Owen Gleiberman Chief: Last News

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Comic-book movie culture didn’t just stumble this year. It face-planted, giving us one movie after another that fans didn’t much care about and that the corporations backing these films took a disquieting loss on. And that’s not how it was supposed to go.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Gladiators, pain freaks, brutes, clowns, true athletes, fake competitors: The slab-of-meat stars of professional wrestling are all those things. And back in the 1980s, when wrestling was reaching its cultural zenith, it almost looked as if you could divide the world between those who took wrestling on the level and those who dismissed it as a vulgar, over-the-top bad joke.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Genies, at least in pop culture, have long been comic foils. Way back in 1940, in “The Thief of Bagdad,” Rex Ingram played Djinn, the movie’s larger-than-life genie — 100 feet tall in his ponytail and red diaper ­— as a sly, laughing soul man of lighthearted effrontery.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s an unintentionally surreal moment in “Food Inc. 2.” Eric Schlosser, the journalist who wrote “Fast Food Nation,” is talking about how the rise of our corporatized, centralized, industrialized food system stifles the very kind of competition that could pose a challenge to it.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Unabashed pop groups with fervid teenage followings tend to get trivialized, at least in the media. They’re dismissed as being slick and calculated and superficial. But there’s a story in “Wham!,” the new Netflix documentary about the quintessential pop duo of the 1980s, that testifies to what a chancy and audacious artist George Michael was even back in his teen-idol days. The year is 1983. Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, coming off their first album, “Fantastic” (which had a few hits, though none of them were great), have established Wham! as an effective lightweight pop machine, with its two young stars prancing around the stage in sexy sportswear. The time has come to record “Careless Whisper,” a song they’ve had in their back pocket for several years (we hear the super-early demo version of it that they recorded in 1981 in Ridgeley’s living room on a TEAC 4-track Portastudio). Michael has become enough of a powerhouse to hook up with Jerry Wexler, the legendary producer of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. He heads down to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio to record the track, with Wexler producing. What more could a 20-year-old budding pop star want?

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s a moment in “Stan Lee,” David Gelb’s lively and illuminating documentary about the visionary of Marvel Comics, that’s momentous enough to give you a tingle. The year is 1961, and Lee, approaching 40, is burnt out on comics. It’s a form he has never taken all that seriously, even though he’s been working at it since 1939, when he started, at 17, as a gofer for Timely Comics. (Within two years he’d become the company’s editor, art director, and chief writer.) The comics he creates get so little respect that he tries to hide his profession when asked about it at cocktail parties. In 1961, though, Lee receives a directive from Martin Goodman, the publisher of the company that’s about to be renamed Marvel. He is ordered to devise a team of superheroes that can compete with DC’s Justice League (who have become the fulcrum of the so-called Silver Age of Comics). Lee, weary of superheroes, is ready to quit the business. But his wife, the English-born beauty Joan Lee, suggests that he create the kind of characters he has always been talking about — a more realistic brand of comic-book figure, one that ordinary people could relate to.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Combat veterans, famously, don’t tend to talk much, if at all, about their experiences of war. At least not to civilians, and maybe not even to their closest relatives. Knowing this, those of us who aren’t veterans tend to have ideas about the things they aren’t discussing. Things like violence and fear and the chaos and insanity of battle. That’s surely a part of it, but in a way it’s also the heightened cinematic version, the one we’ve all gotten from war movies. What it leaves out are the torn-up emotions of soldiers, the lifelong imprint left upon them not just by the cataclysm of war but by their relationship with their fellow soldiers — the loyalty and love, the complex code of liberation and guilt at having survived.   

