Tag: Ryan Gosling

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The Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt

Hollywood is not exactly a place where justice flourishes. But aside from all of the sexual assault, and the way some white guys keep failing upward, one of the biggest injustices in Hollywood is the fact that there is no Academy Awards category for stunt work. 

I don’t know if you’ve looked at a movie lately, but stunt performers are getting more screen time than ever. Many great pioneers of cinema built their reputations on hair-raising stunts: Think Charlie Chaplin roller-skating backwards on the edge of an abyss in Modern Times, or Buster Keaton riding on a locomotive cow catcher, batting railroad ties off the tracks in The General. Jackie Chan, the king of the Hong Kong stunt performers, has broken so many bones his injuries were shown as outtakes in his film’s credit sequences. Chan’s pain became part of his star attraction. 

It’s not like stunt work is not artistic. Look at the greatest film of the 21st century, Mad Max: Fury Road, and tell me the pole cat attack, where the performers are swinging on 20-foot poles mounted on vehicles traveling 80 miles per hour, is not artistic. Even if you do define “art” more narrowly, there’s still the existence of technical categories like Best Sound Design and Best Visual Effects. Stunt work is every bit as necessary for the success of the film as the talented professionals in those categories.

And look, if you want to jazz up the rating of the Academy Awards (and who doesn’t want jazzier ratings?), adding categories where Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious could win something is just the ticket. 

One person who definitely agrees with me on this, the most pressing issue of our time, is director David Leitch. He’s a former stunt performer himself, having been at one time Brad Pitt’s stunt double of choice, before directing the star in Bullet Train. He’s also the co-creator of the John Wick franchise, which has taken fight choreography into the realm of modern dance. The Fall Guy is his love letter to the world of stunt performers. It’s the rare action movie that really feels like it’s made with love. 

It’s also relentlessly inside baseball because there’s nothing film people like more than films about themselves, or “self-reflexivity” in film theory-speak. The Fall Guy is ostensibly based on a TV series from the 1980s starring a post-Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors as a stunt man who solves crimes. (In the 1980s, it was a requirement that every TV star had to solve crimes. But I digress.) In a weird way, The Fall Guy owes a great deal to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, the 1971 romantic comedy about a film set that’s always on the verge of falling to pieces but never quite does.  

Leitch’s star is Ryan Gosling, and to say he’s perfect for the role of Colt Seavers is a profound understatement. The source material is a notoriously rich vein of Reagan ’80s masculinity, with Majors driving a truck and singing country music between bringing in bounties. Gosling brings some much needed Kenergy to the role. This Colt Seavers cries to Taylor Swift songs. There’s not too many actors who could convincingly make a phone confession of their love to their girlfriend, director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), while also fleeing from assassins in a stolen speedboat. 

Jody and Colt met years ago when she was a camera op and he was the preferred stunt double for megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). While filming Tom’s latest sci-fi blockbuster, their relationship evolves from a semi-recurring, on-set fling (which is a fairly common thing in the film world) to something more serious. Then, producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) insists Colt do another take of a dangerous high fall. Colt’s luck runs out, and he wakes up on a stretcher with a broken back. 

Eighteen months later, Colt is hiding out in Los Angeles, working as a valet at a Mexican restaurant, when Gail catches up with him. Jody is directing her first big feature film, a passion project she and Gail have worked for years to put together. They need Colt for a big stunt, a dangerous cannon roll on a beach. Jody has personally asked for him, Gail says, to support her as she tries to make good on her first big break. More inside baseball: Jody’s “passion project” is apparently a remake of the 1983 movie Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, a 3D debacle so notoriously awful it is nowadays only watched by sick cinematic masochists such as myself. 

Colt arrives on set in Sydney and pulls off the spectacular stunt, which in real life broke the Guinness World Record for most on-screen rolls by a car — a fact the film-within-a-film’s stunt coordinator Dan (Winston Duke) points out. But Jody’s not happy to see Colt. She was crushed when he cut off contact after the accident, and tells him via bullhorn as she repeatedly sets him on fire. “That was perfect! Let’s do it again!” 

