Tag: Christoph Waltz

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The French Dispatch

Editorial meeting: Anjelica Bette Fellini, Bill Murray, and Elisabeth Moss in The French Dispatch.

Mention director Wes Anderson, and eventually someone will say he’s “twee.” What does that mean, exactly? The Merriam-Webster definition of “twee” is “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” The word itself is thought to come from the way a small child pronounces “sweet.” Anderson’s films, which began with Bottle Rocket in 1996, were sort of retroactively lumped into a poptimist mini-movement that arguably began with a 2005 Pitchfork article titled “Twee As Fuck.” 

But I’ve never thought of Anderson as particularly twee in the way, say, Shirley Temple was twee. Yes, he’s meticulous in his visuals, and childhood has been a recurring subject for him. You can tell he’s someone who has cultivated what the Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind,” staying in touch with the awe of youth most people lose as they grow older. But there has always been a darkness underneath the curated surface of his films. The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family trying to deal with the aftermath of growing up with an abusive drunk father. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is about failing to deal with failure. At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the hero M. Gustav is summarily executed by Nazis, and the narrator Zero’s wife and child die in a flu epidemic. Moonrise Kingdom is … okay, I’ll give you Moonrise Kingdom. But it’s also a major fan favorite, and one of the director’s biggest financial successes. 

Anderson’s latest film is The French Dispatch. I’m going to go ahead and cop to being biased toward this one, because it’s about magazine writers, and that’s what I am. (Read me in the pages of Memphis magazine!) Befitting the eclecticism that is the magazine form’s bread and butter, it’s an anthology movie — an exceedingly rare bird these days. It begins with the death of publisher Arthur Howitzer Jr. (a magisterial Bill Murray), whose will specified that his magazine, whose name is the film’s full title, The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (okay, that’s pretty twee) would shutter after one final issue which re-runs the best stories from its long history. First, we get Owen Wilson narrating a cycling tour of the fictional French city of Ennui, which lies on the Blasé river, because of course it does. 

Tilda Swinton, Lois Smith, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and a whole bunch of other people.

Then, Tilda Swinton delivers an art history lecture on the origin of the French Splatter-School Action Group. The wild painters were inspired by Moses Rosenthaler (an absolutely brilliant Benicio Del Toro), an insane, violent felon who takes up painting to pass the time during his 30-year prison sentence. His first masterpiece, a nude portrait of Simone (Léa Seydoux), a prison guard who becomes his lover and muse, is discovered by Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody), an art dealer imprisoned for tax evasion. 

Lyna Khoudri, Frances McDormand, and Timothée Chalamet on the barricades.

In “Revisions to a Manifesto” Frances McDormand plays journalist Lucinda Krementz, who abandons neutrality by having an affair with student revolutionary leader Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet) of the 1968 “chessboard revolution.” Due to the students’ lack of demands — beyond unlimited access to the girls’ dorm — Krementz drafts the revolutionary manifesto herself. 

Jeffery Wright working on deadline.

“The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” is the least coherent episode, but it features a killer James Baldwin imitation by Jeffery Wright as Roebuck, a writer whose assignment to do a profile on chef/gendarme Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) spirals off into a tale of kidnapping and murder, with very little actual food content. 

“Twee” implies closed off, hermetically sealed, and precious. The French Dispatch is anything but claustrophobic, even in the scenes set in an actual prison. This is Anderson’s most expansive and generous work, teeming with life in all directions. Heavy hitters like Willem Dafoe, Griffin Dunne, Christoph Waltz, Elisabeth Moss, and the unexpectedly dynamic duo of Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban appear for only seconds at a time. The dizzying array of faces flashing across the screen led me to count the acting credits on IMDB. I gave up at 300. While there are some great shots of the actual French countryside, most of the action takes place on soundstages. Nobody does set design like Anderson, and all kinds of wonders are on display, from tiny dioramas to livable multi-story cross sections. 

The French Dispatch is a love letter to the golden age of magazine journalism, and it made me think I was born in the wrong era. But the underlying theme is revolution in all its forms, from the students manning the barricades to new artistic movements springing from a prison riot. Maybe the critics are right, and all this stylized attention to detail designed for aesthetic shock and awe really is “twee,” but if so, it’s twee AF. 

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Film Features Film/TV

No Time to Die

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No TIme To Die.

