Tag: Guillermo del Toro

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Now Playing: Pinnochio, Iñárritu, and a Dangerous Dish

Alejandro Iñárritu's "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"

If you’ve already seen Black Panther: Wakanda Forever three times, there are plenty of other sources for your movie fix this weekend.

Fresh off the success of his Cabinet of Curiosities, Guillermo Del Toro unveils more potentially holiday-related eye candy with his long-awaited adaptation of Pinocchio. Del Toro says the $35 million stop motion film is the project he’s been wanting to do his entire life. Based on a version of the story by Nineteenth Century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi, it’s not the little wooden boy you remember from the Disney vaults. Voice actors include Ewen McGregor as Sebastian J. “Don’t Call Me Jiminy” Cricket, Tilda Swinton as a Wood Sprite who is totally not Tinkerbell, and Cate Blanchett as a monkey.

Ralph Finnes is serving the most dangerous dish in The Menu. Director Mark Mylod, late of HBO’s plute-shaming soap Succession, has gathered an all-star cast of Nicholas Hoult, Anya Taylor-Joy, John Leguizamo, and Hong Chau, for dinner, and class war is what’s for dinner. Yum!

As a journalist, I know that the best films of all time are all about newspaper people. As a filmmaker, I know Harvey Weinstein is a depraved, power-mad rapist who hurt a lot of people and did irreparable damage to the independent film world. She Said is the story of Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Cantor (Zoe Kazan), two New York Times reporters who broke the story of Weinstein’s reign of terror by convincing his victims to go on the record. He’s currently in jail for 23 years in New York, and yesterday the prosecution rested in his California trial, where he is facing 60 more years in the hoosegow.

Alejandro Iñárritu is no stranger to Memphis. He shot 21 Grams, his second feature film here. Since then, he’s won nine Academy Awards. He’s back with Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a satirical look at Iñárritu’s native Mexico through the magical realist filter of his mind.

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Nightmare Alley

Bradley Cooper stars as Stan, an ambitious carny who seduces psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who just might be more dangerous than he is.

The United States won the propaganda portion of World War II by emphasizing the better angels of our nature. Our individual freedoms of expression, rule of law, and economic self-determination were superior to the dehumanizing groupthink of the fascists. Later, this same formula was successfully brought to bear on the authoritarian communists of the Soviet Union. But after the war, G.I.s who were fighting for this vision of ultimate human freedom returned home to an imperfect country of widespread economic inequality, racism, and religion-driven patriarchy, where criminals and liars prospered while good people were ground down by the brutalities of capitalism.

It was taboo to talk openly about such things during the triumphal postwar era, but beginning in 1944 with Double Indemnity, the discontents coalesced into a new kind of crime film. For Hollywood, centering the criminal was nothing new; Jimmy Cagney had made a career out of playing charismatic psychopaths in the 1930s. But this movement, which the French dubbed film noir, was something different. Cagney’s gangsters were self-made men, but film noir rejects the idea that we are masters of our own fate. The noir antihero is not empowered by his dreams, but rather brought low by his ambition. The land of opportunity is full of tricksters and confidence men, but the one mark you can never fleece is the mark within.

William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley was first adapted for film in 1947, during the height of the noir movement. Set in the world of cheap carnivals and spiritualist swindlers, it’s an atypical noir. There’s no tough-guy detective, and the femme fatale doesn’t show her cards until the climax. But its spooky world-building and uncompromisingly bleak vision of humanity resonated with director Guillermo del Toro, who adapted the story as his follow-up to his 2017 Best Picture winner The Shape of Water.

The director has said this is his first film without a monster, but that’s not true. The monster wears the face of Bradley Cooper as Stan, a down-on-his-luck drifter who finds work at a traveling carnival, run by Clem (Willem Dafoe). He is befriended by Pete (David Strathairn), a hard-drinking carny who takes pity on the penniless stranger, and whom Stan instantly betrays by sleeping with his wife Zeena (Toni Collette). Pete and Zeena’s spiritualist act once made them the toast of Europe, but now Zeena fleeces the rubes as a psychic and tarot reader while trying to keep Pete from drinking himself to death. Stan hectors Pete into teaching him the secrets of cold-reading a mark. When Pete finally succumbs to alcoholism, Stan steals his book of tricks and absconds with cute fellow carny Molly (Rooney Mara).

We catch up with the couple in New York, where they’re selling out fancy nightclubs every night with a mix of fake mind-reading and mumbo jumbo. When Stan is presented with a particularly rich mark in the person of gangster Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), he seduces psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett) into divulging her client’s deepest secrets.

