This is the story of how Shep Gordon met and eventually dated Sharon Stone: “I went to a party in Cannes with Mike Douglas, Mick Jagger and Roman Polanski, and the party was in the house Napoleon built for Josephine. It’s priceless.”
We’ll let slide that Shep knows Michael Douglas by a nickname, and that his trio of party guests would make the best and oddest #TrueDetectiveSeason2 assortment yet. I’m more impressed that he got to go to a party at a friggin’ castle owned and built by friggin’ Napoleon. And that’s just the setup to his story.
“Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon” tells the story of the life and career of the Hollywood manager and producer Shep Gordon, who has plenty more anecdotes like this in his back pocket. But what’s so amusing about it is not even the story but the humbled way in which Shep tells it. Continue reading “Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon”
George Clooney stars and directs this World War II drama with a rich cast and a weak execution.
Art has been a part of human culture since the dawn of man. People like me spend their lives writing about it, protecting it and debating it because it tells us about ourselves, defines our history, makes us think, moves us to act, provides escapism and many more things that can fill a term paper. And we should preserve it at all costs because Hitler is bad and go America.
George Clooney’s “The Monuments Men” champions art and the soldiers who helped to salvage it from the Nazis during World War II, but it’s a muddled war film rather than a stirring piece of art full of ideas and meaning itself. It’s about the lofty Idea of art, only important on the motivation of preventing Hitler from making someone else’s culture his own.
“Art is to be held up and admired, just like these men,” Clooney says. And the extent to which Clooney feels art should simply be placed on a pedestal or hung on a wall like the way America treats its military reflects how pretty and patriotic, yet empty “The Monuments Men” feels. It has echoes of being an amusing buddy caper complete with manufactured camaraderie and a role call of movie stars called into action one by one, not unlike Clooney’s “Ocean’s Eleven.” But it also wants to be a grave war drama and paints the melodramatic set pieces and themes of war, justice and serving your country with a broad brush. Continue reading “The Monuments Men”
With her boastful, grandiose poise, her fiendish cackling and her hateful, sarcastic and sly mocking of her own minions, Maleficent is Disney’s truly great villain. She is the only one who could be seen as completely sadistic. Free of irony or humor, Disney created a movie monster capable of pure, well, maleficence.
And within just moments of Disney’s latest spinoff and CGI, live-action reboot/reimagining, “Maleficent” manages to erase all of the character’s iconography and bravura. Continue reading “Maleficent”
Quentin Tarantino’s Spaghetti Western still rubs somewhat the wrong way watching it two years later.
This review is a quick smattering of thoughts that was first shared in my Letterboxd review.
There’s no questioning Tarantino’s mastery and control behind the camera. Rewatching Django Unchained, the film bursts to life instantly with a just about perfectly gritty and homage of a title sequence and grandly sweeping title song. The film’s opening scene inside a completely dark forest almost looks patently on a set, but Tarantino is doing that intentionally and makes the bleakness and distinct lighting of the scene beautiful. You watch it and its hard to imagine that this will be anything but another of Tarantino’s masterpieces.
I had felt lukewarm about the film on Christmas Day 2012. My somewhat embarrassing review questioned if it was entirely complete as the film was bold, but messy and disjointed, full of set pieces that existed only on their own terms and a revenge plot that felt secondary whenever Tarantino trotted out the flourishes, bloodshed and rap tracks.
And in the first hour of “Django,” those feelings had completely vanished, only to return once Leonardo Dicaprio’s utterly chilling and compelling character showed up. That’s because the first hour is a straight Western, and Tarantino nails it. He could’ve easily drawn out the vigilante hunt for the Brittle brothers to Leone length and made a damn fine film, but he had different ambitions. Continue reading “Revisited: Django Unchained”
Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar winning film is a colorful, witty and incisive look at high society.
Much like Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of the sumptuous Italian Oscar winner “The Great Beauty,” we’ve seen a lot of parties in the movies, and it’s getting harder to impress. The one Paolo Sorrentino throws at the start of “The Great Beauty” though is certainly electric. It comes immediately after a spiritual reverie of an opening with the camera gliding over Roman fountains as choir girls echo in the background, so the blaring EDM and affronting sexuality that come next definitely come as a shock.
