...online at Phoenix Magazine.
Showing posts with label STANLEY TUCCI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label STANLEY TUCCI. Show all posts
Friday, May 1, 2026
Friday, October 25, 2024
SWEET SISTINE
Opening in theaters this weekend:
Conclave--Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, who has the unenviable job of presiding over a contentious election to replace a recently deceased Pope. With liberal, conservative and shifty middle-of-the-road candidates and their factions jockeying, the sequestered old fellows can't arrive at the needed two-thirds majority.
Stanley Tucci is a liberal who insists, demurely and unconvincingly, that he doesn't want the gig, but is willing to take it and will embrace a broad spectrum of progressive reforms if elected. Sergio Castellitto is a cheerfully reactionary, Italo-centric Cardinal who still resents Vatican II. John Lithgow, playing the middle, is all wounded innocence when told that there's a bad report about his last meeting with the late Pontiff. Then there's the mysterious Cardinal (Carlos Diehz) of Kabul, who shows up out of nowhere, having only recently been appointed by the deceased Pope unbeknownst to the College.
This tale of an improbable papal ascendancy almost challenges Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian VII for far-fetched wishful thinking. How possible, let alone plausible, any of it is I can't say. Nor do I much care. High ecclesiastical dramas are fun. Movies ranging from the naïvely pious Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) to the campy Monsignor (1982) to the wild and woolly Angels & Demons (2009) have all taken advantage of the splendor and grand theatrical ceremony of the Vatican, and the intrigues of its sumptuously outfitted habitués.
So too does Edward Berger, the German director of Conclave, adapted by Peter Straughan from the 2016 novel by the Brit Robert Harris. The movie starts a little slow, but very soon, abetted by the cinematography of Stéphane Fontaine and the fevered strings of Viktor Bertelmann's score, it becomes an exciting spectacle, swept along by Berger in a manner reminiscent at times of the great silents; he gives us carefully composed tableaux of clerics skulking about shadowy stairwells, or Eisenstein-ish masses of nuns under umbrellas, surging like tides into high-angle shots.
But Berger's eye on the settings also cuts through the superficial lushness and opulence to find an oppressive cheerlessness. The marble-paneled hallway into which Fiennes and his fellow Cardinals emerge from their austere dorm rooms during the conclave's lockdown has an institutional dreariness. The figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement glower down in reproach upon the Cardinals as they vote. Somehow the most hopeful presence in the film is a rather intrepid turtle.
Berger's skill is impressive, but it's the acting that makes Conclave lively and juicy, and ultimately even moving. Fiennes, always good at suffering, has rarely been so woebegone, or so wryly likable. Tucci and Lithgow could do roles like these in their sleep, and they're both crisply on point. Lucian Msamati and Brian F. O'Bryne are strong as a Nigerian Cardinal and as the Dean's sheepish aide, respectively. And as a large-and-in-charge, baleful-looking nun, Isabella Rossellini's role is almost wordless early on, but then she brings off her one big moment so flawlessly that her punctuating gesture wins applause.
Friday, September 28, 2018
YETI PERSISTED; JUDGE DREAD; FANCY FOOTWORK
Opening in the Valley this weekend:
Smallfoot--The premise of this animated musical kidflick is that Yeti exist, high in the Himalayas, and that they regard us humans just as we regard them--as legendary. These furry, not-at-all-abominable snow-people have a peaceful culture on a mountaintop above a cloudbank, based on a traditional creation story drawn on flat stones worn by the "Stonekeeper." Questioning this mythology can lead to banishment.
This is what happens to our hero Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum) after he encounters a human "smallfoot" and tells his neighbors about it. But he falls in with a secret society of other Yeti who question the literal veracity of the stones, among them Meechee (Zendaya), the daughter of the Stonekeeper (Common). Migo has an adventure below the clouds with a smallfoot named Percy (James Corden), the egocentric, publicity-hungry host of an Animal-Planet-style TV show.
I didn't expect this film do go very far beyond its clever, funny basic idea; I certainly didn't expect it to be a complex satire about skepticism and rational inquiry, and the forces that oppose it. But that's what Smallfoot rather insistently is, even as it fulfills the obligatory demands of the kid movie, complete with slapstick and the occasional flatulence joke.
