Eric (2024)

from Indiewire: https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/shows/eric-review-benedict-cumberbatch-netflix-series-1235009913/

Eric

BY BEN TRAVERS
MAY 30, 2024 9:00 AM


No matter how you dress them up, some characters just aren’t compelling enough to carry a story. They can be daring and desperate, kind and cultured, tattooed and full of ticks — heck, they can even be an alien from another planet, but if there’s no depth to their emotional spectrum, no hook to their charming personality, no mystery to their misery that merits its extended unraveling, well, then they’re just an empty suit — even if that suit is a horned, fanged, six-foot-tall puppet monster.

Such a descriptor may seem harsh for the star of “Eric,” a dad by the name of Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch), who, on paper, seems like a perfectly suitable lead for a six-episode series. First and foremost, Vincent is the co-creator of a hit “Sesame Street”-like TV show titled “Hello Sunshine.” His staged neighborhood of colorful puppets is as beloved as Vincent himself is reviled. You see, Vincent isn’t a very nice person. He’s the cardboard cut-out of a tortured artist (perhaps his name is a nod to Vincent van Gogh?), angering his co-workers with nonstop complaints about everything from network notes to sloppy puppet construction, and driving loved ones away with his controlling nature, exhausting know-it-all-ness, and excessive drinking.


“Everyone thinks about changing the world and no one thinks about changing themselves,” Vincent says, mid-rant, waiting not-so-patiently for his 9-year-old son, Edgar (Ivan Howe), to identify his statement as a Tolstoy quote. Fun dad, huh? Not so much. But bad dads can make for good characters — there’s another show about a wayward father who also happens to be a famous puppeteer that’s actually worth watching — and perhaps Vincent could have been one, too, if only his central problem wasn’t obvious from the second he obliviously quoted one of Russia’s great writers. Vincent is so busy trying to perfect his kids’ show that he doesn’t realize his awful disposition is alienating his own child — until it’s too late.

Somewhere along his morning walk to school, Edgar disappears. The community goes on high alert. And Vincent flies into action. …kind of. “Eric” is predominantly about the search for Edgar, tracked via two parallel plots: a missing persons detective (played with a stirring mix of anger and poise by McKinley Belcher III) leading the NYPD’s official investigation, and Vincent, off on his own, charging ahead with his own misguided crusade. Because his whole world revolves around the fake sun painted above his pretend TV playground, Vincent can only process what’s happening to his family by convincing himself to build Edgar’s idea for a new puppet named Eric. If he can just get the giant, grumbling creature on TV, Vincent thinks his son will see him and find his way home.

As batshit banana-brained as that sounds, watching Vincent stumble around talking to a yeti-like imaginary monster gets old fast — partly because it’s always unclear whether the plan is actually supposed to work, or if everyone just thinks they’re better off humoring a sad dad who’s been pushed to the brink of sanity. (It stops and starts, its urgency waxing and waning with Vincent’s deteriorating mental state, which makes it difficult to determine if we’re watching a madmen in a death spiral or if we’re really meant to believe he’s on the right track.) But the other, arguably more pressing issue is that the cop’s grim investigation doesn’t gel with Vincent’s fantasy-land adventure. While Vincent is downing vodka all morning and dancing with a furry blue Sully substitute all night, Detective Ledroit (Belcher) is hunting down pedophile rings and staking out nightclub restrooms where sexually insecure men threaten to cut off each other’s balls.McKinley Belcher III in ‘Eric’Courtesy of Ludovic Robert / Netflix

The whiplash between the two stories is slightly stabilized by their shared setting: a beautifully gritty vision of 1980s Manhattan courtesy of production designer Alex Holmes. Rarely has New York City felt as full and filthy [complimentary] as it does here, and director Lucy Forbes uses the hustle and bustle to further emphasize that everyone feels like a suspect when you’re searching for a needle in a giant, grimy haystack. With transparent cliffhangers ending most episodes, a fluid pace, and the human compulsion to find out what happened, the episodes fly by, but I wouldn’t say they’re easy to watch. That whiplash never fully fades, and the pitch-black underworld dominating half the show creates a foul flavor that lingers after the credits roll / Netflix autoplays an ad for “Baby Reindeer.”

Plus, as soon as you recognize the embarrassingly flat arc Vincent is barely able to crest, there’s simply no saving “Eric.” For Cumber-enthusiasts, it barely functions as a showcase for its very capable star, since this isn’t the first time we’ve watched the two-time Oscar nominee depict a toxic white man, or a profound windbag, or a rich so-and-so who descends into a drunken and drugged stupor, and these repetitive character traits do little to draw interest toward his tiresome new character.

Aside from Vincent’s self-evident flaws, he also suffers in comparison. Det. Michael Ledroit doesn’t exactly break the mold. We’ve seen cops process their personal grief by throwing themselves into the darkest corners of their work time and time again. But in addition to Belcher’s tough-and-tender turn, his storyline expands beyond his dying boyfriend at home, beyond the search for Edgar among Manhattan’s ugliest denizens, into an affecting (albeit extremely unpleasant) concurrent quest. Marlon Rochelle, a 14-year-old Black boy, has been missing for much longer than Edgar. He’s been gone for enough time his mother has given up hope of finding him alive, but remains resolute in her demands for justice. She calls Ledroit’s office every other day. She asks the questions no one else will ask. Why is all this attention going to another kid? Where’s her son’s nightly news stories? How come the NYPD is trying to brush her and her boy under the rug?

The answers matter less than how Ledroit responds to the questions. As a closeted gay man in a station filled with macho white guys dropping racial slurs and homophobic retorts on the regular, the detective doesn’t exactly feel welcome at work. He doesn’t really feel welcomed anywhere, except with his partner, and that sole safe space comes with a ticking clock. But he’s very good at his job — good enough to know when suspects aren’t telling the full truth, good enough to notice clues overlooked by others, and good enough to spot curious overlaps between Marlon and Edgar’s circumstances. That he’ll have to put his own job, his own life, on the line to help these boys almost goes without saying, but showrunner Abi Morgan makes sure you feel the weight of the forces he’s up against, which feel especially hefty compared to the fluffy furball Vincent’s dragging around.

It’s a bit too simplistic to say “Eric” is half of a good show and half of a bad one. Questionable decisions abound, whether it’s what facts are shared to stretch out the mystery or how the series embodies some of the very problems to which it draws attention. (Maybe don’t spend the majority of your story on the white kid and his basic family while a rightly rage-filled Black mother sits in silence — except, of course, when the show wants to chastise the cops for racial discrimination?) “Eric” is filled with enough important issues — and one big hairy quirk — to make it seem like a series filled with fresh, serious ideas. But they’re really just window-dressing around another bad-dad saga that’s too distracted chasing a long shaggy tail.

from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/04/27/baby-reindeer-review-a-devastating-examination-of-trauma-and-abuse/?sh=659f967268c0

Baby Reindeer

by Erik Kain
Apr 27, 2024,07:00am EDT

Baby Reindeer is one of the best Netflix Originals I’ve ever seen, though it ended up being quite a lot darker and more disturbing than I expected. In its trailers and marketing, Richard Gadd’s adaptation of his one-man play (based on a true story) appears to mostly be about his character’s encounter with a stalker. I knew it was going to be dark, but at first blush it looked more like a dark comedy than anything.

