Tag: Emma Stone

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Now Playing July 12-18: Nic Cage Kills

Maika Monroe wonders what it all means in Longlegs. (Courtesy Neon)

Looks like a busy weekend at the movies — which is good, because it’s gonna be a hot one.

Longlegs

The great Nicholas Cage stars as a serial killer motivated by his devotion to Satan. Maika Monroe (of It Follows fame) is Lee Harker, an FBI agent assigned to catch him. Blair Underwood (of Krush Groove fame) is her partner, and Alicia Witt (of Dune and Twin Peaks fame) is her mom. Writer/director Osgood Perkins is not super famous yet, but his dad is Anthony Perkins of Psycho fame. 

Fly Me To The Moon 

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star as NASA’s PR director and launch director for the Apollo 11 mission. His job is to get the astronauts to the moon. Her job is to fake the moon landing if the astronauts fail. This film probably sounded like a good idea at the time. 

MaXXXine

Ti West and Mia Goth’s trilogy of twentieth century terror concludes with a slam-bang finale. Read my full review.

A Quiet Place: Day One

Lupita Nyong’o leads this hit prequel to 2018’s alien invasion movie. She plays Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient who witnesses the silent alien invasion in New York City. Can Sam and her cat Frodo survive the mass slaughter? Djimon Housou reprises his role as Henri from A Quiet Place Part II. 

Despicable Me 4

You know those oval yellow Minons your batty aunty and drunk uncle are always sharing memes about? They’re from the Despicable Me franchise. And guess what? They made another one!

Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone follow the Academy Award-winning Poor Things with a triptych of stories about debasing yourself for the benefit of others. Read my full review.

Inside Out 2

The movie of the summer is all about anxiety, and it couldn’t be more timely. Amy Poehler reprises her voice role as Joy, whose hold on the mind of her 13-year-old charge Riley (Kensington Tallman) is jarred loose by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), just a a pivotal hockey game threatens her self image.  

The Bikeriders

Director Jeff Nichols’ gritty portrait of Midwestern biker gangs stars Austin Butler and Tom Hardy looking mighty manly. Read my full review.

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Kinds of Kindness

More than 20 years into his filmmaking career, we know what to expect from a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. There will probably be a cultish organization, with strange practices and unclear motives. The dialogue will sound simplistic on the surface, but conceal deeper meaning. The sex will be weird. There will be mutilation, often self-inflicted. Someone will get licked. Emma Stone will do a little dance. 

And yet, Lanthimos’ films are always surprising. Even if you’ve seen everything he’s done, from his 2001 Greek debut My Best Friend to his 2009 breakthrough Dogtooth to last year’s masterpiece Poor Things, you’ll probably have no idea what will happen next when you watch Kinds of Kindness. 

Lanthimos’ latest reunites key members of the Poor Things cast: Emma Stone, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Bella Baxter, the dead woman brought back to life after having the brain of her unborn child implanted in her skull, and Willem Dafoe, the mad scientist who did the deed. Joining them is Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie. Kinds of Kindness is divided into three parts: Each segment is its own isolated story, with the actors playing completely different characters. In “The Death of R.M.F.,” Plemons plays Robert, a corporate executive whose boss Raymond (Dafoe) issues daily memos which control every aspect of his life. When Robert is ordered to deliberately crash his car, he balks, and Raymond cuts him off. Unsure of what to do with his sudden freedom, Robert flails wildly. 

In “R.M.F. Is Flying,” Plemons plays Daniel, a police officer whose wife Liz (Stone) is missing at sea. His partner Neil (Athie) tries to keep Daniel on track, but when Liz is rescued, his insanity only deepens. 

In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Stone and Plemons play Emily
and Andrew, a pair of cultists whose leaders Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau) have issued a prophecy about a woman with the ability to bring people back from the dead. It’s Emily and Andrew’s job to find her. 

Kinds of Kindness delves into three isolated stories, with Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and more playing different characters throughout.

Kinds of Kindness’ three segments may not have common characters, but they do have common themes. In each story, someone is rejected, either from a group or by an individual, and takes drastic action to try to get back into the fold. An obsession with control — who wields it, who is subject to it, who needs it — winds its way through the three stories. Stone, who has emerged as one of the best actresses of her generation, remains Lanthimos’ muse. Her three characters couldn’t be more different, and she is brilliant in all three roles. In the third segment, she even tries her hand at stunt driving. 