Over the course of 25 films, James Bond movies evolved into their purest form — or maybe the word is “devolved.” Eon Productions, founded 59 years ago to make Dr. No, came to believe that the appeal of the series was based on the flashy cars, expensive watches, and other signifiers of wealth and class surrounding the posh secret agent. Bond became a brand, and the films little more than extended commercials for luxury goods, punctuated by extraordinarily expensive stunt sequences. Ian Fleming’s marquee character ceased to be a hard-boiled hero and became a moving mannequin for expensive suits. The tendency deepened as the Cold War waned, and the international spy game lost its capitalist vs. communist stakes. Bond was a violent solution looking for a problem. Remember 10 films ago, in The Living Daylights, when he went to Afghanistan and fought with the Mujahideen, aka the Taliban? Good times … 

And then there’s the misogyny. Commander Bond is a love ’em and leave ’em sailor at heart, but his manly charms, integral to early appearances like From Russia With Love, curdled into something ugly. The exception in the canon is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where George Lazenby, in his only outing as Bond, was paired with the great Diana Rigg as Tracy, an underworld princess depicted as his equal. They marry, and when she is killed at the end of the film by a bullet meant for Bond, he cries. The film was a flop, and Lazenby lost the job. In the next film, 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, Bond can barely hide his contempt for women. 

Daniel Craig has played James Bond for 15 years, first appearing as the superspy in 2006’s Casino Royale.

But even as their relevance waned, the movies became more lavish and more expensive, until, in the 21st century, Eon Productions is eating up a significant chunk of British film financing. No Time to Die, the latest installment, is one of the most expensive films ever produced, costing an estimated $250 million to make, and at least another $100 million to market. Daniel Craig, Bond since 2006’s Casino Royale, is retiring, and he and True Detective director Cary Joji Fukunaga seem to have decided to try something different: What if we used all that money to make a good movie? 

From the trademark cold opening, it’s clear that this is a different kind of Bond flick. Instead of immediately throwing us into the middle of an action sequence, it’s a gauzy flashback from someone who isn’t even Bond. Madeleine Swann (Leá Seydoux), who eloped with Bond at the end of Spectre, remembers the day an assassin came to kill her father, a capo in Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Waltz)’s criminal syndicate. The revelation of Madeleine’s parentage — which comes in the middle of a spectacular motorcycle chase through the Italian countryside — ruins the couple’s honeymoon. 

Five years later, Bond is retired, spending his time drinking on the beach of his home in Jamaica. When an advanced biological weapon is stolen from a secret lab in London, the new 007, Nomi (Lashana Lynch) a Black woman who loves to rock some ’80s Grace Jones sunglasses, is dispatched by M (Ralph Fiennes) to retrieve it on the down-low. When the CIA gets wind of the situation, Bond’s old buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) knows who to call. When it comes to chasing madmen with WMDs, nobody does it better. He arrives at Bond’s doorstep to recruit him with a Trumpite politico named Ash (Billy Magnussen) in tow. Bond immediately pegs Ash as a bad guy (“He smiles too much.”) but agrees to help out anyway. 

James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Paloma (Ana de Armas). Credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Naturally, Blofeld, who is still running SPECTRE from inside his Hannibal Lecter cage, is responsible for the heist. But that’s just the first twist in No Time to Die’s plot. The screenplay, credited to four writers, manages to fit in both character-building scenes and a finale designed around a raid on a secret supervillain lair. Fukunaga plays with expectations by setting up a rookie CIA agent, played by Ana de Armas, as a ditzy female stereotype before revealing her to be a competent operative. Instead of seducing her, Bond toasts her murderous prowess with expensive whiskey. It’s all surprisingly coherent and self-aware for a Bond movie.

Fukunaga gives the supporting cast great moments, like Wright imbuing Felix and Bond with genuine friendship, and Fiennes as the conflicted, alcoholic spymaster. Craig, who has shown his chops in Logan Lucky and Knives Out, delivers the best performance of his career. Sure, the old hero coming out of retirement for one last job is a cliché, but when the execution is this good, it doesn’t matter. You can take a guy out of MI6, but you can’t take the spy out of the guy. 

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Film Features Film/TV

The Legend of Tarzan

Has any fictional character been portrayed on film more than Tarzan? John Clayton, the Viscount of Greystoke, was created in 1912 by pulp writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. Six years later, Tarzan was the subject in the first of eight silent films. In 1932, Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller brought Tarzan into the talkie age, kicking off more than 30 films produced over the next 50 years. So when someone (like me, for example) bemoans Hollywood’s current mania for franchises, remember that it has always been thus.

