THE STANDBYS

There cannot possibly be any other job in Show (or any other) Business where you need the patience of a Saint, be as tough old nails, and as resilient as a rubber band whilst possessing enough talent to substitute for a Broadway Star at the drop of a hat. This is of course the role of a Standby who spend their whole careers in the wings looking at the spotlights that may never ever shine on them.

Stephanie Riggs's moving and fascinating documentary follows the heartbreaking stories of three such performers who have made careers out of just waiting to go on.  There is Merwin Foard, a good humored seasoned actor, with his amazing deep baritone voice, who gets his chance one afternoon to play Nathan Lane's role in 'The Addams Family'. He goes on stage to the customary groans from the audience when they realise they are not going to see the 'star', to wowing them all with his performance and earning a standing ovation by the end.  Foard has been at this profession for 25 years now and has been in 14 Broadway productions, nearly always as the Standby, but it has at least allowed him and his family to have a comfortable life.  He considers himself one of the lucky ones.

Young Ben Crawford was the Standby for Brian d’Arcy James who had the title role in 'Shrek the Musical.' His Agent had procured him a Contract that gave him the right to take over when the Star eventually left, and that's exactly what happened. Crawford got to wow audiences with his own take on the role and received some really good notices for his performance.  He felt secure in the knowledge that he had finally 'arrived'. Then as the Show was set to close on Broadway, the Producers of the National Tour asked Crawford to audition for the role he had already played so well for months.  They also asked his Standby too, and in a cruel twist of fate, gave the role to the new man instead. 

The third actor was Aléna Watters whose roller coaster career was the hardest to witness.  She got her big break appearing as one of the Harlettes who were the backing Group for Bette Midler.  After a short stint in Bette's Show in Las Vegas, the Producers called Aléna and without warning told her she would be replaced by one of the original Harlettes was returning. She was told that she could remain as 'the Swing' who would understudy for all the girls which cushioned the bitter blow slightly. But then a month later and a second phone call, and she was laid off from that 'due to budget restrictions'. She was devastated, as are we watching this all unfurl.

All three performers were generous enough to allow Riggs and her cameras to follow them around for a couple of years and show all of their daily tribulations. She in turn does at least allow them a moment to showcase their talents with a song or two.  As Bebe Neuwirth, herself once a Standby said, that if it wasn't for Broadway's obsession with filling the stages with big celebrities these were the real performers who should be starring in these roles'.  And its left to another ex Standby David Hyde Pierce to sum it up so succinctly about when they actually get to go on.....'for the audience its just yet another afternoon, but for that performer it could the highpoint of their entire life.'

A must view for anyone who ever dreamt that they could or should have won a Tony.

Click here to download or watch it streaming

★★★★★★★★

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Mr X @ Sundance

Auteur is a much misappropriated word in cinema in the same way designer is in fashion, but the idiosyncratic extraordinary Leos Carax is one filmmaker who so unreservedly deserves the accolade. This new affectionate tribute to him examines why since his first film at the tender age  of 24 'Boy Meets Girl' won him an Award and much love at Cannes in 1984 and even though he has made just four other features (and contributed to two more), he is universally regarded as one of the most important filmmakers in French cinema today.

Documentarian Tessa Louise-Salomé takes on the task of trying to find the real man behind the mask and starts by asking Carax if this was a real or assumed name. To which the reply was simply 'it's a real assumed name!'  And that neatly sets the standard for the answers she will get from this very elusive figure in her investigation.  Louise-Salomé had been an assistant on Carax's latest (and possibly best) movie 'Holy Motors' which one critic had called 'The craziest film of this year. Or any year' and still gave it 5 stars .... so she at least had a heads up on the man. 

Carax's debut saw the start of two long very significant relationships for the filmmaker.  The first with actor Denis Levant who Carax plucked out of the Conservatory and thrust him straight into being a leading man in all his movies, and the second with award winning cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier. And whilst his 2nd movie 'Bad Blood' stirred up some controversy, it was his third that would actually make his reputation although at the time it seemed like this extravagant way-over-budget piece would prove to be his potential downfall like Warren Beatty's 'Ishtar' or Kevin Costner's 'Waterworld.'

