Tag: Olivia Wilde

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Don’t Worry Darling

Florence Pugh carries Don’t Worry Darling. Harry Styles, not so much.

The new film Don’t Worry Darling has been overshadowed by the off-screen drama between director Olivia Wilde and stars Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, and fired star Shia LaBeouf. That’s a shame because the film’s message is applicable to contemporary feminism and society. There’s a lot more to it than just the controversy.

The story focuses on a young married couple, Jack (Harry Styles) and Alice (Florence Pugh), who are living a “perfect” life. Alice goes about her day preparing meals for her husband, having a drink ready for him when he arrives home, and satisfying his sexual needs. What Jack does when he’s not at home with Alice is the subject of some mystery. It all seems to be going swimmingly, until Alice starts asking questions: Where does he go every day? Why does she have to live subordinate to him? Why are they even there? But Alice’s questions are met with gaslighting. The men around her portray her as mentally unstable, even dangerous. When Alice’s friend Margaret (KiKi Layne) asks the same questions, she is driven to suicide and taken away from society. When Alice asks what happened, she is told not to worry, that Margaret and her husband were just having a little trouble. Alice’s curiosity about her world, that is both familiar and unsettling, will lead to shocking revelations and bloodshed.

The strength of Wilde’s direction lies in her world-building. She uses long shots of Alice and Jack’s cul-de-sac to express the habitual routines that define the societal structures that keep everyone in their place. She focuses on the details of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and ballet classes that frame Alice’s empty days. Wilde fills the film with symbols, characters, and dialogue which point to the men’s abuse of power.

Florence Pugh is the most engrossing aspect of Don’t Worry Darling. The brilliance of emotions she displays draws you deeper into this strange world. Whenever Alice felt pain, fear, or confusion, I found myself feeling the same emotions in the pit of my stomach. When Alice finally decides to act on her vague suspicions, Pugh walks us through her fear, despair, and resolve.

Another strong performance is by Chris Pine, who usually plays a clean-cut prince. He and Wilde play with your expectations, turning Pine’s character Frank into a dark, godlike figure who appears to hold the answers to the mysteries of this world. Wilde finds the hidden layers of Pine’s personality that were only glimpsed in his previous hero roles.

While Pugh and Pine are excellent, the oppressed housewife role is overplayed. What saves Don’t Worry Darling from a potentially dull plot line of suburban conformity and gender expectations is the shock ending. I won’t spoil it here, but when walking out of the theater, I found myself repeatedly saying, “Wow. Holy crap. Wow. That was —.”

The film’s biggest problem is the miscasting of Jack. Like any other Gen Zer, I have a special place in my heart for Harry Styles as a singer. But for a story so laden with meaning, casting a teenage heartthrob as the male lead turns out to be a very bad choice. Styles can sing, but he can’t act. Often, I found Styles’ facial expressions inappropriate for the emotions Jack should be experiencing. For example, when Alice says she wants to leave their life, she weeps into Jack’s arms and cradles his hands whilst tears stain her dress. Jack, two inches away from Alice’s blushed face, has not a single tear, semblance of emotion, or even eye contact with Alice. This happened many times in scenes where emotion was essential.

In the end, the positives outweigh the Harry Styles-shaped negatives. For me, Don’t Worry Darling is a must-watch for its powerful evocation of feminist values, and the lengths some men will go to in order to feel superior to the women in their lives. Wilde’s themes are best summed up by a minor character’s final words. As Shelley (Gemma Chan) uses a kitchen knife to take charge of her life, she hisses, “You stupid, stupid man.”

Don’t Worry Darling
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2019: The Year in Film

The year 2019 will go down in history as a watershed. Avengers: Endgame made $357 million on its opening weekend, which was not only the biggest take for any film in history, but also the most profitable three days in the history of the American theater industry. It was the year that the industry consolidation entered its endgame, with Disney buying 20th Century Fox and cornering more than 40 percent of the market. Beyond the extruded superhero film-type product, it turned out to be a fantastic year for smaller films with something to say. Here’s my list of the best of a year for the history books.

Worst Picture: Echo in the Canyon Confession: I decided life is too short to watch The Angry Birds Movie 2, so Echo in the Canyon is probably not the worst film released in 2019 — just the worst one I saw. Laurel Canyon was brimming over with creativity in the 1960s and 1970s, with everyone from Frank Zappa to the Eagles living in close, creative quarters. How did this happen? What does it say about the creative process? Jakob Dylan’s excruciatingly dull vanity documentary answers none of those questions. The best/worst moment is when Dylan The Lesser argues with Brian Wilson about the key of a song Wilson wrote.

