Stories of Slick Greed and Genuine Caring
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 & the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
Sharper (Benjamin Caron) rated R 116 min.
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): I’ve still avoided COVID as we’re now into the 3-year-mark of its dreaded presence but managed instead to pick up a cold somewhere that was horrible for me in terms of sneezing (seemed to intensify my always-waiting-to-attack allergies) last Friday, has continued to burden my wife, Nina (Thanks to me, damn it! My apologies, Sweetheart.), with horrible coughing fits (again, negative COVID tests, thankfully), so, while we're healing, I continue to avoid theaters (don’t think I’ve missed much regarding Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania [Peyton Reed] or 80 for Brady [Kyle Marvin] anyway) while hoping to finally catch up with the few Oscar nominees I’d like to see before the Academy’s ceremony on March 12, 2023 so I can finalize my 2022 Top 10 and make awards predictions; I now see I can spend movie-theater-level money by buying for $19.99 each (on Apple TV+ streaming) The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022) and Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022), so we’ll see how that plays out this coming weekend. For now, last weekend I continued with my dual-approach of streaming something new from 2023, Sharper, an intriguing cluster of con-games (an opening graphic tells us the title means “one who lives by their wits”) starring the greater-known-names of Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, John Lithgow plus excellent work from Justice Smith and Briana Middleton (also on Apple TV+, but this one’s free to subscribers) along with a subtly-powerful-Oscar-nominee, All That Breathes, a contender from India in the Documentary Feature category about 2 brothers in Delhi who’ve devoted their lives to healing injured birds in the country’s pollution-filled-capital (again, free to subscribers of TV’s HBO or streaming’s HBO Max). Also, here are links for the schedule of the cable network, Turner Classic Movies, which gives you a wide selection of older films with no commercial interruptions and the JustWatch site which offers you a wide selection of options for streaming rental or purchase. If you'd just want to see what reigned at the domestic (U.S.-Canada) box-office last weekend, go here.
Here’s the trailer for Sharper:
(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: This film’s presented mostly in shifting-into-past-mode (like the magnificent Memento [Christopher Nolan, 2001]—although there’s no memory-loss complication in Sharper) where the first segment represents a chronological present for the story, with the next segment in the past of those actions so what we see later informs what will happen in what we’ve already seen, requiring us to recall past segments so what we’ll learn in upcoming segments has more clarity and meaning if we can keep it all straight. While I could just iron out all of the chronology, summarize what happens from point A to point Z to reduce confusion, you’ll get a better sense of how the film evolves if I describe it as seen on screen, so here we go, with each segment named for a major character in the plot. Tom—Tom (Justice Smith) runs a small bookstore in NYC where he gets few customers until one day Sandra (Brianna Middleton) comes in, says she’s a doctoral student at NYU, wants to get a rare book by Zora Neale Hurston for her faculty advisor. They chat, he asks her out for dinner, soon they’re whisked into a romance which is interrupted one night when a banging on her door turns out to be her troubled brother who owes the mob $350,000 in gambling debts or he’ll be killed. Distraught Sandra wants to help but has few resources; Tom, who has a rich father, offers to get the cash. He does, gives it to her, but she disappears, leaving him as a broken-hearted-mess.
Sandra—Now we jump back in time to find Sandra’s an ex-con with a long rap-sheet, meeting her parole officer (sorry, never caught her name) in a bar (an odd twist of protocol, yet there's a reason for it) where Sandra’s about to go back to jail because of parole infractions if she can’t come up with a $5,000 payoff when the bar owner, Max (Sebastian Stan), comes over, tells the parole officer he’s been watching her all day pull this same crap on her clients, offers her an $8,000 Rolex watch to just let Sandra go. The deal’s completed, Max hustles Sandra outside where he reveals the watch is a fake. They quickly drive away, but she’s soon recruited to learn the strategies of successful hustles, including the upcoming one where she’ll scam Tom out of the $350,000. Max—We jump back in time again (before Max meets Sandra) to an event at the swank dwelling of billionaire Richard Hobbes (John Lithgow) who’s in a new affair with Madeline (Julianne Moore). Madeline’s son, Max, drunk and surly, shows up, provides a bit of a disruption yet convinces his Mom to let him stay there.
