Movies to See Right Now (at home)

Riz Ahmed in SOUND OF METAL

This week, I recommend Sound of Metal (Amazon, included with Prime) and Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You (Netflix). I’ll be writing about both of them soon. Sound of Metal will be going on my list of Best Movies of 2020.

REMEMBRANCE

Christopher Plummer in KNIVES OUT

Christopher Plummer has died at age 91. I loved him in his Oscar-winning performance in Beginners and in 2019’s Knives Out. One of the great Shakespearean stage actors of his generation, Plummer’s TV and movie career, with its 372 screen credits, eclipses the adjective “prolific”. Plummer, of course is best known for that beloved movie that I despise (as did he for decades), The Sound of Music. Plummer elevated some fine movies in his supporting roles: The Man Who Would Be King, Jesus of Nazareth. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Here’s his NYT obit.

ON VIDEO

ON TV

Catherine Deneuve in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

On February 15, Turner Classic Movies airs the romantic French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Innovative writer-director Jacques Demy had the actors sing all of the dialogue. Umbrellas is also notable for the breakout performance by then 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve; and an epilogue scene at a gas station – one of the great weepers in cinema history. 

Nino Castelnuovo in THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG

THE LAST FULL MEASURE: pedestrian, except for the oldsters

Christopher Plummer and Diane Ladd in THE LAST FULL MEASURE

The Last Full Measure tells the true story of a slain military hero who, due to the efforts of those who survived the battle, finally get a deserved Congressional Medal of Honor decades after his death. It’s a pedestrian movie periodically enlivened by excellent supporting performances.

The Last Full Measure is set in 2000, 32 years after the battle, when a selfish Pentagon career-climber (Sebastian Stan) is stuck with the unwanted assignment of validating the act of valor (it ain’t going to help him advance his career). He bitterly visits geezer after geezer to find out why the medal is deserved and why it wasn’t awarded earlier.

I’m not convinced that Sebastian Stan brings anything to non-action movies, and his parts of the film drag (which is bad, because he’s the main character).

Remarkably, the supporting cast of William Hurt, Christopher Plummer, Diane Ladd, Samuel L. Jackson, Amy Madigan, Peter Fonda and Ed Harris have combined for two acting Oscars and sixteen nominations. Christopher Plummer ia absolutrly radiant here; it’s some of his best work. Peter Fonda, in his final movie, also gives an indelible performance. Amy Madigan’s part is perfect matched to Madigan’s piercing eyes. And every Social Security-eligible actor is very, very good.

The battle scenes in the flashback are well-crafted, and Jeremy Irvine is very good as the hero. But this won’t make any list of top 20 Vietnam War films.

If you must watch The Last Full Measure, which is available on most of the streaming platforms, just fast forward until you see somebody old.

KNIVES OUT: born on third base and thought they hit a triple

Daniel Craig in KNIVES OUT

Writer-director Rian Johnson explodes the genre of the drawing room murder mystery in the gloriously entertaining Knives Out.

Knives Out opens at the country estate of a multi-millionaire author (Chistopher Plummer), where he is found dead. If he was murdered, it had to be at the hands of his sweet caregiver Marta (Ana de Armas) or a member of his icky family of ingrates (Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Chris Evans). A Hercule Poirot-type consulting detective (Daniel Craig with a Southern accent) arrives to investigate, and the game is afoot.

I’ve met plenty of folks like the author’s family, who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. That’s what Knives Out is really about – a wickedly funny send-up of totally unjustified entitlement. One of the running jokes is that they claim that Marta is “one of the family”, but none can remember which Latin American country she’s from.

Despite Daniel Craig’s turn as the famed detective, this is really Ana de Armas’ movie, and she is superb. All of the cast are excellent, but everyone except de Armas and Plummer play very broad characters. BTW De Armas plays Paloma, the Bond Girl, to Craig’s James Bond in No Time to Die (coming in April 2020).

