Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

"Vice" is not quite a comedy, not quite a drama. It is an essay. Writer-director Adam McKay's previous "The Big Short" came close to the essay form in its examination of financial malfeasance but it still had a more linear, dramatic structure than "Vice," which freely skips biographical chronology and segues into oddities -- a startling mid-film closing note and credits, a Shakespearean conversation, an Everyman narrator with a twist -- all to make a point about Dick Cheney's conscience-free pursuit and retention of power. At one point a still-young Cheney asks his friend Donald Rumsfeld what they believe; Rumsfeld laughs at the notion. And it's never suggested that Cheney has a real ideology save to have to freedom to do whatever the hell he wants. An avid fisherman whose Secret Service code name was Angler, Cheney early on looked for the angles, and for the right bait to reel in his prey. He often did so as a seeming sidekick, for example...

We seem to have been on a run of celebrity deaths. Today had the news about the passing of Donald Moffat, a deft character actor who was especially good at arrogant, snobby types. He was the president in “Clear and Present Danger,” Ford Frick in “61*,” Lyndon Johnson in “The Right Stuff.” I especially liked his work in “Class Action,” where he went head to head against Gene Hackman in legal wrangling, Just before that we lost Penny Marshall, a funny actress in “Laverne & Shirley,” an able director for “A League of Their Own,” the delightful “Big,” “Renaissance Man” (worth seeing for the “Henry V” monologue, and the Christmas perennial “The Preacher’s Wife.” And it was a grin when she popped up at the end of “Get Shorty” as the director of its concluding movie. There was Ricky Jay, full of off-camera skills but a steady screen player who was a go-to for the formidable writer-directors David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson. There were people who guided my career, such as writer Will...

Notes on a few recent screen titles: "Boy Erased," written and directed by Joel Edgerton (who also plays a supporting role), is a wrenching look at the effects of kindly-intentioned intolerance. The result, in this case of gay-conversion "therapy," is not kind; in fact, it is devastating in this adaptation of the memoir by Garrard Conley. But what makes it especially horrifying is that the process is abetted by two loving parents (Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman) who want the best for their son (Lucas Hedges) -- but do not believe that the best includes his being gay. They send him off to a gay-conversion program and, as I said, it not only proves unhelpful, it is a horror for the young people forced to endure it. There is no true psychological knowledge at work in the camp, only a sense that Satan and a half-assed distillation of Freudian theory are at work in "choosing" to be gay. It's a fine, infuriating film, at once personal and issues based in...