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. 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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

©2024

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

Ferrari: A Review - Despite a Bad Driver, Ferrari Wins the Race

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

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A solid biopic that features some subpar acting but also some fantastic racing sequences.

Ferrari, directed by Michael Mann and starring Adam Driver, is a biopic that tells the story of iconic Italian industrialist and race car manufacturer, Enzo Ferrari, as he navigates a series of tumultuous business and personal events in 1957.

Ferrari, which is written by Troy Kennedy Martin and is based on the book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates, is a strange film. The reason for this strangeness is that sometimes the sum of a film is never as good as the quality of its parts, but that is not the case in regards to Ferrari, which is somehow able to be considerably better than the individual pieces that make up its whole.

For example, you’d think for a biopic about a hard-charging, iconic Italian race car impresario you’d have to have a strong performance from the lead actor in the title role in order for the film to work. In the case of Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the film works despite its lead actor, not because of him.

Driver is a mysterious actor in that it is an utter mystery to me why this insipid clod ever gets work, never mind works with great directors like Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese. As Enzo, a man juggling essentially two families, one with his wife and one with his girlfriend, and who is aggressively trying to have the greatest racing team in the world and maintain his auto business, the empty Driver feels like a kid playing dress up in his grandfather’s much too big suits. His ungodly awful, clownish Italian accent comes and goes like an engine missing the requisite sparkplugs, just like it did when Driver stumbled through the embarrassing Ridley Scott soap opera House of Gucci as another Italian titan of industry…Maurizio Gucci. Considering Driver’s artistic vacuity and acting vapidity, as well as his wandering parmesan cheese of an accent, and his insidiously shallow interpretations of characters, it seems to me the only iconic Italian he should ever be allowed to play is Chef Boyardee.

Another acting issue is Shailene Woodley, who is egregiously miscast as Lina Lardi, who is less Enzo’s gumar than she is his second wife and mother to his bastard son. Woodley gives a distractingly stilted and ineffective performance as Lina as she feels like she belongs in Malibu and not Molena.

The one saving grace regarding the acting is Penelope Cruz, who is absolutely brilliant as Enzo’s wife and business partner, Laura. There’s a scene early in the film where Laura visits her son’s grave and in the span of maybe thirty seconds Cruz, in close up, tells a wondrous and expansive story without saying a word. It’s a captivating and powerful piece of acting, and one that is heightened because Driver’s Enzo has a similar scene just prior to it that is nothing but verbosity filled with vacant histrionics.

Cruz is an actress that I rarely, if ever, think of, but her performance in Ferrari is yet another reminder for absent-minded dopes like me that she is among the most talented and skilled actresses in the world today.

Despite two of the three main performances being subpar, Ferrari pulls off the minor miracle of managing to be not just watchable but relentlessly compelling. A major reason for this is that the racing and driving scenes alone are worth the price of admission. Every racing scene is visceral, vital and undeniably electrifying. Mann and his cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shoot the racing from innumerable ingenious angles with energetic camera movements that capture the dynamic thrill of the sport, and master editor Pietro Scalia splices it all together for the absolute maximum potency and power.

That said, some of the racing sequences can be a bit confusing, as the racing teams from Ferrari and Maserati have similar looks and coloring. But beyond that the racing is superb, and contrary to some reports I’ve read, I did not find the CGI to be distracting or second rate at all.

Michael Mann is an often-overlooked filmmaker who boasts a robust filmography which features a bevy of good and sometimes great movies. In recent years Mann’s output has slowed and diminished in quality, with Ferrari being his first film since 2015’s dismal Blackhat.

Mann’s films are inhabited by a particular type of tormented masculinity, where the protagonist is insatiably driven and must overcome the numerous obstacles placed in front of him as well as the internal burdens which haunt him .

Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider and Collateral are all top notch pieces of cinema that capture Mann’s storytelling and slick visual style across different genres….. but it is his 1995 masterpiece, Heat, which is the absolute apex of his filmmaking career. Heat is one of the best films of the last thirty years as it features the greatest bank robbery and shootout scene captured in the history of cinema, which is an astonishing accomplishment.

