Tag Archives: Antonio Banderas

Dolittle

I suppose it might entertain very young children.

I have meditated on that single sentence above for minutes and even hours, wondering if I should leave it at that. Explaining the why and the how of this movie’s failure is baffling at best yet won’t even make for entertaining reading.

The story is weak yet convoluted. A physician/veterinarian (we have such a combo in our own family: Sean’s sister), Dr. Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) has sequestered himself behind the doors of his menagerie, gone full hermit since the death of his beloved wife. Luckily he has the unique ability to speak to animals in their native language, so he isn’t entirely alone, but his existence is notably and emphatically human-free. Until, that is, the day when not one but two children come calling.

The first is a boy who has accidentally shot a squirrel who needs immediate medical attention. The second is a girl sent from Queen Victoria’s palate where the Queen lays gravely ill, also requiring immediate medical attention. Dr. Dolittle, unhappy to be disturbed either way, treats the squirrel but needs convincing to attend to the Queen. In the Queen’s bedchambers he learns that she’s been poisoned and the antidote exists only on a faraway island. Dolittle, the boy Stubbins, and a bunch of animals of varying degrees of helpfulness, set sail on an epic adventure to find said cure.

They’re pursued by a villain with questionable motives, they subject us to a minutes-long fart joke (will small children even understand that Dolittle is rooting through a dragon’s anus with a leek, relieving it of all the undigested armor of the valiant knights she’s eaten for breakfast?).

I think the journey’s purpose is that Dolittle must learn he can grieve his wife without shutting himself off from the rest of humanity. They don’t exactly earn this, nor do they try very hard to express it.

The best and maybe only good part is an anxious ostrich voiced by Kumail Nanjiani. The worst part is, sadly, RDJ himself. He’s doing an indiscernible accent through which most of his dialogue is lost. He goes full nut when perhaps only half nut would have sufficed. His tone rarely matches that of the story. The poor guy has spent too many years acting in front of a green screen. I think for his first post-Ironman role he needed something a little more grounded but instead he went full fanciful and feels lost forever. Who can rescue his career now?

But Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t the only high-profile actor duped into signing on: Jim Broadbent, Michael Sheen, and Antonio Banderas all appear. Plus Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Tom Holland, John Cena, Octavia Spencer, Craig Robinson, Ralph Fiennes, Marion Cotillard, and Jason Mantzoukas all lend their voice. And yet even standing on all these famous and famously talented shoulders, the film still cannot keep its head above water. Like an ostrich learning the hard way that he can neither fly nor swim, the movie simply adopts a dead man’s float and hopes a film goer or two might take a poke at its bloated corpse.

Pain and Glory

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Thirty-two years after his film Sabor (Flavor) came out, writer-director Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is just coming to terms with it. He hasn’t seen Sabor’s lead actor Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) since it premiered 3 decades ago but the cinemateque has recently restored the film, labelled it a classic, and viewing it with fresh (well, older, wiser, more experienced) eyes, Salvador decides maybe it’s time to bury the hatchet.

It is clear that Salvador is taking stock of his life. He’s not well. But his recollections suggest that his life has rarely been without pain of some kind. As a talented choir soloist, he was educated by the priests and taught his book learning to others. But geography he learned by traveling the world as a successful director. And anatomy he learned through pain and illness. When he reconnects with Alberto we assume he’s making amends but resentments still run hot and what is actually exchanged is heroin.

Antonia Banderas is the picture of a tortured man. Riddled with pain he can no longer make movies. But without shooting, his life has no purpose. To hear those truths is to understand a man who is resigned to the end. His character has come full circle in a lot of ways, a lot of ways that are painfully obvious as a play about his youth is staged and brings out forgotten friends. We learn so much about his fears and motivations and how a man who has made his living telling stories is now grappling with his own. And in many ways, this role brings Banderas full circle from the role that first garnered him attention from American audiences as Tom Hanks’ lover in Philadelphia. This time Banderas is front and centre, earning himself his first Oscar nomination for his restraint, consideration, and tenderness.

Dolor Y Gloria is like a vise on my heart for every shred of his own humanity that master film-maker Pedro Almodóvar pulls from his experience and uses to paint the screen with sorrow and redemption. Using heroin is referred to as ‘chasing the dragon’ but this film chases after so much more: compassion, reflection, grief, making peace. Almodóvar still knows how to engage us, but in this he surprises us, and perhaps even himself, with the authenticity in his unflinching self-examination.

TIFF19: The Laundromat

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“Based on actual secrets,” the screen tells us. Based on the trailer, I sort of expected The Laundromat to be the Erin Brockovich of money laundering. It was not. It was actually just a weak and poor copy of The Big Short.

