thomas4cinema

Peter Straub, Literary Master of the Supernatural, Dies at 79 https://nyti.ms/3RogvnU

The film had me within its first five minutes. After a scene from Gone With the Wind, it opens with a speech, no, a tirade by a Kennebrew Beauregard, played by Alec Bladwin. He is recording an anti-semitic, racist, xenophobic… an all-encompassing hate speech the way maybe only Baldwin can pull it off. He is stopping, doing it again, doing speech exercises, asking his producer for lines, getting it wrong, doing it over, never stop, never stopping. A relentless avalanche of evil pseudo-philosophy spills on the screen, and the tone is set for what’s to come. I did beg the Great of Lord of Movie Scripts twice during this film, the first time was to bring the Baldwin character back during the film, make him the centerpiece even. That remained unheard, but my second wish was granted (maybe because I was only a half-bad boy during the year): When Adam Driver showed up a bit later, as a police detective called Flip working with main character Ron on his undercover operation to get intelligence on the organization that is the KKK, I begged that Driver would be the one to take the role of White Undercover Scam Supremacist – and he did! I was happy!

That’s the thing about Spike Lee’s latest film: it makes you happy. Which is weird, given the background of racism and hate, police violence and murder. Someone called it a buddy cop movie, and to a degree it is a very entertaining entry into that particular genre. There are times when I wondered whether this is the right approach, whether the script does not take its subject matter too lightly, whether I would not rather have Lee taken a more angry approach to his perennial theme. This kind of nagged me all through the film in an odd fashion, me being unhappy about my happiness to see such a splendidly put together piece of proper movie making. Even after having seen it, and that means even after having seen the director’s own way of addressing this supposedly treacherous light-heartedness by adding a final sequence that is all but, I am not perfectly sure. I am undecided whether the final moments are the perfect way to kick the audience in the nuts when they just decided to leave the theatre with a smile in their face. Or whether the severity of those final scenes are somehow unrewarded. I lean towards the former, but maybe that is only because I credit Spike Lee with not being light-hearted about his approach at all, I give him the benefit of doubt by way of his oeuvre. With a different director, I might be more inclined to shout foul play.

Thing is, I don’t need to make a decision on this. The film in all its dimensions leaves me happy and outraged, and my guess is this is what it is supposed to do. As a film, it is among Spike Lee’s best in my book, especially because of the thoroughly terrific cast, where I found myself checking a dozen actors’ names on IMDB. Not just Driver and main character Ron played by John David Washington, not just Harry Belafonte’s short and powerful appearance or Corey Hawkins leading the black revolution. Almost every single cop, Klan member or Black Power activist impressed me. I cannot remember the last time a full cast delivered such a coherently first class performance.

There was mention of the liberties the script writers took with the true events on which the film is based. To this, as always in these cases, I say: balls! This is a movie, and a movie has the obligation to take liberties, as the format requires adaptation of characters and time lines. Films that are religiously true to the books on which they are based or the lives they represent more often than not are dull. BlacKkKlansman is not.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackkklansman

Of course it is possible to develop an interest in the love life of the Inuit, even though in general you would not be too interested in Inuit matters. There’s plenty of interesting stories to be told when it comes to love stories and personal drama. If you find these stories, then any setting can be a thrilling backdrop and any drama can be gripping. This could also work for the lives of archaeologists hanging out in Northern Italy, drinking orange juice and coffee on their villa’s terrace and speaking in a variety of languages. Only… nothing that happens in “Call Me By Your Name” interested me very much. Yes, there is a bit of coming of age and discovering one’s sexuality and serious emotions, there’s some pretty people and some … ah, no, that’s about it. I could not, I admit, connect to this. I kept wondering when something exciting or dramatic was about to happen, and the wait continued until it turned, quite frankly, into being annoyed by all these people.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/call_me_by_your_name

Ridley Scott has an astonishing film record. He directed some of the greatest films of the last decades, but over the last 10 years or so, I feel it harder to grow warm anticipation to the respective next project. To many disappointments paved his way, the Alien prequels most recently, but also the non SciFi works such as “The Counsellor”, were rather meh… Still, there are gems, also recently, such as “The Martian”, and I wouldn’t want to miss his respective next movie, as there’s usually something interesting to be had. With “All the Money in the World”, there’s a bunch of actors that I would always pay to see (Michelle Williams and Christopher Plummer, most notably). There is a 1970s setting that promises fun production design, and there’s an abduction story that promises at least a good starting point. On the other hand… “Based on a real story” more often than not announces a certain level of predictability and ordinariness, and I need to state that “All the Money…” fulfils this expectation. There are not many aspects about the story that elevate the film above what you can expect when reading the premise or the plot summary. As dramatic as events may have been, sticking close to what actually occurred imposes shackles that make the plot development a bit too straightforward to actually be exciting.

