What Happened, Miss Simone?

There is a patina of sorrow over this documentary that I was aware of from the very first scene.

Nina Simone, one of the greatest jazz singers, entertainers, and concert pianists ever, felt isolated by and from both the black and the white community though she was admired and original idolized by both. And how could they (we) not? She truly was a grand dame of jazz, with a depth and darkness to her voice that touched all who listened. The film is not short of people willing to praise her talents, but we get a true sense of her personality when she is profuse in her own praise of other artists as well. Ever humble, she is generous to other musicians and quiet about her own accomplishments though thankful to those who helped her along the way.

The greatest treat in this documentary is undoubtedly the vintage footage of Miss Simone performing. It gives you a real sense of how timeless her sound was, how her incredibly rich voice can still reach across the years and fill your heart like velvet. Oh man.

Simone was also a “patron saint of the rebellion”- a woman who reflected the times she lived in, proudly. She was tired of the establishment in more way than one and did her part to expose its hypocrisies, even if it was at the expense of her white audience. She wasn’t afraid to align herself with militants and defined herself as “not nonviolent” even though MLK was a friend of hers; thankfully she had music at her disposal and not guns. When she started playing exclusively political songs, it affected her career. But she believed it was part of the artist’s role to preach what they believed, to have their art contain a message, and hers certainly did, notably with Mississippi Goddamn, a song written in response to and expressing sorrow and anger over the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the Baptist church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls.

Simone lived in an era where society didn’t appreciate a woman’s genius, let alone a black woman’s. What did it do to her? She struggled with depression and appeared to already be in a downward spiral when Dr. King was assassinated. But when a battle with bipolar threatens – will she be willing to take medication that could rob her of her music?

Simone has been dead for a decade but never ever forgotten. This documentary helps to shed some light on a strong, interesting, multi-faceted woman. It’s nominated for an Oscar this year in a category that feels fairly locked up by Amy, an inferior offering. But the good news is, you can see them both on Netflix right now, and decide for yourself.

Oscar Spotlight: Makeup & Hairstyling

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The nominees for the 2016 Academy Award for best makeup and hairstyling are few: Love Larson & Eva von Bahr for The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega & Damian Martin for Mad Max: Fury Road; and Sian Grigg, Duncan Jarman & Robert Pandini for The Revenant.

The Revenant:

Jarman: Sian and I were working on “Suffragette” — we were actually doing the scene outside the Houses of Parliament at the time. She mentioned that she had been given the script for “The Revenant” and would I be interested in doing the prosthetics. She has been Leo’s make-up artist since “Titanic,” and I have made prosthetics for him since “The Aviator.” We flew out to L.A. a week or so later to have our first meeting with [director Alejandro G. Iñárritu]. I have done a lot of blood gags on films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of maxresdefault Brothers.” But it was the idea of taking that out of the studio environment and into some really harsh terrain and temperatures that really interested me.

Grigg: I have to say the whole film was a huge challenge, knowing that the make-up was so integral to explaining (fur trapper Hugh Glass’) journey and recovery. If his make-up was not convincingly natural, then it could undermine the film. You have to believe he has been savagely attacked by the bear, that his wounds have turned gangrenous, that they recover in the sweat 285 lodge and that he has real ice in his beard — not paraffin wax — and frost nip on his face and lips — not prosthetics pieces. If it starts to look like make-up at any time, you could take the audience out of the immersive quality of the film; it’s staggering how Alejandro and (D.P. Emmanuel Lubezki) manage to make you feel like you are there in the film with Glass, not just watching him on the screen. You even start to feel cold so the naturalism of the make-up is integral and essential.

