Tag: Tyler Perry

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Don’t Look Up

Jennifer Lawrence (left) and Leonardo DiCaprio

When Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s satire of the nuclear age, was released in January 1964, it began with a disclaimer: “It is the stated position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film.”

As journalist Eric Schlosser discovered while researching his book Command and Control, the disclaimer turned out to be wishful thinking. Dr. Strangelove’s central scenario, in which an American general goes murderously insane and orders his bombers to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, was completely plausible. Kubrick created what is arguably the greatest comedy ever by simply telling the truth.

The key to Dr. Strangelove’s success is Kubrick’s tonal tightrope walk between the hilarious and the terrifying. Now, with Don’t Look Up, it’s Adam McKay’s turn on the tightrope.

Michigan State University Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is studying supernovae when she accidentally discovers a new comet inbound from the Oort cloud. Her adviser Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) figures out that Comet Dibiasky is headed directly for Earth. We’ve got six months to stave off utter destruction.

Meryl Streep

Kate and Randall call Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (which, the film notes, is a real thing), and they get a meeting with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). To their dismay, the president and her Jared Kushner-esque son Jason (Jonah Hill) are more concerned with the upcoming midterm elections than with saving humanity. When they leak the news to the press, their appearance on a Good Morning America-type TV show hosted by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry is overshadowed by celebrity gossip generated by pop singer Riley’s (Ariana Grande) sex life. The end of civilization is just too big a bummer to get traction in today’s competitive media environment.

It’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that Don’t Look Up’s comet is an allegory for global warming. McKay, like Kubrick, has been met with some bad reviews, and it’s true that Don’t Look Up lacks the perfection of Dr. Strangelove. The editing is choppy, and the story veers off into useless romantic subplots.

But what McKay gets right, he gets really right. The earnestness of the scientists trying to save the world becomes their biggest handicap. Legacy admission Ivy Leaguers in government dismiss the threatening discovery because it came from a state school. The elite news media descend on the subject — until the online engagement metrics fade. Most chilling of all is Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell, a Steve Jobs-like tech billionaire who discovers precious metals on the comet and decides a couple of billion deaths is a small price to pay for propping up his company’s market capitalization.

Don’t Look Up was written before the pandemic, but if anything, the experience of the last two years has made McKay’s point for him; you could replace “comet” with “coronavirus” and the film would still work. When the comet becomes clearly visible in the night sky, Streep’s Trumpian president exhorts her red-hatted followers, “Don’t look up!” I thought about that scene on January 1st, when Memphis set a new high temperature record of 79 degrees. Crazy weather we’re having, huh?

Don’t Look Up is streaming on Netflix.

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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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Film Features Film/TV

Tyler Perry’s Boo 2: A Madea Halloween

It is what felt like hour three of the 101-minute Boo 2! A Madea Halloween. Freshly 18-year-old Tiffany (Diamond White), had long ago played her divorced parents Brian (Tyler Perry) and Debrah (Taja V. Simpson) against each other so she could go to a frat party at Lake Derrick, where, years before, 14 teenagers had been mercilessly slaughtered by killers still at large. Brian’s Aunt Madea (also Tyler Perry) knew something bad was going down, so she dragged Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis), Hattie Mae (Patrice Lovely), and Uncle Joe (also Tyler Perry) out into the woods, where they are being menaced by inept parodies of Samara from The Ring, Leatherface, and Jason Voorhees. A few rows in front of me, someone is snoring loudly while the No. 1 movie in the country unspools before him.

Then, a blue light. I turn to see the slender figure of a man dressed in an Air Force flight suit. His long legs are propped up lazily on the theater seat in front of him as he puffs on a long cigar. He glows a pale, television blue and appears slightly translucent, as if …

Tyler Perry is Madea (and Brian and Uncle Joe) in Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween

“Force Ghost Will Smith!” I stage whisper.

The apparition grins. “Technically, I’m Captain Steven Hiller …”

“… from Independence Day, who was killed offscreen when Will Smith refused to the sequel. How did Suicide Squad work out for you?”

He blows an ectoplasmic smoke ring. “Haven’t seen it. I assume it was great.”

“Uh, yeah. What are you doing here? You’re not in this movie.”

“I wasn’t in the last one either. And I wasn’t in Star Wars, so why am I a Force ghost?”

“It was a hilarious juxtaposition I came up with to illustrate the fact that no one involved in Independence Day: Resurgence cared.”

“Hilarious?” A ghostly eyebrow rises. “If you say so. I see you’ve put away your notebook. Going somewhere?”

“I’m ready to bolt as soon as this horror show is over! Double Triple Threat Tyler Perry is taking years off my life.”

“Aw naw,” Force Ghost Will Smith says. “You gotta stay for the bloopers. They’re the best part!”

“There are bloopers? On a professionally made film? That’s shown in theaters?”

“They’re the best part!”

In the darkness, the snoring man sleep apneas himself awake.

“I am not sitting through these credits.”

“That’s the beauty of it. They’re before the credits! What do you have against Tyler Perry anyway?”

“What do I have against … He’s awful!” I clutched my pearls in disgust.

“When did you start wearing pearls?”

