The MCU, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or the Avengers cycle, as I tend to think of it), has reached a climax in 2019. Having begun in 2008 with Iron Man and seen that particular superhero meet his end in 2019 with Avengers: Endgame, it's as good a time as any to rank the twenty-three films released during this span. To that end, worst to first:
23. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
I think fans of the MCU in 2019 forget that this was even part of the sequence, produced before Disney acquired Marvel Studios and the rights to Hulk movies subsequently left the character in solo film limbo. But this was the second entry, a light reboot of the unrelated 2003 Hulk, saddling Edward Norton with the thankless task of playing second-fiddle to a story that loses most of the character work of the Eric Bana version for even more mindless CGI destruction.
22. Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
I think this is the MCU descended into outright parody, and no manner of fan acclaim or interest in director Taika Waititi will change that opinion.
21. Iron Man (2008)
The first film of the sequence is terrible. Unrecognizable, by later standards (sensing a pattern yet?), salvaged only by the Iron Man suit itself and the effortless charm of Robert Downey, Jr. I seriously wonder how many fans have bothered to revisit it in the past decade. That's essentially the problem the whole MCU is going to face in years hence: whether it will be worth savoring as much in hindsight as it was getting caught up in it.
20. Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Other than following up on Loki, this is a consensus dud by all accounts, the definition of going through the motions.
19. Doctor Strange (2016)
Essential only in the sense that if you want more of what looks really cool in Avengers: Infinity War, but aren't yet prepared to discover it doesn't look as cool in its own movie, despite every effort to make the visual effects pretty much the whole movie.
18. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
James Spader is an inspired choice to voice Ultron, but this is essentially an excuse to spend time with the Avengers without really accomplishing anything but nudging the narrative along, delaying the relevant Thanos material for...reasons.
17. Black Panther (2018)
This one became almost an entirely separate phenomenon by leaning into (whether deliberately or not) Black Lives Matter by somewhat inadvertently buying into the racist myth that black people belong in Africa.
16. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
I was a bigger fan of this one in 2011 than I am today, in part because its nominal sequences are infinitely better.
15. Iron Man 3 (2013)
I actually think this is otherwise a huge wasted opportunity, but think the big twist concerning Ben Kingsley's Mandarin is inspired storytelling, and uses Kingsley himself brilliantly, a wicked commentary on the terrorists in the first one.
14. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
I think this follow-up to the breakthrough first volume is a letdown, but redeemed significantly by the famous "Mary Poppins" take on Yondu, who ends up stealing the show.
13. Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
I'm a big fan of the Mar Webb Spider-Man movies. I like them more than the Raimi trilogy, and more than the MCU Spider-Man, which tries so hard to be socially relevant it's borderline painful. I just watched this one for the first time. Redeemed mostly by Zendaya, who's actually mostly wasted. A minimalist turn worked better the first time.
12. Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Everyone is calling this one of the best movies of the year. Yeah, no. It's as slapdash a conclusion to the Thanos saga as they could've conceived.
11. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
A version of Spider-Man that tries so hard to get it right that it's almost an amazing backfire, with the worst casting of Peter Parker in a movie to date (yeah) but with at least one great sequence (Peter finding out Michael Keaton is the bad guy).
10. Captain America: Civil War (2016)
In which the Avengers steal Cap's thunder. But it's also the third best Avengers team experience!
9. Ant-Man (2015)
Paul Rudd takes what might have otherwise been a fairly generic MCU movie and makes it his own.
8. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
I think Thanos in his big spotlight is nearly botched, but all the superheroes in their dramatic assembling around him is rousing, with the highlight being Captain America's dramatic return, with one of the few great scoring moments of the MCU.
7. Thor (2011)
What makes this one compelling is proving instantly that Loki is the early breakout star of the MCU.
6. The Avengers (2012)
Classic original assembling of the original team, the narrative template for the rest of the cycle.
5. Captain Marvel (2019)
I actually think the lead character is the weakest aspect of the movie, but everything happening around her (except for the inexplicable ability to give Nick Fury a believable hairline) is gold.
4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Pitting Cap against Hydra, which was posing as his own country, was narrative genius, and produced the best action sequence of the MCU when he realizes what's happening inside a crowded elevator, and he's entirely on his own in the fight that follows.
3. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
Even if it leads to the wobbly logic that resolves the Thanos saga in Endgame, this is the perfect handling of solo mythology in the MCU.
2. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
This is what it looks like when Avengers is recalibrated with entirely new characters. And the results are brilliant.
1. Iron Man 2 (2010)
I know this goes against nearly all prevailing MCU logic, but without Iron Man 2, the entire thing crumbles. This is the movie that humanizes Tony Stark. It's the brilliant introduction (and arguably best use) of Black Widow, and the best villain(s) in the whole cycle, with logical motivation and flawless execution, knowing exactly what to play off of and expand from what has come before. Nothing that came after it even comes close. And despite what fans like to say, it's going to be the easiest single movie to revisit in the years ahead to explain the whole phenomenon.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Ranking Star Wars
Hey, so this has been pretty popular recently, in an internet endlessly obsessed with ranking things. (Hey, I do it, too, and have many lists here, but without pictures. So nobody cares.) Here's my worst to first:
12. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
In their rush to prop up the narrative that anything's better than the prequels, fans latched onto the later TV series, but...this is the bottom of the barrel. Period. In animation particularly, the need for art becomes paramount. A lot of animated flicks try to skirt by on adventure or jokes, but if there's nothing to hang it on, sparse characterization or minimal effort in storytelling, the results fall flat. And this is as flat as Star Wars will hopefully ever get.
11. Rogue One (2016)
Those same fans latched onto Rogue One because it was everything they wanted Star Wars to be, and to my mind, this can be summed up as: embarrassing. A true bastardization of the saga, with as flat an understanding of the source material as Clone Wars. Although ironically, the thing I originally liked least is the one element I like now, Ben Mendelsohn's showy turn as an outright mustache-twirling Imperial officer.
10. Solo (2018)
Here's where I quit griping (I'm disappointed when fans grumble about seemingly the bulk of a franchise), because I actually really like Solo, but I'm finding it hard to rank the saga entries themselves, so it's just easier to get this out of the way.
9. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
What??? Invariably, this is the one everyone else picks as the best of the franchise, and here I'm ranking it as essentially the worst? Thematically, it's an entirely interstitial piece; where it isn't introducing bold new ideas (Yoda, Lando, Vader-as-dad) the story is actually mostly in a holding pattern, with all the key players struggling to accomplish something and having no idea if they're actually making progress. It's literally Star Wars with no real idea of where it's going, but attempting gamely to set itself up for something bigger. That's the definition of a game-changer, but not necessarily in glowing terms.
8. The Last Jedi (2017)
In contrast, Last Jedi makes bold creative decisions while attempting to ensure its characters are making definitive progress, too. While Empire Strikes Back makes a lot of heroes look hapless, at least it's easier to root for Yoda than for Luke in Last Jedi, although conversely it's easier to root for Rey in Last Jedi than Luke in Empire Strikes Back. And for all the criticism Rian Johnson has received, he's easily the third best director of the saga.
7. Attack of the Clones (2002)
Fans have been ripping on the dialogue and chemistry on display in Attack of the Clones for years, but artistically it's probably the best George Lucas ever delivered, the most streamlined of all his interests and instincts. But as cool as Yoda is in action (the initial reaction to the movie loved this aspect, but it's since been completely forgotten), it's a little disappointing to know it rests entirely on his shoulders to pull off what the two other prequels achieve so effortlessly in lightsaber dueling.
6. The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
The final film in the saga is an excellent summation and synthesis, as well as radical reinterpretation of everything that came before it, confidently exploring the concept of redemption that felt like an afterthought previously.
5. Return of the Jedi (1983)
The later Pirates of the Caribbean franchise feels like an outgrowth of the thrilling onslaught of enthralling action that the original climax of the saga essentially is. It might as well have been the literal template.
4. The Phantom Menace (1999)
The first of the prequels ends in breathtaking fashion with the spectacular lightsaber duel between Darth Maul (the perfection of a concept in minimalism created for Boba Fett), Ob-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jinn. I happen to love Jar Jar, thank you. But no acting tops Liam Neeson in the franchise, whose performance here led to a career renaissance, regardless of what fans think.
3. The Force Awakens (2015)
The introductions of Rey and Finn were the best in the whole saga, and Han Solo still manages to steal the show, and proving that J.J. Abrams was a worthy successor to George Lucas.
2. A New Hope (1977)
The sheer boldness of the first film will always top Empire Strikes Back in my book, an astonishing vision that sprang forth from the simple idea of trying to update Flash Gordon. Mission greatly exceeded, Mr. Lucas.
1. Revenge of the Sith (2005)
It was the vision George Lucas had from the moment Star Wars solidified in his mind: how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. The prequels extended that vision to three films, but by the third it focused not on the epic clash between Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the seduction of Palpatine, in the single best dramatic sequence of the saga: a conversation at an opera. Then of course Skywalker and Kenobi clash, and the inevitable happens, and the acting in the franchise reaches its zenith. So yes, the prequels reign supreme.
12. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
In their rush to prop up the narrative that anything's better than the prequels, fans latched onto the later TV series, but...this is the bottom of the barrel. Period. In animation particularly, the need for art becomes paramount. A lot of animated flicks try to skirt by on adventure or jokes, but if there's nothing to hang it on, sparse characterization or minimal effort in storytelling, the results fall flat. And this is as flat as Star Wars will hopefully ever get.
11. Rogue One (2016)
Those same fans latched onto Rogue One because it was everything they wanted Star Wars to be, and to my mind, this can be summed up as: embarrassing. A true bastardization of the saga, with as flat an understanding of the source material as Clone Wars. Although ironically, the thing I originally liked least is the one element I like now, Ben Mendelsohn's showy turn as an outright mustache-twirling Imperial officer.
10. Solo (2018)
Here's where I quit griping (I'm disappointed when fans grumble about seemingly the bulk of a franchise), because I actually really like Solo, but I'm finding it hard to rank the saga entries themselves, so it's just easier to get this out of the way.
9. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
What??? Invariably, this is the one everyone else picks as the best of the franchise, and here I'm ranking it as essentially the worst? Thematically, it's an entirely interstitial piece; where it isn't introducing bold new ideas (Yoda, Lando, Vader-as-dad) the story is actually mostly in a holding pattern, with all the key players struggling to accomplish something and having no idea if they're actually making progress. It's literally Star Wars with no real idea of where it's going, but attempting gamely to set itself up for something bigger. That's the definition of a game-changer, but not necessarily in glowing terms.
8. The Last Jedi (2017)
In contrast, Last Jedi makes bold creative decisions while attempting to ensure its characters are making definitive progress, too. While Empire Strikes Back makes a lot of heroes look hapless, at least it's easier to root for Yoda than for Luke in Last Jedi, although conversely it's easier to root for Rey in Last Jedi than Luke in Empire Strikes Back. And for all the criticism Rian Johnson has received, he's easily the third best director of the saga.
7. Attack of the Clones (2002)
Fans have been ripping on the dialogue and chemistry on display in Attack of the Clones for years, but artistically it's probably the best George Lucas ever delivered, the most streamlined of all his interests and instincts. But as cool as Yoda is in action (the initial reaction to the movie loved this aspect, but it's since been completely forgotten), it's a little disappointing to know it rests entirely on his shoulders to pull off what the two other prequels achieve so effortlessly in lightsaber dueling.
6. The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
The final film in the saga is an excellent summation and synthesis, as well as radical reinterpretation of everything that came before it, confidently exploring the concept of redemption that felt like an afterthought previously.
5. Return of the Jedi (1983)
The later Pirates of the Caribbean franchise feels like an outgrowth of the thrilling onslaught of enthralling action that the original climax of the saga essentially is. It might as well have been the literal template.
4. The Phantom Menace (1999)
The first of the prequels ends in breathtaking fashion with the spectacular lightsaber duel between Darth Maul (the perfection of a concept in minimalism created for Boba Fett), Ob-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jinn. I happen to love Jar Jar, thank you. But no acting tops Liam Neeson in the franchise, whose performance here led to a career renaissance, regardless of what fans think.
3. The Force Awakens (2015)
The introductions of Rey and Finn were the best in the whole saga, and Han Solo still manages to steal the show, and proving that J.J. Abrams was a worthy successor to George Lucas.
2. A New Hope (1977)
The sheer boldness of the first film will always top Empire Strikes Back in my book, an astonishing vision that sprang forth from the simple idea of trying to update Flash Gordon. Mission greatly exceeded, Mr. Lucas.
1. Revenge of the Sith (2005)
It was the vision George Lucas had from the moment Star Wars solidified in his mind: how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. The prequels extended that vision to three films, but by the third it focused not on the epic clash between Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the seduction of Palpatine, in the single best dramatic sequence of the saga: a conversation at an opera. Then of course Skywalker and Kenobi clash, and the inevitable happens, and the acting in the franchise reaches its zenith. So yes, the prequels reign supreme.
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
rating: ****
the story: The saga concludes.
review: This will be another film from 2019 I hesitate to call an out-and-out classic. (True story: when I was picking up the recent home video release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I heard it referred to as the movie where Bruce Lee gets his ass kicked.) Because I really like Rise of Skywalker, but I'm not immediately prepared to go all in. Sometimes a movie will leave you with that kind of impression, right from the start. Sometimes it takes a while. Some of my all-time favorites are like that. My appreciation for Tarsem's The Fall has grown even from a hugely favorable initial impression.
But what you want to read about is Rise of Skywalker. The Star Wars saga has quite an interesting backstory to it at this point. I'm not talking about the films but how they've been accepted by fans over the years. Empire Strikes Back sort of instantly, for most observers, became the franchise favorite, but it didn't make as much money at the box office as A New Hope. Fans instantly derided Return of the Jedi as a shameless conclusion to the original trilogy, festooned with nonsense teddy bears and sudden revelations like Luke and Leia actually being siblings all along. But fans forgot these facts by the time the prequels came around. Over the years, the prequels became pariahs. But the saga continued. J.J. Abrams launched the sequel trilogy with The Force Awakens, but it wasn't until Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi that fans, who were already thinking Force Awakens echoed A New Hope too directly, started to grumble loudly. We live in a #notmy[fillintheblank] era, so of course a fan community already discontent over the prequels had begun suggesting Star Wars was over.
Then of course Rise of Skywalker comes around and is announced as the finale of the Skywalker saga. Not necessarily Star Wars itself, but the saga as it revolves around the Skywalkers. (Do you want a spoiler? By the end of Rise of Skywalker, the concept of revolving around the Skywalkers sort of gets a new definition. But I think it still technically completes the saga as we know it.)
Now, we also now live in a world where Baby Yoda exists. Maybe this is enough to bring back some of those skeptics. I think one way or another Star Wars goes out with a bang, not just in the movie but as a cultural experience. I don't really care what the public perception is. I love Solo. (And still am ambivalent at best about Rogue One.) But it's nice to think Star Wars can still compete with the MCU.
I think Rise of Skywalker is infinitely better than Avengers: Endgame. I think it absolutely schools the Thanos finale. Where Endgame plays at trying to have resonance for a whole franchise, Rise of Skywalker speaks to unanswered questions for eight previous films spanning more than forty years, and does so brilliantly. It doesn't attempt to resolve everything. In the finest Star Wars tradition, it introduces new mysteries, that need never be resolved. I mean, we'll never really know who shot first, after all. (Thanks, George!)
If Last Jedi was unconventional, Rise of Skywalker dips immediately and enthusiastically back into A New Hope, and revisits Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Fans who only want to interpret things negatively will consider the results as nothing more than the original trilogy in a blender, a shameless rip-off.
But it's so much more than that. J.J. Abrams is not George Lucas. He's not Kershner. He's not Marquand. His sensibilities are as much informed by Star Wars as they are Peter Jackson and Harry Potter. He's very much a modern blockbuster filmmaker, and crafts his movie around moments and ideas that didn't exist in the saga previously. His Jedi have the ability to heal, just as George Lucas eventually built up the Sith to have the ability to create life itself (the disputed origin of Vader). Rey has powers we've never seen before. I've seen this sort of thing done with existing mythos before. Green Lantern comics, for instance, which in the '90s I was thoroughly convinced had all the grandeur of Star Wars, before they ever went full epic in the new millennium. Again, some fans will have problems with this sort of thing. I think it rings true. The Force now resides, effectively, in a handful of individuals at best. And by the end of the movie, by the end of the saga, has shrunk even further.
I think the mythology is given its due. I think the characters introduced in Force Awakens are given fitting roles to play, and have fitting arcs. Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and even Domhnall Gleason turn in trilogy-best performances. Original trilogy actors abound! And deliver. Everything delivers.
Even though I didn't like the movie itself, Return of the King had a killer, memorable climax when Sam tells Frodo that even if he can't carry the ring, he can carry Frodo. I don't know if Rise of Skywalker has a moment like that. I don't know if it needs to. Last Jedi had a rousing moment, when Rey and Kylo Ren strike down Snoke unexpectedly, and that's a tough moment to beat in this trilogy, and so it's not really worth trying to compete against. Instead, Rise of Skywalker is filled with reflecting back on everything we've learned, everything we've experienced over the course of three trilogies. There isn't a Vader who seems far from redemption, or two Jedi being torn away from a treasured brotherhood at stake. Rey and Kylo spend the entire movie going over their Last Jedi experiences. Kylo's best moment is a direct riff on a scene in Force Awakens, a quieter and perhaps as a result, more affecting echo. And that's sort of the whole movie.