That is not the case. Still, what I did get—while tough to watch and unexpected—was brilliant. This is a show I highly recommend, though before you do know that it includes graphic depictions of sexual assault and deals with challenging mental health issues, trauma and abuse. It deals with these issues with nuance and care, and it handles its challenging themes without being preachy, which I appreciate. But it’s not an easy watch.

Spoilers follow.

Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian working at a pub in Camden. He meets a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning) who seems a bit down on her luck, and so he does what any decent human being would do and shows her a small act of kindness by giving her her drink (a Diet Coke) for free. Soon, she’s spending every day at the pub, talking his ear off all shift long, making up all sorts of obvious fantasies about her busy, glamorous life. It quickly becomes apparent that she has an obsession with him, and it’s not long after that the emails begin. Hundreds a day, filled with typos and misspelled words, mostly about nothing but increasingly flirtatious.

He looks her up online and realizes she’s been convicted and imprisoned in the past for stalking. But Donny is frustratingly incapable of setting healthy boundaries, and things get out of hand. I wrote about the first half of the show already, and how his character stressed me out so much. He ends up ruining the one healthy romantic relationship he manages to build—with a trans woman named Teri (Nava Mau)—because of all the baggage he’s lugging around, though we learn that his issues go much deeper than Martha.

In the second half of the show, we discover a lot more about what motivates Donny—and what’s holding him back. In the fourth episode (out of seven) the show takes a very dark, very difficult turn. We flashback about five years to when Dunn was just getting started as a comic, trying—and failing rather badly—to get his comedy routine going in Edinburgh. There, he meets a writer named Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill) and the two hit it off. Darrien helps him turn around his comedy show almost overnight. Donny gets that first taste of what fame might be like, and he’s addicted.

When Dunn moves to London, he and Darrien reconnect and soon they’re spending an inordinate amount of time together. Darrien promises to help Donny get his writing career off the ground. And he feeds him massive amounts of drugs in the process, something Donny goes along with because he’s trying to impress his new mentor. When Darrien gives him a shot of GHB—a common date rape drug—it becomes all too apparent what’s happening. He’s being groomed, lied to and put in a terribly vulnerable position. When all of this leads to repeated sexual assault, we hope that Donny will leave. He does not. He stays in this horrifying situation, still clinging to the idea that Darrien meant what he said about him having talent, that this really is still his best shot at fame.

When he returns to his girlfriend, Keeley (Shalom Brune-Franklin) he’s incapable of having sex. She doesn’t understand why. They ultimately break up. Years later, Donny meets Martha and while she becomes his stalker, he becomes almost equally obsessed with her. It isn’t until things really hit rock bottom that he finally reports her to the police.

In the final episodes, Donny finally melts down, revealing everything that’s happened to him while performing at a stand-up comedy finals. It’s heartbreaking, and Gadd’s performance had me in tears. (I spent a lot of time crying in the second half of the show). The monologue goes viral on YouTube, and Donny finally gets his big break, landing sold-out gigs and once again tasting that sweet, sweet adoration and fame—but the nightmare continues.

When Martha begins stalking his parents, she threatens to tell them about his online confession, so he visits them first and tells them everything. It’s yet another heartbreaking scene, not because his parents reject him, but because his father reveals that he, too, was sexually assaulted when he was just a boy. Donny tells them that he worried they’d think of him as less than a man, and his dad replies “Would you think of me as less of a man?” before revealing that he was abused by a priest.

In the end, Martha is convicted of stalking and harassment against Donny and his parents after she leaves a threatening voicemail. There is little satisfaction at her sentencing hearing, as she weeps and admits to everything. She’s left countless voicemails, and after she goes to jail, Donny becomes obsessed with listening to them, trying to make sense of them. His friends and family worry about his mental state.

In the very final scene, he’s just come from visiting Darrien, his rapist. Deeply shaken—the confrontation did not go how he thought it would—he finds himself in a bar.

Sitting there alone, he listens to Martha’s voicemails. One he’s never heard comes on and stops him in his tracks. She finally reveals why she’s given him the nickname, “Baby Reindeer.” It’s because as a young girl, she had a little stuffed reindeer and it was the only good thing in her entire life, the thing she clung to when her parents fought and took comfort in during long years of neglect. And Donny, she says, reminded her of that reindeer right down to its wee bum.

It’s a moment of terrible revelation for Donny, whose guilt over Martha’s fate comes crashing down around him. When the bartender asks him for his drink order, he realizes he didn’t bring his wallet. Sitting there in his misery, dejected and alone, the bartender tells him the drink is on him. The same exact act of kindness Donny showed Martha at the very beginning of the series.

The credits roll.

This is one of the most perfect endings of a limited TV series I can recall, not because we’re meant to think that Donny will now become this dude’s stalker, but because of how it illustrates the way cycles of abuse can perpetrate, and how almost every abuser has at one time likely been a victim first. Baby Reindeer does such a phenomenal, gut-wrenching job at examining how trauma and abuse can make people act in ways that—to the outside observer—make no sense. Donny’s inaction with Martha seems inexplicable, until we realize that so much of what he does is driven by confusion and self-hatred. “The only thing I loved more than [Teri],” he says during his impromptu monologue, “Was hating myself. And I loved her so very, very much.”

He finally realizes that so much of Martha’s mental health stems from her own past traumas and that his behaviors and hers mirror one another. Sitting there in the same seat she was in, his empathy for his once-stalker finally makes sense.

It’s been a long time since a TV show has left me this emotionally shaken in the end. I meant to write about it days ago when I finished, but every time I tried to write I couldn’t find the words. (It doesn’t help that I’ve been quite sick for a week). Very few TV shows are able to grapple with these extraordinarily difficult topics with such nuance and care. Nothing here is glamorized. It’s not being done for shock value. Baby Reindeer simply shows us how abuse and trauma create problems that can be so cyclical and intractable that it can take years—an entire lifetime even—to ever overcome the damage.

I highly recommend this series, but go in knowing it’s a tough watch, with very graphic portrayals of sexaul assault and an examination of mental health issues that can be both very funny at times, and really tragic. The show itself is beautifully shot with some truly outstanding performances from its leads. Both Gadd and Gunning deserve awards as Donny and Martha. Easily two of the finest performances I’ve seen all year. Baby Reindeer will sit with me, I think, for a very long time.

3 Body Problem (2024)

from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/arts/television/3-body-problem-netflix-review.html

3 Body Problem

By James Poniewozik
March 20, 2024


The aliens who menace humankind in Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” believe in doing a lot with a little. Specifically, they can unfold a single proton into multiple higher dimensions, enabling them to print computer circuits with the surface area of a planet onto a particle smaller than a pinprick.

“3 Body Problem,” the audacious adaptation of a hard-sci-fi trilogy by Liu Cixin, is a comparable feat of engineering and compression. Its first season, arriving Thursday, wrestles Liu’s inventions and physics explainers onto the screen with visual grandeur, thrills and wow moments. If one thing holds it back from greatness, it’s the characters, who could have used some alien technology to lend them an extra dimension or two. But the series’s scale and mind-bending turns may leave you too starry-eyed to notice.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, partnering here with Alexander Woo (“The Terror: Infamy”), are best known for translating George R.R. Martin’s incomplete “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy saga into “Game of Thrones.” Whatever your opinions of that series — and there are plenty — it laid out the duo’s strengths as adapters and their weaknesses as creators of original material.

