Tag: Charlize Theron

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Long Shot

Seth Rogan and Charlize Theron in Long Shot

Long Shot is a new film starring Seth Rogan and Charlize Ther…

ALL HAIL IMPERATOR FURIOSA, WARRIOR OF THE WASTELAND, CONQUERER OF THE CITADEL!

I’m sorry. That happens sometimes when I try to talk about Charlize Theron. She is one of our greatest living screen actors, with dozens of film credits and an Academy Award she earned for playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster. But for many cinephiles, she is now indelibly associated with her role in Mad Max: Fury Road, where she stole the show from the title character of George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece.

Furiosa is an icon of female power, and liberation from the patriarchy. In Long Shot, Theron plays Charlotte Field, the blisteringly competent Secretary of State under President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk) who is blisteringly stupid.

Before we continue drooling over Furiosa, I want to praise Odenkirk, director Jonathan Levine, and writers Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah. Long Shot is a romantic comedy, but its setting is contemporary American politics, which is a bloody minefield. The overwhelming presence of the orange criminal in the White House threatens to crowd out any comedy potential. And yet, he must be acknowledged in some way. Chambers is clearly not Trump, but Odenkirk plays him as a distracted, incompetent, and thoroughly corrupt rube, because portraying the president as a reasonably competent patriot would simply be unbelievable in 2019. That’s where we are as a nation.

Anyway, Charlotte is a Hillary-esque figure trying her best to put together an international agreement to curb climate change. She’s also in the midst of putting together a run for the presidency herself, assisted by Maggie Millikin (June Diane Raphael) and Tom (Ravi Patel), her fiercely loyal aides.

Meanwhile, Seth Rogan plays Fred Flarksy, a crusading investigative journalist whom we meet in the middle of a farcical attempt to infiltrate a group of neo-Nazis. Fred finds out his newspaper is being bought by Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), a Rupert Murdoch stand-in who will stymie Flarsky’s truth seeking. Fred quits in a rage, and his rich friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) takes him to a ritzy party to help him forget his troubles. There, he sees Charlotte, who he remembers used to babysit him when she was a hyper-responsible pre-teen and he was even more awkward than he is now.

‘They’re called fingers, but have you ever seen them, like, fing?’

The party scene, which is long and complex and ends in horrible (read: hilarious) humiliation for Fred, is a joy. It’s a fine piece of comedy writing, well-staged by the director and effortlessly executed by the cast, that seamlessly integrates the personal and political. When the dust clears, Fred has a new job as a speech writer for Charlotte, and a new, very unlikely romance is brewing—a “long shot”, if you will.

Is there any more tired cliche than the perfect woman romantically paired with a schlubby guy? From Married With Children to The Simpsons, it’s been pretty much the norm on TV sitcoms for decades. And yet, somehow, we come out believing that the guy who wrote an article called “The Two Party System Can Suck A Dick (Actually Two Dicks)” could get it on with the Secretary of State. Theron and Rogan present the ideal avatars of the stereotypes as they fall in love during the film’s globe-hopping middle acts. Rogan’s got the comedy chops to spare, and Theron…

HAIL IMPERATOR FURIOSA!

…Theron is an effective straight woman. Director Levine wisely doesn’t saddle her with schtick, but uses her acting skills strategically. In one rollicking sequence, Theron gets laughs with a realistic impression of a partier rolling on MDMA. She doesn’t go big and mug for the camera (that’s Rogan’s job) she just delivers the lines while low-key trying to keep it together. The implied joke that maybe negotiations between politicians would go better if one or both parties were on drugs that enhanced their empathy lands naturally.

The way Long Shot differentiates itself from the sexist sitcom cliche is by exploring the difficulty men have in ceding power to women, even if—perhaps especially if—the women are clearly more skilled and intelligent. Frank thinks he’s woke as he can get, but time and again he runs up against his own self-righteousness and unexamined assumptions. As the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl rom-com cycle plays out, he’s just trying to hang on as she is making the kind of career-over-home decisions that a male character would be saddled with in earlier decades. By the time the When Harry Met Sally-inspired denouement rolls around, the couple have found a unique equilibrium that they are still trying to understand. Maybe that’s the portrait of all successful relationships that the romantic comedy, when done right, points us towards.

Long Shot

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Tully

In the mid-1970s, film critic Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of “male gaze.” The vast majority of films, she said, were told from a male point of view, because the power structures that controlled Hollywood and all the other major film production centers of the world were overwhelmingly male. Men were the protagonists and antagonists, and women were mostly just there to be looked at. This point of view bias was so deeply ingrained in movies that it was difficult for many people of both sexes to even perceive it, much less imagine what a film devoid of male gaze would be like.