Plemons’ talent shines throughout the film. In the first segment, his disorientation at having to make his own decisions after a decade of Dafoe dictating his every move is at first hilarious, then poignant, then horrifying. In “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” his vulnerability as a grieving husband gives way to a steely, destructive determination. 

Dafoe, the consummate pro, works wonders with Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou’s often difficult material. In the hands of lesser actors, these stories might come off as silly. Filippou also co-wrote The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which means Kinds of Kindness is a different flavor from the visual extravagance of Poor Things. Instead of the fantastical steampunk cities of an alternate Europe, Kinds of Kindness was filmed on location in New Orleans. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan brings out the Crescent City’s threatening, surreal side. 

As with all of Lanthimos’ films, this isn’t for everyone. But if you’re already on board with his unique, often disturbing world view, you will find Kinds of Kindness ranks with the director’s best work. 

Kinds of Kindness is now playing at Studio on the Square and Collierville Cinema Grill & MXT.

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Now Playing June 28-July 4: Kindness, Quiet, and Hindu Gods

Best Actress winner Emma Stone stars in Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)

There’s plenty of great stuff on the big screen in Memphis, so quit doomscrolling and go see a movie this weekend.

Kinds of Kindness

Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and director Yorgos Lanthimos reunite for another absurdist comedy after the triumph of 2023’s Poor Things. They are joined by Jesse Plemons (whose performance earned him a Best Actor nod at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival), Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau for a triptych of intertwined stories about love, death, and healing. 

A Quiet Place: Day One

The third film in the series goes back to the beginning, which is the end of civilization. Blind space monsters with extremely sensitive hearing land on Earth and start eating up all the tasty people. That’s not so yummy for Lupita Nyong’o, a New Yorker who witnesses the invasion, and must escape very quietly. But don’t worry, she’s got a plan.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1

Kevin Costner directs Kevin Costner in this epic tale — a saga if you will — of American expansion in the West during the pre- and post-Civil War period. Expect horses, hats, and guns from this highly punctuated title. 

Inside Out 2

This brilliant sequel is the biggest box office hit of the year. Head emotion Joy (Amy Poehler) must keep her human Riley (Kensington Tallman) on track as the ravages of puberty take hold, and a new emotion named Anxiety (Maya Hawke) arrives at headquarters. Beautifully animated with stealthily profound screenplay, Inside Out 2 is a must-see. (Read my full review, which, spoiler alert, borders on the rapturous.)

Kalki 2898 AD

Malco has been getting a lot of Indian movies over the last couple of years. This one promises to be different. It’s not a Bollywood song-and-dance film, as much as we love them. Kalki 2898 is the most expensive film ever made in India, weighing in at an impressive $6 billion rupees (approximately $72 million). It’s a sci fi epic inspired by Hindu mythology which is intended to kick off a Marvel-style cinematic universe. And it looks pretty cool.

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The Year in Film 2023

From Barbie to Spider-Man, Across the Spider-Verse to Killers of the Flower Moon, the art of cinema in 2023 was triumphant.

The movie business was in chaos in 2023, but the art of cinema was triumphant. Audiences rejected expensive corporate blandness in favor of films that took chances and spoke from the heart. But before we get to the best of the year, let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum.

What’s worse than one Ezra Miller? Two Ezra Millers.

Worst Picture: The Flash

2023 was the year the superhero bubble finally burst. Warner Bros. scrapped Batgirl to bet the farm on walking PR disaster Ezra Miller. They lost $200 million on what is easily the worst film of the decade so far.

The King of the Monsters tearing up the club in Godzilla Minus One.

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Godzilla

It was looking like Cocaine Bear’s year until the King of Monsters dropped an all-timer. The big guy dazzled in Godzilla Minus One by getting back to his roots — punishing mankind’s hubris with cleansing atomic fire.

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee tug heartstrings in Past Lives.

Best Original Screenplay/Best Ensemble: (double tie) May December, Past Lives

Todd Haynes and Celine Song both constructed delicate hothouse dramedies around a core of three fantastic actors. In Haynes’ May December, Natalie Portman is an actor researching a juicy role who discovers her subjects, played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, can’t be reduced to two dimensions. In Song’s Past Lives, Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are childhood sweethearts in China separated when one family immigrates to America, and John Magaro is the husband caught in the middle when they reunite 24 years later. Both stories are told with remarkable economy, and perfect performances.

The gang starts a fight club in Bottoms.

