Tag Archives: DiCaprio

Joker

3 Oct

‘Joker’: Phoenix tries to hold it all together, but eventually film lets loose, breaks down

By Tom Meek

Image result for joker images

Throughout Batman’s long history, the Joker’s been played by some pretty mighty performers. Standouts include Jack Nicholson, who pretty much hijacked Tim Burton’s “Batman” (1989), and Heath Ledger, who won a bittersweet, posthumous Oscar for his deeply felt portrait of derangement in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” (2008) – and let’s not forget the comic genius of Cesar Romero during the 1960s TV series. Nolan and Burton felt like the right hands to shepherd a dark superhero/villain origins tale, but Todd Phillips, with such swinging steak comedies as “Old School” (2003) and the “Hangover” films to his credit? Odd as it may seem, it’s a somewhat logical evolution from drunken vomit awakenings to blood-splattered foyers with a panicked dwarf who can’t reach a chain bolt to escape.

The real reason Phillips’ “Joker” succeeds is simple: Joaquin Phoenix makes the anti-antihero psycho-saga all his own. There’s also the script by Phillips and Scott Silver that plays with the Batman mythology artfully without getting bogged down in the bigger picture – though we do briefly see Bruce Wayne at a young age, when dad and mom are with us – but without Phoenix, I don’t think “Joker” takes flight. It’s a bravura go, and Phoenix should be right up there at year’s end (like Ledger was) with Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio when Oscar nods are called out. With maybe the exception of Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” (2000) it’s hard to find a movie in which Phoenix doesn’t shine with brilliant quirk and dour doses of menace. He delivers all that here and more; it’s a total immersion. For the part of clown turned Gotham icon and sociopathic perp, Phoenix lost a ton of weight, something done with equal austerity by Christian Bale (who took up the bat cowl for Nolan) in Brad Anderson’s “The Machinist” (2004) or, inversely, when Robert De Niro added 50 pounds as Jack LaMotta in “Raging Bull” – and if as on cue (send in the clowns), the Martin Scorsese-forged actor shows up in “Joker” as beloved late night TV show host Murray Franklin, whom Arthur Fleck (the Joker’s birth name) and his not-quite-all-there mother (Frances Conroy, excellent in the small complicated part) watch religiously. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Judy

27 Sep

‘Judy’: She knows there’s no place like home, but can’t get any closer than stage in London

 

By Tom Meek
Image result for judy garland movie

“Judy,” the biopic about stage icon Judy Garland, is just right focusing on her “hot mess” last chapter as an in-residence performer at a London theater club, her better days interspersed through deft editing and seamless narrative framing. It is a tad oversentimental at times, but overall a bittersweet pill that finds its mark effectively, and three-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner Renée Zellweger knocks it out of the park as the it girl whose star has faded; she’s about as sure a bet to be in Oscar talks as Leo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt.

The script, written with purpose and verve by Tom Edge (“The Crown”), sets us up with Judy and her two youngest, Lorna and Joey (played by Bella Ramsey from “Game of Thrones” and Lewin Lloyd) circa 1969, being evicted from their hotel digs. She’s broke and broken and just wants to be a mother to her children, but there are bills to be paid, no one in the states who will give the unreliable pill-popper a role or a gig and a custody battle brewing with ex-husband Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell). Before London calls there’s a brief L.A. house party with older daughter Liza Minnelli (Gemma-Leah Devereux – stunning) and an uplifting but ultimately unfortunate encounter with a mod hipster Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), who would become her last husband.

The whole saga is sad, with fleeting moments of uplift: Judy is always “on” when on stage or talking to an adoring public, but her own worst enemy sodden with booze and pills after the curtain drops. In flashbacks to her younger days (Darci Shaw crushes it as the young Judy), she’s simultaneously given an avuncular embrace and manipulated malevolently by MGM head Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery) on the set of “The Wizard of Oz,” where studio handlers forbid her food and feed her uppers and downers instead; and men in general attach themselves and milk her throughout her life. About the most love and respect the star gets beyond her progeny comes from her stiff-upper-lip handler in London, Rosalyn (Jessie Buckley) and her young bandleader, Burt (Royce Pierreson). One of the film’s more whimsical and fun moments comes when Mickey comments in a bar about a new, experimental Beatles album – and floats the idea of Judy performing with The Rolling Stones. The crowd is nonplussed, but Judy drinks up hungrily the shot of possibility and confidence.

