16 ★ FT Weekend 22 February/23 February 2020
Critics’ choice
Films on releaseDanny Leigh Digital/DVD
TV choice Pick of the weekSuzi Feay Radio choice
Like the quirky combo of its
title,The Peanut Butter
Falconis predicated on an
unlikely pairing. Shia
LaBeouf stars as Tyler, a
ruffled shoreman on the run
from disgruntled thugs, who
becomes saddled with Zak,
an escapee with Down’s
syndrome dead set on
achieving wrestling stardom.
As a gently heartwarming
buddy road movie, it’s in
debt to predecessors such as
Midnight Cowboy andRain
Man, but the North Carolina
backdrop of bayous and
swaying Spanish moss lends
it a distinctive character.
LaBeouf lays on the low-key
charm, but it’s his disabled
co-star Zack Gottsagen who
gets the best lines and proves
his ample ability. Despite a
cornball ending that’s hard
to swallow,The Peanut Butter
Falconstill soars more often
than it sticks in the throat.
AAAEE
The Oscar-nominated
documentaryHoneyland
balances its sweetness with
bitter truths. The place is
North Macedonia; the year- Fiftysomething
Hatidze lives in a dimly lit,
cave-like home, carefully
cultivating honey through
holistic methods even more
ancient than the half-blind,
bedridden mother she cares
for. Into this idyll of sorts
crashes a loud and unruly
family who threaten
Hatidze’s delicate
equilibrium when they
embark on a beekeeping
operation of their own.
Despite best intentions,
greed clashes with hard-won
natural harmony. What at
first seems a picayune
picture of fading tradition
turns out also to be an
urgently relevant microcosm
of the environmental crisis.
AAAAERaphael Abraham
Like a Boss
Miguel Arteta
83 mins (15)AAEEE
Film-goers worried that
changing times may finally
threaten the dominance of
men in key creative roles will
surely be cheered byLike a
Boss — an unfunny comedy
about women in business
from the all-male team of
director Miguel Arteta and
scriptwriters Sam Pitman
and Adam Cole-Kelly. The
trio bring their particular
insight to this story of female
empowerment, represented
on screen by Mia (Tiffany
Haddish) and Mel (Rose
Byrne), friends since middle
school, now co-owners of a
chaotic artisanal cosmetics
company. Together, the
women have built a
reputation for bright ideas —
and amassed the kind of
debts that make them easy
prey for beauty industry
behemoth Oviedo, home of
dastardly CEO Claire Luna
(Salma Hayek).
Hayek brings more
watchability to the project
than it deserves. But she
can’t redeem a film this
bafflingly slapdash. There
are stoned pratfalls and
extended bits about the
results of eating too many
chillies. One sequence is a
lift from Harold Lloyd’s
silent classicSafety Last, now
three years from its 100th
anniversary. Progress comes
slow indeed.
Midnight Family
Luke Lorentzen
79 mins (15)AAAAE
A simple statistic begins
the jolting documentary
Midnight Family. To serve the
9m people of Mexico City,
the authorities operate 45
ambulances. (Director Luke
Lorentzen leaves it there,
but for comparison, London
has 450.) You’re given half a
moment to do the maths and
then we’re off, the rumble
of an engine breaking into
the wail of a siren, one of
the city’s untold private
ambulances filling manygaps in the market. This
example is operated by the
Ochoa family. The middle-
aged Fer and his natty 17-
year-old son Juan split the
driving and navigation
through traffic while 10-
year-old Josué is flung
around the back. And then
there is us, along for the ride
via windscreen cam.
Much of the film plays
like a madly adrenal action
movie. At least once, the
Ochoas have to race another
ambulance to the
emergency, their rival’s back
door flapping open. If yourThe Last Thing
He Wanted
Dee Rees
120 mins (Netflix)AAAEE
Joan Didion may be rivalled
only by Don DeLillo as a
giant of American prose
whose work film-makers are
clearly terrified of going
near. The fractured
adaptation of her 1996 novel
The Last Thing He Wanted
from director Dee Rees
(Mudbound) won’t change
that. The fictional reporter
at the heart of the matter,
Elena McMahon (Anne
Hathaway), is not Didion,
but writes like her. “Plug
into this news cycle,” she
says in voiceover. “Get the
wires raw, nod out on the
noise”. We meet her first in
the war zone of 1982 El
Salvador, wondering where
all the guns came from.
Back in Washington DC,
years pass and her
investigation stalls. The desk
is frozen, her editor tells her,
the script high on newsroom
jargon, dispatching her
instead into the 1984
presidential campaign.
There, Reagan promises the
crowds they ain’t seen
nothing yet, but McMahon
is blown off-course by her
semi-estranged father
Richard (Willem Dafoe,
turned up to 11). The old
man is a flamboyant gun-
runner whose health is
giving out — and with an
arms sale pending in Central
America, his daughter
crosses professional and
moral borders, and takes his
place executing the deal.
