tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76382982810706755872024-03-14T11:20:58.822-07:00The Flick ChickNorma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.comBlogger2442125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-55299817569916996972019-01-22T17:45:00.000-08:002019-01-22T17:45:12.918-08:00Oscar Nominees<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwrQr_EMX9CxeL6N69tGhhE4MzGiBHFO69Nc7Fcsqw4wqpKYLDHh9BwdtyjpOljhAgcwdBA3onPTzS9DSQLwBLKkJ8_GX6U9AD3VaXdWnQLtF0d_5mQ6-qFNxZRPl8a9BOk0vdfIdEXJk-/s1600/Oscars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="550" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwrQr_EMX9CxeL6N69tGhhE4MzGiBHFO69Nc7Fcsqw4wqpKYLDHh9BwdtyjpOljhAgcwdBA3onPTzS9DSQLwBLKkJ8_GX6U9AD3VaXdWnQLtF0d_5mQ6-qFNxZRPl8a9BOk0vdfIdEXJk-/s320/Oscars.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>Best Picture</b><br />
Black Panther<br />
BlacKkKlansman<br />
Bohemian Rhapsody<br />
The Favourite<br />
Green Book<br />
Roma<br />
A Star Is Born<br />
Vice<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>Director</b><br />
Alfonso Cuarón, <i>Roma</i><br />
Yorgos Lanthimos, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Spike Lee, <i>BlacKkKlansman</i><br />
Adam McKay, <i>Vice</i><br />
Pawel Pawlikowski, <i>Cold War</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Lead Actress</b><br />
Yalitza Aparicio, <i>Roma</i><br />
Glenn Close, <i>The Wife</i><br />
Olivia Colman, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Lady Gaga, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Melissa McCarthy, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
<br />
<b>Lead Actor</b><br />
Christian Bale, <i>Vice</i><br />
Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Willem Dafoe, <i>At Eternity’s Gate</i><br />
Rami Malek, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i><br />
Viggo Mortensen, <i>Green Book</i><br />
<br />
<b>Supporting Actor</b><br />
Mahershala Ali, <i>Green Book</i><br />
Adam Driver, <i>BlacKkKlansman</i><br />
Sam Elliott, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Richard E. Grant, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
Sam Rockwell, <i>Vice</i><br />
<br />
<b>Supporting Actress</b><br />
Amy Adams, <i>Vice</i><br />
Marina de Tavira, <i>Roma</i><br />
Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
Emma Stone, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Rachel Weisz, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Adapted Screenplay</b><br />
<i>The Ballad of Buster Scruggs</i>, Joel Coen , Ethan Coen<br />
<i>BlacKkKlansman</i>, Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee<br />
<i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i>, Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty<br />
<i>If Beale Street Could Talk,</i> Barry Jenkins<br />
<i>A Star Is Born</i>, Eric Roth, Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters<br />
<br />
<b>Original Screenplay</b><br />
<i>The Favourite</i>, Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara<br />
<i>First Reformed</i>, Paul Schrader<br />
<i>Green Book</i>, Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly<br />
<i>Roma,</i> Alfonso Cuarón<br />
<i>Vice</i>, Adam McKay<br />
<br />
<b>Film Editing</b><br />
<i>BlacKkKlansman</i>, Barry Alexander Brown<br />
<i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i>, John Ottman<br />
<i>The Favourite</i>, Yorgos Mavropsaridis<br />
<i>Green Book</i>, Patrick J. Don Vito<br />
<i>Vice</i>, Hank Corwin<br />
<br />
<b>Cinematography</b><br />
<i>Cold War</i>, Lukasz Zal<br />
<i>The Favourite</i>, Robbie Ryan<br />
<i>Never Look Away</i>, Caleb Deschanel<br />
<i>Roma</i>, Alfonso Cuarón<br />
<i>A Star Is Born</i>, Matthew Libatique<br />
<br />
<b>Costume Design</b><br />
<i>Ballad of Buster Scruggs</i>, Mary Zophres<br />
<i>Black Panther</i>, Ruth E. Carter<br />
<i>The Favourite</i>, Sandy Powell<br />
<i>Mary Poppins Returns</i>, Sandy Powell<br />
<i>Mary Queen of Scots</i>, Alexandra Byrne<br />
<br />
<b>Production Design</b><br />
<i>Black Panther</i>, Hannah Beachler<br />
<i>First Man</i>, Nathan Crowley, Kathy Lucas<br />
<i>The Favourite</i>, Fiona Crombie, Alice Felton<br />
<i>Mary Poppins Returns,</i> John Myhre, Gordon Sim<br />
<i>Roma</i>, Eugenio Caballero, Bárbara Enrı́quez<br />
<br />
<b>Makeup and Hair</b><br />
Border<br />
Mary Queen of Scots<br />
Vice<br />
<br />
<b>Visual Effects</b><br />
Avengers: Infinity War<br />
Christopher Robin<br />
First Man<br />
Ready Player One<br />
Solo: A Star Wars Story<br />
<br />
<b>Sound Editing</b><br />
Black Panther<br />
Bohemian Rhapsody<br />
First Man<br />
A Quiet Place<br />
Roma<br />
<br />
<b>Sound Mixing</b><br />
Black Panther<br />
Bohemian Rhapsody<br />
First Man<br />
Roma”<br />
A Star Is Born<br />
<br />
<b>Original Score</b><br />
<i>BlacKkKlansman</i>, Terence Blanchard<br />
<i>Black Panther</i>, Ludwig Goransson<br />
<i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i>, Nicholas Britell<br />
<i>Isle of Dogs</i>, Alexandre Desplat<br />
<i>Mary Poppins Returns</i>, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman<br />
<br />
<b>Original Song</b><br />
“All The Stars," <i>Black Panther</i>”<br />
“I’ll Fight,” <i>RBG</i><br />
The Place Where Lost Things Go,” <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
“Shallow,” <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
“When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings,” <i>The Ballad of Buster Scruggs</i><br />
<br />
<b>Animated Feature</b><br />
Incredibles 2<br />
Isle of Dogs<br />
Mirai<br />
Ralph Breaks the Internet<br />
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse<br />
<br />
<b>Best Documentary Feature</b><br />
Free Solo<br />
Hale County This Morning, This Evening<br />
Minding the Gap<br />
Of Fathers and Sons<br />
RBG<br />
<br />
<b>Best Foreign Language Film</b><br />
Capernaum (Lebanon)<br />
Cold War (Poland)<br />
Never Look Away (Germany)<br />
Roma (Mexico)<br />
Shoplifters (Japan)<br />
<br />
<b>Animated Short:</b><br />
Animal Behaviour<br />
Bao<br />
Late Afternoon<br />
One Small Step<br />
Weekends<br />
<br />
<b>Best Documentary Short Subject</b><br />
Black Sheep<br />
End Game<br />
Lifeboat<br />
A Night at the Garden<br />
Period. End of Sentence<br />
<br />
<b>Best Live Action Short Film</b><br />
Detainment<br />
Fauve,<br />
Marguerite<br />
Mother<br />
SkinNorma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-17652905607460756142019-01-21T17:52:00.001-08:002019-01-22T17:28:55.489-08:00Oscar Nomination Predictions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwrQr_EMX9CxeL6N69tGhhE4MzGiBHFO69Nc7Fcsqw4wqpKYLDHh9BwdtyjpOljhAgcwdBA3onPTzS9DSQLwBLKkJ8_GX6U9AD3VaXdWnQLtF0d_5mQ6-qFNxZRPl8a9BOk0vdfIdEXJk-/s1600/Oscars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="550" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwrQr_EMX9CxeL6N69tGhhE4MzGiBHFO69Nc7Fcsqw4wqpKYLDHh9BwdtyjpOljhAgcwdBA3onPTzS9DSQLwBLKkJ8_GX6U9AD3VaXdWnQLtF0d_5mQ6-qFNxZRPl8a9BOk0vdfIdEXJk-/s320/Oscars.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Nominations will be announced tomorrow. My predictions:<br />
<br />
<b>Best Picture</b><br />
BlacKkKlansman<br />
Black Panther<br />
Bohemian Rhapsody<br />
The Favourite<br />
Green Book<br />
Mary Poppins Returns<br />
Roma<br />
A Star is Born<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>Best Director</b><br />
Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
Alfonso Cuaron, <i>Roma</i><br />
Peter Farrelly, <i>Green Book</i><br />
Yorgos Lanthimos, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Spike Lee, <i>BlackKklansman</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actress</b><br />
Emily Blunt, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
Glen Close, <i>The Wife</i><br />
Olivia Colman, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Lady Gaga, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
Melissa McCarthy, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actor</b><br />
Christian Bale, <i>Vice</i><br />
Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
Ethan Hawke, <i>First Reformed</i><br />
Rami Malek, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i><br />
Viggo Mortensen, <i>Green Book</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Supporting Actor</b><br />
Mahershala Ali, <i>Green Book</i><br />
Adam Driver, <i>BlackKklansman</i><br />
Sam Elliot, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
Richard E. Grant, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
Jonathan Pryce, <i>The Wife</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Supporting Actress</b><br />
Amy Adams, <i>Vice</i><br />
Claire Foy, <i>First Man</i><br />
Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
Emma Stone, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Rachel Weisz, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Original Screenplay</b><br />
Bo Burnham, <i>Eighth Grade</i><br />
Alfonso Cuaron, <i>Roma</i><br />
Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Paul Schrader, <i>First Reformed</i><br />
Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly, <i>Green Book</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Adapted Screenplay</b><br />
Ryan Coogler, <i>Black Panther</i><br />
Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
Barry Jenkins, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
Eric Roth, Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee, <i>BlackKklansman</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Editing</b><br />
Jay Cassidy, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
Tom Cross, <i>First Man</i><br />
Hank Corwin, <i>Vice</i><br />
Alfonso Cuaron & Adam Gough, <i>Roma</i><br />
Yorgos Mavropsaridis, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Cinematography</b><br />
Alfonso Cuaron, <i>Roma</i><br />
James Laxton, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
Robbie Ryan, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Linus Sandgren, <i>First Man</i><br />
Lukasz Zal, <i>Cold War</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Costume Design</b><br />
Alexandra Byrne, <i>Mary Queen of Scots</i><br />
Ruth E. Carter, <i>Black Panther</i><br />
Julian Day, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i><br />
Sandy Powell, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Sandy Powell, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Production Design</b><br />
Hannah Beachler and Jay Hart, <i>Black Panther</i><br />
Nelson Coates and Andrew Baseman, <i>Crazy Rich Asians</i><br />
Fiona Crombie and Alice Felton, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Nathan Crowley and Kathy Lucas, <i>First Man</i><br />
John Myhre and Gordon Sim, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Makeup and Hairstyling</b><br />
Kate Bisco, Patricia DeHaney, Greg Cannom and Chris Gallaher, <i>Vice</i><br />
Goran Lundstrom and Pamela Goldammer, <i>Border</i><br />
Jenny Shircore, Hannah Edwards, Sarah Kelly, <i>Mary Queen of Scots</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Visual Effects</b><br />
Avengers: Infinity War<br />
Black Panther<br />
First Man<br />
Mary Poppins Returns<br />
Welcome to Marwen<br />
<br />
<b>Best Sound Editing</b><br />
Black Panther<br />
First Man<br />
Mission: Impossible - Fallout<br />
A Quiet Place<br />
Roma<br />
<br />
<b>Best Sound Mixing</b><br />
Bohemian Rhapsody<br />
First Man<br />
A Quiet Place<br />
Roma<br />
A Star is Born<br />
<br />
<b>Best Original Score</b><br />
Nicholas Britell, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
Alexandre Desplat, <i>Isle of Dogs</i><br />
Ludwig Goransson, <i>Black Panther</i><br />
Justin Hurwitz, <i>First Man</i><br />
Marc Shaiman, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Original Song</b><br />
"All the Stars," <i>Black Panther</i><br />
"Girl from the Movies," <i>Dumplin'</i><br />
"We Won't Move," <i>The Hate U Give</i><br />
"Trip the Light Fantastic," <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
"Shallow," <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Animated Feature</b><br />
Incredibles 2<br />
Isle of Dogs<br />
Mirai<br />
Ralph Breaks the Internet<br />
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse<br />
<br />
<b>Best Documentary Feature</b><br />
Free Solo<br />
Minding the Gap<br />
RBG<br />
Three Identical Strangers<br />
Won't You Be My Neighbor<br />
<br />
<b>Best Foreign Language Feature</b><br />
Burning (South Korea)<br />
Cold War (Poland)<br />
Never Look Away (Germany)<br />
Roma (Mexico)<br />
Shoplifters (Japan)Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-45442900413048148322019-01-20T11:56:00.002-08:002019-01-20T11:56:50.929-08:00Review: Aquaman (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJSQFBQSeKO7faC-0RrJHUKLiw9SMT5u02KirBy_chECRYGhAPOT3uwNcaMSmXkvj8lSZLwflHMyb_ZnDkM4s4Qa6fF9-k-uioJBih9zMYLDdebO7fC8v0-xha1yWu2W4K86smmcGlqf8S/s1600/Aquaman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="660" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJSQFBQSeKO7faC-0RrJHUKLiw9SMT5u02KirBy_chECRYGhAPOT3uwNcaMSmXkvj8lSZLwflHMyb_ZnDkM4s4Qa6fF9-k-uioJBih9zMYLDdebO7fC8v0-xha1yWu2W4K86smmcGlqf8S/s400/Aquaman.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * 1/2</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> James Wan<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Jason Momoa<br />
<br />
<i>Aquaman</i> is dumb as hell and it doesn't even matter. It's fun and it's entertaining and demonstrates what Warner Bros/DC can do when it gets out of its own way and stops trying to reverse engineer a shared universe. At 143 minutes it's at least 30 minutes longer than it has any business being and it is way too over-stuffed with plot, but it succeeds largely on the strength of star Jason Momoa's charisma and on the fact that there's so much happening so fast that you never have the opportunity to be bored. It's not a great movie, but it's a pretty great watch, particularly on the big screen.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Set sometime after the events of <i>Justice League</i> the film opens with a prologue setting out the origin story of Arthur Curry (Momoa), who is half-human, half-Atlantean as a result of the forbidden love between his lighthouse keeper father, Thomas (Temuera Morrison) and Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), the Queen of Atlantis. Having fled the water to escape an arranged marriage, Atlanna falls in love with Thomas and they have a child, but she's later forced to return to the sea, leaving her young son behind. She does, however, arrange for him to have an Atlantean mentor in the form of Nuidis (Willem Dafoe), who is eventually forced to reveal to Arthur, who desperately wants to meet his mother, that she has been executed. Blaming himself for his mother's death, Arthur wants nothing to do with Atlantis but when Mera (Amber Heard), the daughter of the ruler of another underwater kingdom, comes to tell him that his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) is planning to wage war on the land, he's dragged into the world of underwater politics. Ostensibly Orm is waging war to combat the amount of pollution that humans are pumping into the ocean (fair point!), but in actuality this is a pretext for Orm to become the Ocean Master (a term that gets thrown out many times over the course of the film, and sounds lamer each time), which is like the High King of the seven underwater kingdoms.<br />
<br />
Arthur's conflict with Orm, which includes an offshoot adventure when Arthur (with Mera's help) searches for King Atlan's Trident which, sword in the stone-like, can only be claimed by the one true king, provides the film with rather a great deal of story, but for some reason the film decides to pack even more in by giving Arthur another antagonist in the form of Black Mantha (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a pirate who holds a grudge against Aquaman for the hero's failure to save his father from drowning while trying to hijack a submarine. The Black Mantha storyline honestly brings so little to the film that I don't know why the filmmakers would bother to include it, given that the character could have just been saved for a sequel. The conflict between the Aquaman and Black Mantha is nothing more than a distraction in a film that already has quite a bit of narrative to juggle and which never seems to quite develop a fully formed identity for itself. There are a number of scenes in the film that leave you feeling like <i>Aquaman</i> is cribbing from other films (here it is doing <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i>, here it is doing <i>Splash</i>, here it is doing <i>Jurassic Park</i>, here it is doing <i>Fast Five</i>), some of which work fairly well but all of which taken together give the impression of a film that has no idea what it's supposed to be.<br />
<br />
And <i>yet</i>. Despite these narrative and stylistic issues, despite the inherent cheesiness of the guitar twang that plays basically every time Aquaman does anything in the opening fight scene as if to say, "Yeeeeaaaaaah! Aquaman! Wooooooo!," <i>Aquaman</i> is a lot of fun and does a good job balancing the drama/action with lighter more comedic moments. Momoa is basically the perfect actor for this material because he's very at ease doing very silly things. He brings a child-like enthusiasm to the fun stuff which, in turn, translates to an effective vulnerability when it comes to the film's more dramatic moments. Between Orm and Black Mantha, Arthur has a lot of outward conflict, but he also has a lot of inward conflict as a result of the guilt he feels over his mother's fate and his feeling of having been rejected by his mother's people and Momoa brings that pathos through to a degree that is probably more than the film itself deserves and gives this flashy, candy-colored movie something resembling depth.<br />
<br />
With the fate of the struggling DC movie universe still up in the air, <i>Aquaman</i> is definitely a step in the right direction. It isn't as transcendently good as <i>Wonder Woman</i>, but it steps far enough away from the overly dark aesthetic and overly violent narrative choices of the establishing films of the franchise to make it feel like the whole project is going in a better, more engaging direction. While it could stand to be a little more focused and less bloated, it's a fun movie that gives you your money's worth and it engenders enough good will that the inevitable sequel will be a welcome diversion.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-48239244252804040902019-01-13T12:36:00.001-08:002019-01-13T12:36:30.976-08:00Review: Vice (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheIdl7CU9HOkoS4tKTOtbDJXkkL40pJcKnct980jV0-C1t_OCSx3WtejX8wMVzDt9QqK0JI0vPSckYJHcajDI1efB8GwCQY7TYvlBhK9fbKIBGZNpivOJEFJgGvoGucvFTteRaQAEpTiZd/s1600/Vice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="650" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheIdl7CU9HOkoS4tKTOtbDJXkkL40pJcKnct980jV0-C1t_OCSx3WtejX8wMVzDt9QqK0JI0vPSckYJHcajDI1efB8GwCQY7TYvlBhK9fbKIBGZNpivOJEFJgGvoGucvFTteRaQAEpTiZd/s400/Vice.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* 1/2</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Adam McKay<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Christian Bale, Amy Adams<br />
<br />
132 minutes is a lot of time to spend saying absolutely nothing. While <i>Vice</i> may mock the post-Nixon Republican party for believing in nothing but the power of power itself, the film is just as intellectually, emotionally, and morally empty. Dick Cheney, pulling the strings of the Bush II administration, stripped away many of the checks and balances that are meant to keep American democracy from slipping into tyranny, destabilized the middle east by invading a country knowing that the reasons for invasion were specious, and just generally left the world in a worse place than he found it when he became Vice President. These are things that we already know, though I suppose it may be worth the reminder given the recent trend towards taking a softer view of the Bush II years in light of the mess that's now in power. <i>Vice</i> says nothing new, nothing insightful, and actually laughs at the idea that there <i>is</i> an insight to be had. "What do we believe in?" a young Cheney (Christian Bale) asks his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), who can only burst out laughing in response. But nobody believes in nothing. Even the Joker believed in chaos, which is the absolute freedom of the individual to do as he or she pleases. A film that is content to argue that its protagonist believes in nothing is a film without a narrative rudder. It is sound and fury, signifying nothing.<br />
