The Zone of Interest: A Review - The Profound and the Mundane

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This is a masterful arthouse film about the banality of evil that normal audiences will despise but cinephiles will adore.

The Zone of Interest, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, is an unconventional and unorthodox film that will confound and frustrate general audiences to the point of exasperation. It is also one of the very best films of the year, and one of the most insightful Holocaust films ever made.

The film, which is adapted from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, chronicles the daily life of Nazi Commandant Rudolph Hoss and his family in their new house right next to Auschwitz concentration camp.

Hannah Arendt coined the term “The Banality of Evil” when describing the men who perpetrated the Holocaust. According the Arendt, these men, like Rudolph Hoss, where not sociopaths or Nazi fanatics, but rather bureaucrats and middle managers motivated by professional success rather than ideology.

The Zone of Interest is Arendt’s Banality of Evil brought to cinematic life. The mundanity of the Hoss family life is a damning indictment as it is surrounded by the most monstrous evil that was the Holocaust, which is only ever heard, but never, not once, seen in the film.

The Zone of Interest features no true plot. Nothing really happens in the movie. But the mundanity of it all within the historically cruel setting is what generates the film’s profundity.

Auschwitz is a company town, and Hoss is a good company man. The business of Auschwitz is killing and business is good. Hoss is successful and is very good at his job. He’s an admired and respected man among his peers and underlings.

Rudolph’s wife, Hedwig, is the queen of Auschwitz, and she is constantly at work on her beautiful home and exquisite garden, which are attached to the concentration camp’s outer wall. Beyond that wall the cries of children and screams of parents are routinely heard…so routinely that they become empty background noise.

Rudolph and Hedwig, along with their five children, are living the American dream – or more accurately the Nazi dream. They have gone East (as opposed to West in the American myth), built a beautiful home, found meaningful work they are good at, and have lots of open space and freedom of movement. Their life is idyllic…except for the sounds and smells of slaughter which occasionally break through and pierce their ignorant bliss.

That their blessed life exists because, and within, the most degenerate and dehumanizing industrial genocide imaginable, is something that they are deeply skilled at keeping at bay. The Hoss’s aren’t unaware of the atrocities that surround them, they just choose to focus on other things….just like the rest of us.

The Zone of Interest is exquisitely directed by Jonathan Glazer who never veers from his brazen artistic thesis. The film’s meticulous visual style, its deliberate pacing, it’s odd and jarring photographic and time alterations, all point to a filmmaker who knows exactly what he is doing and exactly what he wants to say and how to say it.

The film is shot by Lukasz Zal, and he and Glazer put on a masterful cinematography clinic. The camera never moves in The Zone of Interest, as every shot is perfectly still. Any movement in the frame is made by the characters or by use of edits to a different angle.

There are straight lines everywhere, spotlighting the precision of the filmmaking and the horrifying meticulousness of the Nazi machine which keeps everything in order in the Hoss’ world.

There are no close-ups of characters in the entire film, and scant few close-ups of anything else…the only one I remember is of a flower. Instead, Zal’s still camera is kept at a cold distance, in a wide frame, never moving, never judging, just observing.

There are times when the film is shot with thermal imaging, which is an alarming change from the cinematic stoicism employed for the majority. That this thermal imaging is used to spotlight the rare moments of humanity, as opposed to the still, distant camera’s capturing of normalized inhumanity, is striking and very effective.

Also very effective is the sound design and music. Mica Levi did the music and it is an industrial sounding horrorscape, that when accompanied by a black screen or a red one, makes for unnerving viewing and listening.

Sound designer Johnnie Burn’s work is astonishing as the ambient sounds of the Holocaust are expertly recorded and deployed throughout, creating an unseen but very deeply felt sense of moral malignancy and madness.

The performances in the film are so understated and naturalized as to be astonishing. Sandra Huller, who is nominated for her work in Anatomy of Fall at this year’s Academy Awards, is absolutely astonishing as Hedwig Hoss.

Huller’s Hedwig is in constant movement and always searching for something, anything to occupy her. She is a proud mother and wife and loves to show off her success to her mother. But beneath her surface there is a calculating and vicious woman who knows what and who she is and what she will do to maintain her kingdom and maintain her status.

Christian Friedel is the picture of normalcy as Rudolph Hoss. Friedel’s Hoss could be at home as a bank manager, a car manufacturer or any mid-level bureaucrat middle-manager in any company in the world. That he is skilled at managing a death factory is almost beside the point.

It is common nowadays to call one’s political opponents or enemies “Nazis”. The U.S. routinely calls whomever it has deemed it adversary on the world stage “Hitler”, and anyone who negotiates with them or fails to go to war against them, “Chamberlain” – as in Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain who famously signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler which was seen as appeasing tyranny.

The thing that has always bothered me about the depictions of Nazis, whether it be in films/tv or in our culture in general, it is that they are cartoonish versions of evil. These men are shown as being blood-thirsty and often completely insane. These depictions make it much too easy for us to see Nazis solely as something that other people become, never ourselves.

The truth, of course, is much more complicated and much more unnerving. The reality is that we are all very capable of becoming Nazis…hell…we are all Hitler’s in waiting who would reflexively dehumanize our opponents and enemies, and/or ignore atrocities that become so common as to be background noise.

Back in the wake of the 2016 election and Trump’s rise to power, there was a debate in our culture about the legitimacy and efficacy of “punching Nazis”. I wrote at length about it expressing the danger of that line of thinking. The majority of liberals and leftists I knew, and many readers of this blog and my writing at RT, were fervent in their belief that punching Nazis was always, and every time, the right thing to do.

My counter-argument was, that is exactly how Nazis think…that punching/silencing/eliminating your opponent/enemy is a righteous act and that violent impulses are to be indulged in the name of that righteousness.

My friends on the left said I was a Nazi myself for not wanting to punch a Nazi, which is sort of ironic since I was much more likely to punch anyone in real life than they ever were.

The reason I bring all of this up in the context of a review about The Zone of Interest, is that the power of the film is that it lays bare in excruciating detail, how all of us, in similar circumstances, would fall into the rhythm of our time and place and would ignore the atrocity right outside our zone of interest in order to maintain our comfort and our sanity.

For example, while there are protests, most of which are performative and impotent, against Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the truth is no one is actually going to do anything about it and it’s not going to change because we have all been conditioned to, at a bare minimum, accept it, if not celebrate it. Thousands of children slaughtered in Gaza? Oh well… shrug emoji…did you see who Taylor swift is dating?

The same is true of the senseless and endless epidemic of murder in inner-city Black communities, and the ceaseless epidemic of suicides by the White working class, and homelessness and drug overdoses among the ever-expanding under-class.

We are overwhelmed by the scope and scale of all of these rapacious tragedies, and so we simply go along to get along and we live out lives of comfort on the mountain of misery our nation routinely produces.

We don’t think of ourselves as Nazis, despite the fact that our government is a malignant force around the globe which inflicts great harm and suffering upon millions, all on our dime and occasionally at our behest. For example, we send billions to nefarious nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia and turn a blind eye when they massacre innocents, just like we turn a blind eye when our nation directly massacres innocents, be it in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan or Yemen.

The denizens of D.C., be they venal politicians or craven lobbyists and the weapons manufacturers across our nation, don’t think of themselves as being Rudolph Hoss, but they are. Those diabolical fools are just like the mainstream media members who think of themselves as Woodward and Bernstein and not Joseph Goebbels. They are mini-Goebbels all.

The Zone of Interest is such a great film because it lays bare this fact that we are all Nazis, in action if not intent, whether we like it or not. And that is why the film is such mandatory viewing.

Unfortunately, The Zone of Interest, despite being nominated for five Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best International Feature and Best Sound, is an arthouse movie through and through, and mainstream audiences, conditioned to expect films that are structured in certain ways and have familiar dramatic arcs, will be repelled by Glazer’s artistic choices.

In common parlance, this film will bore the shit out of normal people because nothing happens in it. But the problem is that nothing happening is the point of the movie.

In my opinion, The Zone of Interest is one of the very best, and best-made, films of the year and is a critical piece of art in our current times. It would be a fantastic companion piece to watch in an ad hoc film festival with Michael Haneke’s masterful The White Ribbon (2009) and Elem Klimov’s masterpiece Come and See (1985), the greatest war film ever made, to try and capture, and understand, the zeitgeist of pre-war and wartime Germany as it is afflicted with the cancer of Nazism.

In conclusion, The Zone of Interest is a magnificent piece of cinematic art that cinephiles will adore and normal people will despise. If you’re a normie, then skip it, but if you are a lover of cinema and all of its artistic possibilities, then The Zone of Interest is definitely a must see.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

El Conde: A Review - Netflix's Toothless Political Vampire Movie

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A bore and chore of a movie that never fully fleshes out its intriguing premise.

El Conde, the new film by director Pablo Larrain streaming on Netflix, describes itself as a black comedy horror film, which I suppose is accurate for a movie that depicts former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet literally as a centuries-old vampire.

The problem with El Conde though is that while it is certainly black, at least visually - as it’s shot in a crisp black and white, it isn’t funny or horrifying or, unfortunately, even all that interesting.

The premise of Pinochet being a blood-thirsty monster is more than just metaphor. While Pinochet was not a “vampire”, he certainly was a brutal and vicious dictator who came to power through a U.S.-backed coup in 1973, and was responsible for the torture, rape, murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of Chileans.

Pinochet is unquestionably a monster, as is the other political figure featured in the film, Margaret Thatcher, which makes the animating idea of El Conde an intriguing one that piques both my artistic and political interest, but despite its alluring thesis the film fails to coalesce as it keeps dramatic and narrative coherence at arm’s length.

The film, which is in Spanish, English and French, can be watched by English speakers either dubbed or with subtitles. The dubbing is distracting because the voice-actors are painfully poor. Subtitles made for a more fluid cinematic experience but it also neuters the comedy…or the attempts at comedy.

The cast, which features Jamie Vadell as Pinochet and Stella Gonet as Thatcher, is entirely underwhelming. All of the performances seemed muddled and stale.

The Pinochet family, including his adult children and wife Lucia (Gloria Munchmeyer), all melt into one amorphous blob of forgettableness, like so much flotsam and jetsam in a dirty stream.

Carmen, a nun hired by the family to exorcise and kill Pinochet, is played by Paula Luchsinger, and the character is so poorly written that one wonders why she’s in the film at all.

No doubt the actors struggled because the script is so distracted and disheveled. None of the characters are dynamic or magnetic and none of the plot lines is thoroughly fleshed out enough to generate any drama.

Writer/director Pablo Larrain is an interesting talent. The first film of his that I ever saw was 2016’s Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy. That film was very polarizing because of Portman’s mannered performance, but I found it fascinating and thoroughly enjoyed it as an arthouse experience.

The next Larrain film I saw was 2021’s Spencer, which was about Princess Diana and starred Kristen Stewart. I think highly of Stewart as an actress (at least in her pre and post Twilight work) but found Spencer to be the most vapid and vacant garbage imaginable. It struck me as arthouse posing rather than artistic adventurism.