Ferrari is nowhere near the level of film as Heat, but it does represent a somewhat more mature piece of storytelling from Mann, that is not to say that Mann’s earlier work was adolescent, but to say that Ferrari captures a man (and Mann) growing old and dealing with the precipitous burdens of his age and station.

 It must also be said that Ferrari is also not as good as James Mangold’s brilliant 2019 film Ford v Ferrari, which Michael Mann Executive Produced. Ford v Ferrari is a better film across the board and features better racing sequences, but Ferrari is no slouch and is a quality piece of cinema in its own right. In fact, Ferrari would make a perfect companion piece to Mangold’s auto-racing masterpiece.

The bottom-line regarding Ferrari is that I was very pleasantly surprised to find it a thoroughly solid, utterly compelling, if flawed, piece of cinema despite the often-lackluster acting. I wholly encourage you to check it out in the theatre if possible, or on streaming when the time comes.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 111 - Godzilla Minus One

On this rip-roaring episode, Barry and I don kimonos and talk all things Godzilla Minus One, the fantastic new Godzilla movie from Toho Studios. Topics discussed include Godzilla Minus One as companion piece to Oppenheimer, Jaws and other influences, and the skill and craftsmanship evident in the film that are sorely lacking in Hollywood. Bonus content - Barry and I have a hilarious discussion about the worst Christmas specials they've ever endured.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 111 - Godzilla Minus One

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix): TV Review - A Sharp Blade Skillfully Wielded

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic animated series…but be forewarned, it has lots of nudity, sex and violence.

Blue Eye Samurai is a new adult animated series on Netflix that tells the story of Mizo, a half-white, half-Japanese samurai who sets out to exact revenge in 17th century Japan.

The series, which is created by Amber Noizumi and Michael Green and directed by Jane Wu, stars the voice talents of Maya Erskine, George Takei, Brenda Song, Randall Park and Kenneth Branagh.

I had never heard of Blue Eye Samurai until Netflix, and its AI’s infinite wisdom, used their algorithm to throw a trailer at me the second I logged onto their service. I watched the trailer and thought, “Hey, maybe this is something my 8-yr-old son and I could watch together!”

Then I watched the first episode…and holy shit this is not something my son…or any child under the age of maybe 16, should be watching at all. It is chock full of ultra-violence, sex…including some very, very weird sex, and nudity…including a cavalcade of animated cocks and balls flopping around like it’s a sausage and grapes stir fry gone awry. When this series says it is “adult”, you better believe it.

But just because the show isn’t good for kids, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, Blue Eye Samurai is terrific and one of the best series I’ve seen all year.

It is difficult to avoid ALL spoilers in a review of this show, but it’s also best to watch the show without knowing any of the spoilers. So, if you want to avoid any spoilers go watch the series now as I highly recommend it for anyone who loves samurai films and top-notch adult (R-rated) animation.

If you want to dip your toe in the water with a review containing one spoiler (which is widely known), then continue reading.

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Blue Eye Samurai follows the journey of Miza, who is deadly samurai, but is also a young woman passing as a man. That’s the big spoiler that is revealed pretty early on in the 8-episode first season, and it is a main plot point as the season develops.

She is on a mission to kill the four white men who illegally remain in Japan after the Shogun has closed the country’s borders to outsiders, one of whom, she knows not which, is her father.

The storytelling on Blue Eye Samurai is exceedingly well-done as it seamlessly jumps back and forth between Miza’s tormented past and her violent, revenge-filled present.

Each character comes to the screen fully developed, there are no caricatures or cardboard cutouts here. Whether it be Miza’s sidekick Ringo, or her samurai opponent Taigen, or Taigen’s fiancé Princess Akemi, or Akemi’s tutor Seki, or any other of the myriad of characters they are all fully formed and believable human beings.

The fight sequences in Blue Eye Samurai are both fantastic and gruesomely realistic. Main characters suffer grievous wounds, and there are multiple savage slayings that are as good as anything you’ll ever see. That all of this is captured by animation only makes it all the cooler.

