into a genuine friendship. They make a good team. With Cookie handling the baking and King Lu, the marketing, a thriving business develops even as the threat of exposure looms. We already know from the movie’s opening — set in the present — that Cookie and King Lu are fated to run into some bad luck as the tale unfolds in one lengthy flashback.

The conversations between Cookie and King Lu aren’t exactly memorable, but they have their own amusing rhythm.

First Cow requires a taste for cinema that’s in no hurry. It’s as if Reichardt wants us to feel the earth under Cookie’s boots and to understand that these men inhabit a historical moment when the passing of time felt different than it does today.

Reichardt’s approach allows for brief detours, odd moments that help make the movie memorable. Through an open window, for example, a captivated Cookie sees a Native American doing what looks like a North Woods form of Tai Chi.

At other times, the movie discovers absurd contrasts, notably Jones’s character and one of his guests chatting about what’s happening in Paris. Their discussion includes references to the colors currently dominating the Parisian fashion scene.

For Cookie and King Lu, such talk has about as much significance as a weather forecast for Mars. They do, however, know enough to realize that in this harsh world, some are faring better than others. Cookie and King Lu take a bit of getting used to, but they make for a memorable duo.

Chasing rock 'no' roll dreams

Soprano's creator David Chase returns to New Jersey, but his film loses its way.

Writer/director David Chase -- the estimable and obviously talented creator of HBO's The Sopranos -- returns to his native New Jersey to tell the story of a group of young men who form (what else?) a rock band.

Looking back on the movie, I'm not sure whether it's more accurate to classify Chase's Not Fade Away as a movie or as an illustrated sound track.

Chase may have wanted to remind us that for every E-Street Band -- Bruce Springsteen's legendary Jersey group -- hundreds of talented wannabes were destined to fade into obscurity. He has hold of a strong idea, but doesn't find quite enough dramatic focus to make it click.

Set during the 1960s, an episodic story centers on Doug (John Magaro), a young suburban drummer who joins a band. Doug hits his stride at a party when he unleashes his version of Time Is on My Side. Doug also becomes involved in a romance with a girl named Grace (Bella Heathcote), but his jealousy and judgments eventually cause the relationship to falter.

Chase's approach to the material makes room for occasional forays into heavy-handed drama. An example: Doug's working-class father (James Gandolfini) can't believe that his son has abandoned college to pursue rock 'n' roll dreams.

The band experiences ups and downs as Chase loads the sound track with music from the Kinks, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Bo Diddley, the Beatles and more. (Chase presumably received an assist in the music department from E Street Band veteran and Sopranos regular Steven Van Zandt, who served as the movie's executive producer.)

A narration provided by Doug's younger sister (Meg Guzulescu) may have been intended to hold things together. But the movie remains a loosely assembled collection of scenes and ideas that never coheres into much of anything, a sketchbook of the '60s.

Let me add a quick p.s.: Although I'm not sure what it had to do with anything, I loved the movie's final shot, which takes place after Doug and Grace have traveled to Los Angeles.



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