Tag Archives: benedict cumberbatch

August: Osage County

Truth tellers: every family has one. They say mean shit and then hide behind its being “the truth” as if no harm ever came from telling the truth. But that’s not the truth. The truth is that the truth can be painful, can be private, and can be left unsaid. And as humans with emotional intelligence and self-control, we have no excuse not to hold back. My grandmother is a truth-teller, often leaving hurt feelings in the wake of her “plain-spokenness”. I don’t always understand what has kept my grandparents together for 66 years (well, okay, probably Catholicism, and good old fashioned not believing in divorce), but my grandmother is not a pill-popper and my grandfather is not a suicidal alcoholic. So there’s that.

When Bev (Sam Shepard) goes missing, his wife Violet (Meryl Streep) rallies the troops. Daughter Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) is already there, always there, but it’s favoured daughter Barb (Julia Roberts) who really matters, who will make everything better when she arrives.

Favourites: every family has these too. Maybe it’s the one who reminds you most of yourself, or maybe the complete opposite. And maybe it changes over time, favouring the best achiever, and then the one who produces the most grandchildren, and then favouring the one who sticks closest to home. There isn’t always a rhyme or reason but we do seem to agree that we must never, ever admit it out loud. But your kids know, just the same as you knew it of your parents. It’s the way of life. Most people are just pretty good at being diplomatic about it.

Violet’s not. Violet’s pretty nasty about it. Ivy is the good one, but Barb is the favourite. Karen (Juliette Lewis) doesn’t really even figure, but it’s mostly nice when she shows up. And she does show up eventually, because her father’s bloated body is fished out of the river and now it’s not his disappearance they’re dealing with, it’s his death. The dynamic between the sisters is fragile, and with Violet twisted with grief and pills, she lets her truth flag fly. And you know how gets caught in the crossfire? Everyone.

The passing on of pain: Violet and her sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) were abused by their mother. Violet is so self-righteous about her own pain that she can’t fathom the pain she causes others, or she doesn’t think it rates. Violet is cruel to her daughters, and Mattie Fae can’t seem to stand her son Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch). That’s the way abuse works, it trickles down the generations. Is Barb messing up her own daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin)? She’s suffering too.

Family secrets: What’s a family without its secrets? Maybe secrets are the cement that hold us all together. Only Ivy and Charles know they’re in love, despite being cousins. Only Mattie Fae knows that Ivy and Charles aren’t cousins, they’re siblings. Only Barb and her husband (Ewan McGregor) know they’re separated. Only the devoted nursemaid knows what Karen’t fiance is trying to do with Barb’s young daughter. And only Violet knows that Bev’s death was actually a suicide.

You’ve got to have nerves of steel to get through August: Osage County. The family drama is raw as fuck. But Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts put in incredibly strong performances amid a top-notch cast that never puts so much as a baby toe wrong. It’s note perfect, it’s just not pretty. A lifetime of pain is more poisonous than all the pills in the world. This film, based on a brilliant play by Tracy Letts, is a force.

SXSW: Walk With Me

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Walk With Me is a documentary that peers behind the mysterious curtain of a mindfulness-practicing monastery in rural France. The denizens of the Plum Village monastery have left behind their possessions and their pretensions to practice the spiritual art of living in the moment. Shot over 3 years with unprecedented access, Walk With Me allows us to get that much closer to a subject often shrouded in secrecy.

It strikes me quite quickly that the documentary itself is an exercise in meditation; it lulls us with deliberately soothing music and excellently edited nature sounds. The film makes participants of us, the pace a thing of beauty, very measured, very calm, each image carefully and mindfully chosen. And it doesn’t hurt one ounce that Benedict Cumberbatch narrates.

Walk With Me boasts of time spent with “The Father of Mindfulness” Thich Nhat Hanh, but what I liked best was the insight gleaned from every day people, people who I could relate to, who had left behind everything familiar and everything material for the pursuit of peace and quiet.

I would guess that directors Marc Francis and Max Pugh were themselves transformed by the making of this movie. They’ve delved deeper than we’ve seen before, and achieved a certain intimacy that is rare in a documentary. Told in a fragmentary, rather than narrative, way, the documentary inspires a sense of being and understanding that allows us to explore this unknown by direct observation. The camera never feels intrusive though; there’s a respectful distance and some breathing room that infuses the project with a spiritual vibe.

