Eddington (4/5 Stars)

There is an old story, I believe I heard it first in the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately sense the danger and jump out to escape. If you put a frog into a pot of tepid water, and slowly bring up the temperature, the frog will sink into a languid stupor and unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

In preparation for this review, I looked up that story on Wikipedia to see if it was true or not. I thought it may be a good metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. But apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, it isn’t true. In fact, it could not be further from the truth. Instead, Wikipedia cites more modern day scientists who argue that a frog placed in tepid water that is gradually heated will notice the increase in temperature and almost certainly try to escape, whereas a frog that is placed in boiling water will very likely die immediately before it can escape.

Somehow, the fact that this widely known metaphor is completely wrong makes it an even better metaphor to bring up in a review of Eddington. I mean, I saw it first in An Inconvenient Truth wherein Al Gore used it to shame people’s supposed ignorance of the science behind global warming. You think Al Gore would have fact checked that part. And if Wikipedia is wrong and you can boil a frog by slow and steady manipulation, that too would be a good metaphor for Eddington, which is about the small rural town of Eddington, New Mexico where everybody and nobody seems to know what is going on and is very angry about it.

There is a general lag in what goes on in the world and what shows up in movies. Unlike television shows or other media that have production timelines which allow it to be topical, it takes a relatively long time for a movie to be greenlit, produced, edited, and then released. I believe Eddington would be the first movie that takes place in the time of COVID-19 (Spring and Summer 2020) and is specifically about what was happening during that time. And boy does this movie have everything, and how. Mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, bitcoin, false flag conspiracies, pedophilia conspiracies, Antifa, etc., all of which is experienced within the context of forced social isolation. Never have I seen a movie with so much social media doomscrolling.

Because of certain coincidences, COVID-19 had less of a dramatic impact on my life than the rest of the country. I had not taken a vacation in a long time and both deserved and could afford an elongated one. I had just married my wife and was literally in the honeymoon phase of the same. We did not yet have any kids that could be kept home from school. Heck, I never even worked from home. All the other companies in our shared office space evacuated, so my law firm just spaced itself out and I biked to work instead of taking the subway. I dipped into my savings, finished my last screenplay, read War and Peace, and played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons on Zoom.

Still, I had the vague sense that although the restrictions that were put into place in New York City made sense in New York City (after all, in March 2020, NYC experienced a very real surge in hospitalizations, the numbers of which inferred that hundreds of thousands of cases were going unreported), I did wonder whether it made sense to replicate those restrictions in the rest of the country. After all, why would you impose the same Spring 2020 lockdown in relatively dense New York City, which had experienced hundreds of thousands of cases, in relatively spaced-out Houston, Texas which maybe had hundreds of cases, if that.

Eddington takes place in a small town of the same name in New Mexico. In May 2020, the mayor (played by Pedro Pascal) has decided to lockdown the city, mandate masks and six feet of separation. There is not a single COVID-19 case in the entire county. This seems crazier to some people than others. The sheriff Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix) suffers from asthma and cannot breath in a mask. He openly wonders why he is being directed to wear one while he is alone in his car. There are some attempts at reasonable discussions, but these attempts are thwarted by actors on both sides recording everything on their smartphones. The practical effect of parties filming an argument/negotiation is that it removes the possibility of an engaged discussion. After all, the speaker is not interested in whether the other participant is listening. Instead, they are making a speech to their social media followers. The problem is one more removed than people not listening to each other. In effect, no one is even talking in the first place as the arguments are ranted into the social media ether. It is like the environment of Cable News has descended upon and engulfed the interactions of regular people. After a disappointing exchange with the mayor, Joe Cross decides to throw his hat in the ring for the upcoming mayoral election. He announces his candidacy on Instagram.

Then George Floyd was murdered and the idiocy of COVID-19 was amplified by galling hypocrisy. I certainly remember being informed many times about that notorious 1918 Parade in Philadelphia that kept on being cited as a prime example for why everyone should stay inside and avoid outside crowds in a pandemic. That analogy was completely forgotten in a space of day when it suddenly became okay to have large outside demonstrations. It was a huge gamble in public safety that browbeaten and timid health officials had no balls to criticize. But then we learned that it wasn’t actually a big deal. Large outside gatherings did not lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases. That was reality. So why then were the public officials who okayed the demonstrations still shaming people into staying inside and wearing masks. The lockdowns and school closings just went on forever.

Eddington is notable in that Ari Aster doesn’t appear to be putting too much of the blame on either side of the political polarization. Indeed, it does not appear that Ari Aster is interested in the politics of the period. What interests him about the COVID-19 pandemic is what interests him as a director of great horror movies (Heriditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid). There is an extreme of human emotions in his films that reminds one of Scorsese and a gleefulness in purposefully triggering such emotions that reminds one of Hitchcock. Ari Aster has taken the trauma of the pandemic and has exploited it into yet another emotionally manipulative (i.e. frightening) movie. That bastard, he is arguably the best director to come onto the scene in the past 10 years.

