The Other Side of the Wind (2018) - Review of a Netflix Production

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Cast

John Huston as J.J. "Jake" Hannaford
Oja Kodar as The Actress
Peter Bogdanovich as Brooks Otterlake
Robert Random as Oscar "John" Dale
Susan Strasberg as Juliet Rich
Joseph McBride as Charles Pister
Edmond O'Brien as Pat
Mercedes McCambridge as Maggie Fassbender
Cameron Mitchell as Matt Zimmer
Paul Stewart as Matt Costello
Peter Jason as Marvin P. Fassbender
Tonio Selwart as The Baron
Claude Chabrol as Himself
Henry Jaglom as Himself
Paul Mazursky as Himself
Lilli Palmer as Zarah Valeska

Director

Orson Welles

Writer

Orson Welles
Oja Kodar

Cinematographer

Gary Graver

Editor

Orson Welles
Bob Murawski

Composer

Michel Legrand

Comedy, Drama

Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity and some language.

122 minutes

 

 

In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film “La Chinoise,” one of the characters, Kirilov, announces, “L’art ne pas le reflet du réel, mais le reel de ce reflet.” Which translates as “Art is not the reflection of reality, it’s the reality of the reflection.” In “The Other Side of the Wind,” a film shot in the years between 1970 and 1976 and later (only partially) edited by Orson Welles, a character named Mr. Pister, a very young, whippet thin and presumably callow square of a film critic—played, not coincidentally, by Joseph McBride, who would go on to become, besides a fine critic and scholar in general, one of the key voices keeping Welles’ often misunderstood legacy alive—asks its bete noire-legendary director figure, Jake Hannaford, “Is the camera eye a reflection of reality or is reality a reflection of the camera eye?”

This citation of Godard sounds more like a piss-take when Pister continues “or is the camera merely a phallus?” This is meant to sound ridiculous, and it does, and yet the more you reflect on what’s actually in “The Other Side of the Wind,” the more the idea of that camera as phallus—or at least as impotent phallus desperate to achieve tumescence and usurp the passive voyeur status of the eye/lens—gains currency. Among other things, this picture from the director of “Citizen Kane,” “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Touch of Evil” and several other masterpieces both mainstream and hermetic, increases the sex-and-nudity quotient of the Welles filmography not by a percentage but by a power. 

The story, such as it is, concerns the 70^th birthday party of Jake Hannaford, portrayed with vanity-free abandon and lemon-sucking bitterness by John Huston, who looks like he’s been dragged through hell and spat back up onto earth because hell found him too hard to digest. To this party have been invited dozens of friends, enemies, well-wishers, and chroniclers. Journalists, academics, TMZ-avant-la-lettre footage collectors, documentarians, and out-and-out spies. The other thread of the story is of the movie Hannaford is trying to complete, a trippy, arty, uncomfortable, almost dialogue-free chronicle of a woman (Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover and a credited co-writer of the movie) walking nearly naked through the world and happening on all manner of orgiastic activity while pursuing a male biker whom she seduces in a moving car in a sequence that’s virtuosic, dreamlike, and squirm-inducing all at once. 

The Hannaford party is an assemblage of the footage shot by the invitees. In a narrated prologue, conceived and executed well outside of Welles’ purview, Peter Bogdanovich’s character explains the rationale behind the document. An extra-diegetic text before the film proper begins explains that this cut of Welles’ unfinished film is an attempt to “honor and complete” Welles’ vision. 

What vision it finally presents is a continually paradoxical one. It is a curse on cinema and a blessing of it. Its explorations of sexuality near explicitness, but its musings on the subject have to do with nothing but secrets. A sniping critic/historian played by Susan Strasberg harps on Hannaford’s camera fixating on his movies’ leading men. She recalls that Hannaford had affairs with all the wives of his movies’ lead males, and theorizes that this was his way of sublimating his desire for the men. Certainly Hannaford’s fixation on John Dale (Bob Random), the hippie-curled leading man of the new project, is not healthy. Dale came into Hannaford’s life while the latter was vacationing. The older man believes he saved the younger when he was trying to drown himself. A drama teacher brought to Jake’s party has a different story about Dale’s own ambition. Repressed homosexuality is not especially emphasized here as a betrayal of one’s self, but “Wind” is a movie in which everyone is selling everyone out, or at least is susceptible to doing so. Its web of relationships is vertigo-inducing, and the breakneck cutting, constantly shifting film stock, and seesawing aspect ratios don’t construct the easiest through-line by which to track them. 

“The Other Side of the Wind” is a very rich film and a very difficult one. I’ve seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of it that “work,” and those where the seams just show too nakedly shift all the time. Cameron Mitchell’s fired makeup artist, with his ridiculous straw hat and bathetic vaudevillian bearing, seems to have dropped in from an entirely different film, and I still can’t be sure that’s not entirely the point. Some of the compositions—an early shot on the studio lot, a low-angle into which move Mercedes McCambridge and a couple of other figures to make a nice Eisenstein-like three-figure composition that Welles expanded upon with just the right dolly-in camera movement—are vintage Welles, including uncomfortable closeups like those of Glenn Anders in “The Lady From Shanghai,” all of the tricks and trills pushed to their limits like a circus act gone mad. While the film-within-a-film, with its empty spaces and forced-perspective winks, is parodying Antonioni and other art-film directors, there’s also a self-critique or homage in the visual references to Welles’ own “The Trial.” In “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead,” the fascinating documentary about the making of this film that’s also an excellent companion piece to it, Simon Callow, the actor, director, and Welles biographer says “I have a feeling, for which I have no evidence, that Welles didn’t want to finish ‘The Other Side of the Wind.’” This is followed by denials, some indignant, of the idea that Welles would not WANT to finish a film. Of course he wanted to finish; he was merely denied the opportunity. 

