Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
There is an immediate feeling after watching a nearly 3-1/2 hour-long movie packed with top-tier performances and strong imagery to feel like you've seen something of heft and substance. That's how I felt after watching The Brutalist - nominated for 10 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor & Actress, Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, and Original Score - but after some time to reflect on the experience, it turns out to be much sound and fury signifying little, but elevated on the back of Adrien Brody's performance.
Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who arrives in America in 1947. After a graphic visit to a prostitute to have his knob polished, he migrates to a small town in Pennsylvania where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has started a custom furniture business with his wife Audrey (Emma Laird). Attila has anglicized his name and converted to Catholicism, assimilating to American life. He gives László a bed in a store room and a job.
One day the son of a wealthy area tycoon, Harry (Joe Alwyn, best known as Taylor Swift's last ex-boyfriend) hires the store to revamp his father's study, building bookshelves, etc. as a surprise birthday gift from him and his twin sister X (Stacy Martin). László creates a stark modern space with shelves hidden behind swinging doors and having a sole lounge chair made of bent chrome tubing with straps for support - an arty lawn chair - as the centerpiece.
Daddy Harrison (Guy Pearce) comes home to find the workers in his home and blows a gasket, tossing them out and refusing to pay for the work or materials. Annoyed by Lászlo, Audrey suggests he find somewhere else to live and Attila accuses him of making a pass at his wife, which hadn't happened, so off László goes.
A few years later, he's working as a coal loader at a shipyard when Harrison appears to take him to lunch. The library he exploded over has become the subject of magazine profiles making him look like a bold patron of design. He looked into Lászlo's background and found he was a heralded architect back in his native Hungary and hires him to design a community center in honor of his mother with a budget of $850,000 ($11.2 million in today's debased currency).
Lászlo's concept is radical and inventive, but work begins and moves along until a train wreck bringing materials causes Harrison to explode again and shut down the project. Lászlo goes to New York City with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a journalist who Harrison pulled strings to get her and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe, to work as a draftsman at an architectural firm. Due to famine, she is wheelchair-bound from osteoarthritis. After several years, a representative hunts Lászlo down to inform him the project is a go again and he is needed back.
The mercurial nature of Harrison's behavior is a constant source of tension which explodes in an out-of-nowhere moment which knocks the film off-kilter and raises questions of what overall points director/co-writer Brady Corbet is trying to make with his epic film? Is it that evil American rich people exploit immigrants while loathing them? Then why does Harrison seek out Lászlo to build this monument? Is it that America is rotten with anti-Semitism and Jews need to go to Israel. Considering the current politics & deep anti-Zionist (read: anti-Semitic) views of much of Hollyweird, that's some bad timing? Other than the vague sense of being an industrialist, we never really know where Harrison gets his wealth from.
The epilogue set in 1980 at a retrospective of Lászlo's career also explains the design of the center and what it represented to him and it smacks of telling, not showing, after 3-1/2 hours when there would've been plenty of opportunities to reveal these details.
But these are the questions that surface after watching The Brutalist. During the ride, it's stunning to realize that Corbet and company have made this 3h 35m period movie set between 1947-1958, filmed in VistaVision, a format which provides a big negative area and was last used for an American production in 1961(!), for a budget of under $10 million by filming in Hungary to represent Pennsylvania. It really shows that half of Hollyweird's financial woes are due to blowing massive sums of money on their projects rather than working lean.
The performances are solid & worthy of nomination across the board. As the missus says, Brody does suffering well. With his big eyes and awkward features, he is almost certain to win the same way he did nearly a quarter-century ago with The Pianist. Somehow Pearce has never been nominated before despite three decades in this business, and he would've had a good shot to win if not for Kieran Culkin's lead performance in A Real Pain being jammed into Supporting Actor. Jones is fine, though she's stuck with the Stoic Suffering Wife of the Tormented Genius role.
While I found my copy of the film on the high seas, the 4K 1.66:1 aspect image still retains the filmic grain look of the VistaVision source. Lol Crawley's nominated cinematography has a good shot in a tough field, especially with Conclave shamefully excluded in order to nominate Emilia Perez for everything. I'm sure the inevitable Criterion Collection release will look great, perhaps broken over two discs to match the two acts with intermission structure.
Corbet's previous film was the Natalie Portman-starring Vox Lux which I didn't write a review for, but logged it as a 3/10 Skip It score so while I can't remember what was bad about it, it was bad. He's definitely come up in the world, though according to this takedown - Why The Brutalist Is Brutal To Watch - which rakes it for getting pretty much everything wrong about the architecture and motivations of designers. While it's an easy path to call the runtime brutal, the cause of The Brutalist's woes started with the blueprints.
After enduring the stinky dumpster fire "musical" Emilia Pérez for this year's Oscars Death March, it's now time for the actual musical up for 10 Academy Awards - Best Picture, Actress, Supporting Actress, Costume Design, Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Original Score, Production Design, Sound, and Visual Effects - the long-anticipated adaptation of the first act of the 2003 Broadway hit Wicked, the prequel to The Wizard of Oz and revised origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West. The highest-grossing nominated movie nominated for Best Picture, just edging out Dune: Part Two, it's one of the token popular movies included to lure viewers into watching the telecast to see what movie the Normies haven't even heard of win.
We open a shot of the Witch's hat in a puddle of water while word spreads that some child from Kansas had killed her. News of her demise travels to Munchkinland and there is great celebration including a visit from Glinda (Ariana Grande, nominated for Supporting Actress). As she's about to float away in her bubble, a Munchkin asks if it's true Glinda knew the Wicked Witch? After a pause, she admits that she had crossed paths with her in school.
We flashback to see Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman) of Munchkinland, who loves his wife (Courtney-Mae Briggs) but as soon as he leaves for business, she welcomes in a stranger for hanky panky. (I haven't see the play, but I suspect by the way they never show her gentleman caller's face that he's the Wizard.) Nine months later she gives birth to a bouncing baby girl whose skin is green. The Governor is horrified and orders her taken away and the CGI bear who is the family nanny does so, but raises Elphaba (Karis Musongole as a child; Best Actress nominee Cynthia Erivo as an adult).
Later, the couple have another daughter, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who is in a wheelchair due to her premature birth. Because racism, Elphaba is bullied and when angered manifests powers like being able to levitate rocks and fling them. But her powers aren't controlled.
Years later, Governor Thropp takes Nessarose to attend Shiz University, which I gather is like Hogwarts without the pale English kids. When Elphaba accidentally unleashes her powers the courtyard, she is spotted by Shiz's Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), who offers to enroll Elphaba and privately tutor her in sorcery.
Also arriving is conceited brat pretty girl Galinda (Glinda's original name) with a massive wardrobe that runs hard into the pink spectrum. When she tries to kiss up to Morrible, it's interpreted as volunteering to share her private suite with Elphaba and she gets an unwanted roomie and the beginnings of a frenemyship begins. Adding to the tensions is the arrival of a conceited prince, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton), who I found hard to read as to his intentions because I saw Frozen and know princes can be villains.
Running parallel is a subplot about animal persecution & bigotry as the last animal professor, the goat Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage), is first victimized with hateful comments on his blackboards then dismissed, with his replacement unveiling the Wizard's new invention, a cage which will hold animals and prevent their learning to speak. This outrages Elphaba and causes another display of her powers, earning her an invitation to go to the Emerald City and meet the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum, Death Wish) where she finds out what Dorothy will encounter was much more sinister in his younger days.
