The Idea of You: A Review - Looking for Love (and Entertainment) in All the Wrong Places

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An insidiously venal piece of rom-com slop.

The Idea of You, the new Amazon movie starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, is one of those insipid romantic comedies that is neither romantic nor comedic.

The film, written by Jennifer Westfeldt and Michael Showalter and directed by Showalter, tells the tale of Solene Marchand (Hathaway), a 40-year-old divorcee and single mother who owns an art gallery in Los Angeles.

Through happenstance Solene takes her teen daughter and her friends to Coachella for a music festival and there she meets and begins a love affair with Hayes, the lead singer of a popular boy band, who happens to be sixteen years her junior.

The story of The Idea of You, which apparently is based upon a book of the same name that no self-respecting human being should have ever read, is one of those divorced wine-mom wet dreams where middle-aged women can imagine themselves being so uber-desirable and hyper-successful and amazing that some high value, wealthy, famous and handsome young stud falls head over heels for them.

For an outsider like me, who is neither divorced nor a wine mom desperate for glory days gone by, this story and the character of Solene seem both fantastical and frankly pathetic. No doubt I would be run out of the mid-day chardonnay ladies book club for voicing such a misogynistic and hateful opinion.

The problems with The Idea of You go well beyond the ridiculous premise. The film bills itself as a romantic comedy yet there isn’t a single thing in it that is even remotely funny or even approaching funny.

The romance side of it is pretty lacking as well, as Hathaway and Galitzine have all the sexual chemistry of week-old dog turd roasting in the hot sun.

That Anne Hathaway is once again playing a sort of ugly duckling transformed into a princess (sexy or otherwise) is, to borrow from her favorite acting tick, eye-rolling. Yes, she has succeeded in this type of role in the past in films like The Devil Wears Prada and those Princess Diary movies, but the bloom is off the rose and it falls entirely flat in The Idea of You.

Ms. Hathaway is certainly a beautiful woman, and to pretend like she’s not or that she’s some frumpy old hag, is absurd to the point of being annoying. Even more absurd is the fact that her daughter in the film, Izzy (Ella Rubin), looks like she is Solene’s slightly younger sister.

In fact, the age difference stuff is the most-inane part of this entirely inane movie. Solene is forty but looks thirty-three, and Hayes is twenty-four and looks thirty-two, and Izzy is seventeen and looks twenty-eight. Everyone seems to be in the same suffocating age bracket and none of it makes any sense whatsoever.

Another extremely annoying part of the movie is that viewers must suffer through musical performances by Hayes and his insufferably awful boy band. Galitzine is apparently a singer in real life, so I assume he’s doing the actual singing in the movie, and I suppose it’s fine, it’s just that the songs are so god-awful atrocious as to be criminal. And that we must sit through entire renditions of these terrible songs that seem interminable throughout the film, feels like a crime against humanity.

In addition, Galitzine’s Hayes and his boy band bros are supposed to be the biggest boy band around but they are so relentlessly amateurish and such raging mediocrities, and their performances so stilted and underwhelming that it all seems even more ridiculous than the asinine premise of the movie.

The Idea of You also violates one of the rules that rarely if ever fails me, namely that if a character must run the gauntlet of a gaggle of rabid journalists/paparazzi at any time in a movie…then that movie sucks. I cannot recall a time when this rule was violated and the film was good and The Idea of You is perfect evidence of the rule’s validity.

Now, to be clear, I am not exactly the target audience for this film. But it is streaming on Amazon and that behemoth has put its considerable corporate heft behind the movie and promoting it, so it caught my eye and I gave it a watch…so you don’t have to.

What is so striking to me about The Idea of You is that this movie, its aesthetics, its tone, its story, the performances and everything about it except its star, is a Hallmark level piece of work. If this were starring Lacey Chabert and running on Lifetime, no one, myself most of all, would even know it exists or ever watch it. But because it stars Anne Hathaway and Amazon is behind it, it is thrust into the cultural spotlight and is taken seriously…or as seriously as a movie like this can be taken.

The truth is that if this movie were made fifteen years ago and starred Julia Roberts and Ryan Gosling, then it maybe, might’ve had a chance to be a big hit. But it wasn’t…and it definitely isn’t.

Anne Hathaway has her charms, but in a role like this in a film like this, they wear unconscionably thin, and Nicholas Galitzine is neither sexy enough nor interesting enough to move the needle in either direction, and so, The Idea of You ends up falling decidedly flat.

If you are looking for a mindless piece of rom-com entertainment, best avoid The Idea of You because it is either too mindless…or ironically, not mindless enough, to be of any value or worth.

The bottom line is that The Idea of You is a bad idea made into a bad movie, and rom-com lovers who seek it out will be looking for love in all the wrong places.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: A Review - Middling Monkey Business

****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 flawed film is the worst of the fantastic recent reboot franchise, but it’s decent enough for Planet of the Apes fanatics despite its very pronounced flaws.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth film in the Planet of the Apes franchise reboot (and the ninth in the overall franchise), hit theatres this past weekend and handily won the box office by raking in $129 million.

The film, written by Josh Friedman and directed by Wes Ball, is set many generations after the events of its tremendous predecessor, War for the Planet of the Apes, which dramatized Caesar, the patriarch of the intelligent apes, delivering the first generation of said apes to the promised land.

In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the memory of the founding father Caesar is long forgotten by many tribes of apes living in isolated enclaves. One of these tribes is an eagle collecting group of apes, among them a young chimp named Noa (Owen Teague).

Noa accidentally stumbles upon another group of apes who not only remember the history of Caesar, but exploit it for nefarious, authoritarian means. This group, led by Proximus Caesar and his henchman gorilla Sylva, go on a rampage of conquest in order to Make Planet of the Apes Great Again….and Noa and his peaceful tribe bear the brunt of their ambition.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has Sasquatchian-sized shoes to fill considering the brilliance of its three predecessors Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes, and, to be frank, it never even approaches adequately filling them. To be clear, the film isn’t bad, but it also isn’t the least bit great, and it is easily the worst of the four films in the rebooted franchise.

Planet of the Apes films, even in the original franchise of the late 1960s and early 1970s, have always been great ideas with social issues embedded deep within the sci-fi splendor.

The same is true of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as it explores authoritarianism, exploitation, manipulation and other social issues. But just like the flawed early 1970’s sequels, Kingdom is much better as an idea than it is in execution.

The biggest issue with Kingdom is that none of its characters are even remotely compelling. The protagonist, Noa (Owen Teague), is no Caesar. He’s a rather dull and disinteresting chimp surrounded by equally dull chimps, like his friends Soona and Anaya. It also doesn’t help that it’s very difficult to tell the chimps apart as they – excuse my chimp racism – all look alike.

The uniformity of Noa’s tribe is further hampered by the flatness of each character. None stand out and none are fully fleshed out. As a result, none of their relationships are developed to the point where they’d be meaningful, never mind captivating.

The humans don’t fare any better. Nova (Freya Allen) is a mysterious human woman who isn’t that mysterious nor interesting. We never truly understand where she comes from or what motivates her. Trevathan (William H. Macy), is a human who works with apes and his story might’ve been pretty interesting but we never get to see it so we’ll never know.

Besides the lackluster characters, the film also suffers due to a lack of narrative clarity and visual crispness. Both of these shortcomings fall in the lap of director Wes Ball. Ball’s previous films include the Maze Runner trilogy, which isn’t exactly the pinnacle of cinematic experience. Watching Ball’s Planet of the Apes movie only increases Matt Reeves standing, as he directed the stellar Dawn and War films and has now graduated to the Batman franchise.

