BEFORE: I think I'm going to make it - the start of the Doc Block on July 1 is just about here, I just need to make it through the weekend and a couple of LONG movies, but one film is already watched so I've got a bit of a head start. It was two weeks ago that I snuck out one day to go to a movie theater, I stupidly went to a theater just a block from Madison Square Garden and there was an NBA Finals game that night, so I walked out into a madhouse and had to pass through some police checkpoints - OK, that one's on me. Thankfully I still had my Tribeca Film Festival pass and I showed it to prove I only wanted to pass through the zone and get down to the theater, which was partially true. Really the crowd was so huge that was the last place I wanted to be, I probably should have just jumped on the subway and come straight home - but you never know, I checked in at work just in case somebody called out.
Liev Schreiber carries over from "Golda". Tonight's film had the buzz about eight months ago, but then I didn't hear anything about it during awards season, that's maybe not a good sign. No Oscar nominations, but it's directed by Darren Aronofsky, who's got a pretty good track record, so we'll see. I've met the man three times, once at a screening and once at Comic-Con and once in the middle of Tribeca Fest.
THE PLOT: When his neighbor asks him to take care of his cat, a former baseball prodigy now working as a bartender finds himself in the middle of gangsters without knowing why. He must use all his cunning to survive and understand what is happening.
AFTER: I think there are a lot of similarities between this film and "One Battle After Another" - they don't share any cast members, though, obviously they're directed by different people and they're based on different books, and one's set in Los Angeles and the other's set in NYC, but I could perhaps make a case for today's film being kind of the East Coast version of "One Battle", but also one hour shorter, meaning it may not be as detailed, but it also won't take up as much of your time. You do you, and proceed as you want. But this film really captures the feeling of living in the dirty, messed-up and mobbed-up Lower East Side in Manhattan. I moved out of that neighborhood way back in 1989, after a summer spent watching drug carriers barf up pills to sell to customers in the park behind my apartment. Umm, thanks but no thanks - hand me those listings for apartments in Brooklyn - no, wait, maybe Queens.
This is set back in 1998, so about 9 years after I moved out of there, before the smart phone craze but back when people had pagers or beepers. People of little means could still somehow get fourth-floor walk-up apartments, which of course can be a pain in the ass, not just the stairs but with those faulty unlockable windows, no air conditioning, steam heat, lots of street noise, and of course the weird neighbors who come and go at all hours. Somebody really nailed this, I assume the director lives or lived somewhere in this neighborhood. In fact, I know it for sure, because I worked a summer at the AMC Theater in the East Village, and there was an older lady there who worked afternoons scanning tickets. Her name was Miss Kitty, and she appears in this film, in passing, a little research tells me that she's spent years living in the same building as the director. Yes, it's the same "Miss Kitty" I worked with - I used to joke that she worked for whatever building was there before the movie theater, maybe it was a nightclub or a stage, and she stuck around and when they tore that building down and built the movie theater, they just built it around her.
But here in the fictional world she lives in the same building as Hank Thompson, a former baseball player who roots for the San Francisco Giants, and talks to his mother about them every day on the phone. But he's haunted by a car crash that killed his friend AND his baseball career at the same time, plus left him an alcoholic. Probably an alcoholic should NOT be working at a bar, but that's where we find ourselves. He works nights at Paul's Bar, and he's seeing a young woman named Yvonne who works at a hospital E.R. or something, and picks him up after he closes the bar for a booty call. Well, at least they're on the same schedule, this relationship could work unless one of them starts working day shift.
Trouble comes when his punk neighbor, Russ, asks him to feed his cat while he's out of town. Before you know it, Russian mobsters come looking for Russ, and even though Hank explains Russ is gone, they still beat Hank up so bad he loses a kidney. After they come back and break into Russ's apartment, Hank calls a narcotics detective, Elise Roman, who reveals that Russ is a drug dealer working for a couple of Hasidic gangsters, the "scary monsters". Roman says that if the scary monsters show up again, he should call her right away. Hank finds a weird rubber poop in the cat's litter box, with a key inside - perhaps this is what the Russians are looking for, but what does it unlock? And where? Unfortunately Hank gets drunk at the bar and forgets where he put the key.
The Russians come back, with a Puerto Rican associate named Colorado, and they beat him up too, threaten him with a gun, however none of this helps him remember where he put or lost the key. (At this point he really should get drunk again, to remember, but he's a kidney down and that's really not a great idea.) Once the Russians leave he gets chased by the Hasidim, gangsters, the Drucker brothers. He manages to give them the slip, but since it's not safe to go home, he circles back to Yvonne's apartment, only to find someone has killed her.
With few places to turn, he goes back to Elise Roman, only to find that she's in league with the Russians and Colorado, however she claims that they did NOT kill Yvonne. So they all go to Paul's Bar to try and find the key, only it's not there. This is where impatient people start to get frustrated, and when they do, the bullets start flying. Paul tries desperately to defend his bar, but he's only got a shotgun against criminals with automatic weapons. Hank is able to lock himself in the back-room until the others leave, then he sets out on his own quest to find the key. At this point Russ returns from London, and reveals that the key unlocks a storage locker with a large amount of money in it, Russ has been acting as a go-between for the various factions, because he's the only person everyone trusts to divide up the money and give everyone their share. The trouble came when he really did need to go to London for family reasons, and nobody wanted to wait until he got back. Russ wants to take all of the money and make Hank the fall guy, but Hank knocks him unconscious instead, reversing that situation.
Hank spends a night on Coney Island, after Russ's head injuries kind of catch up with him, and then ends up going to the Hasidic Drucker brothers to shoot up the Russian's supper club, to kind of put an end to the Russian mob, but Roman is still active and threatening to kill Hank's mother. The Druckers agree to kill the dirty cop as long as Hank will lead them to the money stash afterwards. But first, a couple bowls of matzoh ball soup with the Drucker's bubbe. How nice. I won't say how it all ends up, but Hank manages to walk a very tight line, playing one faction off against the other, when all of the factions had reasons to kill or frame him at various times.
Look, I don't know why two similar-ish films came out in the same year - and I don't know how one managed to win Best Picture and the other one had the buzz last September, like simply EVERYBODY wanted to see this, and now it's nine months later and you just don't hear anyone talking about it any more. That's just how it goes sometimes.
Directed by Darren Aronofsky (director of "The Whale" and "Mother!")
Also starring Austin Butler (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Matt Smith (last seen in "Morbius"), Regina King (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Zoe Kravitz (last seen in "Blink Twice"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Strange Days"), Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio / Bad Bunny (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Alright Now"), Carol Kane (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Action Bronson (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), George Abud, Macy Rodman, Nikita Kukushkin, Yuri Kolokolnikov (last seen in "Kraven the Hunter"), D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Brill (last seen in "Slice"), Tenoch Huerta (last seen in "The Forever Purge"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Jay Kelly"), Dominique Silver, Shaun O'Hagan (last seen in "The Good Nurse"), Jake Bentley Young, Kitty Lawrence, Oleg Prudius, Gregg Bello (last seen in "Mother!"), Stanley B. Herman (ditto), Eddie De Harp, Nu Ka Ki, Renee Asofsky (last seen in "The Fountain"), Henry Wong, Matt Gauland, David Weise, Arishel Ramirez, Janelle McDermoth, Craig "Radioman" Castaldo (last seen in "Jurassic World: Rebirth"), Eric Ian (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending", with the voices of Mike Francesca (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, Lee Harris, Judy de Angelis (last seen in "The Siege"),
RATING: 6 out of 10 loaves of challah bread
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