When Colt confronts Gail, she reveals the real reason he’s been brought on board. Tom Ryder has gone missing, and since he and Colt used to be tight, Gail thinks he would be the best at discreetly tracking down the wayward movie star before Jody and Universal Pictures find out he’s gone AWOL. 

Gosling and Blunt are breezy and charming, and the supporting cast all understand the assignment. The whole point of the now-forgotten TV series was to cut to the chase, forget about all those pesky story beats, and get to the good stunts. The Fall Guy is at its best when it’s putting its small army of crack stunt performers through their paces with the safety wires and crash bags fully visible for once. It only makes the stunts more harrowing by emphasizing the human frailty of the performers. 

The Fall Guy
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Barbie

Margot Robbie as Barbie.

When it was announced that a Barbie movie was in the works, it’s safe to say that one of the questions that crossed everyone’s mind was “Why?”

Barbie’s dream universe has covered everything from nutcrackers to mermaid lore, and it seemed like Barbara Millicent Roberts was past her prime. The Y2K aesthetic only made room for Bratz dolls, and the meme-ification of American Girl dolls transformed them from status symbols to internet mainstays. Meanwhile, the opinion of feminist scholars who had long criticized Barbie for the outrageous beauty standards she perpetuated had gone mainstream. Girls still love their dolls, but Barbie’s star has burned out.

My interest was piqued when I heard Greta Gerwig would be tasked with telling Barbie’s story. The plot has been kept tightly under wraps, with rumors ranging from a Wizard of Oz-esque storyline to something like The Truman Show. Those rumors were not entirely wrong, but Barbie exists as its own film.

From the beginning, it’s evident that the film is a meta-narrative, which adds to the satirical charm. Helen Mirren narrates Barbie’s zeitgeist origin story in a 2001 Space Odyssey-themed sequence, in which she explains that the Barbie doll was created for girls to aspire to something other than motherhood. Barbie is aware of her existence in the world, and aware of the impact that she has had on society as a trailblazing role model for career-minded women. As Mirren notes in her narration, Barbie has solved all the problems of feminism and equality – or at least, that’s the lore in Barbieland.

Margot Robbie stars as the Stereotypical Barbie. She lives in Barbieland with an endless array of Barbie variants, such as Doctor Barbie (Hari Nef), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp) and President Barbie (Issa Rae), who preside over this matriarchal democracy.

Many Barbies live in Barbieland. But only Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie has flat feet.

Then we meet the Kens, who are just as varied as the Barbies, only less cool. Ryan Gosling’s iteration of Barbie’s companion lists “beach” as his profession. But it’s not easy being a Ken. Mirren explains that while Barbie has a great day every day, Ken has a great day only if Barbie looks at him.

Barbie’s perpetual string of great days takes a turn for the worse when she brings one of her nightly blowout parties/soundstage musical numbers to a record-scratch halt when she blurts out, “Do you ever think about dying?” The next morning, she wakes up with bad breath, falls out of her dream house, and discovers that her feet have gone flat. Realizing that something is wrong, she pays a visit to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who explains that the only way for Barbie to restore her perfect tiptoe and avoid cellulite is to trade in her heels for Birkenstocks and take a trip to the real world. Since Ken only exists as an ornamental addition to Barbie’s iconography, he joins her on the journey to reality, where they make discoveries that pose an existential threat to Barbieland’s women-run utopia.

Good morning, Barbieland!

The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie – the 2000 movie Life Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Robbie could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell.)  

Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself, like the recurring joke where Midge (Emerald Fennell), a pregnant version of Barbie that was deeply unpopular with kids, is banished to Skipper’s Treehouse. Gerwig’s attention to detail and dedication to the source material not only satiates a longing for nostalgia, but also showcases her intentionality. Since no child ever made a doll take the stairs in her Dream House, these Barbies float through the air from bedroom to dream car. Gerwig makes that floaty feeling last.