Kingdom’s plot jumps around from a coming-of-age story to a road picture to a fight-the-power narrative, but by trying to be all of these things it ends up being none of them.

Yes, Kingdom does nicely pay homage to the original 1968 film, particularly in one section with its distinct visual style and signature music, and it also gives adequate depth to the franchise’s mythology and archetypes, like having Noa (the biblical Noah – get it?) survive a flood of monkey shit both figuratively and sort of literally. But the movie never grabs you by the throat and makes you pay attention. It never makes you care much about the characters you’re supposed to care about, and never hate the characters you’re supposed to hate.

The best character in the entire film is without question Raka (Peter Macon), a monastic Orangutan who is keeping the gospel of Caesar and his sacred sayings alive, even if it is just to himself. But even Raka is not as good as say Maurice, the stunning orangutan from the previous trilogy.

That said, Raka has far too little screen time, and would be very well served with a Disney + mini-series (as would the entirety of the Orangutan class in the Planet of the Apes universe – give us a Dr. Zaius series!!), which I would voraciously watch. But instead, he’s given short shrift and the film suffers because of it.

The same is true of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the villainous chimp leader of a powerful group of apes, and his number one general Sylva (Eka Darville), a rough and tumble lowland gorilla.

The origin story of Proximus and Sylva too would make an interesting mini-series or feature film, no doubt more compelling than the rather tepid adventures of Noa, the good-hearted country ape forced to face the big, bad world. But instead Proximus and Sylva are rather thin characters despite there being a lot of meat left on those bones.

As far as the visuals of the film go, cinematographer Gyula Pados never paints with much flair, unlike his predecessors in the reboot trilogy. The film looks fine, but in comparison to the luscious visual feast of War for the Planet of the Apes for instance, Kingdom falls flat. The same is true of the action sequences, as the fight scenes, most notably the climactic battle, are dramatically underwhelming and poorly designed.

In addition, the CGI, for some reason, looks a little bit off compared to the previous films, or maybe it was just the lack of unique and compelling characters that made the visuals seem less than. For example, there is no character in this entire film that looks as good as say Koba or Maurice from the three previous films.

Another issue is the acting. Despite it being motion-capture acting, it is still acting, and the cast of the previous three films, most notably Andy Serkis as Caesar and Toby Kebbell as Koba, showed audiences the brilliance possible while acting through technology. Nothing in this film even comes close the stellar work of the cast in the previous films.

For example, Kevin Durand gives a rather trite and predictable performance as the villain Proximus. His bluster and big voice are routine for any first-time actor trying to play the heavy.

Owen Teague as Noa never lives up to the work Serkis did as Caesar, which to be fair, is an impossible task as Andy Serkis is the Marlon Brando of motion-capture acting….but still, the drop-off is notable and uncomfortable.

Now, with all of that bitching and moaning aside…I still have to admit that I liked Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes mostly because the original Planet of the Apes movies were my favorite film franchise of all-time and the reboot trilogy has only made the franchise in total even greater as they were sensational. Kingdom definitely has massive flaws – as explained above, but on the bright side, unlike Tim Burton’s shitty 2001 Apes movie, this is a real film and is passable entertainment. While not great, it is not an embarrassment to the franchise or the rich mythology of the franchise.

If, like me, you love the Planet of the Apes in general, you’ll like this movie well enough. It isn’t anywhere near as good as the previous three films, but it isn’t catastrophically bad either. But the bottom line is…Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a professionally made movie about talking monkeys plotting against and beating the hell out of each other…what’s not to like?

That said, one can only hope that the next Planet of the Apes film is a step up from Kingdom, or at least a step in the right direction, and this extraordinarily long-running, high-quality, fascinating franchise finds better footing moving forward.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire - A Review: The Bigger They Are, the Harder Empires Fall

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Popcorn Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: One of the weaker MonsterVerse movies, but it still features some pretty cool monster brawls. Ultimately, a mindless monster movie that unfortunately speaks to our current moment in all the wrong ways.

Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire, directed by Adam Wingard, is the fifth film in the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse and is a sequel to the 2021 film Godzilla vs Kong.

Godzilla x Kong is the second Godzilla movie to hit theatres in the last six months, following in the large footsteps of the Academy Award winning blockbuster Godzilla Minus One. The big difference between the two films is that Godzilla Minus One is a Japanese production and Godzilla x Kong is in every way, shape and form, an American production…up to and including having the word “Empire” in the title.

I am a huge Godzilla fan and have been since I was a kid watching the Toho films of old which featured a guy in a Godzilla suit destroying model Japanese cities. I loved those movies and am a total sucker for all things Godzilla because of it.

That said, I’ve never truly loved any American Godzilla films. Starting with Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), the atrocious Americanized version of the fantastic original 1954 Japanese film Godzilla.

Then there was the 1998 film Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick, or as I call it, “Ferris Bueller Fights Godzilla”. Not a good Godzilla movie.

Then after a long dry spell came the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse, which started in 2014 with Godzilla – a film I was lukewarm on. This was followed by Kong: Skull Island in 2017, a film I disliked. In 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters hit the big screens and I liked it a bit but it wasn’t great. Then in 2021 we got Godzilla vs Kong, a flawed but fun brawl. Which brings us to today and Godzilla x Kong.

In preparation for Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire I spent the last week rewatching the Legendary MonsterVerse movies….but this time I watched them with my 8-year-old son, who had never seen any Godzilla movies until Godzilla Minus One this past fall, but has grown up hearing me tell endless tales of Godzilla’s exploits.

Rewatching the MonsterVerse with my son was a great deal of fun…as is watching every movie with my son. Seeing movies through his young, unjaded, uncynical eyes, is refreshing for a bitter old cinema war horse like me. My son doesn’t roll his eyes at cliches or tired tropes, he shakes with excitement and joy and it makes me very happy. In order to maintain his cinematic purity, I never tell my son I dislike a movie…ever. I let him bask in the glow of the fun and in fact encourage it, always adding positive thoughts to our discussions post-movie.

Upon rewatching the MonsterVerse, I discovered a few things.

The first is that some of the movies were better than I remembered or at first believed. To be clear, none of the films are as good as say Godzilla Minus One, but they have their moments.

For example, I thought my son would be bored watching Godzilla (2014) because it takes a long time for Godzilla to show up and when he does you don’t see him all that clearly. But the opposite was true, my son was totally sucked into the story and thoroughly enjoyed it. As a result, I ended up liking Godzilla (2014) more as well.

My son liked Kong: Skull Island more than me, but I still thought it had some cool moments, and thought the premise was top-notch but the execution had some issues.

Upon rewatch I really liked Godzilla: King of the Monsters, as did my son. This is just an old school monster movie banger. Big monsters kicking the hell out of each other…lots of fun but never silly – which is vitally important.

Then came Godzilla vs Kong, which was, like the Toho movies of my youth, a fun and solid monster movie too. But Godzilla vs Kong also marked a major shift in the franchise. This was Adam Wingard’s directorial debut in the MonsterVerse, and he changes the tone of the franchise dramatically.

Toho’s Godzilla Minus One was so impactful because the damage Godzilla brings to the real world kills real people and those people have value and meaning to those who survive.

In the first three MonsterVerse films the monsters, be they Godzilla, Kong or any of their adversaries, were destructive and deadly, and a major dramatic throughline of those films is the trauma inflicted upon mankind by the death and destruction caused by the monsters.

For example, Godzilla (2014) opens with Juliette Binoche getting killed as a result of monster movement, which spurs the rest of the film. A major plot point in Godzilla: King of the Monsters is that a father’s young son is killed during Godzilla’s rampage in San Francisco in Godzilla. In Kong: Skull Island, Samuel L. Jackson moves heaven and earth to kill Kong because Kong killed men in his military unit.

