9th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards: 2022 Edition

THE 2022 SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY™® AWARDS

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award of the interminably long awards season. The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, or as some lovingly call them, The Mockeys™®, are a robust tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So, any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this year’s Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next year’s Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Amsterdam – An astonishingly awful film that is so incoherent and incomprehensible I can only posit that the Illuminati running Hollywood (and the world) demanded it be intentionally so poorly crafted in order to scuttle any discussion of Smedley Butler and the Business Plot.

She Said – Imagine making such a shitty a movie that audiences end up rooting for a deplorable fucking pig like Harvey Weinstein by the end. Quite an accomplishment!

Don’t Worry Darling – No, actually DO worry, darling. This turd was an absolute shit show of epic proportions and may very well have mercifully ended Olivia Wilde’s directing career…for that we can be grateful.

My Policeman – To quote Kurt Cobain, “what else can I say, everyone is gay!”…including Harry Styles apparently. A gay plot about gayness that is totally gay, but still makes no sense, that is infused with instantly forgettable performances turned this derivative drama into Return to Blokeback Mountain.

Pinocchio – Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks should return their Oscars after churning out this mindless, heartless, craft-less sack of shit. Just utterly abysmal from start to finish.

The Fabelmans – An alarmingly amateurish, poorly written, directed and acted piece of vapid, narcissistic garbage that is filled to the brim with cringe. Besides that it’s just fine.

AND THE LOSER IS…AMSTERDAM! – It’s actually quite an accomplishment to make a movie this bad and to stand out from this collection of shit sandwiches.

WORST VIRTUE SIGNALING FILM OF THE YEAR

She Said – A movie that featured the stunningly brave, earth-shattering thesis that Harvey Weinstein is bad and women are good! Too bad this empty movie had nothing original or interesting to say. Total piece of junk meant to signal its virtue to the usual suspects in order to garner awards…but was so dreadfully made even its target audience stopped pretending it was good.  

Women Talking – A stagey, whiney, bitchy movie about Mennonite women debating each other like they’re know-it-all know-nothings at a late-night bitch session at Wellesley College. As pretentious, pompous, poorly made and transparently virtue-signaling and awards-thirsty as any movie as we’ve seen in years.

AND THE LOSER IS…WOMEN TALKING – The most blatant bit of vacuous and vapid virtue signaling imaginable. The fact that it is a truly horrendous movie but still won an Oscar tells you all you need to know about its pure pandering business model.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

Tom Hanks – Tom Hanks has won two Best Actor Oscars, yet this year with his truly abysmal work in Elvis and Pinocchio, he has proven himself to be the worst best actor of all time. Hanks’ inability to play a character, or speak with an accent, were on full display this year, as was his hackneyed, hokey, shticky acting approach, and we’re all worse off for it. Please go away forever Tom Hanks.

Harry Styles – Harry Styles was poised to have a break out year and become a big movie star…and then we saw him in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling and his rocket ship to superstardom exploded on the launching pad. Holy shit this kid can’t act…not even a little. As uncomfortable and unnatural a screen presence as we’ve seen since Cindy Crawford in Fair Game.

Seth Rogan – Seth Rogan is an unwiped anus. His work in The Fablemans was a healthy reminder that he is an odious screen presence. I, for one, yearn for his vanishing from the public eye and/or the planet.

AND THE LOSER IS…TOM HANKS! Hanks should be embarrassed and humiliated by his work over the last twenty years, but he’s incapable of feeling anything but smug and superior. This hack should fuck off forever.

