A lot of people were surprised when Willem Dafoe earned an Oscar nomination for “At Eternity’s Gate,” a tiny art film about the last days of painter Vincent van Gogh. But for those lucky few who’ve seen the movie, they know the accolade is well-deserved indeed.
Previous cinematic portraitures of van Gogh have focused on his turbulent life, especially his relationships with his brother, Theo, and fellow painter Paul Gauguin. And, of course, there’s the infamous time he cut off his own ear.
What “Gate” brings to the mix is indelibly linking van Gogh’s mental instability with his art. Director Julian Schnabel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Louise Kugelberg and Jean-Claude Carrière, include lots of examinations of his paintings, including less famous ones like the one from which the movie takes its title, “Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate).”
The camera follows van Gogh around the countryside as he looks for scenes to capture, seeing the world through his eyes. Dafoe portrays him as a woman for whom painting is his whole life, because he’s disturbed and thrilled by what he sees and wants to share it with everyone.
It portrays the ear incident and its aftermath, but as simply one more step along the unstable path he trod, instead of a fetishistic totem of self-hatred.
Gorgeous, haunting and insightful, “At Eternity’s Gate” is a harrowing portrait of a mad who embraced both beauty and madness, and joined the two on canvas.
There’s a tendency for small video releases like this to have very skimpy bonus features, but this one is the pleasing exception. There’s a feature-length audio track by Schnabel and Kugelberg (who also edited the film), and three making-of documentary shorts: “Made by a Painter,” “Channeling Van Gogh” and “Vision of Van Gogh.”
When Willem Dafoe was still young, there was something about him that seemed quite ancient. Now that he’s older, he retains an eerie vitality that allows him to effortlessly play a man three decades younger than himself.
Many say the art of Vincent van Gogh is similar ageless.
Here was a man quite literally obsessed with his work, and yet he only sold a single painting during his short lifetime. “At Eternity’s Gate” is a chronicle of his last, lonely days living in the tiny villages of Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, where he cranked out an astonishing body of work that will live on in immortality.
I’ll confess, at first I was put off by yet another film about van Gogh. Just last year we had “Loving Vincent,” an Oscar-nominated animated movie that used imagery by modern painters to relate the story.
And yet I found “At Eternity’s Gate” to be a breath of fresh air. Dafoe gives a transformative performance as the artist, depicting a man as wrapped up by his own demons as his desire to share his vision of how he sees the world.
Rather than portraying von Gogh as a man who made great art despite his mental instability, director Julian Schnabel, who co-wrote the script with Louise Kugelberg and Jean-Claude Carrière, shows them as inextricably entwined.
Dafoe’s lean, rawboned face turns out to be a surprisingly good match for the features shown in van Gogh’s various self-portraits. The photography by Benoît Delhomme is stunning, with many wordless passages of him just wandering around the French countryside, feeling inspired and feverishly getting it down on canvass.
Rupert Friend plays his brother, Theo, who supports him financially and, on the rare occasions when they’re in the same place, emotionally. They have a very tender moment where Theo comes to the asylum where Vincent has been committed, and cuddles him just as they did on cold nights as boys.
Oscar Isaac makes an impression as fellow painter and friend Paul Gauguin, who is angry and confident to van Gogh’s placid timidity. Both struggled to establish themselves in the face of Impressionism, but while van Gogh wanted to evolve from it and create a new form painting builton what he called “sunshine,” Gauguin rejected the old masters entirely. (Though he concedes Monet is “not bad.”)
Mads Mikkelsen and Mathieu Amalric play, respectively, a priest who struggles to reconcile van Gogh’s faith in God with paintings he considers to be ugly and disturbing, and Dr. Paul Gachet, one of van Gogh’s doctors and the subject of one of his most famous paintings.
The film’s title comes from one of van Gogh’s lesser-known works (if there is such a thing), “Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate).” Van Gogh speaks about his love for painting nature, musing that while flowers may fade and wilt, his capturing of them in paint will live on -- or at least have a chance to.
I liked how the film handled van Gogh’s infamous ear cutting. Rather than fetishizing the incident, Schnabel treats it as just one more episode for a man who struggled to reconcile the real world with the disparate, chaotic one he experienced in his mind. After the incident, the director depicts it by just having Dafoe’s head turned away from that side.
Lovely and insightful, “At Eternity’s Gate” celebrates the art of Vincent van Gogh without trying to obscure the madness and genius of the man behind it.
Befitting its title and main character, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is the grittier, edgier entry in the Star Wars saga. Right from the get-go, director Gareth Edwards and screenwriters Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy give us the tonal and sensory cues that we’re in for something very different.
