KIlling Eve

 

 

BBC America's intoxicating Killing Eve is an intricate pas de deux for its splendid leads, with Sandra Oh's fractured, obsessive MI6 intelligence agent transforming into a hapless fly, struggling frantically in the seductive web of Jodie Comer's icily efficient Russian assassin.

The Kid Who Would Be King

Joe Cornish’s exuberant The Kid Who Would Be King plants Arthurian legend in the midst of a gloomy modern-day England where an unassuming and good-hearted school boy, Alex (Andy Serkis’s son Louis), pulls Excalibur from a stone in an excavation site and awakens ancient evils.

Oscar Notes

Thoughts about some Oscar noms:

BEST PICTURE

"Black Panther" -- Big personal and professional accomplishment for the director, enormous box office, positive message. Comics don't win.
"BlacKkKlansman" -- Spike is back and is in the same groove. Uneven tonally and the lead is not strong despite being Denzel's kid. Won't win.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" -- One truly unbelievable performance does not a winner make.
"The Favourite" -- Rich and ribald. Multiple strong performances and broken rules. Could win.
"Green Book" -- It made a lot of people feel good and a bunch of people feel bad. Mahershala Ali will win supporting actor. And that might be it.
"Roma" -- Impeccable film. Understated and lovely. Hypnotic, heartbreaking and troubling. Should win.
"A Star Is Born" -- Lots of heart, good tunes, but a familiarity that will not be rewarded over the freshness of The Favorite and Roma.
"Vice" -- Fine acting, disjointed script, self-satisfied and not as resonant as most of the rest of the list.

LEAD ACTRESS

Yalitza Aparicio, "Roma" -- Will break your heart.
Glenn Close, "The Wife" -- Will have you cheering in the last reel.
Olivia Colman, "The Favourite" -- Will hypnotize you.
Lady Gaga, "A Star Is Born" -- Will have you singing.
Melissa McCarthy, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" -- Will have you reaching for the scotch -- in a good way.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams, "Vice" -- Not her strongest performance but that's not to say it's weak.
Marina De Tavira, "Roma" -- She plays overwhelmed like few performers I've seen.
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk" -- She's loved by everyone, and her Puerto Rico breakdown is the dramatic heart of this picture. Will win.
Emma Stone, "The Favourite" -- Her amazing performance is canceled by Weisz.
Rachel Weisz, "The Favourite" -- Her amazing performance is canceled by Stone.

LEAD ACTOR

Christian Bale, "Vice" -- Bale brings Bale to every picture. It's a prosthetics tour de force. Could win.
Bradley Cooper, "A Star Is Born" -- Bradley does Barbra. Won't win.
Willem Dafoe, "At Eternity's Gate" -- Little seen, disorienting film with a wonderful performance.
Rami Malek, "Bohemian Rhapsody" -- A little gimmicky but the kid worked his arse off. Might win.
Viggo Mortensen, "Green Book" -- Audiences loved the chemistry between Tony the Lip and Dr. Shirley but may have loved Shirley more. Dunno.
 
SUPPORTING ACTOR

Mahershala Ali, "Green Book" -- He won for Moonlight two years ago. Too soon for a repeat? Maybe not. Too thematically similar? Maybe so.
Adam Driver, "BlacKkKlansman" -- A good performance in an uneven picture.
Sam Elliott, "A Star Is Born" -- There are no small parts but this one might be.
Richard E. Grant, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" -- Actually, a bit more than a supporting role and remarkable. Should win.
Sam Rockwell, "Vice" -- He won for Three Billboards ... last year. It was a stronger performance than George W.