I'm a fan of musicals and I knew that it was considered shocking for the Broadway Wicked to lose Best Score, Book, and Musical to the bonkers Sesame Street-on-crack Avenue Q at the Tony Awards, but after watching Wicked: Part 1 I think that was the correct result. Read any of my musical reviews (click the hashtag up top) and I continually assert that musicals live or die on the quality of their songs and Avenue Q is wall-to-wall bangers (e.g. "The Internet Is For Porn", "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist", "It Sucks To Be Me", "My Girlfriend Who Lives In Canada") while, beyond the instant earworm & act-closing "Defying Gravity" and "Popular", the only other song that grabbed me was Fireyo's introductory "Dancing Through Life." To be fair, I've only heard the score once and I've downloaded the original cast album to give it another spin; this is my first impression.
More problematic is the excessive length of the movie which clocks in at 2h 32m without credits and, as the Part 1 indicates, only covers the first act of the show which minus intermission is 2h 30m long. The desire to wring twice as many ticket sales out of fans has led to a situation where what was 90 minutes on stage is padded by an hour and it makes it a slog to get through. The excuse that people can't sit through a three-hour movie is rebutted by the fact that the top four highest grossing movies are Avatar (162 mins theatrically), Avengers: Endgame (181 mins), Avatar: The Way of Water (192 mins), and Titanic (195 mins) and this year's The Brutalist is 202 mins. They just wanted to milk it.
Director Jon M. Chu is familiar with musicals and dance movies, beginning his career with Step Up 2: The Streets and Step Up 3D and, after his big breakthrough hit Crazy Rich Asians, directed the film of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In The Heights and while he stages some huge musical set pieces on expansive practical sets (enhanced and extended with CGI), they all feel kinda bland and flat.
Part of that is due to Wicked's controversial cinematography and color grading which I've seen at least two YouTube videos analyzing what's going on with it and why it looks washed out and blah compared to The Wizard of Oz's contrasty Technicolor imagery. They put in ridiculous amounts of work (the carpenters list in the credits is like VFX artist lists these days) to construct these elaborate sets - they planted 9 MILLION tulips for the opening shot of Munchkinland and extended those with CGI for only a few shots which most will think is all CGI - and detailed costumes only to make it look hazy.
Part of my ambivalence toward this movie stemmed from Erivo's hissy fit over a fan edit of the film's poster to resemble the Broadway show's key art which covered Elphaba's eyes. Erivo posted a statement to social media crying victim & feeling denied blah-blah-woof-woof, why don't you just call everyone RAAAAAAAAAACIST, Toots. She walked it back a bit after someone from the studio probably told her to get the [heck] over herself before she torpedoes the hundreds of millions of dollars investment the way Rachel Zegler has wrecked Disney's live-action Snow White cash grab. Erivo just comes off as mean in the media with a chip on her shoulder.
So it was a surprise and relief that she is quite appealing as Elphaba and has quite of set of pipes on her; the girl can SANG. It makes the abuse she's subjected to by the United Colors of Bigotry denizens of Oz even more annoying and serves as a reminder that Chronicle made clear: Bullying people with superpowers results in very bad things happening.
The bigger surprise is Grande who was a teen starlet on Nickelodeon's Victorious beginning when she was 16 before branching off to music pop stardom. She's basically making her feature film debut here and she kills it, making Galinda into the Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon's role in Election) if Hogwarts. She's vain, entitled, and everything her "Good Witch of the East" title covers up. It's not a one-note mean girl take on the character as she eventually begins to accept Elphaba. The most effective acting between the two is during a silent dance off during a school party which changes the dynamics between them and their classmates.
Yeoh and Goldblum are their usual selves, but SNL's Bowen Yang, as a gender-swapped Pfannee, is just doing his gay guy shtick from SNL and it's distracting.
While I didn't hate Wicked, I think it's badly flawed by its bloated length and washed-out visuals. I'm not holding my breath for the conclusion due in November, Wicked: For Good (bad title), but if you're a fan of the show and just gotta have it in your life, perhaps you'll be more entertained.
Score: 5/10. Catch on cable/streaming. (Coming to Peacock on March 21, 2025)
If it seems like the world has gone crazier than usual in recent years, let's add to the fun with a phrase even less plausible than "Super Bowl Champion Detroit Lions": Pamela Anderson gives an Oscar-worthy performance in The Last Showgirl.
No, I'm not kidding.
Anderson stars as Shelly Gardner, a....let's go with "mature" veteran of Le Razzle Dazzle, the last old-school Vegas revue show on the Strip. She's been with the show over 30 years and serves as a den mother to younger members Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song, Dollface). Shelly truly believes in the show and what it represents while the girls just view it as a job, earning constant chiding from Shelly who doesn't care for the hyper-sexualized shows (a la Showgirls) or more spectacle-oriented presentations from Cirque de Soleil which have taken over Sin City.
However, all good things come to an end as stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista sporting long hair for the first time I can recall) announces that due to dwindling attendance, the casino management has decided to shutter Le Razzle Dazzle in favor of the "Dirty Circus" show which has already taken the prime nights in the showroom. The last performance will be in two weeks and the youngsters start going out for auditions.
Amidst this upheaval arrives Hannah (Billie Lourd, Scream Queens), Shelly's estranged daughter who doesn't respect her mother's life choices, complaining about how Shelly would leave her in the car with a GameBoy while she did two shows a night. She lived with family friends most of the time and is now a college student nearing graduation which is news to Shelly who gets her age wrong and asks if she's chosen a major.
On the other side of showgirling is Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, leaning waaaay too hard into her current "I'm over 60 and going to be fat" shtick; have your True Lies and Trading Places scenes cued up as eye bleach), who left the show several years previously and is now a cocktail waitress struggling for shifts against younger women. Shelly's attempt at auditioning reveals that beyond her age (57), her chops aren't that great and she had coasted on youth and looks.
The terrific and sadly departed singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl had a song called "What Do Pretty Girls Do?" with lyrics that include:
She was a party girl, stayed up 'til the small hours Now she's embarrassing and everybody laughs At the girl with the face that could drive her baby wild Now wasn't she the child with everything?
You should have seen her with her head held high Now what do pretty girls do? She used to be the same as me or you Now what do pretty girls do?
Well they get older just like everybody else She never thought she'd have to take care of herself
The theme of what happens to attractive women as they age is a hot topic in the culture now especially with the wildly overrated The Substance likely to earn Demi Moore a Best Actress Oscar at age 62 for her gutsy full monty performance which has elevated her profile into Serious Actress territory after over 40 years in the business.
Anderson, to be kind, was starting in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement of regard for her thespian abilities. Whether it's her Playboy centerfold origins to being a Baywatch beauty to her tabloid infamy as half of the couple that put the term "sex tape" into common vernacular with then-husband, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, to her quickie marriage/divorce to Kid Rock, or the fact that her big attempt at crossing over the big screen from the boob tube (pun definitely intended) was 1996's Barb Wire, a movie only remembered (if that) for its credits where she dances around while being hosed down to a rocked-up cover of "Word Up" (very NSFW video), when she started going out in public without makeup, it was easy to see it as a cheap ploy to be taken seriously when "looking old" is a common gambit along with "imitating real people" or "get fat/ugly" to win gold.
