"Vox Lux" is a movie about... something. I'm honestly not sure what. It stars Natalie Portman in the second half as a Lady Gaga-esque pop superstar struggling in her relationships with her sister, daughter and manager. In the first half the character shows how she got where she is, parlaying a horrible childhood incident into a career.
The last 20 minutes is Celeste's big comeback concert -- though don't you dare call it that -- and we're treated to an elaborate stage show of lights, pyrotechnics and exuberant dancing as Portman warbles through various techno-tweaked tunes that could have been sung by, well, anybody.
The Celeste of the first half is a sweet kid of 14 tempted by the sparkle of fame and fortune, and in the second half she's a total rhymes-with-witch who seems decades older than her 31 years, resentful of all the attention she gets while not-so-secretly feeding off it to sustain her sense of self.
All of this is accompanied by flat, emotionless narration by Willem Dafoe. It's the sort of narration that doesn't tell you anything the movie doesn't, so you wonder why it's there.
Surprisingly, it's the second half that's hard to get through. Portman plays Celeste as a shrill, nasty harpy who somehow forgot she's supposed to be the nice girl. There's no emotional match with the wide-eyed kid she was, played by Raffey Cassidy. We wonder what happened in the in-between.
I'd have liked to have seen that movie.
We follow Celeste around as she has nasty encounters with the press, with a restaurant manager who asks for a photo, with her manager (Jude Law), her sister, Ellie (Stacy Martin), her teen daughter, Albertine (Cassidy again) and well, pretty much everybody. Celeste is estranged from Ellie, who writes her songs and takes care of her kid, but gets treated like dirt for her trouble.
The first part is more interesting, when a disturbed classmate shoots up Celeste's class, wounding her seriously in the neck. She wears braces and decorative collars for the rest of the movie. After she and Ellie come up with a heartfelt song for the memorial ceremony, it becomes a national anthem. The manager (never named) is brought in to guide her, which follows a predictable path of ear-candy songs, bizarro makeup effects and squirmy dance moves.
What's the point of it all? I dunno. Writer/director Brady Corbet seems to be trying to fashion a morality tale about how even the most earnest intentions can become twisted in the caldron of the celebrity-making machine. Sounds like a terrible bargain, but not an interesting enough one to watch for two hours.
“The Favourite” is a roiling tale of deception, sex, twisted friendship and power. It reminds me a lot of “Dangerous Liaisons,” in that it contains all the ingredients of a classic romance but reduced down to a fetid brine of jealousy and loathing.
It is depressing, bitingly funny and insightful about the human condition.
The story (screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara) is based on real palace intrigue in the court of Queen Anne of Great Britain during the early 1800s. Widowed, plagued by ill health from a young age, never a mother after 17 (!) failed pregnancies, Anne is masterfully played by Olivia Colman as a bitter, pathetic woman overwhelmed by the throne.
Her friend, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), is for intents and purposes the real acting monarch. It was not uncommon in that time for women who could not officially hold a position within the British government to wield tremendous power as a “court favorite,” aka a close friend of royalty.
Sarah chides the queen like a wayward student and quietly degrades her, at point telling her her makeup makes her resemble a badger, while superficially acting as her closest friend and buttress. She acts as the queen’s go-between with ministers and generals, and since Anne is usually too sick or uninterested, Sarah really runs the show.
They even sometimes share a bed and… other forms of intimacy.
There has been some historical supposition about Anne having a lesbian relationship, but with Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), a fallen noblewoman who became her chambermaid and confidante. Most historians think it’s bunk. This fictional tale supposes even further along those lines, saying it was Sarah with whom she had a romantic relationship, which became a tense ménage a trois when Abigail entered the scene.
Abigail acts as the audience’s eyes and ears during the story, coming across as a timid young woman brought low by her family’s circumstances. She’s actually Sarah’s cousin, which is how she secures a job as a scullery maid. But Abigail has a sly cunning, and ingratiates herself with the queen by concocting a poultice to relieve her painful gout.
At first Sarah is glad for the help. Not having to kowtow to Anne’s daily whims and demands, caring for her pet rabbits or rubbing her various aching limbs, allows her to spend more time at court. She vies with Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), leader of the Tory opposition, about continuing their war with France and the tax increases necessary to do so. Decked out with poofy wig and pancake makeup, Hoult manages to be both comical and menacing.
But when Abigail extends her ingratiation as far as the queen’s bed, Sarah recognizes her as a threat and the women launch an all-out war of wills.
“The Favourite” is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, an acclaimed filmmaker from Greece whose previous efforts (“The Lobster”) have failed to charm me like others. Perhaps because he’s not a screenwriter on this project, his weird, off-putting existentialist meanderings are kept largely in check. It’s more or a less a straight story, though he often uses a distorting fisheye lens to make the posh palace seem grotesque.
