Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
Guy Ritchie has had a wildly uneven career, qualitatively and successfully. After breaking out at the turn of the Millennium with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he face-planted with the Madonna-led flop Swept Away (which led to their marriage and her sucking his talent away) and followed with a pair of movies so mediocre, Revolver and RocknRolla, that I demanded he be blocked from making more movies.
He caught a reprieve when 2009's Sherlock Holmes (5/10, cable) was able to ride Robert Downey Jr.'s post-Iron Man Renaissance to box office gold, but then followed with a trio of disappointing efforts in the sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (didn't see), the bland The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (3/10, skip), and the disastrous King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (DNS), which killed a planned half-dozen movie franchise. (Memo to studios: Try making ONE good and successful movie before planning on making a bunch of them.)
But like a phoenix he came back with the last big Disney live action cash grab before the world ended in 2020 with the Will Smith-fronted Aladdin (DNS). Given a new lease on career, he then promptly reeled off a string of yawners and duds beginning with The Gentlemen (5/10, cable - the new Netflix series has good buzz, not that I buy it), Wrath of Man (4/10, skip), Worst Title Ever entrant Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (5.5/10, cable), and Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (haven't seen it yet, heard good things). Which brings us to his latest flop which only grossed $20 million worldwide on a $60M production budget, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, his latest exercise in working so hard to seem cool that he forgets to make it very interesting.
Based on an actual true caper called Operation Postmaster pulled off by far less attractive people than our stars here, TMoUW stars Henry Cavill as Gus March-Phillipps (who was reputed to be one of Ian Fleming's inspirations for James Bond), a bit of a rogue who is tasked by Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) via Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes), also known as M (another Bond reference), to assemble an off-the-books raid to disrupt the Nazis U-boat supply chain in early-1942.
Because the German subs are sinking half of the ships traversing the Atlantic, England is being starved of supplies and the Americans are reluctant to enter the war in Europe. If the supply ship which brings CO2 scrubber cartridges (which allow the subs to stay submerged undetected for long periods) were to be sunk in its port on a neutral island of Fernando Po off the African coast, it would force the subs to be on the surface enough to be spotted and taken out.
Gus assembles a crew including Alan Ritchson (Reacher), Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians), Hero Fiennes Tiffin and sets off on a fishing vessel with a stop at Nazi island base where Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) is being held and interrogated. After a super easy, barely an inconvenience raid to free him, they head for the ship. Since it's an secret mission, if the British Navy catches them, they'll be arrested, and of course the Nazis will be less friendly.
Concurrently, a second team of a Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, the doctor on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the Freman that Paul kills at the end of Dune Part 1), who runs a casino hall on the island and has connections to additional forces and weapons, and Majorie Stewart (Eiza González) travel to the island to reconnoiter and set up distractions to cover the raid. Majorie catches the eye of SS commander Luhr (Til Schweiger) and proceeds to play a high stakes game of seduction considering she's Jewish.
Along the way complications arise including the supply ship's departure being moved up, the hull being reinforced with armor, and a mole in the Ministry (20 points to anyone who gets that reference) making anything less than total success for our crew not an option.
While slickly made, Ritchie once again manages to drain the energy out of the story with leisurely pacing and an inconsistent tone which feels like a mashup of war movie and Ocean's 11. Are you making a war drama about a desperate mission upon which the survival of England hangs upon opening the seas or is it a jokey action comedy?
Everyone wears plot armor and barely gets a scratch while hordes of Nazis are mowed down. Characters are flattened into a pretty two-dimensional picture without much internal motivation beyond the most superficial like Marjorie's natural antipathy to the Nazis attempting to exterminate her kind. Compare this to something like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds which was a revisionist war fantasy film and Ritchie and his three co-writers really come up short.
Cavill has an impressive beard and swagger, but other than the quiet comedy of him cleaning out the good cigars and booze while being ordered on the mission, he's just another one of Ritchie's shallow gentlemen like, well, The Gentlemen. The rest of the cast is fine, but not really challenged.
In counterpoint, the missus really enjoyed it more than she expected and I'm sure the presence of hunks Cavill and Golding had nothing to do with it. To be fair, González is a dish, especially when she shows up in a Cleopatra costume and asks if the dress is OK, to which I remarked, "It's not the dress."
The 4K presentation has good colors and balance, but not much in the way of demo-worthy HDR grading. It looks good on good TVs. Audio is fine; nothing outstanding.
As we near the end of this year's Oscars Death March along with Past Lives, the other film nominated for Best Picture this year I had no freaking idea about was The Zone of Interest, which Google told me it was about the family of the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz living an idyllic life literally on the other side of the wall from the camp. Holocaust movies used to be a staple of Oscar, but they've fallen from favor post-Schindler's List as they've chosen to focus on more sexy topics like racism and LGBTQ+LMNOPWTFBBQ subjects. It's nominated for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Sound, and International Picture (representing Great Britain, though it's in German meaning subtitles).