It knows, as with the best stories, that the ending reflects back on the beginning. We last see Rey in the most perfect place possible. I think if the results aren't perfect, they're as perfect as they could possibly have been, especially since George Lucas isn't at the helm, and because Abrams sort of swooped back in at the last minute. That's some kind of magic. And that's always been Star Wars in a nutshell. You don't have to worry about what the fans think.
the story: The saga concludes.
review: This will be another film from 2019 I hesitate to call an out-and-out classic. (True story: when I was picking up the recent home video release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I heard it referred to as the movie where Bruce Lee gets his ass kicked.) Because I really like Rise of Skywalker, but I'm not immediately prepared to go all in. Sometimes a movie will leave you with that kind of impression, right from the start. Sometimes it takes a while. Some of my all-time favorites are like that. My appreciation for Tarsem's The Fall has grown even from a hugely favorable initial impression.
But what you want to read about is Rise of Skywalker. The Star Wars saga has quite an interesting backstory to it at this point. I'm not talking about the films but how they've been accepted by fans over the years. Empire Strikes Back sort of instantly, for most observers, became the franchise favorite, but it didn't make as much money at the box office as A New Hope. Fans instantly derided Return of the Jedi as a shameless conclusion to the original trilogy, festooned with nonsense teddy bears and sudden revelations like Luke and Leia actually being siblings all along. But fans forgot these facts by the time the prequels came around. Over the years, the prequels became pariahs. But the saga continued. J.J. Abrams launched the sequel trilogy with The Force Awakens, but it wasn't until Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi that fans, who were already thinking Force Awakens echoed A New Hope too directly, started to grumble loudly. We live in a #notmy[fillintheblank] era, so of course a fan community already discontent over the prequels had begun suggesting Star Wars was over.
Then of course Rise of Skywalker comes around and is announced as the finale of the Skywalker saga. Not necessarily Star Wars itself, but the saga as it revolves around the Skywalkers. (Do you want a spoiler? By the end of Rise of Skywalker, the concept of revolving around the Skywalkers sort of gets a new definition. But I think it still technically completes the saga as we know it.)
Now, we also now live in a world where Baby Yoda exists. Maybe this is enough to bring back some of those skeptics. I think one way or another Star Wars goes out with a bang, not just in the movie but as a cultural experience. I don't really care what the public perception is. I love Solo. (And still am ambivalent at best about Rogue One.) But it's nice to think Star Wars can still compete with the MCU.
I think Rise of Skywalker is infinitely better than Avengers: Endgame. I think it absolutely schools the Thanos finale. Where Endgame plays at trying to have resonance for a whole franchise, Rise of Skywalker speaks to unanswered questions for eight previous films spanning more than forty years, and does so brilliantly. It doesn't attempt to resolve everything. In the finest Star Wars tradition, it introduces new mysteries, that need never be resolved. I mean, we'll never really know who shot first, after all. (Thanks, George!)
If Last Jedi was unconventional, Rise of Skywalker dips immediately and enthusiastically back into A New Hope, and revisits Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Fans who only want to interpret things negatively will consider the results as nothing more than the original trilogy in a blender, a shameless rip-off.
But it's so much more than that. J.J. Abrams is not George Lucas. He's not Kershner. He's not Marquand. His sensibilities are as much informed by Star Wars as they are Peter Jackson and Harry Potter. He's very much a modern blockbuster filmmaker, and crafts his movie around moments and ideas that didn't exist in the saga previously. His Jedi have the ability to heal, just as George Lucas eventually built up the Sith to have the ability to create life itself (the disputed origin of Vader). Rey has powers we've never seen before. I've seen this sort of thing done with existing mythos before. Green Lantern comics, for instance, which in the '90s I was thoroughly convinced had all the grandeur of Star Wars, before they ever went full epic in the new millennium. Again, some fans will have problems with this sort of thing. I think it rings true. The Force now resides, effectively, in a handful of individuals at best. And by the end of the movie, by the end of the saga, has shrunk even further.
I think the mythology is given its due. I think the characters introduced in Force Awakens are given fitting roles to play, and have fitting arcs. Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and even Domhnall Gleason turn in trilogy-best performances. Original trilogy actors abound! And deliver. Everything delivers.
Even though I didn't like the movie itself, Return of the King had a killer, memorable climax when Sam tells Frodo that even if he can't carry the ring, he can carry Frodo. I don't know if Rise of Skywalker has a moment like that. I don't know if it needs to. Last Jedi had a rousing moment, when Rey and Kylo Ren strike down Snoke unexpectedly, and that's a tough moment to beat in this trilogy, and so it's not really worth trying to compete against. Instead, Rise of Skywalker is filled with reflecting back on everything we've learned, everything we've experienced over the course of three trilogies. There isn't a Vader who seems far from redemption, or two Jedi being torn away from a treasured brotherhood at stake. Rey and Kylo spend the entire movie going over their Last Jedi experiences. Kylo's best moment is a direct riff on a scene in Force Awakens, a quieter and perhaps as a result, more affecting echo. And that's sort of the whole movie.
It knows, as with the best stories, that the ending reflects back on the beginning. We last see Rey in the most perfect place possible. I think if the results aren't perfect, they're as perfect as they could possibly have been, especially since George Lucas isn't at the helm, and because Abrams sort of swooped back in at the last minute. That's some kind of magic. And that's always been Star Wars in a nutshell. You don't have to worry about what the fans think.
Saturday, November 23, 2019
Wyatt Earp (1994)
rating: *****
the story: The life of lawman Wyatt Earp.
review: Recently I watched a slew of westerns. It's part of my blood, something I inherited from my dad, one of those John Wayne partisans. Wyatt Earp wasn't part of the lineup (two DVD sets totaling fourteen films, plus Tombstone) until I added it in (plus another viewing of Colin Farell's American Outlaws, which I'm ready to agree is mostly a misfire). I'm glad I did. It's now probably my favorite Kevin Costner movie.
Made at the tail-end of Coster's golden age, just before Waterworld destroyed his (hugely) popular career, a hotstreak that included The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK, and The Bodyguard, it was shot and released at the same time as Tombstone, which was released first, got all the praise, and all but canceled out any interest in Wyatt Earp.
A horrible travesty. When I finally got around to seeing it the first time, Dennis Quaid's Doc Holliday made an immediate impression on me as a wonderfully sensational acting clinic, the best I'd ever seen from Quaid. The problem everyone else who's bothered to see the movie seems to have is that Val Kilmer had already stolen Tombstone in a charismatic (and arguably his best) performance of the same role. But as entertaining as Kilmer's Doc is, Quaid's is unquestionably better.
The same can be said of every other element. Don't get me wrong about Tombstone's Earp, Kurt Russell, who's frequently highly magnetic in his film appearances. It's just, Costner by definition has so much more to work with. His Earp is basically an antihero. If this were 2019, Wyatt Earp would be the angsty DCEU to Tombstone's MCU. Or in other words, Tombstone is in every sense the Disney version, the glossy traditional Hollywood take (and even feels in most respects as if it were released far earlier than 1993, an instant anachronism, as it were), and Wyatt Earp is the western as it might've become if it had landed better.
Indeed, it's one of those movies that just seems to become more timely as the years progress, and therefore timeless. It could just as easily have been that uneasy cinematic response to Black Lives Matter that never really happened until years into the movement (and even then most directly in a movie that's actually set in the past, Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman), with an Earp who's as celebrated as he's reviled, frequently criticized as too violent in his pursuit of justice, even as events sometimes seem to prove his methods justified. That's what Tombstone and Wyatt Earp most have in common, trying to give the true history of the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral, have the heroes be less obviously heroic.
Wyatt Earp traces the whole arc of Earp's life (could almost be the ancestor to all those later movies that begin with a familiar character's childhood where previous depictions hadn't). Gene Hackman, who appeared in two other westerns during the same period, Unforgiven and The Quick and the Dead, both in fairly villainous roles, plays Earp's dad, a tough but loving father that draws out far greater nuance from Hackman, and puts his impulses to good use. He sets the tone for a family saga that drives the women crazy later in the movie (though the script, for such a long movie, doesn't really have much for the likes of Mare Willingham and Catherine O'Hara other than love and exasperation), though it gives good parts to brothers played by Michael Madsen, Linden Ashby (who has only one other notable role to his credit, Mortal Kombat's Johnny Cage, which he nailed), and a young Jim Caviezel.
The supporting cast is bursting with talent besides! Also featured, among others, are Bill Pullman and Tom Sizemore (in a role that doesn't merely require him to be a tough guy, for a change) as Ed and Bat Masterson, respectively, Mark Harmon as someone other than Gibbs, and Isabella Rossellini, who completes the excellent portrait of Doc Holliday as his frustrated lover, Big Nose Kate, plus Jeff Fahey as the head of the troublesome Clantons.
Earp's arc as a troubled lover is highlighted, his losses and triumphs, his yearning to escape the spotlight (one almost has the sense that the sentiment could also have been Costner's). The running time is entirely justified. This is an epic that tells an epic, but also completely human, tale. Costner isn't the romantic hero he so often was in this period, but the complete opposite, a man ground down past such illusions into messy real life, struggling to do the right thing, and not always succeeding.
Watching it again, especially in the context of so many other westerns, it's a revelation, especially set against, once again, Tombstone. Its only real competition, for me, against so many others, was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (which is even better). The western, it seems, was only getting better with time. The more art infused, the less artifice, therefore justifying the genre's outsize placement in film lore. Directed by underrated icon Lawrence Kasdan.
the story: The life of lawman Wyatt Earp.
review: Recently I watched a slew of westerns. It's part of my blood, something I inherited from my dad, one of those John Wayne partisans. Wyatt Earp wasn't part of the lineup (two DVD sets totaling fourteen films, plus Tombstone) until I added it in (plus another viewing of Colin Farell's American Outlaws, which I'm ready to agree is mostly a misfire). I'm glad I did. It's now probably my favorite Kevin Costner movie.
Made at the tail-end of Coster's golden age, just before Waterworld destroyed his (hugely) popular career, a hotstreak that included The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK, and The Bodyguard, it was shot and released at the same time as Tombstone, which was released first, got all the praise, and all but canceled out any interest in Wyatt Earp.
A horrible travesty. When I finally got around to seeing it the first time, Dennis Quaid's Doc Holliday made an immediate impression on me as a wonderfully sensational acting clinic, the best I'd ever seen from Quaid. The problem everyone else who's bothered to see the movie seems to have is that Val Kilmer had already stolen Tombstone in a charismatic (and arguably his best) performance of the same role. But as entertaining as Kilmer's Doc is, Quaid's is unquestionably better.
The same can be said of every other element. Don't get me wrong about Tombstone's Earp, Kurt Russell, who's frequently highly magnetic in his film appearances. It's just, Costner by definition has so much more to work with. His Earp is basically an antihero. If this were 2019, Wyatt Earp would be the angsty DCEU to Tombstone's MCU. Or in other words, Tombstone is in every sense the Disney version, the glossy traditional Hollywood take (and even feels in most respects as if it were released far earlier than 1993, an instant anachronism, as it were), and Wyatt Earp is the western as it might've become if it had landed better.
Indeed, it's one of those movies that just seems to become more timely as the years progress, and therefore timeless. It could just as easily have been that uneasy cinematic response to Black Lives Matter that never really happened until years into the movement (and even then most directly in a movie that's actually set in the past, Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman), with an Earp who's as celebrated as he's reviled, frequently criticized as too violent in his pursuit of justice, even as events sometimes seem to prove his methods justified. That's what Tombstone and Wyatt Earp most have in common, trying to give the true history of the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral, have the heroes be less obviously heroic.
Wyatt Earp traces the whole arc of Earp's life (could almost be the ancestor to all those later movies that begin with a familiar character's childhood where previous depictions hadn't). Gene Hackman, who appeared in two other westerns during the same period, Unforgiven and The Quick and the Dead, both in fairly villainous roles, plays Earp's dad, a tough but loving father that draws out far greater nuance from Hackman, and puts his impulses to good use. He sets the tone for a family saga that drives the women crazy later in the movie (though the script, for such a long movie, doesn't really have much for the likes of Mare Willingham and Catherine O'Hara other than love and exasperation), though it gives good parts to brothers played by Michael Madsen, Linden Ashby (who has only one other notable role to his credit, Mortal Kombat's Johnny Cage, which he nailed), and a young Jim Caviezel.
The supporting cast is bursting with talent besides! Also featured, among others, are Bill Pullman and Tom Sizemore (in a role that doesn't merely require him to be a tough guy, for a change) as Ed and Bat Masterson, respectively, Mark Harmon as someone other than Gibbs, and Isabella Rossellini, who completes the excellent portrait of Doc Holliday as his frustrated lover, Big Nose Kate, plus Jeff Fahey as the head of the troublesome Clantons.
Earp's arc as a troubled lover is highlighted, his losses and triumphs, his yearning to escape the spotlight (one almost has the sense that the sentiment could also have been Costner's). The running time is entirely justified. This is an epic that tells an epic, but also completely human, tale. Costner isn't the romantic hero he so often was in this period, but the complete opposite, a man ground down past such illusions into messy real life, struggling to do the right thing, and not always succeeding.
Watching it again, especially in the context of so many other westerns, it's a revelation, especially set against, once again, Tombstone. Its only real competition, for me, against so many others, was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (which is even better). The western, it seems, was only getting better with time. The more art infused, the less artifice, therefore justifying the genre's outsize placement in film lore. Directed by underrated icon Lawrence Kasdan.
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Unforgiven (1992)
rating: ***
the story: A gunslinger comes out of retirement.
review: This is one of those movies that looms large in aficionado circles, but has never particularly interested me. So I gave it another chance, and at least I can say I'm starting to enjoy Unforgiven.
I think mostly it's the kind of movie that's celebrated for what it meant rather than what it was. It was Clint Eastwood's final western (which, remarkably, remains true in 2019, and given his ever-advancing age, even if he remains as active as ever, isn't likely to ever change), and made at a time when westerns had somewhat definitively lost their role in the continuing lore of cinema, which made it instantly iconic if nothing else. This is not to say it isn't a good movie in and of itself, but that those fans who particularly identify with it (as fans of anything will do) are prone to exaggerating its worth.
I recently watched a slew of westerns, including a few of Eastwood's, and on the whole, I'm less interested in watching Unforgiven again than Pale Rider or Outlaw Josey Wales (which Unforgiven might be considered an unofficial sequel to, and all but functions as such). Among them was also the far less celebrated The Quick and the Dead, which in hindsight seems like a deliberate rephrasing of Unforgiven, but a bit more on that in a moment.
What's most interesting about Unforgiven is perhaps the idea that Eastwood's character isn't really a hero so much as an opportunist the audience has every chance to root on, so of course we're going to, while Gene Hackman's sheriff perhaps isn't as much a villain as he's made out to be, even though as far as the narrative goes, he certainly is. There's an unreliability to the whole thing that's pretty interesting to think about. Hackman's sheriff is perhaps most intriguing as a guy trying to do the right thing but badly botching it, which is something observers of politics would have plenty to say about, and as such there's an allegorical worth to the movie that's perhaps its best feature.
But strip away the legacy and it's a pretty rote experience (which is why I rated, a while ago, The Fugitive much the same way, because when it comes right down to it, the only thing that really stands out about it is Tommy Lee Jones, and pretty much just the "I don't care" line, which is admittedly brilliant, and brilliantly undermines the whole movie in the process, and leads to a whole movie with him as the acknowledged lead, but no one really cared about that, ironically). We don't even get a proper ending, but rather screen text. This is really just an exercise in setting up Eastwood's later career as an aging star. (Clearly it worked.)
But what's so interesting, really, is the Quick and the Dead connection. Lots of commenters have said that Sharon Stone is blatantly playing Eastwood's Man With No Name (though it would be interesting to hear fresh perspectives, now that Charlize Theron uses the exact voice in her action roles), but Gene Hackman plays a more bombastic version of his evil sheriff, and it plays much better the second time, without any confusion about what he is, and Leo DiCaprio plays a better version of the kid who's trying to make a name for himself, with the same basic notes being made there, too. It's harder to think of Russell Crowe's presence in Quick and the Dead, and perhaps the entirety of his popular career, without thinking of Eastwood, once you begin thinking about it. (It's worth arguing that even Eastwood borrowed the persona, possibly from Charlton Heston.)
In Unforgiven, you have a few notable supporting players. Saul Rubinek, who never quite broke out, for instance, and more notably Morgan Freeman, who was on the verge of exploding (which he would, two years later, in The Shawshank Redemption). And then there's Richard Harris. Harry Potter fans like me will forever be seeking out the original Dumbledore's earlier days, and here's an interesting one, as he portrays English Bob, who perhaps most accurately sums up the film as a depiction of American savages, barely grasping the concept of civilization, something a lot of westerns tried to illustrate, but seldom as, well, savagely.
the story: A gunslinger comes out of retirement.
review: This is one of those movies that looms large in aficionado circles, but has never particularly interested me. So I gave it another chance, and at least I can say I'm starting to enjoy Unforgiven.
I think mostly it's the kind of movie that's celebrated for what it meant rather than what it was. It was Clint Eastwood's final western (which, remarkably, remains true in 2019, and given his ever-advancing age, even if he remains as active as ever, isn't likely to ever change), and made at a time when westerns had somewhat definitively lost their role in the continuing lore of cinema, which made it instantly iconic if nothing else. This is not to say it isn't a good movie in and of itself, but that those fans who particularly identify with it (as fans of anything will do) are prone to exaggerating its worth.
I recently watched a slew of westerns, including a few of Eastwood's, and on the whole, I'm less interested in watching Unforgiven again than Pale Rider or Outlaw Josey Wales (which Unforgiven might be considered an unofficial sequel to, and all but functions as such). Among them was also the far less celebrated The Quick and the Dead, which in hindsight seems like a deliberate rephrasing of Unforgiven, but a bit more on that in a moment.