Real people die as a result of these monsters in the first three MonsterVerse films, and those deaths resonate throughout all the living characters. That sentiment disappears once Wingard takes the helm.

That said, Wingard choreographs some pretty sweet monster brawls in Godzilla vs Kong so it’s cool, but it just doesn’t really mean much of anything.

Which brings us to Godzilla x Kong. Let me start by saying my son loved the movie….which makes sense as seeing big monsters on the big screen is pretty awesome even if the movie is not so great…and Godzilla x Kong is…well…not so great.

It seemed to me that Godzilla x Kong was a bit of a jumping of the shark for the MonsterVerse, as it featured an incoherently elaborate plot, a plethora of silliness, and a dearth of life and death consequences that reduced the proceedings to utter absurdity.

Yes, there are some cool monster fights and I enjoyed them no end, but there’s a tone of frivolity infused in the film that makes it feel tongue-in cheek and winking (literally), which I dislike.

To get into the plot is sort of a foolish endeavor, I’ll just say that Godzilla and Kong are not fighting each other at the film’s open because Godzilla lives on the surface of the earth and Kong lives in the hollow earth. But then there’s trouble in hollow earth when a super-secret extra hollow earth is discovered. The story goes from there and involves the Iwi tribe from Skull Island, a tyrannical ape-king, an ice-breathing monster and lots of strange science regarding inverted gravity.

If you’re looking for big monster fights, you’ll definitely get your fair share in this film as there’s spectacle galore, featuring some of earth’s most well-known tourist attractions being stomped by pissed off monsters.

Some of the fights are better than others, and there’s not enough Godzilla in the movie for my liking, but that said, if you’re just looking for some empty-headed monster brawls, the movie gives it to you. Unfortunately for me I like movies like Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which rest on the premise that these monsters are real and exist in a real world with real people. Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire is not that.

Speaking of real world and real people, it is striking to me that this movie has the term “Empire” in its title, as does the new Ghostbusters movie Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

As someone who notices these sorts of things, it is quite fascinating that as the American Empire erodes and crumbles in real time before our eyes, we are given signs of a “new empire” and a “frozen empire”. If I had to choose, I’d say our empire is well on its way to “freezing” and a new empire is rising to take its place – maybe/probably centered in Beijing.

There’s a recurring visual in Godzilla x Kong which shows Godzilla curling up in the Roman Colosseum, sleeping in the belly of an empire long past. Then there’s the battle between Godzilla and Kong at the pyramids, a symbol of an empire even deeper in history.

This all ties in with the lack of humanity featured in these last two Wingard directed Godzilla movies.

What is striking about this symbolism and wordplay regarding “empire” and the elimination of concerns about human life, is that a real-world drama involving empire and a disregard for humanity is playing out right before our eyes if we only had the courage to look and see it clearly.

The American Empire is directly responsible for the bloodbath in Ukraine, as it has made it very clear it is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian in its narcissistic proxy war against Russia.

The American Empire, led around by its nose by its Israeli paymasters, is also responsible for the wicked slaughter in Gaza, where more than 30,000 people, mostly women and children, have been massacred by the vile Israeli regime, armed by America.

The American Empire is losing on every front and no longer has the skill or will to win a fight for its survival. That, of course, doesn’t mean it won’t violently flail as it sinks into the graveyard of history, killing thousands, if not millions, on its way down.

The symbolism throughout Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire certainly kept me thinking, but only a certified lunatic like myself would ever notice these things. Most other people will only see the big monsters beating the hell out of each other and the poor performances of the cast, most notably Dan Stevens, giving one of the most vacuous and phony performances in recent cinematic history as Trapper, the most derivative character in recent cinematic history.

The bottom line is that if you want to watch truly mindless death and destruction nowadays you have two choices…you can either turn on the news and watch the bloody and brutal fruits of America’s demonic foreign policy in Ukraine and Gaza dance across your screen…or you can go watch Godzilla and Kong dance across the big screen at the local cineplex.

Regardless of which choice you make, the end result will be the same, and that is that America and its allies will slaughter more innocent people across the globe, and American Empire will slowly suffocate under the immense weight of its own endless moral corruption.

 FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Dune: Part Two - An Arthouse Blockbuster Rises From the Desert

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. If you’ve read the book, see the movie in a good theatre (emphasis on “good”). If you haven’t read the book, you should read it because it’s very good…and then watch the movie when it hits streaming.

Dune: Part Two, written and directed by Denis Villeneuve based on the classic science fiction book series by Frank Herbert, continues telling the tale of the struggle for the control of the pivotal, resource-rich planet, Arrakis, also known as Dune.

The film, which stars Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Austin Butler and Florence Pugh, among many others, is the sequel to Dune (2021), a Best Picture nominee and six-time Academy Award winner.

Last Saturday I ventured out to the cineplex to see Dune: Part Two, which no doubt will be ending its theatrical run in the coming weeks having been initially released on March 1st.

I went to the 11:50 am showing because I had a very tight window in which to see the two-hour and forty-five-minute film, and that show was the only one that worked.

I went to a Regal theatre which I’d never been to before…and my experience was…dismaying.

First off, the theatre was a confusing mess that felt like it hadn’t been cleaned or refurbished in forty years.

Secondly, the ticket printer wasn’t working so I had to wait forever to get my actual ticket.

Thirdly, when I went into the screening room, it was 11:45 am – plenty of time before the film started, but unfortunately the film didn’t start at 11:50 am. No, the commercials which were already running pre-show continued at 11:50…and kept going and going and going….until 12:10 pm…and then the film still didn’t start…but the previews did. The actual movie didn’t start until 12:20, a full half hour after the listed start time.

What are we doing people? I get maybe ten minutes of previews and commercials, but thirty minutes?

And to top it all off, Regal, like nearly every cinema in America – and certainly every cinema in fly-over country where I currently reside, has a shitty, poorly maintained digital projector that is too dark, and a screen that is too small, and theatre lights that are never dimmed enough. The end result is it feels like you’re watching a movie underwater, or worse, like watching a movie at a drive-in in broad daylight because corporate theatre companies have no interest in spending money on upgrades to their venues, most notably their god-awful projectors.

So that was the context of my Dune: Part Two movie going experience…and yet, I was still able to enjoy the film to a certain degree despite having to literally imagine in my mind what each gloriously framed shot from Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser actually looked like as opposed to the muddied mess I was presented at Regal.

As for the film itself, Dune: Part Two picks up exactly where its predecessor finished, and both movies combined tell the story contained in Herbert’s first book titled Dune – which chronicles Paul Atreidis struggle to survive on Dune following an invasion and the murder of his father the king, and then his attempt to avenge his father’s death and conquer the planet. A third film, titled Dune: Messiah, is allegedly being made and is to be based on the book of the same name which is the second book in Herbert’s series.

Dune: Part Two is what I would describe as an arthouse blockbuster. Villeneuve is a highly skilled auteur, and his cinematic capabilities are on full display in this film – the same ones that garnered the first Dune film a bevy of below the line Academy Awards (Cinematography, Sound, Editing Visual Effects, Production Design), but so are his weaknesses.

For example, the fight scenes, action scenes and battle scenes are a mixed bag. Some are spectacularly well-conceived and miraculously executed, while others, particularly the climactic battle and subsequent individual fight, are underwhelming and visually muddled.