WORST SCENE OF THE YEAR

She Said – Bar Scene – An astonishing piece of cinema that is so atrocious as to be amazing. This scene has everything! From the poor dialogue (“these are the menus”), to the egregious virtue signaling, to the one-dimensional strawman, to the heinous acting. Just an all-around miraculous piece of cinematic shit that would be laughed out of a freshman year student film festival.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR

The Fabelmans – The Fabelmans isn’t just a bad movie, it’s an embarrassing movie. That it was Oscar nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress, is a testament to how corrupt Hollywood truly is. If this film were made by anyone other than Steven Spielberg, it would’ve been vociferously labeled cringey, amateurish horseshit…but since St. Steven made it we are supposed to fawn over how “personal” it is. Get the fuck outta here with this garbage. This movie is shitty to the extreme and absolutely sucks donkey balls. If you liked it you’re an incorrigible idiot and an unrepentant asshole.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE

David O. Russell – Russell has never been a good director, but for some reason he has been considered among the elite moviemakers in Hollywood for the past twenty years or so. I think with the trainwreck that is Amsterdam, Russell has convincingly disabused Hollywood of the notion that he is even remotely able to make movies. To see even the most-simple of things, like setting actor’s eye lines, be fucked up in this deplorable shitshow, was jaw-dropping to witness. Russell put all of his copious amounts of shittyness into the Amsterdam stew and a few of us poor souls had to take a stinky bite. Yikes. Hopefully this asshat never gets another shot to make a movie.

P.O.S. HALL OF FAME

Meghan and Harry – Only these two self-absorbed, narcissistic pieces of shit could make a pervy prodigious pedophile like pecker-face Prince Andrew seem like a half normal person.

These two half-wit shitbags hate publicity and the public eye so much they moved to Hollywood and got into the entertainment business. And now you can’t avoid them because they won’t shut the fuck up and stay off camera for a single, solitary moment.

Prince Harry is a sad-sack eunuch and a ball-less buffoon and Meghan is a diabolical and devious shrew who has successfully neutered her needle-dicked husband and isolated him from his in-bred family.

My wish is that the new King Charles invites these two insufferable cunts to his coronation, they show up and then right after the ceremony King Charles has them beheaded, old school style, on live television. This would please Harry and Meghan because they’d get a lot of attention and get to be victims, and it would also ensure that Charles would be the most popular King in the history of England.

P.O.S ALL-STARS

Sean Penn – I’ve always liked Sean Penn as both an actor and a guy. He and I have very similar personalities…which isn’t exactly a brag on my part.

This year Penn has brought some of his famous screen characters to life in the real world, as he’s publicly morphed into the mentally challenged young man from I Am Sam combined with the gay activist politician Harvey Milk from Milk. Penn has made this transformation in order to bang the drums of war in Ukraine as loudly as possible.

Yes, Sean Penn who was so vociferous in his righteous anti-war sentiments regarding Iraq in 2003, is now out there demanding the U.S. and the military industrial complex get further involved in the war in Ukraine, including direct combat.

What a fucking genius.

Maybe someone should remind Sean that he has a son who’s the perfect age to go fight in Ukraine…and if that country’s “freedom” is so fucking important to him maybe he and his son can gear up and move out and go kick some Russian ass halfway across the world.

If that isn’t something he’s interested in, then maybe I Am Sam should shut the fuck up and stop talking and acting like a fucking useless retard. Maybe Mayor Man Milk should stop shouting that “I’m here to recruit you…to die in the war in Ukraine for the U.S. elites who absolutely hate you and only want to use you for cannon fodder!” Penn’s I am Sam/Harvey Milk character sounds like another famous gay buffoon, George W. Bush, as he marched us into war in Iraq…and as we all remember that went spectacularly well. Mission accomplished motherfucker!

So, Sean Penn, do us all a favor and SHUT THE FUCK UP. If you want to fight, I’d be happy to meet you and your movie star biceps anywhere, anytime, and slap the stupid out of your thick fucking skull. And by the way maybe try and do another exercise bedsides curls when you’re at the gym, you might find your bulging biceps to be less than useful in combat, be it in Ukraine or in a scrap with me. You’re welcome you fucking empty-headed shit heel.

And thus ends the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards and the cinema calendar for 2022…thank God!!

Hopefully the losers this year will be the winners next year…you never know. One thing I can guarantee though is that there will be movies and performances worthy of the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Award next year…and I’ll be ready!!

Thanks for reading!

 FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 84 - My Policeman

On this episode, Barry and I don our gay apparel and head to 1950's Brighton to partake in the British version of Brokeback Mountain titled My Policeman, starring Harry Styles. Topics discussed include the sin of being derivative AND dull, the failed Harry Styles experiment, and is Kris Kristofferson alive or dead?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 84 - My Policeman

Thanks for listening!

©2022

My Policeman: A Review - Welcome to Blokeback

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly acted and executed, knock-off Brokeback Mountain for Brits.

My Policeman, directed by Michael Grandage with a screenplay written by Ron Nyswaner based on the 2012 book of the same name by Bethan Roberts, tells the story two gay men, their forbidden love and the woman stuck between them in 1950’s Brighton, England.

The film, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, stars Brit-pop superstar Harry Styles as the aforementioned gay policeman, as well as Emma Corrin, David Dawson, Linus Roache, Gina McKee and, since it’s a gay British movie, Rupert Everett is legally required to appear…and he dutifully does.

My Policeman is not a good movie for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that it’s so painfully derivative – it’s basically Brokeback Mountain for Brits but without the cinematic skill or quality acting.

In fact, My Policeman was such a dull slog I spent much of my time watching it thinking of cheeky British tabloid headlines to describe it. The best I could come up with was “BUM-LOVING BRITISH BOBBIE GOES FULL BLOKEBACK!” Yes, I agree…I AM clever.

Back in the early 90’s Kurt Cobain sang the lyric “what else can I say? Everyone is gay!”, and if you watch tv and movies nowadays you’d think he was right. It seems every tv show and movie now prominently features a gay character, and every commercial has either an interracial couple, a gay couple or an interracial gay couple.

Despite gays and lesbians being roughly 5% of the population, gayness is so omnipresent in our culture that last week I was watching a hockey game and a commercial for some HIV drug that featured a cavalcade of gay men in various forms of homosexual embrace ran approximately a dozen times. I couldn’t help but think of another song when I saw this ad, which was “Everyone has AIDS” from Team America: World Police. This begs the question…who exactly do they think is watching hockey nowadays?

The reality is that you can’t take two steps in our culture without tripping over some movie, tv show or commercial that is all about gayness. For example, just last week I reviewed the new Jennifer Lawrence movie Causeway, and in it, for no explicable reason whatsoever, Lawrence’s character was a lesbian. The thing that made this character choice so odd was that her lesbianism actually worked to defuse the drama, rather than heighten it. Oh well.

Just recently there was a much-hyped gay rom-com, Bros, and even kid-friendly pop culture fair like Star Wars and Marvel movies now feature gay characters. Hell, there was even gayness in the most recent Toy Story movie…you’ll be glad to know I’ll be refraining from making any Woody jokes.

This is all to say that in our aggressively progressive culture that in the last forty years in general and last ten years in particular, has changed at hyper-speed, being gay is no longer a big deal. Nobody in our very modern times cares if, to quote Spartacus, you prefer to “eat oysters or snails”. Which is why it’s so bizarre that while gays sit comfortably on the throne of pop-culture they’re so adamant to wear the crown of victimhood as they do so.

The recurring theme of popular gay films and tv shows in recent years, from The Imitation Game to Call Me by Your Name to My Policeman and of course the granddaddy of them all, Brokeback Mountain, is oppression. Another thing these films all share is that they must go back in time to find said gay oppression because it doesn’t exist in the modern Western world.

This recurring theme, a sort of sad-sack, woe-is-me, self-pitying, martyr-making view of homosexuality by homosexuals, is a sign of deep-seated insecurity from a gay community that is reflexively uncomfortable with its astounding cultural success, and has, in my mind, become a very tired trope used to avoid seeking deeper meaning and purpose, not to mention artistry, in gay film and tv.

Brokeback Mountain was a stunning piece of cinema, but what made it so astonishing is that it basically obliterated the need for this gay oppression storyline to ever be examined again, as it did it to perfection.

Unfortunately, My Policeman shamelessly mimics Brokeback Mountain. It even, rather blatantly, references Brokeback twice. Once when young Patrick Hazelwood (played by David Dawson) mentions that men often go on “fishing trips” together, wink-wink, and also when he recounts how his gay lover was beaten to death by thugs, which is exactly how Jack Twist came to his demise in Brokeback Mountain.

