Showing posts with label BEN WHISHAW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BEN WHISHAW. Show all posts

Friday, January 6, 2023

WOMEN TALKING; WOMEN NOT TALKING

In theaters today:

Women Talking--In a hardcore religious farming colony, a group of men have been arrested for repeatedly tranquilizing and sexually violating women of all ages, including young children. The attacks have been attributed to ghosts or the Devil, or to "wild female imagination." With the farm to themselves for a couple of days before the men make bail, the minimally educated women sit around the barn and debate whether to forgive the men and carry on as before, to "stay and fight," or to leave the only home they've ever known. They've been told that if they leave, they will forfeit their place in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Written and directed by Sarah Polley from the novel by Miriam Toews--inspired by a real-life 2011 case at a Mennonite community of Canadian origin in Bolivia--this drama opens by calling itself, in subtitle, an act of female imagination. It certainly feels convincing. Superb actresses of all ages, ranging from Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy and a particularly forbidding Frances McDormand among the elders to Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy among the younger adults to some fine, lively women among the youth, embody the various responses, from seething, vengeful fury to sad acceptance.

Though the tone is inevitably somber, Polley's direction is deft, and she leavens the gloom with some high-spirited moments. Looking in from outside their world, many of us in the audience are likely to feel the most sympathy with the viewpoint of the enraged women who favor a violent response; the idea of a mass exodus from the scene of these atrocities sounds like a solid idea too. Forgiveness and a return to the status quo feels, in this instance, like a very distant third.

The movie also includes a token adult male, a gentle schoolteacher (Ben Whishaw, excellent as usual) not implicated in the attacks, who is allowed to take the minutes of their discussions because he can write. He's been to university outside the colony, and when a census-taker drives by in a car, blaring "Daydream Believer" by the Monkees, he softly sings along. The moment makes a pretty strong case for secular pop culture.

Now streaming:

She Said--This chronicle of the struggle of New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey to break the Harvey Weinstein case could be seen as a sort of companion piece to Women Talking (Brad Pitt was among the Executive Producers on both). At one point in the investigation Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Twohey (Carey Mulligan) wonder if anyone will care about the story if it runs. People did--the story, which ran in October of 2017, was not only one of the factors that led to Weinstein's arrest and conviction, it also helped get the #MeToo movement rolling.

The initial response to the movie, directed by Maria Schrader from a script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (based on Kantor and Twohey's book), was less explosive, however; it bombed in the multiplexes in November. It's worth a watch, though. While it lacks the precision and tension of the greatest of investigative-journalist buddy pictures, All the President's Men, it's still an absorbing account, focusing on the extreme reluctance of the targets of Weinstein's savagery to be first to go on the record by name.

Schrader's direction generates a palpable atmosphere of the gloomy anxiety that life in the 45 era had for many of us, but probably more intensely for women, but we're spared graphic violence. While we hear a skin-crawling audio tape of Weinstein with one of the women, the actual assaults are kept offscreen. Much of the dramatic potency in the film derives from the stunned faces of Kazan and Mulligan as they interview the women; the horror that quietly registers in their eyes effectively takes the place of seeing what they're hearing.

Friday, January 12, 2018

BEAR, TRACKS

Opening this weekend:


Paddington 2As far as I know, this is the first crime thriller about the theft of a pop-up book. The title bear wants to buy the one-of-a-kind tome, you see, as a gift for his adored Aunt back in "darkest Peru." Alas, before he's saved up enough of his pay as a window-washer to make the purchase, the book is filched from the antiques store by a mysterious burglar, and Paddington is suspected of the heist and thrown in jail.

The real culprit—it’s revealed early on, but stop reading now if you don’t want the “spoiler”—is a crackbrained, down-on-his-luck actor played by Hugh Grant, who knows, as Paddington does not, that the pop-up book contains clues to the location of a hidden treasure. So as Paddington struggles to negotiate the perils of prison life and his upper-middle-class adoptive London family searches for evidence of his innocence, the thespian gets closer and closer to claiming the loot.

Michael Bond's beloved bear, with his blue coat, floppy red hat and love of marmalade, has been a mainstay of Brit kiddie-lit since the late ‘50s. Bond, who died this past year (Paddington 2 is dedicated to him) claimed that the character’s inspiration came, in part, from the sight of tagged children on railway platforms being evacuated from London during WWII.