Another weakness of the film, and in my opinion its greatest, is the acting of its two leads. Timothee Chalamet is a mystery to me. I don’t think he’s a very good actor, and while he is passable as Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides in Dune: Part Two, he still isn’t very good. Chalamet is such a wispy, flimsy, charisma-free screen presence that it seems so improbable he be a messianic leader to a warrior tribe as to be ridiculous.

An even bigger problem is Zendaya. I really have no idea how Zendaya became such a massive star, but it sure as hell wasn’t because of her acting talent. Zendaya is actively awful in the role of Chani, Paul’s love interest, to a distracting degree. All she seems able to do is give a dead-eyed pout.

Both Chalamet and Zendaya are incapable of being anything on-screen other than petulant Gen-Z poseurs, and that is a terrible burden for a film which is mostly populated by a cast of rather skilled professionals, set in an imagined science fiction future.

Speaking of disastrous casting decisions, Christopher Walken plays the Emperor Shaddam IV, and is egregiously atrocious. Walken is doing Walken things and it all feels so out of place as to be cringe-worthy.

On the bright-side, there are some very noticeable performances. Austin Butler is fantastic as the ferocious Feyd-Routha, and chews the scenery with a relentless aplomb. I couldn’t help but wonder if Butler should’ve been playing Paul instead of Chalamet, although he might be too old.

Rebecca Ferguson is as solid as they come and she certainly doesn’t disappoint as Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother and a spiritual figure to the Fremen people. Ferguson is such a striking screen presence and magnetic actress it is astonishing she doesn’t work even more than she already does.

Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem and Lea Seydoux all give solid supporting performances as well.

When I saw the first Dune film I was about sixty pages into the book Dune, so I knew enough to know what was happening, but not enough to really understand it.

Having now read the first three books of the Dune saga – which is phenomenal by the way, I have a much greater understanding of everything going on in the story, and that is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because Villeneuve tells these stories in shorthand, and expects viewers to understand the references being made. Having read the books I know understand those references and it makes the movies much more enjoyable.

On the downside, Villeneuve does make some pretty substantial changes to the story (I won’t say what exactly to avoid spoilers), particularly in Dune: Part Two. I understand why changes like this are made in film adaptations of books, they’re not the same storytelling mediums so this is inevitable, but it is still jarring and makes the whole enterprise feel a bit watered-down. To be frank, the story in the book is much better than the story in the movie…but that is usually the case when it comes to adaptations.

Dune: Part Two has done very well at the box office thus far, generating $574 million on a $190 budget. If this were a Marvel movie it would be considered a disappointment…but it isn’t a Marvel movie…and that’s important.

Villeneuve’s Dune franchise is off to a very steady start and is successfully threading the needle between box office success and artistry. The first film won 6 notable Academy Awards, and this one will be contending for those same awards.

Marvel seems to be a dying entity and no genre/IP is thus far poised to take its place. Dune represents not so much a replacement for Marvel IP, but a replacement for the idea of movies that Marvel has propagated. Instead of making movies expecting a billion-dollar box office, maybe Dune sets the expectations that auteurs can venture into the land of IP and use their artistry and vision to create something new that is both respected as art but also as blockbuster entertainment (with the definition of blockbuster scaled back ) – hence my description of Dune: Part Two as arthouse blockbuster.

If Dune and this type of filmmaking is the future of blockbusters, then sign me up. Villeneuve is a highly-skilled moviemaker, and despite his flaws he never fails to make something visually compelling and dramatically interesting.

Dune: Part Two isn’t for everybody. In fact, I’d say, if you haven’t read the books then you’d probably struggle to understand what is happening a good portion of the time. That said, I’d highly recommend the books as they are fantastic…and then once you’ve read the first book check out Dune and Dune: Part Two.

My recommendation for cinephiles, those who have read the book and those who enjoyed the first film, is to go see Dune: Part Two in a good theatre.

Unfortunately for me, I will have to wait until Dune: Part Two becomes available on streaming where I can watch it in my home, without thirty minutes of commercials and with superior audio-visual equipment, before I can accurately judge and thoroughly comment on its true cinematic value.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 119 - Dune: Part Two

On this episode, Barry and I don our stillsuits and head to Arrakis to discuss Denis Villeneuve's new film, Dune: Part Two, starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya. Topics discussed include the dismal state of modern cinemas, the weak acting of Li'l Timmy and Zendaya, and the future of sci-fi movies. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 119 - Dune: Part Two

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 118 - Poor Things

On this episode, Barry and I head to Victorian England to discuss Yorgos Lanthimos' crazy Frankenstein-fueled, feminist sex-romp Poor Things, starring Academy Award winning Best Actress Emma Stone. Topics discussed include the astonishing brilliance of Emma Stone, the misery of miscast Mark Ruffalo, and the originality, skill and talent of Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 118 - Poor Things

Thanks for listening!!

©2024

The 10th Annual Mickey™® Awards (2023)

10th ANNUAL MICKEY™® AWARDS

Estimated Reading Time: The Mickey™® Awards are much more prestigious than the Oscars, and unlike our lesser crosstown rival, we here at The Mickeys™® do not limit acceptance speech times. There will be no classless playing off by the orchestra here…mostly because we don’t have an orchestra. Regardless… expect this awards show article to last, at a minimum, approximately 6 hours and 37 minutes.

It’s that time of year again when Hollywood and the whole world holds their breath to find out who wins the most prestigious and most glorious award in human history...THE MICKEY™® AWARD!!

The Mickeys™® are far superior to every other award imaginable…be it the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, the Grammy, the Pulitzer or even the Nobel. The Mickey™® is the mountaintop of not just artistic but human achievement, which is why they always take place AFTER the Oscars!

It is pretty amazing that the Mickeys™® turn ten years old this year! It’s crazy to think that means the Mickeys have been around long enough that they are now old enough to drink!!

This has been a decent year in cinema. It wasn’t a massive success like in say 2019, but it was considerably better than the last four miserable years.

There are a multitude of outstanding films eligible for a Mickey™® award this year. Actors, actresses, writers, cinematographers and directors are all sweating and squirming right now in anticipation of the Mickey™® nominations and winners. Remember, even a coveted Mickey™® nomination is a career and life changing event.

Before we get to what everyone is here for…a quick rundown of the rules and regulations of The Mickeys™®. The Mickeys™® are selected by me. I am judge, jury and executioner. The only films eligible are films I have actually seen, be it in the theatre, via screener, cable, streamer or VOD. I do not see every film because as we all know, the overwhelming majority of films are God-awful, and I am a working man so I must be pretty selective. So that means that just getting me to actually watch your movie is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself…never mind being nominated or winning!

The Prizes!! The winners of The Mickey™® award will receive a free lunch* with me at Fatburger (*lunch is considered one "sandwich" item, one order of small fries, and one beverage….yes, your beverage can be a shake, you fat bastards). I will gladly pay for the Mickey™® winner’s meal…but know this…the sterling conversation will be entirely free of charge…and will probably not be sterling.

Now…fasten your seatbelts, gird your loins, and get ready to rumble…because IT’S TIME!!

Here are the 10th Annual Mickey™® Awards!!

POPCORN MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Godzilla Minus One – This movie crawled out of the Pacific and stomped across the globe winning hearts and minds while destroying everything in its path. Godzilla is back, baby!!

Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse – These Spider-Verse animated movies are really great stuff as they fully embrace the Spidey of everything while churning out some jaw-dropping animation.

The Killer – Fincher’s take on the assassin’s life is pure Gen X cinematic bliss. It qualifies as a popcorn film simply because it’s so deliciously amusing and so light on its feet.

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE! Not just a fantastic Godzilla movie, but a really terrific movie! Welcome to the Mickeys™ Godzilla!