'Les Amants du Pont-Neuf' started with a modest budget of 7 million francs and was scheduled to be shot on location in Paris.  The Mayor would only allow Carax to shoot on the Pont Neuf for 10 days, so he built a full size replica which would prove to be only the first of many headaches.  The somewhat paranoid Carax who obsessed over every minute detail filmed on and off over the next two years and the movie ended up costing over 100 million francs when it was eventually finished in 1990.  A very young Juliette Binoche was the star (along with Lavant) and she described the whole lengthy process as chaotic with some days Carax just pointing the camera and expecting her to act without a script or actual direction. Yet now as she reflects back on it all she appreciates that what a unique experience it was to be working on what turned out to be Carax's most popular film ever. She, and everybody else interviewed, never hesitated in calling this willfully bizarre man anything less than a genius.

Carax's output is hard to define. It is stunning visual and bears no resemblance to anything one has ever seen before on a screen, and always shocks, horrifies and delights you at the same time. This documentary neatly highlighted the fact that some essayists tend to over intellectualise his work.  It is always open for interpretation but maybe not as pretentious as some of them allude too.

Louise-Salomé's excellent wee film may not have uncovered much about the mysterious solitary man himself, but it is a fond appreciation of exceptional filmmaker which will truly delight cinephiles everywhere.

★★★★★★★★★

LOCKE

Ivan Locke is on the eve of the biggest challenge of his career. Tomorrow sees the biggest concrete pour ever that will serve as the foundation for Europe’s largest building to date.  As the foreman of the site he is considered not only the go-to expert but also a safe pair of hands to insure that this mammoth operation will be done without a single hitch.  However, that night he receives a phone call that will not only put the whole project in jeopardy, but will serve to unravel his job, family and his entire life.

Several months earlier whilst on another ‘concrete pour’ away from home, Locke had a one-night stand with an older rather lonely woman.  It was a brief fleeting moment that he had totally forgotten about until tonight when the woman, very scared and panicking, had suddenly phoned him out of the blue to tell his she was about to give birth to his baby at any moment. So after finishing work that day he jumps into his BMW and hotfoots it down the motorway from Birmingham to the hospital in London where the woman is having a difficult labor.

In the course of the 3-hour drive Locke tries to manage the job and also his wife remotely by a series of very fraught phone conversations.  Neither his flabbergasted boss nor his unsuspecting wife can accept Locke’s reasoning for abandoning them both on a whim like this and the phone calls get menacing and bitter as they threaten to destroy Locke if he persists with what they can only see as a foolhardy plan.

Meanwhile in between all this rancor Locke is also balancing calls to his deputy Forman who Locke is convinced can manage the task on his own, even though at this hour the man is already the worse the wear for drink.  He also manages to deal with the police and council officials to insure that the construction site has all the right permits for the task.  On top of which Bethan, the now very distraught mother to be, is also bombarding Locke with hysterical demands as her deteriorating condition means that the Hospital need to make decisions to try to save the baby.

Throughout this all Locke is cool and collected and deals all the anger thrown at him is a quiet reasoned manner.  Even though his Boss fires him, Locke continues to brief his (ex) deputy as he is still convinced that he can supervise the job at a distance.  He does however fail to calm his hysterical wife and she refuses to now take his calls and Locke is left communicating to her through his two teenage sons who are not interested in any family drama and much keener in relaying the play-by-play detail of the football match they had been hoping to watch with him on TV that night.

The sons are obviously the real joy in Locke’s life but in the gaps between the phone calls we learn the real reason why his is insisting on undertaking this journey tonight and its to do with the fact his own father had deserted him at an early age, and so Locke will do anything to avoid repeating this, even though it may end up at a very steep cost.  He has no intention at all of starting any sort of relationship with Bethan, but he wants to take responsibility for his new child regardless.  Whatever his irate boss and his wife who has been blindsided by this one act of betrayal think of him, Locke is in fact a decent man who simply wants to do the best.