On the page, the reader
is transfixed by Didion’s
language. On screen,
Hathaway’s hard work can’t
stop the plot twist feeling
silly. The worlds Rees creates
— sheeny hotel rooms and
sweltering compounds —
are thickly atmospheric, but
the narrative dissolves into
disjointed vignettes. Cast as
aState Department special
adviser, Ben Affleck has the
glazed bearing of a man
lightly sedated on a long-
haul flight.Greed
Michael Winterbottom
104 mins (15)AAAEEWho can forget the day when British
industrialist Sir Richard McCreadie
appeared before the parliamentary
select committee, defending his
ownership of high street fashion
chain Monda? Questioned about
financial sharp practice, his mood
was testy from the start. Mention of
the old nickname Greedy McCreadie
darkened it further. Then came the
protester — and the custard pie.
McCreadie is the invention of the
satireGreed, directed by Michael
Winterbottom and starring Steve
Coogan. Well —ish. If the lawyers
looked away, you might almost call it
a biopic. The custard pie is borrowed
from Rupert Murdoch’s appearance
at the 2011 phone hacking inquiry,
but what comes beforehand seems
pure Philip Green, the retail magnate
whose control of brands including
Topshop and BHS also brought him
scowling before MPs. Drawn from
life, too, is the lavish bash in
Mykonos at the centre of the film —
like Green’s infamous Riviera parties,
stuffed with models and pop stars.
(As the FT has already noted,
sometimes their budgets outstripped
that of the film, a detail that you
imagine has not gone unnoticed by
the Green camp.)
Here, the occasion is the mogul’s
60th birthday. Invitees include ex-
wife Samantha (Isla Fisher) — now
resident in Monaco — and as many
celebrities as can be mustered by
private jet. (Fatboy Slim DJs; Stephen
Fry comperes; Keira Knightley sends
her apologies.) The theme is Romanimperial, requiring the hasty
construction of an amphitheatre.
A bored lion paces in a knocked-up
cage. McCreadie is not much
cheerier, bemoaning the presence on
the beach of a group of Syrian
refugees. He doesn’t object himself,
he says; it’s his guests. “Some of
them are really superficial.”
Winterbottom owes his own debt
toThe Big Short, Adam McKay’s dark
freewheel through the 2008 financial
crisis. And so for a moment
McCreadie is left where he is while
Greedunfurls a quick-fire history of
his 1980s rise and the tailwinds
behind it. A pathological haggler,
he is first among the competition tosee how far overheads drop with
stock made in south Asian
sweatshops. Later, he embraces
another eureka — the lopsided
rewards of the leveraged buyout.
The best comedy in the film is
usually the angriest. It tends to be
tied up with the numbers too. As
McCreadie presents himself with an
outsize cardboard cheque for a
dividend of $1.2bn, a giddy Samantha
tells the assembled staff of Monda
the prize is for all of them too.
Metaphorically, of course. The camera
freezes on Coogan’s wide, cold laugh.
$1.2bn was what Green’s wife
received as a dividend in the halcyon
days of 2005. Yet for all the historicalspecifics,Greedcan feel oddly vague,
uncertain if it wants to go after rogue
capitalism or just poke fun at a
tasteless spiv with whitened teeth.
The super-rich seem likely to
survive. After making the film,
Winterbottom broke ranks with the
his backers at Sony, alleging they
stopped him naming as equally
tainted retail titans, including Zara’s
Amancio Ortega and H&M’s Stefan
Persson, in the closing titles. Some
might recall that the real protester
who took aim at Rupert Murdoch in
2011 was thwarted by the forceful
intervention of Murdoch’s then wife,
Wendi Deng. Custard pies, it turns
out, remain unreliable.From left: Isla Fisher, Steve Coogan and Asa Butterfield in ‘Greed’Tiffany Haddish as Mia and Rose Byrne as Mel in the
bafflingly slapdash ‘Like a Boss’
The Ochoas’s ambulance
in ‘Midnight Family’I Am Not Okay With This
from Wednesday, Netflix
aaaae
“Dear Diary: Go f**k yourself”. It is
a bracing start to a rites-of-passage
story, even if it’s immediately
qualified with “just kidding”.
Disturbed teen Sydney (Sophia Lillis)
is advised to write down all the
furious thoughts that are preventing
her from having “a normal high
school experience, whatever the
f**k that is”. No, tapping them into
her phone isn’t good enough; it has
to be a journal with a kitten on the
front. That Sydney is willing to heed
the therapist’s advice speaks well,
although the diary convention is
quickly forgotten in this low-key
adaptation of Charles Forsman’s
comic book. Scribbling in journals is
not very televisual, after all.