Director Rupert Goold, who’s mostly orchestrated stage theater, and cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland stage and frame the performances stunningly, especially in the use of light and closeups, and with engrossing intimacy. Of course, it all hangs on the star who’s on in every take. One telling scene comes during a TV interview, when a journalist tries to dig in on the former starlet about her “unreliability” and messy custody proceedings and gets blowback: “I’m Judy Garland for one hour on stage and then I’m a member of family just like anybody else.” Sadly, that never really became the case, and you can feel that palpably in Zellweger’s performance. 

Fictional films such as “A Star is Born” (Garland starred in the 1954 version with James Mason) and “All that Jazz” tackle the toll of stardom and its perils, but “Judy” lives it, and through it, you live it too. It breaks your heart, not from the usual distance, but deep down inside with the painful desire of someone who just wants to be loved unconditionally.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Revenant

7 Jan

‘The Revenant’: DiCaprio goes through hell in the Old West, and you’ll feel it in theater

By Tom Meek

 

 

Throughout his career, Alejandro González Iñárritu has set his eye on struggle and the imminence of death. “Amores Perros” (2000), the cornerstone film that made Iñárritu an international commodity, featured a “Cujo”-esque canine able to rip flesh from bone with ease. In 2014’s “Birdman,” Michael Keaton’s play-staging thespian hung on the verge of ruin and suicide and hears voices too, though not to the degree Javier Bardem’s shadowy Spaniard does in “Biutiful” (2010) – he can actually see death. Iñárritu’s latest, “The Revenant,” borrows elements from all three of those achievements as it sends Leonardo DiCaprio’s imperiled frontiersman on a Jobian trek across the frozen northern plains – mostly on his belly.

010616i The RevenantThe title refers to one who returns from the dead or a long absence. Some definitions have it as a ghost or specter, and all are apt in Iñárritu’s ordeal of great suffering. Right from the start, blood gets spilled as a party of American fur trappers in the early 1800s is beset by Arikara warriors. Viewers, like the furriers, don’t see the Native American detachment coming until the visceral twang of a well-guided arrow sails across the screen and pierces the throat of an unwary skinner. Being at the mercy of a largely unseen assailant registers eerily like the band of mercenaries in “Predator” being picked off one by one by a near-invisible alien force.

DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass, the outfit’s guide along with his half-Pawnee son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), get the survivors on a boat down the mighty Missouri River, full, foreboding and a major player in the film. Ever too much the sitting duck on the water, where you can feel the presence of waiting arrows at every bend, the party lands and goes it afoot. It’s there, among the ferns and pines while scouting ahead, that Glass is mauled by a mother grizzly protecting her cubs. The scene is long, brutal and squirm-worthy as Glass’ flesh is peeled from his back and his body pulled from and flung into Emmanuel Lubezki’s impassive, ground-level camera. The orchestration of sound, imagery and the frothed grimace on DiCaprio’s face is as stomach-knotting as it is poetic perfection. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Boston Crime Scenes

30 Sep

From ‘Good Will Hunting’ To ‘The Equalizer’ — Who Gets Boston Right?

Denzel Washington and Nash Edgerton appear in a scene from "The Equalizer" set in Boston. (Scott Garfield/AP, Sony, Columbia Pictures)

BOSTON — Bostonians, how we love our town. And as the years have gone by, Hollywood has loved the Hub too. Why the love?

Some of it has to do with the scenic, historical richness our city has to offer, some of it has to do with (the controversial) tax break incentives to use Boston as a backlot, some of it has to do with the waning power the unions hold and much of it has to do with Boston’s deep and storied criminal past that has become a romantic obsession in Tinseltown.

So used it is, that Dennis Lehane, who’s penned many crime novels set here that have become successful film adaptations also shot here (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” and “Shutter Island”), flipped the setting for the script of “The Drop” from Dorchester to Brooklyn.

The latest Hollywood product to call the Hub home, “The Equalizer,” opened this weekend. While it’s not likely to be a Boston-branded movie, it does make excellent use of the city, balancing the dark criminal past and peripheral pockets that still persist today with the sweeping gentrification.