No ubiquitous text scrawl at the start of the movie. No blast of John Williams’ iconic Star Wars theme to set the mood. Indeed, Michael Giacchino’s score has a dark and forbidding beauty to it. The rebels are shown to be capable of underhanded dealings and even cold-bloodedness in battling the Empire. Hardly a lightsaber in sight.
There’s still a line between good and evil, but lots of graying at the fringes.
There are also plenty of hallmarks of Star Wars. It’s a tale of orphans and adoptive parents, of hope shoving off despair, of those who desire power for its own sake and those who would oppose them. The Force certainly plays less of a direct role than any of the seven other movies, but its energy still thrums in the background, living on the characters’ tongues and in their hearts.
It’s easy to call it the weakest of the Star Wars movies. The first half especially is discombobulated, with too many fringe characters demanding their moment in the spotlight. Including not one, not two but three Asian-influenced warriors who aid the cause. One of them is even the embodiment of that tired old saw, the blind-but-still-a-badass combatant.
Still, it’s a matter of degrees. The weakest Star Wars flick is better than 90% of sci-fi/fantasy films out there. And “Rogue One” continually builds energy as it goes instead of losing it, leading to an action-packed final act I suspect will leave zero fans disappointed.
You probably already know that “Rogue One” shines a light on the events leading up to the destruction of the (first) Death Star, depicting the men and women (and aliens) who procured the secret plans that made it possible for Luke Skywalker to blow up the planet-killing station.
(And, in doing so, it definitely rejiggers around some of the established Star Wars lore. To wit: Apparently, many Bothans didn’t die to bring us this information.)
Felicity Jones plays Jyn Erso, capable thief and miscreant. Abandoned as a child after her father (Mads Mikkelsen) was conscripted by the Empire to help construct the Death Star, she finds herself falling into the hands of the Rebel Alliance. Leader Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) recruits her to seek out Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a radical who rescued Jyn as a child. Saw’s a battle-scarred sort who’s missing parts of his body, and we suspect that’s not all.
Chief baddie is Ben Mendelsohn as Director Orson Krennic, chief architect of the Death Star project, while Diego Luna provides the counterpoint, rebel spy chief Cassian Andor. Donnie Yen plays Chirrut Imwe, aforementioned blind guy, and Wen Jiang is stoic gunslinger Baze Malbus. Riz Ahmed plays Imperial pilot/turncoat Bodhi Rook, whose entire role could’ve been outsourced to a gaggle of stunt men and extras, and probably should have been.
The scene-stealer is droid K-2SO (voice and motion capture by Alan Tudyk), an Imperial enforcer who was captured and reprogrammed by Andor. He’s rather peevish but also protective of his human charges, and is so used to more freewheeling behavior that when the time comes to impersonate his former role, he’s spectacularly awful at it.
I enjoyed “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” – but then I’ve liked all the Star Wars movies, even the unfairly maligned prequels. (To those who harp on their clunky dialogue and goofy humor: that’s a feature, not a bug, of all these films.)
It’s a departure, but also a return to roots for a franchise that seemingly has whole new universes yet to explore.
“Doctor Strange” unwittingly serves as a good stress test on the state of the superhero genre as it approaches middle age. The thinking used to be that once you got past the A-list of heroes, the Spider-Mans and Captains America, it’s hard to get anyone more than fanboys to turn out. But with offbeat characters like Deadpool and the Guardians of the Galaxy turning into huge hits, it seems that as long as you deliver an entertaining flick, people will come.
This film takes one of the oddest, most cerebral comic books ever and turns it into a bubble gum movie. It’s breezy and kooky, featuring some of the landscape-bending special effects we saw in “Inception” and turning the dial up to 11. It mixes hallucinogenic imagery with standard action movie fisticuffs.
Dr. Stephen Strange doesn’t get bitten by a spider or bathed in mutating radiation; he’s just a regular guy who becomes a sorcerer, wielding mystic energies and magical items, who travels through different planes of existence to battle creatures of dark power.
It has the most talented cast you’ve ever seen in a superhero movie: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Mads Mikkelsen, Michael Stuhlbarg.
The question becomes if the mystic mumbo-jumbo replete in the Doctor Strange oeuvre sounds any better coming out of the mouths of Oscar-caliber actors: “sling rings,” the dark lord Dormammu, astral projection, Sanctums Sanctorum, the Eye of Agamotto, etc.
The answer: Not really.
Cumberbatch brings a winking charisma to the role, a guy who’s basically good but is rather full of himself. He’s an a-hole, but an a-hole in the Tony Stark mold.
