On demand: "Attica"

You'll remember the title from the chant Al Pacino launches into outside the bank in 1975's Dog Day Afternoon. Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry's quietly furious doc Attica revisits the reasons that name held such potency in the first place. In September 1971, inmates took over the correctional facility at Attica in New York in what was the largest prison uprising in American history. It was a stand against conditions within the jail, and a not unprincipled stand at that, steered by the prison's significant roster of Black Panthers. The Muslim brotherhood, for their part, intervened to ensure those guards taken hostage on site would be safe from harm; a white inmate with medical training attended to those injured in the course of taking control of the prison; those with prior legal experience advised the democratically elected committee leading the revolt on how to proceed from there. The uprising, which lasted four days, the span of one weekend, was an attempt to remodel a community towards some form of self-governance; as one ex-con recalls of the initial gatherings in the rec yard referred to as Times Square, it was like "a big picnic", at least three days of peace, love and time out. As reframed by Nelson and Curry, it was also a vision of how a prison - and the wider justice system beyond that - might be improved for everyone: among the prisoners' demands were the provision of basics like toothpaste and toilet paper, and access to education. But it couldn't last, or rather it wasn't permitted to last. Sold out by the political aspirations of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, with his joltingly symbolic family name, the men's quest for a fairer world ran up, as such quests often do, against an unyielding (and heavily armed) wall of authority. The prisoners were fish in a barrel when push came to shove on day four; among the many aspects explained by Nelson and Curry's film, you can see exactly why a bank robber trying to raise funds for his transgender lover might have reached for a reference like Attica once placed under his own form of duress.

As a film, Attica hews to a tried-and-tested documentary framework, cutting between talking-head testimony and corroborating archive footage, yet it demonstrates the old ways can still generate power when that testimony and footage is this compelling. The former prisoners Nelson and Curry interviews speak on two levels simultaneously, recounting their own experiences of the uprising while also apparently speaking to the present moment. (A striking rhetorical quirk: how comfortable these seasoned-to-grizzled ex-cons are with such 21st century terminology as "privilege" and "safe space".) As Nelson and Curry see it, Attica was just one of several forks in the road where the American dream of justice for all was up for review and renewal, only for the initially promising conversations to break down with bloody consequences. The film benefits from the fact most of this particular stand-off was mediated extensively as part of US TV's live and uninterrupted coverage of the turmoil of the 1970s. We see with our own eyes the processes of negotiation by which the prisoners reaffirmed their status as individuals and citizens, rather than the cattle they'd been treated as; we hear the blatantly prejudiced rhetoric of the cops sat like hawks or vultures on the rooftops overlooking Times Square; and, finally, we witness the compromise of the prisoners' demands and the violent crushing of their hopes. The final reel is a real gutpunch: we seem to be walking further and further away from anything like an ideal, and more than one of Nelson and Curry's subjects notes how the violence visited upon them as the status quo was reasserted was far worse than anything they'd seen and experienced behind bars or in their previous life on the streets. Every now and again, our collective attention is drawn to an institution that stands for wider society, and how we treat one another in this world. (For Attica, British viewers could swap in The Maze, Grenfell or the Bibby Stockholm.) The filmmakers succeed in setting us down in the middle of that rec yard as the gas descends and the bullets pop off, and there set us to considering just how much society has learnt from Attica in the intervening half-century - particularly with regard to the boundless, disproportionate and demonstrably indiscriminate violence of the state, being both better funded and more scarring than anything individual convicts could achieve with a makeshift shiv. As one of these convicts puts it in Attica's closing moments: "It didn't have to be this way."

Attica is now streaming via the BBC iPlayer.