Inarritu insisted that the wounds not only look realistic, but also appear to bleed freely – and then be stitched up by actors in the same long take. Neck-wound-prosthetics-445515 Impossible you say? To make this happen, the makeup artists used copious amounts of fake blood, created silicone neck equipment that could “bubble and bleed” and added wig lace that could be “stitched” back together by Leo’s cast mates. Poor Leo had to lie in freezing mud connected to dozens of blood lines, covered in cold blood for hours. But it looks damn real in the movie.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared:

The 100 year old man is portrayed in the film by a well-known comedic actor less than half that age. Larson & von Bahr were apprehensive about taking on the task. “When they called us, we thought, ‘Thank you so much for asking us, but no thank you,’” said Larson. “It’s such a hard thing to do with a character in daylight. It’s a suicide mission. If we failed, we would never get a job again.” LR-Allan-4-6

It took four and a half hours to get the actor into 100-year-old mode. “We started off with a back of his neck,” she explained, “a front piece, a neck piece, silicone baldcap, which covered his whole forehead and eyebrows. The edge included parts of his upper eyelids. We 100-yr-old_hands_1200x800_Web_ctsyLoveLarson-300x199 added cheek pieces, an upper lip, a chin, a nose piece and ear pieces, as well as lace eyebrows that were laid and lace sideburns. The whole baldcap was punched with strands of hair individually. We didn’t use any lace pieces on the baldcap. He had contact lenses made by the Reel Eye Company in the U.K. and vacuum-form pieces for his teeth that looked more gray and old-ish – really thin but pretty much like dentures with a 0.2mm thick plastic layer. It doesn’t affect his speech and you can tint and color them.”

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“All the pre-paint was mainly done with silicone paint mixed with oil paint and a Paasche brush utilizing spackling techniques, layers and layers,” Larson LR-100-yr-old_bald-cap_1200x800_Web_ctsyLoveLarson-300x199 stated. “In the trailer, I added castor oil, airbrushed with a Paasche airbrush. If you add castor oil to the Illustrator colors, it becomes a bit more flexible. Then, we added all of the fine details and sealed it with silicone caulking.” Silicone caulking guys – imagine sitting through that! (Well, technically, Matt and I almost can – if you missed the piece where we sit through our own makeup ordeal, check it out.)

Mad Max: Fury Road:

In total the makeup, hair and special effects personnel were a 35 strong crew, headed by Lesley Vanderwalt who knew she wanted Damian Martin as her prosthetics guy. A typical day on the set meant doing “60-120 of the background ‘War Boys’, mainly stuntmen, and about 8-10 close-up War Boys in prosthetics in the tent. We would allow 2.5-3 hours for prosthetics and two hours for the background boys, stunt doubles and picture doubles.” The make-up team actually taught the War Boys actors how to do their own makeup as director George Miller wanted them to be able to individualize their own looks. It must have been grueling to do so many looks on so many people, but the real challenging was getting the make-up to stand up in the desert conditions without getting lots of gritty sand stuck in it – keeping the War Boys white in such a dirty environment was near-impossible, she insists.

You may remember from the movie that the Max\Furiosa team encounter lots of different tribes during their trek out in the desert, and Vanderwalt remembers being inspired by “the oil fields in Angola, the workers of Salgado, the rubbish heaps in the Philippines, and other bleak environments. I also looked at African tribal and Indian religious festivals and Polynesian and Maori scarification.” All the tattoos sported by Max and the like are obviously makeup applications as well, not to mention the horrific genetic anomalies that many characters sport. The most time-consuming of all the characters was the old lady who was covered in tattoos, Miss Giddy. It took a 6 hour application to get her fully coated, done the day before, and the actress (Jennifer Hagan) would have to sleep in them – very carefully! Now that’s dedication.

Which team would you give the Oscar to?

Check out our spotlight on the costume design race, and be sure to follow us on Sunday as we live-tweet our Oscar party @assholemovies .

Ricki And The Disappointment

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For better or worse, I hold Meryl Streep movies to a higher standard than the rest. Meryl Streep has become her own synonym for being a superb, kick-ass actress. She’s really the best we’ve got, and so you naturally want her to be good every time, and for the movie she’s in to be an appropriate vehicle. This one’s not.

