I admit I'm not the biggest Anne Hathaway fan, and nothing in this trailer looks likely to change that. It appears to be a sappy melodrama about folk singers in Brooklyn, but the real kiss of death is the release date, which is January. I've said it before, January is a dumping ground for new releases, just about any film that gets released in January tells you that the studio behind it thinks it's a stinker. So, yeah, not a lot of confidence in this.
REVIEW: "Interstellar" (2014) Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain. Dir. Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is a lot of things. Like Inarritu's latest film Birdman, this is a movie that wants to combine many different genres at once- sentimental family drama, sci-fi adventure, space epic, a progressive vision of the future, a treatise on the value of love above all else...you get the idea, or you will when you see it. Also like Birdman, it's not entirely successful at everything it's trying to do, and some parts of it work much better than others- unfortunately, here it's a lot clearer which parts do and don't, and that's because Nolan is a much more straightforward, structured visionary (if you want to call him that) than Inarritu. The stuff that works, works very well, and the stuff that doesn't...well, it really doesn't.
But one of the things he was lucky enough to get very right here was the casting, and with Matthew McConaughey and Jessica Chastain as the lead characters in this film, I confess to feeling more attachment to them emotionally than I ever have to any of the characters in Nolan's other films, and that's an achievement. The people in his films are usually cold, distant archetypes, there to recite dialogue in ways that get across his ideas- his worlds are mostly cerebral and he's been criticized for being unemotional with his characters. The entire first act of this film seems designed to respond to those critiques, as he builds up McConaughey's all American good old boy Coop to be a widowed dad (of course) saddled with two kids and a farm with acres of cornfields, all part of a distant future where the earth has run out of food, leaving everyone who's survived to take up a useful profession, like farming.
But Coop is educated and trained as an engineer and pilot, so he longs to be able to use the skills he has acquired to go beyond this world, and maybe look for others instead. The building of emotional bonds between Coop and his kids, especially his precocious 10-year-old daughter Murph, and the set-up of their existence in this future may be more sentimental than Nolan fans are used to, but I think it works well in bonding the audience to these characters as people, and I appreciated that effort, because it causes us to care when the special effects extravaganza portion of the movie takes over. And it does indeed take over, lasting the vast majority of the film, which is undoubtedly what most will find to be the most entertaining part. But I was pretty okay with the world establishing, and it's more the space and planet hopping activities where my restlessness began to grow.
But first, we have to explain how Coop gets called away on his mission to the far off worlds in the first place, and it involves the stumbling onto a classic "underground bunker" that's so popular in science fiction, where NASA has been secretly functioning years after it was publicly de-funded. They've been trying to figure out how to move Earth's population to other galaxies, and sending various astronauts to find other worlds and report back with details. Coop of course, is called on to fly their latest mission (seemingly the very day he discovered this whole operation) and he will have to leave his kids behind to do it, which could very well mean he'll never see them again. This is where the authenticity of the earlier family scenes are called into question, because for all his love of the family, Coop really doesn't hesitate that much to leave his kids, and before we know it, he's taken off with a crew consisting of Wes Bentley and Anne Hathaway to track down several planets where potential for life has been reported to exist.
This part of the film is laden with incredible visual effects of course, but you'd expect nothing less after the likes of Inception. Still, Interstellar does a good job at creating moments of wonder, something that was missing in the very structured, puzzle box movies Nolan's crafted before, like Inception and Memento. But his tendency for exposition heavy dialogue is still here, and this time in bouts of speeches infused with details of quantum physics and relativity theory so jumbled that I challenge anyone to keep up with half of anything the astronauts are saying to each other after they leave Earth. To me, this is why many of the scenes in space that aren't directly about planet hopping drag the movie down considerably, and it's only thanks the Matthew McConaughey's always relatable, everyman presence that we're invested in this journey at all. Back on Earth meanwhile, while Coop is off on his journey of discovery, Murph and her brother (who never seems nearly as important to his dad as Murph is- Coop clearly plays favorites here) are aging at a speed much faster than what is passing for the astronauts, and again the most effective parts of the film involve the moments where Coop must see the faces of his kids and realize that he's missed their entire lives in what felt to him like only minutes.
