Eddie the Eagle

Alternate Title:  I Believe I Can Fly...

One sentence synopsis:    A hapless, would-be British Olympian decides to become a ski-jumper, the first for Britain in 70 years.


Things Havoc liked:Those of you who remember my list of the best films of 2015 (which was not that long ago), will remember the movie Kingsman, the Secret Service, which was a demented, insane, bloodfest of a Matthew Vaughn movie which I adored to a degree that probably speaks poorly of my general character. Among the many, many virtues that Kingsman had was its lead actor, an unknown (to me) young man named Taron Egerton (who, I kid you not, grew up in a Welsh town called Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch). Egerton was absolutely fantastic in a role that should, by rights, have been insufferable, and has since garnered other awards for roles in movies I did not see such as Testament of Youth and Legend. I'm an actor's critic, as you all well know, so when a good young actor shows up, I like to track their career throughout the project, and lo and behold, his next film was, of all things, a feel-good sports movie about one of my favorite people of all time.

For those who do not know, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, was an Olympic Ski Jumper from Great Britain notable for being bereft of any shred of Olympic-grade talent for the sport, who nonetheless contrived (due to the fact that there were no other Ski Jumpers from his home country) to make it to the 1988 Calgary Olympics, which also played host to the Jamaican Bobsled team from Cool Runnings. Edwards had no particular aptitude for the sport of Ski Jumping (or for sport in general), but competed nonetheless, becoming a fan favorite on the back of his utter haplessness, self-effacing humor, and British Daring-Do. The role is a far cry from that of Egsy, from the aforementioned Kingsman, but Egerton is once again spot on with it, playing a particularly British type of myopic nerd, who dreams of becoming an Olympian and cares very little for what he has to do to get there, even if it means making a complete fool of himself, and sustaining the horrific bodily injuries that come with failing at a sport like Ski Jumping. These injuries are not minor, as we see in the best line in the film, where Eddie's coach watches with him as another ski jumper shatters every bone in his body while failing a moderate-sized jump, and then leans in to the horrified Eddie to comment "And he knew what he was doing..."

Ah, but the coach is very important in movies like this, isn't he, and Eddie the Eagle's coach is the, far as I can tell fictional, Bronson Peary, played by everyone's favorite wolverine, Hugh Jackman. Jackman is a sardonic, alcoholic bastard, in the wonderful style of these movies since time immemorial, who must gradually warm up to Eddie's innocent-if-ungainly earnestness. It's an old story for a sports movie, yeah, but Jackman has fun with it, gargling booze from everything in sight and seemingly growing to relish the opportunity to troll the entire establishment of Ski Jumping (which apparently exists) with an athlete who is not an athlete by any definition of the word. Long-time character actor and first-time director Dexter Fletcher (of Band of Brothers and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels), takes on the director's chair with a style that seems to play around with the conventions of the sporting movie a bit, from comical overuse of slow-motion-uplifting-music shots to a truly trippy set of scenes involving the so-called "Flying Finn", Matti Nykänen, who rambles semi-coherently about the philosophical "meaning" of ski jumping like a cross between George Mallory and The Dude.

Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is all stock sports cliches, and not just that, but practically a re-tread of the aforementioned Cool Runnings. We have everything here, from the team of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic winter athletes (Norwegians, this time), who inexplicably hate our hero and resent his presence in the Olympics, to the fussy, over-proper British bureaucrats determined to prevent Eddie from doing anything so tremendously unorthodox (HARUMPH!) as competing in the Olympics. One of them even goes so far as to deliver a sneering, twirl-of-the-mustache remark about how the Olympics are not for amateurs, and how people with dreams should have them dashed so as to preserve propriety. Eddie, meanwhile, also has to deal with his father, a working-class plasterer who regards his sporting dreams as irrelevant, and who refuses to support him. Will Eddie's dad see the light in time for the big jump? Might he share a knowing nod with his son while acknowledging that he was right to follow his dreams all along? Perish the thought that I should spoil such mysteries of existence to you, but if you've seen a single film in the last thirty years, I have a feeling you'll work it out for yourself. Fletcher seems to have decided that the best way to make his movie would be to take all four of the plotlines that the four main characters in Cool Runnings had and merge them together into one, which is not precisely the decision I would have made. The result is a movie with a schmaltz and saccharine level that is high enough to carry a diabetes warning.

I also question what in the world several of the more prominent actors who lent their names to this film were thinking beyond the need for another paycheck. The wonderful Jim Broadbent is barely in the film at all, with maybe three minutes of screentime tops as the British broadcaster for the games, a role which requires him to do very little. He does, however, manage to do more than Christopher Walken, who somehow earned himself third billing in the movie for a total of roughly forty-five seconds of screentime, playing (in another nod to Cool Runnings) Jackman's former coach from his own days as a ski jumper, who is terminally disappointed in his once-promising pupil, and regards him as having embarrassed himself and his sport in fostering Eddie. As before, I shall refrain from revealing whether or not this ends with a tearful reunion at the end where bygones are allowed to be bygones and the former student is finally acknowledged by the master who once despaired of him, but I shall rely on the good judgment of all of my readers to determine what they think might come of all this.

Final thoughts:     Eddie the Eagle is a perfectly harmless movie in the style of a hundred other sports films, livened by a couple of good performances and the novelty of its source material, but required viewing by all fans of cinema it is definitely not. What you as a viewer are likely to get out of the film is going to be highly dependent on your tolerance for schmaltz, as well as your ability to excuse the fact that a film's plot is one you've seen many, many times before. I will confess to having enjoyed it, not as a masterpiece or a great work of art, but as a fun little story told reasonably well by a couple of actors I just like watching. There have been worse excuses for movies made.

