Egos on Parade
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) when they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.
“You see, you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the same name)
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): With my COVID-caution still keeping me away from movie theaters for now, I’ll continue on with streaming options this week although I found only one I was all that interested in, but at least it’s still in theatrical release (almost gone, though, after having been out in U.S. theaters since mid-June of this summer), Official Competition, where 2 Spanish cinema idols who’ve also developed solid followings from audiences in their American releases, Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, star in a satire about the very industry they’ve been so successful in, her as an eccentric director, him as a co-star of a new film she’ll be helming where tension between the brothers in the story is easily matched off-screen by the actors played by Banderas and well-known-in-Argentina (as are the directors), Oscar Martínez. The antics in this film may not be universally understood/appreciated (yet the CCAL’s extremely supportive), but I found it be hilarious, easily accessed via cheap rental on Apple TV+. Just so you know, though, another aspect of my potential film viewing time recently was taken up with something else that may have only San Francisco-area-interest as I devoted some hours to watching my beloved Oakland Athletics—not exactly proud of it but consistent in being the worst baseball team in the American League this year—take on the mighty New York Yankees (best in the AL East, one of the tops throughout the sport) last weekend, joyously splitting a 4-game-series (now they’re in D.C. playing the National League’s Washington Nationals, the absolute worst team in major league baseball so we’ll know later Thursday who won the cellar-dwellers-matchup—A's & Nats have split 2 of 3 so far).
I also spent some time re-watching a true classic on my local PBS station, Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944; starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, Angela Lansbury), the story that originates current meaning for the term about anyone (spouse, politician, etc.) trying to convince someone (or many of us) about the truth of something that’s fully, clearly a lie. Also, if none of the above matters to you, here are links for the schedule of the cable network, Turner Classic Movies, which gives you a fabulous selection of older films with no commercial interruptions (!) along with the JustWatch site which offers you a wide selection of options for streaming rental or purchase. If you're interested in what reigned atop the domestic (U.S.-Canada) box-office last weekend, go here.
Finally, to keep you up on new, ongoing additions to this blog you might skip over once you’ve read the review (or reviews if I find more to report on), I’ve added 2 musical tidbits to the previously-inserted-James Taylor song always following the review(s) before I move to the Short Takes lineup.
Here’s the trailer for Official Competition:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge it; activate
that same button or use the “esc” keyboard key to return to normal size.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: Don (it's an honorary title, not part of his name) Humberto Suárez (José Luis Gómez) is a pharmaceutical tycoon celebrating his 80th birthday (we open with shots of lots of material objects, seemingly to imply his success at acquisitions), but he wants something more lasting to secure his legacy. His assistant suggests he finance a needed bridge somewhere, but he’s more drawn to producing some prominent film so he buys the rights to a Nobel Prize-winning-novel, The Rivalry (about brothers, Manuel [the driver in a car crash that kills their parents] and Pedro who takes up with a woman, Lucy, Manuel was interested in while his brother’s in jail, then has a baby with her which further drives a wedge between these siblings), hires festival-darling-director Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz) to helm the project with the intention of a huge success, commercially and artistically, further securing his name for the ages. She brings in Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas), a hugely-successful-movie star who practices Method Acting (he’s sort of a combination of Marlon Brando and Tom Cruise), to play Manuel and Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez), a prominent stage actor of traditional approaches (a Laurence Olivier-type of Classical Acting), as Pedro, with the intention of their clashing approaches to acting adding to the presentation of tension between these brothers.
That actual clash soon surfaces, goaded on by Lola’s incessant pushing of both of them to deliver lines as she understands them, based on her workbook of the script which looks like a collage-scrapbook, leading her to reject Iván’s suggestions for script changes. We also see a bit of his parallel life as an acting teacher where he’s very discouraging toward his students that only a few of them will be able to achieve a career in this demanding profession (he also has a wife, Violeta [Pilar Castro], who writes for children, but she doesn’t factor into this story too much). Most of what we see in this film is a series of rehearsals with the director and her 2 confounded-thespians (Iván rejects her demand that he cry in a scene during this stage of preproduction, saying he’ll do it when needed as the camera rolls whereas Félix simply uses drops of menthol to achieve the effect on the spot). Félix also wants to win an Oscar for this film, which Iván scoffs at, but then we see Iván practicing an acceptance speech in front of a mirror, holding a prop as if it were an award statuette.