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic What’s the darkest moment you’ve ever seen in a rock ‘n’ roll documentary? Up until now, I’d have said the answer was obvious: the sequence in “Gimme Shelter” where Meredith Hunter, in his lime-green suit, rushes the stage at Altamont with a gun in his hand and gets stabbed in the back, half a dozen times, by a member of the Hell’s Angels. For pure heart of darkness, what could top that? But I’ve just seen “Anita,” Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom’s very good documentary about Anita Pallenberg — beautiful and imperious scenester of the ’60s and ’70s, Hollywood actress and icon of scruffy-chic rock royalty, wife of Keith Richards, muse to several of the other Rolling Stones. And there’s a moment in it that made me suck in my breath in shock and horror as much as “Gimme Shelter” does.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), the central character in Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak,” is a middle-aged landlord and proprietor of a pub that sits near the bottom of a sloped street of working-class row houses. We’re in an unnamed village in the northeast of England, and the pub, called the Old Oak, has seen better days. So has Tommy, who’s known as TJ. Dave Turner, the very good actor who plays him, resembles a bone-weary cross between John C. Reilly and Michael Moore. There’s a sweet-souled directness to his sad prole stare, and he treats his customers, some of whom he has known since they were in grade school together, with quiet affection and respect. But the pub is falling apart, and the property values in the neighborhood have plunged. TJ is barely scraping by serving pints of bitters.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Pornography, as a visual medium, has long followed the lead of technology. First it was drawn by hand. Then it was photographed. Then it was shown in back rooms on 8mm one-reelers. Then it was shown in movie theaters. Then it moved to video cassettes and DVD. Then it arrived on the Internet. Then, in the age of Pornhub, it exploded on the Internet. That’s when porn-on-the-computer innovation became the all-porn-all-the-time revolution. “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story,” a documentary that drops March 15 on Netflix, is not a movie about the cultural prominence or significance of porn in our time. Someone should really make that documentary. It’s a story that, like so much else about pornography, is totally out there yet hidden in the shadows. “Money Shot,” directed by Suzanne Hillinger and produced by Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, does touch on key aspects of how porn today is manufactured and consumed — notably how technology has helped to blur, if not obliterate, the distinction between the porn professional and the elevated “amateur.” But the movie explores this mostly in the service of telling the story of how Pornhub, the largest porn site in the world, became a lightning rod of controversy when it was accused of being a place that abetted sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s a genre I like so much I can never get enough of it — I call it the Biopic About Someone You Wouldn’t Make a Biopic About. The form came into existence, in a certain way, with “Sid and Nancy,” but it was all but patented by the screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who planted it on the map, in 1994, with “Ed Wood” (still the “Citizen Kane” of the genre), then went on to script “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “Man on the Moon” (about Andy Kaufman), “Big Eyes” (about the painter Walter Keane and his wife, Margaret, who turned out to be the painter behind the throne), and “Dolemite Is My Name” (about the fluky hustler-comedian Ray Moore). There have been films in the genre from other quarters, like Paul Schrader’s superb “Auto Focus” (about the TV star Bob Crane and his video-fetish sex life), going right up through the recent Toronto Film Festival sensation “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Film-festival awards don’t usually have much lasting impact, but four years ago, when “Green Book” played at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the People’s Choice Award, it had a seismic effect. It set the film on what would become its road to Oscar glory. Since that turned out to be a very bumpy road, with many critics dumping on the film for what they perceived to be its outdated liberal race consciousness (not me — I thought “Green Book” was terrific), the Toronto award kept coming back into the conversation. It was used to signify the nature of the movie’s appeal — namely, that maybe this wasn’t a film destined to be embraced by the most elite levels of the establishment, but it was one that “the people” went for. And that’s just what ended up happening. (The people, in this case, including a great many Oscar voters.)

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s a standard road map for an actor like Sylvester Stallone — at 76, still looking good, but no longer with a body made of rock(y) — to enter the comic-book movie zone, and that’s for him to play a figure like the righteous Ravager Stakar Ogord in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” or to voice King Shark in “The Suicide Squad.” That’s all likable nostalgic novelty casting. But what if Stallone, who in his way has played invincible superheroes for decades (think “Rambo” and its sequels or “The Expendables” and its sequels), wants to go full avenger and portray a total comic-book demigod? He’ll star in a chintzy slice of hellfire like “Samaritan,” based on the Mythos Comics graphic novel that was published in 2014. It’s set in Granite City, an everyday dystopia where Stallone lugs his body around with a reluctant roughneck shamble. He plays an aging crime-fighter-in-hiding in a movie that as written by Bragi F. Schut (who also wrote the comic) and directed by Julius Avery offers a conventional but downbeat, minimally plotted but maximally incendiary variation on bare-bones superhero action.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThe enthralling documentary “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” opens with white-on-black credits accompanied by the staccato pecks of a typewriter, which will be music to some viewers’ ears. Robert Caro, the author at the center of the documentary, writes towering books of nonfiction — “The Power Broker,” his 1,280-page study of how Robert Moses literally shaped the city of New York, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his four-volume biography that’s currently awaiting its fifth and final volume — but taps out these imperially detailed and captivating tomes on an old electric typewriter, X-ing out passages as he goes along, backing up each page with an extra sheet and a piece of carbon paper.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticI’ve always been haunted by the clips of the young Queen Elizabeth II that were used in “The Filth and the Fury,” Julien Temple’s great documentary about the Sex Pistols. They were featured in a montage of images to accompany “God Save the Queen,” the thrillingly vandalistic Sex Pistols single released in 1977 to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

By Owen Gleiberman