In short: Booksmart (2019)

I’m often making fun of actors turning directors, but that’s more on account of the Tom Cruises and Edward Nortons of this world who hijack other peoples’ films to stroke their own egos, notwithstanding the limits of their own talents, than those actresses and actors who come upon their direction work because they actually care about the art of filmmaking.

Olivia Wilde’s tale of the adventures of teens Amy (Kaitlin Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) on the last night before their high school graduation, who try to for once have a traditionally teenage fun time instead of being the teacher’s pet kind of nerd who only thinks about school, certainly suggests an actress who cares and understands said art. At first, the film seems to be a well-made and a bit lightweight but very likeable and genuinely funny coming of age comedy with a tendency to make fun little digressions into weird directions (Molly’s and Amy’s drug fantasy has to be seen to be believed), but the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes that Wilde is also portraying the easiness of emotional shifts and shifts in perspective common in people of our heroines’ ages, so there are moments of quiet tragedy and genuine hurt, of awkwardness and sudden insight when every character who starts out as a classic teen movie type turns out to have another facet and a different side. Wilde portrays these shifts and the opening of her characters to the complexity of other human beings as well as the downsides of their own friendship with sympathy and insight, particularly in the film’s more painful sequences, pretending the film’s a nicely flowing series of episodes when it is actually very thoughtfully structured. There’s some rather more obvious great filmmaking on display too, like the way the scene in which Amy gets her heart broken starts from a feeling of utter contentment and wonder and just flows away from there.


The whole thing is also beautifully played by Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, who pull off all of the film’s tonal shifts with ease, keeping likeable and understandable (which is something better than merely being relatable), and working through the humour, the hurt and the weirdness.

In short: A Vigilante (2018)

A woman we will eventually learn is called Sadie (Olivia Wilde), is helping victims – mostly women of course - of domestic violence to escape the supposed loved ones who abuse them, or, depending on the situation, to drive the abusers off. She’s working with violence, planning, and an anger barely held in check. Sadie’s just holding onto her sanity, apparently, but ironically, her personal brand of vigilantism is what’s holding her together and not what’s tearing her apart.

In flashbacks to support group sessions in a women’s shelter, we eventually learn Sadie’s own story of abuse, something that isn’t quite over yet in the film’s present timeline.

Sarah Daggar-Nickson’s is a master class on how to make what is certainly still a genre film (screw the use of “elevated genre” for what’s actually “really great genre”) about domestic abuse and vigilantism without ever falling into the easy trap of exploiting its theme. In part, this is because of the film’s very careful framing, the way it focuses not on the violence committed on the victims of abuse nor very much on that Sadie inflicts on the abusers in turn, but on the aftermath of both. Like any vigilante film, the film accepts the freeing aspects of what Sadie does - and it’s clear that what she’s doing may be illegal, but it’s also moral and the only thing she can do to stay sane and a person – but it lacks the smug self-satisfaction of most vigilante films, the speechifying, the pretence that this shit is easy. It is also a film much more interested in Sadie helping free these women (and a child) from their horrible situations than in her punishing the perpetrators, and it’s just as interested in a believable portrayal of the psychology of the victims of abuse. That it in the end does finish on an act of vengeance presented in a short series of very classically styled suspense scenes doesn’t actually work against this interest; it is simply the only way for the film to give Sadie some of the peace she desperately deserves, and after having seen what she has been going through, it would be a wrong note to end on to deny her this.

On a more technical level, Daggar-Nickson’s direction impresses through her elegant and meaningful handling of the film’s flashback structure (something that’s too often used as a gimmick), the way she integrates the support group scenes with Sadie’s brand of vigilantism, one part commenting on the other in actually enlightening ways that left this viewer at least understanding more about these characters and the world we live in.


I probably shouldn’t end without mentioning Olivia Wilde’s fantastic performance as Sadie that for large parts of the film works via body language and nuance more than dialogue and huge, dramatic expression. Well, there’s that one big breakdown meant to make clear to the audience how broken she is I found a bit too loud/too much for the rest of the film, but for the most part, we learn all there is to learn about what’s going on with her through glances, posture, the shifting of shoulders and the way her back straightens when she goes out to help someone.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

The Old West. A man (Daniel Craig) with a pretty strange wound, a futuristic looking bracelet around one of his arms and not a clue who he is and how he got there wakes up somewhere in the desert. After proving his alpha male badassitude on some ruffians and demonstrating why men with tiny little heads shouldn't wear hats, he reaches the nearest town, where he eventually learns that he is a wanted robber and possible murderer named Jake Lonergan. His trip to a federal jail is cut short when aliens attack the town and, as aliens are wont to do, abduct some of its inhabitants (among them a badly underused Keith Carradine). Fortunately, Jake's fine little bracelet turns out to be some sort of blaster, which doesn't save everyone from abduction but is rather helpful in pushing the rude aliens back to wherever they came from. For now.