Madeline convinces Richard to hesitantly agree, but when they return home one night they find Max is about to be arrested by an undercover narcotics cop named Collins (Philip Johnson Richardson), so Richard tries to bribe him with a hefty payout to just let Max go. Madeline intervenes, says this whole thing is a shakedown, chases the fake cop away (actually he's Max’s partner, Tipsy) along with Max, but then she meets them later as we see Max isn’t her son, but another partner in crime. The real shakedown soon occurs when Max wants $720,000 in cash to just leave them alone. He gets it, but also meets Tom, who turns out to be Richard’s son. Later, Max, Madeline, and Tipsy meet again to celebrate; however, Madeline tells them Richard’s asked her to marry him, she’s agreed, and has called the cops on Max. He gets away with the cash, uses it to buy the bar where he’ll later (in real time, not screen order) meet Sandra. Madeline—Now we’re into actual present of plot and presentation as time has passed, Richard’s dead, most of his fortune’s gone to Madeline because Richard lost faith in Tom after he had a breakdown due to being conned by Sandra, although Tom does keep the bookstore and is named chairman of Richard’s foundation. Tom hires family friend Pat Braddock (Darren Goldstein) to find Sandra, which he does in spite of Madeline’s attempts to call off the search, fearful of her divulging the truth about Max and herself. Tom has heroin-addicted Sandra stay at the Hobbes home where she confronts Madeline with that dreaded truth, insists Max be brought back into the picture as the price for Sandra’s silence. In a deserted parking lot, Max arrives to meet Sandra and Madeline only for Tom and Braddock to show up as well.
⇒Tom pulls a gun, Sandra wrestles it away, Madeline grabs it, tussles with Tom, shoots him. In order to save herself from jail Madeline quickly agrees to transfer on the spot all of her holdings to the Hobbs Foundation (knowing she’s a trustee; with Tom gone she’ll be in control again), then she, Max, and Sandra are off to the airport to some permanent-escape-destination. Before takeoff, though, Sandra slips off the plane, Madeline realizes the stain on her clothes from Tom isn’t blood, as we see Tom quite alive back at the scene of the shooting. Sandy—(This is the name Sandra’s always preferred.) Now we’re back in the past again as Sandy regrets how she conned honest Tom, so they—with Tipsy and his pal Goldie (who played Braddock)—plan revenge on Madeline and Max, which is what we just saw worked out in the “Madeline” segment; after that we’re back to the present with the 4 cronies celebrating in the bookstore, then Tom and Sandy rekindling their hot romance.⇐
So What? Compared to the aforementioned-Memento, Sharper is a lot easier to follow because there aren’t so many segments to keep track of, plus we don’t have to deal with Leonard Shelby’s (Guy Pearce) consistent memory problems so there’s no questioning about whether what we see on screen in terms of what Leonard’s trying to piece together concerning his life—along with possible dangers to it—is accurate or not, both because we don’t know if he’s drawing proper conclusions to the circumstances he’s faced with and we may not trust our own memories to recall all needed in order to synthesize every notable plot point as there’s just so damn much to try to keep up with. However, this easier structure in Sharper (along with other aspects of its presentation) isn’t always seen as a positive element by some other reviewers. For example, K. Austin Collins of Rolling Stone tells us: “Most deceptions are cleared up within the space of a scene or two; the movie is trying to tell us that lying, for these people, is second nature, hardly a secret worth keeping once the damage is done. It’s also trying to tell us that everything playing out in front of us is sexier than it really is. The movie feels heavy with influences, not quotations of other movies or direct references so much as a thickly nostalgic style, a deliberate resemblance to better movies from trickier eras, with shadowy interiors and neon-specked nighttime streets and characters cozying up to each other to reel their marks in with the possibility of sex in moments that felt more dangerous when movies were allowed to be sexier. […] A lack of humanity is low on these characters’ laundry lists of personal issues. Far more pressing is their lack of personality.” (Nevertheless, I’ll offer more of a defense of Sharper in this review’s next section, plus noting how it’s considerably more supported than panned.)
