→ August 10, 2020
→ By

The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ July 29, 2020
→ By

The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 24, 2020
→ By

The Old Guard.

The Old Guard, now available on Netflix, is an extremely competent action flick that checks just about all of the necessary boxes, with a mostly credible story and some solid character development for its two leads, played by Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne. It’s also a superhero story that has to fit some of the conventions of that particular subgenre, and has some regrettable song choices that often detract from what’s happening on screen, but the two lead actresses are so good, and Theron especially has some incredible fight sequences, that it managed to be better than I’d expect from this sort of film.

Theron plays Andy, the leader of a group of four mercenaries who, we learn very early in the film, can’t die – or, more precisely, don’t stay dead for more than a few seconds. Their bodies heal quickly, even ejecting bullets from their skin, so while our heroes do feel pain, they’re impossible to kill, and have dedicated their long existences to doing good in the world. They’re hired by an ex-CIA man to go rescue a group of kidnapped schoolchildren in South Sudan, but that mission goes awry, leading them to try to figure out who was behind the failure. Around the same time, a new immortal, Nile (Layne), appears to the four heroes in their dreams, so Andy goes on a separate mission to take Nile into their fold, knowing that she can’t continue to live in the human world when she can’t die or even age normally.

There’s a villain, of course, a pharma CEO who is rather one-note as a character and is played perfectly by Harry Melling; if his name isn’t familiar, I won’t spoil why, because the moment when you figure out where you’ve seen him before is pretty incredible. He wants the immortals’ DNA because he sees a way to save humanity, and to turn a tiny little profit too, of course, but while his words seem to favor the former, his actions entirely point to the latter, and he ends up a stock Big Pharma/evil scientist character – as does Anamaria Marinca, who won wide acclaim for her leading role in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but is wasted here as Melling’s lead scientist. The antagonists’ entire argument is that the immortals have an obligation to share their gift, which is presumed to reside in their genes, with the rest of humanity, but that rationale denies the immortals any agency in the decision, and ends up reducing them to the status of lab rats in the eyes of the scientists here.

Based on a series of graphic novels by Greg Rucka, who also wrote the screenplay, The Old Guard feels like an attempt to start up a franchise, especially with the way the ending of the film perfectly sets up a sequel – but it’s effective in that attempt. Andy and Booker, the next-oldest of the four superheroes, are well-drawn, distinctive characters, with varying views on the responsibilities that accompany their gift, while Nile gains depth from her struggle to accept her new powers and the imminent loss of her connections to her family. The other two heroes, Joe and Nicky, both needed a bit more to do as well as some more back story, but they’re notable because they’re a couple, apparently the first out gay superheroes in film, and the script plays that fact as totally unremarkable beyond one interaction with a homophobic mercenary.

The history of this crew is that they go around the world saving people who need saving, trying to do some good, but we don’t actually get any of that in the story here, which is a little bit disappointing since the fight scenes are exceptionally well done (especially when Theron is involved). The two subplots are the battle with Melling for their freedom and survival, and the integration of Nile into their group once they make her understand and accept what’s happened to her, neither of which shows us the Old Guard (who never call themselves that) doing the thing they would typically do. Perhaps that will come in the sequel.

The music in this movie doesn’t just suck, although I would argue that most of the songs on the soundtrack are indeed quite bad, but it’s poorly deployed, with electropop songs playing during what should be tense action sequences. This is the kind of movie that would benefit from less music, or no music at all, given how dark some of its themes are and how brutal the violence can be, although the camera seldom lingers luridly on the violence as it does in, say, Deadpool, where the gore is kind of the point. I was far less bothered by the formulaic parts of The Old Guard, which could just be unavoidable in the genre, than by the obtrusive nature of the soundtrack, which often seemed at odds with the movie’s underlying themes about mortality and meaning. It may be a movie about superheroes with impossible powers, but The Old Guard at least tries to be more serious and thoughtful than the standard MCU film, and by and large it succeeds.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ July 21, 2020
→ By

Les Misérables (2019).

Les Misérables won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019 and was France’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film this past year, earning one of the five nominations but losing out to eventual Best Picture winner Parasite. The first full-length film directed by Ladj Ly, who was born in Mali and raised in the Montfermeil commune in the eastern Paris suburbs, Les Misérables takes its name from the Victor Hugo novel, but tells a very timely story of police brutality and racial strife that seems like it was made specifically for the current moment both in France and in the United States.

