UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Four, Count’em Four, Movies With Flawed Endings. And a Good Book.

One That Goes Slightly Off the Rails at the End.

His Three Daughters (2023. Written by Azazel Jacobs. 101 minutes)

Smaller is sometimes better than bigger. This is a nice example of that.

The situation is simple, but fraught. Three sisters (well, one is a step-sister) who do not regularly hang out together are in the apartment of their father, who is dying. He is being given hospice care by a couple of other people. We almost exclusively stay in the apartment, although we do not see the father until much later.

The oldest sister is Katie, brilliantly played by Carrie Coon. Like most older sisters she is something of a control freak and is rather bossy about it. The middle sister is Christina, brilliantly played by Elizabeth Olsen. She is the quiet and supportive one, often on the phone with her daughter she has left at home. The step-sister (older than Christina, younger than Katie), Rachel, is brilliantly played by Natasha Lyonne.

Have you figured out that Jacobs has written the three characters brilliantly and as director, he has cast and directed them, well, brilliantly?

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The characters are written with great insight and, especially, great nuance. That is essential if Jacobs is going to mostly stay in the apartment with the three, although Rachel does sneak outside to smoke some weed from time to time. You should see this film just to study how to write the full range of emotions and attitudes for the actors to play in a limited space

So what’s the problem with the ending? (If you hate spoilers, stop reading this now.) Late in the film the father gets off his deathbed and gives a long, obvious monologue about how he feels about all three of his daughters. The writing here is nowhere near as good as previously, very much on the nose. Jacobs eventually lets us know that his speech is a dream sequence, but he has not really set it up in the writing so that finding out it is a dream works. It seems artificial and contrived and totally out of key with what has come before.

Maybe when you see the film you should just turn it off when Dad gets out of bed.

Yeah, turn it off. This film is another one that Netflix has screwed up. As they do a lot, they have put it into theatres for a two-week run and then pretty much pulled it and put it on streaming. Netflix is proving itself incompetent as a distributor of films in theatrical release. They were not helped by the Los Angeles Times, which ran an excellent interview with Jacobs and the actors the day after it had finished its theatrical run.

And One that Goes More than Slightly Off the Rails at the End.

The Critic (2023. Screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on the novel Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn [no, not that Anthony Quinn]. 101 minutes)

It is 1934 in London. In the theatre district of the West End, to be exact. We focus in on the theatre critic for one of the major newspapers, Jimmy Erskine. He is played by Ian McKellen (yeah, brilliantly of course). This is very much a vehicle for McKellen who drives it like a Formula One race car driver. Erskine is a nasty, nasty person and his reviews can be savage. He is especially savage towards a youngish actress Nina Land, played by Gemma Arterton, who almost holds her own against McKellen.

The old editor of the paper had just died, and his son David Brooke has taken over. He wants to turn the paper into a more family-oriented one. He wants Jimmy to tone down his reviews. Jimmy is appalled at the idea, so he hatches a plan with Nina. If she will seduce Brooke so that Jimmy will have something to blackmail him with, he will write favorable reviews of her.

So we see Nina go to work on Brooke. Both Arterton and Mark Strong, who plays Brooke, are good and evenly matched, but we keep waiting for McKellen to show up. It has been his film until then and his presence is missed.

Erksine’s plan backfires when Brooke, who is married, commits suicide, and other members of the family take over running the paper. Here is where the film really gets into trouble. We have seen some of these family members before, but we have not really been introduced to them.

Marber, a successful playwright, should have known we needed to have scenes early when the identity of the family members is made clear. The place for it is an early scene in a theatre where Brooke is there with his family. Without us knowing who is who, the machinations at the paper after Brooke dies do not involve us.

According to some sources, the film had a darker ending when it premiered last year at the Toronto Film Festival and audiences made their displeasure known. The ending was rewritten and reshot, but the darker one may have been better.

And Now One that Goes Completely Off the Rails at the End.

Lee (2023. Screenplay by Liz Hannah and Marion Hume & John Collee, story by Lem Dobbs and Marion Hume & John Collee, based on the biography The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose. 117 minutes)

This is a biopic about Lee Miller, a former model in the thirties who became a famous war photographer during World War II. She was one of the first people to get into the concentration camps at the end of the war and photograph the horrors she saw. The magazine she was working for, the British edition of the fashion magazine Vogue was forced by the government not to publish the photographs. Lee stormed into her editor’s office and destroyed some of the pictures. Her editor, Audrey Withers, had already sent copies to the editor of the American edition, who printed at least some of them in late 1945.

Well, a beautiful woman who takes on what was thought to be a man’s job, outwits the macho idiots who do not want her around, shoots great stuff during the war, then even greater stuff about the camps. Why has there not been a film about her before?

Because the macho side of the movie business had no interest in her. But with a leading role like that, you would expect one of our powerful women actors to push a project through. In this case, it is Kate Winslet, at the top of her form, catching everything there is to show (sometimes literally) about Lee, including the fact she smoked like a chimney. I could have done with half the shots of her smoking, no matter how accurate it was.

The structure feels like a TV biopic. In 1977 a young writer comes to interview Lee (the interviewer is played by Josh O’Connor, who does wonders with a nothing part) and we get her life in bits and pieces, some of them more interesting than others.