Now with El Conde, Larrain’s artistry is becoming clear to me in that he is someone who excels in the bells and whistles but not the foundational elements of filmmaking.

For example, El Conde is exquisitely photographed by Edward Lachman, who is nominated for Best Cinematography at this year’s Academy Awards. Lachman’s black and white is sharp and lush, and the flying sequences in the film are elegantly staged and executed and beautifully shot.

But despite Lachman’s stellar work and the gorgeous look of the film, the movie fails because the story at the heart of it is not fully fleshed out and the drama/comedy lackluster and banal…and that falls entirely on Larrain.

The noticeable thing to me about Larrain and his films is that he doesn’t actually have anything interesting to say. To declare that Augusto Pinochet is a blood-thirsty monster, and to do it in such an obvious way, isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

The one oddity of El Conde, which means “The Count”, is that the film unintentionally makes Pinochet into a mush less horrifying beast than he was in real life. Turning this ruthless torturer and murderer into a vampire makes him appear…dare I say it…like someone innocent of his crimes because of his inherent demonic nature. Pinochet is no longer a depraved human-being, he is a struggling demon/animal who doesn’t kill out of maliciousness but out necessity. The real Pinochet inflicted pain because he could, not because he had to, which is why he was such a deplorable person.

One would maybe think that Larrain is being artistically courageous in making such a case, but in context it becomes clear that this defense of Pinochet is purely accidental and not intentional at all. Larrain just doesn’t understand anything about his project beyond its surface layer and its catchy elevator pitch.

Ultimately, El Conde fails at being a black comedy, a horror film or even a mildly entertaining movie. While I thoroughly enjoyed Edward Lachman’s cinematography, I found the rest of the movie to be a bore and a chore.

I simply cannot recommend El Conde because despite its gorgeous photography and intriguing premise, it just never comes together to create a worthwhile or even moderately entertaining piece of cinema.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

American Fiction: A Review - My Pafology Lives in Da Ghetto

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A clever and insightful comedy about racial pandering and virtue signaling that winks and nods as it panders and signals its own virtue.

American Fiction, written and directed by Cord Jefferson, tells the story of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a struggling black author who out of frustration with the publishing industry, writes an absurdly stereotypical “black” book which becomes an instant best-seller.

American Fiction, which is based on the book Erasure by Percival Everett, is one of those multi-layered movies that is sneaky good. On its surface, which features a curmudgeonly yet charming performance from Jeffrey Wright, it is an entertaining, if a bit scattered, movie that just about anybody could watch and enjoy. But just beneath the film’s friendly surface it seethes with an undeniably dynamic cultural political message.

The film follows the travails of Wright’s character “Monk” Ellison, who is a professor in Los Angeles and an author. His high-minded books don’t sell well and his latest is passed over by publishers. The literary world is enamored with books about racial issues and Monk’s book is deemed not “black enough” by the white people running the business.

A dejected Monk then takes a sabbatical from teaching in order to visit his family in Massachusetts. His mother is elderly and suffering from dementia, his newly divorced sister Lisa is frustrated and sad and his long-lost brother Cliff is divorced and newly gay.

It is as Monk navigates this chaotic family drama that he writes his undeniably “black” book My Pafology, under the pseudonym Stag R. Leigh, about growing up in the hood and being in and out of prison - things that are the polar opposite to Monk’s actual life. Monk’s agent submits the book and publishers absolutely love it and it becomes a million-dollar sensation.

That whole story is engaging and entertaining enough. Yes, the film can be a bit too unfocused and run a bit too long, but anytime you get to spend a few hours with Jeffrey Wright it is usually worthwhile, and American Fiction is no exception.

The curious, and most interesting thing about American Fiction though is not its surface but its subtext. It is a movie about white liberal pandering on race issues that itself shamelessly panders on cultural issues.

For example, Monk’s brother Cliff is a blatant and bad caricature of a gay man and his entire story is at best superfluous, but he, and his gay friends, conveniently check a lot of feel-good diversity boxes.

Another example is Monk’s sister Lisa, who is a doctor. But she’s not just any doctor, she’s an abortion doctor, who must have armed guards at her clinic…again…the movie is signaling its virtue and declaring its bona fides to its target audience of liberals, who will probably be blissfully unaware of both the pandering in plain sight and the fact that that they are the target of the film’s meta-joke.

The movie rightfully makes fun of the pathetic white liberals in the publishing industry to great effect, but the deeper laughs, whether intentionally or not, come from the comedy hiding in plain sight in the form of the film’s own pandering.

I mean, making a movie about cultural pandering, which features a movie within a movie, both of which relentlessly pander, is brilliant. Maybe all of that is not intentional, maybe it’s just a giant blind spot by filmmaker Cord Jefferson…but I’d like to credit him for his brilliance than assume it was all by accident.

That said, the film does avoid the much deeper, and pardon the pun, darker issues regarding the negative stereotypes perpetuated and celebrated in American culture. Yes, powerful white people certainly do push certain harmful types of entertainment that denigrate black people - but which black people also embrace. But it’s a very specific type of “white person”, the type who has the controls to the machinery to spread that message and make it culturally universal and celebrated.

Also avoided is the fact that the intelligence community in the U.S., most notably the CIA, have for decades been funding psy-ops that elevate the negative and violent stereotypes of blacks through mass media - which in turns feeds violence in black neighborhoods and communities. For example, the CIA were heavily involved in the birth and dissemination of rap music, most notably gangsta rap. Combined with the intelligence community flooding majority black inner city neighborhoods with drugs and guns (see the late Gary Webb’s reporting on this issue, and the late Michael Ruppert’s claims as well), this makes it quite obvious that it isn’t just pandering, virtue signaling white liberals who want to perpetuate the stereotypes of the violent “black experience”, but it is rather powerful people much higher on the food chain who have very nefarious intentions. Regardless, none of these topics are broached in American Fiction, which is not surprising, but is worth noting.

As for what is in the movie, the very best thing about American Fiction is Jeffrey Wright. Wright is a subtle and skilled actor who never does too much or forces you to watch how much he is acting. As Monk, Wright is funny and ferocious, while never falling into caricature…except when he is expressly trying to be a caricature.

Sterling K. Brown gives an energetic performance as Monk’s brother Cliff. The character doesn’t seem like an actual human being, but to Brown’s credit he sinks his teeth into the role and mines it for some quality laughs.

Both Wright and Brown are nominated for Academy Awards, for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor respectively, their first ever nominations. I didn’t think Brown’s work was worthy of such recognition, but Wright’s most certainly is, as his performance is masterfully rendered.

Director Cord Jefferson, who is also nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, comes from a writing background, as he’s been working in television for the last decade as a writer.

American Fiction is Jefferson’s first feature film and directorial debut. He obviously has an incisive and insightful sense of humor which works well on many levels in the film. That said, American Fiction is visually as rudimentary as it gets and it looks pretty flat, just like a generic tv show.

The bottom line regarding American Fiction is that it is definitely well worth watching. It has the entertaining surface of a funny HBO tv show combined with a sub-text bursting with cutting social commentary. Throw in a winning Jeffrey Wright performance and you really can’t go wrong choosing American Fiction.

American Fiction is currently only available in theatres, and I’m not sure when it’ll be coming to streaming. If you want to have a fun night out then you could do worse than see American Fiction in theatres, although due to its rather basic cinematography, it is not essential to see it on the big screen. My recommendation is that you can wait until it hits streaming but when it does you should definitely check it out because it’s a smart, funny and entertaining piece of work.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024  

Poor Things: A Review - A Funny and Fantastic Feminist Frankenstein

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An original and brilliantly eviscerating black comedy that features the best performance by an actress in recent memory.

Poor Things, the new film from director Yorgos Lanthimos and writer Tony McNamara, is a bizarre and beautiful, weird and wonderful, gruesome and glorious piece of cinema, and is among the very best movies of the year.

The film is a surreal, absurdist, feminist take on the Frankenstein myth, which stars Emma Stone as Bella, a beautiful and horny Frankenstein monster who is raised by her creator God (short for Godfrey – played by Willem Dafoe), and then goes on an odyssey of personal, sexual and ideological discovery when adolescence hits.

On her journey Bella is armed with a powerful naivete, an aggressive resistance to social customs, a sharp scientific mind and an insatiable sexual appetite…all of which lead to a plethora of comedy.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are definitely an acquired taste…and I have certainly acquired it. The first Lanthimos film I saw was 2015’s The Lobster, which starred Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz. The film is an absurdist romantic black comedy, a true arthouse gem, and I adored it. But when I talked it over with friends of mine, they hated it with a visceral passion. I guess they didn’t get it…or worse they did get it.

Lanthimos’ follow-up film, 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, was another strange arthouse psychological thriller starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, but which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve yet to meet anyone else who saw the film never mind felt the same way.

Lanthimos’ next film, 2018’s The Favourite, was a period black comedy which starred Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman, and garnered a lot of attention and Oscar nominations. This was easily Lanthimos’ most mainstream and successful film, it too was funny but also very, very dark. Not surprisingly, I loved it.

Poor Things is more in line with The Favourite than with The Lobster, as it’s a bitter and black comedy, but it’s also broad enough to appeal to slightly wider audiences than just the arthouse…although to be clear, at its heart the movie is an oddball arthouse affair.

What is so interesting about Poor Things coming out this year is that it is an elegant and searing indictment against this summer’s blockbuster event Barbie, and is the coup de grace in the case against the overwrought argument that Barbie is quality cinema.

Poor Things is everything the banal Barbie and its simpleton sycophants claim it to be but isn’t. Poor Things is original, funny, smart, clever and unabashedly and undeniably subversive. Where Barbie is insipid, Poor Things is inspired. Where Barbie is trite, Poor Things is treacherous.

Like Barbie, Poor Things is fueled by feminism but it isn’t the insipid, Human Resources approved, freshman year gender studies feminism of Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar, two-hour Mattel commercial.

Barbie’s feminism was nothing more than a blunt instrument used to bash men and raise a self-pitying pink flag of victimhood for women. Poor Things’ feminism is a pitiless, merciless wildfire that scorches everything in its path, be it men or women, capitalism or socialism.  

Everything about Poor Things is superior to Barbie, from the directing to the writing to the cinematography to the acting.

The script, written by Tony McNamara, is razor sharp, cutting and insightful. McNamara, who also wrote The Favourite and is the creator of the fantastic tv series The Great, writes with a wonderfully incisive wit and maintains a consistent pace and tone.

The beneficiaries of McNamara’s phenomenal script are the cast.

Emma Stone gives the greatest performance by an actress seen this century. Stone, who already has a Best Actress Oscar for La La Land, is far and away the best actress in movies (or anywhere else) this year…this of course doesn’t mean she’ll win the Academy Award again, just that she should.

Stone dives into the Bella character with copious amounts of bravado and skill. She bares her body and devours scenes with equal aplomb. Watching Stone expertly act like a toddler, then like a horny teenager and then a wide-eyed whore, is glorious to behold.