 

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time:  The Fox and the... Meter-maid?

Triple 9

Alternate Title:  Atlanta Heat

One sentence synopsis:    A crew of armed robbers decide to kill a police officer in order to buy themselves enough time to perform one last job for the Russian Mafia.


Things Havoc liked:Though a fair number of people regarded it as highly overrated, I've long held that Michael Mann's 1995 crime film Heat is one of the greatest movies of its genre and its decade, a tour-de-force crime drama starring some of the greatest actors in Hollywood at the top of their games, including Robert De Niro before he began phoning everything in, and Al Pacino at the height of his screaming-insanity phase. Heat was a spellbinding film, one that followed both cops and organized criminals through their lives, their careers, and the pressures they faced trying to do their jobs and defeat one another, and in many ways, Heat stamped its mark on all such films to come, most of which, as is common enough in Holylwood, were not worthy of the heritage they had been given. Still, the nature of film is that when one movie fails, another steps forth to try again, and I've continued to patronize organized crime and heist drama films in the hopes of finding something similar to the masterpiece I saw twenty years ago. With that in mind, this week I sat down to watch the latest offering of John Hillcoat, an Australian director whose credits include the underrated Lawless and the perennially miserable The Road, as he tried to recapture the magic with a new slate of excellent actors plunged into the dark worlds of organized crime and policing.

And excellent actors these are. Triple 9 stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, a man whom I shall one day learn to pronounce the name of, as Michael Atwood, the leader of a crew of organized criminals and corrupt cops, who engage in high-stakes, violent armed robberies of difficult, well-secured targets. Among his crew are crooks played by solid character actors Norman Reedus (Boondock Saints, Walking Dead), and Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), as well as a pair of crooked cops, played by Clifton Collins and one of my favorite actors of recent years, MCU's Anthony Mackie. Following a successful heist, a double-cross, and a need to perform the obligatory "one more job", the crew struggles with putting a plan together to allow them to break into a nearly-impenetrable DHS black-bag facility without being captured by the police task force assigned to do just that. Every one of these actors, whether I've liked them before or not, is excellent in this film, portraying hard, violent, frightened men, some of them holding things together better than others, trying to get ahead in their lives as both the cops and the Russian mob make their lives difficult. But the standout surprise here is the head of the Russian mob in question, an unrecognizable Kate Winslet of all people, playing the widow/wife of an imprisoned Russian mobster, willing and capable of any act of violent depravity necessary to getting her way. I've long-since forgiven Winslet for Titanic, and I praised her earlier this year in Alan Rickman's A Little Chaos, but I legitimately did not even recognize Winslet in this role until the credits ran, so staggeringly alien is it to everything she has ever done previous to this, and so effortlessly does she embody a character one would normally associate with people like Kristin Scott Thomas.

But as with Heat, the crooks are only half of the cast, as we also have non-corrupt police, particularly Officer Chris Allen, played by Casey Affleck, younger brother of Ben. I was never the biggest fan of Casey Affleck, having assumed, as I imagine did everyone else, that he only rose to prominence on the coat tails of his brother. But then, about eight years ago, he began making movies like Gone Baby Gone (directed by his brother), Out of the Furnace, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, all of which were good movies, and all of which he was good in. And so he is here, playing not a fresh-faced rookie but a quiet, reserved cop who gradually begins to realize the magnitude of the events he is being enmeshed in when he becomes Anthony Mackie's (reluctant) partner. I was expecting something like Ethan Hawke in Training Day (not the worst model imaginable), but Affleck plays the character significantly cooler, as he struggles to figure out exactly what's happening in a situation that is rapidly spiraling out of control. It's an excellent performance overall, one that should flush away all concerns regarding nepotism in future endeavors.

Enough about the cast though, because the strength of Triple 9 is its direction and mood, a paranoid thriller that balances a vast number of competing agendas while giving us characters operating on partial information at best at all times. Normally this sort of thing is just annoying, as it relegates the audience to an hour or two of boredom while the characters slowly catch up to where we all are, but when the movie plays everyone as endangered and ignorant, regardless of their personal capacities, then things become much mo0re interesting. Ejiofor and Winslet's duel of wills, wherein he attempts to get paid and she attempts to extort more high-risk work from him, is compounded by all manner of complications, such as the fact that his ex-wife, with whom he has a son, is also her sister, a series of relationships that some of his crew know some elements of, and some do not. Characters routinely walk into rooms with double-agents that they don't know are double-agents, saved only by the fact that the double-agents have their own misconceptions about what the true dynamic is, and on and on. Meanwhile the gritty work of a police and crime procedural continues, and continues well. A standout sequence midway through the film involves Affleck, Mackie, and several other cops staging a high-risk arrest of a gang member by stacking up on a ballistic shield and systematically clearing an apartment building of threats. Shot in a single take, with minimal histrionics beyond the terse, quiet police code commands of professionals under intense strain, it's one of the best raw policing sequences I've seen in the movies, a testament to the skill with which Hillcoat and his crew have done their homework.

Things Havoc disliked: Not everyone makes off with kudos this time, as the film also stars Woody Harrelson as an alcoholic police lieutenant with assorted familial and professional connections to everyone involved (this is par for the course). Harrelson isn't awful, but plays the character way too far over the top, drawing far too many acting points from Al Pacino's detective in Heat without realizing that Triple 9 is a much more subdued movie, and that a red-eyed fanatic screaming at the top of his lungs while running people over doesn't quite fit the tone that the movie is going after. Pacino could get away with that sort of thing in Heat because Heat was that sort of movie, set in Los Angeles, a town accustomed to casual lunacy, and because the screaming that he engaged in was plainly an artifice designed to shock people into compliance. The film also has a bad habit of giving Harrelson what appears to be psychic powers and the capacity to teleport into situations he had no way of feasibly getting to, so as to allow him to save the day in a "cool" fashion. Not traits designed to endear a character to me, particularly not in a movie where the limitations of what particular characters know about each other at any given moment is so integral.

