Category Archives: The Morgue

Elton John’s Million Dollar Piano

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Elton JohnHitting the jackpot in Las Vegas may be dicey, but you can count on Elton John’s Million Dollar Piano show, which debuted in 2011, for a first-class entertainment experience there that blends visual and musical wizardry.

Sir Elton’s show at the Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace includes 20 top tunes in two hours. Joining him is a superb backup band including drummer Nigel Olsson, percussionist Ray Cooper and guitarist Davey Johnstone, each of whom has played with Sir Elton for over four decades. They know each other—and the material— so well that the groove is stirring and strong.

Sir Elton, who turns 69 in March, is celebrating a 50-year collaboration with lyricist Bernie Taupin. His piano playing remains rollicking and his voice is still strong (for a limited time, you can hear a BBC interview with him here). The Colosseum has excellent sight lines and sound that brings the audience right into the mix. At the end of the show, some in the front rows go onstage to sing around the piano with Sir Elton.

It took Yamaha five years to design and engineer the piano expressly for the space and show. Co-producer and lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe explained, “I always thought that the piano would be an extraordinary thing, (but) I wasn’t sure how we would integrate it into the show. It wasn’t until she (the piano is named Blossom) was plugged in, turned on and tuned up that I suddenly felt like she had come home.”

The piano is an “electronic paintbox,” which augments and enhances each tune and includes photographic images and colorful effects. For example, when Sir Elton sings “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” a photo montage appears showing him in his outlandish outfits at various stages in his performing career. For “Crocodile Rock,” the piano edges and backdrop are green glowing scales. According to the show’s website, the 19 animated films and videos that the piano is keyed to were completed in less than four months and involved 175 people working 24/7 in London. The “canvas” is a tennis-court-sized screen behind the band.

Co-producer Mark Fisher had free rein to imagine the set design. “What I was imagining was the creation of an over-the-top world that presented Elton as I saw him, dancing on the knife-edge that separates high art from low camp,” adding “I was looking to balance the huge size of the Colosseum stage with the human scale of one man at the piano.” Huge hanging keyboards, rockets and Sun King images, along with tall guard dogs whose gaze is focused on Sir Elton, add visual interest to the vast expanse.

Sir Elton is in Japan and Australia on tour now, but he and the Million Dollar Piano return to Caesar’s from April 16-30, 2016. It’s a sure bet for an evening of great entertainment. For more information, go to Caesar’s website.

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings.

Brooklyn

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Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn

Not in the mood for the stunning violence of The Revenant or the bitter racism of The Hateful Eight? Nor the angst of Carol or The Danish Girl? Nor the special effects weaponry of Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Here’s a nice, sweet historical movie about first love, the pains and rewards of immigration, and the choices we make.

Brooklyn (trailer), as directed by John Crowley, with a script by Academy Award nominee Nick Hornby (based on Colm Tóibín’s book of the same name), reminds us that leaving home is a lonely choice, even when it’s the best choice a person has. (And so much harder before email, skype, and budget air fares.)

When clear-eyed Eilis Lacey (played by Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan) leaves Ireland to come to America in the early 1950s, she has no confidence that she’ll ever see Ireland again. In a bit of cross-cultural serendipity, she meets Italian plumber Tony (Emory Cohen), and each is charmed with the other and the cultures they come from. Watching her try to learn to eat spaghetti under the tutelage of her bantering roommates is splashily funny. But when tragedy at home calls Eilis back to Ireland, she does go, despite the length, cost, and difficulty of the journey. Once home, the inducements to stay mount.

Brooklyn—which was also an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture—has moments with “a resonance that extends far beyond its immediate circumstances,” says Glenn Kenny for Rogerebert.com. It’s a beautiful, big-hearted movie that will leave you smiling, Irish eyes or no.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audiences 90%.

Bonus treat: an interview with Colm Tóibín and Alice Walker (The Color Purple) about the translation of their novels into film, including a guide to pronouncing his name.