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Oppenheimer - Hoyte van Hoytema – Hoytema, who won a Mickey™® in 2017 for his work on Dunkirk, is one of the best in the business. His work on Oppenheimer was as good as it gets and is a testament to his outrageous skill.

The Zone of Interest – Lukasz Zal – Zal’s previous work on Ida (2014) and Cold War (2018) got him the attention of the Mickey nominating committee. This year he stunned with his precise and pristine cinematography on The Zone of Interest. An absolute masterwork in minimalism and framing.

Asteroid City – Robert Yoeman – Yoeman brought a vibrant color palette and a strict adherence to Anderson’s infatuation with straight lines to Asteroid City. As beautifully and uniquely shot a film as seen all year.

Poor Things – Robbie Ryan – A glorious and imaginative piece of work that utilizes black and white and then color with a glorious verve. Ryan is among the best cinematographers in the world and his stellar work on Poor Things is a testament to that fact.

And the Mickey™® goes to…LUKASZ ZAL – THE ZONE OF INTEREST! Zal’s visual discipline and inventiveness are what makes The Zone of Interest the powerful cinematic experience that it is.

BEST SOUND

Oppenheimer – The sound on Oppenheimer was extraordinary, and it needed to be. The sound was integral in conveying the mammoth, existential event that was being dramatized before us.

The Zone of Interest – This movie used sound to such great effect it feels like as cinematic miracle. When sound was introduced into the cinematic arts this is how it was meant to be used.

Godzilla Minus One – The earth-shaking sound on Godzilla Minus One kept the film in reality, and turned that reality into a horrifying experience…as it was meant to be.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE ZONE OF INTEREST. As great as the sound on Oppenheimer was, the sound on The Zone of Interest was even better. Just a masterful sound design, execution and mix. This is not only the best sound of the year, but among the best sound in a film of all-time.

BEST SCORE/SOUNDTRACK

The Killer – The mod and morose pop-infused laments of The Smiths are what makes The Killer the darkly fun ride that it is. Never has a soundtrack so matched the emotional and mental theme of a film and character.

Oppenheimer – A wonderfully dark and majestic score that effortlessly mixes with the sound of the film to create a mesmerizing cinematic sensation.

The Zone of Interest – A bizarre and unnerving score makes The Zone of Interest feel like a disorienting horror movie. Just a sterling piece of work.

Killers of the Flower Moon – The late Robbie Robertson mixes and matches modern guitar driven music with Native American drums and vocals to create a swirling and scintillating soundtrack that is the best thing about Killers of the Flower Moon.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE KILLER! This win is based on The Killer’s masterful use of the musical musings of Morrissey and The Smiths.

BEST COSTUME/HAIR/MAKEUP

The Mickey™® goes to…Poor Things – I am not exactly as fashionista, but even I appreciated the original and fascinatingly unique costumes, hair and make-up on display in Poor Things. The artisans who created these looks and perfectly executed them, are absolute masters deserving of the highest praise…and the highest praise available is a Mickey™® Award.

BEST EDITING

Oppenheimer – A truly spectacular piece of editing kept this mammoth story from flying off the rails.

The Zone of Interest – Subtle editing gave this movie a perfect pace and tone.

Anatomy of a Fall – The editing on this film was so seamless and deft as to be miraculous.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER – Editor Jennifer Lame’s work was stunning as she wrestled this sprawling, time-jumping behemoth and turned it into a smooth and easy ride.

BEST EFFECTS

Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla feels real and utterly terrifying in this film and that is thanks to the special effects geniuses who threw him together with a minimal budget.

Oppenheimer – A lot was made of the fact that Christopher Nolan used minimal special effects and mostly actual effects to make this movie. How-ever he did it, it is astonishing to behold.

No One Will Save You – This little movie made the most of it when designing and executing their movie monster aliens. It is quite incredible that a small movie like this was able to make such notable effects and utilize them so effectively.

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE!! Somehow these filmmakers were able to make the best special effects of the year…and of the last few years, on a shoestring budget that would be laughable on a Hollywood blockbuster. Well done Team Godzilla!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Willem Dafoe – Poor Things – Dafoe, as always, brings his weirdness to the fore as the Dr. Frankenstein in this bizarro movie. Despite his eccentricities, Dafoe is able to find humanity in every role he touches.

Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer – It’s easy to forget that Downey is more than just iron Man and amusing snark. In Oppenheimer, Downey’s restraint isn’t just necessary but notable and it creates a compelling and convincing character that subtly dominates every scene he inhabits. The line, “no, just a shoe salesman”, is delivered with such perfection as to be devastating.

Ryan Gosling – Barbie – As much as I loathed the movie Barbie, I loved Ryan Gosling as Ken. When Gosling goes for it he is an unstoppable force, and he goes for it with gusto as Ken. Good for him.

Milo Machado-Graner - Anatomy of a Fall – This kid is so good in Anatomy of Fall I forgot I was watching some kid actor. A nuanced and tormented performance that feels as real as real can be.

Charles Melton – May December – I had never heard of Christopher Melton prior to May December, but apparently, he was on some stupid teen show. Who knows? All I know is that he gives the very best performance in that film and it isn’t even close. Subtle and heartbreaking, Melton never falters.

And the Mickey™® goes to…ROBERT DOWNEY JR. – OPPENHEIMER – This was a very tight category, with Gosling and Melton tying for second place just mere percentage points behind Downey. But Downey’s work in Oppenheimer is layered, nuanced, subtle yet very powerful. A true tour de force performance that despite its wins in award shows, is often downplayed because Downey is such a Hollywood icon. The truth is he absolutely crushed this role….and now he’s got the Mickey™® award to prove his worth….as well as all that Iron Man money.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Sandra Huller – The Zone of Interest – Huller’s Nazi wife in The Zone of Interest is an absolutely stunning piece of work. Banal yet bravado, Huller imbues her housewife with a drive and fear that make her part momma bear and part Nazi supremacist. Pray she never runs for your school’s PTA board.

Penelope Cruz – Ferrari – Cruz is often overlooked (even by me) but she is a master craftswoman. Her work in Ferrari could have been throwaway stuff (like her counterpart Shailene Woodley) but in Cruz’s hands it became a well-rounded, nuanced and subtle piece of dramatic work that never fails to compel. Her scene in the cemetery is the best acting caught on screen this year.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers – Ms. Randolph was a revelation as the grieving mom in The Holdovers. More impressive is the fact that she absolutely nails the Boston accent that has been butchered by so many other notable actors. A truly impressive performance.

Julianne Moore - May December – Speaking of actresses that have butchered Boston accents…Julianne Moore plays a weird lady in May December with a relentless aplomb. This is the type of role that she excels in…it’s like a cross between her work in Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

And the Mickey™® goes to…PENELOPE CRUZ - FERRARI!! I have not been able to get the scene where Cruz’s character visits her son’s grave out of my head since I’ve seen it. In the scene Cruz doesn’t say a word and yet conveys a panoply of emotions and tells a dramatically compelling and emotionally devastating tale in less than a minute of screen time. It really is incredible and a monument to her colossal talent and skill.

BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

The Mickey™® goes to….the little kid in Godzilla Minus One and the Dog in Anatomy of a Fall – Okay…I’m a grown man so I don’t really care about babies or whatever…but the little kid in Godzilla is so damn cute and is such a good actress it’s astonishing. This kid was crying on cue so well I was worried she was being abused in order to trigger it. Hopefully she wasn’t.