On paper, it sounded almost promising: a young woman is devastated by the breakup of her marriage, and so her estranged mother who left the family to pursue a life of rock and roll is called in for back up. Might be fun to watch Meryl rock out, be a bit of a badass. We’ve heard Meryl sing show tunes (Into the Woods), disco (Mama Mia), country (A Prairie Home Companion) and the blues (Postcards from Reality). Why not rock? And why not throw in some stuff on aging, motherhood, second chances, redemption. Cast Meryl’s real-life daughter, Mamie Gummer (what a name to be saddled with!) and 80s pop relic Rick Springfield, and voila: a movie that practically makes itself. Right?

In reality: kind of a bore, kind of a chore.

We need to talk about Diablo Cody. She’s the wunderkind who gave us Juno, the hyper-verbal, weirdly anti-abortion, high school pregnancy film that took Hollywood by storm. But that was so 2007. Her attempts to replicate success have been…well, lackluster: Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult, and now this. I know it’s hard to let go, Hollywood, but like the only Rick Springfield hit you can name (Jessie’s Girl), it’s time to call Diablo Cody what she is: a one-hit wonder.

I kind of liked Meryl as Ricki, but I didn’t like Ricki, and nobody else should have either. Not her family, certainly. Rick Springfield (of all people) tells her early on: “It doesn’t matter if your kids love you or not. It’s not their job to love you. It’s your job to love them.” That feels like a full-circle moment – you know, that little piece of wisdom in a film that will eventually come back to our protagonist at the moment of truth so we can see how far she’s come. Yeah, someone should tell Diablo about that. Because what actually happens is: Ricki leaves her kids, again. Wallows in self-pity. Comes back only when someone else extends an olive branch and someone else makes a sacrifice, and even then, she manages to make someone else’s special day all about her. Character development? Growth? Um. Not here. But what we do get is a scintillating Diablo simile in which a human heart is compared to a Big Mac – you know, because neither ever spoils (?).

Meryl is great, and I enjoyed Kevin Kline as the ex-husband and Audra McDonald as the new wife and replacement mother, though found her criminally underused. Nothing against Meryl, obviously, but Audra’s a huge Broadway star so it felt a little odd to have her in a non-singing role in such a song-heavy movie. But the songs are only there to attempt to bring some cohesiveness to a movie that otherwise feels like a bunch of random scenes that felt like good ideas but had no real raison d’etre. The tone is…I’m waffling between inconsistent and non-existent. Am I feeling generous? Enh, not really.

I was bored, and I was frustrated. Is it an adequate time-waster? I suppose. It’s minimally offensive, although now that I think of it, Ricki is a Bush supporter, ostensibly because she “supports the troops” (there’s something to that, but we never really find out what – my hunch: cutting room floor) and opposes gay marriage (because people who abandon their children are paragons of family values) but in fact she also complains about the unlivable minimum wage which means she can’t afford to shop at the grocery store she works at. How and why is an aging rocker who dresses like a hooker at night court so goddamned conservative? Your guess is as good as mine. But is it all worth it just to hear Streep cover both Springstein AND Lady Gaga? Just maybe.

Oscar Spotlight: Sandy Powell

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Sandy Powell is already a renowned costumer designer: she was awarded the sandrapowell OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2011 Queen’s New Years Honours List for her services to costume design and the film industry for her work on films such as The Crying Game, Rob Roy, The End of The Affair, and The Other Boelyn Girl. She’s been nominated for an Academy Award 12 times already and won three – for Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator, and The Young Victoria – but she’s not up for one this year, she’s up for two!

Comparing her Oscar-nominated efforts for 2015, Powell said “On ‘Cinderella,’ the biggest challenge is living up to everyone’s expectations: How can you do another version that will be as iconic and not disappoint. On ‘Carol,’ the challenge was more time and money. Totally different worlds.” Different worlds, but she made her mark on both. Powell has a long history of working on period pieces, with Harvey Weinstein noting “Sandy’s great gift is her ability to make historical costumes look contemporary. She manages to be both true to the 8881sb period and modern.” Powell would agree. “Unless of course the film requires it, I’m not interested in an exact replica of the period. I look at the period, how it should be, how it could be, and then I do my own version.” And that’s how you win awards.