Patrick Hazelwood is the Brit Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) of My Policeman, as he’s the “gayer” of the two men and the one who is unable to control his “urges” which society deems depraved. Harry Styles and Linus Roache play young and old Tom Burgess respectively, and Tom is to My Policeman what Heath Ledger’s Ennis is to Brokeback Mountain.

The similarities don’t stop there as Emma Corrin plays young Marion Taylor, and Gina McKee plays the older version of the character, and Marion is basically a more educated version of Michelle Williams’ Alma character from Brokeback Mountain.

You get the point, My Policeman is literally a very, very cheap British rip-off of Brokeback Mountain.  

Unfortunately, Harry Styles is no Heath Ledger. I am sad to report, since I was so sure it was going to happen for him, but movie stardom is not in the cards for Harry Styles. Styles is a wooden, dead-eyed actor who brings absolutely nothing to the screen. It seems as though Styles has either gotten too little or too much acting coaching at this point as he’s lost whatever charisma he had in the first place.

Yes, he does have his legion of loyal teen girl fans, and no doubt a bevy of gay male fans too, and they all might appreciate handsome and hunky Harry’s homosexual hump-fest in My Policeman, but his acting is, pardon the pun, hard to take.

Emma Corrin does decent work with a pitifully under-written character, Marion. Corrin was brilliant in The Crown as Princess Diana and here she shows the same dexterity and commitment. She certainly has the makings of a solid actress and one can only hope she gets better material to work with next time.

David Dawson is supposed to be some sort of irresistible gay Svengali in the film but he lacks the presence of…ironically…a young Rupert Everett, to pull it off. This leads to Dawson and Styles seeming mismatched as a gay couple due to their decided lack of chemistry.

The older versions of the characters, Gina McKee as Marion, Linus Roache as Tom and Rupert Everett as Patrick, appear lost in another movie entirely. The “older” storyline is almost entirely incomprehensible and illogical. These characters behave in completely nonsensical ways and the entire premise of the venture seems lost in some sort of dementia fog.

Director Michael Grandage, comes from the theatre and it shows, as the film lacks any and all visual style and is utterly incapable of showing instead of telling.

I’ve not read the book My Policeman, and it will come as no surprise that I never intend to, but I can only assume it’s as trite and cliché-ridden as the screenplay for this movie by Ron Nyswaner. Nyswaner, it will not shock you in the least, also wrote the screenplay for Philadelphia…which reminds me again, “Everybody has AIDS!”

The bottom line is that My Policeman, and frankly most gay-themed movies, are stuck in a rut of unoriginality where vapid cultural messaging is more important than profundity or dramatic meaning.

At the moment it seems that gay culture bursting out of the closet in recent decades has stripped it of its dramatic and artistic power…and My Policeman is damning evidence of that.

©2022

Don't Worry Darling - A Review: Cinephiles should definitely worry darling!

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An absolute mess of a movie.

Don’t Worry Darling, the much-hyped and much-discussed sophomore directorial effort from actress Olivia Wilde, premiered with a resounding thud in theatres back on September 23rd and is now available to stream on HBO Max…and I just watched it.

My three-word review of Don’t Worry Darling would simply be, “definitely worry darling”. Unfortunately for you, brevity has never been my strong suit, and therefore neither has wit, so I’ll expound further upon my thoughts.

Don’t Worry Darling was actually deemed an Oscar contender heading into this year because Hollywood had crowned Olivia Wilde as the new “it” girl moviemaker after her first film Booksmart (2019) received positive reviews but underwhelmed at the box office.

I was less enthused about Booksmart and Ms. Wilde’s alleged directing abilities than my brethren in the critical community. It seemed to me that Booksmart, a middling rip-off of Superbad, was, like Lady Bird (2017), vastly overrated because Hollywood and weak-kneed critics wanted to celebrate a female filmmaker even when they made an at-best mediocre movie.

