Old Hollywood is a theme this week, with head scratchers and surprise gems in the mix. Join us as we talk about Stan & Ollie, The Kid Who Would Be King, Serenity, The Great Buster, Genesis 2.0, Yours in Sisterhood plus new releases in home entertainment.
Listen to the full podcast HERE.
by Hope Madden
A conversation between generations, a glimpse into the changing and yet somehow unchanged reality of feminism—filmmaker Irene Lusztig’s unusual documentary Yours in Sisterhood bridges eras to shed some light.
In Lusztig’s lyrical timeloop, modern readers share letters written to the editors of Ms. Magazine in the Seventies and early Eighties. The magazine, the first mainstream feminist periodical, began publishing in 1972 and amplified the sounds of the second wave of feminism enjoying the spotlight at the time.
The letters read, in every case but one, went unpublished, so this doc is the first opportunity the original writer has had to share those decades-old thoughts with a large audience.
Lusztig’s choice of reader—sometimes the writer herself, but usually a stranger making her or his first meeting with the letter—creates the film’s most poignant moments.
At times, these readers have much in common with the original scribe: age, race, geographic locale or socioeconomic circumstances. One letter, penned by an incarcerated young woman on the verge of release from prison, is read and then commented upon by a woman currently behind bars in the same institution.
In other instances, the reader is in one way or another at odds with the writer. This confluence and conflict creates some fascinating and fascinatingly untidy responses. In many ways, the energy of the film relies on the tension between the few people who feel well-matched and the few people who feel dissonant.
What usually happens is that a wrinkle in the larger fabric of feminism shows itself. In the case of the writer, this often takes the form of a person who does not hear her voice or see her face in the pages of the magazine.
In the case of the modern reader, questions about the movement’s evolution or lack thereof open up conversations and considerations worth examining in this post #MeToo, post 2016 election environment.
by Hope Madden
Wouldn’t it be nutty to peek behind the curtain of one of cinema’s most famous pairs—your Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Bert and Ernie—only to find that they are exactly as entertaining and likable in person as they are onscreen?
That’s actually part of what makes Stan & Ollie, Jon S. Baird’s loving biopic of the famous comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, so peculiar a film. Go in expecting demons, divas and drama and you will be disappointed. If you’re looking for a tender image of partnership and friendship struggling to overcome a harsh business, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
The inexhaustible talent of John C. Reilly squeezes into a fat suit of Darkest Hour impressiveness as Oliver “Babe” Hardy. The physical transformation awes, but it’s the way the actor mines Hardy’s gentle good nature that impresses even more.
Coogan’s the real surprise. Not only is his resemblance to Stan Laurel almost eerie, but the performance is easily the best dramatic turn of his career.
Both actors, working from a wistful script by Coogan’s Philomena writing partner Jeff Pope, sidestep drama in favor of a kind of resigned camaraderie. Theirs is that well-worn relationship of both love and necessity that comes with decades of familiarity, unspoken grievances and love.
The actors’ chemistry is a fine match for that of the iconic duo, and through the pairing, Baird explores partnership in a more meaningful and less sentimental way than what you’d normally find in a “stars in their declining years” biopic.
The result is an endearing, if slightly underwhelming dramedy, enlivened by Baird’s charming direction. While the film is at its best when Coogan and Reilly quietly grapple with changes facing them, it is at its most enjoyable when art imitates life imitating art. That is, when Stan and Ollie drag a really big trunk up a big flight of stairs, only to let go of it, watch it slide back to the bottom, and do it again.
Like the comedy of Laurel and Hardy, this film is sweet, clever and entirely of another time.
Just eight best picture nominations this year and a list of contenders that clarifies what a kickass year 2018 was for female roles. Well done, chicas!
Do we have gripes? Well, honestly, not too many. Here’s the rundown.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
This is a good list. Strong. Not a lot of bones to pick here. Our heart goes out to anyone trying to narrow this field down to a single winner. Wouldn’t have minded seeing Nicole Kidman (Boy Erased) or Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace) get in, but how to make the room?
Amy Adams (Vice)
Marina de Tavira (Roma)
Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Emma Stone (The Favourite)
Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
We love Sam Elliott. Honestly, who doesn’t? Driver and Rockwell, too, and all were amazing in their respective films. But we would have had to leave them off in favor of Michael B. Jordan (Black Panther) and Lucas Hedges (Boy Erased). But no Timothee Chalamet for Beautiful Boy? That might be the biggest snub this year.
Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
Adam Driver (BlacKkKlansman)
Sam Elliott (A Star is Born)
Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Sam Rockwell (Vice)
LEAD ACTOR
Another solid list, although how the entire world ignored three insane performances from Joaquin Phoenix this year—You Were Never Really Here, Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot, The Sisters Brothers—is beyond us. Please, please do yourself the favor and watch You Were Never Really Here. We’d have given him Mortensen’s slot, but we and the Academy disagree about that one particular film this year.
We would also have made room for Ben Foster (Leave No Trace) with a Malek/Dafoe coin flip.
