I have not heard of this flick and I’m Finn. Will have to check it out.
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Big news for David Simon fans! https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2023/07/26/david-simon-homicide-philippe-squarzoni/
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the final season of How To w/ John Wilson will be available tomorrow. there may not be a better depiction of the weirdness of NYC than that portrayed in this show. light observational comedy never packed such a punch. the final episode of season 1 is kinda legendary.
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Edit to correct, Idris.
The Wire, in my humble opinion is/was one of the best written dramas, ever. For me, as violent as it was (I don’t go for that genre in films), that show got me hooked. Idris Elba in the role of Stringer Bell; who knew he was a Brit?
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Stopped watching The Wire after the second episode or so (first season) - maybe I should try again?!
Speaking of Idris Elba. Just watched Bastille Day (2016 I believe) last week, a run-of-the-mill action movie taking place in Paris. Nice, not great. And I’m now into episode 5 of Hijack - Idris Elba on a plane! It’s been fun so far.
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Affirmative.
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Badlands. (1973 - Terrence Malick)
Malick’s debut film, and boy, what a opening. A thoughtful, tense neo-noir crime drama, it stars Sissy Spacek as 15 year old Holly, a seemingly average if withdrawn little girl, who is wrapped up in a relationship with 25 year old garbage man Kit, played by Martin Sheen channeling, very explicitly, his best James Dean.
Based loosely on the Starkweather-Fugate spree killings in 1959, Malick is already off and running, allowing quiet, gorgeous nature shots and a brilliant score that returns to Orff’s Gassenhauer as a frequent motif to build tension and suggest the interior lives of his charaters. This was only Spacek’s 2nd film role, and both she and Sheen were blessed to look 10 years younger than their actual ages (Spacek being 23/24 and Sheen in his mid 30’s). It seems obvious to me in hindsight that Altman must have noticed Spacek’s performance here, as it slots in almost perfectly with her role in Three Women. In Badlands, Spacek’s flat affect and furrowed brow convey Holly’s confusion and shock in a way that feels markedly different than how such a role might be approached in the current times. As Kit, Sheen is charming and frighteningly casual about his violence, and seems to regard the whole affair as a joke. The violence in the film is explicit, but not overly bloody and never glorified. This is in stark contrast to a film like Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, which one could look at as the contemporary, over-the-top reboot of a very similar story.
Terrence Malick seemingly mastered the trick of being so inspired by the natural world that he can make it mean almost anything within the context of his films. To see that this skill was evident from this, one of his earliest works, is deeply impressive. A beautiful, troubling film that’s unfortunately as relevant as ever.
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023 - James Mangold)
Well, it’s better than Crystal Skull. That’s a very low bar to clear, but it at least does THAT much. I was not angry leaving the theater as I was for Crystal Skull. As a throwback adventure movie, it’s fine.
What you really want to know is if Ford can still pull it off at 80, and the answer is… sorta. Thankfully, they allowed the character to lean in to his age and to Ford’s own curmudgeonly manner. They also use digital deaging wisely, and don’t make the same mistake of Scorsese’s The Irishman, where an 80 year old DeNiro (deaged to 40) ‘beats up’ another character, and it’s laughably evident that this is an elderly man wearing young man digital drag. Here, when Indy needs to move like NOT an 80 year old man, they wisely plaster his face on the stunt double, to a much more pleasing effect.
But, the film is LONG. Two and a half hours, which gets a little much, and gives you far too much time to notice that there’s a LOT of ‘on location but really in front of a green screen’ stuff going on. Phoebe Waller-Bridge does fine with her character, but as written, she’s largely unlikable through the majority of the film, and her 3rd act redemption feels unearned. Given the film’s 1969 setting, they seem to make a feint towards dealing with social issues, but mostly in the form of Shaunette Renee’ Wilson as a CIA agent in an utterly thankless and criminally underwritten role.
On the plus side, there’s some genuinely great chase scenes, a number of fun cameos (though no Ke Huy “Short Round” Quan), and, again, a sense that if we absolutely HAD to have another Indiana Jones movie (and to be clear, we didn’t), I’m glad it’s ending here, rather than on Crystal Skull. If that sounds a lot like being damned with faint praise, well… yes. It’s one final squeeze to get the goose to pop out one last golden egg before it dies. As it happens, as gold eggs go, at least this one isn’t iron pyrite.
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Several months ago I came in part way on an interview with Harrison Ford hawking The Dial of Destiny. He went on about how he wished he could spend more time with his family but he just had so much work in front of him. The guy is 80 years old and worth $300M. I switched the channel. Hollywood. Guess he wants to go down in history somehow. I know this sounds petty but I was halfway hoping the movie would bomb.