Except here it serves a legitimately good performance, all the more shocking because there was NOTHING in the previous 35 years of ubiquitous fame hinting at the possibility of such a turn from her. She imbues Shelly with notes of pathos and naivete as someone who so devoted herself to the show that she cocooned herself from reality nor thought it could ever end. If suggesting to factory workers whose jobs were exported to the other side of the world that they "learn to code" seems glib and unrealistic if they were approaching retirement age, what's the career path for a AARP-eligible Vegas showgirl?
But Shelly isn't a passive victim here, she's responsible for her choices whether in not raising her daughter or preparing for the inevitable. And her lack of empathy at times is illustrated when one of the girls shows up at her place, upset that she may never be able to return home and Shelly blows her off because she doesn't want to make time for her. Anderson doesn't try to make Shelly into a porcelain doll and it's a brave choice which, while the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild nominated her and Curtis for, the Oscars snubbed her in favor of a man and virtue signalling. Of all the actresses who got shafted this year - Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Lily-Rose Depp - Anderson has the greatest right to feel ignored
The rest of the cast turns in good work ranging from Shipka's naive 19-year-old to Curtis's sun-baked senior citizen. (She looks like Lin Shaye's character in There's Something About Mary.) The only poor fit is Lourd who is a decade older than her role and looks it.
Director Gia Coppola (yes, of the Nepo Baby factory Coppola family; the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola) directs Kate Gersten's screenplay with a gritty style that mashes up semi-documentary realism with dreamy interludes of Shelly gazing at the Vegas skyline, the part that doesn't get seen in the movies. There is also a weird montage featuring a drunk Annette dancing on a platform that's a little too surreal.
The look of Autumn Cheyenne Durald Arkapaw's (Black Panther: Wakada Forever) cinematography, achieved by shooting on Super 16mm film with wild anamorphic lenses takes some getting used to as everything towards the sides of the frame is out-of-focus and distorted. (If I wasn't watching on a S-tier OLED TV, I'd complain to the projectionist.)
It's hard to tell whether The Last Showgirl will propel Anderson into a late-life career as an actual actress exhibiting range or this is just a one-off moment where the multiverse glitched and we glimpsed something previously unimaginable, but if you're into small indie character dramas with decent writing and good performances you should catch this show before it closes.
People complain that there aren't any original movies anymore - everything is a sequel or based on IPs like games - but when something different does come along, they don't seem to go see it. Such was the case with Better Man (which grossed ~$20M on a $110M budget) and now the modestly successful (though poorly marketed) Companion. Considering how generally mediocre movies are these days - especially the dreck being nominated for Oscars - it's nice to be able to recommend a good one for a change, though you should take my word for it and not watch the spoilerific trailer.
It opens with Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Heretic) at a supermarket musing in voiceover that the two times in her life she was happiest were the day she met Josh (Jack Quaid, The Boys) and the day she killed him. (Well, that's a statement of purpose if there ever was one.) We watch them meet cute in the produce section as he causes an avalanche of oranges from the bin.
Then we see her waking up in their car as they head deep into the woods for a weekend with friends at what one described as a rustic little cabin which as Jack notes is none of those things as it's a modern mansion owned by Sergey (Rupert Friend, Homeland). Also attending are Sergey's mistress, Kat (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever), Eli (Harvey Guillén, What We Do In The Shadows) and his partner Patrick (Lukas Gage, Fargo). Iris is worried that Kat hates her and Kat does throw shade, but in general everyone has a great time, getting drunk and dancing.
The next morning, Iris goes down to the lake and is joined by Sergey who proceeds to try and force himself on her. Back at the house, the others are waking up and then shocked to see Iris covered in blood, trying to explain what had happened. Jack commands her to go to sleep and her eyes cloud over and she freezes revealing (to those who didn't see the trailer) that she's a robot. Dun dun DUHN!!! Many hijinks ensue.
I'd known about the twist before watching it, so I was spotting all the tells about Iris and the remarks Kat and Sergey made toward her. But I was thankfully unaware of where the story was going and that made for a kicky fun ride. Sure, it's got elements borrowed from and reminiscent of Blade Runner, I, Robot, The Terminator, Her, Ex Machina, The Stepford Wives and the dreadful Subservience, but it mixes and matches the pieces into something fairly fresh if familiar.
Thatcher is a fresh up-and-comer with her roles here and Heretic as well as playing the young version of Juliette Lewis's character in Yellowjackets, whose voice Thatcher's sounds a lot like here while her look is what the missus described as "Goth Zooey Deschanel." (I went with a cross between Thora Birch's and Scarlet Johansson's characters in Ghost World.) Keep an eye on her starting here.
Writer-director Drew Hancock makes a smart feature debut here, investing the story with its own thoughts about the nature of love, control, identity and self-determination. Even when it's being a bit too familiar or tropey, he keeps things on the level. He was the co-creator and sole writer of a great little series that only ran 8 episodes called My Dead Ex (currently streaming on Paramount+) which you should check out.
Long story short, Companion is a tidy little black comedy with some cool twists and turns. Just don't watch the trailer to get maximum surprise value.
There is a thing called the "Black List" which names the favorite unproduced screenplays kicking around Hollywood that year. In 2020, the List included Jared Rosenberg's script for Flight Risk, a buzzy high-concept movie that eventually attracted Mel Gibson to direct and Mark Wahlberg to star. After watching it, I'm not sure what anyone saw in it.
It opens with Winston (Topher Grace, That '70s Show) watching his Cup Noodles ramen cooking in a fritzing microwave in a rural Alaska motel. Suddenly, the door is kicked open and U.S. Marshals led by Madolyn (Michelle Dockery, Downton Abbey) storm in and arrest Winston who immediately offers to testify against the Moretti crime family, for which he was their accountant, in exchange for immunity and protection. She calls her superiors to see if they'll go for the deal and after a couple of days, the deal goes through.
Needing to get back to civilization to catch a flight back to New York City, they charter a small plane to carry them to Anchorage. Because he's considered a flight risk (roll credits!), she handcuffs and shackles him to his seat behind the Pilot (Marky Mark, Ted). The Pilot is a chatty good ol' boy which annoys Madolyn, though not so much that she doesn't notice a scratch on his neck and a spot of blood on his sleeve after they take off over the mountainous wilderness.
During the flight, Winston spots the pilot's license which is to be displayed and realizes the Pilot isn't him. Since she has headphones on to hear the Pilot and not Winston, who is an annoying chatterbox, he can't get her attention and being chained down he can't get her attention. Eventually, Madolyn catches the Pilot in a lie about knowing the pilot who flew her in and a struggle ensures revealing the Pilot killed the real pilot and is there to kill Winston and by circumstance Madolyn.
After managing to tase the Pilot, the big problem is that she doesn't know how to fly the plane, operate the radio, and the GPS seems to be out. Luckily, she has a satellite phone and is able to contact her boss who finds a pilot to talk her through things. But another problem is that in between sadistic threats of what he's going to do to them when he gets free by the Pilot, he keeps making references to details that he shouldn't know if he's just a hitman for the Morettis. Ruh-roh.
While the premise of a three-hander in an enclosed space is sound, the script too patly doles out the revelations, red herrings and twists like how Madolyn has a Dark Secret in her past and hasn't been in the field for a while and Has Something To Prove, but doesn't know who to trust. Winston is just annoying and not in an amusing Leo Getz way. And other than Marky Mark shaving his head into a bald patch, his character seems almost too crazy to be trusted with an important hit job.