The movie is directed by Scott Derrickson, known mostly for horror films, who co-wrote the script with Jon Spaihts and C. Robert Cargill. They take some pretty dark material, about an arrogant neurosurgeon who loses the use of his hands in a car accident, and continually fluff it up with humor and levity.
For instance, when Strange reaches the remote retreat of Kamar-Taj in Nepal, hoping to heal his hands, the unctuous guide, Mordo (Ejiofor) hands him a cryptic piece of paper with something scribbled on it. What is it? Strange asks. “The Wifi password. We’re not savages,” Mordo quips.
Strange is trained by the Ancient One, an Asian man in the comics but a bald Caucasian woman here played by Swinton. It’s still the typical inscrutable mentor, constantly pushing her pupil but supplying few answers about what’s really at stake.
Strange is … not very good at magic. And not just at first. When the big battle with the bad guy starts to happen, he’s still seemingly little more than a novice. His basic spells -- represented here as sigils written in fire -- fizzle out on him. But we’re supposed to believe he’s the guy to take on Kaecilius (Mikkelsen), a fallen sorcerer who wants to turn over the Earth to Dormammu and stop the flow of time?
You wonder in these movies why the “chosen one” is always a new guy. Shouldn’t it be the person who’s been honing their powers for a really long time? Wouldn’t the Ancient One’s time be better spent preparing for the final showdown instead of training some jerk doctor?
(I call this Yoda Conundrum -- as in, why would a Master send a half-trained Jedi to confront Darth Vader instead of taking him on himself?)
“Doctor Strange” is a fun movie but not a particularly smart one. It takes the easy road when it had the tools and the talent to be more ambitious. It features characters who wield mighty magic, but settles for storytelling parlor tricks.
"Valhalla Rising" starts out in an interesting place, and goes to a less interesting place. This Danish/British production (in English) is the evocative tale of One Eye, a gladiator slave to the Vikings who has no history, nothing to say, and has no identity beyond his ability to kill, which borders on the supernatural. We wonder how it was that he lost that eye, since it would seem to indicate someone got the better of him in combat, at least temporarily.
Based on the bouts we witness, this would not seem possible. One Eye fights at a disadvantage, his neck chained to a post, since the Vikings will not risk him getting free. It matters not. During one match, two opponents cheat by attacking him simultaneously, before his hands have even been untied, and yet he still prevails handily.
The Viking chieftains pass around ownership of One Eye every few years, like some treasure too valuable for any one of them to possess permanently. There's some tension because his current master has held onto him for what the others feel is too long.
Forced to sell him for want of money, the chieftain's last conversation with One Eye is revealing: "Who are you?" As always, no answer is received. After more than five years, he knows nothing about the silent warrior.
Mads Mikkelsen -- who sported another freakish eye prosthetic in "Casino Royale" -- plays One Eye with a stoic calm. There's a mystic quality to the man, who has visions limned in red fire that often come to pass.
His only friend, if you can call it that, is the boy (Maarten Stevenson) who brings him food. He's the only one who will go into One Eye's cage, perhaps because the Vikings believe he will not kill a mere boy, or perhaps because the lad's life has so little value to them that they wouldn't care if he did.
Director Nicolas Winding Refn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Roy Jacobsen, shoots these early scenes with an amazing dream-like quality. The looming hills are perpetually shrouded in mist, and the men who traipse between them seem like the only humans on earth. The Vikings, their apparel and weapons, is astonishingly authentic -- grimy, battered, utilitarian.
One Eye finally breaks his bonds -- in his typically brutal, blood-spurting way, which Refn does not shirk his gaze away from-- and the boy decides to follow him. The chieftain predicts that he will return to wreak vengeance upon them, surmising that he's a man consumed by hatred.
Perhaps this was his intention, but then a strange encounter happens: One Eye and the boy come across some Christian Vikings who are on their way to Jerusalem to free it from the infidels. Upon realizing who he is, they invite One Eye to join them on their holy quest. Religion -- whether pagan or Christian -- is not part of One Eye's shtick, but nonetheless he accompanies them.
(The Christians also had a dozen or so women in their custody, kept naked and huddled, whose origin and disposition after they've left is never hinted it. They would seem to be sex slaves, and how that fits with the Vikings' professed faith is left deliberately vague.)
The mini-Crusade gets stuck at sea for weeks in a blanket of mist, no wind or current, and thirst and hunger grow dire. Divisions rise up between the men, fueled by superstition about curses, and there are some deaths.
They finally reach land, but not a Holy one. It's a lush forest of hills and stones -- America, perhaps, or even Australia? There are cairns holding corpses that could be either Native American or Aborigine in origin.