We do not get much of a forward momentum to her life until the end of the war. She gets word that a lot of people she knew pre-war have disappeared, which begins her efforts to find and photograph the camps. (The film gives the impression that she and her companion Davy Scherman were the only ones recording the camps. In fact, as soon as General Eisenhower learned about the camps, he ordered all the military units photograph both stills and film of the camps. Ike wanted there to be enough evidence that people could never say it did not happen. Scherman, by the way, is played by Andy Samberg, whom I have never been a fan of in his comic roles, but he gives a good solid, serious performance here.

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I have two problems with the film, one at the beginning and one later. At the beginning, there are an interminable number of company logos, followed by their listing in the main credits. I have complained about this in other films, but it may be here to stay.

The other problem is odd. The director of the film is Ellen Kuras, who is known primarily as a cinematographer. You can see all her credits here. She has also directed for television, but this is her first feature. You would not, however, expect it to be as dark as it is. Especially when you get into the camp scenes it is very difficult to make out what Miller’s photographs clearly show.

The murky cinematography is a problem elsewhere. When Lee is typing a letter to a friend, I think we are supposed to be able to read, but we can’t. And at least one of Andy Samberg’s reactions to something Lee has said or done gets lost in the shadows.

How did this happen? And did nobody notice this when they looked at the dailies? Or this could just be a case of the theatre not servicing their projectors. Whatever it is, it is annoying as hell. I can agree that not all films should look as bright and clear as Freddie Young’s cinematography makes Lawrence of Arabia (1962) look, but I do like to see what is going on in a movie I have paid admission to see.

There is also an annoying final twist in the script. I wonder if at some draft of the script, it was revealed at the beginning, which would have worked better.

Well, This Ending is Not Quite as Bad as the Others, but it’s Not Good, and the Middle is a Mess as Well.

My Old Ass (2024. Written by Megan Park. 89 minutes.)

This one starts out great. Elliott, an 18-year-old girl, is about to go off to college, and she is spending the summer tooling around the lake in her motorboat with her two besties. They camp one night and Elliott partakes in some magic mushrooms one of her friends has brought. Suddenly the other friends disappear and Elliott finds herself talking to…her 39-year-old self.

Is that a great setup or what? Especially since the older Elliott is played by Aubrey Plaza. The younger one is played by Maisy Stella, who holds her own with Plaza, especially in the long dialogue scene between the two of them while the older one tells the younger one certain facts of life.

But then Plaza disappears. We hear her on the phone but you cannot see those famous eyes. The Older Elliott has warned the younger one not to get involved with a guy named Chad without telling her why.

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So Elliott the Younger meets a guy named…Chad of course. And he is a great guy. And we are now in a teen romcom, which is not what we signed up for. It is like a lot of movies you have already seen. Many, many times. It is like James Bond going on an hour-and-a-half sabbatical in the middle of a Bond movie.

Finally, Older Elliott shows up with a lame excuse for not being there. Did Plaza have another gig?

Older Elliott finally tells the Younger what she should have told the Younger an hour and twenty minutes ago, and if she had the movie might have been over then, or Park could have more inventive ways to use her great basic setup.

Your homework assignment for next week is to come up with a more inventive way to use Park’s setup.

A Book to Learn From If You are Going into Television.

Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV (2023. Book by Peter Biskind. 382 pages)

If you have read Peter Biskind’s 1998 classic Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (and if you haven’t, you should) you will be aware that one of his great skills is getting people to talk in interviews. I was particularly impressed by his ability to get the wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends et al to talk about what schmucks some of the “genius” filmmakers of the seventies were.

His subject in his new book is different, but his interview skills are the same but better.

Pandora’s Box is about the development of first, cable television, and then streaming. For decades there were the three and a half major broadcast networks: CBS, NBC, ABC, and the half, FOX. In 1973 HBO was formed, but it mostly ran old and occasionally some newer movies and concerts. When I subscribed to cable for three months in 1983 (the cable service in our area was terrible, ironic when you realize a lot of industry people lived in that area), I liked the movies but not so much the other stuff. I remember a Robin Williams concert, which consisted of him talking about his penis for an hour.

Well, yes, because HBO was delivered via cable, they did not have to abide by the Federal Communications rules that governed over-the-air broadcasting, which was using the “public airwaves.” It took HBO a long time to understand that if it could put on Robin Williams and his penis, it could make a series that flouted the FCC rules.

If you are old enough, you may remember that HBO’s “The Sopranos revolutionized television!” Biskind knows that is bullshit (as do some of the people who used to promote that idea). He is clear-eyed about HBO and how it stumbled into doing several series that changed television. If you want to read why I thought Sex and the City was more of a game changer than The Sopranos, you can read my 2014 essay here.

Several people in the industry saw what HBO was doing and decided to follow their path, including AMC, FX, and Showtime. And then Netflix gets into the game and introduces streaming. Hollywood goes nuts for streaming and loses their shirts.

It makes you think that the people running the show are not as bright as you thought they were.

And Biskind is here to show you they are not. How he managed to get the people he interviewed to say on the record what kind of shits their former---and sometimes their---current bosses is amazing. The reason I am reviewing this book and telling you to read it if you intend to get into the movie and/or television business is that it will show you what kind of jerks, idiots, and creeps will be in positions of power over you.

No, I am not in this review going to give you any quotes from the book. If I started doing that, I would find it impossible to stop.