Speaking of great acting…I’m being serious when I say that Messi, the dog in Anatomy of a Fall, is maybe the greatest actor in a movie this year. His near-death scene is so good it had me weeping. This dog has it all…charisma, good looks and acting chops. Somebody get this dog a movie franchise!

BEST ANIMATED FILM

The Boy and the Heron – Hayao Miyazaki is among the greatest animated filmmakers of all-time. The Boy and the Heron may, or may not, be his last film, but if it is he went out with a bang. With his distinctive bizarre flair Miyazaki relays a boy’s grief and fears and his first steps on the journey to manhood. It is the work of a master craftsman and a singular genius.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – These Spider-Verse films are as great as can be as they treat the Spider-man mythos with respect all while generating some of the most impressive animation styles imaginable. This is the second film in a trilogy and the third will be very highly anticipated.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE BOY AND THE HERON!! Miyazaki’s work is a favorite of both mine and my son (who is also a member of the Mickeys Voting Committee) so this was a no-brainer. It is nice that a master like Miyazaki can now retire in peace if he so chooses, having won the most prestigious award in human civilization – The Mickey™®

BEST FOREIGN FILM

Godzilla Minus One – This is the movie Godzilla and Godzilla fans have been waiting decades for. It is a brilliant piece of work that is a truly great movie.

The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer’s film about the banality of evil is so steady and precise that it seeps into your brain and refuses to let you forget it…which is both a blessing and a curse.

Anatomy of a Fall – Expertly made and fantastically acted, Anatomy of a Fall is the type of movie Hollywood used to make but hasn’t for like fifty years.

The Boy and the Heron – Miyazaki is the epitome of the master craftsman combined with artistic genius. There is no one better than him and there has never been anyone better than him.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE ZONE OF INTEREST!! Not only a cinematic masterpiece but a staggeringly relevant piece of culture in a time when we are so eager to be blind to the evil and moral and ethical corruption that surrounds us to such an extent it feels as prevalent as the air we breathe.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Godzilla Minus One – The key to this script’s success is that it treats Godzilla as a real threat with real human consequences. It’s shocking how beautiful this script is.

Anatomy of a Fall – Masterfully written court room drama that keeps audiences guessing for weeks after seeing the film.

No One Will Save You – A truly original and energizing piece of work that elevated what could have been a mundane alien movie into a deeply poignant psychological story.

The Boy and the Heron – Miyazaki is in his 80s and is still exploring the wounds from his youth. Beautifully written.

The Holdovers – A vibrant and well-paced drama that never lacks for witticisms.

And the Mickey™® goes to…ANATOMY OF A FALL! As well-rounded an original script as we’ve seen in years as it refuses to indulge in easy labels and black and white thinking.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Ferrari – This adaptation was floating around for years and finally made it to the big screen. It is a nice companion piece with 2019’s Ford v Ferrari.

Oppenheimer – It’s impressive that Christopher Nolan read this book, never mind adapted it. This massive tome would be an unruly mess in most other writer/director’s hands, but Nolan tames the wild beast and creates a beautiful historical tapestry.

The Zone of Interest – Glazer apparently used the Martin Amis book of the same name as a launching off point and he creatively catapults his adaption into the stratosphere.

Poor Things – An absolutely batshit tale that is so unbelievable but feels realer than real. A solid piece of work.

American Fiction – Funny and insightful, the flawed American Fiction loses focus occasionally but it never fails to be amusing, and its premise is spot on.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER! That Christopher Nolan could make a compelling and coherent film out of the massive tome about a scientist is a testament to his extraordinary storytelling capabilities. As impressive an adaptation as we’ve seen in decades.

BEST SCENE OF THE YEAR

The Killer - Fight scene – Fassbender’s assassin engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a giant gang leader in the middle of the night is as viscerally engaging a scene as you can imagine. Great stuff.

No One Will Save You – First contact scene – This heart-pounding scene is so well executed it stayed with me for days. Just a glorious piece of quality and imaginative filmmaking.

Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla city rampage – Godzilla coming ashore and leveling a Japanese city is what you want from a Godzilla movie…and boy oh boy does this one deliver.

Poor Things – Dance scene – Nothing had me laughing harder this year than watching Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter cut the rug at some fancy French ballroom. Fantastic!

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE!! This gripping scene is jaw-dropping and spellbinding.

BEST ACTRESS

Emma Stone – Poor Things – Stone’s bravura work in Poor Things is absolutely mesmerizing. Like an acting exercise on steroids, Stone’s Bella matures before our eyes and never fails to completely command your attention.

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall – As genuine and grounded a performance as you’ll see, Huller brings nuance and subtlety to new heights.

Kaitlyn Dever – No One Will Save You – An energized and unnerving performance that grabs you from the get go and never lets you go.

And the Mickey™® goes to…EMMA STONE- POOR THINGS! Emma Stone is the best actress in the world at the moment, and it isn’t even close. She now possesses a Mickey™® award proving she is an acting goddess who walks amongst us.

BEST ACTOR

Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer – Murphy’s controlled yet frantic Oppenheimer is a masterclass in containment and a vivid inner life. A sensitive and deeply moving portrayal.

Christian Friedel – The Zone of Interest – This is an astonishing performance as it embraces the ordinary amongst the extraordinary. Subtle and skillful.

Jeffrey Wright – American Fiction – Wright is a terrific actor and his work in American Fiction is a testament to not only his likability but his acting ability.

Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers – Nobody embodies curmudgeons like Paul Giamatti, and he does some of his best curmudgeonly work in The Holdovers.

And the Mickey™® goes to…CILLIAN MURPHY – OPPENHEIMER!! The Mickey Awards have been the center of controversy since their inception for our notorious and blatant anti-Irish bias. Despite the uproar, the Mickeys™® have refused to change their stance at all…and still believe that the Irish are sub-humans and the most base and vile of creatures. That said, it is a testament to Cillian Murphy’s talent and skill that he convinced the Mickeys™® that he wasn’t just human, but the particular human that was Robert Oppenheimer. For his noble and notable work, Cillian Murphy wins the most prestigious award of all…the Mickey™®. But the Mickeys™® still consider him to be an Irish animal and no award, no matter how prestigious will ever change that.

ACTOR/ACTRESS OF THE YEAR

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall/The Zone of Interest – Sandra Huller has the highest distinction this year in that she came in second place in both the Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress categories of the Mickey™® Awards. Her work in both films is astonishing, and one can only hope she finds equally challenging and impressive roles and films in her future because when given quality material she is as good as it gets. Her 2023 was as good as a year as we’ve seen from an actress in quite some time.

BEST ENSEMBLE

Poor Things – Great cast with a few exceptions (Mark Ruffalo and Jerrod Carmichael are actively awful in the movie) is led by the inimitable Emma Stone, who brings her absolute A-game to the festivities.

The Holdovers – Paul Giamatti leads a strong ensemble that features two quality supporting turns from Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa. Just a solid cast across the board.

Oppenheimer – Everywhere you turn in this movie you run into a quality actor turning in a solid performance. Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Jason Clarke among many others. This film doesn’t work without such a notable and strong cast.

Anatomy of a Fall – A bevy of French actors and actresses…and even a dog, turn in subtle and nuanced performances in a film that never gives away the game. A very strong group.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER! This movie would crumble if it weren’t for the genius of Christopher Nolan and the cornucopia of strong actors and actresses he put together for the ensemble.

BEST DIRECTOR

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer – Mickey™® award winner (Dunkirk - 2017) Christopher Nolan is the best blockbuster auteur working in cinema today and he lives up to his impressive history with his stellar work on the massive cinematic achievement that is Oppenheimer. It is inconceivable that any other director could have pulled this film off as well as he did.

