Tag: Adam McKay

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Craig Brewer’s Coming 2 America Earns Oscar Nomination

Eddie Murphy stars in COMING 2 AMERICA Photo: Quantrell D. Colbert © 2020 Paramount Pictures

The nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced this morning. Jane Campion’s Western The Power of the Dog leads the list with 12 nods, including Best Picture, Best Director, and acting nominations for Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Coming 2 America, the sequel to Eddie Murphy’s beloved 1988 star vehicle, earned a nomination for Mike Marino, Stacey Morris, and Carla Farmer’s work in Makeup and Hairstyling. The film was directed by Memphian Craig Brewer. Upon its release in January, 2021, Coming 2 America became became Amazon Studios biggest hit to date. You can read the story behind its making in this Memphis Flyer cover story.

Coming 2 America will compete in the Hair and Makeup category against Disney’s Cruella, Denis Villaneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune, the Jessica Chastain-led biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Ridley Scott’s melodrama House of Gucci. Brewer’s 2005 film Hustle & Flow earned a Best Original Song Academy Award for Three Six Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” and a Best Actor nomination for star Terrance Howard.

Best Picture nominees also included Dune, which earned a total of 10 nominations. Kenneth Brannaugh’s period drama Belfast was nominated in both Best Picture and Best Director categories, as well as Best Supporting Actress for Judi Dench and Supporting Actor for Ciarán Hinds. Adam McKay’s climate change satire Don’t Look Up, another Best Picture nominee, was also listed for Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. Will Smith earned a Best Actor nominee for sports flick and Best Picture nominee King Richard. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 70’s rom-com Licorice Pizza received both Best Picture and Best Director noms, as did Ryuske Hamaguchi’s meditative Drive My Car, which was also Japan’s entry in the Best International Feature category. Steven Spielberg’s re-adaptation of West Side Story made him the first person to be nominated for Best Director in six different decades, while Ariana DeBose was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Anita. Gueillermo del Toro’s carnival noir Nightmare Alley, and Sundance hit CODA rounded out the Best Picture nods.

Elsewhere, Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s story of an Afghan refugee named Amin Nawabi, made history as the first film to ever earn nominations in the Best Documentary, Best Animated, and Best International Feature categories.

The Academy Awards ceremony will be broadcast on March 27, 2022. You can see the full list of nominees at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website.

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Film Features Film/TV

Don’t Look Up

Jennifer Lawrence (left) and Leonardo DiCaprio

When Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s satire of the nuclear age, was released in January 1964, it began with a disclaimer: “It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film.”

As journalist Eric Schlosser discovered while researching his book Command and Control, the disclaimer turned out to be wishful thinking. Dr. Strangelove’s central scenario, in which an American general goes murderously insane and orders his bombers to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, was completely plausible. Kubrick created what is arguably the greatest comedy ever by simply telling the truth.

The key to Dr. Strangelove’s success is Kubrick’s tonal tightrope walk between the hilarious and the terrifying. Now, with Don’t Look Up, it’s Adam McKay’s turn on the tightrope.

Michigan State University Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is studying supernovae when she accidentally discovers a new comet inbound from the Oort cloud. Her adviser Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) figures out that Comet Dibiasky is headed directly for Earth. We’ve got six months to stave off utter destruction.

Meryl Streep

Kate and Randall call Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (which, the film notes, is a real thing), and they get a meeting with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). To their dismay, the president and her Jared Kushner-esque son Jason (Jonah Hill) are more concerned with the upcoming midterm elections than with saving humanity. When they leak the news to the press, their appearance on a Good Morning America-type TV show hosted by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry is overshadowed by celebrity gossip generated by pop singer Riley’s (Ariana Grande) sex life. The end of civilization is just too big a bummer to get traction in today’s competitive media environment.

It’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that Don’t Look Up’s comet is an allegory for global warming. McKay, like Kubrick, has been met with some bad reviews, and it’s true that Don’t Look Up lacks the perfection of Dr. Strangelove. The editing is choppy, and the story veers off into useless romantic subplots.

But what McKay gets right, he gets really right. The earnestness of the scientists trying to save the world becomes their biggest handicap. Legacy admission Ivy Leaguers in government dismiss the threatening discovery because it came from a state school. The elite news media descend on the subject — until the online engagement metrics fade. Most chilling of all is Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell, a Steve Jobs-like tech billionaire who discovers precious metals on the comet and decides a couple of billion deaths is a small price to pay for propping up his company’s market capitalization.

Don’t Look Up was written before the pandemic, but if anything, the experience of the last two years has made McKay’s point for him; you could replace “comet” with “coronavirus” and the film would still work. When the comet becomes clearly visible in the night sky, Streep’s Trumpian president exhorts her red-hatted followers, “Don’t look up!” I thought about that scene on January 1st, when Memphis set a new high temperature record of 79 degrees. Crazy weather we’re having, huh?

Don’t Look Up is streaming on Netflix.

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Film Features Film/TV

Vice

Believe it or not, this is Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice


What do you do about a problem like Dick Cheney?

The former Vice President of the United States sits at a pivot point in history. He’s the connecting link between the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. He led the team that led the United States into an ill-fated war in Iraq. He was the original architect of the War on Terror, now 17 years old and counting. How do you tell a story that huge, that complex, and that damning, to a popcorn audience in a couple of hours.