Lola’s strategies to push her actors into a state of mind she feels is needed for the success of this production as it progresses include 2 extreme scenes for her primary cast: (1) the actors are sitting under a huge boulder held aloft by a crane so they’ll put proper tension in their deliveries, fearful they may be crushed at any minute (we see later the “boulder” was simply a lightweight-prop); (2) Lola requires both of them to bring in some of their awards to the next day’s rehearsal where the men are wrapped together in plastic leaving just their faces free as they watch her cruelly grind up their trophies with a wood-chipper (tossing in a couple of hers also) to symbolize breaking them away from whatever ego-assumptions they’ve brought to the project, opening them up to even-better-performances, although Félix is especially upset by this turn of events (keep this in mind when exploring farther below what I’ve got to say about my chosen Musical Metaphor for this film). We then learn Félix has pancreatic cancer, likely die within a year so he wants to do his best here, earning him some sympathy from Lola and Iván, her deciding to move up the shooting schedule to accommodate his medical needs, but then he says he was only acting to show them his deeper level of talent than he’s normally expected to have; Iván retorts his show of concern was simply acting too.
As rehearsals wrap up, Humberto’s happy with what he thinks the actual result will be so there’s a big wrap-party to celebrate what’s still to come; however, on the various outdoor balconies of the place where it’s held Félix overhears Iván saying what a lousy actor his co-star is; Félix confronts Iván, punches him, knocks him over a railing with us initially thinking he’s dead, yet he’s just in a seemingly-ongoing-coma, apparently because (as the incident’s reported) he accidently fell, so the film proceeds with Félix playing both of the major roles (just as he’d bragged earlier he could do).* ⇒As this all comes to closure, the finished film is entered in the Official Competition at some festival, it’s a big hit even as Humberto is shown standing by a bridge he’s been responsible for anyway; Iván suddenly comes back to consciousness in the hospital as Lola caps it off: “Some films never end.”⇐
*I reported earlier (August 18, 2022 posting) Robert De Niro will do exactly that in the upcoming Wise Guys (Barry Levinson) where he’ll play 2 major mobsters, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello.
So What? When I first got clear on the premise of Official Competition of the 2 famous actors—of conflicting persuasions—at ongoing-odds with each other, I immediately thought of what I’d read many years ago about Laurence Olivier’s dismissive attitude toward Dustin Hoffman’s Method Acting when they co-starred in Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976). In one scene Hoffman’s character is supposed to be nearly-exhausted from lack of sleep along with the awful-ongoing-trauma he’s experiencing in the plot so he gets prepared for the shooting by cutting back on actual sleep, pushing himself to the brink of true delirium to be able to convey that properly in the movie; according to reports I’ve read Olivier was stunned, exasperated at that, supposedly saying to Hoffman, “Why not try acting? It’s much easier.” As this extensive article explores, maybe Olivier never specifically said that to Hoffman, but the reality of the clash of their acting styles serves as a useful template for what’s shown fictionally in … Competition between pop-star Félix and Classical-devotee Iván as they attempt to push each other toward some kind of professional harmony, even as both of them are constantly berated by Lola for not understanding/matching her vision of the project.
Throughout the on-screen-evolution of this story we encounter lots of useful satirical bits about the pompous nature of many of the heavy-hitter-players in the cinema industry, although maybe you have to have been immersed in at least the awareness of such by reading about it through various industry and social-media sources as I have ever since first getting into graduate school in the field way back in 1970, but to get a clear sense of the level of extreme (but well-grounded) silliness in this film, I’ll direct you to this "How to Kiss" scene as Lola’s auditioning her actors in what’s supposed to be an amorous display with each of the men kissing Humberto’s daughter, Diana Suárez (Irene Escolar), playing the role of both brothers' love-interest, Lucy, in this film-within-a-film. Félix assumes he’ll be felt as passionate whether he actually gets aroused or not, Iván’s more-reserved-response to the situation is attributed by Lola to the man being married to the same woman for decades, while her demonstration with the younger woman evolves into near-sex on the floor while her embarrassed father claims the need to rush out for a business appointment; the whole thing’s absurd but appropriate to the characters these fine actors are portraying. A final note here is about the film’s title, Official Competition, which not only technically refers to the judged-aspect of the festival Lola’s film (The Rivalry) is in at the end of this narrative but also refers to the primary actors butting up against each other, even as both of them find constant conflicts with Lola in the main film.