The location of the movie is important. And to someone like me who believes that the nationalization of politics is an exceptionally bad thing, Eddington is instructive to that end. Eddington, the place, does not have a COVID-19 problem and yet the streets are locked down and masks are mandated because of what is happening in New York City. Eddington, the place, does not have a police brutality problem and yet street protests erupt which naturally morph into rioting because of what is happening in Minnesota. The citizens of Eddington have gathered on the streets to yell at each other over issues that do not affect or concern their community. What a nightmare.

About halfway through the movie, Joe Cross is visited at his home by some kind of nutty preacher (played by Austin Butler) who tells him of a story about being an orphan, getting kidnapped by a society of super-rich weirdos in Northern California (sounds like the Bohemian Grove), and being hunted down in the woods as part of some rich super-rich weirdo game. Joe’s wife (played by Amy Adams) brought this guy home for dinner and takes him seriously. You want Joe to explain to the guy that he is nuts, but how is that possible when the world is so crazy. I was thinking about that frog that gets slowly boiled to death without realizing it. Extremism on one side breeds extremism on the other. When neither side has a stable ground to make a sound argument from, it is impossible to defend reason. And no, simply arguing that you support science or scientific authorities is not a replacement for actually understanding the scientific basis of something.

I am 38 turning 39, and I look back on my youth and thank my lucky stars that there was no social media. There are next to no pictures of me in grade school and high school and those that exist cannot be found online. Facebook came to my college in my Freshman year, but more importantly, the Facebook wall wasn’t implemented until,, I think, after I graduated. That Facebook wall, it is an evil thing. It makes it seem like every last thing you have ever posted has the thought and attention paid to it as if you decided to publish it in an established newspaper. It doesn’t even allow you to slur your words so that everyone knows you were drunk when you posted. This is an important thing in real life interactions that is sorely missing in online communications.

Eddington has several teenage characters and I shudder to think that there was in actuality a generation of kids that lived through COVID-19 that went through a very important stage in their social development almost entirely online (or in gatherings on the remote edge of town where they illegally gathered to drink sad beers). At one point, one sorry boy (who reminds me of J.D. Vance for some reason) tries to explain to his parents what the goals of Anti-Racism are and why they are important. This releases the largest laugh of the movie when, after a comic pause, his father erupts: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white!” If you know a kid that went through that phase, try not to hold them to it or remind them of that period of time. They were just trying to fit in.

In Ari Aster’s last movie, Beau is Afraid, I wondered what the movie would be like if Ari Aster had tried to land the plane and not pulled up at the last second for his ending. I think it is fair to say that in Eddington, he does not pull up and that the landing is not successful. This movie crashes and burns in spectacular fashion. Playing it safe may have just resulted in Joe Cross being hospitalized and dying of COVID-19. Instead, Antifa gets involved and the streets of the town experience a hail of machine gun fire.

There is something else not really mentioned here. The movie begins and ends with a conspiracy that is just hinted at. It includes a tech giant that wants to build a large data center right outside of town, which may or may not guzzle up the town’s limited supply of water and energy. This is a local issue that actually affects the residents of Eddington. And yet, there isn’t much controversy about it as the citizens' attention spans are being focused on national problems elsewhere. Indeed, and I am just theorizing here, Mayor Garcia may have locked down the town when he did because he wanted to avoid a civic discussion that would inhibit his ability to push through the development. Is that what the community leaders were discussing in Mayor Garcia’s empty bar that one night when this whole thing started?

Kinds of Kindness (3/5 Stars)

Director Darren Aronofosky once commented in an interview while on the press circuit for “Black Swan” that the type of acting Natalie Portman was doing in that movie was the kind of acting that actors like doing. (See it and you can see why he was being a little defensive.) Actors want to perform scenes of heightened. The movie crew's job is to facilitate the same. Scenes of heightened emotion may not be easy, but easy is not the point. Ambition requires that the task be hard. Christian Bale doesn’t need to transform his body to play any particular role. Makeup and fats suits do exist. Christian Bale wants to do it.

I can only imagine that this sort of ambition draws actors to the projects of Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Writer Efthimis Fillippou, a pair of auteurs that deal primarily with the bizarre recesses of human behavior. Emma Stone is a seasoned veteran now having starred in several movies. Willem Dafoe returns with her from the latest Lanthimos movie, Poor Things, which was about a recently deceased woman who has her brain removed and replaced with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist. Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Hong Chau are all rookies. Jesse Plemons, in particular, is an actor that specializes in being the square white guy in the room. He is flexing muscles here that he doesn’t usually get to flex. Like many Lanthimos projects, Kinds of Kindness is an exercise in stunt acting.

There is a fine line here when it comes to placing strange characters in bizarre situations and watching how they react. If the characters are too strange and the situations too bizarre, then the drama fails because there is no empathetic connection. There needs to be something that the audience can latch onto in order to feel what the characters are feeling.

“Kinds of Kindness” is a three-hour movie composed of three separate stories, one hour each. The actors are the same for all three movies, but they play different characters in each of them. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are the main characters. The titles of the stories refer to the only character that finds itself in all three movies, a man by the initials of R.M.F. And here you will have a good test of the movie reviewer. If the reviewer claims to understand why R.M.F. is important or what he can mean, then they might just be pretentious windbags. R.M.F., if he is anything, is an inside joke. The stories, for all intents and purposes, are in fact separate stories. They just employ the same actors.

