Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Keeper of the Ashes/Pistol/Clint Eastwood

Director’s Note: It’s not the policy of the DMR to “go negative” when submitting our reports, for a number of reasons which need not be recounted here. However, it would be irresponsible for the department heads not to comment on trends that we have observed and feel should be addressed. These observations may not always be flattering, nor entirely fair, but we believe it’s far better to bring them to light in the service of maintaining both a healthy level of skepticism/engagement with media, and also to serve as a cautionary tale for both creators and consumers.

Having said all of that, we are now going to throw Kristin Chenoweth under the bus.

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Keeper of the Ashes: The Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders (Hulu)

This four-part docu-series (ugh) recounts the still-unsolved shocking and horrific murder of three girl scouts in Oklahoma in 1977. A couple of things you should know about this: Kristin Chenoweth takes over the narrative at some point, and it was produced to closely resemble an episode of Dateline, and if you’re any kind of true crime fan, you know what that means: “We’ve gotonly  two pictures of the suspect, so how often can we cross fade them before someone shoots their television screen?”

If this were an episode of Dateline, we know the answer to that question. But this is a 4-Part docu-series (ugh) and they have space to fill. So, on top of the cross fade perp pics, what else do we have to work with? How much B-roll, exactly, do we have of Chenoweth? And can we use all of it?

Evidently, the answer is yes.

I do not know who the audience for this docu-series (ugh) is. It’s not me, and it’s probably not you, unless you really like Kristin Chenoweth to an uncomfortable degree. And there’s four hours of this, this…whatever this is. Performative guilt? I don’t know. If it had been shot on film, I would have been pissed that so much film stock was wasted. I guess maybe I should be upset that they had to recharge their camera drone’s batteries, twice, to get the necessary overhead shots for her incessant narrative voice-over.

I love documentaries. I really do. One of the best things about the new streaming platforms is having access to all of these great documentaries. Singular. As in, one movie. Not a docu-series (ugh). I’m not talking about Ken Burns, here. He’s done some amazing long form projects that are beautifully put together, and what makes them work as well as they do is the fact that each episode furthers the narrative. His subjects aren’t sensationalized, and he manages to fill the space in each episode without doing the same crossfade shot on two stills until we’re sick of seeing them.

Keeper of the Ashes could have been a single movie. It might have made an engaging two-parter. But somehow or another, we needed to see, in a docu-series (ugh) about three murdered girl scouts, Chenoweth’s performing arts center in Armhole, Oklahoma, needed to see her working with kids in singing class, needed to see her singing an original song about the murdered girl scouts with her young protégé, and we just had to see shot after shot of her, walking in the woods, with voice-over deep thoughts about how the murders really defined her a a person.

Best of all, this docu-series (ugh) goes nowhere and does nothing. Well, that’s not fair, exactly. There is a lot of screen time given to the parents who are still grieving, and that manages to be sincere enough on the part of the producers, but this whole project has a veneer of tragedy porn to it, especially since they end the show without having anything resolved, but we do go out on that Chenoweth duet, and even though she sings like an angel, that little stunt at the end undercuts any incidental sincerity that the docu-series (ugh) accidentally managed to generate.

The bunker mascot, clearly as miserable as the rest of us. Just after this was taken, Chenoweth belted out a high note and the editor did a fade to a bunch of birds taking flight from a tree, I swear to God, as if frightened by the noise. Not to be upstaged, the dog got up and left the room, as well.

This trend toward doing a documentary series is not in and of itself a bad thing, but where true crime is concerned, less is more. Baseball and the Civil War are complex and enormous in scale and scope. A sordid crime story from 1977 is not. Dateline is fine for what it is. Save the large-scale format stuff for the things that warrant it. Otherwise, it’s like digitally crying wolf.

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Pistol (FX)

My punk phase started in 1984 (a little late to the party, I know), and it lasted until 2022, which is twelve times longer than the Sex Pistols were together as a band. This is not a dig; one of the best things about the Sex Pistols is that they walked away when they became rock and roll stars.

This mini-series is based on Steve Jones’ memoir, and it’s very well-done, produced and scripted. The kids playing the band members are impressive, none more so than Anson Boon’s twitchy turn as Johnny Rotten and Louis Partridge nearly channeling Sid Vicious from beyond the veil.

The show covers mostly the high notes of the Sex Pistols’ storied meteoric rise to infamy, choosing to gloss over some of the more intricate and/or sordid details that bring about the band’s demise. But director Danny Boyle does a good job of hitting most of the emotional high notes without bogging the story down, which isn’t anything new as far as rock and roll movies go. The band gets together, overcomes their personal differences, finds their sound, gets famous, lets it all go to their heads, yadda yadda yadda.