Beginning with Martin’s finished novels, Benioff and Weiss converted the sprawling tomes into heady popcorn TV with epic battles and intimate conversations. Toward the end, working from outlines or less, they rushed to a finish and let visual spectacle overshadow the once-vivid characters.


In “3 Body,” however, they and Woo have a complete story to work with, and it’s a doozy. It announces its sweep up front, opening with a Chinese scientist’s public execution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, then jumping to the present day, when a wave of notable physicists are inexplicably dying by suicide.

The deaths may be related to several strange phenomena. Experiments in particle accelerators around the world suddenly find that the last several decades’ worth of research is wrong. Brilliant scientific minds are being sent futuristic headsets of unknown provenance that invite them to join an uncannily realistic virtual-reality game. Oh, also, one night all the stars in the sky start blinking on and off.

It all suggests the working of an advanced power, not of the cuddly E.T. variety. What starts as a detective mystery, pursued by the rumpled intelligence investigator Clarence Da Shi (Benedict Wong), escalates to a looming war of the worlds. What the aliens want and what they might do to get it is unclear at first, but as Clarence intuits, “Usually when people with more advanced technology encounter people with more primitive technology, doesn’t work out well for the primitives.”

Most of the first season’s plot comes straight from Liu’s work. The biggest changes are in story structure and location. Liu’s trilogy, while wide-ranging, focused largely on Chinese characters and had specifically Chinese historical and political overtones. Benioff, Weiss and Woo have globalized the story, shifting much of the action to London, with a multiethnic cast. (Viewers interested in a more literal rendition of Liu’s story can watch last year’s stiff but thorough Chinese adaptation on Peacock.)

They’ve also given Liu’s heavy science a dose of the humanities. Liu is a brilliant novelist of speculative ideas, but his characters can read like figures from story problems. In the series, a little playful dialogue goes a long way toward leavening all the Physics 101.

So does casting. Wong puffs life into his generically hard-boiled gumshoe. Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth in “Thrones”) stands out as Thomas Wade, a sharp-tongued spymaster, as does Rosalind Chao as Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist whose brutal experience in the Cultural Revolution makes her question her allegiance to humanity. Zine Tseng is also excellent as the young Ye.

More curious, if understandable, is the decision to shuffle and reconfigure characters from throughout Liu’s trilogy into a clique of five attractive Oxford-grad prodigies who carry much of the narrative: Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a dogged physicist with personal ties to the dead-scientists case; Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), an idealistic nanofibers researcher; Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), a gifted but jaded research assistant; Will Downing (Alex Sharp), a sweet-natured teacher with a crush on Jin; and Jack Rooney (John Bradley of “Thrones”), a scientist turned snack-food entrepreneur and the principal source of comic relief.

John Bradley and Jess Hong in “3 Body Problem.” Part of the series takes place in a virtual-reality world reached via a mysterious headset.Credit...Netflix


The writers manage to bump up Liu’s one-dimensional characterizations to two-ish, but the “Oxford Five,” with the exception of Jin, don’t feel entirely rounded. This is no small thing; in a fantastical series like “Thrones” or “Lost,” it is the memorable individuals — your Arya Starks and your Ben Linuses — who hold you through the ups and downs of the story.

The plot, however, is dizzying and the world-building immersive, and the reportedly galactic budget looks well and creatively spent on the screen. Take the virtual-reality scenes, through which “3 Body” gradually reveals its stakes and the aliens’ motives. Each character who dons the headset finds themselves in an otherworldly version of an ancient kingdom — China for Jin, England for Jack — which they are challenged to save from repeating cataclysms caused by the presence of three suns (hence the series’s title).

“3 Body” has a streak of techno-optimism even at its bleakest moments, the belief that the physical universe is explicable even when cruel. The universe’s inhabitants are another matter. Alongside the race to save humanity is the question of whether humanity is worth saving — a group of alien sympathizers, led by a billionaire environmentalist (Jonathan Pryce), decides that Earth would benefit from a good cosmic intervention.

All this attaches the show’s brainiac spectacle to big humanistic ideas. The threat in “3 Body” is looming rather than imminent — these are not the kind of aliens who pull up quick and vaporize the White House — which makes for a parallel to the existential but gradual threat of climate change. Like “Thrones,” with its White Walkers lurking beyond the Wall, “3 Body” is in part a collective-action problem.

It is also morally provocative. Liu’s novels make an argument that in a cold, indifferent universe, survival can require a hard heart; basing decisions on personal conscience can be a kind of selfishness and folly. The series is a bit more sentimental, emphasizing relationships and individual agency over game theory and determinism. But it’s willing to go dark: In a striking midseason episode, the heroes make a morally gray decision in the name of planetary security, and the consequences are depicted in horrifying detail.

Viewers new to the story should find it exciting on its own. (You do not need to have read the books first; you should never need to read the books to watch a TV series.) But the book trilogy does go to some weird, grim — and presumably challenging to film — places, and it will be interesting to see if and how future seasons follow.

For now, there’s flair, ambition and galaxy-brain twists aplenty. Sure, this kind of story is tough to pull off beginning to end (see, again, “Game of Thrones”). But what’s the thrill in creating a headily expanding universe if there’s no risk of it collapsing?

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Star Wars #19-25 Vol. 4: Crimson Reign

Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)

Just for the record, this is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. I have 30 mins to go in it and I'm done. Sorry, Michael Cera.

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Thor (2020) #19-24

Venom (2021) #1-5

Hulk (2021) #1-6

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Maestro (2023)

from Roger Ebert.com: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/maestro-movie-review-2023

Maestro

Christy Lemire
November 22, 2023


With “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper tells the story of a generation-defining artistic innovator in the most traditional way possible: through the familiar tropes and linear narrative of a standard biopic.

Directing and starring as the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, Cooper has crafted a film that’s technically dazzling but emotionally frustrating. The script he co-wrote with Josh Singer (“Spotlight”) follows a well-trod, episodic path: This happened, then this happened, then this happened. Ultimately, it falls into the same trap as so many biopics, especially prestige pictures with major award aspirations: In covering a huge swath of an extremely famous person’s life, it ends up feeling superficial.

And yet, you should see it. Yes, this sounds contradictory, but “Maestro” is so consistently spectacular from an aesthetic perspective that it’s worth watching. The cinematography, costumes, and production design are all evocative and precise as they evolve with the times over 40 some-odd years of Bernstein’s life. Behind the camera, Cooper takes a big swing in making you feel as if you’re watching a movie that was made in the ’40s and continues to do so with each era. Shooting in high-contrast black and white and Academy ratio, Matthew Libatique—an Oscar nominee as director of photography on Cooper’s debut feature, “A Star Is Born”—works wonders with a single light bulb on a barren stage, for example. There’s a shot where Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre, who will become Bernstein’s wife, steps off a bus at night and walks up the street to the party where she’ll meet him for the first time, and it’s breathtaking in its cinematic authenticity. The lush Technicolor of scenes set in the ‘60s and ’70 offers its own vibrant allure. And inspired transitions from editor Michelle Tesoro carry the story across time and place in thrilling fashion.

