Exclusive Preview: Center Stage On Pointe, Released Sept 6, 2016
Posted on September 6, 2016 at 7:00 am
The newest entry in the Center Stage series about young dancers is “En Pointe,” available on DVD September 6, 2016, and we are delighted to present an exclusive sneak peek into the movie’s first ten minutes.
In this story, Jonathan Reeves (Peter Gallagher) has to find a way to infuse more contemporary styles and modernism into the American Ballet Academy. He enlists his top choreographers Charlie (Sascha Radetsky), Cooper (Ethan Stiefel) and Tommy (Kenny Wormald) to recruit dancers to compete at a camp where the winners will be selected to join the Academy. Bella Parker (Nicole Muñoz), who has always lived in the shadow of her hugely successful sister Kate, finally gets her chance to step into the limelight as one of the dancers recruited for the camp.
“What does AEY stand for?” a newly hired employee asks Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill). “You mean morally?” No, he just wants to know what the initials represent, though the answer is the same: nothing. And, as it turns out, asking the question and correcting Efraim’s mistake get him fired. AEY “stands for” making money, no questions asked. That will be the basis for great success, until it is also the basis for catastrophe.
We this know right from the beginning, when we see Efraim’s partner David Packouz (Miles Teller) released from the trunk of a car and beaten up at gunpoint by some very evil-looking masked guys. In Albania. And then we go back in time to see how David, a college drop-out now on his seventh job, working as a massage therapist, and smoking a lot of weed, met up with Efraim, an old friend from middle school, and joined him at AEY, a company that sold equipment to the Pentagon.
It was 2008. The United States was fighting two wars and outsourcing pretty much everything. If it costs more than $17,000 to outfit each soldier, that means someone has to sell them all that gear. The Bush administration got into trouble for dealing exclusively with “Dick Cheney’s friends” and was under pressure to give some of that procurement business to small companies. And Efraim, a high school dropout, had mastered the art of constantly scrolling through the website that was essentially the government’s wish list and bidding on contracts so small they were beneath the notice of enormous government contractors who sell tanks and planes. “All the money is made between the lines,” Efraim says. He tells David that while big companies go for the pie, they can make plenty of money from the crumbs. David, bored and worried about money for his pregnant girlfriend, signs on.
At first it works. They make tons of money. But buying and selling guns puts them in contact with some untrustworthy and violent people. And a little bit of success makes them eligible to go beyond the crumbs. An international arms dealer who is barred from selling to the US because he is on a watch list (producer Bradley Cooper) offers them a deal too good to pass up on ammunition they can sell to the Pentagon at a huge mark-up. But Efraim and David are very good at the details when it comes to making the pitch; not very good at the details when it comes to delivering the product. This is a business school case study in failure of operations and execution. And in the failures of government procurement.
Director and co-screenwriter Todd Phillips is clearly trying to make the kind of shift from raunchy, slob comedies (“Old School,” “The Hangover”) to sharp, trenchant satire that Adam McKay did with “The Big Short.” And Jonah Hill, looking disturbingly puffy and pasty, clearly wants to play the Leo role instead of the Jonah Hill role in his own “Wolf of Wall Street.” Both get partway there. Hill clearly enjoys being the trigger-happy hotshot who can brashly invite a girl to skip ahead to the third date for $1000 instead of his usual role as either the dumb shlub or the smart shlub. Phillips does a good job in laying out the parameters of the story, making it clear how the window of opportunity opened for AEY and Efraim and David were in the right place at the right time. There are even chapter headings for each section, foreshadowing telling comments we will hear, from “God bless Dick Cheney’s America” to “That sounds illegal.”
He also lays out a classic Hollywood movie structure: set-up, early triumph, hubris, wipeout. There are some fine moments, like the surreal use of identical actors (or CGI) as the Pentagon officials who sign off on the deal. But Phillips’ control of tone and character is uncertain and he relies too much on songs (“Fortunate Son,” “Time in a Bottle”) to carry the story.
Parents should know that this film includes wartime and crime-related peril and violence including automatic weapons, war profiteering, constant very strong language, crude and explicit sexual references, non-explicit situations, drinking, and drugs.
Family discussion: When and why did David and Efraim make different choices? What was their biggest mistake? Were they appropriately punished?