Based loosely on an actual incident of police violence Ly witnessed in that same commune in 2008, Les Misérables takes place over the course of about 36 hours, following three police officers – one, Stéphane, new to the job and to the city – who patrol a specific neighborhood of apartments and shops that are largely populated by immigrants from former French colonies in northern Africa. Both veteran cops, Chris (who is white) and Gwada (who is black and speaks Bambara as well as French), take the approach that they must use force to make the residents ‘respect’ them, with Chris especially willing to profile people, even kids, and rough them up while frisking them without cause, while Gwada often stands by. They’re entwined in the subculture of the neighborhood as well, with rival forces that include the “mayor,” who works with Chris in particular to maintain his local authority, and the Muslim Brotherhood, led by former drug dealer turned imam Salah. When a touring circus of Roma performers threaten the immigrants unless a lion cub stolen from them by one of the children in the neighborhood is returned, the cops’ overbearing tactics leave one child seriously injured and spark a cascade of violence.

Les Misérables is a serious film that balances its multiple themes of police brutality, racism, and xenophobia with a plot that often unfurls like that of an action film. Most of the adult characters have some complexity to them, other than Chris, who is your garden-variety racist white cop like you might find in a less nuanced film. Stéphane has a real arc to his story as he’s confronted with Chris’ increasingly violent and counterproductive tactics and Gwada’s tacit approval despite the latter’s racial and ethnic ties to many of the residents of these apartment buildings, and thus has to choose when to speak or act, finding his voice more as the story progresses and puts him into increasingly more difficult situations. The main child character is Issa, who we’re told is always causing trouble, and who ends up a central character in the trouble that follows – in no small part because the police already know him, and Chris and Gwada seem more than ready to treat him like a dangerous adult rather than a small child who (as we see in an early scene) has no guidance at home.

While this film was made in 2019 and hit amazon prime back in April, watching it right now made it seem like it was written as an argument for community policing. The racism and xenophobia depicted here are nothing new and the script isn’t making any novel points or arguments about them, but the way that Chris and Gwada maintain ‘control’ of this area is extremely damning of what I would think of as the American model of policing. It’s punctuated by their link to this local fixer/boss who calls himself the Mayor, and how they react when they find out they’ve been filmed during one such act of violence against a suspect, and in turn how Stéphane, who isn’t from this geographical area and hasn’t worked as this sort of cop before, reacts when seeing it from an outsider’s view. While the script at least creates some ambiguities around some of the adults in the community, this is a protest against the power given to and wielded by police against underprivileged and mostly powerless communities that lack avenues to fight back through political or legal channels, leaving them little recourse but to respond in kind.

—

I went to put Les Misérables on my rankings of 2019 films, only to discover that I didn’t post them back in March/April like I’d planned to do. So while I still have a few stragglers from last year I’d like to see (Monos, Invisible Life), here’s everything I saw from 2019, with links to my writeups, from my favorite to my least favorite:

1. Parasite
2. Knives Out
3. Little Women
4. Uncut Gems
5. Pain and Glory
6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
7. The Irishman
8. Corpus Christi
9. The Farewell
10. Ford v. Ferrari
11. Les Misérables
12. Monos
13. Hustlers
14. American Factory
15. Wild Rose
16. The Whistlers
17. The Two Popes
18. The Souvenir
19. 1917
20. Toy Story 4
21. Marriage Story
22. High Flying Bird
23. Non-Fiction
24. FYRE
25. Honeyland
26. Bombshell
27. Climax
28. Jojo Rabbit
29. Atlantique
30. Joker
31. Booksmart
32. Judy
33. High Life
34. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
35. The Great Hack
36. Frozen 2

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 14, 2020
→ By

Bombshell.

Bombshell (Apple/Amazon) feels very much like Vice for the #MeToo movement, taking a true and important story – the downfall of Roger Ailes as his decades of sexual harassment and assaults came to light – and trivializing it through an excessively slick, shallow script that is only salvaged by strong lead performances from Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman. I was entertained, as I was by Vice, but I was not informed, and I don’t think the movie did enough to explain how the situation was allowed to persist.