What's most interesting about Unforgiven is perhaps the idea that Eastwood's character isn't really a hero so much as an opportunist the audience has every chance to root on, so of course we're going to, while Gene Hackman's sheriff perhaps isn't as much a villain as he's made out to be, even though as far as the narrative goes, he certainly is. There's an unreliability to the whole thing that's pretty interesting to think about. Hackman's sheriff is perhaps most intriguing as a guy trying to do the right thing but badly botching it, which is something observers of politics would have plenty to say about, and as such there's an allegorical worth to the movie that's perhaps its best feature.
But strip away the legacy and it's a pretty rote experience (which is why I rated, a while ago, The Fugitive much the same way, because when it comes right down to it, the only thing that really stands out about it is Tommy Lee Jones, and pretty much just the "I don't care" line, which is admittedly brilliant, and brilliantly undermines the whole movie in the process, and leads to a whole movie with him as the acknowledged lead, but no one really cared about that, ironically). We don't even get a proper ending, but rather screen text. This is really just an exercise in setting up Eastwood's later career as an aging star. (Clearly it worked.)
But what's so interesting, really, is the Quick and the Dead connection. Lots of commenters have said that Sharon Stone is blatantly playing Eastwood's Man With No Name (though it would be interesting to hear fresh perspectives, now that Charlize Theron uses the exact voice in her action roles), but Gene Hackman plays a more bombastic version of his evil sheriff, and it plays much better the second time, without any confusion about what he is, and Leo DiCaprio plays a better version of the kid who's trying to make a name for himself, with the same basic notes being made there, too. It's harder to think of Russell Crowe's presence in Quick and the Dead, and perhaps the entirety of his popular career, without thinking of Eastwood, once you begin thinking about it. (It's worth arguing that even Eastwood borrowed the persona, possibly from Charlton Heston.)
In Unforgiven, you have a few notable supporting players. Saul Rubinek, who never quite broke out, for instance, and more notably Morgan Freeman, who was on the verge of exploding (which he would, two years later, in The Shawshank Redemption). And then there's Richard Harris. Harry Potter fans like me will forever be seeking out the original Dumbledore's earlier days, and here's an interesting one, as he portrays English Bob, who perhaps most accurately sums up the film as a depiction of American savages, barely grasping the concept of civilization, something a lot of westerns tried to illustrate, but seldom as, well, savagely.
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Get Out (2017)
rating: ****
the story: Chris finds out it's dangerous to be black among white folks with ulterior motives.
review: Wow, so this is a great example of knowing what a movie technically accomplishes, and getting a totally different grasp upon actually seeing it. Get Out, for me, was a victim of the vast scaling back of film watching I've experienced over the past decade. I was pretty out of control, generally speaking, for a few years. I went to the movies all the time. I had a pretty comprehensive sampling of what was released. Then I had to become more selective. I had to start making some snap judgments before movies ever hit theaters, including must-see picks and things that didn't seem like they were for me. Get Out seemed like it wasn't for me. It seemed like one of those movies hipsters like, that only seemed to be clever.
Boy was I wrong.
The surface elements are certainly there but even those underscore its greater message. It's funny that Get Out even had a chance to be widely celebrated, as it mocks liberal attitudes at a time when liberals have virtually succeeded in dominating popular entertainment, both the product and reception of it. But by the end, it becomes so savage as to become inexplicable. Clearly a lot of people just didn't get it. They chuckled knowingly, without comprehension.
You see, Chris's fate is damn ironic. That he ends up escaping it is much a part of how we've reached this endless public hysteria as anything that helped create it. When Bradley Whitford says he would've voted for Obama a third time if only given the option, which he repeats after Allison Williams has already told us he'd say so, director Jordan Peele has shown his hand. That's the whole message right there. Liberals somewhat liberally exploited black people to get the White House. Period. And then moved on, after everything spiraled out of control.
Yeah. Peele's ascent as filmmaker came from a popular sketch comedy series, Key & Peele, which can be felt in Chris's best friend, who hilariously puts the whole thing in context for viewers and comes to his rescue at the end. Chris himself, as portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya, is dumbfounded by the whole experience but never at a loss for action. The only time he's a victim is when Catherine Keener brainwashes him.
Stephen Root shows up in a supporting role, subverting his usual comedic persona by both leaning into and away from the stereotype Southern racist the movie never actually delivers. This is a horror movie with comedy instincts, not a comedy with horror instincts, not a parody. That's what makes the whole thing so refreshing, so subversive, and so biting. It might even be called satire. Probably the way it will properly be understood later.
So I'm glad I finally saw it.
the story: Chris finds out it's dangerous to be black among white folks with ulterior motives.
review: Wow, so this is a great example of knowing what a movie technically accomplishes, and getting a totally different grasp upon actually seeing it. Get Out, for me, was a victim of the vast scaling back of film watching I've experienced over the past decade. I was pretty out of control, generally speaking, for a few years. I went to the movies all the time. I had a pretty comprehensive sampling of what was released. Then I had to become more selective. I had to start making some snap judgments before movies ever hit theaters, including must-see picks and things that didn't seem like they were for me. Get Out seemed like it wasn't for me. It seemed like one of those movies hipsters like, that only seemed to be clever.
Boy was I wrong.
The surface elements are certainly there but even those underscore its greater message. It's funny that Get Out even had a chance to be widely celebrated, as it mocks liberal attitudes at a time when liberals have virtually succeeded in dominating popular entertainment, both the product and reception of it. But by the end, it becomes so savage as to become inexplicable. Clearly a lot of people just didn't get it. They chuckled knowingly, without comprehension.
You see, Chris's fate is damn ironic. That he ends up escaping it is much a part of how we've reached this endless public hysteria as anything that helped create it. When Bradley Whitford says he would've voted for Obama a third time if only given the option, which he repeats after Allison Williams has already told us he'd say so, director Jordan Peele has shown his hand. That's the whole message right there. Liberals somewhat liberally exploited black people to get the White House. Period. And then moved on, after everything spiraled out of control.
Yeah. Peele's ascent as filmmaker came from a popular sketch comedy series, Key & Peele, which can be felt in Chris's best friend, who hilariously puts the whole thing in context for viewers and comes to his rescue at the end. Chris himself, as portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya, is dumbfounded by the whole experience but never at a loss for action. The only time he's a victim is when Catherine Keener brainwashes him.
Stephen Root shows up in a supporting role, subverting his usual comedic persona by both leaning into and away from the stereotype Southern racist the movie never actually delivers. This is a horror movie with comedy instincts, not a comedy with horror instincts, not a parody. That's what makes the whole thing so refreshing, so subversive, and so biting. It might even be called satire. Probably the way it will properly be understood later.
So I'm glad I finally saw it.
Saturday, October 19, 2019
Under the Silver Lake (2019)
rating: ****
the story: A struggling LA resident finds himself deep in the midst of a wild conspiracy.
review: Essentially Once Upon a Time in Hollywood without Tarantino, a sort of love letter to Hollywood culture. Under the Silver Lake is a one man spotlight for Andrew Garfield, letting him drift through the film and its kaleidoscope of craziness, in the process giving director David Robert Mitchell his highest profile movie yet.
Garfield has been a highlight in the movies for about a decade at this point, but two Spider-Man movies that weren't especially well received meant his profile began to suffer. Silver Lake is a reminder of his appeal. The movie, and the music around him, is a vision of Hollywood that only Hollywood itself could conjure, full of beautiful women and logic that makes little or no sense, except that it somehow does, and explains everything from pop music to the fates of the obscenely rich.
What's most impressive about the movie is that it's sort of classic noir, too. Not noir in the way you usually think, whether because you still think of noir for its black and white roots (such as recent examples like The Man Who Wasn't There and The Good German, wrongly dismissed as a Casablanca knockoff because...it features Nazis, and a romance), or general style (as in Brick, which I've never been able to entirely enjoy despite appreciating its overall achievement), but approach, which again, is why we follow Garfield around, and listen to the particular noir-style musical score accompanying him.
The result is a mood piece. Garfield is not a detective, but sort of stumbles into becoming one, as he attempts to solve a bizarre conspiracy theory. One of the running plot points is that he's going to be evicted because he's failed to make rent, but he never seems especially concerned about it. He exists in a wonderland where the only real concerns are ephemeral, and he doesn't mind the eventual solution to his real problem, even if he seems to have had many better ones available.
All of it really means that whatever Mitchell does next, I'll be paying attention.
the story: A struggling LA resident finds himself deep in the midst of a wild conspiracy.
review: Essentially Once Upon a Time in Hollywood without Tarantino, a sort of love letter to Hollywood culture. Under the Silver Lake is a one man spotlight for Andrew Garfield, letting him drift through the film and its kaleidoscope of craziness, in the process giving director David Robert Mitchell his highest profile movie yet.
Garfield has been a highlight in the movies for about a decade at this point, but two Spider-Man movies that weren't especially well received meant his profile began to suffer. Silver Lake is a reminder of his appeal. The movie, and the music around him, is a vision of Hollywood that only Hollywood itself could conjure, full of beautiful women and logic that makes little or no sense, except that it somehow does, and explains everything from pop music to the fates of the obscenely rich.
What's most impressive about the movie is that it's sort of classic noir, too. Not noir in the way you usually think, whether because you still think of noir for its black and white roots (such as recent examples like The Man Who Wasn't There and The Good German, wrongly dismissed as a Casablanca knockoff because...it features Nazis, and a romance), or general style (as in Brick, which I've never been able to entirely enjoy despite appreciating its overall achievement), but approach, which again, is why we follow Garfield around, and listen to the particular noir-style musical score accompanying him.
The result is a mood piece. Garfield is not a detective, but sort of stumbles into becoming one, as he attempts to solve a bizarre conspiracy theory. One of the running plot points is that he's going to be evicted because he's failed to make rent, but he never seems especially concerned about it. He exists in a wonderland where the only real concerns are ephemeral, and he doesn't mind the eventual solution to his real problem, even if he seems to have had many better ones available.
All of it really means that whatever Mitchell does next, I'll be paying attention.
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
rating: ****
the story: A black man encounters the full absurdity of the workforce.
review: Director Boots Riley was worried about comparisons to other black filmmakers, but I think Sorry to Bother You will enjoy its greater legacy in comparison to other workplace comedies, chiefly Mike Judge's Office Space (1999).
Riley's perspective stems from the fact that on its surface, Sorry to Bother You comes from the same recent surge of black filmmaking as Get Out (2017). On the surface, its story arc is chiefly concerned with the role of black people in white society. But it can be a universal message, too. By the time the movie reaches the concept of equisapiens, I think my point has been proven.
I mean, equisapiens, right?
Maybe my greater point is that you don't need to be black to enjoy the movie itself? That seems needlessly reductive. You don't need to be black to understand it, either, you don't need to be black to enjoy it, and you don't need to be black to get something meaningful from it. I mean, on the one hand it seems to be satire from a black perspective, but it's also...just satire. Hilarious satire. I mean, equisapiens. That's an iconic movie image regardless of context, but the context grounds it, too, even while it's so absurd that the whole movie might end up being remembered for it.
The cast is impeccable. I caught Lakeith Stanfield in a supporting role in Girl in the Spider's Web (2018), and he was compelling even in a fairly limited capacity. Here, in the lead role, he remains so. Tessa Thompson is fast becoming one of my favorites. She stands out in everything. Armie Hammer has found new life as a supporting actor. Danny Glover and Steve Yeun are among a strong supporting cast. Patton Oswalt and David Cross are hilarious as a few of the "white voices" in another of the film's hilarious digs at society at large.
Basically, a movie that succeeds well past its initial goals.
the story: A black man encounters the full absurdity of the workforce.
review: Director Boots Riley was worried about comparisons to other black filmmakers, but I think Sorry to Bother You will enjoy its greater legacy in comparison to other workplace comedies, chiefly Mike Judge's Office Space (1999).
Riley's perspective stems from the fact that on its surface, Sorry to Bother You comes from the same recent surge of black filmmaking as Get Out (2017). On the surface, its story arc is chiefly concerned with the role of black people in white society. But it can be a universal message, too. By the time the movie reaches the concept of equisapiens, I think my point has been proven.
I mean, equisapiens, right?
Maybe my greater point is that you don't need to be black to enjoy the movie itself? That seems needlessly reductive. You don't need to be black to understand it, either, you don't need to be black to enjoy it, and you don't need to be black to get something meaningful from it. I mean, on the one hand it seems to be satire from a black perspective, but it's also...just satire. Hilarious satire. I mean, equisapiens. That's an iconic movie image regardless of context, but the context grounds it, too, even while it's so absurd that the whole movie might end up being remembered for it.
The cast is impeccable. I caught Lakeith Stanfield in a supporting role in Girl in the Spider's Web (2018), and he was compelling even in a fairly limited capacity. Here, in the lead role, he remains so. Tessa Thompson is fast becoming one of my favorites. She stands out in everything. Armie Hammer has found new life as a supporting actor. Danny Glover and Steve Yeun are among a strong supporting cast. Patton Oswalt and David Cross are hilarious as a few of the "white voices" in another of the film's hilarious digs at society at large.
Basically, a movie that succeeds well past its initial goals.
Operation: Finale (2018)
rating: ****
the story: The capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina by Mossad agents.
review: One of my favorite historical dramas, in fact one of my favorite movies in general, is Spielberg's Munich (2005), a triumph in pretty much every regard. Operation Finale is a very different movie, but both share the idea of horror at the world their characters are forced to inhabit, which in both cases is the real world, and as such are both all the more compelling for it. Operation Finale is a story of the Holocaust, but instead of focusing on the Holocaust itself (such as with, say, Schindler's List), it centers on the decades that lay ahead, of the people who were affected by it, or in Eichmann's case, helped make it happen.
The most stunning thing about the film is how Eichmann himself is presented. Ben Kingsley is a famously charismatic chameleon. He brings that quality to Eichmann, whom we catch up with already ensconced in his literally new life (with a new name and family) in Argentina. We see an Argentina where Nazis still exist, holding rallies with the same hateful bluster, something history has tended to gloss over (the musical Evita covers a version of events). The movie is mostly concerned with Eichmann himself, and the Mossad agent, played by Oscar Isaac, who finds himself in the unlikely position of convincing Eichmann to agree to stand trial in Israel.
Isaac has emerged in recent years as a reliable film presence, still searching for a truly breakout lead performance despite a wealth of interesting roles behind him. He often appears as ambiguous figures, which is perhaps what allows him to pull off this particularly tricky part. His scenes with Kingsley are the heart of the movie, and both actors deliver. Will Eichmann agree to stand trial, despite every attempt to justify himself as a mere bureaucrat (in so many words)?
Director Chris Weitz (a bit of a chameleon himself, with a track record as varied as About a Boy and Twilight Saga: New Moon) is able to find the right balance, and is wise enough to give Isaac roadblocks, but remove them as necessary. This is a rare trait in such storytelling, often wrongly pursued with the belief that increased use of roadblocks increases the drama, when it only proves how little faith there is in other elements.
(Among the supporting cast is Melanie Laurant, who appeared in another WWII movie, albeit a far different one, Inglourious Basterds.)
By the time Isaas is just another observer, as we glimpse the trial itself, we already know that Operation Finale has done exactly what it set out to accomplish: give audiences the outrage of the Holocaust at exactly the banal level Eichmann himself was said to represent.
the story: The capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina by Mossad agents.
review: One of my favorite historical dramas, in fact one of my favorite movies in general, is Spielberg's Munich (2005), a triumph in pretty much every regard. Operation Finale is a very different movie, but both share the idea of horror at the world their characters are forced to inhabit, which in both cases is the real world, and as such are both all the more compelling for it. Operation Finale is a story of the Holocaust, but instead of focusing on the Holocaust itself (such as with, say, Schindler's List), it centers on the decades that lay ahead, of the people who were affected by it, or in Eichmann's case, helped make it happen.
The most stunning thing about the film is how Eichmann himself is presented. Ben Kingsley is a famously charismatic chameleon. He brings that quality to Eichmann, whom we catch up with already ensconced in his literally new life (with a new name and family) in Argentina. We see an Argentina where Nazis still exist, holding rallies with the same hateful bluster, something history has tended to gloss over (the musical Evita covers a version of events). The movie is mostly concerned with Eichmann himself, and the Mossad agent, played by Oscar Isaac, who finds himself in the unlikely position of convincing Eichmann to agree to stand trial in Israel.
Isaac has emerged in recent years as a reliable film presence, still searching for a truly breakout lead performance despite a wealth of interesting roles behind him. He often appears as ambiguous figures, which is perhaps what allows him to pull off this particularly tricky part. His scenes with Kingsley are the heart of the movie, and both actors deliver. Will Eichmann agree to stand trial, despite every attempt to justify himself as a mere bureaucrat (in so many words)?
Director Chris Weitz (a bit of a chameleon himself, with a track record as varied as About a Boy and Twilight Saga: New Moon) is able to find the right balance, and is wise enough to give Isaac roadblocks, but remove them as necessary. This is a rare trait in such storytelling, often wrongly pursued with the belief that increased use of roadblocks increases the drama, when it only proves how little faith there is in other elements.
(Among the supporting cast is Melanie Laurant, who appeared in another WWII movie, albeit a far different one, Inglourious Basterds.)