There have been several animated TV series based on Bond’s tales, but the first feature film was a 2014 live-action effort, with a CGI Paddington excellently voiced by Ben Whishaw. That movie had plenty of charm, but it was marred, for me severely, by the introduction of a Cruella de Vil-like villainess played by Nicole Kidman, an obsessed taxidermist who, lacking a specimen of Ursa Marmalada in her collection, wanted to stuff Paddington. This nastiness felt really out of place in the gentle context of the movie.

Paddington 2 is a major improvement. Directed, like the first film, by Paul King of the marvelous Brit TV comedy The Mighty Boosh, the sequel features lengthy, complex slapstick sequences in the sprit of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati, executed by Paddington (Whishaw again) with similarly earnest absorption. And its softer and sillier villain hits just the right note, without taking too much of an edge off the picture. It does, after all, contain the line, spoken by a security guard at St. Paul’s, “A nun went beserk.”

And that cast! Returning from the first film are Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi and Jim Broadbent, joined here by the likes of Brendan Gleeson, as Paddington’s tough-guy prison mentor, Tom Conti, Joanna Lumley and Eileen Atkins, billed here as Dame Eileen Atkins, if you please. It’s a testament to the bear’s iconic status over there that that sort of a-list talent could be assembled for a kiddie-movie sequel.

Stealing the picture from all of them is Grant, who turns his no-good greedy ham into a star part. He gets to use a variety of accents and wear cunning disguises—including as that aforementioned “very attractive nun.” He even gets to perform a full Sondheim number.



The CommuterLiam Neeson plays a 60-year-old ex-cop turned insurance salesman who rides a commuter train from Tarrytown to Manhattan and back everyday. Heading home on the day he gets laid off, baffled by how he’ll send his son to college, he’s approached by a mystery woman (Vera Farmiga) with a proposition—somebody on the train doesn’t belong, she says.

He’s given a false name that the person is traveling under (he isn’t told the gender), and promised that he’ll be given $100,000 if, using his cop skills, he makes the identification for them. In a moment of weakness he takes the down payment, but quickly realizes that the people who have hired him are ruthless killers, and that he’d be dooming their target by making the ID. He also realizes that his own family is in danger.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spaniard behind 2015’s Run All Night and several other Liam Neeson righteous/reluctant killing sprees, this thriller pays obvious tribute to Hitchcock—overtly to Shadow of a Doubt—but is just as reminiscent of the Bruckheimer-style action excess playbook. The plot gets more convoluted, and the action more ludicrously overscaled, as the movie progresses.

But as usual, there’s Neeson at the center of it, with his quiet masculinity and his decency and his pained, sad-faced acceptance of the distasteful duty of pulverizing his enemies—it’s distasteful to him, that is; we in the audience drool for their retribution. He’s an action hero for middle-aged guys who feel ineffectual, and he delivers again here.

On the whole, The Commuter is more fun than many of Neeson’s other massacres. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s generous-hearted: especially in a Spartacus-like climatic flourish, it’s about strangers sticking up for each other.

Friday, May 20, 2016

LOOK BEAK IN ANGER

Opening this week:

The Angry Birds MovieThe Angry Birds franchise began in 2009 as a video game, the object of which was to launch roly-poly little birds from a slingshot at little green pigs. The pigs have stolen their eggs, you see. The game led to more than a dozen spin-off games, and merchandising ranging from toys to clothes to TV cartoons, and now, inevitably, to this animated feature.

Our hero, voiced by Jason Sudeikis, is Red, the scowling, cardinal-like bird you’ve been seeing on kids’ hats and t-shirts the last few years, if you’ve been paying attention. He lives on an island inhabited by oddly flightless avians—it’s the entire Universe, as far as they know. Most of these birds aren’t inordinately angry, so an outburst, early on, lands Red in court, and he’s sent to an anger management class, where he meets other…well, you know.

Then huge ships arrive filled with green pigs. The guileless birds are taken in by their friendly overtures, except for Red, who’s suspicious of them. He turns out to be right, of course. The pigs steal the island’s eggs, and it’s up to Red and his anger management classmates to rouse the ire of the populace, and lead them to the land of the pigs to try to rescue them from the Pig King’s kettle.

