Nancy Reagan prepares to surprise her husband with a birthday cake to deflect attention from a potential media crisis in THE REAGAN SHOW
THE REAGAN SHOW: OUR COUNTRY WAS HIS STAGE (Sierra Pettengill & Pacho Velez, 2017)
Tuesday, April 25, Cinépolis Chelsea 4, 8:45
Wednesday, April 26, Cinépolis Chelsea 2, 6:45
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Taking its name from The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s 1998 satire in which Jim Carrey plays a character whose entire life is a reality television program, The Reagan Show posits the fortieth president of the United States as the first full-time made-for-TV leader and his two terms as the height of performance art. The film opens with a December 1988 ABC News interview in which David Brinkley asks outgoing president Ronald Reagan, “Did you learn anything as an actor that has been useful to you as president?” Reagan responds, “There have been times in this office when I wondered how you can do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.” Writer-director Pacho Velez (Manakamana) and producer-director Sierra Pettengill (Town Hall, Cutie and the Boxer) gained access to archives that included what was known as White House Television (WHTV), raw footage shot by White House cameras that obsessively followed Reagan, reminiscent of how Richard Nixon audiotaped everything in the Oval Office. The WHTV clips go behind-the-scenes of the before, during, and after of major and minor events, depicting the cultivation of Reagan’s public image, molding him to look like a leader while choosing style over substance. “The White House has become more and more the stage, a theater, and the question has become, Are the television networks gonna manage that theater, are they gonna manage that stage, or is the White House gonna do that?” communications director David Gergen asks. The all-archival chronological film includes news reports and commentary by such journalists and political insiders as William F. Buckley, Andrew Young, Ted Koppel, Lyn Nofziger, Sam Donaldson, Chris Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, George Will, Tom Brokaw, George Shultz, Peter Jennings, Bill Plante, David Frost, Charles Kuralt, Joe Biden, and Howard Baker as they share their thoughts on Reagan the president and Reagan the media star.
All-archival documentary explores the creation of a public image for the fortieth president of the United States
The film, edited with a sense of humor by cowriter Francisco Bello, Daniel Garber, and David Barker, focuses on key aspects of Reagan’s two terms: his summits with new Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War, his development of the Star Wars SDI initiative, the arms-for-hostages crisis, and his relationship with the press and his wife, Nancy. The Great Communicator is seen rehearsing an endorsement for John Sununu in which he cannot pronounce Sununu’s name correctly, acting like a macho man on his ranch, meeting Michael Jackson and Mr. T, and pardoning turkeys for Thanksgiving. Pettengill and Velez also highlight telling scenes from some of Reagan’s films, explaining in a caption that he “was almost always typecast as the good-natured, all-American hero,” essentially preparing him for politics. In addition, there are numerous parallels to what is happening today, with a reality television star in the White House who plays hard and fast with the truth while the public grows concerned about nuclear war. “Together, we’ll make America great again,” Reagan declares at a rally. As White House deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver tells Barbara Walters, “It’s the staging, how you stage the message. It’s a game.” Five presidents later, it’s still a game we’re all playing, but who is winning and who is losing is up for debate.
The opening scene of Shady Srour’s Holy Air, making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, is utterly charming, as married couple Adam (Srour), a businessman, and Lamia (Laëtitia Eïdo), the head of the Sexuality Center, are stuck in ridiculously heavy traffic. Lamia decides to use the extra time to take a pregnancy test, urinating right there in the car. That is shortly followed by one of the film’s most splendid images, of Adam in the bathtub, his heavily bearded face above the back edge, a glass of alcohol at the ready as the camera stays still. Unfortunately, the film is shaky the rest of the way, too repetitive and fussy with subplots that don’t feel natural. Whereas Lamia is pregnant, Adam’s father is a tough old guy, fighting cancer. Adam’s partnership with his friend Mahmoud isn’t going well, so, soon after encountering a priest singing the holy praises of Mount Precipice, Adam decides to bottle the air on the mountain and sell it as a tourist souvenir. The film takes on the Christian faith, capitalism, road rage, local gangsters, and growing old, but it works best when it focuses on Adam and Lamia together; just about everything else is overly sentimental, too goofy, or just plain nonsensical, which is too bad, because Srour (Sense of Need) and Lamia (Cleopatra in The Destiny of Rome) make for a lovable couple, caught up in the travails of modern-day Nazareth.
Peter Getzels and Harriet Gordon’s The Penguin Counters arrives at Cinema Village just in time for World Penguin Day on April 25, which celebrates the cute and cuddly black-and-white (and often yellow) aquatic birds. However, the tuxedoed animals are facing a major challenge, as climate change threatens their very existence. The film follows Ron Naveen and his small team — Thomas Mueller of Frankfurt’s Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, research ecologist Steve Forrest, Stony Brook assistant professor Heather Lynch, and PhD candidates Mike Polito and Paula Casanovas — as they go from Argentina to Deception Island, tracking three varieties of penguins and following in the footsteps of British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who led a famously treacherous journey to the Antarctic in the first decade of the nineteenth century aboard the aptly named Discovery. In a bit of serendipitous luck, on a cruise ship he’s essentially hitchhiking on, Naveen meets Angie Butler, the biographer of Shackleton’s right-hand man, Frank Wild, who is transporting Wild’s ashes to South Georgia so they can be buried next to Shackleton’s remains, and Naveen joins her on her mission. Naveen, the founder and president of Oceanites, is gathering information for the Antarctic Site Inventory project, which has been detailing the plight of oceanic birds and the ecosystem for more than twenty years. “We’re not explorers, climbers, or athletes,” Naveen explains in a message about the film. “The weather we face is grueling. The terrain is hostile, and we’re only kitted out with golf-ball-sized tally-whackers and waterproof spiral notebooks. But our data has been instrumental in the formation of policies among polar scientists and the fifty member nations of the Antarctic Treaty Organization.”
Made the same year Japan passed a major anti-prostitution law, Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film, 1956’s Street of Shame, is a brutally honest depiction of the decidedly unglamorous life of a group of courtesans at a Tokyo brothel. “Yoshiwara has been here three hundred years,” the Mamasan (Sadako Sawamura) says early on to a police officer. “Does an unnecessary business last so long?” Originally titled Red-Light District, the black-and-white film features an outstanding cast of women playing desperate geisha with serious family and financial problems that lead them to the embarrassment of trying to physically force men off the dark, dank street and into their rooms. Hanae (Michiyo Kogure) has to deal with aging, a baby, and a suicidal husband, Yumeko (Aiko Mimasu) doesn’t want her son to know what she does to earn money to attempt to give him a decent life, Yorie (Hiroko Machida) thinks a husband in a faraway village will gain her longed-for freedom, Yasumi (Ayako Wakao) has become a loan shark to her coworkers, and young Mickey (Machiko Kyō) is quick to share her opinions about the other women but not so quick to catch on to the debasement she is lowering herself to. The protofeminist director of such previous works as Sisters of the Gion, Osaka Elegy, Women of the Night, and The Life of Oharu as well as the brilliant two-part samurai epic The 47 Ronin, Mizoguchi spent much of his career — which included more than seventy films in thirty-three years, up to his death in 1956 at the age of fifty-eight — making films about the exploitation of women, partly influenced by having seen his sister sold into prostitution by their father. It’s a shame that Street of Shame, one of Mizoguchi’s best, also turned out to be his last, but what a way to go. Street of Shame is screening April 22 and 24 in the ongoing “Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z” series, which continues in April with such other S films as Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, Lowell Sherman’s She Done Him Wrong, and Lech Kowalski’s Story of a Junkie A.K.A. Gringo.