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The Piano Lesson

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piano

(photo: Ovi Gherman, creative commons license)

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is on stage at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre through February 7, one of his ten plays—The Century Cycle—set in Pittsburgh’s predominantly African American Hill District in different decades of the 20th century. The Piano Lesson and another play in the cycle, Fences, which McCarter produced two years ago, won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Piano Lesson takes place in 1936, in the midst of The Great Migration of southern blacks to northern industrial cities—Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago. One of its themes is the difference in perspective of visitors and newcomers from the rural south compared to their family members already established in the urban north.

The story centers on members of the Charles family and (with a captivating stage set showing both the urban neighborhood and the intimacy of the Charles’s home): Doaker, a cook on the railroad, his widowed niece Berniece, and her 11-year-old daughter. Their well-ordered routines are disrupted by the arrival from Sunflower County, Mississippi, of Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie, and his friend Lymon, who’ve driven north with a ramshackle truck full of watermelons to sell.

Boy Willie has been offered the chance to purchase the farmland of a white man (Sutter) who died under mysterious circumstances. He’s saved up some money for the purchase, the sale of the watermelons will help, and to seal the deal he needs the proceeds from selling the family piano. Berniece refuses to sell it. Carved on the piano is the story of their family going back to slavery days. So beyond the rural/urban, south/north divide, there is the tug-of-war between honoring the past versus enabling the future.

Further disrupting the family is the claim by each of the northern household that they’ve seen the ghost of the dead white man, and their willingness or unwillingness to believe that Boy Willie killed him. Playgoers can develop various theories as to the reality and significance of this particular ghost, but it’s clear that the characters are haunted by many ghosts, including those represented in the piano’s carvings, and, more immediately, Berniece and her uncle Wining Boy’s dead spouses.

The excellent cast—Stephen Tyrone Williams as Boy Willie (with an unbelievably long Act II monolog that possibly should be trimmed); Miriam A. Hyman as Berniece; John Earl Jelks as Doaker; and Cleavant Derricks as Doaker’s slick brother Wining Boy—is directed by Jade King Carroll. David Pegram was a perfect Lyman, a half-step behind and eager to become citified. There is much good humor in the characters’ interactions of the kind only close kin can indulge in.

The presence of a composer, sound designer, and music director in the crew credits suggests how significant music is in Wilson’s conception of the family and their story. The beautifully staged men’s work song about the Parchman Prison Farm is long, but not long enough!

The program for the play includes a helpful family tree of the Charles family, who can trace their lineage (thanks to the piano) back to Doaker’s and Wining Boy’s great-grandparents. This is an unusually full picture of family during slavery days, as demonstrated in Henry Louis Gates’s fascinating Finding Our Roots PBS television program. Reflecting on ancestors in slavery is powerful, as Regina Mason’s discovery of a great-grandfather who was a former slave, attests. These modern-day quests, three or four generations after the action of Wilson’s play, illuminate how some members of many families, like Boy Willie, wanted to put all that history behind them and how others, like Berniece, believed in keeping it close. In her case, the lessons of the piano were worth more than money.

The Revenant

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RevenantLeonardo DiCaprio won a Golden Globe for his performance as Hugh Glass in The Revenant (trailer), and the movie is nominated for a dozen Oscars. If these awards were for fortitude alone, the accolades would be well-deserved, as cast and crew have spoken at length about the physical hardships they faced in filming this movie. “The elements sort of took over,” DiCaprio told Wired interviewer Robert Capps. One must wonder, why did they undertake such a difficult and potentially perilous project?

Perhaps they did it because younger audiences today haven’t grown up knowing about the privations and violence inherent in the settlement of the West—there was life before Disneyland—and need to have the blood and guts smacked in their face. In which case, the movie is a success. It’s based in part on Michael Punke’s novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, set in 1820s Montana and South Dakota along the Upper Missouri River.

If they want to give cinematography awards to Emmanuel Lubezki for this film, I will be standing in the front row cheering. It is a beautiful film—with breathtaking views of the western United States (and Canada, Mexico, and Argentina)—shot with a deep depth of field worthy of a Sierra Club coffee table book. Snow-melt rivers, star-spangled nights, forests that pull you into the sky.