The images encountered in Walk With Me are unquestionably beautiful. The stories carousel-05 captured, the snippets of life, the tranquility: these all guide us down a path of – and forgive the use of this word – enlightenment.

You can catch Walk With Me at the SXSW Conference & Festival:

March 12 & 13 Zach Theatre

March 15 Alamo Lamar

Eight monastics from the film will be leading daily events at SXSW, including walking meditations and Q&As.

Doctor Strange

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strange Marvel did it again. They took another obscure supporting character, built a movie around him, and made me eager to see his next appearance in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. This time, that obscure character was Doctor Strange, Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme.

Anyone who’s read Marvel comics even sporadically knows who Doctor Strange is, because every so often he’d randomly pop up in your favourite hero’s comic to provide assistance or a few words of wisdom or encouragement. As you may already know, my favourite hero was (and is) Spider-Man, and every ten issues or so I could count on Doctor Strange appearing through a portal, sticking around for 10-12 panels to move the story along, and then exiting as quickly as he entered.

strange-2 But in this movie, because Doctor Strange is the star, we get to follow him through those portals and see what happens next from his perspective. And it’s a hell of a ride. Naturally, I could have done without the origin story but fortunately it’s injected with a welcome dose of humour that makes it speed by. It helps that the opening scene features a battle that will leave the viewer wanting more and provides purpose and urgency to Strange’s magical training.

The special effects are spectacular and the visuals are glorious in IMAX 3D, just as last month’s sneak peek led me to believe. It’s probably also tolerable in regular 3D or god forbid, stupid boring flat 2D, but I’ll never know, at least not until the movie comes to Netflix and I half-watch it while folding laundry.

The icing on the cake is that Marvel has assembled some first rate on-screen talent to supplement those trippy visuals, led by the Doctor himself, Benedict Cumberbatch, who is perfectly cast and does his usual baritone voice/good acting thing featuring a solid American accent. If only I could do a British accent half as well (preferably cockney but I’m really not picky). Taking in a few more episodes of Sherlock can only help, right?

Add some Canadian flavour in Rachel McAdams, doing her regular accent as far as I know (honestly, if we don’t say “about” can you even tell we’re not American?), and a few more Brits in Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tilda Swinton (also both doing American accents even though their characters are worldly people currently living in Nepal), and by my count you’ve got one Oscar winner and three other Oscar nominees, whose talents really help sell silly comic words like Agamotto and Dormammu. We’ve come a long way since the Stallone-Schneider superteam in Judge Dredd!

Doctor Strange is pure comic book joy. It’s a welcome November blockbuster that will keep you entertained from start to finish. I give it a score of nine spiritual goatees out of ten.

Doctor Strange: IMAX 3D Sneak Peek

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Last night I got to see what amounted to an extended trailer for Doctor Strange, in IMAX 3D. At one time not too long ago, 3D movies were a real draw to me. I remember dragging Jay to several 3D re-releases of movies we’d seen a million times before (but only in boring old 2D). After intensive therapy (mainly arm punches from Jay), I’m mostly over that phase.

Nowadays, I usually see movies without the dopey extra glasses, but after last night’s sneak peek I am convinced that I should see Doctor Strange in 3D, punching be damned. The visuals are trippy enough to live up to Steve Ditko’s acid trip 60s backgrounds, depicting all the crazy dimensions that Doctor Strange passed through on his adventures, and that’s a high bar!

The preview’s centrepiece was an absolutely incredible city chase sequence, with gravity changing constantly, New York City collapsing onto itself, and destruction raining down on all sides as copies of buildings collide with each other. Other scenes included nightmare dimensions full of grabby baby hands, fractal patterns expanding and contracting as Doctor Strange plummets through them, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t even begin to describe.

Marvel has done a great job of translating its characters to the screen while retaining the soul of the comic, particularly for second tier characters (with Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy being the best examples). Doctor Strange seems set to follow that same path and with those other movies having paved the way, seems destined to depart at least a bit from the tried and true formula that we have seen way too often.