It’s also surprising, considering how dark the material is, how comedy often creeps in. Stone in particular has several scenes that she turns into a laugh with just a twist of her face or the way she delivers a line of dialogue. I especially liked her character’s relationship with Masham (Joe Alwyn), a court dandy who thinks he’s seducing her but actually becomes his plaything.
The film suffers from a classic example of the filmmakers not knowing how to end it, so they just stop the story at an arbitrary point. But the abrupt finale is more than made up for by three actresses giving knockout performances.
“Roma” is the sort of movie other filmmakers love, and audiences have to endure.
It’s a mesmerizingly beautiful film by writer/director Alfonso Cuarón, his first since “Gravity” five years ago. Shot in black-and-white and set in Mexico City during 1970-71, it’s a semi-autobiographical look at his childhood seen through the eyes of the family maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio).
The cast is largely made up of non-actors, and the camera pans slowly around as if we were standing there witnessing the various familial activities play out, documentary-style.
Problem is, the quotidian doings of most families aren’t especially interesting, and neither is this one. The first half of the movie is a dreadful bore. Children fight, servants toil, the patriarch of the family, a physician named Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) leaves for an extended business trip and is barely seen again.
I appreciate Cuarón’s attempt to summon the spirit of his family life from nearly a half-century ago. But “Roma” plays out more like home movies that run on and on, seemingly without organization or end. The director, who edits his own movies and even won an Oscar for his work, seems too love in love with his own footage to carve out the fat.
The movie does finally gain some momentum in the last hour, when it becomes clear to the mother, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), that her husband is not coming back. The kids slowly wise up to the reality of their situation, and the normal sibling antagonisms get ratcheted up to a frightful level.
Cleo’s budding romance with Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), a rough sort from the other side of the tracks, takes an abrupt turn with a potentially life-changing development. Fermín is a devotee of martial arts, and I’m sure the most talked about scene will be his fully nude demonstration of his skills for Cleo using a hotel bathroom shower rod as a makeshift staff.
I’m puzzled as to what Cuarón hoped to accomplish with this scene. I think he intended it to be dramatic and even a little scary, but it plays more like a pornographic Bruce Lee spoof.
The family has four children, three boys and a girl, ranging from roughly age 6 for the youngest up to about 12. Only the oldest boy, Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey), is given anything like a distinct personality, as he continually rebels against his mother’s authority in his father’s absence. The other kids register as a sort of blur, horsing around in the background while Cleo is working, or making spoiled demands for ice cream or movie trips.
I’m not opposed to slow-moving movies. I nearly put “Ghost Story” in my top 10 list last year, and that contains a 10-minute scene of Rooney Mara doing nothing but eating pie.
But “Roma” has a self-indulgent listlessness that serves not to draw us in, but push us out. The experience of watching is a very pure form of cinema: observation without any sort of emotional intrusion.
Cleo is a cinematic construct for looking at the family, not a fleshed-out character unto herself. I believe Cuarón is trying to make some sort of statement about power dynamics, and how Cleo is essentially their beloved servant who’s almost a piece of property.
Trouble is, by not giving the character anything like an interior, he uses her just as badly as a filmmaker.
“Smallfoot” is a better idea than movie. The twist is that in this story, bigfoots really exist, except to them we’re the mythological and frightening creatures. It’s a cool concept that gets watered down into a standard kiddie film with boingy action and a slathered-on life-lessons theme.
Channing Tatum voices Migo, a young yeti who is about to take over the prestigious job of gong-ringer. This means making the sun rise by catapulting himself across their Himalayan mountain village and slamming his head into a massive gong. His dad (Danny DeVito) has held the position for many years, and has literally shrunk in the job.
A lot of the things the yetis do are like that -- they’re fun but don’t make much sense. Still, it’s a bustling place with a lot of joy.
They have some strange laws, though, enforced by the stoic Stonekeeper (Common), who wears a robe consisting of stone tiles, each one inscribed with a law known to be true. One of them reads, “There is no such thing as a smallfoot.” Odd that they would have a word and a rule for something that supposedly doesn’t exist.
Soon enough Migo stumbles across a real smallfoot, aka human, in the form of Percy Patterson (James Corden), a down-market wildlife television personality who has come to the Himalayas in order to fake a bigfoot sighting and pump up his ratings. Then he runs into the real thing, they become fast friends and Migo takes him back to his mountaintop village.
This puts him in conflict with the Stonekeeper and the yetis’ entire belief system. But with a few musical numbers and antics, everything will turn out all right.
“Smallfoot” is animation for the whole family, or at least the sort under age 10. It’s a perfect movie for home video, since parents can hit the ‘play’ button and then find something better to do.