A costume designer thinks up the costumes – not just what a character might likely be wearing, but how that outfit could enhance the character’s personality, or reflect a time period or social status. There’s often a lot of thought to colour – indeed, colour can reflect the plot, or help us distinguish good guys from bad guys. Tone and texture help create the world a character lives in. A costume may also distort or enhance the character’s body – Julia vampire Roberts famously thanked a costumer for giving her cleavage in Erin Brockovich. Sandy Powell, while working on Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, said “It was different. Tom Cruise was lovely to me, but there were many discussions about his height in relation to Brad Pitt’s. There are always vanity concerns.”

The costume designer has a whole wardrobe department working under them to realize the film’s look. They’ll also be consulting and influencing the makeup and hair stylists as well. A wardrobe department consists of set costumers (usually for each of the lead characters), key costumers, and a costume supervisor. The tasks are split between the “making wardrobe”, the people who use the designs to create or acquire the costumes in pre-production (before filming) and the “running wardrobe”, the people who maintain costumes during filming and make sure they’re available each day of filming.

“As a costume designer,” says Powell, “you need to be able to sew. Not be the greatest tailor or sewer in the world but you have to know how things are constructed otherwise you can’t talk to your tailors and your cutters and your seamstresses. You have to be able to understand their job to tell them what to do. You can’t just not have any knowledge of construction.”

The assistant designer helps the designer with research, shopping, rentals and fittings for all characters; the designer is creating a vision which will be informed by all kinds of inspiration. The costume supervisor is in charge of aviator coming up with a realistic budget (Sandy Powell had a 2 million dollar budget for The Aviator!), keeping track of all the receipts, and managing the demands of the production schedule (like, which costumes will be needed on which day). The set costumer is in charge of costume continuity – if someone removes a sweater in the first part of the scene, it needs to stay off. And if someone is shot, their jacket needs to have a bullet hole thereafter. That kind of thing. The key costumer will supervise the set costumers and maintain the principle costumes for the lead actors’ wardrobes. The truck costumer is the person inside the wardrobe trailer at the shoot; they make sure the costumes for the actors are in their personal trailers\dressing rooms when they’ll need them, clean or dirty as the shoot requires. A dresser helps with fittings and alterations, and getting all those extras into their costumes.

There are dozens of people thinking about what jeans will do the job, and how they’ll look, and how distressed they should be, and if they need to be hemmed, and where to buy them, and if they’re affordable, and what wonders they’ll do for someone’s bum, and how to transport them to the set, and if they’ll need to be ironed or if wrinkly is more the thing, and of someone will need help wriggling into them, and if they’ll need to be washed at the end of the day, or if they’ll smell like horse, or need blood splatter. Someone did a piss-poor job of the jeans job on the set of War of the Worlds, because Tom Cruise, who played a lowly construction worker, was spotted wearing a $300 pair of jeans while operating a crane. Not bloody likely, and not likely to occur on Powell’s watch, either. Ever humble, though, she insists “a costume designer’s contribution is to help make some believable characters, that’s all.”

Sandy Powell is responsible for the beautiful look of Cinderella – and while Cinderella’s ball gown is obviously a showstopper, I was even more enamoured with Cate Blanchett’s eye-catching pieces.

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To make this one dress took Powell perhaps 4 to 5 months. “First of all, there’s a crinoline over a wire cage. Then there are petticoats with hundreds and hundreds of miles of frills to give it the volume and the lightness. On top of that are the really fine layers of fabric.” Those layers of fabric are not just blue, but greens and lilacs and aquas that together achieve that beautiful, perfect blue.

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Between Cinderella, the fairy godmother, and the wicked stepmother, Sandy Powell used 1.7 million Swarovski crystals.

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The fairy godmother dress actually had LED lights that made it twinkle.

The wicked stepmother’s jewel tones had some surprising inspiration. “I wanted her to look like a traditional wicked characters. I based her on people like Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford in the 1940s as if they were doing a 19th century period piece, and getting it all a little bit wrong. I wanted her colors to be strong and I wanted always there to be an element of black, so she’s always wearing some black.”

And the shoe?