The high-ticket voice cast, which includes the likes of Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Peter Dinklage and even Sean Penn—amusingly cast as the Angriest of the Birds—more or less ensures that there will be a few laughs. There’s some ingenious visual shtick, too. But overall The Angry Birds Movie is tiring—too many of the gags and situations seem artificially extended, as if the filmmakers knew they didn’t have much story to work with, and were trying to pad for time.

More than this, there’s the whole matter of the theme of anger. Anger is funny. Most comedy is based on some degree of anger. Anger also resonates with children, who feel it intensely but in most cases impotently.

But there’s anger and then there’s anger. There’s legitimate, mature outrage at, say, rudeness or injustice, and then there’s the anger that can arise from annoyance at other people’s cheerfulness, or from changes in our world with which we’re uncomfortable, or simply from daily inconveniences.

We’re all subject to this second sort, of course, and it’s always a good source of comedy. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for wisdom, and I fear that’s how The Angry Birds Movie wants us to see it. I certainly don’t think the film is intentionally reactionary, but I’m also unconvinced that a celebration of anger—resolving itself in war on foreigners—is what our society is most in need of just now. We have plenty of angry birdbrains already. 


 The LobsterHaving been dumped by his wife, David (Colin Farrell) checks into an elegant but cheerless resort hotel for singles. He has forty-five days to find a new partner, and if he fails he’ll be transformed into an animal. This happens often: David shares his room with his dog, who used to be his brother.

David is asked what kind of animal he wants to be if he doesn’t pair off, and he chooses to be a lobster, because of their longevity, and because he loves the sea. The hotel manager congratulates him on his thoughtful choice; the staff’s manner is always one of brisk, patronizing politeness, with contemptuous pity just under the surface.

Compatibility in a relationship is judged by shared impairments—nearsightedness, or a limp, or a tendency to nosebleeds, or sociopathic heartlessness—and people regularly try to feign these limitations to attract a mate. The guest activities include hunts of the neighboring forest, where “Loners”—feral single people—are shot with tranquilizer darts and brought back to undergo their transformations. Bagging a Loner adds days to your stay at the hotel, and thus to your chances of pairing off.

In other words, this is another of those Kafka-lite pop absurdist comedies, sort of a European spin on the likes of Being John Malkovich or Cold Souls. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek known for Dogtooth, from a script he co-wrote with Efthymis Filippou, the film is seamlessly imagined and entirely coherent on its own strange terms.

The pace is a little slow, and it seems to slow down even more in the second half. Other than that, the movie really can’t be faulted in terms of execution. The cast, which includes John C. Reilly, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, Olivia Colman and the excellent Ben Whishaw, maintain admirably straight faces, and Farrell, remaining quietly shellshocked throughout, makes you care about his plight.

It might even be fair to call The Lobster brilliant, but for all its whimsicality, it isn’t much fun. The atmosphere is dark and desperate, and many scenes are horrifically violent—those sensitive to violence toward animals are particularly warned to leave this one alone.

The premise seems to have arisen from a genuine, vitriolic bitterness toward the societal pressure to pair off, and the implication that those who can’t, or don’t want to, are regarded as subhuman. This avoids coming off as a hipster pose because Lanthimos pointedly shows us that life in the woods among the Loners is no less oppressive—romance and sex are forbidden there, and severely punished.

So The Lobster isn’t sentimental. It fully acknowledges that there’s a price to going it alone, or two-by-two, and that the price can be high either way. It also implies that our motivations, either way, are generally selfish. It’s possible to be both cynical enough to respect this viewpoint and romantic enough to be unable to fully agree with it. In any case, this Lobster, though admirable in many ways, brought me less pleasure than one served with butter and lemon.

Friday, November 6, 2015

BROWN. CHARLIE BROWN.

Opening this weekend:


The Peanuts MovieCharlie Brown is trying to fly a kite in winter, on the theory that the Kite-Eating Tree will be dormant. The chaos that ensues is interrupted by the arrival of a new kid moving in across the street from his house. This turns out be a Little Red-Haired Girl, and once Our Hero gets a look at her, he’s in love.

The trouble is, we get a look at her too. It’s true that the Little Red-Haired Girl was shown, very ill-advisedly, in a couple of the later Peanuts movie and TV cartoons, but she was kept offstage in the strip, and she should have been here, too. Showing the Little Red-Haired Girl is like showing Maris on Frasier or Howard’s Mom on The Big Bang Theory or Charlie on Charlie’s Angels or Carlton the Doorman on Rhoda.