By the time Isaas is just another observer, as we glimpse the trial itself, we already know that Operation Finale has done exactly what it set out to accomplish: give audiences the outrage of the Holocaust at exactly the banal level Eichmann himself was said to represent.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
Joker (2019)
rating: ****
the story: Arthur Fleck begins to suspect his life is a comedy.
review: Toss Andy Kaufman, Heath Ledger's Joker, Taxi Driver, and You Were Never Really Here into a blender, and you would get Joker. The result is greater than the sum of its parts, and completely justifies making a movie about Batman's most famous nemesis, something Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, virtually was, based on Ledger's show-stopping Joker.
You Were Never Really Here also stars Joaquin Phoenix, by the way, in a role that almost combines the concept of Batman and the Joker (at least as represented in Joker), a man living with his mother and meting out terrible vengeance. Phoenix doesn't make any effort to duplicate Ledger's performance; visually the similarities begin and end with the stringy hair we see Arthur Fleck, late in the movie, dye green. The makeup is halfway between Ledger's and your average circus clown (and we see him apply that, too; no chemical baths in this story, thank you).
Director Todd Phillips (previously best known for the Hangover trilogy before branching out with War Dogs) was vocal about evoking Scorsese; that's your Taxi Driver connection (the social commentary is there, too, demonstrated best by Peter Boyle in perhaps his best role), other than Robert De Niro himself, sounding like Lawrence Welk as a Gotham late night TV host. Brett Cullen, who appeared in a different role for Nolan's Dark Knight Rises, puts a sinister spin on Thomas Wayne (you know, Batman's dad), an elite who thinks he knows what's best for the poor but won't associate with them if he can help it, including viciously cutting off Arthur's mom when her problems prove too complicated. Zazie Beetz (for the second time, following Deadpool 2) puts in another small but knockout supporting role as a would-be love interest for the erstwhile Joker.
And, Andy Kaufman? Today he's best remembered for the Jim Carrey movie Man on the Moon, but his whole career was defined by defying logic, rebelling against expectations. Arthur may not be intentionally following in his footsteps, but that's the best way to explain his reality, including a misguided sidestep into standup comedy that most feels like Kaufman.
This is another 2019 movie (after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) that feels like a classic in the making that I'm not ready to dub quite yet. It's got better viewing appeal than You Were Never Really Here (a relentless tone that alienates the viewer), and mesmerizes in its descent into madness, as it spirals to the inevitable. This may not become the definitive Joker, but it will be the definitive Joker story; it will be impossible to beat. The movie is set in the '80s, but feels as if it's ripped from the playbook of the modern era, in which riots are well-intentioned but...still riots. Heroes are hard to find, and even those who stumble into the role seem more like villains. Arthur Fleck is the hero we deserve but don't need. Wasn't that said about somebody else? Something like that?
Anyway, Joker will be a definitive film for this era, regardless of its ultimate worth.
the story: Arthur Fleck begins to suspect his life is a comedy.
review: Toss Andy Kaufman, Heath Ledger's Joker, Taxi Driver, and You Were Never Really Here into a blender, and you would get Joker. The result is greater than the sum of its parts, and completely justifies making a movie about Batman's most famous nemesis, something Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, virtually was, based on Ledger's show-stopping Joker.
You Were Never Really Here also stars Joaquin Phoenix, by the way, in a role that almost combines the concept of Batman and the Joker (at least as represented in Joker), a man living with his mother and meting out terrible vengeance. Phoenix doesn't make any effort to duplicate Ledger's performance; visually the similarities begin and end with the stringy hair we see Arthur Fleck, late in the movie, dye green. The makeup is halfway between Ledger's and your average circus clown (and we see him apply that, too; no chemical baths in this story, thank you).
Director Todd Phillips (previously best known for the Hangover trilogy before branching out with War Dogs) was vocal about evoking Scorsese; that's your Taxi Driver connection (the social commentary is there, too, demonstrated best by Peter Boyle in perhaps his best role), other than Robert De Niro himself, sounding like Lawrence Welk as a Gotham late night TV host. Brett Cullen, who appeared in a different role for Nolan's Dark Knight Rises, puts a sinister spin on Thomas Wayne (you know, Batman's dad), an elite who thinks he knows what's best for the poor but won't associate with them if he can help it, including viciously cutting off Arthur's mom when her problems prove too complicated. Zazie Beetz (for the second time, following Deadpool 2) puts in another small but knockout supporting role as a would-be love interest for the erstwhile Joker.
And, Andy Kaufman? Today he's best remembered for the Jim Carrey movie Man on the Moon, but his whole career was defined by defying logic, rebelling against expectations. Arthur may not be intentionally following in his footsteps, but that's the best way to explain his reality, including a misguided sidestep into standup comedy that most feels like Kaufman.
This is another 2019 movie (after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) that feels like a classic in the making that I'm not ready to dub quite yet. It's got better viewing appeal than You Were Never Really Here (a relentless tone that alienates the viewer), and mesmerizes in its descent into madness, as it spirals to the inevitable. This may not become the definitive Joker, but it will be the definitive Joker story; it will be impossible to beat. The movie is set in the '80s, but feels as if it's ripped from the playbook of the modern era, in which riots are well-intentioned but...still riots. Heroes are hard to find, and even those who stumble into the role seem more like villains. Arthur Fleck is the hero we deserve but don't need. Wasn't that said about somebody else? Something like that?
Anyway, Joker will be a definitive film for this era, regardless of its ultimate worth.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Into the Ashes (2019)
rating: ***
the story: Vicious thugs end up getting their comeuppance.
review: If it weren't for the performance of Robert Taylor as the sheriff whose son-in-law goes on a revenge rampage, I wouldn't be talking about Into the Ashes. I watched the movie at all because it was another of James Badge Dale's string of minor 2019 releases, the best being Standoff at Sparrow Creek and Donnybrook, which like the latter also costars Frank Grillo. Grillo has been a fascinating career to follow recently, too, and he gives a different kind of performance, in the same basic role, than he does in Donnybrook. (A far cry from my first distinct memory of him, in Warrior, where I assumed he was a real-life MMA fighter cast to give authenticity to training sequences.)
Dale, meanwhile, has such a minor role in this one that he doesn't spend too much time creating a distinct character, which is the opposite of what he did for Donnybrook.
But as I said, I'm talking about Into the Ashes at all because of Robert Taylor. I know, who? There's an earlier Robert Taylor, but this one is the guy who starred in the latter-day western TV series Longmire. Late in the movie he settles into a low drawl that totally transforms the performance, and becomes the best reason to watch, and talk about, the movie.
Because suddenly you're watching the western Harrison Ford never quite made. Ford did make a kind of western, Cowboys & Aliens, but even as it was being billed as "Indiana Jones Meets James Bond," the movie was much more centered on Daniel Craig than Ford's grizzled rancher. The Harrison Ford being channeled in Into the Ashes actually comes circa Blade Runner 2049, one of the many times in recent years Ford has revisited an iconic role. As in Cowboys & Aliens, Ford's work in Blade Runner 2049 is a relatively minor one, all considered, but in it he seems at last totally comfortable as an older person. If he'd made a western (I suppose he still could), it would be Into the Ashes, exactly as Taylor does it.
And Taylor looks like Ford (except, maybe, the hair, but why quibble?), and I can't help but wonder if that was all completely deliberate. Before I got swept up in the idea, I even thought the filmmakers were deliberately looking for a bargain basement Ford, but Taylor is a relatively known commodity. I have no idea if he did the same sort of channeling in Longmire, never seen it and probably never will. But by the time we're following Taylor's sheriff basically more than anything else (sort of making the movie in the same spirit as No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges, respectively, in similar roles, but here perhaps at its best, even if the other elements aren't), it no longer really matters. Taylor is fulfilling what Ford had done, but would probably never do this way.
And maybe doesn't have to, really, now that Taylor has.
the story: Vicious thugs end up getting their comeuppance.
review: If it weren't for the performance of Robert Taylor as the sheriff whose son-in-law goes on a revenge rampage, I wouldn't be talking about Into the Ashes. I watched the movie at all because it was another of James Badge Dale's string of minor 2019 releases, the best being Standoff at Sparrow Creek and Donnybrook, which like the latter also costars Frank Grillo. Grillo has been a fascinating career to follow recently, too, and he gives a different kind of performance, in the same basic role, than he does in Donnybrook. (A far cry from my first distinct memory of him, in Warrior, where I assumed he was a real-life MMA fighter cast to give authenticity to training sequences.)
Dale, meanwhile, has such a minor role in this one that he doesn't spend too much time creating a distinct character, which is the opposite of what he did for Donnybrook.
But as I said, I'm talking about Into the Ashes at all because of Robert Taylor. I know, who? There's an earlier Robert Taylor, but this one is the guy who starred in the latter-day western TV series Longmire. Late in the movie he settles into a low drawl that totally transforms the performance, and becomes the best reason to watch, and talk about, the movie.
Because suddenly you're watching the western Harrison Ford never quite made. Ford did make a kind of western, Cowboys & Aliens, but even as it was being billed as "Indiana Jones Meets James Bond," the movie was much more centered on Daniel Craig than Ford's grizzled rancher. The Harrison Ford being channeled in Into the Ashes actually comes circa Blade Runner 2049, one of the many times in recent years Ford has revisited an iconic role. As in Cowboys & Aliens, Ford's work in Blade Runner 2049 is a relatively minor one, all considered, but in it he seems at last totally comfortable as an older person. If he'd made a western (I suppose he still could), it would be Into the Ashes, exactly as Taylor does it.
And Taylor looks like Ford (except, maybe, the hair, but why quibble?), and I can't help but wonder if that was all completely deliberate. Before I got swept up in the idea, I even thought the filmmakers were deliberately looking for a bargain basement Ford, but Taylor is a relatively known commodity. I have no idea if he did the same sort of channeling in Longmire, never seen it and probably never will. But by the time we're following Taylor's sheriff basically more than anything else (sort of making the movie in the same spirit as No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges, respectively, in similar roles, but here perhaps at its best, even if the other elements aren't), it no longer really matters. Taylor is fulfilling what Ford had done, but would probably never do this way.
And maybe doesn't have to, really, now that Taylor has.
Mary Magdalene (2019)
rating: ****
the story: Mary decides to follow Jesus Christ, but finds Peter about as accepting as her brother had been.
review: With Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix leading the cast, it's safe to say Mary Magdalene isn't necessarily the kind of movie that will appeal only to Christian audiences (plenty of uninspired filmmaking does exactly that, though). Mara is the eponymous Mara, Phoenix is Jesus. The fact that it isn't entirely beholden to the religious viewer doesn't mean Mary Magdalene is akin to The Last Temptation or Jesus Christ Superstar. It's a serious approach that wishes to explain the material at face value, not wildly reinterpret it.
Mary as the central subject is a way to explore not only how the ministry of Jesus would've looked, but the world around it, and even Jesus himself. I don't think any of it radically departs from the Gospels, but there's also room for an interesting idea or two.
The most interesting one, perhaps, is exploring the character of Judas Iscariot (a brilliant Tahar Rahim), the apostle who would later betray Jesus. Here he's depicted as a true believer, but motivated, it seems, in the hope that Jesus will resurrect his dead family. Conversely, Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor in his best role since 12 Years a Slave) is presented perhaps for the first time as the grumpy figure he always was, without the focus on his ultimate redemption, just how he would've come across before it.
Mara has been a fascinating chameleon at least since her breakthrough role as Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the performance, and the movie itself, still criminally underrated). She tends to inhabit low-key individuals in trying situations, and is always compelling to watch. Her Mary has an older brother who's scandalized that their father has been indulging her, letting her remain unmarried and living at home well past the traditional norms. If there's something of the modern feminist in the conception of Mary in the film, it becomes less about that and more the liberating idea of finding freedom in budding Christianity, an idea that seems completely outrageous today.
Jesus in the movie becomes drained of energy in vast crowds, especially when dispensing miracles. I don't know if the idea is unique to this movie, but it's perhaps the most humanizing thing it does with someone who has sometimes seemed difficult to conceptualize on a human scale (although many have argued that he was just human, even those who believed in him). His disgust at the tenders of sacrificial lambs at the temple is one of the most electrifying sequences in a movie about Jesus ever filmed, finding new context in one of the familiar scenes of his life. In this version, the disgust is more about the awareness of his impending sacrifice (the whole entrance to Jerusalem is fraught with destiny) than profaning God's home with mere financial matters.
Anyway, we also get a scene or two in a synagogue, which surprisingly is something that's never really been emphasized in a story about Jesus. When you remember that Jesus was Jewish, and that he was known to preach in synagogues, it seems all the more surprising, but then so few attempts have been made to stray, in good faith, from the traditional narratives. It's actually Mary attending services, by the way.
I don't know if watching a film like this will affect someone's perspective on matters of faith, but it feels like something that has genuine insight, and on that level alone can be recommended. But it's also good filmmaking and worthwhile viewing for fans of Mara, Phoenix, and Ejiofor.
the story: Mary decides to follow Jesus Christ, but finds Peter about as accepting as her brother had been.
review: With Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix leading the cast, it's safe to say Mary Magdalene isn't necessarily the kind of movie that will appeal only to Christian audiences (plenty of uninspired filmmaking does exactly that, though). Mara is the eponymous Mara, Phoenix is Jesus. The fact that it isn't entirely beholden to the religious viewer doesn't mean Mary Magdalene is akin to The Last Temptation or Jesus Christ Superstar. It's a serious approach that wishes to explain the material at face value, not wildly reinterpret it.
Mary as the central subject is a way to explore not only how the ministry of Jesus would've looked, but the world around it, and even Jesus himself. I don't think any of it radically departs from the Gospels, but there's also room for an interesting idea or two.
The most interesting one, perhaps, is exploring the character of Judas Iscariot (a brilliant Tahar Rahim), the apostle who would later betray Jesus. Here he's depicted as a true believer, but motivated, it seems, in the hope that Jesus will resurrect his dead family. Conversely, Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor in his best role since 12 Years a Slave) is presented perhaps for the first time as the grumpy figure he always was, without the focus on his ultimate redemption, just how he would've come across before it.
Mara has been a fascinating chameleon at least since her breakthrough role as Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the performance, and the movie itself, still criminally underrated). She tends to inhabit low-key individuals in trying situations, and is always compelling to watch. Her Mary has an older brother who's scandalized that their father has been indulging her, letting her remain unmarried and living at home well past the traditional norms. If there's something of the modern feminist in the conception of Mary in the film, it becomes less about that and more the liberating idea of finding freedom in budding Christianity, an idea that seems completely outrageous today.
Jesus in the movie becomes drained of energy in vast crowds, especially when dispensing miracles. I don't know if the idea is unique to this movie, but it's perhaps the most humanizing thing it does with someone who has sometimes seemed difficult to conceptualize on a human scale (although many have argued that he was just human, even those who believed in him). His disgust at the tenders of sacrificial lambs at the temple is one of the most electrifying sequences in a movie about Jesus ever filmed, finding new context in one of the familiar scenes of his life. In this version, the disgust is more about the awareness of his impending sacrifice (the whole entrance to Jerusalem is fraught with destiny) than profaning God's home with mere financial matters.
Anyway, we also get a scene or two in a synagogue, which surprisingly is something that's never really been emphasized in a story about Jesus. When you remember that Jesus was Jewish, and that he was known to preach in synagogues, it seems all the more surprising, but then so few attempts have been made to stray, in good faith, from the traditional narratives. It's actually Mary attending services, by the way.
I don't know if watching a film like this will affect someone's perspective on matters of faith, but it feels like something that has genuine insight, and on that level alone can be recommended. But it's also good filmmaking and worthwhile viewing for fans of Mara, Phoenix, and Ejiofor.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Men in Black: International (2019)
rating: ****
the story: A new MiB recruit quickly discovers another giant intergalactic crisis.
review: So, here's the thing: Men in Black (1997) is probably a classic on par with Ghostbusters (1984), but it's somewhat hard to view it as such because Will Smith was just getting started on a decade-long run as one of the most reliable box office attractions of that period, making it difficult to distinguish whether Men in Black was its own entity or, ultimately, just another Will Smith smash hit. Regardless of whether or not you enjoy Smith two subsequent appearances in the series, this fourth entry then becomes: Does the concept work without him?
I think it does. Then, I generally like the whole series. The storytelling has changed over time, notably the attempt to pivot almost entirely to Smith in the third one, at a time when his appeal was actually waning, and his performances were shifting away from the kind he was giving in the first one, which actually served to put more focus on the MiB universe itself, its vision of aliens run amok in all manner of guises. MiB: International, at the very least, adds to the memorable menagerie with the sidekick Pawny and the Beard Alien. The Beard Alien is just awesome.
Notably, the stars of the movie, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, are actually reprising an act from Thor: Ragnarok. Thompson is the lead character here, inhabiting the Will Smith initiate role from the first movie, which a more developed backstory and a more deliberate arc. Any concerns that the hard focus on her being a woman playing too much into current trends might be redirected to how Smith was presented, including the memorable gag of the decoy white driver. Which is to say, even that is entirely in-character for the series.
Hemsworth, meanwhile, gets to do what Smith never did, which is to make being an agent seem like a casual thing. Clearly Smith's J was always supposed to turn out to be a rogue figure, but he was mostly presented as such in relation to Tommy Lee Jones' K. I like that Hemsworth and Thompson actually reveal their real names to each other, further distinguishing the two versions of the series, where even though we learn J and K's names, those initials will always be how they're remembered. If this is the only time we experience Hemsworth and Thompson in the series (though it would be interesting to Fast & Furious the series), then at least they leave a mark.
The mole trope seems fairly obvious from the moment Liam Neeson appears. He plays his part obviously from the start, but he's here for a supporting role. Emma Thompson provides one of several pieces of linking material within the series (in hindsight it was a good thing Rip Torn was killed off last movie, since by this one he was, sadly, dead in real life). Rebecca Ferguson appears as the somewhat requisite femme fatale.