And that sentence describing the plot pretty much describes the entirety of the plot, such as it is, of the movie. Adapted from the Martin Amis novel, The Zone of Interest is about Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, also nominated for Best Actress in Anatomy of a Fall) and their five children (let's call them Greta, Helga, Groucho, Harpo, and Baby Jake) as they live a posh life in a nice house with gardens and a small pool and greenhouse. Hedwig models a nice fur coat courtesy of the Jewish woman who won't be needing it anymore. A worker in striped pajamas is glimpsed tending Rudolph's horse.
Sure, there are the sounds of genocide wafting in - gunshots, screams, cries, dogs barking, the paranoia-inducing rumble of the machinery of death - and it's inconvenient when the winds shift and blow the odor and ashes of the exterminated onto the laundry on the lines or when a human jaw bumps into you while your fishing requiring yanking the children from the river and scrubbing them in the bath, but the bosses are impressed with Rudolph's efficiency and there's talk of promotion. Life is good.
If this sounds glib and dismissive of the horrors of the Holocaust, it's intentional because writer-director Jonathan Glazer (whose 2004 film Birth, about Nicole Kidman believing a 10-year-old boy is her reincarnated dead husband, was just awful) has taken the concept of the banality of evil and stretched it out over 105 airless minutes where it begins to take on the aura of an Andy Kaufman bit where the utter lack of humor is what makes it funny.
From the four-minute "overture" which sounds like someone fell asleep on a keyboard triggering an ambient techno patch over a black screen to extended shots of the pale Aryan family enjoying a trip to the river then driving home for a loooong time then lots of watching the help hang the laundry, Glazer relies on locked down camera angles (he wired the house with a bunch of fixed digital cameras recording constantly so the actors didn't have crew disturbing them in what Glazer called, "Big Brother [the TV show] with Nazis") or very rigid tracking shots a la Stanley Kubrick which I suppose is meant to give the viewer a voyeuristic perspective, but it's comes off as self-consciously pretentious. This doesn't even include the bizarre interludes filmed with an infrared camera of a girl hiding fruits where prisoners would be laboring which look like black and white film negative. ( I had to look up a synopsis to find out who the girl was.)
The way people blasely discuss things like when Hedwig's visiting mother muses whether the Jewish woman she worked for was over the wall in the camp getting what Jews had coming before grousing how she got outbid on some curtains of hers or the designers of a more efficient crematory design which will allow for maximum throughput of people needing incinerating, the Holocaust is portrayed as being thought of as dispassionately as a logistics puzzle or how much ash should be spread in the garden to nourish the crops with the ash coming from one the million-plus people next door.
The film ends with a bizarre flash-forward of workers dusting and sweeping Auschwitz as it is today, a tourist destination with exhibits of the piles of luggage and shoes arriving guests had confiscated as a reminder of one of humanity's darkest chapters.
But does anyone really need to be told that the Holocaust was bad, mmmkay? Any irony that such monstrous deeds were perpetrated by people NOT acting like Hitler, barking in angry German as shown on newsreels, is ironically tempered now by the flood wealthy celebrities demanding that Israel, the Jewish state established in the wake of the Holocaust, stop protecting itself after the 10/7 Hamas attacks which killed over 1200 people solely for being Jewish in the worst day of mass murder since the Holocaust.
Are celebrities and the Academy aware of the disconnect between honoring this movie with awards while the members such as Best Supporting Actress nominee America Ferrera and two-time Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett demanding a ceasefire to save the attackers and preserve their ability to continue raining rockets down on civilian areas of Israel? Is the ruthless murder of Jews bad or not, Hollyweird?
While smartly crafted and deliberately told, The Zone of Interest never really engages the viewer because nothing ever changes. No characters change; the way they are in the beginning is the way they are in the end. It's 1-3/4 hours of not much happening, though plus points for doing little in half the time Killers of the Flower Moon wasted. It's purely cerebral about something usual meant to be felt viscerally. Frankly, you'll learn more about Höss in this Smithsonian magazine feature released in conjunction with interest in the film.
Well, this was unexpected. Somehow after 13 years and four increasingly appallingly bad movies which had me repeatedly calling for the revocation of his filmmaking privileges, Christopher Nolan has finally made a movie that isn't absolute garbage.
His six films from 2000-2010 starting with Memento and ending with Inception were all very good to excellent (scores: 7-10), but starting with 2012's The Dark Knight Reloaded (as I will never stop calling it) thru 2020's Tenet (which got to hide its failure behind the Hot Fad Plague) have been one misbegotten self-absorbed steaming piles of manure after another (score: 2-4). He believed his hype from legions of fawning fans who have placed him in the same area as Martin Scorsese where they believe that because he made great movies in the past, that means everything he makes now is also great.