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I'm going to start at the very end, because I think the film's mid-credits scene exemplifies the ways that it ultimately fails itself. Earlier in the film there is a scene in which the government runs a focus group to test out the efficacy of its version of newspeak, where terms like "enhanced interrogation" replace "torture." In the mid-credit scene the film returns to the focus group, with one man decrying the film's liberal bias and shooting down another man who counters by stating that the film is just using "facts" by calling him a Hillary supporting "libtard." As the argument escalates into a physical fight, the camera moves to two other members of the focus group, one of whom confides that she can't wait to see the new <i>Fast and Furious</i> movie. We're made to understand that this woman is an idiot, as is the guy who called the film liberally biased, and that the man who cited "just the facts" is the lone voice of reason and intellect in the room. This is flagrantly self-aggrandizing because it outright declares that writer/director Adam McKay considers his work to be more intellectually challenging and therefore "better" than commercial ventures like <i>The Fast and the Furious</i>. He's highbrow, not lowbrow, is what this scene is saying. McKay, a producer on both of the <i>Daddy's Home</i> movies, thinks he's above of the makers of <i>The Fast and the Furious</i> movies as well as the audiences who enjoy them who, presumably (given the tenor of this scene) would be incapable of enjoying his own work. Are <i>The Fast and the Furious</i> brilliant cinema? Hell no. They are <i>absurd</i>. They also entertained me, which is more than I can say for <i>Vice</i>.<br />
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As for the "liberal bias" versus "facts" part of the scene, the implication that the inclusion of "facts" means the exclusion of "bias" is, at best, intellectually dishonest and, at worst, lazy. Something can be both factual and biased depending on which facts it chooses to include. For example, the only Democratic presidency that the film chooses the acknowledge is that of Jimmy Carter, presumably so that it can include a scene of Carter implementing the use of solar energy, followed later by a scene in which the Reagan administration has those same solar panels ripped up and tossed aside. The meaning of those dual images is that conservatives refuse to move away from reliance on finite energy resources. The issue isn't that that's not true, it's that when you take those images into account in conjunction with, for example, the film's heavy criticism of the Bush administration for human rights violations like imprisoning people indefinitely and without charge in Guantanamo Bay, while failing to acknowledge that Guantanamo is still open despite 8 years of the Obama administration, it reveals a bias towards expounding on the moral failings of the Republican party while glossing over the moral failings of the Democratic party (except for one brief moment when it shows Hillary Clinton supporting the invasion of Iraq because <i>of course</i>). And this is all to say nothing of the fact that the film, through it's "these are just the facts" character, is arguing that it's just presenting the truth even though the title card that opens the film acknowledges that the truth (ie some of "the facts") can never fully be known because Cheney was so secretive in what he was doing and so effectively covered his tracks (the film's exact words are "We did our fucking best").<br />
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Cheney operated in the shadows of the Bush administration and <i>Vice</i> can do nothing, really, to illuminate him. It depicts a young Dick Cheney as a ne'er do well who seems content to waste his life drinking and fighting until his girlfriend, Lynne (Amy Adams), makes it clear that she's not going to stick by a loser with no ambition. He pulls himself together because he doesn't want to lose her and six years later he's got a job as an intern in the Nixon administration, where he's taken under the wing of Donald Rumsfeld. During the Ford administration Cheney rises to the position of Chief of Staff, during the Reagan administration he's elected to Congress, and during the Clinton administration he enters the private sector and becomes CEO of Halliburton. <i>Vice</i> makes a point of the jobs that Cheney holds, but it never manages to tell us much of anything about the man himself. The character is a cipher who, even in the moments when he's being actively manipulative, such as a scene in which he talks George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) into handing over all the power of the presidency to him, does not seem to be driven by anything in particular. He's ruthless simply for the sake of being ruthless, wants power simply for the sake of wanting power, and seems to have no real reason for doing any of the incredibly destructive things he sets into motion except to see if he can get away with it.<br />
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Moreover, the film does absolutely nothing to develop the character from drunken wastrel into ruthless power monger, unless we're meant to infer that Lynne, depicted as having a sense of purpose greater than the limits of what she believes she will be able to accomplish because of her gender, simply molded him like clay into the man who could satisfy her craving for power - although that still implies that he's merely a blank content to accept the personality someone has made ready for him. The jumping in and out of the timeline and the various stylistic devices the film employs are perhaps meant to disguise the fact that the film itself doesn't have a handle on who this man is, but it doesn't succeed at doing that. You emerge from this film with no greater understanding for who Dick Cheney is than you came into it with. The only thing that actually stuck with me is how brutally casual the character is about it whenever he realizes that he's having a heart attack. By the third of fourth one he begins announcing it with the nonchalance of someone giving you the time, and this is more a credit to Bale's performance than to the film itself.<br />
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Despite having so little to work with on a story level, Bale still manages to deliver a great performance beneath however many pounds of makeup were required to make him resemble Cheney. What comes across in Bale's performance is the notion of the banality of evil taken to its greatest extreme, of a man who does things that have terrible consequences for the rest of the world but is still capable of glimmers of humanity which suggest an emotional life, despite the film's assertions that he's as heartless (literally, as in one shot that lingers on his empty chest cavity when he's having a heart transplant) as he is power hungry. Adams also manages to do a remarkable amount with Lynne, who doesn't come across as a shrewish wife so much as a woman frustrated by how many extra obstacles are in her way despite how much more capable she would be at the job than some men (though, make no mistake, she's still one of those mind boggling "every women should stay in the kitchen <i>except</i> for me" types). Accepting that she can't achieve her own ambitions, she channels them into shaping her husband and, later, her eldest daughter. Despite how superficial the film is, these performances, somehow, are not.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-63996833411038803512019-01-07T08:00:00.000-08:002019-01-07T08:00:00.528-08:00Review: The Favourite (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6VBX1GV6eEnzoRaSIC_bXbwQvc9Q80wPA4CR4hFVkdMNcQ6IDxtRk2AQUj1MwR4G46z7bV0znBk0pg-pwo4xeuC_tMkUs9NX36cZ0-6z_nczea3qYU_bmL-Kr69G2HttWKwYj22AZvGE7/s1600/Favourite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="580" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6VBX1GV6eEnzoRaSIC_bXbwQvc9Q80wPA4CR4hFVkdMNcQ6IDxtRk2AQUj1MwR4G46z7bV0znBk0pg-pwo4xeuC_tMkUs9NX36cZ0-6z_nczea3qYU_bmL-Kr69G2HttWKwYj22AZvGE7/s400/Favourite.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Yorgos Lanthimos<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone<br />
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Most movies are lucky if they feature one really great role for an actress. Yorgos Lantimos' latest, <i>The Favourite</i>, can boast of having three. It's a delight that is nearly unheard of. Setting its action at the court of Queen Anne (played with entertaining petulance by Olivia Colman), <i>The Favorite</i> is all about the dangerous game of social dominance and power, of how leverage can be useful only insofar as someone knows how to use it properly, of how one might not even realize that they were gambling until they see how badly they've overplayed their hand. It's a dark comedy about two ruthless women, one of whom tells the other, "We'll make a killer of you yet" and lives to regret it when she sees just how good the other is at the game. It's fantastic.<br />
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It's a testament to how weird Lantimos' films typically are (I'm only basing this on <i>Dogtooth, The Lobster</i>, and <i>The Killing of a Sacred Deer</i>, but I'm willing to bet that his earlier works are all bizarro, too) that <i>The Favorite</i> is easily his most straightforward. It's set in 1708 and, per usual in centuries earlier than the 20th, Britain is at war with France. The British army is led by the Duke of Marlborough whose wife, Sarah (Rachel Weisz), is the Queen's closest confidante, much to the chagrin of Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, way too young for the part by such an acid delight in the role that it doesn't matter), the leader of the Opposition who wants the government to stop spending on the war. Into this war of influence comes Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), Sarah's down and out cousin (you wouldn't know it from the film, but in real life Abigail was also a cousin to Harley, because every British aristocrat has some degree of cousinship with every other British aristocrat if you go far enough down the family trees), whom Sarah agrees to take in as a servant.<br />
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Abigail's arrival is ignoble (she arrives covered in mud, having been shoved out of a carriage by a character credited as "Wanking Man") but her rise is swift in part because for all Sarah's posturing as a master game player, she somehow doesn't see her cousin's maneuvering until it's too late. Still, the more experienced courtier is confident in her ability to outplay all rivals (be they nobodies from nowhere like Abigail, or men with certified political power like Harley), secure that her bond with the Queen is so strong that it cannot be broken ("No one but me would dare," she states when the Queen, whom she always addresses by name rather than title, is convinced that someone called her fat and ugly) and that no one can come between them. And why shouldn't she be? In the opening minutes of the film Anne is gifting her with Blenheim Palace, a place grand enough to be fit for royalty and rather a great extravagance given that the Queen is on the verge of having to raise taxes to pay for the war, and Sarah seems to be the only person with whom Anne shares any degree of intimacy, her children all having died, her husband presumably dead given his lack of mention throughout (though, in reality, Prince George was still alive until October of 1708). As the film opens, the only living thing that Anne loves other than Sarah is the 17 rabbits that represent her 17 lost children.<br />
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Sarah wields her power rigorously, if not necessarily wisely, dominating her relationship with Anne where Abigail chooses the path of obsequiousness, ingratiating herself and then using the information that she has learned to usurp Sarah's place in both the Queen's heart and her bed. The sexual aspect of the dynamic - which might sound anachronistic, but after falling out of favor Sarah Churchill really did accuse Queen Anne of having a sexual relationship with Abigail - sharpens the battle for power in the story because it reduces the power held by the men around them and elevates the women beyond their lack of legal personhood. Men like Harley have the type of power that can be seen, demonstrated in a scene in which Anne address Parliament and he manages to preemptively congratulate her on not raising taxes to fund the war, putting her in an awkward position because she was going to announce that she <i>is</i> going to do just that, leaving her at such a loss that all she can think to do is pretend to faint to buy herself some time. While Sarah and Abigail don't have official political power - Sarah herself cannot go into Parliament but can only hover outside its doors - their influence with Anne nevertheless represents the real power over the throne, which begins to waver back and forth between supporting the Whigs and the Tories once Abigail makes an alliance with Harley. This is a center of power from which men are entirely exempt, played out not in the public view but in private, often only between the three players themselves.<br />
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The back and forth (and back) between the three women, and the way that it affects the political balance of power around them, is fascinating thanks to the razor sharp screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara (I think this is easily the best written screenplay of the year for the dialogue alone) and the central performances. Weisz and Stone each find different takes on the "grasping favorite," finding different ways to express each character's desire for and comfort with the power they want to attain (Weisz's Sarah is so comfortable in power that she wears it like an old pair of shoes, but deeply vulnerable, even wounded, when it slips away from her; Stone's Abigail enters the power game like someone uncertain of what she's doing and afraid of taking a misstep and then, once she achieves power, seems to think that she has to "perform" it in order for it to be real) and both deliver fantastic performances. Colman, finally getting her big moment after years spent mostly in the supporting ranks, is a marvel as Anne, who despite the film's focus on some of her worst qualities (her capacity for tantrums, her desire for instant gratification) nevertheless comes through as a character worthy of sympathy. The performance is driven by the loneliness at the character's core, with her willingness to be manipulated informed by her longing for companionship and love. While <i>The Favourite</i> sometimes rises towards the absurd (did 18th century nobles really entertain themselves by racing ducks? After seeing this, I would like to think they did), it's the human element brought to the screen by Colman that makes the film's cuts feel so deep.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-15154753978439273722019-01-06T17:19:00.001-08:002019-01-06T20:17:54.150-08:00Golden Globe Winners<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryoiGUBcqSy7s12CqMFu3sYm1ORfro7l7UVLfIASO8hFzXkLl3p2fdnOTScbvZlxGmRqPG2mDSEwWFWC-KPzvMhBxeYwJywdH8RVQM5L7iaKDdxCpzXnheJVmqC5QAEdgwrJ9HA6I_Q1C/s1600/Golden+Globe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="500" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryoiGUBcqSy7s12CqMFu3sYm1ORfro7l7UVLfIASO8hFzXkLl3p2fdnOTScbvZlxGmRqPG2mDSEwWFWC-KPzvMhBxeYwJywdH8RVQM5L7iaKDdxCpzXnheJVmqC5QAEdgwrJ9HA6I_Q1C/s320/Golden+Globe.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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As they're announced:<br />
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<b>Best Motion Picture - Animated:</b> Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse<br />
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<b>Best Score:</b> Justin Hurwitz, <i>First Man</i><br />
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<b>Best Original Song:</b> "Shallow," <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
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<b>Best Supporting Actress:</b> Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
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<b>Best Supporting Actor:</b> Mahershala Ali, <i>Green Book</i><br />
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<b>Best Screenplay:</b> Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly, <i>Green Book</i><br />
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<b>Best Actor - Musical or Comedy:</b> Christian Bale, <i>Vice</i><br />
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<b>Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language:</b> Roma<br />
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<b>Best Director:</b> Alfonso Cuaron, <i>Roma</i><br />
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<b>Best Actress - Musical or Comedy:</b> Olivia Colman, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
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<b>Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy:</b> Green Book<br />
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<b>Best Actress - Drama:</b> Glenn Close, <i>The Wife</i><br />
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<b>Best Actor - Drama:</b> Rami Malek, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i><br />
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<b>Best Motion Picture - Drama:</b> Bohemian RhapsodyNorma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-48184052382820959542019-01-06T11:10:00.003-08:002019-01-06T16:32:38.790-08:00Golden Globe Predictions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryoiGUBcqSy7s12CqMFu3sYm1ORfro7l7UVLfIASO8hFzXkLl3p2fdnOTScbvZlxGmRqPG2mDSEwWFWC-KPzvMhBxeYwJywdH8RVQM5L7iaKDdxCpzXnheJVmqC5QAEdgwrJ9HA6I_Q1C/s1600/Golden+Globe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="500" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryoiGUBcqSy7s12CqMFu3sYm1ORfro7l7UVLfIASO8hFzXkLl3p2fdnOTScbvZlxGmRqPG2mDSEwWFWC-KPzvMhBxeYwJywdH8RVQM5L7iaKDdxCpzXnheJVmqC5QAEdgwrJ9HA6I_Q1C/s320/Golden+Globe.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
The awards will be given out tonight. Here are my predictions:<br />
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<b>Best Motion Picture - Drama:</b> A Star is Born<br />
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<b>Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy:</b> The Favorite<br />
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<b>Best Director:</b> Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
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</i> <b>Best Actress - Drama:</b> Lady Gaga, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actor - Drama:</b> Rami Malek, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actor - Musical or Comedy:</b> Christian Bale, <i>Vice</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actress - Musical or Comedy:</b> Olivia Colman, <i>The Favorite</i><br />
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</i> <b>Best Supporting Actress:</b> Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Supporting Actor:</b> Mahershala Ali, <i>Green Book</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Screenplay:</b> Barry Jenkins, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Motion Picture - Animated:</b> Incredibles 2<br />
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<b>Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language:</b> Roma<br />
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<b>Best Original Score:</b> Marc Shaiman, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Original Song:</b> "Shallow," <i>A Star is Born</i>Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-89494783586165103842018-12-29T13:06:00.001-08:002018-12-29T13:06:32.554-08:00Review: Roma (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsYSuXfdEdtIhsdA2KZMWocaysFYINtar9MxGulcnBrs10u9g0xiY3dRHuyAbY3MV6kEPc5kQK3zEEIYwUu4fsPutqgSzlYJOZDHDs98D8Q_wAPZTXlEOTt9tkvQh5bzyONKB7ik1y2Q3v/s1600/Roma.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="650" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsYSuXfdEdtIhsdA2KZMWocaysFYINtar9MxGulcnBrs10u9g0xiY3dRHuyAbY3MV6kEPc5kQK3zEEIYwUu4fsPutqgSzlYJOZDHDs98D8Q_wAPZTXlEOTt9tkvQh5bzyONKB7ik1y2Q3v/s400/Roma.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Alfonso Cuaron<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira<br />
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Alfonso Cuaron's last film, 2013's <i>Gravity</i>, was a cinematic experience that captured the vastness of space while telling what is, ultimately, an intimate story about a woman working through her grief. His latest film, <i>Roma</i>, is a story told on a small scale that suggests the great, wide world going on around it (and, while <i>Gravity</i> was a film that practically demanded to be seen on as big a screen as possible, <i>Roma</i>, which has been released in theaters and Netflix simultaneously, is intimate enough that it's impact isn't lessened by watching in on a smaller screen). Though he's made only five films in the last seventeen years including this one (the others being <i>Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men</i>, and <i>Gravity</i>), Cuaron is one of the most reliably great filmmakers working today and <i>Roma</i> makes a strong case for being his best film to date.<br />