Tarzan is a prototype superhero, so naturally, in this silver age of superhero movies, he’s ripe for a reboot. But there’s a problem with importing the character into the 21st century. Burroughs was an Englishman of his time, so his Lord of the Jungle is a white, English aristocrat constantly demonstrating his superiority over black, African tribesmen. To resurrect the franchise, a new angle was needed, and the person who cracked the problem was Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer. The solution he offered in his 2011 script for the film that would eventually become The Legend of Tarzan was to make colonialism itself the enemy. Brewer’s story was influenced not only by the extensive Tarzan lore Burroughs left behind, but also by King Leopold’s Ghost, a history of the African genocide the Belgian monarch perpetrated between 1885 and 1902, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The strength of Brewer’s script briefly landed him in the director’s chair, but he fell victim to studio machinations at Warner Bros. that took the project to the brink of collapse.

When Tarzan was resurrected, it was with David Yates, the director of the last four Harry Potter films, at the helm. Although several different writers were called in to try new drafts, the final script still retained enough elements of Brewer’s original that he retains a credit, alongside Adam Cozad.

Would The Legend of Tarzan have been better with Brewer in the big chair? That’s an academic question now, but one thing’s for sure: Yates was the wrong choice. The Legend of Tarzan is a wildly uneven film. Yates adopts the same languid pace he did for The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 and Part 2, when narrative propulsion would better suit the pulpy material. We first meet Belgian bad guy Leon Rom in a scene that echoes the immortal beginning of Raiders of The Lost Ark. Brewer’s version of the character was a Colonel Kurtz figure, a Westerner gone savage trying to colonize darkest Africa. Christoph Waltz, however, plays him like Indiana Jones’ dandy nemesis Belloq. Alexander Skarsgård turns out to be a good choice for Tarzan. He’s the strong, silent type, introduced in London as an English aristocrat grown beyond grunting “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” Watching Tarzan code switch between English drawing rooms, daub huts of tribal Africa, and the apes of the jungle is one of the film’s pleasures. Unfortunately, Yates pairs Skarsgård with one of the greatest living American actors, Samuel L. Jackson, as George Washington Williams, an adventurer on a covert mission for Uncle Sam. Although Jackson is clearly toning it down, he can’t help but steal all of his scenes with the emo Skarsgård. Worst of all is Margot Robbie, whose phoned-in Jane fills me with dread for her turn as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad.

Yates tries to create tense buildups to explosive action scenes, but his gratuitous slow-motion fetish inevitably mucks it up. True to superhero movie form, Tarzan’s origin story must be shoehorned in. It’s handled much better than in Batman v Superman, but when the flashbacks stretch into the third act, things get confusing.

It’s not all bad. Like Yates’ Potter films, the supporting cast, such as Djimon Hounsou as Tarzan’s enemy, Chief Mbonga, are consistently compelling, and chunks of Brewer’s dialog still float through the butchered screenplay. I had more fun in The Legend of Tarzan than I did in The Jungle Book reboot, or X-Men: Apocalypse, but fun product from the Hollywood sausage factory has been in short supply this year.

The Legend of Tarzan
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Film Features Film/TV

Big Eyes

You’ve seen the work of Walter Keane: kitchsy paintings of doe-eyed children staring plaintively out from pastel-colored canvases. Your grandmother probably had one in her kitchen or rumpus room, while the print of Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy was in the formal living room. Keane sold millions of paintings, prints, postcards, and anything else that could hold an image in the ’50s and ’60s and counted Andy Warhol as an admirer. And he was a complete fraud.

Big Eyes is the story of Margaret Keane, Walter’s wife, played by Amy Adams. The film opens just as she has left her first husband and struck out to make her artistic fortune in San Francisco with her daughter Jane in tow. She struggles as a single mother, making ends meet by painting babies and storks on cribs for a furniture maker, until she meets Walter (Christoph Waltz) while the two are selling paintings to tourists in Golden Gate Park. She is immediately smitten with the worldly artist, who had attended art school in Paris, while she is so hopelessly naive that she asks her girlfriend DeAnn (Krysten Ritter) the difference between espresso and reefer. When Jane’s father sues for custody, Margaret hastily accepts Walter’s marriage proposals.