This conventional stuff is maybe what keeps the movie from being quite the instant classic that it wants to be. There's one terrific rap number, performed by Common, in which the Stonekeeper explains how his orthodoxy arose, and what it does for his society. Otherwise, the songs are pleasant but not really exciting.
Overall, though, Smallfoot is a very pleasant surprise, witty and generous-hearted and expansive. Also, one of the questioning Yeti--voiced by LeBron James--is named "Gwangi," presumably in homage to the allosaurus title character of 1969's The Valley of Gwangi, my childhood favorite movie. So I'd be disposed to like Smallfoot in any case.
The Children Act--Here's another story about the negotiations between reason and faith. But this Brit drama, adapted from an Ian McEwan novel, is a little less lighthearted than Smallfoot.
Emma Thompson plays Fiona, a justice in London. Fiona is routinely charged with making godlike moral rulings on, say, whether a hospital can separate conjoined twins, at the expense of one twin's life and against the wishes of the parents. Her neglected professor husband (Stanley Tucci) announces his plan to have an affair, then leaves her.
While she's in the midst of this turmoil, she's assigned the case of a seventeen-year-old boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead), who's dying of leukemia and refuses to accept a potentially lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with the Jehovah's Witness faith in which he's been raised. Against her usual practice, Fiona decides to visit the boy in hospital, apparently to decide about the depth and seriousness of his commitment to refusing the treatment.
She finds Adam to be an ecstatic, flamboyantly self-dramatizing fellow, and the two bond at once, in part because of a shared passion for music. But it proves difficult to retreat back to her perch of legal abstraction after her short trip to the world of real humans that her decisions effect. Her connection with Adam continues after her ruling, in unexpected but painfully plausible ways.
Those of us who worship at the altar of Emma Thompson will get a potent dose of her brilliance here. It would be unfair to say that this is in spite of the material rather than because of it, but I think it's partially true, too. Although the quality and intelligence of the production is undeniable, there's something uneasily reductive about the story's approach to its central characters. The persistent suggestion is that Fiona is haunted by her failure to reproduce, and that this is what leaves her emotionally unequipped to deal with the intensity of Adam's, or indeed of her husband's, feelings for her. This feels too thin and pat for the woman that Thompson shows us.
Richard Eyre's direction is tightly proficient, the dialogue is crisp and swift--the script is by McEwan--and the supporting players are all spot-on, especially Whitehead (the everyman soldier protagonist from Dunkirk). But the movie is built around Thompson's performance; it's one of those vehicles where a poised and self-controlled central character is set on a collision course with an Oscar-clip meltdown. Thompson's trademark arch, ironic tones that modulate into a mildly beseeching singsong at the ends of sentences bespeak a self-deprecating reserve that's ripe to be punctured, and Thompson delivers as usual, pushing her performance even past this movie's limits.
Playing Sunday afternoon only at FilmBar is La Chana, the documentary on the famed Spanish flamenco dancer. Check out my review online at Phoenix Magazine.
Smallfoot--The premise of this animated musical kidflick is that Yeti exist, high in the Himalayas, and that they regard us humans just as we regard them--as legendary. These furry, not-at-all-abominable snow-people have a peaceful culture on a mountaintop above a cloudbank, based on a traditional creation story drawn on flat stones worn by the "Stonekeeper." Questioning this mythology can lead to banishment.
This is what happens to our hero Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum) after he encounters a human "smallfoot" and tells his neighbors about it. But he falls in with a secret society of other Yeti who question the literal veracity of the stones, among them Meechee (Zendaya), the daughter of the Stonekeeper (Common). Migo has an adventure below the clouds with a smallfoot named Percy (James Corden), the egocentric, publicity-hungry host of an Animal-Planet-style TV show.
I didn't expect this film do go very far beyond its clever, funny basic idea; I certainly didn't expect it to be a complex satire about skepticism and rational inquiry, and the forces that oppose it. But that's what Smallfoot rather insistently is, even as it fulfills the obligatory demands of the kid movie, complete with slapstick and the occasional flatulence joke.
This conventional stuff is maybe what keeps the movie from being quite the instant classic that it wants to be. There's one terrific rap number, performed by Common, in which the Stonekeeper explains how his orthodoxy arose, and what it does for his society. Otherwise, the songs are pleasant but not really exciting.