Video extras are decent, and include a new animated short, “Super Soozie,” about a yeti toddler. There’s also a sing-along mode, three music videos and a couple of making-of featurettes.
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.
Plantin' and readin'. Plantin' and readin'. Fill a man full
of lead, stick him in the ground, and then read words at him. Why, when you
kill a man, why try to read the Lord in as a partner on the job?
--Simms Reeves
I love it when screenwriters give some of the best dialogue to minor characters. That's a hallmark of 1948's "Red River," directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne, Montgomery Clift and Walter Brennan. It's a big picture with an intimate feel, not to mention one of the darkest-themed Westerns of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Frequent Wayne collaborator John Ford is said to have remarked after seeing the film, "I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act!"
Personally, I think "The Searchers" was the apotheosis of the grimmer side of Wayne's star persona, but "Red River" certainly deserves a spot among his better performances.
The quote above comes from the frequent Western player Hank Worden, known for his stick frame, bald head and high moan of a voice. It's a reference to Wayne's character, pioneer cattleman Thomas Dunson, who has a habit of shooting dead anybody who opposes him, including his own cowboys, but always insisting upon a proper burial and Bible reading the morning after.
All his killings seem to conveniently take place in the evening so as not to interrupt the massive cattle drive he's currently undertaking from Texas to Missouri. The story is a fictionalized version of the first major drive in 1865 on the Chisholm Trail, which actually goes to Kansas. (More on that in a minute.)
Dunson has spent the better part of the last 15 years building up the largest beef herd in all of Texas, only to find himself destitute with no market for his cattle. So he resolves to drive 10,000 head 1,000 miles to Missouri. He doesn't even have enough cash to pay his men, only the promise of triple pay if and when they should reach the market.
"Red River" is chockablock with interesting side characters and throwaway lines of dialogue. Screenwriters Borden Chase and Charles Schnee received an Oscar nomination for their story, based on Chase's story in the Saturday Evening Post. It contains the usual Western tropes of six-shooter duels, marauding Indians and womenfolk tempting cowboys to leave the trail in favor of more civilized town life.
The other Academy Award nod was for Christian Nyby's editing, which may literally have saved the film from extinction. Originally shot in 1946, "Red River" wasn't released until two years later as Hawks sought to tighten the narrative, and also was sued by Howard Hughes, who thought the finale too similar to his from "The Outlaw." Brennan recorded a narration which was used to replace written journal entries that pop up from time to time, but that cut of the film was lost for decades until it was reassembled from the Criterion Collection release a few years ago.
The version I saw is not that one, and still includes the journal pop-ups, which as Hawks feared are fleeting and difficult to read.
Brennan plays Groot (!), another in a long line of cantankerous oldsters in his repertoire. He's more sensible than some of his other soft-headed characters, showing fierce loyalty to Dunson but only up to a point. The story opens with just the two of them breaking off from a wagon train to stake their own claim across the Red River in Texas.
Dunson leaves behind a bountiful lass (Coleen Gray) who pretty well throws herself at him, insisting he take her along, but the lonesome prairie is no place for a woman and all that. He gives her his mother's bracelet as a promise to send for her, but hours later the pioneers are massacred by Indians, one of who wears the trinket as a prize.
Consigned to lifelong bachelorhood (read: cantankerous chastity), Dunson takes a young boy who escaped the attack, Matt Garth, as his ward and heir apparent. He admires that the lad, shell-shocked by the killing of his family, still has the wherewithal to pull a pint-sized gun on Dunson when he slaps the boy to his senses.
"He'll do," Dunson mutters to Groot in admiration.
Years later Matt has just returned from the Civil War a seasoned leader and gunfighter. Dunson appoints him trail master of 30 or so cowpunchers, with Groot driving the chuck wagon. As the trail goes on and the troubles pile up, Dunson becomes increasingly dictatorial and hard-handed, shooting several deserters or would-be mutineers.
Matt, now played by Montgomery Clift, obediently knuckles under and keeps the men (mostly) in line. But when one lunkheaded idjit (Ivan Parry) causes a stampede by clanking some pots while stealing some sugar, resulting in the death of one man and 300 lost head, Dunson insists on whipping the transgressor. When the man refuses to accept this debasement, Matt shoots him in the shoulder to prevent the boss from giving him one between the eyes.
Soon Dunson is barely sleeping and drinking all the time, a paranoid petty tyrant of the plains.
Things finally come to a head when Dunson wants to hang some deserters, and Matt opposes him, essentially leading an ad-hoc mutiny. The older man vows to catch up to Matt and kill him, and for the rest of the movie the audience is looking over his shoulder right along with him.