Cooper has clearly taken great care in getting the details right, big and small. That includes spending six years learning how to conduct to perfect a particularly essential scene: a six-plus minute recreation of Bernstein leading the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in 1973. (Yannick Nézet-Séguin was Cooper’s crucial conducting consultant.) The camera roams fluidly across the orchestra, choir, and soloists, the music overtaking his entire body and booming throughout this majestic edifice. Bernstein is passionate and rapturous with perspiration; this is the apex of his joy. The whole film is worth seeing in a theater before it begins streaming on Netflix on Dec. 20, but this lengthy, cathartic moment is one you’ll want to experience with the best possible picture and sound.

But while Bernstein’s music is woven throughout—including an amusing use of his “West Side Story” prologue during a period of marital discord—we never truly understand him deeply as a musician or a man. He’s a legend, a larger-than-life cultural force in mid-century America whose persona extends far beyond the rarefied circles of the classical music world. But the necessarily performative nature of Bernstein’s existence, as a closeted gay man, keeps us at a distance as viewers, too. Fully aware of his brilliance and increasing celebrity, he was always “on.” We spy a few glimmers of his intimate happiness with various men, including Matt Bomer as a clarinetist ex-boyfriend, with whom he shares a heartbreaking, tearful farewell on a Manhattan sidewalk. But a tantalizing, unfulfilled quality to the characterization lingers throughout.

Lenny’s relationship with Felicia was complicated, yet “Maestro” rarely digs far beyond the surface. The two share a bubbly, infectious chemistry as they meet and fall in love—and Cooper the director wisely lets these scenes, and later the couple’s arguments, play out in long, single takes. The affection between them feels genuine, and Mulligan is frequently magnificent, finding avenues in her portrayal of Felicia that elevate it beyond the mere woman-behind-the-man notion. And yet, the Costa Rican-Chilean actress is often literally in Bernstein’s shadow; one image finds her standing in the wings as her husband conducts, with the exaggerated shape of him swallowing her up as if he were a monster. (Mulligan is also the beneficiary of costume designer Mark Bridges’ most exquisite fashions throughout the film.) But how does Felicia truly feel about sharing her husband with a series of men, most younger and fawning? She catches him kissing a party guest in the hallway of their apartment in the historic Dakota building and icily scolds him: “Fix your hair. You’re getting sloppy.” That comes close to the real, raw emotion that would have given “Maestro” more heft.

Speaking of the skin-deep nature of the movie, much has been made about Cooper’s decision to wear elaborate prosthetics to make his transformation into Bernstein more complete. The prominent nose, in particular, has been a source of consternation, as Cooper is not Jewish. (Bernstein’s children have defended the choice.) Makeup guru Kazu Hiro, who won Academy Awards for turning Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for “The Darkest Hour” and Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly for “Bombshell,” does thoroughly convincing work here, especially when Bernstein appears as a 70-year-old man at the very beginning and end of the film.

Something does happen toward the film’s conclusion, though, that deserves criticism. It’s the late 1980s, and the frame has expanded to widescreen. Bernstein drives his Jaguar convertible, blaring R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Just as he zooms into the center of the shot, lead singer Michael Stipe yells the lyric “Leonard Bernstein!” Maybe this is something Bernstein did in real life; he clearly thought quite highly of himself, so maybe he was so tickled to be mentioned in this capacity. But in a movie, this choice was eye-rollingly on the nose. I groaned audibly.

Bernstein took chances with his work; that’s what made him great. “Maestro” would have been stronger if it had done the same.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-2001

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Roger Ebert
December 19, 2001

We invest Hobbits with qualities that cannot be visualized. In my mind, they are good-hearted, bustling, chatty little creatures who live in twee houses or burrows, and dress like the merry men of Robin Hood--in smaller sizes, of course. They eat seven or eight times a day, like to take naps, have never been far from home and have eyes that grow wide at the sounds of the night. They are like children grown up or grown old, and when they rise to an occasion, it takes true heroism, for they are timid by nature and would rather avoid a fight.

Such notions about Hobbits can be found in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," but the Hobbits themselves have been pushed off center stage. If the books are about brave little creatures who enlist powerful men and wizards to help them in a dangerous crusade, the movie is about powerful men and wizards who embark on a dangerous crusade, and take along the Hobbits. That is not true of every scene or episode, but by the end "Fellowship" adds up to more of a sword and sorcery epic than a realization of the more naive and guileless vision of J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Ring Trilogy embodies the kind of innocence that belongs to an earlier, gentler time. The Hollywood that made "The Wizard of Oz" might have been equal to it. But "Fellowship" is a film that comes after "Gladiator" and "Matrix," and it instinctively ramps up to the genre of the overwrought special-effects action picture. That it transcends this genre--that it is a well-crafted and sometimes stirring adventure--is to its credit. But a true visualization of Tolkien's Middle-earth it is not.

Wondering if the trilogy could possibly be as action-packed as this film, I searched my memory for sustained action scenes and finally turned to the books themselves, which I had not read since the 1970s. The chapter "The Bridge of Khazad-Dum" provides the basis for perhaps the most sensational action scene in the film, in which Gandalf the wizard stands on an unstable rock bridge over a chasm, and must engage in a deadly swordfight with the monstrous Balrog. This is an exciting scene, done with state-of-the-art special effects and sound that shakes the theater. In the book, I was not surprised to discover, the entire scene requires less than 500 words.

Settling down with my book, the one-volume, 1969 India paper edition, I read or skimmed for an hour or so. It was as I remembered it. The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes. Landscapes are described with the faithful detail of a Victorian travel writer. The travelers meet strange and fascinating characters along the way, some of them friendly, some of them not, some of them of an order far above Hobbits or even men. Sometimes they must fight to defend themselves or to keep possession of the ring, but mostly the trilogy is an unfolding, a quest, a journey, told in an elevated, archaic, romantic prose style that tests our capacity for the declarative voice.

Reading it, I remembered why I liked it in the first place. It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many sights to see, many adventures to share. I cherished the way it paused for songs and poems, which the movie has no time for. Like The Tale of Genji, which some say is the first novel, "The Lord of the Rings" is not about a narrative arc or the growth of the characters, but about a long series of episodes in which the essential nature of the characters is demonstrated again and again (and again). The ring, which provides the purpose for the journey, serves Tolkien as the ideal MacGuffin, motivating an epic quest while mostly staying right there on a chain around Frodo Baggins' neck.

Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director who masterminded this film (and two more to follow, in a $300 million undertaking), has made a work for, and of, our times. It will be embraced, I suspect, by many Tolkien fans and take on aspects of a cult. It is a candidate for many Oscars. It is an awesome production in its daring and breadth, and there are small touches that are just right; the Hobbits may not look like my idea of Hobbits (may, indeed, look like full-sized humans made to seem smaller through visual trickery), but they have the right combination of twinkle and pluck in their gaze--especially Elijah Wood as Frodo and Ian Holm as the worried Bilbo.

Yet the taller characters seem to stand astride the little Hobbit world and steal the story away. Gandalf the good wizard (Ian McKellen) and Saruman the treacherous wizard (Christopher Lee) and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), who is the warrior known as Strider, are so well-seen and acted, so fearsome in battle, that we can't imagine the Hobbits getting anywhere without them. The elf Arwen (Liv Tyler), the Elf Queen Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Arwen's father, Elrond (Hugo Weaving), are not small like literary elves ("very tall they were," the book tells us), and here they tower like Norse gods and goddesses, accompanied by so much dramatic sound and lighting that it's a wonder they can think to speak, with all the distractions.

