TIME OF HER LIFE

Opening today at Harkins Shea (on Amazon Prime October 16):

Time--Garrett Bradley directed this nonfiction portrait of Sibil Fox Richardson, aka "Fox Rich," a Shreveport, Louisiana woman who, desperate for money to keep their clothing store running, tried to rob a credit union branch in Grambling with her husband Rob in 1997. They were caught and went to prison, and while Fox was released after about three years, Rob was sentenced to sixty years, and was still imprisoned two decades later. His wife--and mother of his six children--rebuilt her family's life, but she also worked tirelessly to attempt to shorten this preposterous sentence.

The title has multiple potential meanings. On a social level, it's a reproach against the outrageous "time" for which poor and non-white convicts are disproportionately incarcerated. But it also has a powerful perceptual meaning. Bradley originally intended the film as a short, until she was given hours of Fox's home-video footage covering years of her life, her impressive kids at different stages of their growth, etc.

This material, intermixed with the more current footage Bradley shot, and unified with it in beautiful black and white and with a sprightly, persistent solo piano score, gives the film a powerful sense of refracted time, of access to free-flowing memory, of a whole life seen at once. The feeling, which may sometimes overtake people in middle age, of all the moments of life seeming to constrict into close proximity with each other, is unaccountably captured by this movie.

This trembling, exalted tone-poem quality is worthy of the story's intense central character; with her low, urgent, un-histrionic yet somehow conspiratorial manner of speaking, Fox pulls us into her sense of mission. When she tries to get answers from court officials over the phone, she remains flawlessly courteous, well knowing how counterproductive it would be to lose her patience. But we see the toll it takes on her. We see the quiet worry under the surface of her strong, patient mother. And we see, and feel, her radiant love for her family. This isn't like any documentary you've seen before.

Also at Harkins:

The War with Grandpa--Grandpa being Robert De Niro, as a widower who's become so short-fused and violent that he's a danger to himself and others. He has to move back in with his daughter (Uma Thurman) and her husband (Rob Riggle), thus displacing his snotty grandson (Oakes Fegley) out of his bedroom to the attic. The little crud declares "war" to get his room back, and wacky slapstick ensues.

As cheesy middlebrow family comedies go, this one, directed by Tim Hill from a 1984 children's novel by Robert Kimmel Smith, is by no means the worst you've ever seen,  though the tone is a little artificially lighthearted for the nastiness of some of the pranks. On the shelf since it was completed in 2017, it should wring a few giggles out of your kids or grandkids on a slow afternoon.

But the real interest for an adult moviegoer is, of course, De Niro. How did a guy whose last name has become almost a synonym for "great actor" decide he needed to do this? His costars here include Cheech Marin, Jane Seymour and Christopher Walken--dutifully doing his best "Christopher Walken," of course--and it's fun to see the four of them work together, even in this silly stuff.

But it should be noted that while De Niro maintains a certain dignity, the menace of his Scorsese years has faded, even for comic effect. He comes across like an avuncular pussycat, something like he did in 2015's The Intern. Come to think of it, he came across that way last year in Scorsese's The Irishman, too.

TIGERS & BEARS, OH MY!

Opening this weekend:

The Jungle Book—Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book is probably my favorite of that studio’s animated features. This is partly sentimentality—it’s the first movie to which I can remember being taken, when I was four or five years old. But it’s also looser, lighter, funnier and far richer in personality than a lot of Disney fare, with vibrant primary colors, wonderful voice acting and a couple of catchy big band numbers.

It was hard to imagine that this same charm could be captured in live action. There was a live-action attempt in the 1940s, made by the Korda Brothers and starring Sabu. Heavily narrated, it used live animal footage, but also had a much more human-oriented story.