It’s just that we’re shown unspeakable violence, then astounding beauty, then unspeakable violence, then astounding beauty, then unsp. . . .you get the rhythm. In fact the violence was always so gruesome that it became (I hate to say this, since human and animal lives were purportedly involved) borrring. The beauty that followed it began to feel like heavy-handed ironic commentary, losing any capacity to soothe. The sound design and music are emotionally apt and compelling, I thought (score by Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who wrote the script with Mark L. Smith, did not conceive of Hugh Glass as anything more than a character bent on revenge. Glass pursues this hollow quest for pretty much two hours and thirty-six minutes. What I like to see in a character is some growth, some change, some “ok, this is awful, but I can rise above it” (or not). But while DiCaprio may well be capable of a meatier performance, the film doesn’t ask it of him. We learn nothing by watching it except that having an angry mama-bear drooling over you is really disgusting, but wait a sec, now she’s going to fling you around like a rag doll again. And drool some more.

For good reason, we don’t like the Frenchies, or the single-minded Indians, or the dim Americans. Everywhere they appear, Lubezki’s beautiful landscape is soon tainted by blood, usually human. Please. A little nuance. But, as Manohla Dargis says in a New York Times review, Iñárritu “isn’t given to subtlety.” The word revenant means “ghost,” and it was clear why the ghosts of Glass’s murdered wife and son keep reappearing and where they will lead him. And I won’t even mention the many, many instances in which the viewer Sees What’s Coming a Mile Away.

All this made me long to reread The Big Sky, the 1947 novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner A.B. Guthrie, Jr. The novel was chosen as “The Best Novel of the American West” by members of the Western Literature Association. As in The Revenant, The Big Sky’s characters travel the Missouri River, live as trappers and guides, and face the vicissitudes of weather and the native population. Yet their struggles will stay with you always, while, I fear, The Revenant is at least dramatically forgettable.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 87%.

Weekend Movie Pick: The Danish Girl

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Alicia Vikander, Eddie Redmayne, Danish Girl

Alicia Vikander & Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl

You (like me) may have admired Eddie Redmayne in the TV version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008), in My Week with Marilyn (2011), as Marius in Les Miserables 2012), and as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (Academy Award, 2014). You still may be surprised at how moving his delicate performance is in The Danish Girl (trailer).

I knew vaguely what this movie was about—very “loosely based” on the lives of mid-1920s Danish painters Einar and Gerda Wegener.

Despite their happy and loving marriage, Einar comes to realize he is a woman in a man’s body. “Lili,” as his alter ego is named, is at first a diversion for the pair, then a painful inevitability, and Einar becomes one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. Both of them suffer because of Lili’s condition and the strains it places on their love, yet they desperately try to make some kind of relationship work. Yet it’s dangerous to be a pioneer.

While Redmayne is superb, he’s matched in nuanced expressiveness by Swedish actor Alicia Vikander as Gerda. The delicious Matthias Schoenaerts plays Einar’s childhood friend, Hans, with whom a frantic Gerda reconnects while the couple is in Paris. Ben Whishaw also appears, determined to court the shy Lili, or is it Einar he recognizes and pursues?

Not much was known about transgender identities in 1925, and the medical practitioners with whom the couple shares its secret propose predictably draconian measures. But the real drama is watching Redmayne transform himself into a female being. Says Nathan Heller’s Vogue article, “He is no longer recognizable as a 33-year-old man; suddenly, the flash strikes his face and the transformation is complete.”

The film, directed by Tom Hooper with a script by English playwright Lucinda Coxon, is based on the 2000 David Ebershoff novel. Due to Coxon’s diligent research, the movie actually contains numerous factual details not in the book. Tim Gray’s interview with Coxon for Variety reveals that the film is actually closer to what really happened than either the novel or Lili Elbe’s pastiche of a “memoir,” which was, Coxon told Gray, “a work of many hands.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 71%; audiences 75%.