I won't say too much more about what happens, other than the film shirks off its narrative cohesion, like a reptile shedding its skin, and becomes more of a contemplative tone poem -- less "Braveheart" than "Aguirre, The Wrath of God." The boy, who had been acting as interpreter for One Eye (though we suspect he was faking it), becomes the oracle of an earthbound god pronouncing his judgment on those that remain.
The last half of the movie is strange, loopy and doesn't seem to fit with the first half. Still, I enjoyed the relentless moodiness of the film, and its redolent images. I don't think it's for everyone, but its contemplation of the convergence between violence and faith is certainly never dull.
One Eye in some ways is a Celtic cousin of Mad Max, roaming an unknown wasteland after his purpose for living has disappeared. There is only survival, although eventually that becomes less important, too.
DVD extras are practically non-existent, limited to a theatrical trailer.
Despite arriving in April, in many ways "Clash of the Titans" was the first big summer movie of 2010.
The remake of the kitschy 1981 fantasy adventure is fast-paced and slick, with Ray Harryhausen's clunky stop-motion animation critters replaced by sleek computer-generated ones.
Perseus has undergone his own transformation, from Harry Hamlin's feathered-hairdo favorite son of Zeus to a snarling Sam Worthington, buzz-cut and seriously P.O.'d at the gods for using humans as their playthings.
Directed by Louis Leterrier, "Titans" is a mash-up of Greek/Roman mythology so addled, Edith Hamilton must be crying somewhere in Olympus. But the story doesn't have an ounce of fat, and captures the over-the-top fun of the original while dumping most of the schlockier elements.
The story: Zeus (Liam Neeson) and the other gods are furious that humans aren't praying to them like they used to, sapping their strength. He taps the original underworld boss, Hades (Ralph Fiennes), to strike terror into their hearts by threatening to unleash the Kraken, a powerful sea titan.
Perseus, the half-human son of Zeus, must find a way to defeat the Kraken by visiting the Stygian Witches, but not before fighting off some oversized scorpions and running afoul of Calibos, cursed into demon form by the gods.
And Medusa is still out there, in need of a close shave.
Video extras -- at least with the Blu-ray version -- are truly top-notch, providing hours worth of entertaining and insightful peeks behind the camera.
The DVD comes only with deleted scenes, but they're pretty hefty: Totaling about 18 minutes, they include much more intrigue between the gods, which I for one loved about the first film.
The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack comes with a host of other features, including an alternate ending that is much angrier in tone than the theatrical one -- not to mention Perseus ends up with a different lady love.
There's also a featurette on Worthington's growing reputation as the go-to action hero of his generation. "He's better than a stuntman," Leterrier says.
The centerpiece is a "Maximum Movie Mode" that combines 11 featurettes about nearly every aspect of production, plus 40 minutes of picture-in-picture commentary.
One takeaway nugget: Originally, the planned to have Hades as a female character!
"Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky" is the second recent film about the life of the fashion icon. It and "Coco Before Chanel" actually debuted in France around the same time last year, but this movie is just now coming to American shores.
Strange how people like Coco and Truman Capote are ignored for decades, and suddenly filmmakers are fighting over themselves to do a film biography.
I will say I much preferred Anna Mouglalis' Coco Chanel to Audrey Tautou's. With her brazen stare and low rumble of a voice, her Coco effortlessly brushes aside society's conventions, whether it has to do with the clothes women wear or the independence she savors.
She's the sort of woman who can say to her lover, Igor Stravinsky: "You think a man is worth two women? I'm as powerful as you are, Igor ... and more successful."
It's debatable whether Chanel and the great Russian composer actually had an affair, but it's the sort of legend that is more salient than the truth. Chris Greenhalgh wrote the screenplay based on his fictional novel.
The story opens, briefly, in 1913 Paris for the debut of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." The audience was so torn by his cutting-edge use of rhythm and dissonance that it literally started a riot. Stravinsky and Chanel share but a glance.
Cut to 1920, and much has changed. Chanel is now a famous fashion designer, and her affair with Arthur "Boy" Chapel has ended with his tragic death. Stravinsky is virtually penniless, cramming his wife and large family into a hotel room.
Seemingly on a whim, Chanel invites the composer and his brood to stay with her in her luxurious villa outside Paris. Proud but destitute, he accepts.
I loved the scene where the Stravinskys are given a tour of their new home, which is decorated fashionably but monochromatically. "You don't like color, Mademoiselle Chanel?" asks Katarina, Igor's wife. "As long as it's black," she dryly responds.