Bottom line: International proves the series isn't entirely about Will Smith. That's a good thing.
the story: A new MiB recruit quickly discovers another giant intergalactic crisis.
review: So, here's the thing: Men in Black (1997) is probably a classic on par with Ghostbusters (1984), but it's somewhat hard to view it as such because Will Smith was just getting started on a decade-long run as one of the most reliable box office attractions of that period, making it difficult to distinguish whether Men in Black was its own entity or, ultimately, just another Will Smith smash hit. Regardless of whether or not you enjoy Smith two subsequent appearances in the series, this fourth entry then becomes: Does the concept work without him?
I think it does. Then, I generally like the whole series. The storytelling has changed over time, notably the attempt to pivot almost entirely to Smith in the third one, at a time when his appeal was actually waning, and his performances were shifting away from the kind he was giving in the first one, which actually served to put more focus on the MiB universe itself, its vision of aliens run amok in all manner of guises. MiB: International, at the very least, adds to the memorable menagerie with the sidekick Pawny and the Beard Alien. The Beard Alien is just awesome.
Notably, the stars of the movie, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, are actually reprising an act from Thor: Ragnarok. Thompson is the lead character here, inhabiting the Will Smith initiate role from the first movie, which a more developed backstory and a more deliberate arc. Any concerns that the hard focus on her being a woman playing too much into current trends might be redirected to how Smith was presented, including the memorable gag of the decoy white driver. Which is to say, even that is entirely in-character for the series.
Hemsworth, meanwhile, gets to do what Smith never did, which is to make being an agent seem like a casual thing. Clearly Smith's J was always supposed to turn out to be a rogue figure, but he was mostly presented as such in relation to Tommy Lee Jones' K. I like that Hemsworth and Thompson actually reveal their real names to each other, further distinguishing the two versions of the series, where even though we learn J and K's names, those initials will always be how they're remembered. If this is the only time we experience Hemsworth and Thompson in the series (though it would be interesting to Fast & Furious the series), then at least they leave a mark.
The mole trope seems fairly obvious from the moment Liam Neeson appears. He plays his part obviously from the start, but he's here for a supporting role. Emma Thompson provides one of several pieces of linking material within the series (in hindsight it was a good thing Rip Torn was killed off last movie, since by this one he was, sadly, dead in real life). Rebecca Ferguson appears as the somewhat requisite femme fatale.
Bottom line: International proves the series isn't entirely about Will Smith. That's a good thing.
Donnybrook (2019)
rating: ****
the story: A U.S. army vet goes to extreme lengths to improve life for his family.
review: There's now a lineage of movies from the past decade that needs pointing out: Warrior (2011) to Hell or High Water (2016) to Donnybrook (2019), which will be perhaps the best and easiest way to explain what Donnybrook accomplishes.
Warrior was an MMA movie that was anything but an MMA movie. It wasn't the MMA version of the traditional Hollywood boxing drama, but rather a movie that featured mixed martial arts but wasn't about mixed martial arts. It was about the contrasting fortunes of a pair of brothers destined to collide all over again (in or out of the octagon). It was above all else great filmmaking. Hell or High Water was a latter-day western, a Great Recession story about a pair of outlaws who were also brothers. They were both concerned with matters of the modern world we often don't focus on, how easy it is to fall behind when everyone's so focused on the glories of getting ahead. But the reality is, there's a large percentage of the population that routinely struggles.
Donnybrook is a powerful, poetic experience. It maintains a razor focus on its characters. It features acts of grizzly violence. Interestingly, the only time director Tim Sutton actually shows the violence is perhaps the worst but also the most routine: when a scene of domestic violence plays out inside of a car. It's fair to say that most of this is metaphor, that unlike Warrior, which ends up spotlighting the MMA tournament it builds toward, the eponymous backwoods version of that event in Donnybrook is really only glimpsed at the very end. Where Warrior and Hell or High Water trace a sequence of events, Donnybrook follows its lead characters as they meet their various fates.
It's a movie where the villain has no redeeming qualities. This is an era that has often put villains in a sort of sympathetic spotlight, but not Donnybrook. There's never any hope of redemption for Frank Grillo, who had his breakthrough role in Warrior, which led to Captain America: Winter Soldier, where he first inhabited this kind of character. Grillo's sister is played by Margaret Qualley, who nearly stole Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from much bigger actors. Between the two performances, she has easily become a personal favorite. Grillo's counterpoint is Jamie Bell, once an adorable young actor and now turned into grizzled veteran, and perhaps this is his perfect role, the army vet with nowhere to turn but sheer desperation. James Badge Dale, who seems to have been cast out from Hollywood proper, turns in a typically compelling performance as the only cop who might've been able to intervene in these desperate lives, having firsthand experience as he does.
The whole experience is handled expertly, from how it opens to how the story circles back to that point, and the rich music score that punctuates every moment, knowing exactly when to pivot, as the story itself does. Apparently what little exposure it has had fixates on the violence, but doesn't seem to understand how little there really is, or what any of it means. A pity. But one that shouldn't end up being the final word.
the story: A U.S. army vet goes to extreme lengths to improve life for his family.
review: There's now a lineage of movies from the past decade that needs pointing out: Warrior (2011) to Hell or High Water (2016) to Donnybrook (2019), which will be perhaps the best and easiest way to explain what Donnybrook accomplishes.
Warrior was an MMA movie that was anything but an MMA movie. It wasn't the MMA version of the traditional Hollywood boxing drama, but rather a movie that featured mixed martial arts but wasn't about mixed martial arts. It was about the contrasting fortunes of a pair of brothers destined to collide all over again (in or out of the octagon). It was above all else great filmmaking. Hell or High Water was a latter-day western, a Great Recession story about a pair of outlaws who were also brothers. They were both concerned with matters of the modern world we often don't focus on, how easy it is to fall behind when everyone's so focused on the glories of getting ahead. But the reality is, there's a large percentage of the population that routinely struggles.
Donnybrook is a powerful, poetic experience. It maintains a razor focus on its characters. It features acts of grizzly violence. Interestingly, the only time director Tim Sutton actually shows the violence is perhaps the worst but also the most routine: when a scene of domestic violence plays out inside of a car. It's fair to say that most of this is metaphor, that unlike Warrior, which ends up spotlighting the MMA tournament it builds toward, the eponymous backwoods version of that event in Donnybrook is really only glimpsed at the very end. Where Warrior and Hell or High Water trace a sequence of events, Donnybrook follows its lead characters as they meet their various fates.
It's a movie where the villain has no redeeming qualities. This is an era that has often put villains in a sort of sympathetic spotlight, but not Donnybrook. There's never any hope of redemption for Frank Grillo, who had his breakthrough role in Warrior, which led to Captain America: Winter Soldier, where he first inhabited this kind of character. Grillo's sister is played by Margaret Qualley, who nearly stole Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from much bigger actors. Between the two performances, she has easily become a personal favorite. Grillo's counterpoint is Jamie Bell, once an adorable young actor and now turned into grizzled veteran, and perhaps this is his perfect role, the army vet with nowhere to turn but sheer desperation. James Badge Dale, who seems to have been cast out from Hollywood proper, turns in a typically compelling performance as the only cop who might've been able to intervene in these desperate lives, having firsthand experience as he does.
The whole experience is handled expertly, from how it opens to how the story circles back to that point, and the rich music score that punctuates every moment, knowing exactly when to pivot, as the story itself does. Apparently what little exposure it has had fixates on the violence, but doesn't seem to understand how little there really is, or what any of it means. A pity. But one that shouldn't end up being the final word.
Saturday, September 7, 2019
The Distinguished Gentleman (1992)
rating: *****
the story: A conman runs for congress (stop me if you've heard this one).
review: Wow. So until I randomly ran across a DVD of it in a library book sale, I'd never heard of The Distinguished Gentleman. Seems kind of odd. I mean, it stars Eddie Murphy, one of the best-known comedic actors of the past forty years. He'd made a considerable splash in the '80s with movies like Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, and Trading Places, and while it's true he went into a box office dry spell in the early '90s, before The Nutty Professor revived his career, I still thought I'd at least knew the stuff in-between. But apparently not. There might be a very good reason, and it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the movie itself.
The Distinguished Gentleman was released in theaters in December 1992. You may recall that the US presidential election had just been held the previous November, and that Bill Clinton won. It was a highly-publicized political season. Clinton's popularity surged in part thanks to his appearance playing a saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, and he was later called "the first black president." Distinguished Gentleman makes no direct references to Clinton (other than borrowing part of his campaign material evoking H.W. Bush's "read my lips"), but anyone paying attention to the movie will understand how it perfectly evokes Clinton-style politics, and as such, it can be viewed as a criticism of Clinton on the very eave of his presidency.
And yet it's strangely nonpartisan. Murphy's conman spends the whole movie, in which he quickly wins congressional election based on name recognition alone (he shares a last name with the recently-deceased congressman played by James Garner) and plunges straight into Washington affairs, without once worrying whether anyone is a Democrat or Republican. The '90s were a period where the feud between the parties hotly intensified. Aside from probably Air Force One, Hollywood presidents tended to be Democrats in the Clinton years, typified by The American President (which in turn gave birth to The West Wing but perhaps most honestly, Spin City).
But anyone who began to suspect that politics had become a sort of cynical, get-rich-quick lifestyle might have found Distinguished Gentleman very familiar. It's just not how people were actually talking about it. Clinton's most direct satire, Primary Colors, began as a cynical book phenomenon but eventually became a somewhat fawning movie. But Distinguished Gentleman blows it out of the water. It's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the modern age.
Where Jimmy Stewart plays an irrepressible idealist, Murphy at first has no interest in the job itself, until he begins to see the responsibility he's accepted, and the colleagues who have completely rejected it. Lane Smith plays his mentor, and in name he evokes Nixon (Smith even played Nixon three years prior, in The Final Days, so it can hardly be considered coincidental), but the story, in an era where Watergate's legacy remains as relevant as ever, never really reflects Nixon himself. This is called biting satire.
The somewhat anonymous cast includes Chi McBride when he apparently was being billed simply as "Chi." He remains a hidden treasure wherever he pops up. The spotlight rests, then, on Murphy, who gets to pull off, instead of his familiar trick of Peter Sellers ubiquity, a number of killer accents, including an MLK impression that if he'd ever turned into a full performance might've totally transformed his career. But he never mugs for the camera. This is a fairly straight performance for Murphy, which is probably one of the reasons it's been so easy to overlook. It's obviously a comedic movie, but its famously spastic star restrains himself. It's the absurdity of the story that's the source of the humor this time.
And the sad part is that politics remains exactly like this today, making Distinguished Gentleman increasingly relevant material, created at the dawn of an era, dismissed as poorly timed, but in the end, quite timeless. And well worth rediscovering because of it.
the story: A conman runs for congress (stop me if you've heard this one).
review: Wow. So until I randomly ran across a DVD of it in a library book sale, I'd never heard of The Distinguished Gentleman. Seems kind of odd. I mean, it stars Eddie Murphy, one of the best-known comedic actors of the past forty years. He'd made a considerable splash in the '80s with movies like Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, and Trading Places, and while it's true he went into a box office dry spell in the early '90s, before The Nutty Professor revived his career, I still thought I'd at least knew the stuff in-between. But apparently not. There might be a very good reason, and it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the movie itself.
The Distinguished Gentleman was released in theaters in December 1992. You may recall that the US presidential election had just been held the previous November, and that Bill Clinton won. It was a highly-publicized political season. Clinton's popularity surged in part thanks to his appearance playing a saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, and he was later called "the first black president." Distinguished Gentleman makes no direct references to Clinton (other than borrowing part of his campaign material evoking H.W. Bush's "read my lips"), but anyone paying attention to the movie will understand how it perfectly evokes Clinton-style politics, and as such, it can be viewed as a criticism of Clinton on the very eave of his presidency.
And yet it's strangely nonpartisan. Murphy's conman spends the whole movie, in which he quickly wins congressional election based on name recognition alone (he shares a last name with the recently-deceased congressman played by James Garner) and plunges straight into Washington affairs, without once worrying whether anyone is a Democrat or Republican. The '90s were a period where the feud between the parties hotly intensified. Aside from probably Air Force One, Hollywood presidents tended to be Democrats in the Clinton years, typified by The American President (which in turn gave birth to The West Wing but perhaps most honestly, Spin City).
But anyone who began to suspect that politics had become a sort of cynical, get-rich-quick lifestyle might have found Distinguished Gentleman very familiar. It's just not how people were actually talking about it. Clinton's most direct satire, Primary Colors, began as a cynical book phenomenon but eventually became a somewhat fawning movie. But Distinguished Gentleman blows it out of the water. It's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the modern age.
Where Jimmy Stewart plays an irrepressible idealist, Murphy at first has no interest in the job itself, until he begins to see the responsibility he's accepted, and the colleagues who have completely rejected it. Lane Smith plays his mentor, and in name he evokes Nixon (Smith even played Nixon three years prior, in The Final Days, so it can hardly be considered coincidental), but the story, in an era where Watergate's legacy remains as relevant as ever, never really reflects Nixon himself. This is called biting satire.
The somewhat anonymous cast includes Chi McBride when he apparently was being billed simply as "Chi." He remains a hidden treasure wherever he pops up. The spotlight rests, then, on Murphy, who gets to pull off, instead of his familiar trick of Peter Sellers ubiquity, a number of killer accents, including an MLK impression that if he'd ever turned into a full performance might've totally transformed his career. But he never mugs for the camera. This is a fairly straight performance for Murphy, which is probably one of the reasons it's been so easy to overlook. It's obviously a comedic movie, but its famously spastic star restrains himself. It's the absurdity of the story that's the source of the humor this time.
And the sad part is that politics remains exactly like this today, making Distinguished Gentleman increasingly relevant material, created at the dawn of an era, dismissed as poorly timed, but in the end, quite timeless. And well worth rediscovering because of it.
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Iron Man 2 (2010)
rating: ****
the story: Tony Stark's afterglow from the big Iron Man reveal is threatened by a business rival.
review. I hate Iron Man. I hate the movie responsible for the whole MCU. I think that if everyone who flocked to see Avengers: Endgame this year actually bothered to rewatch (or surely in some cases, watch) it, they'd hate it, too. But we have this fiction that the MCU has done no wrong. Forget that everyone forgets Incredible Hulk is the second MCU movie, or even exists within the MCU, and you get an origin to the whole thing that makes it all the more remarkable that the MCU happened at all. What saved Iron Man was the fortuitous casting and performance of Robert Downey Jr., and Iron Man 2.
Now, conventional wisdom is that it's actually Iron Man 2 that sucks. Which is nonsense. Iron Man 2 is the reason the MCU happened. And it's the reason why anyone thinks the MCU has been so good. It's the real template. And it did it better than just about all of the subsequent movies.
Tony Stark is given a real arc. A real arc. This is the only movie, in all his appearances, where he is given a real arc. And a satisfying one, at that. He seems like a real character. The charm of the performance matches, for the first time, the charm of the character. And built all around it is an incredible assembly, the first great assemblage of characters in the MCU. This is Scarlett Johansson's first appearance as Black Widow. Arguably it's her best appearance as Black Widow. Samuel L. Jackson has his first decent-sized appearance as Nick Fury. Don Cheadle assumes the role of Jim Rhodes. Garry Shandling is a smarmy senator trying to match wits with Tony Stark. Gwyneth Paltrow does more of her Pepper Potts (which is basically the same in every appearance). Director Jon Favreau, in his second and final film at the helm in the MCU, puts in another appearance as Happy Hogan (inexplicably his most enduring contribution to the whole thing). Mickey Rourke throws away his Hollywood comebackto play Whiplash, with a wicked Russian accent. Clark Gregg puts in an Agent Coulson appearance. And...ladies and gentlemen: Sam Rockwell.
Sam Rockwell's whole career is unfathomable. How does he keep finding roles? You'd think after The Green Mile he would've been dismissed into an endless stream of tiny creep roles. But he just keeps finding decent roles, decent-sized roles. And you can thank appearances like his Justin Hammer for it. He utterly lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man in this one. He lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man 2 in this one. And somehow we never see the dude again. Absolutely indispensable magic. But at least they realized instantly how important Loki was (the best thing about Thor by far).
So the whole package is pretty wonderful. And quite possibly still the best single thing about the whole MCU.
the story: Tony Stark's afterglow from the big Iron Man reveal is threatened by a business rival.
review. I hate Iron Man. I hate the movie responsible for the whole MCU. I think that if everyone who flocked to see Avengers: Endgame this year actually bothered to rewatch (or surely in some cases, watch) it, they'd hate it, too. But we have this fiction that the MCU has done no wrong. Forget that everyone forgets Incredible Hulk is the second MCU movie, or even exists within the MCU, and you get an origin to the whole thing that makes it all the more remarkable that the MCU happened at all. What saved Iron Man was the fortuitous casting and performance of Robert Downey Jr., and Iron Man 2.
Now, conventional wisdom is that it's actually Iron Man 2 that sucks. Which is nonsense. Iron Man 2 is the reason the MCU happened. And it's the reason why anyone thinks the MCU has been so good. It's the real template. And it did it better than just about all of the subsequent movies.