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Set in 1970/71, <i>Roma</i> unfolds over the course of a year (or so) while following Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), one of the maids in the household of a doctor (Fernando Grediaga) and his wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira). Though we see their conflict only peripherally, played out in clipped exchanges that occur in passing, overheard in the close confines of a household, it quickly becomes apparent that the marriage is coming apart and soon enough the doctor has disappeared from the picture, supposedly gone away to a conference, while Sofia tries to keep up the pretense that everything is fine, not wanting their four children to know that he's not coming back and still holding out hope that he's going to return to the marriage. This strategy of playing out one story just to the side of another (an art that Cuaron perfected as far back as <i>Y Tu Mama Tambien</i>) is deployed to tell both the intimate story of the household and the wider story of the political situation in Mexico at the time. Inside the house is a story of a family falling into chaos. Outside, a country is doing the same.<br />
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Like the failing marriage of the doctor and his wife, the political upheaval of the Mexican Dirty War encroaches on Cleo's life just enough to turn it in ways that she can't anticipate, but not so much as to begin to define it. The problems of the rest of the world swirl around her, with the sweeping long shots of Cuaron's camera (in addition to writing, directing, and producing, he also takes on cinematography duties and shares the editing credit with Adam Gough) speeding past people on the street to show the brief intersections of Cleo's life with those of others, but the story itself never belongs to anyone but Cleo, even if she's positioned to the side of most of it rather than central to it. The marital difficulties of her employers is largely characterized as Cleo's story, experienced from the outside, with Sofia's anger at her husband, which she cannot directly express because she's trying to keep it under wraps, finding an outlet in Cleo, who is admonished for everything from not cleaning up after the dog to just being there to witness something that Sofia didn't want her to witness. When she learns that she's pregnant, Cleo can only presume that it's going to be more of the same.<br />
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Sofia surprises her by treating her with kindness, perhaps seeing the similarity in their situations (she has been abandoned by her husband, who soon stops sending money because he's spending it all on new hobbies that he's sharing with his girlfriend; Cleo has been abandoned by the father of her child, who completely disavows knowledge of her when she tries to seek his help), but Cleo's situation is nevertheless a precarious one, pregnant or not. In the house she is at times treated with affection as though she's part of the family, but even in those moments her place in the household's hierarchy is always quickly reasserted the second anything needs to be done. She's one of them when it costs them nothing to include her - letting her sit down to watch TV with them, for example - but they don't hesitate to put her back to work as soon as they have needs that need to be tended to and when she's out of their company she's not even accorded the privilege of electricity, performing her evening exercises by candlelight because Sofia doesn't want her keeping a light on at such a late hour. She is, at least, treated much better than the poor dog, for whom the garage (so narrow that the doctor has to perform a very precise calculation in order to pull his monstrously wide car into the space) is as close as he ever gets to being outside.<br />
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<i>Roma</i> flows slowly, but it's never boring. Aparicio is captivating as Cleo, who is so accustomed to putting herself second that the performance is, by necessity, quite restrained and quiet, until the one moment when she breaks and says exactly what she's feeling. She's the glue that holds the film together and Cuaron shapes an easy rhythm to the highs and lows, the joys and the tragedies, of her day to day life. de Tavira is also excellent as Sofia, who could easily be the star of her own story as a woman bearing the consequences of her husband's midlife crisis who slowly comes to realize that she doesn't, in fact, need him and may even be better off without him. <i>Roma</i> is a beautiful film about how these two women find the strength to carry on, about how life itself goes on even when it seems like it's the end of the world. Finding the universal in the specific, the epic scope in the intimate portrait, this is Cuaron at his best.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-66401695988718777172018-12-28T08:00:00.000-08:002018-12-28T08:00:00.180-08:00Review: Widows (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh91qdGWTPz1T9AkpIFyeGARcOUfF7ybv-DQ0sKHbo9VHInCK7xdGF-ojmsgeStIIeZlHkYkqA0gn3SHl29BsOyF7SXUPP05gALPGXGXIbQRKfUweqkEEQg6w6tUQEEzfMEcvbcUCeI2c09/s1600/Widows.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="650" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh91qdGWTPz1T9AkpIFyeGARcOUfF7ybv-DQ0sKHbo9VHInCK7xdGF-ojmsgeStIIeZlHkYkqA0gn3SHl29BsOyF7SXUPP05gALPGXGXIbQRKfUweqkEEQg6w6tUQEEzfMEcvbcUCeI2c09/s400/Widows.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * * 1/2</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Steve McQueen<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell<br />
<br />
<i>Widows</i> is more than the movie that you might be expecting, which stands to reason since it's directed by Steve McQueen, who is known for art films (<i>Hunger, Shame</i>, <i>12 Years a Slave</i>) rather than crowd pleasers. <i>Widows</i> is, perhaps, the happy medium between the two. It's a heist thriller of no small amount of skill, filled with tension and action and reliant on some of the familiar tropes of the genre, but it's also a character piece about four women who are underestimated by everyone around them. Only three of them are widows (there is a fourth widow, but she takes a different path), but they are all women that the men around them take for granted can be walked all over. Now is the time of year when the studios release the last of their great big blockbusters for the year and the last of their great big award hopefuls, which might leave little time left to catch up on films that have already been in release for several weeks, but <i>Widows</i> is a movie worth making the time for.<br />
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The movie begins with a heist that goes wrong, killing Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his crew and burning up the money they had absconded with. The money belonged to Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), a gangster who is looking to get out of the crime life by running for election as alderman of Chicago's south side, where he's up against Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), the scion of a political dynasty. Needing the money to finance his campaign, Manning pays a visit to Rawlings' widow, Veronica (Viola Davis), and gives her a timeline in which she can return the money to him. Lacking in assets that can be liquidated to pay him and having found her husband's notebook, in which he wrote out detailed plans for his next heist, Veronica decides to carry out her husband's next job, enlisting/threatening Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), the widows of two members of the crew, to help her. The fourth widow, Amanda (Carrie Coon), doesn't answer Veronica's call and when Veronica learns that she's been left with an infant to raise on her own, she decides not to pull her into the scheme.<br />
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At first glance, these women are ill-suited for the task they've assigned themselves. Veronica is a smart woman, but she's used to giving orders for things to be done, rather than doing things for herself, having lived the high life on the proceeds of her husband's crimes. Linda has been blindsided by the fact that her husband so badly mismanaged their money that even the legitimate source of their income - her store - has been swept out from under her, leaving her on the verge of losing her home and having no way to support her kids. Alice, having been raised by her rattle snake of a mother (Jacki Weaver in the sort of role that proves that there truly are no small roles, only small actors, given how much she makes of it) to be reliant on a man for everything, seems capable of bringing nothing to the table at first, but arguably comes the furthest as she invents new tools for herself that allow her to cut the corners she can't negotiate on her own. Increasingly aware that they'll be unable to pull the heist off without a fourth person, they then enlist Belle (Cynthia Erivo), a single mother who never stops moving as she takes every money making job that she can get, running from one to the next as she struggles to make ends meet.<br />
<br />
<i>Widows</i> is a heist movie complete with the sorts of scenes you expect from the genre - the training sequences, scenes where the plan is discussed and dissected, the scenes where everything seems to go wrong - but in many ways the mechanics of the plot are secondary. It is much more concerned with exploring the characters and the context of their lives, from the greater context of the story's Chicago setting - where in one scene, the film's camera planted on the hood of Mulligan's car, we're made to see how poverty and wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, live side by side separated by only a few blocks - to the personal context of each of the women, who have nothing in common save the fact that the people around them (or, more specifically, the men around them) feel entitled to take from them with the expectation that they will not fight back. The climactic scene (which I'll do my best not to spoil) is the best example of this theme, reminiscent of the climax of last year's <i>Wind River</i> in that both involve a man quite literally whining and crying about how he isn't getting his way, demanding sympathy that ignores all the harm he's done to a woman because, hey, a woman's life matters much less than a man's feelings of self-worth and security, right?<br />
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<i>Widows</i> was written by McQueen and Gillian Flynn, who have adapted it from a British TV series of the same name, and the screenplay does an excellent job of building out, establishing the characters as "types" and then developing them through scenes that reveal a great deal about them without having to explicitly spell those things out through exposition. The actors - a veritable dream team of talent that also includes Robert Duvall and Daniel Kaluuya - take that ground work and run with it, giving the film terrific performances from top to bottom. Davis is impeccable, as she always is, as the icy but determined Veronica and Farrell adds another performance to the growing list of evidence that he was always meant to be one of our most reliable character actors, playing a man who is the very embodiment of every kind of privilege a person can have, a man who is practically handed power on a silver platter and can do nothing but complain that he was never given a choice about whether or not to take it. The standout, however, is Debicki, an actress who is apparently 10 feet tall judging by the way that she towers over everyone else in the film and who brings a heady mix of vulnerability and self-possession to Alice. No one expects anything from her, including herself, but she's the story's dark horse. Underestimate her at your peril.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-21868481862871434832018-12-17T08:00:00.000-08:002018-12-17T08:00:16.595-08:00Review: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgERUVwvL9xiqPNGfDWnyQNzX7_J3vmstJOidedMZEcWZPma9Gb_SYclUNxAHpiMeyJjcM4HiF8u0fTRzOfZ1m6HBJEaWt_aKD-f8k2oyVvvGlIB6uu2BVK2eeHOlJQ-ytki1QI5LJZp4tV/s1600/Buster+Scruggs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="688" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgERUVwvL9xiqPNGfDWnyQNzX7_J3vmstJOidedMZEcWZPma9Gb_SYclUNxAHpiMeyJjcM4HiF8u0fTRzOfZ1m6HBJEaWt_aKD-f8k2oyVvvGlIB6uu2BVK2eeHOlJQ-ytki1QI5LJZp4tV/s400/Buster+Scruggs.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Joel Coen & Ethan Coen<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, Zoe Kazan, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson<br />
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Ever since Netflix began acquiring and developing its own library of films the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has, with the exception of Netflix's documentaries, resisted recognizing Netflix pictures as legitimate, award worthy content. This changed last year when <i>Mudbound</i> broke through to get 4 nominations and one imagines that this year, with the release of <i>Roma</i>, already so thoroughly lauded with awards from critics, and with filmmakers like the Coen brothers turning to the platform with their latest, the notion that films released through Netflix aren't "real" movies will be obliterated. The Coen's latest, <i>The Ballad of Buster Scruggs</i> is a great challenge to the idea that Netflix removes the "cinema" from films, as it is a thoroughly cinematic piece of work even when viewed on a small screen thanks to the sumptuous compositions of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who previously lensed the Coen's <i>Inside Lleweyn Davis</i>. Telling a series of tales set in the old west, <i>Buster Scruggs</i> hearkens back a time when the Western was as big as all outdoors while being told in the wry, modern voice of the Coens.<br />
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The film is built around a framing device of a series of short stories being read from a book, with an unseen reader literally turning the page between the end of one story and the beginning of the next to transition between narratives. The first two stories - the darkly funny and very winning tale of the titular Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), an outlaw whose cheerful demeanor belies just how deadly he is, and the story of a would-be bank robber (James Franco) who catches exactly one break amid a series of (self-created) misfortunes - might lull you into thinking that this is going to be a comedy. A violent comedy in which a character causes a man to shoot himself in the head three times and then sings a rollicking song about it, but a comedy nonetheless. Instead the comedy somewhat abruptly falls away by the third story, in which a traveling impresario (Liam Neeson) begins to consider whether his current act has run its course, and from that point the tales become longer and more dramatic, though there's something of a return to comedy with the last story, in which five people travel together in a stagecoach without being altogether at ease in each other's company.<br />
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As in any anthology film, some stories work better than others. The first, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," is very engaging and contains Delbonnel's most playful and inventive work through the film (I particularly enjoyed the shot where Scruggs steps into a saloon and pats the dust from himself, walking away and leaving in his wake a ghostly outline that hangs in the air for a minute before dissolving) while the second story, "Near Algodones," is funny but has an unfinished feeling to it. Of the three dramas that follow, the best is "All Gold Canyon," based on a story by Jack London, in which a prospector (Tom Waits) dedicates himself to digging up a quiet valley in search of a pocket of gold he knows to be hidden within it, only to have his bounty threatened the moment he finally finds it. The climax of the story is a masterclass in tension and patience which shows the Coens at the top of their game.<br />
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For the most part, <i>The Ballad of Buster Scruggs</i> is an easy sit. It's neither the best nor the most challenging film the Coens have ever made, but it works very well for the sort of low stakes and relaxed piece of work that it is. It's disappointing, however, that for all the things that can be said to the film's credit, it takes such a dim, incurious, and limited view of Native Americans, who appear briefly in "Near Algodones" and "The Gal Who Got Rattled," a story about a woman (Zoe Kazan) who finds her fortunes changing as she travels to Oregon as part of a wagon train, and are used merely for "flavor." They are the physical embodiment of danger, whooping while ambushing unsuspecting white people, killing them and taking their scalps. It's a depiction that wouldn't be out of place in a film made a hundred years ago - which may be the point, the film is built around the idea that these are stories coming out of an old book of tales of the west told from the perspective of white people and playing to the prejudices and assumptions of a prospective white audience, but the Coens may go a bit too far in making that point. The Native Americans are caricatured in a way that feels extreme even when you take into account the context in which these stories are being told and the wider view taken by the film as a whole and the Coen's ironic approach.<br />
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That approach involves an explicit surface and the implicit meaning lurking just beneath the text. In those two stories the Native Americans are explicitly dangerous, attacking with full force and without reason. Implicitly throughout the film, however, it's the white men who are settling the west who are being marked out as the real danger. Buster Scruggs kills at least half a dozen men in his brief story. The bank robber is willing to kill to get what he wants and is faced with being killed on multiple occasions in the name of justice for things that he both is and isn't guilty of. The impressario would just as soon murder as care for another person depending on what will put money in his pocket. The woman on the Oregon trail makes a fatal decision out of fear because of what the wagon train's leader has told her the Native Americans would do to her if they were to capture her. The final story features a pair of bounty hunters (Brendan Gleeson and Jonjo O'Neill) who, though they have the option of bringing men in dead or alive, only ever choose the former. Even the prospector, who spends much of his story alone, comes into a pristine valley where everything in nature is living in harmony and begins tearing it up and throwing it into disarray even before gunshots start getting fired. There's blood all over all of the stories and all over the hands of the white men and women in them, but it's the violence of the Native Americans that stands out because, from the perspective of the storytellers, the trail of death that follows the white characters is just part of the business of manifest destiny, so commonplace that it's barely worth dwelling on - except perhaps to sing a song about it.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-72651785323230892232018-12-12T20:14:00.003-08:002018-12-12T20:14:36.626-08:00Screen Actors Guild Nominations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLgIzBa6OYJN-kD6fkFcBXYw-0BRWGkt57_Yz5ZIDBW4McygIOXlMIiGxGPg9cGLKdhpOjjhZIqLTVfOTPL83-aLR7iPX0_KAXqyl2y-o6cOYFvHN4MatIX2onc-LLlEntV9IJGYRArIcs/s1600/SAG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLgIzBa6OYJN-kD6fkFcBXYw-0BRWGkt57_Yz5ZIDBW4McygIOXlMIiGxGPg9cGLKdhpOjjhZIqLTVfOTPL83-aLR7iPX0_KAXqyl2y-o6cOYFvHN4MatIX2onc-LLlEntV9IJGYRArIcs/s400/SAG.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<b>Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role:</b><br />
Emily Blunt, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
Glenn Close, <i>The Wife</i><br />
Olivia Colman, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Lady Gaga, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Melissa McCarthy, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
<b><br />
</b> <b>Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role:</b><br />
Christian Bale, <i>Vice</i><br />
Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Rami Malek, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i><br />
Viggo Mortensen, <i>Green Book</i><br />
John David Washington, <i>BlacKkKlansman</i><br />
<br />
<b>Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role:</b><br />
Mahershala Ali, <i>Green Book</i><br />
Timothee Chalamet, <i>Beautiful Boy</i><br />
Adam Driver, <i>BlacKkKlansman</i><br />
Sam Elliott, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Richard E. Grant, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
<br />
<b>Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role:</b><br />
Amy Adams, <i>Vice</i><br />
Emily Blunt, <i>A Quiet Place</i><br />
Margot Robbie, <i>Mary Queen of Scots</i><br />