Booksmart and Lady Bird, and their directors Olivia Wilde and Greta Gerwig, were hyped beyond all proportion as a result of Hollywood and the access media being desperate to show allegiance to the #MeToo mania gripping Tinsel Town. Hollywood’s obsession post-2016 election and post-Weinstein scandal has been to hire as many female and minority moviemakers as possible, the overwhelming majority of which have been completely devoid of talent, skill and craftsmanship. If you want to understand why the movie industry and the cinematic arts are suffering so much right now, look no further than this blind addiction to diversity, representation and inclusion over talent, skill and craftsmanship. That’s not the only reason for the recent drought of good films, but it’s certainly a major reason for that shortage.

It was due to this current female filmmaker hype and hysteria that Don’t Worry Darling got labelled as an Oscar contender before anyone even saw it. But then the discussion about the film quickly shifted from the female empowerment of it all to the various “scandals” surrounding the production.

There was the alleged feud between the film’s star Florence Pugh and director Olivia Wilde. There was the rehashing of the firing of Shia LeBouf which included a back and forth about exactly why he was fired, the result of which revealed Olivia Wilde to be a bit of a liar. And then there was the allegation that Ms. Wilde was having an affair with LeBouf’s replacement, cast member and co-star Harry Styles, during filming…while she was married to Ted Lasso…oops, I mean Jason Sudeikis. Oh dear.

That’s a lot of negative press swirling around a movie. The problem though is that those gossipy stories are infinitely more compelling than anything that actually happens in Don’t Worry Darling.

Describing the plot of Don’t Worry Darling is a difficult if not impossible thing to do, not because I want to avoid spoilers but because it’s so ridiculously convoluted and incoherent.

The basic premise, I guess, is that there’s a couple, Alice and Jack, living in what someone suffering from #MeToo induced mania would describe as some sort of banal precursor to the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale disguised as a 1950’s supposed utopia in the California desert named Victory. Victory – a less than subtle declaration of victory for the patriarchy, is a company town where all the men work on the mysterious, top secret “Victory Project” for their boss Frank (Chris Pine), who seems more like a cult leader than anything else.

While Jack (Harry Styles), a bargain basement looking James Bond with the fancy car to match, and his fellow employees go off to work every day, their cadre of beautiful housewives stay home and cook, clean and gossip.

Alice, played by the ever-captivating Florence Pugh, is one of these sexy housewives who gossips with the other sexy housewives in between making sumptuous dinners, keeping a tidy house and having Harry Styles perform oral sex on her.

But something seems off. Alice can’t quite put a finger on what it is but she keeps having dreams and flashbacks to…something…that is not of this neat and controlled world she finds herself inhabiting.

As the plodding movie progresses and the plot further unfurls, all of the supposed promise of that premise evaporates into thin air. Eventually there’s absolutely nothing of any note left to hold onto.

The film is a D-level Stepford Wives for the modern generation as it’s obviously trying to make some profound statement about the patriarchy and the inherent evil of men, but to call the film’s gender politics trite would be the most profound of understatements.

To be fair to the film, there are some positives. For example, Florence Pugh is terrific. I remember the first time I see Pugh in a film, it was 2016’s Lady Macbeth, and I instantly recognized what a special actress she was, writing, “Pugh…has stardom written all over her. She is a beautiful woman, but her beauty never overshadows her talent. She is blessed with the skill of being able to convey her character's intentions and vivid inner life with the slightest of glances. Pugh is a charismatic and powerful screen presence who exudes an intelligence and strength that few young actresses possess. I am willing to bet that she has a most stellar career in front of her.”

Pugh is such a dynamic, magnetic and charismatic screen presence in Don’t Worry Darling that she’s able to overcome the albatross of the moronic script and middling moviemaking and avoid embarrassing herself.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique also does notable work as he gives the film an appealingly crisp visual style and luscious, cinematic flair.

As for everything else…oh boy…its bad.

Screenwriter Katie Silberman needed at least three more drafts of this script as it simply makes absolutely no sense as currently structured.