As it happens, I agree with Callow, and I think there is evidence: it’s the movie itself. As a vessel for Welles’ self-loathing, which by this point in his life was arguably bottomless, “Wind” itself needed to have no bottom. The hundred hours of footage from which Welles worked on the feature was packed with self-inflicted wounds upon which he could pour salt, particularly with respect to his tortured relationship to the film culture he helped create, and more specifically his personal relationship with Bogdanovich. Down to the pettiest little thing. When Bogdanovich’s Brook calls Hannaford a “rough magician,” after a speech in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and Hannaford “confesses” to Brook that he knows not the meaning of the word “abjure,” those who have read Bogdanovich’s interview book with Welles, “This Is Orson Welles,” should be able to hear Welles himself pretending he doesn’t know who Mizoguchi is. 

In that book Welles says of Godard, “What’s most admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium—which, when he’s at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting.” It’s not for nothing that Welles sets the ending of “Wind” at a drive-in theater, the inverse of a sacred movie palace, a place for the desecration of cinema and a pretext for sexual activity, and shoots it like it’s a touchstone site of the romance of the American West, which of course it is. Everything contradicts everything else in this film, while at the same time drawing perfect circular connections. What Godard had to say about Welles, in 1963, was this: “[M]ay we be accursed if we forget for one second that he alone with Griffith, one in silent days, one sound, managed to start up that marvelous little electric train in which Lumiere did not believe. All of us will always owe him everything.” Fun fact: on the slates for “Wind,” the cameraman was written in as “Bitzer.” If you get that joke—for “Wind” is a movie best appreciated only by individuals as enriched and as damaged by cinema as Welles was himself—you will get this movie.

 

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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) - Review of a Netflix Production

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

Cast

Tim Blake Nelsonas Buster Scruggs
James Francoas Cowboy
Liam Neesonas Impresario
Tom Waitsas Prospector
Brendan Gleesonas Irishman
Bill Heckas Billy Knapp
Zoe Kazanas Alice Longabaugh
Tyne Dalyas Lady

Director

Ethan Coen
Joel Coen

Writer

Ethan Coen
Joel Coen

Cinematographer

Bruno Delbonnel

Editor

Ethan Coen
Joel Coen

Composer

Carter Burwell

Comedy, Drama, Western

Rated R for some strong violence.
133 minutes
 

I’m not one of those reviewers who likes a particular type of Coen Brothers movie more than another. As much as I revered the filmmakers’ knotty, relatively somber “Inside Llewyn Davis,” I didn’t sit through “Hail Caesar” grumbling that I’d have preferred a more serious work.

It’s hard to pin down the brothers’ new film, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” an anthology film that presents itself as a literal story book, first edition 1873. As the mournful air that supports the ballad “Streets of Laredo” (and other lyrics, as the movie demonstrates in its last story) plays, the book opens, the pages turn; a full-page illustration shows a moment from a tense poker game; and away we go.

Into a rather goofy singing-cowboy vignette, the title story, starring Tim Blake Nelson as a man in a white hat who addresses the viewer most cheerfully before he begins blowing holes in any number of dirtier men who won’t cooperate with him. Is he, as a wanted poster paints him, a “misanthrope?” No, he insists, he just doesn’t like to be, um, contradicted.

This episode is a gasp-inducing wonder, a perfect storm of Frank Tashlin and Sam Peckinpah stylings, suggesting this is going to be one of the more raucous and absurdist Coen outings. The next story, starring James Franco as an ill-fated bank robber, leads up to a punchline that’s one of the funniest in the Coen canon.

In the third story, “Meal Ticket,” the movie takes a grim, mean turn. Its protagonists are a taciturn, hard-drinking traveling showman, Liam Neeson, and his charge, an armless and legless young man with a great store of poetry and scripture at his command, billed as a great “Orator.” Beginning his “set” every night with Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” he speaks to ever-dwindling frontier audiences, compelling Neeson to make an arguably ruthless business decision.

 In “All Gold Canyon,” inspired by a Jack London story, Tom Waits—who fits so well into Coen World that it’s kind of a shock to realize this is his first picture with the filmmakers—plays a prospector for whom process seems more fulfilling than the accumulation of wealth. The next story, “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” featuring remarkable performances from Zoe Kazan, Bill Heck, and Grainger Hines, is also an adaptation, from a story by Stewart Edward White, but the Coens stack it with mordant ironies that not only make it their own, but make it perhaps the saddest of the tales here.

There’s a lot of killing in this movie, and many of those who suffer it are depicted lying down, with their eyes open, looking at the sky. In the movie’s final story, “The Mortal Remains,” one of a pair of bounty hunters, played by Jonjo O’Neill, tells his fellow passengers in a stagecoach of how, after his partner (Brendan Gleeson) has “thumped” one of their victims, he enjoys looking into that man’s eyes and watching as he negotiates the border between life and death, trying to find a state to which he can be reconciled. Do any of them “make it?” one of the passengers asks. “I don’t know,” the bounty hunter says cheerfully. “I’m only watching.”