Emma Stone, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Rachel Weisz, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
<br />
<b>Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture:</b><br />
A Star Is Born<br />
Black Panther<br />
BlacKkKlansman<br />
Bohemian Rhapsody<br />
Crazy Rich Asians<br />
<br />
<b>Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture:</b><br />
Ant-Man and the Wasp<br />
Avengers: Infinity War<br />
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs<br />
Black Panther<br />
Mission: Impossible - FalloutNorma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-32398044996190164762018-12-09T21:25:00.001-08:002018-12-09T21:25:12.821-08:00Los Angeles Film Critics Association Winners<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhThzaPhw86LmbcBwPGYkqkyHd9CMmefi3_bj_BQYlZPTgFqByinNEbfxHAD4rUQZs1egoRE9xWIZaAp4tW3gYuZPEKGOpeyIUDUxu9FHBC1OyhJ181XOaZY-Jc84BkhoSqgdt_3bpqil1e/s1600/LAFC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="650" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhThzaPhw86LmbcBwPGYkqkyHd9CMmefi3_bj_BQYlZPTgFqByinNEbfxHAD4rUQZs1egoRE9xWIZaAp4tW3gYuZPEKGOpeyIUDUxu9FHBC1OyhJ181XOaZY-Jc84BkhoSqgdt_3bpqil1e/s400/LAFC.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The winners of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards, announced earlier today:<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Best Film:</b> Roma<br />
<br />
<b>Best Director:</b> Debra Granik, <i>Leave No Trace</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actress:</b> Olivia Colman, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Actor:</b> Ethan Hawke, <i>First Reformed</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Supporting Actor:</b> Steven Yeun, <i>Burning</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Supporting Actress:</b> Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Screenplay:</b> Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Cinematography:</b> Roma<br />
<br />
<b>Best Editing:</b> Joshua Altman and Bing Liu, <i>Minding the Gap</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Animated Film:</b> Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse<br />
<br />
<b>Best Foreign Language Film:</b> Burning and “Shoplifters (Tie)<br />
<br />
<b>Best Documentary:</b> Shirkers<br />
<br />
<b>Best Music/Score:</b> If Beale Street Could Talk<br />
<br />
<b>Best Production Design:</b> Hannah Beachler, <i>Black Panther</i>Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-34122085463884173842018-12-06T17:20:00.001-08:002019-01-06T11:03:34.578-08:00Golden Globe Nominees<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryoiGUBcqSy7s12CqMFu3sYm1ORfro7l7UVLfIASO8hFzXkLl3p2fdnOTScbvZlxGmRqPG2mDSEwWFWC-KPzvMhBxeYwJywdH8RVQM5L7iaKDdxCpzXnheJVmqC5QAEdgwrJ9HA6I_Q1C/s1600/Golden+Globe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="500" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryoiGUBcqSy7s12CqMFu3sYm1ORfro7l7UVLfIASO8hFzXkLl3p2fdnOTScbvZlxGmRqPG2mDSEwWFWC-KPzvMhBxeYwJywdH8RVQM5L7iaKDdxCpzXnheJVmqC5QAEdgwrJ9HA6I_Q1C/s320/Golden+Globe.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Announced earlier today:<br />
<br />
<b>Best Motion Picture, Drama</b><br />
Black Panther<br />
BlacKkKlansman<br />
Bohemian Rhapsody<br />
If Beale Street Could Talk<br />
A Star Is Born<br />
<br />
<b>Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy</b><br />
Crazy Rich Asians<br />
The Favourite<br />
Green Book<br />
Mary Poppins Returns<br />
Vice<br />
<br />
<b>Best Director, Motion Picture</b><br />
Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Alfonso Cuarón, <i>Roma</i><br />
Peter Farrelly, <i>Green Book</i><br />
Spike Lee, <i>BlacKkKlansman</i><br />
Adam McKay, <i>Vice</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama</b><br />
Glenn Close, <i>The Wife</i><br />
Lady Gaga, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Nicole Kidman, <i>Destroyer</i><br />
Melissa McCarthy, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
Rosamund Pike, <i>A Private War</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama</b><br />
Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
Willem Dafoe, <i>At Eternity’s Gate</i><br />
Lucas Hedges, <i>Boy Erased</i><br />
Rami Malek, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i><br />
John David Washington, <i>BlacKkKlansman</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy</b><br />
Christian Bale, <i>Vice</i><br />
Lin-Manuel Miranda, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
Viggo Mortensen, <i>Green Book</i><br />
Robert Redford, <i>The Old Man and the Gun</i><br />
John C. Reilly, <i>Stan & Ollie</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy</b><br />
Emily Blunt, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
Olivia Colman, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Elsie Fisher, <i>Eighth Grade</i><br />
Charlize Theron, <i>Tully</i><br />
Constance Wu, <i>Crazy Rich Asians</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture</b><br />
Mahershala Ali, <i>Green Book</i><br />
Timothée Chalamet, <i>Beautiful Boy</i><br />
Adam Driver, <i>BlacKkKlansman</i><br />
Richard E. Grant, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
Sam Rockwell, <i>Vice</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture</b><br />
Amy Adams, <i>Vice</i><br />
Claire Foy, <i>First Man</i><br />
Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
Emma Stone, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Rachel Weisz, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Screenplay, Motion Picture</b><br />
Alfonso Cuaron, <i>Roma</i><br />
Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, <i>The Favourite</i><br />
Barry Jenkins, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
Adam McKay, <i>Vice</i><br />
Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, <i>Green Book</i><br />
<br />
Best Original Song, Motion Picture<br />
“All the Stars,” <i>Black Panther</i><br />
“Girl in the Movies,” <i>Dumplin’</i><br />
“Requiem for a Private War,” <i>A Private War</i><br />
“Revelation,” <i>Boy Erased</i><br />
“Shallow,” <i>A Star Is Born</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Original Score, Motion Picture</b><br />
Marco Beltrami, <i>A Quiet Place</i><br />
Alexandre Desplat, <i>Isle of Dogs</i><br />
Ludwig Göransson, <i>Black Panther</i><br />
Justin Hurwitz, <i>First Man</i><br />
Marc Shaiman, <i>Mary Poppins Returns</i><br />
<br />
<b>Best Motion Picture, Animated</b><br />
Incredibles 2<br />
Isle of Dogs<br />
Mirai<br />
Ralph Breaks the Internet<br />
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse<br />
<br />
<b>Best Motion Picture, Foreign Language</b><br />
Capernaum<br />
Girl<br />
Never Look Away<br />
Roma<br />
ShopliftersNorma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-58853729769825962742018-11-29T17:56:00.001-08:002018-11-29T17:56:43.699-08:00New York Film Critics Circle Winners<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4xr13DpfWFxAPnLfg3oXtN0omCndpc0mI-0b_RsVWxwAbiipgdYT_qsRL7s3vke99_JWB3KClxW3MpT3VZvItbf45Ptzilhyphenhyphen-s21di8Tk4w25w2AfjigQPX2PdJRloQaj5U4xgjZ1ijAX/s1600/NYFCC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="700" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4xr13DpfWFxAPnLfg3oXtN0omCndpc0mI-0b_RsVWxwAbiipgdYT_qsRL7s3vke99_JWB3KClxW3MpT3VZvItbf45Ptzilhyphenhyphen-s21di8Tk4w25w2AfjigQPX2PdJRloQaj5U4xgjZ1ijAX/s400/NYFCC.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Announced earlier today:<br />
<br />
<b>Best Film:</b> Roma<br />
<br />
<b>Best Director:</b> Alfonso Cuarón, <i>Roma</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actress:</b> Regina Hall, <i>Support the Girls</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actor:</b> Ethan Hawke, <i>First Reformed</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Supporting Actress:</b> Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Supporting Actor:</b> Richard E. Grant, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Screenplay:</b> Paul Schrader, <i>First Reformed</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Cinematography: </b>Alfonso Cuarón, <i>Roma</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Foreign Film:</b> Cold War<br />
<br />
<b>Best Non-Fiction Film:</b> Minding the Gap<br />
<br />
<b>Best Animated Film:</b> Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse<br />
<br />
<b>Best First Film:</b> Eighth GradeNorma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-85333216248387868632018-11-29T08:00:00.000-08:002018-11-29T08:00:03.718-08:00Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXohHlVeyutDl5fL67di4PTHLjA0jdWLRICaUMJM0TCPfq9ih4IM7hdi7g-c_6DzjVXhg1RZ3Uup8hPLp9FTsxHDlbmtws_S3K4gHhJD3QmFR7DVvnm231qj_yHW-yJm86kp_2WU0cTdAK/s1600/Can+You+Ever+Forgive+Me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="660" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXohHlVeyutDl5fL67di4PTHLjA0jdWLRICaUMJM0TCPfq9ih4IM7hdi7g-c_6DzjVXhg1RZ3Uup8hPLp9FTsxHDlbmtws_S3K4gHhJD3QmFR7DVvnm231qj_yHW-yJm86kp_2WU0cTdAK/s400/Can+You+Ever+Forgive+Me.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * * 1/2</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Marielle Heller<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant<br />
<br />
Likeability is a very overrated quality in a protagonist. We don't need to like someone to find their story compelling and engaging. We don't even have to like them in order to root for them to come out of things alright. Good thing, too, since <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i>'s Lee Israel, played with marvelously jagged edges by Melissa McCarthy, is pretty difficult to like most of the time. She's a nasty, misanthropic drunk who doesn't think twice about using people, screwing them over, and manipulating them. She's also a lonely person who tends to self-sabotage relationships because she fears connection/expects rejection, adores her cat, and is capable of deep compassion for people who are (somehow) worse off than she is. She's also pretty damn funny ("Oh to be a mediocre white man who doesn't realize how full of shit he is," she laments at one point and, lord, truer words have rarely been spoken) and the movie itself offers a great balance of seriousness and humor. It's one of the year's lowkey delights.<br />
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Set in the early 1990s, <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i> finds its protagonist well past her glory days - which may actually have been nothing more than a "glory day." Though she's had some success as a writer in the past, Lee Israel now works an office job (or she would, if she didn't get fired in the opening moments) and can't even get her agent (Jane Curtin) to return her calls - not that that matters since when she finally does get to talk to her agent she's told that no one is interested in the book she wants to write and that if she wants to have a career as a writer she needs to start playing nice, networking, and stop burning bridges at every turn. This is impossible for Lee to even contemplate because she has no patience for other people, but her unwillingness to play ball doesn't negate her need for money. She's behind on her rent and her cat is in need of a vet's attention so, in desperation, she sells a prize possession: a handwritten letter from Katharine Hepburn. When she later finds a letter written by Fanny Brice folded up and left in a book, she sells that, too, and begins to realize just how lucrative the "letters of dead celebrities" business can be. The only problem is that she has no more letters - at least, she has no more genuine letters.<br />
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Over the last several years McCarthy has become known for broad, often foul-mouthed, overtly comic characters. She's good at that, but she's good at subtler, more character based work, too, and that ability is on full display in <i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i> Lee is a hard character, but that hardness masks a soft, vulnerable center. We don't learn much about her life beyond the period that we see unfold in the film, but through McCarthy's performance we're given to understand that she rejects people before they have a chance to reject her, that she can only let someone in so far before she has to put on the brakes because to be any closer than that with someone would be to let down her defenses and give them an opportunity to hurt her. We see this play out in the tentative romance she has with a book store owner which ends before it even truly begins because Lee just can't bring herself to let someone in, even a little bit. Director Marielle Heller doesn't belabor the point, letting Lee's retreat from this relationship, and the profound sadness of someone who is so desperate for some kind of connection being too afraid to actually connect, speak for itself.<br />
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The one relationship Lee <i>does</i> form during the course of the film is not a romantic relationship, but a sort of bonding of kindred spirits with a fellow drunkard of great disrepute. This is Jack Hock, played superbly by Richard E. Grant as a man who is at once so similar to Lee and yet so completely her opposite. Both are drunks who will not hesitate to take advantage of someone for their own gain, but while Lee does everything she can to separate herself from the rest of humanity, Jack embraces it, engaging with the world as a social butterfly whereas Lee engages like a hermit. He's determined to go through life like it's nothing but a good time, as if he's forever living inside an amusing anecdote even though his circumstances are much darker than he lets on. He manages to stir something in Lee - not romantic in the least, both being gay - that compels her to let him further into her life than anyone else, even letting him in on the secret of her newfound criminal enterprise, which he has a difficult time comprehending because the idea of paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for someone else's correspondence is completely ridiculous to him. He's a great character, funny and tragic in turn (and sometimes all at once), and while McCarthy is bound to get plenty of attention for her performance as the Best Actress race develops, I hope that Grant emerges in the conversation for Best Supporting Actor because he more than deserves it.<br />
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<i>Can You Ever Forgive Me?</i> works on several levels. It works as a portrait of two sad, damaged and damaging people who find in each other the understanding that so often eludes them, and then lose each other because they just can't help from giving into their worst and most destructive instincts. It works as a comedy about those same two people getting into trouble and not giving a damn because they're having such a good time (most of the time) while doing it. And it works as a slow burning thriller about someone who, in desperation, turns to crime and only realizes that she's in over her head once it becomes too late to pull out of it unscathed, becoming more and more frantic as it becomes increasingly clear that the game is almost up. The tension towards the end is almost unbearable because, despite everything she does throughout the film, you kind of end up rooting for Lee to get away with it all - even though you don't necessarily like her, even though she herself is almost entirely unrepentant. The title might ask forgiveness, but she seeks none, and it's that pitch perfect "sorry not sorry" tone that the film captures so well and which makes it such an engaging piece of work.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-52812627520935165842018-11-28T08:00:00.000-08:002018-11-28T08:00:18.049-08:00Review: Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNGjKsv75Klr7AfAo6ROm1Q-6qj1RS_VTSGMiSU0sScxqksb2tCDdQ9opbvpun_eruKNAJNdORP2lxC-WuKQSt6tyy33oRYP2nuhGi-rekdKhRW4RVb_BKvgqdayjMoXUIhUXKSUtm9rUk/s1600/Bohemian+Rhapsody.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="655" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNGjKsv75Klr7AfAo6ROm1Q-6qj1RS_VTSGMiSU0sScxqksb2tCDdQ9opbvpun_eruKNAJNdORP2lxC-WuKQSt6tyy33oRYP2nuhGi-rekdKhRW4RVb_BKvgqdayjMoXUIhUXKSUtm9rUk/s400/Bohemian+Rhapsody.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Bryan Singer<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Rami Malek<br />
<br />
Early in <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) argues that Queen shouldn't be conventional, a moment that, even at that early stage in the narrative, is hilariously lacking in self-awareness given how conventional the film itself actually is. Yet as formulaic as the film's opening stretch is, by the time it reaches its conclusion <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> has managed to overcome its flaws (of which there are many on a basic storytelling level) to become something deeply moving. Maybe it's the music, so familiar, so catchy, so capable of amping a person up. Maybe it's the lead performance by Malek, which transcends mere imitation and hits on something intensely and beautifully true. Whatever it is, once <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> gets going it doesn't just take off, it soars.<br />
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The road to <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> was an arduous one. For the better part of a decade numerous directors, writers, and stars were attached and then dropped out of (or were dropped from) the project and even after production of the film finally got under way, it remained plagued by problems with some scenes being directed by the film's cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel, credited director Bryan Singer being fired with two weeks remaining on principal production (for frequent absences from the set - though it's worth noting that those absences and the firing coincided with allegations of Singer's sexual predation), and Dexter Fletcher being brought in to finish directing the film. With all that being taken into consideration, it's amazing that <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> isn't a complete mess from start to finish, but it does get off to a rough start, adopting a narrative strategy of "this happened and then this happened and then this happened," hitting important moments but not necessarily building a narrative that actually feels like it's developing the characters and the story. Instead it feels like scenes dropped into the movie one after the other without any particular depth, nuance, or grace.<br />
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However, once the film gets past the opening stages and starts to settle into its characterization of its protagonist, it improves exponentially. It never shakes that "pause and wink" trap that biopics tend to fall into, where scenes are designed to name drop an event or thing that the audience will easily recognize and feel an instant connection to, scenes where you can practically hear a "Ding!" as it hits the mark (here the band is writing "We Will Rock You" Ding! Here the band is writing "Another One Bites the Dust" Ding!), but at a certain point that stops being a distraction. The film might not have the most elegant screenplay structure, but it quickly comes to excel in using Mercury to fashion an affecting portrait of loneliness. Early in the film Mercury meets and begins dating Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), a relationship which is precious to him but ultimately at odds with his sexuality. They break up but he keeps her close to him, buying a house for himself and a flat next door for her to live in, ecstatic at the idea that he can look out his window and see into hers. Although he has wealth and fame, he has none of what he actually wants, which is the intimacy of sharing his life with someone. The loneliness encapsulated in that scene, during which he switches a light on and off and encourages Mary to do the same in her flat as if to confirm that not only does he see but is seen in return, is heartbreaking.<br />
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That desire to have someone - not to be with someone, but to <i>have</i> someone - emerges as the thread that pulls everything together. It informs so much of what the film shows of Mercury's life in the latter half of its story, as the other band members drift somewhat away, occupied with their partners and families, as Mary drifts away into a new romantic relationship, as the AIDS epidemic casts an even greater shadow on Mercury's sexual life than already existed as a result of bigotry and hatred, that it's little wonder that the Live Aid performance that comes at the film's end and which becomes its showcase sequence is so powerful. In that performance (which is, without question, one of the absolute best sequences in film this year) Mercury finds that connection. He calls to the audience and they answer him in many voices coming together as one. There's a give and take, a relationship, and for the duration of that performance they're everything to him and he's everything to them. If this sequence was the only good thing in the movie, the movie would be worth seeing for it alone because it's just that good.<br />