Best Comedy: Bottoms

College friends Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott, and Ayo Edebiri teamed up for this wicked high school satire about a pair of loser lesbians who start an after-school fight club to get laid. The young cast is razor sharp, and it features the year’s most unexpected comedic performance by NFL legend Marshawn Lynch.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Biggest Bomb: Oppenheimer

We’re not talking box office — Christopher Nolan’s three-hour experimental film about a nuclear physicist who loves Hindu literature made $954,000,000 — we’re talking actual explosive devices. The Barbenheimer phenomenon proved that audiences are hungry for something different and are smarter than studio execs give them credit for.

Nicholas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

MVP: Nicolas Cage

Cage has frequently been the best part of uneven films. In 2023, he was an uncanny Dracula in the otherwise forgettable Renfield and a reluctant psychic celebrity in Dream Scenario. The man’s a national treasure.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Animated Film: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

An astonishing visual achievement requiring a record 1,000 animators, the film escaped the superhero doldrums with a witty script and the best cliffhanger in recent memory.

Emma Stone turns in a career performance as Bella in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

Best Performance: Emma Stone, Poor Things

The Best Actress category at the Academy Awards is going to be awfully competitive. My favorite was Emma Stone as a creature with the body of a grown-up and the brain of an infant. Her progression from peeing on the floor to discussing philosophy in the salons of Europe is as technically challenging as it is emotionally compelling.

Margot Robbie as Barbie.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Barbie

Directors wear many hats, and none wore them better than Gerwig, the first woman to ever helm a billion-dollar picture. Balancing the satirical edge of Barbie with pathos and empathy while also staging sweeping musical numbers and recreating the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a rare feat. How did she get all that stuff past the studio?

Lily Gladstone, Robert DeNiro, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Best Picture: Killers of the Flower Moon

In an extraordinarily good year for cinema, Martin Scorsese’s epic of love and betrayal among the Osage stood above the rest. What started as a story about the birth of the FBI opened into an examination of the soul of America. At the center of this maelstrom of greed and exploitation is an unlikely love story between Leonardo DiCaprio’s thick-headed bushwhacker and the extraordinarily coy Lily Gladstone as the wealthy Native American woman his Machiavellian uncle, played by Robert DeNiro, has marked for death. Scorsese switches genres at will, going from romance to Western to howcatchem to courtroom drama, and nailing every beat. Along the way there are several deeply committed performances by Native American actors, and stunning cinematography which shows the 81-year-old Scorsese is still eager to experiment.

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Poor Things

Emma Stone turns in a career performance as Bella in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, is regarded as the first true science-fiction novel. Shelley’s themes and tropes have echoed for more than two centuries: The brilliant scientist is so consumed by the intellectual challenge of discovery that he doesn’t consider the costs; the question of what, exactly, it means to be “human”; and even Stan Lee’s mantra, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Recent readings have emphasized Shelley’s personal life to explain its unsettling tone. The story’s mixture of horror and fascination with the creation of new life came from an author whose mother had died in childbirth and who personally had multiple miscarriages, and buried two babies before their third birthday.

In Shelley’s original novel, the Creature is not the hulking figure with an abnormal brain and limited vocabulary, familiar from the Universal horror films. He is intelligent enough to recognize his own monstrosity, and cunning enough to plot complex revenge on his creator. The novel’s middle passage, told from the Creature’s POV, presents a critique of humanity’s hypocrisies from an outsider’s perspective.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things remixes the Frankenstein elements to foreground the outsider perspective, with spectacular results. Emma Stone stars as Bella, whom we meet as she is throwing herself off a bridge. Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a Frankenstein-esque surgeon who carries the scars of his own father’s brutal experiments on his face. He finds Bella’s body in the river while it’s still warm — and discovers the fetus she is carrying in her womb is still viable. He repairs her lightly damaged body and implants the baby’s brain in her skull. When he reanimates her with “galvanic energy,” she awakens an infant’s mind in an adult’s body.

Dr. Baxter locks his subject in his stately mansion, both to keep her secret from the torch-and-pitchfork crowd who can’t understand his genius and to control this grand experiment into the nature of humanity. He hires one of his most gifted medical students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to record Bella’s every move and chart her development. But Baxter (or “God” as Bella calls him) can’t keep her a secret forever, and she attracts the attention of his attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) right around the time she discovers sex — or as she calls it, “furious jumping.”