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Powell visited the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery in England where she searched the archives for old, period shoes and found a beautiful pair from the 1890s that were “incredibly elegant and had a ridiculously high five-inch heel. I knew I wanted to use that shape—just in glass. They lent me the shoe. I made a 3D copy of it and worked with Swarovski to really get that shape and turn it into a faceted crystal shoe.”

But let’s not forget Powell’s equally stunning work on Carol.

“For Carol, I looked at a lot of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, from the period exactly from the months that we were shooting — the winter months in 1952 going into 1953 — and that pretty much that gave me all the shapes, all the color tones, everything that I needed.”

carolwardrobe

“I looked at the specific fashion photographers like Gordon Parks, Clifford Coffin and Cecil Beaton, and if you pick up any magazine from 1952, that is the silhouette you will see. In order to CAROL create that silhouette, I had to start with the undergarments. That’s not Cate’s natural silhouette — she doesn’t have pointed bosoms [laughs]. Believe it or not, a lot of the jacket shapes are actually padded over the hips to give that hip shape and the small waist and the bras provide that shape of the bosom. So you create the silhouette from the foundation garments and build the clothing over the top.”

But if you’re thinking she’s a shoe-in for the Oscar, I’m not quite confidant you’re right. She’s got strong competition from Paco Delgado for The Danish Girl, Jenny Beavan for Mad Max: Fury Road, and Jacqueline West for The Revenant. I don’t think anyone’s a lock in this competition!

Race

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Jesse Owens deserved better. Race is a movie that hits the points you’d expect but does it so mechanically that it has no momentum. Rather than having the power of its Olympic sprinter protagonist, Race is soft and lumbering, like a darts competition at the local dive bar.

The only time Race really shines is during the one-on-one exchanges between Owens (Stephan James) and his coach, Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis). Those conversations are funny, warm and real. Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. It’s too bad that the film didn’t put those interactions into the foreground as that would have made for a much more
enjoyable movie.

Perhaps the problem is there was simply too much ground to cover. Race’s story follows Owens through the course of several years during the peak of his career. We flip back and forth between Ohio, New York, Berlin, Nebraska, Michigan, Los Angeles, and probably more places that I’ve forgotten. We hit the athletic highlights, like Owens setting three world records and tying a fourth in less than an hour in 1935, and Owens winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games. We touch on the hypocrisy of the United States’ threat to boycott those Berlin games at a time when racism and segregation were the status quo in the “land of the free”. We gloss over the rest of Owens’ life by way of end titles and some nice photographs of Owens and family at various stages of his life.

There is a good movie in here somewhere but the plodding delivery sinks it (and the important-sounding score doesn’t help matters). Race seems to want to be a message movie highlighting the aforementioned hyp jesse-owens ocrisy by showing us the second-class citizenship of Owens even when he’s America’s hero. If that was the aim, Race falls well short. Painting Hitler and the Nazis as the bad guys is easy, and Race goes that route. But the real story is more damning and I wish Race had told it as it happened. At a political rally in October 1936, relatively soon after his triumphant return to the U.S. with four gold medals in hand, Owens said, “Some people say Hitler snubbed me. But I tell you, Hitler did not snub me. I am not knocking the President….but remember that the President did not send me a message of congratulations because people said, he was too busy.” Hitler reportedly shook Owens’ hand after his victories, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn’t find the time to send Owens a congratulatory telegram.

The President’s indifference to Owens presumably lines up with the attitudes of white America at the time. That may explain why Owens’ life after 1936 was a difficult one. His amateur status was revoked when he tried to make some endorsement money from his Olympic success, and after lo RACE sing his amateur status he was reduced to racing against horses for show. Later, Owens got by as a dry cleaner and gas station attendant (though “got by” may be generous as he declared bankruptcy and was prosecuted for tax evasion). All in all, it’s a very sad statement. Today, Owens is rightfully regarded as a legend but it seems that during his lifetime he was not treated like one, to say the least. Race hints at that fate but doesn’t focus on it, and that’s a shame.

That’s probably the biggest reason that Race seems like an opportunity missed. Coach Snyder would have called it a natural that lacks the work ethic required to be truly great. For its half-hearted effort, Race gets a score of five medals out of ten.