Savannah’s Southern Charms

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horse, ship

Figurehead, Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Last week I wrote about the terrific walking tours we did in Savannah last Thanksgiving. And there was so much more! Here are just some of the highlights:

  • Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum (41 Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard; ) at the William Scarbrough House and Gardens– If you like stories of the old sailing days and maritime disasters, as I do, this is your place. No sightings of Captain Jack Aubrey, but unbelievably gorgeous ship models, carvings, artworks, and short videos. Note: a lot of ships have been named Savannah!
  • Inspired, we did the one-hour Savannah Riverboat Cruise of the harbor and from the water, you see the city differently. Savannah was a strategic port city in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and today is one of the nation’s largest seaports, with direct access to the Atlantic Ocean. Having taken a lot of riverboat tours, I can authoritatively say this was one of the best narrations ever. Interesting and informative. Located at 9 East River Street.
  • Too much city prompted us to take the short drive to the 175-acre Oatland Island Wildlife Center, which is quite manageable for people of all abilities (strollers), and you see some pretty impressive critters up close (gators, mountain lions, buffalo, wolves, and much more) and in their natural habitats. There’s a boardwalk through the salt marsh and well-marked trails: 711 Sandtown Road; 912/395-1212.
  • Congregation Mickve Israel on Monterey Square was founded in 1733 with the largest single migration of Jews to the colonies—mostly Sephardic Jews who’d fled to London to escape Portugal’s Inquisition. The sanctuary is in gothic style (consecrated in 1878) and its museum includes two 15th century deerskin Torahs.
  • Being in town at Thanksgiving, we got to see the Christmas Lights Boat Parade on the Savannah River, with scores of boats “decked out” in lights, displays, Santas, music, and fun! We initially watched from the balcony of one of my favorite restaurants of the trip—Vic’s on the River (26 East Bay Street)—then from the esplanade.
  • cemetery angel

    Bonaventure Cemetery (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

    On the must-see list (but too far out for the trolley tours) is Bonaventure Cemetery (330 Bonaventure Road), site of the unforgettable scene with the hoodoo priestess in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Alas, the statue of the “Bird Girl” from the cover of that book had to be moved to a more secure location. But there you’ll find an unforgettable southern gothic atmosphere, as well as graves of national treasures Johnny Mercer, whose tombstone inscription is “And the Angels Sing” and Conrad Aiken, whose reads “Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown.”

 

Not to mention Forsyth Park where the elaborate fountain reportedly came from a Sears, Roebuck catalog, the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, the beautiful Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, the childhood home of Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts . . .

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Five Most-Read Posts of 2015

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red pencil, grammar, comma

(photo: Martijn Nijenhuls, Creative Commons license)

Of the 208 posts I published on this website in 2015, these five had the largest readership:

#5 – Pump Up Your Vocabulary – Test the size of your vocabulary, and use these resources to rejuvenate the tired array of words we overuse. Awesome, no?! Plus a reminder of the importance of reading—fiction, especially—in building a rich vocabulary. With more words you can express more ideas, with greater precision and subtlety.

#4 – Fan Fic Fest – Lots of people over 30 are only dimly aware of this phenomenon. I wanted to know more, so audited a class devoted to it at Princeton. Wow. Takeaways: fan fiction (loosely: derivative works) has always existed; people write fan fiction for love of existing characters (Holmes & Watson; Spock and Kirk; Little Ponies), not money; it’s a tremendously diverse enterprise, though there is a strain of unexpected couplings and freewheeling sex; it’s decoupling works from the intents of their original creators and making them fractal, with derivative works on top of derivative works.

#3 – Best Reads of 2014 – Soon to be followed by Best Reads of 2015!

#2 – *****The Cowboy and the Cossack – this 2014 book review was near the top of the charts again in 2015. Generally rave reviews from everyone who’s read it, as well as from me.

#1 – Freelance Editing Services Booming – At a time when book lovers complain about the poor quality of editing in books today (and forget proofreading altogether), this article covered reports of a cottage industry in freelance editing services. Included are links to some reputable-seeming services and some “beware of” resources.