Final thoughts:     Despite all the comparisons I've been making, Triple 9 is not as good a movie as Heat was, but that's faint criticism if ever there was any. What it is, is a damn fine cops and robbers movie in the style of Heat, one with good actors and good direction underlying a story of crime and murder as compelling as any I've seen recently. Such flaws as mar the landscape don't serve to do more than push the movie down to a simple "good" rating, but a good movie is nothing to be ashamed of. Particularly in Doldrums Season, one takes what one can get.

 

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  The Eagle has Landed.

Deadpool

Alternate Title:  A Romantic, Heartwarming Journey of Self-Discovery and Love

One sentence synopsis:    A deranged mercenary suffering from inoperable cancer undergoes a radical procedure designed to cure him by making him a super-soldier.


Things Havoc liked:To say that Deadpool was a movie with a troubled history behind it is to say that Avatar made some money or that Battlefield Earth was poorly made: a description that is technically true in every way, and yet utterly inadequate to describe the thermonuclear scale of the problems associated with the character and his cinematic existence. Having made his debut in the execrable X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a movie in which the legendary "Merc with the Mouth" had his goddamn mouth sewed shut, the prospect of a full-on Deadpool movie seemed... remote. And yet, six years later, what has 20th Century Fox gone and done with the legendarily 4th-wall averse invulnerable mercenary, but made a movie about him. And then released it in the doldrums. With Ryan Reynolds still playing the lead.

In fact, let's talk about Ryan Reynolds for a second, because this situation is just too strange to gloss over. Reynolds has been jonesing to play Deadpool for a long time, at least since 2003 if the internet is to be believed. His dream came true back in 2009 only to implode into a singularity of near-perfect suck, in a film that not only took away the vocal chords of one of the most prominent talkers in comics, but did so in the midst of a film that was also a colossal trainwreck in several other dimensions. Origin's failure having left the prospect of a standalone Deadpool movie in tatters, Reynolds bided his time by making crap like Paperman, Turbo, Self/Less, The Woman in Gold, R.I.P.D., and yet another comic book disaster of a film, this time on the DC side of the spectrum, 2011's Green Lantern. Yes, Reynolds has had the occasional success in the midst of all that dross, but were it not for the inexorable rise of Marvel and the corresponding bonanza of Superhero movies that we are all in the middle of nowadays, there is strictly no chance that this thing could possibly have gotten made, let alone with the same damn actor attached to it, an actor who already presided over a $350,000,000 superhero flop. Coming off a string of something like nine consecutive bad movies, and with his last appearance as the character one of the low points of the genre, was there really any chance that Reynolds and first-time director Tim Miller could possibly come up with something good?

Well... it turns out that yes. Yes there was.

Deadpool is a good movie, veering on a great one, and that is a statement I was certain, to the point of wagers, that I would never say. And yet here I stand, saying it, and the credit for why I am doing so can really only go to Ryan Reynolds himself, the man whose labor of love this has been for more years than I have been writing these reviews, and who, given one final chance to get the character right, finally hits it right out of the park. Green Lantern was a disaster, yes, but what most people have forgotten is that Reynolds was actually pretty damn good in the movie, albeit unable to overcome massive deficiencies in the film's writing, directing, and scope. Unburdened at last from the chains of inferior filmmakers, Deadpool affords Reynolds a chance to finally break loose, and boy does he ever. His incarnation of Deadpool is just perfect, foul and crazy and demented and twisted up and vengeful and violent and bloody and utterly contemptuous of the very concept of the 4th wall, constantly stopping for outtakes, asides, and strange breaches of continuity that do not hesitate to satirize the less-than-shining path that Reynolds has walked to get to this place. As Wade Wilson, a goon for hire with a deranged sense of humor, who veers constantly on the edge of being an unlikeable douche but never quite jumps over the line, Reynolds finds his true calling, as if Van Wilder grew up to shoot and slice men for money and make sardonic jokes along the way. This is the kind of character that can quickly become unwatchable, requiring as it does a delicate balance between actor, writer, and director, and while there are wobbles at times, Deadpool's total disregard for continuity allows the character to become whatever is required for a given scene, be it a tender romantic scene with his girlfriend, screaming rage at the bad guy, orgiastic violence against a horde of mooks, snarky asides to the audience, or often, all of the above. I've seen a lot of movies try to make characters like this and fail, but Reynolds has the same robust lack of inhibition that characterized his work on Green Lantern here, and wordlessly softens the most assholish parts of the character while sharpening the others. The result is a lot of fun.

And part of the reason it's so much fun is because of the cast around Reynolds, which begins with Morena Baccarin, another actor I had given up on after she went on from Firefly to do approximately nothing. Yet here she's just great, a match for Reynolds' twisted humor and lunatic disregard for social mores, complementing Wade Wilson almost perfectly. If, as I am often told, some people just "make sense" together, then these two do, and the establishment of just what makes them tick properly (particularly a running gag involving ever-more ludicrous sob-stories about their awful childhoods) sets the tone just right. The villain meanwhile, played by the usually-useless Ed Skrein (see the latest Hitman movie if you want proof of that), takes a page from Spy, whereby if you wish to make your asshole hero more likeable, give them a villainous foil who is even more of an asshole by several orders of magnitude. Skrein isn't much of an actor and never has been, but he can play a smarmy British douchebag as well as anyone, granting the audience license to enjoy the catharsis of having a psycho like Deadpool inflicted on him and his plans. Supporting roles are generally strong as well, with particular accolades due to Brianna Hildebrand, playing Millenial X-man Negasonic Teenage Warhead (this is apparently a real character), whose signature is bored disinterest with Deadpool's antics, and T. J. Miller as Deadpool's friend and bartender, Weasel, who effectively plays a cross between his character from Silicon Valley and his character from Big Hero 6, a stoner slacker who accepts the insanity of Deadpool and his surroundings with nothing but snark, because what the hell else is he supposed to do?