Written and directed by Steven Knight, who picked up an Oscar Nomination for his screenplay for Stephen Frears ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ and is also known for writing ‘Eastern Promises’ for David Cronenberg.  Knight wrote this piece for Tom Hardy and when he persuaded the actor to take the part, he was given just 2 weeks by the Actor’s agent to shoot the whole thing.  It is a tour-de-force career defining performance by Hardy who is on screen in that car for the entire performance.  He is nothing short of electrifying and I can totally appreciate why Knight insisted that the role was his alone.

There is whole plethora of wonderful English talent who are the disembodied voices at the end of the phone that included Olivia Colman, Ben Daniels, Danny Webb, Andrew Scott and particularly Ruth Wilson as Locke’s distraught wife.

Hands up too for Haris Zambarloukos the D.P. and Justine Wright the editor for helping make an entire movie short in car so compelling.

This small indie movie was shown in the Spotlight Section at Sundance this year and is just about to have a limited theatrical release in the UK.  I do so hope it becomes more widely available as the audience it so well deserves should see it.

★★★★★★★★★

THE PAST

Life for Marie is very fraught. Ahmed, her soon-to-be-ex husband arrives back in Paris from his native Tehran to finalise their divorce.  Marie is already living with her next husband-to-be Samir a laundry owner whose current wife is still lying in a coma after a failed suicide attempt. And the ramshackled crowded household has three children including two daughters from a marriage that pre-dated the one to Ahmad, and the oldest one Lucie a rebellious teenager prefers her stepdad over her mother and her new beau and makes no effort to disguise this fact.

Ahmed's return soon exposes the fact that his relationship with Marie still lacks closure and there is a combination of affection and resentment that still pervades.  Marie still insists on testing Ahmed's feelings like announcing just minutes before their divorce judgement that she is pregnant with Samir's child.  Samir in turn feels Ahmed's presence is threatening to his own relationship with Marie and insists moving back to his own apartment until Ahmed leaves town, and hopefully their lives, again.

Then suddenly the whole plot takes a sudden turn and adds more than one other complex layer which shakes all their emotions up. It's an unpredictable but rather brilliant drama with more than its fair share of twists and turns that keep you completely intrigued to the very end.

The storyteller is Asghar Farhadi the Iranian auteur that won his country's first ever Best Foreign Picture Oscar with his spellbinding 'A Separation'  ..... another family drama about a couple having to make difficult decisions. This new one cannot possible match this but it comes pretty close with a rather stunning performance by Bérénice Bejo as the anguished Marie which won her the Best Actress Award at Cannes.

Available on Amazon

★★★★★★★★

ADULT WORLD

Amy is a poet.  And a rather annoying whiny one at that. Just recently graduated from Syracuse University with a massive student loan debt and living with parents who's bank accounts she has drained and who's patience she has finally exhausted, her life is a mess. No local employer wants to employ a Poetry Major so she ends up getting a job at a local porn store run a sweet old married couple she ignores and managed by Alex a cute young man she patronises.

She does however discover that Rat Billings her all-time favorite poet is about to do a signing in a local bookstore and she starts to stalk him desperate to be taken on as his 'protege'.  Past his prime, Billings has seen better days and has never managed to re-capture the success of his earlier books back in the 1980's, and is now reduced to producing jokey anthologies to sell in Urban Outfitters.  He is bitter and sardonic whilst Amy is irritatingly self-absorbed and simply aggravates Billings by her relentless persistence.

Amy spends most of her time and money submitting her work to countless periodicals who reject her work without hesitation, and she is desperate for Billings to confirm the massive talent she alone believes she has. He eventually tells that she must live life and go do 'things' before she can really start to begin as a writer. Odd then that on the very morning she wakes up from losing her virginity (to the Store Manager she despised) she gets a phone call offering her a full time commission writing erotic for a porn magazine she had been baited to submit a piece too.

