Tag: Steve Carell

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NOW PLAYING: Fantastical Visions

I Saw The TV Glow (Courtesy A24)

The week of May 17-23 at the movies offers lots of fun choices, including the premiere of a film I’ve been most excited about for months:

I Saw The TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s psychological horror about teenage fandom is already being hailed as one of the best movies of the year. Owen (Justice Smith) bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their mutual love for the YA series The Pink Opaque. Years later, with adulthood’s problems pressing down, Maddy reappears in Owen’s life, telling him they can escape into the fictional world of the show — but there’s a price to pay for a permanent trip to TV land. 

IF

Young Elizabeth (Cailey Fleming) has an imaginary friend named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) that only she can see. The catch is, she can also see other kids’ imaginary friends, including the ones whom their companions outgrew. Her neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) has the same ability, and together they try to reunite the abandoned Imaginary Friends (IFs) with their former kids. This live action/animated hybrid features a huge cast of voices, including Steve Carell, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, and, in his final role, the late Louis Gossett, Jr.

Back to Black 

Marisa Abela stars in this biopic of singer Amy Winehouse, who scored major hits in the 00’s and set the record for the most Grammys won in one night. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson tries to separate the tabloid hype from the real person, who died in 2011 at age 27. 

The Blue Angels

This new documentary takes IMAX back to its roots as the biggest documentary format. The U.S. Navy’s aviation demonstration team features some of the best pilots in the world. The film gets up close and personal with them, as they get up close and personal with each other while flying F-18s at 300 mph.

Flash Gordon

The Time Warp Drive-In returns for May with the theme Weird Realms. It’s three sci-fi movies from the ’80s that feature extreme visuals unlike anything else ever filmed. In the early 1970s, after George Lucas had a major hit with American Graffiti, he wanted to do a remake of Flash Gordon, which had started as a comic strip before being adapted into one of the original sci-fi serials in the late 1930s. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis refused to sell him the movie rights to Flash Gordon, which he had purchased on the cheap years before, so Lucas decided to do his own version. That became Star Wars, and you may have heard of it. After Lucas struck gold, De Laurentiis decided to finally exercise his option. His Flash Gordon, which featured visuals inspired by the classic comics, didn’t impress sci-fi audiences upon its 1980 release, but has proven to be hugely influential in the superhero movie era. The best parts of the film are the Queen soundtrack and Max von Sydow (who once played Jesus) chewing the scenery as Ming the Merciless. To be fair, there’s a lot of scenery to chew on.

The second film on the Time Warp bill is The Dark Crystal. Muppet master Jim Henson considered this film his masterpiece, and the puppetry work is unparalleled in film history. If you’re only familiar with the story through the Netflix prequel series (which was also excellent), this is the perfect opportunity to experience the majesty of the original.

The final Time Warp film was Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Blade Runner. Legend has it that the unicorn shots in Blade Runner were actually Scott using that film’s budget to shoot test footage for Legend. A really young Tom Cruise stars with Mia Sara in this high fantasy adventure. Again, the best part of the film is the villain. Tim Curry absolutely slays as Darkness, while sporting one of the best devil costumes ever put to film.

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Film Features Film/TV

Vice

Believe it or not, this is Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice


What do you do about a problem like Dick Cheney?

The former Vice President of the United States sits at a pivot point in history. He’s the connecting link between the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. He led the team that led the United States into an ill-fated war in Iraq. He was the original architect of the War on Terror, now 17 years old and counting. How do you tell a story that huge, that complex, and that damning, to a popcorn audience in a couple of hours.

Writer/director Adam McKay starts by calling Cheney a “dirtbag,” then gets more specific from there. McKay, former head writer for Saturday Night Live and director of pop-comedy juggernauts like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, is probably the best qualified person to make a movie like this. The Big Short, McKay’s blow-by-blow of the 2008 financial crash, is told with wit, sarcasm, and a whole lot of voice over. Even as a news nerd, I felt like I came out of that film feeling both entertained and like I understood the world better.

Amy Adams (left) as Lynne Cheney.

In Vice, McKay applies the same methodology to Cheney’s life story, but the results aren’t nearly as clean cut. The story opens with Cheney (Christian Bale) getting his second DUI for driving piss drunk in a swerving Studebaker on a rural Montana road. He’s flunked out of Yale for drinking and brawling, and now he’s a lineman, drinking and brawling his way through life as a flowering dirtbag. But his wife Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams) is having none of it. In a crucial scene that will echo throughout the film, she orders her mother out of the room and dresses him down. “Did I choose the wrong man?” she hisses.

Then we cut to 9:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001. It’s the first of many time jumps in this byzantine screenplay. Cheney is the senior official at the White House while George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) is reading My Pet Goat to a room full of Florida school children. When he gives the authorization to Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) to shoot down any civilian airliners in American airspace, he does so in the President’s name. It’s a clear usurpation of authority, but when Condoleezza Rice (LisaGay Hamilton) challenges him, all it takes is one guttural growl to shut her up.

The meat of the story is Cheney’s transformation from dirtbag drunk into the consummate power player. Narrated by Jesse Plemons, whose onscreen identity becomes the setup for one of the film’s most powerful visual gags, the screenplay is anything but subtle. Bale has already won a Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Golden Globe, and his unlikely performance as one of the great villains of American history is worth the price of admission alone. He’s surrounded by A-listers giving pitch black performances. By the time Adams starts doing Shakespeare as Lynne Cheney, you’ve probably already identified her with Lady MacBeth. Carell and Bale recreate Cheney and Rumsfeld’s creepy chemistry. LisaGay Hamilton makes an uncanny Condi Rice; Tyler Perry doesn’t really resemble Colin Powell, but he does manage to embody the former general’s conflicted countenance when he was put in the position to lie to the United Nations on the eve of the Iraq War.

This has been a season of political films, ranging from Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You on the good end to Dinesh D’Douza’s Death of a Nation way down on the other end. Like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Vice kind of flies apart at the end, as if the filmmaker just couldn’t quit while he was ahead. McKay’s fumble is the result of the basic problem with designing a polemic around an antihero — we’re hard wired to see the guy who gets the most close-ups as a heroic figure, even if he’s a war criminal who set his country on a path of ruin. For all his weight gain and intentional ugliness, Christian Bale is still an incredibly charismatic performer. Like Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, one might end up liking him, even though he’s clearly a monster.

But while having a charismatic leading man might be bad for the purposes of political rhetoric, it’s great if you’re trying to make entertaining cinema. Vice may be dense, divisive, flawed, and maddening, but it’s definitely entertaining.

Vice

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Battle Of The Sexes

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

Emma Stone and Steve Carell in Battle of the Sexes

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

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

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

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

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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!”