Wilde also drops the ball consistently as the film’s pacing is relentlessly lethargic yet the plot also moves too fast in the second half to be remotely comprehensible.

Pugh aside, Wilde is incapable of drawing solid performances from her cast, most obviously from herself in a supporting role. Wilde’s acting is just as bad as her directing, as there’s a lot of posing and preening and histrionics but nothing believable.

I remember the first time I ever saw the film’s co-star Harry Styles. I had never heard of, or seen, his boy band One Direction, because, you know, I’m a grown man and not a teenage girl. But then while watching Sesame Street with my young son I saw this group of absurd pretty boys singing some song about the letter “U”. I had no clue who these people were or the tune they were using, but I immediately noticed this one guy who jumped off the screen. Upon further investigation I learned it was Harry Styles. As silly as this sounds, Styles’ Sesame Street performance impressed the hell out of me because it oozed with an effortless charisma and lack of self-consciousness that you just can’t teach. In addition, he seemed to innately understand how to fill a screen, another skill not easy for people to pick up.

I then saw Styles in Christopher Nolan’s magnificent movie Dunkirk, where he played a desperate British soldier trying to survive and escape France as the Germans closed in on Dunkirk. Styles’ role was pretty minimal in the movie, but once again I was impressed by him.

The next time I saw Styles was in a post-credit scene for the truly unwatchable Marvel monstrosity Eternals. I have no idea what Styles was doing in that moronic scene, and frankly, it looked like he had no clue either.

And now Styles, who is currently dating Olivia Wilde to much fanfare, has two movies out. The first is Don’t Worry Darling and the second is My Policeman, a film I intend to see very shortly.

As much as I had high hopes for Styles’ acting career, I see them fading very, very fast as the bloom is definitely off the Harry Styles acting rose. He’s truly, abysmally awful in Don’t Worry Darling. I’m rooting for this guy to be good and goddamn he is just one cringe after another in this movie. There are scenes where his amateur acting status is laid so bare as to be uncomfortable. And his girlfriend/director Olivia Wilde does him no favors as it seems he wasn’t “directed” at all but rather left to his own rather limited devices.

That said, I did find it somewhat amusing seeing pretty boy pop star Harry Styles with glasses, bad skin and greasy hair in one of the movie’s flashback/dream sequences.

The bottom line regarding Don’t Worry Darling is that the various controversies surrounding the film have nothing to do with how bad it is. To be clear, I don’t care who Olivia Wilde is sleeping with, unless of course she wants to sleep with me, something I’d be more than happy to accommodate.

What I want from Olivia Wilde is not juicy gossip but a good movie, something she seems incapable of delivering. On Don’t Worry Darling Wilde’s bloated ambition vastly exceeded her minimal talent, and the end result is a movie that is so poorly put together that it’s actually embarrassing.

My hope for Wilde’s next film, and she’ll definitely get another one, is that she reins in her inflated ego, loses the infatuation with trite cultural politics and instead focuses on the fundamentals of storytelling and the art of cinema. A man can dream.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 50 - Eternals

On this episode, newly crowned B-listers Barry and I examine the Marvel monstrosity, Eternals, directed by Chloe Zhao. Topics discussed include Ms. Zhao's shortcomings, Marvel's misfires and its murky future going forward, as well as my lamenting "what happened to Harry Styles?"

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 50 - Eternals

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Dunkirk : A Review

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

My Rating : 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation : SEE IT. See it in the theatre and see it in 70MM if you can.

Dunkirk, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is the story of the emergency evacuation in 1940 of British forces from the French coastline as the German war machine quickly closed in around them during the second world war. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy. 

Dunkirk is a tense, taut, pulse-pounding and original piece of exquisite filmmaking. Christopher Nolan, who has made such notable movies as The Dark Knight Trilogy, Memento and Inception, outdoes himself with his stellar direction on Dunkirk. The film is minimalist in dialogue and character development, but maximalist in suspense, which is a remarkable achievement for a film that is re-telling such a well-known story from history. With Dunkirk, Nolan has masterfully made a classic movie with technical precision that boasts a very satisfying structural and dramatic symmetry. 