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New At The Movies: Paris, Love Triangles, and Crawdads

Ryan Gosling as Six in The Gray Man (Paul Abell/Netflix © 2022)

Hollywood is enjoying its first real post-pandemic summer blockbuster season, which means most weekends have been featuring only one or two new major new releases. But this weekend’s slate of new releases offers the most choice we’ve seen in months.

The most expensive release of the weekend has a local connection. The Gray Man is based on a book by Memphian Mark Greaney. It stars Ryan Gosling as Sierra Six, an above-top-secret CIA operative who has to go on the lam after uncovering some major government misdeeds. Retired Captain America Chris Evans plays against type as the psychopath hit man sent to track him down. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have worked with Evans before on some small independent movies you probably haven’t heard of called Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

Next up is another adaptation of a work by a Southern writer. Delia Owens is a zoologist from Georgia whose debut novel Where The Crawdads Sing became a huge bestseller in 2020. Reese Witherspoon is the executive producer of the film version, directed by Olivia Newman. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kya, nicknamed The Marsh Girl by the inhabitants of the small North Carolina town near where she lives. She’s accused of murdering the town’s star quarterback Chase (Harris Dickinson), and as an outcast, she makes a convenient scapegoat for the mysterious death. Swampy, Southern gothic intrigue ensues.

Lesley Manville earned an Academy Award nomination for Phantom Thread. Paul Gallico’s novel Mrs. ‘Arris Goes To Paris has been adapted for the screen three times. Director Anthony Fabian makes it four. Manville stars as an English maid who becomes obsessed with her boss’ Dior wardrobe, and embarks on an adventure to the City of Lights. French things ensue.

She Will is an intriguing folk horror from director Charlotte Colbert and IFC Films. Alice Krige stars as a film star recovering from cancer in a rural estate best known for a history of witch burning. Turns out the witch ghosts are pissed. Wouldn’t you be?

Gabby Giffords was a Congressional Representative from Arizona married to NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. Then, in 2011, one of her campaign events was attacked by a man with an assault rifle. Six people were killed. Giffords was shot in the head, but survived. Now, Kelly is a Senator and Giffords works for sensible gun control. Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down is a timely documentary from CNN Films.

French director Claire Denis has been quietly making great films since 1999’s Beau Travail. Her latest is Both Sides of the Blade. The great Juliette Binoche stars as Sarah, a Parisian radio DJ who is caught between her comfortable life with husband Jean (Vincent Lindon) and her sexy ex Francois (Gregorie Colin). Who doesn’t love a good erotic thriller?

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First Man

In First Man, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) is talking to his kids the night before heading to Cape Canaveral, where he will launch for the moon. His son Rick (Luke Winters) asks him if he’s sure he will make it to the moon and back. “A lot of things have to go right for that to happen,” he replies.

Armstrong was an Ohio farm boy and Eagle Scout who took his first solo flight before he learned to drive a car. He enrolled in college with the help of a Navy reserve scholarship just in time to be called up to fly close air support in Korea. After the war, he became a test pilot, putting the latest and fastest experimental aircraft through their paces, and waiting for something to fail.

Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in First Man

That’s where First Man picks up Armstrong’s story. In a riveting opening sequence, fraught with foreshadowing, he flies the X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space, then bounces off the atmosphere when he tries to return home. It’s only his quick thinking and superhuman calm that save him.

But once on the ground, the mastery he feels in the cockpit is rudely dispelled by reality. His two-year-old daughter Karen is dying of a brain tumor, and even though he brings the same scientific discipline and rigor to her treatment, there’s nothing he can do to save her. Neil and his wife Janet’s (Claire Foy) formerly strong relationship is strained to the breaking point by their daughter’s death, so he pours everything into his work — which soon means beating the Russians to the moon.