Whether the movie actually ends up being worthwhile is yet to be determined, but with a stellar cast (including Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mads Mikkelson), an hour of IMAX-specific footage, the report that Marvel had to adapt the visuals to make the 2D version make sense, and the amazing effects in the preview, IMAX 3D is the clear platform of choice to view Doctor Strange’s adventures when the film opens November 4th.

Black Mass

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Jay here. I’ve been MIA for a while and most likely will be for a bit more. Back surgery and its sidekick morphine have indisposed me for writing movie reviews.

Anyway, Black Mass has been kicking around for a while now, generally disappointing folks despite its all-star cast and generous dash of promise. It basically tells the incredible story of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger (Johnny Depp), and how he ran Boston from the underground for years, in part because of a brilliant “alliance” with the FBI. An old childhood friend (Joel Edgerton) has conveniently made a name for himself at the FBI and he convinces his boss (Kevin Bacon) that Bulger will be a useful informant. The information flows both ways though, with Bulger constantly evading investigation, and Bulger divulging details already known to the FBI by other means.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Bulger’s brother, Billy, a successful state politician. Suspicious? Well nobody at the FBI seems to think so, until there’s a new kid in town, Corey Stoll, who starts asking some incredulous questions, like how on earth has a notorious psychopath and criminal with ties to the IRA never ever been investigated? Why indeed.

So things fall apart for Bulger, although never as spectacularly as they do for everyone around him (including Jesse Plemons, and can we just call him what he is: low-rent Matt Damon), and Rory Cochrane (bloated for this role, it’ll kill your Empire Records fantasies right quick), and Peter Sarsgaard (who once did an SNL skit where he was attending a pirate convention, and all the attendees really relished overpronouncing his name – PetARRRRGGGHHHH SAAAARRRRRRsgAAAAARRRRRRD, and now I am forever doomed to do it myself).

Maybe the biggest problem with this movie is that it crammed too many names under too small a marquee. There just isn’t enough to keep everyone busy, and at the end of the day, this feels like a pretty standard mob movie, with Scorsese wannabe undertones. It fails to distinguish itself. The relief, though, is that Johnny Depp remembers how not to be a cartoon. It’s not any great relief though, since this is Depp’s fourth, FOURTH, time portraying a real-life gangster. Even my dogs have learned the trick by the fourth repetition.

You will not find a bad movie here, just a very tired one, but I guess it allowed a lot of Hollywood types to tick off MOB MOVIE on their SAG Bingo card, and if that’s not a good reason to make a movie, then I don’t know what is.

Oscars 2015: Best Actor and Actress

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Finally, the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress. For most of us, this is the reason we stay up late through all the speeches from people we’ve never heard of, awkward presenters, and excrutiatingly unnecessary montages.

Best Actress

Marion Cotillard- Two Days, One Night

Felicity Jones- The Theory of Everything

Rosamund Pike- Gone Girl

Julianne Moore- Still Alice

Reese Witherspoon- Wild

Best Actor. Best Actress. Best Picture. We wait all night for these Oscars and, once we’re finally there, it’s anti-climatic. There’s almost never any question as to who will take home the Oscar at the end of the night. “I just want to stay up to see who wins Best Actress” has become “I just want to stay up to see Julianne Moore win Best Actress”.

All four of us here have predicted a win for Moore and so has pretty much everyone else. The inevitable may not be very exciting on live television where supposedly anything can happen but I won’t be a bit disappointed when she wins. I wrote at length about how good I thought she was in Still Alice (and in so many other things). It’s always gratifying to see the best performance be honoured, especially in cases like this where the performer has done good work for so long.

2014 may not have been a spectacular year for great roles for women but, now that I look at it, Moore’s competition isn’t half bad. I held out on commenting on this category because I was waiting for the chance to see Two Days, One Night which unfortunately didn’t come. Jay managed to see it and enjoyed the performance. I have no doub that Cotillard is amazing because she pretty much always is. She’s already won though in 2008 so the Academy won’t snub Moore to honour Cotillard a second time.