Jonathan Glazer – The Zone of Interest – Glazer is a bit of an odd duck of an auteur, but his vision and the execution of that vision, on The Zone of Interest is the most artistically ambitious and insightful directorial work since Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. Just extraordinary.

Justine Triet – Anatomy of a Fall – As skilled a directorial job as any this year, Triet’s firm and steady hand kept this film from floundering and showed her to be a master craftswoman.

Yorgos Lanthimos – Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos is an acquired taste…but I’ve acquired it. His sense of humor and his ability to draw out superb performances from his cast while embracing the comedy and drama with an exquisite cinematic artistry, is what makes him one of the best, and most original and interesting, filmmakers of our time.

And the Mickey goes to…JONATHAN GLAZER – THE ZONE OF INTEREST! Glazer doesn’t make many movies, but when he does, they demand your attention, none more so that The Zone of Interest. That Glazer could be so artistically committed and disciplined with his approach on this film speaks to the power of his cinematic vision and his artistry. Kudos to him and congratulations on winning the most prestigious award in cinema and world history.

BEST PICTURE

10. American Fiction – A funny and sometimes insightful film that may or may not be in on the joke its telling. The film is flawed and a bit scattered, but is an amusing ride.

9. Ferrari – Hamstrung by a poor lead performance from Adam Driver, this movie still manages to be compelling thanks to director Michael Mann and supporting actress Penelope Cruz.

8. No One Will Save You – A little movie with big ideas that never fails to keep you guessing or on the edge of your seat.

7. The Killer – David Fincher goes full Fincher in this wry and culturally aware assassin’s tale which feels like a poorly camouflaged autobiography.

6. The Boy and the Heron – A Miyazaki movie through and through as it is deeply moving and also deeply weird.

5. Anatomy of a Fall – A masterfully constructed and acted courtroom drama that grabs hold of you and never lets you go…even in the days after seeing it.

4. Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla is back, baby! This movie is a truly top-notch piece of cinema.

3. Poor Things - Yorgos Lanthimos proves once again why he is among the very best filmmakers in the world, and Emma Stone proves she IS the best actress in the world. A stunningly original piece of work.

2. Oppenheimer – A massive and sprawling film that director Christopher Nolan makes feel intimate. A throw-back to Hollywood’s glory days when big movies about big ideas got made and made very well.

1.The Zone of Interest – An unnervingly banal yet artistically ambitious look at the Nazi death machine that is masterfully directed by Jonathan Glazer.

MOST IMPORTANT FILM OF THE YEAR

The Zone of Interest/Oppenheimer – These two films have much in common. For example, they both deal with the same World War II era, albeit from different sides of the divide. They also have protagonists that are employed by the state to manage their massive industrial machinery of murder.

And most notably, at least in my eyes, is that both films strictly refuse to show the fruits of their protagonist’s nefarious labor.

The Zone of Interest is set in a concentration camp but never shows Jews being murdered, and Oppenheimer is about the atomic bomb but never shows the slaughter it produced.

These two films are the most important films of the year because they dramatize and embody our own steadfast refusal to see what is right in front of our eyes…namely the insidiously evil nature of the government of the United States of America and its affiliates, and the slaughter and suffering they cause across the globe.

I can’t remember who it was, but someone once said, “isn’t it funny how the good guys win every war?” The reason that joke is funny of course is because it’s the winners of wars who write the history of those wars and they always see themselves as the good guys. To the victor’s go the spoils and the spoils in modern warfare are that you get to paint yourself as a hero…always and every time.

If Rudolf Hoss, the protagonist of The Zone of Interest, had written a book in the wake of a Nazi victory in World War II, it no doubt would’ve been about how through his brilliant management style he heroically helped save Germany and the rest of Europe. It would probably be titled “Somehow I Manage”.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once stated in the wonderful Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War, that if the U.S. had lost World War II the entire American military command would’ve been tried and hung as war criminals for the firebombing of Tokyo.

Of course, the same would be true for Robert Oppenheimer as a result of the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were directly the result of his scientific achievements.

The U.S. was on the winning side of the war, and so Oppenheimer faced no executioner. Rudolf Hoss, on the other hand, was on the “wrong side of history” and was tried at Nuremberg and hung for his war crimes.

To be clear, no one weeps for Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, despite the fact that Hoss, like Oppenheimer, was just “following orders” and “doing his job” and “fighting for his country”, but that doesn’t make him any less culpable or morally and ethically repugnant.

Hoss and Oppenheimer were both exceedingly good at their jobs and both were deft bureaucratic infighters who could maneuver through some very tricky situations in order to get what they wanted. Both of them ultimately paid a price for their successes, Hoss was hanged and Oppenheimer hung out to dry.

Hoss was a Nazi and I think we can all agree that the Nazis were a stunningly clear embodiment of evil. But if the Nazis were so evil why were so many of them absconded from post-war Germany and brought to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip? Why did so many Nazis, like scientist Wernher von Braun, become integral parts of the U.S. power structure?

Could it be that our moral preening in the wake of WWII was just that, empty preening, and our victory, which wasn’t really ours but the Soviet Union’s, was nothing more than window dressing for the masses – the shuffling of cards in a rigged deck? Could it be the Fourth Reich is alive and well and ruling the world from some smoky backroom in D.C. or Geneva or some other monied capitol?

The Nazis, or Not-sees as my friend The Falconer calls them, did NOT-SEE the humanity of the Jews and Slavs they slaughtered on an industrial scale. But that inability to see the humanity of their enemy isn’t a Nazi thing, but a human thing, an impulse and instinct we must struggle against.

The most-clear example of this is that the ancestors of the same Jews who survived the Holocaust perpetrated upon them by the Nazis, are now perpetrating a holocaust upon Palestinians. The same dehumanization that animated the Nazi Holocaust is the same one that animates the current holocaust inflicted upon the Palestinians.

In a way, the brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis is the epitome of a historical tragedy because Israel was formed as a direct result of the Holocaust, and now it has become the monster from which it was birthed. It is like a child conceived in rape growing up to become a serial rapist.

That Israelis and Palestinians cannot see one another as human is no surprise considering the tormented, tortured, bloody and brutal history of that region, but that Americans refuse to see their own complicity in the dehumanization and slaughter is much more alarming and shameful.

Americans are as ill-informed, mis-informed and dis-informed as any group of people on the planet, and their ignorance and willful blindness to the U.S.’s malignant presence in not just the Middle East, but across the globe, is truly disturbing.

American’s refusal to see that they are complicit in the massacre in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, is exactly what The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer are dramatizing, consciously or unconsciously.

The U.S. instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup in 2014, and have thwarted any and all peace attempts and encouraged Ukraine to break any peace accords or ceasefires. As a result, hundreds of thousands are dead…mostly Ukrainians. But our media and political establishment stomp their feet and screech and wail about the villainy of evil Putin and so on and so forth. You don’t have to think Putin is a hero to know that we Americans are the villains in Ukraine.

The same is true regarding the Palestinians and Israel. Israel’s occupation and long-time expansion of settlements in the West Bank, only occurs because we give them financial and military aid as well as diplomatic cover at the U.N.

The tens of thousands slaughtered in Gaza? Their blood is on our hands because if our leadership – and I use that term loosely, wanted it to stop they would simply say to Israel, “if the settlements in the West Bank aren’t torn down, and the killing in Gaza doesn’t stop now, then all U.S. aid, be it financial or military, will cease now and forever”, but that will never happen. The reason it will never happen is something you aren’t allowed to say but is true nonetheless…namely Israel does whatever it wants because it runs America, not the other way around. Joe Biden doesn’t tell Israel what to do, Israel tells Joe Biden what to do. And the same was true with Trump and will be true if Trump wins this year’s election. It doesn’t matter who the President of the United States of America is in regards to Israel because the American leadership class in its entirety is thoroughly compromised by Israeli’s over-sized lobby and massive money-machine, Israeli’s ruthless intelligence apparatus (does anyone remember Jeffrey Epstein?), and a bevy of Zionist fifth columnists throughout the U.S. government.