Cooper, playing a part originated by the great Tyrone Power, is perfect. You might think, because he gets the most close-ups, that he’s the hero, but Stan is under no such delusions. He tells Lilith that he’s attracted to her because “You’re no good, just like me.” The genius of the story is how every step down Stan’s path to damnation is just a slight escalation from his last lie. Blanchett plays the Hitchcockian ice queen you always knew she had in her, while Collette is a Cassandra whose warnings of the ruin caused by misusing the tools of a perfectly respectable con are ignored. Also great are Willem Dafoe having the time of his life as a sleazy but articulate carny and Mary Steenburgen as a grieving mother taken in by Stan’s rackets.

Veering from the grubby midway to the resplendent art deco interior of Lilith’s office, Nightmare Alley is visually ravishing. It had the misfortune of being buried at the box office by Spider-Man: No Way Home and Omicron, but hopefully its well-deserved Best Picture nomination will help bring a new audience to this mini masterpiece of neo-noir. After all, Nightmare Alley’s dark vision of America as a utopia for confidence men and carnival barkers has never felt more relevant.
Nightmare Alley is streaming on Hulu.

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Film Features Film/TV

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is bookended by two versions of “Season of the Witch.” Over the opening credits is Donovan’s psychedelic classic from 1966, the dark side of Sunshine Superman. The second is a confident, if breathy version by Lana Del Rey, who becomes the latest artist to attempt to capture the song’s serenely spooky vibes.

What can an artist bring to something like “Season of the Witch”? The song’s Wikipedia entry lists 26 different versions, done by everyone from Vanilla Fudge to Hole. Maybe the reason the song appeals to so many artists is because it has strong bones. Its soft-loud, verse-chorus structure would be appropriated by the Pixes in the 1980s and inspire a legion of imitators, including Nirvana. The lyrics are as vaguely threatening as they are nonsensical. Versions like Del Rey’s continue to sound fresh because the artists have sussed out the secret: Just do it like Donovan did it, and you’ll be okay.

Michael Garza (left) and Zoe Margarett Coletti star in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Good bones are what keep Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark upright. It’s an adaptation of a series of short story anthologies released in the 1980s by folklorist and fantastically prolific author Alvin Schwartz. The stories, which are aimed at young readers, are short and often gruesome resettings of campfire tales and dimly remembered legends. Schwartz’s books, greatly enhanced by Stephen Gammell’s haunting illustrations, have consistently appeared on the American Library Association’s Most Banned list for the last 30 years.

Horror maestro and 2017 Best Picture winner Guillermo del Toro executive produced this long-gestating adaptation. Instead of doing a Creepshow-esque anthology, del Toro crafted a framework story and tapped Trollhunter helmer André Øvredal to direct. It opens on Halloween of 1968, which the narrator describes as “The last autumn of our childhood.” The narrator is revealed to be a teenager named Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), who is fastening fake warts to her face and applying black lipstick to dress as a witch for the annual shenanigans in the small town of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania. She meets up with her friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur), and they set out to exact a little flaming bag of poo-themed revenge on bat-wielding bully Tommy (Austin Abrams). But when their plans go pear-shaped, they flee into a drive-in theater, where they are saved by Ramón (Michael Garza) as Night of the Living Dead spools in the background.

The group finds their way to the town’s only bona fide haunted house. Naturally, it’s a crumbling late-Victorian affair where the rich descendants of the Bellows, the town’s founding family, degenerated into gothic madness. Their youngest daughter Sara (Kathleen Pollard) was an albino whom they kept locked away in shame. The family is long since gone, but Sara has lived on in legend for the scary stories she would tell to any 19th-century kid brave enough to sneak up to the manse.

Guillermo del Toro and André Øvredal bring Stephen Gammell’s illustrations to the big screen.

If the above seems like a lot of trouble to go to in order to set up a framing device for a bunch of short creepy tales, well, it is. Øvredal and del Toro work very hard to get us invested in this group of small town outsiders living on the eve of Nixon’s election. It helps that Colletti brings some big Hermione energy as the ostracized smart girl who is obsessed with writing horror. Their prank wars soon turn seriously spooky when aspiring writer Stella steals Sara’s book of scary stories scribbled in the blood of children, and Tommy has a run-in with a sinister scarecrow.