The plot of Blue Eye Samurai jumps back and forth between not only Miza’s past and present, but also Miza’s story and the story of Princess Akimi’s struggle for freedom in a male dominated Japanese culture.

The animating (no pun intended) principle of the series is a common one in our current cultural moment, namely feminism in the form of the girl power narrative.

I usually find the egregious girl power garbage in modern movies and tv to be absolutely embarrassing because it’s so often just trite and vapid pandering or blatant virtue signaling.

But Blue Eye Samurai is none of those things. It tells a compelling girl power narrative by splitting the female archetype into two. First is Mazi, the female heroine using her physical prowess on the male hero’s journey. Then there is Princess Akimi, the traditional female heroine using her feminine wiles to gain advantage in a male dominated society. That Mazi has a side-journey into traditional femininity, and Akimi one into warrior-dom, makes the characters and their archetypal narratives all the more intriguing and potent.

Both female protagonists are also deeply flawed, physically fragile and vulnerable, and make numerous errors on their journeys, which gives the story and characters a power that eludes the plethora of recent female protagonists in film and tv that are both invulnerable and perfect.

Now, to be fair, there is the usual man-hating stuff littered throughout the series, but considering the times presented and the times we live in, it is relatively benign.

As someone who is almost instinctually repulsed by girl power narratives due to their relentless ignorance regarding the power and purpose of archetypes, it is so refreshing and invigorating to see creatives get it right, which is why I loved this series.

There is a second, and maybe more, seasons coming of Blue Eye Samurai and to be frank, I am concerned…as it felt to me the first season should have been stand alone. And from what I can gather and/or project, it would seem following seasons are even more vulnerable to the cultural politics which season one exquisitely and successfully navigated. I’ll keep my fingers crossed the series doesn’t devolve into what it avoided in the first place.

One final thought, and that is that as someone who has long loved Japanese cinema, it’s a goddamn great time to be alive. Godzilla Minus One is kicking ass across the globe and here in America. Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastic film The Boy and the Heron is garnering critical and audience appreciation (and possibly Academy Awards recognition as well). And now Blue Eye Samurai is telling a kick-ass, modernized animated version of a Kurosawa film. I feel like I’m in heaven.

The bottom line is if you love high-quality animation, Samurai stories and Kurosawa films, and can either tolerate or get titillated by animated sex/nudity, then Blue Eye Samurai is for you…it sure as hell was for me…but it’s most definitely not for my young son…not for another decade or so.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Leave the World Behind (Netflix): A Review - It's the End of the World as We Know It...and Obama Feels Fine

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This film never lives up to its potential but it does feature some impressive cinematography and a tantalizing and unnerving narrative. It isn’t a great movie but it does make for a good conversation/thought piece.

Leave the World Behind, written and directed by Sam Esmail, is a dystopian, apocalyptic, psychological thriller produced by Barrack and Michelle Obama now streaming on Netflix.

The film, which stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, is based on the novel of the same name by Ruuman Alam, and it tells the story of the Sanford and Scott families as they navigate an unfolding cataclysm across the U.S. from a tony neighborhood on Long Island.

The Sanford’s, a white family from Park Slope-adjacent Brooklyn, made up of the ornery Amanda (Julia Roberts), her easy-going husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their teenage children Archie (Charlie Evans), who is obsessed with girls, and Rose (Farrah McKenzie), who is obsessed with 90s pop culture – like Friends and The West Wing, rent a beautiful home at the beach on Long Island for a week.

In the middle of their first night, there’s a knock at the door, and two black people, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth (Myha’la), appear. The story between the Sanfords and the Scotts go from there but I won’t get any more in-depth on it in order to avoid spoilers.

The rest of the plot revolves around mysterious events that are happening in the U.S., specifically in relation to the Sanfords and Scotts, in New York City.

Technology, such as cell phones, the internet and cable television, stop working, leaving the protagonists in an information and communication blackout, which allows chaos and paranoia to flourish.

Once again, in order to avoid spoilers, I will refrain from delving much deeper into the plot than that.

The film’s director, Sam Esmail, is best known for creating the tv series Mr. Robot, but this is just his second feature film, and despite some very bright spots, at times it shows.

