Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs,” his ninth film, may be his grimmest yet, but it’s perfectly at home with his best, most familiar work

If anything, Wes Anderson is very consistent. His films all share his brisk pacing, deadpan humor, diorama creativity and color, and precise attention to detail. And they’re all good.

This is even though each of his nine films is wildly different and ambitious in ways unique to each project. He’s put his quirky, fantastical stamp on coming-of-age romances, family dysfunction dramas, children’s fables and French New Wave cinema. You could make a case that any of Anderson’s films is the “Most Wes Anderson” film. I wrote as much about his previous film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which found him globe hoping, going to dark places and using his dioramas to examine legacy and loss. That’s all true even though his other films have these qualities in spades, in their own ways.

So where does that leave Isle of Dogs, his second stop-motion animated film following the wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox? It feels like Anderson at his ugliest, dabbling in washed out horizons, muted colors and grizzly characters, though you can find parallels in his past films. He’s fully embracing his Japanese influences from Akira Kurosawa and kabuki dance, though eagle-eyed viewers must’ve known he’s a fan. And it also feels like his most grim movie, with an immensely percussive score lending gravitas and stakes to an otherwise pleasant story about dogs. You know where this is going.

Isle of Dogs is exactly like all of Anderson’s films and none of them. It dazzles with animation and moods that Anderson has never dabbled in before, and yet it feels at home with his best work. Continue reading “Isle of Dogs”

Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach’s biopic.

TrumboPosterDid the injustice of the Hollywood Blacklist have to do with Americans’ Cold War fears, how we suppressed the First Amendment rights of thousands, or how we wrongly persecuted and led a witch hunt against innocents and those just expressing political beliefs? Or was it all because Dalton Trumbo was just too good?

“Trumbo”, the biopic on the life of the Oscar winning, yet blacklisted screenwriter, is filled with some stirring sentiments and American values. As Trumbo, Bryan Cranston delivers winning speeches with impeccable diction, all while maintaining his position as a contentious, even disagreeable figure. Jay Roach’s film though may just be a little too fun for its lofty ambitions. The screenplay touts values of Free Speech, but the story itself suggests the motto, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

Trumbo was brought up in the Golden Age of Hollywood, so the film is fascinated with that Old Hollywood charm, playing off campy fun biopic beats as it checks off the list of stars who made their way through Trumbo’s life: Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Otto Preminger. The cast all gets their moments to do their mini-impressions of some of Hollywood’s most iconic and eccentric figures. “Trumbo” even opens with a montage of some of Trumbo’s many credits and takes us through his work on “Roman Holiday,” “Spartacus”, “The Brave One”, and “Exodus”, and Roach peppers the score with slinky jazz and a light, breezy tone. Much early on is even told through news reels rather than personal moments.

And yet “Trumbo” can be questionably chipper when dealing with the severity of The Blacklist and The Hollywood 10. Trumbo was one of the first waves of Communists brought in front of HUAC, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, to testify and name names about his involvement with the Communist Party. Many Hollywood insiders, including his liberal friend Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg), sold him and his colleagues out. In turn, Trumbo and the other nine spent up to a year in prison despite not committing a crime, and they were barred from ever working in Hollywood again.

Trumbo instead took up aliases and fixed up bad B-movie scripts for producer Frank King (John Goodman), and Roach has a lot of fun with this concept. The behind-the-scenes dealings and a money-grubbing John Goodman brandishing a baseball bat at those threatening to boycott him are hugely entertaining, and often more of interest to Roach than the pain and suffering brought on by the Blacklist.

Roach illustrates the hatred of Communists through plainspoken bigots throwing drinks at Trumbo at a movie theater or the big talk threats of Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren). But it overlooks the Trumbo family retreat to Mexico, or the deaths that even took place during the period. Instead he zones in on the family drama and how Trumbo’s shadow screenplay work took a toll on his wife Cleo (Diane Lane) and his equally political and outspoken daughter Nikola (Elle Fanning in Nikola’s teenage years).

Cranston though is largely the catalyst behind “Trumbo’s” added weight, political significance and modern relevance. His Hollywood 10 colleague Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) asks, “Do you have to say everything like it’s going to be chiseled onto a rock?” Cranston’s hitched up pants, his hunched posture as he marches about the room, and the way he chomps on a cigarette or cigar certainly smack of a “performance”, but he’s modest enough in his speech to make it convincing. Where everyone else is clear-cut about their politics, Cranston plays Trumbo as largely articulate and argumentative of principles over strict ideas. In one scene he stands up to John Wayne and challenges Duke’s non-existent war record, despite how he invokes the war to condemn people like Trumbo. The wit and words behind Cranston’s performance help elevate Trumbo as an artist and thinker but also show how he might be difficult at parties.

Roach’s film may be too entrenched in Hollywood history and royalty to not somewhat diminish the Cold War era hardships of the Blacklist, but Trumbo’s name was suppressed for years, and now this film proudly adorns it as a fitting title and story.

3 stars

Godzilla (2014)

Gareth Edwards’ “Godzilla” remake is a slow and lumbering bore with very few ideas or memorable moments.

I already got my quota of ambiguously monstrous hulking CGI masses terrorizing humanity in “Noah”, thank you very much. Godzilla is a legacy movie monster more than fit to be trotted out today to comment on climate change or national defense, but if the new “Godzilla” will not even bother to be about something more than an oversized spectacle then why am I watching it?