Well, it kinda did. Ok, maybe not bomb, but “underperformed”, I believe, is the current euphemism of choice.
Disney was hoping for a Star Wars Ep 6 - sized hit. This… was not that. It’s currently around $360 million. Considering the budget was a reported $300 million, it’s generally considered that a film has to make at LEAST 2x its cost, if not 3x, to be considered really successful. It will inevitably go to Hulu/Disney+, and there will be at least some physical media sales, but those no longer play as big a role as they did in the era of peak VHS/DVD.
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Oppenheimer (2023 - dir. Chris Nolan)
Well, there we go. Finally a Chris Nolan movie that everyone, from the filmgeek fanboys to the stodgiest of old school academy voters can agree is an example of the craft and art of filmmaking par excellence.
Nolan has deftly, and, more importantly, appropriately pulled from the various techniques, tricks, and stylistic choices he’s honed over the years to tell the story of the birth of the atomic age, and one of its main founders. In 70mm IMAX, it is a literal larger than life spectacle that isn’t bombastic (no pun intended). It is a nuanced portrait of a very human, VERY complicated man, who often finds himself so overwhelmed with the pursuit of of his intellectual goals fails that he fails to meet the needs of his more pedestrian concerns, and who has to grapple with the great moral quandry of working, for the best possible reasons, to build a weapon of unprecedented destruction.
Surrounding Oppenheimer’s personal drama is, of course, the immense drama of the time, from the early, feverish scientific excitement about quantum theory, to the uneasy politics of fighting both fascism and the specter of communism throughWWII, into the McCarthy era and onto the 60’s.
The acting is award quality essentially across the board. Cillian Murphy absolutely disappears into the role, Robert Downey Jr. is nearly unrecognizable. Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt manage to make the most of their (by necessity) smaller roles. Matt Damon may have never been better. The production design and attention to detail is just jaw-dropping, and those familiar with the story of Los Alamos or who’ve read other contemporaneous accounts, such as Richard Feynmen’s writings, and anyone who’s had more than a cursory introduction to physics, will recognize names, details, theories, most all of which are (reportedly) scrupulously correct.
Folks familiar with Nolan’s work will recognize his style. Interleaving timelines, telling a continuous tale in fragments and facets, each timeline distinct in its color palette, and (in the case of real IMAX presentation) its aspect ratio . Like the best of his work, he’s managed to make momentous, potentially ponderous dialogue read realistically, and only very rarely will someone slip an “as you know…” bit of expository infodump in order to fill in the history a bit. The sound design, in particular, should be noted. A few times (and ONLY a few, thankfully), Nolan really fully makes use of the huge bass possible in an IMAX setup, and the impact of those booms and rumbles can be felt bodily. Blessedly, all the dialogue is perfectly understandable, except when it very deliberately isn’t, and this doesn’t become a frustrating, Tenet-like mess. At 3 hours, it’s certainly has to work to earn that sort of running time, but ultimately, it does.
Between this and Dunkirk, Nolan has proven himself to be a maker of both popular AND “important” films, and is even managing to pull off a couple trick that his hero, Mr. Spielberg, only managed once. One that’s BOTH.
tl;dr: see Oppenheimer. If you’re fortunate enough to live within easy distance of one of the real 70mm IMAX theaters in the world, it is absolutely worthwhile making the effort to see it that way. Otherwise, as close to that standard as possible.
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Occasionally far too loud, at LEAST an hour too long, but far more interesting than I’d expected.
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See, I can completely understand than point. For lots and LOTS of folks, anything longer than 2 hours gets at least a little side-eye, and once you hit 3 hours you’re approaching bladder capacity for a significant percentage of the population. And yes, a film needs to EARN those extra minutes. Maybe by making the character so fascinating you want to spend time with them, maybe by moving the story along in a way that keeps you so engrossed you don’t notice the time, maybe by being so damned beautiful you want more and more time just to stare at it.
Imho, Nolan manages moments of all three. Is it still a very long movie? Absolutely. But I’m willing to sit through it because each of the scenes contributes in one way or another to one of those reasons.
Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai might be the best example of this. A 3.5 hour black and white movie from 1954 and it flies by.
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i generally side with the Ebert school in this regard (… then again, this is coming from a guy that sat through Shoah in a theatre):
‘No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.’
– Roger Ebert
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Magnolia comes to mind.
ha. i saw that film the weekend it was released. the theatre was maybe 20% full (mostly Tom Cruise fangirls). by the start of the credits, there were about five of us left.
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I own the DVD and thought it was fantastic. I’m about as far from a TC fan girl as humanly possible, and thought this might’ve been one of his best performances, and let’s not forget the rest of the cast (PSH, Julianne Moore, JC Reilly, Bill Macy… ). Great soundtrack, too.
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