So it was with zero enthusiasm where I sat down for three hours of Nolan called Oppenheimer. I had skipped the whole "Barbenheimer" silliness last year and couldn't believe a long biopic about the Father of the Atomic Bomb would gross nearly one billion dollars with the general public who probably would've skipped it if not for the magic Nolan name. (But people think Train rocks, so...)
But at the conclusion I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't want to beat anyone up for liking this, but quickly realized that what Nolan had done was somehow fill three hours with almost no content, obscuring it with flashy filmmaking and a manic score by Ludwig Göransson which keeps the viewer hyped and awake and feeling they're watching something meaningful. So, yay?
Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer and in a return to Nolan's self-indulgent gimmick from Dunkirk the story is told via two interlaced timelines: one in color titled Fission, covering Oppie's life beginning as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge through the development of the A-bomb at Los Alamos in the context of a star chamber proceeding considering whether he should retain his security clearance in 1954; the other in black & white titled Fusion, which covers the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) in 1959 and how he waged a vendetta against Oppenheimer over slights, petty and imagined. (Of course the later chronological scenes are in B&W because Nolan.)
Along the way we're treated to a whirlwind of familiar names (if you're a nuclear science nerd like I was as a yoot) and faces as a legion of famous actors flow by so swiftly you don't really catch names, just roles. There's Florence Pugh as Jean, a Communist mistress of Oppie's (and features in the first sex scenes of Nolan's entire career) who he still sees after marrying Emily Blunt's Kitty and starting a family. Matt Damon as the general in charge of Manhattan Project; Josh Hartnett as Op's best friend who invented the cyclotron; Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Kenneth Branagh, David Krumholtz as scientists; Tom Conto as Albert Einstein. Casey Affleck, Dane DeHaan are military men; Jason Clarke, Tony Goldwyn, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Alden Ehrenreich and more are lawyers and politicos. Hey, it's Gary Oldman under a ton of makeup playing Harry S. Truman! A cast of many!
With so many people and places and events all jumbled together, the viewer is always scrambling to keep things straight and figure out what the connections are. While not utilizing the stock linear biopic template may've been an attempt to freshen the formula, the way Nolan jumps back and forth in order to hide the thin excuse motivating what Oppenheimer is subjected to until deep into its third hour results in an immediate feeling that you've witnessed something sprawling and epic, but the next day realizing nothing stuck with you because there was little substance there.
Here's what I recall about Oppenheimer: Hat, haunted stare, ummm, smart...that's about it. We don't get any feeling for his relationship with Kitty (a nominated Blunt, mostly for a couple of simmering scenes, but not much else) and why Janet was so important. We get a better sense of the rivalries and disputes between the founders of the Atomic Age and some of the moral qualms about the practical applications of their theoretical research. While there may be an intellectual kick to developing a bomb that could set off a chain reaction that would set the Earth's atmosphere on fire, killing everything on the planet, there is that whole ENDING THE WORLD side effect if someone used this invention.
Because quantum theory is so complicated to understand for non-Big Brain folks, Nolan attempts to present an impressionistic picture of the unimaginable (like the ridiculous 4D Magic Bookcase inside the black hole at the end of Interstellar), so he throws random whirring glowing things and macro photography left over from a Pink Floyd planetarium show and shots of Op tossing glasses into the corner of the room watching them shatter as if divining the Secrets of the Universe in the shards. I hated A Beautiful Mind and sold the DVD immediately after watching it (which is the ultimate rejection considering how much bad stuff I keep), but the way Ron Howard visualized game theory and how John Nash viewed the world explained the arcane concept where Nolan doesn't even try, preferring to flash some lights and crank the score volume.
And speaking of flashing lights, much was made of Nolan's proclamation that he wouldn't use any CGI VFX to recreate the Trinity bomb test. The obvious joke was that he was going to set off an actual atomic bomb, but the absolutely underwhelming depiction of this explosion makes one wish he had done so as this explosion which they weren't 100% certain wouldn't set the atmosphere on fire is nothing more than a big gasoline explosion which looks nothing like an atomic bomb mushroom cloud. THE moment of the whole story is a damp squib.
But that test occurs about 2/3rds of the way through the three hour runtime leaving a whole hour of vamping to babystep to the only real conflict of the film, that the reason for the 1954 inquisition stemmed from Stauss' butthurt over being mocked at a hearing by Oppenheimer after the war and his imagining to be the subject of disrespect by him and Einstein when they meet in 1947 when Strauss was trying to get O.P.P. to set up at Princeton. When we finally realize why Opie was subjected to such suspicion it elicits the first real emotional reaction to the story, but it's too little, too late.
With such a stacked cast, there are no real weak performances, just performances set adrift by the sparsity of Nolan's everything everywhere all for three hours screenplay. Pugh gets naked and kills herself, but so what? Blunt is the stoic partner to a man whose attention was always elsewhere, but who cares? Damon is good, everyone's good, but they mostly come and go without a lasting impression. The big surprise was Hartnett, who looks different enough and his acting through his eyebrows for once.