How To Be Single

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The best thing about this movie was New York City. I love that city. I love it so much I can’t quite justify why I don’t live there, except then I couldn’t visit. 12339563_1534849863502185_4845266985900591715_o And boy do I visit. I hit that city like a hurricane of cash and I only leave when I’ve spent myself out. It sparkled in every nearly scene of this movie, which is more than I can say about the leads – Alison Brie, a total snore; Dakota Johnson, devoid of personality; Rebel Wilson against whom I am loathe to say a bad word except she’s working a shtick that’s tired and offensive (dear Hollywood producers, including Drew Barrymore, the name behind this particular mess: I have it on very good authority that it IS possible for a female to be fat and NOT obnoxious. I promise you it’s true!). I didn’t have a problem with Leslie Mann, resident old lady (seriously, it’s great that she’s game to play the crone opposite young actresses all the time, but let’s not put her in a box!), so of course she’s the Leslie-Mann-How-To-Be-Single-Movie-Poster least used of the four.

I think this is supposed to be a feminist rom-com, only without the rom, or the com. There’s nothing new here, and the notion that the feminist choice is between one boyfriend or many, is pretty insulting. The lesson taken from How To Be Single (besides consumerism and alcoholism) is either a) be rich enough to not need a man (and\or fat enough not to land one) or b) sleep with people you know you shouldn’t while pining over the guy YOU rejected and wallowing in self-pity and a bad haircut. Because how else will we women ever hang a picture or program our PVRs? I cannot recall laughing a single time during this movie, but I do 12370750_1534849806835524_1592610361207727068_o remember wincing in several spots – like when it quietly referenced a better movie about female empowerment. If this was an attempt to be ‘different’ it was a very, very conservative effort while still relying on heaps of familiar tropes and situations (ie, how did all the guys I’m sleeping with end up at the same party???).

And it’s too bad. Because in the time I was briefly single, I felt happy and alive. And maybe some of that was leaving a bad marriage, but the free Alison-Brie-How-To-Be-Single-Movie-Poster dom tasted sweet and the possibilities felt truly exhilarating. I was tingly feeling genuinely awake and I embraced being happy on my own. And I was. Very. And then I met Sean and became very happy with him. In fact, he made me unsingle five years ago this Saturday and I am plump with satisfaction. It is extremely gratifying to go through life with someone who gets you and wants the best for you. But I was happy being on my own, truly happy, and I wasn’t missing anything. And I certainly wasn’t missing this movie in my life, and neither are you. Not even a little.

45 Years

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When I first got married, I used to fantasize about a 40th wedding anniversary. As one character in 45 Years puts it, a good marriage is “so full of history”. I couldn’t wait to start living forty or more years of history with the woman I was marrying and to one day hopefully celebrate how we beat the odds and stood the test of time. We lasted a little more than four years.

I knew that marriage would be hard. Literally everyone I knew who had ever walked down an aisle warned me of this and I really did think I understood what they meant. But nothing could prepare me for the seemingly impossible choices and challenges that awaited me. If I, as keen and committed as I was, couldn’t last 5 years, what does it take to make it to 45? I’ve often thought about the kinds of compromises the couples that last would have to make, the things they’d need to talk about, and the things they’d need to avoid talking about.

45 Years looks at what happens when a happily married couple are faced with one of those subjects that they got along just fine without talking about just one week before their 45th anniversary party. Five years before he married Kate, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) lost his girlfriend in a tragic hiking accident. Fifty years later, he gets a letter telling him that her body has been found.

Initially, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) can’t understand why Geoff is so preoccupied with this development. Once she realizes how much he wants to talk about his memories of her, she tries her best to be supportive and starts to ask questions about her husband’s former lover. Although she seems genuinely curious at first, she starts to regret her questions when his answers make it more and more clear that her husband’s previous relationship may have been more serious than she’d been led to believe.

Kate’s jealousy of a woman that died fifty years ago is fascinating. She always knew that Geoff’s last relationship didn’t so much end as was cut tragically short but she seemed to always avoid asking herself the hard questions. Would he have married her had she lived? How often does he think of the life he could have had with her?