Horror aficionados will recognize many of the tropes at play here, which lean much more heavily on Cronenbergian body horror than the retro setting would suggest. Especially upsetting is the poster-worthy pimple from hell suffered by Chuck’s sister Nancy (Natalie Ganzhorn) on the night of the high school’s big harvest festival. But what Scary Stories lacks in originality, it makes up for in execution and heart. Øvredal makes a virtue of his limitations, shooting in a muted autumnal palette and even getting a scare out of the color grading at one point. The eager actors and mid-budget, analog feel to the effects turn out to be the film’s greatest assets. There are a lot of parallels to the Stephen King horror juggernaut It, and when the nerdy Auggie dresses as a clown for Halloween, it is surely meant as a jab at the competition. Admittedly, not everything here works, but I greatly prefer Scary Stories’ playful pluck to the reverent sterility of It.

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Pacific Rim: Uprising

Right now, the app getting the biggest workout on my Apple TV is Filmstruck. The cinephile-focused streaming service’s deep catalogue includes practically the entire Criterion Collection, and recently added films from the Turner Classic Movie vaults. Alongside the Bergman, the Agnès Varda deep cuts, and the works of experimental documentarian Bill Morrison are selections from Toho, the Japanese studio who first introduced the world to kaiju. Toho’s greatest artist was Ishiro Honda, creator of Godzilla. Honda’s tokusatsu work spanned more than 20 years, from 1953’s Gojira through Rodan, The Mysterians, Mothra, King Kong vs. Godzilla, and Destroy All Monsters, before he retired in 1975 with Terror of Mechagodzilla.

Honda’s films were full of homegrown special effects shots. His speciality was putting a guy named Haruo Nakajima in a lizard suit and filming him tearing down cardboard cities. In the black and white Gojira, which is at its heart a deadly serious fantasy of the firebombing of Tokyo, it’s chillingly effective. Later, when color was added, and there were a couple of guys in suits wrestling each other on scale model Monster Island, it descended into self-parody.

John Boyega (above) stars in Pacific Rim: Uprising as the war between humankind and giant monsters continues.

In 2013, Guillermo del Toro dedicated Pacific Rim to Honda. The film, set in a shiny future where much of the world’s GDP is devoted to building giant robots call jaegers to fight giant, monstrous invaders from another dimension, is right out of the Honda playbook. It was a modest success in the United States, and a huge hit in Asia. For the sequel, freshly minted Best Director del Toro turned over the reigns of his new franchise to veteran TV director Steven S. DeKnight, and brought on a mostly new cast, made necessary by the last film’s high body count for giant robot pilots. The biggest missing piece is Idris Elba as Stacker Pentacost, who was last seen detonating an atomic bomb on the floor of the ocean to seal up the interdimensional rift allowing the kaiju to travel to Earth. Ten years after his world-saving sacrifice, his son Jake (John Boyega) struggles in the shadow of his memory. Where Stacker was a soldier, Jake is a playboy, making a good but illegal living selling stolen jaeger technology. But when a misadventure with fellow jaeger hacker Amara (Cailee Spaeny) goes bad, the two are caught and pressed into service by the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, led by Jake’s adoptive sister Mako (Rinko Kikuchi). There, they struggle under the command of Jake’s frenemy Nate (Scott Eastwood), until an attack by a mysterious giant robot named Obsidian Fury signals the beginning of another round of world-threatening attacks by, variously, giant cyborgs, drones, kaiju, and grotesque meta-mega-kaiju.

At this point, I figure you’re either the kind of person who is liable to be entertained by giant robots fighting giant monsters, or you’re not. If you’re the former, or if you’re giant-robot-curious, this is the movie for you. If you’re the latter, you should give this one a pass, because Pacific Rim: Uprising is pretty much just giant robots doing stuff.

As I sat in the theater nodding while John Boyega led his giant robots into battle on (where else) the slopes of Mt. Fuji, I wondered: Why does Pacific Rim work when our other major Giant Robots Doing Stuff franchise, Transformers, fails so utterly and so predictably? I think it’s because the folks behind Pacific Rim don’t hate their audience, their jobs, and themselves. Boyega, for example, has bonhomie to spare and knows exactly how serious to take the material. In order to make the dizzying action scenes work, he has to sell the fact that driving a giant battle robot is extremely dangerous, while also subtly winking to audience that, yeah, this is a movie about giant battle robots. He’s trying, while his Transformers counterpart Mark Wahlberg just looks like he’s been rousted out of bed and forced to play each scene before he’s had his coffee.

Maybe that also explains the continuing appeal of Honda’s kaiju movies. Even with something as bloated and silly as 1969’s All Monsters Attack, you get the sense that this is a product of a bunch of artists having fun. Pacific Rim: Uprising is big and dumb, but at least it’s having fun.