Cillian Murphy is a 50-50 favorite, along with Paul Giamatti, for Best Actor, but he is playing such an internally conflicted character whose actions are inscrutable - why exactly did he almost murder a professor? Seems a bit over-reactive - due to the Cliff's Notes script and Nolan's ADHD narrative that all that remains is the hat and the stare.
On the other hand, Downey Jr. is going to win for his portrayal of Strauss, a petty, vindictive man who put his pride before his fall. Strauss is the villain of the piece, leveraging Op's dalliances with Communism in the 1930s when everyone joined the Commies cuz it was the cool fad before it became a career liability in the 1950s (and ironically a career requirement for liberal politicians and entertainment folks now) into concerns over his loyalty to America. (That we repurposed a bunch of Nazi rocketeers for our space program goes unmentioned due to not being relevant.) Downey deserves to win as much for his performance as the lifetime achievement catch-all it will represent.
Which brings us back to Nolan himself and the personality cult that surrounds him and how he skates on so many flaws because he made The Dark Knight. His fetish for shooting on IMAX - Kodak had to invent a B&W IMAX film stock for this production - and making viewing Oppenheimer in 70mm a quest for his fans despite frequent technical problems in projecting a massive 11-mile-long, 600 lb. film print caused in the handful of theaters even capable of showing it, contributed to a Reality Distortion Field around the content of the film itself. He has gotten away with cranking up the sound so loud you can't hear the dialog and relying on the overwhelming impact of Cillian Murphy staring hauntedly at you six stories tall that the viewer gets bludgeoned into believing they're witnessing Something Really Important. (It made almost a billion bucks, so it clearly worked.)
But if the test of a song is how it stands up to being performed on a guitar or piano with all the other 100 tracks of pop music production stripped away, then the quality of a film should hold up when viewed on a 55-65" HDTV. (No one should be watching movies on a phone or tablet. Let's not be stupid.) And without the kilotons of picture size and sound you get in the theater, the sparsity of the film is exposed. It's a two hour movie stuffed into a three hour sack with too much time spent on the superfluous at the expense of the interesting.
It's not to say there aren't some meaty thoughts rattling around, especially the ethics of these mega weapons and the risk of making something that really shouldn't be used, but if you don't have on hand to deter those with ill intents then may land on your head. But since the science itself is so arcane, that leaves vast voids of time where we see Oppenheimer rush around to meet names nerds only will recognize, but if they cut out half the cast would anyone have noticed. Pugh's character almost seems to exist solely to provide some skin, especially in a weird moment where Blunt imagines her nude and straddling a naked JRO during the trial. Huh?
If you're trying to figure out how this is the first movie of Nolan's I haven't hated yet I've got so little to praise it for, that's the conundrum of Oppenheimer. It's a Big Story about Important People doing Momentous Things that changed the world momentarily for the better, but will probably end us all in the long run told in a fast and furious manner and my praise is mostly due to making three hours sail by without feeling it drag much. (We only took one bathroom and beverage break.)
But the nagging feeling that all the timeline jumping, flashing forward and backward to obscure the payoff that petty small men do cruel things for selfish personal reasons makes the overpraise and likely Oscars gold feel hollow. It's like how the Academy finally noticed Martin Scorsese with The Departed, but then kept nominating his progressively more bloated and unengaging movies afterwards including this year's wretched Killers of the Flower Moon.
Where does Oppenheimer land in the ranking of the 11 movies I've seen of Nolan's? At number 7 as more the best of his bad movies than the worst of his good ones. At least he's not going to get stroked by the Academy for something awful, but still.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable. (It's on Peacock now.)
Let's get something clear right now: It doesn't matter how good an artist WAS in the past or how large a legacy they've amassed if they're recent work is subpar. Too often, critics grade on a curve, transferring the greatness of the past to the mediocrity of the present to varying degrees. I've repeatedly called out the immunity Christopher Nolan has earned from his run from Memento to Inception which has allowed everything since to be hailed as yet another "masterpiece" from a "visionary filmmaker" when they've ranged from screamingly mediocre to "Why is anyone allowing this clown to make movies?" (I haven't seen Oppenheimer yet because I'm not in a rush to spend three hours checking in whether he still sucks. UPDATE: Saw it and it's OK. Not terrible, but not the masterpiece his simps feel it is.)
The desperate equivocation over Tenet nearly broke some critics as they attempted to justify that blazing dumpster fire by transferring the greatness of The Dark Knight and mumbling about how maybe it'd make sense after repeated viewings. (Note: If you need to watch a movie more than once to understand the plot, it's failed at basic storytelling.)
