Tag Archives: Willem Dafoe

The Best Films of 2024

29 Dec

It was a strange year in cinema, a year where blockbuster success at the box office was rare (“Inside Out 2” was the top grab, followed by the overdone “Deadpool & Wolverine” superfrenemy romp) and outshone by adult-themed animation, non-English-language and documentary offerings. Also strong were films featuring women’s voices and indie creep-outs – a combination best embodied and exemplified by TJ Mollner’s “Strange Darling,” Anna Kendrick making her directorial debut with “Woman of the Hour” and the gonzo body-horror spectacle “The Substance.” None of which made mt top 10, but were squarely in the hunt.


1. “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”

A sardonically black political comedy that’s right out of left field, powered by witty takes on hot topics (Andrew Tate, Putin and Pornhub, to name a few) and a killer performance by Ilinca Manolache, without whom the movie could not be. Manolache plays Angela, a feisty Romanian woman looking to make it in the gig economy as a filmmaker and TikTok sensation. Her main hustle is as a production assistant for a company that makes safety videos, kind of – on many shoots, Angela coaches accident victims, often in wheelchairs, to talk about the safety measures they should have taken to have avoided injury despite the clear negligence of the employer to provide a safe workplace. They’re more CYAs than PSAs, and that’s the degree of biting humor imbued by writer-director Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”)

2. “Flow”

The official Oscar nominee from Latavia, is a mesmerizing, dialogue-free animated adventure about a cat and all the other birds, dogs and capybara that out feline encounters. Themes of climate change—flash floods and tsunamis are the reason the cat and fellow animals find themselves adrift on a sailboat—and a peaceful world sans the presence of man and mankind’s destructive ways pervade Gints Zilbalodis’s gorgeously stylized of an Eden like end to the world. Visually “Flow” has all the beauty and poetry of a Hayao Miyazaki masterpiece and the way it navigates mature matters makes it multi-tiered and applicable for all members of the family regardless of age.

3. “Memoir of a Snail”

Not a claymation romp for the whole family – not even close. No, this very dark and very adult animated tale has twins (voiced by “Succession” and “Power of the Dog” stars Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee) separated after the death of their father and placed in foster homes on opposite coasts of Australia, as well as edgy, plot-driving incursions into swinging, fat feeding, pyromania and religious zealotry. Wickedly funny yet tenderly bittersweet, “Memoir of a Snail” has the dark, loving embrace of Tim Burton done with the edgy verve of Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park.”

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Poor Things

16 Dec

Weird science makes a monster for men who need to feel they’re the masters

“Poor Things” is a nifty mashup of genres from Yorgos Lanthimos, curator of things off-kilter and unsettling – as evidenced by such engrossing, psychologically dark works as “The Lobster” (2015), “Dogtooth” (2009) and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017). The film, based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel that borrows heavily from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” isn’t so much about reanimation as it is about reawakening. In this case, the subject is Bella (Emma Stone, who was Oscar-nominated for her last collaboration with Lanthimos playing a lady-in-waiting in a love triangle with Queen Anne in “The Favourite”). Her mind has not caught up to her body, as we hear her creator, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), remark to his affable Igor, a soulfully dark-eyed apprentice named Max (Ramy Youssef). 

The time, as you can imagine, is Victorian London, which is rendered with more of a fantastical Disney theme-park vibe than Merchant-Ivory authenticity. Bella, as we first meet her, has a childlike brutishness. She delights at the giant bubbles emitted at the dinner table by Godwin – who in primal grunts she refers to as “God” (nothing heavy-handed there, though it is true that Shelley’s father was the philosopher William Godwin) – as the result of some deviant, Cronenbergian dialysis machine. Later, she punches Max in the nose with a gleeful smile and rapid “look at what I did” handclaps. In a quick flash through the receiving room door, a duck-headed dog scoots by; there are other cross-phylum curios roaming the homestead too, a harmless, friendly homemade menagerie. The special effects are well done. Godwin himself is hard to take your eyes off of, or perhaps too hard to linger on, as his face is panels of stitched flesh that look almost like you could peel them off and rearrange them should the desire rise. 