The script has a glib approach where Megyn Kelly (Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Kidman) often break the fourth wall to tell the viewers background information relevant to the story, such as how Fox News operates behind the scenes or what Ailes’ history was prior to founding Fox News and building it into the country’s biggest cable news network. Bombshell then takes us through three roughly simultaneous storylines, one around each of the three main women in the film: Kelly’s meteoric rise at the network and Donald Trump’s subsequent attacks on her after she challenged him on his history of mistreatment of women; Carlson’s lawsuit against Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming she was demoted from her show for illegal cause; and the fictional Kayla (Margot Robbie), a wide-eyed ingenue who calls herself an “evangelical millennial” and ends up another Ailes victim. The three stories eventually intersect as Kelly and Carlson independently look for other women to speak up against Ailes. (Ailes and Fox settled with Carlson, Fox paid off Ailes’ contract by way of firing him, and Ailes was dead within a year.)

Bombshell looks incredible. Theron is a ridiculous likeness for Kelly between the hairstyling and makeup, for which the movie won its lone Academy Award, and her mimicry of Kelly’s voice and delivery. Kidman’s not quite as dead a ringer for Carlson, but is pretty close. I thought John Lithgow did his best with Ailes, making him into a blustering, lecherous tyrant, although the physical resemblance isn’t there. Nearly every on-air personality at Fox who gets a moment in this film is played by someone who looks just like them, however, which you could view as incredible dedication to verisimilitude, or a big fat missing of the point, that it is story that matters, not imitation.

Theron and Robbie were both nominated for awards, Theron for Best Actress and Robbie for Supporting, but I don’t think either deserved the win and thought Robbie was better in a smaller role Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kayla is written so thinly and Robbie has no room to do anything except show some gross emotions, mostly because she’s a prop for the plot, not an actual person or a fully-developed character – she’s there to give Ailes someone to harass while we watch.

And that’s biggest problem with Bombshell: it’s so concerned with making things look right that it doesn’t bother telling the story behind the story. How Ailes got away with this for nearly twenty years – and probably longer, although the story doesn’t touch anything he did prior to Fox News – is never addressed, nor does the story touch on the toxic corporate culture within Fox News, or why the Murdochs didn’t care until they did care, or, perhaps most interesting of all, why so many women stayed quiet. If anything, the movie blames the victim a bit when Kayla confronts Megyn to ask why she waited ten years to talk about Ailes harassing her. It’s a jarring, wrong note for a movie that seems so eager to tell you it’s right. This story, and these women, deserved a lot better.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ March 31, 2020
→ By

The Souvenir.

Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama The Souvenir made a slew of best-of-2019 lists, taking the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and winning Sight and Sound‘s poll for the best film of 2019. My friend Tim Grierson has been a big advocate of the film, ranking it 7th among films of last year, and of director Joanna Hogg, which was really enough to get me to watch it. It is a very British movie, understated and often ponderous, but it’s bolstered by two very strong performances by the leads and the resolution gives a real catharsis to everything the film has asked you to endure up to that point. (It’s streaming now on Amazon Prime.)

Honor Swinton-Byrne plays Julie, a 24-year-old would-be filmmaker, in film school at the moment, who meets a Foreign Office staffer in his mid-30s named Anthony (Tom Burke) and almost falls into a desultory affair with him, despite his secretive nature and tendency to subtly put her down. It seems like he’s gaslighting her from the start, but it becomes more evident when he starts to borrow money from her – despite him having a job that often sends him abroad, while she’s a poor student – and eventually she learns via a friend of his (Richard Ayaode) that he’s hiding a heroin habit. She’s too enamored of him to leave, however, despite his increasing duplicity, and the relationship begins to consume her as Anthony’s situation gets worse.

This is a very slow burn until the last quarter of the film; there are no screaming fights, no violence, just a few verbal confrontations where Julie ends up apologizing even though Anthony is clearly in the wrong. It’s painful to watch her abase herself for a man who has never shown himself to be worth this kind of devotion; I’m not even clear what his redeeming qualities are supposed to be, as he’s not charming, good-looking, or kind. What finally pushes her to the breaking point is several steps beyond what a rational person would need to say ‘enough,’ but that’s the emotional center of the film – just how far Julie has fallen into this trap, and how easily it happened to her. There have been many entries in the “young woman falls for a feckless, manipulative, older man” genre, but this one, based on Hogg’s own life in film school in the late ’70s, feels extremely realistic because it doesn’t have the Big Moments and never comes across like a film trying to make you feel something specific.