Armstrong is that greatest rarity in our fake age: an authentic hero. He was by all accounts exactly what he appeared to be, a sincere science geek who took his position as a role model seriously, even though he didn’t seek it out. After retiring from NASA, Armstrong chose to teach at the University of Cincinnati, the American city named for the early Roman general who refused the allure of dictatorial power and returned to tend his farm once the wars were through. After the moon landing, Armstrong was the most famous and respected person in the world. He could have, like fellow Ohioan John Glenn, parlayed his fame into a political career. Instead, he taught undergrads science at an underfunded public university. That alone sets him apart from the borderline sociopaths today’s big budget Hollywood productions portray as heroes.

Armstrong probably wasn’t cut out for politics outside NASA, though. A running gag in First Man has him ignored at Washington parties and bombing at press conferences, where he has to be bailed out by the bombastic Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll). In his element, Armstrong was eloquent and concise. Gosling’s greatest moment is when the NASA selection committee asks him why we should travel into space, and his stoic exterior slips as he talks about the need to change our earthbound perspective.

Gosling, who does “Midwest reserve” better than anyone, was born to play Armstrong, His performance is matched by Foy as a woman who has been to way too many funerals. Other standouts in the cast include Kyle Chandler as Chief Astronaut Deke Slayton and Christopher Abbott as Dave Scott, who almost dies in orbit with Armstrong when the Gemini 8 mission goes spectacularly wrong.

Directed by Damien Chazelle, First Man boasts some incredible set design and art direction. The NASA offices are bleak, utilitarian government buildings, while the space capsules are incredibly complex, handmade deathtraps. For the spaceflights which form the film’s backbone of set pieces, Chazelle keeps things mostly restricted to Armstrong’s point of view, where the rockets roar, the metal groans and creaks, and wonders lurk just outside the tiny window. And it works, for the most part.

Like the moon shot, a lot of things have to go exactly right for a giant
biopic like this to take off. Unfortunately, First Man suffers from a major systems failure. The cinematography, credited to Linus Sandgren, undermines the solid script, good performances, and exquisite art design. First Man is shot in multiple formats (16 mm, 35 mm, and IMAX) which are combined haphazardly at best. Long stretches of the film are done in intentionally shaky handheld camera that is just plain bad. You can hold your iPhone steadier than these professional camera operators manage while just shooting two characters walking down the street, having a conversation. It’s especially baffling coming from Chazelle, whose last film, La La Land, was one of the most visually rigorous of the decade. That means rendering intimate domestic scenes like they were battles in The Hunger Games was a deliberate, nauseating choice. There are flashes of brilliance in First Man, but like the stuck thruster that almost killed Neil Armstrong before he ever got to the moon, the shoddy photography sends the whole thing spinning out of control.

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2017: The Year In Film

In America, it was the worst of times, but inside the multiplex, it was the best of times. Mega-blockbusters faltered, while an exceptional crop of small films excelled. There was never a week when there wasn’t something good playing on Memphis’ big screens. Here’s the Flyer‘s film awards for 2017.

Worst Picture: Transformers: The Last Knight
There was a crap-flood of big budget failures in 2017. The Mummy was horrifying in the worst way. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales sank the franchise. There was an Emoji Movie for some reason. What set Michael Bay’s nadir apart from the “competition” was its sneering contempt for the audience. I felt insulted by this movie. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think about their lives.

Zeitgiestiest: Ingrid Goes West
In the first few years of the decade, our inner worlds were reshaped by social media. In 2017, social media reshaped the real world. No film better understood this crucial dynamic, and Aubrey Plaza’s ferociously precise performance as an Instagram stalker elevates it to true greatness.

Most Recursive: The Disaster Artist
James Franco’s passion project is a great film about an awful film. He is an actor dismissed as a lightweight doing a deep job directing a film about the worst director ever. He does a great job acting as a legendarily bad actor. We should be laughing at the whole thing, but somehow we end up crying at the end. It’s awesome.