As cliché as it is to say, Emma Stone gives a masterclass in acting in this film without ever making you feel like you’re watching her act. The dance scene alone is worth the price of admission.

Willem Dafoe too does extraordinary work as the mutilated mutilator Godfrey. Dafoe, beneath a bevy of prosthetics, gives Godfrey a humanity – in all its glories and failures, that never rings hollow.

The few missteps in the cast come from Mark Ruffalo, who plays Duncan Wedderburn, a cad who becomes enamored with Bella, and Jerrod Carmicheal as harry, an intellectual.

Ruffalo is miscast, and gives a very mannered performance that is at times uncomfortable to watch. Ruffalo is trying to be funny and it is this desire that suffocates the humor of his character.

Ruffalo also tries to speak in a very specific way and his mouth seems unwilling or incapable of cooperating with his brain’s instructions. The result is a muddled, mush-mouth performance that the film must fight to overcome…and thankfully, successfully does.

Carmichael, who is a comedian by trade, just seems to be a bad actor as he loiters in every scene he barely inhabits. He never adequately grasps the dialogue he is tasked with speaking and feels entirely out of place in the film.

Poor Things is, unlike its summertime counterpart Barbie, beautifully shot. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan is given a lot to play with and he makes the most of it. His use of black and white, and then a glorious cornucopia and dream like colors, is exquisite, and is substantially better than the flat visuals of Barbieland.

The production design, costume design and hair and make-up are all also extraordinarily well-done, and Robbie Ryan’s photography only accentuates the brilliance of the artists who created all of it.  

Poor Things is nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (McNamara), Best Actress (Stone), Best Supporting Actor (Ruffalo) and Best Cinematographer (Ryan). How many, if any, it will win remains to be seen but I will say this, if it wins them all I certainly won’t be angry about it.

That said, Poor Things is not for everyone. It’s a decidedly dark comedy and it features a plethora of nudity and sex…so if you have a puritan or Victorian taste and those things make you uncomfortable then I recommend you stay away. But if you have a cynical sense of humor and you can at least tolerate the nudity and sex and the arthouse weirdness of it all, then Poor Things is definitely worth a try as it’s an exquisite piece of cinema.

Follow me on Twitter: MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 114 - Academy Award Nominations

On this episode Barry and I talk snubs and surprises and everything else regarding the Academy Award nominations. Topics discussed include Greta and the Angry Barbies. Is Emma Stone's victory set in stone? And is Oppenheimer inevitable?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 114 - Academy Award Nominations

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Revisiting Killers of the Flower Moon - Thoughts on a Second Viewing

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!*** THIS IS A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!!!****

As you may or may not remember, I wrote a review of Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, back in November after having watched it in the theatre.

I found the film to be pretty middling and said as much in my review - I gave it 2.5 stars out of 5, but with a giant caveat. The caveat was this…the theatre in which I saw the film, an RC theatre here in flyover country, is just dreadful. The digital projectors are awful, the sound muddled and for some inane reason they refuse to turn the lights all the way off, which makes it seem like you’re watching a movie at a drive-in during the day.

In my review, I said I’d have to hold off with my final evaluation until I saw the film in a better environment, namely at home. Well…Killers of the Flower Moon is now available to stream on Apple TV+, and I watched it again, this time in darkness with decent sound.

Here are a few things that jump out at me upon further review.

First…I liked Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance much more the second time around than the first. I still don’t think it’s award worthy or great, just that it isn’t as mannered and empty as I found it to be on my initial watch.

In contrast, I was less impressed by Lily Gladstone’s performance. I don’t think she’s bad at all, it’s just a bit less impressive on second watch. The most notable thing about her performance is that she is able to unflinchingly share the screen with DiCaprio…which is no small thing…but beyond that the performance thins substantially the more you see it.

On the other hand, Robert DeNiro’s performance is even more impressive on second viewing. As William “King” Hale, DeNiro gives a remarkably skillful performance. It is invigorating to see this acting icon bring his formidable, yet subtle, “A” game, something which has been sorely lacking in the last few decades of his career, to the film. It is no surprise that it's his old collaborator Scorsese that is the director who has coaxed the two very best DeNiro performances of the latter stage of his career with The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon.

As for Killers of the Flower Moon in totality, I still, unfortunately, found it to be greatly lacking.

A second viewing should make the sprawling narrative more coherent since you know the players and the story arc, but it still feels very unfocused and discombobulated.

The length isn’t a problem (at least for me), but the lack of narrative and dramatic focus is. There’s an emotional and theatrical incoherence to the film that, much to my chagrin, does not disappear upon second viewing.

I’ve watched The Irishman, Scorsese’s previous film, which also ran well over three hours, numerous times in the past few years, but The Irishman, despite its long run time, is a taut piece of filmmaking that never loses its drive or its focus.

The truth is that Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t lose its narrative drive and dramatic focus either, but that’s only because it never has them to begin with.

While I am disappointed in Killers of the Flower Moon, the movie is now on Apple TV +, so if you have the streaming service and haven’t seen the movie, why not give it a watch and decide for yourself? It’ll only cost you three-and-a-half hours and the usual Apple TV+ subscription rate.

If you don’t have Apple TV+ but want to give Killers of the Flower Moon a shot, here’s my advice. Sign up for a month or try and get a free month…but wait until February to do so. Then you can watch both Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which should be available for free on the service mid-February. I’ve not seen Napoleon yet so I’m not recommending it, just that if you’re going to dip your toe into the Apple TV + pool, might as well get as much as you can out of it, because frankly, there’s not a whole lot over there that’s worthwhile.

As for Killers of the Flower Moon, I really wished I liked it, as its subject matter is near and dear to my heart and Martin Scorsese is among my Mount Rushmore of filmmakers. But unfortunately, the film just doesn’t work, and feels like a missed opportunity.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Anatomy of a Fall: A Review - Unnerving Legal Drama Hits Dizzying Heights

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A well-made and well-acted legal/family drama that succeeds by leaving you with more questions than answers.

Anatomy of a Fall, which is currently available on Video on Demand (I paid $6.99), is one of those movies that lingers with you, tormenting and teasing you for days after you watch it.

The film, directed and co-written by Justine Triet, chronicles the investigation and trial of a woman whose husband falls to his death while renovating their isolated mountain chalet.

On its surface, Anatomy of a Fall is a standard court room procedural and family/relationship drama, but it percolates with a dramatic intensity and genuine humanity that is exquisite and rare in the genre and which elevates it into a superb cinematic experience.  

The film, which is in English and French (with English Subtitles), stars a mesmerizing Sandra Huller as Sandra Voyter, a successful writer living in a remote location in the French Alps with her husband and young son Daniel, who is blind.

Sandra’s life is turned upside down when her husband Samuel dies and the legal authorities aggressively examine his death and pick apart every minute detail of Sandra’s life - including the state of her relationship with Samuel.

What is so unnerving about Anatomy of a Fall is that it lays bare the notion that anyone’s life, examined closely enough, could reveal them as being capable of, not so much of a crime, but of being found guilty of a crime…whether they committed one or not.

In a way Anatomy of a Fall feels like some sort of horror film, with the legal system playing the role of the insatiable monster relentlessly chasing their wide-eyed prey.

What makes the film so intriguing is that at no point, even days after viewing, are you certain, one way or the other, as to whether Sandra is innocent or guilty of murdering Samuel.

And yet, while we can be swayed by the case against Sandra, we also are drawn in, through Huller’s exquisite performance, into sympathizing and empathizing with her. She may be a criminal, but unlike the vicious prosecutor unleashed upon her, she is also all too human. She is fragile, vulnerable and flawed, which makes her an easy target for the machinery of the legal system, and also someone easy to relate to for viewers.

Huller’s Sandra is a character thoroughly lived-in. She is a normal middle-aged woman, tired and worn down from the grind of her life raising her son, working (she’s a writer), and maintaining her marriage…the usual stuff.  Huller’s Sandra is barely able to keep herself, and her family, together amidst the carnage of the accusations against her. Huller has Sandra in a constant state of unraveling through the ordeal of her dizzying descent into the labyrinthian legal system, but never chooses to have her unravel all at once, and it is captivating to behold.

Also captivating is Mile Machado Graner as Sandra’s blind son Daniel. Without giving anything away I will say that Daniel is caught in the middle of the legal battle and Graner plays this torment expertly. Like Huller, Graner never falls into the trap of over-acting, or over-reacting, and simply embodies his character and imbues it with a humanity that is both touching and terrifying in context.

Director Justine Triet, who co-wrote the script with her husband Arthur Harari, is a calm, cool and steady hand behind the camera. She never falls prey to the usual traps associated with legal dramas, namely choosing a side and revealing sympathies.

Triet also never lets her film turn cold and into a stale procedural. Instead, Triet populates her film with genuine, real people, and shows them, flaws and all, being stripped emotionally bare and subjected to the grueling meat grinder that is the legal system.

One can’t help but wonder if an American filmmaker would have the confidence, and maybe more importantly, the studio acceptance, to make such a subtle yet dramatically complex legal drama.  

Which also brings up the question as to whether American audiences can get on board with Anatomy of a Fall. At first glance I would think that most American viewers, raised on the exceedingly vapid, insipid and seemingly inexhaustible tv franchises Law and Order and CSI, would struggle to get on board with a story as subtle, nuanced and dramatically complex as Anatomy of a Fall.

But then as the film lingered with me in the days after my watching it, I began to think that it was exactly those Law and Order and CSI audiences that could potentially get the most out of Anatomy of a Fall, as it would, with its deft and cinematically skilled touch, shake them out of their comfort zone by subverting their expectations.

Add in the high-quality acting and I think that Anatomy of a Fall could resonate with wider audiences here in America. That’s not to say wide audiences, it is a French film with subtitles after all, just slightly wider audiences than usual for such arthouse fare.

Anatomy of a Fall is currently available on VOD, and I’m not sure when it’ll come to a streaming service here in the U.S., but I think it will get a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards this year, so that will generate interest to see it and a streaming service will no doubt soon follow.

My recommendation is to fork over the money and see it on VOD for $6.99. If not, then wait for it to hit a streaming service in the coming months. Regardless of how you see it, you should see it. You won’t regret it, and you’ll be mulling it over in your head for days after your viewing…just like me.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Maestro: A Review - Lifeless Leonard Bernstein Biopic is Out of Tune

****THIS IS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS ABOUT LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S LIFE!! THIS IS TECHNICALLY NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!***

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This movie just doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. But it’s on Netflix so if you’re so inclined watch it and see for yourself.

Maestro, the new Netflix biopic directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, chronicles the life of renowned musical genius Leonard Bernstein.

I readily admit that prior to seeing Maestro I knew little about Leonard Bernstein, the iconic conductor and composer who dominated the classical music scene in America for nearly fifty years in the 20th Century. After watching Bradley Cooper’s two-hour and nine-minute dramatization of Bernstein’s life I still know next to nothing about the man.

