Tag Archives: Margot Robbie

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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Amsterdam

10 Oct

Murder mystery with an A-list cast

David O. Russell has made some broad-ranging films. His debut, “Spanking the Monkey” (1994) roiled literally in the Oedipal; “Three Kings” (1999), semi-famous for George Clooney and the director rankling each other, was one of my favorites of the 1990s; the locally shot story of Micky Ward in “The Fighter” (2010) was a gritty something-else for Russell; and then there was the almost-never-released “Accidental Love” (2015), an Affordable Care Act satire starring Jessica Biel as a waitress who gets a nail stuck in her head (the original title was “Nailed”) and experiences nymphomaniacal impulses. That last film has an abysmal IMDB ranking of 4.1 and came on the heels of two highly successful Jennifer Lawrence collaborations, “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) and “American Hustle” (2013). To cleanse his palate of “Accidental Love,” Russell reteamed with Lawrence for the Home Shopping Network spoof “Joy” (2015), but his camera has been silent since. Given the ambitious scope of his latest, “Amsterdam,” that’s understandable.

If some confused Russell’s “I Heart Huckabees” (2004) for a Wes Anderson film, get ready for more: “Amsterdam” has that “Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014) punchiness to it, and an equally eclectic ensemble of quirky A-listers. We begin between the two great wars in New York City (the sets are super impressive) with Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), a fallen-from-grace practitioner who uses his own meds, and his pal, Harold Woodman (John David Washington), an attorney looking into the suspicious death of a decorated World War I general (Ed Begley Jr.). To get information, our sleuths seek out the general’s daughter (Taylor Swift), but before she can whisper that big thing her father was on to, bad happenstance befalls her and Burt and Harold are on the hook for it.

From there it’s off to (or a flashback to) France and the Great War, with Burt as an officer assigned to lead a platoon of black soldiers because their last leader, a racist, had Harold, the spokesmen for the platoon, on the verge of mutiny and a likely court martial. In action, the pair get pretty well shot up. Burt loses an eye, and the two spend weeks in a hospital where a smart-mouthed French nurse played by Margot Robbie pulls shrapnel from their backs and buttocks. The war ends, a romance blossoms between Harold and Robbie’s Valerie, who it turns out is not really French, and the three head off to Amsterdam to mend and unwind as Burt, in moments of pause, mewls for his less-than-attentive wife back home (Andrea Riseborough, who played a similar aloofness in “Oblivion”).

But what of that mysterious death of the general and Ms. Swift, looking 1930s glam, onboard for such a brief intonation or two? Well we have the rise of Hitler, Robert De Niro (who worked with Russell on “Silver Linings”) in the mix as another war hero general, Rami Malek as an overly patriotic philanthropist, Anya Taylor-Joy, as his wife with neatly coiled braids that rival those of Princess Leia, Mike Myers and Michael Shannon as bird-loving spies, Chris Rock as Harold’s sergeant-at-arms and the ever elegant Zoe Saldana as Burt’s patient nurse and potential love interest. There’s a lot going on, to say the least, and it builds nicely in a frenetically chaotic murder-mystery way with smart twists and turns. The final end feels like an arduous goose chase without the gander – you almost wish the film never ended. Bale is at his shaggy-dog, disheveled best, far from his turns as Batman but not too far from his maniacal performance of the drug-abusing Dicky Eklund in “The Fighter,” for which her won an Oscar. It’s also good to see Washington, who was somewhat inert as a covert agent in “Tenet” (2020), return to the warmhearted intensity and signs of promise he showed in “BlackKklansman” (2018). The buddy bond that Bale and Washington forge goes a long way to holding “Amsterdam” together, and Robbie’s free-spirited third cements it.