I’ve seen Gone Girl twice and am still not enthusiastic about Rosamund Pike but I know a lot of people were. I know someone who boldly said that she was “guaranteed an Oscar” after seeing it for the first time. She won’t win but she deserves the nomination for getting such earnest support from so many, even if not from me. I can’t say that I’m much more excited about Felicity Jones, who did a very good job with a surprisingly good part. The Theory of Everything was almost as much about Jane Hawking as it was about Stephen but Eddie Redmayne seemed to overshadow her, probably because of the physical demands of his role.

Reese Witherspoon wasn’t quite as good in Wild as Moore was in Still Alice. Plus, she- like Cotillard- has won before. So she won’t win. But if the rules of your Oscar pool force you to pick anyone other than Moore, smart money would be on Reese. I was a big fan of this performance, even if not of Reese herself. She was believable in both working through her grief by using heroine and struggling through hiking the PCT. She never even seems concerned with looking cool while she does it.

Best Actor

Steve Carell- Foxcatcher

Bradley Cooper- American Sniper

Benedict Cumberbatch- The Imitation Game

Michael Keaton- Birdman

Eddie Redmayne- The Theory of Everything

This is exciting. For once, I have no idea what’s going to happen. Luc and I have predicted a win for Michael Keaton and Jay and Sean are betting on Eddie Redmayne. I am not sure that any of us are confident though. It’s been a good year. It would be even better if Bradley Cooper’s nomination was replaced with either David Oyelowo for Selma or Timothy Spall for Mr. Turner. Bu still. A good year.

Even Cooper shouldn’t be ruled out completely. He managed to disappear behind that beard and that accent. When his character retreats within himself after his first tour in Iraq, Cooper seems to retreat even further into character. There are moments though, especially during the pre-Iraq scenes which I wish had been cut altogether, where he’s a little less than awesome. Maybe even a little miscast. Besides, American Sniper is by far the worst of the five films and that has to count for something.

How cool is it that Steve Carell has been nominated for an Oscar? His commitment to the character is even more complete than Cooper’s. I’ll admit that he gets lots of help from the makeup department (also nominated) but the way du Pont moves, talk, and stares is all Carell and he nails it.

Cumberbatch. The movie’s not perfect but Cumberbatch nearly is. He doesn’t have to change his voice much or do an accent or anything like that but still manages to transform into the brilliant but socially inept Alan Turing just as much as Cooper or Carell disappeared into theirs. I’m a big fan of this performance.

Almost anything can happen here but it looks like it’s going to be between Keaton and Redmayne, two performances that are so different from one another that it’s almost impossible to judge one as better than the other. Keaton doesn’t change the way he moves or speaks as much as the other nomnees but his performance may be the most honest. Both Redmayne and Keaton have won several awards this season so it’s a tough race to call. I’m putting my money on Keaton there’s just no telling this year.

Penguins of Madagascar

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Sidekicks can steal the show – just ask the minions of Despicable Me, and now, belatedly, the Penguins of Madagascar, in their very own spy thriller!

The movie opens on a March of the Penguins-like origin story for this band of ragamuffins, and a documentary film crew (voiced brilliantly, in part, by Werner Herzog!) show them to be, let’s say, more bumbling than brilliant. This proves true once they’re grown as well – they escape the circus from the last movie but land themselves right in the hands of a nemesis they didn’t know they had (John Malkovich), an old zoo-mate from their Central Park days. This nemesis, also known as “Dave”, has it out for penguins in general and these ones in particular – their cuteness took the crowds away from his own zoo exhibit and he’s been harbouring a grudge ever since. The penguins seem to be in a little over their heads but an agency called the North Wind (a wolf voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, a neurotic polar bear, a sarcastic seal, and a sexy snow owl) swoops in to take over the rescue operation.

The traditional animation isn’t ground-breaking and the story’s not exactly scintillating, but I can see how this will work for kids. It’s full of fun visuals, simple puns, and wacky sight gags -“Melons, dead ahead!” It’s very hard not to have fun watching this movie, and if you’re a littlun all sugared up on snack bar, all the better – the pace is frenetic! I’m not sure it has much to keep adults captivated – too silly and earnest – but you should at least be able to sit through it with the kids. And if you’re missing King Julien, then just sit through about half a Pitbull song (if there’s a better musical representation for this empty-but-flashy animation, I don’t know it) during the credits, and whoop, there he is.