On demand: "Tangerine"

2015's Tangerine was one of the writer-director Sean Baker's first studies of figures on the fringes of contemporary American life, in this case two transgender sex workers dealing with a spiralling situation. It's Christmas Eve in North Hollywood, and for Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), there's none of the usual pre-festive winding down. Instead, we bear witness to a sudden and dramatic winding-up: Sin-Dee learns her beloved has been cheating on her while she's been serving a 30-day sentence for soliciting, and - adding insult to injury - cheating on her with a cisgender white girl. Off she tears to extract confessions from (and possibly exact revenge on) all parties, her pal in tow whenever Alexandra can keep up, pursued by the ingenious and resourceful Baker, shooting the action on an iPhone (with certain image-correcting lenses) so as to keep costs down and generate greater immediacy. (Some scenes accordingly resemble those shopfront confrontations that occasionally go viral on social media.) What follows proceeds not along the straight lines of the Hollywood mainstream - ain't nothin' straight here, hun - but in a frenetic zigzag under an unseasonal sun, heading late into the night. Along the way, we're even offered something of a narrative puzzle, invited to consider what our heroines' haphazard progress has to do with an Armenian cab driver (Karren Karagulian) - a more conventional portrait of an L.A. working stiff - to whom Baker sporadically cuts.

The thrill of Tangerine is tied up with that iPhone, and how it seems to liberate the action: you feel Baker and his excellently named cinematographer Radium Cheung could go anywhere and shoot anything, could veer off down any one of the side streets they pass and alight upon a comparable brouhaha. (As for the taxi driver business: well, why not? Easier to sit in the backseat for a few blocks than hare after the female leads on foot - and such mobile focus worked for Jafar Panahi in his time, though Panahi never went as far, and was never allowed to go as far, as Baker does here. One quietly funny running gag: how delighted all the working girls are to see the cabbie. You'll see why.) This does seem a production governed by the girls' mantra-like cry of "fuck it": it does what it does for the story, or for shits and giggles, and that spontaneity is a large part of its charm. Tangerine has a freshness beyond bigger American movies, busy tying themselves in knots to no good end. With no budget for effects or chases, Baker is obliged to fall back on that old favourite human interest, and both Rodriguez and Taylor light up the screen, trash-talking whirlwinds who were never going to hit their marks and often seem more inclined to hit one another, thereby laying waste to several city blocks. Baker has proven especially adept at sourcing such personalities and then allowing them to be, flourish, shine, but here he also demonstrates a marked sympathy for those around them, most notably the Chinese woman stuck doing a solo shift at the donut shop where the film's primary troublemakers gather to thrash out their differences. The subsequent The Florida Project would refine the technique and massage in a little more of the emotional subtlety that arrives late here, but Tangerine retains the forceful impact of citrus to the face: it's a movie that grabs you by the weave, whether you like it rough or not.

Tangerine is available to stream via Prime Video and MUBI, and to rent via the BFI Player and YouTube.

Back in the ring: "Gladiator"

At the turn of the millennium, Gladiator was a seductive conjunction of the old and the new, of craft and flash. The fledgling DreamWorks studio had witnessed Hollywood raise the Titanic with dazzling visual effects, and now wondered whether it couldn't resurrect the Roman epics of fifty years before with a comparable creative guile and muscle. Ridley Scott was duly appointed to return us to and around the Colosseum, the backdrop of an earlier era's multiplex cinema, here reframed as the multiplex of an earlier era. And we were returned there in the company of the kind of heavyweight cast it was still possible to gather in the year 2000 A.D. The newly crowned Russell Crowe, the erstwhile soap star who'd just outpunched the A-listers in 1997's L.A. Confidential, made for a convincing bruiser in a way you worry even a gym-honed Paul Mescal, himself altogether rapidly promoted to serve as the star of this autumn's belated sequel, may not be. The then-emergent talent Joaquin Phoenix, scion of an acting dynasty, was pitted against him as Commodus, the louche, lisping Emperor we all love to hate. And they would be surrounded and supported by veterans who seemed almost to date from that earlier era, now taking the applause of the crowd for one last time: Oliver Reed (d. 1999, prompting some post-production jiggery-pokery), Richard Harris (d. 2002), David Hemmings (d. 2003), his eyebrows pointing towards the infinite as a ring announcer whose unmiked voice surely couldn't have carried to all corners of this especially colossal Colosseum. It would be one of those logistically grand and tricky projects you still thrill to see Hollywood make, and make this well, studio money spent wisely: Scott could show the carnage Cecil B. DeMille couldn't, fully stir our bloodlust and satiate our desire for catharsis, and there was human and historical interest to ground the technological wizardry. Audiences, and the Academy, could hardly resist. Are you not entertained?, as the cry went up.