Now it’s the woke 21st century, but the vast majority of films are still headed by men, despite major initiatives by women inside and outside the industry. Tully is directed by a man (Jason Reitman, son of the legendary producer/director Ivan Reitman), but its point of view is decidedly female, thanks to the film’s other major creative partners. Diablo Cody, who broke into the business with 2007’s Juno, wrote the screenplay and produced it alongside its star, Charlize Theron.

With a little mental work, one can imagine how Tully‘s story would break out if it were from a male point of view. It would go something like this: Drew (Ron Livingston) is a hard working father whose wife Marlo (Charlize Theron) goes to great lengths to convince him to help out with the parenting duties.

Mackenzie Davis stars opposite Charlize Theron in Diablo Cody’s Tully.

Maybe the I Love Lucy version is how it looks to Drew, but that’s not how it looks to Marlo. To her, pregnant with their third child, Drew is barely there. He travels frequently for work, and when he’s home, he spends his free time slaying video game zombies. Their kindergarten age son Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica) is starting to exhibit signs of serious autism, making his transition to school very difficult. The couple’s struggles are put into sharp relief by a visit to Marlo’s brother Craig’s (director/producer Mark Duplass) enormous Modernist home, complete with servants and a nanny.

Craig, hinting at difficulties with postpartum depression Marlo had after Jonah was born, offers to foot the bill for a part-time nanny who will come in at night so Marlo can get some sleep. Drew’s pride is wounded by his more affluent brother-in-law, so at first they decline the offer, but once baby Mia is born, Marlo’s situation moves from difficult to impossible. That’s when Tully (Mackenzie Davis) arrives. Tully is the perfect helper — maybe a little too perfect. She’s almost like the female version of the male gaze trope of the quirky girlfriend who exists only to improve the life of the male comedic lead — a Manic Pixie Dream Nanny.

Tully takes its time in the wind up, but that’s okay since it gives the audience more time with Theron. She was already one of cinema’s great actresses before her immortal turn as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Since then, she’s been doing a lot of presumably well paid action leads, such as the fun but slight Atomic Blonde. Seeing her do comedy/drama naturalism is like a sip of fine wine after drinking from the box for too long. From the first shot of the film, which focuses on her ready-to-pop pregnant belly, she is photographed in a series of increasingly unflattering situations, many of which involve breast pumps. Cody’s self-aware, wisecracking dialog hasn’t found an actor who worked with it so well since Ellen Page in Juno. Theron sells it by trying to sound polite and normal while delivering cutting barbs.

Once Tully enters the scene, everyone fades to the background as the film becomes a tight two-hander between her and Marlo. Davis has masterfully handled an intense female relationship before, in Sophia Takal’s excellent Always Shine. Here, it’s less about jealous lesbian murder and more about cupcakes and self-care. But even as Marlo relaxes into the situation and accepts the help she didn’t think she needed, undercurrents of tension and subtext swirl around the two women.

Reitman and Cody try for an ambitious ending, and don’t quite stick the landing. But then again, Tully is all about the problems of excessive expectations of perfection thrust upon women in general and mothers in particular. Once you watch it, you’re going to want to do something nice for your mom.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Kubo and the Two Strings

Kubo And The Two Strings starts out with a moment of quiet bravado: “If you must blink, do it now.”
The voice, we will soon learn, belongs to our hero Kubo (Art Parkinson, aka the youngest Stark on Game Of Thrones), and “If you must blink…” is the beginning of his carny pitch. But it also doubles as a manifesto for one of the most visually sumptuous films of the year.

11 years before, the infant Kubo washed up on a beach with his mother; now, he earns money to support her as a street performer. With his magic shamisen (a three-stringed, Japanese musical instrument), he can bring origami figures to life and use them to bring tales of derring-do to life for the curious villagers. The star of his stories is a paper samurai named Hanzo, modeled after the boy’s missing father.

Already it’s easy to see the mythic resonances in Kubo’s story: Perseus also survived abandonment at sea, and later learned he was demigod, son of Zeus and the mortal Danae. Kubo’s father Hanzo was mortal, but his mother was the most powerful of three daughters of Raiden the Moon King (voiced by Ralph Fienes).