For a while it’s a cozy, happy existence. The scientists poke at cadavers while Bella, mimicking them, hones her skills for a future at the local abattoir. As her mind becomes more adult, Godwin betroths her to Max, and the need for legal documentation brings a lecherous attorney into the mix. Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn might not be Snidely Whiplash, but he’s not far off, as he stokes her awakening womanhood and then absconds with her for a hedonistic traipse across Europe. Sex is a vigorous and rewarding wonderment to Bella, an act she refers to as “furious jumping,” through which she proves to be quite the vessel of female empowerment and independence, disappointed nearly to the point of scolding Duncan when he can’t go another round, and unabashed about receiving another man’s attentions and more. “Poor Things” could be taken as “Fear of Flying” before there were airplanes. What began as an uneasy predatory play by Duncan gets inverted and twisted, as Bella’s backstory comes to light in carefully meted strokes.

For the fabric of such a phantasmagoric yarn Lanthimos has stitched together a dark fairytale coverlet evocative of all things Tim Burton with the Kafka-esque surreality of “The Lobster” or “Dogtooth.” In Portugal, zeppelinlike sky trams float overhead, barely tethered to wispy wired tracks; and later, on a cruise, waves crest in pastel rolls of opulence; then there’s the Parisian brothel Bella takes up employment in endowed with a seemingly endless maze of antechambers – secret doors behind secret doors. 

“Poor Things” registers a stunning visual achievement that one-ups itself continually. But if not for the heroic, all-in effort by the cast, Lanthimos’ toil might have been all for naught. Youssef and Dafoe make subtle yet critical contributions as cuck and creator; Ruffalo owns his part with amiable smarm and a faint vestige of vulnerability Not enough can be said about Stone and her evolution from grunting child inserted into an adult’s body to stirred woman with no regard for the patriarchy who is, as a result, free to skirt its curtails and checks. The lens on men behaving badly – and well – is intriguing, especially when the action comes home to roost and proves that Duncan isn’t the worst card in the deck. The ending may be a bit too neat, but the sojourn of Bella’s awakening is full of surprise. 

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The Northman

24 Apr

‘The Northman’: Viking precursor to Hamlet barely hesitates to hack away at his problems

By Tom Meek Friday, April 22, 2022

It’s hard to believe Robert Eggers’ $90 million Viking saga is just two films out from his rousing debut “The Witch,” which he made for a humble $4 million back in 2015. That moody, Colonial-era chiller went on to amass more than $25 million worldwide, reinvigorating the folk horror genre and pronouncing Eggers as the talent of tomorrow. Tomorrow is today as “The Northman” thunders into theaters, an ambitious, big-scale take on the A.D. 895 tale of Amleth, a classic (or the classic?) revenge drama that would later become the roots for the Shakespearean tragedy “Hamlet.”

From the opening shots of an Icelandic volcano belching rivulets of lava and the churning north sea (the North Atlantic, as we now call it), Eggers casts a foreboding scape that brims with brutal beauty and primal allure. We often get Viking warriors crouched on all fours, grunting and howling as they channel their inner wolf during pre-battle rites conducted within the ring of a bonfire; no words, English or language of yore, fall from their lips.

In chaptered segments, we begin with King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) returning from a conquest to his people, his wife Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) and his young son, Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak). Hawke slips surprisingly well into the gruff, growly role, but Aurvandil’s not with us long; his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang, “The Square”) ambushes him and looks to kill the prince as well, but as lore and legend have it, Amleth is something of an Aquaman and can swim far and wide. In the next chapter we catch up with Amleth, now mature and ripped and played by Alexander Skarsgård (who played opposite Kidman as her husband in the series “Big Little Lies”) embarking upon a war party raid that is one long, gorgeously shot carnival of carnage. It’s not until the last drop of blood soaks into the mud (the film has that “Gladiator” sword-and-sandal texture to it, but mud-and-blood is a more apt tag) that you fully realize that Amleth is out for one thing: to even the score with Fjölnir. To do so, he poses as a slave working Fjölnir’s fields. You’d imagine with such strong genetic ties, his uncle might recognize his now burly and physically capable nephew, but he does not, and neither does his mother, who has taken up with Fjölnir and borne him a son.

Much of the copious and well-staged violence unleashed onscreen is the manifestation of the molten rage that roils inside Amleth, who proves an efficient and unrestrained killing machine. Skarsgård carries the part strikingly, but it’s Kidman who shines in a multifaceted role in which everything is not as it appears. Eggers regular Anya Taylor-Joy (“The Witch”) throws in as Olga, a slave alongside Amleth who becomes his lover and co-conspirator, as does fellow Eggers ally Willem Dafoe (who co-starred with Robert Pattinson in “The Lighthouse”) as Aurvandil’s fool. Icelander Björk, in her first feature performance since “Dancer in the Dark” in 2000, takes up the part of the oracle who torments Amleth.