Yet, this shifting back and forth in the times being depicted (whether you’d see these folks as sexy or not) might still be a bit clumsy to process so if you need an audiovisual-explanation to accompany my written one above (assuming you’ve read all of the Spoiler material because otherwise I can see why confusion easily sets in), you can go to this link (8:54) as long as, once again, you’re ready for Spoilers in its presentation. For me, Sharper is a fun use of a couple of hours (even if it could have used a little more impact at the end), with that fun attitude part of why I chose what you’ll find below to be my Musical Metaphor to link with this film because otherwise there’s not much connection between cinematic-plot and song-content, just an overlay of attitudes that I find to be quite enjoyable.
Bottom Line Final Comments: Apparently this film was released in a few domestic theaters on February 10, 2013 (maybe for future awards consideration, yet I doubt it'll get any, interesting as it may be), but its primary location for viewing (free for subscribers) is now on Apple TV+ streaming. You’d get only hesitant encouragement from the CCAL, though, as the Rotten Tomatoes reviews come in at 70% positive while the usually-notably-lower-Metacritic crowd offers an average score in the same realm, 65%. While I found Sharper to be a delightful exploration of con-upon-con (as opposed to heist-movies, also called “Big Caper” stories where the whole concept is about one fabulous theft as with Topkapi [Jules Dassin,1964] or an extended, complex con across the entire narrative as with The Sting [George Roy Hill, 1973]), many in the critical community found its concept and execution to be lacking from the full potential it could have achieved, as noted in my previous section from the Rolling Stone review. However, I’m more in line with Peter Travers of ABC TV’s “Good Morning America” who says, in noting successes and limitations: “Though ‘Sharper’ is beautifully shot on film, a relief after the digital cheapness of so much streaming product, the ending disappoints because closure is an illusion for grifters who long ago sacrificed their humanity to stay on the hustle. Be careful before you bite into this sinful temptation -- it's a bonbon spiked with wit and malice.” So, to verify my Bottom Line portion of this posting, I recommend Sharper as a generally-fascinating-entertainment-experience, even if the calculated-ending loses a bit of its steam.
My ending for this review will be my usual tactic of a Musical Metaphor, this time Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” (from his superb 1986 Graceland album) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq-gYOrU8bA because this song deals with confused difficulties and eventual accommodations, as is the case with most of the principal characters in Sharper, while this particular video plays on constructed identities with Chevy Chase lip-synching the lyrics Simon’s actually singing, as if the 2 of them have somehow interchanged personas; this is also a situation of fakery (as with both guys in the video seeming to play trumpet or saxophone later in their performance), also a fundamental aspect of Sharper, which encourages me to offer another Metaphor (not Musical, I admit) from an NBC TV Seinfeld episode directly addressing fakery of a most-important-type, which might have also been an aspect of the implied bedroom encounters (not part of what we see in the film) between Tom and Sandra, Madeline and Max, Madeline and Richard, where I’ll bet there was needed faking at some point. No faking in this review, though; I liked Sharper quite a bit, and I think you would too.
SHORT TAKES (no spoilers here)
This is a marvelous documentary about 2 brothers in Delhi, India who run a hospital for injured birds (hawk-like creatures called black kites) in their huge metropolitan area, often the victims of the city’s terrible pollution; there’s nothing truly dramatic here, just a wonderfully-humane account of the dedication the men have to the needs of these birds and the director’s concern for all other animals.