The Imitation Game

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Mathematician Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) meets a girl at a bar while taking a break from trying to build a machine that can break a Nazi code. She may not be the genius that Turing is but she makes an off-hand remark that helps him see a problem that he’s been struggling with in a new way. He gets this crazy look in his eye and runs off without warning, leaving her wondering what she just said. She has just given Turing his Eureka moment.

I hate Eureka moments in movies and The Imitation Game has a few of them. Actually, there were a handful of scenes here and there that felt lazy and occasionally a little pandering. Worst of all though, they distract from what is overall a fantastic script.

Winner of the People’s Choice Award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, some have suggested The Imitation Game as the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar. They may be on to something. Like The King’s Speech and Argo, there isn’t much special about it except that it’s a good story told very well with healthy doses of dramatic license taken to keep the truth from getting in the way of a good story.

The best reason to see The Imitation Game is Benedict Cumberbatch. Turing is a tough guy to get to know. At first, the film establishes only that he is brilliant at all things math and ignorant of most things social. He’s portrayed almost as a British Sheldon Cooper, hilariously misunderstanding statements that he takes too literally. He uses logic, not emotion, to guide him and at first it seems like he doesn’t feel much of anything. With time, and the more time he spends with new friend Joan Clarke (well played by Keira Knightley), Cumberbatch slowly lets us see a little compassion and lots of pain. By the end, we’re left with one of the year’s best performances and a genuinely heart-breaking ending.

Read another Asshole’s opinion of The Imitation Game.

The Imitation Game

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Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Avengers for math nerds. As Alan Turing, he assembles a crack team called Hut 8 who will secretly try to break the unbreakable German code machine, Enigma, to win the war, while pretending to be regular schmos putting in time at a radio factory.

Turns out, pretending to be regular is probably the bigger of the challenges for Turing. He’s a genius, but he’s also probably autistic. He’s horrid with people, often laughably so in the film (Cumberbatch portrays him lovingly, with sensitivity, grace in his gracelessness, and touches of clueless humour). Turing is also gay, and closeted, necessarily. Churchill credited him with the single largest contribution by an individual to the war effort; his work probably shortened the second world war by at least two years. He was an expert in his field, the father of computer science, and a war hero and yet he struggled just to make a friend.

The film flips between different time periods: his boyhood at school where he had his first love, a post-war break-in of his home that leads to him being interrogated by police, and the time he spent at Bletchley Park deciphering Nazi codes. Both book-ending periods paint us, the audience, a picture of the things he’s keeping secret. The film does an excellent job of presenting his world as a series of codes: as a boy he confesses that for him, conversation is a code. People are an enigma. The wallpaper in his home looks like morse code, dashes and dots. The production design is upscale period all the way.

For a movie about math and cryptology, it’s surprisingly gripping. Reels of news footage help give us a sense of their urgency. They aren’t battling Germans, they’re fighting a clock. Their countrymen are dying in tunnels during air raids (as Keira Knightley already did, in Atonement), or simply wasting away of starvation. The movie isn’t 100% historically accurate, but I think it’s faithful to the time and place and people, and if the computer itself is given the Hollywood treatment, looking much more impressive than it ever did in real life, where’s the harm? Perhaps it will inspire people to go home and look it up.

I think the film’s strength is its moral question. Once the code is cracked, how and when can that information be used? How many civilialns and soldiers would you sacrifice to keep a secret that could win the war? The movie does a great job of personalizing the question and we start to feel that as awful and tense as it was in the not knowing, it was a lot more bearable than the responsibility we’re faced with when we do know. The weakness is in having painted Turing as the unblemished hero. The truth is , he was probably unknowable, and without ever having known him, I’m betting that no one could be as spotless as he’s implied to be in the film. Turing, the actual man, was mistreated by his ungrateful government, who kept his war records sealed while he was prosecuted for simply being a gay man at a time when it was illegal to be so (or at least to act on it – “gross indecency” they called it, hypocritically), and then sentenced him to chemical castration, robbing a nation, and the world, of a great mind.