Overall, though, Smallfoot is a very pleasant surprise, witty and generous-hearted and expansive. Also, one of the questioning Yeti--voiced by LeBron James--is named "Gwangi," presumably in homage to the allosaurus title character of 1969's The Valley of Gwangi, my childhood favorite movie. So I'd be disposed to like Smallfoot in any case.
The Children Act--Here's another story about the negotiations between reason and faith. But this Brit drama, adapted from an Ian McEwan novel, is a little less lighthearted than Smallfoot.
Emma Thompson plays Fiona, a justice in London. Fiona is routinely charged with making godlike moral rulings on, say, whether a hospital can separate conjoined twins, at the expense of one twin's life and against the wishes of the parents. Her neglected professor husband (Stanley Tucci) announces his plan to have an affair, then leaves her.
While she's in the midst of this turmoil, she's assigned the case of a seventeen-year-old boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead), who's dying of leukemia and refuses to accept a potentially lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with the Jehovah's Witness faith in which he's been raised. Against her usual practice, Fiona decides to visit the boy in hospital, apparently to decide about the depth and seriousness of his commitment to refusing the treatment.
She finds Adam to be an ecstatic, flamboyantly self-dramatizing fellow, and the two bond at once, in part because of a shared passion for music. But it proves difficult to retreat back to her perch of legal abstraction after her short trip to the world of real humans that her decisions effect. Her connection with Adam continues after her ruling, in unexpected but painfully plausible ways.
Those of us who worship at the altar of Emma Thompson will get a potent dose of her brilliance here. It would be unfair to say that this is in spite of the material rather than because of it, but I think it's partially true, too. Although the quality and intelligence of the production is undeniable, there's something uneasily reductive about the story's approach to its central characters. The persistent suggestion is that Fiona is haunted by her failure to reproduce, and that this is what leaves her emotionally unequipped to deal with the intensity of Adam's, or indeed of her husband's, feelings for her. This feels too thin and pat for the woman that Thompson shows us.
Richard Eyre's direction is tightly proficient, the dialogue is crisp and swift--the script is by McEwan--and the supporting players are all spot-on, especially Whitehead (the everyman soldier protagonist from Dunkirk). But the movie is built around Thompson's performance; it's one of those vehicles where a poised and self-controlled central character is set on a collision course with an Oscar-clip meltdown. Thompson's trademark arch, ironic tones that modulate into a mildly beseeching singsong at the ends of sentences bespeak a self-deprecating reserve that's ripe to be punctured, and Thompson delivers as usual, pushing her performance even past this movie's limits.
Playing Sunday afternoon only at FilmBar is La Chana, the documentary on the famed Spanish flamenco dancer. Check out my review online at Phoenix Magazine.
Friday, March 7, 2014
BARK IN TIME
The format of the Peabody’s Improbable History segments on the old Bullwinkle cartoons was always pretty much the same. Wryly erudite Mr. Peabody and his enthusiastic ward Sherman would use their miraculous time machine the WABAC to visit some major historical figure. They would find Magellan or Napoleon or Marco Polo or Paul Revere or Beethoven or Zebulon Pike or whoever it was, usually personified as a radio-comedy ethnic stereotype, faced with some absurd obstacle to their greatest historical achievement. Peabody would then offer an equally absurd solution.
The implication was that we owed the Western Tradition to the paradoxical retroactive intercession of a little white dog in spectacles and a red bowtie who spoke like a Boston-Brahmin academic. Sherman served as his gee-whiz Boswell, and as audience for the excruciating puns with which Peabody closed his adventures.
When I was a kid, Mr. Peabody was who I wanted to be when I grew up. He wasn’t my only role model—there was also Mr. Spock, and the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, and maybe Tom Lehrer. You get the idea. I wanted to be calm and benignly ironic yet genuinely and helpfully engaged with humanity. The result, of course, was an insufferable pedantic know-it-all who got beat up a lot.
The aspiration hasn’t worked out for me in adulthood, either—I’m too slow-witted, emotional and sentimental to get anywhere near that ideal. But I still love Peabody. There’s a tiny Peabody standing on my desk as I type these words, arms spread wide as if inviting an embrace.
This is all by way of making clear how complicated my feelings are about the feature film Mr. Peabody & Sherman, opening today.