DIRECTOR

Spike Lee, "BlacKkKlansman" -- Spike does Spike.
Pawel Pawlikowski, "Cold War" -- Who has seen it?
Yorgos Lanthimos, "The Favourite" -- Brilliant and rococo and in English.
Alfonso Cuarón, "Roma" -- Lovely and humane and in Spanish.
Adam McKay, "Vice" -- Too much clever rehashery from The Big Short.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

"The Favourite" -- The language was glorious.
"First Reformed" -- Truly disturbing
"Green Book" -- Whose story is it?
"Roma" -- Personal and elegant
"Vice" -- Smart but a bit clownish

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

"The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" -- Masterful weaving together of disparate tales of western woe.
"BlackkKlansman" -- Gaps and gaffes.
"Can You Ever Forgive Me?" -- Sassy and sorrowful.
"If Beale Street Could Talk" -- Truncates much of Baldwin's brilliant prose but will probably win.
"A Star Is Born" -- Not enough story.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

"Cold War" -- Who has seen it?
"The Favourite" -- Some nice, disorienting fish bowling effects.
"Never Look Away" -- Who has seen it?
"Roma" -- The beach rescue scene is phenomenal. Should win.
"A Star Is Born" -- Moody and dour in spots, lustrous and intimate in others.

Mid90s

Writer/ Director Jonah Hill’s spirited study of LA lost boys, Mid90s, is told through the often impassive eyes of 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic), who is battered by his bitter older brother (Lucas Hedges) but befriended by four rootless teen skaters, a damaged but caring crew.

Ben is Back

Peter Hedges directs A-lister Julia Roberts and his uncannily reliable son Lucas in the somber film Ben is Back, a teen drug addict tale that is more existential than cautionary as it considers the limits of love and family and asks how much of what we become is in our control.

On the Basis of Sex

Mimi Leder's rousing biopic On the Basis of Sex delivers the requisite dramatic moments as it blends stories of the evolution of law professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) as champion of women's rights with her role as a devoted wife and the mother of a defiant feminist.

Hedges and Chalamet

Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet (here at the Golden Globes) approach acting with fearlessness and generosity. Each routinely hits his marks and delivers truth while leaving space for others on the screen, in the story, unlike many older actors who fret and crowd to no effect.

Escape Room

Adam Robitel's high-concept Escape Room recasts the entrapment puzzle game as a fairly entertaining and plausible franchise bid complete with a beautiful and brainy lead (Taylor Russell) and an ethnically diverse Six Little Indians who bicker while warding off artful termination.

The Lifespan of a Fact.

John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's fiery disquisition on the nature of "non-fiction" ~ The Lifespan of a Fact. (now a Broadway play) ~offers readers (and no doubt playgoers) a probing, often infuriating exercise in truth mining, with an article on a teen's death-by-suicide as ore.

Mary, Queen of Scots

Josie Rourke’s Mary, Queen of Scots has a scenarist’s eye for intrigue and an art director’s eye for tableaux but the two women around whom all of these scheming courtiers swirl, Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie) and Mary Stuart (Saoirse Ronan), feel more like emblems than characters.

Vice

Christian Bale’s lumbering, monomaniacal Dick Cheney lends essential gravitas to Adam McKay’s self-satisfied Vice as it traces the future V.P. and change-maker through his early days as a congressional aide, rise as a GOP wrangler and his eventual commanding of the war on Iraq.

Bumblebee

Travis Knight's irresistibly clever, never robotic, fine-tuned Bumblebee weaves stories of intraspecies revolution, alien invasion and teenage rebellion with a modicum of sci-fi hokum and cheese but an abundance of visual wit -- just what one expects from Spielberg productions.

The Mule

Clint Eastwood's The Mule calls us to reflect on our national family as we ride shotgun with an unfiltered nonagenarian drug mule (Eastwood) who was a miserable husband and father but a masterful grower of daylilies and as amiable and annoying an old codger as ever drew breath.T

Aquaman

Jason Momoa's salty swagger and lovable dudeness keeps James Wan's Aquaman afloat even when maddeningly complex and unending surf and turf battle scenes -- both the small and the epic -- and villanous speechifying threaten to sink the proceedings in soggy bombast and monotony.

Mary Poppins Returns

Rob Marshall's Mary Poppins Returns has two ace troupers in Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda, but the narrative is cloying, often dull, the musical numbers flat and unengaging despite hawking the message our troubles disappear when we take a risk and unharness our imaginations.