Copyright 2016 MagnoliaWriter/director Ira Sachs makes small, exquisitely observed, films that are cinematic chamber music. He does not follow the reliable movie formulas about how many minutes into the running time you introduce characters, the challenges those characters face, the small conflict, the big conflict, and the resolution. He does not exaggerate to let us know whose side we are on or even what we are hoping for. He just allows us for a little while to be a part of the lives of basically good-hearted people who, like good-hearted people in real life, mean well but cannot help hurting each other. At first, the stories may seem slight. Sometimes the most important developments happen off screen. But with increasing confidence and understanding, Sachs has provided us with some of the most reliably worthy movies for grown-ups, including “Love is Strange,” and now “Little Men.”
“Little Men,” perhaps a reference to the Louisa May Alcott book of the same name, is an inherent contradiction. In this film, at least two of the characters it refers to are at that moment of inherent contradiction, middle school. As it begins, Jake Jardine (Theo Taplitz) is home alone when he gets a phone call. His grandfather has died. Soon, Jake and his parents, an actor named Brian (Greg Kinnear) and a psychiatrist named Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) move to his grandfather’s Brooklyn brownstone, an apartment over a dress shop owned by Leonor (Paulina García), an immigrant from Chile, who lives nearby with her son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), who is Jake’s age. Leonor greats Jake and his family warmly, if a little warily. And the two boys hit it off immediately and quickly become good friends. All three parents (Tony’s parents are separated) support this friendship, even as their own relationship starts to fray. Jake’s father had not raised Leonor’s rent in many years, even though rates had gone up as the area gentrified. Brian, currently rehearsing Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” does not make much money as an actor, and he is painfully aware that the family depends on Kathy to pay the bills. So is she. Brian’s sister is also pushing him to raise the rent because she is co-owner of the property.
The Jardines’ relationship with Leonor is not quite businesses and not quite friendship. In a way, Brian is a “little man” himself. He knows Leonor cannot afford to pay more and has nowhere else to go. He wants to be a good guy and fair to everyone, and that makes him feel ineffectual.
Sachs and his co-writer, Mauricio Zacharias understand the intensity of middle-school friendships, even when the people involved have little in common beyond being the same age and not quite fitting in anywhere else. Jake is quiet, a loner, happy to stay in his room and draw all day. Tony is outgoing, confident, and ambitious. He wants to be an actor, not because it would be fun to be on television and be famous but because he is serious about acting. In the film’s most uninhibited and joyous scene (filmed in Barbieri’s real-life acting class), Tony and his acting teacher do an improvisation exercise that has them shouting and mirroring one another. And we also see the boys gliding together through Brooklyn on roller blades and scooter, the exhilaration of being young and finding your first real adventure.
And we see Leonor, Brian, and Kathy trying to find some common ground with increasing frustration and impatience. Each scene is a small gem, a particularly apt metaphor because each shows us a different facet, a different face. If at first it seems discursive because it does not follow the traditional beats of cinematic storytelling, we see as it unfolds that Sachs is very much in control. His films reward us with patient, layered storytelling that reveal how large, and large-hearted, a small story can be.
Parents should know that this film has a sad (offscreen) death, family stress, drinking, smoking, some strong language, and issues of income inequality.
Family discussion: Should the boys’ friendship be affected by their parents’ dispute? Who was right and why?
Copyright Sony Pictures Classics 2016 “Equity” is a razor-sharp financial thriller about people who are themselves razor sharp. Their battlefields are boardrooms and trading floors but the stakes are high and the rules are just a starting point. There has been some understandable buzz about the background of the film, the first major national release to be entirely made by and about women. But this is in no way a stunt. It is a way to explore the way that the movie’s characters experience the ultra-testosteronic world of Wall Street, and, as we watch them, to explore our own assumptions and biases as well.
Anna Gunn (“Breaking Bad”) plays Naomi Bishop, an ambitious, even ruthless investment banker who knows she has to be twice as smart and work twice as hard in the ultra-competitive world of high finance. Her job is to persuade highly successful privately held firms to let her take them public by being listed on the stock exchange, which means huge fees for her company. That involves a lot of tricky arithmetic to come up with a valuation on the stock they will be selling that is high enough to entice the owners of the private company to agree to the deal, but low enough that the stock will gain in value as soon as the deal goes through. It also involves a lot of tricky diplomacy, stroking and soothing the egos of the clients, who are being courted by every firm on Wall Street.