Still there is Plummer as Jean Paul Getty, billionaire misanthropist and possibly the best and worst grandfather one could imagine. He is quite astonishing a character in his Xanadu world, the pleas for a bit of human touch deflecting on his hard shell that defines his life as a business man. The kidnappers are pretty cardboardish, (accurately or not) representing the worst clichés of small-time Italian crooks and (later) organized crime. While I do in general like Mark Wahlberg as a screen presence, he is not given a lot to do in his role as privately hired investigator, making his part feel a bit shoehorned into the story to allow for another A-list actor to fill the poster.

The film is still entertaining (and the post-production recasting does not matter when you watch it), but at the end of the day, it will be pretty hard to remember a lot about it in a couple of weeks or even years. Not among Scott’s master pieces.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/all_the_money_in_the_world_2017

So far, my assessment is that Iannucci cannot go wrong. Someone who wrote “The Thick of It” has a lot of credit in my books, and I will always look with great affection of positive spirit at what he is doing next. “The Death of Stalin” needs that credit, because there are some items where I had to swallow a “WTF?!” and hold back with my skepticism for a bit longer. And, yes, it pays off. Having the story of a mass murderer and his fate, and the flock of accomplices around him, as the setting for a comedy is a bold starting point. Once you accept that notion, the film does not hold back on the atrocities committed by this system, the system of mortal fear and arbitrary danger that was imposed as a policy instrument.

This is very very bold, I have to say. While thinking about whether it is an act of genius or utterly misjudged, I started laughing. Then I wondered whether I should have. And continued laughing (or gasp-laughing, if that’s a thing). My judgement would be: yes, you can do this. It is in line with a tradition of British comedy that knows little boundaries and tries to find the next threshold to step over. It is a tradition that owes a lot to Monty Python’s: the organ donation in “Meaning of Life” was legitimately funny? Then the same applies to the Central Party Committee wading in Stalin’s pee or Jason Isaac’s comment on the execution of a prisoner (“well that’s done then”, if I remember correctly). On procedural issues: The choice of having an all-English language cast chattering along in their native language (be it English or American) is irritating for a second, and then you swallow it, as it allows for those great comedic actors lined up to do their thing (I do not fancy the idea of everybody speaking English with Russian accents, and having a subtitled comedy might take off the edge a bit, no?). Simon Russell Beale as the Shakespearean / Machiavellian Beria in particular, and Jeffrey Tambor as limp leader Malenkov made my day, Steve Buscemi holds it together with his Steve Buscemi thing, Michael Palin is given some nice dialogue with his dog.

As with the all comedy based on violence and “poor” taste, I feel hesitant to just be enthusiastic about the film, but in the end, I am. After all, the violence may be more physical than the one exerted by Malcolm Tucker, but Iannucci has found a way of walking the balance to make another comedy purely based on incompetence and villainy. Kudos!

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_death_of_stalin

After catching up with a few films I watched over the last months, now I am stuck with this monster of a film… what to write about it? It requires comment, no doubt. Dismissing “mother!” as a mere act of madness is possible, but the question (to me) is whether it is an act of madness to be appreciated and praised, or rather frowned upon. Maybe I have to start by writing that I was never bored, that each time the life of Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem threatened to move into smooth territory, and each time the previous intrusion of craziness was done with, the director leads you one step further up the ladder of mayhem.

It starts with what looks like an innocuous visit by an admittedly creepy stranger (then again: Ed Harris, who lets Ed Harris into the house in the middle of the night and expects a calm night?), the increasingly deviant behavior of Bardem’s character towards his wife, his life, and his fans. The bunch of relatives Harris lures into the house. Their increasingly violent struggles. Harris’ wife and her alcohol-fueled unsolicited streams of love advice. The sons (of Brendan Gleeson, actually, but that is just background fun). The literary agent (girl! you managed to defy expectations…), the squad team, the disciples, the … Lawrence gawks at all this, she is a bystander to her world being turned upside down, her house being turned into an allegory for … many things: Earth, religion, motherhood etc.

The breaking point for an audience comes, I guess, when you kept shouting at Lawrence  “Do Something!” for an hour, and she still won’t. If you go with it, feel her victimhood and the role she plays as being subjected to a world going mad around her, then you will stay to the end, maybe even watch it again and stumble across quite a few rewarding clues and traces hinting at the things to come, and what the larger picture here may be.