Tony Stark is given a real arc. A real arc. This is the only movie, in all his appearances, where he is given a real arc. And a satisfying one, at that. He seems like a real character. The charm of the performance matches, for the first time, the charm of the character. And built all around it is an incredible assembly, the first great assemblage of characters in the MCU. This is Scarlett Johansson's first appearance as Black Widow. Arguably it's her best appearance as Black Widow. Samuel L. Jackson has his first decent-sized appearance as Nick Fury. Don Cheadle assumes the role of Jim Rhodes. Garry Shandling is a smarmy senator trying to match wits with Tony Stark. Gwyneth Paltrow does more of her Pepper Potts (which is basically the same in every appearance). Director Jon Favreau, in his second and final film at the helm in the MCU, puts in another appearance as Happy Hogan (inexplicably his most enduring contribution to the whole thing). Mickey Rourke throws away his Hollywood comebackto play Whiplash, with a wicked Russian accent. Clark Gregg puts in an Agent Coulson appearance. And...ladies and gentlemen: Sam Rockwell.
Sam Rockwell's whole career is unfathomable. How does he keep finding roles? You'd think after The Green Mile he would've been dismissed into an endless stream of tiny creep roles. But he just keeps finding decent roles, decent-sized roles. And you can thank appearances like his Justin Hammer for it. He utterly lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man in this one. He lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man 2 in this one. And somehow we never see the dude again. Absolutely indispensable magic. But at least they realized instantly how important Loki was (the best thing about Thor by far).
So the whole package is pretty wonderful. And quite possibly still the best single thing about the whole MCU.
The Great Gatsby (2013)
rating: ***
the story: Nick Carraway becomes swept up in the epic life of Jay Gatsby.
review: Leonardo DiCaprio has frequently been a brilliant actor. Not always. And it's always strange to discover the exceptions. The Great Gatsby is one of them.
Baz Luhrmann does the Moulin Rouge version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, and Spider-Man, I mean Tobey Maguire, is our host. Maguire's casting, and performance, in the film is one of the textbook examples of failing to escape a well-known role. Maguire had a career as someone other than Spider-Man, before he put on the spandex, but then he did and now, because he's an actor of limited range, it's going to be hard to see him as anything but Spider-Man. And I find it difficult to believe that Lurhmann didn't on some level comprehend that. Maguire has voiceover work in his Spider-Man movies, too, so it's even harder to understand. He plays Carraway as the same Peter Parker dork persona, and Luhrmann dresses him as the same Peter Parker dork persona.
And then in strolls DiCaprio, and by now it's clear that he's developed a worn-in face, but the voice, if he isn't careful, is that of a child actor who...just has a career that's inexplicably continued. And that's Leo DiCaprio if he hasn't bothered to sculpt a performance. And that's his Gatsby. Anytime he opens his mouth, it's just Jack from Titanic in an alternate reality. Which I suppose was half the point of casting DiCaprio in the role.
Carey Mulligan is Daisy Buchanan. Mulligan was the It Girl at the time, but displays little reason for being It in the role. Isla Fisher has a thankless tiny supporting role (as she tends to have), and Jason Clarke is in it, too.
The real reason, the only reason to watch this version of The Great Gatsby is Joel Edgerton's Tom Buchanan, is Joel Edgerton. Following his Hollywood breakthrough performance in Warrior (2011), The Great Gatsby was Edgerton's first real chance to shine, and he obviously threw himself at the opportunity. His even better performance in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), I suspect, has something to do with this one. Edgerton's somewhat blank face has always been his biggest drawback, but his voice and his sheer acting talent, when he's been allowed to shine, are undeniably huge assets. He clearly seized this opportunity. He's the only one in the movie who simultaneously loses himself in the time period and dominates the screen every time he appears. Some would call it overacting, or simply dismiss him as a ham. Those I would call clueless idiots. In another era, he would've instantly become a huge star. In this one he's settled back into a fairly anonymous career in the years since.
So the Jay Gatsby of this version? Is its Tom Buchanan.
the story: Nick Carraway becomes swept up in the epic life of Jay Gatsby.
review: Leonardo DiCaprio has frequently been a brilliant actor. Not always. And it's always strange to discover the exceptions. The Great Gatsby is one of them.
Baz Luhrmann does the Moulin Rouge version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, and Spider-Man, I mean Tobey Maguire, is our host. Maguire's casting, and performance, in the film is one of the textbook examples of failing to escape a well-known role. Maguire had a career as someone other than Spider-Man, before he put on the spandex, but then he did and now, because he's an actor of limited range, it's going to be hard to see him as anything but Spider-Man. And I find it difficult to believe that Lurhmann didn't on some level comprehend that. Maguire has voiceover work in his Spider-Man movies, too, so it's even harder to understand. He plays Carraway as the same Peter Parker dork persona, and Luhrmann dresses him as the same Peter Parker dork persona.
And then in strolls DiCaprio, and by now it's clear that he's developed a worn-in face, but the voice, if he isn't careful, is that of a child actor who...just has a career that's inexplicably continued. And that's Leo DiCaprio if he hasn't bothered to sculpt a performance. And that's his Gatsby. Anytime he opens his mouth, it's just Jack from Titanic in an alternate reality. Which I suppose was half the point of casting DiCaprio in the role.
Carey Mulligan is Daisy Buchanan. Mulligan was the It Girl at the time, but displays little reason for being It in the role. Isla Fisher has a thankless tiny supporting role (as she tends to have), and Jason Clarke is in it, too.
The real reason, the only reason to watch this version of The Great Gatsby is Joel Edgerton's Tom Buchanan, is Joel Edgerton. Following his Hollywood breakthrough performance in Warrior (2011), The Great Gatsby was Edgerton's first real chance to shine, and he obviously threw himself at the opportunity. His even better performance in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), I suspect, has something to do with this one. Edgerton's somewhat blank face has always been his biggest drawback, but his voice and his sheer acting talent, when he's been allowed to shine, are undeniably huge assets. He clearly seized this opportunity. He's the only one in the movie who simultaneously loses himself in the time period and dominates the screen every time he appears. Some would call it overacting, or simply dismiss him as a ham. Those I would call clueless idiots. In another era, he would've instantly become a huge star. In this one he's settled back into a fairly anonymous career in the years since.
So the Jay Gatsby of this version? Is its Tom Buchanan.
Cinderella Man (2005)
rating: ****
the story: The Great Depression is almost Jim Braddock's greatest opponent.
review: Boxing is such a familiar movie premise at this point it can be easy to take for granted, but there's a reason it's used so much, because it's inherently cinematic. It's almost better to watch boxing in the movies than any other way. Cinderella Man, in turn, dramatizes one of the great boxing stories, a comeback tale that dwarfs the later fictional Rocky Balboa saga.
It's also a Russell Crowe vehicle. It seems as if Hollywood (and/or the press) periodically chews up and spits out its stars, finding whatever pretense it can (there always seems to be one), and this was just about the point where Crowe's remarkable Oscars streak (starring in back-to-back Best Picture winners, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind) had reached its sell-by date, right when he seemed to have found another surefire winner. But the system was done with him, and that's all you really needed to know about Cinderella Man. Right?
Crowe has been chasing Brando his whole career, by his own admission. Before he became a known acting commodity, Crowe was acting singing (yeah! he sang before he acted) "I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando." Brando's early defining role was washed-up boxer Terry Malloy ("I coulda been a contenda!"). It's not hard to imagine Crowe envisioning himself playing Malloy, after a fashion, and the audience finally getting to see the guy actually box. And of course, because it's based on a real story, Malloy getting to hold his head high for an entirely different reason, at the end of the movie.
Cinderella Man is in some ways the end of the old Hollywood, before blockbusters finally squeezed out the traditional drama in the popular imagination. The Oscars, ironically, no longer have time for movies like it, even though their whole stereotype is built on it. But Cinderella Man isn't just the stereotype. As I say at the beginning of the review, it's about the boxing itself, how well it translates to film, and about perhaps the greatest boxing story ever.
Crowe's only real support in all this is Paul Giamatti, in a role that catches him at the exact moment he was attempting to finally transition into a leading man, thanks to the one-two punch (pop! pop!) of American Splendor and Sideways that helped studios and audiences finally discover his unique appeal. His role in Cinderalla Man expands as the movie continues, but it's still clearly a supporting one. There's also Renee Zellweger, who was in the midst of her own career transition, downward, having once been a Hollywood darling. Her role shrinks in the movie as it goes along, naturally. Director Ron Howard, of course, who helmed Crowe previously in A Beautiful Mind, was afterward best known for his Robert Langdon adaptations, and never again, like Crowe, embraced by the Oscar set.
Crowe never did get to make movies like this again. His subsequent career has been marked with reinvention. So perhaps different for the better. Cinderella Man is a neat little swan song for all involved.
the story: The Great Depression is almost Jim Braddock's greatest opponent.
review: Boxing is such a familiar movie premise at this point it can be easy to take for granted, but there's a reason it's used so much, because it's inherently cinematic. It's almost better to watch boxing in the movies than any other way. Cinderella Man, in turn, dramatizes one of the great boxing stories, a comeback tale that dwarfs the later fictional Rocky Balboa saga.
It's also a Russell Crowe vehicle. It seems as if Hollywood (and/or the press) periodically chews up and spits out its stars, finding whatever pretense it can (there always seems to be one), and this was just about the point where Crowe's remarkable Oscars streak (starring in back-to-back Best Picture winners, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind) had reached its sell-by date, right when he seemed to have found another surefire winner. But the system was done with him, and that's all you really needed to know about Cinderella Man. Right?
Crowe has been chasing Brando his whole career, by his own admission. Before he became a known acting commodity, Crowe was acting singing (yeah! he sang before he acted) "I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando." Brando's early defining role was washed-up boxer Terry Malloy ("I coulda been a contenda!"). It's not hard to imagine Crowe envisioning himself playing Malloy, after a fashion, and the audience finally getting to see the guy actually box. And of course, because it's based on a real story, Malloy getting to hold his head high for an entirely different reason, at the end of the movie.
Cinderella Man is in some ways the end of the old Hollywood, before blockbusters finally squeezed out the traditional drama in the popular imagination. The Oscars, ironically, no longer have time for movies like it, even though their whole stereotype is built on it. But Cinderella Man isn't just the stereotype. As I say at the beginning of the review, it's about the boxing itself, how well it translates to film, and about perhaps the greatest boxing story ever.
Crowe's only real support in all this is Paul Giamatti, in a role that catches him at the exact moment he was attempting to finally transition into a leading man, thanks to the one-two punch (pop! pop!) of American Splendor and Sideways that helped studios and audiences finally discover his unique appeal. His role in Cinderalla Man expands as the movie continues, but it's still clearly a supporting one. There's also Renee Zellweger, who was in the midst of her own career transition, downward, having once been a Hollywood darling. Her role shrinks in the movie as it goes along, naturally. Director Ron Howard, of course, who helmed Crowe previously in A Beautiful Mind, was afterward best known for his Robert Langdon adaptations, and never again, like Crowe, embraced by the Oscar set.
Crowe never did get to make movies like this again. His subsequent career has been marked with reinvention. So perhaps different for the better. Cinderella Man is a neat little swan song for all involved.
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)
rating: ****
the story: A former TV star's bid for career resurrection intertwines with the life of Sharon Tate.
review: A week after seeing it I'm still processing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Sometimes I'm instantly in love with a Quentin Tarantino film (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained), other times I'm not sure how devoted I'll be (Jackie Brown, Hateful Eight, even Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs). The two-volume Kill Bill is sort of in-between, although the second one is closer to instant love.
But of all his movies, Once Upon...is probably closest to Jackie Brown, which was Tarantino's first taste of languid, of just letting his filmmaking speak for itself rather than splashy violence (Reservoir Dogs) or splashy stars (Pulp Fiction) do the talking (along with the characters, naturally). Once Upon takes its tone from Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate, who today is best known for being horribly murdered at the behest of Charles Manson. Tarantino has stated that he wanted Tate to exist apart from that narrative. In fact, Once Upon... becomes his second film, after Inglourious Basterds, to deliberately rewrite history, in allowing Tate to avoid her fate, and it's in that regard that the film reaches its highest note and possibly the note on which the entire movie will ultimately be judged.
But Robbie's Tate isn't really the star of the movie. That honor falls to Leonardo DiCaprio, who's featured as the former TV star, a fictional character, who has been struggling to find meaningful roles. His TV show was a western, and by the time we catch up with him he's being cast in his latest guest spot in another one, and as Tarantino presents it the material becomes a movie-within-a-movie, something I wish he'd done with Django Unchained (as a flashback-of-sorts for the Brunhilda myth), which for some viewers might be a needless tangent, but it helps put the character in context, how he views himself, and thus how everything would turn out for all the characters if we followed their narratives equally. Metaphorically, you understand.
Just below DiCaprio is Brad Pitt playing his former stunt double, now personal assistant. After, oh, about a decade of sliding toward irrelevance and being best known for his relationship with Angelina Jolie, Pitt's performance in Once Upon... is almost akin to Travolta in Pulp Fiction, a giant reminder of his considerable talents, the full impact of his charismatic screen presence. He's got the best scene, too, a fight with Bruce Lee that becomes better as it builds, which is interesting for Tarantino, who usually accomplishes the bulk of his work with words. It's another subtle evolution of his filmmaking mastery.
Among the supporting players are Al Pacino (allowing himself a rare character role), Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, who's probably in the best sweet spot of his career (previewed, in some ways, by Death Proof, with a great spotlight in Hateful Eight).
But the ending is the real selling point. As I said, Tarantino allows Sharon Tate to cheat fate. In doing so, he probably allows Tate's husband, at the time of her death, Roman Polanski a reboot as well. Polanski at one time was known simply as a brilliant director. He was just coming off his breakthrough film, Rosemary's Baby, at the time, and would later direct Chinatown and The Pianist, but his career was forever tarnished by a rape charge he chose exile from America to avoid prosecution over. Is it reasonable to assume Tate's death played a role in the sequence of events that led to this fate? Is Tarantino saving two lives here? That's how I choose to view it, anyway.
Giving Tate the focus, rather than Charles Manson, is itself a noteworthy choice on Tarantino's part. It takes the power away from Manson, who entered virtual cultural immortality as the result of ordering Tate's murder, and Tate herself became just a name. In effect, Tarantino is addressing two major sins, and offering a chance at correction, that've haunted Hollywood for fifty years, which is noteworthy in and of itself at a time when Hollywood has been playing a moral authority. Is it a direct criticism? Will Hollywood even care, come the Oscars next year, or merely be flattered, as it tends to be, when presented as subject matter? If it gives Tarantino his long-deserved Academy recognition, all the better.
Perhaps, in time, I'll better understand how much I appreciate this one. For now I'll be a little cautious. But like all Tarantino's movies, it won't be easy to forget. Not by a long shot. Yeah....
the story: A former TV star's bid for career resurrection intertwines with the life of Sharon Tate.
review: A week after seeing it I'm still processing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Sometimes I'm instantly in love with a Quentin Tarantino film (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained), other times I'm not sure how devoted I'll be (Jackie Brown, Hateful Eight, even Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs). The two-volume Kill Bill is sort of in-between, although the second one is closer to instant love.
But of all his movies, Once Upon...is probably closest to Jackie Brown, which was Tarantino's first taste of languid, of just letting his filmmaking speak for itself rather than splashy violence (Reservoir Dogs) or splashy stars (Pulp Fiction) do the talking (along with the characters, naturally). Once Upon takes its tone from Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate, who today is best known for being horribly murdered at the behest of Charles Manson. Tarantino has stated that he wanted Tate to exist apart from that narrative. In fact, Once Upon... becomes his second film, after Inglourious Basterds, to deliberately rewrite history, in allowing Tate to avoid her fate, and it's in that regard that the film reaches its highest note and possibly the note on which the entire movie will ultimately be judged.
But Robbie's Tate isn't really the star of the movie. That honor falls to Leonardo DiCaprio, who's featured as the former TV star, a fictional character, who has been struggling to find meaningful roles. His TV show was a western, and by the time we catch up with him he's being cast in his latest guest spot in another one, and as Tarantino presents it the material becomes a movie-within-a-movie, something I wish he'd done with Django Unchained (as a flashback-of-sorts for the Brunhilda myth), which for some viewers might be a needless tangent, but it helps put the character in context, how he views himself, and thus how everything would turn out for all the characters if we followed their narratives equally. Metaphorically, you understand.
Just below DiCaprio is Brad Pitt playing his former stunt double, now personal assistant. After, oh, about a decade of sliding toward irrelevance and being best known for his relationship with Angelina Jolie, Pitt's performance in Once Upon... is almost akin to Travolta in Pulp Fiction, a giant reminder of his considerable talents, the full impact of his charismatic screen presence. He's got the best scene, too, a fight with Bruce Lee that becomes better as it builds, which is interesting for Tarantino, who usually accomplishes the bulk of his work with words. It's another subtle evolution of his filmmaking mastery.
Among the supporting players are Al Pacino (allowing himself a rare character role), Bruce Dern, and Kurt Russell, who's probably in the best sweet spot of his career (previewed, in some ways, by Death Proof, with a great spotlight in Hateful Eight).
But the ending is the real selling point. As I said, Tarantino allows Sharon Tate to cheat fate. In doing so, he probably allows Tate's husband, at the time of her death, Roman Polanski a reboot as well. Polanski at one time was known simply as a brilliant director. He was just coming off his breakthrough film, Rosemary's Baby, at the time, and would later direct Chinatown and The Pianist, but his career was forever tarnished by a rape charge he chose exile from America to avoid prosecution over. Is it reasonable to assume Tate's death played a role in the sequence of events that led to this fate? Is Tarantino saving two lives here? That's how I choose to view it, anyway.
Giving Tate the focus, rather than Charles Manson, is itself a noteworthy choice on Tarantino's part. It takes the power away from Manson, who entered virtual cultural immortality as the result of ordering Tate's murder, and Tate herself became just a name. In effect, Tarantino is addressing two major sins, and offering a chance at correction, that've haunted Hollywood for fifty years, which is noteworthy in and of itself at a time when Hollywood has been playing a moral authority. Is it a direct criticism? Will Hollywood even care, come the Oscars next year, or merely be flattered, as it tends to be, when presented as subject matter? If it gives Tarantino his long-deserved Academy recognition, all the better.
