You really can’t blame Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olson or any of the cast for the unremitting dullness of the biopic I Saw the Light. The life of Hank Williams, Sr. was so filled with pathos and singular achievement that it should inspire a captivating movie. After all, Hank’s songwriting genius (36 hits and six #1 songs in only six years) catapulted him from the obscurity of backwater Alabama to national celebrity. Being a womanizing alcoholic with chronic back pain made him a less than ideal husband, resulting in martial carnage. And his meteoric career ended when he died in the back seat of his Cadillac at age twenty-nine. Now THAT’S a compelling life story.
Unfortunately, neither the singularity of Hank’s talent nor the urgency of his self-destructiveness comes through in the series of vignetted in I Saw the Light. Marc Abraham is an able producer (The Commitments, The Hurricane, Children of Men) – writer-director not so much. Halfway through, I was contemplating where to dine afterwards.
As Hank, Hiddleston impersonates Hank’s singing voice well and brings a special gleam to the performances. But he can’t enliven this plodding movie.
In 1955, James Dean wasn’t yet an icon. East of Eden was in the can but hadn’t been released, and Dean was trying to get cast in Rebel Without a Cause. To the extent he was known in popular culture, it was as Pier Angeli’s red carpet date at movie premieres. The free-lance photographer Dennis Stock was convinced that Dean was fascinating, and Stock followed Dean around New York and to Dean’s Indiana home town. The resulting photos in LIFE magazine (one is below) were indeed iconic, and the film LIFE follows the two men in this episode.
LIFE is moderately interesting because Dean was such a character. And it’s an interesting time in cinema and we get glimpses of Angeli (Alessandra Mastronardi), Nicholas Ray, Natalie Wood, Julie Harris, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Ben Kingsley has a fun turn as Jack Warner, a mogul who has dealt with many a temperamental artist and is more than a match for any of them.
The problem with LIFE is that it’s about one of the most charismatic actors in film history. Dane DeHaan captures Dean’s mannerisms very well, and we see Dean as interesting, charming, insecure, infuriating, bratty and striving. But we don’t see him suck all of the oxygen out of the room. We don’t experience Dean’s charisma.
Now I am a big fan of Dane DeHaan, who was absolutely brilliant in Kill Your Darlings. He’s a fine, fearless and promising actor and a real original. It’s not his fault that he’s not James Dean.
Robert Pattinson plays James Stock, and his stoniness sure doesn’t help. I still don’t understand why Twilight fans find him to be so dreamy. Kelly McCreary of Grey’s Anatomy plays Eartha Kitt, the one character whose dazzling persona pierces this otherwise bland movie.
LIFE is available to stream from Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Amy, documentarian Asif Kapadia’s innovative biopic of singer-songwriter is one of the most heart-felt and engaging movies of the year.
In a brilliant directorial choice, Amy opens with a call phone video of a birthday party. It’s a typically rowdy bunch of 14 year-old girls, and, when they sing “Happy Birthday”, the song is taken over and finished spectacularly by one of the girls, who turns out to be the young Amy Winehouse. It shows us a regular girl in a moment of unaffected joy and friendship, but a girl with monstrous talent.
In fact ALL we see in Amy is footage of Amy. Her family and friends were devoted to home movies and cell phone video, resulting in a massive trove of candid video of Amy Winehouse and an especially rich palette for Kapadia.
We have a ringside seat for Amy’s artistic rise and her demise, fueled by bulimia and substance addiction. In a tragically startling sequence, her eyes signal the moment when her abuse of alcohol and pot gave way to crack and heroin.
We also see when she becomes the object of tabloid obsession. It’s hard enough for an addict to get clean, but it’s nigh impossible while being when harassed by the merciless paparazzi.
Amy makes us think about using a celebrity’s disease as a source of amusement – mocking the behaviorally unhealthy for our sport. Some people act like jerks because they are jerks – others because they are sick. Winehouse was cruelly painted as a brat, but she was really suffering through a spiral of despair.
The Amy Winehouse story is a tragic one, but Amy is very watchable because Amy herself was very funny and sharply witty. As maddening as it was for those who shared her journey, it was also fun, from all reports. Everyone who watches Amy will like Amy, making her fate all the more tragic. It’s available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
The excellent crime drama Black Mass tells the true life story of how gangster James “Whitey” Bulger built his Boston Irish gang into a major crime empire under the protection of the FBI. As if we needed an illustrative example, Bulger is proof that psychopathy and ambition is a really nasty combination. And, as Black Mass points out with the FBI characters, even ambition alone can prove to be a vulnerability.
Here’s what really happened: Bulger (Johnny Depp), the ruthless leader of the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston was approached by FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) for help in eradicating Boston’s Italian Mafia. Connolly was as ambitious as Bulger, and the two men shared Southie roots. It was in Bulger’s interest to rid himself of the competition, and he parlayed Connolly’s career-climbing grasping into a de facto amnesty that allowed Bulger to expand his murderous enterprises throughout Boston and beyond – even to Florida jai alai and gun running to Northern Ireland.