Weekend Movie Fare: Carol

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Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Carol

Rooney Mara & Cate Blanchett

Hailed as a top Oscar contender this year in numerous categories—best director, film, actress, and cinematography—Carol (trailer) is the story of a wealthy but unhappily married woman (played by Cate Blanchett) who embarks on a relationship with a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) she meets by chance. Unquestionably, it’s a period piece (nice Packards!), written by author Patricia Highsmith, herself a lesbian, who wrote high-class mysteries like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and it would have had considerably more shock value—and prompted more audience reflection—in its 1952 novel version, The Price of Salt.

In a story set in that era and with the social class differences involved, there are lots of ways for this relationship to go wrong. Worse, with a husband willing to play his ace—custody of his and Carol’s four-year-old daughter Rindy—the stakes are high. Yet, I didn’t find this movie either engaging or revelatory. Of course Blanchett is terrific, as always, though even she may underplay the role of Carol through most of the film. Mara, as the initially childlike Therese Belivet, is so indeterminate that it’s hard to root for her happiness (what would that require, exactly?) and even harder to see what the glamorous, sophisticated Carol sees in her. Perhaps director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy hoped that, by making Mara more or less a cipher, viewers would be free to pin their own romantic hopes and dreams on her.

In the New York Times, critic A.O.Scott calls Carol “a study in human magnetism, in the physics and optics of eros . . . (giving) emotional and philosophical weight to what might be a perfectly banal question: What do these women see each in each other.” That was my question, all right. Therese says she is almost will-less, that the complications in her life arise because all she ever does is say “yes,” and the film takes on the challenge of imbuing her most important affirmation with real meaning. In a season where we’ve seen so many excellent high-drama films, this one, to me, did less than I would have liked it to. I’d give it a B-.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 94%; audiences: 79%.

Savannah Walking Tours

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Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, Savannah, Georgia

Savannah (photo: wikimedia.org)

On a recent week-long trip to Savannah, my family group indulged in a number of interesting walking tours. Not only were they a good way to explore this beautiful city, they helped us stave off any extra pounds we might have put on, thanks to this city’s fabulous food! One of us wore a fitbit, which provided electronic validation of the more than 16,000 steps we accomplished on our most ambitious day, but 14,000 was not unusual.

Flannery O'Connor, Savannah

Mini-lending library outside Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home (she raised peacocks)(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

It’s hard to believe that at one point, developers wanted to destroy the system of squares that make the city so unique, as the nation’s first “planned city.” Each square has different features—statues, fountains, styles of benches—and most are filled with live oaks draped in Spanish Moss.

How much you enjoy walking tours depends a lot on the personality of your guides and what they choose to highlight. Maybe we were just lucky, but all our tours were great. In addition to several house tours—including the Mercer Williams mansion on Monterey Square, featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the tiny early childhood home of author Flannery O’Conner—we especially enjoyed:

  • The “Savannah Walks” one-and-a-half hour Civil War walking tour (912/704-1841). We heard the story of how Savannah wasn’t burned by General Sherman—the precise reason depending on the guide—probably some combination of: the Confederate forces had already abandoned the town, Sherman was set up in the beautiful and comfortable Green Meldrin house on Madison Square, and he had friends who lived in the city.
  • The “Southern Strolls” history walk (912/480-4477). I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this, as we’d already done so many, and maybe others felt that way, too, as only three of us showed up at the Johnny Mercer Bench in Johnson Square at the appointed time. The guide gave a very quirky, personalized tour, and while we saw a few of the same sights, his interpretations were so entertaining, we all agreed it was the best tour of all!
  • To explore some of the area’s African-American history, we took the Freedom Trail Tour led by Johnnie Brown. While not strictly speaking a walking tour, this minibus excursion does let passengers out to visit the Civil Rights museum and the First African Baptist Church—organized in 1773—whose upstairs pews, made by slaves, retain markings indicating which African tribe the congregants came from.
Savannah carriage

Our carriage awaits! (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

For a general orientation to the city, the hour-long carriage tour that leaves from City Market provided a good overview (912/236-6756) at a pace slow enough to absorb the stream of information. We did that one our first morning. Later that day, we also took one of the many trolley tours. Although it covered a wider area, the presentation was canned, and added little to what we had already learned. There are several trolley tour companies and you can’t walk a block without seeing one pass.