The movie starts with Amy in her bedroom with its poster of her idol Sylvia Plath who she is about to copy by sticking her head in the gas oven.  It's a hint of what was to follow which was all a tad over melodramatic even for a self absorbed bothersome young woman like her. She was played by pretty Emma Roberts who, in case of art copying life, is currently studying poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Alex was played by Evan Peters who in real life is now Miss Robert's fiancee even though last year she ended up in a Canadian jail after being charged with domestic abuse against him!

One troubling question that remained in my mind after watching this rather irritating movie, was why would anyone cast the glorious Cloris Leachman (as the Porn Store Proprietor) and then give her nothing to do/say? The one bright spot was Rubia, a glamourous transvestite with a very caustic wit who seemed to have unspecified role in the Store and in Alex's life, rather brilliantly played by Armando Riesco.

If you can cope with 97 minutes filled with a pretty but shallow young woman whining 'oh whoa is me', then you'll like this movie much more than I did.

Out now in US theaters and on Amazon

★★★★

CAPTIVATED : THE TRIALS OF PAMELA SMART

In 1990 in a small New England town Pamela Smart, an attractive blond sexpot teacher who was having an affair with one of her students, was  accused of plotting her husband’s murder. This rather scandalous cause celebre was the first ever trial to be televised and this new HBO documentary from filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar focuses on how the intense media coverage completely manipulated the case that sealed Pamela's fate.

The three teenage boys responsible for actually killing Mr Smart were cajoled by the Authorities into 'plea bargaining' where, if they gave evidence at Pamela Smart's trial, they would only be charged with 2nd Degree murder.  Smart however, who was not present when the actual deed was done, was still charged with 1st Degree murder. They would end up serving a fixed time sentence before being freed, where she would face life imprisonment without Parole. It was one of the many disturbing facts that Zagar's documentary uncovered.

One of the worse ones that emerged at the trial was how Smart's teenage intern Cecelia Pierce who had been coerced to being a witness had been fitted with a 'wire'.  The tapes she made whilst talking to Smart were almost completely unintelligible but the Prosecution had them greatly enhanced without the involvement of a licensed audiologist the Defence Team proffered. This may have been yet another nail in Smart's coffin but it made a media star out of Pierce who also pocketed $100000 for her life story.

Two days before the Trial even started Smarts story was turned into TV movie starring Helen Hunt with the local newspaper reporter playing himself.  Despite this and the daily deluge of coverage by a hostile media that had already convicted Smart in newsprint and on air, the Trial Judge still refused to sequester the Jury, and so they went home every night to absorb this ceaseless onslaught of broadcasting. Never before had the media been so instrumental in shaping how the American public learned about a small-town murder case, and they had them baying for blood. Pamela's that is.

After a speedy 18-day trial, Smart was convicted and was whisked away to the Bedford Correctional Facility in New York for being an accomplice to first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and witness tampering. She will never ever be released save for a personal pardon from the Massachusetts Governor. Each of the young men involved in the case received lesser sentences, two have already been released and the other two are up for parole in 2015. 

There's has been another movie based on the story starring Nicole Kidman called 'To Die For'  but it was the earlier TV one that had the most effect. One of the teenagers who had accompanied the murderers that fatal night was set to re-confirm his original statement that the Police had suppressed as it had supported Smart's claims of innocence, but he now reneged on this and all he could remember ....word by word.... was the fictional movie version of the things!

Zeger tries his best to get beyond what he presents as a travesty of justice and in effect puts the media on trial for its coverage.  Inevitably whilst he does this, he is in fact adding yet another layer of speculation and opinion making which maybe more even handed than in the past but it is still yet just another case media manipulation.

This debut documentary of Zeger's will be shown on HBO TV in the US later this year.

★★★★★★★★