Gorgeous shot after gorgeous shot, in what feels like a Technicolor remake of Last Year in Marienbad. The dialogue is wading-pool deep, which made me wonder if last year’s The Great Beauty only resonated because it was in Italian. Michael Caine was pleasant, if unconvincing, while Harvey Keitel seemed to have wandered in from a different movie set.
As advertised, total escapist fun. The new droid is adorable, the sets are intriguing, the weird characters, humanoid and not, are engaging, and the story is ageless. The female lead is commendable: she’s strong, smart, has a British accent and is not required to show cleavage. Everyone else is adequate, but the movie comes alive when Harrison Ford shows up. The references to Wizard of Oz that were so prominent in the 1977 original make a welcome return. In substance, the movie was as nutritionally satisfying as a bag of popcorn – but equally enjoyable.
“How bad can a Quentin Tarantino movie be?,” we asked ourselves. The answer, it turns out, is “worst movie of the year, and most pretentious movie of the century.” It starts with a boring “Overture” by Ennio Morricone, just to link Tarantino with the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. It’s shot in Panavision 70 and shown in “Roadshow” format, for no cinematic purpose but to link the film, we are reminded, with Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia. The shots of the snowy setting aren’t particularly spectacular; they just make us feel cold. Worse, though, is the acting: Tarantino seems to have told his stars to act like they are in High Noon. The result is corn, the pace is like molasses, and the only actor worth watching is Jennifer Jason-Leigh. The plot, as much as we saw of it, was stupid. I should probably title my review, Fearsome Four, as we left, sighing relief, at “Intermission.”
A splendid period piece and a beautiful companion to Brooklyn, as the story of a young woman coming into her identity, here, her forbidden sexuality. Rooney Mara was wide-eyed and as captivating as she was captivated, her resemblance to Audrey Hepburn unmistakable in shot after shot. Cate Blanchett was elegant and austere, and if she seemed “stylized,” it was because we were seeing her through Therese’s awestruck eyes. I thought the ending would go the other way, but the plot was really beside the point. What remained was a portrait – two of them. (Smoking: 7 out of 10; not as constant as Trumbo, but to show us it was the ’50s everyone smoked, even where not allowed.)
A financial primer on the 2008 mortgage meltdown dressed up as a movie, with outsized performances, frenetic cutting and comic asides apparently intended to spice up a subject the movie-going public either wouldn’t understand or would find too dull. The worst were the two goofballs from Colorado, but blustering Steve Carrell and how-weird-can-he-be Christian Bale were scarcely more realistic. In creating such a dichotomy between the established financial world that was smug and blind and the small band of outsiders that were disconnected and eccentric, the film sacrificed the drama and poignancy of real human contact that a much better movie, Margin Call, found in a similar story. Michael Lewis’s book was much better.
This was more of a press release than a documentary, as there was no story, unless you count Noma’s regaining its position as #1 restaurant in the world in the unexplained but totally unscientific annual contest now sponsored by San Pellegrino. Potential subplots emerged – how “Nordic cuisine” was invented from locally sourced ingredients; how chef Rene Redzepi dealt with his status as a Muslim immigrant in Denmark; how Redzepi ran his kitchen; how Noma recovered from having 63 diners poisoned by norovirus – but they all sort of petered out. Finally, we just grew tired of Redzepi, and his frequent and unnecessary insertion of “fucking” into his sentences. And we never got a sense of what a meal at Noma is like. Instead of leaving the theater with our mouths watering, I felt this is one restaurant I’m not going out of my way to dine at.
Ersatz to the heart would be more like it, starting with Chris Hemsworth’s take on Matt Damon’s Boston accent, running through every painted backdrop and whale sighting and going ultimately to the movie’s core – the idea that Moby Dick emerged from Herman Melville’s late-night interview of the last survivor of the Essex. Once again, historical details – if that’s what they were – only added to the unbelievability of the tale: men surviving 68 days in a rowboat on the Pacific, returning months later to a deserted island to rescue more survivors, etc. Other plot aspects – the cartoonish conflict between our superstar first mate and the incompetent ship’s captain, the suits back on land who tried to spin the disaster, the love between our hero and the pregnant wife he left behind – never rose above cliche. And as for insight on whaling, the movie left me with more questions than answers.
It would be hard to make a dull movie about Peggy Guggenheim’s life, what with her eccentric family, love affairs with artists and, finally, her world-class museum of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art in beautiful Venice, but this effort teetered. It started with the worst opening credits I have ever sat through, spread out over what seemed like ten minutes of film. Then the director added annoying graphics – every line swooped onto the screen and interviewee names rolled up, distractingly. The choice of interviewees was occasionally bizarre, and the later ones added nothing to what we’d been told long ago. Worst was the use of phony archival footage: we were never told which clips were actual footage of events in Peggy’s life; which were of a similar scene; and which, like the Titanic sinking, were taken from old movie recreations. The art, however, was wonderful, and seeing how one person of limited means and looks made herself central to at least two great art movements of the century was fascinating.
A Spielbergian look at a Cold War incident, replete with recitations of the Constitution and what it means to be an American. Who better to present the message than uber-vanilla-good guy Tom Hanks, who, alas, seemed very unlikely as a tough-lawyer negotiator. Not only was I not convinced that his character could have pulled off the deal, I was totally unbelieving that he would have upped the stakes – to extricate a second American hostage – on his own. His ploy to accomplish this latter struck me, further, as double-dealing quite inconsistent with his Mr. All-America image. As expected from Spielberg, subtlety was missing: a shot of Brooklyn youths leaping backyard fences, for instance, over-obviously echoed a previous scene of East Berliners being gunned down as they tried to scale the Wall. Mark Rylance did what he could, creating an interesting character out of Rudolf Abel, but all around him were one-dimensional figures, much as we saw in Lincoln.
Janis Joplin was a phenomenon of a time and place – specifically, San Francisco USA in 1969, give or take. Unfortunately, viewed in retrospect, I don’t really like her music, her looks or her persona. While much the same could be said of Amy Winehouse, that documentary had a societal depth that Janis lacked and a more well-rounded cast of supporting characters and incident. When some artists die too young, you wonder what was lost. Sadly, with Janis, I felt I had seen all there was. (The only music I liked was ‘Bobby McGee’ and ‘Cry, Baby’ – both of which had been done just as well by others first.)
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