Archive | December, 2022

Babylon

24 Dec

Old-timey Hollywood debauchery, indulgent chaos of Biblical proportions

There’s been a lot of self-indulgent film projects this year – “The Fabelmans,” “Amsterdam,” “Bardo,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Top Gun: Maverick” to name a few – and just in time for Christmas, here comes the cherry on top: “Babylon,” from director Damien Chazelle, who with this what-did-I-just-see spectacle of seems hellbent on topping that awe-invoking opening scene in “La La Land” (2016) by any means possible. The film, something of a love letter to the silent-to-talkie crossover era in Hollywood, begins with a torrid gush of a pachyderm’s fecal matter on the head of a some poor Hollywood underling, then ups the stakes with a raucous flapper rave turned pseudo-orgy, replete with a midget riding a giant penis pogo stick that ejaculates. No, I am not making this shit up.

Once there’s a moment to catch your breath and the gonzo, hyperkinetic hedonism comes to a post-coital rest, the film trains its lens casually on a trio right out of central casting: Brad Pitt (“Fury,” “Inglorious Basterds”) as the movie star Jack Conrad, a blend of Fairbanks and Clark Gable; Margot Robbie (“The Suicide Squad,” “The Wolf of Wall Street”) as the Clara Bow-esque modeled Nellie LaRoy, who gets her big break taking center stage at the aforementioned bash; and Diego Calva in a breakthrough turn as Manny Torres, a studio errand boy and fixer (he’s the one who fetched the elephant, but not the one showered by it) who rises in the Hollywood ranks through his happenstance relationship with Jack.

The cast is more than game, the production values are through the roof – every shot screams opulent cinematic artistry – but something’s amiss in all the mayhem and madness. Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” which also starred Pitt and Robbie (this their third teaming, “The Big Short” being their first), was also steeped in a Tinseltown transition (Golden/TV era to New Hollywood), but that film had soul and flawed characters up against time and imbued with genuine vulnerability. Here Jack and Nellie party 24/7 and never have a hair our of place when on set. Also too, they’re not that interesting, they get their moments at the top and sulk once the sun sets on them.

The film spans a 26-year period, with Manny’s ascent becoming the heart of the film. It’s easy to root for Manny even as he becomes involved with Nellie and shackled by her overindulgences in gambling and cocaine. From there the film goes to some very dark places – I’ll just say that there’s a subterranean party with S&M, a strongman geek and a crocodile that makes that first fete feel tame. In the vast cast there’s a lot of zesty personas hanging on the fringe: Tobey Maguire as a red-eyed fop who runs the numbers game, Eric Roberts as Nellie’s opportunistic father, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea as a buttoned-up studio exec, director Spike Jonze as a maverick director in the vein of Eric von Stroheim and Li Jun Li, who steals every scene she’s in as the commanding chanteuse Lady Fay Zhu. The rest of the vast cast includes Any Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, Jonah Hill, Olivia Wilde as one of Jack’s exes, Max Minghella as the real-life Irving Thalberg (the blend of real and fictionalized is curious) and Jovan Adepo as a Black band leader whose narrative thread weaves throughout but never carries much heft. Themes of race, here and with Manny, are largely left unexplored.

And about the title: I’m not that up on my Bible, but clearly the film takes its name from the city that in Biblical lore was the locale for the erection of the tower to reach God that resulted in our vast array of world languages. Later, its licentious activity was the target of God’s ire, as Sodom and Gomorrah were. The metaphor perhaps being that the talkies and the formal studio system were the cleansing of the silent era’s excess? The one going to indulgent extremes, however, is Chazelle. “Babylon” is a clear passion project and it shows. It rivets and dazzles, but forgettably so. 

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The Whale

21 Dec

Isolated and literally heartbroken, Fraser’s character carries weight of stagey drama

By Tom Meek, Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Director Darren Aronofsky, a decidedly deft cinematic craftsman, has taken some deep dives into personal torment: “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “Black Swan” (2010) and “The Wrestler” (2008), to name a few. Here he’s back digging into that all-consuming inner turmoil, but his visual verve – the thing that brings that internalized struggle to the viewer – is missing, emasculated and eradicated by the narrative’s format. Based on Samuel D. Hunter’s 2013 play about a 600-pound recluse struggling with his place in the universe, “The Whale,” as adapted by Hunter and framed by Aronofsky, feels pretty much like a play with the camera perched on the edge of our protagonist’s living room, where nearly all the action takes place. That makes some sense, since Charlie (Brendan Fraser) can’t really get off the couch without the aid of a walker, cane or other hoists.