Swinton-Byrne is very convincing as Julie, imbuing the character with naïveté rather than just innocence, and making it a bit more plausible that she’d fall under Anthony’s spell because she seems so lonely in the early scenes – and thus more appreciative of someone, especially an older man, giving her attention. Burke does what he is supposed to be doing with Anthony, although the attraction of such a mopey, vaguely derisive man is beyond me; he does carry himself with an air of sophistication that might explain it, although perhaps it’s just the upper-class English accent that got me. Ayaode is only in one scene, but he grabs the whole thing from the two leads and utterly owns that entire conversation – sitting next to his real-life wife, Lydia Fox, as they talk – while not just delivering a key piece of information to Julie, but doing so with a unique affectation that totally commands your attention. Swinton-Byrne’s mother, Tilda Swinton, appears in the film as Julie’s mother, although her character is something of a cipher and she has little to do until the last few scenes.

The Souvenir is quite good, but also so slow and quiet in parts that it feels almost expressly anti-commercial: The audience for this sort of movie is very small, a set that probably comprises fans of art house films, Anglophiles, and not a whole lot more. I liked it, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, between the pace and the horror of watching Julie so unaware that Anthony is taking advantage of her. It’s a film to be appreciated, rather than one that seeks to entertain.

—

I’ve seen 31 movies from 2019 so far, and I have three more I’d really like to see before closing the book on the year, so to speak, all of them foreign-language films. Two are streaming now on Hulu, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Monos, while the third will stream on Amazon Prime in about two weeks, the Oscar-nominated Les Misérables. (Amazon also will premiere the Brazilian submission to the 92nd Oscars, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, this Friday). I’ll probably watch the first in the next few days, and then I’ll rank the movies I’ve seen from 2019, but if you have suggestions I’m all ears.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ March 24, 2020
→ By

Uncut Gems.

Uncut Gems was one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019, taking home the Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Actor honors at the Independent Spirit Awards in February, and landing at the top of many critics’ year-end lists, including those of my friends Will Leitch and Tim Grierson. (I count 20 critics who put it on top of their 2019 lists on this Metacritic roundup, which includes Tim’s list but not Will’s.) After finally catching it on demand this week, I can at least add my voice to the chorus – it’s tremendous, maybe not my favorite movie of last year but close to it, and one of the most intense, relentless movie experiences I’ve had in quite a while. (It’s available to rent now on amazon and iTunes.)

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler in New York’s Diamond District who has a sliiight gambling problem and, as a result, makes one reckless decision after another, including regularly pawning valuable pieces that other people have loaned to him. As the film opens, we see the discovery of a large black opal in an Ethiopian mine, a stone that Ratner has negotiated to obtain so that he can sell it at auction for what he expects to be over a million dollars. He’s harassed by goons from a loan shark, Arno (Eric Bogosian, looking pained at every moment), who is extremely pissed that Howard keeps betting rather than paying him back. And in another early scene, Howard’s assistant Demany (Lakeith Stanfield) manages to get then-Celtics star Kevin Garnett into the shop, where Garnett becomes obsessed with the uncut black opal stone and asks to borrow it because he seems to think it will bring him good luck on the court. Howard is also busy having an affair with an employee while still living with his estranged wife, and appears to owe several other people money, but can’t stop himself from betting or making other really terrible decisions.

Directed and co-written by the Safdie brothers, Uncut Gems grabs you by the throat from the start and never lets up until the closing sequence (a gimmicky shot that mirrors one from the beginning of the film). Everything about this movie will induce anxiety in the viewer, not least the music, which often feels like the soundtrack to a 1980s arcade game, and the frenetic cinematography, which often puts the viewer uncomfortably close to the action. The story itself never gives you a chance to catch your breath: Any time it appears that Howard might have a way out of trouble, something goes wrong, usually something of his own doing. Meeting Garnett turns out to be the worst-best thing to ever happen to him, not least because he’s a bit starstruck and suddenly decides to bet huge amounts on complicated parlays involving Garnett and the Celtics. This four-dimensional balancing act he’s trying to pull is absurd and you know it’s destined to fail and you shouldn’t even want this guy with no apparent redeeming qualities to succeed, but knowing what the consequences will likely be if it doesn’t work will still put you on the edge of your seat and have you rooting for Ratner in spite of yourself.