Writer/director Adam McKay starts by calling Cheney a “dirtbag,” then gets more specific from there. McKay, former head writer for Saturday Night Live and director of pop-comedy juggernauts like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, is probably the best qualified person to make a movie like this. The Big Short, McKay’s blow-by-blow of the 2008 financial crash, is told with wit, sarcasm, and a whole lot of voice over. Even as a news nerd, I felt like I came out of that film feeling both entertained and like I understood the world better.

Amy Adams (left) as Lynne Cheney.

In Vice, McKay applies the same methodology to Cheney’s life story, but the results aren’t nearly as clean cut. The story opens with Cheney (Christian Bale) getting his second DUI for driving piss drunk in a swerving Studebaker on a rural Montana road. He’s flunked out of Yale for drinking and brawling, and now he’s a lineman, drinking and brawling his way through life as a flowering dirtbag. But his wife Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams) is having none of it. In a crucial scene that will echo throughout the film, she orders her mother out of the room and dresses him down. “Did I choose the wrong man?” she hisses.

Then we cut to 9:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001. It’s the first of many time jumps in this byzantine screenplay. Cheney is the senior official at the White House while George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) is reading My Pet Goat to a room full of Florida school children. When he gives the authorization to Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) to shoot down any civilian airliners in American airspace, he does so in the President’s name. It’s a clear usurpation of authority, but when Condoleezza Rice (LisaGay Hamilton) challenges him, all it takes is one guttural growl to shut her up.

The meat of the story is Cheney’s transformation from dirtbag drunk into the consummate power player. Narrated by Jesse Plemons, whose onscreen identity becomes the setup for one of the film’s most powerful visual gags, the screenplay is anything but subtle. Bale has already won a Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Golden Globe, and his unlikely performance as one of the great villains of American history is worth the price of admission alone. He’s surrounded by A-listers giving pitch black performances. By the time Adams starts doing Shakespeare as Lynne Cheney, you’ve probably already identified her with Lady MacBeth. Carell and Bale recreate Cheney and Rumsfeld’s creepy chemistry. LisaGay Hamilton makes an uncanny Condi Rice; Tyler Perry doesn’t really resemble Colin Powell, but he does manage to embody the former general’s conflicted countenance when he was put in the position to lie to the United Nations on the eve of the Iraq War.

This has been a season of political films, ranging from Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You on the good end to Dinesh D’Douza’s Death of a Nation way down on the other end. Like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Vice kind of flies apart at the end, as if the filmmaker just couldn’t quit while he was ahead. McKay’s fumble is the result of the basic problem with designing a polemic around an antihero — we’re hard wired to see the guy who gets the most close-ups as a heroic figure, even if he’s a war criminal who set his country on a path of ruin. For all his weight gain and intentional ugliness, Christian Bale is still an incredibly charismatic performer. Like Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, one might end up liking him, even though he’s clearly a monster.

But while having a charismatic leading man might be bad for the purposes of political rhetoric, it’s great if you’re trying to make entertaining cinema. Vice may be dense, divisive, flawed, and maddening, but it’s definitely entertaining.

Vice

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Film Features Film/TV

The Big Short

In 1947, Humphrey Bogart was the biggest movie star in the world. With a fresh contract giving him greater creative control in hand, Bogie and his drinking buddy, director John Houston, set out to make a new western called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which he would play the hero. But when the film was released the next year, audiences were in for a shock. As expected, Bogart was the center of the movie. He had the most lines, the most close-ups, and was featured prominently in the advertising, but his character, Fred C. Dobbs, was not the hero of the story. Played by Bogie as selfish, paranoid, vain, and crude, Dobbs was actually the villain. Houston and Bogart were subverting the audiences’ expectations to make a point about unchecked greed.

Toward the end of The Big Short, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) shows the camera a bonus check for $47,000,000 he earned for his part in destroying the world economy in 2008. Speaking into the camera, he says, “I never claimed to be the good guy.”

Brad Pitt

Michael Lewis’ 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a detailed explanation of the events leading up to the 2008 collapse of Wall Street trading firm Bear Stearns, which precipitated the financial crisis and resulting Great Recession, the effects of which are still being felt today. Strangely enough, the film adaptation of the best seller fell to former Saturday Night Live writer and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy creator Adam McKay. When Stanley Kubrick was researching nuclear war scenarios in the early 1960s, he decided that the only honest way to make a film about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was to make it a comedy, and so Dr. Strangelove was born. Faced with the corrupt ridiculousness of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), McKay made the same choice, and created the best movie of his career.

Steve Carell

The ensemble cast McKay assembled is top-notch: In addition to Gosling, Christian Bale plays one-eyed M.D.-turned-capital manager Michael Burry; Steve Carell plays rageaholic investment banker Mark Baum, and Brad Pitt (who also produces) plays former-banker-turned-full-time-paranoid Ben Rickert. There’s a ton of complex exposition to get through, so McKay throws Margo Robbie in a bubble bath and has her explain the basics of the mortgage market. The screenplay is downright brilliant, pulling tricks like pointing out when events have been simplified to gain the audience’s trust.

Like Dr. Strangelove, the laughs The Big Short elicits are coal black, but unlike Wall Street, it tips its hand enough to avoid making its sociopathic greedheads into heroes. No one will look at Bale’s scarily committed portrayal of a speed-metal-obsessed, autistic number cruncher and say, “I want to be that guy.” Instead, McKay’s masterful sendup of late-stage capitalism will leave you saying, “Never again!”