Overlooked Gem: Blade Runner 2049
How does a long-awaited sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, directed by one of the decade’s best directors, co-starring a legendary leading man and the hottest star of the day, end up falling through the cracks? Beats me, but if you like Dennis Villaneuve, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, smart scripts, and incredible cinematography, and you didn’t see this film, rectify your error

Best Scene: Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land
The most successful superhero movie of the year was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Midway through the picture, our hero leads a company of soldiers across a muddy World War I battlefield. Assailed on every side by machine gun fire and explosions, Wonder Woman presses on, never wavering, never doubting, showing the fighting men what real inner strength looks like. In this moment, Gal Gadot became a hero to millions of girls.

Best Memphis Movie: Good Grief
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking’s documentary Good Grief rose above a highly competitive, seven-film Hometowner slate at Indie Memphis to sweep the feature awards. It is a delicate, touching portrait of a summer camp for children who have lost loved ones due to tragedy. Full disclosure: I’m married to one of the directors. Fuller disclosure: I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the success of this film.

MVP: Adam Driver
Anyone with eyes could see former Girls co-star Adam Driver was a great actor, but he came into his own in 2017 with a trio of perfect performances. First, he lost 50 pounds and went on a seven-day silent prayer vigil to portray a Jesuit missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Then he was Clyde Logan, the one-armed Iraq vet who helps his brother and sister rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Stephen Soderberg’s Logan Lucky. Finally, he was Kylo Ren, the conflicted villain who made Star Wars: The Last Jedi the year’s best blockbuster.

Best Editing: Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s heist picture is equal parts Bullitt and La La Land. In setting some of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed to a mixtape of sleeper pop hits from across the decades, Wright and editor Jonathan Amos created the greatest long-form music video since “Thriller.”

Best Screenplay: The Big Sick
Screenwriter Emily V. Gordon, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani turned the story of their unlikely (and almost tragic) courtship into the year’s best and most humane comedy.

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Sylvio Bernardi, Sylvio
In this hotly contested category, 2014 winner Caesar, the ape commander of War For The Planet Of The Apes, was narrowly defeated by a simian upstart. Sylvio, co-directed by Memphian Kentucker Audley, is a low-key comedy about a mute monkey in sunglasses (played by co-director Albert Binny) who struggles to keep his dignity intact while breaking into the cutthroat world of cable access television. Sylvio speaks to every time you’ve felt like an awkward outsider.

Best Performance (Honorable Mention): Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch referred to his magnum opus as an 18-hour film, but Twin Peaks is a TV series to its core. The Return may be the crowning achievement of the current second golden age of television, but without MacLachlan’s beyond brilliant performance, Lynch’s take-no-prisoners surrealism would fly apart. I struggle to think of any precedent for MacLachlan’s achievement, playing at least four different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose identity gets fractured across dimensions as he tries to escape the clutches of the Black Lodge.

Best Performance: Francis McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sometimes the best film performers are the ones who do the least, and no one does nothing better than Francis McDormand. As the mother of a murdered daughter seeking the justice in the court of public opinion she was denied in the court of law, McDormand stuffs her emotions way down inside, so a clenched jaw or raised eyebrow lands harder than the most impassioned speech.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
Lady Bird is destined to be a sentimental, coming-of-age classic for a generation of women. But it is not itself excessively sentimental. Greta Gerwig and star Saoirse Ronan are clear-eyed about their heroine’s failings and delusions as she navigates the treacherous psychic waters of high school senior year. Gerwig, known until now primarily as an actor, wrote and directed this remarkably insightful film that is as close to perfection as anything on the big screen in 2017.

Best Picture: Get Out — In prepping for my year-end list, I re-read my review for Get Out, which was positive but not gushing. Yet I have thought about this small, smart film from comedian Jordan Peele more than any other 2017 work. Peele took the conventions of horror films and shaped them into a deeply reasoned treatise on the insidious evil of white supremacy. Sometimes, being alive in 2017 seemed like living in The Sunken Place, and Peele’s film seems like a message from a saner time.