Which brings us to Martin Scorsese who has made some all-time classics in his 50-year-long career, but has devolved into a purveyor of needlessly excessively long movies which rack up tons of Oscar nominations for the past decade-plus. His last four films - The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon - have and an average running time of 3h 9m and Killers is 3h 26m of mercilessly boring nothingness that expects us to swoon because Marty is working with his two most famous muses, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. [UPDATE: It worked as it raked in 10 Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Costume Design, Original Song, Original Score, Production Design, Editing, and Best Cinematography. Oy vey.]
Set in 1919 Oklahoma we learn the Osage Indians on the land discovered oil some time before and as a result have become very wealthy, but because racism they are deemed "incompetent" and must have their finances and savings managed by a white court-appointed legal guardian.
Into this frontier comes Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) who returns from World War I looking to live near and work for his uncle, William King Hale (De Nero). Given a job as a cab driver, he meets Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and becomes smitten with her, eventually marrying her and starting a family.
However, on the side Ernest has been also committing robberies against the Osage with his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) and King has been ordering the murders of Mollie's family members because the headrights - the rights to the valuable minerals and oil under the land - would accrue to the remaining family, eventually meaning only Mollie survives and as a diabetic, Ernest is given poison to put in her insulin to further weaken and eventually kill her, leaving the rights to Ernest.
The Osage realize they're being knocked off, but with local law enforcement in King's pocket they attempt to hire a private investigator and seek help from the Federal government, but those efforts are thwarted. Only when Mollie makes a pilgrimage to Washington D.C. and pleads to President Calvin Coolidge which brings a BOI (the original name of the FBI) investigator, Thomas Bruce Wright Sr. (Jessie Plemons), to town where the conspiracy is unraveled and Ernest put on trial along with King.
There is so much wrong with Killers of the Flower Moon that it's hard to know where to start, but let's begin with the running time. This is a two-hour movie stuffed into a 3-1/2 hour sack. For comparison, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull ran 10 minutes under and over two hours; Scorsese's pity Oscar winner, The Departed was 2-1/2 hours. Even the bloated Gangs of New York was "only' three hours. There simply isn't enough story to justify the runtime. [UPDATE: How the great Thelma Schoonmaker gets nominated for editing a movie which appears to have just assembled everything they shot into something sequential is sad.]
Yes, the indigenous peoples of these lands got a raw deal and that's why liberals refuse to observe Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, but I agree with Spike's take on the subject on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in that we get it, MOVE ON! But even as a liberal white self-loathing hairshirt worn by Hollywood to preen virtue it seems more interested in the bad white guys stories than the Indians other than their being the victims of white genocide/land theft.
Then there's Leo's performance, if you can call grimacing as if he has a tummy ache for 3-1/2 hours a performance. [UPDATE: The fact that Leo was shut out for nominations by everyone while his co-stars were noted says it all as to how bad this is. When nominations are handed out like candy and he don't get none.] He's also a totally passive character, bossed around by King, doing as he's told even as it's harming the woman he supposedly loves. And he's simply waaaaaaaaay too old for the part. DiCaprio was 47 when filming this and he's looking his age. (Banging sub-25-year-old supermodels ages a man, I guess.) He simply doesn't read like a young man needed a job after a war.
Gladstone is OK as the suffering Mollie, though all she does is smile knowingly at Leo's flirting, be stoic, then spend hours crying and suffering. There's a lot of Oscar buzz around Gladstone, but sadly it seems mostly oriented about wanting to Make History and allow Hollyweird's liberal white guilt itch to be scratched by naming the first Native American Oscar winner now that they checked the First Asian Best Actress box last year with Michelle Yeoh. (It's racist and demeaning, but that's Hollyweird for you.) [UPDATE: While Emma Stone has been winning most of the awards for Poor Things as she should, Gladstone won the SAG Award and that may portend an upset at the Oscars. It would be another sad case of Hollyweird allowing their political preening to trump performance as when Sean Penn in Milk was gifted Best Actor over Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler in response to California voters atteHGmpting to codify opposite sex marriage in 2008. Penn's performance was excellent and was my runner-up pick, but even Penn knew he won because of politics.]
The surprise performance is De Niro's. He's been phoning in his performances for ages, lazily relying on his tough guy persona and outdated reputation as America's Greatest Actor (when his last Oscar win was in 1980), but here he actually shows up ready to play, probably to show Scorsese and DiCaprio who the boss was. King could've been a one-note cartoon, but De Niro trims his portrayal with enough humanity and manipulative charisma that you'd believe an idiot like Ernest would obey.
Part of the fawning over Killers of the Flower Moon is due to Scorsese's age (he's now 81) and how many more movies he has in him. (For comparison, Ridley Scott is 86 and currently making Gladiator 2.) But as I said at the beginning, past success is no excuse for current failure. If your favorite restaurant's quality has declined, would you keep going because it used to be good? Exactly. My favorite Scorsese movie is After Hours which was recently released by the Criterion Collection. That 1985 black comedy has a stacked cast, is simply bonkers in its storytelling, and clocks in at a brisk and satisfying 97 minutes. Scorsese should try telling meaningful stories in a concise manner because this does neither.
