Tag: Ralph Fiennes

Hail, Caesar!

hail-caesar-posterThe Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” acts as a sizzle reel for all the classic Hollywood film genres the pair could’ve honored and lampooned throughout their career but never got the chance. It shows how the Coens might do a sword and sandal epic, a lush costume melodrama or even a Gene Kelly musical. But “Hail, Caesar!” is a movie about the future, a post-modern mish-mash of genres and styles that hints at where history will take cinema as much as it is a throwback. The Coens are having a lot of goofy fun but still manage a surreal, captivating art picture on par with many of their classics.

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) was a real VP and “fixer” in Hollywood up through the ‘50s, but here he’s an executive with the fictional Capitol Pictures, the same studio that employed Barton Fink. His job requires wrangling stars and getting films completed, and he’s the through line connecting all of “Hail, Caesar!’s” disjointed cinematic set pieces that traverse genres. Set during the 1950s, Capitol’s major prestige picture, also called “Hail, Caesar!,” is a story of Christ featuring the massive Hollywood star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, playing a doofus as he so often does in Coen films). A pair of extras drug Whitlock on set, abduct him to a meeting of Hollywood Communists, and demand $100,000 in ransom.

Meanwhile, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich, delivering a breakout performance) is a burgeoning Western star reassigned to a fancy production called “Merrily, We Dance.” He can’t really act to save his life, and he doesn’t gel with the loquacious, British thespian of a director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes channeling Vincente Minnelli). It’s Doyle who becomes “Hail, Caesar!’s” unlikely hero instrumental in locating Baird.

“Odd” does not quite capture how perfectly weird “Hail, Caesar!” actually plays. No scene or gag feels cut from the same cloth. The Coens will stage an opulent aquatic ballet in the spirit of an Esther Williams/Busby Berkeley routine starring Scarlett Johansson as a mermaid starlet, with the kaleidoscopic colors and aerial shots at times recalling “The Big Lebowski’s” dream sequence, only to abruptly cut away and become a shadowy noir.

Even the Coens humor ranges from absurd to deadpan to modest to rapid-fire wordplay. There’s Tilda Swinton channeling Old Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as not one, but two twin sisters, never on screen at the same time and each one-upping the other in terms of their readership. There’s the cleverly circular dialogue between a group of religious experts debating whether “Hail, Caesar!” will pass censors. And of course there’s Channing Tatum, who explicitly reminds everyone why he’s the contemporary Gene Kelly, donning a navy sailor suit and charming the hell out of the audience with a showy tap dance number.

Ehrenreich as Hobie Doyle is the real surprise, a baby faced dolt with a stoic, stilted demeanor. In one shot he performs a lasso routine just to pass the time, and his eyes barely emote a thing in a way that makes his act hilariously Buster Keaton-esque. And in a verbal showdown with his director Laurence Laurentz, a simple line reading, “Would that it were so simple,” becomes the film’s unusually outrageous centerpiece.

What do the Coens have to say with all this madness? If the set pieces seem cold, or if the individual sequences feel disconnected from the rest of the film, it’s the act of showing the movie’s seams that stand out. Between flashy wipe cuts and gorgeously artificial backlot sets, the color and visual design of “Hail, Caesar!” leap out at you. We recognize Hollywood as the beautiful forgery that it was, and we can appreciate the Coens’ tribute to the era in how they call attention to everything it stood for.

Hollywood was all of these things in its Golden Age, and in the subtext are Mannix’s internal malaise, the arrival of the H-bomb at Bikini Atoll, and the coming drama of the Blacklist. “Hail, Caesar!” does this period better than “Trumbo.” But it invokes the arrival of the near future, how genres would be blended and how the world would become less clear. “Hail, Caesar!” is a lot of movies rolled into one, but it captures the spirit of an era in a way very few films have.

3 ½ stars

Rapid Response: Strange Days

“Strange Days,” Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what 1999 Los Angeles might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a dystopian police state.

StrangeDaysPosterOne might assume that a film set at the dawn of the new millennium and about the fear of Y2K might feel a hair dated. But while that aspect does, “Strange Days” touches on a subject that’s been more than prevalent in 2015.

Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what near-future Los Angeles and Hollywood might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a mildly dystopian police state. It was released just four years after the Rodney King beating, and it uses the death of an iconic rapper named Jeriko One to act as a martyr and catalyst for all the unrest. Back when the film was released, Tupac Shakur and his eventual death in 1996 came to mind. Today, any of the black men wrongly killed and captured on video will do.

The reason though “Strange Days’s” concept of race feels so poignant has all to do with its sci-fi parameters. In the near future, the police have introduced a tool called a “Squid” that can capture a person’s live experience, from their point of view, as they’re living and experiencing it. People can then enter into “playbacks” that allow you to relive and feel what that person felt.

