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Tag: movie review

Movie Review: Terrific ‘Anomalisa’ Is The Middle-Aged Man’s ‘Inside Out’

By Colin Covert, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (TNS)

Is it right to call a movie’s visual details sumptuous when they reflect the blase designs of bona fide daily life? If they precisely copy the bland pastel fabrics omnipresent in an ordinary hotel, and the wishy-washy gray that hot shower steam leaves on a bathroom mirror? What if they are handcrafted, near-perfect miniatures designed to draw us toward a protagonist exhausted by his pallid life and personality?

That’s the quality of attention that Anomalisa focuses on its story. It’s the latest from Charlie Kaufman, who has given us remarkable worldviews in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. With the help of co-director Duke Johnson, it creates an amazing work with crossover appeal as adult drama, melancholy comedy and unexpected stop-motion animation.

At its center is Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a fifty-something consumer service guru visiting a Cincinnati convention to deliver a speech. He is depressed and socially awkward, despite his intelligence. He keeps people at arm’s length, whether it’s the fellow passenger who gives his hand a nervous squeeze as their plane roughly lands, or the talkative cabdriver who takes him downtown, endlessly recommending the city’s perfectly sized zoo and perfectly prepared chili.

The population of this monotonous Midwestern purgatory sounds uniform to him, because that is how he perceives everyone. Whether it’s a singer delivering an aria on his iPod, a phone call to his wife and son, or dull small talk with every Tom, Dick and Sally, they sound precisely the same through the admirably shaded vocal performance of Tom Noonan. Whatever their height or shape, they all have look-alike faces.

Michael passes between them like a man afraid of smothering from ennui, protecting himself by communicating hardly at all. Then his pessimism is overturned by Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a tender turn rivaling her bloody fireworks show in The Hateful Eight). She doesn’t sound or look like the rest. She isn’t sophisticated. She doesn’t understand parts of Michael’s book, even with a dictionary. But she doesn’t communicate in the insincere, upbeat monotone of everyone else. She’s different.

Following a few drinks at the hotel bar, he invites her to his room, where she sings “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” in a cappella English and Italian. Suddenly drunken Michael falls in love, leading to a clumsy but honest and moving bedroom scene, with the lifelike puppets’ anatomically correct genitals in full view. The film, rated R, might be NC-17 if it was in live action, but it is not pandering for a moment.

The intimate scene hints that Michael might be moving out of his midlife breakdown.

Then again, a weird phone call summoning Michael to the hotel manager’s office and an attack of sexual panic that follows it could negate everything before as a meaningless extramarital fling. In the fresh light of the next morning, he seems to modify French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, silently implying that hell is other people at breakfast.

When the confused Michael delivers his productivity-boosting address to hundreds of fans, he veers helplessly off course. “What is it to be human?” he asks. “What is it to ache? What is it to be alive?” Though he has written a popular book on the idea of commitment to the service of others, it seems like a concept foreign to him.

Anomalisa not only renders its warts-and-all human portraits in a remarkable craft that is almost photorealist, it shows personalities with extraordinary precision, too. In its morose sort of genius, it is the well-off, self-absorbed, middle-aged man’s Inside Out.

‘ANOMALISA’

3.5 out of 4 stars

Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language. In English and Italian.

©2016 Star Tribune (Minneapolis). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: A scene from Anomalisa. (Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures/TNS)

 

Column: ‘Home Alone’ A Holiday Classic? Don’t Make Me Laugh

Column: ‘Home Alone’ A Holiday Classic? Don’t Make Me Laugh

By Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Pardon me, but Home Alone has made enough hundreds of millions of dollars by now and solidified enough of a multigenerational fan base to survive the following review: to hell with it.

This is not a popular or festive sentiment. People are crazy for Home Alone. Macaulay Culkin’s blase comic authority killed, and helped make it one of the most popular comedies ever made. For millions of preteen children (and plenty of others), its final 30 minutes is the definition of rousing slapstick comedy.

This breaks my heart.

Seriously. It breaks my heart. The movie’s slapstick sensibility is harsh enough to invite comparisons to slasher movies. You think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding. I’m heartbroken, and I’m not kidding.