I love crazy movies that don’t lose control of their structure, so I have to say: this was brilliantly done almost beginning to end! I loved to hate Bardem and almost everybody else in the film, and I loved to follow this world being torn to pieces and recycled in another effort to make things better. This is edgy, and edgy is direly needed amidst all the straightforward story telling that we face every day.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mother_2017

Imagine “Stand By Me” without a quest for a body, but with an occasional hooker mom, you are… no, still not anywhere near Florida Project. But they feel like relatives: Florida Project is also a feelgood movie about the beauty of childhood, the carelessness of roaming about your neighbourhood during the summer break, ignoring all your little world’s problems for a few weeks. The kids who live in the decrepit compound just outside the Magic Kingdom make the best out of the strange setting, skim off the tourists’ dreams and ice cream money. It’s not as if they are not aware of the financial duress of their families, the film’s heroine Moonee frequently joins her mother in her third- and fourth-job efforts to sell perfume to tourists out of a plastic bag and is made to witness and participate in the more dire efforts her mother engages in to make ends meet. But it is their world, and they embrace it and use it as their playground. They play and they joke (“there’s a leprechaun at the end of the rainbow who watches the gold pot” – “let’s go beat him up!”). They make friends and they lose them. They burn hoses by accident, just like every other kid, right?

That’s why the film , at the end of the day, is about the beauty of childhood, not about the calamities of the financially depraved. Merging the two into one light-hearted yet profound glance at a world most of us will probably initially feel very detached from works masterfully.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_florida_project

All the while during watching Lady Bird, I was drawing parallels to “Boyhood”, this masterful and calm analysis of how life takes no prisoners when you are part of a family. These are perfect companion pieces for those wondering what it’s like to be a parent. While Boyhood took a larger perspective, Lady Bird is more narrowly focused in time and personnel, looking in particular at the relationship between the self-named high school teenager Lady Bird and her mother. But maybe that only is the natural result of the family father drowning deeper and deeper in apathy and depression after the loss of his career. Both films are frank, in good times and in bad times.

It cuts deep, I have to say. Fortunately, my guess is that only those who actually do have children will really appreciate how deep, what pain there is involved to have those cute little toddlers take over our lives and run away with it (as Boyhood said so brilliantly), or even turn it against us (as it looks in Lady Bird sometimes). Maybe it’s like the pain of childbirth: you start forgetting how much it hurt very quickly, as a protection mechanism of nature, or no one would ever be foolish enough to have another baby. The pain of having to deal with a teenager defining her own life can be no less. If people could anticipate what it means to live through the various stages of a parent-child relationship, how many would decide to start a family in the first place?

Lady Bird and her mother both do not shy away from a fight, about the respect for the family or the proximity to the parents in choice of college. Both accuse each other of passive aggressiveness, and they are sometimes unable to change their communication pattern, because they’ve been there too often and are exhausted. You can feel that the sometimes harsh reaction of the mother is the result of years of combat, her moderation and mediation fuel is in the red, she says things we never want to say to our children but are worried that at some point we will (“do you know how much it cost us to get you through your life?”). Boyhood had those moments of conflict, and they were brilliantly managed by cutting away to the next time slot and showing that the smoke from all those battlegrounds had dispersed into nothingness, other matters have come about and everybody just moved on. Lady Bird, being dedicated to a much shorter period of time this family passes through, is less gracious, stays on one of these conflicts for longer and shows how the family members struggle with somehow finding a resolution for these existential threats to the family bonds. It will be allright in the end, but damn is there a lot of not-allright to overcome until then.

There is often talk about the loss of childhood, about the slow process of losing the lightness of childhood, of realising one day that you have not been out “to play” in years, wondering why not and somehow succumbing to the fact. There is, we see here, also the loss of parenthood. At some point, the world has moved on and you are sitting on your kitchen table (Boyhood) or in your car (Lady Bird) facing the reality of the empty nest, another pointer that your life has completed its maybe most important stage and has left you on the wrong side of whatever. Lady Bird’s mother tries to fight this realisation to the very last moment, and she has to face that new reality while feeling she has been betrayed, which makes it almost impossible for her to get through it with her head up. In both films, those final scenes are heart wrenchingly cruel. What is a consolation is that if we cut a year into the future, we can assume that everybody has learned to deal with the new stage in life (Lady Bird off to college), that everybody is better able to merge love and anger into a new glue for that family. After all, even in her most glum moments, Lady Bird defends her mother’s actions by appreciating that she is acting out of great love for her daughter.