Jackson has used modern special effects to great purpose in several shots, especially one where a massive wall of water forms and reforms into the wraiths of charging stallions. I like the way he handles crowds of Orcs in the big battle scenes, wisely knowing that in a film of this kind, realism has to be tempered with a certain fanciful fudging. The film is remarkably well made. But it does go on, and on, and on--more vistas, more forests, more sounds in the night, more fearsome creatures, more prophecies, more visions, more dire warnings, more close calls, until we realize this sort of thing can continue indefinitely. "This tale grew in the telling," Tolkien tells us in the famous first words of his foreword; it's as if Tolkien, and now Jackson, grew so fond of the journey, they dreaded the destination.

That "Fellowship of the Ring" doesn't match my imaginary vision of Middle-earth is my problem, not yours. Perhaps it will look exactly as you think it should. But some may regret that the Hobbits have been pushed out of the foreground and reduced to supporting characters. And the movie depends on action scenes much more than Tolkien did. In a statement last week, Tolkien's son Christopher, who is the "literary protector" of his father's works, said, "My own position is that 'The Lord of the Rings' is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form." That is probably true, and Jackson, instead of transforming it, has transmuted it, into a sword-and-sorcery epic in the modern style, containing many of the same characters and incidents.

Oppenheimer (2023)

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oppenheimer-film-review-2023

Oppenheimer (2023)

Matt Zoller Seitz
July 19, 2023

For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face.

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others.

Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact).

The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he's a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it.

That, I believe, is really what "Oppenheimer" is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it's not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn't indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that's about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about "Oppenheimer." It's not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy's baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It's also about the effect of Oppenheimer's personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie's Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, who has some of Gloria Grahame's self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn't going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic "crybaby" who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame's editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick-y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It's wedded to virtually nonstop music by Ludwig Göransson that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that's probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus while listening to a playlist of Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one's own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn't delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn't important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I'm increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it's as if the park bench scene in "JFK" had been expanded to three hours). There's also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of "Full Metal Jacket" star Matthew Modine, who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann's "The Insider," late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "The Pawnbroker," "All That Jazz" and "Picnic at Hanging Rock"; and, inevitably, "Citizen Kane" (there's even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti, talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond).


Most of the performances have a bit of an "old movie" feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet.

But as a physical experience, "Oppenheimer" is something else entirely—it's hard to say exactly what, and that's what's so fascinating about it. I've already heard complaints that the movie is "too long," that it could've ended with the first bomb detonating, and could've done without the bits about Oppenheimer's sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it's perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower's cabinet. But the film's furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how's and why's of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Barbie (2023)

from wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie_(film)

Barbie ("Stereotypical Barbie") and fellow dolls reside in Barbieland, a matriarchal society populated by different versions of Barbies, Kens, and a group of discontinued models who are treated like outcasts due to their unconventional traits. While the Kens spend their days playing at the beach, considering it their profession, the Barbies hold prestigious jobs in law, science, politics, and so on. Ken ("Beach Ken") is only happy when he is with Barbie, and seeks a closer relationship with her, but she rebuffs him in favor of other activities and female friendships.

One evening at a dance party, Barbie is suddenly stricken with worries about mortality. Overnight, she develops bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet, disrupting her usual routines and the classic perfection of the Barbies. Weird Barbie, a disfigured doll, tells Barbie to find the child playing with her in the real world to cure her afflictions. Barbie decides to follow the advice and travel to the real world, with Ken joining Barbie by stowing away in her convertible.

After arriving in Venice Beach, Barbie punches a man after he gropes her. Barbie and Ken are briefly arrested. Alarmed by the dolls' presence in the real world, the CEO of Mattel orders their recapture. Barbie tracks down her owner, a teenage girl named Sasha, who criticizes Barbie for encouraging unrealistic beauty standards. Distraught, Barbie discovers that Gloria, a Mattel employee and Sasha's mother, inadvertently caused Barbie's existential crisis after Gloria began playing with Sasha's old Barbies. Mattel attempts to put Barbie in a toy box for remanufacturing, but she escapes with Gloria and Sasha's help, and the three travel to Barbieland with Mattel executives in pursuit.

Meanwhile, Ken learns about patriarchy and feels respected for the first time. He returns to Barbieland before Barbie does and persuades the other Kens to take over. The Kens indoctrinate the Barbies into submissive roles, such as agreeable girlfriends, housewives, and maids. Barbie arrives and attempts to convince the Barbies to be independent again. When her attempts fail, she becomes depressed. Gloria expresses her frustration with the conflicting standards women are forced to follow in the real world. Gloria's speech restores Barbie's confidence.

With the assistance of Sasha, Weird Barbie, Allan, and the discontinued dolls, Gloria uses her knowledge from the real world to deprogram the Barbies from their indoctrination. The Barbies then manipulate the Kens into fighting among themselves, which distracts them from enshrining male superiority into Barbieland's constitution, allowing the Barbies to regain power. Having now experienced systemic oppression for themselves, the Barbies resolve to rectify the faults of their previous society, emphasizing better treatment of the Kens and all outcasts.

Barbie and Ken apologize to each other, acknowledging their past mistakes. When Ken bemoans his lack of purpose without Barbie, she encourages him to find an autonomous identity. Barbie, who remains unsure of her own identity, meets with the spirit of Ruth Handler, Mattel co-founder and creator of the Barbie doll, who explains that Barbie's story has no set ending and her ever-evolving history surpasses her roots.

After sharing goodbyes with the Barbies, Kens, and Mattel executives, Barbie decides to become human and return to the real world. Sometime later, Gloria, her husband, and Sasha take Barbie, now going by the name "Barbara Handler", to her first gynecologist appointment.

 

Leave The World Behind (2023)

from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/movies/leave-the-world-behind-review.html





From left, Mahershala Ali, Myha’la, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in “Leave the World Behind.”Credit...JoJo Whilden/Netflix


By Alissa Wilkinson
Dec. 7, 2023

The haunting cleverness of Rumaan Alam’s novel “Leave the World Behind” — published in 2020, when every novel about the apocalypse felt uncannily prophetic — comes in what it doesn’t say. For the whole book, you’re expecting to find out what’s caused the catastrophe that is just beginning to reach the main characters, New Yorkers who just happen to be vacationing out in the sticks when things start going wrong. And then, tensions stretched to the breaking point, the book thwarts all expectations, leaving behind a feeling of lingering unease.

The film adaptation of the novel, written and directed by the “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail, also leaves behind lingering unease, but for entirely different reasons. In this rendition of the story, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as Amanda and Clay Sandford, an advertising executive and her English and media studies professor husband, who live a comfortable but not extravagant life in their Brooklyn home. (He says it’s in Sunset Park; she says it’s in Park Slope; that’s a clarifying character detail, if you know the geography.)

Prompted by her annoyance with humanity, Amanda, a prickly misanthrope, rents a house to which she, Clay and their teenagers decamp. They wish, as the listing promised, to “leave the world behind.” (As a New Yorker, I have to pause on this house for a second, because somehow it’s in the woods, only reachable by a multi-hour drive and remote enough that cellular service is extremely spotty, but the Manhattan skyline seems closer from the yard than it does when you’re in, like, Brooklyn Heights. I don’t know.)