Baxter knows he can no longer stop her from experiencing the world, so he grudgingly consents to Bella running off with the worldly attorney. They embark on a comedically debauched tour of a steampunk version of Victorian Europe, where dirigibles roam the skies and architecture runs amok. Bella continues the pattern of outgrowing one mentor after another as she tries to forge her own identity and correct the wrongs of the world.

Stone’s always been a trouper, but she is absolutely fearless as Bella. In a career-high performance, she finesses Bella’s growth from peeing on the floor to debating philosophy, progressing ever so slightly from one scene to the next until she’s the one performing experimental surgery. It’s an extreme performance, but Lanthimos directs everyone around her so big, Bella seems like the most grounded person on screen. Ruffalo looks like he’s having the time of his life as the rakish Wedderburn, who awakens something in Bella no one can control. Dafoe is so matter-of-fact in his deranged sociopathy that you find yourself instinctively nodding along to even his most outrageous pronouncements. Kathryn Hunter, who stole the show as the witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, slithers and shines as a brothel madam who takes Bella under her tattooed wing.

With a visual palette wild enough to match the story’s shenanigans, Lanthimos has created a fresh and daring film about what it means to be both a human and a woman. As Bella searches for answers about existence, her crazy world starts to feel awfully familiar.

Poor Things
Playing at Malco Theatre locations beginning December 22nd

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2018: The Year In Film

If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.

Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed

Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed

In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”

Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.

Chuck, the canine star of Alpha

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha

Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk

Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.

Rukus

Best Memphis Movie: Rukus

Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Best Screenplay: First Reformed

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.

Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther

MVP: Michael B. Jordan

Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.

Regina Hall in Support The Girls

Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade

In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.

Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.

Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.

Sorry To Bother You

Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.

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Battle Of The Sexes

To this day, the most-watched tennis match in American history is not a Wimbledon final, or a U.S. Open match. In 1973, Bobby Riggs, former Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion and self described male chauvinist, and Billie Jean King, a feminist icon who was in the midst of a historic roll on the women’s tennis circuit, played a match in the Houston Astrodome in front of a live audience of more than 30,000 and an estimated international TV audience in excess of 90 million. It was both a coming out party for women’s tennis and a major cultural event at a time when the nationwide push for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was in full swing.

Emma Stone and Steve Carell in Battle of the Sexes

The best thing about Battle of the Sexes, the sprawling story of the grudge match seen ‘round the world, is the casting. Emma Stone plays King, disappearing into the role in a way she has never done in any of her previous films, and Steve Carell plays Riggs, a 55-year-old, washed up tennis pro turned huckster. Riggs’ gambling problem is so out of control that even when he wins a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit from sneering rich guy Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) it still gets him kicked out of his huge house, owned by his rich wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue).

The supporting cast are all aces as well, led by Sarah Silverman as Gladys Heldman, Kings’ agent and partner in the new and struggling Women’s Tennis Association. Alan Cumming vamps freely as Ted Tinling, a fashion designer who put color on the court for the first time, and Fred Armisen has a small but scarily committed role as Riggs’ Dr. Feelgood, Rheo Blair.

The performances are where husband and wife directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farris excel, as you can easily see in their last big hit, Little Miss Sunshine. Battle of the Sexes is an accomplished, entertaining work. Where it runs into problems is the reconciling the tone. Stone and Carell are not only playing different characters, but they sometimes appear to be in completely different movies. King’s story is a coming-out drama, where she realizes that her friendly but largely loveless marriage to her husband Larry (Austin Stowell) is doomed to lose out to her love for her hairdresser, Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough). Riggs’ side of the story is a clown show of over-the-top sexism and hype, powered by a barely contained Carell.

What the film lacks in artistic unity, it makes up for with a series of memorable, well-wrought scenes, like Riggs’ meltdown in a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting and an exquisite sequence where Kings’ two lovers accidentally meet in an elevator on the way to the same hotel room. Battle of the Sexes is a well crafted film that feels timely, fun, and occasionally even poignant

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La La Land

The medium is the message,” said Marshall McLuhan in 1964. There is no separating the meaning of a work of art (or journalism or anything) from the way the information is delivered. TV news, for example, must first teach you how to watch TV news before it can impart any other meaning. A film may be about war, or love, or death, but first and foremost, it’s about the act of watching a film.