La Negrada

Jorge Pérez Solano's La Negrada (Black Mexicans) trains a dispassionate but thoroughly captivating lens on the lugubrious lives of a dozen dispossessed Afro-Mexicans in Oaxaca coastal villages, where isolation and insulation are heirlooms, like votive candles and fishing boats.

Nancy Wilson

Nancy Wilson's passing reminds me of the days when albums by "colored singers" were in the collections of much of Middle America above the Mason-Dixon, alongside Perry Como and Peggy Lee. Ms. Wilson, whom I loved, had regal bearing, seemingly perfect pitch and impeccable diction. She was cabaret fabulous and sang American standards without too much jazz (leave that to Ella and Sarah). She transitioned into the modern era along with Dionne but was never embraced by the young-uns. Dunno why. Still, hearing her deliver smooth and smoky, inoffensive two-minute sides evokes images of that time when some black entertainers had to scrub the race out of their shows to make a living. Green Book 'Merica. RIP.

At Eternity's Gate

The visual intensity of Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate might be off-putting to those who will find his use of extreme close ups claustrophobic and long passages of frantic, handheld tracking nauseating. But, to me, they are wholly indicative of Van Gogh's obsession and compulsion.

It will NOT be a blockbuster but I feel it is an important film in its difficulty and unease -- both in its subject and its composition. It feels determined to test the viewer's patience and endurance, defiantly uncompromising, like Van Gogh.

Green Book

As a major studio release, Green Book has the expected number of Hollywood moments -- those scenes where the emoting and speechifying take off. One that was edited for the trailer comes midpoint in the film. Dr. Donald Shirley, the black classically trained pianist, has just been admonished by his white driver and assistant, who earlier in the film displayed a penchant for racial prejudice, for essentially not being in touch with his, Shirley's, roots. According to the film, Shirley, incredibly, was unfamiliar with Little Richard and Aretha Franklin and much of African-American popular music, but, in the movie, performed something that approximated blues-inflected classical music in his concerts and lived in an apartment above Carnegie Hall that was a shrine to Africana. He actually met Tony wearing a regal tribal robe and sitting on a throne (compensation?). In the pivotal confrontation mid-film, the pianist and his driver are standing in the pouring rain, Shirley has been offended by Tony's remarks and is walking who knows where when he stops. "If I'm not black enough, and I'm not white enough, and I'm not man enough, then, Tony, what am I?" The trailer did not include the phrase "man enough," perhaps not to give away that Shirley was gay. He was depicted in the film naked at the YMCA, having been arrested with, presumably, a man he had met there. Little is made of Shirley's sexuality beyond this horrifyingly tin-eared scene, in which Tony bribes the police to let Shirley go. The choice for the edit is clear -- the producers did not want to introduce the sexuality element into the promotion for a film that offers NO insight into that dimension of Shirley's personality. Exploring the isolation that most certainly grew out of the intersection of race and sexuality and cultural upbringing would have been fascinating to me. I guess we'll have to wait a little longer for those stories from the majors.

Boy Erased

Boy Erased's excellence is not just in Lucas Hedges but in the evenness across the cast. Some films have a single stellar turn that offsets weaker deliveries. Here, every word and action rings true. None truer than Nicole Kidman as a mother battling to save her son and herself.

Bohemian Rhapsody

 

 

Thematically, "Somebody To Love" might have served as a better title for the Queen flick. "Bohemian Rhapsody" capsulizes the band's audacity but the song's unusual structure and fairly inscrutable lyrics made it more of a novelty -- albeit one helluva karaoke treat. "Somebody To Love" to me, speaks to Mercury's emotional isolation, which also underpins the movie's message. Mercury was searching for identity and trust and comfort and ultimately something called family. Though not a successful film, it is exhuberant and rather splendid when it isn't artificial and self-conscious in its depictions of excess. https://youtu.be/op07UzSCu4c

A Star is Born (2018)