And then there's everything else. Direction, writing, cinematography, not the best we've ever seen in a superhero film, certainly, but far from bad. In keeping with a lot of films from the last couple of years such as Ant-Man or Iron Man 3, Deadpool is a film with a limited scope, attempting to avoid superhero fatigue by means of concentrating on its strengths of comedy and action. Being one of the only R-Rated Superhero movies ever made certainly helps with this, as the action is crisp and bloody, if not spectacular, and the comedy, with a few exceptions, is right on the money. A standout opening scene gag, replete with layered jokes, references, and Easter Eggs, all set to the Juice Newton Adult Alternative staple Angel of the Morning, is one of the funniest things I've seen at the movies in a long time, and is easily the best credit sequence since Watchmen. Ditto a sterling after-credits sequence, about which I will say nothing beyond the fact that it takes place in the smoking ruins of the Fourth Wall and introduces the possible movies to come in a somewhat more... direct manner than most of us are accustomed to.

Things Havoc disliked: The plot of Deadpool is nothing to write home about, a standard origin story mixed with a formula threat from a generic bad guy and his army of disposable evil leather-clad gunmen. Given the disasters that attended heavy plot-laden movies like The Wolverine or X-men 3, I suppose playing it safe on this front was inevitable, but it is reasonably hard to generate much concern for the mechanics of the film when neither the characters nor the director seems tremendously interested in them. More important is the sidelining of several major characters as the plot goes on. Baccarin's character, after a strong beginning, fades into the background as the movie becomes more of a formula piece, as does the inventive humor, which never quite departs, but does get a lot less fresh. Perhaps the filmmakers thought they had to lead with the A-material, and they probably weren't wrong, but the result is that the second half of Deadpool is considerably less strong than the first. Not an uncommon failing with movies in general, to be fair, but one that does keep Deadpool from attaining the heights of its more lavishly-funded brethren.

Overall though, the problems with Deadpool aren't in the form of some terrible decision made by a studio hack, or a particular scene that misfires spectacularly, but rather a lack of audacity. I know this might sound strange given how audacious a prospect it was to bring this movie to the screen in the first place, and I'm not trying to pretend that there wasn't an element of risk that had to be weighed, but for a character like Deadpool, in a movie that frames itself as being very much bereft of taste, restraint, and common sense, there is a palpable sense that perhaps not everything that could have been done with this character and these settings, was done. Some characters, such as the blind old lady that Deadpool rooms with, seem to have been effectively left in as an afterthought, as they have nothing to do with any aspect of the plot, nor any particular element of interest that draws them. The fourth-wall breaks, while many, are mostly pretty standard 90s-era fake Indie fare, and don't quite live up to the promise that the film's marketing campaign (which involved outright trolling at points) seemed to make. Maybe I'm projecting too much, but I found myself filling the holes in the film with my own mental suggestions, hoping that it would push the envelope even further and reach even higher, but it never really did. The filmmakers seem to have intended to make a serviceable film, and did so, but great art is made by those who dare more.

Final thoughts:    Comparing Deadpool to great art is not going to do me any favors with the segment of my audience who thinks I don't spend enough time watching silent black and white films about sad clowns flipping pancakes by the illumination of a bare light bulb, but the point is justified, I think, by the fact that the movie Deadpool reminds me of the most, ironically, is last December's Star Wars Episode VII. Obviously the films are very different in tone and scale and budget and intention, but what links them in my mind is that they both felt like proofs of concept, attempts to justify to someone at their respective studios, or perhaps to the audience itself and critics like me, that films like them were even possible in the first place. And like Star Wars before it, Deadpool, whatever its failings, answers that implied question with an emphatic yes. It is not a great film, nor a great comic book film, but it is a damn good one, a better one than I expected to see from this actor and that director and these conditions that it was made in. Already green-lit for a sequel, Deadpool may yet prove capable of the potential I saw within it, or it may become yet another franchise to collapse under its own weight. But if nothing else, Deadpool has earned the right to exist, and that alone is justification enough.

 

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  Heat: Atlanta.

Hail, Caesar!

Alternate Title:  That's Entertainment!!! (Volume XVIII)

One sentence synopsis:    A 1950s studio boss must track down the kidnapped star of his biggest production of the year, while simultaneously dealing with a series of other crises afflicting multiple movies.


Things Havoc liked:This project began with the Coen Brothers, many years ago at a western by the name of True Grit. Though it was the first film I ever reviewed on this project, it was hardly the first Coen Brothers movie I've seen, as they've been entertaining me and mine since the early 90s with everything from Fargo to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, to The Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men, and The Hudsucker Proxy (shut up, I liked that one). With a pedigree like that, a new Coen Brothers film is the sort of thing that instantaneously lights up my movie radar, and the fact that it was a classic ode to Hollywood of old, starring approximately half of the actors in the world only made it more appealing. I know that not all of you are as obsessive about watching movies as I am, but for a cinephile like myself, this was like the promise of power and riches. I was in.