This month an intriguing array of articles have appeared online and in print, exploring this notion of “Home Alone” as an insidious gateway drug, acclimating children the world over to the next level of related thrills and methodical kills found in the slasher genre. Rhett Jones, writing for Hopes&Fears, lays out the argument: “The best reason to watch slasher films is for the well-designed kill, always. The same goes for Home Alone, which is actually a pretty (messed) up movie.”

Let’s back up a moment. Verifiably, screenwriter John Hughes’ massively successful mashup of sadism and sentiment made Home Alone the biggest hit of 1990. This was thanks largely to the wily deadpan elan of the key performance: Macaulay Culkin as young, privileged but put-upon 8-year-old Kevin, left behind in a five-bedroom mansion (in Winnetka) while his busy, distracted family jets off to France for the holidays.

The coolly accomplished boy defends his turf against a pair of invading burglars played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Kevin does so by going commando, rigging a series of booby traps inflicting grievous, skull-crushing bodily harm using hot tar, hot wires, nails to the foot, paint cans to the skull and a blowtorch. Everything but cluster bombs.

Director Chris Columbus went for broke, and for bizarrely realistic levels of brutality. Gruesome sight gags were filmed, and many people working on the movie assumed they’d never make the final cut. They did. All of them.

In 1990, reviewing it for the San Diego Union (now the Union-Tribune), I felt like a fringe dweller. “None of the hyper-violent gags in the climax — with Pesci and Stern getting irons in the face and blowtorches in the hair — are staged or performed with any wit; none of them are tailored to the individual actors’ styles … this is just second-shelf Three Stooges wrapped in treacle.” Grumble, grumble. Twenty-five years later, “Home Alone” remains one of the most profitable comedies ever made in America, and its silver anniversary is being celebrated with a return to theaters Dec. 9, for a limited theatrical rerelease.

Who could possibly work up a line of hate against such a familiar, entrenched, officially sanctioned Cute Picture?

A lot of people, it turns out. On Thrillist recently, Dan Jackson wrote of Home Alone and the even more violent Home Alone 2 as more disturbing, in their deceptive all-ages way, than Straw Dogs.

Jackson: “There’s surely a defense to be made of the series’ absurd violence by saying that it’s merely a live-action cartoon, a Wile E. Coyote-style explosion of kinetic action. As a child, it’s easy to be sucked in by the violent fantasies peddled by these movies … but at a certain point, the film’s constant violence starts to wear you down and you leave these movies behind. And when that happens, Straw Dogs will be waiting for you.” The writer refers to an instructive, blow-by-blow Slate piece by Alan Siegel, in which Home Alone is compared to Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 revenge thriller, very rough for the time and seething with bloodthirsty comeuppances meted out to the home invaders.

“To my 7-year-old self,” Siegel writes of Home Alone, “the mayhem (in Home Alone’s) final 30 minutes was almost pornographic.” Sure enough, Siegel’s interview with Home Alone production designer John Muto has Muto admitting that, 25 years earlier, during filming, he “kept telling people we were doing a kids version of Straw Dogs.”

Interestingly (and this was true of another widely loved Hughes screenplay, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), the hometown reviews of Home Alone were tougher than many on the coasts. Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune: “The pleasures here are entirely cruel, with an unhealthy concentration on the suffering of the victims, on the thudding impact of various objects against their heads, on their howls of agony.” Regarding Home Alone 2, Kehr shrewdly notes that “the slapstick violence — already astonishingly intense in the first film — (grew) even more graphic and sadistic” in the second. Roger Ebert, who gave Home Alone a nonclassic 2.5 stars, compared its climax to that of Last House on the Left. Elsewhere, Time Out London: “It mistakes the pain threshold for hilarity.” TV Guide? “Full of unanticipated sadism … a close-up of Stern’s bare foot slipping slowly down on a six-inch nail is the film’s most ghastly image.”

That’s my problem with Home Alone. Its appeal is closer to bear-baiting than prime visual comedy. It jerks you around, from an improbable (but effective) child’s nightmare of abandonment to a liberating vision of a child’s premature adulthood, capping it off with a coldblooded vanquishing of the enemy. It’s the biggest bait-and-switch holiday movie of all time.