Bradley Cooper's tuneful remake of the much-remade A Star is Born feels most true when the film's stars (Cooper as hard-drinking / hard-drugging country rocker Jack and Lady Gaga as drag show chanteuse and ballad-belter Ally) are off-stage, exploring the contours of each other's face. These elegantly crafted scenes, which Cooper both starred in and directed, display a refined emotional sensibility, behind and in front of the camera, that is highly evocative. Though the music performances are strong (how could they not be?), one of the film's greater contributions to the ASIB legacy, IMO, is its presentation of America's cultural diversity -- in this age of oppression and exclusion. Some might argue that the picture's rainbow is a bit too deliberate, too calculated; Ally's background too wispy; Jack's relationship with his manager / brother (Sam Elliott) more a dramatic device than a true narrative element; and Jack's meltdown too precipitous and, in one scene, too gauche. But, to me, Cooper has created a beautiful film of love found and lost that will break many a heart.

The Meg

Yes, Jon Turteltaub's The Meg borrows without apparent shame from the Spielberg, Cameron, Emmerich playbooks (Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Abyss, Godzilla) and goes on to load this familiar human v giant critter story with distracting "family fare" that adds little to the proceedings because the characters lack depth. Star Jason Statham's diver Jonas meets cute Bingbing Li's intrepid oceanographer Suyin and her precocious and curiously ever-present 8-year-old daughter on a billion-dollar deep-sea rig off the coast of China, where their benign explorations disturb the rest of a 90-foot prehistoric shark believed extinct, which leads to wholly predictable results. (The picture seems oddly anti-scientific inquiry). Turteltaub has populated the film with the usual array of factotums who deliver plot points when they're not being sacrificed to the voracious 90-foot shark of the tile. And, as expected, it's the chomp-chomp and Statham's close calls that are the most fun. In my screening, a family of five sat in a row near mine, the youngest child in daddy's lap throughout the flick, which is grisly and bloody and chock-full of peril. If you're going to traumatize your child, pick a better flick.

A Simple Favor

Actor / director Paul Feig is known for his frothy, sometimes filthy, comedies (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy). His latest film, A Simple Favor, has delectable doses of crass humor wrapped around a chewy murder mystery that has some inspired surprises. Anna Kendrick stars as uber-Single Mom and vlogger Stephanie, who befriends and is seduced by another Mom, Emily (Blake Lively), whose big-city, psycho brio domestic goddess Emily finds intoxicating. Emily is married to the hunky Sean ("It Boy" Henry Golding), an English literature professor who can't seem to reignite his career. When Emily disappears, Stephanie tells her vlog subscribers (the posted comments from whom add a wonderful bit of cultural spice to the story) and takes off to discover what happened to her. Stephanie shifts into detective mode and uncovers hidden (at times hilarious) secrets on the back roads of Emily's past and realizes quickly enough that nothing is as it seems.

White Boy Rick

French Director Yann Demange's White Boy Rick tells the true story of a white Detroit teen in the '80s who joins a black drug-dealing organization, ingratiates himself to its members and leaders but ends up turning evidence against them in exchange for a lighter prison sentence, which is not delivered. Newcomer Richie Merritt is the eponymous youngster, Rick Wershe Jr., who lives with his desperate but enterprising gun-dealer father (Matthew McConaughey in his usual fine form) and druggie sister (a terrific Bel Powley). We're led to believe young Rick's circumstances account for most of the disaster his life becomes, but the case is not convincing because aside from the bombed out landscape we don't really come to feel present in Rick's world; his life remains cloudy and remote. The film also has a convoluted narrative (filmed mostly in Detroit, the seasons don't seem to line up from scene to scene) and the lack of substantive exchanges between the characters leaves their motivations blurry and indistinct. Too often important characters seem to occupy the same space but aren't actually in the same moment. The film also fails to recognize the elephant in the room: the whiteness that is referred to in the film's title and the book upon which it is based. How was 16-year-old Rick Wershe able to overcome racial distrust, if not animosity, as he clearly did? We're not offered more than just passing references to Rick's relationship with his closest friend, a low-level player in the organization. Why are they friends? What is their history? How was their friendship used to lend Rick gravitas? While the film has several powerful scenes (the rescue of Rick's sister from a crack den is gut-wrenching) the whole feels frustratingly incomplete.