It is 1951, the golden age of Hollywood, and Eddie Mannix, played by the imperturbable Josh Brolin, is the head of production at Capitol Pictures, a massive MGM/Warner Bros/Universal-scale motion picture studio simultaneously working on dozens of different projects. It is Mannix' job to play the fixer, to resolve the ten thousand and one impediments that arise each day at the various location or backlot shoots, and somehow keep the stars and directors of Capitol's various movies happy, alive, and out of the press, not necessarily in that order. Hollywood is, and always has been, an insane place, and Brolin plays the character like a devoted worshiper at the altar of movie-making, mugging for the camera with a whole series of fifties-style "Good gravy, what will the boss say when he hears about this?!" over-readings, which is exactly the right choice for a movie this stylized. I've not always admired Brolin's work, but he's excellent as the perpetually frazzled lead in this, a romantic who plainly worships the magic of Hollywood, even as he dives regularly into the seamier sides of it.

Nor is Brolin alone here, for the Coen's have assembled a murderer's row of excellent actors to cast in an old-fashioned Hollywood romp. Front and center is George Clooney, playing a sendup to Kirk Douglas, a massive Hollywood superstar of great fame and few brains, the star of the tentpole film "Hail, Caesar!", a Romano-biblical epic in the style of Ben Hur. Clooney's character is a buffoon famous for being a famous actor, but nails the role perfectly, both in the overacting he indulges in on set, and the easily-led, shallow thoughts he leads with when off it. The plot of the film, such as it is, concerns Clooney being kidnapped by a semi-inept gang of Communist screenwriters, who indulge in pointless garbled debates concerning arcane points of Marxist dialectic, the sorts of things that sound profound and deep to people who can't parse together the fact that they are all talking through their hats. Meanwhile, back at the studio, a handful of other subplots are boiling over, including Ralph Fiennes, playing a David-Lean style veteran British director saddled with Alden Ehrenreich, a Gene-Autry-style singing cowboy whom the studios are trying to push forward as a movie star despite the fact that the film he's being pushed into is a costume drama and the fact that he can't act at all. There's also Scarlett Johanssen, doing a synchronized swimming send-up to Esther Williams, swimming gracefully in a fountained pool dressed like a mermaid before climbing out of the water and complaining about her "fish-ass". There is Christopher Lambert, doing a ludicrous send-up to Werner Herzog, a director who clearly has no idea what the studio boss is talking about when he storms onto the set, but feels that everything can be resolved with a hug and a pre-emptory command to go. There is Clancy Brown, doing... well Clancy Brown, by and large (I require nothing more than this), and best (and most surprising) of all, there is none other than Channing Tatum, who gets an entirely pointless extended song-and-dance number clearly inspired by South Pacific or similar musicals, in which he tries to turn himself into Gene Kelly, singing, dancing, and even tap dancing for no reason other than the fact that it's the 50s, and Hollywood believed this sort of thing would sell. The purpose of these sequences really isn't to service the plot, by and large, it's to simply showcase the glitz and glamour of a romantic period in Hollywood history, if only because we're now far enough away from it that we forget the truly awful dreck that came out amidst the Cleopatras and Sierra Madres.

And that's... more or less all there is to Hail, Caesar, an excuse for the Coen brothers to assemble a cast and have fun with them. Oh Brother Where Art Thou was no more than this after all, and Hail, Caesar has similarly absurd showcase moments that make little sense when sat down and pondered over, but seem organic from within the movie. An extended sequence wherein Channing Tatum is rowed out to sea to board a submarine, for instance, has nothing really to do with anything, save as an excuse for Tatum to mug for the camera shamelessly as he leaps dramatically for the railing and tosses his hair back to deliver a parting quip in the best tradition of a Golden Age setpiece. There's a slow-burn sequence of great length and determination as Ralph Fiennes tries desperately to find a line that Ehrenreich is capable of delivering reasonably, and the Coens even get everyone's favorite ubiquitous actress, Tilda Swinton, to play identical twin gossip columnists, trying to out-scoop one another for scandal stories for their respective tabloids, all while screaming that "the people deserve to know the truth!" If this is the kind of thing that you go to the movies to see, then Hail, Caesar delivers just that.

Things Havoc disliked: If, on the other hand, you go to the movies looking for things like plot, characters, or story, then you're in a bit more trouble.

The Coen Brothers have always made weird, quirky films, but those films usually had a point to them, even if that point was simply weird quirkiness (The Big Lebowski comes to mind). They had plots, of greater or lesser importance, and stories, and characters that populated them and were showcased to us by virtue of living in Coen-Brothers-world. But Hail, Caesar, to its detriment, has none of those things, no characters beyond the thinnest veneers, no plot to speak of, no surprises or twists beyond the most rudimentary of tactics, nothing, really, except the glamour of early Hollywood, and even for the Coens, that is not enough.

Consider Brolin, who is laden with a boring subplot concerning a job offer he is being pitched by Lockheed-Martin, for a position that pays extravagantly well, necessitates none of the crazy hours or absurd wrangling that his current position involves, and would reward him after ten years with sufficient stock and bonuses to retire for the rest of his life. And yet can he really turn his back on the crazy-but-glamorous world of movie-making with all its insane and loveable characters? Well I've got a better question, does anyone really give a damn? Brolin certainly doesn't, as he never seems more than slightly perturbed by the kidnapping, terrorism, and McCarthyesque flirtations with Communism that his actors and directors are up to. Without a sense of why he would take the job, why would we ever consider the possibility that he might take it to be a compelling one? After all, it's not like he's currently in a position lacking in money, power, or interest.