But it is at this moment Sorrentino quite literally turns the movie on its head to show just how absolutely delirious, rich and brilliant this film is. The camera rotates upside down and the celebration rages on, the wealthy and privileged of the high society now as high as they can go with no sign of coming down.
“The Great Beauty” is a colorful, vibrant, intellectual and aloof treat, a Fellini for the 21st Century and art classic for the ages. And yet it is also a devastating, powerful piece of cinema, bold and brash in its style and incisive to the lifestyle it depicts. It could fit along with 2013’s “Gatsby”, “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Bling Ring” as a have-more movie, but Sorrentino goes farther by challenging the notion of having it all without ever having to bring us down. Continue reading “The Great Beauty”
Gareth Edwards’ “Godzilla” remake is a slow and lumbering bore with very few ideas or memorable moments.
I already got my quota of ambiguously monstrous hulking CGI masses terrorizing humanity in “Noah”, thank you very much. Godzilla is a legacy movie monster more than fit to be trotted out today to comment on climate change or national defense, but if the new “Godzilla” will not even bother to be about something more than an oversized spectacle then why am I watching it?
Director Gareth Edwards’ film is as slow and lumbering as its giant hero. The dialogue is thick, the characters are thin and the action and story are plain boring. By removing any allegory, ideas or humor, nothing gets in the way of this being purely cathartic summer mayhem, but it leaves nothing that might be memorable. Continue reading “Godzilla (2014)”
“Louie” and “So Did the Fat Lady” gives lesser seen individuals a voice and is a character study rather than a plea.
TV, its been said, is in a golden age. There are great shows and great criticism surrounding it. But every once and a while a single episode of a single show makes such noise that every Tom, Dick and Harry comes out of the woodwork to write a think piece about it.
Two years ago “Girls” stoked controversy with a polarizing episode in which Hannah enters into something of a fantasy weekend with a hot, wealthy guy played by Patrick Wilson. More recently, “Game of Thrones” stirred questions of whether or not a character was raped.
And in each case the headlines and articles are as contrarian, attention grabbing, thought provoking (and hopefully as intelligent) as the episode on which it is based.
This week, “Louie,” one of my favorite shows on television, hit a homerun with an episode that subverted tropes, pointed a finger at society and made Louis C.K., the show’s brilliant auteur behind so many of its elements, into a character we truly pity rather than laugh at.
“Louie” has done this before. Back in Season 2 Louie learned that an old friend was going to perform a last night of standup and then commit suicide, and whether Louie or his friend has the better case for living or dying is left somewhat up for grabs. In Season 3, Louie connects with a Latin American lifeguard in Miami in a relationship that seems more than platonic. These episodes were clear in their ideas, and they were celebrated because they provided us another point of view. C.K. forced us to think about how media and how society depicted ideas like homosexuality, masculinity, suicide and in other episodes religion, relationships and even the campaign in Afghanistan.
Anyone who knows C.K.’s comedy knows he’s actually quite the feminist, and this week on an episode called “So Did the Fat Lady,” he tackled a subject and a fear that for reasons he lays bare throughout the episode, feel close to home: dating as an overweight woman and the perception we carry about them.
The episode involves a chubby waitress named Vanessa (played by a now breakout performer Sarah Baker) who comes on strong and asks Louie out after he performs. She’s funny, charming and clearly into him, all of which offset the fact that Louie might be a little uncomfortable having a woman he’s just met be so up front. You constantly beg for him to say yes and just see what happens, but he’s got pressures in the form of Jim Norton lurking in the background saying “Yuck” as she walks away, Louie continuing to approach the comedy club’s other waitresses like “Sunshine” and his own weight being rebuked when he’s out with his brother on a “Bang Bang,” in which he eats two huge meals of different cuisines back to back.