In retrospect, we might in fact have Gladiator's success to blame for one or two things - Mel Gibson's subsequent The Passion of the Christ and the Star Wars prequels' over-reliance on CGI, to cite the most immediate and dire consequences. Yet in and of itself it continues to work handsomely: you will see no more thumping entertainment in the Odeon or Cineworld this week. What I hadn't grasped at the time, yet what's become more apparent with the years, is the extent to which the movie also functions as a golden-glowing self-portrait of Scott himself - or at least a portrait of someone you sense Scott would easily identify with: the self-made proletarian scrapper, adrift in a world of nepo babies and scheming, snivelling functionaries deemed unworthy of a man's time, handshake and mercy. (Beyond historical verisimilitude, there has to be a reason for naming your antagonist after a toilet.) Maximus Decimus Meridius is from the off an obvious commander of men - someone you'd follow into the breach, if called upon - but Scott and Crowe equally conspire to make him a details guy, smiling ruefully at a robin who drifts into the opening battle, rubbing dirt onto his hands to get a better feel for the terrain that lies ahead of him, only then leading a vast army into battle. "At my command, unleash hell" is just a long-winded way of shouting "action"; Maximus's vow "I will win the crowd... I will give them something they have never seen before" is straight from a pitch meeting, no translation from the Latin required. Yet this storied commander is caught at a transitional moment, forever yearning for the tranquillity of home, even as circumstances conspire to loose him from the safety of empire (for which we might read the perks, privileges and protections of the studio system) and force him to fight his own battles, huffily, grumpily, dourly.

Certain elements here date very much from the late 20th century, which is where Scott seems to have got stuck creatively: there are naggingly negligible roles for Djimon Hounsou as the slave who nurses our white hero back to health and Omid Djalili as the trader who sold Reed his "queer giraffes". (Hounsou, at least, recurs amid the stirring coda, involving one of many small details this script troubles to pay off.) As a filmmaker, Scott remains a singular mix of insensitivity and insecurity: a born entertainer - Robbie Williams, say - doesn't need to ask whether we're entertained or not, nor so bluntly state their methods. Commodus's observation of his sister's dozing child ("He sleeps so well because he's loved") meshes intriguingly here with Maximus's battle to earn the crowd's respect. (That he does is down to a mix of potent backstory, resilience, skill and flair, all transferrable skills for the modern creative.) Were Scott's battles to come worth fighting? In the new century, the veteran would get increasingly prolific and increasingly unreliable; he's that rare director who's made more films the older he's got, proof of his ability to talk a good game in the boardroom. Gladiator found the director, aged 63, turning his thoughts towards legacy and how a man is remembered - it was the beginning of late-period Scott - but were A Good Year (again: Crowe as Scott surrogate, this time furrowing his brow over bottles of wine), the various Alien footnotes and last year's Napoleon (with Phoenix as the anti-Scott) worth remembering? Wouldn't Scott have been better staying at home with the missus and kids, touching grass? At what point does the fight become a wearying compulsion? Born of Hollywood's ongoing inability to imagine a viable future - the auguries are not good - Gladiator II is almost upon us: the fear, shared by Crowe himself, is that Scott will overwrite this Champions League entertainment with something more akin to the Nations League, falling somewhere on a scale between timekilling and timewasting. Maybe there's some fight in the old dog yet. But the Elysian fields are calling.

Gladiator is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and available to stream via ITVX; Gladiator 2 opens November 15.