This final segment plays like an extra-morbid but enigmatic coda to the prior proceedings. Then it hits you how, in a speech by Saul Rubinek’s  “Frenchman” character (who introduces his philosophy of life by anticipating Sartre’s statement that “we have only this life to live”), his insistence that in life you “cannot play another man’s hand” completes a circle:  extending the movie’s trajectory back into an animating situation in its first story.

What’s most bewitching throughout “Scruggs” is its sense of detail. Its meshing of formal discipline and screwed-down content sometimes give it the sense of a work that has been carefully and elaborately embroidered rather than photographed.

Do the Coens troll their audience? Yes and no. Movies require too much money and effort to predicate them merely on pranking people you don’t like. On the other hand, I had a conversation last fall with a great film scholar and critic who rather famously dislikes the Coens' work, and he was taking issue with the naming of the main character and ostensible hero of “Hail Caesar.” Josh Brolin’s good guy “Eddie Mannix” was named for a real-life character who was in fact a rather bad guy, an MGM-employed “fixer” who covered up major crimes by film figures and bullied potentially rebellious stars into doing the studio’s will. “Why would they want to ennoble Eddie Mannix,” he asked, and I said that, clearly, the movie wasn’t intended as any kind of portrait of the real Eddie Mannix, and that they probably just liked the name. Which I think is true. But the Coens are creators who rather effortlessly work on multiple levels, and I think it’s closer to the truth to say that they liked the name AND that they knew that using it would push certain people’s buttons, and they’re not just fine with that; they’re delighted by it.

Here, their adaptation of Western story modes goes directly against contemporary consciousness of Native American genocide and other issues. Because it’s a pastiche, it situates itself in an old-fashioned mode in which diversity is articulated only in terms of mutual antagonism. The only articulation of a Native American perspective comes in the form of a disdainful laugh one “Indian” warrior throws in the direction of a character with a noose around his neck. For the purposes of this marvelous and disquieting movie, it’s enough. Its pleasures—the endless succession of perfect shots of remarkable scenery, the gorgeous music by Carter Burwell and others that swells and dips like the landscapes themselves—are real, and acknowledged as such, but there’s something more real underneath it all. The book’s pages at the movie’s beginning are turned too quickly for a viewer without a freeze button to read its dedication and epigraph, but the latter might as well be a portion of the Russian grammar book sample Vladimir Nabokov used to open his 1952 novel The Gift, to wit, “An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a bird. Death is inevitable.”

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The Girl In The Spiders Web (2018) - Film Review

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDERS WEB

Production companies: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, New Regency Pictures, Pascal Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Cantillon Company, Yellow Bird
Cast: Claire Foy, Sylvia Hoeks, Lakeith Stanfield, Sverrir Gudnason, Vicky Krieps, Stephen Merchant
Director: Fede Alvarez
Screenwriters: Jay Basu, Fede Alvarez, Steven Knight based on the novel by David Lagercrantz and characters by Stieg Larsson
Producers: Eli Bush, Elizabeth Cantillon, Berna Levin, Amy Pascal, Scott Rudin, Soren Staermose, Ole Sondberg
Executive producers: Bob Dohrmann, Anni Faurbye Fernandez, David Fincher, Line Winther Skyum Funch, Johannes Jensen, Arnon Milchan
Director of photography: Pedro Luque
Production designer: Eve Stewart
Costume designer: Carlos Rosario
Editor: Tatiana S. Riegel
Music: Roque Banos
Casting director: Carmen Cuba
Venue: Rome Film Festival (official section)

The adventures of Lisbeth Salander, the intrepid punk-goth hacker made famous in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, continue in The Girl in the Spider's Web. The filmmakers take a heroic, action-packed, high-tech approach that empties out some of the originality of this unique female heroine, while pointing the movie at a rather different kind of audience from the first trio of Swedish movies and David Fincher’s 2011 remake The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It is based on the book by David Lagercrantz that continues the series after Larsson's death.

There is a new backstory for Lisbeth that soft-pedals the original one of multiple rapes and abuse. Other disconcerting changes should test the loyalty of the series’ fans, while perhaps picking up younger audiences. She now sports much more advanced IT skills. She also has the new superpower of accessing any computer in the world in two clicks, not to mention driving motorbikes and Ferraris over ice and snow at Le Mans speed and surviving certain-death situations. If you flash on an angry, pierced, femme version of James Bond, you are into the spirit of the piece directed by Fede Alvarez and starring Claire Foy (First Man, The Crown) in the lead role.

Perfunctory in its psychological realism and flagrantly lacking any other kind, the screenplay by Alvarez, Jay Basu and Steven Knight is certainly not the most satisfying version of Lisbeth. But it is edgy and action-packed, and Alvarez’ direction keeps the tension high through a slew of ever-more-improbable threats to Lisbeth and her allies. In the end, her character is so invincible she feels unreal as a human personality. For one thing, she has lost the traumatic background of abuse that made her credible as an angry feminist revenger in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s also perplexing to discover she has a sister (Sylvia Hoeks) whom she left behind when she escaped from their father, a Russian crime lord.

In the film’s dazzling opening flashback, two little girls — Lisbeth and her sister Camilla — play chess together in an icy fortress. A servant announces their father wants them in his bedroom, and one look at his perverted face is enough to know what he wants them for. While Camilla hangs back, little Lisbeth throws herself out of a high window into a blizzard and, surviving the fall, runs for her life. She never goes back while Dad is alive.