Amy Adams as Margaret Keane in Big Eyes

At first, things go great. Walter’s got a lucrative career in commercial real estate that allows Margaret to stay home with Jane and paint. After being spurned by a pretentious art gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman), Walter hangs his and Margaret’s paintings in a rowdy jazz club, where they are soon noticed by the hep cats. Margaret’s sometimes haunting portraits of children with unnaturally large eyes start selling better than Walter’s conventional French landscapes, and so one day when a buyer mistakes Margaret’s work for Walter’s, he doesn’t bother to correct her. From there, the deception grows. Walter is a great self-promoter and natural entrepreneur, and he finds Margaret’s proto-anime girls easy to sell. Since women can’t be taken seriously in 1956 America, and the money is rolling in, Margaret tacitly agrees to the deception. But lying to the world, and the fact that a man is getting credit for her work, slowly eats away at her.

Tim Burton, who is usually seen twisting reality into new shapes, re-teams with screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who wrote Ed Wood, the 1993 biopic of the “worst director in history” that many consider to be the filmmaker’s best work. Like all of Burton’s work, Big Eyes is meticulously designed, but here it is in the service of transporting the viewer into the mind of a real person in the real 1950s. The colors are vibrant, reflecting the inner worlds of the people who inhabit the lovingly crafted mid-century modern houses. Adams, who was fantastic in last year’s American Hustle, inhabits Margaret fully. You can see it in her eyes when she agrees to go along with something she knows isn’t right, but she knows the other choices look even worse. And besides, who could turn down Waltz at his coolly convincing best? Late in the story, when the situation has deteriorated into a courtroom drama, Burton, who usually at this point in his movies would be throwing all manner of absurdities up on the screen, instead channels the restraint of Douglas Sirk and lets the absurdity of the situation play out between the two great actors.

Big Eyes works because it gets the fundamentals of acting, directing, and screenwriting right. As in music, individual genius is great, but there’s just no substitute for a band with good chemistry.

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Film Features Film/TV

Horrible Bosses 2

Would it surprise you to learn that Horrible Bosses is the highest-grossing black comedy ever? It surprised me, mainly because I didn’t think they kept statistics for that kind of thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love black comedy as much as any good, cynical movie critic. But they don’t usually make a lot of money — as the old saying goes, “Satire closes on Saturday night.” And yet, Horrible Bosses raked in north of $200 million on a $35 million budget. So they made another one.

The would-be murderous trio from the first one, uptight accountant Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman), dental assistant Dale Arbus (Charlie Day), and clueless finance drone Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis), have started a business to market their invention, the Shower Buddy. After they bicker, bumble, and pantomime hand jobs on a TV morning show, they improbably get a call from someone at a boutique mail-order business, Boulder Stream, who thinks the Shower Buddy is a “home run.” After turning down a buyout offer from Boulder Stream executive Rex Hanson (Chris Pine, the guy who plays Captain Kirk but isn’t William Shatner), they strike what they believe is a favorable deal with his father, CEO Bert Hanson (Christoph Waltz). But once they fulfill their part of the contract, Bert double crosses them, and they have only a few days to save their company from his clutches. Naturally, they decide to kidnap Rex for $500,000 and use the ransom money to pay off their loan to the bank. Maybe, they “reason,” they’ll be better at kidnapping than they were at murder.

They aren’t, so they meet again with “MF” Jones (Jamie Foxx), who gives the gang some vague plans about sedating the victim, which leads them to break into the office of Dale’s old boss, Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston). The film reaches its comedic high point when Nick must bluff his way through a sex-addiction recovery group to save his co-conspirators from discovery. Armed with a canister of anesthetic, they attempt to kidnap Rex, who immediately gets the better of them and takes over the plan. They’ll fake his kidnapping and split $5 million, because Rex is the kind of guy who thinks big.

The central comedy trio works well enough: Bateman is the straight man, the Groucho figure, while Day and Sudeikis goof it up. Pine is deliciously douchebaggy as the devoid of all human empathy scion of wealth, and Waltz plays to type as his calmly evil father. Aniston is apparently incapable of partial commitment to a role, and there’s a beautiful cameo from Kevin Spacey, who looks like he just showed up for one day and nailed his profanity-filled monologue.
But for this kind of comedy to work, the actors need a pretty tight plot to mug against for laughs.The Hangover was a good example. Unfortunately, Horrible Bosses 2 takes after Hangover 2 instead, cynically pilfering plot points from better movies like Raising Arizona when it’s not just replaying beats from the original. While the original got subversive laughs from the class tensions, making the central trio businessmen like their targets instead of employees defangs the premise and makes them into just another set of amoral, plotting sharks in an economy filled to the brim with them. As Foxx’s character says in a failed joke that reads like a screenwriter’s uncomfortable moment of clarity, these characters are just a bunch of criminals who still think they’re nice guys. But with this much star power on display, they should at least be funny criminals.