To Esmail’s great credit, he creates some very vivid and stunning images in Leave the World Behind, that rattle viewers to the core. Visually the film never fails to unnerve with one apocalyptic nightmare visual after another, like luxurious paintings hanging in a dystopian art gallery.

Esmail and cinematographer Tod Campbell use an often swirling, spinning, panning, zooming and rotating camera to make the viewer just as discombobulated and disoriented as the characters portrayed on-screen. All this camera movement isn’t just directorial masturbation, but instead is very cinematically effective and done with an admirable amount of precision and creative dexterity. As the character’s go through their strange journey, Esmail’s camera leaves viewers in a world where up is down, and left is right…literally.

The same is true of the camera framing, as things are often shot from odd angles, and despite the visuals being crisp and amid razor-sharp straight lines, everything is framed off-kilter and off-center, to great affect.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved the look of the film, the story it shows and the drama it reveals are often sorely lacking.

The biggest issue with Leave the World Behind is that it is bursting with a cavalcade of dramatic potential, but is never able to fully realize it.

The greatest obstacle to the film’s dramatic success is that it gives us one-dimensional, unreal characters, places them in an extreme yet compelling and entirely believable situation, and then has them behave in the most inane, counter-intuitive and annoying ways imaginable.

I can’t give too much away in regards to specifics, but things happen, and characters behave, in ways, both big and small, that are just ridiculous beyond belief and it frankly ruins the film as the tension and drama are undermined by these egregious plot and character improbabilities and decisions.

There’s a bit at the end which is meant to be poignant, and could have been really terrific, but is ultimately neutered by a failure of Esmail to thoroughly impress upon the audience, through repetition or targeted intensity, the crucial pieces involved. (Again, I am being intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.)

As for the cast, they do the best they can with the rather shallow characters they’ve been given.

Julia Roberts’ Amanda is basically an upper-middle class, left-of-center Karen, exercising her mid-life crisis muscles by being an irritable bitch for reasons she will never even try to understand. Roberts is a steady screen presence but she has never brought much of interest to the table and Leave the World Behind is no exception.

Ethan Hawke has matured into a solid actor and his good-natured Clay is a passable and likable attempt at an everyman – if ‘everyman’ were a college professor of English and Media Studies. It’s the character of Clay that is much more troubling than the actor portraying him, as Clay is the clueless, sack-less white man incapable of not only defending himself but of mustering the courage to even attempt it.

Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie play the teens Archie and Rose respectively, and there isn’t much to the characters or the actor’s performances. Neither of them jumps off the screen or generates the least bit of magnetism.

Mahershala Ali is, as always, a strong presence on-screen, but his character G.H., is an absurd stand-in for the film’s producer Barrack Obama. G.H. is impeccable. He is unfailingly good, smarter than everyone and entirely incapable of cowardice. He is principled, moral, ethical, noble, brave and above all…correct. Yawn. The truth is that there were twists and turns that could’ve occurred with G.H. to make him more interesting, but they never happen and so we are left with little more than a cardboard cutout of the man that Barrack Obama, and his slavish sycophants, thinks he is - paging Dr. Freud…narcissism alert!

Myha’la as Ruth Scott is fine, I guess, but again, she doesn’t have much with which to work. Ruth is, like G.H., better than everyone else…I suppose simply because of her immutable characteristics…namely that she is black and a woman. Like Roberts’ Amanda, Ruth is an incorrigible bitch but it’s ok because she’s just speaking her truth…or something like that.

The genuine drama between Ruth and G.H., and between the Sanfords and the Scotts, is eschewed in favor of a rather tepid, embarrassingly trite, middle-of-the-road, decidedly elitist and liberal, high school freshman level identity/race politics that feels forced and obscenely phony, which is very unfortunate.

Speaking of politics, the fact that the Obamas produced this movie, the first non-documentary film they’ve produced, is both telling and, frankly, quite unnerving.

The apocalyptic, dystopian, and totally believable plot of Leave the World Behind, and Obama’s insider status among the power elite, makes it feel like this movie isn’t a piece of fiction but rather a piece of predictive programming…or enlightened prophecy, as to what awaits us.