Gibson hasn't directed a film since his Oscar-nominated work in 2016's Hacksaw Ridge, following Apocalypto in 2006. What about this trifle attracted is eye is a mystery other than probably working with his Father Stu co-star Wahlberg. While the $25M budget is pretty small for movies these days, it's hard to see where the money went other than big salaries for Gibson and Wahlberg and some visual effects for the scale is remarkably small with only two sets and two locations, airports, the motel room and the plane itself.
While not especially bad, Flight Risk just doesn't quite land with the effect that the folks who voted it to the Black List apparently saw. At least it's short, at a still slightly too long 91 minutes.
Gone with the Wind, Oppenheimer, Forrest Gump, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Chicago, Mary Poppins and Emilia Pérez all are in Oscar history as recipients of 13 nominations, except it is almost certain that you barely recognize the last name and even more unlikely to have even seen it despite being on the top streaming service for a few months now.
As tenuous a grasp the Oscars had on legitimacy after a couple of decades of suspect & downright horrible nominations & winners - forget Shakespeare In Love, who wants to defend The Shape of Water (aka Grinding Nemo) as Best Picture? - they went all in this year with their us-versus-the-audience (and American voter) overkill of love for Emilia Pérez, the most DEI of DEI nominees. Elevated as a political tantrum over recent election results, it is ironically imploding due to political correctness and cancellation coming for its star and only reason anyone pretends to like this bizarre mess of bad music and bad storytelling.
Nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actress (LOL), Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, International (non-English), Sound, and two Song noms which caused the broadcast to not perform the nominated songs, it's the next stop on the Oscars Death March.
We open meeting Rita Castro (Zoe Saldaña, Lioness), a lawyer in Mexico City who is concocting a defense for her client who is accused of murdering his wife. When a witness refuses to testify, she decides to blame the media for driving the woman to suicide. After the guilty man is acquitted, she receives a call from a man wanting to meet her and tells her to be at a newsstand in 10 minutes.
She does so and is promptly abducted, ending up in the back of a mobile crime lord truck face to face with Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón, nothing you've heard of under his birth name of Carlos), a bearded cartel kingpin who wants Rita to do him a favor in exchange for many dinero: He wants her to find a surgeon to mutilate him into a simulacrum of a woman and relocate his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, Wizards of Waverly Place), and two children to Switzerland, telling them it was for their safety from his enemies. He's been taking hormones for two years and has developed breasts that no one in his gang or the wife has noticed somehow.
Rita first travels to Bangkok (for a number that became a viral laughingstock) then Tel Aviv where she meets Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir, Schindler's List) who sings a song about how surgery doesn't really change who one is (phobe!), but he agrees to travel to Mexico to meet Manitas. After their discussion, the deal is made. Jessi and the kids relocate to Switzerland, Manitas fakes his death, then goes under the knife, becoming Emilia Pérez.
Four years pass and Rita has relocated to London. (Money buys a better peer group.) At a dinner party, a burly woman chats with her and Rita rapidly realizes who it is. What he wants is to see his children again and he has Rita uproot Jessi and the kids and return them to Mexico City where they will live with Manitas' wealthy sister Emilia in a Mexican Mrs. Doubtfire scenario. While Jessi doesn't notice that Auntie Emilia has the exact same build (plus breasts) as her dead husband, his son recognizes his smell and sings a song about it.
One day, Emilia and Rita are having lunch when a mother leaves a flyer for her missing son on their table. Emilia decides that his new life purpose is to use his wealth gained from being a cartel boss (and making many mothers sons disappear himself) to start a NGO to have imprisoned sicarios tell where they disposed of their victims so that families can find closure. One woman, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), whose abusive husband had been missing for five years, attracts Emilia and they immediately hook up. Meanwhile, Jessi is contacting her old lover, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez).
Normally, I wouldn't go too in-depth of the rest of the plot, but since this is a Skip It movie that is unworthy of almost all of the hype, I'm going to lay out the rest of the story so you can see just how badly it ends.
Jessi announces that she is marrying Gustavo, so thanks for the place to stay, Emilia, but we're leaving. He flips out and attacks her, slipping and saying she can't take "my children" away. Spooked, Jessi disappears in the night with the kids. Emilia cuts off Jessi's credit cards and has his goons beat up Gustavo, giving him $100K to leave down or else. So the lovebirds retaliate by kidnapping Emilia and sending a couple of his fingers to Rita as the opening gambit of a ransom exchange.
When the exchange goes sideways, Gustavo throws Emilia in the trunk of a car, and he and Jessi drive off. Having just discovered who Emilia really is, Jessi pulls a gun on Gustavo and in their struggles, the car drives off a cliff, crashing then exploding, killing everyone. A funeral procession with an effigy of Emilia is parading through the streets while a massive crowd sings her praises as a modern saintly icon and the kids end up with Rita to be raised. The end.
No, I am not making this sh*t up.
Before addressing the controversies, let's discuss the merits of the film itself...........ummmm, well, one of the musical numbers isn't total trash and Saldaña is excellent........that's about it.
It's hard to pick a spot where to begin thrashing this mess, but let's go with the "musical" part of this self-proclaimed "genre-defying" (translation: mash-up that does nothing well) where actors who mostly can't sing perform tuneless tunes with no lyrical sense, melody or structure. I'm not expecting Chicago fercryingoutloud, but doughy dork Joss Whedon wrote 15 songs in various styles for the legendary Buffy the Vampire Slayer Once More, with Feeling episode that are all streets ahead of the atonal tripe by composor Clément Ducol and French singer Camille. They sound like they were written by AI trained on SoundCloud accounts of rapper wannabe teens with cracked copies of FL Studio. (And two of these are nominated, though one is OK.)
Then there's the whole "leave my life of crime behind and do good" premise. OK, sure, fine, whatever, but at no point does Manitas/Emilia atone for HIS sins. He doesn't unearth his victims or suffer any consequences for his actions. Starting the NGO and having all the other thugs who ARE serving time for their criems fess up is his good deed and he gets a girl, a parade, and an icon in his honor. What a mensch. And as shown by his explosion of rage at Jessi's planned nuptuals, you can cut the balls of the cartel boss, but you can't take the toxic masculinity out of the woman he's pretending to be. Oy vey.
The only character who really has some development is Rita, ferociously played by Saldaña, and who is really the lead with ten percent more screen time than Gascón, but ending up nominated for Supporting Actress. Saldaña has been underestimated as a talent for over 15 years because genre entertainment almost never gets recognized and three Star Trek movies as Lt. Uhura, three Guardians of the Galaxy movies where she's painted green, and a pair of Avatar movies where her performance capture was transformed into a giant blue Thundersmurf don't exactly scream, "Give that gal a trophy!" but here she makes a career-changing impression.
In her portrayal, Rita is a complex, guilt-ridden woman who sells her soul for riches then tries to earn it back with good deeds as best she can when her benefactor is a killer with issues. Saldaña's pre-acting training as a dancer is showcased in the one non-terrible song and number, "El Mal" ("The Evil"), where Rita points out all the corrupt politicians attending a fundraiser for Emilia's organization. (Thankfully, Netflix posted the number on YouTube so you can watch the best part of this thing for free. You're welcome.)
Which leaves us with the penis elephant in the room and the only reason Emilia Pérez has become the cause which Hollyweird has chosen to set their images on fire to match their city in the wake of the wildfire borne of their poor political priorities: Gascón's status as a "transgender woman" (read: a man) at a time when the Normies, whom our self-anointed elites loathe, have finally united to reject this woke madness which has destroyed countless troubled young people bodies. As a mighty FU to a nation who voted incorrectly according to Hollyweirdites, they nominated this movie for pretty much every category, pushing aside more deserving candidates, in order to promote a movie no one likes other than critics and awards bodies.