But the episode’s most affecting, and polarizing, moment comes in a monologue by Vanessa when they finally do go on a coffee date.
“Neighbors” allows Seth Rogen and Zac Efron to be both snobs and slobs and gives Rose Byrne a great female comedic role.
The millennial generation is so maturing beyond their age that even their college comedies are about old people. “Neighbors” appeals to the generation that knows they have to grow up but isn’t quite sure how. And although it manages to out-raunch “Animal House” et. al., it feels mature, positive and enthusiastic about the future.
Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne have wonderful chemistry as new parents Mac and Kelly Radner. The movie opens with Mac literally narrating his excitement at having spontaneous sex with his wife in the middle of the day, only to be foiled by their precious baby daughter Stella smiling at them from across the room. This failed attempt perfectly echoes their dynamic, one in which they eagerly try to be great parents and fun, friendly people to their friends and neighbors but end up embarrassing and tiring themselves out at just how hard they try.
Rogen and Byrne are constantly talking over one another in sunny platitudes. Even when they’re swearing and upset they seem incapable of harm, and there’s a great moment when Mac says he’s going to buy a gun and end the life of his neighbors that is so far removed from their cheery demeanor that its almost adorably hilarious.
Mac and Kelly end up directing that anger at their new next door neighbors, the Delta Psi Fraternity and their ring leaders, frat President Teddy (Zac Efron) and VP Pete (Dave Franco). The guys are predictably loud and disturbing to their baby, but Teddy and the frat declare war when Mac breaks a promise Mac made at the Frat’s house warming party: “If we’re too loud, call us before you call the cops.” Continue reading “Neighbors”
Two of the earliest Best Picture winners, “Wings” and “Cimarron,” are ambitious, but have not aged well.
“Welcome to a merry little war,” reads one intertitle in 1927’s “Wings,” the Best Picture winner at the first ever Oscars. “Wings” goes to show that war movies winning Hollywood’s biggest prize are as old as the award itself, but this war film looks fondly and lightly on World War I, an otherwise grim and consequential period of American History. “Wings” sets the spoils of war and the global turmoil as the backdrop to a sprawling, action driven melodrama and feels somewhat cheaper for it.
“Wings” has this in common with 1931’s Best Picture winner, “Cimarron,” a Western about the pioneers at the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889 who built the settlement, town, region and then state from the ground up. It too has a complex setting of moral ambiguity, racial intolerance and gender inequality made weaker by a muddled narrative of nostalgia, conquest and a shoot-out or two.
To ask that both “Wings” and “Cimarron” be progressive is probably a stretch for movies as old as they are, but these are Best Picture winners forever given a place on film history lists, and although they hold up better than could be expected, they’re troublesome entries among many other great films in that time period and throughout Oscar’s legacy. The curious cinephile will find some surprising spectacle and production value in each film, but both “Wings” and “Cimarron” are ultimately non-essential in the Best Picture canon. Continue reading “Side by Side: Wings and Cimarron”
“The Boondock Saints” is one of the most polarizing cult films of all time, but does it work on its own terms?
Many cult films are called such because they’re under-appreciated gems with a fervent fan base. The critics might even like it somewhat, but really they just don’t understand. Most cult films however have at least some critic who will go to bat for it as something of a masterpiece.
“The Boondock Saints” is the rare example in which the film and its director are straight reviled by everyone who isn’t in the club. It’s a trash vigilante movie of utter style over substance, so go the naysayers, and one of the worst examples to grow out of the Quentin Tarantino copycats.
And yet here I am perched in the middle, an admittedly strange place to be with a film so polarizing as this. Everything bad about the film is also a distinctive characteristic. It’s ugly, excessive violence through and through, but it’s staged with elegance and operatic grace. It’s grossly overstated and sweeping in its tone but approaches its bigness unironically and fully to the point that it earns it. It’s full of trashy machismo attitudes and vigilante sensibilities, and yet the spiritual underpinnings and noble, Robin Hood heroes on a mission from God are a notable contrast from what’s typically associated with the vigilante and B-movie genre. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Boondock Saints”