The film is essentially about Bernstein’s relationship with his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan). The decision to focus on this aspect of Bernstein’s life is a poor one as the marriage is a dramatically flaccid affair. To boil it down, the plot of the film is that Leonard Bernstein, a gay man, marries Felicia, who knows full-well he is gay and readily accepts it…but then later on she gets mad that he’s gay for some reason. Not exactly compelling stuff, which is why it’s such an odd choice to focus on Bernstein’s marriage and not his music.

Even the most grotesque of philistines, like me, knows that Leonard Bernstein was a once in a lifetime type of talent, of that there is no doubt, but unfortunately Maestro is just a run of the mill movie devoid of even the most remote of insights into the great man it depicts.

Bernstein was an iconic public figure, but Cooper is incapable, as an actor and as a director, to get beyond the façade of Bernstein’s public persona and reveal the actual human being beneath it all.

Cooper’s great failings on Maestro are that he is overly ambitious while being relentlessly safe, and also egregiously indulgent.

His ambition as a director vastly exceeds his talent and skill, and so the massive scope and scale of Bernstein’s epic life, as well as his artistry and humanity, is unconscionably diminished.

Cooper the director uses a plethora of filmmaking tricks to try and make a compelling drama, for example, in the first act of the film he often transitions from one scene to the next with a time and space jump but without a cut, but these techniques ring hollow because the drama they surround is so shallow.

Cooper’s ambition as an actor is, on some level, admirable, but there too he is well out of his depth. His mimicry of Bernstein is consistent and, at times, impressive (and in the character’s later years aided by Kazu Hiro’s superb prosthetics), as he’s obviously closely studied the man’s mannerisms and voice. But Cooper’s portrayal ultimately misses the mark because, despite its showiness – or maybe because of it, it never rises to anything more than genuflection in the form of imitation.

Cooper’s indulgence as both director and actor is another albatross around the neck of the film. He directs the movie like an actor, reflexively indulging the worst of actor’s impulses. For example, he consistently holds scenes for a few beats too long – no doubt in the hope of some magic appearing, at the cost of scuttled dramatic tempo and pace.

Another example is that the acting style across the board in the film is incessantly ‘actory’ – meaning indulgent to actor’s narcissistic whims. The acting on display is all style and no substance. No characters come across as actual human beings and no scenes feel grounded, genuine or real. This is most evident in Carey Mulligan’s portrayal of Felicia, Bernstein’s wife, an awful Sarah Silverman as Shirley, Bernstein’s sister, and in Cooper himself playing Bernstein.

The only moment in the film that feels grounded, and as a result is moving, is a scene where Bernstein introduces his new girlfriend, Felicia, to David, a man with whom he has had a long running sexual relationship. David is played by Matt Bomer, and he absolutely crushes this scene. Bomer expresses David’s cavalcade of emotions with a simple and subtle series of looks. Cooper and Mulligan and the rest never approach this level of simplicity and mastery at any point in the picture.

Ironically, as ambitious as Cooper is as a director, the reality is that he has made a suffocatingly safe film. According to reports, the Bernstein family cooperated with the film and fully supported it, and it shows. Cooper’s movie never dares to challenge the Bernstein myth, but instead hews closer to hagiography, a common pitfall for films about real people with interested parties deeply invested in maintaining an image looking over the filmmaker’s shoulder.

Cooper also plays it safe himself. Yes, he is playing a gay man, but twenty years after Brokeback Mountain feels a bit less brave than it used to. But he plays it safe even there, as we never actually see Cooper’s Bernstein kiss another man…it is only implied or shown from the back and at a distance. It seems Cooper wanted to be a “brave” actor by playing a gay man but at the same time didn’t want to tarnish his movie star brand…and brand management won out.

There’s another oddity about the homosexual angle of Bernstein’s story that is mishandled, and that occurs during a scene on the street in New York City in the 1950s. Bernstein and David, his lover/former lover, walk down Central Park West and then stop and have a tender moment together in broad daylight. David caresses Bernstein’s face and kisses him on the forehead. These two men are obviously in love with each other and showing it….and no one says anything. Neither David nor Bernstein is afraid. Extras walk past them and don’t do a double take or express outrage. Bernstein says that people across the street recognize him…but he isn’t worried that they’ll see he’s gay, just that he’s famous.

This entire sequence is bizarre beyond belief. First off, just as a matter of fact, being openly gay in New York City (or just about anywhere) in the 1950s wasn’t just frowned upon…it was illegal. So, Leonard Bernstein, ambitious conductor and composer, would be scared to death to be outed because he would not only lose his job but be arrested and potentially go to jail.

Secondly, removing the stigma from Bernstein’s homosexuality, removes an obstacle for the character which existed in real life. Obstacles create drama…think of Brokeback Mountain…the two gay cowboys in that movie knew they had to hide their love because if it got-out they could be killed. Now that’s an obstacle.

An easy, and subtle, way to express this obstacle and show how constricting the culture was to a gay man like Bernstein in the 1950s, would have been to have those extras who walked by look back in disgust and horror at the two men being affectionate. And Bernstein could have struggled to hide himself or end the interaction in order to avoid detection and thus exposing himself, and his career, to peril. But no, we get none of that and all of that potential drama is neutered.

Making a movie about an artistic genius is difficult. Making one about an artistic genius who for the most part is conjuring up brilliance in his mind, is even more difficult…which is why movies about writers are notoriously hard to pull off.

Bernstein’s brilliance is both in writing and in performing – as a conductor…but we only get a scant few scenes of seeing him display his genius in front of an orchestra. The one scene that stands out as the most dynamic in the film is when Bernstein conducts an orchestra in a legendary performance in England in the early 1970s. Cooper is very good in this scene, as both an actor and director, but the success of this magnetic scene only accentuates the lifelessness of the rest of the movie.

As an actor and also as a director, Bradley Cooper is, above all else, exceedingly desperate to be good. He often reeks of desperation to such a degree, especially come award season, that it is uncomfortable to witness. But as is often the case, his level of desperation is inversely proportionate to his level of talent and skill.

Cooper’s first foray into directing was in 2018 with the fourth version of A Star is Born to hit the big screens. I found this film, which starred Lady Gaga opposite Cooper, to be cloying and mawkish, but it did have an impressive box office run and garnered a bevy of Oscar nominations but came up short in all the major categories.

I’ll say this about Maestro, I think it is much better than A Star is Born, and I think it is a much more worthy and meaningful cinematic attempt, even if it does end in failure, than Cooper’s directorial debut.

I’ll also say this…if Maestro were made twenty-five years ago, the Oscars would go bananas for it and throw every award it could grab at it because it would be considered epic yet also edgy and brave. But it’s not twenty-five years ago…and Maestro isn’t edgy and brave…it’s really rather blasé. So, I don’t think the Oscars, or anyone else, is going to be bestowing awards upon this movie.

Ultimately, Maestro as a cinematic and dramatic venture just doesn’t work, and its failure can be chalked up to Bradley Cooper’s directorial and acting ambitions being bigger than his limited talent and skill.

Tar (2022), another ambitious movie about an icon in the classical music world (albeit a fictional one), was a flawed film too but featured superior acting (it starred Cate Blanchett) and direction (directed by Todd Field) than Maestro. Neither film worked, but both are somewhat noble and worthy attempts to make a serious, adult drama with a somewhat moderate budget. We need as many of these types of films as we can get, so, while I didn’t like Maestro, I do like that this movie exists, I just wish it were much better made.

At the end of the day, I cannot recommend Maestro, but since it’s streaming on Netflix, I feel it’s appropriate to tell people to check it out for themselves and see if they like it. If you do, good for you. If you don’t, that’s okay too, because I didn’t either.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 113 - Saltburn

On this episode, Barry and I pour ourselves some bathwater cocktails and dance around our mansion in the nude as we discuss Emerald Fennell's new controversial film Saltburn. Topics discussed include the weirdness of Barry Keoghan, Emerald Fennell's major third act issues, and the cinematic skill of Linus Sandgren.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 113 - Saltburn

Thanks for listening!

©2024

The Holdovers: A Review - A Happy Humbug for the Holidays

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Not a great film, but a good enough one. It’s an exceedingly safe movie that boasts quality performances from a terrific cast.

The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Paul Giamatti, tells the story of a teacher, student and cook who are stuck together at a tony New England prep school over the Christmas holiday break in 1970.

I consider myself a marginal fan of director Alexander Payne. I’ve loved some of his movies, like About Schmidt and Nebraska. I’ve liked some of his movies, like Sideways and Election. And I’ve loathed some of his movies, like Downsizing and The Descendants.

The Holdovers, Payne’s first film since the box office and critical bomb Downsizing in 2017, was in theatres at the end of October and is now streaming on Peacock.

The film, set at the fictional prep school Barton, tells the story of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a stern and curmudgeonly academic who attended the school in his youth and has taught there for the vast majority of his adulthood.

Hunham is just like Robin Williams’ iconic character John Keating in Dead Poets Society…if Keating had a wall-eye, bad body odor and was despised by both students and colleagues alike. Hunham’s students would only stand and recite “O Captain! My Captain!” if they were about to frag him.

Hunham is, much to his chagrin, tasked with taking care of a rag tag group of students who, for a variety of reasons, have nowhere to go over the Christmas break. One of these students, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), is abandoned at the lasty minute by his mother and step-father for the holidays.

After a twist and turn of events, the only people left at Barton for holiday break are the sad-sack trio of Hunham, Tully, and the school’s head chef Mary Lamb (DaVine Joy Randolph). The one thing these three all have in common though is that they’re all in various stages of grief, such as denial, anger and depression.

The tone throughout The Holdovers is one of melancholy mixed with a cloying sentimentality. Yes, there are some amusing bits and sequences, and Giamatti’s Harvard educated Hunham has a quick, erudite and eviscerating wit, but for the most part this is a straight forward, throw-back, adult dramedy.

The Holdovers is a return to scale if not entirely to form for Alexander Payne. I thought the film was…fine. It isn’t great. But it is good…enough. It is proficiently made, well-acted, and entertaining. But what it lacks is…well…some sense of profundity, as it is incessantly safe above all else.

This is the type of film that would be perfect to sit down with extended family during the holidays and watch without anyone getting offended or upset or even all that excited. It is, as I said, above all else - safe…but it’s also entertaining and kept me captivated for its full two-hour-and-thirteen-minute running time.

The performances from the three main characters are all noteworthy. Giamatti, one of our better actors, is terrific as Hunham. The dialogue for Hunham is very well-written by screenwriter David Hemingson and is expertly delivered by Giamatti. Giamatti is very comfortable in the discomfort felt by the irascible egghead with the literal googly-eyes who smells like fish. He trudges through Hunham’s dramatic odyssey with his usual aplomb.

Dominic Sessa is a discovery as Angus Tully. This is Sessa’s first movie and while he is a bit rough-around-the-edges he brings a vitality and adolescent angst that is impossible to fake.