But then that's a minor issue compared to everything else. It may sound like there's a plot to this movie, with kidnappings, ransom demands, and the Communist threat, but that's all me trying to pull the movie together into some semblance of order. In reality, none of this amounts to anything, not the kidnapping, not the communists, not anything at all. Half the cast seems to have joined into the movie on a dare, and not because there was anything for them to do, including Johanssen, who gets one scene of any interest, and even that of no consequence, before falling for another character off-screen in a manner that conveniently absolves the film of any need to put her before us again. Jonah Hill, who I usually like, is in the movie for about thirty seconds and contributes nothing to it, and the same applies to Coen Brothers' regular Francis McDormand, who I don't recall even getting a single line of dialogue and who seems to have been placed in the movie for the purposes of a slapstick gag. This isn't cameo casting, or a stunt performance like Channing Tatum's from This is the End. Even seemingly-major characters like Ehrenreich or Swinton really have no purpose in the film. They exist, appear, say lines, and are gone. I've seen every Coen Brothers movie there is, and they do tend towards having weird characters for the hell of it, but in those movies, the characters in question exist to throw light on the world or the other characters that inhabit it. These characters have nothing to show us, and show us nothing for the runtime of the movie, before it finally ends, with nothing having happened, and nothing being resolved.

Final thoughts:    Hail, Caesar! is not a bad movie. It's not a particularly good movie either though, and when it comes to these directors and this cast, not being particularly good is damning enough. I am and remain a great fan of the Coens', and the fine movies they have given to us, such as No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, True Grit, and many others besides. As Roger Ebert used to say, I cite these fine films as an antidote to this one, a movie that came to be on a marketing sheet and never properly evolved from there, and one that proves conclusively that a handful of scenes, even when directed by great artists and performed by great actors, do not a movie make.

I have seen far worse movies over the course of this project than Hail, Caesar! But few had this pedigree and this potential, and did this little with them. One can only hope that the Coens remember what it is to make a movie in the near future, at which point we can put this minor misstep behind us, where it belongs.

 

Final Score:  5/10

Next Time:  No Pickles.

The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Short Films

The Live Action showcase this year was honestly a bit of a let down, mostly because of drama fatigue. Yes, these movies are usually about awful things happening to people in terrible situations (I still remember the Afghan movie about child-beggars from a few years back), but there is customarily a bit of levity to undercut the horror and heavy drama somewhere in the showcase (such as the Norwegian movie about the old man who massacres seagulls with machine guns and builds tubas to sound across the Atlantic). This year, it seemed like everything was a pile of pain and high drama, which just gets tiring after a while, as you watch awful climax after awful climax. Nevertheless, we have the films before us, and it's time to evaluate them!

The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Animated Live Action Films

Ave Maria:: A Palestinian-French film that is, of all things, a comedy, this one concerns a hardcore orthodox Jewish family who gets into a traffic accident at a West Bank convent of catholic nuns on Shabbat. The Jews can't use any technology on Shabbat, while the sisters have all taken vows of silence. Hijinx ensue, albeit not as many as I was expecting, and the entire thing is resolved through a nun suddenly possessing the advanced skills and tools to do something she realistically could have done at any point prior to the movie's commencement. Still, not every film has to be Hamlet, and this one's at least all right.

6/10

Shok::  Hey guys, did you know the war in Kosovo was horrible for children? Because it was! Shok is a movie about two Albanian boys in Kosovo dealing with efforts to alternately Serbify and eventually Ethnically Cleanse their village, and it is approximately as uplifting and warm-hearted as you would expect as a result. The film has a couple of quite good scenes, but overall it's nothing more than another "children in hell" flick, a sob-story archetype that the Oscars are not new to.

5.5/10

Everything Will Be Okay:  Longest of the movies on offer, this German film features handheld cameras documenting a father picking his daughter up from his ex-wife's house for the weekend, buying her toys, taking her to the amusement park, and then embarking on a complicated scheme to abduct her out of the country using falsified documents. Filmed more or less from the perspective of the daughter, an eight-year-old girl who slowly comes to realize what is happening, the movie is intriguingly well-made, but has the unfortunate quality of spending most of its runtime waiting for the character in question (the little girl) to catch up to what the audience already knows. Still, the film ends strongly, and has a true-to-life feel throughout.

6.5/10

Day One: A complex, multifaceted story about how much Afghanistan sucks, Day One follows an Afghani-American translator on her first day in-country with a force of US military personnel, as they try to track down a bombmaker allied with the Taliban and accidentally stumble upon the bombmaker's wife, currently in labor, whose medical situation necessitates treatment. Instantly, a hundred complexities of local custom, religious scruple, guest-laws, and medical training pop up, forcing everyone to struggle to figure out what to do. The situation is highly contrived, but the movie gets a lot across in a little time, and has a cohesiveness to it that the others on the same theme lack.

7/10

And the Havoc award for Best Live Action Short Film goes to...

Stutterer: Admittedly, this is a close one, and in many ways the best of a mediocre lot, but Stutterer was at least entertaining in a way that most of the other films were not. A typographer with a terrible stutter who has been in an online relationship that is suddenly coming offline stresses out over what to do to avoid revealing his crippling inability to speak. The setup isn't revolutionary, and the film ends on a rather pat note, but the film has an interesting style to it, and is written well enough to push itself over the top. Not a great year for the short films, but one perseveres.
7.5/10

Next Time:  The Coen Brothers take us back to Hollywood's golden age.

The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films

And now for something completely different (... again)

Once more we have a new year of films spread out before us, but with the Oscars coming up early this year, and January a wasteland of quality enlivened only by special projects like this, I decided to start things off with a few short films. Therefore, as is customary, The General's Post proudly presents:

The 2015 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films

World of Tomorrow: What the hell was that? World of Tomorrow is a very strange film about a young girl being given a tour of a trans-humanist future reality by a third-generation clone of herself. A bit rambly and extremely incoherent, the film has some really clever ideas in it (like a time travel device that isn't the most accurate thing in the universe, either temporally or physically, but the whole exercise seems to be a bit of weirdness for no real purpose. Full disclosure: most of my viewing companions thought this one was the best of the bunch.