Perhaps, in time, I'll better understand how much I appreciate this one. For now I'll be a little cautious. But like all Tarantino's movies, it won't be easy to forget. Not by a long shot. Yeah....
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Yesterday (2019)
rating: *****
the story: A struggling musician suddenly finds himself in a world that doesn't remember the Beatles, and so begins claiming their songs as his own work.
review: The critics are idiots. There's been a vocal effort to dismiss Yesterday on the basis that the specific conditions that created the success of the Beatles has to be taken into account in any attempt to sell their songs on their own merit.
Yeah. The film does that. But that's not even the point, is it? The Beatles attained success, initially, as the quintessential boy band. They wrote songs that drove the girls wild. And then they just kept evolving, and their work became wildly praised. And then they ended, after about a decade's work.
Today, we still have boy bands. BTS, the current model. One Direction, started out in a reality show singing competition as individual competitors. None of them was good enough to win on their own. Then they were strung together, and the rest is history. And these are just recent examples.
Jack Malik finds initial success "stealing" the Beatles with their ballads. Love songs are universal. That's kind of the point. And the Beatles wrote some damn good ones. And not just "some." The success of the Beatles, again, was in their ability to keep producing at a high level, and at an increasingly high level. That was kind of the whole point.
But he doesn't find immediate success. His own parents treat "Let It Be" as just another cute example of their son's hopeless delusion, won't even let him get past the very beginning of the song. And his first gig playing Beatles songs is no more successful than his previous existence clinging to material like "Summer Song" that only his good friends care anything at all about.
But then someone hears him. Asks him to record in a tiny private studio. And then Ed Sheeran hears him. And then suddenly he becomes a full-blown phenomenon.
The fact is, Yesterday is a hugely honest (until, maybe, the part where Jack decides to just walk away, regardless of circumstances, but this is gooey romance, after all, at its heart) depiction of what it takes to succeed. It takes being noticed. And that's not easy. And then not just being noticed but becoming something that's easy to sell. Such as the fact that he "writes" so many instantly fantastic songs, which is what wows Sheeran (whose career the film takes for granted but may not be familiar to everyone), and what the major studio that signs Jack uses as his key selling point. Every major act has a key selling point. That's what sets them apart. It might even be argued that it's not the songs themselves that suddenly makes a success of Jack, but that he knows what to do with them.
But yes, it's also a gooey love story, which is writer Richard Curtis's trademark (I don't watch a lot of this kind of movie, but About Time is pretty magical, too), so it's really about Jack and his longtime not-quite-girlfriend Ellie. Where Jack is played by relative unknown Himesh Patel, Ellie is portrayed by Lily James, the biggest name actor in the movie, with the possible exception of Kate McKinnon, who has been a standout in Saturday Night Live for years and has been appearing in various movies, too (probably best thing about the 2016 Ghostbusters). Oh, and in an uncredited, brilliant cameo role as John Lennon, there's also Robert Carlyle.
The director is Danny Boyle, with a long and storied career behind him. For me, Yesterday is a particular triumph in relation to Boyle. I still don't know the best way to describe Slumdog Millionaire that doesn't draw uncomfortable memories of British interests in India. But Yesterday doesn't have that problem. Jack's ethnicity is never really dwelt on; he's just another Brit who grew up a big fan of the Beatles, and happened to be in the right place at the right time to capitalize on that. This is "colorblind" casting at its best. Patel didn't get the gig, presumably, to diversify the story, but because he was the best option to play Jack. And he can sing the hell out of the Beatles, yeah.
Where 2018's A Star Is Born felt artificial, Yesterday feels organic, not because I already knew the songs, but because the artistic journey doesn't feel forced. It doesn't hurt that the results celebrate the enduring legacy of the Beatles, and in fact that aspect of the film was largely responsible for me wanting to see the movie at all. The movie itself rewards the premise, and moves beyond it. What more can you ask? This is a great film.
the story: A struggling musician suddenly finds himself in a world that doesn't remember the Beatles, and so begins claiming their songs as his own work.
review: The critics are idiots. There's been a vocal effort to dismiss Yesterday on the basis that the specific conditions that created the success of the Beatles has to be taken into account in any attempt to sell their songs on their own merit.
Yeah. The film does that. But that's not even the point, is it? The Beatles attained success, initially, as the quintessential boy band. They wrote songs that drove the girls wild. And then they just kept evolving, and their work became wildly praised. And then they ended, after about a decade's work.
Today, we still have boy bands. BTS, the current model. One Direction, started out in a reality show singing competition as individual competitors. None of them was good enough to win on their own. Then they were strung together, and the rest is history. And these are just recent examples.
Jack Malik finds initial success "stealing" the Beatles with their ballads. Love songs are universal. That's kind of the point. And the Beatles wrote some damn good ones. And not just "some." The success of the Beatles, again, was in their ability to keep producing at a high level, and at an increasingly high level. That was kind of the whole point.
But he doesn't find immediate success. His own parents treat "Let It Be" as just another cute example of their son's hopeless delusion, won't even let him get past the very beginning of the song. And his first gig playing Beatles songs is no more successful than his previous existence clinging to material like "Summer Song" that only his good friends care anything at all about.
But then someone hears him. Asks him to record in a tiny private studio. And then Ed Sheeran hears him. And then suddenly he becomes a full-blown phenomenon.
The fact is, Yesterday is a hugely honest (until, maybe, the part where Jack decides to just walk away, regardless of circumstances, but this is gooey romance, after all, at its heart) depiction of what it takes to succeed. It takes being noticed. And that's not easy. And then not just being noticed but becoming something that's easy to sell. Such as the fact that he "writes" so many instantly fantastic songs, which is what wows Sheeran (whose career the film takes for granted but may not be familiar to everyone), and what the major studio that signs Jack uses as his key selling point. Every major act has a key selling point. That's what sets them apart. It might even be argued that it's not the songs themselves that suddenly makes a success of Jack, but that he knows what to do with them.
But yes, it's also a gooey love story, which is writer Richard Curtis's trademark (I don't watch a lot of this kind of movie, but About Time is pretty magical, too), so it's really about Jack and his longtime not-quite-girlfriend Ellie. Where Jack is played by relative unknown Himesh Patel, Ellie is portrayed by Lily James, the biggest name actor in the movie, with the possible exception of Kate McKinnon, who has been a standout in Saturday Night Live for years and has been appearing in various movies, too (probably best thing about the 2016 Ghostbusters). Oh, and in an uncredited, brilliant cameo role as John Lennon, there's also Robert Carlyle.
The director is Danny Boyle, with a long and storied career behind him. For me, Yesterday is a particular triumph in relation to Boyle. I still don't know the best way to describe Slumdog Millionaire that doesn't draw uncomfortable memories of British interests in India. But Yesterday doesn't have that problem. Jack's ethnicity is never really dwelt on; he's just another Brit who grew up a big fan of the Beatles, and happened to be in the right place at the right time to capitalize on that. This is "colorblind" casting at its best. Patel didn't get the gig, presumably, to diversify the story, but because he was the best option to play Jack. And he can sing the hell out of the Beatles, yeah.
Where 2018's A Star Is Born felt artificial, Yesterday feels organic, not because I already knew the songs, but because the artistic journey doesn't feel forced. It doesn't hurt that the results celebrate the enduring legacy of the Beatles, and in fact that aspect of the film was largely responsible for me wanting to see the movie at all. The movie itself rewards the premise, and moves beyond it. What more can you ask? This is a great film.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Doctor Strange (2016)
rating: ***
the story: An arrogant doctor loses the use of his hands, but his mind becomes greatly expanded.
review: The MCU Avengers cycle is a full-blown phenomenon that has come to define the modern cinematic era, and the twenty-three movies to date that comprise it have seemingly explored just about every kind of superhero movie imaginable. Doctor Strange did it with magic (although it's also one of the few outright examples of superpowers in the franchise, too). That's the main calling card here.
A lot of fans saw too many parallels between Stephen Strange and Tony Stark. One of the few criticisms fans have leveled against these films is that the plots tend to be the same: brilliant individual has a fall, builds themselves back up, defeats villain in spectacular fight. And the villain tends to be fairly uninspired (with a few exceptions). But you can level the plot critique against just about any story. I tend to think the specifics are worth considering. Strange and Stark are only tangentially worth comparing at that level. Stark may be a tech genius, but he's also building on a family legacy. Strange is a brilliant physician. They both may possess out-of-control egos, but Strange is far more likely to use his skills to actual benefit than Stark, who initially just wants to make easy money, without caring about the consequences. For Strange, he may alienate colleagues, but he's undeniably saving lives. He believes he can save more lives if he can just perform his research undisturbed. Essentially, Stephen Strange is House on a grander scale. (It's really hard not to envision the producers using the Hugh Laurie breakout role as a pattern for Strange, and how they determined Benedict Cumberbatch to be the best pick for the role.)
Then Strange goes on the journey to becoming Doctor Strange, and the visuals take over. Clearly the movie itself was inspired as much by Inception as the Harry Potter films, and letting the blend of them run wild. Too wild, really, however awesome the results. The characters never really treat them as anything but meaningless backdrop. They're audience eye candy, nothing more. But still hugely notable.
Doctor Strange is the "Sorcerer Supreme," but he is also, essentially, a superhero wizard. And that's the role he fills in the MCU. The ending features a nifty time-repetition that the character's later crucial appearance in Avengers: Infinity War suggests is how he discovers the only way to beat Thanos (in all fairness, that's probably the best sequence of this film, watching Strange repeatedly confront what is otherwise a pointless CGI effect just as doggedly each time, so it would probably have been just as pointless to repeat the sequence, especially when we know Strange can't win this time).
Cumberbatch has a meaty role to play in this appearance (he doesn't have nearly as much to work with in later appearances to date), and is once again thoroughly Cumberbatch. Rachel McAdams is probably the most credible female supporting player, having often played this type where others in the MCU felt hamstrung in similar roles. Tilda Swinton is perhaps about as perfectly cast as she's ever been as the Ancient One, Mads Mikkelsen letting his eyes do all the work in the way he so creepily often does. Benedict Wong is the kind of actor who doesn't need much to make an impact. Benjamin Bratt has a tiny role that makes you kind of wonder why they even bothered. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the most baffling case. He went from starring in the highly acclaimed 12 Years a Slave to this rather than, say, Black Panther (who instead is played by Chadwick Boseman, who is an utter charisma void). I don't get it.
This is not a movie that expects much from its audience, and so it doesn't really try much, aside from visually. It slides by on mumbo jumbo. Why Strange is as good at magic as he is at surgery, not particularly explained. It just sort of happens. But if you don't care, you get a movie that does just about what it needs to. And at that, it's about as good or better than the average MCU film. It knows what it really needs to accomplish, and at least nails that. Knowing what Strange does in other movies is just kind of icing on the cake.
the story: An arrogant doctor loses the use of his hands, but his mind becomes greatly expanded.
review: The MCU Avengers cycle is a full-blown phenomenon that has come to define the modern cinematic era, and the twenty-three movies to date that comprise it have seemingly explored just about every kind of superhero movie imaginable. Doctor Strange did it with magic (although it's also one of the few outright examples of superpowers in the franchise, too). That's the main calling card here.
A lot of fans saw too many parallels between Stephen Strange and Tony Stark. One of the few criticisms fans have leveled against these films is that the plots tend to be the same: brilliant individual has a fall, builds themselves back up, defeats villain in spectacular fight. And the villain tends to be fairly uninspired (with a few exceptions). But you can level the plot critique against just about any story. I tend to think the specifics are worth considering. Strange and Stark are only tangentially worth comparing at that level. Stark may be a tech genius, but he's also building on a family legacy. Strange is a brilliant physician. They both may possess out-of-control egos, but Strange is far more likely to use his skills to actual benefit than Stark, who initially just wants to make easy money, without caring about the consequences. For Strange, he may alienate colleagues, but he's undeniably saving lives. He believes he can save more lives if he can just perform his research undisturbed. Essentially, Stephen Strange is House on a grander scale. (It's really hard not to envision the producers using the Hugh Laurie breakout role as a pattern for Strange, and how they determined Benedict Cumberbatch to be the best pick for the role.)
Then Strange goes on the journey to becoming Doctor Strange, and the visuals take over. Clearly the movie itself was inspired as much by Inception as the Harry Potter films, and letting the blend of them run wild. Too wild, really, however awesome the results. The characters never really treat them as anything but meaningless backdrop. They're audience eye candy, nothing more. But still hugely notable.
Doctor Strange is the "Sorcerer Supreme," but he is also, essentially, a superhero wizard. And that's the role he fills in the MCU. The ending features a nifty time-repetition that the character's later crucial appearance in Avengers: Infinity War suggests is how he discovers the only way to beat Thanos (in all fairness, that's probably the best sequence of this film, watching Strange repeatedly confront what is otherwise a pointless CGI effect just as doggedly each time, so it would probably have been just as pointless to repeat the sequence, especially when we know Strange can't win this time).
Cumberbatch has a meaty role to play in this appearance (he doesn't have nearly as much to work with in later appearances to date), and is once again thoroughly Cumberbatch. Rachel McAdams is probably the most credible female supporting player, having often played this type where others in the MCU felt hamstrung in similar roles. Tilda Swinton is perhaps about as perfectly cast as she's ever been as the Ancient One, Mads Mikkelsen letting his eyes do all the work in the way he so creepily often does. Benedict Wong is the kind of actor who doesn't need much to make an impact. Benjamin Bratt has a tiny role that makes you kind of wonder why they even bothered. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the most baffling case. He went from starring in the highly acclaimed 12 Years a Slave to this rather than, say, Black Panther (who instead is played by Chadwick Boseman, who is an utter charisma void). I don't get it.
This is not a movie that expects much from its audience, and so it doesn't really try much, aside from visually. It slides by on mumbo jumbo. Why Strange is as good at magic as he is at surgery, not particularly explained. It just sort of happens. But if you don't care, you get a movie that does just about what it needs to. And at that, it's about as good or better than the average MCU film. It knows what it really needs to accomplish, and at least nails that. Knowing what Strange does in other movies is just kind of icing on the cake.
Stardust (2007)
rating: ***
the story: A young man seeks to win the heart of a beautiful woman by seeking a falling star.
review: The idea of new cult movies seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years, possibly because the MCU Avengers cycle has effectively made geek cinema mainstream in just about every iteration imaginable. But Stardust is about as liable a contender as anything that's been released in the last fifteen years, in large part to a cast that has kept on giving, and a writer and a director whose legacies keep expanding.
The cast. Oh, the cast! You've got Charlie Cox as the lead character, Tristan. Cox eventually found another spotlight in the Netflix series Daredevil. Henry Cavill, in a much smaller role as Tristan's romantic rival (in Tristan's imagination, anyway, insofar as Tristan ever really had a chance), is perhaps the biggest easter egg in the movie, nearly unrecognizable as a fop with blond hair. He would, of course, later take on the role of Superman. Ian McKellen, at this point only a few years removed from his career-defining role as Gandalf in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, is narrator. Mark Strong, who would become a much better recognized supporting actor across a dizzying array of films, plays a would-be king. Rupert Everett is in there, unrecognizable. Ricky Gervais is easier to spot. Claire Danes is the falling star. Michelle Pfeiffer is the witch who wishes to be young again. Sienna Miller is the girl Tristan thought he deserved (an oddly low key role, considering this was Miller's heyday). Peter O'Toole, looking surprisingly frail, is in there. And Robert De Niro.
Ah, De Niro. This was the period where De Niro was finally coming to grips with his father. Robert De Niro, the most famous tough guy of modern cinema, was the son of a gay man. He'd directed The Good Shepherd (2006), a kind of allegorical film about his father, and then appeared in Stardust as a pirate who is secretly gay. The gay aspects of the character are kind of parody, but the role is unexpected for De Niro, so seeing him this way is itself kind of reason enough to see Stardust. I suspect part of the cult appeal for it comes from the LGBTQ community.
The writer of the book from which Stardust is derived is Neil Gaiman, who also wrote the epic Sandman comic book series. Stardust was his first major screen adaptation. The director is Matthew Vaughn, whose geeks credentials have expanded since.
The results aren't as magical as all that. You'd want a contender for The Princess Bride, but it just isn't there. The presence of all those stars is just about enough compensation, though, with De Niro leading the pack. McKellen sets the tone with his storybook narration. Princess Bride is a storybook that spirals hilariously out of control. Stardust remains storybook. But it's still a good modern storybook. Few enough elements compete with De Niro. One is the collection of dead brothers. The other is the goat who becomes a man (somewhat unconvincingly). There's also Strong's undead duel with Tristan. If there had been more of that, there'd be a better chance at truly comparing the results to Princess Bride.
Not that there has to be a comparison. As its own thing, Stardust lightly sparkles. And then, again, you see yourself drawn to all those stars...
the story: A young man seeks to win the heart of a beautiful woman by seeking a falling star.
review: The idea of new cult movies seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years, possibly because the MCU Avengers cycle has effectively made geek cinema mainstream in just about every iteration imaginable. But Stardust is about as liable a contender as anything that's been released in the last fifteen years, in large part to a cast that has kept on giving, and a writer and a director whose legacies keep expanding.