That may sound irrational, or like “conspiratorial thinking” – something that is lambasted in the film as being unserious despite it being proven correct in the story (and more and more often in real life), but whether conscious or unconscious, artists and art often have a way of showing us the catastrophe that is right around the corner. 9/11 is a recent example of this.

The film is marinated in an establishment politics that is entirely rigid, center-left and upper-class. This elitist, left-liberal orthodoxy is so deeply ingrained in the movie that most-mainstream, establishment indoctrinated viewers won’t even recognize, and if they did they wouldn’t see it as political.

I’ll write a much more in-depth, political, psychological analysis of the film in the coming days, but will state here only that this movie is riddled with as much insidious propaganda as anything I’ve seen in any feature film in recent times.

Whether it be subtle, or not-so-subtle, attacks on libertarians, right-wingers, white people, conspiracies, and even Elon Musk, or anything else that isn’t establishment approved, the film never fails to be in complete lockstep with mainstream orthodoxy as designed by the aristocracy and oligarchy.

In this way the film, despite its attempt to present itself as edgy and politically avant-garde/revolutionary, is, at its heart, an intellectually and dramatically flaccid but ideologically faithful homage to the status quo….just like the former President who produced it.

In conclusion, Leave the World Behind is chock full of dramatic potential but is never able to fully realize it. Despite some compelling visuals and sequences, the film’s dramatic and narrative failures ultimately leave it an unsatisfying viewing experience.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 109 - Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (Apple TV+)

On this episode, Barry and I navigate the maze that is Apple TV+ in order to review the first two episodes of the Godzilla-adjacent tv series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. Topics discussed include my bizarre obsession with all things Godzilla, how spending money doesn't always translate into quality filmmaking, and if a Godzilla shrieks on a podcast but the mic doesn't pick up...did it really happen?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 109 - Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Killers of the Flower Moon: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Disappointing (with caveats elucidated below). Wait to watch it when it hits streaming.

To say I was excited to see Killers of the Flower Moon, the new film from iconic director Martin Scorsese, would be a terrible understatement. Scorsese is, along with Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa, among the most pivotal filmmakers in developing my incurable cinephilia, and when a film of his is released, it’s a major event in my life.

As a teenager, when I discovered Scorsese’s masterpieces Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (years after they were initially released) it was a holy experience that converted me into a true believer in the church of cinema.

Ever since that time I’ve been an ardent admirer and devout fan of Scorsese. That doesn’t mean I’ve loved all of his films…because I haven’t, but it does mean that I’ve always taken them very seriously and treated them with the deep respect they deserve having come from a master filmmaker.

Killers of the Flower Moon, which is directed and co-written by Scorsese and is based on the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, premiered in theaters on October 20th. Unfortunately, due to circumstances well beyond my control, I was unable to see the film until this past weekend. My nearly month long wait to see the film was excruciating as I had to quarantine myself and avoid any and all mentions of the film in the media/internet in order to stay clear of reviews and opinions. See, I don’t care what anyone else thinks of Scorsese’s films, I only care what I think.

I finally trekked out to the cineplex here in flyover country to see the three-and-a-half-hour-long film on Sunday, and the context of my viewing is a crucial caveat to my opinion on the movie.

Here in flyover country the local RC Theater is a fucking shithole, but it’s the only fucking shithole theater in town. The theater has shitty digital projectors, egregiously awful sound, refuses to turn the lights all the way off in the theater, and doesn’t have screens big enough to accommodate certain aspect ratios. So, I watched Killers of the Flower Moon with a projector that froze seven times, sound that rendered much dialogue inaudible and ambient sound injuriously loud, a condensed screen that cut off heads and compressed expansive vistas, staff members talking loudly in the projector room, and lights on at the top and sides of the theater that made it feel like I was watching a movie at an old drive-in during an especially sunny day.

Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? To be fair, I’m not sure how, or even if, me or Mrs. Lincoln can answer that question.

The reality is that upon viewing the film under these frustrating and infuriating circumstances, I thought Killers of the Flower Moon simply didn’t work, but I feel like I need to see it again under better circumstances before I can truly say. It is quite an indictment of our theater system that I will need to wait until the movie becomes available to stream at home before I can properly view and review it.