Maybe that’s why people love it; after one too many rounds with A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life, maybe the skull-cracking came as a relief.

©2015 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Macaulay Culkin and Joe Pesci in “Home Alone.” (Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox/TNS)

Movie Review: ‘Suffragette’ Is An Unglamorous Look At Important Fight For Rights

Movie Review: ‘Suffragette’ Is An Unglamorous Look At Important Fight For Rights

By Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service (TNS)

The story of women fighting for the right to vote is all too recent, and for some, all too forgotten. Director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan bring the history of the British suffragette movement to bear in the film Suffragette, as a reminder of the struggles that have come before, and the achievements that have yet to be won. The resulting film is dark and unglamorous, but it burns with a determined fire, giving these women a revolutionary hero treatment.

Suffragette is carried by the excellent Carey Mulligan, who does career-best acting in an unshowy role. Her Maud Watts is a fictional stand in for the working class women drawn into the movement in the early 20th century, fighting alongside real historical figures Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep, in a glorified cameo) and Emily Davison (Natalie Press). As Maud, Mulligan is drawn and wan, her eyes tired, her mouth pulled into a wry, sad smirk, like she can’t even believe her situation herself. From a contemporary perspective, it’s hard to comprehend the realities of this brutal, bloody battle.

Maud works in a huge industrial laundry run by a sadistic, lecherous man, Taylor (Geoff Bell). As she testifies before a government committee, she was born there, her mother carrying her on her back while she worked. Maud started work at age 7, and at 24, the dangerous, injurious work of steam, irons and clouds of linen are all she’s ever known. Her husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), is passive, cowardly. The greatest, and only, joy in Maud’s life is her small son, George (Adam Michael Dodd).

At the laundry, her mouthy friend Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) starts to spout off about “Votes for Women!” and with the prodding of proud suffragette pharmacist Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), and upper-class activist Alice Haughton (Romola Garai), Maud is soon embroiled in the fight.

Spurred by entreaties to civil disobedience espoused in Emmeline Pankhurst’s secret speeches, they become a group of feminist terrorists, which garners the attention of law enforcement. Like many other freedom fighters and revolutionaries throughout history, they are subjected to government surveillance, imprisonment and torture while fighting for their rights. These suppressive actions, enacted by a group of men scared to lose their power, only inspire the women to fight back with even more ferocity.

The torment that Maud is put through is devastating, but Suffragette, as a film, often robs itself of its own emotional power. The film is shot with hand-held cinematography, which helps to bring an immediacy to early 20th century London. But during dramatic moments, the handheld close ups are chaotic and confounding. During a powerful scene where Maud stands up to her nemesis, Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson), her face is partially obscured by his shoulder. It could be a visual metaphor for the continued presence of oppressive patriarchy that obstructs her path, but it’s also a frustrating obstacle in the audience feeling Maud’s vigor when she fully comes into her own power.

Despite these questionable aesthetic choices, Suffragette successfully ties together varied themes that place the movement within a wider context of civil rights struggles. The right to vote is motivated by economic and labor issues, and stoked by government persecution. This revolution looks like others that we’ve seen on screen, and the film legitimizes it while also offering a stark reminder that the fight is far from over.

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‘SUFFRAGETTE’

3 stars out of 4

Rated PG-13 for some intense violence, thematic elements, brief strong language and partial nudity.

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Romola Garai, Anne-Marie Duff, Ben Whishaw

Directed by Sarah Gavron

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

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Photo: (From L to R) Actresses Ramola Garai, Helena Bonham-Carter, Anne-Marie Duff and Carey Mulligan pose at the Gala screening of the film “Suffragette” for the opening night of the British Film Institute (BFI) Film Festival at Leicester Square in London October 7, 2015. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

‘Truth’ Is Plodding Retelling Of Downfall Of CBS News’ Dan Rather

‘Truth’ Is Plodding Retelling Of Downfall Of CBS News’ Dan Rather

By Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — Is “swift-boating” still part of the common lexicon? The political and cultural climate has moved far and fast since the skirmishes of the 2004 presidential election, a time the movie Truth looks to re-examine.

