Wednesday, April 10, 2019

At the Movies

More movies, some spoilers.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? -- I was skeptical of this one going into it, but the outstanding performances across the board won me over. By now you probably know the premise -- bestselling biographer falls on hard times, can't crack the changing marketplace, not getting any help from her agent or publisher, and so turns to the rather esoteric niche market of forging art collectibles.

Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant do most of the heavy lifting as Lee Israel and, um, Jack Hock, respectively. I strongly believe that comedians and comic actors tend to make excellent dramatic actors, and McCarthy reinforces that theory with her wonderfully nuanced portrayal of Israel, who wore an unpleasant, almost hermit-like demeanor as a defense mechanism, both from the world at large and from herself. Jane Curtin(!) is a nice surprise as Israel's agent, and the rest of the small supporting cast are wonderful as well.

The subject and scope of the story are indeed very niche-oriented, and might not hold everyone for the full stretch, but again this is a finely-tuned portrayal of the artist's contentious relationship with the world of commerce, and the fleeting caprices of talent and love.

Grade:  A-



The Sisters Brothers -- The western genre hasn't traditionally lent itself to much introspection, but it seems that that has changed at least since The Unforgiven or perhaps Tombstone. Still, the western mostly depends on some sort of ending climax of saving the town from the bad guys or what-have-you. The Sisters Brothers takes these reliable plot devices and tweaks or ignores them altogether, preferring to concentrate on the inner motivations of its anti-heroes.

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix portray the titular brothers with the unusual surname, contract killers who have never really done anything else. Reilly, as elder brother Eli, muses about their future after time eventually catches up with them, while Phoenix (Charlie), the more impulsive of the pair, lives in the here and now, moving across a violent landscape with nothing more on his mind than booze and whatever task his paymaster (Rutger Hauer, unfortunately unseen until the very end, and then as a corpse in a coffin) has set before him.

The brothers' mission this time is to track down a chemist who may have discovered a formula for finding surface and river gold, without having to pan or mine for it. As they near closer to their quarry, tracking through Oregon and California gold country, they begin questioning their purposes and motives, and what kind of men they want to be, and be remembered as. When it all goes bad, as these things inevitably do, the brothers come full circle to confront the origins of their violent lives.

Reilly and Phoenix are both quirky but versatile actors; here they play it straight, and it pays off with strong performances for both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed are also strong in key supporting roles. An interesting side note (for me, as a lifelong Californian who has been to every part of the state many times) is that the exterior location shooting was done primarily in Spain and France, and it sure as hell looked like California gold country to me. This is a terrific movie, directed with care and patience, belying the violent narrative throughout.

Grade:  A



Bohemian Rhapsody -- This is a movie where you simply have to manage your expectations going into it. For one thing, it had been in various stages up production since 2010, with Sacha Baron Cohen originally cast to play Freddie Mercury, and ultimately departing the project for a variety of reasons. Several screenwriters and directors later, and recasting Mr. Robot star Rami Malek as Mercury, this is what you have -- a well-meaning but ultimately muddled Star Is Born template of excess, redemption, and tragedy.

Growing up in the late 1970s with parents that mostly listened to country or AM pop, bands like Queen helped me make a critical jump outside those relatively narrow parameters. There was especially heavy airplay around the Jazz and News of the World albums, culminating in The Game's smash hit success across the board. Just in those three albums, you can hear them successfully experimenting in multiple genres -- hard rock, arena anthems, cheeky pop confections like Bicycle Race, disco, and even rockabilly gems like Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But of course they had much more to offer throughout their career.

If you eschew the usual path of listening to one of the greatest-hit collections, and just go back through the catalog, you can hear and appreciate how truly fearless they were musically. Naturally the movie makes a huge deal of that with the conception and production of the title track, but A Night at the Opera was their fifth album, and they had been doing adventurous outings similar to Bohemian Rhapsody all along.

Hell, check out side two of Queen II, and imagine the guts it took to get something as intricately crafted and flat-out weird as The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke onto vinyl. And then to have that song segue into Nevermore, a schmaltzy ballad which packs more passion and sorrow into seventy-eight seconds than you'll find in the entire catalogs of your Mariah Carey and Celine Dion types.