Movie musicals are the perfect example. Made in the earliest years of the transition from silent to talking pictures, 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade are all musicals about people trying to make careers in Broadway musicals. 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, frequently cited as the greatest movie musical ever made, is a musical about people trying to make musicals during the transition from silent to talking pictures. The last musical to win a Best Picture Oscar, 2002’s Chicago, is a musical about people trying to make it in musical theater. Guess what director Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, which stands a strong chance of being the next musical to win a Best Picture Oscar, is about?

Emma Sone and Ryan Gosling star in Damien Chazelle’s La La Land.

I say this not to denigrate La La Land, but to put it into perspective. Professional movie grousers like myself are always going on about the loss of Old Hollywood craftsmanship. Chazelle has apparently decided to stop grousing and do something about it, using the musical as his medium. La La Land transports the tropes of classic Hollywood musicals to 2016, and it’s a perfect fit.

What was better about old school musicals? West Side Story (1961), for example, was fairly conventional in its non-singing parts, but when the music started, the singing and dancing was shot in long takes, with the camera pulled back to reveal the dancers’ entire bodies and the grace of their movement through the stage-inspired sets. When the music starts in Moulin Rouge! (2001), on the other hand, the cuts get quicker and more random, a jumble of close-ups and medium shots meant to create the illusion that Nicole Kidman could dance like Rita Moreno. From the dazzling opening sequence of La La Land, Chazelle puts himself squarely on the side of West Side Story. When we first meet our protagonists, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), they’re stuck in traffic on Los Angeles’ infamous I-405, oblivious to the intricately choreographed mass of commuters around them singing “Another Day of Sun.” Cinematographer Linus Sandgren’s camera swoops and dives, but the focus is always on the dancers’ athleticism.

The sequence sets the tone for the film. Chazelle has a knack for finding beauty in the mundane details of Los Angeles. Palm trees become pillars of light and shadow, backyard pool parties are riots of dappled color, and, in one of the most dazzling sequences of the decade, Chazelle uses an actual L.A. sunset as a backdrop for Stone and Gosling’s first dance together.

Mia and Sebastian are both trying to make it in showbiz. Mia is an aspiring actress working as a barista in a studio backlot coffee shop, while Sebastian is a keyboardist obsessed with jazz who dreams of owning his own club. But it’s hard out there in La La Land. Mia’s stuck in a loop of humiliating auditions for indifferent casting agents, while Sebastian scrapes out a living playing Christmas carols in a piano bar — at least until he’s fired by J.K. Simmons in a sly reference to Chazelle’s last film, 2014’s Whiplash.

Stone and Gosling can’t live up to the standards of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — who could, really? — but they more than make up for any shortcomings when they’re not singing and dancing. From the moment she glimpses his shabby convertible out the window of her Prius, you’re instantly rooting for them. This is their third pairing as an onscreen couple, and they have chemistry to spare. It’s the careful balance between the emotional realism of the acting and the sheer technical audacity of the musical numbers that elevates the movie into the realm of greatness even before Chazelle rips out your heart with the extended, bittersweet coda. In a year defined by sadness and loss, La La Land provides a much-needed injection of joy.

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Birdman or, The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance

Every once in a while, a film comes along that starkly divides critics and audiences. I usually take this as a sign that an artist has taken a chance and created something new. That is the case with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, a sprawling, thrilling film that, for better and worse, is one of the most fully realized personal visions to hit screens in years.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, an actor famous for playing a superhero named Birdman in the 1990s, but who fell into relative obscurity after leaving the role following three highly successful Hollywood blockbusters. Now, he is attempting a comeback by staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But the pressure of writing, directing, and producing the play with his own money is driving him slowly insane as opening night approaches. He starts to believe he has telekinetic powers that only manifest themselves when others aren’t around. And maybe he does — Birdman is not the kind of movie that gives you simple answers to the questions it poses.

The mixture of reality and fantasy extends past the screen, as there is no escaping the comparisons between Keaton, who went into semi-retirement on his ranch in Montana after capping a brilliant career in the 1980s with two Batman movies for director Tim Burton. I don’t know if Keaton, who is riveting in the film’s make-or-break role, thinks he can move things with his mind in real life, but I’m pretty sure Iñárritu does. The technical challenges he called on his cast and crew to overcome in this film rival the most complex in history. He and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Oscar last year for his work on Gravity, take a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and stage the entire film as one continuous shot. Hitchcock did it in 1948’s Rope, which takes place almost entirely in one New York apartment. Similarly, all of Birdman happens in and around the historic St. James Theatre in Times Square, but digital technology has given Lubezki much more freedom of movement than Hitch enjoyed. The camera functions almost as another character in the film, swooping through corridors and spying on the players as they struggle through a parade of theatrical disasters.