It’s a neat and true testament to see the unpretentious working class streets of East Boston (where Denzel Washington’s equalizer lives in a humble apartment) coupled with an Edward Hopper-esque diner in Chelsea offset by the wide shots of the Zakim Bridge and a high-rise criminal perch with panoramic views of the Financial District and the Seaport. The film also boasts the single best use of a Boston Herald delivery truck as a plot device.  Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Wolf of Wall Street

26 Dec

‘The Wolf of Wall Street’: greed, lust, envy, hubris in Scorsese’s best since ‘Goodfellas’

By Tom Meek
December 25, 2013

whitespace

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is everything “American Hustle” wanted to be and more. It’s smart, mean and makes a pointed political statement while rolling in the excess of its characters. As far as drama goes, let’s face it, rags to riches and success isn’t so alluring. No one wants to see a nice guy make it – they want to see someone claw their way up, live large and fall hard. Look at “Scarface,” “Goodfellas” or “Wall Street” to name a few. “Wolf” and “Hustle” are less violent and black and white, but the elements of greed, lust, envy and hubris are all there in fine, fermented form.

122513i The Wolf of Wall Street

The two films too are based on true stories and take place in New York City during high-flying eras that predate cellphones and the Internet. “Hustle” jogs through the Abscam scandal of the 1970s via a petty con who, ensnared by the feds, helps draw in corrupt pols. “Wolf” is smaller fare, following the hilariously self-destructive travails of a hungry wannabe who, from humble origins, gets his brokerage license on the eve of the Black Friday market crash of 1987 and instead of cashing out and moving on to something more surefooted, goes on to parlay his smooth cold-calling skills into a pump-and-dump scheme, manipulating the penny stock market and making a killing on the 50 percent commissions. The sad underlying truth to “Wolf,” as wonderfully articulated by an over-the-top broker (a blazing Matthew McConaughey, adding to his banner year) teaching the naive “Wolf” pup the ropes over a five-martini lunch, is that money in motion is change in your pocket. Always be selling and always be buying; forget about value added. If money is made, good, but it’s all about movement.  Continue reading →

Tags: , , , , , , ,

The Great Gatsby

12 May

‘The Great Gatsby’: Fitzgerald classic remixed with lots of spectacle, but no soul

By Tom Meek 

May 10, 2013

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald never really made it in Hollywood (he was an uncredited revisionist on the script for “Gone with the Wind”) and Hollywood never got his seminal novel “The Great Gatsby” right in four attempts and a TV movie, or the latest go by gonzo stylist Baz Luhrmann.

The bookgot midling reviews when it was published in 1925 and sold only 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died in his forties unfulfilled and unrecognized, topics (fame, wealth, longing and loneliness) that are recurrent and at the fore of his works. Some of his works, such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “The Last Tycoon,” his reflection of his feckless times in Hollywood, have translated well onto film, but not Gatsby, not yet.

The original title Fitzgerald had for the book was “Trimalchio,” a reference to the Roman purveyor of porn who orchestrated wild orgies in “Satyricon.” Luhrmann takes this all to heart, staging the bashes at Gatsby’s estate on the near tip of Long Island as both festive and fetishistic. Imagine Victoria Secrets’ angels, salvos of fireworks and bottomless buckets of confetti in a ceremony of pomp and display with all the resources of an Olympic opening or closing gala – and a descendant of Beethoven is brought in to tickle the keys on the massive pipe organ.  Continue reading →

Tags: , , , ,

The 11th Hour

16 Mar

The 11th Hour (published in Cineaste Magazine Vol. XXXIII, No 1)

 

If An Inconvenient Truth was a somber, sentimental warning about global warming and the repercussions that mankind could face after years of wasteful living, then The 11th Hour is a town crier, ampped up and propelled by a visceral montage projecting the imminent apocalypse. As the film has it, it’s not only the eleventh hour on the timepiece of doom, but 11:59:59 p.m. The future is a non issue  Yet for all its fire-and-brimstone certainty, The 11th Hour ultimately blossoms into a twenty-first-century PSA of sorts, buoyed by hope and optimism, providing solutions and answers where An Inconvenient Truth never did.

To deliver the bad news, the filmmakers, Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners (sisters), along with producer and de facto narrator/host, Leonardo DiCaprio, have assembled an impressive battery of talking heads. Most are scientists and doctors gleaned from the far reaches of their obscure fields, though some, such as physicist Steven Hawking—so commanding and enigmatic a presence in Errol Morris’s A Brief History of Time—and healthy-living guru Andrew Weil, are immediately recognizable. Also in the eclectic mix are some stark and surprising choices. Continue reading →

Tags: , , , ,