Christian Bale (Vice)
Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born)
Willem Dafoe (At Eternity’s Gate)
Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)
Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)
LEAD ACTRESS
We would have applauded nods for Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade and Toni Collette for Hereditary, but holy cow, people, this is acting. This is the art and the craft, right here. No bones. No complaints. Just awe.
Yalitza Aparicio (Roma)
Glenn Close (The Wife)
Olivia Coleman (The Favourite)
Lady Gaga (A Star is Born)
Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Had hoped for Black Panther and Leave No Trace (in a whiplashed swing from “everybody saw” to “nobody saw”). Buster Scruggs was a surprise, but when is it ever a bad idea to nominate the Coens?
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel and Ethan Coen)
BlacKkKlansman (Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee)
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
A Star is Born (Eric Roth, Bradley Cooper Will Fetters)
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
What we would have given to see Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade get some love here. Where would we have put it? Honestly, only The Favourite and Roma are better written, but in our book, it certainly deserved the slot designated to the self-congratulatory Green Book.
The Favourite (Deborah Davis, Tony McNamara)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
Green Book (Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly)
Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
Vice (Adam McKay)
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Don’t mind the overrated Shirkers not making it, but shocked not to see Won’t You Be My Neighbor? here.
Free Solo
Hale County: This Morning, This Evening
Minding the Gap
Of Fathers and Sons
RBG
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEATURE
Um…Burning? Really, did you just forget?
Capernaum
Cold War
Never Looks Away
Roma
Shoplifters
CINEMATOGRPHY
We’re a little surprised not to see If Beale Street Could Talk or First Man included, but none of these are weak.
Cold War
The Favourite
Never look away
Roma
A Star is Born
ANIMATED
This is just a fight for second place after Spider-Verse.
Incredibles 2
Isle of dogs
Mirai
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
DIRECTOR
Would have cheered for Lynne Ramsay (YWNRH), surprised not to see Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born) and disappointed not to see Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), but how great is it to see Pawel Pawlikowski make this list for his groundbreaking love story Cold War? Pretty great. (Also, Oscar likes black and white movies.)
Lee, Lanthimos and Cuaron, though, that is a trifecta we applaud until our hands ache.
Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman)
Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War)
Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite)
Alfonso Cuaron (Roma)
Adam McKay (Vice)
FILM
Only eight this year, which means we can wish for two without having to bump any. We wish for Eighth Grade and Hereditary. Then we’d bump Bohemian Rhapsody and admitted frontrunner Green Book in favor of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and You Were Never Really Here. There you go. We’ve dreamed up a nice list.
Black Panther
BlacKkKansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Roma
A Star is Born
Vice
The 91st annual Academy Awards will air Feb. 24th on ABC.
Only a couple of options this week, but both are worth your time for different reasons.
Click the film title for the full review.
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
Thank you Netflix for financing and distributing Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece, Roma. No offense to the small screens that Netflix often lives in, but this one demands to be seen on the big ones.
A breathtaking culmination of his work to date, Roma pulls in elements and themes, visuals and curiosities from every film Cuarón has made (including a wonderfully organic ode to the inspiration for one of his biggest), braiding them into a semi-autobiographical meditation on family life in the early 1970s.
At the film’s heart is an extended group concerning an affluent Mexico City couple (Fernando Grediaga and the scene-stealing Marina de Tavira), their four children and their two live-in servants Adela (Nancy Garcia Garcia) and Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio).
The family unit will morph, stretch and strengthen by film’s end as Cuarón envelopes us in a languidly paced but visually sumptuous exploration of Cleo’s point of view.
A remarkable Aparicio quietly observes all that goes on around her—the tumult and the quiet of life inside and outside the house—as Cuarón’s camera performs a cross between poetry and ballet to capture those observations.
Filmed in gorgeous black and white, the picture is showy without being showy, it’s realistic with flourishes of absurdism. More than anything, it is proof of Cuarón’s mastery as a cinematic storyteller. The same fluidity he brought to his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban serves a different kind of magic here, capturing the intimate and the epic, the simple and the wildly complicated with pristine clarity.
Sequence upon sequence offers a dizzying array of beauty, as foreground and background often move in glorious concert during meticulously staged extended takes that somehow feel at once experimental and restrained. The effect is of a nearly underwater variety, a profound serenity that renders any puncture, from a street parade moving blindly past the distraught woman in its path to a murder in broad daylight, that much more compelling.
Roma is filmmaking of the most consummate skill. Though it’s anchored in family strife that might feel at home in a Lifetime melodrama, the film achieves an intimacy that’s grand, detailed and perhaps more than anything else, inviting. Accept that invitation, and Cuaron will serve you a feast not easy to leave behind, even if you want to.
You won’t want to.
Can Shyamalan do his trilogy right? Is Shoplifters the best foreign language film of the year? Are fraternities ever a good idea? We cover Glass, Shoplifters and Pledge, plus all that’s worth note in new home entertainment, on this week’s podcast.
Listen HERE.
by Hope Madden
How does one create a Patrick Bateman?