Stravinsky is played by Dutch actor Mads Mikkelsen, probably best known to American audiences as the bleeding-eye villain in "Casino Royale." His performance is much more internal than Mouglalis'; we sense that the affair never would have started without Chanel making the first move. His devotion to his wife and family is genuine, but he can't escape her gravitational pull.
Mikkelsen's command of several languages in the film seemed genuine to me, and I consider it a compliment when I say that his mien is authentically Russian.
It's quite a thing to carry on an affair with the woman of the house while your wife and kids are sometimes literally in the next room, and director Jan Kounen clearly but subtly demonstrates the rotting effect it has on familial relations. The children play and pout like regular youngsters, but their eyes see the dying of the grace between their parents.
Yelena Morozova plays the wan Katarina, in a beautiful performance of sadness and dread. She's smart enough to recognize and even appreciate the bold way Chanel has ordered her life in defiance of patriarchal constraints, but herself is trapped in a prison of her own making. Katarina loves Stravinsky the artist, possibly even more than the man, and her greatest fear is not that she will lose her husband but that the affair will corrupt his musical gift.
"She collects people," she tells Igor, pleadingly but accurately.
"Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky" never quite convinces us of any deep soulful connection between the two -- it's more a lust story than a love story. But it's an absorbing tale of the intersecting orbits of two 20th century giants who each changed the world in different ways.
Even if it isn't true, we'd like to think it could be.
Has it really been three decades since the original "Clash of the Titans," featuring a mangled mash-up of Greek mythology, herky-jerky stop-motion animated monsters and a really bitchin' Harry Hamlin feathered haircut?
The new "Clash" exists mostly to remind us how much things have changed.
The monsters are now sleek computer-generated beasties, snapping and slithering in all their 3-D glory. The gumbo of Greek legends has been remixed with the addition of wood-skinned sorcerers and some new humanistic themes.
And as Perseus, the half-man half-god hero, Sam Worthington's no-frills buzzcut signals that this is one classical dude with a lot of post-modern 'tude.
This remake is unnecessary but unobjectionable, and generally pretty fun. Fans of the original -- who, like me, regard it with warm nostalgia while chuckling at its hokier aspects -- will find themselves ticking off a checklist of what's been retained, changed or dropped.
I was disappointed that Calibos, the half-demon villain from the original, has been relegated to a walk-on role. Although there's still a nice touch of pathos to him.
And I didn't like the reduced byplay between the Gods of Olympus. I really enjoyed the first film's depiction of scheming, jealous super-beings conniving against each other, with mortals and their own demigod offspring used as chess pieces.
Liam Neeson gets in a few moments of thunder as Zeus, head god and Perseus' father. And Ralph Fiennes shines as crafty Hades, dissolving into mist and turning a human queen into an ancient hag with a touch.
But the rest of the gods are relegated to mere eye candy. Danny Huston, as Poseidon, has about two lines of dialogue. The female gods don't even get that.
At least the earthbound women got meatier roles. Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), the princess of the god-offending city of Argos, is prepared to sacrifice herself if Hades releases the Kraken, a powerful sea titan, as revenge for their arrogance. And Io (Gemma Arterton), an ageless demigod herself, takes on the role of Perseus' protector and companion.
Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi deliver a lean, mean script that focuses on the thrill of individual encounters without an ounce of dilly-dally in between. Perseus and a band of Argos' best warriors are sent to find the Stygian Witches -- frightful triplets sharing a single eye -- to learn if the Kraken can be defeated.
Instead of being the anointed, favored son of the gods, in this version Perseus is a poor fisherman resentful of the big boys' meddling in their workaday lives. He even refuses the gift of a magic sword from Zeus because he wants to win as a man, not a god.
(Although I couldn't help noticing he starts accepting these supernatural advantages ... but only after his cadre of comrades has been significantly reduced in headcount, and his own neck is on the line.)
Director Louis Leterrier keeps things moving along at a brisk pace that prevents the audience from dwelling on any incongruent new elements. Like Perseus' djinn companion, who looks like a cross between the "Lord of the Rings" ents and the Tusken Raiders of "Star Wars." Or that the Greek team also includes, for some reason, a pair of Russian hunters. I think someone took a wrong turn at the Caucasus.
One throwaway joke neatly sums up this entire movie. As Perseus and his crew are arming themselves for their journey, he reaches into a pile of equipment and pulls out a certain golden mechanical owl and asks what it is. The gruff captain (Mads Mikkelsen) tells him to leave it behind.
Younger audience members will be bewildered, but fans of the 1981 film will feel their hearts freeze: "Not that frackin' owl!!" Fortunately, the new "Clash of the Titans" has retained enough of the stuff that made the original memorable, and left the goofier ordnance back in the nostalgia bin.