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Fortunately <I>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> has more to its credit than just that sequence, and more than just Malek's terrific, soulful performance. Many of its pleasures are superficial, found in the way the camera moves through certain scenes with a sensual grace, in the costume design, and, of course, in the musical performances. I think that even the most resistant audience member would be quickly won over as soon as one of those songs starts up (and then won over again with the next one and won over again with the next one... a Queen playlist is pretty stacked with awesomeness). Objectively speaking, <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> is not a great movie, but by the time you get to the end it <i>feels</i> like a great movie. Sometimes that's more than enough.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-25606931342725955872018-11-27T17:44:00.002-08:002018-11-27T17:44:28.752-08:00National Board of Review Winners<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp9wl_I9gFg-ib2VJnasDMDf49GNf5pS2l69bUNilXTodp5tz4K2KAfumqTqzzs2Re0H4TL6c3rFMm84xjFx1PdV2Q_cjRbYd9nXoZZXoG9Ki8Tj4WtPj09feojGcaB6S4x8X9xxNSlG8G/s1600/NBR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="700" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp9wl_I9gFg-ib2VJnasDMDf49GNf5pS2l69bUNilXTodp5tz4K2KAfumqTqzzs2Re0H4TL6c3rFMm84xjFx1PdV2Q_cjRbYd9nXoZZXoG9Ki8Tj4WtPj09feojGcaB6S4x8X9xxNSlG8G/s400/NBR.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The best in film from 2018 as selected by the National Board of Review, announced earlier today:<br />
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<br />
<b>Best Film:</b> Green Book<br />
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<b>Top 10 Films</b><br />
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs<br />
Black Panther<br />
Can You Ever Forgive Me?<br />
Eighth Grade<br />
First Reformed<br />
If Beale Street Could Talk<br />
Mary Poppins Returns<br />
A Quiet Place<br />
Roma<br />
A Star Is Born<br />
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<b>Best Director:</b> Bradley Cooper, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actor:</b> Viggo Mortensen, <i>Green Book</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Actress:</b> Lady Gaga, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Supporting Actress:</b> Regina King, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
<b><br />
</b> <b>Best Supporting Actor:</b> Sam Elliott, <i>A Star is Born</i><br />
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<b>Best Original Screenplay:</b> Paul Schrader, <i>First Reformed</i><br />
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<b>Best Adapted Screenplay:</b> Barry Jenkins, <i>If Beale Street Could Talk</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <b>Best Animated Feature:</b> Incredibles 2<br />
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<b>Best Foreign Language Film:</b> Cold War<br />
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<b>Top 5 Foreign Language Films</b><br />
Burning<br />
Custody<br />
The Guilty<br />
Happy as Lazzaro<br />
Shoplifters<br />
<br />
<b>Best Documentary:</b> RBG<br />
<br />
<b>Top 5 Documentaries</b><br />
Crime + Punishment<br />
Free Solo<br />
Minding the Gap<br />
Three Identical Strangers<br />
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?<br />
<br />
<b>Breakthrough Performance:</b> Thomasin McKenzie, <i>Leave No Trace</i><br />
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<b>Best Directorial Debut:</b> Bo Burnham, <i>Eighth Grade</i><br />
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<b>Best Ensemble:</b> <i>Crazy Rich Asians</i><br />
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<b>William K. Everson Film History Award:</b> The Other Side of the Wind and They'll Love Me When I'm Dead<br />
<br />
<b>Top 10 Independent Films</b><br />
The Death of Stalin<br />
Lean on Pete<br />
Leave No Trace<br />
Mid90s<br />
The Old Man & the Gun<br />
The Rider<br />
Searching<br />
Sorry to Bother You<br />
We the Animals<br />
You Were Never Really HereNorma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-20287702749759015832018-11-14T08:00:00.000-08:002018-11-14T08:00:05.479-08:00The Other Side of the Wind (2018) and They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoM1dyJaSR30wW8a2SHOQ9BTeM0tyyAYqPdBHxS6_P-7LHgzAs1HeV68Tfq3hPGTjcGCJ9czm8U45tgEBk408J2FUnuMeKZb4Ocv9EjrWBzWFJSu0Ido78GbgkiF8_L3IxRFutXH2NXTNF/s1600/Other+Side.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="660" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoM1dyJaSR30wW8a2SHOQ9BTeM0tyyAYqPdBHxS6_P-7LHgzAs1HeV68Tfq3hPGTjcGCJ9czm8U45tgEBk408J2FUnuMeKZb4Ocv9EjrWBzWFJSu0Ido78GbgkiF8_L3IxRFutXH2NXTNF/s400/Other+Side.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<b>The Other Side of the Wind Director:</b> Orson Welles<br />
<b>They'll Love Me When I'm Dead Director:</b> Morgan Neville<br />
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Rarely has an artist been so astonishingly talented and so stunningly unlucky. Orson Welles was only 25 when he made <i>Citizen Kane</i>, a masterpiece among masterpieces, and while it certainly wouldn't be accurate to say that it was all downhill from there, his filmography boasting several great post-<i>Kane</i> movies, things certainly started to get a lot more difficult almost immediately. By the time of his death in 1985, his film work consisted of projects made just for the money so that he could fund his own personal projects, and those personal projects, which were largely left unfinished. One of those projects was <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i> which was filmed off and on from 1970 to 1976, embroiled in various legal battles for decades thereafter, and has now been completed by a team overseen by Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall. <i>They'll Love Me When I'm Dead</i> is a documentary companion piece to <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i>, detailing its troubled production as well as touching on several of his unfinished projects. Both are available on Netflix.<br />
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<i>The Other Side of the Wind</i> is a movie about the making of a movie called The Other Side of the Wind. The director of the movie within the movie is Jake Hannaford (John Huston), once a giant of the industry and now deep in a period of decline. In an attempt to get his career back on track he's trying his hand at making something more boundary pushing and experimental, but the film has gone off the rails as a result of one of his male lead John Dale (Bob Random) having stormed off the set in the midst of filming. Despite the actor only appearing via the footage of the film within the film, the relationship between the director and the actor slowly comes into focus as the crux of the piece. Hannaford thinks that Dale is his "discovery," a kid that he's plucked out of nowhere and fashioned into an actor through his superior skills as a director. Later he discovers that Dale manufactured their chance meeting in the hope of gaining his big break and this revelation, coupled with suggestions of a sexual aspect to the pair's relationship (not necessarily consummated), sends Hannaford into something of a tailspin.<br />
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The film within the film, glimpsed in bits and pieces throughout <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i>, is about... I don't even know. There's this woman (Oja Kodar, whose character is billed as The Actress) who is maybe (or maybe not?) being pursued by a guy (John Dale), they have sex in a car (in front of her boyfriend, who is driving), they end up on the MGM backlot, they're both naked a lot and neither of them at any point says a single word of dialogue, and the last scene shown from the movie within the movie involves her stabbing an inflatable phallus until it collapses. Basically, it's the worst kind of late 60s/early 70s auteur movie: opaque for the sake of opaque, gratuitously sexual, mistaking boundary pushing for depth. It's ridiculous, but intentionally so - it's meant to be a parody of the worst excesses of that period in cinema. That's clear enough from <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i>, but Welles explicitly states as much in an interview clip included in <i>They'll Love Me When I'm Dead</i>, but what's revealing about the documentary is that, in a different way, Welles' approach to <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i> was just an self-indulgent as the filmmakers that he's mocking. In an interview about the film he describes, essentially, wanting to turn on the cameras and just see what happens. He doesn't know exactly what it's going to be, he gives various suggestions of things that might happen and says things like "and that could be the film!"; his enthusiasm is charming, but he doesn't really give the impression in these interviews that there's really a point to the project.<br />
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<i>Although</i>, the finished project ultimately has so many elements of autobiography that it belies this supposedly "loosey goosey" approach. <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i> is, after all, about a director who was a major player once but now struggles to get financing for his projects and ends up leaving the film he's working on unfinished. That, in and of itself, is Welles' story, but there's also a subplot involving the tension between Hannaford and Brooks Otterlake, once a protege and now a much more successful director played by Peter Bogdanovich... who was once a protege to Welles and, at the time the film was made, a much more successful director. There's also the fact that <i>The Other Side of the Wind</i> is having some fun at the expense of a certain kind of movie that was being made in the 60s/70s and the documentary points out that Welles specifically chose a location that was next door at the house that gets blown up at the end of <i>Zabriske Point</i>, a film which epitomizes exactly that kind of terrible movie he's mocking.<br />
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<i>The Other Side of the Wind</i> is a strange but ultimately entertaining movie all on its own, but it's best seen in conjunction with <i>They'll Love Me When I'm Dead</i>, which illuminates so much about Welles' struggles to get the film made and then to get it through post-production (among the many problems was the fact that the film had received backing from an Iranian company and after the Iranian Revolution the film was impounded by the government of Ayatollah Khomeini). I would recommend watching the film before the documentary, because the documentary will give you an increased appreciation for Welles' craftsmanship, particularly when it delves into the fact that Welles would often start filming a scene, take a break to go off and do some other movie in order to make money to put into his own production, and then come back (sometimes years later) to finish filming that particular scene - something which isn't really apparent from the finished product; a lot of it looks pretty seamless. As is the case is so many documentaries about troubled film productions, <i>They'll Love Me When I'm Dead</i> (which also touches on the issues that drove him out of Hollywood in the first place as well as the great many films that he left in various stages of completion) is fully worth watching in its own right as a film that's both informative and entertaining in equal measure.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-79027868616130274472018-11-13T08:00:00.000-08:002018-11-13T08:00:15.981-08:00Review: Outlaw King (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMGXcllPGj8skmF0oNJdE-6J7S9cODFR9JL-P4PALPmM16Ds3Z3WBNJ_oDJts7qHBJx1U4XsTxZV4YvHKdLzgF9W311xJ3JSBpgLscxeXhxotp9mX9peC2_Ni5wVCqENXCKbycF5T12rax/s1600/Outlaw+King.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="555" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMGXcllPGj8skmF0oNJdE-6J7S9cODFR9JL-P4PALPmM16Ds3Z3WBNJ_oDJts7qHBJx1U4XsTxZV4YvHKdLzgF9W311xJ3JSBpgLscxeXhxotp9mX9peC2_Ni5wVCqENXCKbycF5T12rax/s400/Outlaw+King.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> David Mackenzie<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Chris Pine<br />
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Generally speaking, when a movie premieres and the only thing people are discussing is the star's nude scene, that's a bad sign. It usually means that there's nothing else that's particularly interesting about the finished project, and when the critical reception is mixed (in the case of this film, to the tune of a 56 on Rotten Tomatoes and a 60 on Metacritic) that only reinforces that idea. In the case of <i>Outlaw King</i>, a historical drama about Robert the Bruce, the salacious bent of the coverage and the lack of enthusiasm from critics doesn't really do the film justice. As far as the much discussed nude scene goes, I doubt people would even give it a second thought if it had been done by an actor less famous than Chris Pine or an actress of any level of fame (and, in fact, Pine's co-star Florence Pugh also has a nude scene in the movie, and one in which the camera lingers on her nudity much more than it does on Pine, but female nudity is so de rigueur in film that it doesn't even seem noteworthy). As far as its poor critical reception, well, it's not a masterpiece but it's a perfectly serviceable movie of the "Important Man Did Important Thing" variety and shouldn't be written off as nothing more than <i>Braveheart</i>-lite.<br />
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<i>Outlaw King</i> begins with flair via a showy tracking shot that begins inside a tent where Robert Bruce (Pine) bends the knee to Edward I of England (Stephen Dillane) then walks outside where Edward's son, also Edward (Billy Howle), challenges him to a sword fight, which proceeds for a couple of minutes before Edward is called into the tent where his father tells him, essentially, to stop fucking around because it's embarrassing him, before going outside himself to show off his new siege weapon, launching a flaming boulder into the castle in the distance and then telling one of his underlings that now he can accept the surrender of the army garrisoned inside - he just didn't want to accept it until after he'd had a chance to use his new toy, since it was so expensive and took so long to make. As flamboyant as the sequence is - and, just in case you didn't register the technical prowess of the shot, the script has Edward I announce "We have a spectacle!" - it also serves to establish a few key things: Edward I is kind of a dick, his son is desperate for the approval of his father which he will never get, and Robert (who spends the sword fight alternating between swinging the sword and drinking) is sort of over it. Two of these things will remain true until the end of the film; the other will change over time.<br />
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After the death of his father (also named Robert), who had been the primary influence in Robert's decision to do homage to Edward I, Robert becomes head of the Bruce family and is in a position to begin planning a revolt against the English overlordship of Scotland. After murdering John Comyn (Callan Mulvey), his rival claimant to the Scottish throne, Robert is crowned King of Scots and begins his campaign to wrest his country from English rule, leading to a series of scenes bathed in blood and mud as swords clang, arrows fly, and men die agonizing deaths. Director David Mackenzie doesn't reinvent the wheel with the battle scenes and none of them particularly distinguish themselves from any of the thousands of similar scenes from countless medieval-set movies, but they're well done nevertheless. The CGI is unobtrusive and Mackenzie manages to simultaneously capture the chaos of the medieval melee while also providing a clear sense of where the characters are in relation to each other and how the battle is unfolding. It might not be anything new, but it's certainly never boring.<br />
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Like all historical stories, <i>Outlaw King</i> plays a bit fast and loose with the facts, sometimes for good reason, other times not so much. Robert's consort Elizabeth de Burgh (Pugh, bringing some spark and steeliness to the prototypical "woman behind the man" role) did not end up spending years in a wooden cage hung up outside a castle - her father was, after all, a friend of Edward I and a courtier powerful enough that Edward needed to maintain his support - after being captured by the English, but that was a fate that befell Robert's sister, Mary, and the decision to assign that fate to Elizabeth instead functions both as a means of consolidating events for a cleaner narrative with fewer characters to keep track of (you wouldn't know from the film that Robert even had sisters, since his family is shown as consisting only of his father, his brothers, and his daughter from his first marriage) and as a way to give some meat to the character. Less justifiable is the depiction of Edward I dying on campaign in Scotland and his son ordering that his body be dumped in a grave then and there, as if Edward I wasn't brought back to London and laid to rest properly at Westminster Abbey - in a tomb that identifies him as "Hammer of the Scots," just to rub it in. Scenes like this only serve to further belabor the point that Edward II - a King who is seemingly more disliked in our time than he was in his own, and he was <i>despised</i> in his own time - sucks. While not succumbing to the overt homophobia of <i>Braveheart</i>'s portrayal of him, <i>Outlaw King</i> nevertheless goes out of its way to characterize him as a sniveling fool, even going so far as to have him literally run crying from a battle at which, in real life, he was not even present.<br />
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Veracity aside, <i>Outlaw King</i> tells a solid and compelling story, depicting Robert the Bruce as a man willing to sacrifice everything for his country and who perseveres even when it seems most hopeless. After being badly routed by the English he's left trying to recruit new troops, a hard enough task even before he has to admit to those he's trying to tempt to his side that he's down to an army of all of 40 men. Rather than give up, he decides to change his tactics, doing things that the English won't expect (such as burning down his own castles just to keep them out of English hands), and turning his intimate knowledge of the land to his advantage to lead the enemy army into a trap. Despite the character being a leader of men, Pine scales back his usual charisma, turning in a performance that involves a lot of silent brooding, but it works. At one point a character asks him what kind of man he is and he responds that he's trying to be a good one - it's that sense of conflict over wanting to be good but having to do terrible things to get there, that Pine gets across and it's the engine that ultimately drives the movie.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-58950041213191195382018-10-30T20:38:00.001-07:002018-10-30T20:38:27.687-07:00The Hate U Give (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC0yNVIZTNgocU0N9KVuxFWO6H97mrzI979ua2LATax22WLb7FeA_ZdKRxoSG1UnMvlfGA0zUApN3ZC6yY3r3CcsEMdI8gWaBe4KZOawuLZyG7WFjJQz07sPgrtceCRWscMjapA8WL7NO2/s1600/Hate+U+Give.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="555" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC0yNVIZTNgocU0N9KVuxFWO6H97mrzI979ua2LATax22WLb7FeA_ZdKRxoSG1UnMvlfGA0zUApN3ZC6yY3r3CcsEMdI8gWaBe4KZOawuLZyG7WFjJQz07sPgrtceCRWscMjapA8WL7NO2/s400/Hate+U+Give.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * * 1/2</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> George Tillman Jr.<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Amandla Stenberg, Russell Hornsby, Regina Hall<br />
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I don't know that there's an emptier platitude than when a white person states that they "don't see color." It's a statement that's intended to indicate to whomever is listening that the person making it isn't racist - is, in fact, so not racist that he or she doesn't even recognize that the concept of race exists - but which actually just announces that the person saying it is blind to the way that racism is so institutionalized that it's an inescapable part of day to day life. If you're going to say "I don't see color," you might as well just say "I can't be bothered to see what you're going through, even though it's happening all around me." White people and people of color experience the world in different ways, because the world experiences <i>them</i> in different ways. White parents don't need to talk to their kids about how to minimize the possibility that they will be shot by the police; black parents do. That's tragic and it's wrong and you can't solve a problem without acknowledging that it exists in the first place.<br />