Lady Bird was much praised as an important contribution of a female perspective by a female film maker. Seen in the context of the current debate about harassment and objectification, that may be a valid point. I did not read this film as having a particularly female perspective, though. It is just very competent film making, on the example of a family where the women play the more active role, take on the fights where necessary, and the men / boys frequently just hop on the back seat and hope that the ladies won’t crash the whole thing in the ground. That is not a female perspective, but maybe a true reflection on many families’ reality.

It is hard to differentiate “Lady Bird” as a cinematic achievement from its achievement in showcasing some profound examples for what it means to be a family. As a movie, despite the brilliance of all the actors and the competence in style, it may not even be spectacular. As an analysis, it is.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lady_bird

“Are you still torturing niggers?” – “You don’t say Nigger torturing no more, it is supposed to be persons of colour torturing.” When a film makes you briefly wonder whether this exchange is meant as a joke or whether the person saying it means it… then the film got you hooked. Sam Rockwell delivers the line, and despite the film revolving about Frances McDormand’s character and her odyssey to get her daughter’s killer arrested, it’s Rockwell’s film. I love that actor, even though I have not seen too many of his films. I do remember, however, how I was watching “The Green Mile” and even though I saw Rockwell for the very first time back then (I think), he has this handsome and fierce appearance that makes him the most disgustingly likable villain on the screen. Here he is caught in all of the textbook macho poses, until his career and his life get shattered, and even in his worst moments I feel I kind of want to hang out with him and maybe comfort him and help him get out of his misery. It would be a very funny night out, is my guess. The film allows him to slowly realise that what he’s doing, who he pretends to be and how his mother (glorious performance by Sandy Martin!) tried to shape him is a track towards solitude and misery.

After this little detour, back to the fact that “a film with Sam Rockwell, Frances McDormand and Woody Harrelson, directed by Martin McDonagh” is an almost perfect description of “This film was made for me in particular”. I am a big fan of McDonagh’s since “In Bruges”, the genre of “foul mouthed violent comedic thriller” that he excels in is what makes me smile. Or laugh out loud. When comparing the humour in “Billboard”’s actually quite bleak and grim setting with the pathetic efforts of outright comedies like “Girls Trip”, I feel I either do not get comedy, or I do get comedy, and I am very happy that “Billboards” has my kind of humour. The script is far from perfect, the twists and turns somehow more uncomfortable than the general tone of the film had called for (such as when the town’s attitude toward McDormand’s Mildred shifts after an incident with Sheriff Willoughby). At the end of the day, this is a low key drama with an unsmiling heroine that let me forget the flaws by sheer force of characterization, acting and – yes – a bunch of violently funny outbursts.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/three_billboards_outside_ebbing_missouri

Gerald’s Game has never been one of my favourite King novels, hence I have only read it once when it came out. I had a basic memory of the plot but not much in ways of where the personal calamity that befalls the lady at the beginning was going or how it ends. Suffice to say, when the opening scenes happened, I felt deeply uncomfortable, to the point of wondering whether I really liked the idea of Jessie being tied to a bed post. I was shouting (silently) “No, don’t, not the cuffs!”, but she was not listening, and things started to happen. Thanks to two great actors (Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood), this worked terribly well. It is a chamber piece that conveys the horror of being stuck in an uncomfortable place all too well. Jessie’s memories, her inner monologues, her virtual escape buddies… I was captivated and rooted for her. And for the dog. I am inclined to pick up the book again to see especially how those dark places in her past that she mulls over play out when given more space. As a tight little bit of tension cinema (or Netflix-pic, rather), this was done very well.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/geralds_game

We know this phenomenon from “Stand By Me” or “Shawshank”: there is a certain nostalgia with Stephen King source material that has nothing to do with his reputation as a horror writer which very much appeals to cinema audiences. As he is (in my humble opinion as a Constant Reader) unsurpassed in characterization, especially of nostalgic settings, of coming of age stories and of underdog heroes, this is what works greatly for people who can’t really be bothered with the horror genre. As “IT” is in many ways an extended cut of The Body / Stand by Me, it is no surprise that this new version, the first chapter of which focuses on the kids’ first encounter with the evil that torments Derry, has been a vastly successful adaptation. I just reread the book a short while ago, and while reading I was wondering how the book’s structural flaws might work out on the screen. Doing away with the intercutting between past and present, and doing two movies dedicated respectively to one time period might have been a good idea, even though I believe that this means the second movie will fall a bit flat in contrast, as it is also less powerful in the book.