To keep our appetites whetted for
this series about a self-described
“boring 17-year-old white girl”
suffering growing pains in a small
town in Pennsylvania — seven
episodes in the first season — the
opening shows her running down the
street in a nightie, panicked and in a
welter of blood. “My dad sorta died
last spring”, a laconic voiceover
informs us. It might be the diary
speaking. Her mother Maggie
(Kathleen Rose Perkins) is busy-
slash-indifferent. “You’re making me
look like a bad mom!” Pause. “And
I’m a good mom!” Little bro Liam
(Aidan Wojtak-Hissong) is adorable,as is his pet hedgehog, Banana. They
are poor, however, “stuck with
scratch-offs and bottle caps n’shit”.
An awkward friendship with fellow
eccentric Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), “the
master of zero f**ks”, together with
Sydney’s slowly emerging kinetic
powers, begins to suggest a fusion of
Carrie withThe End of the F**king
World. Apart from the cellphones,
there’s little by way of fashion or
music to suggest we’re anywhere
near the present day, although
Stanley does apologise for still havinga video collection. Brownsville is
stuck in a time warp, its only amenity
of note a minimally picturesque
ironwork bridge.
In a show that blends the deadpan,
the banal and the supernatural,
Sydney’s relationship with “badass”
best friend Dina (Sofia Bryant) is
deftly observed. Dina, with her vast
social capital and conventionally cute
looks, is kind and supportive of her
oddball friend until jock boyfriend
Brad appears, at which point Sydney
might as well turn into a mushroom.In contrast, Stanley dances down
the street in delight after finally
getting Syd to notice him. He
philosophises on the deeper meaning
of high school football as they lurk
on the sidelines, in a bold overhaul
of conventional views about success
and failure. Oleff’s performance
layers goofiness and vulnerability
over aloof intelligence, while Sydney
floats above in a bubble of angry
solipsism. The objects that start
flying around are just the metaphor;
the emotions are the real deal.Stanley Tucci narrates
The Californian Century
(Monday, Radio 4, 1.45pm)
as “The Writer”, w hose
jaded anecdotes are
accompanied by the rat-a-
tat-tat of an antique
typewriter. Ten episodes
traverse decades via a series
of historical figures from
Hollywood’s silent era to
Silicon Valley in the 1990s.
The Writer dictates
everything as though it’s a
film script. Despite some
effective mental montages,
all that “Exterior, day. Cut
to crane shot. Reverse
angle... ” business gets
stale quickly. Episodes
feature the 1930s radio
preacher Sister Aimee
Semple McPherson, who
may or may not have staged
her own kidnapping, Hattie
McDaniel, the first black
Oscar winner, and William
Mulholland, who diverted
water from the Sierra
Nevada to turn LA from
desert to boom town.
California’s longest-serving
governor, Jerry Brown, pops
up to explain why water is
still a political issue today.
Fade to black, and credits.
AAAEE
February 29 will be a day
like any other but inLeap
(Tuesday, Radio 4, 11.30am)
the artist currently known
as Monster Chetwynd
reckons we should use it to
be wild and spontaneous.
It should be “an annual
acknowledgment” of
irrationality (someone tell
her it only happens once
every four years). Invited
to create an aural artwork,
she enlists friends to put on
silly voices, recite terrible
poetry and perform daft
acts that then have to be
described to us.
Admittedly I heard a
rough cut, but if they
remove the nonsense, all
that’s left would be a few
minutes with astronomer
Kristen Lippincott, sensibly
explaining why leap
years exist.AAEEE SFThe Twilight Zone
Tuesday, 9pm, Syfy/CBS
aaaae
I’m not sure anyone hides
behind the sofa any more
when theDoctor Whotheme
sounds, but the four-note
motif ofThe Twilight Zone’s
theme tune instantly
unsettles. Jordan Peele is the
po-faced narrator, stepping
incongruously into shot with
creepy little homilies and
the opening episodes largely
deliver the brand’s thought-
twizzling chills.
“Replay” concerns a smart
lawyer driving her son
Dorian to college for his first
semester. Dorian (Damson
Idris) is open-hearted and
optimistic (“I want to do
something good in the
world”), while his mother
Nina (Sanaa Lathan) is
understandably ambivalent
about launching her “baby”.
Events take a terrifying turn
when they are pulled over
en route by a Virginia state
trooper. The mother has
discovered she can turn back
time with the rewind button
on an ancient camcorder, but
a classic “The Appointment
in Samarra” scenario
develops as Officer Lasky
looms inescapably. This
device cleverly dramatises
the notion that there’s no
such thing as a good traffic
stop if you happen to be
African American. “It’s why
my son is so important to
me... it’s why he matters,”
pleads his mother.