Adapted by screenwriter James Vanderbilt in his directing debut, the film is based on the book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power, by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, who after the success of reports on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal attempted to untangle the convoluted history of then-President George W. Bush’s military service in the Air National Guard in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The 60 Minutes II report that aired in September 2004 was based in part on documents whose authenticity were immediately called into question, creating a furor that led to Mapes being fired and paved the way for the resignation of Dan Rather from CBS News.

Truth is a movie curiously in conflict with itself. There is a constant shift between granular detail and big-picture sweep that the movie never fully resolves, as serious discussions of type fonts and spacing between lines and letters on the military documents fit awkwardly with musings on what-it-all-means.

Mapes’ book and Vanderbilt’s screenplay present the incident as a harbinger of the deeply divided and contentious climate in which the news is now delivered each day, and a demarcation point regarding the importance of journalism along with the intersection of the Internet and media ownership.

Which all might be a bit dry were it not for the sparkling performances by Cate Blanchett as Mapes and Robert Redford as Rather, who provide two distinct approaches on movie-star dynamics. Blanchett attacks her role while Redford lets it come to him. There are also fine supporting performances from Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Topher Grace, Stacy Keach and Bruce Greenwood. Noni Hazlehurst delivers a devastating monologue as the wife of the man who first delivers suspect documents to Mapes.

Vanderbilt is best known as the screenwriter of David Fincher’s Zodiac, another film dense with historical and factual information. Fincher as a director was better able to handle the sheer volume of data in that story, letting its weight provide momentum, with a nimble grace that Vanderbilt is unable to bring to Truth. It is not hard to wonder if Truth the screenplay might have rang its bell a bit more clearly in the hands of another director, another set of eyes and hands to distill the material.

The film plays best as a forensic procedural leading up to and receding from the fulcrum point of the September 2004 broadcast of that now infamous story on Bush’s National Guard service, an examination of how the story came together and how quickly it came apart. (A subsequent internal investigation by CBS found that the disputed documents could be neither verified fully nor discounted completely.) For anyone who knows what is to come after the broadcast, a number of early scenes on the reporting of the story feel like moments just before a car crash, where in retrospect the accident could have been avoided, but in the moment it is coldly inevitable.

The post-broadcast investigation builds to a magnificent series of scenes in which Blanchett as Mapes spars with a panel made up of the privileged and elite, delivering a feisty declaration of principles that is uncynically the stuff of awards-season clip packages. Blanchett has become such an otherworldly screen persona — having played Cinderella’s stepmother, a queen, an elf, a delusional socialite, Katharine Hepburn and Bob Dylan — that seeing her play an ostensibly regular person now feels unusual. Blanchett still brings a regal bearing to her earthy depiction of realness, her tousled hair flicked precisely as to always be perfectly imperfect.

Redford is an unusual choice at first in the role of Rather and the actor doesn’t change his hair color or seemingly make much effort to look like the real television newsman. But eventually Redford’s own presence and understated charm take hold and the actor doesn’t so much inhabit the role as simply make it his own, bending it toward his own gravitational pull. It’s a trick of hiding in plain sight — at some point the actor stops reading onscreen like Robert Redford as Robert Redford and suddenly is Robert Redford as Dan Rather.

The film ends with Rather’s final broadcast and there’s a slow-motion glamour shot of Redford that is jarring for the way in which it seems to enshrine both the actor and the character as some sort of new Mount Rushmore of rustic Americana. The moment is odd for a number of reasons, feeling outside the tone of the rest of the movie, but most of all for how it shoves Mapes to the side of her own story.

Even as the film clearly conveys both the how and why of the mistakes made in reporting and airing the Bush National Guard story — mistakes that also shed no real light on the veracity of the story’s core claims — there are no ultimate conclusions to be drawn from “Truth.” There is no smoking gun, deathbed confession or definitive answer; rather there is a web of shifting perspectives and conflicting motives. And for a movie about contentious recent history and the contemporary media environment within which that history is being written, that air of conflict and uncertainty may remain the most genuinely honest result one can expect.
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Mark Olsen: mark.olsen@latimes.com
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‘TRUTH’
Rated: R, for language and a brief nude photo
Running Time: 2 hours and 1 minute
Playing: In limited release
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(c)2015 Los Angeles Times
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