The stories, like Lanthimos' career, are hit and miss. The first hews the closest to reality and thus works the best. The second works until its last fifteen minutes when it gets cold feet and breaks point of view. The third straight-up employs miracles, which have the strange effect of legitimizing what is otherwise utterly bizarre behavior. We will take them one at a time.

The first stars Jesse Plemons in an interesting turn. His character works for Willem Dafoe, but not in any worldly employment. Willem Dafoe orders him and Plemons complies in doing things so specific and disturbing that one would naturally suppose that Plemons is being blackmailed. But, apparently, Plemons isn't being blackmailed. Instead, he is just so needy and pathetic that he can't function without someone telling him what to do.  In fact, this neediness is so absolute that by the end of the story, you may start wondering whether it is Willem Dafoe that has the short end of the stick. And since the movie employs no magic, adheres to its internal logic, and is well acted by consummate professionals, it is inherently interesting to watch.

The second story is strong until it commits a perplexing error. It too stars Jesse Plemons as a police officer whose wife, Emma Stone, survived a plane crash and several weeks on a deserted island before being rescued and returned home. The thing is, for whatever reason, Jesse Plemons isn’t sure that the Emma Stone who returned is the same woman who left. He thinks that maybe she is an imposter, perhaps an alien. So, either he is insane or she is an imposter. Because this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, both could be a possibility and for most of this story, it is fun trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, about three quarters of the way through, the movie switches its point of view from Jesse Plemons to Emma Stone and gives away the game. Like a movie trick that is explained, it loses its luster. Its feels like Yorgos may have gotten cold feet.

The third story stars Emma Stone as a woman who has abandoned her family to work for a religious cult. The cult is obsessed with purity, but not in any scientific way. As an example, to cleanse their sinners, they subject to them to hours in a sauna. Then they lick their sweat to test, based on the taste I guess, whether the purification rite worked. The catch is that this cult is on the search for a great healer of a certain gender, height, and weight, who can cure people just by touching them. This person ends up existing. And if she exists, well maybe you can test whether someone is pure by licking their sweat. As far as I can tell, the cult's plan is to find, kidnap, and imprison this healer on a boat and then, (maybe), sell tickets to visiting sick people. This story does end in a rather satisfying way, whereupon Emma Stone does a cool dance and nothing that took place before matters. Then R.M.F eats a sandwich, which also doesn’t mean anything.

Poor Things (4/5 Stars)

 

It would be understandable if you thought of Director Yorgos Lanthimos as a satirist. His movies (“The Lobster”, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, “The Favourite”) feel like satires. But to be a true satire, the movie has to comment, through comparison or metaphor, on reality or something akin. That is for something to be a satire, there must first be a real-life subject. WIthout that subject, the art can’t be satire. 

“The Lobster” and “The Kiling of a Sacred Deer” dealt with situations that never existed and people that never will exist. “The Favourite” took its inspiration from the real-life monarchy of Queen Anne of England, an accident of history that thrust the guardianship of a nation-state upon a woman who had lost 17 children in the space of 11 years to miscarraige and infant mortality. It could have worked as a comment on the absurdity of a political system based on hereditary rights, but Mr. Lanthimos seemed to take no interest in the story’s historical significance. Instead, it was a great movie about “mean girl” backstabbing.

Which brings us to “Poor Things” , his latest endeavor, a movie that seems like it is commenting on our world, but has its satiric power undercut from the fact that it appears to take place in an alternate universe. Like his other movies, it is probably best to not think too much about what it might mean. Yorgos is doing something weird and is doing so in a very competent and fascinating way. Just take it as it is.

Where and when does this movie take place? That is a paramount question you may be asking yourself. There are certain identifiable landmarks. The places are given European names: London, Lisbon, Paris. The characters dress in prudish aristocratic suits and dresses sort of like it might be the turn of the 20th century (circa 1900ish). Certain set pieces, like the medical auditorium where surgeons can watch whatever new operation may be the next big thing, are associated with that time and place. 

But this is not the turn of 20th century Europe. There are strange scientific inventions that were not there back then and indeed would be new today. It’s sort of like Steampunk, but not even that. The color scheme is more vibrant and varied than Steampunk as it pertains to the landscape, makeup and the costumes. (All three categories just won Oscars and you will understand why). In one scene, a band in what would pass for a normal upper class ballroom plays music with discordant make-believe instruments. 

Perhaps the best example of the weirdness of the time/place conundrum is how the characters speak. Again, they wear the tuxedos and dresses of upper class British socialites and speak with upper class British accents. But they also curse like sailors, like all of them. In fact, it is interesting how they go back and forth between the two. They will start off a conversation as if they are in a Merchant and Ivory film, get frustrated and drop a bunch of “F” bombs. Noone in the history of the world speaks like this. It is weird. And boy, you should see them dance. You won’t forget it.

The conceit of the movie is that this mad scientist, Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Defoe) comes upon a pregnant woman who has just attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. The woman died but her unborn girl was still living. For reasons I couldn’t really understand, he performed the following experiment: he transplanted the brain of the daughter into the skull of the woman, and then, via an experiment that directly alludes to Frankenstein, he brought her to life and named her Bella Baxter. So, this person is both her daughter and her mother. Now Frankenstein was a metaphor for man’s relationship with God and the rights and obligations between the two. I have no idea what this mother/daughter relationship could be a metaphor for. I expect it may just be weird.

