Hyde Park on Hudson (2012)

rating: ****

the story: FDR develops a relationship with his fifth-cousin while entertaining British monarchs struggling with public relations problems.

what it's all about: It's a terrible shame that Hyde Park on Hudson was allowed to slip out of general awareness so easily.  Bill Murray gives one of his few non-Bill Murray performances, which is to say he builds a performance, a character, other than Bill Murray.  Now, Bill Murray being Bill Murray is usually a reliable source of entertainment, but it also creates a situation where the actor becomes highly underrated as a performer.  This is what happened after his '80s boom, which stretched into the early '90s: like Robin Williams, it wasn't until he underwent a dramatic twist in the '00s that critics started taking Murray seriously again.  You can pinpoint Lost in Translation, his melancholic study of jaded celebrity, as the turning point, and yet, all it really meant was that audiences continued to not really care about him anymore, and that critics did.  (It was the same with Williams, who at least had been alternating serious and comedic roles all along, culminating in Good Will Hunting, at which point it seemed okay to forget he existed.)

What's ironic about all of this, in relation to Hyde Park, is that Murray's take on FDR is a complete revelation for reasons beyond Murray's performance.  In a lot of ways, Hyde Park is a better version of the Oscar-winning The King's Speech, from a mere two years earlier.  This was a fawning, unconvincing attempt to dramatize how poor King George got over his speech impediment and rallied the British against the Nazis.  This was incredible for any number of reasons, not the least because history records Churchill as the lion of that cause, with nothing in King's Speech remotely contradicting it.  Really, it was one long piece of propaganda, trying to justify continuing fascination with an increasingly irrelevant monarchy.

Where Hyde Park gets it right is making George and Elizabeth human rather than a bunch of movie stars gamely trying to hoodwink the audience.  The fact that neither of the actors playing them are household names, where the ones playing Roosevelt and the two women in the spotlight around him (Murray, Laura Linney as the fifth-cousin, and Olivia Williams as Eleanor), none of whom resort to caricatures (the best thing about King's Speech is Geoffrey Rush being Geoffrey Rush, which is always a winning formula), are, goes to sort of prove the point.  This is an intimate piece of history.

Granted, there's much dispute as to how factual it is.  The fifth-cousin wrote about this affair in letters that didn't circulate for decades, and the characterization of Eleanor is called suspect, too, but the effect is itself a revelation: whether or not it's true, it still humanizes Roosevelt.  There's this popular image of the polio-stricken president as superman, both for his New Deal and the way he handled WWII, along the way serving a historic three terms and being elected to four.  Yet for all that, it's uncanny that he's all but dominated by his mother in this movie.  Who knew?

It's that kind of insight that makes Hyde Park a truly winning experience, its leisurely pace, the way it not only contradicts everything we know about Murray, but also makes him almost incidental to the movie itself, which is narrated by Linney, who for whatever reason has fallen out of favor in Hollywood and with critics.  Both of them further strong cases for already-stellar careers in this movie.

Right now there's a big struggle about the importance of seeming important in movies.  I guess it mostly depends on whether or not it strikes the right note, whatever that means.  I think most of why Hyde Park had to be downplayed was because King's Speech had already covered some of this territory and had gotten plenty of awards glitz for it.  Critics couldn't very well admit that just a few years later someone did it better, and quite handily.  They like to say bombast kills subtlety, but when it comes to which is bombastic and which is subtle, I think of the two, Hyde Park makes a good case for what truly merits applause. 

Reduce it only to Murray's revelatory performance if you must.  But on that score alone, Hyde Park on Hudson deserves much more attention than it's gotten.

Hell or High Water - a cultural inquiry

Hell or High Water has become one of the surprise hits of 2016 in limited release, one of the movies being touted as everything the year's big blockbusters have gotten completely wrong.  I knew the minute I saw the trailer the first time that I wanted to watch this movie.  I'm extremely glad that Chris Pine has finally managed to find something that has unabashedly pleased everyone.  Outside of Star Trek, he's continued to flounder despite natural talent and charisma, leaving many to wonder whatever happened to him.  Except he's kind of like Tom Hardy (whom he costarred with in This Means War) or Colin Farrell, a go-to talent no matter how big a box office draw he fails to be, or critics magnet.