You might think this curious, because Perseus was Greek, and the world where Kubo lives is undoubtedly a stylized version of feudal Japan. The mixing of East and West continues through the story, a largely by-the-book Hero’s Journey sprinkled liberally with concepts from Shinto and Japanese folklore. It’s the mark of a team of young filmmakers, led by Travis Knight, who have clearly grown up steeped in manga, anime, and Studio Ghibli.

Instead of hailing from Tokyo, Knight’s animation studio Laika is based in Portland, Oregon, and Knight’s father Philip is the co-founder of Nike. Laika is the studio behind great-looking stop motion films such as Coraline, but this is CEO Travis’ first credit as director, which might lead the more cynical among us to dismiss Kubo as a rich guy’s vanity project—or a shot across the bow of the Disney battleship.

Kubo is thrust into adventure when he inadvertently exposes his whereabouts to his evil aunties, a pair of black-clad twins chillingly voiced by Rooney Mara. Kubo’s grandfather stole one of his eyes when he was an infant, and now the Moon King wants the other one. Kubo’s questing companions include the wise Monkey, voiced with incredible precision by Charlize Theron, and the rather thick Beetle, a perfectly cast Matthew McConaughey.

The real star of the show is the seamless blend of advanced stop motion animation and CGI, which Laika use to create stunning, hyperreal images, such as an underwater garden of malign, staring eyes, and a boat made of orange fall leaves.

When he leaves the familiar environs of his village, Kubo awakens in a featureless, snowy landscape. There’s no shortage of eye-popping set pieces in the film, but this little moment of visual restraint stuck out as proof that Laika’s head is in the right place. A lesser film would have been afraid to bore its audience by going blank, but Knight and company let the landscape’s lack of landmarks reflect their hero’s psychic dislocation. Kubo’s visuals are not just knockout gorgeous, they’re always in service of character and story.

How has Laika succeeded where so many other have failed this year? There are four credited writers, none of whom are the director, which means it was not the vision of a single auteur, but the product of a healthy collaborative process.

This is the model of contemporary corporate filmmaking that has recently seen so many specularly expensive failures. A plucky little studio, both geographically and spiritually removed from the Hollywood sausage factory, has beat the majors at their own game, and they’ve done it for a fraction of the cost.

The dog days of August is when Hollywood traditionally dumps the losers from their summer line ups, but with Kubo and the Two Strings, they’ve saved the best for last. 

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Film Features Film/TV

The Year in Film 2015

It’s fashionable to complain about how bad Hollywood movies have become. But from the perspective of a critic who has to watch it all go down, it’s simply not the case. At any given time in 2015, there was at least one good film in theaters in Memphis—it just may not have been the most heavily promoted one. So here’s my list of awards for a crowded, eventful year.

Worst Picture: Pixels

I watched a lot of crap this year, like the incoherent Terminator Genysis, the sociopathic San Andreas, the vomitous fanwank Furious 7, and the misbegotten Secret in Their Eyes. But those movies were just bad. Pixels not only sucked, it was mean-spirited, toxic, and ugly. Adam Sandler, it’s been a good run, but it’s time to retire.

Actually, I take that back. It hasn’t been a good run.

Most Divisive: Inherent Vice

Technically a 2014 release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s ode to the lost world of California hippiedom didn’t play in Memphis until January. Its long takes and dense dialogue spun a powerful spell. But it wasn’t for everyone. Many people responded with either a “WTF?” or a visceral hatred. Such strongly split opinions are usually a sign of artistic success; you either loved it or hated it, but you won’t forget it.

Best Performances: Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, Room

Room is an inventive, harrowing, and beautiful work on every level, but the film’s most extraordinary element is the chemistry between Brie Larson and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who play a mother and son held hostage by a sexual abuser. Larson’s been good in Short Term 12 and Trainwreck, but this is her real breakthrough performance. As for Tremblay, here’s hoping we’ve just gotten a taste of things to come.

Chewbacca

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Chewbacca

Star Wars: The Force Awakens returned the Mother of All Franchises to cultural prominence after years in the prequel wilderness. Newcomers like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver joined the returned cast of the Orig Trig Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in turning in good performances. Lawrence Kasdan’s script gave Chewbacca a lot more to do, and Peter Mayhew rose to the occasion with a surprisingly expressive performance. Let the Wookiee win.

Best Memphis Movie: The Keepers

Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson’s film about the people who keep the Memphis Zoo running ran away with Indie Memphis this year, selling out multiple shows and winning Best Hometowner Feature. Four years in the making, it’s a rarity in 21st century film: a patient verité portrait whose only agenda is compassion and wonder.