This is her new traumatic childhood, which is supposed to have turned her into a vigilante famed for hurting men who hurt women, probably as close to a #MeToo hashtag as an action-thriller can come. Her reputation as a dangerous outlaw hacker gives her an underground cool, and in fact she has been living incognito among Stockholm’s swinging nightcrawlers while apparently wanted by the police for illegal hacking activities.

Her big wounded eyes belying a tough guy appearance, the athletic Foy does quite a respectable job following in the footsteps of Rooney Mara and, in the Swedish films, Noomi Rapace, though she doesn’t outpace them. Her casual bisexuality is entirely in keeping with her modern image: She has a number of female lovers but still has a tender spot for Mikael Blomkvist, the unfaithful journalist who wrote and published her story, causing her to disappear from his life. In a much-reduced and unexciting part, Sverrir Gudnason is hardly more than a shadow in the role that was Daniel Craig’s. Versatile Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) is more regrettably thrown away in a cameo as Mikael’s business partner and lover. All the actors speak English with mild Swedish accents, including Krieps and the British Foy, an affectation that keeps them in their parts.

An early demonstration of Lisbeth’s steely resolve, as well as her fighting skills, comes in the rescue of an abused wife from her big businessman husband, who has just beaten her bloody and is making excuses for himself. Lisbeth appears dressed as an avenging angel with black wings; she quickly trusses the husband up in a lasso and hangs him from the ceiling, a perfectly impossible operation from a realistic p.o.v. Meanwhile, she empties his bank account in favor of his wife and the two prostitutes he beat up. Her trademark weapon, an electric taser, makes its first of many appearances as she stings him where it hurts the most.

The story proper begins when she’s contacted by Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), a frightened American programmer who is in possession of software capable of hacking into the world’s nuclear arsenals. He has come to fear it’s not a good thing to leave unattended in the hands of the U.S. government. Admittedly, the stakes are high, and for once Lisbeth is stymied over a password. Though Balder doesn’t get far into the story, he has communicated all the passwords to his savant 6-year-old son August, played by the delightfully serious Christopher Convery. The boy’s presence in Sweden complicates things considerably for Lisbeth, Mikael, the Swedish head of national security and the film’s best new character, Edwin Needham (Lakeith Stanfield), a legendary hacker turned NSA security techie, whose prowess scores some points for the USA. Needham is challenged to keep out of it by his Swedish counterpart but ignores her and plows ahead on a collision course with Lisbeth and friends.

Fortunately, there’s not much gab in the conference room and the hacking — involving anything from building surveillance cameras to national weaponry — takes from two to three seconds of screen time to accomplish. One does get tired of everybody locating everybody else using the old trick of triangulation of phone calls.

Sweden’s wintry landscapes turn out to be the ideal background to buildings bursting into blazing fireballs and motorcycle chases on ice. Imaginative visuals keep coming when a colorful figure from Lisbeth’s past unexpectedly appears and, surprise but no surprise, turns out to be the Spider Master. This arch villain first gasses, then vacuum-packs Lisbeth in a black plastic bag, which must be a first in the world of screen punishment. However, their final confrontation takes place on emotional terrain that is exactly the film’s weak point.

Lisbeth’s fans will be happy to know she still has the dragon on her back, a bit the worse for wear after the ruthless Spiders turns her cool secret digs in an abandoned warehouse into burnt toast. Cement fortresses without windows are characteristic of Eve Stewart’s production design, which pushes high tech ideas into the future with conviction. Also notable is Pedro Luque’s icy cinematography, draining color from scenes like blood from faces.

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The Guilty (2018) - Film Review

The Guilty (2018)

Cast

• Jakob Cedergren as Asger Holm
• Jessica Dinnage as Iben
• Omar Shargawi as Rashid
• Johan Olsen as Michael
• Katinka Evers-Jahnsen as Mathilde
• Jeanette Lindbæk as Vagtleder Nordsjælland
• Simon Bennebjerg as Junkie
• Laura Bro as Journalist
• Jacob Ulrik Lohmann as Bo

Director

• Gustav Möller

Writer

• Gustav Möller
• Emil Nygaard Albertsen

Thriller

85 minutes

 

 

 

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the first film that really started a buzz was from the relatively under-promoted World Dramatic Competition, Gustav Möller’s “The Guilty,” now finally opening in limited release. It’s easy to see why so many critics and viewers have taken to this laser-focused study of a man whose prejudices and assumptions enhance a tense day on the job. With its single setting and real-time story, “The Guilty” is a brilliant genre exercise, a cinematic study in tension, sound design, and how to make a thrilling movie with a limited tool box. The film’s own restrictions actually amplify the tension, forcing us into the confined space of its protagonist.

The opening moments of “The Guilty” might feel like mere wheel-spinning until the “real story” kicks in but they’re essential to why the film really works. In them, we meet Asger Holm (Jacob Cedergren) a Danish police officer embroiled in a bit of a controversy, and so stuck at an Emergency Services (their version of 911) call center until it blows over. We get snippets of conversation about a testimony tomorrow and learn that he no longer lives with his significant other, but we don’t know the details—these are just elements that add to the fabric of tension, and reveal that Asger is under a lot of stress.

Asger is also kind of a jerk. In his role as the provider of necessary, often life-saving services, he can be judgmental and abrasive. A few calls early in the film reveal this character trait as he scolds one caller for taking drugs and allows another who has been mugged by a prostitute to stew in his bad decision before sending help. The idea that Asger isn’t as free from assumptions about the people who call him as he should be sets him up as a flawed character. And so when he gets a call that will change his life, we know that he’s already imperfect—and that could impact how the night unfolds.