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The Suicide Squad

8 Aug

‘The Suicide Squad’: Supervillains born to lose get their chance like James Gunn’s ‘Guardians’

By Tom Meek Wednesday, August 4, 2021

With this semi-reboot of DC’s Suicide Squad concept, the whole riveting potential of Harley Quinn still remains to be realized – and perhaps never will be. “The Suicide Squad,” not to be confused with “Suicide Squad,” is a step up from that disappointing 2016 entry point as well as “Birds of Prey” (2020), the muddled feminist take designed to let Margot Robbie take her Harley out for a wide-open spin. The carrot here is that it’s helmed by James Gunn, the once lo-fi auteur of gore and superhero quirk (“Slither” and “Super”) who rose to mainstream notoriety with the marvelously offbeat Marvel Universe entry “Guardians of the Galaxy” (2014). It’s wildly intriguing, if curious, to see him on the DC side of things, but what better hand to give a boost to a floundering franchise holding tight to the blood-splattered dress of its all-star player?

That said, Robbie’s maniacally mercurial – and damn lethal – Quinn is a supporting player here, which is good and bad. Good in that she’s a lightning bolt of frenetic energy in every scene she’s in. Bad in that when she’s not onscreen, the film ebbs noticeably. Also, at more than two hours, the film feels way too long for what it is. It begins with the snazzy pop that Gunn was able to maintain throughout the entirety of his two “Guardians” chapters as a squad of convicts with special skills (“odd” would be the better word) is led by patriotic jarhead Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and Quinn to a beach landing on Corto Maltese, a fictitious South American country. In their charge there’s a Laplander with a catchy accent and a big javelin (Flula Borg), a soldier with detachable arms (Nathan Fillion), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney, playing the part again), SNLer Pete Davidson as Blackguard, the fly in the ointment, Gunn regular Michael Rooker with glorious, flowing Edgar Winter-like locks as Savant and a giant CGI weasel. The landing’s something of a D-Day, with few besides Quinn making it to the next stage. 

Gunn, playing with us, rewinds to the assembly of the team by government handler Amanda Waller (Oscar winner Viola Davis, also back again). There we learn that the team, known as Team One, really was a “Suicide Squad”; it was a distraction and fodder so Team Two, led reluctantly by Bloodsport (Idris Elba), a dead shot with an arsenal of firearms neatly attached to his body armor, could slip in sans bloodbath. His squad is equally as ragtag, with John Cena growing his acting chops as Peacemaker, a sardonic arms and demolition expert, and the straight-faced Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who can toss toxic dots at adversaries and whose mommy issues nearly upstage Quinn. There’s also a waif known as the Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior) who can summon a horde of rats, and King Shark, aka Nanaue, the half-man, half-shark voiced by Sylvester Stallone and a likable oaf when not chomping on human flesh – I really wanted a Land Shark joke, which would have been justified by Davidson’s inclusion. Speaking of humor, the reason the United States wants to infiltrate Corto Maltese is something called Project Starfish, for an ever-transforming extraterrestrial housed in a castle-like silo by a mad scientist called The Thinker (Peter Capaldi), who has brain bulbs or whatnot sticking out of his head and looks like the unholy fusion of Hellraiser and Doc from the “Back to the Future” films. Getting back to that joke, Peacemaker remarks that “in prison, a starfish is another name for butthole.” He later says he’d eat a beach full of penises to do his duty for country. Yeah, a lot of the gags miss wide, which is why you’re only too happy when Quinn drops back in the game.

From a sociopolitical angle you could argue that the film shines a light on the long-running exploitation of developing Latin countries by U.S. and other Western interests. Naturally, there’s also those home-bred despots looking to fulfill their megalomaniacal whims – the killing of women and children being a moral threshold for some of the Squad, and a shrug and whatever for others. The movie’s supposed to be Elba’s, and while his Bloodsport’s sword-waving with Peacemaker is puckishly good second-tier fun, the shine here is Quinn. No Quinn, no movie. In the grand finale the Squad is confronted with said starfish, something of a cross between a kaiju and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s not a shark jump, but it does underscore the missed opportunity.