Sandler’s performance here is remarkable, and it’s a crime he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor here. Gone is the joking, crude comedian persona, replaced by a nervous, obsequious, crude version of himself, with minuscule changes to his appearance that somehow were enough to make him seem like Not Adam Sandler. He is this character, so that everything he does fits with what we know about him; without the performance there’s no way this film would be watchable, let alone good, because everything depends on him being credible. Garnett is the other real revelation here – sure, he’s playing a version of himself, but, as with Sandler/Howard, you have to believe that Garnett really wants that stone, and you have to believe his interactions with Howard are authentic. There’s a lot of stunt casting here – Mike Francesa appears as a bookie/restaurateur, John Amos has a brief cameo (which makes for a good in-joke about the Safdies’ prior film, Good Time), the Weeknd plays himself, Tilda Swinton and Doc Rivers make voice cameos – but Garnett’s is the one that has to be credible for the film to work, and he does it.

I still have two more movies I want to see before posting a very-late ranking of 2019 movies, but this is clearly in my top 5 for last year. I couldn’t put it over Parasite, which was just as gripping, and also quite funny in parts (as is Uncut Gems), but also has a more serious underpinning than this film does. The Uncut Gems script also has a few moments that don’t quite add up, but the ending works, and some of the flourishes that pop up towards the end of the film (Wayne Diamond’s character doesn’t appear until maybe 80% of the way through, but damn is he effective) pay off in more substantial ways than I expected. I’m not that shocked that an indie thriller starring an actor known for lowbrow comedies was snubbed by the Academy, but Uncut Gems deserved more recognition than it got.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 18, 2020
→ By

Wild Rose.

Jessie Buckley’s first film role was in the highly underrated, barely-seen independent thriller Beast back in 2017, a star turn by the young Irish actress just four years who had previously only worked in theater and on British television. She had a minor role in last year’s Judy, which was probably Americans’ first exposure to her work, but once again starred in an independent film, this time the musical comedy-drama Wild Rose, which plays with the standard formula of such smalltown-girl-makes-good movies and shows off Buckley’s impressive vocal and acting range. It’s free on Hulu and available to rent on amazon and iTunes.

Buckley is Rose-Lynn Harlan, who is just getting out of jail as the film opens and heads home to her two children and her mother (Dame Julie Walters), who has been taking care of them for a year while Rose-Lynn served out her sentence for a minor drug charge (revealed a bit later in the film). She’s never without her white cowgirl boots, and her only goal in life is to get to Nashville and become a country-music star, even if it means neglecting her kids or spurning the few people in her life willing to help her, including her mother and the woman whose house Rose-Lynn cleans for work. Susannah (Sophie Okonedo, who does not age) hears Rose-Lynn singing and tries everything to help her get to Nashville, but Rose-Lynn simply can’t get out of her own way.

Wild Rose is half formulaic, but manages to zig and zag enough times to get away from most of the clichés of the genre – notably the way such films generally rely on extraordinary good fortune to push their protagonists along the path to stardom. Rose-Lynn could have that, maybe, but every time she has such an opportunity, reality intercedes, often in the form of her own irresponsibility. She had her two children quite young and still hasn’t accepted the obligations of parenthood, nor does she seem to recognize the burden she places on her mother through her behavior. Yet she’s also spirited and driven and a talented singer and you’ll probably find yourself rooting for her in spite of her actions, even when she has gone past deserving our support. There are some moments that made me cringe, but that is what most helps this script avoid the saccharine elements of typical up-from-nowhere music films.

Nearly all of the songs Rose-Lynn sings in the film, and the majority of the songs on the soundtrack, are covers, many of them well-known country songs (John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is a particular standout), along with a cover of Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” and a few originals. The closing song “Glasgow (No Place by Home),” co-written by Mary Steenburgen, is one of the two best songs in the film along with “Angel” and deserved one of the five Best Original Song nominations, at least over the Diane Warren song and I’d argue over the Elton John/Bernie Taupin track that won.