“It’s poetic license!”

“Don’t front like you’ve seen a Tyler Perry movie before.”

“Front? Why … I’m sure I have.”

“When?”

“At some point. I watched one on TV. Some of it…. Look, I know he’s producing, writing, directing, and playing three parts at once, but this is awful! Has he ever even met an editor? I’ve seen better-written YouTube cat videos. I think he attempted a Get Out joke, and it made me want to just re-run that review and tell everyone to watch it again.”

“Okay, so. It’s bad. But you gotta respect Tyler Perry. He makes movies on the cheap so he can keep control of them every step of the way. He’s exactly what you say you want.”

“I don’t want this! This is like Mama’s Family for black people.”

“YOU don’t, but lots of people do. When Tyler started, African American audiences were so underserved that they would take anything, as long as it had people who looked like them in it. He proved how wrong Hollywood was, stayed independent, and now he’s worth $600 million. And now, because of Tyler, movies like Moonlight and Get Out get made.”

The snoring has resumed. “If that’s his audience, at least they’re getting some rest.”

“Oh, like you’ve never fallen asleep in a movie before.”

“I may have drifted off during Kingsman 2 …”

The glow is gone. I am once again alone in the theater with Mr. Sleepy Man. THE END flashes on the screen, followed immediately by a raft of snappily edited line flubs, crack-ups, and outtakes. Force Ghost Will Smith was right. The bloopers are the best part.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Gone Girl

Gone Girl is based on a bestselling crime novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay. With its byzantine plot, morally ambiguous characters, and obsession with peeling back layers of “reality,” it is the perfect material for director David Fincher. It is the stylistic and thematic cousin of Fincher’s masterpiece Zodiac, and may surpass the 2007 film in reputation. One of the few useful notes I took before surrendering to Fincher’s dark spell was: “Perfect frame after perfect frame.”

Gone Girl is currently teaching me how much of my weekly word count is taken up with summaries. The expertly executed whiplash plot has earned word of mouth that is the envy of Hollywood, and yet recounting it here would be useless. If you’ve read the book, you already know what happens. If you haven’t, you don’t want to know. Here’s the setup: On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) comes home to find his wife Amy (former Bond girl Rosamund Pike) missing, apparently the victim of a kidnapping. In less than 48 hours, the case becomes a full-blown media circus. Then things get weird.

Gone Girl is about the media. It’s probably the best filmic critique of our industry’s effect on society since Natural Born Killers predicted the metastization of the 24-hour news cycle 20 years ago. It’s marketed as a mystery, but it’s closer to Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole or Sidney Lumet’s Network than a classic mystery like The Big Sleep. Once observed by the media’s electron microscope, the characters behave like a quantum particle forced into choosing a definite state. Is Nick a hero, villain, or victim? Like Schrodinger’s cat suspended between life and death, he exists as all three at once. In a memorable exchange near the end of the film, he confronts his greatest tormentor, talk-show shouter Ellen Abbot (Memphian Missi Pyle), with all of the lies and distortions she has spread about him. “I go where the story is,” she says, even if that means inventing details to support the most lucrative narrative.

Ben Affleck in Gone Girl

Gone Girl is not misogynistic. Nor is it misandristic. It is misanthropic. Its worldview is so cynical it makes Double Indemnity look like It’s a Wonderful Life. Everyone in the film stoops to their basest level, confirming their sexes’ worst stereotypes. Nick’s glibly charming exterior hides a lazy, emotionally distant philanderer. Amy’s perfect woman exterior hides untold depths of emotional manipulation and cold-blooded lies. As she says, “We’re so cute, I want to punch us.” If, as has been suggested, Fincher’s adaptation tips the moral scales toward the male, it’s because Affleck’s job description as a movie star is: “Be sympathetic on camera.” And Affleck is very good at his job.

Gone Girl is exquisitely well acted. Pike shows complete control over her instrument, shifting into whichever version of Amy the director needs her to be as the points of view change. Kim Dickens shines as Detective Rhonda Boney, the Marge Gunderson-like investigator who proves impotent in the face of overwhelming evil. Neil Patrick Harris manages to take his character Desi Collings from creepy to nice and back again with very limited screen time. But the best of the bunch may be Tyler Perry as the Johnnie Cochran-like defense attorney who cheerfully plots the character assassination of a missing woman who, for all he knows, could be rotting at the bottom of a lake.

Gone Girl is about class. It’s one of the most insightful movies made about the Great Recession, exposing films like Up in the Air as classist dreck. The fear of losing economic status permeates everything. The story’s real inciting incident isn’t Amy’s 2012 disappearance; it’s 2009, when the couple lose their media jobs and are forced to move from New York City to a Missouri McMansion, propped up by debt and illusion. In one telling moment, when one of the movie’s many middle-class Machiavellians finds themselves confronted with actual, desperate lower-class criminals, they are summarily beaten at their own game.

Gone Girl is circular. It’s an appropriate structure for a story where everyone is trapped, either by their sex, their class, their perceptions, or by a whole sick society whose death throes make missing white girls into a growth sector for cable conglomerates.

Gone Girl is a very good movie. You should go see it.