Gascón being nominated in the Actress category is inexcusable. Not because he gives a bad performance - ironically it isn't that bad as his portrayal of a man who longs for his children and then can't control his possessive nature with disastrous results has nuance - but for the simple fact he isn't a woman. Period. (Which he can't have.) If he had been nominated as Best Actor, there'd be no complaints, but then what sort of political benefit would acknowledging basic biology provide the Academy who desire to signal virtue more than reward genuine excellence?
Who knows which biological woman's performance got shoved off the podium by this stunt - Angelina Jolie in Maria; Nicole Kidman in Babygirl; Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu; Saldaña herself here? - but it flies in the face of previous handling of gender-bending performances. Linda Hunt won Best Supporting Actress playing a male role in The Year of Living Dangerously; Hillary Swank won Best Actress playing a transish role in Boys Don't Cry; Felicity Huffman was nominated as Best Actress for Transamerica, playing a pre-operative male-to-female character; and Jaye Davidson was up for Best Supporting Actor for The Crying Game way back in 1993. (I hadn't seen the last one before the Oscar nominations were announced, but knew the basic plot about the soldier's "girl" and was puzzled why the actress was nominated in the male category. Spoiler alert!) It's not a hate crime to properly categorize actors.
The Academy convulsed with such outrage at the return of the Bad Orange Man (who hadn't ushered in fascism last time and didn't arrest a single star howling to eff him) that they punished a fellow actress (back of the bus for you, ladies) and cost others like Stéphane Fontaine, cinematographer of Conclave, his nomination in favor of the ugly work here by Paul Guilhaume. Quality is out, pretending that nominating a French film set in Mexico, told in Spanish, with a trans "actress" lead will make the Bad Orange Man's golf game suffer is in. (News Flash: He didn't even notice or care.)
The cruel irony of making Gascón their hero(ine) is that the discovery of old tweets where he expressed incorrect thoughts about the Religion of Peace, George Floyd, and the Academy itself made him a pariah amongst his former advocates and writer-director Jacques Audiard and Saldaña disavowed him in order to save themselves. (LOL.) Not even being the apex predator of the intersectional hierarchy allows for impolite thoughts about the folks who attacked the offices of French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo 10 years ago, killing 12 and prompting declarations of "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie") from the same celebs now distancing themselves from him. Hypocrites.
And as mentioned, all of the hype, praise, awards (it won the Golden Globe and the Jury Prize at Cannes), or nominations have enticed the Normies to watch it. It's been on Netflix since mid-November 2024 (three months at this writing), no trip to the art house movie theater (if your town even has one) to see it required, and I don't recall ever seeing it on the Top 10 Movies list. Not when the critics gushed over it then, not when it won the Golden Globe, not when it got 13 Oscar nominations. Try as they might, they can't make fetch happen. Womp womp!
And it's not just red state bigots who had a problem with it. Mexicans were offended that a French filmmaker shot his Mexican story in France with a cast of non-native speakers. While Saldaña had some experience owing to her Dominican background and brushed up, apparently Texas-born Gomez had to crash course and learn phonetically. While my gringo ears couldn't tell, the real people could. LGB groups also weren't appreciative of the tokenized and trite portrayal of their condition with GLAAD calling it "a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman" and "a step backward for trans representation" Ingrates!
From a technical standpoint, there's nothing in the nominated image or nominated sound that justifies their nominations. If you're not paying for the most expensive tier of Netflix, you're missing nothing. It's functional and nothing more.
While a lot of YouTubers without any current Star Wars content to thrash on for clicks have taken their whacks at Emilia Pérez as the worst movie ever - if it had won, it would've joined Hollyweird's racism fantasia Crash on Worst Oscar Winners lists - I think a smart take comes from Film Threat founder Chris Gore who said that if John Waters had made this and it starred Divine, it would've been a hilarious camp classic. But Waters didn't, and if he had it wouldn't have served as Hollyweird's latest cudgel against an audience they've driven away so hard over the past five years that they're going to collapse into insolvancy eventually. And if not for bad tweets, Hollyweird could've chopped their own junk off for it. (They'll probably go with The Brutalist or Anora instead.)
It's been a while since we've had an Apple Original movie, but for Valentine's Day they dropped the unlikely rom-com-slash-sci-fi-horror flick The Gorge about a couple of cute young snipers who fall in love then fall into Hell on Earth.
We open on Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy, Emma, Furiosa), a Lithuanian sniperette who's been holed up in a blind for 10 days overlooking an airport awaiting her target whom she dispatches with a shot from thousands of meters away. We are then introduced to Levi (Miles Teller, Top Gun: Maverick, Fant4stic) waking up from a nightmare then hanging alone at the beach, writing poetry.
He is summoned to meet with Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver, Galaxy Quest), a mysterious woman from what he deduces is a private military outfit who is seeking someone with no personal attachments, that no one would miss if he didn't come back. Haunted by all the killing he's done and alone, he signs up for the one-year-long gig. Meanwhile, Drasa is learning that her father is terminally ill and planning on unaliving himself on Valentine's Day. She was also spotted somehow in the vicinity of the opening hit, so she needs to lay low. (Perhaps for a year?)
Levi wakes up on a plane after being sedated approaching the drop zone. The plane's crew can't tell him where he is and after he parachutes down, he'll have to travel a couple dozen miles over treacherous terrain to arrive at his post at the titular gorge where he is briefed about things by Basil Exposition J.D. (Sope Dirisu, Slow Horses). The fog-shrouded gorge is home to what previous guards have dubbed The Hollow Men (after a T.S. Eliot poem). It has been guarded since the late-1940s after 2400 soldiers never returned from a mission down there.
It's guarded from two towers, theirs on the west side with the east tower presumably staffed by Soviet/Russian personnel. His job is to patrol his side's gorge rim, checking the auto-turrets and satellite jammers keeping it hidden from Google Earth, replacing the hanging mines, etc. There's a garden patch, plenty of supplies (more on this later), solar power, and there is to be absolutely no contact with the other tower's guard. (Why not? Because reasons.) J.D. then heads off to be picked up and we discover why Bartholomew doesn't want family men for the job.
Starting in September, Levi begins his vigil, patrolling, reading, checking in once a month via shortwave radio where the voice on the other end doesn't want anything more than to know whether any contact with what's in the gorge had occurred? No? Then talk to you in a month.
He also naturally notices the hottie across the way (wo)manning the East Tower. After quite some time, he looks through his binoculars and sees her holding a sign asking his name. He replies via dry erase board that they're not supposed to have contact to which she replies by shooting his drink off the rail. He reciprocates by shooting her beer bottle and the flirting begins. They play chess by sending the moves by message (yes, stolen from Dawn of the Dead) and even make up ersatz drum kits to bash away. (While this may seem like a meta riff on the stars prior roles in The Queen's Gambit and Whiplash, they claim it was in the script already and they asked for it to be removed.)
The also manage to rile up the creatures of the gorge by blasting Ramones music and while dancing around, almost realizing too late that they were scaling the walls from the abyss. Much shooty-shooty-bang-bang ensues. Then they go back to flirting for months, wondering what the small rockets they observe emerging from the fog are about for a moment, culminating in Levi rigging a zip line across the ravine and scooting over to meet Drasa up close and personally. On his way back, creatures trigger a mine and shrapnel severs the line, sending him plummeting into the unknown. (Luckily he had a parachute on!) Drasa races to grab some gun, gear and her own chute and leaps after him.