‘Soul Man’

Best Memphis Film(s): Hometowner Shorts I’ve been competing in and covering the Indie Memphis Hometowner Shorts competition for the better part of two decades, and this year was the strongest field ever. Kyle Taubken’s “Soul Man” won the jury prize in a stacked field that included career-best work by directors Morgan Jon Fox, Kevin Brooks, Abby Myers, Christian Walker, Alexandra Ashley, Joshua Cannon, Daniel Farrell, Nathan Ross Murphy, and Jamey Hatley. The future of Memphis filmmaking is bright.

Apollo 11

Best Documentary: Apollo 11 There was no better use of an IMAX screen this year than Todd Douglas Miller’s direct cinema take on the first moon landing. Pieced together from NASA’s peerless archival collection and contemporary news broadcasts, Apollo 11 is a unique, visceral adventure.

Amazing Grace LLC

Amazing Grace

Best Music: Amazing Grace The year’s other direct cinema triumph is this long-awaited reconstruction of Aretha Franklin’s finest hour. The recording of her 1972 gospel album was filmed (badly) by director Sydney Pollack, but the reconstruction by producer Alan Elliott made a virtue of the technical flaws to highlight one of the greatest performances in the history of American music.

King Ghidorah, Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: King Ghidorah, Godzilla: King of the Monsters Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a tasty treat for megafauna fetishists. Godzilla, the Cary Grant of kaiju, looked dashing, but he was upstaged by his three-headed arch enemy. King Ghidorah, aka Monster Zero, whose pronoun preference is presumably “they,” is magnificently menacing, but versatile enough do a little comedy schtick while pulverizing Boston.

Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore

Slickest Picture: Dolemite Is My Name Eddie Murphy’s comeback picture is also Memphis director Craig Brewer’s best film since The Poor & Hungry. Murphy pours himself into the role of Rudy Ray Moore, the comedian who transformed himself into a blaxploitation hero. The excellent script by Ed Wood scribes Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski hums along to music by Memphian Scott Bomar. Don’t miss the cameo by Bobby Rush!

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

MVP: Brad Pitt Every performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is great, but Brad Pitt pulls the movie together as aging stuntman Cliff Booth. It was a performance made even more remarkable by the fact that he single-handedly saved Ad Astra from being a drudge. In 2019, Pitt proved he’s a character actor stuck in a movie star’s body.

Beanie Felstien as Molly and Kaitlyn Dever as Amy in Booksmart

Miss Congeniality: Booksmart I unabashedly loved every minute of Olivia Wilde’s teenage comedy tour de force. Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are a comedy team of your dreams, and Billie Lourd’s Spicoli impression deserves a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Booksmart is a cult classic in the making.

Chris Evans in Knives Out.

Best Screenplay: Knives Out In a bizarre twist worthy of Rian Johnson’s sidewinder of a screenplay, Knives Out may end up being remembered for memes of Chris Evans looking snuggly in a cable knit sweater. The writer/director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi dives into Agatha Christie mysteries and takes an all-star cast with him. They don’t make ’em like Knives Out anymore, but they should.

Lupita Nyong’o in Us

Best Performance: Lupita Nyong’o, Us If Jordan Peele is our new Hitchcock, Get Out is his Rear Window, an intensely focused and controlled genre piece. Us is his Vertigo, a more complex work where the artist is discovering along with the audience. Lupita Nyong’o’s dueling performances as both the PTSD-plagued soccer mom Adelaide and her sinister doppleganger Red is one for the ages.

Parasite

Best Picture: Parasite Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winner absolutely refuses to go the way you think it’s going to go. There was no better expression of the paranoid schizophrenic mood of 2019 than this black comedy from Korea about a family of grifters who infiltrate a wealthy family, only to find they’re not the only ones with secrets. It was a stiff competition, but Parasite emerges as the best of the year.

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Booksmart

Beanie Felstien as Molly and Kaitlyn Dever as Amy in Booksmart

Every now and then, a movie comes along that is so of its time that it comes to define its time. Rebel Without A Cause caught the energy of the early rock and roll era. In the 80s, John Hughes films both reflected high school reality and helped shape it. As I came out of Booksmart, I felt like I had just seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the first time. Olivia Wilde’s directing debut has the potential to be one of those generation-defining high school films.

Part of that is by design. Booksmart is very specifically about the class of 2019, and BFFs Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are about to graduate at the top of it. Amy is a do-gooder lesbian who drives a vintage Volvo with a Warren 2020 sticker on the bumper. Molly is the anti-Bart Simpson: the product of a distinctly working class home who is an overachiever at everything. On the last day of school, as class president, she’s more interested in going over year-end budget numbers with her jock VP Nick (Jason Gooding) than finding ways to celebrate.