What makes a good marriage? 45 years seems to suggest it’s as full of little white lies as it is of history and explores whether a seemingly strong partnership can withstand being shaken up by a little truth. Of course, these are polite old British people in a British movie so the distance that begins to develop between husband and wife may not express itself explosively enough for some audiences. This is a restrained film with restrained performances where the drama comes as much from what is NOT said as from the dialogue itself. Luckily, Courtenay and Rampling are masters of subtlety. Oscar-nominee Rampling in particular is captivating both with the brave face she puts on and the unshakeable doubt that she occasionally shows us. She gives a performance that is way too honest and low-key to ever win her an Oscar. But she gets my vote.

Deadpool

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It’s always nice when a comic book movie doesn’t take itself too seriously. Deadpool makes clear from the opening credits that there is no danger of any seriousness here. Throughout the movie, Ryan Reynolds keeps that lighthearted vibe going by dropping references to every other comic book movie he’s been in, as well as a few that he hasn’t, and keeping the patter going even during what would be serious scenes in any other superhero movie.

Deadpool-Guns-Out Deadpool delivers, plan and simple. It is big, loud and stupid, just like it should be. After all, the main character(a) is insane; (b) is immortal; and (c) knows he is a comic book character. There’s really not any need for pretense – we came to see craziness and that’s what Deadpool gives us, from start to finish.

There’s even a bit of love to be found, but only to inject some tension. Since Deadpool can’t be hurt, someone else has to be in danger so the climactic fight means something. But for the most part, Deadpool gives us the merc with a mouth in all his glory, drawing with crayons, forgetting his guns, doling out terrible life advice, and generally being the worst hero imaginable.

And that’s okay! We don’t need all our superheroes to imitate 1960s Batman. Deadpool didn’t teach me anything and I respect it for not trying to. Though I could have done deadpool_clip_hd.0 without another superhero origin story. It’s not necessary, it’s lazy, AND I’m pretty sure they already did Deadpool’s origin in Wolverine: Origins (though I’m also pretty sure they screwed it up). So Deadpool makes a misstep there but it’s forgivable since it keeps us laughing while it spins its wheels. And really, the comedy is the whole point anyway so it’s not a major complaint, it’s just my critical two cents.

Overall, I enjoyed Deadpool a lot (and a lot more than I expected to). I give it a score of seven self-mutilating escapes out of ten.

Zoolander 2

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Zoolander 2 is really, really, ridiculously dull. There was so little going on all I could really do was wonder why this movie got made and why so many recognizable faces pop up. The only answer I came up with was that no one involved had anything better to do. Well, I had better things to do – I could have been watching Deadpool!

There really isn’t a good reason to watch Zoolander 2. The “good” moments are rehashes of the original, and the rest seems like stuff they cut from the original (and rightly so). We get it, the fashion industry is vapid and empty, but you can’t satirize it with a movie that’s even more vapid and empty, because then the joke is on the movie. And the joke is definitely on the movie here. Even Justin Bieber should have known better than to be involved with this mess.

I honestly can’t think of one moment in the movie that I liked, and this is coming from a guy who laughed from start to finish during both Daddy’s Home and Dirty Grandpa. The original Zoolander was another movie that consistently made me laugh, but the sequel comes up woefully short. It’s old and tired, and made me feel the same way. Zoolander 2 gets a score of two glasses of prune juice out of ten.

Hail, Coen Brothers!

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Joel and Ethan Coen are at it again – the two wacky guys who brought us Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men have a new insta-classic to add to the list and it’s called Hail, Caesar!

The Coens are brilliant. I have no qualms about using that word, and I think their resume speaks for itself. Their names are already on this year’s Oscar ballot for having written the stirring screenplay for Bridge of Spies, an underrated but totally worthy movie that feels nothing like a Coen Brothers film, and isn’t one. They wrote it, and can write anything, but when they’re sitting in the director’s seat, they seem to prefer larger than life stories they can have a little fun with.