Down at the bottom of the gorge, they are surrounded by sickly colored fogs and beset upon by fantastical creatures which seem borne from an orgy between Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, and the designers of Annihilation and The Mist. As they travel along uncovering the truth of what's going on down there, it's like a nature hike through Dante's Inferno except as written by a grade-school dropout.
I've seen reviews that cut miles of slack for the issues with the script by Zach Dean (writer of the unremembered Amazon Original flick, The Tomorrow War, whose premise was so fatally flawed by the need to be cool more than smart) and the missus is one of those who really enjoyed The Gorge, but there were too many details demanding they not be thought about on top of the obligatory suspension of disbelief starting with the entire setup of their mission.
There is this massive area which is so secret that the people charged with securing it aren't told where it is, there's a no-fly zone around it (except for the chopper pilots who fly in at the end), it uses jamming tech to prevent satellites from seeing it, and it's guarded by TWO people who are forbidden to contact each other and check-ins are monthly meaning that if something happens to them, say the monsters get them, it could be 29 days before anyone suspects there's a problem? You're not supposed to warn your counterpart that there are monsters coming up their side where they can't see them coming while your autoturrets fire across the gorge at them?
Who is restocking the towers with ammo, mines, parts for the jammers, etc.? Where did the books and the stereo and the records come from? Why are the sentries required to travel on foot for a day, climbing treacherous mountain passes that they could fall off of instead of just flying them in? If the stuff in the gorge is so dangerous, why is there a piece of tech there for who to use and how did they not find the Basil Exposition film can? If the creatures are just monsters, why are they able to lay traps? Don't know, don't know, don't don't don't know know know.
We're already expected to buy into the core premise of The Gorge while ignoring all the stupidity surrounding it and it's too big an ask. All I could think was that there should be a lot more people on the site covering shifts, daily contacts if not a zillion security cameras monitored by a base, so many basic things all shoved to the side because we need to have two young(er) attractive people getting horned up by each other to make the plot go.
Which brings us to our cast. At the time of filming two years ago, Teller and Taylor-Joy were 36 and 26, respectively. He's the right age for a former Marine who went into the mercenary business and is now wracked by guilt, but she is simply too young. How did this kitten get into the long-distance head bullet delivery business and rise to the top tiers?
It's been a while since we've had a case of Sandra Bullock Syndrome - when we're supposed to believe a perfectly attractive woman can't seem to find a man interested in her (coined by me after Bullock's roles in The Net and While You Were Sleeping) - but no way a hottie like Taylor-Joy doesn't have dudes panting after her. Mind you, they're a cute couple and have good chemistry, but she's simply too young. Someone like Blake Lively (who was 34 when this filmed and has done accents and action drama in The Rhythm Section, where she was much better than the script) would've been better.
Where The Gorge does excel is in the design of the creatures and environments down there. Everything is creepy and horrifying and director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone) stages the frights well. Bonus kudos to cinematographer Dan Laustsen (John Wick 2-4, Nightmare Alley & four other Guillermo del Toro films) for his moody lens work.
As with all content on Apple TV+ it's in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos audio. Visually, the colors are rich, but muted, with only a few spots where HDR brightness is present. The Atmos mix has top level activity during storms and helicopter flyovers, but none it is particularly demo material.
While the missus and other less-demanding viewers seemed to have fun with The Gorge, the piling on of unnecessarily dumb decisions just killed it for me. It wouldn't have taken much to fix almost everything wrong, too. Here's how:
Have Levi flown directly to the gorge via helicopter from an airbase he doesn't know where. The chopper also ferries in a small shipping container filled with supplies, ammo, food, books, movies, whatnot for his stay.
Convey the info J.D. gives in a briefing video and have check-ins be daily and more than just surly radio voice only wanting to know if there's contact.
Have both towers be in contact with each other to build rapport and support each other in fighting monsters.
Eliminate Drasa's backstory scenes so we know nothing about her until they start working together. The twist will be that she works for the Evil Company that hired Levi and when he falls in, she was supposed to just call in that they need a new sucker for the West Tower.
Everything else can pretty much remain the same, even having a too-young, inexplicably hot murder chick on the other side. Maybe have the monsters a little more conversational, too?
But as it stands The Gorge is what I call a bimbo movie - looks great, but doesn't have much going on upstairs. Perhaps style and thrill are enough to overcome the lapses for you. Mileage varies.
If there is a genre as well-worn as superhero, horror, or science fiction movies, it's the musical biopic. From Walk The Line (about Johnny Cash), Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddie Mercury), One Love (Bob Marley), Coal Miner's Daughter (Loretta Lynn), Walk Hard (Dewey Cox*), or current Oscar contender A Complete Unknown (Bob Dylan), recapping the life of an important musical figure is usually a pretty safe bet for commercial and critical, even awards, acclaim.
But what if the subject is a pop star who was in a British boy band in the early-1990s during the interregnum between New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys and N*Sync and was massively successful everywhere BUT America, probably due to grunge, alternative, and angry female music topping the charts here and our own pop stars arising during the turn of the Millennium? Oh yeah, and what if the movie has an anthropomorphic chimpanzee as its lead?
What happened was box office disaster as Better Man absolutely cratered at the global box office, grossing about $20M on reported $110M budget. It even flopped in England! And it wasn't a bad movie with critics and audiences giving positive marks 90% of the time. People who saw it liked it.
Telling the life story of Robbie Williams (if you're saying, "Who?" then you see the problem), we are given the musical-biopic-by-numbers template filled in with all the predictable checkpoints. Modest upbringing with father abandoning family for illusory fame in his youth? Check. Finding fame by joining boy band Take That before his boozing and drugging gets him sacked? Check. Struggling to find his songwriting voice and having a tempestuous relationship with girl group All Saints member Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno, with Kayleigh McKnight providing singing vocals)? Check. Ultimately pulling off the biggest concerts in UK history at the time? Chickity-check! Been there, seen that.
The question in the aftermath of the flop was why did they spend nine-figures on a VFX-driven biopic of such a figure of limited appeal; why not just make a straight biopic for probably less than half the cost? A: Because that would've also failed because Williams simply isn't ubiquitous enough and it would've been Just Another Musical Biopic.
In this case, the gimmick is what elevates the threadbare details into something just bonkers and entertaining to watch. VFX juggernaut Weta FX brings their experience from the providing the simians from the modern Planet of the Apes series to bear converting the performance capture of Jonno Davies (Williams and Adam Tucker provides singing vocals; Carter J. Murphy does Young Robbie's voice) into an absolutely convincing representation of a pop idol chimpanzee. That nobody ever remarks on his appearance also sells the premise as it represents how Williams viewed himself.
Director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman, which I liked though too many of the songs sounded like New Zealand tourism commercial jingles) presents the tale with energetic, dynamic camera work which enhances the verisimilitude of what we're seeing with sweeping musical numbers - the massive "Rock DJ" oner on Regent Street is epic - and gritty handheld moments, while still calming things down to let the monkey emote. (All of which made Weta FX sweat as they had to recreate lens flares & cope with less-detail motion capture than they'd prefer at times as this Corridor Crew episode details.)