What you have then is a situation in which Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone) is essentially an infant mentally in the body of a full grown woman. This provides the opportunity for some throw-down acting by Emma Stone who spends the first part of the movie doing a great impression of my infant son Hiro. Then, in that great tradition of “fish-out–of-water” movies, Bella goes into the world and confounds society with her childlike questioning of how things are. The movie does some shallow exploring of wealth inequality and scientific ambition, but settles down on its primary topic: Sex and men’s obsessive desire to possess women. Her first paramour Duncan Wedderburn is driven to madness by her free spirit. He is played by Mark Ruffalo who is increasingly funny in the movie as he more and more loses his mind.

This movie is notable due to the sheer amount of vulgarity present in it. Not only is there much cursing as noted above, but there is also quite a lot of nudity and sex. There have been more vulgar movies for a very long time, but I don’t think there has been one as vulgar as this one that has garnered so many Oscar nominations. It has been noted that taboo subjects in general society have changed. What we once considered “grown-up” categories: sex, violence and curse words are now commonplace. Instead, we shy away from the “n-word” and other racial epithets for fear of society’s retribution. This occurred in my life-time. Remember “There’s Something About Mary” in 1999. That was a shocking movie. “Poor Things” has ten times the vulgarity of that movie. And Emma Stone won the Oscar. As a result, there will be legions of young women interested in acting who will watch this movie and consider her performance to be a normal thing.

It is inherently unfair to satirize the past and not just because they are all dead and can’t defend themselves. To be more fair, try thinking of human beings that lived in past times not as older, but as younger. Take the general course of human history and consider that someone in 1000 A.D. would only have their own personal experience plus whatever amount of the past had been written down and taught to them as part of their education. Whereas, a person today, has not only their experience but Wikipedia in their smartphone, which is the entirety of human experience within a Google Search. If we equate age with experience, everyone today is much much older than anyone in the past.

Yorgos Lanthimos perhaps is sending up past times as an absurd place in terms of how it viewed sex. Back then, there were taboos on homosexuality, pre-marital sex, sex between races and sex between classes. You can look at it through our eyes today and consider it all backward and outdated, particularly for the reasons given for the taboos (i.e. religious, nationalistic, racial). But we now know things that they didn’t know back then. For instance, we have ways of telling whether a child is actually genetically related to its father and we know that certain diseases are caused by germs and some germs and not others can only be transmitted through sex. And with that knowledge, we have developed ways to make sex much safer than it was then in the past. If you forget all that, then the world in the past may seem like an absurd place. If you understand that there was an obvious, albeit misunderstood, connection between promiscuity and certain plagues breaking out in society, you would be less judgmental on the value placed in the past on a woman’s virginity or the taboo upon male homosexuality. You wouldn’t want your son to visit a whore or your daughter to sleep with a sailor. You wouldn't know exactly how it might happen, but you knew they could die or go insane (this is what syphilis does). If you were religious, and you probably were, you may conclude by experience that God didn’t like these actions because the people who did them were visited upon by strange and awful maladies.

And hey, if you didn’t consider the above, then “Poor Things” might be a satire. 

The Favourite (5/5 Stars)

“The Favourite” was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Now here is a director whom I have a love/hate relationship with. I have seen three movies of his, rated the first (“The Lobster”) five stars, the second (“The Killing of a Sacred Deer”) with one star, and now the third, “The Favourite” five stars again. The style of Lanthimos does not change all that much, film by film. The main difference between “The Lobster” and “The Favourite” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is that Sacred Deer takes place in the present day with supposedly normal people. “The Lobster” by contrast took place in a futuristic society with humans that consistently did not act like humans. The setting of “The Favourite” though obstensibly historical is more in line with a setting like “The Lobster” in fact that is part of what makes it so funny. “The Favourite” presents an absurd historical scenario. It concerns the short reign of Queen Anne of England (played by Olivia Coleman) who reigned in the first decade of the 18^th century. Queen Anne has no business being on the throne. She has been involuntarily been delegated the task of ruling a nation through the childless efforts of the past three Tudor kings. She herself lost seventeen children within fifteen years to miscarraige, still-birth, and infant mortality. Such a history would make any person a little unhinged if not completely crazy. Queen Anne is no exception. She will be the last of the Tudor dynasty and it shows.

This consistently ill (her maladies include fevers and gout), generally burnt out and severely insecure lady nevertheless has enormous influence over the fate of the nation. She never leaves the house (to be fair it is a big palace) so the most important decision makers in the nation camp out in her court waiting for her to be well enough to attempt to address the issues of the day. “The Favourite” refers to the woman who at the moment has the most weight with the Queen. This is not a merit based position. It takes fierce ambition, the capacity for much mean girl backstabbing, and a mental limberness that allows one to completely subjugate one’s thoughts and feelings to the whims of a sick crazy woman in order to ultimately manipulate all the other people around her. Does Yorgos Lanthimos show Queen Anne or her sycophants any sympathy. Absolutely none. At times this seems unnecessarily cruel, but given that all the people involved are running an incompetent and irresponsible government it is very much what they all deserve. It’s okay to laugh at these people. They are all doing terrible things. “The Favourite” would make a great double-feature with “The Death of Stalin”. If you ever feel bad about democracy, go and watch these two movies back to back.