Those who might be concerned that such a budget and scope might change or addle the filmmaker’s work can relax. “The Northman” feels strangely akin to Eggers’ earlier efforts; at the core, they’re all period pieces set in harsh, unforgiving surroundings haunted by the spirits of past inhabitants. Where those big dollars go are the sets, the stockaded villages, Viking ships and earth-roofed fiefdoms nestled into the rolling hills of Iceland. Eggers carries forward his animal obsession too. It was a menacing goat in “The Witch” and a baneful seagull in “The Lighthouse”; here we get a murder of crows that have Amleth’s back, not to mention his ability to commune with a friendly fox on his covert night stalks or Fjölnir’s pet bull mastiff. Not all of “The Northman” works – some of it’s muddled visually and linguistically, and at turns it gets a bit too feral for its own good – but the immersion and mood makes for a mesmerizing and haunting odyssey, much in the same way Terrence Malick’s dreamy “The New World” (2005) took us to back to our early colonial origins.

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Nightmare Alley

18 Dec

‘Nightmare Alley’: Escaping from the carnival into noir with a savage Cooper and Blanchett

By Tom Meek Thursday, December 16, 2021

Guillermo del Toro dusts off Edmund Goulding’s 1947 B-tier noir starring Tyrone Power and gives it a lush polish with rich reds and a house-of-horrors ambiance. There’s a sense of wonderment in there too, but that’s mostly reined in by the constraints of the noir form and the seediness of carny life. Set in the mid-1930s, “Nightmare Alley” is a scrumptious, set piece-driven experience to drink in, which should be no surprise given de Toro’s penchant for opulent dial backs such as “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006) or “The Shape of Water” (2017). The film’s blessed with one heck of a cast to boot. The twisted yarn, based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel, focuses on Stan (Bradley Cooper), a mysterious drifter who becomes a carnival hand with a traveling operation. After capturing the show’s escaped geek – a wild man whom we do get to witness biting the heads off chickens – Stan gets an elevation of sorts from the show’s owner (Willem Dafoe) and cozies up to Zeena (Toni Collette), a clairvoyant, and her alcoholic husband Pete (David Strathairn), bedding the former and lifting the tricks of the trade from the latter before endearing himself to the show’s demure ingenue, Molly (Rooney Mara).

It turns out Stan’s not quite that quiet, earnest guy we first meet, but a man hot with ambition and devilish drive to get what he wants. It also turns out that “Nightmare Alley” is something of a double-shift narrative. The first half is something of a Horatio Alger story fused with Tod Browning’s creepy 1932 tale, “Freaks.” (Here, along with a geek roaming the tents and cages there’s a pickled baby and cyclops boy, and Ron Perlman as the strong man). After Stan takes leave of the carnival and becomes a mentalist performing in swank nightclubs, the film moves into full-on noir mode when he meets his match in the femme fatale form of Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a socialite and psychiatrist. She’s onto him, and he’s intoxicated by her social stature and overpowering sense of confidence. There’s an air of feral sexuality whenever the two jockey for an edge. Soon the target becomes Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), a wealthy power broker in Ritter’s sphere, and “Nightmare Alley” turns into a succession of confidence games with a few dark and deadly secrets tumbling out along the way. As good as Blanchett and Bradley are and are together (Flick alert: Cooper is a raucous treat as Jon Peters in the upcoming “Licorice Pizza,” and Blanchett gives another great micro turn in the end-of-the-world satire, “Don’t Look Up” streaming as of Dec. 24 on Netflix), their chemistry gets diluted by plot machinations and the restrictions of the genre. There’s just not enough emotionally at stake; it’s great pomp, sans the punch. It still works, mind you, but as a viewer you sail through the film enamored with the filmmaking and performances without being pulled in by flaws, desires and dreams.

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Interview with Robert Eggers

26 Oct

Remote location, relentless weather had effect on ‘Lighthouse’ filming, not just on characters

Robert Eggers reveals at least one secret behind his stormy new movie

By Tom Meek
Robert Pattinson and Willem DaFoe in Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse,” playing now at Davis Square’s Somerville Theatre.

Don’t spend too much time looking for answers about the meaning of “The Lighthouse,” Robert Eggers’ sophomore film, from Eggers himself.

Eggers, interviewed on a swing through town before “The Lighthouse” began screening Thursday at Davis Square’s Somerville Theatre, said he didn’t set out with a specific theme or statement, but “wanted to raise more questions than provide answers.”