Ana de Armas in KNIVES OUT

I recently wrote about Rian Johnson’s 2005 breakthrough Brick, which inhabited the form of another familiar movie genre – film noir. In Nate Jones’ interview in Vulture, Johnson says “One thing I don’t believe in is the notion that this is a dusty old genre and you have to find a way to flip the old tropes on their heads. The basic machinery of it, the tropes of it, are why it works.

Johnson slyly (and without comment) inserts a shot of Marta’s mom watching a rerun of Angela Lansbury in a Murder, She Wrote, dubbed in Spanish. And the great M. Emmet Walsh has a cameo as the aged security guy who proudly explains the VHS-based security camera system.

Knives Out works as a darkly funny murder mystery and as a pointed social satire. It’s one of the year’s smartest and funniest films.

DVD of the Week: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I loved the 2010 Swedish version (it was #8 on my list of the year’s best) and had very high hopes for this film by David Fincher (The Social Network, Zodiac, Fight Club).  Those hopes have been fulfilled and Dragon Tattoo made it on my list of Best Movies of 2011.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tells the first part of journalist-turned-novelist Stieg Larsson’s Milenium trilogy.  The stories are centered on Larsson’s muckraker alter ego Mikael Blomkvist and the damaged and driven Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander.  Lisbeth is only 90 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like  relentlessness.  Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.

In top rate performances, Daniel Craig plays Blomkvist and Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth. Lisbeth is the key to the movie, and Mara comes through with a compelling portrayal – stone faced until she explodes into a cyclone of wrath.  The other characters are played superbly by Stellan Skarsgard, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright and Stephen Berkoff.

Fincher is still operating at his best.   Remember – The Social Network is essentially about some annoying, immature geeks writing computer code and getting financing for a company – but Fincher made it rock!  Fight Club‘s desperate violence and Zodiac‘s whodunit relentlessness translated directly to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. So there couldn’t be a better director for this project than Fincher.  I’m looking forward to his versions of the next two chapters in the saga.

Fincher shot the film in Sweden and had made the country look and feel unrelentingly frigid.

The score by Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor is award-worthy and is a major contribution to the story.

some random thoughts on tonight’s Oscars

Oscar deserving Michele Williams (with Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller) in MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

I’m really not too exercised about tonight’s Oscars because I trust that it will a good night for my favorites among the nominated films:  The Artist and The Descendants.  Most of the nominations are relatively deserved, so it’s not like two years ago, when I was gnashing my teeth over the battle between The Hurt Locker (my fave) and Avatar (NOT my fave).

I am really rooting for Michele Williams to win the Best Actress Oscar.  Her performance is deserving, and she warrants recognition as the best of our younger actresses – and one who bravely picks quality scripts (Brokeback Mountain, Wendy and Lucy, Blue Valentine).

If you’re betting, the three biggest locks are Christopher Plummer for Supporting Actor,  Rango for Animated Feature and A Separation for Foreign Language Picture.

 

Spoiler Alert: comparing the two Dragon Tattoos

Stellan Skarsgard in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Again – this post contains spoilers.

I liked both versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – the 2010 Swedish and the 2011 American.  Both made my top ten lists at the end of the year.  Still, they are distinctly different movies.

The best thing about the Swedish movie was Noomi Rapace’s full throttle performance as Lisbeth.  Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth is different, but just as good.   Rapace modulated her performance between sheer rage and full-out fury, and her signature was the always whirring motor.  Mara’s Lisbeth has a more stone-faced affect until the moments that she explodes into a cyclone of wrath.

The rest of the performances are far superior in the American version.  Daniel Craig is a much better Blomkvist; Craig has already played James Bond, so he is liberated here to play Blomkvist as a weary and defeated hang-dog whose confidence has been completely deflated.  The other key characters are brilliantly played by Stellan Skarsgard, Stephen Berkoff, Robin Wright and Christopher Plummer.

In both versions, Lisbeth goes to her guardian’s house, puts down her bag and is victimized.  In the Swedish version, he see her stumble home completely traumatized, wash herself and then watch the video of her own rape – OMG! She taped it! And she has it all on digital!  This discovery is a huge moment in the film (for those of us who hadn’t read the book).  But in the American version, when she puts down the bag, anyone who has seen a spy movie can tell that she’s got a camera in the bag, which takes the surprise effect away when she later plays the tape of her rape.