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The Shape Of Water

Fish. Everybody likes them, but some people really like them.

I’m going to try to keep the jokes to a minimum in this review, because Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a good movie. You might even call it the Citizen Kane of fish fetishist films.

OK, I’ll stop. I promise. The Shape Of Water begins beautifully, with an art deco apartment completely submerged in water, with the furniture floating everywhere, and our heroine Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) suspended in ecstasy. The apartment drains suddenly as Elisa wakes from her dreamworld to discover that she is still in 1962 Baltimore, and her existence is just as dreary as she left it. Elisa, rendered mute from a childhood injury that left her throat scarred, works in housekeeping at a secret government lab. She’s not unhappy, per se—she’s got her bestie Zelda (Octavia Spencer) to watch her back at work, and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a commercial artist freelancing after he lost his job for being gay—but she’s not exactly fulfilled, either. The highlight of most days for her is masturbating in the tub. Yeah, she’s got a thing for water.

(The apartment, by the way, is above a movie theater called The Orpheum whose signage and interior looks almost exactly like Memphis’ venerable Downtown treasure.)

A lot of weird stuff goes through the lab, and the housekeeping staff is used to keeping their mouths shut and mopping up the occasional pool of unexplained blood. But nothing prepares Elisa for the moment she sees the lab’s latest asset, a humanoid amphibian that, for complex copyright reasons, I can’t say looks like a super cool version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In charge of the Asset is Col. Strickland (Michael Shannon), a sexually harassing creep whose idea of scientific research is torturing Amphibian Guy with an electric cattle prod he calls his “Alabama Howdy-Do”.

Elisa takes pity on the poor amphibian and starts sneaking into the lab to feed him eggs and play him Benny Goodman tunes on her portable turntable. As his condition deteriorates, and she overhears plans to vivisect the Asset, she hatches a hairbrained plan to bust him out of the lab and return him to the ocean. Naturally, things spiral out of control, and she and her new fishy beaux are plunged into a whirlpool of Soviet spies, shady scientists, and aquatic intrigue.

The Shape Of Water grew out of del Toro’s failed pitch to direct a reboot of The Creature From The Black Lagoon for Universal’s monster universe. Those execs are probably kicking themselves for passing over del Toro in favor of Tom Cruise’s excruciating remake of The Mummy. The Shape Of Water is a return to form for del Toro after his gothic horror romance Crimson Peak—which, admittedly, some people liked, but I thought was tedious and silly. The difference here is Hawkins, whose near wordless performance mixes perfectly with del Toro’s always inventive visual sense. She actually manages to have good chemistry with the six-foot amphibian, played in a horribly restrictive, CGI-augmented suit by Doug Jones (but not that Doug Jones). The premise is goofy as hell, but late in the film, when Elisa slips into a dream where she and her Special Amphibian Friend dance in a big musical number, I realized that del Toro had drawn me into this world. The Shape Of Water will charm the pants off of you, and you won’t even mind the fishy smell afterwards.

The Shape Of Water

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Film Review: Crimson Peak

My dearest Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston),

It is with heavy heart that I must inform you that I, your wife, am leaving your ancestral home of Allerdale Hall, aka Crimson Peak, and filing for divorce. This may come as a shock to you, but I now think the dissolution of our relationship was inevitable from the start. Maybe when my mother came back from the grave as a hideous ghost and hissed “Beware of Crimson Peak!”, I should have listened to her. Maybe I should have noticed that you look and act just like the evil Norse trickster god Loki. Maybe I missed another opportunity to avert relationship disaster when my rich father Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver) tried to bribe you into leaving the country. But he was such a terrible actor that I was almost relieved when he died under mysterious circumstances. And besides, you needed his considerable fortune to finish the construction of your steampunk machine that will bring the red clay mines underneath your estate back to profitability.

Mia Wasikowska in Crimson Peak

Come to think of it, the weird scheme to create an automated clay-mining machine should have been another red flag. Is there really a huge market for gooey red clay that looks like fake blood? Maybe you could have put that money into fixing up the house instead. I mean, come on. There’s a giant hole in the roof where the rain and snow come in and cascade down into the central stairwell. Sure, it makes for a dramatic scene, and the soft snowdrift did save my life when your sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) tried to kill me, but it’s way past time to put a tarp on it. Between that, the walls that drip blood all the time, and the small army of ghosts that roam the halls (but never have much of an effect on the plot), my lawyer is going to have no trouble convincing the judge that you are forcing me to live in unacceptable conditions.