The call comes from a woman, who Asger identifies through his call system as Iben. She sounds like she’s in trouble but she’s not making a lot of sense. We soon learn, with Asger, that she can’t exactly say what’s wrong but she alludes to a very bad situation, and our protagonist soon gets sucked into the nightmare she’s experiencing. Well, he gets sucked into his interpretation of what she’s experiencing. “The Guilty” is a complex examination of how commonly we make assumptions about other people—how easily we can take a limited amount of information and fill in the gaps in a way that’s not always right. Just as he blames the drug taker for making a bad decision without knowing anything about what led up to that decision, he jumps to conclusions with Iben that prove to be his downfall.

In a sense, all of us make variations on the mistakes that Asger makes in this film, only with less terrifying results (I hope). Think about how often we use a tweet or a text in ways to read the mind of the person sending it. One of the masterstrokes of “The Guilty” is how identifiable Asger feels. Even though he’s not exactly likable, we want him to pull out of the tailspin he’s in on this night, and “The Guilty” gains another level of complexity when Asger realizes that this night is allowing our hero to see how he got here—the aforementioned controversy—in a whole new light.

“The Guilty” is a tight, excellent piece of work that will likely be seen by way too few and forgotten in the year-end conversation. Denmark has submitted it for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, a category that can often be hard to predict but typically goes with more recognizable auteurs or movies dense with internationally resonant social messages. It’s been a phenomenal year for this category with films like “Roma,” “Shoplifters,” and “Burning” almost certain to pop up. Those Cannes and TIFF hits deserve their acclaim, but don’t forget about the film from Sundance.

 

 

 

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First Man (2018) - Film Review

First Man (2018)

Cast

• Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong
• Claire Foy as Janet Armstrong
• Corey Stoll as Buzz Aldrin
• Kyle Chandler as Deke Slayton
• Jason Clarke as Edward Higgins White
• Shea Whigham as Gus Grissom
• Christopher Abbott as Dave Scott
• Brian d'Arcy James as Joseph A. Walker
• Pablo Schreiber as Jim Lovell
• Patrick Fugit as Elliott See
• Cory Michael Smith as Roger Chaffee

Director

• Damien Chazelle

Writer (based on the book by)

• James R. Hansen

Writer

• Josh Singer

Cinematographer

• Linus Sandgren

Editor

• Tom Cross

Composer

• Justin Hurwitz

Drama, History

Rated PG-13 for some thematic content involving peril, and brief strong language.

138 minutes

If you want to get an almost first-person sense of what it felt like to fly in one of the earliest supersonic planes or ride a rocket into orbit and beyond, "First Man" is the movie to see. More so than other films about the US space program, including "The Right Stuff" and "Apollo 13," it makes the experience seem more wild and scary than grand, like being in the cab of a runaway truck as it smashes through a guardrail and tumbles down the side of a mountain.

Future first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and his fellow Apollo Program team-members zip themselves into insulated suits fitted with bags to catch their body waste, strap themselves into narrow seats, wait hours or days for clearance to take off, then spend a few minutes being shaken and rolled. The vibrations of the trip rattle their bones and the noise scorches their eardrums. There might be a brief moment of beauty or peace, along with a sidelong glimpse through a window of the blue earth, the grey-white moon, or the blackness of space, but that's generally all the aesthetic pleasure they get—and maybe all they can handle. They expend most of their mental energy studying the instrument panels in front of them and trying to process the information that's being fed through their headsets by mission control, knowing that one missed fact or wrong choice could mean their deaths.

To do this kind of work, you have to be the bravest person on earth, or have a death wish. This blockbuster drama from director Damien Chazelle ("Whiplash," "La La Land") and screenwriter Josh Singer ("Spotlight," "The Post") implies that there might not be a lot of difference, and that if there is, the astronauts aren't the people to explain it, because they're steeped in a tradition that forbids admitting you even have feelings, much less discussing them. 

Neil, a handsome but tight-lipped test pilot in the mold of Sam Shepard's Chuck Yeager from "The Right Stuff," enrolls in the Apollo program in part because he wants to be distracted from the pain of losing his two-year-old daughter Karen to cancer. Neil's wife Janet (Claire Foy) is grieving, too, but during missions she's stuck at home, or roaming the halls of NASA trying to get information about Neil's safety. To their credit, the filmmakers periodically remind us that, as dangerous as Neil's job is, it's at least a respite from the emotional pain of living with loss—and that the helplessness the wives felt as they sat in the living room watching coverage of the mission or TV, or waiting for the phone to ring, was uncompensated emotional torture. 

Every now and then, the movie lets you know that other things were going on in 1960s America besides a race to beat the Soviets to the moon. A brief sequence near the midpoint shows that many African-Americans (who were behind the scenes participants in the space program, as "Hidden Figures" showed, but weren't allowed in planes and rockets) thought the Apollo missions were an expensive distraction from the fight for racial and economic equality on the ground. Much of the white political left and some women felt the same, even when they were inspired by the astronauts' bravery. We get hints of this disquiet in conversations and TV images alluding to Vietnam and social protest, as well as in glimpses of astronauts' wives stewing in the shadows while their husbands claim the spotlight. Chazelle and Singer deserve credit for allowing notes of national unease to creep into the story; it helps make "First Man" feel truer to the period than other movies about the US space program (although, for its totality of vision, the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" is superior). 

