Tag: Helena Bonham Carter

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Ocean’s 8

What is the appeal of the heist movie? Is it about watching a supremely clever person concoct an elaborate plan, and then reveling in the OCD perfection when all the pieces click into place? Is it about the powerless getting one over on the powerful? Or is it all about the charisma of the criminal mastermind, a way for the audience to harmlessly indulge their need for a leader?

The history of heist pictures goes all the way back to the beginnings of American cinema, and they’ve always been popular. The Great Train Robbery held the record for highest grossing movie from 1903 until Birth of a Nation in 1915. It was also the subject of the first remake in history, when Edwin S. Porter’s original film was redone by Sigmund Lubin and released under the same title in the same year.

The only heist movie that’s been remade almost as often as The Great Train Robbery is Ocean’s 11. The original is a curious artifact: a massive vanity project put on by the Rat Pack as their Las Vegas decadence reached fever pitch. It’s not a great movie. Frank Sinatra is visibly distracted, while Martin is visibly drunk. It’s a bunch of celebrities cynically cashing in on their fame, best enjoyed by fans who are content just to look at their heroes.

Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter star in writer/director Gary Ross’ Ocean’s 8.

That’s one of the reasons Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s 11 remake was so surprising: It was actually a pretty good movie. Just as the original cemented the Rat Pack as the pre-eminent stars of the early 1960s, so too did Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11 define the first batch of 21st-century superstars: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, and Andy Garcia. Julia Roberts was the lone feminine presence to redeem the sausage fest.

Soderbergh took the barely-there plot of trying to rob a bunch of casinos at once and honed it to a razor edge. His editing was tight and cinematography outstanding. The 2001 Ocean’s 11 wasn’t just an object of fan admiration — although it unmistakably was on some level — but unambiguously good filmmaking. It’s trashy fun, but incredibly well executed.

A female driven remake was inevitable in the #MeToo era. The ragtag band of thieves camaraderie translates perfectly into the girl power moment, and high-powered talent agencies would love to see their clients put into the roles that women all over the world would imprint on. In the Sinatra/Clooney slot is Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean, the younger sister of Danny Ocean, who, we find out in the opening shots of the film, is dead. Probably.

The film gets off to a good start with Bullock faking sincerity in her parole hearing. She’s got the smooth prattle and irresistible charisma of the Ocean family down pat. Less than a day after being released from her five-year stint in the pen, she’s shoplifted a whole new wardrobe and fraudulently ensconced herself in a luxury hotel. Then, there’s the requisite gathering of the team: Lou (Cate Blanchett), a crooked New York nightclub owner; Amita (Mindy Kaling), a jeweler; Constance (Awkwafina) the pickpocket; a hacker known as Nine Ball (Rihanna); and Tammy (Sarah Paulson), a big time fence hiding out as a suburban mother of two. The plan, which Debbie came up with while in solitary confinement, is to steal a necklace called The Toussaint, valued at $150 million. To steal it, it has to be lured out into the open at the Met Gala, an annual, super ritzy fashion world party thrown by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To do that, the gang targets Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter), a fashion designer drowning in debt, to convince superstar actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) to use her clout to convince Cartier to let the necklace out of the vault so she can wear it for the party.

During the scenes inside the simulated Met Gala, Ocean’s 8 functions extremely well as lifestyle porn with a more propulsive plot than Fifty Shades of Grey. The actresses are rarely called upon to do much more than stand around and look cool, so heavy hitters like Blanchett and Paulson are out-cooled by a spliff-smoking Rihanna. In that way, Ocean’s 8 is much more like the 1960 Ocean’s 11 than the 2001 version. Unfortunately, director Gary Ross fundamentally lacks the Soderbergh snap that was on display in last year’s Logan Lucky. But if you’re just in it to look at some of the best actresses in the business pal around for a frothy summer treat, Ocean’s 8 will do just fine.