Anyhow, the house is beautiful and they’re happy for a few hours until they go to the beach, where something so bizarre happens that I, who am not made of such strong stuff as them apparently, would have headed back to my Sunset Park (Slope) home immediately. Instead they go back to the house and seem to shake it off, for a while — until a man (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter (Myha’la) show up on the doorstep, claiming that this is their house, and they’re so sorry, but there’s a blackout in the city and can they please stay here tonight?



It soon becomes clear there’s more than a blackout, but this is where the movie really goes awry. Here is the thing about stories about the apocalypse: What they reveal, most of all, is what we think will actually end the world. What works in the novel is this question is left open, a blank space for the reader to fill with their own conjecture. Thus the reader discovers something about themselves, maybe indulges in a little self-examination, without getting caught up in the plausibility of this particular catastrophe.


You can do that in a movie — Jeff Nichols’s stellar 2011 thriller, “Take Shelter,” comes to mind — but it is a bit trickier to exercise restraint in a visual medium, and requires deft storytelling. Instead of leaving room for imagination, Esmail elects to throw everything at the screen. What will bring the apocalypse? White liberal racism (present in the novel, but underlined in some thuddingly obvious ways here, like when Clay keeps turning the car radio dial and landing on 1619 AM). Class divisions. Also conspiracy theorists and survivalists ranting about microwave weapons. Also our phones, our market fluctuations, our enemies foreign and domestic, self-driving cars, radiation — in essence, a “dysfunctional nation,” populated by people who, like Amanda, don’t really like one another.

So basically, a divided country, one easily manipulated by bad actors. After a while, the movie plays like a bulleted list of everything wrong with America — fair enough — but hurled so relentlessly at the audience that you can only assume the goal is for anyone watching the movie to find something they agree with. In the onslaught, the narrative tension dulls into passivity, both for us and for the characters. Really, no one is in control, as one person says. No one is pulling the strings. And “the best even the most powerful people can hope for is a heads up.”

A more skillfully crafted movie might have been able to turn that sentiment into something more horror adjacent, or at least a little more discomfiting. But there’s a lot of over-signaling dialogue here: Early on, Clay tells Amanda about a former student who wrote a book about how “media is both an escape and a reflection,” and comments, apropos of nothing, that it’s “a contradiction that she manages to reconcile.” Camerawork choices seem to suggest a third party is watching them — lots of showy overhead spiraling shots, repeated punch-outs to the earth floating in space — but have no narrative payoff. And though the main cast are accomplished, beautiful and intermittently interesting, they feel out of place in a movie that ought to have been a lot more scary, or a lot more subdued. Here, they feel stranded.



The film’s ending seems like a punchline. It’s strongly implied that what will survive the apocalypse is not humanity or beauty or neighborliness or even civilization, but physical media, the DVDs that will still work when the internet and the streamers go down. “Leave the World Behind” is a Netflix movie, so there’s irony in that. But I guess it’s one irony I can get on board with. This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a theme song.







Netflix film. Julia Robert’s and Ethan Hawke. Meh.

May December (2024)

From the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/movies/may-december-review-natalie-portman-julianne-moore.html




By Manohla Dargis

Published Nov. 30, 2023


Much of Todd Haynes’s sly, unnerving “May December” takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life’s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.

“May December” is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that’s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It’s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn’t the first such package.

That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of “May December” — years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade — a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.

A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He’s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he’s drawn to the woman’s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as “wet, wasted afternoons” and reveal what lies “beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.” She might as well have been talking about this movie.

Written by Samy Burch — it’s her first produced screenplay — “May December” is a woman’s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (“Far From Heaven,” “Carol”), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you’re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in “May December,” which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.

Gracie’s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.) The case generated a predictable tsunami of grotesque media slavering and found putatively serious journalists referring (and continuing to refer) to the sexual assault as a “tryst” and “forbidden love,” language that prettied up the crime as a passionate romance.

Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own terms, which emerge as Elizabeth gathers intel. As Elizabeth plays detective — she scans old tabloids, interviews family and friends — she helpfully establishes the back story. Gracie isn’t a teacher, and she and Joe met in a pet store, a seemingly incidental detail that takes on poignantly metaphoric resonance as the story unfolds. At one point, Elizabeth also accompanies Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) on a shopping trip. When the girl tries on a sleeveless dress, Gracie tells Mary she’s “brave” for baring her arms and not caring about “unrealistic beauty standards.” Mary looks crushed, Gracie oblivious and Elizabeth a bit stunned but oh-so fascinated.

At this stage in her process, Elizabeth has begun to imitate Gracie’s gestures and expressions, a turn that Haynes expresses in the tricky shot that opens the shopping scene. As Mary tries on dresses, the women sit side-by-side facing the camera, two mirrors flanking them like drawn curtains. Because of the angles of the mirror, Elizabeth looks as if she’s seated between Gracie and Gracie’s reflection. It takes a beat to read the image and figure out why there are two Gracies, although as Elizabeth slips into character, suddenly there are three.

Moore and Portman’s synced performances give the movie much of its weird comedy. Elizabeth guides you into the story, and you’re tagging along when she pulls up to her Savannah digs and later to Gracie and Joe’s home. Portman gives Elizabeth the studied agreeability of someone who has to work to present a friendly front, an effort that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever interviewed a bored film star. Elizabeth is quick to smile, but Portman shows you the character’s brittle affect, so that you see the flickers of hesitation in her eyes and twitches around her mouth. Mostly, you see that Elizabeth isn’t a very good actress. (Presumably that’s why when she tries out Gracie’s lisping voice, she evokes Madeline Kahn.)

Gracie doesn’t need to put up a false front because her existence is nothing but a fully committed, melodramatically rich performance that Moore supplely delivers with alternating eerie calm and impressive histrionic mewling and caterwauling. Gracie has embraced her roles as a loving wife and doting mother, and seems to be living in a profound state of denial about what these roles have cost her husband and children, a lack of understanding (and remorse) that establishes the story’s inaugural moral crisis. It’s not at all clear, at first, if Gracie is lying to herself, blissfully self-unaware or just another garden-variety sociopath playing at the American dream, uncertainty that gives the story a frisson of mystery.

Gracie and Elizabeth dominate the first half of “May December.” Then, almost imperceptibly, the focus shifts to Joe, and the story grows ever more serious, heavy and very, very sad. Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power. A stunted man-child with a hulking, ponderous body, Joe too has multiple roles as a father and husband, an object of desire and exoticized other. Yet none fit as persuasively, and he’s most at ease in the scenes of him with the Monarch butterflies he raises in little cages. It’s a sweet pastime and a potentially blunt metaphor, one that Haynes handles with enormous, moving delicacy, never more so than when these beautiful creatures emerge from their chrysalises and Joe tenderly watches them take flight.

All The Light We Cannot See

From Variety: https://variety.com/2023/tv/tv-reviews/all-the-light-we-cannot-see-review-1235762557/

All The Light We Cannot See

By Alison Herman






“All the Light We Cannot See” is not, in the strictest sense, a comfort watch. Like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthony Doerr novel on which it’s based, the four-episode limited series takes place in a walled city under siege by a bombing campaign, its trapped civilians unable to evacuate — hardly a relaxing break from today’s headlines. But the Netflix show is, in a way, a return to simpler times.