Unfortunately, none of these notes are developed into anything but side trips or afterthoughts. It soon becomes clear that the director's heart is in the flight sequences, the climactic moon landing reenactment, and the various scenes of Neil tamping down his depression and anger because he's a mid-century American man who understands more about physics and engineering than he does his social conditioning. When Chazelle is examining Neil's inarticulateness, "First Man" becomes a tragedy of American machismo, in the vein of "American Sniper" (which wasn't shy in admitting that its hero kept volunteering for combat duty because he couldn't deal with being a husband and father) and "The Deer Hunter" (in which straight white men expressed love for each other through pain and sacrifice). 

Almost every man in the Apollo program is in the same emotional boat as Neil—including Kyle Chandler's Deke Slayton, Ethan Embry's Pete Conrad, Pablo Schreiber's Jim Lovell, Jason Clarke's Ed White, Shea Whigham's Gus Grissom, Cory Michael Smith's Roger Chaffee, William Gregory Lee's Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, and the crewcuts of mission control. They all have the correct Life Magazine corn-fed, square-jawed look, and the actors all do their best to inhabit the time period without fuss. But ultimately, none of Neil's colleagues register as much more than glorified background characters. When Chazelle re-enacts the 1967 Apollo 1 capsule fire that killed three astronauts, it's upsetting because of the matter-of-fact abruptness of the staging (as if a candle had been unexpectedly snuffed out), not because we'd gotten to know and care about the crew. Their deaths register mainly as threats to Neil's safety and the future happiness of his family. 

The only actor besides Gosling who makes a strong impression is Corey Stoll as Neil's future Apollo 11 capsule-mate Buzz Aldrin. The character is presented as a wry, talkative fellow who can access his own emotional interior, knows he's handsome and charming, and enjoys acting the role of the cocky space pilot when TV cameras are pointed at him. Neil respects Buzz but sometimes seems annoyed by how comfortable he is in his own skin. Whenever they share the screen, Chazelle and Singer veer a little too close to endorsing the idea that emotional constipation equals manly virtue. If the movie didn't suggest that Neil's stoic nature and suppressed grief make him resent anyone who seems happy, "First Man" might've come across as validating the notion that, after all these decades, the strong, silent type is still the masculine ideal. The first man was, after all, a caveman. 

Even when "First Man" stumbles as historical psychodrama, it still represents a giant leap forward for movies about the physical experience of flight. I wouldn't call the test piloting and blastoff-and-orbit scenes artful, exactly—there's little poetry in the images—I don't think they're really aiming for that. They're more about single-mindedly putting you inside Neil Armstrong's body and brainpan, and giving you a sense of how hard it must have been to focus, work out equations and flip switches with all that motion and noise battering the senses. 

Chazelle and his regular cinematographer Linus Sandgren try to keep the camera on, or with, Neil, whether he's absorbing facts during a NASA briefing, reading to his son at bedtime, fighting with his wife, or walking away from a burning wreck. The objective seems to be to make you feel, by the end, as if you've walked a million miles in Neil Armstrong's boots. On that score, judged solely as a spectacle, "First Man" has to be considered a success—especially if you see it in IMAX format, which imparts astonishing clarity to the images even when Sandgren's handheld camera is shaking so hard that Southern Californians might wonder if the film is doing its job or if the San Andreas Fault has finally called it quits. 

Chazelle is an extremely visceral director, more in the mold of a technically adept big-screen showman like Robert Zemeckis ("Contact," "Flight") than the gritty '70s character-driven filmmakers that he cites as heroes during interviews. The musical scenes in "Whiplash" were so intense that they sometimes made you feel as if you were trapped inside a drum during a solo. The large-scale action scenes in "First Man" play like the most hellish amusement park ride ever, so unrelenting that you'll wonder how long you'd have been able to endure the real thing without giving up and pressing the "Eject" button. The three stars at the top of this review are for Chazelle and Sandgren's visuals, Gosling's internalized but rarely mannered acting, the script's ability to communicate Neil's buried emotions without dialogue, and the bowel-rattling sound design. If you watch it in IMAX, add half a star but make sure not to eat beforehand. If you see the movie at night, you may glance up at the moon afterward and realize that it's nice to look at, but you'd never want to go there.

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On Her Shoulders (2018) - Film Review

On Her Shoulders (2018)

Director

• Alexandria Bombach

Producer

• Hayley Pappas
• Brock Williams

Documentary

95 minutes

Four years ago, Nadia Murad Basee Taha was a teenager living in a Yazidi farm community in the Sinjar district of Iraq when ISIL took over the town, murdered 600 people, and captured the women and girls as sex slaves. She escaped three months later and has spent most of the time since speaking out on what happened to her and her people. This month, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This award-winning documentary tells her story. 

Director Alexandria Bombach understands that there are two stories here. First there is the inspiring story of a young woman who had no ambitions of becoming a world figure but who overcame unthinkable loss and trauma by devoting herself to helping others. Then there is the story of a young woman who is forced to relive her most painful experience over and over and who is constantly bombarded by the overwhelming needs of others, from the photo-op sympathy of politicians and journalists to the heartbreak of her surviving community, most still living in refugee camps, who sob in her arms and beg her to get them some help.