The Coens don’t chase box office success, but they do make the kind of movie that film buffs love to obsess over. I’m already obsessing over this one, which has been deemed by lesser souls to be of “limited appeal,” but dollars to donuts (yes I’m using that wrong and no I don’t know what it means) it’s the most fun I’ve had in a movie theatre in a good long while. This was at the expense of my fellow movie goers since I’m perennially sick and every fit of giggles dissolved into a fit of coughing. Coughing is the new clapping. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. There was lots of coughing. I mean lots of laughing!

The plot: Edward Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a honcho at the Capitol Pictures movie studio. He’s a fixer. He doesn’t own the place, but he does make it run. We follow him for about 27 hours, a day in the life as it were, and there are no less than 4 movies being shot on the studio back lot: the first, their blockbuster Hail, Caesar!, starring Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) as a Roman soldier who encounters Jesus Christ; the second, a movie musical currently shooting its aquatic spectacle with its newly and scandalously pregnant star (Scarlett Johansson); the third, a drama period piece set to star a spaghetti western crossover, Hobie Doyle (Alden Hail-Caesar-(2016)-poster Ehrenreich) much to the consternation of finicky director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes); and the fourth, a comedy starring sprightly song and dance man Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum). Poor Eddie has a lot to contend with – fixing stars up on dates, rescuing starlets from French postcard situations, making good on his promise to his wife to quit smoking, and fending off twin sisters and rival gossip columnists, both played by Tilda Swinton – and that’s before he realizes that his biggest star, Baird Whitlock, has been kidnapped!

There is much (too much) to say about this film. First off, the cast was excellent. Of course it was excellent. The Coens have been in the biz an awfully long time and they’ve got a george-clooney-gets-kidnapped laundry list of Hollywood A-listers who beg to be in their films. George Clooney, for example, has worked with them three times before – Brother, Where Art Thou, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn After Reading – all movies that I like, though I confess a particular burning love for Intolerable Cruelty especially. The Coens have great faith in Clooney’s comedic timing and treat us to a whole reel of his best reaction shots. It’s down right gluttonous – almost as sinful as that Roman costume they’ve got him strutting around in, showing off leg like you’ve never seen from him before. And my they’re nice legs. In fact, is there a human being on this planet who’s not a little in love with George Clooney?

Josh Brolin continues to ride this incredible surge in his career and proves a worthy choice. This is Brolin’s third Coen movie (after No Country for Old Men and True Grit) and he pulls this one together so tightly, so adroitly, you know he’ll be around for more. New comer Alden Ehrenreich impressed me immensely. IMDB assures me I’ve seen him before (in hail-caesar-featurette-the-cowbo-810x456 Blue Jasmin) but this is the first that I’ve noticed him – and he almost stole the show! Tilda Swinton, who is great in everything, is great again here, only doubly so since she’s handling twin duties and it’s uproarious. Heather Goldenhersh, as Mannix’s hard-working secretary, is pivotal and delightful, and I must say, this woman deserves to be fucking famous already. But even small roles are peppered with famous faces – the study group alone, from Fisher Stevens to my beloved David Krumholtz, is worthy of its own spin-off. And no Coen Brothers movie would be complete without at least a brief appearance by my spirit animal, the fabulous Frances McDormand. The reigning Coen Queen, this is her 8th film of theirs, although it’s not exactly a fair fight as she’s married to Joel (not that her oodles of talent require any nepotism). Her role is brief but watch for it, it’s a scene stealer.

So: the Coens know how to write. And they sure as hell know how to cast. And bringing back cinematographer Roger Deakins and convincing him to shoot in film again (as opposed to his preferred medium, digital) was exactly the right thing for this ode to old Hollywood. Even though your eyes see Channing Tatum in a sailor suit, your mind is steeped in 1950s glamour (which is actually much grimier than the usual coating of nostalgic veneer would have us remember). As usual with the Coens, what you see is only half of what you get. There’s a lot of layers to this seemingly lighter fare, from God and Commies, to pop culture and hydrogen bombs. I was charmed and tickled from start to finish and I’m going to find it awfully hard to buy tickets to Deadpool when what I’d really like to do is see this one again. And again. And probably again.