The problem I now face, however, is how much I want to support something that may be succeeding mostly because it continues a disturbing trend from the turn of the millennium of popular culture unabashedly embracing antiheroes, most of whom are far less redeemable than Pine and Ben Foster's characters in Hell or High Water happen to be (a couple of Merry Men).  I know Americans tend to have sympathy for this type, from Depression-era gangsters to their post-Civil War hellion predecessors, and maybe it's just shocking to see first-hand just how much they really are embraced in the culture.  The thing is, these are fictional characters this time.  Walter White never existed.  The heroes of this era are actively flouting the laws of society, actively trying to reshape it.  I mean, I know Prohibition proved to be a horrible idea, but there's no reason we should hero-worship the folks who kept serving up alcohol anyway, much less their descendants. 

Pine and Foster seem to be a sort of Jesse James gang.  One of my favorite movies is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which kind of takes for granted Jesse's mystique and inherent worth to the culture.  Among everything else it most certainly is hero-worship.  Hell or High Water is also kind of like No Country for Old Men, with Jeff Bridges taking over for Tommy Lee Jones, and Pine and Foster being less hapless than Josh Brolin.  Because Pine and Foster are easier to root for, there will probably be few comparisons between them, but the idea is basically the same.  Both are about moral ambiguity, new-style Westerns, and the shifting landscape of the country.

I love that Pine went minimalist for the movie, which is what he did in Star Trek Beyond, too, although fewer people noticed because of all the action happening around him.  His versatility has always been considerable (just watch him in Smokin' Aces...if you can spot him!), and thanks to his breakthrough in Hell or High Water, other people are noticing him, too.  It only figures that he finally had to play an antihero to prove it, because he's so consistently played heroes over the past few years, it's no wonder he was considered one-note.

Maybe I don't have to worry too much about it.  I mean, I love Batman, too, don't I?  The Dark Knight was basically one long argument for finally seeing him for the lawbreaker he is, and why that may not be as bad a thing as it might seem.  When done right, antiheroes are heroes.  When done wrong, they're not nearly as worth supporting as it can sometimes seem.  But Hell or High Water seems to have done its job in finding the distinction.  It just might be one of the most important movies of the year.

Fantasy films 1982-2008

Today we're going to talk a little about these movies:

The Dark Crystal (1982)

 

The NeverEnding Story (1984)

 

Return to Oz (1985)

 

Legend (1985)

 

Labyrinth (1986)

 

The Princess Bride (1987)

 

Willow (1988)

 

Hellboy (2004)

 

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

 

The Fall (2008)

 

 

Today's discussion is about fantasy movies.  Obviously, it's a subject today that involves the Harry Potter films and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, but for my purposes these will be omitted so we can concentrate on the '80s push that helped make them possible, as well as a few other more recent entries.

 

Jim Henson's production offices got the ball rolling back during the first season of Saturday Night Live, where the concepts behind The Dark Crystal were first explored.  The same company later developed Labyrinth, which has been the standard memory of the '80s fantasy push, thanks in part to the participation of David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly.  Younger fantasy fans had The NeverEnding Story and its sequel, while Return to Oz was an attempt to follow-up the iconic Wizard of Oz. 

 

Legend proved to be a bomb, and only took on cult status when Ridley Scott later released a director's cut.  It can be argued that Legend has the longest creative legacy.  Besides the look of Hellboy (which evokes Tim Curry's character in the movie), it can also be said to have inspired Pan's Labyrinth, the breakthrough critical success of Guillermo del Toro.  Willow might be said to be the first attempt at correcting the perceived mistakes of Legend.

 

Following the mixed fortunes of these early efforts, The Princess Bride went in an entirely different direction, downplaying the fantasy elements and instead focusing on the comedic potential of the humans involved.  The Fall later went further and made the whole thing dramatic.

 

It's interesting to think of these movies in relation to each other, whether or not the filmmakers did at the time they were being made.  Genre fans will no doubt have spent some time comparing them, or simply making preferences (that's the business of being a genre fan right there).  Some of them will no doubt have fallen through the cracks, so that unless you know they exist you might think the ones you do know are all you need to know.  Hollywood has never embraced fantasy as fully as other genres, which makes the '80s explosion all the more notable.  Yet, with the genre's fanciful elements, these films are often the source of remarkable creativity, and as such are capable of being among the most breathtaking movies you'll ever experience.







Ryan Reynolds' identity crisis: Smokin' Aces, Self/Less, Deadpool, and Criminal

Smokin' Aces (2006)



Self/Less (2015)

 

Deadpool (2016)

 

Criminal (2016)

 

 

In 2006's Smokin' Aces, Joe Carnahan's ensemble action flick, Ryan Reynolds plays FBI agent Richard Messner, who is assigned to protect federal witness Buddy Israel.  By the end of the movie, we learn what's so special about Buddy (nicknamed "Aces," and so the name of the movie literally translates to the act of assassinating him, not the cast of characters who attempt to do so), and it leads Reynolds as the most important figure in the story, as he alone gets to decide what's to become of Buddy.

