Hamilton is the must see
I’ve been catching up on 2020 movies for a while now, and still hobbling together my reviews for movies that didn’t come out in theaters (at least not anywhere near me). Happily, there have still been some good films this past year and I’d recommend a few of these, but of course I rarely award four stars, so Hamilton must be the one to watch. I will try to post at least two more roundups to encompass the entirety of what I saw last year.
THE INVISIBLE MAN * * (Dir. Leigh Wannell)
Unseen terrors
The Invisible Man is a moderately effective thriller that has a couple good jump scares to go with a rather predictable plot that reboots a classic Universal horror property, which isn’t enough to really recommend it (unless you’re starved for horror these days, which many people probably are). Elisabeth Moss plays an abused wife who runs away from her rich businessman/inventor husband, who then turns up supposedly dead but actually invisible, to further terrorize Moss as she inherits his money. There are some decent suspense sequences in this, but others are more silly than scary, as Moss often has to do physical battle with literally nothing beside her, leading to a lot of jerking and conks on the head that come from nowhere and look slightly comical. Moss is fine, but it’s hard to invest in these characters, as she has some sort of weird and unexplained friendship with a detective (Aldis Hodge) close enough for her to live in his house and share a room with his daughter, yet the movie never bothers to tell us why she lives there or what exactly their connection is. The husband’s face isn’t seen until the end of the movie, but it’s hardly satisfying, nor is the “twist” ending that should surprise virtually no one. It’s a passable movie, but not a very good one.
HAMILTON * * * * (Dir. Thomas Kail)
Preserved for the ages
It’s hard to document a filmed theatrical production, as the experience of a play is meant to be seen live and in person, yet for most people, it’s an event too costly and inaccessible to experience. Hamilton was a genuine cultural phenomenon a few years ago and now it’s finally available for the rest of us on Disney Plus, so this is the very best version we’ll ever have. Filmed over three performances in 2016 with its original cast and seamlessly edited together, the angles and photography of the stage and performers are first rate, with no frame of action or musical number missing. It’s the best endorsement of a filmed play possible, and the production itself remains a thrilling, exuberant, joyously patriotic yet slyly subversive musical, superbly performed and sung by its cast, including the mastermind himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Standouts include the wildly charismatic David Diggs (my favorite) as a sardonic Thomas Jefferson and Philippa Soo as the heartbroken Eliza Hamilton. Directed and produced by Thomas Kail, it’s the kind of experience that makes you wish every Broadway production could be filmed and distributed to the masses this way, even though the box office must remain the source of profit for live theater. Still, for fans with no ability to see first run productions longing for the day when they can view theater from the comfort of their homes, one must hope this is a harbinger of the future.
SKIN: A HISTORY OF NUDITY IN THE MOVIES * * * (Dir. Danny Wolf)
Marlyn Monroe was an early icon of bolder sexuality in the movies
Documentaries about film history can often seem like clip shows, but for movie buffs, we can never get enough of them. The best result is in finding films we haven’t yet seen or heard of, and in this case, Danny Wolf’s Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies does just that. The title describes exactly what the movie is, taking you back to the beginning, from the peep shows at the turn of the century to the exploitation “nudie” flicks of the 1950’s (didn’t know much about this genre!) and beyond. The more interesting stuff is how filmmakers got around censorship laws during the production code with films you probably haven’t heard much of, but once you get to the 70s, interviews with still living actors (and particularly actresses) take over with their accounts of how they were treated by crew on set, producers behind the scenes and often expected to go topless if they wanted a job. The influence of the MeToo movement is considered as we creep all the way up to recent history, and at that point the movie starts to feel long (no documentary of this sort need be over two hours), but the sheer amount of information is enlightening, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable, especially for students and connoiseurs of the art form (filmmaking of course, not nudity).