The original favourite is Lady Sarah (played by Rachel Weisz). Her ambitions are mainly political. She wants the Queen to finance a war with France. The subject is brought up constantly in this vague abstract way that can’t possibly lead to competent decisions about it no matter what side they ultimately fall upon. Lady Sarah’s political opponent is the leader of the opposition, Lord Harley (played by Nicholas Hoult). Court dramas are generally stiff affairs what with the costumes and the elevated language. Not so with “The Favourite”. Lord Harley is dressed like an insane clown. He has this big white wig, way too much white face makeup, and stupidly high heels. Nicholas Hoult is already a tall actor. Put heels on him and he absolutely towers over the women of the story. It is rather funny how this towering man with a large powerful constituency has to ingratiate himself to a fickle weak women by his dumb dress and absurd courtly manners. Nicholas Hoult has become an eminently watchable actor. This is the same guy who played Nux in “Mad Max: Fury Road” and amazingly, the boy in “About a Boy”. There is a certain confidence he can bring to odd characters that put at least his work in “The Favourite” on the level of a Robert Downey Jr., Sam Rockwell, or Christopher Walken. The man just walks around and kills it in every scene.

Because Lady Sarah’s ambitions are mainly political, she fails to notice at first the upstart Abigail (played by Emma Stone) who has designs on the Queen herself. Abigail does not particularly care whether the war is financed. She wants the Queen’s attention to elevate her position from a servant girl into something more. Her first successes in winning the Queen’s favors draws the attention of Lord Harley. Lord Harley is willing to arrange a wedding with a Lord for Abigail that will automatically elevate her to the nobility herself, in a polite exchange of course for Abigail’s services in backstabbing mean-girl style Lady Sarah’s relationship with the Queen. The movie resembles more “Heathers” than any Merchant and Ivory costume drama and I mean that in the best way.

“The Favourite” presents the learned viewer with a view to a historical anomaly in the stature of women. Three hundred years ago, the women of England had no greater political rights than any other women in the world and no other women in the world at that time had any political rights for the last several thousand years. However, England like other countries had a hereditary monarchy, and in a hereditary monarchy, a woman (not women) could have considerable power given their access to the royal persons. (In the case of England’s Queen Elizabeth, it was possible that a hereditary monarchy could even luck into a great monarch in the form of a woman.) An influential woman in the court of a hereditary monarchy could have the type of power akin to the President’s Chief of Staff in our system. They could direct the monarch’s attention to certain matters and enable or restrict access to the monarch from various constituencies. Lady Sarah does exactly that in “The Favourite”. It is an interesting historical fact that although women were universally oppressed for all of human history, they were most able to attain power in the most oppressive of governments. It was not unnoticed by the Ancient Greeks when they compared their government, a direct democracy (which limited rights only to men), to that of Persia, whose royal courts were continually dominated by the mothers and wives of the emperors. The United States of America is a good modern example. It has been almost 250 years and we have yet to elect a woman as president. Meanwhile anti-liberal states like Pakistan and Myanmar have both had woman heads-of-state in the past 50 years. These women are not coincidentally family members of important political dynasties. Political power spread wide but unevenly as in Ancient Greece and the United States (at least until the 1970s) keeps women from power. Political power tightly held routinely ends up in the hands of a woman.

But what type of woman gains this power? The movies in today’s time have a conundrum that will be a hard needle to thread. How do we, in this newly woke society, treat women in history. We want to tell stories that show empowered women. However, as much as women in power hundreds of years ago may have been ambitious, may have been brilliant, and may have been heroic in their intentions, they were all confined by the misogynistic structure of society. Thus, to gain any power, they would all need to be cunning, scheming, and duplicitous. “The Favourite” shows this dynamic in spades and contains fully-developed interesting female characters. An example of how to not to thread this needle is the last several seasons of “Game of Thrones” TV series which has bowed to consistent pressure as to how it portrays women in its medieval fantasy land. The most annoying example is the nine-year-old Lady Mormont who speaks with vivacity and eloquence to large groups of male warriors and sometimes even persuades them to change political tacks. It is totally unbelievable that these men would let her into the room and even more unbelievable that they would be persuaded by her words, which are even more unbelievable in that they come from a nine-year-old child (you can contrast her behavior with that of Bran who was also a child lord). I suppose in this season of #MeToo, women characters must all be born with an unreal amount of pluck and wisdom lest the creators be branded sexist. A certain amount of complexity in character development is sacrificed when a movie inserts unreality into a historical situations for modern political purposes. The women in “The Favourite” given the society they live in, must adapt in sometimes deceitful and amoral ways. This makes them more interesting and, in my opinion, a better movie. Political correctness be damned.