The passage of time is a much pondered theme of this movie, and is explored and quantified in every possible way, much of it in that gobbledygook dialogue (which may actually make some sense to quantum theorists, but not so much to the average viewer), but then in the last third of the film as an amazing, borderline ludicrous but consistently wondrous sequence where McConaughey travels into a five dimensional reality and must communicate with himself from the past. I don't know if any of what happens there makes sense, but I certainly enjoyed it while I was watching it.
That's probably a good way to describe a lot of Interstellar, even the middle part of the film which drags heavily through long scenes and an entire subplot involving a cameo from a major movie star that frankly could have been cut altogether. Same goes for the unfunny and awkward robot sidekick TARS, which comes across as a forced attempt at creating a "lovable" comic relief buddy, and if Nolan's out of his wheelhouse with the emotionalism, imagine his shot at forcing in a comedy only character. Yikes. At nearly three hours long, this is a movie that needed to have some serious fat trimmed off it in the editing room, and had it done that it's possible a near masterpiece could have emerged. As it is now, it's a big entertainment with some great actors doing their best to ground Nolan's lofty and ambitious ideas (Jessica Chastain as the grown Murph again turns in a deeply felt performance that elevates the rather bit part she's given), and that makes it worth experiencing on the whole, because the good parts are definitely good enough to warrant a first viewing, and maybe even a second. And simply by virtue of being worth a second look, that already places it a notch above Inception in my book.
* * *
Blu-Ray Pick of the Week: "Christmas in Connecticut" (1945)
Well, it might as well be Christmas season already, right? The stores have already put out their decorations, and the Hallmark cable channels started playing Christmas movies 24/7 the day after Halloween (not kidding about that). So I'm going to jump into the season by recommending this screwball comedy starring the great Barbara Stanwyck as a single woman in her 30's (the horror!) who works as a columnist giving out homemaking advice to housewives (ala Martha Stewart), a subject that in truth she knows nothing about. So now when her boss wants to bring a war hero to the home of the "best homemaker in America," she's got to put on the show of her life. It's a classic that Stanwyck carries completely with her special brand of streetwise daffiness- it's a good one that should be better known.
Original 1945 Trailer:
FEATURETTE: "The Imitation Game"
Two new featurettes for The Imitation Game that shed more light on the underknown story of codebreaker Alan Turing, and what he and a group of other colleagues achieved during the second world war. The movie is coming out this Friday in the UK and Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S.:
FINAL TRAILER: "Annie"
This last trailer for director Will Gluck's updated version of Annie kinda toys with the idea of not pretending the movie isn't a musical, although just barely- you can only see glimpses of people dancing in the street (I guess we can assume that's where the songs are taking place). It also ups the cutesy factor to almost unbearable levels. I don't know- I'd be pretty shocked if this was any good, but who knows, maybe it'll surprise us. It's coming out on Christmas Day.
2014 Academy Governor's Awards Recap
The Governor's awards ceremony took place last night, where Golden Age actress Maureen O'Hara, costume designer Jean-Claude Carriere and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki were honored with honorary Oscars for lifetime achievement, while actor/singer/activist Harry Belafonte received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award. The event has also, somewhat cynically, become the first place for potential Oscar nominees to hobnob with Academy members, meaning that of the huge crowd that showed up last night, few of them were likely there to hear the speeches from the honorees. But since they deserve their moment in the sun (that is what the event is for, after all), here are the videos of last night, provided by the Academy.