And then there’s your sister. Lucille is always smiling and courteous to my face, but I get the sense that she’s plotting against me. Perhaps it’s because of the similarities between our relationship and the one between Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains’ mother in the 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film Notorious, what with the poison in the tea and the purloined key and the basement full of secrets and whatnot. But the year is 1901, which means Hitch is just 2 years old and films with actual plots are only now being invented, so you can understand how I would have missed those particular red flags. I guess you live and learn.

I admit I share some of the blame for this fiasco. I guess I was blinded by the splendor of all those puffy-sleeved silk organza nightgowns and crushed velvet top hats. But frankly, my dear Thomas, there are so many holes in our story, I just don’t think it’s salvageable. So we must go our separate ways and hope that next time, director Guillermo del Toro can conjure up a more coherent world for us to live in.

Yours,

Edith Cushing Sharpe (Mia Wasikowska)

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The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies

There’s The Hobbit that is, and The Hobbit that might have been. Let’s talk about the latter first.

Far back in the mists of time (read: the mid-1990s), Peter Jackson and his screenwriter/producer/significant other Fran Walsh wanted to do a film trilogy based on the work of
J. R. R. Tolkien. Their original plan logically started with The Hobbit and condensed the events of the three Lord of the Rings novels into the remaining two films. But getting the fantasy movies financed was an uphill battle, so they cut costs by excising the “short” prequel of The Hobbit and pitching only the two darker and more action-packed Lord of the Rings movies. But when an exec at New Line finally saw the light, he wanted three movies, all based on The Lord of the Rings. Jackson agreed and made history with his now-classic fantasy trilogy, which culminated with 2003’s Return of the King winning 11 Academy Awards.

Naturally, New Line wanted more and set about an epic quest to bring The Hobbit to the screen and thus earn another dragon’s hoard’s worth of gold. They partnered with MGM, who then promptly went bankrupt, to make two movies out of the book that established Middle Earth. Jackson, Walsh, and screenwriter Philippa Boyens were back, and they brought in Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) to direct. The actual book Tolkien wrote is much lighter in tone than The Lord of the Rings books and is the shortest of the four volumes. But the chance to make a single, tight adaptation of The Hobbit had passed, and so Boyens and company brought in some material from Tolkien’s notes, short stories, and appendices to flesh out the story. But after years of delay, del Toro reluctantly moved on, and a recaptialized MGM demanded three movies to ensure steady cash flow as it emerged from bankruptcy. Professor Tolkien’s pastoral fantasy about dwarves who loved to sing, dragons who loved gold, and a pathologically honest hobbit burglar was now budgeted just shy of half a billion dollars.

The Battle of the Five Armies

Which brings us to The Hobbit that is. Boyens and Jackson worked from the two-movie plan they had developed with del Toro to expand the material even further and, with 2012’s The Unexpected Journey and 2013’s The Desolation of Smaug, have now crafted three financially successful films. But were they artistically successful?

The short answer is no; the long answer is yes with a but. There are shots, scenes, and whole sequences of The Battle of the Five Armies that are as riveting and beautiful as anything in Jackson’s oeuvre. When the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) tries to cross a bridge made from a fallen, crumbling tower while dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) fights the orc champion Azog at the top of a frozen waterfall, it is a virtuoso display of action movie choreography worthy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Martin Freeman does an excellent job of holding down the trilogy’s center as Bilbo Baggins, and Armitage brings a stately, tragic air to Thorin, the penniless dwarf who risked it all to reconquer his rightful throne as King under the Mountain from the dragon Smaug, only to lose his soul in the process.

As a work of epic fantasy to be binge-watched on HD flatscreens over a weekend, The Hobbit will hold its own against Game of Thrones, provided you’re not just in it for the HBO series’ extensive nudity. But as a filmgoing experience in its own right, The Battle of the Five Armies is erratic and unsatisfying. The opening sequence, where Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) confronts the dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) as Laketown burns around him should be edge-of-your-seat thrilling. But even a dyed-in-the-wool fanboy like me, who first read The Hobbit when my age was still counted in single digits, had trouble working out who was who and why I should care until the old guard of Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel, Ian McKellan’s Gandalf, and Christopher Lee’s Saruman slip on their Rings of Power and mix it up with Sauron on the top of a mountain. But even that incredible scene isn’t part of Tolkien’s book, and it’s the plague of additional subplots that keeps the entire trilogy from achieving greatness. There’s a great movie buried in the almost eight hours of The Hobbit trilogy, and I’m sure Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens, know it. But as the dwarf Balin (Ken Stott) says, “Don’t underestimate the evil of gold.”