Now the technology is used on the black market, and Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, the “Santa Claus of the Subconscious” who sells sexual and thrill seeking experiences like it’s a drug. At the start of the film, we witness a crew robbing a restaurant and then falling to his death as he escapes from the cops. Bigelow shoots in a shaky-cam, first person POV that pre-dates found footage films and makes for some gripping action. Lenny himself is an addict for “jacking in”, or “wire tripping”, as Lenny says, as he obsesses over old memories of him with his former girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis). But when someone starts leaving threatening videos for him to watch, Lenny and his tough friend Mace (Angela Bassett) are on the run from both a madman and a pair of renegade cops.

The plot twist for what’s causing Lenny to be on the run is captured in a video involving the death of Jeriko, and it inherently brings to mind the cell phone videos that have sparked protests today. But after the events of the past year, one has to wonder if the outrage, animosity and eventual justice seen here is just another part of “Strange Days’s” fantasy.

Part of the problem with “Strange Days” is that the race riots are hardly even the main focus of the film. Made for $42 million back in the ’90s, the film was a giant flop that raked in only $7 million. One of the film’s trailers touches on just how all over the place “Strange Days” is, with a heavy focus on the sci-fi, a conspiracy mystery and the fear of what’s to come on New Year’s Eve 1999.

That’s not to say Cameron and Cocks’s story is bad or unfocused, but it drags to over two and half hours and feels like it has two endings, one to confront the sadistic madman threatening Lenny and Faith, and the other to confront the cops who want the tape Lenny is hiding. And the thread connecting these two plot strands is tenuous at best.

But you wish Bigelow did take a bigger interest in the unique sci-fi angle of the story. “Strange Days” becomes strictly procedural in its last hour or so, whereas other sci-fis that take us inside people’s minds, like “Minority Report,” “A.I.,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich”, to name just a few, go deep into psychological implications; “Strange Days” only considers these brain-teasing pleasures and consequences superficially.

Bigelow does however put the POV perspective to powerful, action heavy use, implicating the viewer in some of the film’s more depraved moments. If you thought Bigelow was advocating for torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” and that those scenes were rough, try on the rape scene in “Strange Days”. A masked intruder sneaks into a woman’s hotel room and begins to rape and strangle her, but before he finishes, he places a viewing device on her head, forcing her to watch herself die from the eyes of her killer. Lovely.

That scene could be debated for days. More simply however, while Angela Bassett kicks ass and dominates the screen in Bigelow’s stylish fights, and Juliette Lewis commands a a handful of grungy rock performances, Ralph Fiennes seems strangely miscast. Only his fifth film role at the time, it’s hard to imagine him as the steamy count in “The English Patient” or the sinister Amon Goethe in “Schindler’s List”, let alone any of his more recent iconic roles. He has the sleazy, slick, fast-talking demeanor of James Woods and the ’90s haircut of Nicolas Cage. He’s not the action star, but audiences should appreciate the depth he and the cast bring to “Strange Days’s” more melodramatic moments.

If anything, the interesting foibles of “Strange Days” demonstrate that Bigelow was well on her way to becoming a master. It’s just hard to “jack in” to that frame of mind.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” finds Wes Anderson embracing his visual style fully and showing complete control as a director.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson has been making Wes Anderson movies his entire career; no one quite does it better (though many have tried). They’re rife with perfectly precise miniatures of colorful, excrutiating detail, and over the years his set dressing has conveyed kitsch, adolescence and cartoons.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” may be the most Wes Anderson-y film yet. Its title character M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) embodies the fastidious perfectionist with an eye for fashionable excellence in a way that no other Anderson character has captured the director’s true sense of style. It’s a silly, sinister and sneaky caper that thrives on its careful construction.

Gustave is the concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the fictional Eastern European country Zubrowska in 1932. Years later after war has forever affected the majesty of the region and the hotel itself, we meet Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham) regaling his days as a young lobby boy (Tony Revolori) under Gustave’s tutelage.

Fiennes is wonderful as an eloquent and aloof manager and womanizer, quick witted in his authority and charmingly blunt to the elderly women he beds. His prize is Madame D. (an almost unrecognizable Tilda Swinton under pounds of makeup), a wealthy maiden who suddenly turns up murdered, but not before bequeathing a priceless painting to Gustave. As a result, Gustave soon finds himself on the run from Madame’s vindictive son (Adrien Brody) and the authorities (led by a hilariously out of place and without an accent Edward Norton). Continue reading “The Grand Budapest Hotel”

Skyfall

After a 50 year run, “Skyfall” is the best James Bond movie in years, if not the best ever made. It is the first that has made us ask about Bond’s past and future and the first to make us realize the game has changed but that we’d be nowhere without him.

Sam Mendes picks up the franchise after the unfortunate hiccup that was “Quantum of Solace,” a movie that made Bond into a forgettable Jason Bourne. What he brings to the table is style mixed with the silly and substance mixed with the smarm. It’s a Bond movie as ludicrous and fun as the previous but going beyond the grittily realistic norm established by “Casino Royale.”

Its magnificent opening motorcycle chase along rooftops has Bond (Daniel Craig) pursuing a man who has stolen a hard drive containing the identities of all the MI6 operatives. The two leap onto a moving train upon which Bond tears off the back end of a trolley with a bulldozer and leaps aboard, adjusting his suit ever so justly as he does. As they fight, M (Judi Dench) orders her other agent Eve (Naomi Harris) to take a risky sniper shot that hits Bond instead of the target.