Because Peabody is such an icon for me, I was, on the one hand, delighted to see him widely celebrated. On the other, I went into the film with trepidation, knowing that the simple, silly conceit of the crudely-animated original cartoons would be twisted to fit the tropes of the contemporary animated feature for kids.
The new film, directed by Rob Minkoff from a script by Craig Wright and several other hands, devises an adventure which allows our heroes visits to the French Revolution—Peabody rides a tumbrel and narrowly escapes the Guillotine—ancient Egypt, Leonardo’s Florence and the Trojan War. But of course all this must be strung along a present-day plot about Peabody’s custody of Sherman being challenged after the boy gets in a fight with a bullying girl at school, and the sting Peabody feels when Sherman resents the girl calling him “a dog.” Sherman gives the bully-girl an unauthorized ride in the WABAC, which results in peril to the space-time continuum, but also to a softening of feelings between the two.
If you find this sort of thing unworthy of the original Peabody’s dignity, I agree. But taken on its own merits, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is very cute, and though I could have done with less of the big time-warp climax, I must admit that the film isn’t dumbed-down, either—it’s full of ingenious gags, many of them witty cultural allusions but a surprising number of them mildly scatological low comedy. It even has a couple of pretty good, by which I mean terrible, puns.
Ty Burrell and Max Charles sound passably reminiscent of Bill Scott (incredibly, the same guy who voiced Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right) and Walter Tetley from the originals. The cast also includes Stanley Tucci as Leonardo, Lake Bell as Mona Lisa, Mel Brooks as Einstein and Patrick Warburton as a frat-boy-like Agamemnon.
It all works; my eleven-year-old was thoroughly entertained. A Peabody purist might growl at the idea of Peabody being subject to ordinary paternal anxieties—it takes him, somehow, from civilized to, well, tame.
But for most audiences this would be the pickiest of nitpicking. Mr. Peabody & Sherman is charming, and it’s built on a pretty sound joke—time travel is easy; parenting is hard.
When I was a kid, Mr. Peabody was who I wanted to be when I grew up. He wasn’t my only role model—there was also Mr. Spock, and the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, and maybe Tom Lehrer. You get the idea. I wanted to be calm and benignly ironic yet genuinely and helpfully engaged with humanity. The result, of course, was an insufferable pedantic know-it-all who got beat up a lot.
The aspiration hasn’t worked out for me in adulthood, either—I’m too slow-witted, emotional and sentimental to get anywhere near that ideal. But I still love Peabody. There’s a tiny Peabody standing on my desk as I type these words, arms spread wide as if inviting an embrace.
This is all by way of making clear how complicated my feelings are about the feature film Mr. Peabody & Sherman, opening today.
Because Peabody is such an icon for me, I was, on the one hand, delighted to see him widely celebrated. On the other, I went into the film with trepidation, knowing that the simple, silly conceit of the crudely-animated original cartoons would be twisted to fit the tropes of the contemporary animated feature for kids.
The new film, directed by Rob Minkoff from a script by Craig Wright and several other hands, devises an adventure which allows our heroes visits to the French Revolution—Peabody rides a tumbrel and narrowly escapes the Guillotine—ancient Egypt, Leonardo’s Florence and the Trojan War. But of course all this must be strung along a present-day plot about Peabody’s custody of Sherman being challenged after the boy gets in a fight with a bullying girl at school, and the sting Peabody feels when Sherman resents the girl calling him “a dog.” Sherman gives the bully-girl an unauthorized ride in the WABAC, which results in peril to the space-time continuum, but also to a softening of feelings between the two.
If you find this sort of thing unworthy of the original Peabody’s dignity, I agree. But taken on its own merits, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is very cute, and though I could have done with less of the big time-warp climax, I must admit that the film isn’t dumbed-down, either—it’s full of ingenious gags, many of them witty cultural allusions but a surprising number of them mildly scatological low comedy. It even has a couple of pretty good, by which I mean terrible, puns.
Ty Burrell and Max Charles sound passably reminiscent of Bill Scott (incredibly, the same guy who voiced Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right) and Walter Tetley from the originals. The cast also includes Stanley Tucci as Leonardo, Lake Bell as Mona Lisa, Mel Brooks as Einstein and Patrick Warburton as a frat-boy-like Agamemnon.