This feature version of the greatest American comic strip—and one of the great achievements in 20th-Century literature—is very cute. It’s visually inventive from beginning to end. It has good values at its core. And it doesn’t vulgarize its source material, at least not too much—not nearly as much, certainly, as some of the terrible Peanuts TV cartoons that were made while Charles M. Schultz was alive, presumably with his blessing.

But The Peanuts Movie is still more miss than hit, or at least it was for me. It could be that I’m too close to Peanuts—the strip is a big part of why I fell in love with reading, and I still take my volumes down from the shelf frequently. I’ve been reading and rereading the best vintages of Peanuts (roughly the late ‘50s to the mid ’70s) all my life, and this movie, produced by Craig Schultz (son of Charles) from a story of his devising, doesn’t feel like Peanuts to me. It’s almost Peanuts.

The misstep with the Little Red-Haired Girl isn’t the only one, alas. There’s too much rich texture—to Lucy’s hair, to Charlie Brown’s shoes, to the countryside over which Snoopy flies in search of the Red Baron. Peanuts was an austere world of lines and dots and stock phrases from which Schultz wrung an astonishing half-century’s worth of variations; this movie tries to fill in the details he let our minds fill in.

More disappointingly, The Peanuts Movie turns Charlie Brown from a mythic figure—a loser who strives mightily against his fate as a loser, and doesn’t overcome it—into a standard kids-movie underdog who triumphs. It’s true that he triumphs for the best of reasons—his selflessness and honesty—but it still robs him of his neurotic complexity and his pained, unrecognized heroism.

“Winning is great,” Schultz once observed, “but it isn’t funny.” The unflinching moral of Peanuts is that some people really are born losers, and that this sucks for them, but it doesn’t mean that their lives are without value. The first Peanuts movie, 1969’s A Boy Named Charlie Brown, ended on this note, but it’s not the sort of thing that the makers of a big-budget contemporary animated movie can embrace.

This, maybe, is why the meandering story lacks tension and emotional weight. When the Charlie Brown of the strip or the earlier TV cartoons said “Rats!” or was told “Boy, are you stupid, Charlie Brown!” it landed like a blow. The Peanuts Movie isn’t a disgrace, but it pulls its punches. It’s in 3-D, but it has less depth than a line drawing.


SpectreJames Bond, it could be argued, is sort of the anti-Charlie Brown: confident, assured, decisive, in command, and always a winner with the ladies, Red-Haired and otherwise. It’s only since Daniel Craig took over the role that the Bond movies have begun to seriously explore the idea that he’s no less neurotic or unhappy for all that.

This new one takes 007 from Mexico City to Rome to Austria to Tangier and back to London, chasing down a final tip from the late M (Judi Dench) that leads to an old enemy (Christoph Waltz). Meanwhile the new M (Ralph Fiennes) is struggling to keep a bureaucrat from shutting down the Double-0 program and, incidentally, turning the world into one big cyber-surveillance police state. Q (Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (charming Naomie Harris) get caught up in the intrigue this time too.

Watching the old Bond pictures, with their excesses and chauvinisms, used to feel like a Paleolithic indulgence—like letting yourself enjoy something that was bad for you, and probably bad for the world. The Bonds featuring Craig, with his wearily amused old-shoe face and his effortless poise, seemed to be trying for more emotional and moral depth.

Until this one, that is. Despite the relevance of the supposed theme to current civil rights concerns, these are old-fashioned Bond antics—preposterously overscaled set-piece action scenes, women succumbing to 007’s charms, urbane courtesies between Bond and his enemies. It’s also way overlong.

Having said that, I mostly enjoyed Spectre anyway. Director Sam Mendes doesn’t ask us to take the proceedings too seriously—though it’s less overtly facetious, it’s not much less cornball than the Roger Moore Bonds—so I just enjoyed it for its old-fashioned movie serial silliness.

Also, Monica Bellucci appears as an assassin’s widow with whom Bond hooks up. It’s a brief role, but a little Monica Bellucci is better than no Monica Bellucci, I always say.

Plus, the title sequence features a really cool octopus.