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Film Features Film/TV

Suffragette

Sarah Gavron’s new film Suffragette looks and feels like a fresh hunk of Oscar bait.

Now, you might be wondering what exactly “Oscar bait” is. Although noted author and peerless Academy Awards handicapper Mark Harris hates the term and wishes it would go away, Oscar bait is real, but it is seldom spectacular. You’ve seen Oscar bait before. Perhaps you’ve even enjoyed some of it. Maybe you’re an Argo kind of gal; me, I’m partial to animal-centric heart-tuggers like Spielberg’s War Horse. Wikipedia defines movies like these as “Lavishly produced, epic-length period dramas, often set against tragic historical events such as the Holocaust,” that “often contend for the technical Oscars such as cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, costume design, or production design … The cast may well include actors with previous awards or nominations, a trait that may also be shared by the director or writer.”

I might also add that movies like these typify a strain of safe, grade-grubbing, color-between-the-lines moviemaking that’s engineered for mature adults uninterested in or unresponsive to important aesthetic qualities like vulgarity, coarseness, economy, and wit. They also arrive on schedule every autumn. Once the leaves start to turn and the superhero franchises go into hibernation, these simple, proper, “sophisticated” films start showing up in theaters like fashionably late guests trying to class- up a kegger.

At first glance, Suffragette fits the Oscar bait description. At 106 minutes, though, it’s merely a normal-length period drama that’s set in 1912 England. The tragic historical event that drives its story and galvanizes its characters is, thankfully, not World War I; it’s the women’s suffrage movement, a time when many brave women exhibited surprising courage and resilience but were met with patronizing indifference and/or brute force.

Yet in a few key ways, Suffragette struggles against its prestige-picture corset. The production design is shrewd and economical but unspectacular, the cinematography serves up the same gruel-like gray found in any movie about the miseries of early 20th-century factory work, and the makeup, hairstyling, and costume design, while impressive at times, probably isn’t ostentatious enough to garner awards. Nevertheless, there’s a trio of Emmy or Oscar-nominated actors (Carey Mulligan, Brendan Gleeson, and Helena Bonham Carter) knocking heads here, and about midway through the film one multiple-Oscar winner shows up to bless the proceedings.

Suffragette‘s weird, bellicose sentimentality is also atypical for Oscar bait. It feels like a byproduct of Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s attempts to identify and harness the numerous energies — domestic, political, paternal, spiritual — that powered the movement they depict. Unfortunately, such energies often dissipate when set against Alexandre Desplat’s insufferable, obvious orchestral score. To its partial credit, though, Suffragette is a messy, distracted film that, like its laundress-turned-activist heroine Maud Watts (Mulligan), isn’t sure what exactly it wants to be.

It begins as a lively, idea-heavy drama about the validity of violent revolution, narrows its focus to document the social cost of one woman’s gradual political awakening, and plays around at being a cat-and-mouse detective story for a scene or two before reinventing itself as a gauzy, delicately colored reenactment of a shocking historical accident that had a monumental impact on both the English suffrage movement and suffrage efforts from around the world.

The performances are fine: Mulligan is her usual incredulous, sobbing self; Gleeson assays a half-decent portrait of disgruntled middle-aged compromise; Bonham Carter is tiny and fierce; and rugged types like Anne-Marie Duff shine for a scene or two. But not everyone is watchable. Emmeline Pankhurst, the rabble-rousing ringleader of the English suffrage movement, is played by none other than Meryl Streep. Streep appears for a single scene, but when she delivers her fiery, inspirational balcony speech, she looks like Mary Poppins and sounds like Glinda the Good Witch. Plus, there’s so much crosscutting between Parkhurst’s speech and the British government’s attempts to nab her that what could have been a fun, hammy, Orson Wellesian drop-in is over before it lands.

Such eccentric timing exemplifies Suffragette‘s hyperventilating, wind-sprint-sense of pacing. One minute the camera is darting through crowds at high speeds, barely recording moments of triumph by the women or moments of violence by the police in charge; the next minute it slows way down for close-ups of tear-stained faces, newspaper photographs, and feet.