The Big Short was about the Wall Street crash of 2008, more or less, precipitated by the housing bubble. And how all that lending, and then speculating against those bad mortgages, really fucked a lot of good people over. That film wove together a narrative interspersed with attempts to break down financial concepts to the audience. A celebrity – cameos by Margot Robbie or Selena Gomez, for example – would break the fourth wall to address the audience directly, and explain textbook concepts, like subprime mortgages, to us in a way we could easily grasp. It was celebrated for its unconventional techniques, which helped secure it the Oscar for adopted screenplay.

You can’t really blame The Laundromat for trying to capitalize on its success, but when your success is based on novelty and innovation, you pretty much inherently can’t replicate it. To even try seems…lazy.

Meryl Streep stars as an old lady who goes on a pleasure cruise with her husband, played by James Cromwell. An errant wave hits them and the boat capsizes, killing 21. In the wake of the accident, it is discovered that the cruise company is without insurance. Not that they didn’t have any – they thought they did – but that their policy was bought by another company, and another, and possibly another, until all there were were shell companies and no real policy, no real insurers, and definitely no money for the victims of the accident.

But Meryl Streep’s portion of the film is just one third of what we’re ultimately presented with. The other stories are only loosely connected by a law firm that exists just to hide money for its obscenely wealthy companies. The lawyers, played by Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman, serve not just as characters, but also as narrators who get to skip through all the scenes, breaking the fourth wall and revealing the film’s sets to be just that: sets. It’s all very meta. And while these characters are a lot of fun, it stinks so badly of The Big Short you can never quite forgive it, even when it’s entertaining.

Based on the Panama Papers leak, the movie tries to reveal even just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the rich getting richer: tax evasion, bribery, fraud, offshore accounts. But it’s sloppily assembled and is such a weak photocopy you can’t help but resent it outright. This is actually a very important issue that absolutely deserves our attention. But Steven Soderbergh just can’t pull this together, and in fact confuses the matter with his weird, episodic vignettes and title cards that just don’t add up. I’m just a lowly 99-percenter who pretends saving is optional and credit is use it or lose it. What do I know? Besides, you know, wanting my money back for this movie ticket.

TIFF18: Life Itself

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If you watch Dan Fogelman’s This is Us, then you know what to expect from the writer-director: a love story to make you swoon, a family saga to make your heart swell, emotional manipulation to milk your tearducts dry. Life Itself is This Is Us on steroids, and with swearing.

Will (Oscar Isaac) and Abby (Olivia Wilde) have the kind of love story only found in movies and imaginations. She’s wounded in a sexy way, he’s wildly devoted to her, they’re both unbearably attractive, he talks about his feelings, which are grandiose and pointed solely toward her, she doesn’t complain when he kisses her with stubble.

But – record scratch – this isn’t some ordinary rom-com, this is Life Itself! We can’t stop MV5BOTAwMjU4NjA5Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODgyOTY4NTM@._V1_SX1500_CR0,0,1500,999_AL_ there. No, Dan Fogelman grows the concept to include generations that cross continents. The ensemble cast includes Antonio Banderas, Annette Bening, Olivia Cooke, Sergio Peris- Mencheta, Laia Costa, Alex Monner, Mandy Patinkin, and Jean Smart. Like his hit television show, Life Itself is not so much about the destination but the journey. Fogelman plays around with the chronology, as he does, and with an unreliable narrator and its delicious implications.

I love the casting. I loved seeing Jean Smart. Oscar Isaac was a stand-out for me. He’s playing Prince Charming, only sexy, and he sells it. Coming from almost anyone else on Earth I’m sure I would have been rolling my eyes but for Oscar I was nodding and tilting my head, and wanting desperately to touch him lightly on the forearm. Alex Monner was also really solid. His part isn’t huge, but he leaves quite an impact. And I loved that his story line shot in Spain was done in Spanish and subtitled in English. I think there’s been a trend in films lately to see more characters speaking in their native tongue, and I’m all for it. It worked really well here and I hope to see this trend continue.

But before you start thinking this is to good to be true, to be honest, I had some problems with the film. Specifically with the direction taken by some of the characters that just didn’t feel right to me. I admit those choices fit the narrative; Fogelman knew where he was going and he got us there. Does that excuse it? Ugh. I’m struggling because the movie gave me emotional release, I had such a satisfying, cathartic ugly-cry that I sort of want to excuse it anything. But the truth is that no, you shouldn’t shit on your characters. If you’re going to ask me to buy some pretty extreme things, you shouldn’t spend so much time letting me get to know them first, know them well enough to call bullshit when they suddenly start acting out of character.

In the end, fans of This Is Us are extremely likely to like this movie if they aren’t too shocked by Dan’s potty mouth. I liked it myself. I can’t help it! This movie hits you right in the feels and there’s no use trying to logic it away.