This particular walled city is located in Nazi-occupied France, on the verge of American liberation in August 1944. As written, “All the Light We Cannot See” is already set amid a conflict that’s far closer to good versus evil than most armed struggles. (This is one explanation for the enduring popularity of World War II stories, even as the period slowly passes from living memory.) As adapted by screenwriter Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders”) and director Shawn Levy (“Stranger Things,” “Free Guy”), the series leans into sentiment and moral simplicity. Knight and Levy aim for an uplifting, inspirational tale of connection that transcends division, distance and prejudice, but instead deliver a flat, jumbled story that lacks the desired effect.

Most of “All the Light We Cannot See” unfolds in the story’s present tense, as residents of the Bretonese town of Saint-Malo await the imminent arrival of American forces. Marie (Aria Mia Loberti), a young blind woman, sends illicit radio broadcasts from her attic; Werner (Louis Hofmann), a German soldier and radio tech, listens rapt until his superiors order him to track Marie down. But sporadic flashbacks tell us how each character found themselves in the seaside hamlet. Marie and her father Daniel (Mark Ruffalo), a locksmith at a museum, fled Paris to seek shelter with her great uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie) — and hide a potentially cursed diamond called the Sea of Flames that Daniel smuggled out of his workplace. Werner grew up in an orphanage, listening to scientific lectures on the same radio frequency where Marie now reads excerpts of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” His skill with radio earned Werner a place in an elite Nazi training school, separating him from his sister Jutta (Luna Wedler).

There’s a romantic tone to this story that borders on fairy tale-like fantasy, with Marie locked in an attic á la Rapunzel and a wicked jeweler-turned-Gestapo-officer (Lars Eidinger) on the hunt for a magical gem. “All the Light We Cannot See” can seem arbitrary in where it chooses to impose realism on this quasi-mythical story of two soulmates quite literally on the same wavelength. Both Loberti and Nell Sutton, the actor who plays Marie as a child, are visually impaired, a casting strategy Levy has championed for both “representation” and “authenticity.” Much of the series was also filmed on location in France. On the other hand, the dialogue is entirely in English; the French characters sound British, while the German ones have a noticeable accent while never actually speaking German (though they’re played by German actors). It’s a bizarre choice coming from Netflix, a platform that’s now synonymous with international hits that transcend borders and language barriers. An English-language show allows the participation of recognizable stars like Ruffalo and Laurie — but no “Squid Game” actor was widely known outside South Korea before that show became a record-breaking smash. A more comparable success might be “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Netflix’s German war film that became a major Oscar contender last year.



The confusion only compounds in how Knight has chosen to structure the story. To be fair, chronology is the greatest challenge in adapting “All the Light We Cannot See,” which hopscotches through time as Werner and Marie reflect on their lives in a moment of acute peril. Yet the show rushes some reveals before it’s had time to build up any suspense, and clumsily explains what it’s about to more effectively show. Etienne, for example, is traumatized by World War I and has spent decades holed up in his house, communicating with the outside world only through his radio. Before we even learn this, though, we’ve already seen him running around Saint-Malo as an agent of the French Resistance. This creates some tension around how the recluse got from Point A to Point B, but kills any catharsis when he finally resolves to go outside. For his part, Werner doesn’t just mention his harrowing time at school; he describes it in detail before several scenes set there make the description redundant.

A more substantial change is in how “All the Light We Cannot See” depicts, or doesn’t, the nuance of growing up in a fascist state. The symbolism of Marie’s condition is straightforward and left largely intact from the book: she’s both part of a population threatened by Nazi ideas of genetic purity and in tune with deeper truths than skin-deep appearance. But Werner has a more complex journey marked by moral, rather than physical, challenge. In Doerr’s telling, the German boy is conscious of the gains in quality of life the Nazi regime initially brought, and is excited to escape the coal mines of his hometown for a better opportunity. It’s only gradually, and through the access to other cultures and ideas the radio affords, that Werner unlearns the state propaganda he’s been steeped in for years.

On television, however, that inner evolution becomes external stasis. Werner is always pure and decent, while every Nazi adult he encounters is a menacing cartoon. (This evil, at least, is never banal.) “I have done bad things,” he admits as an adult, but we never witness any or hear them outlined in detail. Even Werner’s earliest brushes with the authorities happen under extreme duress; a Third Reich official demands he fix a radio at gunpoint, a successful effort that gets him shipped off to school. Because Werner isn’t under the Nazis’ sway to begin with, he never experiences an epiphany about the humanity of others — itself a cliché, but at least one that involves dynamic characters.

This doesn’t mean “All the Light We Cannot See” is wary of cliché elsewhere. Nazis “hate anyone who’s different,” Marie helpfully points out; “I will never give up hope,” another character vows. Such stirring rhetoric fails to make an impact. At four hours, “All the Light We Cannot See” is just barely longer than the feature film it nearly became when producer Scott Rudin first optioned the rights. A more extended story may have enriched its protagonists beyond figureheads for innocence, integrity or loving parenthood. In its current form, “All the Light We Cannot See” calls on viewers to acknowledge the complex humanity of others while failing to depict much itself.

from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/05/movies/film-she-s-having-a-baby-from-john-hughes.html

She’s Having A Baby (1988)

FOR John Hughes's Ferris Bueller, it was only a day off; for his Jefferson (Jake) Briggs, it may be an entire life. In the first scene of ''She's Having a Baby,'' which opens today at the Paramount and other theaters, Jake is seen marrying a woman he can barely stand, and this is only the beginning of his half-heartedness and disenchantment. He takes a dismal job in advertising. He moves to a sterile suburb. He winces at his wife's cooking. Jake seems bored with his entire existence, and as such he may be an even less sympathetic character than his teen-age antecedent.

''She's Having a Baby'' is supposed to be about how Jake changes, but there's nothing in the first 98 percent of the film to indicate he's even capable of that. This character is shallow, smug and lazy, which is not to say Mr. Hughes can't make such qualities amusing; in the past, he has. But in this film's case, misanthropy in general and misogyny in particular are greater problems. Even when Jake, imagining his wife at death's door, is finally prompted to have some nice thoughts about her, there's no changing the fact that he hates his house, neighbors, job, in-laws and everything else about his life.

Kevin Bacon is likable even when Jake is not, which is most of the time. But Elizabeth McGovern has a dreadful role that seems fatuous even by the standards of the 1950's, which is where this film's sense of social satire lies. (There is actually a fantasy sequence in which men with lawnmowers and women carrying trays of drinks do a little mock-suburban dance around the lawn sprinklers.) As Jake's wife, Kristy, Miss McGovern is made to seem a sexless, listless drone, an embodiment of domesticity at its most life-denying. However, while the film throws other women at Jake (most notably a fantasy creature with a European accent), it doesn't have the nerve to give him any more libido than his wife has.

Aiming at a target as easy as suburban sterility, ''She's Having a Baby'' might be expected to hit its mark every now and then. But the film's mood is simply too sour, despite the best efforts of a cast filled with appealing actors, a number of whom have had walk-ons in other Hughes efforts. Another modest plus is the pop-music soundtrack, which is as lighthearted as the comedy is leaden. When Jake and his wife have fertility problems and Kristy insists they take a more scientific approach to sex, Sam Cooke's ''Chain Gang'' is heard in the background.