Bottom Line Final Comments: Official Competition was truly in official competition of sorts when it premiered way back on September 4, 2021 at the Venice International Film Festival, then opened in February 2022 in Spain, March 2022 in Argentina (collectively honoring the directors and principal actors), made it to the U.S. with a slow rollout starting on June 17, 2022 taking in a total gross over these past 11 weeks of $590 thousand domestically, $4.6 million worldwide, now also available for streaming on Apple TV+ for a $4.99 rental fee (plus the monthly subscription rate of another $4.99), your best chance to see it as it’s now down to 3 northern North America theaters. While it hasn’t made a lot of money the CCAL’s quite supportive, with Rotten Tomatoes critics offering a marvelous cluster of 96% positive reviews while the normally-reserved-folks at Metacritic are practically swooning by their standards with a 79% average score. (Of anything both they and I have reviewed of 2022 releases only Turning Red [Domee Shi; review in our March 24, 2022 posting—I was more critical with a 3½ stars rating] and Everything Everywhere All at Once [Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert; review in our April 14, 2022 posting—4 stars of 5 from me, similar to the MC results] topped … Competition with average scores respectively of 83% and 82% while Top Gun: Maverick [Joseph Kosinski; review in our June 9, 2022 posting—back to a lower 3½ stars from me] and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande [Sophie Hyde; review in our June 23, 2022 posting—another matching 4 stars from my perspective] both came in with 78% average scores.) Official …’s also picked up a couple of 2021 awards I’m aware of: Outstanding International Feature at the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival (Ontario, Canada) and the Audience Award for most popular film in a Galas and Special Presentations program of the Vancouver (Canada) International Film Festival.
It may be too much of a cluster of insider-jokes about the cinema industry and the presumed self-importance of some of its major players for the satire to be as effective for a wide range of viewers as it was for me, but I found it consistently hilarious, am recommending it highly if you care to take a chance on it. I’ll close out with my usual choice of a Musical Metaphor to go along with the film, which in this case requires more metaphorical digression on my part (and yours if you follow along with me) than the songwriters (Brian Wilson, Terry Sachen, Mike Love) intended with “Hand On to Your Ego” (which evolved into “I Know There’s an Answer” on the Beach Boys 1966 album Pet Sounds) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRHu3s6EZaQ (where you get both versions of the song) because Wilson’s original intention with lyrics like “They trip through the day / And waste all their thoughts at night” was to critique those who used LSD for escapism from/denial of the personas they’d developed in their lives at this point (although he’d used LSD himself but found it opened new vistas in his mind), so for him “ego” was more in the Freudian-descriptive-mode of your balanced-self, neither wrapped up in the hedonistic Id nor the suffocating-morality of the Super Ego, a plea to embrace your true self, not escape into some false mental fantasyland, telling his listeners to “Hang on to your ego / Hang on, but [pessimistically, said] I know that you’re gonna lose the fight.”
Nevertheless, Beach Boy-bandmate Love didn’t want the group to be associated with a drug song in any interpretation so he changed some lyrics to make it more about discovering meaning within yourself, sort of becoming your own guru: “I know there’s an answer but I have to find it by myself.” Therefore, if you blend the total words and meanings of both versions of the song—at least for me, in my wandering mind—I find “ego” to also be about the self-importance some people create for themselves, making everything about their own concerns and triumphs as with the 3 primary players in Official Competition, so our singers can address these folks not as mind-destroying-druggies but as those who (ironically, according to the original nature of this song) don’t need to “Hang on to your ego” but instead need to be confronted by someone who wonders “Now how can I come on / And tell them the way that they live could be better?” Ultimately, my twists on these lyrics probably frustrate all the different intentions of the intrepid-songwriters, but given the freedom these filmmakers have taken with the industry they’re all successfully a part of, I think I can play around with the original directions of my chosen Metaphors even if you have to stretch a bit to see what I’m trying to do with my own interpretive versions of film reviews (idiosyncrasies which surely have contributed to my repeated failure to be voted into the ranks of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle or the accepted legions of Rotten Tomatoes). Ultimately, here, though, what I’m doing is applying my interpretation of “let go of your (“my way or the highway”-self-centered-form of) ego” as I’d say I hear it in “I Know There’s an Answer,” but I’ve still specified “Hang On to Your Ego” as the official Musical Metaphor because that’s where the crucial word’s actually used and I can appreciate Wilson’s original intention there of “hanging on” to a more neutral use of the word in that song’s version even as I see the negative implications of “ego” in “I Know There’s an Answer,” with all of that fitting in various ways to the presentation of the 3 main characters in Official Competition (so, let’s face it: if this film’s intended as a version of “out there,” then my responses should correspond).