It all works; my eleven-year-old was thoroughly entertained. A Peabody purist might growl at the idea of Peabody being subject to ordinary paternal anxieties—it takes him, somehow, from civilized to, well, tame.
But for most audiences this would be the pickiest of nitpicking. Mr. Peabody & Sherman is charming, and it’s built on a pretty sound joke—time travel is easy; parenting is hard.
Friday, March 1, 2013
WALKING TALL
A story with a hero named Jack is always promising. The Ripper aside, fictional Jacks tend to be plucky, resourceful working-class fellows who overcome adversity through courage and native wit, without benefit of being knights or princes. Indeed, in latter-day retellings they sometimes even get the Princess—and while killing a giant may be impressive, being accepted by the 1% is truly the stuff of fairy tale
The Cornish folktales known since at least the 18th Century as Jack the Giant Killer have been adapted for the movies at least once already, in a pleasant 1962 version manifestly made in imitation of the Ray Harryhausen classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The lavish new version opening today, directed by Bryan Singer and called Jack the Giant Slayer, borrows elements from the earlier film but applies them to a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk.
The new movie’s Jack is played by Nicholas Hoult of Warm Bodies, whose long, homely-handsome face lends itself to the idea of a farm-boy hero. The script, by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney, cleverly makes Jack’s acquisition of the Magic Beans plausible without either violating the spirit of the story or making him a hopeless dupe. The plot is also embellished to add a sweet Princess (Eleanor Tomlinson), a fretful King (Ian McShane), a scheming rat of a courtier-villain (Stanley Tucci, sly as ever), and a valiant guardsman (Ewan McGregor), among other secondary characters, all effective.
But of course this movie must stand or fall by its giants, and it’s nice to report that they’re terrific—squalid and scabby and scary, but with a certain uncouth grandeur and with pungently distinctive characterizations, from the two-headed alpha male (the left head voiced by Bill Nighy, the gibbering right by John Kassir) down through various aggrieved subordinates and malcontents. They have pathos and a bitter dignity along with their menace; you want to see them defeated, but you don’t hate them.
When episodic high fantasy of this sort is done right—soberly but not somberly, with unpretentious high spirits, a generous heart and a well-structured story that sticks to the rules it sets up—it can offer one of the keenest pleasures of which the movies are capable. Jack the Giant Slayer comes closer to nailing this atmosphere than any I’ve seen in a while, much closer than the remake of Clash of the Titans from a couple of years back.
I don’t think I could ever feel as warmly toward CGI effects as I do toward stop-motion, but that’s personal nostalgia. And it should be said that Giant Slayer is likely to be a little too frightening for smaller kids. But that’s not a criticism either; it just means that they’ve taken their giants with proper seriousness. Jack the Giant Slayer is a strong entertainment. Only in its final minute or two does it strike a very slightly sour note, when it links the story’s legacy to an ongoing aristocratic fetish that is unworthy of a self-respecting Jack.
But of course this movie must stand or fall by its giants, and it’s nice to report that they’re terrific—squalid and scabby and scary, but with a certain uncouth grandeur and with pungently distinctive characterizations, from the two-headed alpha male (the left head voiced by Bill Nighy, the gibbering right by John Kassir) down through various aggrieved subordinates and malcontents. They have pathos and a bitter dignity along with their menace; you want to see them defeated, but you don’t hate them.
When episodic high fantasy of this sort is done right—soberly but not somberly, with unpretentious high spirits, a generous heart and a well-structured story that sticks to the rules it sets up—it can offer one of the keenest pleasures of which the movies are capable. Jack the Giant Slayer comes closer to nailing this atmosphere than any I’ve seen in a while, much closer than the remake of Clash of the Titans from a couple of years back.
I don’t think I could ever feel as warmly toward CGI effects as I do toward stop-motion, but that’s personal nostalgia. And it should be said that Giant Slayer is likely to be a little too frightening for smaller kids. But that’s not a criticism either; it just means that they’ve taken their giants with proper seriousness. Jack the Giant Slayer is a strong entertainment. Only in its final minute or two does it strike a very slightly sour note, when it links the story’s legacy to an ongoing aristocratic fetish that is unworthy of a self-respecting Jack.
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