and Michael Keaton in Birdman

A host of excellent actors revolve around Keaton, delivering uniformly awesome performances. Most surprising is comedian Zach Galifanakis as Jake, Thomson’s long suffering manager. Edward Norton turns in a wry, self-depreciating turn as Mike, a hotshot actor who is called in at the last minute to replace a crappy thespian whom Thomson may or may not have tried to kill with his telekinesis. Emma Stone is excellent as Sam, Thomson’s resentful, just-out-of-rehab daughter who is struggling to stay straight as she chafes at even the low level of control her father tries to impose on her.

Birdman works as a Noises Off-style backstage comedy, but it is just as much an essay on what the creative process looks like from the inside. Iñárritu tells as clear a story as he ever has in his career, but it’s clear that plot is a secondary consideration for the director. He enthusiastically pours ideas big and small onto the screen and doesn’t seem particularly concerned if all of them register with the audience or not. By making the bad guy Lindsay Duncan’s Tabitha, a snarling New York Times theater critic who promises to savage the play out of spite before she has even seen it, he is all but daring folks like me to criticize him. Several have taken him up on the dare, and now it’s my turn:

Can it with the false endings, Iñárritu. I counted three places where Birdman could have ended on a more satisfying note without sacrificing any of the power or themes that you spent so much time and energy conjuring. C’mon, Poltergeist was 30 years ago. Popular screenwriting books have made false endings fashionable again, but they have become a crutch that filmmakers lean on to avoid making the hardest choices. Pick an ending and go with it.

Wow. That felt refreshingly honest. Just like Birdman!

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Film Features Film/TV

“Magic in the Moonlight” Is Less Than Magical

Critical judgments are seldom permanent; when given some time and room to breathe, an underwhelming or puzzling movie from March can end up on a best-of list in December. This is also true for filmmakers. As the years go by, some filmmakers step into the spotlight while others slowly recede from view.

Then there’s Woody Allen, who doesn’t appear to care about things like legacy and influence. Allen plugs away year after year and movie after movie, confronting the same old issues and repeating himself in the same old comic or dramatic ways no matter how badly you want him to just stop already.

Amazingly, he can’t be entirely ignored yet. 2011’s Midnight In Paris, with its uncharacteristically loose Owen Wilson performance, its gentle insistence that there were never any good old days, its jokey depiction of Lost Generation icons, and its plentiful shots of Rachel McAdams’ ass (purely accidental, I’m sure), was his best and most playful film in nearly two decades. But Magic in The Moonlight, Allen’s latest European period piece, is a humorless reversion to a depressing norm.

Emma Stone and Colin Firth

The old-timey jazz tunes on the soundtrack, along with that unmistakably faux-classical opening title-card sequence promise more of the same old thing. Set at the end of the roaring 1920s, Magic stars Colin Firth as Stanley, a famous magician and skeptic who’s asked by an old friend to travel from Berlin to the south of France to debunk Sophie (Emma Stone), a young medium from Kalamazoo who appears to have real supernatural powers.

As everyone in the movie points out repeatedly, Stanley is the right man for the job: having sworn fealty to logic, reason, order, and nothingness, he spouts Nietzsche at people who look at him too long and smirks at anyone “desperate for a little hope in a world that has none.” But will Sophie show him the error of his ways? Well, would an Allen surrogate like Stanley dare to let some girl expand his conception of how the world works?

In this cotton-mouthed farce, Firth deserves some credit for making Stanley an insufferable prick. Strident, heedless, and almost angrily self-satisfied, Firth plows through the film like a cross between The Great Gatsby‘s Tom Buchanan and The Big Bang Theory‘s Sheldon Cooper. Emma Stone, playing the requisite ingénue, handles her diaphanous-dipsy role better than previous Allen muses. With help from cinematographer Darius Khondji’s blurry, lens-flared Mediterranean postcard work, Firth and Stone’s scenes together almost drown out Allen’s usual God-is-dead, what-does-it-all-mean bellyaching.

If you have to see a Woody Allen movie this year, John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo, in which Allen played a supporting role, is a gentler and sexier romantic comedy where the characters may have read some existentialist philosophy but have the good taste not to lecture each other about it. But never fear; Allen is already at work on his next project. Emma Stone will star.