SHORT TAKES
That’s all for my critical commentary this week (which usually reminds me of some parting lyrics from Pink Floyd’s "Time": “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say,” or maybe R.E.M. knows me even better [from "Losing My Religion"]: “Oh no, I’ve said too much / I haven’t said enough"), but whether you agree with any of that stuff or not I’ll offer you one more opportunity to be in unity with an attitude that would benefit all of us, James Taylor’s "Shower the People" (on his 1976 In the Pocket album), because we should “Shower the people you love with love / Show them the way that you feel / Things are gonna be much better/ If you only will.” We’re now sailing through divisive times; it could be a smoother ride if we’d only help each other a bit more.
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Here’s more information about Official Competition:
https://www.officialcompetition.movie (click the 3 little bars in the upper left for more info)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuubuOJFhtg (4:22 interview with actors Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz [in Spanish, so if needed use the CC button to bring up subtitles, then Settings—looks like a gear wheel— button, then auto-generated arrow, then Auto-translate option to choose another language]) then this video flows into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t75oamOhezs (3:09 interview with actors Oscar Martínez, Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas
[in English this time, although Oscar doesn’t talk in this short clip])
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/official_competition
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/official-competition
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Here’s more information about your “Concise? What’s that?” Two Guys critic, Ken Burke:
If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work. (But if you truly have too much time on your hands you might want to explore some even-longer-and-more-obtuse-than-my-film-reviews-academic-articles about various cinematic topics at my website, https://kenburke.academia.edu, which could really give you something to talk to me about.)
If we did talk, though, you’d easily see how my early-70s-age informs my references, Musical Metaphors, etc. in these reviews because I’m clearly a guy of the later 20th century, not so much the contemporary world. I’ve come to accept my ongoing situation, though, realizing we all (if fate allows) keep getting older, we just have to embrace it, as Joni Mitchell did so well in "The Circle Game," offering sage advice even when she was quite young herself.
By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check-out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile (quite an eternal while, in fact, but maybe while there you’ll get a chance to meet Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, RIP). Ken
P.S. Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker (although, as you know, with bar songs there are plenty about people broken down by various tragic circumstances, with maybe the best of the bunch—calls itself “perfect”—being "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" written by Steve Goodman, sung by David Allen Coe). But wherever the rest of my body may be my heart’s always with my longtime-companion/lover/
wife, Nina Kindblad, so here’s our favorite shared song—Neil Young’s "Harvest Moon"—from the performance we saw at the Desert Trip concerts in Indio, CA on October 15, 2016 (as a full moon was rising over the venue) because “I’m still in love with you,” my dearest, a never-changing-reality even as the moon waxes/wanes over the months/years to come. But, just as we can be raunchy at times (in private of course) Neil and his backing band, Promise of the Real, on that same night also did a lengthy, fantastic version of "Cowgirl in the Sand" (19:06) which I’d also like to commit to this blog’s always-ending-tunes; I never get tired of listening to it, then and now (one of my idle dreams is to play guitar even half this well). But, while I’m at it, I’ll also include another of my top favorites, from the night before at Desert Trip, the Rolling Stones’ "Gimme Shelter" (Wow!), a song “just a shot away” in my memory (along with my memory of their great drummer, Charlie Watts, RIP). To finish this cluster of all-time-great-songs I’d like to have played at my wake (as far away from now as possible) here’s one Dylan didn’t play at Desert Trip but it’s great, much beloved by me and Nina: "Visions of Johanna." However, if the day does come when Nina has to recall these above thoughts (beginning with “If we did talk”) and this music after my demise I might as well make this into an arbitrary-Top 10 of songs that mattered to me by adding The Beatles’ "A Day in the Life,"
because that chaotic-orchestral-finale sounds like what the death experience may be like, and the Beach Boys’ "Fun Fun Fun," because these memories may have gotten morbid so I’d like to sign off with something more upbeat to remember me, the Galveston non-surfer-boy.
However, before I go (whether it’s just until next week or more permanently), let’s round these songs out to an even dozen with 2 more dedicated to Nina, the most wonderful woman ever for me. I’ll start with Dylan’s "Lay, Lady, Lay" (maybe a bit personal, but we had a strong connection right from the start) and finish with the most appropriate tune of all, The Beatles again, "In My Life," because whatever I might encounter in my Earth-time, “I love you more.”
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