TENET * * (Dir. Christopher Nolan)
A confusing, muddled mess
As fun as 2010’s Inception was, I always thought it didn’t wear well upon repeat viewing, with more than an hour of pure exposition no longer necessary once you were familiar with the world and the rules of that world you were expected to follow. But what I wouldn’t give for even a quarter of that exposition after sitting through Tenet, an overly long and near incomprehensible piece of science fiction that well earns the label gobbledygook, if anything ever did. If Christopher Nolan secretly agreed with my assessment of Inception’s flaws, he goes overboard in trying to correct them here, simply dropping the viewer in some vague nondescript future (or present?) with The Protagonist (John David Washington), some sort of government agent who gets saddled with some sort of vague mission and soon finds himself trying to stop some sort of Russian warlord (Kenneth Branagh) from acquiring nuclear weapons but using some sort of technology to manipulate time itself in order to do it. That summary is an accomplishment on my part, because it’s far more clarifying than what goes on in this movie. There’s something of a Bond-ian feel to the atmosphere, with the hero and his sidekick (Robert Pattinson) globetrotting to different exotic locales, but their actions and whatever their goals are are simply indecipherable, along with the time paradoxes that keep appearing and disappearing throughout. The fact that this movie makes no sense is one problem, but an even bigger sin is the complete lack of interest in creating characters to invest in, as Washington is a charmless, charisma free screen presence in the lead role, Pattinson very nearly matches him and Elizabeth Debicki, usually a compelling actress whose height alone warrants outsizes attention, gets the damsel in distress part with no other notes to play besides distressed. Only Kenneth Branagh seems to be trying to have some fun chewing the scenery with his villainous Russian, while the others appear as lost in the plot as we are. Perhaps it’s unfair to blame them. There are couple of well filmed action scenes but the fault in this one lies entirely with its impossible to follow script. You might gain some insight upon a rewatch, but who’d want to rewatch this? Sure, you don’t know what’s happening, but thanks to the cardboard cutout characters, neither do you care.
THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 * * * (Dir. Aaron Sorkin)
Unpleasant history reverberates through the present
Aaron Sorkin is back with The Trial of the Chicago 7, a movie that has his rollicking and snappy dialogue mostly set to the old-fashioned courtroom drama, a genre he famously contributed to with his script for A Few Good Men and now returns to in the director’s chair. A talented ensemble of (mostly male) actors fills out this show, based on the infamous court case in the late 1960’s of activists Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and others including Black Panther Bobby Seale, who were arrested at the 1968 Democratic convention, which had turned into a riot on national television. Nixon’s DOJ was out to make an example of the counterculture figures and Judge Julius Hoffman who presided seemed to genuinely have a screw loose, conflicting with the prosecutors and defense attorneys as the show trial proceeded. Sorkin’s script is delightful to listen to, as usual, and many of the actors shine, particularly Yahya Abdul Mateen II as Seale and Frank Langella as the nutty judge, along with Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Redmayne as lead activists Hoffman and Hayden (but both struggle a bit with their American accents in trying to imitate the particular dialect of the figures they’re inhabiting). It’s a fast-moving, entertaining drama and Sorkin embellishes history of course (though this case hardly needed it) while managing to cut back and forth from the riots at the convention to the courtroom procedural via seamless editing. The movie perhaps stands out more due to current echoes reflected in the turbulence of the 1960’s, especially as concerns a corrupt government and protest in the streets, alongside confrontation between factions of the political left over how best to steer their movement to success. Within the confines of the conventional genre film it resides in, it’s a provocative, thoughtful and resonant movie that speaks to today as well as the past.
WONDER WOMAN 1984 * * (Dir. Patty Jenkins)
Pretty big swing and a miss with the new WW movie
Patty Jenkins’ long awaited Wonder Woman sequel turned out to be hardly worth the wait, unfortunately. There may be certain elements that work and one can appreciate the different tone Jenkins brings to a movie that’s more allowed to have its own voice than the MCU’s finely tuned corporate product (though WB is no less demanding when it comes to its allotted number of mindless special effects and action scenes), but the plot really needed some work in this one, as well as the main character. Gal Gadot is back as Wonder Woman but her limited acting ability exposes itself when she’s asked to bring more range to Diana’s emotional journey. An ultra hammy Pedro Pascal is Maxwell Lord, a Trumpian con man/businessman in 1984 who steals a kind of “wishing stone” empowered by the God of Lies that grants wishes at different costs to different people. Lord’s wish is to become the stone (why??) which then causes him to become the movie’s villain out to destroy the world, while Diana wishes for Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor to come back, which he does, apparently inhabiting the body of a random guy whose own soul was somehow overridden by Steve’s…this is a very weird, distracting plot element that apparently no one involved in the making of the movie thought was weird. Diana doesn’t seem to care at all and takes advantage of this unsuspecting guy’s body in all carnal ways, as well as endangering it and getting it nearly killed, only for Steve to eventually have to leave again anyway, rendering the entire subplot pointless. It’s strange, but so is Kristen Wiig’s Cheetah, yet another bad guy origin story involving the mousy nerd turned villain trope, an overdone tale we’ve seen before, but even so, Pascal’s character takes up most of the film, suppressing both Cheetah and Wonder Woman. This is a long, overstuffed, messy movie with badly filmed action scenes and poor cinematography, an un-involving plot overly focused on a villain we don’t care about, and a weirdly resurrected romance that’s far too badly written to be emotionally involving. It’s a shame the WW sequel was this mediocre, but maybe this is the real reason it was sent to HBO Max rather than delayed until theaters can finally reopen.