This is why the U.S. is so quick to slander Putin as a war criminal but would never dare to suggest that of Israel…because Netanyahu IS a war criminal, but…he’s OUR war criminal. And Americans simply accept this unending hypocrisy and moral duplicity blindly and without a second thought.

This desperate and willful blindness, be it moral, ethical or political, is what animates The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer, and what animates the entirety of the political and media establishment, as well as the populace, in the United States of America.

The bottom line is that closing your eyes to moral atrocities doesn’t actually make you blind, it only makes you gullible and culpable…and the American people are lots of both.

Well on that very, very upbeat note….the tenth (THE TENTH!! – and God-willing not the last!) Mickey™® Awards comes to a close!! Thank you so much for continuing to read my work and for sticking with me through thick and thin. I greatly appreciate it. I hope you have a great 2024 and we’ll see you next year…AT THE MICKEYS™®!!

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Napoleon: A Review - You Can't Always Get What You Want

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The film could have, and should have, been great, but it just never coalesces and much to my chagrin ends up being a rather dull, formulaic and flaccid affair.

Napoleon, the highly-anticipated bio-pic from iconic director Ridley Scott, stars Joaquin Phoenix and dramatizes the rise and fall of France’s famous Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

The film, which hit theatres back on November 22nd, is now available to stream on Apple TV+, and I finally got a chance to see it.

I admit I was very excited to see Napoleon when it first hit theatres as I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott and consider him one of the master filmmakers of his generation. I also think the film’s star Joaquin Phoenix is the best actor on the planet, and his co-star Vanessa Kirby, is no slouch either. But despite avoiding reading reviews it was readily apparent that the film had garnered no cultural traction upon initial release, so I never put in the effort to see it in the theatre.

Napoleon has long been a tantalizing subject for cinematic exploration. For instance, in the late 1960’s Stanley Kubrick set his sights on the diminutive tyrant and got far along in the pre-production process but due to the high cost of shooting on location the film got scrapped.

I saw a Kubrick exhibit a decade ago in Los Angeles at LACMA which had a plethora of artifacts from his various movie projects. There was a bevy of material from his un-made Napoleon project…and I found it mesmerizing.

Unfortunately for me…and you too, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is not a Kubrickian Napoleon. Truth be told it doesn’t really even feel like a Ridley Scott movie. There is no epic feel to the festivities nor is there an intimate one. Filmmaking 101 tells us that you can either be epic or intimate, and on rare occasions both…but you can never be neither.

Napoleon, which runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes, is a dramatically impotent, narratively inert exercise in expensive wheel-spinning.

The film follows a rather tedious and trite bio-pic formula of jumping from one notable event to another, but provides no dramatic or human insight into any of it.

Despite some stunningly gorgeous cinematography from Dariusz Wolski, most notably in the coronation scenes – which are breathtakingly beautiful, the film just never coalesces into anything more than bland background noise.

There is rumor of a four-hour director’s cut of Napoleon that will one-day be available to screen but isn’t yet. I hope that is true because that director’s cut might unlock the dramatic and narrative coherence the theatrical release lacks. This was true with Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), a film that failed as a theatrical release but shines in its lengthy director’s cut…one can only hope Napoleon follows the same course.

Joaquin Phoenix is, in my never humble opinion, the best actor in the world, and yet in Napoleon he fails to settle into the role and feels decidedly detached from the character. This just isn’t a solid performance, as it feels scattershot and dramatically random, which is a shocking thing to say about a performance from a titanic acting talent like Joaquin Phoenix.

Vanessa Kirby is, as always, a luminous screen presence but she too is out of rhythm and entirely forgettable as Josephine, Napoleon’s wife. Josephine is quite a character and yet we never see her as an actual human being, only as a sort of conniving figurine…lovely to look at but ultimately empty.

Worse still is that the infamously combustible relationship between Napoleon and Josephine is deprived of any and all life. There is no chemistry or electricity between Phoenix’s Napoleon and Kirby’s Josephine. It is a lifeless and meaningless affair, which renders the rest of the film equally lifeless and meaningless.

The script, written by David Scarpa, is rudimentary, as it avoids getting under the skin of its subjects, and thus removes their motivations and humanity.

Yes, we know that Napoleon was a small man looking for a balcony, but why was he like that? And how did his relationship with Josephine propel that tyrannical instinct? And who was Josephine and what drove her to make the choices she makes? These are important question and none of them are answered or even remotely pondered in Napoleon.

There can be little doubt that Scarpa’s limited script is a large contributor to the less than stellar performances from usually spectacular actors like Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.

I really wanted to love Napoleon because I love the talent involved (Ridley Scott, Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby) and the topic explored, but ultimately the movie, at least in its two-hour and thirty-seven-minute form, is a strange one that seems to be devoid of not just artistic and entertainment value, but of purpose and meaning.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon reminded me in some ways of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Both Scott and Scorsese are two of the most iconic filmmakers of their generation, and they both came out with sprawling, lengthy films this year that failed to live up to their prodigious talents and astonishing previous work. If I’m being brutally honest I would say that at least Napoleon looked better than Killers of the Flower Moon…but both fall decidedly flat.

At the previously mentioned Kubrick exhibit at LACMA, as I perused his notes, pre-production materials and photographs of his Napoleon that were on display, it pained me deeply upon seeing those treasures that Kubrick never made the film. I had the same feeling watching Ridley Scott’s version of Napoleon but for different reasons…as Scott’s failure on Napoleon simply taints what should have been a magnificent cinematic story, and leaves it terribly tarnished and unusable for at least another generation – not because its “so bad”, it isn’t, but because it’s just entirely uneventful and forgettable.

Back when Kurbick was contemplating his Napoleon movie, The Rolling Stones sang that “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you find, you get what you need”.

Well, the first part is right…but as Ridley Scott’s Napoleon proves, the second sure as shit isn’t as I definitely didn’t need this Napoleon.

Kubrick’s Napoleon is what I wanted…Ridley Scott’s muddled mess of Napoleon is what I got.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

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

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 116 - Oscar Nominee Barbie

Barry and I don our pink beach wear as we talk about Greta Gerwiog’s blockbuster summer hit, Barbie, which is nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Topics discussed include the potential path of Greta Gerwig’s career, Margot Robbie’s alleged snub, and the sneaky brilliance of Elf.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 116 - Oscar Nominee Barbie

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 115 - Oscar Nominee Killers of the Flower Moon

In the coming weeks Barry and I will examine the Best Picture nominees for this year’s Oscars. First up is Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Topics discussed include the strengths and weaknesses of DiCaprio, Scorsese’s late career filmography and the pain of missed opportunities.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 115 - Oscar Nominee Killers of the Flower Moon

Thanks for listening!

©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

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

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 112 - Rebel Moon Part One

On this episode, Barry and I enter the Star Wars adjacent Snyder-verse of the new Netflix science-fiction movie Rebel Moon directed by Zack Snyder...and want to escape that hellhole as quickly as possible. Topics discussed include the plague of unoriginal thinking, how truly dreadful everything about this movie is, and cinematic guilty pleasures. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 112 - Rebel Moon Part One

Thanks for listening.

©2024