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Adapted by Audrey Wells from the novel by Angie Thomas, <i>The Hate U Give</i> tells a story in which race and identity are paramount. It centers on Starr (Amandla Stenberg) a teenager who lives in a neighborhood that is predominantly poor and black but attends a private school full of rich, mostly white kids. As she explains in voiceover, this leaves her feeling divided against herself, adopting one persona at school while living another at home. She is vigilant when she's at school, determined not to give her classmates a reason to look down on her or view her through the prism of any number of racial stereotypes - she accepts slights such as someone cutting in front of her in a line up because she knows that if she speaks up she'll become the "angry black girl;" she won't let her boyfriend come over to her house because she doesn't want to be written off as being a girl from "the ghetto." Her boyfriend, Chris (KJ Apa), is white and sort of clueless, telling her that he doesn't see color even as she's trying to explain to him that she <i>needs</i> him to see her as black if he's going to understand even a modicum of what she's been going through.<br />
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The stress of living two lives and of trying to navigate the competing desires of her parents - her mother (Regina Hall) wants to move out of their neighborhood due to the gang presence there, while her father (Russell Hornsby) wants to stay because abandoning the neighborhood to the gangs would be doing a disservice to their community, which is full of people who can't just up and move away - would be compelling enough on its own, particularly given the depth and nuance of Stenberg's performance, but <i>The Hate U Give</i> merely uses this premise as the foundation for a much larger and more eventful story. Although she's dating Chris, Starr is also drawn to Khalil (Algee Smith), a boy from the neighborhood that she's been friends with since infancy but hasn't seen much of lately because their lives have been set on such different paths - hers onto one designed to raise her out of the poverty and lack of opportunity that's all around her, his onto one designed to lead him into what Starr's father refers to as "the trap" represented by the drug trade with its false promises of profit. After running into each other at a party from which they're forced to flee when a fight breaks out and a gunshot is fired, Khalil gives Starr a ride home and they're pulled over by the police. The traffic stop will end with Khalil being shot three times and Starr left with a choice: does she keep her head down, stay silent and just move on with her life as best she can, or does she speak up and attract the attention (and ire) of both the police and the gang leader (Anthony Mackie) that Khalil was dealing for.<br />
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From this point forward <i>The Hate U Give</i> proceeds in breathless fashion, following several different threads as the various facets of Starr's life wind together around this incident. There's her grief at the death of her friend (the second friend she's lost to gun violence, having seen another gunned down years earlier), her fear about speaking out against the police and the pressure she faces from activists to testify at a grand jury inquiry, the threats that she and her family receive from the gang who don't want an investigation to turn in their direction, her desire to keep her identity as the witness to the shooting a secret so that the kids at school don't know that she was involved and draw a negative, stereotypical inference, and her relationships with her white friends at school, one of whom decides that the aftermath of a black kid getting shot is the perfect time to express that "all lives" matter, and her relationship with her peers generally, some of whom use the shooting as an excuse to cut class under the guise of protesting the epidemic of black people being killed by the police. There's also a subplot involving Starr's brother Seven (Lamar Johnson), with whom she shares a father but not a mother and whose mother is in a relationship with the gang leader who is threatening Starr and her family. In a lesser movie all of this plot (which also includes a protest that turns into a riot) might start to seem overwrought, but director George Tillman Jr. keeps things on an on even keel and, more importantly, keeps things grounded in the reality that the system is rigged against black people who, in the words of one of the characters, cannot do enough to seem "non-threatening" when their very blackness has been weaponized and turned into something menacing in and of itself.<br />
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<i>The Hate U Give</i> is a deeply engaging and moving film in addition to being intensely, sadly relevant. Elements that might seem like weaknesses in a less skillfully made film - such as how incredibly busy the plot is and the inelegance of some of the exposition in the dialogue - are easily overlooked here thanks to the emotional depth of the storytelling and the effectiveness of the performances. Few performances this year will be better than Stenberg's as the conflicted Starr, caught between worlds, faced with nothing but painful choices and trying to do more than simply get through it, and she's ably supported by the rest of the cast, particularly Hornsby and Hall as parents desperately trying to keep their children safe in circumstances where any number of small mistakes could end in tragedy. <i>The Hate U Give</i> is a solid movie that leaves you rapt from beginning to end.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-18961015534532815572018-10-29T08:00:00.000-07:002018-10-29T08:00:00.139-07:00Review: First Man (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXIdWDtWrfAruz1UCO4qaHeOmR68rbBdrAI0RxH8YXT1qenxBcwJeLc8SX96XScp0jxCxtR3RlWYr4kS9grmU_a-jvAm2Bq_NUSov8RQ6eLn5hGgj5jqJF9zZagRQXBxO7vHkx3Gaxup-n/s1600/First+Man.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="600" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXIdWDtWrfAruz1UCO4qaHeOmR68rbBdrAI0RxH8YXT1qenxBcwJeLc8SX96XScp0jxCxtR3RlWYr4kS9grmU_a-jvAm2Bq_NUSov8RQ6eLn5hGgj5jqJF9zZagRQXBxO7vHkx3Gaxup-n/s400/First+Man.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * * 1/2</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Damien Chazelle<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy<br />
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With <i>First Man</i> Damien Chazelle tells the epic story of the moon landing on a deeply intimate scale. At times it feels more like a domestic drama about a family suffocating under the weight of grief both real and anticipated than a retelling of the dangerous work of figuring out how to send human beings off of earth and onto another astronomical body and then bring them back - though, make no mistake, the film is nevertheless invested in showing the painstaking process of trial and error that resulted in NASA's triumph. Anchored by a great performance from Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, with the supporting ranks full of solid performances themselves, <i>First Man</i> is a thoughtful, sometimes even powerful, film about one of the defining events not only of the 20th century, but of human history itself.<br />
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The emotional axis on which the narrative turns is the impact of the death of Armstrong's daughter, Karen, who succumbs to brain cancer in 1962 at the age of two. As the film opens, Karen is still undergoing treatment and Armstrong is shown keeping detailed log books about every aspect of her treatment and symptoms, as though he might be able to "solve" her illness as if it were a math problem. After Karen's death the family moves to Houston so that Armstrong can participate in Project Gemini, with his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), hopefully stating that it will be a "fresh start." However, it's difficult to move forward from trauma without actually dealing with it first, and Karen's death is like a specter chasing Armstrong deeper and deeper inside himself. As the goal of getting a man to the moon comes closer and closer to becoming a reality - happening at speed because the Soviets keep reaching milestones first - and men who are in the program with him begin to lose their lives in the pursuit, death becomes an inescapable part of Armstrong's daily life. Each time a friend and colleague dies, the pain of losing his daughter comes back to him and the reality that his life may be the next one lost becomes into sharper and sharper relief.<br />
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The story is told in two distinct spheres. One is the workplace where Armstrong and his colleagues work diligently to solve the problems presented by trying to get a man to the moon and back, and who bravely put their lives on the line in test after test as NASA tackles one aspect of the problem after another. When Chazelle depicts these men in their various crafts, the metal rattling as if it might come apart at any moment, seeming as though it's held together by little more than prayers, the thin line between success and failure is driven home with clarity. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (played by Corey Stoll and depicted here as the sort of boorish loud mouth who claims to say the things that every one else is only thinking) made it to the moon and back, but there were never any guarantees. Any number of things could have gone wrong at any number of points throughout the mission and though we the audience have the benefit of knowing how this turns out, Chazelle is still able to ratchet up the tension and highlight how non-existent that margin for error really was.<br />
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The other sphere is the Armstrong home, where Armstrong is depicted as being in perpetual retreat from emotional attachment. The pain he feels over Karen's death is his alone, shared with no one - including Janet, the one person who would truly understand it. Although there are moments of happiness in the Armstrong household where he's shown playing with his two sons and joking with Janet, the closer the film gets to the Apollo 11 mission the more isolated Armstrong becomes, distancing himself from his family. So reluctant is he to engage emotionally that he's shown packing up to leave home before the launch, having apparently planned on leaving without saying goodbye to his sons or acknowledging to them that they may never see him again. This is a bridge too far for Janet, who up until this point has quietly accepted that the emotional labor of the family will be her burden alone, but refuses to accept the extraordinary responsibility of having to tell their kids that their dad has gone to the moon without saying a word to them about it. The role of the concerned wife is, generally speaking, a thankless one. That's as true in this film as in most, though Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer try to emphasize how vital Janet's role is as part of the family unit and how little acknowledgement she gets for it, but this scene alone is so powerful that it's little wonder why Foy was drawn to the role.<br />
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When Janet finally does force her husband to talk to their children about what he's going to do, he does it with the matter of factness of a press conference, acknowledging in the face of his eldest son's questions that he may never return, but betraying nothing about how he feels about that and saying none of the things he might be expected to want to say just in case he never comes back to say it later on. As told by Chazelle, <i>First Man</i> is a film about the first moon landing, but it's equally a film about the loneliness of grief in a society that demands that men be restrained in their emotions. For that reason alone I'm somewhat baffled by critics who read this movie as a right wing longing for the "good old days." There's nothing particularly commendable about societal notions of masculinity being so limited that a man can only cry over the death of his daughter when he's alone in a room and bristles at the mere mention of her death lest he betray that he feels anything other than anger, and the film doesn't depict this as being in any way aspirational. The quiet final scene reiterates this with Armstrong, having experienced the different perspective that he speaks of space offering early in the film, making a simple gesture to express an emotion. He and Janet are literally separated by glass when he does it, but the way that Chazelle films it turns it into a moment of deep intimacy as her reflection on the glass combines with his image. In that moment he finally lets her in - all he had to do to get to that place was leave the planet.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-11514575482822667362018-10-16T18:14:00.001-07:002018-10-16T18:14:01.963-07:00A Star Is Born: An Evolution in Four Films<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAu5q4Kv_epAVYrgLuX0sjQXVxnDSzPZTKd4ZuMknHqiDnd867YI7XCBw_cAYz0bLZKIhf0kDaNc-LM6YSxH2HM1Mwb_ox6PddcxCIqc729e-1vQfH7UgBAPYDsSK48wzTXuMaFGM_z6oV/s1600/ASIB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="735" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAu5q4Kv_epAVYrgLuX0sjQXVxnDSzPZTKd4ZuMknHqiDnd867YI7XCBw_cAYz0bLZKIhf0kDaNc-LM6YSxH2HM1Mwb_ox6PddcxCIqc729e-1vQfH7UgBAPYDsSK48wzTXuMaFGM_z6oV/s400/ASIB.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
They say that there's a version of <i>A Star Is Born</i> for every generation - a statement which isn't technically true since the 1990s never produced a version, resulting in a 42 year break between the most recent two, but which seems true enough in spirit. While the knee-jerk reaction to movie remakes is generally something along the lines of, "Ugh, why?" (unless it's a reboot of <i>Ghostbusters</i>, in which case it will be met with hysterical wailing about childhoods retroactively ruined), there's something endlessly compelling about this love story of a star in decline and a star on the rise. When you strip these four films down to the absolute bare bones of their stories, there is no fundamental difference between them. It's the same story - and, indeed, the same story beats - each and every time, leaving no reason why it shouldn't become stale after multiple outings. And yet there still manages to be something unique and compelling about each version, something which makes it worthwhile to keep coming back to the story again and again. So let's take a look at the fundamental similarities, and the specific differences, between these four films.<br />
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For the uninitiated, this is the story of <i>A Star Is Born</i>: A male star (Norman Maine in the first two films, John Norman Howard in the third, Jackson Maine in the fourth) meets a woman trying to break into the industry (Esther Blodgett, later Vicki Lester in the first two films, Esther Hoffman in the third, Ally in the fourth) and uses his clout to help her get her break as they begin a relationship. When they marry she is on the cusp of stardom, while his alcoholism is finally catching up to him to the point that he's run out of second chances in his career and is being written off by his industry. She stands by him as he falls further and further until he realizes that he's going to drag her down with him and takes his own life so that she will be free of him. Each version features the showcase scene of the female protagonist winning an award and the male protagonist interrupting her speech to ramble drunkenly, and each version ends with her speaking into a microphone, identifying herself as the wife of the man she loved but also standing on her own and announcing, in not so many words, that the show is going to go on.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC1nv17Pk4lyxdewIBHztDVK2a8mkacASizm_4nB6o7GPwYc9gpi6Q36LYpu6PMlrEgiBEWrnkvgFPCekQRCt5Ritxg9zkxf63cbm-9dLeQxi5mjnoWZaYXmeMN4RoETQYgb5OgNFirWuO/s1600/ASIB37.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC1nv17Pk4lyxdewIBHztDVK2a8mkacASizm_4nB6o7GPwYc9gpi6Q36LYpu6PMlrEgiBEWrnkvgFPCekQRCt5Ritxg9zkxf63cbm-9dLeQxi5mjnoWZaYXmeMN4RoETQYgb5OgNFirWuO/s320/ASIB37.jpg" width="320" height="201" data-original-width="580" data-original-height="365" /></a></div><center><b>A Star is Born (1937)</b></center><br />
<b>Starring:</b> Janet Gaynor, Frederic March<br />
<b>Director:</b> William A. Wellman<br />
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The first version opens on the Blodgett family farm, where Esther (Gaynor) dreams of going to Hollywood and becoming a star. The only member of her family who supports her dream is her grandmother (May Robson), who helps her sneak off the farm in the middle of the night and catch a train to Los Angeles, giving her life savings to Esther to help her get her new life started (Esther is reluctant to take her money, but her grandmother insists, hilariously revealing that she was only saving it for her funeral anyway). Things don't get off to a great start in Hollywood, where Esther struggles to get work as so much as an extra, but while working for a catering company she meets movie star Norman Maine (March), whom she had previously encountered at a concert. Taken with her, Norman helps her get a screen test, after which she gets a contract and a new Hollywood identity: Vicki Lester. She and Norman make a movie together which makes her an overnight sensation and the two actors begin a relationship, but she'll only marry him if he agrees to stop drinking. After they elope (much to the chagrin of the studio) her career continues a sharp upward trajectory, while he realizes that his drinking derailed his career to such an extent that he's not going to be able to recover from it. Though he's supportive of Vicki's career, he's frustrated with the decline of his own and starts drinking again and interrupts Vicki's acceptance speech when she wins an Oscar. He goes to a sanatorium to get sober but falls off the wagon again later and ends up getting arrested for drunk driving. Vicki pleads his case in court and afterwards decides to give up her career in order to care for him. Realizing that he's ruining her chance at stardom, Norman walks into the ocean and drowns himself. Though a grief stricken Vicki is prepared to walk away from Hollywood, her grandmother arrives in time to give her a pep talk and convince her not to walk away from all she's worked for. As the film closes, Vicki is at the premiere of her new movie and steps up to the microphone to speak to fans listening to a radio broadcast, identifying herself as "Mrs. Norman Maine."<br />
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This version, with a screenplay credited to William A. Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker, and Alan Campbell (who get a credit on every subsequent version, though only Wellman and Carson would get to share the Oscar for Best Writing, Original Story), is the template on which the three subsequent films will build themselves, and though it's somewhat similar to 1932's <i>What Price Hollywood?</i>, it's different enough that it doesn't really qualify as a remake itself (though one could argue that it's similar enough to be a "rip off"). It's a nimble picture that, unlike the versions that follow, manages to get it done in under 2 hours and which, despite its moments of heavy drama, is well balanced with lighter moments. It's centered on two strong performances by Gaynor and March, though Gaynor's time to shine really only comes at the end when she's tasked with working her character through her feelings of grief and defeat, while March gets to dig deep throughout the film. He starts the film as a man who has already gone to seed but is still charming enough that he seems rakish rather than tragic, but as the film progresses he slowly unravels, what remains of his dignity being chipped away bit by bit until all that's left is someone so vulnerable and wounded that he can no longer withstand anything.<br />
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In addition to the central performances, it also has a strong supporting cast, including Adolphe Menjou as the producer who helps shape Vicki's career and who tries to remain a friend to Norman even after Norman becomes persona non grata in Hollywood circles, Andy Devine as Vicki's best friend, and Robson who acts as both comic relief and the figure who provides Esther with the solid emotional support that she needs and whose performance is all the more amazing for the fact that she only appears right at the beginning and then right at the end. <i>A Star is Born</i> (1937) is a film that leaves little to improve upon, which goes a long way towards explaining why it has remained the foundation on which all the other versions build themselves.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpxcu0b2vepsvavQzRKbfdM7cIOqlXaGG8Dq8bKgnz4CrinfkVDK_2rO3bM6VTAcDdJ4PaePt-0mPj51civRuL0cMXqLeMdEdmHoS7dPDiFtocQzuVvU-9rRajSaIsV0jh3hahb9TTZT3a/s1600/ASIB54.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpxcu0b2vepsvavQzRKbfdM7cIOqlXaGG8Dq8bKgnz4CrinfkVDK_2rO3bM6VTAcDdJ4PaePt-0mPj51civRuL0cMXqLeMdEdmHoS7dPDiFtocQzuVvU-9rRajSaIsV0jh3hahb9TTZT3a/s320/ASIB54.jpg" width="320" height="197" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="370" /></a></div><center><b>A Star is Born (1952)</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> George Cukor<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Judy Garland, James Mason<br />
