Big Eyes

Movies to See Right Now

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Laura Dern in WILD
Laura Dern in WILD

After today, all of the prestige movies of 2014 will be in wide release except for A Most Violent Year and Two Days, One Night, which open more widely next weekend. Of the ones that I’ve seen, here are your best bets:

    • The cinematically important and very funny Birdman. You can still find Birdman, but you may have to look around a bit. It has justifiably garnered several Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture.
    • Reese Witherspoon is superb in the Fight Your Demons drama Wild, and Laura Dern may be even better.
    • The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. AND Mrs. Genius.
    • The Imitation Game – the riveting true story about the guy who invented the computer and defeated the Nazis and was then hounded for his homosexuality.
    • Big Eyes is a lite audience pleaser.
    • Set in the macho world of Olympic wrestling, Foxcatcher is really a relationship movie with a stunning dramatic performance by Steve Carell.
    • Mr. Turner is visually remarkable and features a stuning performance by Timothy Spall, but it’s toooo loooong.

My DVD/Stream of the week is Boyhood, an important film – a milestone in the history of cinema. It may turn out to be the best film of the decade. It’s a Must See. Boyhood is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

On January 20, Turner Classic Movies is airing A Face in the Crowd. During every year of the 1960s, Andy Griffith entered the living rooms of most Baby Boomers as Sheriff Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and in guest appearances on Mayberry R.F.D. Younger folks knew him from another ten seasons on television starring as Matlock.

But, in his very first feature film, Griffith shed the likeability and decency that made him a TV megastar and became a searingly unforgettable villain. In the 1957 Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd, Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, a failed country guitar picker who is hauled out of an Arkansas drunk tank by talent scout Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal). It turns out that he has a folksy charm that is dynamite in the new medium of television. He quickly rises in the infotainment universe until he is an A List celeb and a political power broker. To Jeffries’ horror, Rhodes reveals himself to be an evil, power hungry megalomaniac. Jeffries made him – can she break him? The seduction of a gullible public by a good timin’ charmer predicts the careers of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, although Lonesome Rhodes is meaner than Reagan and less ideological than Bush.

Amazingly, A Face in the Crowd did not garner even a nomination for an Academy Award for Griffith – or for any of its other filmmakers. Today, it is well-regarded, having been added to the library of Congress’ preservation list in the US National Film Registry and rating 91% in the critical reviews tallied by Rotten Tomatoes. It is one of the greatest political films.

Movies to See Right Now

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Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne in THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne in THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

It’s the Holidays, and theaters are featuring movies from my Best Movies of 2014 list:

  • The cinematically important and very funny Birdman.
  • The best Hollywood movie of 2014, the thriller Gone Girl, with a career-topping performance by Rosamund Pike.
  • I liked the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, which won an award at Cannes and is Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

And here are some other hearty recommendations:

  • Reese Witherspoon is superb in the Fight Your Demons drama Wild, and Laura Dern may be even better.
  • The Theory of Everything is a successful, audience-friendly biopic of both Mr. AND Mrs. Genius.
  • The Imitation Game – the riveting true story about the guy who invented the computer and defeated the Nazis and was then hounded for his homosexuality.
  • Set in the macho world of Olympic wrestling, Foxcatcher is really a relationship movie with a stunning dramatic performance by Steve Carell.
  • Big Eyes is a lite audience pleaser.
  • J.K. Simmons is brilliant in the intense indie drama Whiplash, a study of motivation and abuse, ambition and obsession.

My DVD/Stream of the week is the smart and hilarious The Trip to Italy, which showcases the improvisational wit of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, along with some serious tourism/foodie porn. The Trip to Italy is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

On January 6, Turner Classic Movies brings us War Hunt, a 1962 film about Robert Redford joining a Korean War unit as a new replacement, with John Saxon as the platoon’s psycho killer. Along with Redford, Sidney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola are in the cast, making War Hunt the only film with three Oscar-winning directors as actors. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss for Coppola as an uncredited convoy truck driver.

Tomorrow night, TCM is airing Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). Anthony Quinn is Mountain Rivera, a fighter whose career is ended by a ring injury by Cassius Clay (played by the real Muhammed Ali). His manager, Jackie Gleason, continues to exploit him in this heartbreaking drama. There’s no boxing in this clip, but it illustrates the quality of the writing and the acting.

BIG EYES: amazing story, lite movie

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Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams in BIG EYES
Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams in BIG EYES

Now here’s an amazing true story:  those ubiquitous but creepy images of waifs with exaggerated eyes were created by painter Margaret Keane, but the credit for them – and income from them – were taken by her con man husband Walter Keane.  In the entertaining Big Eyes, the couple is played by Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz.

Adams’ performance is perfectly tuned, so we can understand how Margaret could be charmed and bullied into such a disadvantageous situation.  Waltz does a good job in the first two-thirds of the movie, when he depicts Walter’s charm and chutzpah;  but his performance in the final third of the movie seems very broad.  Big Eyes also features especially fun supporting turns by Danny Huston and Terence Stamp.

Big Eyes does a good job of illustrating the overt sexism of the pre-Women’s Lib 1950s.  And the serious issue of domination and control in a relationship lurks in the background.  But Big Eyes has been distilled down to a simplistic Good Gal/Bad Guy story.

Denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area will enjoy the familiar Bay Area locations, especially the recreation of North Beach in the Beat Era and Woodside in the Sunset Magazine 1960s.

Bottom line: Big Eyes is a satisfying audience-pleaser, but not a movie I’ll be thinking about tomorrow.

Whither Reese Witherspoon

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Reese Witherspoon winning an Oscar in WALK THE LINE

After the very brief February appearance of the universally panned This Means War, Brooke Barnes wrote in the New York Times:  “Hollywood keeps trying to turn Reese Witherspoon into a Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts for a new generation. A new generation keeps refusing to take the memo.”

It’s a good point.  Starting in 1998, Witherspoon acted in a string of smart, high quality movies, most notably Pleasantville,  Election and American Psycho, culminating in an Oscar for 2005’s Walk the Line.  The operative word is “smart”, and even in the popular hit Legally Blonde, Witherspoon played a smart woman who was only acting like a ditz.

But since then she’s been plugged into popular crap like How Do You Know and This Means War, with very little artistic or commercial success.

Happily, I see that Reese Witherspoon is taking on what look to be some high quality projects.  She’ll be starring with Michael Shannon in the film Mud, by writer director Jeff Gordon (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter).

She’ll also be acting with Colin Firth in Devil’s Knot, Atom Egoyan’s (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) version of the Robin Hood Hills murders and witch hunt, the subject of the three Paradise Lost documentaries.

And she’ll star in Big Eyes, writer Scott Alexander’s (The People vs Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon) screenplay for bio of the artist Margaret Keane, whose husband claimed credit for her works.

The common thread here for Witherspoon is avoiding Hollywood fluff to work with top quality filmmakers.  At last, good for her.