6.5/10

Bear Story:  A silent, stop-motion animated film from Chile with a really clever visual style to it (more or less the entire film takes place inside a clockwork display mechanism), this film would have been instantly identifiable as a Chilean piece even if I hadn't known ahead of time where it came from, so tightly is it focused around the trauma of Pinochet. A decently-clever film, but nothing I'm going to remember.

6/10

We Can't Live Without Cosmos: A Russian movie (LEVIATHAN FLASHBACK! AAAAAARGH!!!) about two best friends who are also astronauts, this one actually proves to be the funniest one of them all, relying on situational humor and slapstick. The film's ending feels a bit slow and tacked-on, but overall it's a much better piece than the last thing I saw from Russia...

7/10

Prologue:A six-minute, one-scene sketch cartoon plainly drawn from some sort of rotoscope-like software, Prologue is a single fight sequence between two teams of two ancient Britons, who fight to the death with spear, axe, sword, and bow. It's well-made, certainly, with vividly lifelike movement and well-paced action, but there's really nothing much to it beyond people killing one another briefly. Still, it's the first time I've ever seen the Short Film showcase warn the audience of graphic violence and nudity.

6.5/10

And the Havoc award for Best Animated Short Film goes to...

Sanjay's Super Team: An Autobigraphical piece directed by Pixar Animator Sanjay Patel, this short film debuted in front of last year's Good Dinosaur, and it's just as good now as it was then. A young Indian boy who wants to watch Saturday morning cartoons about superheroes is instead forced by his father to participate in Hindu morning prayers, and daydreams the gods of the Hindu pantheon as members of a DC/Marvel-style superhero team. Wonderfully-animated (as is customary with Pixar), richly-produced and filled with warmth and emotion, this one ultimately won out in my mind. Call me a studio hack if you like, but Pixar knows how to do them right.

7.5/10

A Little Chaos

Alternate Title:  Indulgence

One sentence synopsis:    A widow-turned-professional gardener is hired by the head landscaper of Louis XIV to build an outdoor ballroom within the gardens of the newly-constructed Versailles.


Things Havoc liked:As I've mentioned before, I'm entirely reliant upon trailers in order to determine what movies I should be watching, but then that's not always such a bad thing. Still, it has given rise to odd occurrences, particularly when a movie pops up in the trailer reels which never actually materializes as a released film. This happens every so often, usually when a foreign company finds itself with a tremendous bomb on its hands, and cuts its losses halfway through the marketing campaign, and before securing an American release. Generally these films are no loss, as they represent movies I was hardly about to go and see whether they were released or not, but once in a very long while, a movie I had circled as something potentially special disappears without a trace. So it was with a film I first heard of last year, mid-Doldrums, while slogging through the likes of White God, The Water Diviner, and Leviathan. It was a film set in 17th century France, an epoch of stockings and wigs, promising splendor, beauty, and the services of the incomparable Alan Rickman, one of my favorite actors working, taking on the dual role of the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, as well as the director's chair for the occasion. Though costume dramas are not really my particular cup of tea, I was excited for this one, and disappointed when the film failed to materialize in the US despite the promised release date. But it wasn't until earlier this year, with the news of Alan Rickman's passing at the age of 69, that I decided that while my rule has always been only to consider films in theaters, it was time to make an exception. And so, through methods I had best not admit to directly online, I was able to acquire a copy of Alan Rickman's final film, that I might give it the dubious honors I am capable of bestowing upon the capstone to a remarkable career.

It is the late 17th Century, and King Louis XIV is busy commissioning the construction of what will become his most enduring legacy, the magnificent royal palace of Versailles, a task that also involves the construction of the grandest gardens that have ever been produced. The task of playing the Sun King cannot have been a simple one, as Louis XIV was, both at the time and today, the effective model for absolute monarchs across Europe, a man of ambitions so towering that they consumed all of Europe in sanguinary wars, not once, but many times. It's therefore fitting perhaps that Rickman steals this show effortlessly, portraying a King whose every gesture, word, and glance is a calculated tool of rulership, and who has carefully constructed a heliocentric universe of courtiers, nobles, artists and officers around himself, whose task and mandate are to reflect glory upon him. Rickman's imperious, deadpan delivery and expression, honed over the course of many films (recall him from Dogma if you want an idea) is a perfect match here, whether instructing his grandchildren in mid-speech asides on how to be both loved and feared, cutting dead a mistress who has outlived her political usefulness with a single barbed word, or expressing his delight in such subtle terms that the object of such delight needs the services of a translator to determine if she has offended or pleased the King. Indeed, some of the weirdest sequences in the movie involve the King striking a pose of power and authority, and everyone nearby instantly and literally falling into orbit around him, forming a tableau of power and central authority for any who should choose to be watching.