Battle of the Sexes (4/5 Stars)

Putting the Show back in Chauvinism

The show was so good it is hard to believe that it was actually true. “The Battle of the Sexes,” a tennis match played in 1973 between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King plays like a professional wrestling match. In one corner is the heel, the ex-champion Bobby Riggs, a boastful, clownish, male chauvinist. In the other corner is Billie Jean King, young, serious, the greatest female tennis player in the country. Bobby believes that he can beat at his age, 55, any woman who has the guts to challenge him. His reasoning: men are better than women. The match became so hyped that it ultimately was played in a football stadium and 50 million people watched it on television. Like professional wrestling, it had a man one could love to hate and a woman everyone wanted to win.

Except that this wasn’t a professional wrestling match. The outcome that would delight the world, good guys win, bad guys lose, was not predetermined. The prize money was a million dollars and Bobby Riggs, a compulsive gambler, had bet $15,000 of his own money on himself. There would be no throwing of the fight and the fact that Bobby had previously soundly beat the next best female tennis player, Margaret Court, in what was termed the Mother’s Day massacre, had put a real suspense onto the outcome of the match. The match was exciting. And in this movie, the feeling is fully captured.

To Billie Jean King, the significance of the match was very serious. She had turned down Bobby several times before Margaret’s defeat, made it essential that she take the match in order to prove that women’s tennis wasn’t a joke. At the time, she was lobbying for equal pay in tournaments between men and women. Her reasoning: the men and women sell the same amount of tickets, why are they paid differently. To Bobby, the significance of the match seems less serious and more of a ploy to be paid more money. Bobby knows that by trolling the women’s lib movement he could generate interest in the match. Whether he actually hates women is an open question, but on a certain level it doesn’t matter. He does not take the women’s lib movement serious. As he comments in one scene: the women don’t deserve to be paid as much as the men because they can’t beat the men in a match-up. In fact, he says, “I’m being paid less to play on the men’s senior circuit than the women are making in their regular circuit. If I can beat the top women, its unfair to me to be paid less than them.”

It strikes me that I’m talking far more about the plot than usual. Well, that speaks to the power of the story. It is a fantastic battle between two very strong characters. Steve Carell is the perfect actor to portray the clownish Bobby Riggs and Emma Stone is perfect as Billie Jean King. In fact, I think this is the fullest character Emma Stone has ever played and is her best performance. Sarah Silverman and Bill Pullman pull their weight in supporting roles.

The movie thankfully pays a lot of time and attention to the match itself. It is well directed by Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Davis (directors of “Little Miss Sunshine”) and written by Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”). This is a good movie. I really liked it.

La La Land (5/5 Stars)

Watching “La La Land,” one wonders why there aren’t more movies like it. After all, it is a lot of fun. The movie starts in a typical traffic jam on a Los Angeles overpass. That is until one person starts singing a cute upbeat tune entitled “It’s Just Another Day of Sun.” She is joined one by one by her fellow commuters and then all at once by every other person stuck on the overpass. They are of all creeds and colors and are lightly dressed and brightly colored. They start dancing, doing tricks with bikes and skateboards, and at one point the back of a van opens to reveal a band already playing this upbeat song. Suddenly the song ends, everyone gets back into their cars, and the traffic jam continues. The camera pans up to show the Los Angeles skyline and the movie’s best joke appears as a title. Simply, it states, “Winter.”

“La La Land” is written and directed by a young man named Damien Chazelle. He’s made three movies so far. His first “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” was notable in how it contained distinct musical numbers, set pieces almost never seen in a no-budget movie (almost never because Damien Chazelle did it). “Whiplash,” Chazelle’s first brush with a budget (albeit still a very small one), was a virtuoso in editing which spoke volumes about the director’s preternatural talent and industry for displaying rhythm on the screen. “La La Land” is the full flourishing of Chazelle’s power. He reunites with Justin Hurwitz, the musical director of his previous features, and has created the best movie musical since 2002’s “Chicago.”

Unbound by a restrictive budget and reveling in the presence of movie stars like main leads Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, “La La Land” is a brilliantly romantic and exceptionally kinetic movie musical. The music riffs several themes over and over in various ways and they are good enough that the repetition is welcome. The cinematography wastes no frame in its attempt to make the movie wall to wall artistry. Cinema lovers who have watched Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” and “An American in Paris” will notice where the movie gets its inspiration. Gosling and Stone are not exceptional dancers (though they do a flawless Viennese Waltz at one point) but they don’t really need to be for you to have fun alongside them.

The movie might just win Best Picture and the reason it is the front-runner is also the only minor quip I have with it. The story, like previous Oscar winners like “The Artist,” “Argo,” and “Birdman,” is about people in the movie business. Emma Stone plays a wannabe actress striking out at various auditions and Ryan Gosling is a struggling jazz pianist. As someone who watches lots of movies, I believe I have seen enough movies about these particular types of people. “La La Land” is an exceptional movie musical, I just wish there were exceptional movie musicals that weren’t about people convinced the epitome of life is becoming famous.

Having said that, you may notice that these two characters aren’t necessarily equal in these cliche ambitions. Gosling is already good enough to get a good job in this movie, he just doesn’t want to settle for a regular gig. His ultimate goal is to open a jazz club where patrons can receive a very specific experience he feels is valuable. Whereas Emma Stone would be happy with any type of work and her ultimate goal is apparently to be recognized while buying coffee and insisting to pay for it when the manager tries to give it to her for free. One goal is actually worth having and this may reflect Chazelle’s far greater interest and experience in jazz than in whatever vague abstraction of success the Emma Stone character is going after.  