It’s a game go by Fraser, who put on weight for the part (with the final 300 pounds coming from the obvious use of prosthetics) and was last seen with ample heft as a baby-faced gangster in Steven Soderbergh’s “No Sudden Move” (2021). Much is asked of Fraser in “The Whale,” and he responds convincingly, conveying a troubled yet compassionate soul with more than his share of emotional vulnerability. Charles teaches an online writing class (never using his camera for the video sessions), pushing students writing essays to really dig down and say something from within, not just check the boxes of an assignment. Visiting Charles frequently are his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink, enjoyably nasty, if only two-dimensionally so), his nurse (Hong Chau, last seen being far less compassionate in “The Menu”) and a young religious missionary seeking a soul to redeem (Ty Simpkins). Along the way we learn the reason for his daughter’s vindictive state: Charles abandoned the family for another man, and because that didn’t go so well (the details are never fully explained), Charles fell into a deep depression, with food as his only solace. We’re also told by his nurse that Charles’ blood pressure is through the roof and that he’s suffering mini heart attacks at regular intervals but won’t go to the hospital – another nagging snag to the plot.

The title of the film (in theory) is not a reflection of Charlie’s appearance, but a reference to a cherished essay about “Moby Dick.” This dicey fine line has sparked some backlash, and perhaps deservedly so, if not for the title then perhaps for scenes of consumption as Charles folds a whole pepperoni pizza in half and snarfs it down in fast, carnivorous chomps, or his nurse enabling him by bringing him meatball subs that he eats off the crest of his chest. The scenes are nearly as look-away worthy as those in “Bones and All.” Still, there’s palpable love for Charles and his quest for redemption, and all the threads do converge emotionally in the end, even though it feels somewhat manufactured. And that’s another changeup from Aronofsky – clean clarity, not provocative chaos (as in his 2017 film “Mother!”). The bland, matted cinematography takes some zip off, but Fraser, clearly committed, carries much, and the supporting cast do their part.

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Avatar: The Way of Water

17 Dec

After thirteen years, James Cameron gets back in the swim of things

By Tom Meek, Thursday, December 15, 2022

Much was made of James Cameron’s 2009 passion project “Avatar,” a $240 million cinematic (or is that computer?) revolution that mixed live-action humans with 10-foot, blue-skinned humanoids called the Na’vi, an indigenous race on the distant planet of Pandora (don’t open that box!). It was a grand, opulent immersion that scored nine Oscar nods, with wins for Visual Effects, Art Direction and Cinematography, and made nearly $3 billion worldwide, the most by a movie, ever! It was also a fairly flat revisionist fable: White man who is part of the invading forces switches sides, embeds with the technologically inferior natives and leads them to a victory that otherwise could not be achieved – “Dances with Wolves” (1990) circa 2150.

The militarized mining force that devastated Pandora’s ecosystem in that first “Avatar” chapter went by the moniker of the Resources Development Authority, a corporate, colonizing NGO bristling with annexation ’roid rage. The “oorah” mentality fueled and led by Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) felt right out of central casting, Snidely Whiplash simplistic without a nod or wink. In the new “Avatar: The Way of Water,” that limited two-dimensionality – and Quaritch – are back, and ready to rumble. What’s at stake this time? Pretty much the same as the last time: the ways and existence of indigenous folk and a delicate ecosystem with which they share a sustainable, symbiotic relationship. The big changeup in “Way of Water” is the milieu for the showdown and the resource the colonizing forces covet; instead of “unobtainium” and the planetary neural net that the Na’vi can plug into via their USB-enabled hair cord, it’s the water-world side of Pandora and the juice from a whalelike creature’s brain that can ease aging in humans.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), one of Quaritch’s grunts who last time around earned his pay by having his consciousness transferred into a Na’vi body to act as an RDA envoy, is back to lead the water Na’vi against Quaritch’s Sky People (any affiliation to Skynet?), named so because of their flying and now wave-riding war machines. Jake and Quaritch (seen shot full of arrows last time, now in Na’vi form too) don’t need liquid-filled tanks to lie in for the avatar process; they’re full-on Na’vi, and Jake’s married (funny how earthly traditions span galaxies) to love interest Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), who taught him the ways of the Na’vi and Pandora. Between the two films, they bore a small brood. Also in the mix as young Na’vis are veteran actors Kate Winslet and Sigourney Weaver, who have worked with Cameron in the past – Winslet on that other water adventure (“Titanic”) and Weaver on “Avatar” and “Aliens” (1986). There’s even a Tarzan-clad human named Spider (Jack Champion) running around with the Na’vi teens.