For me, chapter 1 did work, even though I am not as enthusiastic about it as many reviewers. It very much provides an executive summary, slightly corrected (and partly improved) version of a large narrative. As you would expect, you cannot engage nearly as much with the movie losers as you can with their book counterparts, as so much of the back story needs to be left out.  Still: they create a wonderful atmosphere of childhood, of Summer holiday and what it’s like to be a kid. There are scenes that are actually very moving, when nothing happens but the kids roaming about, hanging out, chatting and enjoying Summer while they can. The horror elements are kind of traditional, horror prototypes the way the book envisages them, and work as such, even though that’s clearly not what the movie is about. How the loss of childhood, and even of childhood memories is handled will, to me, will decide on the quality of the second chapter.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/it_2017

This is very very odd. The film is, my guess, utterly incomprehensible, if not silly, from a Dark Tower novice’s perspective. There is mid worlds and centerpiece worlds, gunslingers and black stones, dark towers and beams with turtles… and the effort to explain how this all belongs together and links to what that Roland supershooter does is weak, to say the least. For a Dark Tower fan, it deviates completely from what’s written, adds characters, adds science fiction elements and other weird stuff, without really getting to what’s the spirit of the novels. The Man in Black is a vulnerable villain-Jedi, no mystical dark force, and how the hell Jake gets through that first portal despite being attacked by some wooden panel monster eludes me… I do understand the intention of kicking off a set of sequels and tv shows, setting up a centerpiece movie from which all the other products will emerge, I actually got quite a bit excited about this idea, allowing the epicness of the volumes to unfold. But this? Nope… this was a belittling of a vast literary achievement, a dwarfification of a giant piece of literature. Might be that things can be resolved through some of the follow-up pieces, but then again, given the justifiedly devastating reception of this film, I very much doubt there will be much in terms of follow-up…

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dark_tower_2017

Over the last couple of years, the story of slavery made a comeback as feature film and tv material, with Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” probably still the gold standard. It became that standards, I believe, because if exceptionally skilled directorial skills and outstanding actors. While the fact that it was based on a true story may have contributed to the hype, I’d rather believe that it succeeded despite the shackles that reality usually puts on stories. “The Birth of a Nation” has a similar starting point, using events that are now referred to as the Slave Uprising of 1831, when slaves led by Nat Turner from Virginia tried to break free. A little Spartacus, a little Braveheart, a little Twelve Years a Slave, of course.

The way this is narrated, with the focus on a character who sets out as a slave preacher, and ends up a freedom fighter, is less inspiring than the “12 Years” example, though. After watching this, I had to struggle remembering remarkable moments, emotional turning points or moments of being wowed by one of the actors. It plays out rather straightforwardly, the way you expect it to do after learning about the setting. There are some grueling moments of violence (the teeth… oh my, that’s one to haunt me), and there are ambiguous and weak characters (such as farm owner Sam) but I never felt that I am all too familiar with the characters and their motivations, never felt I was embraced by the story and the drama. I could even imagine that this is intentional, indicating that what happened did not happen in a cinematic way, but the way life works, as a succession of individually less than glamorous or dramatic events that somehow lead to a tipping point. It still means that the film never really dragged me in. I felt like reading an illustrated history text book, rather than a dramatization, missing the cinematic qualities of Steve McQueen’s effort. It’s not a bad film, it just is not all too remarkable in retrospect.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_birth_of_a_nation_2016

If you tell the real life story of Saroo as it happened, you realise there is not much story to it: boy from rural India gets lost, orphanage, adoption by Australians, later seeks to find his family years later to get some form of closure. The script of “Lion” seeks to add a bit of extra drama to it, but focuses mainly on the fact that this boy basically has forgotten about his past life, and the way he is suffering from the loss only when by chance he stumbles across something that triggers his memory. In consequence the film is not very dramatic in its best moments, but very introvert and calm. There are some beautiful scenes at the beginning, before young Saroo gets separated from his family because of an unfortunate event he only learns about much later. In these moments, it is quite a heart-warming depiction of siblings relationship and the pleasures and pains of being a kid. The second part is not as strong as a film, with its setting in less exotic Australian suburbs and the addition of characters such as Saroo’s “brother” that do not add a great lot to his story. Of course, the way the story pans out is still moving, and the use of technology to trace his past life even provides for some thrills. Taken as a whole, I found “Lion” to be a bit too unbalanced to really enjoy it. I could appreciate Dev Patel’s acting skills, and I could easily fall in love with Sunny Pawar, who plays Saroo as a child. No doubt this is solid awards season material, but could have been bit more edgy for my taste.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lion_2016