Director Gareth Edwards’ film is as slow and lumbering as its giant hero. The dialogue is thick, the characters are thin and the action and story are plain boring. By removing any allegory, ideas or humor, nothing gets in the way of this being purely cathartic summer mayhem, but it leaves nothing that might be memorable. Continue reading “Godzilla (2014)”

'Argo' absolutely deserved to win Best Picture

“Argo” may not try anything completely new or daring, but it’s an ambitious achievement and a new classic. “Argo” is the most deserving of all the Best Picture nominees.

Argo Affleck Best Picture
Image courtesy of CNN

As it became increasingly certain that “Argo” would walk away with a Best Picture Oscar Sunday night, the articles claiming why “Argo” was not worthy of the movie industry’s top prize were a dime a dozen. Heaven forbid that in this Internet age we have something other than a contrarian opinion, or that we commit the even worse sin of agreeing with the Oscars.

Because a funny thing happens when something or someone becomes the assumed front-runner: people get begrudgingly accepting of whatever it will be. Everyone knew “Argo” and Anne Hathaway and Daniel Day-Lewis would win, but was anyone really happy about it until they finally did and gave the touching (or in Day-Lewis’s case hilarious) speech they were always meant to?

The Academy’s stamp of approval suggests to most that something is good and for the most part deserving, but the real gem is something else entirely.  Yet somehow I doubt that every critic who writes about the Oscars for a living would be infinitely happier if “Holy Motors” was the indisputable winner, because a win for a movie like that wouldn’t say as much about this year in movies as “Argo” will.

No, my movie of the year didn’t even get nominated for Best Picture, but I’m prepared to say that no movie deserved to win the Oscar this year more than “Argo.” Continue reading “'Argo' absolutely deserved to win Best Picture”

Argo

“Argo’s” images of people rioting in Iranian streets look startlingly similar to the ones we see coming out of the Middle East today. The fact that this movie’s opening scene is an attack on an American embassy gives it an even more disturbing modern day resonance.

Ben Affleck’s film speaks to the power of images and the strength of Hollywood movies to impact the culture around the world.

Thankfully, “Argo” is exactly the arresting genre picture a movie about movie making (even fake movie making) deserves. It’s a multi-layered thriller laced in Hollywood bravura and whip smart cynicism, and it does this remarkably true story proud by letting its heroes and storytelling shine.

“Argo” is based on a recently declassified CIA mission from 1979 to 1980 in which six American diplomats hiding out in the Canadian embassy were snuck out of Iran during a several month long American hostage crisis. The plan to make their escape was organized by Tony Mendez (Affleck), who admits that this was the best bad idea they had. That’s because it does move into that ever-so-common movie territory of “too good to be true.”

We’ll set up alibis for the six Americans as a Canadian film crew making a science fiction movie named Argo. The script is a sprawling “Star Wars” ripoff set in an exotic location, and Iran just might be the perfect place to shoot. We’ll sell ad space in Variety, attach producers and make this fake movie a fake hit.

Well there’s your movie right there.

Affleck takes this farfetched story that would only be good enough for movie magic and makes it a true-to-life reality. It’s an accurate account of how Mendez enlisted help from an Oscar winning make up artist, John Chambers (John Goodman), got a curmudgeonly producer, Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), and established an elaborate cover story.

What makes “Argo” such delicious catnip to movie lovers is its strong insider mentality. Every idea brainstormed is a hopelessly bad one, no one has any faith in the plan or even this movie that actual Hollywood execs think to be real, and yet the movie magic pluck that the good guys will make it in the end always seems to win out.

It does so in the last minute chases at the Iranian airport or the cynical sparring battle between Arkin and a producer over what project he’s going to finance next, and it happens when two Iranian border agents are struck silly by storyboards for even the idea of this fake movie.

And yet Affleck acknowledges that the movies only work because of their images, not their words. So much of his story is told through TV screens and archive footage, and the rest is captured in grippingly immersive suspense scenes often free of score or even much dialogue.

His subtle way of explaining how much images matter come when an American protester quotes “Network” in saying he’s mad as hell, or when the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber) says to Mendez, “I expected more of a G-Man look.”

These are moments and ideas that come from the movies, and in this way “Argo” is a powerful zeitgeist movie that is set in the early ‘80s but can resonate in our modern, media driven world.

3 ½ stars

Drive

Samurai don’t wear a robe or carry a sword anymore, but they still exist. They wear driving gloves and carry a hammer to nail a bullet into a thug’s forehead.

“Drive”’s nameless anti-hero possesses the same focus, patience and loyalty of his feudal Japanese ancestors, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn shares the same pacing and cinematic flourish as his Asian, French and Italian counterparts. Continue reading “Drive”

Review: Contagion

Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” is a precise, engaging and squeamish thriller about living in the modern age.

In a modern age of Twitter, text messaging and round the clock news, information can spread like wildfire. In the epidemic thriller “Contagion,” it merely takes one blog post to incite riots and one text to put a life in danger. And you wonder why these things are called “viral.”

Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” is a precise thriller that charts the rapid spread of a highly contagious and lethal virus, one that jumps from Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) as she returns from Hong Kong to quickly spreading across the globe.

It’s an engaging and squeamish thriller that makes you anxious to touch your face or move your foot on the sticky movie theater floor. And it’s because this is the sort of mass panic that would happen today. Continue reading “Review: Contagion”