Visually, the film is stunning, more so than the last, though you can’t escape the fact that it still looks like a video game running on the greatest graphics card of all time. I saw it in 3D Imax and suggest any fan champing at the bit do the same – it’s worth your greenback. The film cost nearly $340 million to make, and for about every $2 million you get one minute of Cameron’s obsession.

Keeping in mind that it took 13 years between the original and “Way of Water,” there are another three “Avatar” sequels on the slate. The sad thing is that the series has already begun to feel a bit like Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit” films: indulgent and long, with flabby, uninspired – recycled is more like it – dialogue. It’s too bad, too, because Cameron has taken concepts such as “Terminator” (1984) and Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) and shepherded those concepts in fresh, new ways.

I did sit through the whole three-plus hours fully engaged, marveling at the effects and the imaginative designs, but when I walked out I felt Camron had just told me the exact same story, and all he did was just add water.

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Film Clips

5 Dec

‘The Inspection’

Elegance Bratton’s autobiographical account is about Ellis, a gay Black man (Jeremy Pope) joining the Marines because his mother (Gabrielle Union) kicks him out and, as a homeless Black man, he decides his time on the street is something of a death sentence. Pope’s Ellis tells us he’s going to make his life mean something, but this is during the don’t-ask, don’t-tell era, when a whiff of “gay” would mean being hazed in brutal ways you’ve seen in other boot camp dramas such as “Full Metal Jacket” (1987) and “A few Good Men” (1992). “The Inspection” is not on par with those films in terms of production and scope, but it is deeply personal and moving. Pope does so much behind the eyes to convey the pain of enduring cruelty and repressing his identity during a hateful time, and Bokeem Woodbine sparks fire as an unrelenting drill sergeant, propelling the film the way R. Lee Ermey and Louis Gossett Jr. did in “Metal Jacket” and “An Officer and a Gentleman” (1982) respectively.

‘The Fabelmans’

Steven Spielberg’s nostalgic and self-indulgent semi-autobiographical tale – a theme this week – frames a young filmmaker coming of age during the end of the Great Age of Hollywood in an America rife with antisemitism. We begin with a young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan, replaced as the character ages by Gabriel LaBelle, of the “American Gigolo” television series) reluctantly taken to his first film by doting parents (Paul Dano and Michelle Williams). The film, “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952), and the experience spark an awakening as Sammy becomes obsessed with the film and recreating the train crash scene with miniatures, concocting something of a home movie studio. Then, because dad lands a dream job with IBM in California, the Fabelman clan relocates to the cauldron of cinematic wonders; Sammy, surrounded by blond Adonises, is bullied regularly for being Jewish, but instead of folding Sammy takes up a camera. The results, often shared with the community, is more a uniting salve than a harsh light on inequities and othering. It’s an odyssey of self-definition and embracing one’s inner passion that moves poetically in chapterlike strokes and gives insight into one of the most creative cinematic minds of our generation, a jagged, bittersweet sojourn that made Spielberg the visual fable spinner he is. The solid ensemble includes a gruff Judd Hirsch and Seth Rogen as extended Fabelman kin and a quirky, deft cameo choice as the aged John Ford (not to be named, as it’s a ticklish surprise that should not be ruined, but I will say the person is named elsewhere in this column). It may be the most inspired casting of the year.

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