In 2018, Netflix made its first really hardcore run for Oscar gold with Alfonso Cuaron's Roma, garnering 10 nominations and winning for Best Director and Cinematography, both going to Cuaron. It was everything Oscar loves - it was in a foreign language (Spanish), it was shot in black & white, it featured extensive gratuitous full-frontal male nudity, it was about class struggle against a backdrop of civil strife and political upheaval, and it was boring as hell and unless you knew the Mexican history being portrayed, it didn't make sense. It was the self-indulgent wank that Oscar loves and rewards.
So when Kenneth Branagh's Belfast claimed seven Oscar nominations - including Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay (all Branagh), and Supporting Actress and Supporting Actor - and I saw it was a black & white semi-autobiographical movie about Branagh's childhood in Belfast during the Troubles, I snarked in my Culture Vulture's Oscar nomination hot take video that it was "Kenneth Branagh's Roma." Now that I've seen it, except for the lack of male nudity (sorry, Academy) and a slightly less foreign language (Irish), I can say I nailed it.
Opening in 1969, it's the story of Buddy (Jude Hill - because calling him "Kenneth" would be too on the nose) who lives on a short street of Protestant and Catholic families. Suddenly, a mob of rioters appears and attacks the Catholic homes. They're super hardcore Loyalists to England who are not only unhappy with the Catholics, but aren't satisfied that there are Protestants coexisting with them and feel they should be more intolerant and purgey.
Buddy's father, Pa (Jamie Dornan, helping undo some of the damage being in the 50 Shades movies did), works in England (the economics of that commute are never explained), leaving Ma (Caitriona Balfe) to raise Buddy and his brother alone most of the time, though Pa's parents, Pop (nominated Ciaran Hinds) and Granny (nominated Judi Dench) are over frequently to help. The family is in arrears to the tax man and concerns about the rising sectarian violence, with a local thug pressuring Pa to get involved with the religious war and prove how Protestant he is, making him want to move the family to Sydney or Vancouver.
Like most semi-autobiographical period pieces, Belfast is an episodic disjointed collage of fragments of the filmmaker's memory. While Buddy frequently is the observer of what his parents or grandparents are experiencing, sometimes he seems to disappear while the adults' stories are featured. His crush on a Catholic classmate doesn't really go anywhere and being a child he's not the driver of events, but a passenger upon them.
While the performances are solid across the board with the exception of Hill, who slips into Bad Child Actor moments sometimes, they aren't particularly outstanding. Dench and Hinds are as good as they normally are, but not particularly Oscar worthy and why Balfe was snubbed while the acting noms were being handed out like candy is another blot on an already blotted slate this year.
Also snubbed is the lustrous monochromatic cinematography by Haris Zamabarloukos, Branagh's longtime DP. The framing may've been cribbed from Bergman, but it's still beautiful and it's a shame it was snubbed.
As with so many of this year's Best Picture nominees, the problem with Belfast is that it's not an especially bad film as it is an inconsequential film that doesn't really illuminate the human condition and is mainly a filmed memoir of a prominent director's youth, tarted up with A-list talent and rich aesthetics to give it a patina of relevance.
Race relations are a mess in America these days because despite totally ignoring Martin Luther King's dream, the nation foolishly elected - TWICE - someone solely due to the color of their thin skin and not the content of his character or any accomplishments who then hid his myriad failures behind a shield of accusing his critics of racism. He installed an Attorney General with a shady past who immediately snarled that Americans were "cowards on the subject of race" while applying a racialist and hyper-political regime at the DOJ, openly refusing to investigate black-on-white civil rights cases.
Add on the disgraceful exploitation by race hustlers and Leftist politicians of the events in Ferguson, MO and NYC which led to riots in the streets and chants for the deaths of cops which ultimately led to two NYPD officers assassinated while sitting in their car and it wouldn't be hard to wonder what happened to Dr. King's dream.
Into this poisoned atmosphere comes Selma, the dramatization of King's protest which led to the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which received only two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Song, which perpetuates the damnable lie about Ferguson which is "Hands up, don't shoot.") prompting yet another round of race-warrior exploitation as Al Sharpton demanded an audience with the Academy under threat of his leading a riot at the ceremony. In this environment where everyone seems to have an axe to grind what's been sadly overlooked is that Selma is actually a quite good movie that most people won't see because they resent being bullied by the Leftist race-warriors who will never in a million years get within sight of King's ideals. (I'm sure Dr. King is looking down at this nation and thinking, "I died for this? That President? That wicked preacher? All that violence and division?")