On demand: "Meantime"

From the early days of the Mike Leigh Film Project, an often riotous comedy about deeply dissatisfied people. Fashioned (believe it or not) for Central Television, home of darts-based Sunday teatime favourite Bullseye, 1983's Meantime feels like Leigh's update of the old Tolstoy dictum that insisted each family is unhappy in their own way. It opens with a directorial feint: a check-in with upwardly mobile suburban couple Alfred Molina and Marion Bailey, caught doing up their two-bed semi as a means of filling what otherwise seems a terribly empty petit-bourgeois existence. Yet for the most part, we're embedded - bogged down may be the better phrase - with the couple's pungently named relatives the Pollocks: unemployed dad Jeff Robert, mum Pam Ferris trying to keep the household afloat on bingo winnings, and two late-teenage sons (perma-aggro Steve Wright-alike Phil Daniels and gormless mouthbreather Tim Roth), neither of whom forms the greatest argument for procreation. Even if you disagree vehemently, you can see how the argument Leigh doesn't much care for his characters came about. (One early exchange between Daniels and skinhead mate Gary Oldman goes as follows: "You're really thick, you are." "I ain't as thick as you." "No-one's as thick as me.") Yet as embodied by a forceful new generation and style of actors, these characters remain enormously fun to watch and listen to, drilled into sulky, sarky, slangy rhythms that suggested Leigh had kept his ears open during his years of apprenticeship, and was now attempting something as revolutionary in film acting as the Method had been thirty years before. You can still feel how thrilling Meantime must have been in 1983: no Merchant-Ivory, this, no Chariots of Fire. Adios stuffed shirts and stiff upper lips, hello thick ears and lashings of tongue and cheek.

If Leigh really loathed the Pollocks, he a) wouldn't have turned these 100 minutes over to them in the way he does, b) wouldn't so closely hang on their every spit and cough, and c) wouldn't so clearly be making a case that their wayward meanderings - linked in passing to the inertia then being fostered within the working classes by Thatcherism - merited the most attentive study. Meantime remains political only in passing: though Roth's Colin is unexpectedly, nay miraculously offered a chance to improve his lot (and blows it), practically everyone else on screen has nothing to do and little to hope for. So they bicker with and snipe at one another, the rumbling getting nasty whenever a character of colour walks on, though arguably no nastier than it would have been on the streets of the real Britain circa 1983. Leigh isn't interested in pointmaking or point-scoring, however, instead diligently observing who these people are and why they've turned out like this: petty, sad, bored, depressive or passive-aggressive. Rather than dismissing these grumps and muppets out of hand, the director demonstrates a commendable generosity of spirit in centralising small lives and spotting within them the potential for at least a narrow form of growth. It's loudly, even rudely British, bristling with familiar faces, locations (pissy towerblock lifts, concrete precincts overrun with plastic bags, Chigwell Tube station), insults ("he's a jammy bastard", "Kojak", "nosy bloody Parker", "oi, prat!"), ad jingles, and lines that come out of nowhere to summarise the British experience ("I just had a really horrible hamburger", "Of course I'm not sure"). Better still, Leigh was starting to develop a sly visual sense: the whole movie seems to exist just to showcase the image of an anoraked Roth shambling past a statue of Churchill, but also don't overlook the (frankly hilarious) late revelation that Oldman's prize dunderhead Coxy has somehow started a fight with himself in an overturned bin. The core of the Leigh filmography - dating back to 1971's Bleak Moments and passing through High Hopes and Life is Sweet to Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and points beyond - would be variations on the theme of daily drudgery. Some would be more engaging and successful than others, but Meantime now looks like the first time Leigh realised this technique could not only sustain a feature but prove wholly enveloping in its description of phrases, routines and textures. We ought to quote it just as often as people quote from Abigail's Party and Nuts in May.

Meantime is available on a Special Edition DVD through ITV Studios Home Entertainment, to stream via YouTube, and to rent via the BFI Player.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 4-6, 2024):

1 (new) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

2 (1) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

3 (2) Speak No Evil (15) ****

4 (5) The Substance (18) **

5 (3) The Outrun (15)

6 (8) Despicable Me 4 (U)

7 (6) Lee (15)

8 (11) 200% Wolf (U)

9 (re) Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (PG) ***

10 (new) A Different Man (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Gladiator

2. Young Frankenstein 

3. Paddington 2

4. Paddington 

5. A Different Man

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (re) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

3 (4) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

4 (14) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

5 (2) Despicable Me 4 (U)

6 (12) Joker (15) **

7 (new) The Hitcher (15) 

8 (5) Twisters (12) ***

9 (7) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (1) The Bikeriders (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

3. Hundreds of Beavers

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Wicker Man [above] (Sunday, BBC2, 11.55pm)

2. Us (Saturday, BBC1, 10.30pm)

3. Hope (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.45am)

4. Zootropolis (Sunday, BBC1, 2.15pm)

5. The Square (Tuesday, Channel 4, 1.45am)

In memoriam: John Amos (Telegraph 09/10/24)

John Amos, who has died aged 84, was a versatile stage and screen actor revered for his roles in two major US TV hits: James Evans, the proud yet put-upon father in the groundbreaking sitcom Good Times (1974-79), and the adult incarnation of Kunta Kinte, the enslaved hero in ABC’s adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots (1977).

Spun off from progressively minded writer-producer Norman Lear’s earlier successes All in the Family (1971-79) and Maude (1972-78), Good Times – the first network show overseen by Black creatives, centred on a family getting by in Chicago’s housing projects – blended social themes with crowdpleasing comedy, paving the way for such later hits as The Jeffersons (1975-85) and The Cosby Show (1984-92).

Years after the show passed into television history, Amos discovered the eternally job-seeking James had been a demographic-spanning model of fatherhood: “Young men in their thirties and forties, of every ethnicity imaginable, come up to me and say, ‘You’re the dad I never had’.” Yet behind the scenes, there had been unrest. 

Over the show’s first three seasons, the comedy grew ever broader, prompting Amos to object to what he deemed stereotypical writing: “I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days, and [the producers] got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes. So they said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t we kill him off? We can get on with our lives!’ That taught me a lesson – I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show.”

James Evans was duly dispatched – in an offscreen car accident after the character finally landed employment – as Good Times’ fourth season began. Yet Amos’s popularity with the viewing public proved crucial to his casting in Roots, a cannily packaged confrontation of slavery and its legacy that became appointment television – and then something of a small-screen phenomenon – as the Seventies played out.

An estimated 130 million people, half the US population in 1977, tuned in on the miniseries’ initial run; the concluding instalment remains the second most watched series finale in US TV history, after M*A*S*H’s 1983 signoff. For Amos, who spent months in Liberia researching the role, the show’s success was “a revelation… because I saw my country [had] finally reached a point where it’s ready to look at its past and say, yes, we did this, and some of these things were terrible.”

Roots went on to win a Peabody Award, a Golden Globe, and nine Emmys from a total of 37 nominations, including a reaffirming nomination for Amos himself: “It was just what I needed. It took the bad taste of Good Times out of my mouth… I realise that a lot of it I brought on myself. I was not the easiest guy in the world to get along with, or to direct. I challenged any and everybody. [But Roots] was a vindication, a tremendous feeling of satisfaction.”

John Allen Amos Jr. was born in Newark, New Jersey on December 27, 1939 to mechanic John Amos Sr. and his housekeeper wife Annabelle. As a boy, he attended East Orange High School; he subsequently studied sociology at Colorado State University. A keen athlete, he boxed to Golden Gloves level and signed a contract with gridiron’s Kansas City Chiefs before pivoting to entertainment.

After trying stand-up in L.A., Amos got his first break as a writer for The Leslie Uggams Show (1969) before landing a recurring onscreen role as the weatherman Gordy in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). Early movie credits included cult classics Vanishing Point (1971) and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

Further film work followed, most memorably Cleo McDowell, the renegade burger shack manager in Coming to America (1988). Yet Amos’s strongest roles were on stage and TV: he won an NAACP Award for his role as a retired cop in Dennis McIntyre’s play Split Second and was alternately genial and combative as Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in The West Wing (1999-2006).