The big revelation though is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb. Randolph’s character Mary is the least well-written, but she fills the spaces with a weight that speaks volumes. What impressed me the most about Randolph though is that she absolutely, but subtly, nails her Boston accent, which is something that such luminaries as Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson and Julianne Moore have embarrassingly butchered (Hanks on multiple occasions).

When I have loved Alexander Payne’s films, like About Schmidt and Nebraska, it’s because they have had an acerbic and wickedly cutting and subversive nature to them. It also helps that those films star Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern respectively, giving some of the best performances of their careers.

When Payne loses me is when sentimentality and shtick come to the fore, like in The Descendants and Downsizing. (I also thought George Clooney and Matt Damon, respectively, were actively awful in both of those movies)

The Holdovers has a mix of both the best and the worst of Payne. It’s filled with sentimentality, but also features a great actor, Giamatti, swimming in a thick sea of acerbity (much like he did in Sideways).

It also has some shticky moments that disappoint and irritate. Like when Hunham chases Tully through the school, which was very reminiscent of a dreadfully bad sequence in The Descendants where George Clooney goofily runs up and down a long winding road.

But despite those contrived moments and disappointing bits, I found myself buying in to The Holdovers almost entirely because this type of movie – a smart, adult dramedy, which used to be so common in the 1970’s, is so rare nowadays.

Well-written, well-acted small comedy-dramas made by quality directors featuring skilled performers, are unfortunately few and far between in today’s Hollywood. Which is maybe why The Holdovers is being so well-received by critics and audiences alike.

If you have Peacock, I definitely recommend you watch The Holdovers, and if you don’t have Peacock, they’re always having one-week free trials so sign up for a free week and watch the movie and then cancel.

Ultimately, I enjoyed The Holdovers despite its various shortcomings and lack of artistic ambition, and frankly, I think you will too. It’s a safe movie and it definitely won’t change your life…but it also won’t disappoint.

 Follow me on twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Saltburn: A Review - This Shit Sandwich Needs More Salt, Less Burn

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an abomination. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a lobotomy.

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day I had the great misfortune of having watched Saltburn, the new movie from filmmaker Emerald Fennell, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

I decided not to write my review of Saltburn until after the New Year so as to not leave 2023, or enter 2024, with such a vile taste in my mouth, and to not subject you, my dear readers, to such potent negativity during what I hope was a joyous holiday season.

Well, now that I’ve officially published a positive review to open 2024 (of Michael Mann’s Ferrari), it’s time to get back and do the dirty work of sifting through the mountains of excrement that Hollywood shats upon us. At the bottom of that shit pile is the rancid turd known as Saltburn.

Saltburn is written and directed by Emerald Fennell. This is her second feature film as writer/director, the first being 2020’s Promising Young Woman, for which she won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Promising Young Woman was a movie about rape and fighting the patriarchy created during the height of the #MeToo mania and released in the wake of the 2020 election.

It was one of those movies that critics were afraid to criticize because its politics were “righteous”, namely that it was made by a woman and was a polemic against the patriarchy. Much to my embarrassment, even I succumbed to the moment and was muted in my criticisms of the film, and even went so far as to consider Promising Young Woman to be the first film for a promising young director (or not so young as the case may be).

To be clear, I liked the performances of Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman, but I did find the film’s third act to be so egregiously amateurish as to be catastrophic.

Upon rewatching Promising Young Woman in anticipation of seeing Saltburn, I came to clearly see that Fennell as a filmmaker is deeply, deeply flawed, and the trajectory of her career would only become clear once I’d seen her second feature.

And then I watched her second feature Saltburn…

Saltburn is the worst movie I’ve seen in maybe the last decade or more. It’s not satire, or parody, it’s simply an inane and inept attempt at drama, and it fails so miserably as to be astonishing, and frankly, embarrassing.

Saltburn is so bad I’ve been sorely tempted to encourage people to watch it just so I can commiserate with them about how awful it is.

The basics of Saltburn are thus…the film tells the tale of Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a poor boy thrown to the uber-wealthy wolves at Oxford University in the Fall of 2006. Oliver is smart but a social outcast. He becomes infatuated with an impossibly handsome classmate, Felix (Jacob Elordi), who happens to be the member of an affluent and influential family.

Oliver then goes to great lengths to ingratiate himself into Felix’s life, and succeeds as he gets invited to Felix’s expansive family estate, Saltburn, for the Summer. Oliver then has to navigate the perilous minefield which is Felix’s wealthy family and friends.

I will stop there in describing the plot so as to avoid any spoilers in case you really, really hate yourself enough to want to watch this piece of shit.

All I’ll say is that the twists and turns in the plot are so ham-fisted it feels like it was written by a self-loathing, spoiled-rich, thirteen-year-old girl pouting in her mansion as she plays with Barbies, who is writing a story to try and stroke her fragile ego and to distract herself from the dull, pulsating pain and emotional roller-coaster of her first menstruation.

The film features some of the more ludicrous and repugnant “sex” type scenes you’ll ever see, one of which involves the previously mentioned menstruation…oh…and it also features enough shots of Barry Keoghan’s floppy phallus to last a lifetime.

The acting in Saltburn is rather rudimentary. Barry Keoghan, a talented actor, gives a rather rote performance as the creepy little weird guy, something he has played far too often in his short career.

Jacob Elordi is impossibly handsome as…the impossibly handsome Felix, but beyond that there’s not much going on there.

The only performance of note is Rosamund Pike as Felix’s mother, Elspeth. Pike sinks her teeth so deep into the bone of this painfully thin caricature, and is able, through sheer force of will and talent, to find life deep, deep in the marrow. Pike’s performance is so razor sharp it makes me wish she got a chance to play this role in a different, and much better, movie.

Just as with Promising Young Woman, the third act of Saltburn is apocalyptically awful. The film veers so far off the rails in the last forty-five minutes it is hard to even remotely comprehend the scope and scale of its failure.

Also difficult to comprehend is how anyone, be it producers, executives or actors, could read this script from start to finish and think, “yeah, this is a great idea!” The characters are all caricatures, the plot is absurd beyond belief, and the political/cultural sub-text is so tone-deaf and brain-dead it should be euthanized, or at a bare minimum, institutionalized.

The thing that became excruciatingly clear while watching the grueling two-hour-and-ten-minute Saltburn, particularly its egregious third act, is that Emerald Fennell is, like so many of the actresses-turned-directors who’ve been given a leg up in Hollywood in recent years - like Olivia Wilde and Elizabeth Banks, absolute fool’s gold.

Fennell has no idea what she is doing. She is an unserious, unskilled and untalented filmmaker, and no amount of wishful thinking or affirmative action Academy Awards will ever change that fact.

After watching Saltburn the trajectory of Emerald Fennell’s career has become exceedingly clear…odds are, simply because Hollywood is desperate for female directors, she’ll get another shot or two at a feature film, but in five years or so she’ll only be directing television…and in ten years she’ll only be directing commercials…and in fifteen years, she’ll be lucky to be directing traffic.

In conclusion, Saltburn is an absolute and utter mess of a movie. I watched this piece of shit so you don’t have to…and trust me when I tell, you really don’t have to.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

May December (Netflix): A Review - A Comedy Wrapped in a Social Commentary Inside a Melodrama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This movie, like its subject, is elusive, but if you look at it through the proper lens, it often becomes fascinating.

May December, starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, is a dramatic reimagining of the salacious story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a school teacher who fell in love with her 13-year-old student back in the 1990s causing a huge scandal.

The film, which premiered on Netflix December 1st, is directed by esteemed auteur Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch.

May December follows the story of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a famous actress cast to star in a tv movie as Gracie, the woman who had a scandalous affair with her 13-year-old student Joe. Gracie went to prison for the rape/sexual misconduct with a minor, but when released resumed her relationship with the then-of-age Joe and later married him and had two children with him.

Elizabeth comes to Savannah, Georgia and integrates herself into Gracie’s life in order to better understand the character she will be playing in the tv movie. She observes Gracie and her family and community, and each night goes back to her hotel room and tries to capture Gracie’s essence by mimicking and imitating her.

But as time goes on the truth about Gracie and Joe, and even about Elizabeth, becomes more and more murky, and more and more elusive.

Director Todd Haynes is a unique filmmaker. I remember the first film of his that I ever saw was Safe (1995), which also starred Julianne Moore. That film was a very tense, deliberate, psycho-drama that was masterfully assembled.

Since then, I’ve found myself less enamored with Haynes’ work. His acclaimed films Far from Heaven and Carol felt decidedly flaccid and his more off-kilter attempts, like Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There fell flat.

May December though feels a bit different in that as a straight drama, it’s a colossal misfire, but as a sneaky comedy, melodramatic parody/satire, it works incredibly well. The question, of course, is whether Haynes is intentionally trying to be funny or if all of the comedy is purely unintentional.

One hint that Haynes is shooting for comedy is the recurring, and hilariously bad, music cues. The soundtrack for this movie is laugh out loud awful…and absolutely perfect for a cheesy, exploitationist, made-for-tv movie…just like the one Elizabeth is making regarding Gracie’s fall from grace.

There’s a scene in May December where Gracie’s adult son from her first marriage, Georgie, who is an absolute trainwreck of a human being, attempts to blackmail Elizabeth into getting him the job of “music supervisor” on the tv movie she’s making about his mother. How that resolves itself is never entirely clear but by the awful sound of the music in May December, I think if Georgie didn’t get the gig on Elizabeth’s film, he definitely got it on May December.

Haynes also treats us to some immaculately crafted, cheesy as hell zoom shots, and tightly choreographed scenes that are epically hilarious in the most subtle of ways.

The funniest part of the film though is that both Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, seem to be completely unaware that this is a comedy and entirely locked in to melodrama mode…and are both pretty awful at it.

Moore sports a grating and completely contrived lisp that is the height of distraction, and Portman is so mannered as to be a mannequin. Both of them are constantly acting, which is exactly what both of their characters are doing as well. It’s like they’re in a hall of mirrors and the real people, Gracie and Elizabeth, are impossible to differentiate from the spate of reflections upon reflections.

Speaking of mirrors, that’s not to say that there isn’t magic between these two acting icons. On numerous occasions Moore and Portman share a small space in the film and despite the lisps and the over-acting, the scenes crackle with life. These scenes are often shot, masterfully, in mirrored spaces, like bathrooms or changing rooms, and watching Moore and Portman work their instinctual magic through a camera and through a mirror or multiple mirrors, is absolutely mesmerizing.

Also mesmerizing, is Charles Melton, who plays Gracie’s victim and now husband, Joe. Melton gives the most layered, nuanced and finely crafted performance imaginable, and one of the best performances of the year. Melton, who is best known for starring in the CW series Riverdale (which I’ve never seen), is so present, genuine, grounded and exceptional as Joe it’s like he’s in a different movie altogether.