Naomi appears on a panel before a group of young woman and is very frank about her priorities. When she is asked, “What’s that thing that makes you want to get up in the morning?” she says, “I like money.” She also says that she thinks the time has finally come when it is permissible to say so. On that, she could be wrong, especially from a woman.
Naomi wants and believes she deserves a promotion. But she has just made the first mistake of her career, mismanaging an important deal. It may be that a it would not be as serious a setback for a male in her position. Or it could be that her anxiety about the mistake has clouded her judgment about the best time to push for the promotion. But she needs a win badly. She has an equally ambitious deputy named Erin (producer and co-story writer Sarah Megan Thomas), who is pregnant. This triggers in Naomi, who is unmarried and childless, all of the conflicts we can imagine, though the screenplay is too smart to spell it out too explicitly. Can Erin make the kind of commitment the job needs and, just as important, how can she persuade the client that she will? Both Naomi and Erin know they have to come across to their colleagues, bosses, and clients as confident but not arrogant, dedicated but not reckless.
There is another ambitious woman, Samantha (producer and co-story writer Alysia Reiner), a classmate of Naomi’s, now a prosecutor who is looking for her own big win. At big financial companies, there is a “Chinese Wall” division between the investment bankers like Naomi and people who buy and sell stock, like hedge fund managers. It is illegal and absolutely forbidden for them to exchange “insider” information about deals and there are many rules and structures to make sure that they do not. Could that be why one of those hedge fund managers is romancing Naomi?
The story is taut and engrossing, fraught with moral hazard that would be just as compelling outside of high finance, in a factory or a university, but benefits from the high stakes and provocative details — and from a fresh perspective that adds dramatic heft and makes it clear how much we can learn from letting women tell their own stories.
Parents should know that this film includes very strong language, some sexual references, drinking, smoking, and criminal behavior.
Family discussion: What gets you out of bed in the morning? Would you want to work with Naomi? How would the character’s situation be different if she was a man?
The charm of the popular “Lip Synch Battle” series is the way that the contestants, all very talented and successful performers, transcend the limits of race and gender — and other limits, too, like vocal range. In her way, real-life heiress Florence Foster Jenkins was doing the same thing a century ago. Her dedication to music was monumental. So was her lack of talent. But she lived a blissful life with a devoted husband, staging elaborate tableaux and concerts. Like the emperor with the non-existent and therefore invisible new clothes, she was surrounded by people who never told her that her singing was a disaster in every category, from hitting the right note to staying in any single key from measure to measure.
In the second film of 2016 based on the life of Ms. Jenkins, Meryl Streep gives (of course) a performance of exquisite humanity and precision. (Earlier this year, the French film, “Marguerite,” was also inspired by Jenkins.) You have to know how to sing well (see “Mamma Mia,” “Postcards from the Edge,” and “Ricki and the Flash”) to sing this badly and you have to be an actor of sublime perfection to make terrible singing funny and brave and poignant. Hugh Grant is also superb as the magnificently named St. Clair Bayfield, Jenkins’ consort, a failed Shakespearean actor who shares Jenkins’ passion for performance and almost envies her complete freedom from self-awareness.
There are lovely performances from Nina Arianda as a brassy showgirl who married a wealthy man, Rebecca Ferguson (“Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation”) as Bayfield’s girlfriend, and “Big Bang Theory’s” Simon Helberg as Jenkins’ long-suffering accompanist, the equally magnificently named Cosmé McMoon. Jenkins is the ultimate exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome: those who are least able are also worst at assessing their own ability. The fun of this film, far more than laughing smugly at Jenkins’ cluelessness, is the fantasy of having endless resources to create our own fantasies of stardom.
Parents should know that this film includes drinking, smoking, sexual references and non-explicit situation, and a sad death.
Family discussion: Was St. Clair right to hide the truth from Florence? What do we learn from her visit to Cosme?
If you like this, try: The documentary “Florence Foster Jenkins: A World Of Her Own”