''She's Having a Baby'' is rated PG-13 (''Special Parental Guidance Suggested for Those Younger Than 13''). It includes some sexual references and strong language. Mating Rituals SHE'S HAVING A BABY, directed, written and produced by John Hughes; director of photography, Don Peterman; music by Stewart Copeland; production designer, John Corso; released by Paramount Pictures. At Guild 50th Street, 33 West 50th Street; Paramount, 61st Street and Broadway; New York Twin, Second Avenue and 66th Street; 34th Street Showplace, between Second and Third Avenues. Running time: 106 minutes. This film is rated PG-13. Jake Briggs... Kevin Bacon Kristy Briggs... Elizabeth McGovern Russ Bainbridge... William Windom Jim Briggs... James Ray Sarah Briggs... Holland Taylor

Under The Banner of Heaven (series)

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/under-the-banner-of-heaven-fx-hulu-tv-review-2022

Under The Banner of Heaven

FX's Under the Banner of Heaven is a Shocking, Fascinating Investigation of Faith
Nick Allen April 28, 2022

Based on the novel by Jon Krakauer and created by Dustin Lance Black, the FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven” concerns a grisly murder in an unlikely place—a heavily Mormon community in Utah, where a cop like Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) says that everyone leaves their doors unlocked. Pyre is one of many devout followers to the visions and whims of Mormonism founder Joseph Smith, which has since fostered tight-knit, wholesome, peaceful, but silencing places like Pyre’s.

The message of Joseph Smith has different meaning to the members of the Lafferty family, whose story turns Black’s series into much more than an in-depth murder investigation, but an American saga of faith, gender roles, and radicalism. Known locally as the Kennedys of Utah, the Laffertys are initially shown as a high-energy, eclectic bunch under the imposing patriarch Ammon (Christopher Heyerdahl), who leads his sons with a tight fist that sometimes has a whipping belt: Ron (Sam Worthington), Dan (Wyatt Russell), Jacob (Taylor St. Pierre), Allen (Billy Howle), Robin (Seth Numrich), and Samuel (Rory Culkin). That masculine intensity is only masked so much when we first meet them, through the eyes of Brenda (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who married into the family via Allen. She is not too ready for the submissive roles that the Lafferty women (played by the likes of Britt Irvin, Chloe Pirrie, Megan Leitch, Michele Wienecke, Denise Gough) have more or less accepted. It’s a calm, outdoor lunch, and the pleasant setting contrasts with how uncomfortable it becomes: the harmonious nature of the Laffertys turns disquieting, and that's before one brother tells Brenda’s future husband Allen to “mind [his] property.”

In a gripping pilot episode, the present part of the timeline in the early 1980s is chaos. After showing up with blood all over his clothes at the crime scene where his wife Brenda and their 15-month-old baby have been brutally murdered, Allen is quickly taken into police custody. Allen becomes one of many messengers who clues us into the progressively sinister ways of the Laffertys, which started with espousing rebellious anti-government ideals to later preaching about polygamy and embracing fundamentalism. The roads within “Under the Banner of Heaven” are windy and ominous, and learning about former Mormon traditions like a “blood atonement” is just a piece of its shocking true story. 

As much as the series concerns the Lafferty family history, charting how their already conservative ways became even more toxic, much of it hinges on Garfield’s performance. He plays one of the most gentle, wholesome cops to have been in a true crime story—perhaps too soft, why is he in this business? But he’s able to talk the quiet talk, with Garfield’s soft voice given a great showcase as he learns more about other family men of his church. As more information comes to light, about the Laffertys but also the history of fundamental Mormonism, the story becomes all the more about him seeing the makings of his whole world perspective. It’s a personal case, with the show’s unique stakes being that of his belief in an institution he seems to have never questioned.

Garfield’s gentle nature brings us into this from the very beginning—the series’ handheld cinematography initially presents him playing with his two daughters on a sunny day. But then he’s called into work. With Jeff Ament’s building score prodding at the moment, we follow Pyre through a gruesome crime scene, noticing shot by shot the blood that has been scattered. Garfield's face and stillness give us a visceral sense of his dread, of having to approach a point of no return. He doesn’t want to know what horrifying sight is behind a bloodied door to a nursery, but he must confront it head on.

Using its nuanced emphasis on faith, “Under the Banner of Heaven” gradually depicts in extensive flashback how their ways became so monstrous. The performances, however, are sometimes too overzealous in their manic nature—like how Culkin transforms into complete mania and guttural scripture-spewing. (It doesn’t help that by design we don’t see until later the connective tissue of how these changes came to be until into later episodes.) And while Worthington is especially stiff in a role that also calls for him to be gradually monstrous, Wyatt Russell gives the standout performance here. He uses his salesman-ready warmth and sometimes cracking voice to illustrate the growth of thinking, from why he shouldn’t have to pay taxes, to why he should have multiple wives. Like his father, he can readily claim a challenge from Heavenly Father as just more fuel for his destructive fire.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” moves about its expansive story of toxic faith with the rhythm of a true-crime page-turner, thanks to its growing list of witnesses who provide more and more background, and its select moments of action. Courtney Hunt (“Frozen River”) has an assured touch for tense standoffs that end in revealing conversations, and David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”) adds fire to scenes that are largely built from police questioning, while creating a robust buddy cop chemistry between Garfield and Birmingham’s unamused, non-religious outsider Bill Taba. Meanwhile the plotting stays tight, motivated by a mystery about the possible suspects seen at Brenda and Allen’s home, along with the uncertainty of where certain Lafferty brothers have vanished to in the modern timeline. 

The series is so expansive that it even takes time to recount the history of Joseph Smith, his wife Emma, and the competing prophet Brigham Young, which is told in sizable snippets throughout. Used to complement what the Laffertys have come to believe, these reflections can feel more sinister and eyeopening than the regular History Channel-ready passages they resemble in production value. It’s more that the editing can be overzealous in flashing back between them, as if overemphasizing how these stories all overlap, but disorienting the viewer in the process. It’s easy to imagine “Under the Banner of Heaven” without these moments, or in so much detail. But they prove part of the show’s own wrestling with Mormonism, and its intricate albeit often horrific reckoning with messengers who use the message to serve themselves.

In the midst of this story is Edgar-Jones' Brenda, sometimes forgotten about in the story’s emotional scope, but a vital voice. Her story, told by Allen in jail, has a more welcome type of radicalism: she went to Brigham Young University with hopes of becoming a TV journalist, she outsmarted creepy professors who then told her only men could read the news, she became a voice of vital reason while the Lafferty men were starting to lose their minds to the gods in their head. Edgar-Jones creates a rich, spirited performance out of a tragedy for how fruitful a progressive mind can be, and similarly how conservative ideals can so readily eat people alive.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” is a mighty busy show, sometimes to the detriment of its many ideas, its many stories, and all those Laffertys. But it is held together by its fascinating, unique way of presenting faith—it’s not as reverential as stories so deep in these communities can be, and it’s also more empathetic to earnest believers like Brenda and Jeb. The show is a gripping investigation in many ways, especially as it preaches the clarity that comes in not being afraid to ask questions.