But Disney’s new version of Kipling’s tales of Mowgli the wolf-raised “Man-Cub,” featuring a live actor as Mowgli and CGI as his animal co-stars, takes a different approach from either earlier version, and finds some unexpected grit and emotional range. Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Justin Marks, the film uses bits of Kipling’s language and gets across some of his near-peerless storytelling panache. Bits of his icky colonialist presumption inevitably creep in here and there, too, though to my mind this film wasn’t nearly as bad on this score as The Lion King.

As before, young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is menaced by the scarred tiger Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba), who bears him a grudge. It’s decided that the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) will return Mowgli to the “Man Village,” and episodic adventures ensue. He’s befriended by the leisure-loving bear Baloo (Bill Murray) and threatened by the python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and the primate King Louis (Christopher Walken), here presented much like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, before he and Shere Khan have their big confrontation.

It’s an odd hybrid, with the Brit actors declaiming high drama alongside Murray’s Chicago-accented shtick, but mostly it works. Lupita Nyong’o, voicing Mowgli’s lupine mother, brought tears to my eyes with her avowals of love for him. It should be noted that there are a few funny but retroactively wistful lines spoken by the late Garry Shandling, as the porcupine.

There are also a few missteps, the most glaring, for me, being the decision to allow Murray and Walken to perform their character’s songs from the 1967 film. Both are great performers in their own right, but musically Murray is no Phil Harris and Walken is no Louis Prima, and they seem to know it—their numbers feel halfhearted, almost sheepish.

Parents of smaller kids—and anyone sensitive to animal suffering—should be aware that the film is violent at times, especially by current kid-movie standards, and that a couple of characters are killed in the course of the story. As the saying goes, it’s a jungle out there.

BOYS 2 MENSCH

Opening this weekend:

Jersey Boys—The 2005 Broadway musical, chronicling the rise of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, had a contemporary-cinema approach to its staging—short, fast-shifting scenes, driven by music and Scorcese-style narration. Director Clint Eastwood chose instead to make the movie version less of a jukebox musical and more an old-fashioned showbiz biopic. The characters still address the camera directly, but there’s less of a music-montage feel to the flow of the action. This seemed like a mistake to me—compared to the show, the movie feels plodding and flat and cliché-riddled, especially early on.

But it’s pretty enjoyable all the same. The ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s-era period detail is fun (though not always strictly accurate), the young actors who play the Seasons—John Lloyd Young, from Broadway, as Valli, Erich Bergen as Bob Gaudio, Michael Lomenda as Nick Massi and, maybe most personable of all, Vincent Piazza as Tommy DeVito—are charming, and Christopher Walken does his Christopher Walken shtick in a built-up role as an avuncular mob boss.

Better still, Eastwood does something that makes up for a multitude of sins: When there’s a song, he treats it as a number. There’s very little talking over the songs, or showing the action progress during the songs. He points the camera at the performers and lets us enjoy their performance. That’s old-fashioned moviemaking at its best.

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon—To be accurately described as a mensch in the Yiddish sense—a kind and loving family member, a reliable friend, a good neighbor and citizen—is, I would argue, the proper ambition of an adult. Thus the title Supermensch suggests the kind of superhero epic I could really get behind.

But the movie is really the feature directorial debut of Mike Myers, who is also one of the movie’s many big-name showbiz talking heads to gush about the legendary Gordon, a sweet guy from Long Island who managed Alice Cooper, Anne Murray and Teddy Pendergrass, among many, many other stars. Gordon is also frequently credited with popularizing the idea of the celebrity chef.

The documentary traces his brilliant and canny yet (supposedly) scrupulously non-shark-like management style, which has left him a huge corps of famous and non-famous friends. It’s very inside-baseball—I was unfamiliar with Gordon, and I take an interest in such things—but for show-business and ‘70s pop-music aficionados, it’s enormously entertaining. It left me wishing that Gordon would manage my career, or at least let me hang out with him once in a while.

My pal Dewey Webb has finally knuckled under to peer pressure and started a blog; check it out here—his debut post details the anachronisms of Jersey Boys.