On its surface, Pledge may appear to be little more than a competently made fraternity horror in the tradition of Skulls. It is a cautionary tale about hazing taken to its sadistic (if likely logical) extreme.
But director Daniel Robbins’s latest horror show, from a tight script by co-star Zack Weiner, digs into issues bigger than tribe mentality. Pledge is not just about how far you’d go to belong. It asks about compliance, cowardice, and the cost and definition of success.
Weiner plays Alex. Alex is a college freshman and a nerd. He’s joined by buddies Ethan (Phillip Andre Botello) and Justin (Zachery Byrd), the three forming a trio of losers looking for acceptance. As the day of fraternity pledge party embarrassments wears on, a pretty girl shows up from nowhere and invites the buddies to a different kind of party.
Who can say too “good to be true”? Well, anybody who’s ever seen a movie, but Pledge has some surprises hiding behind those kegs.
The film’s first obvious strength is the cast. Each of the primary trio of actors delivers a believable outcast, and their chemistry feels fresh and honest enough that you never doubt their actions.
In fact, all the performances are quite solid—the good guys occasionally unlikeable, the bad guys sometimes teetering on sympathetic—and the writing is sharp.
Once Robbins has you rooting for his sad sack heroes, the film works well enough as a straightforward exercise in bloodlust and torture. And nasty ass soup.
But where Weiner’s savvy script and Robbins’s sly direction really excel is in digging into this predictable plot (see Hostel, American Werewolf in Paris and any number of other “hot chick invites doofus guys to a party at their own peril” subgenre) to find an ugly picture of American privilege.
Pledge is no masterpiece. It is, however, a tightly packaged, insightful and mean little flick.
It’s Halloween all over again! Two above-average spookfests and one longshot Oscar contender ensure that just about everything this week in home entertainment is a tasty treat.
Click the movie title for the full review.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EbOgr4aTvM
Science Fiction and Horror are cousins—creepy, often slimy cousins. Cousins with pustules, often.
There are so many utterly brilliant options to pick through that our omissions are bound to frustrate and upset, but whether your horror comes from the lab, from space or from the space/time continuum, when you watch these five, your neighbors will hear you scream.
Director Dono Siegel was the first filmmaker to bring Jack Finney’s Cold War nightmare to the screen. He wouldn’t be the last, maybe not even the best, but what he did with this eerie alien tale tapped into a societal anxiety and quickly became one of the most influential and terrifying films of its time.
Doc Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) is just home from a short trip when he’s inundated by patients swearing their loved ones are not their loved ones at all. Sure, they look the same and have all the same skills and memories, but there’s no warmth, no passion.
With this, the fear that our very nation could be overtaken by an outside force – Russians, say, for terrifyingly immediate sake of argument – working its way through not by force, but by quietly taking over each and every person in one town, then spreading from town to town to town.
It’s the kind of insidious evil that fuels contagion horror, infestation horror, even demonic horror. But Invasion of the Body Snatchers spoke to a society’s deepest fears and became a touchstone for all SciFi to follow it.
After a couple of interesting, if un-medical films, the great David Cronenberg made a triumphant return to the laboratory of the mad scientist in his most popular film to date.
But it’s not just Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that makes The Fly fly; it’s the performance he draws from Jeff Goldblum.
Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.
He and Geena Davis make the perfect pair, with their matching height and mullets, and their onscreen chemistry does give the film a level of human drama traditionally lacking from the Cronenberg canon. Atop that, there’s the transformation scene in the bathroom – the fingernails, the pustules – all classic Cronenberg grotesquerie, and still difficult to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BzwxJ-M_M0
This one is nutty, and absolutely required viewing for anyone with an interest in space/time continuum conundrums.
Writer/director/co-star Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) mocks our desire for control and our fear of the doppelganger with a very quick and dirty trip through time. So much can go wrong when you travel just one hour backward. The less you know going in, the better.
An always clever experiment in science fiction, horror and irony, Timecrimes is a spare, unique and wild ride.
John Carpenter’s remake of the 1951 SciFi flick The Thing from Another World concocts a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination, and mutation.
A beard-tastic cast portrays a team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.
This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.
The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.
Director Ridley Scott’s other masterpiece, Alien, traps a crew aboard a rickety, dark, workingman’s spacecraft with the coolest monster perhaps ever.
After a vagina-hand-sucker-monster attaches itself to your face, it gestates inside you, then tears through your innards. Then it grows exponentially, hides a second set of teeth, and bleeds acid. How much cooler could this possibly be?
Compare that to the crew, and the competition seems unreasonably mismatched. The sunken-chested Harry Dean Stanton, the screechy Veronica Cartwright, the sinister Ian Holm, the mustachioed Tom Skerritt, even the mulleted Sigourney Weaver – they all seem doomed before we even get to know them.
Much ado has been made, rightfully so, of the John Hurt Chest Explosion (I loved their early work, before they went commercial). But Scott’s lingering camera leaves unsettling impressions in far simpler ways, starting with the shot of all those eggs.