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Blade Runner 2049

“I can’t help thinking it’s a lot like making a sequel to Casablanca,” tweeted author William Gibson while on his way to see Blade Runner 2049. Gibson has the distinction of being one of the first in a long line of creators influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. He was about a third of the way through his first draft of Neuromancer, the novel that invented cyberpunk and indelibly shaped our conception of the internet age, when he saw the film. Neuromancer and its sequels are set in a decaying urban world that looks a lot like the hellscape Scott created for Blade Runner.

Casablanca has been described as having a screenplay made entirely of cliches — but the reason they’re cliches is because subsequent screenwriters stole them from Casablanca. Something like that happened with Blade Runner visually. “It affected the way people dressed,” Gibson said in a recent Paris Review interview. “It affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.”

Blade Runner was released in the summer of 1982, sci-fi’s cinema’s miracle year, in the company of classics like Poltergeist, The Thing, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and The Dark Crystal. But Scott’s groundbreaking visual masterpiece had the misfortune to be released two weeks after Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had declared Morning in America, and audiences wanted a feel-good story about a brave, healing alien more than a glimpse into the dystopian future. Even having Harrison Ford as the lead couldn’t put asses in seats, and Blade Runner flopped hard, almost destroying Scott’s career.

But the legend grew over the decades, and so Scott, acting as executive producer, tapped Arrival director Denis Villeneuve to helm the long-awaited (or perhaps long-dreaded) sequel, with screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who had adapted Philip K. Dick for the original film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, who worked with Villeneuve on Sicario, was chosen to follow up one of the most visually influential films in history.

Blade Runner‘s opening shot identifies the setting as “Los Angles, 2019.” Blade Runner 2049 begins with an echo of those images: An eye, in extreme close up, and a flying car gliding over the ruins of California. In the ensuing three decades, the ecological crisis has only deepened. The only way to grow food is in vast, climate-controlled greenhouses. When the car lands in one lonely agricultural outpost, K (Ryan Gosling) emerges. Like Rick Deckard, he works for the LAPD hunting down artificial humans or replicants, who have gone rogue. Unlike Deckard, he is unambiguously a replicant himself. At the farm, he finds Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), an android on the run who berates him for killing “his own kind.” He wouldn’t do that, Sapper says, if he had “seen the miracle.” K kills him anyway, but the words ring in his ears. What miracle?

Those fearing a cookie cutter remake of the original will be pleased to discover that this is not the case. Blade Runner 2049‘s story builds logically on the original — a seemingly impossible task pulled off gracefully by Fancher and co-writer Michael Green. Resonances come not out of slavish fan service, but because both films are essentially noir detective stories. Some elements feel more like a sequel to Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? than Scott’s film, such as K’s relationship with his holographic A.I. Joi (Ana de Armas)—two simulated beings experiencing possibly real emotions. Gosling gives by far the best performance of his career. When his investigation leads him to an aged Deckard living in the irradiated remains of Las Vegas, he goes toe to toe with Ford and a malfunctioning Elvis hologram in a bravado sequence that alone is worth the price of admission.

The only element of 2049 significantly inferior to the original film is the music. Vangelis’ improvisational synth score is as big a part of the Blade Runner mystique as John Williams’ soundtrack is for Star Wars. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch created a conventional, pounding, atonal soundscape that feels much less subtle.

The film’s running time is hefty, but its pleasures are deep and satisfying. Villeneuve’s direction is brilliant, and if Deakins doesn’t win an Oscar for this cinematography, the award has no meaning. See it on the largest screen you can find.

Blade Runner 2049
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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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A Bigger Splash

I think A Bigger Splash could represent a turning point for my career as a critic: It’s the moment when I get to identify, and hopefully lend a name to, an emerging genre.

Hear me out: The last few years have seen a slow trickle of films produced in Europe that, despite their outward differences, share certain structural similarities. A group of people, usually white but always unusually rich and privileged, travel to an exotic destination for fun and relaxation. Fine wines are consumed, and lots of sex is had. But their attempt to outrun their personal demons is short-circuited by an unexpected visitor, and soon paradise comes to seem like an expensive prison. Call them First World Problems (FWP) films. Last year’s Youth, an Italian film starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, sequestered the aging actors in a resort in the Swiss Alps where they are driven to despair and then rediscover the joys of life while looking at a nude Miss Universe. It was one example of the genre, which seems to be driven financially by Italian tourism department tax credits.