Here’s the trailer:
The concept of this documentary is established in its opening minutes when we learn 2 brothers in Delhi, India (the national territory containing the country’s capital, New Delhi), Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud—along with their helper, Salik Rehman—have devoted their lives to rescuing ailing/wounded birds that share this metropolitan space with humans and other animals (early on we have lingering shots of many rats; later we see pigs in a stream). Their avian-neighbors, called kites (or black kites), majestic birds that we often see in closeups (reminds me of hawks, although there’s lots of individual appearances among these likewise-carnivores), often suffer sickness or injury in Delhi’s constantly-polluted-skies, so the brothers set up a cramped hospital in their basement to tend to these birds, nurse them back to health, hopefully allow them to return to the wild (though as we see in a early scene when one of them flies off he grabs Salik’s glasses as he goes). While some Delhi citizens think of the kites as obnoxious, their role as scavengers is an essential service to the city in terms of eating the mounds of garbage that pile up all over the place (we’re given the metaphor of Delhi as a stomach, kites as bacteria that digest the food), so Nadeem and Saud are doing their part for a better living space as well for all by getting as many sick birds as they can back into the sky, a task they’ve voluntarily been doing since they were teenagers. At times we get background awareness of religion-based-tensions/clashes giving us subtle messages of some Hindu animosity toward some Muslims (the faith of the brothers), along with clear indications of how difficult it is for any animal—human, bird, or otherwise—to live with the noise, pollution, crowdedness of this city,* a situation of great importance to director Sen (9:01), who hopes this film will help people better understand the necessity of inter-species-tolerance/cooperation/ acceptance. The good news we get, though, before this pleasantly-short-doc is done is the brothers receiving a grant which allowed them to build a much-larger-hospital so their work can be done more efficiently, effectively.
*Which will only get worse as India is predicted to become our planet's most-populous-country, even by April of 2023, with its roughly 1.4 billion+ surpassing China, despite India’s eastern-neighbor country being at least twice the size of what’s usually designated as Asia's southern subcontinent.
The deeply-humane (without being sentimental; the cinematography’s top-notch, innovative also) … Breathes is already embraced by the CCAL with RT reviews at 99% positive, the MC average score exceeding high for them at 87%; in parallel fashion it’s already won or been nominated for many awards, among them the winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize – Documentary, the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Eye (best doc), and is now in contention for Oscar’s Best Documentary Feature, with some predictions it’ll take this trophy as well. You can see it on HBO Max or cable TV’s HBO (some screenings scheduled for next week, check local listings; free to subscribers in both cases). While my chosen Musical Metaphor here doesn’t speak directly to this film (It’s a metaphor, damn it! Maybe I should have picked something by The Byrds … but, no.), for me it’s another uplifting human experience ultimately from India with the magnificent raga played by Ravi Shankar (sitar), Alla Rakha (tabla drums), and Kamala Chakravarty (tambura drone) at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk60ObnbIOk (footage from Monterey Pop [D.A. Pennebaker, 1968], another marvelous doc; I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Shankar perform twice [with Alla Rakha] when I lived in Texas in roughly 1968, 1971; unfortunately this 18:42 video’s interrupted at 2:48, 16:03 by ads, a problem I blessedly didn’t have at live concerts). For me, this music takes flight with the kites; I hope it'll work in a similar manner for you.
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.
Other Cinema-Related Stuff: Here are a couple of extra items that you might like to know some more about: (1) AI use on the rise in Hollywood; (2) Writers Guild strike looms.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
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AND … at least until the Oscars for 2022’s releases have been awarded on Sunday, March 12, 2023 we’re also going to include reminders in each posting of very informative links where you can get updated tallies of which films have been nominated for and/or received various awards and which ones made various individual critic’s Top 10 lists. You may find the diversity among the various awards competitions and the various critics hard to reconcile at times—not to mention the often-significant-gap between critics’ choices and competitive-award-winners (which pales when they’re compared to the even-more-noticeable-gap between specific award winners and big box-office-grosses you might want to monitor here)—but as that less-than-enthusiastic-patron-of-the-arts, Plato, noted in The Symposium (385-380 BC)—roughly translated, depending on how accurate you wish the actual quote to be—“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” so your choices for success are as valid as any of these others, especially if you offer some rationale for your decisions (unlike any awards voters who blindly fill out ballots, sometimes—damn it!—for films they have never seen).
To save you a little time scrolling through the “various awards” list above, here are the 2023 Golden Globe nominees and winners (if you even care about them after all of their recent controversies) and the Oscar nominees for 2022 films.
Here’s more information about Sharper:
https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/originals/sharper//
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymmBTuLzuRk (6:37 interview with actors Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Briana Middleton, Justice Smith)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sharper
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/sharper
Here’s more information about All That Breathes:
https://www.hbo.com/movies/all-that-breathes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNaJwgxMQwc (21:22 interview with director Shaunak Sen)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/all_that_breathes
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/all-that-breathes
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