Another standout performance is by D.W. Moffet, who plays Gracie’s first husband Tom. Moffet has essentially one scene in the movie, and it’s a conversation between Tom and Elizabeth - who is asking him about the experience of being on the wrong end of Gracie’s infamous affair with an underage boy. Moffet is extraordinary in this compact scene. In lesser hand this scene is just an exposition dump and some mugging for the camera, but Moffet turns it into a profound and deeply moving drama all its own.

As the film unfolds, viewers can either accept it as a piece of heightened parody and camp, or can resist it and be extremely disappointed in it as a straight drama that gets lost in a swamp of melodrama.

I chose to enjoy the comedy of it all, and laughed out loud on numerous occasions…like when Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth does a skin-care commercial that is just like a real-life Natalie Portman skin-care commercial. I don’t know why I found that so funny…but I burst out laughing nonetheless.

If you’re looking for a smart, sly, sneaky and subtle comedy about predatory relationship power dynamics, the exploitative nature of our culture and the venality of fame, then May December is for you.

If you’re looking for a high-intensity, prestige drama that will move you deeply, then May December is not for you.

I chose the former and thought May December was a worthwhile cinematic venture. I think if you go into it with the proper, finely-tuned expectations, you’ll end up appreciating it and be glad you watched.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Boy and the Heron: A Review - The Master Miyazaki Returns

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

Hiyao Miyazaki is arguably the greatest director of animated film in cinema history. His filmography, which includes such classics as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Ponyo, is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful.

Miyazaki, who is 82-years-old, hasn’t made a feature film in a decade (The Wind Rises), and it was believed that he was finished making movies. But fortunately for us, Miyazaki is back with a new film, The Boy and the Heron, which premiered in theatres this past weekend.

The Boy and the Heron follows the travails of Mahito, a twelve-year-old boy living in Tokyo during World War II. Despite Mahito’s valiant efforts, his mother, Hisako, is killed when her hospital burns to the ground one night.

Mahito and his industrialist father Shoichi, then move to the countryside to live in the estate Hisako grew up on. Shoichi remarries with Hisako’s look-a-like younger sister, Natsuko – who becomes pregnant.

Things get typically weird from there as Mahito is pestered by an aggressive heron, and stumbles onto a hidden tower which leads him on a dark yet magical journey in the hopes of seeing his mother again and saving his step-mother from peril.

The Boy and the Heron, like so many of Miyazaki’s movies, deals with very deeply profound philosophical, psychological and existential issues. For example, grief and the meaning of life are the two pillars around which the film is constructed.  

Many of Miyazaki’s movies seem like dreams that often veer into nightmares, or like something cobbled together from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and The Boy and the Heron is no exception. There are shapeshifting demons/angels and giant, carnivorous warrior parakeets, and adorable pre/post life souls that float like balloons, and aggressive hordes of pelicans.

Through it all Miyazaki keeps his protagonist Mahito focused on finding his pregnant step-mother Natsuko and the dream of seeing his long-lost mother again, and it is that fragile humanity and gut-wrenching emotion that gives the film not only its meaning but its purpose.

As always with Miyazaki, the animation is glorious and gloriously weird. Things in Miyazaki’s world look ever-so-abnormal to the point of nightmarish. For instance, the heron is at first gorgeous, but then over time becomes grotesque. The old women, as is custom in Miyazaki films, are charming yet gruesome, witch-like characters.

The film is available in many theatres here in the U.S. either in Japanese with English subtitles or dubbed in English. I saw the film with my young son and subtitles move too fast for him to read, so we saw the dubbed version and it works well for the most part.

The cast are a collection of solid, well-known actors, such as Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Most of them are perfectly fine, with Pattinson in particular giving a quite remarkable performance that is unrecognizable.

Christian Bale, an actor I usually like, stands out though for a rather poor performance, as his work as Mahito’s father Shoichi is bizarre. At different times Bale gives Shoichi a New York accent that often stumbles into a Boston accent. All of Bale’s voice work here seems to be out of place and out of step.

Beyond that there isn’t much to complain about…it’s a Miyazaki movie after all, but it must be said that despite this being allegedly one of Miyazaki’s most personal stories, it is not among his best films. That is not to say the movie is bad, it’s just to say that in light of Miyazaki’s masterpieces, of which there are many, The Boy and the Heron somewhat pales in comparison.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing The Boy and the Heron and was thrilled that my son, who wasn’t even born when Miyazaki’s last film came out, got to see his work on a big screen. My son and I have watched all of Miyazaki’s movies in recent years and he is as big a fan as I am. It brings me endless amounts of joy watching my son watch Miyazaki movies, as he just loves everything about them.

We’ve yet to see a Miyazaki movie we’ve disliked. My son’s favorites are my favorites too, starting with My Neighbor Totoro. After that it’s Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Porco Rosso, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky and The Wind Rises. I would rate The Boy and the Heron below My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo, but right up there with any of Miyazaki’s other work. And it is most definitely better than any of the garbage Disney and Pixar have churned out in recent years.  

It was heartening to me to see that The Boy and the Heron was number one at the U.S. box office this weekend, which is something I never thought could happen. That both The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One, two Japanese films, would be so well received by U.S. audiences in back-to-back weeks is a glimmer of hope in an often-times dark and depressing popular culture landscape.

If you haven’t seen Miyazaki’s earlier films, you should go to the streaming service Max – and click on the Studio Ghibli portal, as it has all of Miyazaki’s films available to stream. Miyazaki’s movies are unique because they’re for both adults and children (I’d say kids 7 and up but your mileage may vary in terms of proper age to start). For kids I recommend you begin with My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, and for adults you can start with those or with Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, and go from there…you won’t be disappointed, and it’ll whet your appetite to see The Boy in the Heron in theatres.

In conclusion, I thoroughly recommend you see The Boy and the Heron in the theatre, and appreciate Hiyao Miyazaki while we have him on earth and still making movies.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Killer (Netflix): A Review - The King of Cold-Blooded Cinema

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My recommendation: SEE IT. A quintessentially Fincher film in every way. Coldly cinematic, diabolically dehumanized and darkly comedic, this movie’s icy embrace is undeniably compelling.

The Killer, director David Fincher’s new film about a fastidious assassin for hire starring Michael Fassbender, premiered on Netflix this past Friday, November 10.

David Fincher is one of the great auteurs of his generation, and his filmography, which, including The Killer, is twelve films deep, reveals a craftsman of such obsessive precision that it borders on the maniacal.

The Killer is the first Fincher film in his impressive filmography though that seems to unflinchingly reflect the artist himself, as the protagonist, an unnamed assassin, is every bit as meticulous and obsessed with process as the filmmaker telling his story.

The Killer seems to inhabit the same cold, nearly inhuman universe as previous Fincher films like Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Zodiac and even The Social Network. In a very real sense, The Killer feels like a thematic and tonal sequel to those films in the Fincher Cinematic Universe, just told from a different perspective.

Speaking of perspective, The Killer is told, with one notable exception, entirely from the assassin’s subjective perspective, and it is informed by the protagonist’s inner monologue as he goes about his ruthless business. This subjective approach is brilliant as it immediately connects us to the killer (Michael Fassbender) and in doing so compromises the viewer’s moral and ethical standing. We are so immersed into the mindset of this killer-for-hire that we simply accept his profession and ultimately root for him to succeed.

A nearly complete subjective approach to cinematic storytelling is not an easy thing to accomplish, and the proof of that is that other filmmakers rarely ever even attempt it. The God-like urge to show the audience something beyond the protagonist’s limited perspective is just too tempting and so directors succumb, which ends up watering down the audience’s experience.

In The Killer, Fincher and his cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt are, as always, masters of cold, yet deliriously crisp, visuals. Fincher’s signature, Carravaggio-esque, darkened, muted color scheme and use of forbidding shadows make for a glorious visual experience. As does Messerschmidt’s seemingly effortless camera movement and exquisite framing.

Adding to the perverse joy and humor of The Killer is Fincher’s use of the music of 1980’s British alternative band The Smiths. The assassin’s personal playlist on his ipod nano is chock full of The Smiths and their iconic and ironic anthems. Fincher matches his visuals to The Smiths soundtrack and it injects dark comedic irony into many scenes and elevates the film to an enormous degree.

In another rarity, the assassin’s voice-over, which reveals his inner monologue, also elevates and propels the film. Voice-overs are usually the sign of a director flailing, but in this instance the voice-over draws the viewer in to the unreliable narrator’s state of mind.

Fassbender’s killer is like Fight Club’s protagonist, but instead of saying to himself, “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise”, he says things like “trust no one”, “anticipate don’t improvise” and “skepticism often gets confused for cynicism”.

That the killer is often saying these things to himself while he is actually doing the exact opposite makes for an amusing and revealing trend.

As for Fassbender as the unnamed killer, he is perfectly cast. Fassbender is capable of saying everything while not speaking a word. His lithe frame and steely eyes are all the performance he needs and it fits masterfully with Fincher’s diabolically frigid cinematic style.

Tilda Swinton and Charles Parnell both have very brief, but extremely well done, supporting turns in The Killer, but besides that there is nothing but Fassbender and his delightfully dead pan voice-over.

The Killer, like much of Fincher’s work, seems to me to be a commentary on man’s struggle with his fast-fading humanity in a dehumanizing world.

Fassbender’s killer character seemingly wants to make himself mechanical, like some impervious, emotion-less Terminator. In order to do so he repeats his emotionless mantras like an inhumane prayer or playbook and wears an Apple watch to control his sleeping patterns and even his heartbeat (and maybe, just maybe, deep down to remind himself that he is indeed a human being with a heart).

Yet, despite this nearly mechanical meticulousness, the killer’s failures and mis-judgements, which are numerous, prove him to be all too human despite his best efforts.

The Killer also makes clear that maintaining one’s humanity isn’t just a struggle in the blackened human heart, it is an even more elusive goal in the grim outer world as well. In the world of The Killer, and in the real world, everything is corporate controlled and mechanized/digitized. You don’t use your hands to pick a lock in this modern world, you use your phone or a device to hack it. You don’t use your hands to hotwire a car, you use a fake credit card to rent it. You clean your filthy human body in an anti-septic shower in a soulless airport lounge for corporate customers with frequent flyer miles, like it’s an automated car wash. You don’t wear disguises to conceal your human face, but instead have multiple digital identities named after 70’s sitcom characters that were mere approximations of real people – and whom empty modern people devoid of, and detached from, their cultural history will never recognize.

The mechanized/digitized world, dehumanizes and isolates everyone who touches it, which enables Fassbender’s assassin to swim effortlessly through this icy, corporate-controlled pseudo-simulation of life like a shark through the frigid waters of the Atlantic.

Fassbender’s assassin, for all his inhuman mantras about “don’t trust anyone” and “forbid empathy”, is oddly inspired on his bloody spree by the most human of all emotional states…revenge. In this way, the killer fails miserably at his mechanical/digital ideology while only succeeding in deluding himself.

The somewhat anti-climactic conclusion of The Killer may leave some viewers unsatisfied, but I found it inspired and delightfully diabolical (and without giving away spoilers – it is insightful because it savagely exposes the deeply ingrained power dynamics of class in America, and rightfully eviscerates the proletariat for its flaccid weakness).