In the American version, some characters in the Vanger family are compressed.  That’s fine with me.  There are really only so many nasty blondes you can tell apart.

In the book (I understand) and the Swedish movie, Lisbeth ties Gottfried and Martin to the murders by plowing through the travel receipts in company’s archived expense accounts.  In the American version, Lisbeth is looking through archived records when she (and we) see news photos of Gottfried and Martin near the scenes of the crimes.  I prefer the non-dumbed down Swedish version.

The Swedish movie contains flashbacks that we learn depict 12-year-old Lisbeth burning her own father for his abuse of her mother.  This device worked very well to explain Lisbeth’s constant state of fury.  In the American film, this fact is described in dialogue and not shown.  It’s usually better to show and not tell, and it is here, too.  I prefer the approach of the Swedish film.

The American version’s opening credits depict a nightmarish montage of oiled human forms, all to a ripping version of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song.  I didn’t like the montage, which does not kickstart the story and just looks the opening sequence to a TV drama series.  I do like the version of Immigrant Song, which I wrote about here.  In fact, I liked all the music in the American version, by Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor.

Apparently, Scandinavian audiences don’t need filmmakers to tell them that they live in a cold clime.  But Fincher makes the unrelenting cold into a character itself, a touch that I liked very much.

On the whole, both movies are very good.  After the first Dragon Tattoo, there was a change in directors for the Swedish trilogy, so I expect that Fincher’s take on the second and third movies to be far superior to the plodding Swedish versions.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Fincher keeps the thrill in “thriller”

I loved last year’s Swedish version (it was #8 on my list of the year’s best) and had very high hopes for this film by David Fincher (The Social Network, Zodiac, Fight Club).  Those hopes have been fulfilled.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tells the first part of journalist-turned-novelist Stieg Larsson’s Milenium trilogy.  The stories are centered on Larsson’s muckraker alter ego Mikael Blomkvist and the damaged and driven Goth hacker Lisbeth Salander.  Lisbeth is only 90 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like  relentlessness.  Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.

In top rate performances, Daniel Craig plays Blomkvist and Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth. Lisbeth is the key to the movie, and Mara comes through with a compelling portrayal – stone faced until she explodes into a cyclone of wrath.  The other characters are played superbly by Stellan Skarsgard, Christopher Plummer, Robin Wright and Stephen Berkoff.

Fincher is still operating at his best.   Remember – The Social Network is essentially about some annoying, immature geeks writing computer code and getting financing for a company – but Fincher made it rock!  Fight Club‘s desperate violence and Zodiac‘s whodunit relentlessness translated directly to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. So there couldn’t be a better director for this project than Fincher.  I’m looking forward to his versions of the next two chapters in the saga.

Fincher shot the film in Sweden and had made the country look and feel unrelentingly frigid.

The score by Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor is award worthy and is a major contribution to the story.

DVD of the Week: Beginners

Ewan McGregor’s dad (Christopher Plummer) has just died, shortly after coming out of the closet.  As if this weren’t enough to deal with, McGregor is a depressive anyway, with a rich history of sabotaging his relationships.  But then he meets Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds)(and they meet cute).

This is a winning comedy – one of the year’s best movies.  It’s smart, sweet and original.  All of the performances are excellent, especially Plummer’s, which should garner him an Oscar nomination.  All in all, Beginners is a notable achievement by director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker).

Beginners: smart, sweet and original

Ewan McGregor’s dad (Christopher Plummer) has just died, shortly after coming out of the closet.  As if this weren’t enough to deal with, McGregor is a depressive anyway, with a rich history of sabotaging his relationships.  But then he meets Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) (and they meet cute).

This is a winning comedy – one of the year’s best movies.  It’s smart, sweet and original.  All of the performances are excellent, especially Plummer’s, which should garner him an Oscar nomination.  All in all, Beginners is a notable achievement by director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker).