Trump Archives - DMovies

Motherless Brooklyn

Posted on 3rd December 20194th December 2019 by Jeremy Clarke

It’s taken Edward Norton 20 years to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn for the screen, but it’s been worth the wait. Norton is best known as an actor, but his talent clearly extends a long way outside of that field – as well as being the lead, star actor here, he produced, wrote and directed, fulfilling all these duties as well as you can imagine any four separate people doing. You can sense the time that’s gone into this: the loving period detail, the feeling that the script has marinated so that the characters have a real depth to them on the page, the superb music score. There is a palpable sense here that you are watching one of the great private eye movies. Actually, there’s more than that… although this is a period piece, it feels very much about where we are now.

New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog (Norton) works for Frank Minna’s detective agency. A confident, safe pair of hands, Minna (Bruce Willis) has taken a chance on Lionel who suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Someone will say a word or make a gesture and it will set Lionel off. He just can’t help it. Most people would regard Lionel as an unemployable misfit, a drain on social resources. Frank sees his potential. Lionel’s head detects patterns, makes connections, won’t leave puzzles alone until all the pieces that don’t quite fit have been assembled into a coherent whole. Lionel is now an invaluable asset on Frank’s crew.

So when in the opening minutes Frank goes to a meeting which leads to a car ride which ends in his death, the circumstances and background worm their way into Lionel’s subconscious and force him to investigate, ponder and try to make the disparate pieces fit together. Somewhere in the puzzle, an unseen member of numerous committees at City Hall, lies the power behind the city’s planning department, visionary developer Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, the actor who among other roles is known for satirising Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live) who thinks nothing of demolishing areas where poor people live to further his idealised metropolis of the future. It’s simply collateral damage. Moses is contrasted with Paul (Willem Dafoe) who looks like a tramp but turns out to be a trained architect fallen from grace and the brother of Moses, with whom he has profound disagreements about urban development and the way people who live in a city should be treated.

Lionel’s investigations lead him to a woman named Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at the Committee Against Racial Inequality in Housing. She drags him to a Harlem jazz dive where he discovers the music to be a liberating experience; if his Tourette’s is normally a cause of social embarrassment, here he finds himself involuntarily singing scat and impressing the players on the stage. He and she connect on the level of outsiders – he because of his so-called disability, she because of the colour of her skin. Eventually he will work out for himself her place in the complex puzzle his head is putting together.

Everything about this film – from its broadest brushstrokes to its finest detail – is magnificent. Nothing is here that hasn’t been considered, from Dick Pope’s satisfying noirish cinematography to a period jazz score with a contemporary urban edge involving legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, composer Daniel Pemberton and a demo (of his song Daily Battles) by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Norton’s vision is so strong and so detailed that he elicits and encourages incredible work from his well chosen team be they in front of or behind the camera.

More significantly though, the film is about something very important: ordinary people at the bottom of the pile, with their weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which make them human, doing the best they can. Perhaps even making a positive difference. And, at the other end of the social spectrum, the rich and powerful who walk all over them without seeing themselves doing anything wrong. It’s a US movie which clearly speaks to an America run by the despotic, racist and sexist Trump. The film doesn’t appear to be conceived that way – it was in development way before Trump was even a presidential nominee – it’s just that as a movie coming out now it seems to fit the place in which America currently finds itself. It likewise seems appropriate as a comment on the wider world right now. As for Britain, currently in the throes of a general election where the incumbent Tories appear to care little for truth in their duplicitous and deceitful campaigning, ordinary damaged heroes like Lionel who fight for human dignity as best they can are exactly what we need. The movie of the moment. Go see it as soon as you possibly can.

Motherless Brooklyn is out in the UK on Friday, December 6th.

Active Measures

Posted on 9th April 2019 by victorfraga

Just last year, Fahrenheit 11/9 garnered a mass audience through infamy, industry and innuendo. Michael Moore’s latest documentary, a call for unity in the US, proposed itself a revelatory clarion call rather than the cheap, callous comic strip it became. A petty insert of a past interview with Trump and a sling of lewd photos intimating carnal interactions with Ivanka Trump rubbished an argument founded on morals and honesty.

Active Measures is different. Impeccably researched, edited, weighted and talking head clips, Jack Bryan posits a serious, but telling, truth detailing the might and power Vladimir Putin exerts over the US. It begins with the towering and turbulent enterprise by which Putin collected himself. He’s regaled by what the film boasts is “the single largest intelligence operation in history”, the imprints and footprints of which the film shows his influence over American politics.

It’s a dissertation told in methodical and methodological order, essaying the principles which influences Russian and American politics. Though Russian/American cordialities may have faltered in the 1990s, Bryan pieces that Trump benefited from the Russian Oligarchs at the turn of the early millennium years. Protected from financial failings, Trump was a prime pawn for future endeavours.

Senator John McCain, a recipient of Trump’s lacerated tongue, remembers a 2007 speech where Putin glared at him mockingly. One of many interviewees casting well calibrated aspersions, McCain questions the legalities by which Putin’s administration acted, coercing a montage of cyber attacks for the viewers to enjoy.

That the film acts on archive footage is both a strength and a weakness. The film offers little other visual flair, indiscernible in its interview footage. Where Moore understands the power of the moving camera, Bryan’s work is flat, bland, often stale. Unvarnished backgrounds do little to attract the eye and interior seated interviewees stand in pedestrian settings, none any different from each other. While Moore balanced his films with long shots, close ups, inside trackers and exterior angles, Active Measures moves in one continuous setting.

Yet it works as an astonishing excavation of notions and clips, juggling each jigsaw piece into place. A telling clip shows Ivanka equating her father’s bankruptcy to a homeless man, exacting the seriousness of the predicament Trump found himself in. It builds on this angle by which Trump, a profiteer with little interest in politics, would throw himself into the financial hooks of a mafia. Clips of newspaper clippings collide with the mounting concerns of Russian monetary influence which reporters collected over the years, some dated as early as 2008.

Of the two Trump documentaries released, Bryan’s is the more thoughtful and well put together. Though he lacks the stylised flair Moore brings to the film, the interviews, clippings, articles, emails and reports make Active Measures a more robust piece of filmmaking, demonstrating why the 2016 election proved a dubious victory.

Active Measures is available on all major VoD in April 2019.

Fahrenheit 11/9

Posted on 18th October 201820th August 2019 by Jeremy Clarke

Michael Moore’s latest documentary starts with the US election which was a shoe in for Hillary Clinton, with the US polls predicting with 100% certainty that she would win. Except that the exit polls showed something different and, as we know, victory went to Trump. As Moore says, how the fuck did we get here?

Some of his argument is well-worn, familiar material. The Democrats overruled their grassroots, replacing popular, anti-neoliberal candidate Bernie Sanders with party elite favourite Clinton, disenfranchising many Democrat voters who, simply, didn’t see any reason to vote after that. This thesis has been recounted elsewhere, although the idea that the Democrats actually lied about Sanders’ winning voter numbers saying he’d lost perhaps hasn’t been touted so widely.

ext up, Trump’s campaign: not so much an attempt to win the presidency as to boost ratings and up his TV appearance payments – which backfired and got him sacked by the network. Faced with this situation, Trump was persuaded to attend the two rallies he’d organised and the campaign grew of its own momentum, unexpectedly demolishing first the other Republican candidates and secondly Clinton’s Democrat opposition. Both loser Clinton and winner Trump were taken aback.

But not Michael Moore. The director has previously had warned that he understood how people in places like his home town of Flint, Michigan think. And therefore how they vote. Indeed, the film’s most powerful segment tackles the pre-Trump scandal of Michigan’s governor’s Rick Snyder switching Flint’s clean water supply source from the crystal clear Lake Huron to the polluted River Flint simply because it’ll turn a higher profit. Never mind that it gives everyone irreversible lead poisoning.

But the kicker is yet to come. Moore isn’t kind to Obama either. He cites Obama’s record on drone strikes among other things.

Anyway, the then President Obama visits Flint to sort out the crisis and drinks a glass of local water. In order to show it’s potable. When all the stats say it isn’t. And when I say drinks, I mean touches the water to his lips without actually consuming any of it. Yes, it’s a stitch up between elitist Republican governor and equally elitist Democrat president. One less reason to vote for either.

Overall, however, this is a partly fascinating Flint material and partly uninspired rehash of well rehearsed arguments about Trump that add nothing new to the debate. Which is a pity because Moore has made better films and I really wanted to see him on top form tackling Trump and everything for which Trump stands.

Fahrenheit 11/9 played in the London Film Festival, where this piece was originally written, and is also in cinemas from Friday, October 19th. It’s out on VoD on Friday, February 8th.

The Eyes Of Orson Welles

Posted on 3rd August 201813th August 2018 by Jeremy Clarke

This takes the form of a letter, as in, a letter to Orson Welles read out by director Mark Cousins on the film’s soundtrack as the film proceeds. According to the press blurb, Cousins never wanted to make a film on Welles feeling that numerous books and documentaries had already said everything there was to say. But then Cousins was presented with an unexpected opportunity. He was given access to a box of hitherto unseen drawings, paintings and sketches by the great man. These, he felt, gave him a way to represent a side of Orson which hadn’t really been seen before.

So Cousins starts off in New York to Albioni’s doom-laden Adagio, today a familiar film music staple which was first used in Welles’ screen adaptation of one of the 20th century’s great dirty texts, Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (1961). Welles himself, and the wider body of work which bears his name, is another of those dirty texts and Cousins proves himself exactly the person to have another crack at documenting him with the drawings and paintings from the box the perfect vehicle for that journey. For the newcomer to Welles it’s a great starting point; for the more knowledgeable viewer there’s a wealth of never before seen material here.

The whole breaks down into separate sections discussing Welles with regards to Pawn, Knight, King and – in a less chess-referenced epilogue – Jester.

The Pawn section deals with common people, starting with his mother Beatrice, A Christian Unitarian activist who got herself elected and ensured “a Christmas gift for every child” making a huge political impact on her son.

The more complex section on the Knight deals with several aspects of Orson’s love life – among them visual loving, chivalry and death/guilt. Up pops the four in a bed revelry from Shakespeare/Falstaff vehicle Chimes At Midnight (Welles, 1965) and a drawing of a devil who visits Welles when his then wife Rita Hayworth is absent. No drawing of Rita, but numerous clips from the film he built around her, The Lady From Shanghai/1947, including the transcendent sequence where whilst lying on the deck of a boat she requests a cigarette and the camera framing her face moves to follow down her arm to a cigarette coming into her hand which she then brings back up to her face.

As for the King,in the opening minutes there’s an unspoken reference to Donald Trump. The current Potus is reminiscent of various despotic characters created by Welles: newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane/1940), murderous monarch Macbeth (1948), racketeer Harry Lime (The Third Man, Carol Reed/1949) and corrupt cop Hank Quinlan (Touch Of Evil/1960). Cousins suggests current the state of the world would fascinate Welles whose formative years included the 1930s’ stock market crash, the Great Depression and the rise of fascism which lead to WW2.

The rather different Jester section has Welles (voiced by Jack Klaff) writing back to Cousins, suggesting that all the world’s a circus. Cousins’ imagined Welles throws up various ideas that don’t fit the film’s thesis – the japes of Welles’ home made Too Much Johnson (1938), the absurdist world of Mr. Arkadin (1955) and a series of drawings of St. Nicholas which gradually turn Santa Claus into a drunkard with a bottle.

It all works extremely well as a film, whether you already know Welles or not. That said, the wealth of material here cries out for additional exposure in other media – a book of pictures, an art exhibition or an interactive website. You can see that just from watching the trailer. For the moment, though, this film version will do just fine.

The Eyes Of Orson Welles is out in the UK on Friday, August 17th.