After being tributed by Susan Sarandon and Chris Rock, Harry Belafonte's fiery acceptance speech was the best of the night:
94-year-old Maureen O'Hara (who probably should have won this years ago), was honored by Clint Eastwood and Liam Neeson before receiving her award for starring in such classic films as The Quiet Man, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Miracle on 34th Street and The Parent Trap, among others:
And the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, who wasn't even there to receive his competitive Oscar when he won for Spirited Away in 2003, made a rare appearance after being touted by John Lasseter as, along with Disney himself, one of the two most important figures in the history of animation:
BOX OFFICE 10/07-10/09: 'Big Hero 6' Beats 'Interstellar' at the Box Office
It was expected to be a tough fight for #1 this weekend, as would be blockbusters Interstellar and Big Hero 6 both vied for the top spot, but in the end, Disney's superhero kiddie ride easily landed in first, with $56 million over the weekend. Interstellar came in second with $50 million, despite beating out the animated film on Friday. It did have some challenges, being a long, three hour film that can't play at as many showtimes, and family audiences tend to pack the matinee times on Saturday and Sundays, but both films got pretty good Cinemascores (A- and B+ respectively), so they should stick around for a while.
In third was Gone Girl, pulling in another $6 million and showing some pretty remarkable staying power. Its accumulated haul is now $145 million, making it a huge success for David Fincher, and even though its a genre the Academy tends to stay away from, I think the box office and good reviews do make it a dark horse for some Oscar consideration, especially in Director. Ouija continues to hang around, coming in fourth with another $6 million, and St. Vincent broke into the top five this weekend, earning $5.7 million, making it quite a big success for an indie film this year.
Top 5:
- Big Hero 6- $56.2 million
- Interstellar- $50 million
- Gone Girl- $6.1 million
- Ouija- $6 million
- St. Vincent- $5.7 million
In limited release, the big story was The Theory of Everything, which debuted to the fourth best independent opening of the year, with $207k from just five screens, and a $41k average. That's only behind The Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood and Birdman, so that's a promising start for the Stephen Hawking biopic's awards hopes. Next week it's the premiere of Dumb and Dumber To and the limited debut of Foxcatcher, as Oscar season is really kicking off. See you then!
REVIEW: "The Homesman" (2014) Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank. Dir. Tommy Lee Jones
It pains me to write a review for a movie like The Homesman, which is a well made, beautifully shot, entertaining and slightly offbeat feminist western, of all things, that unfortunately makes a crucial error in its screenplay about two thirds of the way through, with an event so jarring that it proves detrimental to the entire film as a result. You see something like that and think, well, one badly written event can't possibly take a whole movie down, but in this case, it really does and it's so critical to the plot and the story arc up until that scene that it leaves a bad taste in the viewer's mouth, and the film is unsalvageable as a whole after that moment, even if individual scenes are still quite good.
Tommy Lee Jones co-wrote and directed The Homesman, which is based on a novel and in it he does a very rare thing, which is to tell a western tale from a woman's point of view, something hardly ever done in the long history of movie westerns. Women in this universe have usually been regarded as one of two things- prostitutes or docile housewives, never a part of the action themselves. Of course, that was historically accurate- the American west of the 19th century was vast, lawless, and dangerous for all women, even those with husbands to provide for them. Rape was an ever present threat, along with robbery and murder, possibly at the hands of strangers, Indians, any and all men that built the West through savagery and John Wayne toughness. It was never a place that had much room for women, least of all single women, which is the role our protagonist, Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) plays in this movie. She's a lone single woman who runs her own home in a tiny little Nebraskan town (and I do mean tiny- the population looks to be about eight people), which includes tending the fields and handling the crops, essentially all on her own. We're not sure why she's there, just that she apparently made the trip herself, leaving a family back home in New York, to try her hand at the new frontier. That will ultimately prove to be a mistake, as Cuddy herself realizes she can't survive long without a husband, and proposes herself to a caller in the opening scene, a man who turns her down flat for being plain and bossy. In other words, too unladylike.