Rather than do the full-life biopic thing, Selma just concentrates on the few months in 1965 leading to the march on Selma, Alabama which led to the Voting Rights Act. King (a should've-been-nominated David Oyelowo) and his sidekicks are looking for specific town where the conditions would be right for the local racist idiots to take the bait and Selma's sheriff is just the guy for the job. Beatings and deaths ensue, but justice is attained.
What I found most interesting about Selma's portrayal of the events is something I haven't seen mentioned in all the hoohaw over the Oscars: That King was using the media to provoke outrage to the conditions blacks were enduring in the South. In one scene he asks the local organizers if the sheriff was like one in Albany (Georgia, I presume) who gently carried away protesters on stretchers for months or like Bull Connor, the Birmingham lawman who turned dogs and fire hoses on the protesters and made the media, the point being that King sought to get his followers abused on camera. When they make their first march on the courthouse, he and the leaders stand behind those getting their heads cracked, flinching, but never interceding.
It's also refreshing to see the others involved in the movement and their opinions about strategy given time. Rather than make King out to be Infallible Black Jesus to whom all looked for guidance, there are frequent doubts as to whether his strategy and tactics are appropriate, even from King himself as people start dying. His philandering is addressed in a scene where it's made to look as if LBJ ordered J. Edgar Hoover to send Coretta wiretaps of King's antics, which has been challenged for authenticity in the specifics, while the general fact of King's womanizing has been downplayed to protect the myth.
While there have been the usual criticisms of historical accuracy - most critically the idea that LBJ was dragging his feet when transcripts of phone calls showed he was very supportive of King's goals - the overall tone of Selma rings fairly true. (UPDATE: Here's a good breakdown separating fact from fiction.) The uproar over the "snubs" is more a matter of racial entitlement (X amount of nominees MUST be of color) and grievance-mongering than acceptance that not everyone gets nominated (HALF of the Best Pictures didn't have their directors nommed starting with Clint Eastwood) and the director, Ava DuVernay, simply didn't finish the film in time for screenings. No one is outraged over Angelina Jolie's genetically-engineered-for-Oscars Unbroken being passed over for all but a few technical categories.
Finally, what's with all the English actors? The top roles - Oyelowo, Carmen Ojogo (Coretta), Tim Roth (Gov. George Wallace), and Tom Wilkinson (LBJ) - are all Brits making this the most non-Southerners-playing-Southerners thing since True Blood.
If you've been avoiding Selma because you're tired of the race warrior agitation that we've been pounded with for over a year, you're denying yourself an above-average biopic which manages to avoid the cheap shots and leftist tilt (other than the terrible song) that has encrusted its awards prospects. Check it out.
The Imitation Game is this year's The King's Speech for the Oscars: A well-made, well-acted, veddy British historical drama which manages to make interesting people and events utterly forgettable.
Bernadette Cumberbund plays Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician hired by British Intelligence to crack the code of the Enigma machine, a Nazi device which the Brits managed to get a unit of, but can't use because the initial settings are changed daily. It doesn't matter if they somehow guess the proper code out of 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 possible settings combinations because the next day, the code would change.
Since it would be impossible for humans to run through all the combos, Turing proposes building a machine - which would become considered one of the first electronic computers - that would automate the process, but even that's not enough until a lucky epiphany gives them the key to cracking the code. Ironically, they can't use this knowledge to its fullest extent that they could because if the Germans noticed the Allies were suddenly aware of their doings, they'd change the method and the good guys would be set back to square one.
Bracketing the war effort scenes are sequences set after the war and from Turing's childhood concerning his homosexuality which was super not allowed back then with supposedly tragic consequences. (More below on that.) These scenes are tangential to the story and seemed tacked on to provide a soapbox for gay rights preaching when the way it effects the main war-time story is just as effective. (i.e. Turing discovers a Soviet spy, but doesn't turn him because the spy threatens to out him back.) The chaste "romance" between Turning and a brilliant female on the team, played by Keira Knightley, who doesn't get respect because woman is OK but typical sexism-of-the-era stuff which also fuels Marvel's Agent Carter.
Bandersnatch Cumquat is quite good as Turing, though the character is written as the usual Brilliant A-Hole With Zero People Skills Whom Others Grudgingly Accept Because Genius trope. At least we don't think of Sherlock or Khan 2.0 while watching him. Knightley is also OK, though I'm not sure if she's Oscar-grade. However, Charles Dance, as the boss of this operation, seems to have thought he was still playing Tywin Lannister.
As is the usual with Hollywood's depictions of real events, there's plenty of dispute as to the accuracy of the film but while the substitution of Knightley for the mortal-looking Joan Clarke isn't so bad, the claimed reason and timing for Turning's death really casts suspicion on the agenda of the filmmakers; you shouldn't imply as fact what's clearly not. Also, they never explain in the least how the massive code-breaking machine works - it's just this huge clacking contraption that makes magic.