Gracey said that the reason he chose to represent Williams as a chimp was due to the musical biopic formula being so over-familiar. He was right about that, but the one thing that saved it from boring is what killed it at the box office. I remember when the trailer dropped, watching it and wondering why they were making a Robbie Williams biopic with a monkey? And so did everyone else. Which is too bad, though Weta did snag a Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination, which I think it should win because if Chimp Robbie doesn't work, the entire movie collapses.
Trying to break out of the formula is risky. Just as Better Man flopped, so did Piece by Piece, the documentary about Pharrell Williams which was done entirely with Lego animation. It appears that audiences either don't want something different or the marketing is failing on selling them on what's going on. But while the 23 credited executive producers lost their shirts and probably had to settle for dollar store cocaine (free band name!), hopefully it will be discovered by audiences when it hits streaming.
There is a joke that every Cardinal goes into a papal conclave a Pope and, but one, comes out a Cardinal. Such are the ground rules for the next trudge through the Oscars Death March, Conclave, which is up for eight Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Editing, Production and Costume Design), and deserves perhaps three of those & is missing one.
The Pope has died and Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the dean of the College of Cardinals, is charged with conducting the papal conclave to elect a successor. The Cardinals from around the world travel to Rome to be sequestered until the work is done. However, right before the gates are closed, Lawrence is informed by the prefect of the papal household that on the day the Pope died he had demanded that a leading contender, Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), resign and an extra Cardinal, Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who has paperwork claiming that he was secretly named Cardinal to Kabul, Afghanistan (a place where being non-Muslim is bad for your health), has arrived to participate.
In addition to Tremblay, the leading contenders are Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), an extremely liberal priest whose views would be at home with the Episcopalians; Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a Nigerian who would be the first African Pope, representing the continent where the Church is growing the most as it withers elsewhere; and Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a staunch traditionalist who believes the Church needs to return to the pre-Vatican II ways with Latin Mass and less coddling of sinners which Bellini believes must be accommodated.
As Lawrence tries to herd the red-capped cats, shenanigans begin to occur. A nun causes an outburst leading to a revelation that knocks out one of the contenders. A discovery of corruption takes out another. The votes shift from ballot to ballot and even Lawrence starts gaining support, which annoys him because he planned to resign his Deanship, but was denied by the Pope. And in the outside world, explosions are heard, eventually impacting the Sistine Chapel itself.
The obvious setup is intended to provide avatars representing various factions in the Church, ranging from traditional to conservative to liberal to Episcopalian. Everyone makes a little soapbox speech to tell the audience what they represent with the intention of framing the traditionalists as backwards cavemen blocking progress and the liberals as the good guys because the only good Catholic is a borderline Episcopalian.
The problem with Conclave is that is spends a whole lot of time depicting the rigid ceremonial rituals of the conclave, but never explains why votes are shifting from candidate to candidate. We know the cartooned positions of the candidates (of course the most traditional is also painted as racist because he wants an Italian Pope again, not an African one), but never hear what the rest of the class thinks. No one is making speeches about why they should become top dog, so upon what are they voting?
Then there is the matter of the intrigues surrounding with the deceased Pontiff and his actions. Everyone claims that he decided this or that, but what is the truth? Tremblay denies being asked to resign and says his involvement in sandbagging a competitor was a the direction of the Pope. Benitez claims the Pope knew of the medical condition that provides the whammy twist which caps the movie with pure wishcasting by those who despise the Church. Lawrence wanted to resign because he had doubts and that the Pope may've had doubts about the Church, but neither are explained. We have time to watch them swear an oath over their ballots, but not get to know anyone more fully.
The twist ending - which I'd heard about long ago and had crossed Conclave off my too-watch list over until the Oscars Death March forced me to view it - is actually less offensive than advertised, but it reminds just how thin the script is because we're to believe the ultimate winner of Who Wants To Be A Pope? was determined by a trite, bromide-rich, pabulum speech that catapults the speaker over everyone else. As if.
Which is a shame because everything built upon this thin tissue of plotting & two-dimensional characterizations is quite good starting with the UNnominated cinematography of Stéphane Fontaine (Jackie) and the UNnominated direction of Edward Berger (2022's All Quiet on the Western Front) as they team to create lush, painterly frames. (How they were overlooked in favor of the Academy's woke tantrum, Emilia Perez, only reinforces how damaging that movie has been to this year's Oscars.)
The stacked cast deliver solid performances as expected, though Isabella Rossilini's nominated performance is the smallest & least worthy. She's not bad, but all she does is glower in a handful of scene in a film by its nature is a sausage fest. Fiennes is very good and deserving of his nod, his first in a shocking 28 years since The English Patient. (He should've been nominated for The Menu along with the movie for everything. The Oscars suck.) Tucci and Lithgow are their usual good and Msamati should enjoy more attention.
As always, if the script is weak, no amount of visual opulence nor thespian skill can overcome the structural deficits. While it's not as much of a smear job as the Catholic Church is routinely given by media (looking at you, Dan Brown) that I'd heard, that Conclave can't decide if it wants to present a debate about the direction of the Church or just be a pulpy potboiler (e.g. the Pope hides incriminating documents in the padding of his headboard) prevents it from amounting to much though many will try to find meaning in the white smoke emanating from the chimney.
Score: 4/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Peacock.)
If you've heard any pop or hip-hop music in the past quarter-century, you've probably heard music performed or produced by Pharrell Williams like 2013's "Happy" from the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. Now he gets his own documentary retrospective directed by Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) with a truly unique twist: It's told with Legos. As in, everyone and everything is depicted with animation like The Lego Movie.
Starting with his childhood in Virginia Beach where he went to school with his future Neptunes collaborator Chad Hugo as well as future hip-hop superstars Timbaland and Missy Elliott (I had no idea they hailed from the same place and time), it colorfully follows their struggles to get discovered in a town without a music industry until New Jack Swing kingpin Teddy Riley plants his operation in town.
Including interviews with Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Pusha-T, along with various music biz folks, it's your usual career overview spiced up with the Lego presentation which allows for the beats he makes to be depicted as glowing, pulsing constructs. It definitely makes for a different experience.
Where Piece by Piece stumbles is in the usual places like never telling the viewer what freaking year any of these events are happening and breezing over details like his attending Northwestern University for a couple of years and that Timbaland is his cousin which I just discovered looking at his Wikipedia page. (Seriously, WTF? I'm docking a half-point for that omission.)
Why he split from his friend and partner Hugo is never explained and the obligatory veer into race politics where a wealthy black man who sought to be a crossover sensation and made plenty of money off of white folks decides to traffic in the damnable and debunked "Hands up! Don't shoot!" lie for a Kendrick Lamar track dampens the fun.
There is also a problem with the Lego conceit in that by the virtue of portraying everyone as minifigs, they all look the same other than hair styles and at times it gets difficult to recognize who's talking because they only flash credits once or twice. At one point I thought they'd introduced a new speaker, but it was Williams in different clothes, or "clothes" since they're just decals on plastic.That said, the visuals are as good as the various Lego movies.
When I become Emperor of the Universe I intend to use N.E.R.D.'s "Lapdance" as my walkout music - you know it from Kingpin's introduction in the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie - and as a "He did that?" primer of Williams' career, Piece by Piece is a different way of covering the high points (and a few of the low ones), but despite the unique animation format, it ultimately falls a little flat in its superficiality. But because of the style, I ended up watching it when I may not have bothered with a straight-up presentation.
Score: 6.5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently exclusively on Peacock.)