The cast. Oh, the cast! You've got Charlie Cox as the lead character, Tristan. Cox eventually found another spotlight in the Netflix series Daredevil. Henry Cavill, in a much smaller role as Tristan's romantic rival (in Tristan's imagination, anyway, insofar as Tristan ever really had a chance), is perhaps the biggest easter egg in the movie, nearly unrecognizable as a fop with blond hair. He would, of course, later take on the role of Superman. Ian McKellen, at this point only a few years removed from his career-defining role as Gandalf in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, is narrator. Mark Strong, who would become a much better recognized supporting actor across a dizzying array of films, plays a would-be king. Rupert Everett is in there, unrecognizable. Ricky Gervais is easier to spot. Claire Danes is the falling star. Michelle Pfeiffer is the witch who wishes to be young again. Sienna Miller is the girl Tristan thought he deserved (an oddly low key role, considering this was Miller's heyday). Peter O'Toole, looking surprisingly frail, is in there. And Robert De Niro.
Ah, De Niro. This was the period where De Niro was finally coming to grips with his father. Robert De Niro, the most famous tough guy of modern cinema, was the son of a gay man. He'd directed The Good Shepherd (2006), a kind of allegorical film about his father, and then appeared in Stardust as a pirate who is secretly gay. The gay aspects of the character are kind of parody, but the role is unexpected for De Niro, so seeing him this way is itself kind of reason enough to see Stardust. I suspect part of the cult appeal for it comes from the LGBTQ community.
The writer of the book from which Stardust is derived is Neil Gaiman, who also wrote the epic Sandman comic book series. Stardust was his first major screen adaptation. The director is Matthew Vaughn, whose geeks credentials have expanded since.
The results aren't as magical as all that. You'd want a contender for The Princess Bride, but it just isn't there. The presence of all those stars is just about enough compensation, though, with De Niro leading the pack. McKellen sets the tone with his storybook narration. Princess Bride is a storybook that spirals hilariously out of control. Stardust remains storybook. But it's still a good modern storybook. Few enough elements compete with De Niro. One is the collection of dead brothers. The other is the goat who becomes a man (somewhat unconvincingly). There's also Strong's undead duel with Tristan. If there had been more of that, there'd be a better chance at truly comparing the results to Princess Bride.
Not that there has to be a comparison. As its own thing, Stardust lightly sparkles. And then, again, you see yourself drawn to all those stars...
Saturday, July 13, 2019
2019 Favorites So Far
- The Man Who Killed Don Quixote - The long, long awaited Terry Gilliam film. To my mind, well worth it.
- Detective Pikachu - Brilliant repurposing of an existing franchise (even if technically it was based on one of the many games). Continues Ryan Reynolds' penchant for playing with identity.
- Serenity - It's not really a twist ending when most of the movie explains that it's part of the narrative.
- The Standoff At Sparrow Creek - I've waited a long time for a James Badge Dale spotlight. It delivered.
- The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot - Mesmerizing portrait on aging.
- Glass - A fitting finale for the Shyamalan trilogy.
- Dumbo - Playfully subversive family film from Tim Burton.
- The Upside - Sort of instantly, for me, the best material featuring Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston.
- Hotel Mumbai - Chilling portrait of modern terrorism.
- Captain Marvel - One of the best MCU movies.
- John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum - It's like the Fast & Furious movies all over again. The longer the series continues, the more awesome it becomes.
- Fighting With My Family - Very much a movie version, but still fun to have an actual wrestler's journey (WWE's Paige) documented, with Dwayne Johnson getting to immortalize The Rock in film.
- Dark Phoenix - The X-Men saga comes to a moody conclusion.
- Avengers: Endgame - It's like watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King all over again. For a lot of folks that's a good thing. For me, not as much.
- Secret Life of Pets 2 - Saw this thanks to my niece.
2018
Viewed/Ranked
- Isle of Dogs
- The Death of Stalin
- Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
- The Old Man & The Gun
- Solo: A Star Wars Movie
- Damsel
- Super Troopers 2
- The Favourite
- Dark Crimes
- Gringo
- Tag
- Holmes and Watson
- The Yellow Birds
- Woman Walks Ahead
- Sicario: Day of the Soldado
- The Girl In The Spider's Web
- Can You Ever Forgive Me?
- Vice
- Widows
- Stan & Ollie
- Ant-Man and the Wasp
- Mission: Impossible - Fallout
- Avengers: Infinity War
- Venom
- Aquaman
- Deadpool 2/Once Upon a Deadpool
- Teen Titans Go! To The Movies
- Early Man
- Tomb Raider
- Black Panther
- Robin Hood
- Skyscraper
- Death Wish
- The Sisters Brothers
- Mary Queen of Scots
- Paul, Apostle of Christ
- Annihilation
- You Were Never Really Here
- Son of Bigfoot
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
- A Star Is Born
- BlacKkKlansman
- The Happytime Murders
- Dr. Seuss' The Grinch
- Ready Player One
- The Hurricane Heist
- A Quiet Place
- A Simple Favor
- Bad Times At The El Royale
- Bohemian Rhapsody
- Boy Erased
- Bumblebee
- Crazy Rich Asians
- Creed II
- Green Book
- The House With A Clock In Its Walls
- Incredibles 2
- Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom
- Mary Poppins Returns
- The Meg
- The Mule
- Ocean's 8
- Peppermint
- The Predator
- Ralph Breaks the Internet
- Sorry To Bother You
- Upgrade
- Welcome To Marwen
Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019)
rating: *****
the story: A young director finds himself thrust into the world of Don Quixote.
review: By some fortuitous twist of fate, I ended up reading Don Quixote by Cervantes, for the first time, not long before finally getting to see Terry Gilliam's torturously-gestated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I don't think it's necessary to have read the book recently, but to have read it at all surely helps explain many if not most of Gilliam's subsequent creative choices for the film. You might even say that Gilliam's film is a modern updating of the book.
I think the reaction of most critics to the film owes to their ignorance of the book. I think the reaction of most critics owes to the fact that they really only know the story from the musical Man of La Mancha, whose fifty year existence is something of a drop in the bucket of the four hundred years the book has been in existence (Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare). Those critics may not know how much the musical departs from the book. They might not even care. They might really be convinced that Don Quixote is the story of an irrepressible dreamer.
It is, in fact, Sancho Panza's story. Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, a peasant from the same neighborhood as the lord whose fortunes have been declining. Most of the misfortunes that befall Don Quixote, in their subsequent adventures together, fall on Sancho more harshly. Sancho spends the book doubting Don Quixote's sanity and going along with his flight of fancy mostly because he believes he'll end up with a higher station in life. At one point he gets to play governor of an "island," something Don Quixote has been promising him as the most likely outcome of their time together.
But what is Sancho's story? Well, it's much like Toby's. (Meanwhile, the name of this character in Gilliam's movie is most likely derived from a namesake character in Tristram Shandy, a book inspired by Don Quixote and much later adapted into Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which takes a much more literal metafictional approach to adapting the source material. Toby is also a supporting player in that story, and at least in the book, steals attention as shamelessly as Sancho.)
Toby is the young director played by Adam Driver. Toby's career sort of peaked early when he made a student film, called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He discovers a DVD copy of it by chance, in the present, and he decides to return to the village where he filmed it. There he comes across the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he'd convinced to play Don Quixote. Only now, the cobbler believes he is Don Quixote. It's a comparable development to how Cervantes first set Don Quixote on his path of knight-errantry.
But Toby is driven, like Sancho, mostly by ego. Going on the road with Don Quixote has nothing to do with believing in his quest. As with Sancho, Toby doesn't believe for a minute that the cobbler is really Don Quixote, and the audience is given a concrete reason to sympathize with him. As in the book, the character of Don Quixote becomes the very colorful window dressing the story uses to follow Toby's doubt, and how by the end he begins to believe.
So in short, the musical is about belief, while the book and this new movie are about doubt.
Toby's life is complicated by the fact that the main producer (Stellan Skarsgard) of the commercial he had set out to make when he becomes plunged into the world of Don Quixote, is something of a tyrant. (A character no doubt inspired by Gilliam's ridiculously complicated production history.) And the producer's wife (Olga Kurylenko) keeps trying to have an affair with him. And the girl Toby cast as Don Quixote's beloved Dulcinea has reentered his life as well, and keeps instigating him to look beyond his cynical outlook. She disagrees that his student production ruined her life. But their further relationship clarifies around the cobbler's adventures, and the story ends up coming full circle.
As I've said, most of the story beats in Gilliam's film come directly from Cervantes' book. Most of Gilliam's films throw their main characters into bewildering journeys, and sometimes the bewilderment becomes the viewer's as well. I think Toby provides a clear center, his perspective easy to understand, whether or not you see all the parallels with the book, the departures and many elements missing from the musical.
It actually becomes ironic, that we're once again living in an age like Cervantes'. A real argument could be made that what Don Quixote was really about was Cervantes complaining that his contemporaries no longer valued or understood the literature that he himself still cherished, which in his case as with his main character was chivalric fiction. Critics today, by their bewilderment of this film, admit that they have no real knowledge of the book itself. (Makes you really wonder when you read any review that claims, "the book was better.") Gilliam's instincts are well-established. His last movie, The Zero Theorem, was pretty straight-forward but a lot weirder by design. He never sets out to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote weird for the sake of being weird (probably Tideland is the benchmark in Gilliam's work for that). It's probably his most straight-forward movie ever! Even The Fisher King makes you wait to find out what happened to Robin Williams. Here you know everything you need to almost right from the start, and the story becomes, as with most stories, waiting to see how things turn out.
Driver is perfect as Toby. I know there were many actors cast to play the character, and Don Quixote for that matter, over the years, but in the film as it ended up, it's difficult to imagine anyone else being able to lose himself in the role. Johnny Depp, at the time he was cast, had yet to break out as a true character actor, and so still retained his dreamy persona, when not sporting scissors for hands. Don Juan De Marco is an excellent example of Depp in his prime at that point in his career, and is similar to Don Quixote (a man who believes he is in fact the celebrated lover). Driver is able to sell the ego-driven Toby, the would-be lover, and the man who becomes completely overwhelmed by his later experiences, and finally someone capable of taking on, yes, the impossible dream, without ever making any of it feel like a caricature. It's a performance that needed to be grounded. By all rights, it's a career-defining performance, in Gilliam's, at long last, career-defining film.
My favorite Gilliam movie, before this, was The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I'm still working on fully appreciating Brazil. Arguably The Fisher King will remain his most accessible movie, and Twelve Monkeys will be the one the cool kids like. But The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he tried making for a quarter century, is quite literally a movie only he could make, in a career of movies only he could make. We live in an age where the idea of the remake is anathema, even as we never quite scoff at mere adaptations. But storytelling is always about retelling stories. The best stories are those that continue to resonate, even if a few details have to be updated every now and then, because they are continuously relevant. Gilliam includes Muslims and even Russians in his version. Muslims were in fact integral to Cervantes' version as well, and that's just one of the many ways Gilliam helps resurrect it. I think Toby's arc, from being lost in his own life to allowing himself to be lost in someone else's, is the whole point. In the movie, as in the book, there are characters who think they'll make things better by attempting to do so cynically, mostly so they can mock Don Quixote. But what Toby discovers is that the better version of himself, the one he can live with, has finally cut himself free from doubt. He no longer views Don Quixote as crazy. This isn't an impossible dream. It's about finally refusing to make compromises, and just doing something. Somewhere along the way, the spontaneous Toby who made the student film stopped existing. The course he set the cobbler on was the opposite one Toby took. This is a story of how they meet up again.
Anyway, it's also a damn good film, beyond anything else. You don't need to try and take life lessons from it. Things work out for Toby. The end.
the story: A young director finds himself thrust into the world of Don Quixote.
review: By some fortuitous twist of fate, I ended up reading Don Quixote by Cervantes, for the first time, not long before finally getting to see Terry Gilliam's torturously-gestated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I don't think it's necessary to have read the book recently, but to have read it at all surely helps explain many if not most of Gilliam's subsequent creative choices for the film. You might even say that Gilliam's film is a modern updating of the book.
I think the reaction of most critics to the film owes to their ignorance of the book. I think the reaction of most critics owes to the fact that they really only know the story from the musical Man of La Mancha, whose fifty year existence is something of a drop in the bucket of the four hundred years the book has been in existence (Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare). Those critics may not know how much the musical departs from the book. They might not even care. They might really be convinced that Don Quixote is the story of an irrepressible dreamer.
It is, in fact, Sancho Panza's story. Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, a peasant from the same neighborhood as the lord whose fortunes have been declining. Most of the misfortunes that befall Don Quixote, in their subsequent adventures together, fall on Sancho more harshly. Sancho spends the book doubting Don Quixote's sanity and going along with his flight of fancy mostly because he believes he'll end up with a higher station in life. At one point he gets to play governor of an "island," something Don Quixote has been promising him as the most likely outcome of their time together.
But what is Sancho's story? Well, it's much like Toby's. (Meanwhile, the name of this character in Gilliam's movie is most likely derived from a namesake character in Tristram Shandy, a book inspired by Don Quixote and much later adapted into Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which takes a much more literal metafictional approach to adapting the source material. Toby is also a supporting player in that story, and at least in the book, steals attention as shamelessly as Sancho.)
Toby is the young director played by Adam Driver. Toby's career sort of peaked early when he made a student film, called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He discovers a DVD copy of it by chance, in the present, and he decides to return to the village where he filmed it. There he comes across the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he'd convinced to play Don Quixote. Only now, the cobbler believes he is Don Quixote. It's a comparable development to how Cervantes first set Don Quixote on his path of knight-errantry.
But Toby is driven, like Sancho, mostly by ego. Going on the road with Don Quixote has nothing to do with believing in his quest. As with Sancho, Toby doesn't believe for a minute that the cobbler is really Don Quixote, and the audience is given a concrete reason to sympathize with him. As in the book, the character of Don Quixote becomes the very colorful window dressing the story uses to follow Toby's doubt, and how by the end he begins to believe.
So in short, the musical is about belief, while the book and this new movie are about doubt.
Toby's life is complicated by the fact that the main producer (Stellan Skarsgard) of the commercial he had set out to make when he becomes plunged into the world of Don Quixote, is something of a tyrant. (A character no doubt inspired by Gilliam's ridiculously complicated production history.) And the producer's wife (Olga Kurylenko) keeps trying to have an affair with him. And the girl Toby cast as Don Quixote's beloved Dulcinea has reentered his life as well, and keeps instigating him to look beyond his cynical outlook. She disagrees that his student production ruined her life. But their further relationship clarifies around the cobbler's adventures, and the story ends up coming full circle.
As I've said, most of the story beats in Gilliam's film come directly from Cervantes' book. Most of Gilliam's films throw their main characters into bewildering journeys, and sometimes the bewilderment becomes the viewer's as well. I think Toby provides a clear center, his perspective easy to understand, whether or not you see all the parallels with the book, the departures and many elements missing from the musical.
It actually becomes ironic, that we're once again living in an age like Cervantes'. A real argument could be made that what Don Quixote was really about was Cervantes complaining that his contemporaries no longer valued or understood the literature that he himself still cherished, which in his case as with his main character was chivalric fiction. Critics today, by their bewilderment of this film, admit that they have no real knowledge of the book itself. (Makes you really wonder when you read any review that claims, "the book was better.") Gilliam's instincts are well-established. His last movie, The Zero Theorem, was pretty straight-forward but a lot weirder by design. He never sets out to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote weird for the sake of being weird (probably Tideland is the benchmark in Gilliam's work for that). It's probably his most straight-forward movie ever! Even The Fisher King makes you wait to find out what happened to Robin Williams. Here you know everything you need to almost right from the start, and the story becomes, as with most stories, waiting to see how things turn out.
Driver is perfect as Toby. I know there were many actors cast to play the character, and Don Quixote for that matter, over the years, but in the film as it ended up, it's difficult to imagine anyone else being able to lose himself in the role. Johnny Depp, at the time he was cast, had yet to break out as a true character actor, and so still retained his dreamy persona, when not sporting scissors for hands. Don Juan De Marco is an excellent example of Depp in his prime at that point in his career, and is similar to Don Quixote (a man who believes he is in fact the celebrated lover). Driver is able to sell the ego-driven Toby, the would-be lover, and the man who becomes completely overwhelmed by his later experiences, and finally someone capable of taking on, yes, the impossible dream, without ever making any of it feel like a caricature. It's a performance that needed to be grounded. By all rights, it's a career-defining performance, in Gilliam's, at long last, career-defining film.
My favorite Gilliam movie, before this, was The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I'm still working on fully appreciating Brazil. Arguably The Fisher King will remain his most accessible movie, and Twelve Monkeys will be the one the cool kids like. But The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he tried making for a quarter century, is quite literally a movie only he could make, in a career of movies only he could make. We live in an age where the idea of the remake is anathema, even as we never quite scoff at mere adaptations. But storytelling is always about retelling stories. The best stories are those that continue to resonate, even if a few details have to be updated every now and then, because they are continuously relevant. Gilliam includes Muslims and even Russians in his version. Muslims were in fact integral to Cervantes' version as well, and that's just one of the many ways Gilliam helps resurrect it. I think Toby's arc, from being lost in his own life to allowing himself to be lost in someone else's, is the whole point. In the movie, as in the book, there are characters who think they'll make things better by attempting to do so cynically, mostly so they can mock Don Quixote. But what Toby discovers is that the better version of himself, the one he can live with, has finally cut himself free from doubt. He no longer views Don Quixote as crazy. This isn't an impossible dream. It's about finally refusing to make compromises, and just doing something. Somewhere along the way, the spontaneous Toby who made the student film stopped existing. The course he set the cobbler on was the opposite one Toby took. This is a story of how they meet up again.
Anyway, it's also a damn good film, beyond anything else. You don't need to try and take life lessons from it. Things work out for Toby. The end.
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