Birdman (5/5 Stars)

Or: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

When Roger Ebert came upon a long shot in a movie he applied the Goodfellas standard to it. This standard referred to Martin Scorsese’s famous shot of Henry Hill taking out his girlfriend to the local nightclub. The shot starts with Hill handing his car keys to the valet and then taking his girl past the long line outside the club into a backdoor through the kitchen (he slips several guys $20 each) and into the main club area where the proprietor brings out a special table just for him and plants it in the front right next to the band. Hill sits down and his friends at the next table buy him a bottle of wine. The shot ends at 3 minutes 13 seconds. Subsequent filmmakers, inspired by Goodfellas, attempted such long shots of their own and Ebert was continually dismayed by what he saw. The copycats got the technicalities correct but missed the point. What made the long shot in Goodfellas great was not that it took a lot of skill and coordination to pull it off (it did), but that it was the correct way to tell the story. Scorsese was relating to the audience how Henry Hill’s position in the mafia opened doors to him that were closed to regular people. The best way to show that would be how quickly he could get a seat in a crowded at the Copacabana in real time. Add on that the song that played over the entire shot, The Crystal’s “Then He Kissed Me,” and the audience also gets a great idea of how his girlfriend felt about the whole thing, i.e. she was super impressed by it. The long shot in Goodfellas is not a showoffy ‘look what I can do with a camera’ conceit. It is the story. That is what makes a long shot great or not great. After all if just making the shooting process as hard as possible were what made it great, then Hitchcock’s “Rope” is the king of long shots (the entire 90 minute movie only has four takes). But it isn’t and you don't really need to see “Rope.” Hitchcock was just playing around with his camera to see if he could do it. There was no reason that movie needed to be told that way.

Which brings us to Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s “Birdman,” which is not unlike Rope. I mention the cinematographer because he happens to be the best in the business. He works with Terrance Malick (Tree of Life and To the Wonder) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men and Gravity) and this is not the first time he has worked in incredibly long shots. In other movies though the long shots generally concerned action scenes. (The point of long shots in action scenes is to give a more realistic ‘you are there!’ momentum to what is happening on the screen. If you have ever seen ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Gravity’ you will know what I mean.) But ‘Birdman’ is not an action movie. It is a story about Riggan Thompson a washed up movie star who was last culturally relevant a quarter century ago when he played the very popular comic book character ‘Birdman.’ He enjoyed great success as ‘Birdman’ but soon became unable to do anything else. When he refused to do “Birdman 4,” his career went down the tubes. Now he is staging an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” on Broadway. He is desperately trying to become a serious artist again and is fighting against the widespread notion that he is a cartoon character and can’t be anything else.

Now why does this need to be shot in one continuous long shot (It is and it is very technically impressive but nevermind let’s apply the Goodfellas standard). Well, the surprise answer is something I have never seen a long shot in a movie ever accomplish. Surprisingly the way the long shots in this movie are used, they actually take the focus off of what the director is doing and allow the audience to focus much more on the actors. It is really kind of exhilarating. Wactching ‘Birdman,’ a movie about people putting on a play, actually feels like a play. It is even written like a play. By that I mean that characters provide through dialogue much more exposition than usual and at other times go into emotional monologues and speeches at length the way that is generally impossible in movie time. You may have noticed that a three hour play basically feels the same length as a two-hour movie. The whole ‘being there’ aspect of a play elongates the audience’s patience whereas movies generally need to move much faster. But here, because of the extraordinarily skilfull camera of Lubezki, the momentum of the long take gives the actors far more leeway for dramatic performances. And boy, do the cast in the movie rise to the occasion. There is some serious throw down acting in this movie and it occurs all the way through it.

Anchoring the movie as Riggan Thomas is none other than Michael Keaton who if you remember him at all you probably remember him as the Tim Burton era Batman. The role is so perfectly tailored to Keaton’s life (his career did have a downturn after he stopped being Batman) that it provokes the question of whether the movie was inspired by him. Probably not but he is the perfect casting decision on paper and it turns out as well in practice. It is a great performance and should be a cinch for an Oscar nomination. Certainly nobody this year has done “more” acting in a movie. Playing against him as his main antagonist (among many) is Edward Norton as one of those crazy method ‘actors’ that throw fits when they drink water instead of gin in a scene when they are supposed to be drinking f*cking gin. Then there is Zach Galifinakis as Riggan’s best friend, agent, and producer. Zach plays the sane one in this movie, a choice that reminded me of the casting of Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie is crazy, so why not cast a crazy comedian as the serious one. It works. I liked it. Rounding out the cast is Naomi Watts (a long time actress and newcomer to Broadway), Emma Stone (who has huge eyes), Andrea Riseborough, and Amy Ryan (divorcee of Riggan). All of them do good jobs even if they don’t get the really big moments like for instance running through Times Square in only underwear with a marching band in the distance. Someone does that, won’t tell you who.