Lonergan (still wearing hats though he shouldn't) becomes part of a posse of townsfolk trying to rescue the abductees. Among the (obviously rag-tag) bunch are the local sadistic torturer and potentate with a hidden heart of gold Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford, better at wearing a cowboy hat) and his kinda-sorta Apache adoptive son (Adam Beach), the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde, much better at wearing a cowboy hat than Craig), a shotgun-toting preacher (Clancy Brown in a too small role), a wasted-on-his non-role Sam Rockwell (he's the mild-mannered shop keeper learning to be A MAN, you know), a goddamn orphan boy and his stupid dog and various other alien fodder characters.

Later developments will see the group team up with some bandits and a small tribe of Apaches as the only hope to save Earth from the scouts of an alien invasion. Because no alien baddies ever follow up on their lost scouts.

Wasted as a bunch of great to competent actors are in it, I did find Cowboys & Aliens much easier going than the full-grown catastrophe its critical reception let me expect. Sure, it's a film full of tired old cliché characters doing tired old cliché things, but it's also a film actually willing to use the oldest tropes in the writing book (and by the way, why are scriptwriters Orczi, Kurtzman and Lindelof so much less intelligent when they write for the movies than when they write for TV?) to entertain an audience in an adequately old-fashioned style. There are some moments of the dreaded "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we know how silly this all is", but more often than not, Cowboys & Aliens plays its silly nonsense straight, which of course is the way silly nonsense has to be played to be any fun at all.

For me, more problematic than the clichés alone ever could be is the film's length in combination with these clichés. There's really no reason for a concoction about cowboys (and Native Americans and bandits) fighting off an alien invasion to be one-hundred and thirty minutes long when ninety would lead to a faster, punchier and less bloated feeling movie; I don't think Cowboys & Aliens would have lost anything by cutting thirty minutes of character bits (and the orphan and his dog), especially not when all the character bits are taken from the handbook for blockbuster writer beginners and are below actors like Rockwell, Brown, Beach, Carradine and Wilde (see how I cleverly not mention Craig and Ford?).

And here I go again making a film sound much worse than I actually feel about it. For most of the time, Cowboys & Aliens is utterly serviceable - if dumb - entertainment that may be completely forgettable, but is at least mildly exciting while it lasts. Which, sadly enough, makes it much better than your average blockbuster shat out by Hollywood these days.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,jon favreau,daniel craig,harrison ford,olivia wilde,sam rockwell,clancy brown,sf,western,reviews

Three Films Make A Post: More Startling Than Jules Verne!

The House That Would Not Die (1970): Aaron-Spelling-produced TV movie with Barbara Stanwyck as a government executive on leave because of a broken heart moving into an old dark house with her niece. The usual strange occurrences and possessions by ghosts hint at some terrible evil that was done there in the past. It's an exceedingly dependably made film by the exceedingly dependable John Llewellyn Moxey that makes for a decent 70 minutes of old-fashioned spookery, but lacks any spark of ambition or real excitement. The most interesting aspect of the movie is that Stanwyck's love interest is about twenty years younger than her in a clear demonstration that not only elderly male actors were once allowed younger romantic leads. Even though poor Stanwyck's Richard Egan here is neither pretty nor charismatic, I still approve of this exciting demonstration of equality.

 

Tron: Legacy (2010): Remember Tron? Well, Disney didn't, so they made this thing. The only parts of the film (and I use the word "film" loosely, given that this is mostly a check-list-like wandering through iconic elements of the original, but with a darker colour scheme - colours are evil!, as we all know - and more hippie babble than you can shake a stick at) worth mentioning are the fine music by Daft Punk, the performances of Jeff Bridges (now as the Dude in your computer) whenever he's showing his actual face and not the digital uncanny valley version of it and Olivia Wilde. Incidentally, these are also the only aspects of the film that seem to be alive and not constructed by PR people thinking about focus groups with only a vague idea of what the original film was about, and no interest at all in making an actual movie. It's not that Tron was a brilliant intellectual effort, but it was a film with a heart, its very own (and at the same time very timely) aesthetics and a sense of wonder about the world it created where its supposed sequel has nothing but the greedy eyes of a Disney executive.

 

Golgo 13: Queen Bee (1998): Also not very good is this OVA based on the long-running manga by Saito Productions about the super-assassin and all-around tough guy Duke Togo and his inherent awesomeness and sexual prowess. It's directed by Osamu Dezaki, pioneer and veteran of more than one type of anime, as well as one of the three directors responsible for an earlier Golgo anime, but is still lackluster, slightly incoherent and more than just a bit distracted, as if nobody involved were all that interested in making the tits and violence it contains exciting in any way or form.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,japanese movies,anime,horror,sf,action,barbara stanwyck,john llewellyn moxey,jeff bridges,olivia wilde,osamu dezaki,in short