The legend of the legendary Sunset Strip is the topic of the part-history lesson/part-reminiscence documentary of the same name which is at its best when living in the distant past.
Covering its literal beginnings as a poinsettia farm in the early-20th Century through the rise of legendary nightclubs where the Rat Pack would hang out (before Las Vegas became the in scene for that crowd) in the post-war years (a la L.A. Confidential) through its reinvention as a hub of the counter-culture in the Sixties through the hair metal days of the Eighties until today, it weaves tons of interesting footage through interviews with the likes of Johnny Depp (founder of the Viper Room), Hugh Hefner (duh), uber-groupie Pamela Des Barres and more. When stand-up comedy's heyday is covered, the footage of Robin Williams took an a poignancy due to his recent suicide.
When the talk is of the history and their perspective, it's engaging, but as they approach the 1980s, it starts to come unglued as they short-shrift the punk scene of the late-Seventies with X and The Germs and then really underrepresented the Eighties metal scene with only Steel Panther (a parody act) being shown. Where is Van Halen? Where are Guns & Roses and Quiet Riot and Ratt and Motley Crue other than quick statements from Slash, Tommy Lee and Ratt. Where is Gazzarri's, other than just a passing item in the closing credits animation? Too often, celebrities are included in group interviews and never say a thing. Who cares about Jack Osbourne sitting there? While it's cool to see The Screaming Sirens' Pleasant Gehman sitting with Cherie Currie, unless you know who she is, it's irrelevant and why is Courtney Love doing most of the talking? Why is Billy Corgan's opinion relevant since Smashing Pumpkins were from Chicago?
What's most ironic about the detailing of the debauched history of the Sunset Strip is that unlike most parties you hear about, I didn't ever wish I had been there to partake.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable. (Watched on Netflix)
"Historical" dramas (note the quotes) which claim to be "based on real events" are tricky because they blur the lines between fact and fiction often leaving viewers with a misleading impression of how things actually happened. (e.g. The Social Network invented Zuckerberg's girlfriend credited as the incitement for creating Facesmash and "Wardo" wasn't screwed as badly as they made out, though he was only a low-end billionaire after they diluted his shares.) Thus warned you should approach George Clooney's latest, The Monuments Men, with due caution to enjoy this somewhat entertaining, though uneven "historical" dramedy.
It's WWII and Hitler is looting the art treasures of Europe for a massive museum he has planned for when his Thousand-Year Reich has secured victory. Stolen from museums and churches and private collections (mostly Jewish families), art historian Clooney is concerned that as the Allies advance and liberate Europe, historical cathedrals may be bombed and the art within lost as well as seeking to recover what the Nazis stole. He proposes that a team of art historians and architects go through Europe treasure-hunting. The building of the team plays out like Ocean's 7: WWII Art Hunters as Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, Matt Damon, Jean Dujardin (The Artist), and Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) are assembled and rushed through basic training (ha-ha, fat Goodman can't get over the obstacle course wall and doesn't know they use live rounds, guffaw) before landing at Normandy, much pacified in July 1944.
From there the team splits up and the film's tone sort of fractures as well. Director/co-writer Clooney and long-time collaborator and co-writer Grant Heslov are trying to balance an old-fashioned feeling war movie with a caper flick with broad comedic moments and somber sad times and it's just too tricky an act for them to pull off. One example is when the gently bickering duo of Murray and Balaban are bunked with troops during the Battle of the Bulge at Christmas time. They receive packages from home including a record from Murray's family. While he showers, Balaban pipes the record over the camp's PA system allowing everyone to hear Murray's family crooning "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" (one of the most depressing Christmas songs ever!) while in another part of the camp a mortally-wounded soldier found by the road by Clooney is tended to. It's very well done as filmmaking, but totally manipulative and it's not an isolated instance of jarring tone switches, though even deaths are handled lightly.
A plot thread involving Damon trying to convince Cate Blanchett, a French Resistance sympathizer unwillingly working for the Nazis hauling away artworks, goes nowhere over a long period of time and her reluctance to trust him because she fears recovered art will be spirited away to American museums (because it would be better if the Nazis or Russians keep/get it?) is hard to believe. Urgency is increased when they learn that Hitler has decreed that if he's killed that all the art is to be destroyed and the Russians closing in on the eastern front are claiming recovered art as reparations for their tens of millions killed.
I can understand what Clooney and Heslov were going for - a bit of a romp with undertones of the horrors of war and the need to protect art as a collective historical memory of a people - but it just doesn't quite gel up with the episodic structure, predictable tropes, and wasted time on dead end scenes like when Murray has to go to a dentist which seems to only exist as a meaningless callback to his cameo in Little Shop of Horrors. Taken individually, the scenes and sequences are fine, it's just as a whole that they don't really amount to a fitting monument to the fictionalized heroes (ALL the names have been changed, so it's probably more fiction than fact) of The Monuments Men.