‘Birdman’ is a seamless auditory and visual experience. There is an element of magic in the movie that is not fully explained but after awhile does not really need to be. It feels correct and is fairly understood as an extension of the scene’s emotional tone. There are plenty of details that lend to the overall otherworldliness of the movie. A couple of great ones cherry picked from the movie include the fog machines, the Christmas lights at the liquor store, a Japanese critic, and a certain quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth at precisely the right time. Birdman is a must see movie. It is one of the best of the year and should at least net Lubezki’s 2^nd Oscar in as many years.

Zombieland (4/5 Stars) October 23, 2009

It’s the Zombie Apocalypse and Jesse Eisenberg still can’t get laid. 

Zombie movies really don’t have much leeway in terms of originality. There like the opposite of a superhero movie or a James Bond flick. A lot of what makes those distinguishable from each other would be a new villain with an ingenious way to take over the world. In Zombie movies the enemies are always the same. They are zombies. And by Zombie rules, how they plan to take over the world never changes: They will relentlessly stalk you and eat your brains. So what sets some zombie movies apart from other zombie movies usually has more to do with style than substance. Some are social commentary, some are thrillers, some try for laughs. But putting aside genre differentiations all of them have one thing in common: They are incredibly predictable. This can be boring (I am Legend) or this can be comforting (Shaun of the Dead). Like I said, it usually depends on the story teller and how they use the rules. 

In this movie, the rules are used for comedic purposes. The zombies are oafish and stupid. And they move just slow enough that the heroes can be clever in how to dispatch them. Woody Harrelson is perfectly cast as Tallahassee, a gung-ho zombie killer. Here's an exchange that describes him perfectly

Jesse Eisenberg: You're one of those guys that constantly have to top everybody, aren't you?
Woody: No, I once knew a guy who was better at it than I am.

It’s hard to keep count of all the weapons he kills zombies with (banjo, shotgun, car door, machine gun, garden shears, etc.) because he never uses the same weapon twice. But to say the primary purpose of this movie is to create clever ways to kill zombies is selling it short. The movie has another more difficult subplot than survival in zombieland and that is this movie’s mission to somehow get Jesse Eisenberg laid. And if you thought that would be a relatively easy thing to do what with the near extinction of the human species, then you probably haven’t seen a movie starring Jesse Eisenberg.

Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland) is like the poor man’s Michael Cera (Superbad, Juno). He’s oppressively neurotic, awkward, and paranoid. But unlike a Michael Cera character that seems to be at least reacting to strenuous outside forces, Eisenberg gives off the sense that these attributes are inherent. He starts off awkward and perhaps because his he senses how pathetic he is, all his actions seem like he’s consistently apologizing for being such a loser. In this movie he is a self described loner who before the zombies took over, spent all his time playing Warcraft and drinking Code Red Mountain Dew. He calls the pretty girl down the hall “406" because that’s the number of her apartment and he hasn’t bothered to introduce himself. Like I said, surviving zombies isn’t the most difficult plot problem this movie has set out to overcome. 

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the idea for this movie started off with Eisenberg’s problem and that the writers came up with zombies because they couldn’t think of any other way to solve it. After meeting up with Tallahassee, Jesse happens upon two sisters who haven’t been zombified yet. One (Emma Stone from Superbad) happens to be just about his age. What's even more convenient is that the gung-ho Tallahassee is more interested in Hostess Twinkies than women. So that means there is absolutely no competition. He’s the last man on Earth and she is the last women. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be enough. Emma Stone ditches him several times and even steals his guns and his car.

But this movie is just getting started. Emma Stone somehow forgets several cardinal zombie rules while at an amusement park and her and her kid sister (Abigail Breslin) become hopeless damsels in distress. Jesse and Tallahassee come to the rescue in a gorey carnival zombie killing climax! Now he’s got to happen, I mean, he just totally saved her life. Please tell me he at least gets to first base. I’m not giving it away. You’ll just have to watch and find out. 

There’s a certain romance to zombie movies that all the best ones key in on and that is our endless fascination with apocalypses. There is an ironic joy in being completely free of restrictions from your job, your family, or your civilization. In Zombieland there are no authority figures. The characters smash up an Indian casino for fun and play golf inside Bill Murray’s abandoned mansion. They need a car so they just take an abandoned yellow hummer they find in the middle of the street. No strings attached, the owner is dead and the car works fine. I get the sense that this would be a very fun movie to work on. To think when I was Abigail Breslin’s age I was in goddamn grade school. I think at that age I would have rather been in Zombieland. 

Overall I felt the movie was probably funny. I say it that way because I saw it on Thursday Night at 10:00 pm and I was practically the only person in the theater. I laughed out loud several times but didn’t hear anybody else titter. It’s hard to gauge a comedy completely alone. At least I thought it was funny. Although, there was some unneeded sentimentality in it. Sure its realistic that people would be a depressed upon remembering the death of family members, but come on, this is a zombie movie. If you dwell realistically on these things, it could become kind of depressing and boring (see that clunker I am Legend, god that movie sucked).

Note: there is a fine cameo by Bill Murray in which he plays himself. He exits perhaps too soon when he is killed in perhaps the stupidest possible way to die in a zombie movie.