Best Conversation Starter: But for the Grace

In 2001, Memphis welcomed Sudanese refugee Emmanuel A. Amido. This year, he rewarded our hospitality with But for the Grace. The thoughtful film is a frank examination of race relations in America seen through the lens of religion. The Indie Memphis Audience Award winner sparked an intense Q&A session after its premiere screening that followed the filmmaker out into the lobby. It’s a timely reminder of the power of film to illuminate social change.

Best Comedy: What We Do in the Shadows

What happens when a group of vampire roommates stop being polite and start getting real? Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement and Eagle vs Shark‘s Taika Waititi codirected this deadpan masterpiece that applied the This Is Spinal Tap formula to the Twilight set. Their stellar cast’s enthusiasm and commitment to the gags made for the most biting comedy of the year.

Best Animation: Inside Out

The strongest Pixar film since Wall-E had heavy competition in the form of the Irish lullaby Song of the Sea, but ultimately, Inside Out was the year’s emotional favorite. It wasn’t just the combination of voice talent Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith with the outstanding character design of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness that made director Pete Docter’s film crackle, it was the way the entire carefully crafted package came together to deliver a message of acceptance and understanding for kids and adults who are wrestling with their feelings in a hard and changing world.

It Follows

Best Horror: It Follows

The best horror films are the ones that do a lot with a little, and It Follows is a sterling example of the breed. Director David Robert Mitchell’s second feature is a model of economy that sets up its simple premise with a single opening shot that tracks a desperate young woman running from an invisible tormentor. But there’s no escaping from the past here, only delaying the inevitable by spreading the curse of sex and death.

Teenage Dreams: Dope and The Diary of a Teenage Girl

2015 saw a pair of excellent coming-of-age films. Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, introduced actor Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a hapless nerd who learns to stand up for himself in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Inglewood, California. Somewhere between Risky Business and Do the Right Thing, it brought the teen comedy into the multicultural moment.

Similarly, Marielle Heller’s graphic novel adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl introduced British actress Bel Powley to American audiences, and took a completely different course than Dope. It’s a frank, sometimes painful exploration of teenage sexual awakening that cuts the harrowing plot with moments of magical realist reverie provided by a beautiful mix of animation and live action.

Immortal Music: Straight Outta Compton and Love & Mercy

The two best musical biopics of the year couldn’t have been more different. Straight Outta Compton was director F. Gary Gray’s straightforward story of N.W.A., depending on the performances of Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. playing his own father, Ice Cube, for its explosive impact. That it was a huge hit with audiences proved that this was the epic hip-hop movie the nation has been waiting for.

Director Bill Pohlad’s dreamlike Love & Mercy, on the other hand, used innovative structure and intricate sound design to tell the story of Brian Wilson’s rise to greatness and subsequent fall into insanity. In a better world, Paul Dano and John Cusack would share a Best Actor nomination for their tag-team portrayal of the Beach Boys resident genius.

Sicario

Best Cinematography: Sicario

From Benicio del Toro’s chilling stare to the twisty, timely screenplay, everything about director Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war epic crackles with life. But it’s Roger Deakins’ transcendent cinematography that cements its greatness. Deakins paints the bleak landscapes of the Southwest with subtle variations of color, and films an entire sequence in infrared with more beauty than most shooters can manage in visible light. If you want to see a master at the top of his game, look no further.

He’s Still Got It: Bridge of Spies

While marvelling about Bridge of Spies‘ performances, composition, and general artistic unity, I said “Why can’t all films be this well put together?”

To which the Flyer‘s Chris Davis replied, “Are you really asking why all directors can’t be as good as Steven Spielberg?”

Well, yeah, I am.

Hot Topic: Journalism

Journalism was the subject of four films this year, two good and two not so much. True Story saw Jonah Hill and James Franco get serious, but it was a dud. Truth told the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ fall from the top-of-the-TV-news tower, but its commitment to truth was questionable. The End of the Tour was a compelling portrait of the late author David Foster Wallace through the eyes of a scribe assigned to profile him. But the best of the bunch was Spotlight, the story of how the Boston Catholic pedophile priest scandal was uncovered, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. There’s a good chance you’ll be seeing Spotlight all over the Oscars this year.

Had To Be There: The Walk

Robert Zemeckis’ film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who tightrope-walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, was a hot mess. But the extended sequence of the feat itself was among the best uses of 3-D I’ve ever seen. The film flopped, and its real power simply won’t translate to home video, no matter how big your screen is, but on the big screen at the Paradiso, it was a stunning experience.