With that context in place, let’s dive into my thoughts on Scorsese’s 26th feature film Killers of the Flower Moon.

The film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Lily Gladstone, tells the story of a vast criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Whites against the Native American population living on the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s. I will avoid any more in-depth discussion of the plot in order to avoid spoilers.

I have not read the book so the plot was a mystery to me before seeing the movie. The story is unquestionably an important one, but the film lacks a cohesive storytelling approach and the narrative is at times barely coherent.

I am someone who actually prefers long movies (hell…I thought The Gangs of New York and Silence should have been LONGER), and Killers of the Flower Moon runs a daunting two hundred and six minutes long, but unfortunately it doesn’t earn that arduous run time. Despite so much screen time with which to work, the characters are under developed, the plot muddled and the drama neutered.

A major issue with the film is that its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, is horribly miscast. DiCaprio plays the dim-witted Ernest Burkhart, who sports an atrocious haircut, a perpetual frown and some fake, 1920’s idiot teeth. DiCaprio’s Ernest looks like he is the long-lost uncle of Sling Blade and the surly twin brother of Ben Stiller’s retarded character Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder.

Yes, there are the usual DiCaprio histrionics in Killers of the Flower Moon, as he weeps and wails and rends his garments like a toddler in a tantrum, but it all seems terribly vacant and dramatically ridiculous.

DiCaprio’s standing as the “greatest actor of his generation” has always felt slightly unearned to me as he often gives performances that are sub-par but which are filled with enough hyper-emoting to convince the uninitiated into believing he’s some great artiste. He’s much more an unabashed movie star than he is a great actor. That’s not to say he hasn’t given good and even great performances, because he certainly has (and these are all of them…What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Catch Me If You Can, Inception, Django Unchained, The Wolf of Wall Street, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), but often times, especially with Scorsese, he doesn’t.

This is DiCaprio’s sixth film with Scorsese and in most of them he has been at the very least outshined by his cast mates, and in some of them actively awful.

For example, in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio gives a relentlessly hollow performance and is absolutely blown off the screen by Daniel Day Lewis doing Daniel Day Lewis things. In The Aviator he seems like a little kid playing dress up as Howard Hughes. In The Departed, he gives a solid performance, but which at times feels forced and is definitely overshadowed by Matt Damon. Shutter Island is a mess of a movie and his performance is middling at best. The one exception is The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leo brings all of his star power and acting ability to bear and hits it out of the park.

I was hoping DiCaprio brought that Wolf of Wall Street level of acting to Killers of the Flower Moon…but he doesn’t. He is simply too bright-eyed to play such a dead-eyed dolt like Ernest, and his attempts to energize his performance with dramatic histrionics rings horribly hollow.

Robert DeNiro does very solid work as William King Hale, the local leader of questionable intent. DeNiro’s last two outings with Scorsese, this and The Irishman, have been the best work of the last two decades, and it’s nice to see him flex his considerable acting muscles once again.

Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie, Ernest’s Osage wife, eclipses her more famous co-star DiCaprio by giving a simple and subtle performance that radiates with charisma. Gladstone speaks volumes with a simple look and never over emotes or feels the need to press like DiCaprio does. She lets her compelling (and gorgeous) face tell the story.

The supporting cast features some truly dreadful performances, most notably, and unfortunately, by the Native American actresses. I will not name names but will say that there are some super cringy moments where a certain actress gives such an amateurish performance that it actually hurts to watch.  

Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer on the film and while there are some notable sequences, such as a burning farm sequence, the rest seems very ordinary. To be fair, as explained earlier my viewing experience was not ideal so maybe I was just not able to appreciate Prieto’s genius (and he is undoubtedly a fantastic cinematographer), but what I did see underwhelmed. For instance, early in the film there is a bunch of black and white Newsreel footage that gives the history of the setting and story that looks like a cheap flashback sequence in a bad tv show.