The character study of two clashing personalities (Willem DaFoe and Robert Pattinson) tending to a New England beacon far offshore during the late 1800s is in throwback black and white, hard to define – it’s not really arthouse horror or a psychodrama, but a dabble of both and then some – and hits some pretty dark depths. It might not have been made had Eggers not caught Hollywood’s eye with his 2015 Calvinist colonial beguiler “The Witch,” which made a splash at Sundance and won him the Directing Award.

Robert Eggers. (Photo: Tom Meek)

“I had to choose very carefully,” Eggers said of his follow-up, invoking the notoriously fickle nature of the industry. Eggers, intentionally vague, mentioned a flirtation with a bigger project that got made by another filmmaker while “The Lighthouse” came to fruition from a script he and his brother Max had worked on years earlier, inspired by an old Welsh poem and the works of maritime penners of the era such as Melville. 

The film, with the provocation, tricks of the light and a dash of the outré now identified as part of Eggers’ signature style, landed two very big fish as its stars with surprising ease. “I didn’t think ‘The Witch’ would find much of an audience, [but] one of its fans was Willem Dafoe, who contacted me and asked me out for lunch – which was like ‘Wow,’ because he was a huge hero of mine. And Robert Pattinson had similarly been in contact with me,” Eggers said. “When they greenlit ‘The Lighthouse,’ I thought, who else?”

Of his journey into film, New Hampshire native Eggers has it down pat: “My dad was a Shakespeare professor at UNH, my mom had a kids’ theater company and I got bad grades – so the only college I got into was an acting school in New York.” Afterward, Eggers joined a theater troupe, where set design became his forte and a skill that ultimately elevated him in the theater and filmmaking industries. Those roots are on display impressively in the “The Lighthouse”; the structure of the title looks like an authentic relic but was built from the ground up for the film. “Anyone who could hold a hammer in Nova Scotia helped out, because we didn’t have a lot of time,” he said.

Because much of the film takes place during a relentless nor’easter that drives the action, that set was erected on Cape Forchu, a rocky peninsula on the southern tip of Nova Scotia that Eggers calls a “the most punishing location we could find that had good road access.” 

“It really delivered, but I had never been so cold in my life. I mean, I had experienced colder weather, but the gale force winds on that rock in the North Atlantic were just so relentless, and there’s no respite with all the saltwater spray coming at you,” Eggers said. Many of the scenes are in driving rain – mostly natural, though sometimes driven by a fan and only occasionally helped by a firehose. The short time on location, weather and physical demands of filming meant there was little time for relaxation.

Aside from Dafoe and Pattinson, who give performances worthy of award consideration, the other big star of the film is a clamorous seagull who menaces Pattinson’s newbie with all the brio of the bullish goat Black Phillip in “The Witch.”

“Actually it was three trained seagulls,” Eggers said. “They’re rescue birds, and they’re so smart and clever.” For the scene where the seagull files up to a window and pecks it three times, Eggers thought he was going to have to cut the elements together and maybe use CGI, but the bird did what was in the director’s head on the first take. 

Next up for Eggers is “The Northman,” a 10th century viking revenge story staring Nicole Kidman, her “Big Little Lies” costar Alexander Skarsgård, Dafoe and Anna Taylor-Joy (the star of “The Witch”). I had to ask Eggers how he became so obsessed with off-the-grid period pieces. “It’s what rings my bell,” he said. “I prefer to understand where we are and where we are going by exploring where we came from.”

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The Lighthouse

18 Oct

‘The Lighthouse’: Surrounded by dark waters, sloshing through a storm of their own making

By Tom Meek

Image result for the lighthouse movie

“The Lighthouse” is a senses-riveting immersion, aurally awash in the sonorous sounds of the sea, the pelt of torrential rain and the soul-shaking roar of the title structure’s bullhorn. It’s also brilliantly composed in austere black and white, in a retro-cropped format (practically, a neat square at 1.19:1) by Jarin Blaschke, who also shot director Robert Eggers’ debut, “The Witch” in 2015. “Roma,” another bold black and white gamble, walked off with the Academy’s best achievement in cinematography last year – and rightly so – but I must say, much of what Blaschke and Eggers conjure up here is more vital to their film’s core and registers an overall surpassing grade. Hard to imagine, but yes, it’s that stunning.