Buckley is an absolute star, though – she’s magnetic on screen and, it turns out, quite a singer too. (She finished second on a British reality-TV singing competition show at age 19, which led her to drama school and eventually to this career on screen and stage.) I’m not sure what it’ll take for her to land a  role in a major film that gets the attention of American audiences, but after three films, two in which she was the star, she’s reached the “I’ll watch anything she’s in” status for me. She earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress along with four nominees for the Oscar for the same award, taking the nod that Cynthia Erivo received here. She makes this movie work, even when it’s a bit uneven, and carries off the star-is-almost-born role to make every aspect of it credible, even when the plot seems a little farfetched (the Susannah bits). The resolution here is just perfect as well, avoiding the sentimental or the maudlin for a conclusion that’s just atypical enough to be satisfying.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 11, 2020
→ By

Ford v. Ferrari.

Ford v. Ferrari is a love letter to testosterone, and to boys playing with cars and getting mad at other boys who don’t want to let them play with their cars the way they want to play with those cars. It gets lazy in key places, with an antagonist who could have been written by a 10-year-old, played in an uncomfortably simpering manner throughout the film. It’s also kind of fun, if you want to dial back your brain for a few hours without turning it off completely, thanks in large part to the outstanding camera work that puts you right on the track in each of the film’s racing scenes. It just became available to rent via amazon and iTunes this morning.

Based on the outline of a true story, Ford v. Ferrari tracks two men, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who find themselves recruited by the Ford Motor Company to build a race car capable of beating Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Ford executive Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) pitches this idea to Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) as a way to change the company’s image, and sells the scion on the plan to go out and find the best people to build that car and race under the Ford name. They run into opposition from the ambitious sycophant Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), who tries repeatedly to take control of the project or stymie it any way he can, but ultimately the Shelby/Miles duo do make that car and race it at Le Mans in 1966.

There’s so much wrong with this movie on a fundamental level, but that really wasn’t enough to stop me from enjoying just about all of it. Ford v. Ferrari is just fun. We caught it in a theater, so the sound and visuals of the races were very effective at putting us right on the track with Miles, whether it’s on various test tracks as they try to build the car or the actual races at Daytona and Le Mans when they do get out there. The three screenwriters punch up the race scenes with drama on and off the tracks, including decisions on how far to push Ford’s new GT engines (7000 rpm is pitched from the opening scene as a critical threshold) and disagreements between Shelby and Beebe on how to handle each race. There’s a fair amount of time between races in the script, from more internal drama to conversations about how best to build the car or handle the heavy wear on the brakes during a 24-hour race, but the scenes are generally short to keep the nearly 150-minute movie from flagging. For a movie of its length, it hums along without too much interruption … and have I mentioned how thrilling the race scenes are? I don’t even like car racing of any sort, but the sounds during the race sequences are so well done, which I suppose explains why Donald Sylvester won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing for this film.

However, there’s a lot wrong under the hood here, starting with the portrayal of Beebe, a real person who did make the controversial decision to have the three Ford cars cross the finish line very close to each other (not simultaneously, as shown in the film) in 1966, a decision he long defended as borne of safety concerns rather than a photo op. (A friend of Beebe’s defended his legacy in this 2016 post, which has some details relevant to this film as well.) Beebe is the most one-dimensional, disposable antagonist you could conceive for the good ol’ boy Shelby and the English rebel Miles, and Lucas plays Beebe with an over-the-top, effeminate manner that contrasts poorly with all of the very masculine men who are just trying to build a better race car, gosh dang it. When Beebe isn’t sucking up to Ford II – and the very talented Letts is rather wasted in that role – he’s scheming to overthrow the project, or trying to pull one over on Shelby, who responds with frat-boy trickery to win the day.

There’s also one named female character in the entire film, Miles’ wife Mollie, whose name I had to look up just now because she’s not that significant in the story itself. Played by Caitriona Balfe, Mollie is there to alternately support and argue with Ken, to worry a lot while he’s racing, to get mad over unpaid bills, and to wear sundresses. I’m not all about the Bechdel test, but whoa boy, does Ford v. Ferrari flunk that.