MVP: Samuel L. Jackson

First, he came back from the grave as Nick Fury to anchor Joss Whedon’s underrated Avengers: Age of Ultron. Then he channeled Rufus Thomas to provide a one-man Greek chorus for Spike Lee’s wild musical polemic Chi-Raq. He rounds out the year with a powerhouse performance in Quentin Tarantino’s widescreen western The Hateful Eight. Is it too late for him to run for president?

Best Documentary: Best of Enemies

Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon teamed up with Twenty Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to create this intellectual epic. With masterful editing of copious archival footage, they make a compelling case that the 1968 televised debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal laid out the political battleground for the next 40 years and changed television news forever. In a year full of good documentaries, none were more well-executed or important than this historic tour de force.

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road

From the time the first trailers hit, it was obvious that 2015 would belong to one film. I’m not talking about The Force Awakens. I’m talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. Rarely has a single film rocked the body while engaging the mind like George Miller’s supreme symphony of crashing cars and heavy metal guitars. Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa will go down in history next to Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Sigourney Weaver in Alien as one of the greatest action turns of all time. The scene where she meets Max, played by Tom Hardy, may be the single best fight scene in cinema history. Miller worked on this film for 17 years, and it shows in every lovingly detailed frame. Destined to be studied for decades, Fury Road rides immortal, shiny, and chrome.

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Mad Max: Fury Road

I was going to start this review with an extended riff on how the thread of apocalyptic science fiction in novels like Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World found its ultimate cinematic expression in George Miller’s Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), but you know what? Forget that. Just go see Mad Max: Fury Road.

I was going to title this review “Punk’s Sistine Chapel,” which is what Ballard called The Road Warrior, but never mind that. I figure going on about the web of symbolism and allegory woven into George Miller’s first visit back to the blasted Australian outback in 30 years would obscure the central question in many readers minds: Does stuff blow up good?

Stuff blows up. Real. Good.

And it’s real stuff, really blowing up. It’s not that there’s no CGI in Fury Road. It’s just that Miller sees it as just another tool in a toolbox that also includes armies of stunt drivers piloting a fleet of custom vehicles, many of which are on fire at any given time.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Miller, cinematographer John Seale, production designer Colin Gibson, and editor Margaret Sixel have composed a symphony of revving engines, crashing metal, and thundering reports. Unlike most action movies made since The Bourne Ultimatum, Fury Road doesn’t try to disorient you. Quite the opposite: Miller is a master of creating a space inside your head that feels real, then hurtling you through the space in the most exciting way possible. He has exposed most Hollywood action directors as highly paid frauds. Miller’s not here to slap a bunch of disjointed images on the screen, throw millions of marketing dollars to persuade an audience that dreck is acceptable, and chalk it up as a success. Miller delivers an object of pure cinema that wouldn’t work as a novel, a comic book, or a video game. He uses exquisitely detailed images and minimal dialog to carefully parcel out just enough information at just the right time to keep you emotionally engaged in the mayhem on the screen. Actions have consequences, effect follows cause. When people get hit, they get hurt. The world feels real. There’s a guy suspended from cords on the front of a giant war truck playing metal riffs on a guitar that shoots fire, and he fits right in.

Seriously, you should see this movie.

And then there’s Charlize Theron. Her Imperator Furiosa is a woman of few words but limitless steely gazes. She’s somewhere between Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from Alien and Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. There’s no shortage of good performances, including Nicholas Hoult as paint-huffing bezerker Nux, Mad Max veteran Hugh Keays-Byrne as warlord Immortan Joe, and Riley Keough (who is Elvis’ granddaughter in real life) as Capable, one of the five sex slaves whose rescue provides the story’s catalyst. But Theron just flat out steals the show.

I know it probably feels like I’m laying it on a little thick for what is essentially a big car chase movie, but when I left the theater I felt like a starving man who had just been fed a steak. It’s a rare film that engages the mind while rocking the body. Miller’s vision of a world consumed by its own greed, where water, gasoline, and bullets are the most precious commodities, seems even more relevant today than it did 30 years ago. In 2015, armies of men in makeshift war machines crafted by hand from Toyota trucks really do fight over basic resources in places like Syria, Chechnya, and Mali. ISIS, a reactionary, apocalyptic religious cult led by a divinely inspired warlord, looks a lot like Immortan Joe and his War Boys. It’s Mad Max’s world, we just live in it.

Why are you still here? Go see Fury Road!