It’s an amazing tale, and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) tells it very well, letting Depp and Edgerton drive the story by inhabiting a pair of characters that become a toxic mixture. With an erect swagger and some of the coldest eyes in cinema history, Johnny Depp is superb as the feral Bulger. The trailer below includes his life lesson to a small boy around the family breakfast table that shows his world view. When the eyes go cold, Depp’s Bulger can terrorize with a touch, a word or even just a glance.
Joel Edgerton is equally effective as the corrupted FBI agent Connolly, who uses Southie bombast and bluster to escape the snares of office politics. Alas, it all finally catches up to him when a new prosecutor directs fresh eyes on Boston’s crime scene. Until recently, I’ve known Edgerton as an Australian action star (he was the the Navy Seal team leader in Zero Dark Thirty and one of the thugs in Animal Kingdom). Edgerton recently wrote, directed and stared in the excellent psychological thriller The Gift, and his performance in Black mass reinforces that he’s a very talented and versatile filmmaker.
The cast is very deep and uniformly excellent, including Julianne Nicolson, Juno Temple, Kevin Bacon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris and House of Cards) and Dakota Johnson. Besides Depp and Edgerton, three other actors popped off the screen for me:
Rory Cochrane plays Bulger’s partner Steve Flemmi. Cochrane is a veteran actor whose most memorable role is probably as the pothead Slater in Dazed and Confused. Now filled out in middle age, he plays a guy who is about half of Depp’s scenes, but says very, very little. As they say, the best acting is reacting, and Cochrane just chews gum and observes, letting his eyes tell us what he is thinking and feeling.
David Harbour plays Connolly’s FBI partner, a guy who becomes entangled in a web not of his own doing. One of the most riveting scenes in Black Mass, he becomes terrorized about, of all things, a recipe for a steak marinade. Harbour is a reliable veteran, but this is among his very best work.
Peter Sarsgaard is always brilliant, and here he gets to become a tweaked out lowlife who involuntarily giggles when he thinks that getting handed a valise full of cash is a good thing when it’s not.
Black Mass is a top rate crime story very well-told. No more and no less.
One more thing: there is a string of up-close-and-personal murders depicted here, including two by strangulation and a host of gunshot executions. It’s not particularly gruesome by the standards of modern crime movies, but DON’T TAKE YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD. A couple at my screening did just that. What are people thinking?
Love & Mercy, the emotionally powerful biopic of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, is the true life story of an extraordinarily gifted person facing three monsters. Wilson is a musical genius, one of the great songwriting, arranging and producing talents of his century. But his art and his very survival were tested by his tormentors until unselfish love found him an escape to treatment, and, ultimately, his salvation.
In his first feature as a director, veteran producer Bill Pohlad chose to depict two phases of Wilson’s life, with Wilson played by Paul Dano and John Cusack.
The first monster is Wilson’s father Murry (Bill Camp), an abusive father whose adult sons still fear after they have fired him as their manager. What kind of father needs to belittle and sabotage his sons so he doesn’t have to acknowledge that their success surpasses his own? Brian Wilson is deaf in one ear from his father’s punches, but the psychological scars are even more deeply felt.
The second monster is Brian’s own schizoid affective disorder, a condition causing auditory hallucinations. Brilliantly, Pohlad has chosen to let the audience hear what Brian hears. This can be thrilling in moments of musical inspiration. And, of course, it is terrifying most of the time.
The third monster is charlatan psychologist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a Svengali-like manipulator, who over-medicates Brian, then confines him, while controlling and watching his every move. Landy leeches off Brian’s fortune and is ruthlessly protective of his racket.
Murry and Landy are so scary that Beach Boy Mike Love, known to be (and portrayed here as) a colossal jerk, almost seems sympathetic by comparison.
In the younger Dano segments, we see Brian at his creative peak, emotionally tortured by Murry and about to be driven into a breakdown by his condition. In the middle-aged Cusack parts, we see Brian, broken down by his illness, utterly helpless against and captive to Landy’s web of control.
Dano shows us Brian’s vulnerable genius. Cusack shows us Brian as gentle and genuine. The story of Love & Mercy is about how he escapes being under the thumb of his monsters, chiefly from the perspective of Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), the woman who would become his second wife. As good as are Dano and Cusack, Banks is absolutely stellar; her character must continually react to the unpredictability of Brian’s illness and the increasing horror of Landy’s tyranny.
From the beginning, Love & Mercy sweeps us up into the highs and lows of Brian Wilson’s life – and it’s a helluva life. Love & Mercy is one of the Best Movies of 2015 – So Far. Watch the end credits all the way to the end.
Love & Mercy is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes and Vudu.
Amy, documentarian Asif Kapadia’s innovative biopic of singer-songwriter is one of the most heart-felt and engaging movies of the year.
In a brilliant directorial choice, Amy opens with a call phone video of a birthday party. It’s a typically rowdy bunch of 14 year-old girls, and, when they sing “Happy Birthday”, the song is taken over and finished spectacularly by one of the girls, who turns out to be the young Amy Winehouse. It shows us a regular girl in a moment of unaffected joy and friendship, but a girl with monstrous talent.