So is Suffragette Oscar bait or not? More than likely, it’s not enough of anything to matter much.

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Film Features Film/TV

Cinderella

It was strange to watch Disney’s new, live-action Cinderella so soon after seeing Into the Woods. In Stephen Sondheim’s fairy tale musical mashup, Cinderella, who was played in last year’s film adaption by the extraordinarily talented Anna Kendrick, is a flighty, witty presence who toys with the Prince because she can’t seem to make up her mind about much of anything. But the new Disney Cinderella played by Downton Abbey‘s Lily James is none of those things, which is why Sondheim’s take on the character is labeled “revisionist.” For better or worse, this Cinderella is as familiar and unthreatening as Disney’s branding department needs her to be.

The director Disney chose to revamp the intellectual property Walt appropriated from the cultural commons of fairy tale land is Kenneth Branagh. A prolific Irish stage actor who was hailed as the second coming of Sir Lawrence Olivier, Branagh is no stranger to screen adaptations, having began his film career in 1989 the same way Oliver did in 1944, with a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Henry V. And while he has done yeoman’s work adopting the Bard over the years (Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet), lately, he’s found success adopting Marvel heroes (Thor) and Tom Clancy novels (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit).

Even working within the Disney corporate environment, Branagh’s hand is evident in Cinderella. He approaches this adaptation in the same classy way he approaches Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: It’s not the Grimm version of the tale he’s adopting, like Sondheim did in Into the Woods. Nor is it the 17th-century French version of the tale Cendrillon, which introduced the Fairy Godmother and the glass slippers. Branagh’s bailiwick is to adopt Disney’s 1950 animated musical Cinderella into a live-action, non-musical version.

I’m still pondering why anyone thought this would be a good idea. Cinderella is extremely important to Disney. It’s widely credited as being the film that saved the studio, reversing Walt’s sliding fortunes after a decade of war and bad luck had pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. After all, Disneyland’s centerpiece is Cinderella’s Castle. It’s built right into their corporate logo. And no one has been more successful with musicals in the 21st century than Disney, as hordes of parents who can’t get “Let It Go” from Frozen out of their heads will be the first to tell you. So why strip out the music from the corporate flagship, dooming it from the very beginning to be a tinny echo of the original?

Branagh does his best, as he always does, and over all, the production benefits from his taste and style. Cinderella reads Pepys to her melancholy father (Ben Chaplin) after her mother (Hayley Atwell of Agent Carter fame) dies. The diction is much higher than with most movies aimed primarily at preteen girls, with narrator and Fairy God Mother Helena Bonham Carter opining about how “economies were taken” when Cinderella’s father dies offscreen, leaving her stepmother (Cate Blanchett, who steals every scene she’s in) and stepsisters Drisella (Sophie McShera) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) without any means of support. James’ Cinderella and the Prince (Richard Madden from Game of Thrones) actually have good chemistry, and they appropriately share some of the film’s best scenes together, such as when Branagh has them circle each other on horseback when they first meet in the forest, and when they steal away during the ball so he can show her his “secret garden.” Visually, the director takes frequent inspiration from the animated version, from the color coding of the wicked stepsisters to the way Cinderella’s pumpkin coach dissolves when the Fairy Godmother’s spell wears off.

Branagh’s swooping camera and sumptuous CGI palaces look good enough, but they can’t replace the classic, hand-drawn animation of the old-school Cinderella. And even without the songs, this version is almost 50 minutes longer than the classic. Most of the extra running time comes in the beginning, when Branagh spends time exploring more of the family’s backstory, although he wisely gives Blanchett’s Wicked Stepmother as much screen time as possible. Cinderella‘s not a bad movie, per se, it’s just turgid, overly long, and desperate for a reason to exist beyond the boffo box office numbers it put up last weekend. But we all know that, for the House of Mouse, $132 million is reason enough.