Then there is the ending, which I will refrain from giving specifics, only to say that this coda is, in the context of my viewing, gut-punchingly bad, especially when combined with the film opening with Scorsese reading a statement to camera that looks like a hostage video and sounds like it was written by the terrorists in the human resources department at Apple Corp.

Overall, I found Killers of the Flower Moon to be a terrible disappointment because my expectations were so high. It isn’t a great movie, but it isn’t awful either. That said, I really do reserve the right to change my opinion once I get to see it at home under better technical circumstances. I hope the film gets better upon my second viewing (which according to reports will probably be in late December or early January) because the story it tells is a vitally important one, and the director telling it is among the greatest to ever make a movie. But for now, it pains me to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is simply not worth seeing the theater…which may have more to do with how awful the theater experience has become than it does with the film…we’ll see.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Follow Me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Ahsoka (Disney +): TV Review - The Force is Female...and Boring as Fuck

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

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a poorly written, poorly acted (with the lone exception being Ray Stevenson) series that further diminishes the Star Wars brand.

This past week Ahsoka, the most recent of Disney’s Star Wars series, concluded its eight-episode first season on Disney +. The series, which is a spin-off from The Mandalorian and stars Rosario Dawson in the title character, follows Jedi Warrior Ahsoka Tano as she investigates a potential threat to the New Republic in the wake of the fall of the Empire.

If I’m being kind, I would declare that Ahsoka is completely and entirely forgettable. If I’m being honest, I would say it is an embarrassment. This series, like so much of Disney’s Star Wars material, is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst an absolute atrocity.

Ahsoka’s failings are numerous and include, but are not limited to, completely ignoring any sort of previously set rules for the Star Wars universe. For example, the “rules of the force” are abandoned entirely, as is the deadly nature of the light saber, a once fearsome weapon which is turned into a mere flesh wound maker on Ahsoka.

Besides destroying the most fundamental of things from Star Wars canon, one of the other major issues with Ahsoka is the abysmal acting and inferior cast.

I remember seeing Rosario Dawson when she made her big screen debut in the unnerving Larry Clark film Kids (1995). Dawson was a natural screen presence and absolutely magnetic in Kids, but a lot has changed in the last 28 years. Over the ensuing decades Dawson has become not just a bad actress, but a terrible one. She was so atrocious in the recent Hulu series Dopesick as to be shocking. Here in Ahsoka she is so uncomfortable on screen that it left me actually perplexed. If I saw one more scene where a wooden Dawson as Ahsoka just folded her arms and stared blankly at her scene partner, I was going to light myself on fire. Dawson folds her arms so often on Ahsoka that if you did a drinking game where you did a shot every time she crosses her arms in an episode…you’d die.

Then there’s Dawson’s awkward, anti-athleticism in the fight scenes. To be fair, the fight scenes on Ahsoka are poorly staged, poorly shot and poorly executed. They all seem slow, dull and like they’re being performed underwater, but Dawson in particular moves like an arthritic, elderly woman in a nursing home….as opposed to the mere unathletic middle-aged woman she is.  

The younger actresses in the cast fare no better in terms of fighting or acting either.

Natasha Liu Bordizzo plays Sabine Wren, a Mandolorian and former Jedi apprentice to Ahsoka. Wren is an egregiously poorly written character, but Bordizzo doesn’t help matters by being so vacant in the role. Sabine is supposed to be the energizing force in the series but she’s so vacuous as to invisible. Making matters worse is that Bordizzo is just as bad as Dawson in the action sequences despite being half her age.

Diana Lee Inosanto, daughter of famed martial artist Dan Inosanto (under whom I trained many moons ago), plays Morgan Elsbeth, and unfortunately, is not a good actress. Inosanto is terribly stilted and uncomfortable to watch as she’s devoid of even the slightest bit of presence. Even her fight scenes are yawn-inducing, which is shocking considering her impressive lineage.

Then there’s Eman Esfandi who plays Ezra Bridgers. Esfandi looks like a guy who would be cast to play Jesus in a National Geographic documentary re-enactment, and has that same level of talent too. Esfandi has all the charisma of a tumbleweed and seems like a background actor who mistakenly stumbled in front of the camera.