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The 1952 version is not a carbon copy of the 1937 version - it cuts out Esther's backstory, for example, starting the story when she's already in Hollywood and has been plugging away, trying to get her break, for a while; and it's also much longer on account of the musical numbers that appear throughout - but it is nevertheless extremely faithful to the original. It's so faithful that it doesn't merely reproduce narrative beats, but it recreates entire scenes right down to the dialogue. This includes a charmingly bizarre scene where Norman (James Mason) tries to show Esther/Vicki (Judy Garland) that he's capable of doing things around the house by making her a sandwich, which she gamely attempts to eat even though it's too big for any normal person to actually consume. To the 1952 version's credit, the sandwich that Mason hands Garland actually does look ridiculous (and Garland gets some good comic mileage out of trying to conquer it); that's not really the case in the 1937 version, which honestly just looks like a regular sandwich.<br />
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This version of the film is, arguably, the most beloved, featuring a luminous performance from Garland and a performance from Mason that's really quite tremendous as the increasingly broken man who goes from being a star in his own right to being a liability to his wife's stardom. This version is emotionally rich and handsomely put together under the direction of George Cukor, who had been offered the opportunity to direct the 1937 version but declined because he felt it was too similar to <i>What Price Hollywood?</i>, which he had directed. There are two versions of this film, the theatrical release (which runs at 154 minutes) and the restored version (which runs at 176 minutes). The restored version includes two musical numbers that were cut from the theatrical release as well as scenes "reconstructed" using restored dialogue played over production stills. Personally I recommend the theatrical version because I find that the use of production stills to restore lost scenes just interrupts the flow of a film, but the restored version is still worth seeing if only for the musical numbers, which appear here in their entirety.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgODeD6gTlLVThCdGQENyRv0XYoFvwUW90Ay69yQCnfs_7pF5hBmWPqaZJf1tWsqt8EXgOFy43rsZmd8F7B4_cbbYuFs3yp7qZDUepxHh8amWcs1UUofHAcmG1B228H-H7kn2xmvlHtJh06/s1600/ASIB76.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgODeD6gTlLVThCdGQENyRv0XYoFvwUW90Ay69yQCnfs_7pF5hBmWPqaZJf1tWsqt8EXgOFy43rsZmd8F7B4_cbbYuFs3yp7qZDUepxHh8amWcs1UUofHAcmG1B228H-H7kn2xmvlHtJh06/s320/ASIB76.jpg" width="320" height="197" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="370" /></a></div><center><b>A Star is Born (1976)</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Frank Pierson<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson<br />
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If the 1952 version is a faithful remake, the 1976 version is a remix. Transporting the story from the movie industry to the music industry, 1976 fashions its characters as rock star John Norman Maine (Kris Kristofferson), who is a popular performer even though literally every time he performs in this movie there comes a point when the crowd starts to "boo" him, and Esther Hoffman (Barbra Streisand), who is performing in small venues as part of a trio as the film opens. The structure of the story remains the same - he sees something in her that no one else does and helps nurture her career, opening the door to stardom for her so that she can burst through on the strength of her talent; they marry but his career falls apart under the weight of his addiction and the behavior that stems from it (in this case it results in his band deciding to carry on without him and his antics), while her career hits the stratosphere; she tries to nurse him through his addiction, even if it means sacrificing her own career - but the 1976 version is its own animal. While the 1937 and 1952 versions succeeded not merely on the strength of its two stars but also on the supporting players around them, the 1976 version relies much more heavily on its two stars. There are supporting players here - including a radio DJ whose antagonistic relationship with John Norman takes the place of the relationship between Norman and the studio publicist in the previous two versions - but they don't function as well as well as the supporting casts in the previous versions. The DJ, for example, just plays as a nuisance whereas the publicist had actual power and used it to give the fallen star a push towards the edge.<br />
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In this version there's really only room for the two protagonists and their relationship to each other, but the Streisand/Kristofferson combination doesn't work as well as Gaynor/March or Garland/Mason. Streisand is never particularly believable as the woman waiting for her big break - she seems like a "star" from the moment she appears on screen - and her performance tends to dwarf that of Kristofferson, whose performance is much more subtle. In a break from the previous two version, Kristofferson's version of the fallen star first tries to push his wife away when he realizes that his addiction is going to take them both down, cheating on her in a way that she's guaranteed to find out about. Instead she forgives him and they retreat to their home far away from all the temptations of the rock world, where the only thing that can separate them is death. Here, too, this version breaks with the previous one. Where the previous films ended with Norman taking his own life but doing so in a way that's just ambiguous enough that the press can characterize it as an accident, this one ends in a wholly ambiguous way. John Norman drives recklessly and then the films cuts away and next we know he's dead in the wreckage of a crash. He may have crashed on purpose, but it may actually have been an accident; the film leaves the question lingering.<br />
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While the 1937 and 1952 versions are both strong in their own ways, the 1976 version never completely works, which is a shame since it actually does try to remake the story while still doing something a bit different. Kristofferson is excellent, but his musical numbers get awfully repetitive (I swear, if I heard him ask "Are you a figment of my imagination, or am I one of yours?" one more time I would have lost it) compared to Streisand's numbers. On the other hand, some of the costumes in this movie are <i>ridiculous</i>, which can be entertaining in and of itself. In some of the scenes where Esther and John Norman are at their home away from the city they pretty much just look like they're doing cultural appropriation cosplay. But, yeah, there's a reason why this version is the least revered one.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAsWuNffuUFZVd5rIKFwCSEKBxutu8F-I5tC6-xN11rZDU1XL4LHcfeZXnXP76GCq7KXlViE9eSWXRSq-TWCHiHixJ44GV7D58kX6WcCpB8_6r-H4ZPBdLWqkErCZl5OfBe0cUeUIPb-nD/s1600/ASIB18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAsWuNffuUFZVd5rIKFwCSEKBxutu8F-I5tC6-xN11rZDU1XL4LHcfeZXnXP76GCq7KXlViE9eSWXRSq-TWCHiHixJ44GV7D58kX6WcCpB8_6r-H4ZPBdLWqkErCZl5OfBe0cUeUIPb-nD/s320/ASIB18.jpg" width="320" height="197" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="370" /></a></div><b></b><br />
<center><b>A Star is Born (2018)</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Bradley Cooper<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper<br />
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Like the 1976 version, the 2018 version departs a bit from the story, save for the specifics of the narrative's outline. Although Cooper's characterization of Jackson Maine owes something to Kristofferson's performance, and although the 2018 version recreates a scene from 1976 (specifically a scene in which the two lovers take a bath and she puts make up on him), 2018 isn't a remake of 1976 specifically. Like the 1976 version it sets its story in the music industry rather than the film industry, but like the 1937 and 1952 versions it also develops a solid world of supporting characters around the two protagonists. From Jack's brother, Bobby (Sam Elliott), the man who tried to make it first but never came close to the heights his younger brother would reach, to Ramon (Anthony Ramos), the friend to Ally (Lady Gaga) who encourages her to throw caution to the wind, to Ally's father (Andrew Dice Clay), who had dreams of being a singer himself, and Jack's friend, George (Dave Chappelle), who appears briefly but long enough to make the audience understand the depth of their long friendship, the supporting cast is strong and is used in a way that helps strengthen the audience's understanding of the two main characters.<br />
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Unlike any of the previous films, this one also removes any ambiguity regarding the male protagonist's fate. While the first two make it clear to the audience that he's committed suicide, but have him do it in a way that one could conceivably believe that he's died as a result of an accident, and the 1976 version leaves things vague so that you don't know for certain whether he's committed suicide or died as a result of an accident, this version leaves nothing to question. When Jack commit suicide, it's quite clearly suicide; an interesting choice that, in turn, allows Ally to give into rage, where Gaynor and Garland's characters are instead left to be serene in their grief. The 2018 version doesn't do anything by halves, wearing emotions on its sleeve at all times whether it be passion, anger, or the deepest despair. <i>A Star is Born</i> fully embraces the naked emotionality of melodrama and comes across not merely as a film that aims to manipulate its audience into feeling something, but as a work that feels things itself. I have no doubt that that's a large part of the reason why it's been so popular. While only time can tell if this version has staying power, it seems safe to say that it's a perfect movie for right now.<br />
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<b>Best Version:</b> 1937<br />
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<b>Best Esther/Vicki/Ally:</b> Judy Garland<br />
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<b>Best Norman/John Norman/Jack:</b> Bradley Cooper<br />
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<b>Best Award Show Interruption:</b> 1976<br />
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<b>Best Music:</b> It's not really fair to say. I'll have to reserve judgment until such a time as "Shallow" is no longer stuck in my head (10 days and counting...)<br />
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<b>Best Supporting Character:</b> Esther's grandmother, 1937 version<br />
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<b>Best Costumes:</b> 1976 version - they're ridiculous!<br />
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<b>Best Variation on "I Just Want to Take Another Look at You":</b> James Mason's line reading<br />
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<b>Best Final Scene:</b> 2018Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-13045296977293435352018-10-10T21:48:00.001-07:002018-10-10T21:48:11.835-07:00Review: A Star is Born (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXmYkgP3XvIY-GEWpD4y3xrLZzb3Z7hgCGbamDXkvnPJd7WsWGlEdgBiGyhZW5zl0DzcecmKrOytC5LcqoWMa6wlKEBdA7TIqEwXqF01OgxmxrHl9QZFSFi8f3XRVpppVZzPKy7mHJHVLC/s1600/Star+is+Born.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="660" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXmYkgP3XvIY-GEWpD4y3xrLZzb3Z7hgCGbamDXkvnPJd7WsWGlEdgBiGyhZW5zl0DzcecmKrOytC5LcqoWMa6wlKEBdA7TIqEwXqF01OgxmxrHl9QZFSFi8f3XRVpppVZzPKy7mHJHVLC/s400/Star+is+Born.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Bradley Cooper<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper<br />
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One of the most pleasant surprises so far this year is how good <i>A Star is Born</i> really is. I doubt many people would have expected that when the project was first announced, and when the studio released the trailer, which to my mind is one of the best trailers of the year, I don't know that most of us would have expected anything more than an okay movie with a really good trailer. So here it is and it's not only as good as its pre-release hype would suggest, it's as good as its tremendous post-release hype has been. I don't remember the last time that a non-Marvel, non-Star Wars movie prompted such a wealth of posts on pop culture sites, burning bright like a supernova of publicity. It's difficult to say that <i>any</i> movie could live up to this much chatter, but <i>A Star is Born</i> comes close enough. It's just a damn good movie; it really is.<br />
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This is, of course, the fourth version of <i>A Star is Born</i> and I feel confident in saying that at least part of the reason it's been so rapturously received is because it's somewhat fascinating to realize that a story that has been literally told three previous times (as opposed to the figurative sense in which most stories have been told before because they follow templates and accord with genre conventions) can still be so captivating. If you've seen any of the previous three versions - or, indeed, if you just know the story, because it's fundamentally the same each time - you won't be surprised by any part of the plot of this one, but that really doesn't matter. That thing that certain pieces of art possess, that ineffable <i>something</i>, flows through this movie. Maybe it's the skill of first-time director Bradley Cooper, maybe it's the luck of good timing. We're living in an emotional time, but the primary emotion of the age is anger. <i>A Star is Born</i> is pure melodrama, a nakedly emotional, deeply intimate film that invites you to feel happiness and sadness, euphoria and despair. It's cathartic as hell, is what I'm saying.<br />
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It opens with Jackson Maine (Cooper), who is already at the height of his stardom and the depths of his addiction to alcohol. Feeling wired after a performance, and having run out of booze in his limo, he has his driver pull over to a random bar so that he can get a drink, arriving just in time to see Ally (Lady Gaga) sing. He's enthralled and after spending what remains of the night hanging out with her, he insists on having her come to his next show. She's reluctant but then decides that whatever she has to lose, she doesn't mind losing, and goes to the show, where he brings her on stage with him to sing a song that she's written (that would be "Shallow," the performance of which is already the thing I'm most anticipating at the next Oscar ceremony). She's an instant hit, gets her own agent, records her own record, and theirs becomes a two star relationship. However her meteoric rise is coinciding with his increasingly rapid descent, placing a ticking clock on their relationship.<br />
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In all its versions, <i>A Star is Born</i> is the story of a woman who loves a man so much that she's willing to give up her dream to take care of him and of a man who loves a woman so much that he won't allow her to waste her talent while he loses his battle with his demons. In the first two films, in particular, the male protagonists achieve a sort of nobility with their final gesture because of the general sense that the female protagonists' sacrifice is something that they're ultimately entitled to. Society dictates that women are meant to stand by their men, that they <i>should</i> be ready and willing to give up their own desires in order to support him, so in removing themselves as obstacles to their wives' professional progress, the men achieve a kind of tragic heroism. <i>A Star is Born</i> is her story - quite literally, <i>she</i> is the "star" of the title - but it's him who becomes the object of the film's fascination.<br />
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This version takes a more complicated view, albeit in a way that is sometimes at odds with itself. On the one hand, this really is his story. Like the 1976 version (but not the 1937 or 1952 versions), he's the character that we meet first and in the language of cinema that's a silent indicator to the audience of who we're meant to identify with. Moreover, there's something solid in his identity, something the film considers worth exploring as it casts its eye towards his brother (Sam Elliott, who is absolutely brilliant) and the memory of their long dead father in its attempt to get to the root of who Jack is and why he's this way, that it doesn't necessarily feel for Ally, whose past the film doesn't consider worth exploring even though what we see suggests that there's a loss of her own there (specifically her mother) informing the how and why of who <i>she</i> is. So dimly does the film consider Ally (and women generally given that Ally is the only female character in the entire film, with other women appearing onscreen only occasionally to say a line or two and then disappear) that she doesn't even get a last name until the final scene, where she rebrands herself as "Ally Maine." When they meet for the first time and she addresses Jack as "Jackson Maine," he jokes that when you get famous people take to calling you by your full name. Yet even when she becomes famous, she is still just "Ally," as if that encapsulates the totality of her existence - and, of course, Ally the name is spelled the same way as "ally," as in someone who enters into a partnership with someone else to complete a certain task. He's the character and she's his ally, trying to help him do what he needs to do. When she's with him she has purpose, she does something "real." When she goes out on her own, she turns away from the "real" and starts making what is, in his opinion, empty pop music that doesn't actually mean anything, even if it brings her fame and awards.<br />
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But, on the other hand, Ally has more agency and is also a more self-determining character than the women in the previous films. While the women in the previous films are seemingly endlessly understanding and forgiving - even in the 1976 version where he cheats on her, she's already back to holding and kissing him all of a minute after finding him in bed with another woman - there are sharper edges to Ally. When he tries to castigate her for making pop music and tells her that she's "embarrassing," she reads him like a book, stating that he's embarrassed by himself for his increasingly out of control behavior and refusing to let him turn it around on her by accepting the premise that him feeling bad about himself is her fault. She demands that he own his behavior and recognize his self-loathing for what it actually is. She has, in fact, already "had it" before she even meets Jack, her first scene taking place in a ladies' room where she's on the phone with a boyfriend who thinks that her breaking up with him is merely the opening salvo in a negotiation. When she gets off the phone she unleashes a primal scream of "Men!" (or, rather, "Meeeeeeen!!!!") In this moment, and in more subtle moments like when she's fussing over her father (Andrew Dice Clay) at home, the film aligns itself with her, recognizing that she's been giving more than she receives in terms of emotional labor, a situation that doesn't in the least subside when she gets together with Jack. He might open doors for her professionally, but good lord is this man a mess, careening downhill in the expectation that someone (be it his brother or Ally) will break his fall.<br />