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Birds of Prey

8 Feb

‘Birds of Prey’: Harley Quinn’s still fabulous, but vehicle doesn’t take her far or fast enough

By Tom Meek
Friday, February 7, 2020
 
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Looking back at my dismissal of “Suicide Squad” (2016), I pined for a vehicle that would bask in the glorious kitsch and kink of Margot Robbie’s infectious sociopathic supervillain, Harley Quinn. Well, here we are with “Birds of Prey,” and I’ll just say that sometimes one’s desires are best left unrealized. In that DC spinoff, Quinn (say her name fast, Harley Quinn, Harlequin, i.e. a comedic servant), an S-Squad front-villain, was also the gal pal of the Joker (Jared Leto). Here, in a film with a subtitle celebrating the “emancipation” of Harley Quinn, we never glimpse the green-haired “jester of genocide” that Joaquin Phoenix so recently elevated to Oscar-worthy fare; instead we begin with Harley’s breaking up with him in hyper explosive fashion.

That freedom, however, means it’s open season on Quinn, who in her drunken celebration breaks the kneecaps of the driver of Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), the owner of the nightclub she’s taken over, and Gotham’s biggest organized crime boss. Everyone’s out to get Quinn: the cops, those she wronged while under the auspices of the Joker, even the brother of the exotic pet shop owner Quinn buys a breakup hyena at – creepy guy comes onto her, she feeds him to her new furry bestie. In her hungover state, all Quinn wants is the perfect egg sando from her favorite greasy spoon, but before she can have a curing bite, boozy Gotham detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez, fantastic) corners her and we’re off to the races with Quinn giving us fourth-wall narrative asides, “DeadPool” style.

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Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood

25 Jul

‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’: Stardom loses some luster in dusty, bloody wilds of L.A.

By Tom Meek

Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” isn’t a rescripting of historical events the way “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) envisioned the Nazis toppled by a handful of hard-hitting Jews, but there are definitely some major ripples in time. No, “Hollywood” is more a tongue-in-check, kick-in-the-pants modern fairytale with a hefty side of cinematic homage; it rambles some, to be sure, but it’s more sincere and genuine in execution than the video store clerk-turned-auteur’s last outing, “The Hateful Eight” (2015). It may be Tarantino’s most personal and intimate film to date (tying with “Jackie Brown” on the latter) as the director talks about tapping out after 10 films – which this would be if “Four Rooms” counts, but I digress.

The setting is the late 1960s. Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), something of a Clint Eastwood or Chuck Connors, came to fame in a fictional hit television western called “Bounty Law” a decade earlier and now finds it hard to get lead work – he plays mostly heavies on (real) shows such as “The F.B.I.” and “Lancer.” Front and center too is Dalton’s shadow and heyday stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), a smooth, angular chap with an aw-shucks facade and a deeply dark side that gets leveraged to glorious and disturbing effect. Because the two are loyal bros, Dalton, during his downward fade, employs Booth as driver and gofer. Dalton also lives next door to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski – and, yes, on the eve of the Manson family murders – and in a separate silo we get Margot Robbie as an ebullient Ms. Tate looking grand and fabulous as she dances poolside at a Playboy mansion gig and taking in a screening of “The Wrecking Crew,” which she stars in with Dean Martin.  (At the box office, she asks if she can get a free pass, because she’s in it.) Robbie may not say much, but she’s intoxicating in every scene she’s in. Doomed in real life as a Manson victim, Tate is held up by Tarantino as the essence of a sunsetting era.

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Vice

27 Dec

‘Vice’: Bale submerges self into role of Cheney for an overall shallow look into the Bush years

 

By Tom Meek 
Image result for vice

For all the gonzo intelligent narrative devices laid down in “The Big Short” (2015) – a film rightfully regarded for its unconventional tact and devilish skewering of Wall Street greed – “Vice,” the latest from “Short” director Adam McKay, takes a stumble into the pool of smug self-indulgence.