“Nightmare at 30,000
feet” will tweak anyone
who’s ever been on a plane.
Twitchy investigative
journalist Justin (Adam
Scott), booked on a 13-hour
flight from Washington DC to
Tel Aviv, is only moderately
intrigued to note that flight
1015 on October 15 is
scheduled to leave at
10.15pm, but what he
discovers in his seat pocket is
seriously disturbing. It’s a
device loaded with a podcast
which seems to predict the
plane’s disappearance, a
mere hour into the flight. As
the podcast enumerates the
various theories and the
minutes count down, Justin
races around trying to
locate the air marshal and
the Russian mafioso in the
witness protection
programme. If only the pilot
can be persuaded not to say
his fatal last words from the
cockpit to air traffic control
in New York, maybe 117
lives can be saved.
Kumail Nanjiani stars as
Samir in “The Comedian”,
doggedly persevering with
his Second Amendment joke
despite zero laughs. Even his
young nephew thinks his set
sucks. One night, consoling
himself in a bar, he’s amazed
to find himself sitting next to
comedy legend JC Wheeler
(Tracy Morgan). If anyone
has the secret to success, it’s
JC, but the knowledge comes
at a price. Soon Samir’s
career is on the upturn:
never has “killing it” been so
apt. Supernatural twists and
Escher-like plot convolutions
seem a little passe post-Black
Mirror, but the performances
shine through. SFThe ears have it: Harry
Enfield as Prince Charlesversion: Vicki Pepperdine’s is
merely a caricature, and
unfunny at that. Louise Ford
has perfected Kate’s
customary nervous vanilla
flavouring, and Hugh
Skinner continues his run as
adorably daft, dim Wills,The Windsors
Tuesday, 10pm, Channel 4
aaaee
Just as politics has now
officially staggered beyond
satire, the latest eruptions
within the House of Windsor
have begun to outface
parody. The writers ofThe
Windsorsmust have looked
on in horror as the jest-
generating Sussex-
Cambridge alliance
splintered — they can’t keep
losing core cast members
like this.
Given the recent rifts,
Series 3 inevitably lags
behind reality. Still, there’s
much to treasure in Kathryn
Drysdale’s earnest Meghan,
wittering on (“Bananas andavocados are something I
feel passionate about”) while
Harry slouches around in the
background. (Tom Durant-
Pritchard has taken over the
role from Richard Goulding,
and is slightly less subtle; not
that subtlety is the issue
here.) How much does
likeness count, anyway? It
took me a few seconds to
realise that a random man
(Matthew Cottle) is meant to
be Prince Edward. As a gifted
impressionist, Harry Enfield
sounds perfect as Prince
Charles, but just looks like
Harry Enfield with ears. If
anything is calculated to
boost Camilla in the
popularity stakes, it’s Haydn
Gwynne’s pantomimevillainess, turning up at
Meghan’s door dressed as
Snow White’s wicked
stepmother. “I need to drive
a wedge between them... but how?’” she hisses.
Surely no one watching the
last series ofThe Crownwas
lulled even for a second into
the illusion that they were
watching the actual Queen,
rather than Olivia Colman’s
wonderfully restrained
performance.The Windsors
has it easier in that respect,
for one thing keeping the
older generation out of it.
They’ve suffered enough. Of
the few head-to-head
comparisons possible,The
Crown’s Princess Anne (Erin
Doherty) beatsThe Windsors
albeit with better hair than
the original.
It’s odd even to
contemplate Prince Andrew
in a comedy set up.
Fortunately Tim Wallers
looks nothing like him (the
real Andy is nowhere near
as patrician) and keeps to
the background. A reference
to “your nonce friend” has
been shoehorned in.
Ellie White and Celeste
Dring are the divinely self-
absorbed sisters Beatrice
and Eugenie, wilfully
repurposing aitches from all
those dropped HRH titles:
“Ware sisters, aren’t whe?”
Rich and thick, like treacle
pudding laced with
British sherry. SFSanaa
Lathan in
‘Replay’
from ‘The
Twilight
Zone’Rites-of-
passage story
with a twist:
Sophia Lillis and
Wyatt Oleff in
‘I Am Not Okay
With This’instinct is to see the family
as opportunistic, even
parasitic, part of the reality
set out in this gripping,
endlessly human film is how
rarely they make any actual
money — tending to victims
of gun battles or hit-and-
runs only to find the patient
can’t or won’t pay. Lorentzen
lets us draw our own
conclusions, focused on the
overlap of the dystopian and
quotidian — the blood
mopped up before a
snatched meal of canned
tuna in a brightly lit
convenience store.FEBRUARY 22 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 20/2/2020 - 17: 28 User: paul.gould Page Name: WKD16, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 16 , 1