But while Rickman is the main draw for me, he's not the main focus of the movie, which is ultimately a romance, featuring one actor I'm a fan of and one I'm generally not. The former is Matthias Schoenaerts, a Belgian actor I remember well from The Drop, Rust and Bone, and Death of a Shadow, the Dutch sci-fi film I encountered back in 2012 during my annual showcase of the Oscar-nominated Short Films. He plays the legendary gardener (these apparently exist) André Le Nôtre, the (real) head gardener of Versailles, a position which, back then, was roughly the equivalent of a Cabinet post today. Schoenaerts underplays the role considerably, which is the right call, as his character is both a nobleman of the Ancien Regime and in a position to both enjoy unlimited access to the King's Ear, and receive all the blame if anything goes wrong with Versailles' construction. An early scene, in between interviews with would-be subordinates, has him remark that despite being on such close terms with the King that he is allowed to dine with him, failure in his task will almost certainly mean execution. The other party is Kate Winslet, whom I first met in Titanic and needed a long, long time before I could forgive her for that fact (the same was true of DiCaprio). My grievances aside, Winslet is a fine actress, as roles from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Finding Neverland, or Little Children will all attest to. Here she plays Madame Sabine de Barra, another gardener selected to assist Le Nôtre in completing a particular feature of the gardens, a widow who supports herself through her work (not as rare in 17th-Century France as you might think), and who falls in love with her boss. Conventional though this all might be, Winslet and Schoenaerts have a nice chemistry on screen, butressed by the fact that these are both middle-aged veterans of the games of politics and gilded disappointment that has been their lives.

But if I wanted to watch a conventional romance, even one with Alan Rickman, I have quite a few to choose from, so what makes this movie special? The pageantry, for one. Rickman's directorial style is very lean on dialogue and long on landscape, using a Wes Anderson-style geometric shot construction to get the glory and the splendor of Versailles across, a world of wigs and gowns and stockings and poisonous politics, wherein everyone is quite happily sleeping with everyone else in "arrangements" that only the French could possibly keep track of. So it is with Stanley Tucci, who steals the show as the Phillipe, Duke of Orleans and brother of the King, whom he plays as an endlessly talkative, flamboyantly gay ornament of the court, whose wife, Princess Elizabeth of the Palatine (Paula Paul) has come to a perfectly happy arrangement with the above, aligning herself with Madame De Montespan, chief Mistress of the King (this was an official position in those days). Fortunately, the film doesn't expect us to remember who is who among the dizzying array of Madames and Seigneurs that we are presented with, but hints constantly at the byzantine complexities that surround the characters, getting everything across, as a rule, with inference and wordplay. Indeed, the dialogue in the film is almost relentlessly off-point, using metaphor and voice tones to say what is actually going on. It's a strange effect to someone used to more traditional Hollywood fare, but the resulting film feels a lot richer for it, as the characters circle around one another dispensing charm and venom in equal measure. A particular gem is Helen McCroy, playing Schoenaerts' cold-hearted courtesan of a wife, a woman who has elevated her husband through marriage and does not intend to ever let him forget it, even as she dallies with other men (as does largely everyone in the movie). The music, meanwhile, by cellist Peter Gregson, complements the effect with baroque splendor, a chamber orchestra to accompany a world that is consciously artificial.

Things Havoc disliked:The dialogue in this film is quite rarefied, and while I would hesitate, generally to cite that as a negative, it can actually be quite hard to figure out what the hell people are talking about (or doing) as a result. An extended sequence, midway through the film, where a promenade in the countryside stumbles upon what appears to be a pagan altar, seems to serve no purpose whatsoever except to allow a rider to announce that someone is dead, while the confusion of Winslet's character concerning the intrigues of the court translates to nothing more than confusion for the audience on the same subject. I could not tell, for instance, which mistress was and was not on the outs with the King at any given moment, which is a matter, as it turns out, of some importance, nor have I any idea why Winslet, approaching the most important job interview of her life, would decide for no apparent reason to begin messing around with the potted plants in her prospective employer's front yard.

And yet, strangely for a movie which turns in circles this lofty, so lofty that a critic as experienced as myself was lost several times, the actual plot of the film, as so often in romances, is relatively shallow, particularly in the second half, wherein Schoenaerts' wife spontaneously develops a Mean Girls' streak to her, and decides to sabotage a royal construction project for no reason other than spite and to no effect other than getting herself in a great deal of entirely predictable trouble. In a film where literally everyone has a mistress or a lover, where she suddenly develops a jealous streak sufficient to be willing to risk summary execution is beyond me, but we require a "crisis" of some sort to drive the formula plot forward, so there. All is forgotten, of course, by the end of the film, as is the "little chaos" of the film's title, a subject it took some pains to set up and then fails entirely to pay off. Much time is devoted to the fact that Winslet's gardener has shocking (one might even say British) ideas regarding landscape and horticulture, preferring the chaos of nature to the rigid order of French-style gardens (believe it or not, I know what I'm talking about). And yet having established Winslet as a Gardener who Doesn't Play By The Rules (imagine an 80s cop movie with this concept), she then spends the rest of the film playing by the rules. The final result, an outdoor ballroom with a cascading fountain (which I have seen in the real Versailles) is indeed very pretty, but has no element of Chaos within it, Little or otherwise.

Final thoughts:    A Little Chaos is the sort of movie that isn't commonly reviewed on this website, mostly because I don't care for formula romances enough to bother to see them. But to my surprise, despite the criticisms I leveled at it a moment ago, Alan Rickman's second (and sadly, final) directorial effort is an effortlessly-charming little film, one that speaks well above the intellectual level of its plot, and which imbues its admittedly formulaic structure with warmth and light and a soft-hearted cheer that is entirely fitting of the purpose it has unfortunately taken on. I am, of course, indisputably biased regarding this movie, being both a Francophile of long-standing, and an abject admirer of Alan Rickman's work. But given the jaundiced eye I generally cast upon romantic period pieces of this sort (the less I have to discuss Pride and Prejudice, the happier everyone will be), a movie that wins me over despite that is perhaps worth giving a shot to. And if nothing else, A Little Chaos serves as a fine tribute to a legendary actor, who will most certainly, by this critic at least, be missed.

 

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  A yearly tradition returns for another installment!