This is one of those bands that did all of that crazy self-destructive rock and roll excess insanity and set the template for every other band to come along. That’s one of the reasons why I was never all that impressed with Guns ‘n’ Roses. And for only making one album, they remain one of the most influential bands of the 20th century. Never Mind the Bollocks still holds up; it got me through most of 2017.

If you’re a fan of the Sex Pistols and think John Lydon has had a stick up his ass for going on twenty-plus years now, you’ll probably get a real kick out of Pistol.

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NTAB Directorial Culture Exchange Update: Clint Eastwood

With so many directors, twenty in all, and twice as many movies, we are bound to run across a movie or two that we don’t like. Also, we have been undertaking this project with a minimum of put-in from popular culture, choosing instead to steer our own craft, as it were. For myself, I would like to say, I thought including Clint Eastwood on the list was a safe choice. After all, who’s going to argue with the director of The Outlaw Josey Wales? Pale Rider? Unforgiven? Bird? Million Dollar Baby? Gran Torino? Sully? As it so happens, Eastwood has directed a lot more movies than those obvious examples above. A lot more. And you might not know about any of them because, for once, popular culture got it right.

Had we listed Eastwood on our previous actor’s list, it would have been a very different discussion, because he’s starred in a number of movies that he didn’t direct and that we can all agree are great movies. Every Which Way But Loose springs instantly to mind, as does the much later In the Line of Fire. Sure, we’ll put Unforgiven on there. Why not? And also Firefox! What a cool movie from the 1980s. It’s when you want to look at the movies he’s directed, but not choose any of the ones you’ve already seen, that things get...what’s the word? Interesting.

I chose True Crime (1999), a completely by-the-numbers movie about a washed-up has-been reporter (played by Eastwood) dragged into a death row murder case where he is running around on the day of the execution to try and prove the man’s innocence.

The plot is on rails, which led me to wonder what the hell Eastwood was doing, bedding co-worker’s much younger wives, trying to bed much younger reporters he works with, screwing up his relationship with his ex-wife and his daughter, and in general trying to see how much of an ass he can make of himself. I nearly turned it off three times. I ended up fast-forwarding the movie between the scenes where he has a personal life crisis of some kind and stopping when he was doing investigative reporter stuff. I was mildly curious as to whether or not he’d solve the case or not. Spoiler: he does, but right up until about twelve seconds before the movie ends, you are meant to think it was too little, too late. That seems needlessly mean. The whole movie is a shit-show, a chauvinistic throw-back to something from the late seventies or early eighties when this sort of movie would have starred Nick Nolte and been played for laughs.

Janice felt sorry for me, and she took one for the team by picking White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), a movie based on legendary filmmaker John Huston and his apparent obsession with shooting an elephant in Africa. The movie is based on a book, so no one’s real names are being used, but it’s obvious to see that they are making The African Queen, even before you see the iconic boat.

About John Huston much has been written; he is, in a sense, Hollywood Royalty, even if his role in that particular court is that of Black Knight. Eastwood’s take on John Huston is not to try and imitate his mannerisms, nor his way of speaking, nor anything else about him. Absent of anything visual or iconic to hang the performance on, it comes off as Clint Eastwood, being charming and handsome, until he says something off-color, horrible, or just plain turns into a shithead and steamrolls over everyone in his life. Nice.

This movie, then, is about the Not-John-Huston character being an intentional ass in order to do the thing he considers to be a sin, and the movie clearly spells that out, in case you miss it. And just when you think, “oh, wow, we’re going to see an inkling of humanity from him,” that’s taken away by what may or may not be a real tragedy that happened, and side bar: if it did, how would anyone know, since this was the era of Hollywood fixers covering up scandals for the studios so that they’d look wholesome, if not downright innocent.

That being said, it’s at least a more entertaining movie to watch, in the same way that dried dog shit smells a lot less stinky than fresh, wet dog shit. At least the supporting cast was doing some of their best work, and in that same way that a broken watch is right twice a day, there are a couple of scenes that work very well with Eastwood’s charm and charisma. I almost liked this movie, despite itself. Almost.

This doesn’t shade Eastwood’s masterpieces for me, not at all. But it sure does bring them up into sharper relief, because, you see, there’s definitely a sliding scale of quality for the man’s directing efforts. I was surprised to find us so far down on that yardstick, not once, but twice.