The big bad in the series is Grand Admiral Thrawn, underwhelmingly played by Lars Mikkelsen. Thrawn is an epic character in the Star Wars universe and here he is reduced to loitering through each scene which he so barely inhabits.

The most striking thing about Ahsoka is Ray Stevenson, who plays Baylon Skoll, a Dark Jedi who stands in the way of Ahsoka as she pursues the truth. Stevenson is literally the only actor in the entire series who brings any inner life to his character. He’s also the only actor with presence and gravitas. When Stevenson is on-screen he effortlessly demands your attention. Stevenson is one of those British actors who is just highly skilled and a master craftsman. His skill and craftsmanship are subtle but extremely effective and the rest of the cast would have done well to learn from him.

Baylon Skoll is also the only interesting character in the whole series, but unfortunately, he is sidelined for the majority of it. Even worse, Stevenson tragically died after filming the series, which is a terrible loss for all of us…made all the worse in that Baylon Skoll will never get his own series.

That Stevenson, who had a bit of a knock around career despite being a fine actor, is the best actor in this series by a mile says a great deal. In contrast, Andor, another Star Wars series, was littered with top notch performances by people with similar careers and backgrounds to Stevenson. Why the hell can’t Disney just cast decent actors like Stevenson in EVERY Star Wars series and movie and in every role?

The writing on Ahsoka is as bad as there’s ever been in a Star Wars series, which is quite an accomplishment. The plot is incomprehensible to the point of being just plain silly (lightsabers can’t kill, there are stormtrooper zombies, witches, and space whales…yes…fucking space whales), and the dialogue is Junior High School drama club level of bad.

Of course, there’s the usual Star Wars nostalgia injection to placate old timers hungry for their lost youth, this time in the form of Anakin Skywalker, the always dreadful Hayden Christensen, and C3PO. One would need to be lobotomized to care the slightest about either cameo.

Since Disney bought Star Wars back in 2012, the franchise has undergone a transformation that has left it bereft of the things that made it noteworthy in the first place. To be fair, Lucas hadn’t exactly crushed it with his lackluster prequel trilogy, but Disney’s post-Lucas Star Wars output makes the prequel trilogy look like The Godfather trilogy.

Since the Disney takeover of the galaxy far, far away, the studio and Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy have, for some reason, decided to declare that “The Force is Female”. The problem is that the female force, whether in films or series, has proven to be boring as fuck.

Why Disney has leaned so far into gender politics in Star Wars that they’ve stumbled over their own sagging tits is beyond me. Star Wars has, for the most part, been something boys have nerded out over since it hit big screens back in the 70s. The animating myth and archetype of Star Wars is, as Joseph Campbell told us, a masculine one. Disney’s intention to turn the franchise mythos into a girl power vehicle is so obviously self-defeating as to be demented as it neuters the Star Wars myth and renders its archetypes psychologically powerless, diminishes the Star Wars brand and alienates the core audience.

That Disney is also castrating their Marvel myth and brand with the same diminishing creative, artistic and commercial results, only makes the decision to feminize Star Wars all the more perplexing.

The bottom line is that the Star Wars franchise in general, and Ahsoka in particular, are symptoms…and Disney is the disease. Disney’s steadfast determination to inject cultural politics into all of their franchise material and ignore artistic and dramatic quality has aggressively corroded the value of Star Wars (and Marvel) to an astonishing degree.

Star Wars tv series like Ahsoka should be slam dunks for Disney as the franchise is chock full of fascinating stories and characters, and yet the studio consistently churns out underwhelming, if not abysmal, series that act as little more than cultural political vehicles that ultimately actively destroy what people used to love about Star Wars.

In conclusion, Ahsoka is simply not worth your time or energy. Even hardcore, rabid Star Wars fans should skip Ahsoka as it really is a blight on the brand.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 107 - No One Will Save You

On this episode, Barry and I talk about No One Will Save You, the terrific new sci-fi/horror movie on Hulu. Topics discussed include UFOs, the uncomfortable accuracy of the film's  title, the excitement of an ambitious and well-made movie, and the exquisite performance of actress Kaitlyn Devers. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 107 - No One Will Save You

Thanks for listening!

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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