Matthias Schoenaerts (left) and Tilda Swinton have first world problems in A Bigger Splash.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash follows the FWP template by sending Tilda Swinton to the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria. Swinton plays Marianne Lane, a Bowie-esque rock star who has retreated to the sunny little island to recover after surgery to remove vocal cord polyps. She’s happily napping in the sunshine with her boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a filmmaker trying to stay sober after a drug-induced suicide attempt a couple of years ago, when trouble arrives in the person of Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Harry is a freewheeling rock producer who has only recently acknowledged that Penelope is his daughter. The reason for his Mediterranean sojourn is ostensibly to get to know his progeny, but since his chosen itinerary is a visit with his ex-girlfriend, Marianne, it soon becomes obvious that his real motives are different from his stated mission. Penelope is initially starstruck, but that doesn’t last long as she sees that the glamorous folks her dad keeps company with are just flawed human beings like the rest of us.

Dakota Johnson dons Lolita sunglasses in A Bigger Splash.

When Swinton rolls out of bed, she already has the gravitas to play a rock star trying to do the right thing, so for an added degree of difficulty, she plays Marianne as practically mute. If she speaks, she risks undoing the healing her voice sorely needs, so when she does get worked up enough to speak, her words come out as a feeble croak. Swinton is able to conjure more emotion with simple and subtle pantomime than most actors can manage with a full script. Fiennes gets to play essentially the opposite of his fastidious Gustave from The Grand Budapest Hotel. Unlike Marianne, Harry hasn’t accepted any of the responsibility that’s supposed to come with age, but where he and his ex once had wild partying in common, now he’s trying to keep the party going on his own, and it’s getting a little pathetic. Their slowly building emotional tug of war is the film’s heart and soul.

Just as all four main characters have backed themselves into a corner and things are about to get really interesting, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich cop out. Instead of resolving the converging tensions, they try to raise the stakes, but succeed only in breaking the spell of fermenting decadence. A Bigger Splash is not a bad film, per se, it just never lives up to the early promise of its crackerjack cast. But since these FWP films are financed by tourism-promoting tax credits, it did succeed in one respect: I really want to go to Italy now.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Nice Guys

Shane Black made his bones in Hollywood by writing Lethal Weapon, which is still considered one of the quintessential buddy-cop movies. Superman director Richard Donner’s pairing of Mel Gibson as the borderline insane adrenaline addict Martin Riggs and Danny Glover as the veteran detective who is getting too old for this crap proved that people not named Eddie Murphy could mine the genre for thrills, laughs, and big box office. Black went on to become one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood history, deconstructed the strongman action genre with 1993’s Last Action Hero, and then knocked around Hollywood for more than a decade before getting his first shot at the director’s chair with 2005’s cult classic Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. That led to him getting tapped by Marvel for the hugely successful Iron Man 3.

Black’s latest film, The Nice Guys, represents something of a return to his buddy-cop roots. It’s the kind of movie you get to make when your last venture is No. 10 on the list of all-time highest-grossing pictures. Ryan Gosling plays Holland March, a private eye trying to make a living for himself and his daughter, 13-year-old Holly (Angourie Rice) by solving banally sordid cases for a client base of easily swindled old ladies. He’s the kind of guy who laments the drop off in his business caused by California’s adopting no-fault divorce laws. As usual for Los Angeles film detectives since Humphrey Bogart was slapping around gunsels, he stumbles into the biggest case of his life: The aunt of recently deceased porn star Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio) thinks she’s still alive and that a girl named Amelia (Margaret Qualley) knows where she is.