The narrative the ambience hangs from isn’t quite as sure, but what’s to worry when you have Willem DaFoe and Robert Pattinson? The setup, based on writings by Melville and sea-obsessed others of the era, has two men keeping the flame on a remote isle somewhere far off the New England coast. It’s circa 1890, so there are no cell towers; there’s also no Morse code from the island should something go wrong. The pair are dropped off on the rock for a four-week shift. Dafoe’s Thomas is a salty old tar, Pattinson’s wide-eyed Ephraim the newbie in his charge. The order of things gets laid out early on: Thomas does the all the attending to light, which is kept under tight lock and key, as well as the cooking, while Ephraim pretty much does the backbreaking rest – scrubbing the floors, hauling heavy loads of coal across jagged rock outcroppings, emptying the piss pots and painting the structure from a rickety harness that would make any OSHA official cringe. 

Thomas proves to be an Ahab-like taskmaster, though just what his white whale is never surfaces. The first rub between the mates comes over the consumption of booze (Ephraim won’t partake) and later the quality of those scrubbed floors. What Eggers begins to simmer here (as he did in “The Witch”) is a slow descent into madness as things fall apart, with faint hints of perhaps something bigger and more divine at play – fog-impaired siren sightings, booze-addled images of sensually writhing tentacles and even the incarnation of Neptune himself. The existential horror story gets triggered by a vociferant gull with all the brio and menace of the devil-eyed goat Black Phillip in “The Witch,” and the arrival of a nor’easter that could hold up their relief by weeks, if not months. The stranding ultimately becomes an opportunity for the actors to really dig in and Act – and boy do they, as alcohol, sexual tension and stormwater rain down upon the splintering shingles of their characters’ relationship with the mystery of the lighthouse tower and Thomas’ journal (also conspicuously under lock and key) ever pulling at Ephraim.

The chemistry between the two, well at the top of their games, couldn’t be any more perfect, and it’s a pretty physically taxing slog, to boot. Pattinson, so good in such offbeat, gritty ditties as “Good Time” (2017) and “High Life” this year, pours himself into the part, never flinching as torrents of wind-driven rain or fecal matter pelt his face. But this is Dafoe’s flick, his mercurial changeups and old sea dog affect behind a beard so thick and mangy it rivals that of Edmond O’Brien’s old coot in “The Wild Bunch” (1969), sells and seals both the authentic air of the period and the reality-warping mayhem. 

The film’s finest moment, echoing the “Indianapolis” scene in “Jaws” (1974), has the marooned liquored up and singing and dancing gaily. In the cloistered quarters, the choreography and execution are pure bravura. Of course there’s no shark to break the interlude, just the specter of loneliness, haunted pasts and the unmistakeable boundary of taboo. Other cinematic borrowings from “The Shining” (1981) and “Apocalypse Now” (1979) may raise a brow, but are otherwise unnecessary distractions. 

The other bright spot is the titular structure itself. The isle-perched beacon looks a legitimate relic, 150 years old, but truth be told, it was erected to house Eggers’ haunted hall of personal demons. There’s also some eye-grabbing visual effects with the use of white burning light and an eerie score by Mark Korven that deepens the whole, beguiling experience. Like Pattinson’s deep space cruiser en route to a black hole in Claire Denis’ “High Life,” “The Lighthouse” is less about liftoff or landing and more about the tormented sojourn.

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The Florida Project

13 Oct

Florida Project’: Filmmaker going places looks lovingly again at people who aren’t

 

By Tom Meek 
Thursday, October 12, 2017

Two years ago, wunderkind Sean Baker blew away audiences with “Tangerine,” a film that cut into deep new territory – not so much in that it featured transgendered heroines on a quest to bust one of their men for fooling around with another, as the narrative succeeded loftily on many levels, but because it was shot on an iPhone, making it both a throwback and cutting edge. Filmed on the passively seedy streets of Los Angeles and drenched in orange and yellow, it was a scrumptious feast to drink in, not to mention being deftly humorous, moving and a bellwether for aspiring filmmakers.

It was also a promise of what might come next, and that’s here: “The Florida Project.” Something of a minor miracle and, so far, one of the best films of 2017 (joining “Get Out” on that short list), this is a beacon of hope for the future of independent film as Harvey Weinstein sinks into an abyss of shame and disgrace. Baker trades one sunshine locale (California) for another (Orlando, Fla.) while still hanging out with affable strugglers on the low who can’t get out of their own way. The film begins with two 6-year-olds spitting on a woman’s car from the balcony of a purple motel. When confronted, the pair offer four-letter retorts and buzz off, laughing gleefully. “Where is their moral compass?” You might ask. Have they escaped the cellular confines of “The 400 Blows” or “Salaam Bombay”? Continue reading →

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