Tag Archives: The Suicide Squad

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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Three Thousand Years of Longing

27 Aug

Spectacle with an unfulfilled wish for narrative harmony

By Tom Meek Thursday, August 25, 2022

The latest from George Miller, the man known primarily as the force behind the innovative “Mad Max” film franchise (though let’s not forget he also helmed such diverse fare as “The Witches of Eastwick” and “Happy Feet”), is an opulently rendered tale about two bereft souls who find each other through happenstance and blossom as a result. Part of the film’s charm is Miller’s ability to go big, something put on glorious display in his last, “Mad Max: Fury Road” back in 2015, and again here in “Three Thousand Years of Longing” in re-creating a mid-B.C. visit between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon amid Ottoman empire buildings. The film’s other charm is its leads: Tilda Swinton, as a set-in-her-ways scholar and Idris Elba – whom you can also catch in theaters this week in the “Jaws”-with-claws thriller “Beast” – as the genie she uncorks while on an academic retreat in Istanbul.

Much of what unfolds in this adaptation of the novella by A.S. Byatt (“Possession”) takes place in a hotel suite. Not just any hotel suite, but the one in which Agatha Christie wrote “Murder on the Orient Express.” It’s something of a dark pajama party, with Swinton’s Alithea and Elba’s Djinn (as he’s called by Alithea) in bathrobes; she’s just out of the shower when wrangling with the hand-blown bauble picked up in a marketplace, and he, after initially being room-fillingly large and vaporous, dons terry cloth in his more human assumed form. The two trade tales: Back in the day, he was Sheba’s lover and Solomon trapped him in a jar and tossed him in the sea. Not to be outdone about a love gone wrong, Alithea recounts her marriage to a fellow academic, intellectually and sexually fulfilling until he ran off with a student. There’s also the matter of three wishes, and the long, inglorious history of unintended circumstances that have come back to bite greedy wishers. Alithea, an expert on narrative structure, the history of storytelling and lore, is wise to the perils and wonders if The Djinn is in fact trying to trick her – to gain his freedom from the bottle and mortal servitude, he needs to grant a mortal three wishes. Alithea holds out, and just like the Major and Barbara Eden in “I Dream of Jeannie,” mortal and magical begin a relationship with sexual undercurrents raging and rife at every turn. 

Miller’s vision has some big, spectacular set pieces, especially as it riffles back to the ancient times of The Djinn’s long-lived existence, and the actors, both talented and clearly up for the game – Swinton ethereal, wise and ever probing, while Elba, so commanding as Bloodsport in “The Suicide Squad” last year, casts a majestic yet troubled, somber aura – are captivating to behold with all their soul-baring. And yet somehow, something feels amiss. Something’s not there. Their sudden, deep romantic bond feels like a quick Gorilla Glue fix applied during script revision triage, and what of the rules of those wishes? There’s some stuff about unfulfilled third wishes (the wisher died after No. 2) requiring closure that never seem to get addressed. Several times Alithea says, “I wish …,” but what happens, or not, never fully makes sense. The two do finally get out of the hotel suite and travel back to London, where Alithea, tired of her xenophobic neighbors, has Djinn help her deliver exotic midday snacks to the biddies who spend their days doing little more than othering. I wish the film had more moments like that. There’s much to admire in the craft all around, but for all its grand gestures, “Three Thousand Years” feels not quite fully formed. It’s a novel concept about parched beings thirsting for soul-slaking water, as was the case for the masses in “Fury Road.” In Miller’s impressive “Max” revisit, in the end, the water flowed in torrents. Here, it’s as if someone forgot to pay the water bill. 

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