Mostly, Bombach just lets the camera sit quietly as Murad goes through her exhausting schedule of meetings, media appearances, and book signings. She captures some telling images: a refugee lowering his fishing line into the ocean through a cracked panel in the fence around the camp, Murad touching a heavy chain around a locked gate, Murad’s comment on seeing a school marching band practice, “If this were in Iraq, someone would blow himself up.” She gazes into a beauty salon mirror as her hair is wrapped around a curling iron. In one of her appearances before a UN assembly, we will learn something about what her long hair means to her. 

Murad wants the world to hear her story and she is focused on a particular goal. She wants to be on the agenda of the meeting of world leaders in New York, to ask them to declare what happened to her people an official genocide and to give them justice. The process for getting the opportunity to speak to the assembly of Presidents and Prime Ministers is a daunting one. Early in the film she is preparing for what amounts to an audition. She will speak to a committee at the United Nations, and if she passes muster, she can move up to the next level. 

The time limit is strict. Her rehearsal for the initial presentation is 50 seconds over time so she has to figure out what to cut. If she takes out too much detail, the plea for help will have no weight. If she takes out the plea, she will leave without presenting a challenge to be met. When she has to shorten the speech for the final version, she eliminates the call to the world leaders to imagine what it would be like to be enslaved by ISIS because “What’s the benefit of asking them to imagine?”

The film’s most affecting moments are when Murad speaks directly to the camera. She says that the only way she can deal with what she has suffered is to devote herself to helping the other girls who suffered, too, but do not have the opportunity to bring their stories to the world. She says she feels worthless, and will always feel that way until her people get justice. 

She was content in her home in Sinjar, she tells us, doing chores, tending sheep, spending time with family, and hoping she could become a hairdresser, a place “where women and girls would see themselves as special.” She wishes that people would know her as an excellent seamstress or athlete, not as a victim of ISIS terrorism.  

It is at best bittersweet when she is named a goodwill ambassador by the UN. Her title carries as much tragedy as honor: Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. As Murad makes clear in her three minutes, there is no dignity without justice. There is only one border, she tells the presidents and prime ministers, “the border of humanity.” We see this movie to learn who the young Nobel Peace Prize winner is, but in the end, it is about her challenging us to learn who we are.

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CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (2018) - FILM REVIEW

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) 

 

Cast

• Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel
• Richard E. Grant as Jack
• Marc Evan Jackson as Llyod
• Joanna Adler as Arlene
• Ben Falcone as Alan Schmidt

Director

• Marielle Heller

Writer

• Jeff Whitty

Writer

• Nicole Holofcener

Cinematographer

• Brandon Trost

Editor

• Anne McCabe

Composer

• Nate Heller

Comedy, Crime, Drama

Rated R for language including some sexual references, and brief drug use.

107 minutes

 

Despite her brilliant energy and comic timing, Melissa McCarthy has starred in a number of not-so-great and forgettable movies—a streak that ends with Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” Here, McCarthy makes a grouchy curmudgeon into a surprisingly sympathetic figure, throwing off her likable persona to play someone who is cold to those close to her, and mean to just about everyone else. 

As a biographer who specializes in telling other people’s stories, Lee Israel (McCarthy) doesn’t value name recognition as much as her literary agent (Jane Curtin). She also doesn’t dress up for parties or mingle with other writers well, and it’s costing her professionally. After losing her job, her beloved cat taking ill and receiving an eviction warning, Israel adapts her writing skills into creating fake letters from famous names and selling them for hundreds of dollars. It becomes a wildly lucrative new career—one that attracts the attention of the FBI. In trying to avoid detection, Israel enlists her close friend, Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), to keep the fraud going until the feds catch up with them both.

Like Heller’s debut, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” her next film is a period piece of an era that’s not too far from our memory yet features stories we likely haven’t seen before. Her first film was about the coming-of-age misadventures of a teenager (Bel Powley) growing up in 1970s San Francisco. This time, Heller sheds the Polaroid palette she used in that movie for a look that captures the in-between feeling of its era—one where the grimiest of years had passed yet working writers could still afford to live in Manhattan. Visually, it’s a style that balances the sleek qualities of skyscrapers and the warm tones of wooden shelves and books in an old dusty shop. Outside, Israel walks through a dreary looking New York City, as if the weather reflects Israel’s less-than-sunny outlook on life.

The range in McCarthy’s performance cannot be overstated. At almost every turn, her character gives the audience plenty of reason not to like her. Yet, with Heller’s sympathetic approach and McCarthy’s acting, the movie humanizes her beyond caricature. The part is far from any number of one-note roles McCarthy has been boxed into. Here, she plays a combative personality who really only shows regular kindness to her ailing cat and whose social awkwardness also causes her to get defensive against those trying to help or befriend her. When on a date with a bookshop owner who likes her work, Israel fumbles through flirting with the woman. There’s so much vulnerability just below this character’s prickly surface, yet the audience only gets to see those moments in short bursts.

To balance out the caustic on-screen personality, Grant plays Hock as Israel’s polar opposite in almost every way. Where Israel is most comfortable being frumpy and grumpy, Hock is charming and dresses up to compensate for his transient lifestyle. She struggles to connect with outsiders, while he connects with almost everyone who crosses his path. He’s a bit like a grown-up raconteur in the spirit of Grant’s character in “Withnail & I,” a devilishly charming person who shakes the dust off someone whose become too complacent with life. Israel and Hock make a delightful odd couple of friends, meeting regularly for drinks at one of the Village’s oldest gay bars and trading friendly barbs at each other. Their delightful rapport feels so lively, that when it shatters, the silence that moves in between the two best friends becomes the most painful part of Israel’s demise.