Presumed dead, Bond spends the next few years off the map “enjoying death,” going through the motions of a freewheeling lifestyle with cold detachment. It’s only when a cyber terrorist attack against MI6 hits that Bond decides to return. His new target is Silva (Javier Bardem), a former computer hacker for MI6 with a vendetta against M. His presence tests whether Bond or M are both fit for duty, allowing us to finally reach these characters on an emotional level without sacrificing Craig’s biting wit or Dench’s spitfire attitude.

If there’s one thing to notice about “Skyfall,” it’s that Bond has never looked better. Director of Photography Roger Deakins, a man with nine Oscar nominations and still no victory, is possibly the best cinematographer alive today. He’s made a recent shift from film to digital, and he has taken the dark shadows and sharp colors usually found in a David Fincher movie and applied it to the classical look of 007. In one early fight scene in Shanghai, he blends space, depth and color to create a beautiful battle of silhouettes that looks as good as anything I’ve seen this year. And later when the film takes us to a deserted villa on the Scottish countryside, the unreal lighting and deep focus of Javier Bardem illuminated in front of a burning building holds up as instantly iconic. It’s a drop-dead gorgeous movie that just makes the whole experience ignite.

This blending of aesthetics matches the high psychological stakes Mendes is imposing. If “Skyfall” had forgotten to be an action movie first, the super serious talk about whether the world still needs Bond might get as tiresome as a discussion about sending Grandma to a nursing home. But screenwriter John Logan establishes a high-tech cyber scheme that still finds ways for Bond to be practically and physically intuitive. The computer hacker one step ahead of the good guys is ground well tread by other recent action movies, but never Bond. Somehow he fits in as smoothly as though he were still at the poker table.

Much has already been said about Judi Dench finally giving a hefty performance as M that befits her talents, but I’m more interested in the juicy work by Bardem. Most Bond villains have a physical disability designed to distinguish them, but Bardem makes do on his snakelike sexuality that in a delicious scene briefly tests Bond’s own. His presumed homosexuality is in its own way another mixed bag of political incorrectness, but in screen villainy terms it’s the absolute tops.

Mendes takes great pains to treat such a terrific villain with stealthy patience. The moment in which Silva is introduced is a wonderful long take that watches Bardem slowly saunter up to Bond as he tells a story about how catch rats. In wide shots, striking composition and a steady hand, Mendes provides style and flair uncommon to the gritty realism of contemporary action pictures.

“Skyfall” really is Bond reinvented. It takes the uncouth, rugged James Bond newly discovered in “Casino Royale” and molds him into a man with depth and class. “Youth does not guarantee innovation,” as Bond says in one scene to Q, and as one of the finest movies of the year, it’s clear this 50 year old franchise feels as good as new.

4 stars

The Hurt Locker

“The Hurt Locker” is a pulse-pounding, hyper-realistic war epic but also a moving character study.

It happens to every Best Picture winner: the average Joe movie goer comes out to see the big prestige film of the year, and it gets criticized in all the wrong places.

For “The Hurt Locker,” one of the few memorable masterpieces to win the Best Picture Oscar that will be remembered as a symbol of the 2000s years from now, it was soldiers claiming it was hardly as realistic as it appeared. No soldier would ever be able to leave the FOB alone and in street clothes.

This is true, and no soldier would ever drop a smoke bomb to blind the vision of his team as he went to defuse an elaborate ring of six bombs on his own either.

“The Hurt Locker” is not merely the most pulse pounding, intense and theoretically authentic Iraq War film ever made; it’s a harrowing character study pummeled home through a tightly made action and suspense movie in this modern warfare setting.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film is strikingly visual and compelling, sometimes awesome and at others harrowing. Each moment is so finely tuned and precise in its cinematic perfection that it reflects the care Alfred Hitchcock would’ve enlisted had he made a war film. Continue reading “The Hurt Locker”

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II” is a film of reunion, redemption and reconciliation. The fans that have grown up with the characters of what is now the largest franchise in movie history have not come for the end, but have come to say goodbye.

In a homecoming roll call of old friends and enemies, “Harry Potter” comes to a close in this eighth and final sequel. Yes, this is the conclusion to a story already split in two, but this is more of an opportunity for everyone to reflect on the life that started nearly 10 years ago today, and how we now realize how the magic will live on.

It’s for the legendary Maggie Smith to put on one last fiery show. It’s for Robbie Coltrane to charm us one last time, the big lug. It’s for Michael Gambon to take a long-awaited final bow. It’s for Helena Bonham Carter to literally explode on screen. It’s for Ralph Fiennes and Alan Rickman to finally revel in their own villainy.

And it’s for Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson to show they’ve at last grown up.

The kids proved to be the best of casting choices a decade ago, and here they show maturity, not teen angst, as the fate of the wizarding world rests upon their shoulders. Continue reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II”