They finally make it to Abilene, turning west to avoid the bandits attacking every cattle drive, and because they heard there's a new railroad stop there. There Matt again meets up with Tess Millay (Joanne Dru), a plucky gal and member of another wagon train the boys saved from Indians along the way, and they fall hard for each other.
(Including the usual heavily-implied but in-no-way-depicted sex.)
The final showdown between Dunson and Matt is energetic, if a little soft-headed. Dunson has recruited a dozen or so hard gunmen to accompany him, but then insists on a mano-e-mano face-off with Matt. Matt refuses to draw his gun, even when Dunson shoots his hat off and grazes his cheek. I loved Clift's surly, sneering defiance in this scene.
They trade guns for fists, until the scuffle is broken up by Tess when she holds them both at gunpoint and essentially forces them to hug it out. Dunson's fevered spell is immediately broken, and he's back to smiles and treating Matt as his adopted son.
This doesn't really play for me. If Dunson never intended to kill Matt, then why round up a crew and come after him? In the original published story, Dunson is slain by Cherry Valance (John Ireland), a deadly gun they took on at the start of the drive. But a movie can't end with John Wayne gunned down -- at least not unless it's his last film, "The Shootist," which coincidentally this film uses footage from in the flashback scenes.
Cherry is the darkling yang to Matt's yin, both skilled gunfighters with a lot of bravado and grit. In an early scene, they trade pistols and impress each other with some sharpshooting.
It seems destined that the two will eventually come to blows and/or bullets -- several other characters make this observation explicitly -- but interestingly, they never do, forming a grudging friendship. I would have loved to seen a sequel where the pair light out for some adventures of their own.
A few other notables from the cast:
Harry Carey Sr. plays the friendly businessman in town eager to scoop up the beef, and his son Jr. is the unfortunate cowboy who got squished in the stampede. His dream was to buy his wife a pair of red shoes, which is a pretty meager dream.
Shelley Winters has one of her earliest screen roles (uncredited) as a dance hall girl. Ditto for Richard Farnsworth, playing a background cowboy.
Chief Yowlachie plays Quo, an Indian scout who wins a poker hand against Groot in which he has staked a 50 percent interest in his set of false teeth. I loved his line, "From now on, I will be known as Two Jaw Quo." He lets the cook have his teeth back for eating, but otherwise carries them around in a little pouch like a totem.
"Red River" is a mighty fine-looking picture, with a lot of lush scenes of the American prairie. Although I would've loved to see a version of this movie shot a few years later with Technicolor and CinemaScope. Hawks skillfully maneuvers his camera to make a herd of cattle number maybe a few hundred to resemble 10,000, though I admit it gets a little old watching a parade of hooves go by. In one memorable shot, he pans his camera 360 degrees around the ranch.
Originally just seen as another workaday Western, the reputation of "Red River" has grown with the years, and was even named the fifth-best ever of its genre by the American Film Institute. That's a bit over the top, methinks, but it's definitely a surprisingly hard-bitten tale that rides high in the saddle.
I enjoyed “Mission: Impossible -- Fallout,” as I’ve liked all the movies starring Tom Cruise as international superspy Ethan Hunt. The franchise has been going for 22 years now if you can believe it, though only six films total. It seems like anytime talk of “Is Tom Cruise’s star starting to fade?” pops up, he quickly runs back for another MI megahit.
“Fallout” is essentially a retread of the last one, again featuring the same villain: Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), a terrorist who wants world peace but thinks it can only be achieved by mass destruction and death. Ethan put him in jail in the last movie, but he manages to break out and start mayhem anew.
The new wrinkle is the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), a famous philanthropist by day who is assisting Lane on the sly. There’s a suggestion of an attraction between Ethan and her, though I get the sense any coupling would be of the praying mantis variety. (Google it.)
The various sidekicks are back: Ving Rhames as Luther, munitions man extraordinaire; Simon Pegg as Benji, sort of a nerdy Q knockoff; Angela Bassett and Alec Baldwin as Washington politicians tut-tutting Ethan’s methods; and Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa, a British agent who’s been both an ally and nuisance over the years.
Henry Cavill plays a new ally-slash-competitor, CIA wetboy Walker. He and Ethan have a memorable two-against-one fight in a men’s bathroom against a little dude who’s more than a match for them. Of course, their own confrontation is telegraphed so much it feels inevitable.
“Mission: Impossible -- Fallout” is a perfect example of a popcorn movie. It tastes good going down, but it’s empty calories you soon forget.
Bonus features are quite good. These include three separate commentary tracks: one with director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise, another with McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton, and the third with composer Lorne Balfe.
There’s also an expansive making-of documentary, deleted scenes with optional commentary, a musical breakdown of a key foot chase, storyboards and an isolated musical track score.