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While there's always been at least a touch of glamour to the tragic love story of <i>A Star is Born</i>, there's nothing pretty about Jack's addiction or the desperation and defeat at the heart of it. Cooper plays him like a man slowly drowning, buoyed only briefly by love, but ultimately too tired to keep treading water. It's a great performance that is more than what seems, at first, like it's going to be an imitation of Kris Kristofferson's performance from 1976. Even better than the performance is his direction, which manages to give the film both sweep and intimacy, like a small, personal story told on a grand scale, and which coaxes a performance out of Gaga that feels revelatory. In real life she's been a star for about a decade, but she's believable here as a nobody who knows that she's talented but has sort of given up on the idea of "making it" after so much rejection. She's as good in the small moments as she is in big moments of the musical performances and <i>A Star is Born</i> lives and dies in those quieter moments between its two stars, where they subtly forge the deep bond that the story's success relies on. <i>A Star is Born</i> is one of those films where all the stars align just right; it's a beautiful, deeply-felt movie.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-65115655088082799372018-09-25T08:00:00.000-07:002018-09-25T08:00:12.912-07:00Review: Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM67fW7cofDLzEgTMrjY2tJBFAuw12qqhoFFfCWUOKLng2uhMb7CChZB4jZ1rS2-G2tBNP8RExey99ZqCeFrEJ8aMSR3MtO0IIbQhnCbKmyVoxHuCVJfdaMUF7EFXhXfY_e2TquvdFEpoB/s1600/Fahrenheit+119.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="355" data-original-width="660" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM67fW7cofDLzEgTMrjY2tJBFAuw12qqhoFFfCWUOKLng2uhMb7CChZB4jZ1rS2-G2tBNP8RExey99ZqCeFrEJ8aMSR3MtO0IIbQhnCbKmyVoxHuCVJfdaMUF7EFXhXfY_e2TquvdFEpoB/s400/Fahrenheit+119.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Michael Moore<br />
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The first 10 minutes of Michael Moore's <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> are brutal. Taking us back to the eve of the 2016 election, when for many of us it seemed inconceivable that a candidate who was openly racist, an admitted sexual assaulter, and who actively incited violence at his rallies could be elected President, the opening minutes of <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> are awash in people gleeful at the prospect of a Democratic victory, having counted the chickens before they hatched. It's like seeing that two cars are about to collide and being utterly helpless to stop it. And in the end, it's far from the most upsetting thing in this documentary, a polemic that, despite the advertising's heavy focus on Trump, is not really focused on Trump specifically, but the political system that made his ascension to the United States' highest office possible. If you hate Michael Moore you aren't likely to be won over by this film, which is a shame because he makes a lot of solid points.<br />
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Moore's targets in <i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> are varied and he approaches them with varying degrees of seriousness. The question he asks after those opening 10 minutes - specifically, "How the fuck did this happen?" - is one that he posits has many possible answers. It happened because Hillary Clinton was too compromised by the special interest groups that supported her and because she didn't bother to show up in the States that she needed to win over. It happened because the elites that control the Democratic party ignored the will of their voters. It happened because the media allowed itself to become Trump's sideshow platform, valuing the revenues created by his presence over everything else. It happened because the media (and, very specifically, men in the media who have since fallen from grace during the course of the #MeToo movement) was harder on Clinton than it was on Trump. It happened because the other candidates running for the Republican nomination were a veritable island of misfit toys. It happened because of Russian interference. It happened because the policies enacted during Bill Clinton's tenure in office did so much to erode the values of the Democratic party. It happened because Barack Obama's hands are not as clean as his popular image would suggest. It happened because the electoral college is a remnant of the days before the abolition of slavery that has no place in the modern political system. And it happened because of Gwen Stefani.<br />
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This is Moore's opening, that Trump, jealous of the fact that Gwen Stefani was making more to appear on <i>The Voice</i> than he was making to appear on <i>The Apprentice</i>, pretended that he was going to run for President as a means of getting NBC's attention and convincing them that he was so invaluable and so popular that they needed to give him a raise. This is utterly ridiculous. It's also probably true. However, instead of securing a raise, that press conference got him fired because of his racist rhetoric. From that point on, he was too racist to employ as an on camera personality on network television, but somehow not too racist to take the Presidency.<br />
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But, again, this isn't really about Trump, whom the film sees as a symptom and not the disease. The disease is a broken political system in which the majority of would-be voters are so disenfranchised and disenchanted that they aren't participants in what is, arguably, the most essential element of a democracy: voting. It's a system that values corporations over people to such an extent that when it became clear that the water from the Flint River was poisoning the people of Flint, Michigan (whose water source had previously been Lake Huron) the government, under the leadership of Michigan's Governor Rick Snyder, did nothing, but when it became clear that the Flint Water was corroding the products being manufactured in the General Motors Plant, it reopened the water pipeline coming from Lake Huron - for the General Motors Plant only.<br />
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Moore is from Flint and has been fairly heavily involved in activism around the Flint water crisis, so it's no surprise that the strongest parts of the film are the ones that deal with Flint. There's a special place in hell for Rick Snyder, who will hopefully one day be repaid by karma with interest, but this section also features a scathing indictment of Obama, who shows up in Flint to cheers from its citizenry as if he's going to save them from the corruption and evil that has resulted in what the film refers to as a form of ethnic cleansing, and instead makes a show of pretending to drink Flint water (only wetting his lips, not actually drinking it, as one person who was in the audience points out), theorizing that at some point during his childhood he probably had a nibble of some lead-based paint, and generally downplaying the public health crisis as though it had been resolved and was never that big a deal in the first place. "He was my President [before that press conference]," one Flint resident declares. After that press conference, she felt differently.<br />
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Obama let Flint down. Clinton never arrived. Trump, however, showed up to take a tour of Flint's water treatment plant. And that's the thing, isn't it? Trump showed up in communities that had been made to feel invisible and voiceless, communities that other politicians couldn't be bothered to take seriously. Although Moore is undeniably leftist in his politics, and certainly no fan of Trump, it's Democrats and the Democratic party that take the brunt of his criticism throughout the film, excoriated for moving away from the ideals that are supposed to be the fabric of their political identity to become a centrist party that continuously sells out its base to pander to Republicans. The scenes dealing with the failings of the Democratic party and, in particular, scenes which demonstrate the way the Democratic establishment have actively tried to dismantle the grassroots campaigns of up and coming young politicians in order to protect their old guard, who they can be confident will continue to kowtow to the special interests that have tied their money to the party, are damning. In the end what the film has to say about Trump - none of which hasn't been said elsewhere - is less profound than what it has to say about the Democratic party and the rot at the core of the whole political system.<br />
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<i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> is a good movie and often effective, though I can't say that I agree with everything it has to say. It implies, for example, that there would be a Democrat in the White House if the party had nominated Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, which I think is patently false. For one thing, as the film points out, Clinton won the popular vote and was only undone by the fact of the electoral college. Most people who voted, voted for Clinton. And, while there's certainly evidence (which the film itself shows) that the party rigged things in Clinton's favor, I find it disingenuous whenever someone claims that the Democratic Party stole the nomination from Sanders without bothering to point out that Sanders is not, and has never been, a member of the Democratic Party, which is probably the biggest reason why the party didn't want him to have the nomination. Sanders should have run as an Independent because that's what he always has been and the banner under which he has always run for elected office. I also have a hard time believing that Sanders could have emerged victorious against Trump for the simple reason that Trump's response to everything he said would likely have been, "That guy's a Commie," an accusation which I imagine would be condemnatory to the "Make America Great Again" crowd even though its members are open about not caring whether Trump colluded with the Russians because that level of cognitive dissonance is just our reality now.<br />
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I also find Moore's claim that low voter turnout is the sole result of disenchantment with the Democratic party to be insincere. For sure, there are people who look at how corrupt the system is and choose not to participate and there are people who just aren't interested in politics. But there are also people who have been actively prevented from participating in the election process and to not mention the fact of voter suppression when pointing out that 100 million people didn't cast a vote in the 2016 election is to create a straw man argument that, in light of the other very solid points that Moore will make throughout the film, is entirely unnecessary. I also found the film's equating of Trump with the Hitler and Nazis to be heavy handed - not because the comparisons aren't apt, but because this point has been made so many times already that it seems redundant to play audio of a Trump speech over video of Hitler giving a speech.<br />
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<i>Fahrenheit 11/9</i> is a film that is often depressing and anger inducing and sometimes deeply disturbing (there's a sequence in the film that deals with the Stoneman Douglas school shooting and shows footage that some of the kids took on their phones while the shooting was taking place). But it's also a hopeful film. While Moore views the political establishment as too far gone to be saved, there's hope to be found in the people working at grassroots levels from up and coming politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib who have had to battle against the gatekeepers of the Democratic party despite having the support of their constituents, to the teachers of West Virginia who refused to let their union sell them out, to the people trying to pull Flint back from the brink of destruction, to the kids from Parkland who have been determined to make their presence known and their voices heard. The America that Moore envisions is one that is truly of the people and it's one that he believes is still within reach - but he's warning that it might not be for much longer.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7638298281070675587.post-55634669692713133612018-09-23T08:00:00.000-07:002018-09-23T08:00:07.833-07:00Review: The Children Act (2018)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjskscJw9U0VdEDelhOf3BJjMJ6aGROVJxqsQu4uhRNxCIbbkZI3hQREVxKfj_DezK7PVXrqBJL49v1DPfJBcIv8zaG56WN8V0nuavu8Vgu6v9WPT3fkjGgrfUVtTExnlvSv7axyF_DZPid/s1600/The+Children+Act.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="355" data-original-width="650" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjskscJw9U0VdEDelhOf3BJjMJ6aGROVJxqsQu4uhRNxCIbbkZI3hQREVxKfj_DezK7PVXrqBJL49v1DPfJBcIv8zaG56WN8V0nuavu8Vgu6v9WPT3fkjGgrfUVtTExnlvSv7axyF_DZPid/s400/The+Children+Act.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><center><b>* * *</b></center><br />
<b>Director:</b> Richard Eyre<br />
<b>Starring:</b> Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Fionn Whitehead<br />
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<i>The Children Act</i>, based on the novel of the same name by Ian McEwan (who takes on screenwriting duties here), is a rare breed of modern film. Unlike so many films released now, which are designed to appeal to as broad an audience as possible because transcending the boundaries of demographics is the only way to recoup increasingly astronomical production costs, <i>The Children Act</i> squares in on a specific audience and is content to cater to it alone. It's a movie for adults, a drama about morality that centers on a woman in a position of power who comes to doubt the way that she has used that power. It's headlined by Emma Thompson, whose performance is reliably profound and raises the film up even in its weakest sections. <br />
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Thompson plays Fiona Maye, a judge in the High Court of Justice whose cases tend to be high profile and high in emotion. As the film opens she's to decide to fate of conjoined twins who will die if they aren't separated. Separating them will result in the certain death of one but will provide the other a chance of survival. The parents don't want the surgery, believing that if the children die it is God's will. The doctors want to perform the surgery and save one of their patients. Fiona sides with the doctors and is branded a "murderer" by the parents' lawyer then has to sneak out the back of the courthouse to avoid the press and, possibly, protesters. Hers is a demanding, emotionally draining job and her home provides little escape as her husband, Jack (Stanley Tucci), frustrated by how unavailable she is and how checked out of the marriage she seems, announces that he's going to have an affair with a colleague half his age.<br />
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The weakness in the film is, largely, in how it depicts the marriage between Fiona and Jack. His initial point, that their marriage has become sexless and that they never spend any time together, leaving him in a state of loneliness and frustration, is fair. It's literally everything that happens between them afterwards that makes you want to see Jack get punched in the face just once. He tells her that he's going to have an affair but that their marriage will carry on as usual. It's not a negotiation, it's an edict. When she tells him that their marriage is over if he has the affair, he tells her that she's being ridiculous. He then packs a bag and goes off to be with the other woman, disappearing for a few days without any communication with Fiona, and then he comes back as if nothing has happened, is surprised when she tells him he'll be sleeping in the guest room, and is angry when he finds out that she's consulted a divorce lawyer and tells her that he hopes the lawyer told her she was overreacting. Jack can go pound sand but instead of acknowledging that and, in particular, instead of suggesting that perhaps the reason Fiona won't talk to him about how she's feeling is because he keeps telling her that her feelings are wrong, the film aligns itself with Jack and winds its way towards Fiona having a moment of "clarity" that will allow her to come back into the marriage. It's not that their reconciliation is a bad thing, per se, or even that Jack's original complaint, that Fiona doesn't make any time for their relationship, isn't legitimate; it's that the film frames their marital difficulties as if the only problem is that Fiona is being unreasonable even as it shows Jack acting like a total dick who isn't interested in resolving their issues so much he's determined to get his own way.<br />
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As her marriage is coming apart, Fiona hears the case of a teenager with leukemia who is refusing a blood transfusion because it goes against his beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness. The hospital has asked for a court order allowing them to provide the transfusion, while the boy's parents (Ben Chaplin and Eileen Walsh) ask the court to make an order that their son can refuse treatment, reasoning that he's only a few months away turning 18 and having the legal right to make that decision for himself. In an unusual move, Fiona announces that she's going to go to the hospital and talk to the boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead), in order to determine whether he truly understands the decision he wants to make. When she arrives, Adam is amazed that she would come to speak to him and is enthralled when she teaches him the lyrics to a song he's learned how to play on the guitar. He asks her to stay and keep talking to him, but she has to return to court to render her verdict. She ends up siding with the hospital and afterwards, his life having been saved by the blood transfusion, Adam begins popping into her life with regularity. He gets hold of her cell phone number and leaves a series of messages for her, he shows up at the courthouse to try to talk to her, and he follows her when she goes out of town to sit in other jurisdictions as part of the circuit court. The experience of having been prepared to die for his religious beliefs only to have the court intervene to prevent his death has caused him to have a crisis of faith. Now he wants Fiona to fill the void that's been left.<br />
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The relationship between Fiona and Adam is more complex and more compelling than her relationship with Jack is ever allowed to be. Fiona's motivations are never really spelled out for clarity. Ostensibly she goes to visit Adam at the hospital because she's going to give him a chance to prove to her that he has a clear and complete understanding of what it means for him to refuse treatment, but as he will later point out after he does a bit of investigating, she couldn't really have been on the fence about how she was going to rule because the court has always sided with hospitals in similar cases. So what was she really trying to get out of seeing Adam? Was it to obtain a moment of human connection that she feels has been lacking? Whatever the reason, the experience has a profound effect on Adam that she refuses to take responsibility for. On the one hand, she's technically correct in her attempts to not have contact with Adam because it would be entirely inappropriate in the circumstances for her to become his friend or to accede to the request he makes later to be allowed to move in with her and Jack, since his loss of faith has created conflict in his relationship with his own parents. On the other hand, this situation with Adam is one of her own making, borne not of necessity but of a decision that she makes for reasons that seem more personal than professional.<br />
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For Fiona, the meeting between her and Adam was just a moment in time, something that happened and which should then have become a footnote in her history, but for Adam the meeting is literally life changing. When his case goes to court, he insists that he's fully prepared to die. After he receives the blood transfusion his perspective on his religious beliefs changes and he begins to dismiss the episode as a matter of teenage melodrama, of him having become caught up in this image of himself as some kind of holy martyr. He also begins to turn away from his parents, questioning why they were so prepared to allow him to die. The wedge driven between him and his parents sends him seeking validation from Fiona and after she repeatedly rejects him, his perspective is changed once again. Now instead of seeing Fiona as the person who saved his life and convinced him that there are things worth living for, he sees the situation as his own <i>The Last Temptation of Christ</i>, with himself as Christ and her as the Devil trying to tempt him away from his destiny at the moment he's meant to fulfill it.<br />
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There's a great deal of emotional and intellectual intricacy in the relationship between Fiona and Adam and Thompson and Whitehead dig deep, exploring this unusual relationship with subtlety and grace. Although the film has certain flaws, it is ultimately an extremely well-acted and often thought provoking drama with merits that far outweigh its imperfections.Norma Desmondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12185179321818700556noreply@blogger.com0