“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is at once a low-stakes crime drama, a buddy comedy, a period piece and a loving tribute to a woman who at this point in her life and career did not feel loved. The movie not only revisits the real Lee Israel’s old New York haunts like the bar Julius', but also returns to the scenes of some of her crimes, the now-fading independent book shops where she sold her fake letters. Even the jazz standards that play throughout were chosen because they were some of Israel’s favorite songs. “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” comes from a place of understanding and love that few other biopics do, and it makes this difficult character a joy to meet.

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Venom (2018) - FIlm Review

Venom (2018)

Cast

Tom Hardyas Eddie Brock / Venom
Michelle Williamsas Anne Weying
Riz Ahmedas Dr. Carlton Drake / Riot
Reid Scottas Patrick Mulligan
Michelle Leeas Donna Diego

Director

Ruben Fleischer

Screenplay

Scott Rosenberg
Jeff Pinkner
Kelly Marcel

Characters

David Michelinie
Todd McFarlane
Mike Zeck

Director of Photography

Matthew Libatique

Original Music Composer

Ludwig Göransson

Editor

Alan Baumgarten

Action, Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language.

112 minutes

 

 

Tom Hardy is notorious for giving it his all—for digging in deep, physically and emotionally, for every role he inhabits. Whether it’s bulking up to play Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises,” being strapped to the front of a truck for “Mad Max: Fury Road,” spouting indecipherable dialogue as British gangster twins in “Legend” or spending the entirety of a shoot alone in a car for “Locke,” Hardy never half-asses it. It’s been said many times before, but it’s true: He’s our generation’s Brando.

So of course, Hardy applies that same intensity to the comic-book anti-hero origin story, “Venom.” And his fully committed performance is pretty much the only reason to see it.

This is an extremely minor entry in the Marvel universe (although it’s not technically a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for those of you who care about these things), a tonally wonky lark that’s actually stronger when it’s sillier. It’s a mess, but a fun mess—at least for a while.

Think of this as an intensely violent version of “All of Me,” the 1984 comedy in which Lily Tomlin’s soul ends up in Steve Martin’s body. As in that film, the best parts of director Ruben Fleischer’s uneven extravaganza occur when Hardy’s character, investigative reporter Eddie Brock, struggles to retain control of his body, even as an otherworldly life force in the form of a menacing black blob is gaining strength inside and bickering with him.

The most successful example of this comes when Eddie first realizes the extent of his newfound (and unwanted) abilities—the thing that turns him from a regular guy into a hulking mass. A group of heavily armed henchmen have invaded his shabby San Francisco apartment to take him down and retrieve the gooey alien specimen inhabiting him, which he accidentally acquired while snooping around a high-tech lab. Eddie unwittingly annihilates them one by one, his limbs instantly stretching and transforming into sharp, shiny and supremely deadly weapons. His body gets yanked hither and yon and his panic rises, even as the growling voice in his head (also Hardy) grows louder and lifeless bodies lie scattered in his frenzied wake. In moments like this, Hardy seems down for both the demanding physicality of the role as well as the dark humor, even though the two mixed together aren’t always the smoothest fit as the film goes on.

When he’s completely overtaken by the wide-eyed, sharp-toothed Venom, he literally bites people’s heads off, but he also wants you to toss your head back in laughter with his wacky quips. (Four writers get screenplay credit: Scott Rosenberg, Jeff Pinkner, Kelly Marcel and Will Beall). It’s a tough balance to strike, one the extremely R-rated “Deadpool” movies achieved by absolutely going for it in terms of both ridiculous violence and raunchy humor. “Venom” is right there on the edge of what you can get away with and still maintain a PG-13 rating, in that it features massive amounts of carnage, gunfire and destruction, but no bloodshed. But as the film’s action set pieces grow larger in scale—including one particularly exciting motorcycle chase through the streets of San Francisco—they increasingly fail to connect emotionally and visually.

Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Gangster Squad”) had the benefit of working with a true artist in Matthew Libatique, Darren Aronofsky’s longtime cinematographer. (He also happens to have shot Bradley Cooper’s remake of “A Star Is Born,” which is opening this week, as well. It’s a must-see for a multitude of reasons, but Libatique’s glossy, dreamy images are among them.) But so much in “Venom” happens at night—and Venom himself essentially looks like an enormous dominatrix clad in head-to-toe black Latex—that it’s often difficult to discern what’s happening. This is especially true when Venom takes on a guy whose body has become the host for another angry blob: mad billionaire scientist Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), who’d hoped to tame these space specimens for the supposed good of mankind.

Their fight scenes are as inscrutable as anything you’d see in a “Transformers” movie: a sticky mass of sinew, screams and flailing limbs. Sometimes, it’s clear that there are people inside these creatures, as opposed to the other way around, which complicates the visuals even further. But once again, on a more intimate level, the playful connection between Eddie and Venom can be enjoyable. This is often true in his/their interactions with Michelle Williams, who’s imminently overqualified for the role of Eddie’s ex-fiancée, Anne Weying. Hardy also has some sprightly interplay with Jenny Slate as the whistleblower at Drake’s company; it’s one of several examples of the film’s inspired casting.

And eventually, as we know, Venom will have to become a villain in Spider-Man’s web. That’s why we care about him, theoretically. For now, in Hardy’s hands, it’s the ambiguity of the character—if not his surroundings—that makes him intriguing.

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