Nolan makes the interesting, and ultimately wise, choice to break the film into three separate story lines all with different perspectives of the massive British military escape from the clutches of the Germans. The three perspectives are, a regular British foot soldier in great peril and living a recurring nightmare (literally) of being stuck on the beach, an RAF pilot giving air cover, and a civilian father and son who take their small boat across the English channel to try and help rescue their countrymen. The shifting perspectives can be at times a little confusing as there are jumps in time that accompany them, but whatever narrative disruption this technique may bring it more than makes up for it with dramatic punch. 

The foot soldier's storyline is enhanced by Nolan's decision to cast three very similar looking actors to play the main characters trying to get out of Dunkirk and back to England. Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles and Aneurin Barnard all are gaunt, dark haired privates who will try anything to get out of the hell that is Dunkirk's beach. Whitehead, Styles and Barnard do excellent work with very little dialogue. They are focused on their objective, survival, and not on verbal communication. Whitehead in particular does terrific work that is both subtle and compelling. He has an expressive, everyman's face coupled with a subdued charisma that make for a dynamic performance. Styles is a famous boy band star in his own right, but to his credit he does surprisingly solid and steady work in Dunkirk.

Tom Hardy is superb as the RAF fighter pilot dueling with the Luftwaffa over the English Channel. Hardy has an air mask on his face for the overwhelming majority of his screen time, but while his face is covered, his charisma is not. Confining a volcanic talent like Hardy into the cockpit of a Spitfire has the potential to be a disaster, but Hardy is able to focus his energy and intent into his eyes and he lights up the screen. 

The civilian boaters are Mark Rylance, Tom-Glynn Carney and Barry Keoghan. Rylance is one of the great actors working today, and his work in Dunkirk is stellar. Rylance has a soft and gentle power about him that emanates through his entire performance. There is a quiet, steady strength in Rylance's character that is meant to symbolize the British everyman who, when his nation needs him, steps up and delivers. Rylance, who won a Best Supporting Oscar for his work in Bridge of Spies two years ago, may well garner another nomination with his work in Dunkirk. 

Kenneth Branagh has a pivotal supporting role as Commander Bolton, the pier-master who overseas the evacuation. Branagh, who, not coincidentally, came to prominence as the ultimate symbol of English resilience and strength, Shakespeare's Henry V, conjures up a similar energy as Bolton. Branagh is a fine actor, and his presence in the film is a crucial lynchpin that ties all of the different narratives together. 

Dunkirk will no doubt be nominated for multiple Academy Awards in many categories, but sound mixing and sound editing are a sure thing. The sound is absolutely fantastic and is pivotal in enhancing the film's pressure packed drama. The music has the same effect, as Hans Zimmer once again produces a pulsating and chilling score that elevates the film to the sublime. 

The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is transcendent as well. The film's crisp and lush visuals are absolutely beautiful to behold. Hoytema is able to imbue a distinct and effective style to the cinematography of the film without ever compromising in any of the three narratives. Hoytema's camera work in the water, on the beach and in the sky are all noteworthy for their disciplined impeccability. 

I saw Dunkirk at a high end theatre in 70MM and it was breathtaking. Sadly, even at my fancy cinema, there were issues with the projector and the film had to be stopped for a few minutes, and then when the film came back on they left the lights on in front of the screen for ten minutes, which is not exactly the optimal way to enjoy the film. But that said, the film was so good I was still able to enjoy it regardless of these distraction. If you do have the opportunity to see it in 70MM, you most definitely should. 

In Christopher Nolan's already stellar career, the stunning Dunkirk is his finest film. I highly recommend that you see Dunkirk in the theaters, and see it in 70MM if at all possible. Dunkirk is a staggering technical and cinematic achievement by Nolan and his crew and is not to be missed. It is also an inspiration for Brits and the rest of us to get through the dark age that is descending upon our world, so that we may live to see and fight another day. Go spend your hard earned money on Dunkirk, you will not be disappointed. 

©2017