So, going to Savannah? Pack your walking shoes!

Your Travel Circles:

Although Savannah is well worth a visit on its own, you can add on a couple of days there pretty easily if you’re traveling to:

  • Charleston, South Carolina (106 miles)
  • Jacksonville, Florida (139 miles)
  • Atlanta (250 miles)

The Big Short

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The Big Short

Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale

Five stars for this comedy-drama (trailer) based on the best-selling Michael Lewis book about the 2008 financial crisis and the lonely voices in the wilderness calling, “Housing bubble,” “Housing bubble,” “This will end baaaadleeee.” The idea that mortgage-backed securities could be anything other than rock solid so went against conventional wisdom that no one listened. But, as we know now, these securities had become more and more vulnerable as riskier loans were bundled into them, and the chaff soon outweighed the wheat.

It takes a bit of understanding about how this financial market operated to grasp the significance of the action. Director Adam McKay, who wrote the screenplay with Lewis and Charles Randolph, cleverly provides the necessary background, having characters break the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience. For example, from her symbolic bubble bath and sipping champagne, actress Margot Robbie tells us what a financial bubble actually means. It’s “ a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea and despair,” says A.O. Scott in his New York Times review, which includes a clip from McKay on some of the clever ways the film explains the financial goings-on.

The cast does an exemplary job of embuing characters with strong personalities. Christian Bale plays Dr. Michael Burry, a loner physician-turned-hedge-fund-manager who figures out the problem early (and whose character confirms my aversion to heavy metal music). He takes the unprecedented step of actually looking at the individual mortgages bundled into the securities being offered and sees that many of them are weak and involve adjustable rate loans. When their interest rates go up, the homeowners will default. This, to him is an investment opportunity; he’ll bet against the mortgage market. The banks are happy to back his scheme (involving credit default swaps), seeing it as a sure-fire winner for them.

One of the banks he approaches has on staff a skeptical analyst, played by Ryan Gosling, who believes the good doctor may just be right. He convinces the unconventional trading firm led by Mark Baum (Steve Carell) to invest in the swaps, too. In one of the movie’s funniest sequences, Baum sends staff to Florida to investigate some of these mortgages. They find unbuilt houses, a forest of “for sale” signs, and two beach-bum mortgage brokers (Max Greenfield and Billy Magnussen) , who don’t hesitate to say they will insure basically anything. “Why are they confessing?” Baum whispers to his staffer. “They’re not confessing. They’re bragging,” he replies. Similarly, Melissa Leo, as an official at an investment rating agency, is badgered into explaining how, if her firm rated investments accurately, the banks would just take their business down the street.

In a Colorado garage, another pair of youthful investors (played by John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) wants to parlay $30 million into a bigger fortune. They set out to New York to figure out how. There they stumble onto the real estate problem and see the credit default swaps as their big chance, but they need connections, and they get help from their neighbor back home, a disenchanted former investment banker (Brad Pitt).

It’s telling that the few people who foresaw and took advantage of the inevitable crisis were all, one way or another, Wall Street outsiders. They weren’t unaware that their gains were made on the backs of everyday Americans who lost billions in housing value, jobs and homes, pension fund value, and savings. Meanwhile, the many individuals and institutions whose carelessness, greed, or criminality created the bubble in the first place have not been called to account. No less an expert than Paul Krugman has written, “I think (the movie) does a terrific job of making Wall Street skullduggery entertaining, of exploiting the inherent black humor of how it went down.” And, even more important, he says it “got the underlying economic, financial, and political story right.” And it’s still a story lots of people don’t want Americans to hear.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%; audiences, 91%.