When the FOMO hits.

But right before cap and gown time, they are suddenly struck by an acute case of late blooming FOMO. They set out on their penultimate high school night to find the ultimate high school party, and maybe finally put the moves on their respective crushes while they’re at it. The two have a Ferris/Cameron dynamic. Molly, utterly convinced of her own smarts, is constantly talking the reluctant Amy into escalating the hi-jinx, while Amy immediately lives to regret it. Feldstein, who shone as Saoirse Ronan’s best friend in Lady Bird, fully emerges as a major comedic talent. Dever plays it tighter to the vest, but the two characters are such fully intertwined teenage best friends you can’t really call her the straight woman.

We follow Amy and Molly, and root for them to have fun, and for their friendship to endure. But Booksmart rises above the usual teen movie cliches by fully humanizing all of its supporting characters. First and foremost is Hollywood royalty Billie Lourd giving off strong Jeff Spicoli vibes as Gigi, the drug addled rich girl who serves as Amy and Molly’s spirit guide for their procession through progressively less lame parties. Jared (Sklyer Gisondo) drives an 80s Firebird with a FUK BOI license plate. His taste in hats echoes Pretty In Pink’s Ducky. Booksmart kicks into high gear at the epically unsuccessful party he throws on a docked yacht, and keeps that momentum going all the way to the end, wrenching unexpected twists from the Superbad-like premise.

Billie Lourde as Gigi (left) taking Amy for a ride.

Working from a whip smart screenplay by four women writers, Wilde lovingly shepherds Amy and Molly through the best/worst night of their lives. The way she precisely balances out Fieldstein’s manic energy and Devers thin veneer of calm is reminiscent of how John Landis handled Belushi and Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers. Most crucially, editor Jamie Gross, who worked on MacGruber and Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, two of the decade’s best comedies, delivers a cut so tight you could bounce a quarter off it.

So much contemporary comedy feels clutching and desperate for a laugh. They’ll just throw in five vaguely amusing gags and hope you fall for one of them. Booksmart feels loose and spontaneous, and it looks like everyone’s having a good time on the set, but the laughs flow naturally from the characters and situations. Even when something truly, Porky’s-level outlandish happens, it feels earned, and not mean spirited. It’s hard to do comedy well in these politically fraught times, but Wilde gets the tone just right, so it feels like an authentic voice of Generation Z, or whatever the hell we’re calling the kids these days.

And what kind of portrait of the “kids theses days” emerges from Booksmart? Pretty darn good, all things considered. The politics of the moment are integral to everything. Molly is focused on changing things from within the system, and planning to move to Washington to get into politics after she graduates from Yale, which conveniently fits her personal ambition in with the greater good. Amy, who sports a denim jacket with patches that say “SISTERS”, is going to go to Africa to help women there directly. You know that their idealism will get roughed up when they run up against the real world, but the kids’ determination to shape it in a new and better image is the spark that gives them life. And consider this: Even at the end of John Hughes most optimistic film, The Breakfast Club, the social barriers remain in place, even if the characters themselves got to see around them for a time. In Booksmart, once social barriers are confronted, they’re revealed to have been mirages all along. If that’s how the class of 2019 sees the world, we’re all going to be better off.

Booksmart

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Flashbacks: Vinyl and 11.22.63

Two new TV series obsess over the details of a certain moment in time, but with vastly different approaches.

Bobby Cannavale as hard living record executive Ritchie Finestra in Vinyl

As Martin Scorsese’s new series for HBO, Vinyl is focused on 1973, a time which, in retrospect, was the height of the recording industry. Co-produced with Mick Jagger and much of the same production team behind Boardwalk Empire, including writer Terence Winter, Vinyl is a tale of out of control excess on all fronts. Bobby Cannavale, veteran of that show as well as Will And Grace, plays record executive Ritchie Finestra, head of the fictional American Century records. Ritchie is trying to turn his company’s fortunes around by signing Led Zeppelin and selling out the the German company Polygram, and turn his life around by getting clean and moving to Connecticut with his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde). But with cocaine bumping all through his hard partying social circle, it’s clear from the beginning that sobriety was going to be an uphill battle.