I grew up listening to opera because my mom was a huge opera buff. The King and Queen of her fandom were tenor Franco Corelli and mega-diva prima donna soprano Maria Callas, who final days are the subject of Maria, a Netflix Original biopic starring Angelina Jolie, making an unsuccessful run for Oscar appreciation for the first time in ages.
Opening on Sept. 16, 1977 with authorities arriving in her Paris apartment to take her body away (she was only 53), the film then goes back a week to show Callas's life in her opulent home, accompanied by her two dogs and her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), the former whom she is constantly requesting he move the grand piano around.
She hasn't performed for several years and has been abusing prescription drugs including Mandrax, a sedative which can cause hallucinations like the young filmmaker, also named Mandrax (get it?) played by Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Name of the Dog), who has arrived to interview her and follows her around town. She also imagines she is encountering scenarios where a crowd flash mobs the Anvil Chorus from Carmen or an orchestra & choir in front of a church in the rain are doing Madame Butterfly.
There are also flashbacks to her prime years and her ill-starred love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), whom she met in 1957 and eventually left her husband for only to have Ari end up marrying the widow Jackie Kennedy, thus becoming Jackie O. These black & white flashbacks include a news-to-me scene where her mother appeared to be pimping her daughters out to German and Italian officer during WWII and the officer who chooses Maria tells her to not bother disrobing, but just sing for him.
Callas is also meeting with conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield) to test her voice for a potential comeback, but it's clear that ship has sailed and sunk and that only fuels her despair more.
On paper, Maria should've been a sure fire Oscar bait film. Chilean director Pablo Larraín's past films have included 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer which earned stars Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart Best Actress nominations for portraying Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, respectively. Jolie has been mostly absent from acting beyond voice work in the Kung Fu Panda series and the two Maleficent live-action Disney joints for almost 15 years. Her last big movies - 2021's Taylor Sheridan misfire Those Who Wish Me Dead and Marvel misfire Eternals did poorly in the post-Hot Fad Plague world - and her last Oscar nomination was 2008's Changeling. Her last Oscar and Golden Globe wins were literally a quarter-century ago; she's due for a comeback.
Sadly, it didn't happen partially because the Academy chose to throw away a Best Actress nomination on a man who is currently as of this writing being disavowed by Hollyweird because he made politically incorrect tweets some years back, but mostly because despite some critical kudos, it sank without a trace on the endless shelves of Netflix content mostly due to it being quite slow and dull. (The missus fell asleep and I struggled myself.)
Choosing to focus on the final days of her life makes the experience into just waiting for her to die. We don't know really understand why she was reduced to a reclusive life with her dogs and staff. The flashbacks to her relationship with Onassis don't really sell this supposedly deep love between a self-described short, ugly man who doesn't like opera and the diva.
That said, I liked the fantastical Impressionistic hallucination-fueled musical vignettes and appreciated Jolie's ghostly performance of a woman who stop living years before, yet never quite let go of the life she led. Bucking the trend of most awards-bait imitation performances, she eschews the use of prosthetics to transform her familiar visage into Callas' more honker-forward look. She chooses to act Callas, not cosplay Callas. I thought it was a subtle performance with flashes of vibrancy with minimal scene chewing, but the missus disagreed, for what it's worth.
Ultimately, the only Oscar nomination Maria received was for Edward Lachman's period-evoking cinematography. Current day scenes have a muted color palate while flashbacks are in lustrous B&W. It's not much in the way of a Dolby Vision showcase, but the Atmos audio is clear and enveloping.
My mom had a stroke in 2007 and passed away in 2018 and thus missed this biopic of her favorite soprano as well as 2016's Florence Foster Jenkins which starred Meryl Steep as the literal antithesis of quality opera singing. I wonder what she would've thought of them both?
Back in the last century there was a workplace teen-oriented alleged comedy called Empire Records which opened with an employee taking the cash from the record store's safe then going to a casino where he proceeds to lose all the store's money. Watching this I remarked to the missus that this movie was set in an alternate universe where the people look like humans, but don't act in any way like real humans. This alternate universe appears to be the setting for Nicole Kidman's failed Oscar-bait run Babygirl. Wikipedia says it's an "erotic thriller", but just having nudity and sexual content doesn't equal erotic and there are zero thrills, but plenty of eye rolls.
Kidman stars as Romy Mathis, founder and CEO of a robotics company, who is married to theater director Jacob (Antonio Banderas), has two teen daughters - Nora (Vaughan Reilly) and Isabel (Esther McGregor, Ewan's daughter), the latter whom is gay and her parents are thrilled because of course - a gorgeous apartment in the city and mansion in the country, and for some reason an unhappy sex life. Despite the film opening with her appearing to be having happy fun times with Jacob, she later goes elsewhere in the apartment to look at porn on her laptop while bad touching herself to completion.
Things change with the arrival of Samuel (Harris Dickinson, A Murder at the End of the World), one of the new interns. She'd previously seen him tame a dog that was attacking a pedestrian and was impressed by him. He then approaches her saying he chose her to be his mentor through the corporate mentor program. She said she wasn't part of that (being CEO and all), but he insists and because she apparently doesn't look at her Outlook calendar and the plot has to happen, she takes the meeting and responds to his inappropriate behavior not with showing him the door, but embarking on a ludicrous sexual relationship where he orders her around and makes her demean herself to him.
When she makes half-hearted moves to break things off, he reminds her that he could destroy her life with a phone call to HR, but doesn't want to. So she goes along with the affair even when he shows up at her country place (allegedly to bring her work laptop) to sit with the family and shows up with her assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde, Talk To Me), who is dating Samuel, and not-so-subtly lets her boss know she knows what's going on and needs more opportunities for women in the firm.
There is so much wrong with Babygirl it's hard to pick a starting point to tear it apart, but let's go with what the missus immediately sounded off about during the movie, the absolutely ridonkulous choice of Dickinson as the guy a smart, wealthy, powerful woman would risk her entire world for. He's not particularly handsome (we agree that Austin Butler would've at least made some sense) or interesting and is a jerk.
Even allowing for the premise that aging women want to prove they can snag a younger man - because Banderas is dog food or something (note: while he's not Desperado hot, he's still suave in the silver fox department) - he's not really a catch and the whole HR angle makes him even less valid an option. (If he was a cater waiter at some charity event she decided to bang in the coat check room would make more sense.)
The implication that this was all a set-up by her assistant in retribution for not paying her enough career attention requires a plan with a zillion single points of failure to execute flawlessly. If at any point Romy doesn't go for Samuel's advances, it's over. And how would she even know that Romy was susceptible to another man?
Dutch writer-director Helena Reijn apparently was inspired by sexual films like Indecent Proposal and Basic Instinct and possibly wanted to comment on women in power, women in unsatisfactory relationships - Romy says she's never orgasmed with Jabob in their two decades married; considering who she's married to, seems like a her problem for not even mentioning it - but does nothing with these seeds of ideas. I can think of so many different ways the story could've been told as an All About Eve meets The Assistant story, but as it exists Babygirl does nothing smart and so much dumb.
And bearing the brunt of this failure is poor Kidman, who demeans & exposes herself chasing Oscar only to have the final nomination slot go to a dude because Hollyweird wants to figuratively burn itself down with the public in addition to LA burning. She gives her all even when the script doesn't deserve it and as the missus asked, who thought this was a good idea? It wouldn't even cut it as an episode of Red Shoes Diaries.