 

The theme of identity, which is what Smokin' Aces is all about, ends up playing a big role in Reynolds' later career.  Aside his first shot at playing Deadpool in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which becomes its own meta identity crisis, Reynolds would later explore this idea in 2015's Self/Less as well as in 2016's Deadpool and Criminal.  And somehow, no one really seems to have noticed, least of all critics who wrote unfavorably about Criminal, when the trend had become blazingly obvious.

 

I was always a fan of Smokin' Aces.  It has a killer cast (including Chris Pine's best performance to-date), and was the first time I took notice of Reynolds (which turned out to be somewhat ironic, given his part's later significance).  I was also a fan of director Tarsem going into Self/Less, which may be why I liked it better than most fans (including critics, who didn't even notice that this whole movie is literally about the second life dilemma, to the point where hardly a scene goes by without an additional layer of second life material being added to the story's rich tapestry).  Everyone knew how passionate Reynolds was to get Deadpool made, but few could have guessed that its resulting shape would look so much like Self/Less (much less Smokin' Aces).  so when he popped up as the prior life Kevin Costner assumes in Criminal, I kind of had to assume that at this point, it can't possibly be coincidence.

 

In fact, knowing Deadpool would be covering familiar territory, that was how I found most of my enjoyment from the breakout superhero flick, which has otherwise been hailed as a breath of fresh air in that genre.  I thought its noisiness wasn't all that noteworthy, but found it fun to see all the points where it lines right up with Self/Less.  While I haven't seen Criminal yet, I imagine there's plenty to enjoy about it in that regard, too.

 

There are so many people today who take this sort of thing as an insult to storytelling, that if plot points are at all similar, you have to automatically reject the newer story's creative value.  I don't agree at all.  Every story is different, particularly in movies, where casting so often dictates the results.  It's funny that Reynolds is at the center of a convergence like this, but it only makes it that much easier to appreciate how the theme varies in each iteration, how different it looks each time.  I mean, who else would even have compared Deadpool with Self/Less, which was a box office bust? 

 

This is how I approach movies, and storytelling in general.  Yeah, it's cool to like the popular stuff, whether with audiences or critics, but it takes some greater conviction to look beyond what other people are saying, and simply judge the material for yourself.  There's a lot to say about creative vision, no matter how it represents itself, and the ability to appreciate the subtle things that make it resonate.

 

You could take two or three of these movies, and still enjoy their comparisons.  Take all four, and you start to see how far this way of looking at movies, at storytelling, really goes.  



2015

Viewed/Ranked

1. Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens
2. The Hateful Eight
3. Self/Less
4. Aloha
5. The Martian
6. The Revenant
7. Legend
8. Jupiter Ascending
9. Sicario
10. Home
11. The Visit
12. Furious 7
13. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
14. Fantastic Four
15. Strange Magic
16. Minions
17. Avengers: Age of Ultron
18. War Room

Other Notable Releases

1. The Age of Adaline
2. Anomalisa
3. Ant-Man
4. The Big Short
5. Bridge of Spies
6. Carol
7. Cinderalla
8. Concussion
9. Creed
10. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
11. Ex Machina
12. Fifty Shades of Grey
13. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
14. In the Heart of the Sea
15. Inside Out
16. Joy
17. Jurassic World
18. Mad Max: Fury Road
19. Pan
20. The Peanuts Movie
21. Room
22. Spectre
23. Spotlight
24. Spy
25. Straight Outta Compton
26. Taken 3
27. Ted 2
28. Terminator: Genisys
29. Tomorrowland
30. Trainwreck

Best Films 2005-2015

1. The Dark Knight (2008)
2. The Fall (2008)
3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
4. Munich (2005)
5. Warrior (2011)
6. Django Unchained (2012)
7. The Departed (2006)
8. Interstellar (2014)
9. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
10. Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

One to watch: Jeff Nichols

Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special is now in theaters.  The more I saw the trailers on TV the more I knew that name.  I haven't seen any of his movies yet, but he's consistently been working on buzz-worthy projects.  First was Take Shelter, the 2011 film that helped create buzz around Michael Shannon.  Then there was 2012's Mud, which was an integral part of Matthew McConnaughey's comeback.  He also directed Shannon in 2007's Shotgun Stories, and is working on Loving with Joel Edgerton, who has been a favorite of mine since Warrior (which is in fact one of my all-time favorite movies).

So I'm making a note about Nichols here, and for anyone else who happens to stumble by...