Most people have never heard either of those songs; most Queen fans are unfamiliar with them. They were never played in concert or on the radio. Sheer Heart Attack has a bunch of hidden gems as well; Flick of the Wrist and Stone Cold Crazy are much better than Killer Queen, which is pretty damned good to begin with. The radio hits were just the tip of the iceberg with these guys.

What Queen really did was take the chamber-pop aspirations of late-period Brian Wilson and Beatles, and put them in a prog-rock context, and then turned around and made those orchestrations accessible across a wide variety of musical genres. That's way more interesting (to me, anyway) than Freddie Mercury's conflicted personal life, although seeing Queen drove the point home much more than hearing them did, and it should be appreciated as well, Mercury unabashedly strutting and preening in unitards in giant arenas in front of traditionally homophobic hard rock fans, defying them to make the connection of people they were conditioned to hate making music that they loved.

Anyway, the movie and its expectations. If you watch it as a straight-up biopic, you'll be disappointed, not only because the musical chronography is botched (to cite just one example, Fat Bottomed Girls was released in 1978 and was a concert staple for years after; there is no way they could have toured with that song in 1973-74), but because it eschews real introspection for cliché.

There's an interesting situation with Mercury, clearly in love with his girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), not sexually attracted to her but wanting "everything else," and so keeping her in the mansion next door to his own. It's a dilemma of generosity and selfishness that is never adequately explored, just accepted after a while, as Mary gets a boyfriend and starts her own family, all while still inhabiting the house that Freddie bought. She clearly cares about him as well, but there is always that impasse, and she never fully moves on from being his muse/curator in the gilded cage.

One minor humorous note in the first half of the movie is the cameo appearance of a nearly unrecognizable Mike Myers as EMI Records exec Ray Foster, shit-talking Bohemian Rhapsody when the band presented it to him, and thereby turning the scene into an extended Wayne's World meta-reference. It's an interesting move, but again brushes over what, considering the band's earlier output, had to have been a much more complex discussion between the band and the record company. But we need the simplified Hero's Journey trope of Standing Up For Exalted Principles And Integrity, so that's where it lands here.

The rest of the band, played by unknowns, fall into the usual trite templates:  Brian May is the brainy astrophysicist who occasionally takes his head out of the stars to write some songs and play some solos; Roger Taylor is the pussyhound drummer who wanted to be a dentist; John Deacon is the quiet one, as all bassists other than Paul McCartney are. Who knew that Deacon was actually an electrical engineer who designed and built a custom amplifier for May's idiosyncratic guitar orchestrations? It's all second fiddle to whatever drama Freddie's cooking up at the moment.

The movie does succeed on its own terms in the final act, as Live Aid becomes the focal point of the band reuniting for Freddie's triumphant return, before becoming too ill to perform anymore. They did manage to record another studio album (Innuendo), and a very good one at that, but that's never even mentioned. (Although The Show Must Go On, from that album, does play over the final credits.) Basically they perform at Live Aid, and six years later Freddie dies, the end.

However. Malek is outstanding in his performance (especially the Live Aid performance at the end), despite the distracting prosthetic teeth, and the music....well, it's Queen. They could have just run two straight hours of music and that would have been great. This one gets two grades, one for the music and one for the movie.

Grades:  A+ (music); C (movie)



Triple Frontier -- Another project that had been in the works for years, going through rounds of scripts and writers and directors and recasting, finally landing on Netflix and premiering last month. As action/heist movies go, the premise isn't half bad:  former black-op mercs, left high and dry by the gubmints they quietly did wetwork for, decide to rob a narco chieftain deep in the jungle near the convergence of the Amazon headwaters of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia (not to be confused with the Iguacu Falls intersection of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay).

The casting is solid enough, featuring Charlie Hunnam as the ringleader, and Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, and Ben Affleck accompanying him on the heist. (Affleck pulled out of the project for a year to hit rehab, then returning for what seems like a fairly subdued performance, considering the premise.) And there are some nice action set pieces here and there, particularly in the opening scenes, but it ends strong as well.

The plot does make some use of the remoteness and lawlessness of the locale (although the movie was filmed in Oahu), but in the end, this sort of thing has been explored in movies ranging from A Simple Plan to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the theme of greed getting the better of people.

Still, it's well-made and the cast is very good. It's an old theme but a good one, and the action moves along fairly tightly. There are plenty of worse ways to spend two hours.

Grade:  B+

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