In fact ALL we see in Amy is footage of Amy. Her family and friends were devoted to home movies and cell phone video, resulting in a massive trove of candid video of Amy Winehouse and an especially rich palette for Kapadia.
We have a ringside seat for Amy’s artistic rise and her demise, fueled by bulimia and substance addiction. In a tragically startling sequence, her eyes signal the moment when her abuse of alcohol and pot gave way to crack and heroin.
We also see when she becomes the object of tabloid obsession. It’s hard enough for an addict to get clean, but it’s nigh impossible while being when harassed by the merciless paparazzi.
Amy makes us think about using a celebrity’s disease as a source of amusement – mocking the behaviorally unhealthy for our sport. Some people act like jerks because they are jerks – others because they are sick. Winehouse was cruelly painted as a brat, but she was really suffering through a spiral of despair.
The Amy Winehouse story is a tragic one, but Amy is very watchable because Amy herself was very funny and sharply witty. As maddening as it was for those who shared her journey, it was also fun, from all reports. Everyone who watches Amy will like Amy, making her fate all the more tragic.
Keira Knightly and Benedict Cumberbatch in THE IMITATION GAME
So – here’s a pretty good true story: the guy who invented the computer and played a key role in defeating the Nazis was hounded for his homosexuality. And The Imitation Gametells that story very well and is a pretty good movie. Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who was able to create a proto-computer that could break the codes of the German Enigma cipher machine. To make his character even more interesting, Turing had appalling, almost Asberger-like personal skills and needed to conceal his sexual preference. Cumberbatch nails the role, and will reap an Oscar nomination for his efforts.
It’s a top-to-bottom excellent English cast. Keira Knightley is especially good as Joan Clarke, the real life female codebreaker who overcame sexism and who became, briefly, Turing’s fiance.
The Imitation Game is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
The Theory of Everything is based on the book by the woman who married Stephen Hawking – and this is important. While the story of Stephen Hawking – a generational genius who becomes physically disabled but continues his groundbreaking work – is pretty amazing, the story of the two of them facing this journey together brings more depth and texture to the tale. And, since everybody is somewhat familiar with the arc of Stephen Hawking’s career, the added focus on Jane Hawking brings some unpredictability to the plot.
The role of Stephen is one that many actors would kill for, and Eddie Redmayne delivers an exceptionally good performance. You may remember Redmayne’s solid turn in a good movie, My Week with Marilyn, and that he was one of the few highlights in the otherwise dreadful Les Miserables.
Felicity Jones’s performance as Jane stands up to Redmayne’s. She masks her profound inner strength with adorability. She was very good in Like Crazy, a romance that I really liked, although NONE of my readers did.
It’s worth mentioning that The Theory of Everything was directed by James Marsh, because he’s on a helluva storytelling run: the acclaimed documentaries Man on a Wire and Project Nim and last year’s overlooked thrillerShadow Dancer.
All told, The Theory of Everything has a compelling story with two fine performances, which adds up to a satisfying moviegoing experience. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the 19th Century British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, is visually gorgeous, is centered on a career-topping performance by Timothy Spall as the title character, and is just too damn long.
It kills me to say that, because I’m a huge admirer of Leigh’s films, especially Secrets & Lies and Another Year;. But it’s 150 minutes long, and there’s only 120 minutes of compelling story in there. I took a party of several seasoned art house film goers to a screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and EVERYONE agreed that Mr. Turner dragged.
That’s too bad, because it wastes a stunning performance by Leigh regular Timothy Spall. Turner was driven by his artistic passions, distracted by his carnal appetites and didn’t invest much energy in getting along with most people. Spall uses a palette of grunts, not as a gimmick, but as a means to reveal what this guy – otherwise trying to be so contained – was thinking or feeling. (So heartbreaking in Secrets & Lies, Spall is most recognizable as Peter Pettigrew/Wormtail in the Harry Potter movies.)
As in any Leigh film, all the acting is excellent, but Dorothy Atkinson turns in an especially noteworthy and vanity-free performance as Turner’s long suffering maid.
The real Turner was a groundbreaking genius in his use of light. Leigh’s greatest achievement in Mr. Turner is visual – evey exterior shot looks like it could have been painted by Turner. It’s a remarkable visual achievement.
Alas, the stunning photography and two great performances weren’t enough to keep my mind from wandering.
Keira Knightly and Benedict Cumberbatch in THE IMITATION GAME
So – here’s a pretty good true story: the guy who invented the computer and played a key role in defeating the Nazis was hounded for his homosexuality. And The Imitation Gametells that story very well and is a pretty good movie. Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who was able to create a proto-computer that could break the codes of the German Enigma cipher machine. To make his character even more interesting, Turing had appalling, almost Asberger-like personal skills and needed to conceal his sexual preference. Cumberbatch nails the role, and will reap an Oscar nomination for his efforts.
It’s a top-to-bottom excellent English cast. Keira Knightley is especially good as Joan Clarke, the real life female codebreaker who overcame sexism and who became, briefly, Turing’s fiance.