A tragedy hits the blossoming town when it's realized by the parish that three of the town's female citizens (two wives and a sister of some of the men) have lost their minds due to the various severe tolls that life on the frontier has taken, and must be transported across the Missouri river and delivered to a preacher's wife who will arrange for their safe passage back east. When no men volunteer for the job, Mary Bee declares herself up to the task and takes it upon herself to transport the women, feeling it's God's duty to ensure them a better life than what has now fallen upon them through no fault of their own. Of course, she's smart enough to know that her determination alone will never guarantee the success of this trip, and when she sees a man strapped in a noose to a tree, she saves his life in exchange for assisting her on the long and arduous journey. That man is Tommy Lee Jones of course, who plays to his familiar strengths as the tough and grizzled rascal George Briggs, and the two develop a fine partnership as he undertakes the task alongside her. From that point onward there are twists and turns that are fairly unpredictable (the one I mentioned earlier being the most startling) but always well-paced, and the vast array of midwestern landscapes are incredibly well shot, conveying the empty hollowness and enormous space of a wild new land that eventually drove each of the female passengers crazy (we get flashbacks to the horrors that all of them have undergone in their pasts).
But the movie belongs to Hilary Swank as Mary Bee, who's perfectly cast as the stoic yet strong and capable homesman of the title (at least until a certain point), and to develop the film from her perspective was to create a movie that gives us a very fresh take on a genre with thousands of entries, almost entirely male dominated, to its name. Which brings us to the major error in the story, of which is impossible to go into detail without spoiling the film, and so I can't explain exactly what happens that knocks a perfectly fine western just under the bar of recommendation. But I will say that as one of several offbeat and unpredictable twists in the film, this is one that serves no purpose but to alienate the viewer entirely, and change the tone so dramatically that it never quite recovers its footing. It was handled badly, should have been spotted at the screenplay level, and with maybe just a couple of rewrites, it would not have played to the story's detriment, no matter how it may have come across in the novel. Adaptations are changed for a reason, and that mistake has to be laid at the feet of the movie's director and writer. It's truly a shame, because otherwise he had made a very good movie, with good performances and a starkly feminist take on the Old West, and that's something we don't get nearly enough of, with the genre itself something of a dying breed these days. Quite a shame indeed.
* * 1/2
TRAILER: "Selma"
One of the last films coming out this year to debut a trailer, here's a look at Selma, the MLK biopic about the famous march. This was directed by arthouse filmmaker Ava Duvernay and is coming out in limited release on Christmas Day. It had been labeled a potential Oscar contender, but obviously we won't know how good it is until it screens for an audience, which it still hasn't done yet. The trailer makes it look pretty good, except for that music in the background in the last part (seems like desperate attempt to make history feel modern, which is a constant thing they do in trailers like this and it's really annoying). David Oyelewo looks pretty good as MLK, although it doesn't appear to be much of an imitation. Maybe that's a good thing though.
FINAL TRAILER: "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"
The last Hobbit movie gets a final, epic trailer, but it seems to me that in dragging this book out to three movies, buzz and excitement has decreased significantly for these entries. Of course, I'm biased, not being a big fan of either of the first two films. I'm sure the die hards will still be there to complete the trilogy, but most of this has seemed like a missed opportunity.
TRAILER: "Into the Woods"
Well, here we go with a full length trailer that finally decides not to hide that it's a musical. Yet, after seeing it, I'm still concerned. To be honest, the only person who looks like she's got the tone right here is Meryl Streep, hamming it up with some campiness in tow, while everyone else seems to be playing it deadly straight. This play was a flat out comedy, as it needed to be in order for the fairy tale universe to be believable. I don't think deadly seriousness is the right approach for this at all. Hopefully, this is just the trailer not conveying the tone properly, but we'll see. The Emily Blunt and Little Red Riding Hood characters in particular look worrisome, the polar opposites of their portrayals on stage.
TRAILER: "Furious 7"
Okay, so this one is decidedly not an Oscar contender, but expect it to be a monstrous hit next April. And yes, they're showcasing Paul Walker front and center here, maybe even in a fashion that's a little too on the nose, although it's probably considered a tribute to his memory. I'll be honest, I haven't kept up with the Fast and Furious series since seeing the first one in theaters way back when it came out, but I guess that opening action scene here looks kinda cool? With Kurt Russell in the mix now, it seems to have some kind of added pedigree.