The truth is that Fassbender’s killer, for good and for ill, is every single one of us whether we want to believe it or not. Our culture has left all of us just as dehumanized and dead inside as the killer, and just as ultimately incompetent and impotent despite our instinctual desire to be just as demonically depraved.

Fincher masterfully lures us in with his gorgeous and entertaining filmmaking style, and convinces us to identify with, and root for, a committed serial killer. It’s an ugly business, but Fincher makes it look beautiful…and we are ultimately just as guilty as the man pulling the trigger.

I really love David Fincher as a filmmaker, although admittedly, I don’t like all of his films. Some of them, like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Gone Girl (yes, I know, I am decidedly in the minority in that I hate Gone Girl with a passion), are truly awful. Some of them, like Zodiac and The Social Network are magnificent masterpieces. The Killer is not as great as Zodiac and The Social Network, but it is definitely among the better films in Fincher’s filmography.

If you like Fincher films you will, not surprisingly, love The Killer, as it is quintessential Fincher. If you find Fincher films to be hit or miss, I would recommend you at least give The Killer a shot. It’s on Netflix so it doesn’t cost you anything…so why not?

The reality is that in our current culture of mediocrity there’s a desperate dearth of quality films from truly great directors, so you need to enjoy superior artistry when given the chance, and The Killer is definitely your chance.

 Follow Me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 108 - Wes Anderson Four Short Films - The Roald Dahl Collection

On this episode, Barry and I talk all things Wes Anderson and critique the four short films he recently made for Netflix based on the Roald Dahl short stories The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison. Topics discussed include the joy of short films, the challenging style of Wes Anderson and the awful marketing of Netflix. As a special bonus - watch Barry’s own classic short film "...With No Hands"…which stars me!! It was the first time Barry and I ever met.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 108 - Wes Anderson Four Short Films - The Roald Dahl Collection

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Collection (Netflix): A Review of Four Short Films

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A compelling and often captivating collection of four short films from an often times singular cinematic genius.

Idiosyncratic filmmaker Wes Anderson, who earlier this year released the feature film Asteroid City, is back after a brief respite with four short films streaming on Netflix.

The films, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Ratcatcher and Poison, are all adaptation of literary works by Roald Dahl. Dahl is best known for his children’s stories such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox (which was adapted to film by Wes Anderson in 2009), but these Dahl short stories adapted by Anderson are of a more grown-up variety than Dahl’s dark children’s stories.

Anderson is a filmmaker of considerable talent and skill, and his early filmography boasts a plethora of quality films such as Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums, which are among my favorites. With the lone exception of The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is his very best film, the more recent cinematic output from Anderson has often been sub-par due the burden of either a formulaic story where adults behave like children and children behave like adults, or a mountain of painstaking yet pedantic cinematic style.

For example, Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), which many adore, was an aggravating bore to me because of the kid/adult – adult/kid formula. I simply had seen Anderson’s shtick too many times by that point to be entertained, never mind captivated, by it.

As for Anderson’s style, he is as impressive a visual storyteller as we have, but he often of late becomes so enamored by the beauty and intricacy of his creation that the rest of the cinematic experience, be it the storytelling or acting, gets lost under a mountain of manic meticulousness and artifice. A perfect example of this are Anderson’s last two feature films The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, which felt too cute by at least half to be truly worthwhile cinema, despite being gloriously and gorgeously photographed.

Which brings us to these four new short films. In these films, Anderson doesn’t diminish his artistic assault on the cinematic senses, but instead he heightens it, turning the Wes Anderson of it all up to eleven. Remarkably though, this approach, which I have found off-putting to the point of being irritating in recent feature-length Anderson outings, works incredibly well in the short film form.

Anderson’s intricate sets and staging, his actor’s performance style and his lush, exquisite visuals, turn what could have been rather mundane short stories into always engaging, often compelling and sometimes captivating short films which feature an ensemble of actors, which include Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Rupert Friend and Ben Kingsley, playing a variety of differing roles in all four of the short films.

The longest of the films is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which runs 41 minutes. This film stars Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ben Kingsley, and they give top notch performances and fit seamlessly into Anderson’s contrived performance style.  

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a winding tale that stars Cumberbatch as Sugar, a wealthy bachelor who uses his inherited fortune to fuel a gambling compulsion. Through some pretty extraordinary narrative twists and turns Henry Sugar ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his life.

Anderson shoots this film, and the other three shorts, like an extravagant stage play. Anderson’s use of stage theatricality in his works has gone through an interesting, if sometimes unsuccessful, evolution. For example, in Rushmore (1998), the main character, Max, puts on a stage play at his high school. This stage play is a very cinematic, and derivative, Vietnam story, which includes multiple explosions. In contrast from the cinematic stage play in Rushmore, in Asteroid City (2023), Anderson makes a film with a play and the making of that play at its narrative center. The ridiculously cinematic stage play in Rushmore was hysterically funny, but the stage play aspect of Asteroid City was an albatross and a banal burden to the film.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, particularly Ben Kingsley’s work in it, and having not read the short story, was pleasantly surprised by its narrative twists and turns.

The Swan, which features a terrific performance from actor Rupert Friend, is a mere 19 minutes long, but it grabs you from the get go and never lets you go. It tells the story of a young boy in a bird sanctuary and it’s a remarkable little story.

Anderson’s stellar use of straight lines within his frame to accentuate depth, movement and stillness, as well as his masterful camera choreography, are all on full display in all of these shorts, but none so gloriously as in The Swan.

Poison, which also runs 19 minutes, features solid performances from Cumberbatch and Patel, as it recounts a potentially perilous snake bite situation.

Anderson skillfully heightens the drama of this scenario and gets a helping hand from his actors Cumberbatch, Patel and Kingsley, all of whom fully commit to the circumstances. The turn near the end is quite interesting on a variety of levels…all I’ll say about it is that the poison isn’t what you think it is but is more toxic than you imagined.

The final film is The Ratcatcher, which also runs just 19 minutes. The film tells the story of a small English town that hires a ratcatcher to rid it of its rat infestation. Fiennes and Friend star in this one and do admirable work.

I found The Ratcatcher to be the weakest of the four films, mostly because I found the theatrical artifice of it to be the most objectionable. For example, there are props that are mimed instead of being real. So, Fiennes must pretend to hold an object in his hand instead of actually holding one. Having worked in the theatre for a great deal of my life, I found this level of theatricality to be quite off-putting (or maybe just triggering!) as it was just too silly.

In addition, Anderson pushes the envelope…even for him…when he tries to shoot some darker, confrontational type of sequences that to me were unsuccessful as they fell a bit visually flat. That said, it was nice to see Fiennes “sink his teeth” into the role of the ratcatcher, as he’s quite good.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the short films of the Roald Dahl Collection by Wes Anderson and recommend them to anyone who wants to be entertained and enraptured, even if it’s just for a brief twenty-minute stint. Oddly enough I think if Anderson had lumped these four stories together and put them out as a feature film, much as he did with The French Dispatch, I would’ve disliked it. I think the sickly-sweet visual style of Wes Anderson coursing through these short films would’ve been too much to handle if force fed to me in a two-hour feature film.

For some strange reason, Netflix has not even packaged these films together, so you have to search each one out individually on the streaming service. If you search Roald Dahl collection on Netflix, you’ll get not just the individual Wes Anderson short films but also movies like Matilda…which is sort of weird. It’s also weird that if you watch one of the Roald Dahl Wes Anderson short films, it will not automatically roll into the next Roald Dahl Wes Anderson short film. I have no idea why that is…just that it is.

My recommendation is to seek out and watch these four Wes Anderson short films. Watch them at your leisure and enjoy them for what they are….which is pieces of short, fascinating cinematic art from one of our most singular filmmaking talents.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Asteroid City: A Review - The Unbearable Quirkiness of Wes Anderson

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Cinephiles should watch it because it really is masterfully photographed, but normal people will find its excessive twee-ness and unorthodox storytelling tiresome and/or irritating.

The word “twee” is defined in the dictionary as “excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty or sentimental.” Surprisingly, filmmaker Wes Anderson, whose films include Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch and his newest cinematic venture, Asteroid City, is not pictured next to that definition in the dictionary since his movies are the ultimate cinematic embodiment of the word – for good or for ill.

Asteroid City, Anderson’s 11th film, hit theatres this past June 16th and barely anyone noticed. The film, which boasts a large ensemble cast of stars, including such luminaries as Scarlet Johansson and Tom Hanks, quickly came and went, but it just premiered on the streaming service Peacock – where I got a chance to finally see it.

As a general rule I love that Wes Anderson films exist even when I don’t love the Wes Anderson film I’m watching. This is very true of Asteroid City as it is an impeccable piece of cinema, but not a very good movie.

On its surface, the film, set in a sort of hyper-stylistic 1950’s America, follows the travails of a disparate group of people who come to a remote desert town (Asteroid City) for a youth astronomy convention and science competition.

Of course, Wes Anderson being Wes Anderson, he doesn’t just tell a straight forward story about people and a place. Asteroid City is really like a cinematic Matryoshka Doll (Russian Nesting Doll), as it is really a stage play, within a stage play, within a stage play, within a movie.

That set up is as twee as can be, and the execution of the film is twee too…but in a good way.

Anderson, as always, shoots a glorious movie. His highly stylized approach is visually stunning and includes sharp framing, crisp camera movements and exquisite colors and lighting. Anderson and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Robert Yoeman, once again create a film with a stunning level of visual precision to it that is greatly appealing and extraordinarily impressive.

But despite the visual feast on display, the film’s storytelling and drama is pretty thin gruel.

There are, as is par for the course in a Wes Anderson movie, the cavalcade of eccentric, emotionally distant characters who behave in idiosyncratic ways as they experience dramatic life anomalies.

In terms of storytelling and character development, like much of Anderson’s recent work, it falls very flat. Yes, the story is clever…but much too clever for its own good, and the end result is a film that feels too cute by half…or considerably more than half.

The story’s Matryushka Doll/multiple layers don’t add to the drama but consistently detract from it and feel like a cheap cinematic parlor trick to try and enhance a shallow idea. The characters are all thin caricatures, and the dialogue feels less stagey and theatrical than just plain phony.

The lead of the film is Jason Schwartzman, a frequent face in Anderson’s films. Schwartzman is a mystery to me as he has never been good in anything in which I’ve ever seen him. Schwartzman is cousins with the co-creator of the story for Asteroid City, Roman Coppola of the vast and impressive Coppola family. Hmmm…maybe I’m beginning to understand why Jason Schwartzman has a career despite his minimal talent.

Scarlet Johansson is very good in Asteroid City as Midge Campbell, an actress and mother, and her work in this film is a pretty notable reminder that she is a movie star and would’ve been one in any era of Hollywood.