First it must be said that Christian Bale, under tons of makeup and with a harsh, whispery intone – almost like his Batman voice – brings the incarnation of former “Vice” President Dick Cheney to life with astonishing credibility. What doesn’t work in this “W”-esque biopic is the singular throttle of Cheney as the Darth Vader of backroom politics. The film is a series of vignettes: The young Dick, an underachiever working on oil rigs, drunken and failing out of Yale, but then the rise in business, the union with wife Lynne (Amy Adams, underused in the thankless role of garnish) and Halliburton raking it in after Desert Storm. The Cheneys are rich and, at 45 minutes in, the credits roll. That’s one of the many McKay-infused shenanigans (like Margot Robbie in a hot tub with a glass of champagne to explain complex investment vehicles in “Short”) that don’t quite aid the satire, but more stoke the flame as things begin to wane.

After the “fake” credits roll, the call from W comes. During a man-to-man backyard barbecue Cheney casts a dark spell over Bush (Sam Rockwell, restrained and spot-on in the small part) growling about special power if he signs on as VP.  From there it’s a mad shell game, pulling strings from behind the curtain, undermining foes with glee and raking it in. That weapons-of-mass-destruction declaration goes ka-ching to Cheney’s ears.

The Scooter Libby scandal and that infamous shotgun blast all make it in via campy digs that feel more vindictive and skewed than they are of validating some truth. The whole film’s narrated too by some kind of Nick Carraway voice, and when you finally find out who it is, you might have a heart attack over the revelation. Kitsch is where the heart is.

The Cheneys’ biggest humanization comes in the defense of their gay daughter at multiple turns, but even there, McKay paints Cheney as an arduous manipulator worming and working for the win-win – giving the conservatives ins on the gay marriage issue while taking his daughter off the table.

If you’re looking for the real Dick Cheney, there’s probably plenty of nuggets here, but the portrait is so lopsided and skewed you’d almost think it was Michael Moore behind the lens. Bale, while totally convincing and immersed, is afforded only the opportunity to do SNL skit impersonations. Besides the bro barbecue with Bush, Cheney’s not much more than a hiss or a head cock from his Vader throne, using his force to manipulate the universe for evil gains.

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I, Tonya

24 Dec

‘I, Tonya’: Skater absorbed too well lesson about being a tough Olympics competitor

 

By Tom Meek 
Thursday, December 21, 2017

Quite the year, 1994. O.J. dominated the news. “Pulp Fiction” minted Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino as Hollywood heavy hitters. Then there was the sad saga of Tonya and Nancy, a relative footnote by comparison but gonzo enough to become tabloid fodder and seize the public’s attention. We all know what happened – or think we do: The darling and the obstreperous outsider going toe loop to toe loop, vying to be America’s figure-skating princess, then a lead pipe to the knee and instant villainy. Trial by press, as we’ve come to know so well these days, can be swift and without appeal. Such seemed to be the case for Tonya Harding after the hit on rival Nancy Kerrigan during their competition in Detroit preceding the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

Less interested in right or wrong or justifications than it is about soul and motivation, Craig Gillespie’s sharp, witty “I, Tonya” plays fast and loose as it untangles the messy threads of Harding’s life, from humble origins with a controlling – if not abusive – mother to the fierce competitive could-be and a multitude of poor choices.

Screenwriter Steven Rogers, best known for his work on rom-coms such as “Hope Floats” and “Stepmom” (both in 1998) dug deep into the archival footage and interviewed the interested parties (Harding was involved in helping craft the narrative) to pull together what one might describe as the American Dream gone sideways. Just how close to the truth “I, Tonya” comes might be debatable, but it’s a wondrously compelling human drama armed with the fangs of dark comedy and fueled by outré plot twits that feel lifted right out of “Fargo” – a winning formula if ever there was one.  Continue reading →

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