Amelia quickly catches on to Holland’s clumsy attempts at detective work and pays thug-for-hire Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) to dissuade him from continuing. Jackson is the rare knee-breaker who takes pride in professionalism. He’s a white-knuckled teetotaler and only administers the exact amount of violence necessary to complete the job. As a professional courtesy, he explains to Holland what kind of fracture he’s about to receive before breaking his arm. That’s why Jackson is appalled at the sloppy thugmanship displayed by a pair of heavies (one of whom is played by the immortal Keith David) who break into his house and, in the process of interrogating him about his connection to Amelia, kill his two tropical fish. Vowing revenge for the piscine slaughter, he turns around and hires Holland to find out why Amelia is so important to so many people. The mystery that unfolds takes the unlikely pair of fast friends on a tour of the Los Angeles underworld during the high decadence of the 1970s. Black bounces his dim-witted duo off of the fading remnants of ’60s political radicals, a corrupt Justice Department official played by Kim Basinger, and a psychotic killer who looks like John Boy from The Waltons.

Gosling and Crowe are, perhaps unsurprisingly, naturals at this kind of material, and Black supplies them with some good gags, such as a memorable hallucination with a talking bee and a Richard Nixon cameo. The production designers clearly had a ball recreating disco-era L.A., and the highlight of the film is a porn star party where the band is a digitally recreated Earth, Wind, and Fire. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that something’s a little off. Jokes don’t land, the continuity is confused, and the rhythms are inexplicably jerky. Here’s a lesson: If you want to make a throwback to ’70s cop shows like The Rockford Files, don’t hire the editor of Transformers. Grumpy Gosling and growling Crowe are fun, but they can’t save The Nice Guys from feeling shoddy.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Big Short

In 1947, Humphrey Bogart was the biggest movie star in the world. With a fresh contract giving him greater creative control in hand, Bogie and his drinking buddy, director John Houston, set out to make a new western called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which he would play the hero. But when the film was released the next year, audiences were in for a shock. As expected, Bogart was the center of the movie. He had the most lines, the most close-ups, and was featured prominently in the advertising, but his character, Fred C. Dobbs, was not the hero of the story. Played by Bogie as selfish, paranoid, vain, and crude, Dobbs was actually the villain. Houston and Bogart were subverting the audiences’ expectations to make a point about unchecked greed.

Toward the end of The Big Short, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) shows the camera a bonus check for $47,000,000 he earned for his part in destroying the world economy in 2008. Speaking into the camera, he says, “I never claimed to be the good guy.”

Brad Pitt

Michael Lewis’ 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a detailed explanation of the events leading up to the 2008 collapse of Wall Street trading firm Bear Stearns, which precipitated the financial crisis and resulting Great Recession, the effects of which are still being felt today. Strangely enough, the film adaptation of the best seller fell to former Saturday Night Live writer and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy creator Adam McKay. When Stanley Kubrick was researching nuclear war scenarios in the early 1960s, he decided that the only honest way to make a film about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was to make it a comedy, and so Dr. Strangelove was born. Faced with the corrupt ridiculousness of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), McKay made the same choice, and created the best movie of his career.

Steve Carell

The ensemble cast McKay assembled is top-notch: In addition to Gosling, Christian Bale plays one-eyed M.D.-turned-capital manager Michael Burry; Steve Carell plays rageaholic investment banker Mark Baum, and Brad Pitt (who also produces) plays former-banker-turned-full-time-paranoid Ben Rickert. There’s a ton of complex exposition to get through, so McKay throws Margo Robbie in a bubble bath and has her explain the basics of the mortgage market. The screenplay is downright brilliant, pulling tricks like pointing out when events have been simplified to gain the audience’s trust.

Like Dr. Strangelove, the laughs The Big Short elicits are coal black, but unlike Wall Street, it tips its hand enough to avoid making its sociopathic greedheads into heroes. No one will look at Bale’s scarily committed portrayal of a speed-metal-obsessed, autistic number cruncher and say, “I want to be that guy.” Instead, McKay’s masterful sendup of late-stage capitalism will leave you saying, “Never again!”