The film was nominated for Best Picture, which feels like a stretch to me – it’s an extremely enjoyable movie, but I’d have a hard time thinking of it as ‘great’ in the Best Picture sense. Its other nominations were all easier to understand – Sound Editing, for which It won; Sound Mixing, and Film Editing. It didn’t get a screenplay nod, and director James Mangold wasn’t nominated. Neither lead actor was nominated either, although Bale is excellent as Miles and would have been more deserving of a Supporting Actor nod than Anthony Hopkins. If it wasn’t good enough to get screenplay, directing, or acting nominations, what is the probability that it was one of the nine best movies of the year? Give that spot to The Farewell, or Knives Out, or any of several foreign films nominated, and let Ford v. Ferrari be what it is: a much smarter than normal action film/buddy movie with some truly thrilling car-racing scenes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 3, 2020
→ By

Jojo Rabbit.

Jojo Rabbit won the People’s Choice award at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, a rather significant honor given that the previous year’s winner was the dreadful Green Book … which ended up winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Jojo is nominated for the latter honor, although there doesn’t seem to be much sentiment that it’ll win, which is a marginal improvement; it’s a lot better than Green Book, but it’s a really uneven film that seems unable to decide whether it’s a comedy and ends up with too many jokes that don’t quite land.

Based on a book by Christine Leunens called Caging Skies, Jojo Rabbit takes place late in World War II andfollows the title character, a a ten-year-old Hitler Youth member who has become a true believer to the point that his imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi, who directed and wrote the screenplay). Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) lives with his mother (Scarlett Johansson); his sister has just died of influenza, and his father is gone, presumably fighting at the front. After injuring himself while training with the Hitler Youth, Jojo ends up doing menial tasks around town and spending more time at home, which leads him to discover that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). The two embark on an entertaining dialogue where he starts out spouting the anti-Semitic nonsense he’s been taught by the Nazi regime, while she taunts him to try to keep him from saying anything about her presence, even to his mother; over time, of course, his prejudices break down and the two form a friendship that is tested by outside events.

Satire has a point, while farce exists just to send up its target. Jojo Rabbit doesn’t work as satire, but it’s moderately successful as farce. The targets here are the Nazis, and their adherents; Jojo is indoctrinated by the adults and older kids around him, never questioning what he’s told, even though his own mother tries to undermine their messages of hate and aggression. Waititi has made them largely ridiculous, from his own performance as Hitler to Sam Rockwell’s one-eyed Nazi Captain to Stephen Merchant’s Gestapo officer to Alfie Allen’s dimwitted officer, which is amusing but doesn’t really get us anywhere in the end. The Nazis weren’t objects of comedy, and the film spends more time showing them being absurd or stupid than it does showing them doing the horrible things they actually did. To be effective as a film, it either needed a stronger theme, or to be consistently funny; Jojo Rabbit lacks the former, and it’s only inconsistent at the latter. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s more a series of jokes that make you chuckle along with some that just don’t work, which makes the tonal shifts to the film’s few extremely serious moments even harder to absorb. (The posters that make this look like a screwball comedy don’t do the film any favors either.)

By far, the funniest character in the film is Jojo’s best friend Yorki, played by Archie Yates, who my daughter pointed out is a dead ringer for Russell in Up. He gets the best lines, he has the film’s best visual gag, and his delivery and affect are consistently hilarious. Merchant probably does more to strike the right balance between comedy and satire than anyone else in the film, with Waititi making him appear even more ridiculous with camera shots from low enough that Merchant appears to be about eight feet tall (he’s 6’7″). Rebel Wilson has a side role that she clearly relishes but that is just the same gag repeated over and over, funny just because she’s so absurdly enthusiastic about it. Most disappointing, however, is Waititi himself, who is surprisingly unfunny in the caricature of the imaginary Hitler; he’s kind of doing Viago again, with a sort of German-adjacent accent, and most of the jokes seem to revolve about how dumb he is, or around Waititi moving his arms and legs in a silly manner.

Scarlett Johansson earned one of her two Oscar nominations this year for her role as Jojo’s mother, and she is quite good, although I could make an argument that Thomasin McKenzie’s role and performance are ultimately more important to the film as a whole. (She also appears in the upcoming film adaptation of the Booker-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang with George MacKay of 1917 and Russell Crowe.) Johansson is charming, but the character is a bit one-note, while McKenzie has to explore a much wider range of emotions, and Jojo Rabbit couldn’t work without her. That the film works at all, and ends up a solid-average watch overall, is as much a credit to her performance as Elsa as anything else. There’s just no way I’d support this for Best Picture, given what else is nominated.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,