The rest of the cast are fine, I guess. From Tom Hanks to Bryan Cranston to Tilda Swinton to Maya Hawke to Jeffrey Wright to Steve Carrell and on and on, are all pretty forgettable. Watching this cast perform this script is unfortunately like watching a junior high drama class play out an inside joke that no one else gets or even remotely cares about.

Like seemingly all of Wes Anderson’s films, the movie also features oddball teenagers and kids who act like adults, and goofy adults who act like kids. This formula has occasionally worked in Anderson’s past, but here it feels tired to the point of cliché.

As for the deeper analysis of Asteroid City, it is interesting that it deals with the notion of aliens, UFOs and visitation all while those topics are in the headlines in the real world.

As congress holds hearings on alleged crashed UFOs that have been retrieved along with Non-Human Biological Entities, and military pilots share their stories and data of interactions with UFOs, it is pretty interesting to watch a film that somewhat grapples with the question of how earthlings would handle the notion of not being alone in the universe, or that they’re not on top of the knowledge food chain.

I’ve been interested in, and studying the UFO topic for a very long time, and Asteroid City portrays a scenario which feels surprisingly pretty realistic despite being played for laughs.

If a UFO landed on the White House lawn and aliens got out and waved for the cameras, there would probably be a gigantic freak out by the populace accompanied by a reflexively authoritarian and tyrannical response from government. And then, after a few weeks (or even days considering our attention deficit culture) people would basically go back to their lives and their usual petty bullshit. Governments, of course, would keep their newly pronounced and always-expanding powers – in order to consolidate their power, silence dissent, line their own pockets and cover their own asses, forever and ever.

The aliens would probably not really care about us one way or the other, which may be the most frightening prospect of all…that the human race is utterly irrelevant.

Anyway, those are the thoughts I had after watching Asteroid City, which to its credit, at least had me mulling the future of mankind, aliens and the impact of disclosure.

As for whether I recommend Asteroid City? Well, if you work in the film industry or are a cinephile, then yes, I’d say you should watch it because Wes Anderson is a very particular talent and his films are important in the grander arc of cinematic history and within the current art of cinema. But if you’re a normal human being who just wants to watch a good movie, maybe be entertained or enlightened or deeply moved, then Asteroid City is not for you because, unfortunately, it doesn’t really do any of those things.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Oppenheimer: A Review - Destroyer of Worlds, Creator of Great Cinema

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. The rarest of the rare in our current culture, an exquisitely crafted movie made for grown-ups. A masterful work that deserves to be seen on the big screen.

Oppenheimer, the new film written and directed by Christopher Nolan which recounts the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who first made the atomic bomb, is a stunning accomplishment for a variety of reasons.

The first of which is that it is made with a level of technical and cinematic proficiency rarely seen in our current age of mundane, mind-numbing, moviemaking sub-mediocrity.

Secondly, Oppenheimer is remarkable because it’s a mature movie made for adults that features zero fights and car chases that has generated a tremendous amount of interest, and if reports are to be believed, box office.

My screening here in flyover country (I’m currently living on a farm in an undisclosed part of Middle America) at noon on a Saturday was packed with a striking cross section of regular folks, the overwhelming majority of which I can confidently assume do not consider themselves cinephiles or even count themselves among regular movie goers.

As I watched the three-hour film that consists almost entirely of dramatic scenes of people talking unfold before me, I couldn’t help but wonder if these ‘regular’ people around me liked this film as much as I did.

Oppenheimer tells the sprawling story of its protagonist’s struggle with the moral and ethical burdens of his world-altering calling, but compresses it into an intimate drama that, much like how Oppenheimer builds the first atomic bomb, explodes inward first, which then triggers the greater outward conflagration.

Watching Oppenheimer, one cannot help but marvel at a filmmaker bristling with confidence and competence, the former of which is all too common (and unearned) and the latter of which all too rare nowadays. This is an ambitious movie to the point of being audacious, and I cannot think of another living filmmaker who has the unique artistic style and populist storytelling skillset of Christopher Nolan who could even approach pulling it off.

To be clear, I am not some Nolan fanboy. I respect him greatly but have had some mixed feelings about his previous work. For instance, I thought both The Dark Knight and Dunkirk were masterpieces (I think Dunkirk is his greatest film and one of the very best films of the 21st Century), but I thought Interstellar and Tenet were garbage. On the whole I find him to be a sort of new generation Spielberg without the shmaltz and obsession with children. He is the rare auteur nowadays who makes big budget – big box office, popular movies.

Nolan empties his bag of moviemaking tricks on this one as he uses time jumps, different film stocks and aspect ratios, and wonderfully deft editing to create a mainstream movie that often feels like an impressionistic fever dream.

The key to the success of this massive undertaking is Cillian Murphy who plays Oppenheimer – the American Prometheus who gives the ultimate fire to humanity. Like Dr. Frankenstein, he meddles with powers beyond his moral comprehension that ultimately hunt and haunt him for the rest of his life. If Murphy fails even a little bit in the role this movie crumbles under the weight of its own ambition, but he never stumbles, not even a little.

Murphy is able to convey the vivid, rich inner life of his character with a single, hollow-eyed close-up, and Nolan takes full advantage of his talents. Over the course of the film Murphy’s Oppenheimer goes from being a ravenously ambitious student to a callously arrogant expert to a hollowed-out martyr desperate to be punished for his egregious moral sins and all of it feels grounded and genuine and gloriously compelling.

Another very effective performance comes from Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, an administrative admirer of Oppenheimer and bureaucratic bully. It was an absolute joy to see Downey back to serious acting after his long and fruitful run as Iron Man. Downey has not lost his chops as his Strauss is a cauldron of conflicting and conniving energy that is captivating to watch.

The other stand out performance comes from Gary Oldman, who has just one scene, but he is phenomenal in it. It’s a testament to Oldman’s prodigious talent that he can be so thoroughly unforgettable in a mere matter of moments in a movie.

The rest of the cast, for the most part, acquit themselves well enough. Matt Damon as a demanding American General Leslie Groves, is fine, as are the cavalcade of actors like Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek and Josh Hartnett who pepper the cast.

Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt are the two main actresses and they do the best they can with roles that feel underwritten and a bit uneven. Pugh is always terrific and brings her dark magnificent energy to bear here. Blunt at first feels out of sorts in her role as Oppenheimer’s wife, but she finds her stride in the last third of the film and nails one critical scene when it matters most.

The only performances I thought were notably underwhelming were Benny Safdie as Edward Teller and Rami Malek as David Hill. Both seem out of place and rather awkward in their roles.

On the bright side, it seems definite that Cillian Murphy will be nominated for Best Actor and will probably be the odds-on favorite to win. Downey Jr. will also likely be nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

The film is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who himself could be staring at a second Oscar nomination (his first was for Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk). Hoytema’s framing, close-ups in particular, are exquisite, as is his use of color and contrast.

The soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson is also very effective and well-done. It skillfully but subtly enhances the drama of the film without over-imposing itself and feeling manipulative.

As good as the cinematography and music were, the editing by Jennifer Lame really stands out. The film jumps back and forth in time and yet never loses coherence thanks to Lame’s deft and skillful work.

It is always difficult to discern any sort of political or cultural meaning from Nolan’s films, but they seem much more apparent than usual in Oppenheimer, at least to me. Of course, one must be self-aware enough to know that they may be projecting their own ideological perspective onto a film rather than discovering the director’s intent.

For example, after Nolan’s superhero masterpiece The Dark Knight came out in 2008 there was lots of talk among members of the George W. Bush torture and death-cult that the film was about Bush as Batman being scapegoated for what he has to do to defeat the Joker/Bin Laden, the ultimate terrorist agent of chaos. I never found that argument compelling and always thought it had more to do with the guilty conscience and vacuous ideology of its adherents rather than with Nolan’s intended sub-text.

The same may be true of my reading on Oppenheimer, which seems to me to be a movie that speaks to much of our current era’s issues. For instance, Oppenheimer is persecuted for speaking out against establishment orthodoxy and for holding views deemed to be dangerous. That seems to be very relevant to our current times where wrong-think is a cultural crime as has been well documented here and elsewhere.

Oppenheimer is also a stark reminder of the destructive power and nature of human beings, and how serious that subject is but how we often take it much too lightly.

For example, we have both liberals and conservatives in this country hell bent on escalating the proxy war in Ukraine up to and including to the point of direct conflict with Russia, a nuclear armed state, in order to desperately cling to our self-delusional empire. Oppenheimer eventually came to understand the power he unleashed by building an atomic bomb, but somehow our modern culture has forgotten the earth destroying ability it possesses and feels so comfortable toying with.

And finally, one can’t help but think of Artificial Intelligence while watching Oppenheimer. AI is a great achievement for scientists but like the team at Los Alamos that unleashed the destructive power of the gods onto humans, the unintended and long-term consequences of AI seem to be a moral and ethical minefield for which its creators never seriously prepared or even remotely considered. The impending, and most likely inevitable, dire consequences of artificial intelligence feel all the more chilling when considered in the context of the moral dilemma and outcome of Oppenheimer.

Whether the film is actually about those things or I am just projecting my own fears and ideologies on to it, is ultimately irrelevant, as the film stands on its cinematic artistry alone regardless of its deeper or wider meaning.

The thing that stood out to me the most regarding Oppenheimer was just the fact that it exists and that regular people are interested in seeing it.

For decades the art of cinema has been in steep decline and in recent years the business of movies has followed suit. For the entirety of this century Hollywood has been training audiences to watch nothing but dumbed down bullshit and to instinctively yearn for mindless entertainment. Oppenheimer is counter to that. To be clear, this film isn’t highbrow or arthouse, but it is definitely elevated, adult, populist moviemaking, storytelling and entertainment.

I doubt this will turn the tide of franchise excrement coming from Hollywood, but it is a sliver of hope. In the sea of shit that has been movies over the last four years, original, mature stories from auteurs have been few and far between and even the ones that did come out were among the lesser of the director’s filmography. But with Oppenheimer we have Christopher Nolan, one of the more successful directors in recent Hollywood history, putting out an original, adult-targeted film, and one of his very best films, when all hope seemed lost in the industry for this sort of thing.

Audiences are desperately hungry for quality films that are made for grown-ups…and with Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan has delivered. I, for one, am grateful.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100 Part Two - Popular Streaming Platform Recommendations

On the conclusion of our 100th episode celebration, Barry and I finish up our streaming service  film/tv recommendations. Topics discussed include the wonders of the Criterion Channel, the god-awful shit that is Peacock, and how HBO Max was better before it became Max. Oh...and a flock of geese gets slaughtered on air for no apparent reason. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100 Part Two

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Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100!! Recommendations for Movies and Shows Currently Available on Streaming Services - Part One

On this very special episode, Barry and I host a massive party at LCFM headquarters to celebrate our 100th episode. In part one of this historic podcasting event, we not only name drop our bevy of celebrity friends, but also give our selections for good movies and shows to watch currently available on each streaming service. Stay tuned for part two of this blockbuster celebratory event in the coming days.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100!! Top Movies and Shows Currently Available on Streaming Services

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©2023