With his cronies Zak (Ray Romano) and P.J. (Scott Levitt) at his side, he uses his “golden ear” to find acts to create hits for the label, cringing when he finds out his A&R people had a turned down ABBA as uncommercial. Ritchie’s big breakthrough, which forms the frame of the pilot episode, is finding the New York Dolls and opening up the American glam rock scene. We also flash back to the 1960s, when Ritchie got his start in the business promoting soul singers. Ritchie is another totally unlikeable protagonist in the Scorsese mold of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. Record executives and Wall Street junk bond traders both live near the bottom of the list of careers that inspire sympathy, and Ritchie’s cavalier attitude towards paying his artists justifies reflexive hatred.

But drug-crazed macho preening is not Vinyl’s biggest problem. It’s characters seem to lack motivation (beyond “he’s drug crazed”) for almost anything they do, flying into fits of rage and falling in lust almost at random. And for a historical story made by people who were there, it plays fast and loose with anachronism. Punk and hip hop arrive three years too early, and the concert scenes, which should be the series strong suit, come off like Rock Band: The TV Show. There’s a long way yet to go in Vinyl’s first season, but Scorsese and company will be hard pressed to get themselves out of the corner that the pilot’s frankly ridiculous ending painted them into.

James Franco gets anachronistic in 11.22.63

Better with the historical details is Hulu’s 11.22.63. With 50 years of conspiracy theorists picking over the Warren Report and Zapruder film, few historical events have been obsessed over as thoroughly as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stephen King, who wrote the short novel that the series uses as a jumping off point, created the story out of seemingly the same impulse that drove Oliver Stone to make JFK: to wallow in the details and try to emerge with a coherent narrative. But there’s no Stone-esque psychedelia here. Director Kevin MacDonald’s pilot is a workmanlike table setting exercise, spelling out the rules of the time travel scenario that sees New England writing teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) going back to 11:58 AM on October 21, 1960 by merely stepping into the closet in the back of the neighborhood diner run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper) Jake is convinced by Al to use the portal to try and stop the Kennedy assassination, and thus Vietnam and a host of other bad things from happening. He’s got a carefully researched dossier accumulated from his own time travel adventures, and advice like “If you do something that really fucks with the past, the past fucks with you.”

King has had a spotty record with adaptations of his work, but this 11.22.63 does a good job of capturing him at a moment of storytelling tightness. Franco is an appealing presence, and his experience in genre work, which often requires actors to convey information about plot and emotional states very quickly, shines through. The first of eight planned episodes finds Jake experimenting with all of the information advantages being a time traveller 50 years in the past brings, which, when done intelligently and with a sense of play, is the fun part about time travel stories. The trademark King supernatural creepiness comes into play in the person of the Yellow Card Man (Kevin J. O’Connor) who periodically appears to Franco to point out that he doesn’t belong in the past. With the expositional formalities out of the way, 11.22.63 looks ready to take off.

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Third Person

What turns a comedy into a drama? It’s a good question that Third Person writer-director Paul Haggis would never deign to answer. But it’s a question the film raises, and you might come up with a few theories after watching it.

Like his Oscar-winning 2004 film Crash, Third Person is a sprawling and ambitious network narrative powered by pretty people in big cities trying to connect. One story set in NYC follows a downtrodden former soap opera star (Mila Kunis) engaged in a custody battle with her ex-husband, a world-renowned finger painter (WTF?) played by James Franco. A second story, which features a sad-sack corporate lackey (Adrien Brody) who slowly and justifiably grows infatuated with a mysterious beauty he meets in a bar (Moran Atias), takes place in Rome. The third story concerns a successful writer (Liam Neeson), who, when he isn’t staring meaningfully at the MacBook on the desk in his gigantic Paris hotel room, is carrying on an affair with a woman (Olivia Wilde) young enough to be his daughter.

As Third Person‘s stories unfold, a few provocative cross-cuts combine with some odd coincidences and repetitions to suggest a deeper connection among these people.

Wilde, however, stands out. Like Cameron Diaz, Wilde uses her intense, playful sexiness to go two places instead of one; the way she lounges about on couches and beds also heightens her cutting coolness, intelligence, and emotional distance. Wilde’s aspiring writer and gossip columnist character may be smarter and more attractive than anyone around her, but even she can’t breathe the necessary life into the perfectly sculpted and obviously written dialogue she’s given.

When the script’s literary aspirations mix with the rough-draft incompleteness of its interpersonal encounters, Third Person‘s deliberate yet roughed-in feel starts to undermine the weightier moments. Big emotional scenes can’t be trusted, and any bite or zip in smaller moments is lost; every meaningful frame, gesture, and slow-motion action sequence starts to look funny. Humorless ambition may be the currency of dictators and football coaches, but it makes for lousy art.

Third Person

Opens Friday, July 18th

Studio on the Square