He spoofed Good Times – with a talking dog – in a 2010 episode of 30 Rock and continued working until his death: one of his final appearances will be in the upcoming legal spin-off Suits: L.A. (2024-). Yet he remained level-headed about the actor’s life, telling one journalist: “There are three stages in an actor’s career: ‘who is John Amos?’, ‘get me John Amos’ [and] ‘get me a young John Amos.’”

He married three times, to Noel Mickelson, Lillian Lehman and Elisabete de Sousa; all three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his two children with Mickelson.

John Amos, born December 27, 1939, died August 21, 2024.

Altered states: "My Old Ass"

When men talk, think and write about time and time travel, their thoughts tend to stray in the direction of assassinating the baby Hitler: a quest for heroism, or maybe just vengeance and carnage. When women do likewise, we end up with Freaky Friday and 13 Going on 30: searches for greater wisdom and understanding. (In very rare cases, such as Alice Lowe's current release Timestalker, the movies occasion a quest for wisdom and carnage, suggesting the two need not be mutually exclusive.) In the readymade comfort movie My Old Ass, cranberry farmer's daughter Elliott (Maisy Stella) celebrates her 18th birthday by sneaking off from her family to trip balls on an island with friends, only for this particular trip to wind up with Elliott's 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) sitting next to her on a log, telling her - in no uncertain terms - to do everything within her powers to avoid a boy called Chad. It's pure fantasy (if you could go back in time to tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?) and pure movie set-up, but in this initial encounter, writer-director Megan Park establishes the mode of address of the film entire: not the cranked-up, farce-adjacent jabber of the slicker studio movies in this vein, but that of a casual fireside or dormroom chat. The title, characteristically, is the name under which Elliott saves her older self's phone number, arming herself with an advice line that becomes doubly handy when Percy Hynes White's Chad - long hair, sandals, surprising depths - shows up at the lake.

My Old Ass is mostly repeating old wisdoms: value your leisure time and loved ones, be careful around Chads, gather ye rosebuds (or cranberries) while ye may. (One novelty: an acknowledgement we might only be able to steer our younger selves so far, or that there might only be so long our younger selves could bear to listen to our old asses. There's life to be lived, and there are mistakes to be made that are part of the process.) What's cheering is that Park is saying all this the way a friend might: unforced, relaxed, with obvious and abundant affection. She's recruited a major ally and selling point in Stella, hitherto unknown but here revealed as a star by name and nature, possessed of that same X factor that dazzled when we first fell head over heels for Julia Stiles or Emma Stone. She makes a convincing teenager: witness how she expands an exclamatory "Jesus!" from two syllables into three, and the previously gay Elliott's cringing upon realising she might also like boys like Chad now. Yet this is also demonstrably an actress who knows what she's doing, the genre she's working in, and what elevates the best teen movie heroines over and above the rest. (Judging on Park's aerial shots, Stella also knows how to handle a motorboat, one deftness of touch among many here.) The production around her is a small one, content to gather a cast of funny faces who visibly vibed with one another on the shores of the one, sunny location. Park permits herself one flourish: a Justin Bieber homage that really will make anybody over the age of 21 feel antiquated. (Never heard the song before, no idea of its cultural significance. Sorry.) And she's pushing for feels over funnies, sobs rather than setpieces: despite prominent billing, Plaza is only present in person for a couple of scenes, leaving us downstream from The Notebook, The Lake House and Nicholas Sparks-land. (Perhaps you can only get out this way by boat: all the tears shed have left the terrain waterlogged.) Yet the sobs are well-earned, and you come away from My Old Ass feeling more movies should be assembled like a summer camp rather than a mid-range family car or military campaign. If the Elliott-Chad story gets you - as, I must confess, it got me - it's for one reason: it's been told with a sweetness you may have thought had been all but purged from American movies in the era of Deadpool & Wolverine. (Again: when men talk, think and write about time and time travel...)

My Old Ass is now showing in selected cinemas.